Year: 2001
Record Label: Knitting Factory
Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde
Musicians: Charles Gayle (piano)
Review: Charles is an intriguing and contradictory personality. The cover of his newly released album "Jazz Solo Piano" shows him in conservative banker attire: dark suit and tie, starched white shirt at the piano. His frame is lean. His manner seems to be relaxed. But, his face is blank and expressionless. Only his eyes that reveal something else: they are fierce. One gets the impression that in conversation he would stare at you without blinking. There is intensity to Charles Gayle.
Gayle is a dedicated free jazz saxophonist and self-advertised former homeless person as a result of an unreceptive audience for his music. His saxophone is unrelenting and expressed with incessant screeches and honks. On this outing, he turns to the piano. The choice of music is combination of classic jazz pieces and his compositions.
Gayle has a leaden style that mimics ragtime and stride of his youth with striking sharp dissonant detours into the avant-garde. He says "I am trying to bring out the modern cliches of jazz from both yesterday and today."
A representative tune is the classical Monk composition, "Round Midnight"--although it is labeled as "Round Midnite" which may or may not reflect what Gayle has done. Gayle begins simply enough faithfully interprets the haunting and elegant composition, but abruptly drifts aimlessly and frenetically into an unsettling cacophonic street scene.
"Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" is played in the same manner. Gayle begins the Hammerstein classic at very quick tempo and immediately shifts into a frantic, urgent mode. The problem is that he attacks most of the pieces in the same way. There is little variety to his shifts between playing it straight and playing it tilted with choppy, disconnected fragments. The repetitiveness of his approach throughout the recording soon becomes predictable.
Gayle's own "1939" recalls an askew piano past that might be called stride on acid. It actually works. It might be a fractured soundtrack to a Charlie Chaplin short. Gayle plays it precisely but frantically with unexpected whirls.
Gayle creates his own universe. It's a sharp, hard, frenzied and uncompromising place to go. You can tell by his eyes.
Record Label Website: http://www.knittingfactory.com
Reviewed by:
Lee Prosser
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