Albert Ayler did it once, and only once. On February 24, 1964, in New York, on the same day as the session that would become Spirits, he recorded a program of spirituals and standards with no screaming, no glossolalia, no demolition of form: "Goin' Home", "Ol' Man River", "Down By The Riverside", "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Deep River", "When The Saints Go Marchin' In", "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen". Songs of suffering and salvation, played with a devotional restraint that hits harder than any wall of sound. This was Ayler's first repertoire: he learned it before he was a teenager at Cleveland's Liberty Hill Baptist Church, mentored by his father on alto, then carried it through years of r&b work alongside Little Walter and Lloyd Price. What he took from Sidney Bechet - the thick pitch-bending vibrato, the blues coloration that turns a melody into testimony - is here, uncut and undisguised. Call Cobbs Jr. brings a veteran's florid touch at the piano, Henry Grimes and Sunny Murray hold back on purpose, and the tension of everything they are not playing runs through the whole session. Art Lange, in his liner notes, puts it best: a chapter that does not advance the plot but explains the main character.

Goin' Home returns as thingamajig 2515, a 2026 edition authorized by The Estate of Albert Ayler, with three alternate takes added to the original program. Sonic restoration and mastering by Michael Brändli, cover photograph by Valerie Wilmer, curated by Werner X. Uehlinger. The quietest and most revealing record Ayler ever made.