We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Translations

by Charles Gayle Quartet

/
1.
2.
Healing 19:01
3.
4.
5.

about

"At a time when too many musicians rely on arch referential irony or a reverence to catholic, stylistic recreations, it is bracing to hear a musician who unabashedly ignores fads and styles to aggressively pursue a music imbued with such powerful, emotional depth."
Michael Rosenstein, Cadence, November 1994

This January Thursday breaks bright, boding well. At 10:15 that morning, a motorcade of taxicabs, its drivers protesting hazardous working conditions, moves slowly down Broadway toward City Hall, car horns in a distinctive staccato rhythm - a rhythm often favored by Charles Gayle, standing on the corner of Canal Street as they drive past.
This cold, windy Manhattan day feels oddly warm. Maybe it's the pale winter sun, or knowing that 12 years of Reagan and Bush have ended. It is the first full day of the Clinton administration.
At the inauguration in Washington the previous noon, at a podium a few feet from the new president, the distinguished African-American writer Maya Angelou had read an impressive entry in that difficult genre, public poetry rifting on the triple trophes laid out in the opening lines: "A Rock, A River, A Tree"

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new
steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me,
the Rock, the River, the Tree,
your country....

That night, the president sat in with a band and blew credible blues licks.
Now Gayle, standing on the southwest corner of Canal and Broadway, bundled up in overcoat and cap, carefully sips steaming coffee from a paper cup, and greets the first member of his party to arrive. Charles is in a good mood, says he's expecting some kind of breakthrough in the studio today, but can't say what. "We gotta bleed today. We gotta draw blood," he says amiably, the way someone else might say the weather looks promising for the picnic. Charles professes to be bugged there's a tenor saxophonist in the White House. "I don't need the competition," he says sourly, and looks at you to see if you're falling for it.
Even well-meaning writers and fans may paint Gayle with broad strokes: as disenfranchised - Homeless, as his first Silkheart title has it, as a dreamer oblivious to propriety, as free musically as he is materially. If you know Charles, its hard to reconcile this severe fellow with the sociable man who likes an icecream bar in the aftemoon, and cracks up watching Jaleel White's TV nerd Steve Urkel. Even as scribes filed their Gayle-the-homeless stories, he'd been living in a reasonably secure and stable squat, in an apartment building on East Ninth Street a place where he gets mail, and has electric lights, and locks on the doors, and neighbors who look out for each other.
At 10:30, Vattel Cherry walks up wheeling his bass. He'd been in Washington the other day, playing for a pre inaugural ball. (So many musicians are needed for the social whirl surrounding a change of administration, gigs rain even on outcats.) Michael Wimberly arrives, saying he'd had unusual trouble finding a cab. (William Parker's driving out separately; he has a rehearsal with Cecil Taylor after the record session, and needs to make a fast getaway.) As Gayle's people stand around, a van pulls up in a No Parking zone, under the watchful eye of a policeman who makes low-key shooing gestures, and everyone piles in.
We drive under the Hudson to New Jersey, where concrete at last gives way to pockets of hilly woodland, river, rock, tree.
On the way, Charles says he likes to make occasional changes in the rhythm section, not out of dissatisfaction, but just to keep things fresh. Cherry and Wimberly have just met, and continue their conversation. Vattel had been in Gayle's band two years; he's on Repent (Knitting Factory Works) recorded in early '92. Altoist Will Connell had tipped Charles to Wimberly. Gayle went uptown to hear Michael play, and immediately offered him a gig. Wimberly mentions he guests on a then-current record, Steve Coleman's Drop Kick (Novus). West Orange is close to New York, but the studio's in an isolated spot, tucked into a hillside. The air is clean and apple-crisp. Inside, engineer Nick Prout, who radiates benign calm, gets the musicians set up quickly. They're almost ready to go when William Parker arrives.
"William's the best bass player for this," Gayle volunteers in a conversation sometime after the session, but for this date Charles had asked William to bring his violin and cello along as well. By now a crowd of friends, fans, producers and photographers is thronging the booth. A page from today's Times lies face up on a table: Angelou's poem.
For Charles Gayle, recording is in a way just another gig, an excuse to play for better money than you and yours get working for a slice of door money at the Knitting Factory, thirteen Mondays of the year. Even so, he takes making records seriously. Given his Buffalo steeltown working-class roots, Gayle surely doesn't mind that making albums is good hard work. ("High-energy" refers to what goes in as well as what comes out.) And he's the sort of inspirational team-leader modern industry craves. At the end of a typical Gayle session, producers find themselves with hours more tape than they'd bargained for. This Silkheart session has produced two CDs so far--the other is Raining Fire, Silkheart 137--and there's talk of a third.
