Eddie Gale - Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music (1968) {Blue Note}

×

Eddie Gale - Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music (1968) {Blue Note}

Close

One of our favorite all-time records, and a real lost album on Blue Note! Eddie Gale leads this group of righteous singers and musicians through five fantastic tracks of soulful chanting and hard jazz playing that never goes too far out, but always threatens to break free of its own chains – soaring to the skies on wings of freedom and spirituality! Gale's trumpet rings hard and loud, and the vocal arrangements never verge on sentimentality, but manage to convey a ton of soul with an incredibly righteous approach that's never been duplicated again! Imagine Donald Byrd's vocal group albums recorded for Strata East – or a hipper version of Billy Harper's Capra Black – and you've only got part of the picture! Titles include "The Rain", "Fulton Street", "The Coming Of Gwilu", and "A Walk With Thee".

The aesthetic and cultural merits of Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music cannot be overstated. That it is one of the most obscure recordings in Blue Note's catalog – paid for out of label co-founder Francis Wolff's own pocket – should tell us something. This is an apocryphal album, one that seamlessly blends the new jazz of the '60s – Gale was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra before and after these sides, and played on Cecil Taylor's Blue Note debut, Unit Structures – with gospel, soul, and the blues. Gale's sextet included two bass players and two drummers – in 1968 – as well as a chorus of 11 voices, male and female. Sound like a mess? Far from it. This is some of the most spiritually engaged, forward-thinking, and finely wrought music of 1968. What's more is that, unlike lots of post-Coltrane free jazz, it's ultimately very listenable. Soloists come and go, but modes, melodies, and harmonies remain firmly intact. The beautiful strains of African folk music and Latin jazz sounds in "Fulton Street," for example, create a veritable chromatic rainbow. "A Walk with Thee" is a spiritual written to a march tempo with drummers playing counterpoint to one another and the front line creating elongated melodic lines via an Eastern harmonic sensibility. The final cut, "The Coming of Gwilu," moves from the tribal to the urban and everywhere in between using Jamaican thumb piano's, soaring vocals à la the Arkestra, polyrhythmic invention, and good, old-fashioned groove jazz, making something entirely new in the process. While Albert Ayler's New Grass was a failure for all its adventurousness, Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music, while a bit narrower in scope, succeeds because it concentrates on creating a space for the myriad voices of an emerging African-American cultural force to be heard in a single architecture. This is militant music posessed by soul and spirit.

×

Eddie Gale - Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music (1968) {Blue Note}

Close

×

Eddie Gale - Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music (1968) {Blue Note}

Close