[2] Writer Phil Freeman described him as having "one of the fiercest, most unfettered saxophone styles in all of jazz", "a player so explosive that it seems like microphones and recording equipment can barely contain him".

[3] Arthur Doyle was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944,[1] and was inspired to play music as child after watching Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on television.

[6] Although he was at first uninterested in free jazz, he gradually gravitated toward it after playing at a Black Panthers festival,[2] having developed a sound that was "raw and unpolished, charged with vocal glossolalia arrived at by using a soft reed and singing through the horn".

[5] In 1968, Doyle moved to New York City, where he worked with Sun Ra and Bill Dixon, and met and befriended saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and guitarist Sonny Sharrock.

In the late 1970s, Doyle also began playing with guitarist Rudolph Grey, often in noisy duo settings, and performing in clubs such as Max's Kansas City.

Mystic music which took on the air of chasing ghosts and spirits through halls of mirrors",[7] and who would release two of Doyle's albums (More Alabama Feeling (1993) and The Songwriter (1995)) on his Ecstatic Peace!

[5] During this time, he played and recorded with drummers Hamid Drake, Sabu Toyozumi, and Sunny Murray, among others, and formed The Arthur Doyle Electro-Acoustic Ensemble.

[3] Doyle was known for his "wild, full-blast playing"[3] and for his unique sound, which resulted from what one writer called his having "approach(ed) his instruments in a manner that makes the term 'idiosyncratic' seem painfully inept.

[6] Alabama Feeling was described as having been "recorded in fidelity that would make garage punk aficionados wince",[3] while More Alabama Feeling was "raw, with pause button slams, Doyle muttering incomprehensibly, multiple takes of shrieking sax power lift..."[6] In a tribute following Doyle's death, Jon Dale wrote: "if anything, the crudeness, the rudeness of the recordings posit these albums as exalted and exultant documents of deeply personal expression... At his greatest, Doyle was a pure energy source – a thousand shafts of light vaulting out from the breath-sax nexus, and one great, pure and soulful voice, crying deep from the maw, its deceptive simplicity paradoxically singing out the complexity of life on this old earth.