Gayle says he wants to play some "shorter," 12 or 15 minute pieces. "You want the special mood lighting?" Nick Prout asks before the tape rolls. "No, that'll put me to sleep," Charles responds, laughing. The first number is a typical Gayle set-opener: a vault into the falsetto-sphere, the place he has to get beyond to arrive anywhere else. Gayle's like Sun Ra: often most interesting when he's finished playing what he came to play, and then has to come up with more.
They launch immediately into another piece, later dubbed "Joyous Fellowship". (The music on this disc appears in the order recorded.) It's amazing how quickly Gayle recreates the feel of a gig behind the baffles--the four players arrayed in an elongated diamond, drums the long way across from Charles, basses on either side. Someone asks if Gayle's distracted by the two photographers milling about as he plays. "No, you can let everyone in here if you want."
At the top of "Joyous Fellowship", Gayle conducts the bowing bassists, drawing long arcs in the air, before quickly jumping in on tenor. In his saxophone improvisation, the antiphonal interplay of falsetto barks and guttural middle register phrases is like two voices in conversation, like Mingus-Dolphy instrumental dialogues. Fourteen minutes in, Gayle cues an abrupt finish. After one more tune, he calls a break. Outside, he remarks, "I don't consider myself avant-garde; I'm just a normal fellow."
For the next round, Parker unpacks his cello. Gayle gets out the bass clarinet, his instrument for exploring the more sweetly plaintive side of his music. They immediately cut "Healing", the oceanic/AACMish ending of which is something new for Gayle. Earlier Wimberly had expressed a little apprehension, not having played free music before, and never having heard any other drummer play with Gayle. Michael fits right in. He has the capacity to explode and keep on exploding that Charles likes, but also pays attention to texture and dynamics more than some of his predecessors.
The afternoon rolls on; they're supposed to break at six pm, but keep recording till seven. William won't be on time for his rehearsal, but right now he's more involved with what he's doing than what he should be doing. The day's last take is "Holy Mountain", with William playing child-size violin with the same worrying arco technique he uses on bass or cello, and Charles back on tenor. Vattel plays kalimba and bells at the top.
"Let's do a set, with different combinations," Gayle says before the first take the following noon. A couple of warmups later he says, "We'll do one more and that's one set. We're gonna do them set by set." And then comes "Hymn of Praise", returning to yesterday's textural text as if "Holy Mountain" was moments before.
Two hours later, "Suffering for Love" unfolds, a spontaneous suite beginning with Gayle on viola and Parker on violin. William knows his way around the string family; Charles is decidedly non-virtuosic. Parker dances in place, rocking back and forth but mindful where the boom microphone is: Gayle, switching to incendiary tenor, rocks from side to side, irregularly gyrating much as his lines do. The third movement is explicitly Ayleresque hymnody, playing with gospel cadences as surely as Angelou's poem does.
There's much more to say about the music Charles Gayle shaped in the studio those two days, through pre-planning, exhortation and the wisdom to stand back and let things take their own course. But for that, consult the notes to companion volume Raining Fire. Charles's intimated breakthrough became obvious in retrospect: the unit assembled for these sessions stayed together as his new working band. The quartet went on to record the two-CD More Live at the Knitting Factory and Black Saint's Consecration. Why Gayle kept them is obvious from these recordings. The band keeps the music hard enough to draw blood, but lets it seek its own channels, branching where it will, rock river tree.

Kevin Whitehead

credits

released June 16, 2018

Charles Gayle tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, viola
William Parker bass, cello, half-size violin
Vattel Cherry bass, kalimba, bells
Michael Wimberly drums

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Silkheart Records Stockholm, Sweden

Our musical policy puts Silkheart Records out on a limb. Silkheart is dedicated to recording the sublime heights of creativity in improvised music. Our continuing policy is to maintain a focus on evolving changes in vernacular improvised music, on the look-out for musicians with that ultimate sparkle. ... more

contact / help

Contact Silkheart Records

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

Silkheart Records recommends:

If you like Translations, you may also like: