This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Buy back issues of the magazine here.

In the summer of 1963, a tenor saxophonist named Albert Ayler moved into a room in a flat owned by his aunt, across the street from St. Nicholas Park in Harlem. It wasn’t the 27-year-old’s first trip to New York City, but this time he’d come intending to stay. Ayler was heading into the New York jazz epicenter as a complete unknown. It was a tumultuous time for a music in the process of splintering into fragments, building on its storied past but unsure where it would go next. Giants of bebop like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were alive and well and cutting important records (the latter would in another year be on the cover of Time); Miles Davis was in a transitional period, but was on the verge of making some of his finest work, with his second great quintet right around the corner; Charles Mingus was humming at a creative peak, and Duke Ellington had been canonized but was still busy. If you wanted to be someone in jazz during this era, a time when the music still commanded attention, New York, then as now, was the place to be.