Charles Gayle - Streets (2013/2024) [Official Digital Download]

The cover image reveals almost everything. In a classical pose, tenor saxophonist Charles Gayle is playing his favorite piece (the instrument is meant, please) like, say, Sonny Rollins or Charles Mc Pherson. Actually, we would have to say Archie Shepp first of all, but to label Gayle as a late-career Archie Shepp would not be entirely fair. Nevertheless: with the hard, jagged, rather rebellious jazz of the post-fusion era, we are quite well located here. Larry Roland on bass and Michael TA Thompson on drums build a competent bridge to the kind of stubborn improvisational skills of our days that refuse to be assigned to any assignment – except that there really is no laptop involved. Not a spark of electronic and, accordingly, hardly an experimental exploration of one's own sound, not a half-hour blowing on the overtone of an overtone?? (there is not, I know anyway). No, does not happen here. This is where driving, post-classical jazz is made, which sounds as if Mingus recorded his "Changes I & II" only a few weeks ago, as if Miles Davis is just starting his coke phase, as if Coleman, Cherry and Co. are still playing their fingers sore to find a way out of the free impasse. For Gayle, this might have been the greatest era of jazz, but because you can do it even less seriously like, say, a swing revival band, the man is not sitting on the cover like Rollins or Shepp (ah yes, the cover ??) - but dressed as a clown. Which can certainly be understood as self-irony. But this is not quite so, because the comedian allegedly lets Gayle hang out at concerts mainly verbally. How this should get along with his ecstatic-expressive saxophone playing would definitely be worth an experience.

TRACKLIST

1. Charles Gayle - Compassion I
2. Charles Gayle - Compassion II
3. Charles Gayle - Glory & Jesus
4. Charles Gayle - Streets
5. Charles Gayle - March of April
6. Charles Gayle - Doxology
7. Charles Gayle - Tribulations



Thanks to the Original customer.