Charles Gayle
- Issue #121 (March '94) | Interviews
- By: Howard Mandel | Featuring: Charles Gayle
- Printable version
On the streets and in the subways of New York, the spirit of black free jazz lives on in the music of a few true believers – musicians like Charles Gayle; homeless, neglected but still burning with the passion to be free. By Howard Mandel.
“Let’s do the interview at your place,” suggests Charles Gayle, reigning king of New York City’s black free jazz players. “Because the heat at my place is not really happening.” The January weather has been severe in NYC and Gayle, aged 54 but still tall, lean and muscular, lives as he has for four years in an unrenovated East Village squat.
It seems that free jazz in New York is nearly homeless, certainly at the culture’s farthest fringe. Though physically vigorous, the nominally non-commercial, sometimes politically engaged, sometimes rhetorically self-righteous, sometimes fatally self-absorbed music that erupted from Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and their many associates three decades ago has just a few devotees who earn about as much money and respect as street people. Nonetheless, tenor saxophonists such as Gayle, David S Ware and Zane Massey, pianist Matt Shipp, bassist William Parker, drummer William Hooker, and a score or two of others persevere.
Free jazz is shunned and/or scorned by music mags, record labels, the latest wave of so-called mainstream players, influential critics, academics and presenting institutions. It is characteristically loud, dissonant, anarchic and confrontational, though free jazz players claim, as they always have, spiritual catharsis if not transcendence as their aim. The style’s superficial chaos, its apparent lack of differentiation, resembles, more than anything, the helter-skelter interactions of urban life. Well, what grows in the City takes on protective colouration. Most New Yorkers probably see and hear no more in free jazz than they do in weeds.
Drummer Rashied Ali (who appeared on Gayle’s 1993 FMP release Touchin On Trane) recently hosted the saxophonist at his Monday night series of concerts at The Cooler – a large, dim room in the remote meat-packing/transvestite-hooker district of New York. Other than such performer-produced occasions and infrequent events like radio station WKCR’s ‘Loft Jazz’ festival at Columbia University, you only find free jazz in New York’s midtown streets and subway tunnels – and at the Knitting Factory. There, Michael Dorf has promoted Gayle and others through regular bookings, inexpensive recordings, and tours of America and Europe.
Dorf knows that free jazz as practiced by blacks and whites and anyone else (Tuvan singer Sainkho Namchylak could certainly hang) refuses to disappear, be co-opted or die. In fact, he sees new fans arriving at the juncture out of rock and Improv (which is exactly the kind of connection being made in the music of guitarists like Rudolph Grey or Raoul Björkenheim, or such initiatives as Thurston Moore’s free jazz releases on his Ecstatic Peace label). “There’s a segue between Charles Gayle and Sonic Youth or even Nirvana,” says Dorf. “It’s like The Violent Femmes being interested in Cecil Taylor because of his cascade-of-notes concept. Charles just recorded with Henry Rollins, who wants him to open for his band whey they play New York this spring. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth wants to do something with Charles. These popular white rockers appreciate the noise content of free jazz.”
In a warm office, Gayle unwraps wool scarves from his face, blows urgently on his hands, declines coffee, accepts peppermint tea in a mug bearing a picture of Malcolm X, then leans back and speaks candidly. “I’m thankful for the Knitting Factory,” he says, “because if it wasn’t there, it would be a little bit harder.”
Through his Factory appearances he’s gained a new audience who’ll brave a sub-freezing winter or a sweatbox summer to hear the piercing cries, gut-centred bellows, and melody-shredding phraseology that mark his take on free jazz.
It seems that free jazz in New York is nearly homeless, certainly at the culture’s farthest fringe. Though physically vigorous, the nominally non-commercial, sometimes politically engaged, sometimes rhetorically self-righteous, sometimes fatally self-absorbed music that erupted from Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and their many associates three decades ago has just a few devotees who earn about as much money and respect as street people. Nonetheless, tenor saxophonists such as Gayle, David S Ware and Zane Massey, pianist Matt Shipp, bassist William Parker, drummer William Hooker, and a score or two of others persevere.
Free jazz is shunned and/or scorned by music mags, record labels, the latest wave of so-called mainstream players, influential critics, academics and presenting institutions. It is characteristically loud, dissonant, anarchic and confrontational, though free jazz players claim, as they always have, spiritual catharsis if not transcendence as their aim. The style’s superficial chaos, its apparent lack of differentiation, resembles, more than anything, the helter-skelter interactions of urban life. Well, what grows in the City takes on protective colouration. Most New Yorkers probably see and hear no more in free jazz than they do in weeds.
Drummer Rashied Ali (who appeared on Gayle’s 1993 FMP release Touchin On Trane) recently hosted the saxophonist at his Monday night series of concerts at The Cooler – a large, dim room in the remote meat-packing/transvestite-hooker district of New York. Other than such performer-produced occasions and infrequent events like radio station WKCR’s ‘Loft Jazz’ festival at Columbia University, you only find free jazz in New York’s midtown streets and subway tunnels – and at the Knitting Factory. There, Michael Dorf has promoted Gayle and others through regular bookings, inexpensive recordings, and tours of America and Europe.
Dorf knows that free jazz as practiced by blacks and whites and anyone else (Tuvan singer Sainkho Namchylak could certainly hang) refuses to disappear, be co-opted or die. In fact, he sees new fans arriving at the juncture out of rock and Improv (which is exactly the kind of connection being made in the music of guitarists like Rudolph Grey or Raoul Björkenheim, or such initiatives as Thurston Moore’s free jazz releases on his Ecstatic Peace label). “There’s a segue between Charles Gayle and Sonic Youth or even Nirvana,” says Dorf. “It’s like The Violent Femmes being interested in Cecil Taylor because of his cascade-of-notes concept. Charles just recorded with Henry Rollins, who wants him to open for his band whey they play New York this spring. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth wants to do something with Charles. These popular white rockers appreciate the noise content of free jazz.”
In a warm office, Gayle unwraps wool scarves from his face, blows urgently on his hands, declines coffee, accepts peppermint tea in a mug bearing a picture of Malcolm X, then leans back and speaks candidly. “I’m thankful for the Knitting Factory,” he says, “because if it wasn’t there, it would be a little bit harder.”
Through his Factory appearances he’s gained a new audience who’ll brave a sub-freezing winter or a sweatbox summer to hear the piercing cries, gut-centred bellows, and melody-shredding phraseology that mark his take on free jazz.