“We like to bring music to Cleveland in the spirit of the great and incredible and wonderful Albert Ayler. Let’s get a round of applause for all he stands for!” As those words rang from the stage of the Bop Stop, a jazz club on the near-West Side of Cleveland, Ohio, the audience packing the house let out cheers. They were celebrating not only Ayler, the Cleveland-born saxophonist and free-jazz pioneer, but also the night of music to come—a double bill of two fearsome trios, Vandermark-Lytton-Wooley and Ballister—and the fact that such a night could exist after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The master of ceremonies was Matt Laferty,
