Merrily on high

A persistent urban myth holds that when the sodden corpse of the free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler was fished out of the East River in November, 1970, it was discovered that he'd been tied to a jukebox. Which surely suggests a particularly bleak parlour game, or maybe the pitch for a radio programme, Desert Island Discs reimagined by Chris Morris: if you were plunging towards a cold, dark, watery, inevitable doom, which records would you want to be playing on the lump of chrome and glass and bakelite that was dragging you under?

Albert Ayler: 'Bells' (1965).

Oh, Merry Christmas, by the way.