Charles Gayle - Blue Shadows

Silkheart

It’s hard not to pine for Charles Gayle in his early Nineties prime. At that time, the saxophonist was in flagrant fire and brimstone thrall, scorching venue rafters with his full bore free jazz assaults and famously proclaiming: “If the roof’s still standing when we’ve finished, we’ve failed.”

Sure, there were miscalculations like alter ego Streets the Clown and the anti-abortion/gay screeds, but the fury and force of his music, particularly when channeled through tenor, was difficult to deny. Lately, he seems a watered down facsimile of his former musical self with releases on Clean Feed and Ayler failing to capture the same level of sanctified fervor that made several of his earlier sides for FMP, Knitting Factory and Silkheart such blasted earth classics. That disparity in style and temperament is what makes this new release such a boon. True, it’s a collection of material that was originally shelved at Gayle’s insistence, but it comes from one of his more ambitious sessions during that aforementioned Nineties apex. A time capsule bundled with bandolier of Holy Ghost C-4.

Producer Lars-Olof Gustavsson relays the back-story that will already be familiar to listeners who have returned to the previous Silkhearts over the years. In early 1993 Gayle blended his two trios by pairing bassists William Parker and Vattel Cherry. Drummer Michael Wimberly was a then new recruit, conscripted from a fledgling career playing rock and R&B. The string players brought in an array of peripheral instruments including kalimba, child-size violin and cellos. Gayle unboxed a viola, playing it intuitively Ornette-style and coming up with a similarly primitive results. These Silkheart sessions originally yielded two commercial releases notable for Gayle’s attempts at expanding his group concept. The ensemble would soon gel further Gayle’s “strings” group with the recording of Daily Bread for Soul Note.

These tracks may be also-rans in one sense, but they’re also akin to coming across antiquated vials of nitroglycerine that still possess their chemical potency. The pieces chosen emphasize Gayle’s incendiary tenor work with only “In Sorrow” finding him see-sawing away on ill-fitted viola. “Inside the Sun” is but a fragment, but it explodes with the impact of a fragmentation grenade, Gayle’s tenor spraying notes in shrapnel splinters against Wimberly’s thundering drum backdrop. The pint-sized title piece unfolds in a cascade, his horn remaining unexpectedly controlled and almost tuneful as he races through registers and speeds. “Snap” and “Soul’s Time” sound like curious stabs at postbop. The former contains a scrap of Coltrane’s “Impressions” while the latter concludes with Gayle admitting in resignation that he “can’t do it”. Both are fleeting, but their presence as interstitions between the longer tracks helps the program breathe.

Parker and Cherry carve and pummel away at their respective sets of strings, the integrity of their lines sometimes lost in all the frenzied activity. The occasional pile-ups point to one of the advantages of Gayle’s restrained approach of the past few years: He’s partioned time to smell the roses even as he razes them. Back in the day, the relentless rush to demolish everything in roiling waves of racket meant that sometimes the details and dynamism died in the bargain. The music here generally avoids such excess, striking a malleable balance between catharsis and consensus.

~ Derek Taylor