Coltrane and his peers dared to lead jazz into the mystic. Gayle, Ware and Shipp are still there and not looking back. But the powerful, challenging music on their records shows that while they may be out on the fringe, they sing through their instruments with body and soul.
It is not and never has been easy music to describe, nickname or categorize. The saxophonist Archie Shepp used the term “fire music" as the title of a 1965 LP. The African-American author Amiri Baraka coined the phrase “new black music" in the mid-'60s, back when his byline was still LeRoi Jones. White jazz critics with more enthusiasm than imagination simply dubbed it “the new thing." Ornette Coleman unwittingly created the most enduring brand name when he called his seminal 1961 blast of rhythmic and harmonic liberation Free Jazz.
More than 30 years after a generation of visionary black jazzmen led by Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor shattered the relative calm of post-bop and cool-era tonality, quick-fix words still do little justice to the provocative, intensely physical music being made at the outer limits by the hurricane-force tenor saxophonist Charles Gayle, the daredevil pianist Matthew Shipp and the fireball saxman and cliffhanging improviser David S. Ware. Even the freedom implied in the words free jazz must seem like a cruel joke to men who have long been marginalized by a jazz industry besotted with sharp-dressed mainstream re-boppers.
Genre is not an issue, though, in the punk-rock community, where Gayle and company have received a much warmer welcome. Henry Rollins has signed Gayle to his 213CD label and recently put out a new Shipp album, Critical Mass. (Circular Temple, a '92 Shipp session, is a reissue under the archive imprint Rollins has started with producer Rick Rubin.) Sonic Youth guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo have both recorded with the drummer William Hooker, and Moore has released “out" jazz recordings on his living-room label, Ecstatic Peace.
Freak rock and radical black music are actually old bedfellows. Cecil Taylor once shared a bill with the Yardbirds at the Fillmore West. The MC5 liberally adapted compositions by Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders into garage-feedback oratorios; “L.A. Blues," on the Stooges' Fun House, is basically Armageddon jazz with amps. If you have no problem diving headfirst into the white-noise lava pool of Sonic Youth's “Expressway to Yr Skull," you're ripe for the propulsive ecstasies of Kingdom Come.
Now in his mid-50s, Gayle is a veteran of the original liberation-music scene who has only recently come into well-deserved glory after two decades of playing on the New York streets and in the subways. On Kingdom Come - featuring bassist William Parker (a Cecil Taylor veteran) and the free-percussion pioneer Sunny Murray - Gayle never settles for anything less than total catharsis. In “Lord Lord," the album's 21-minute centerpiece, he bolts out of the starting gate, blowing in tongues over the catgut groan of Parker's bowed bass and Murray's hissing cymbals and snare rifle shots. Desperation, joy and rage roar through Gayle's horn, sometimes all at once; multiphonic honks and air-raid-siren shrieks explode with heat, color and primordial exuberance.
Yet there is a startling purity of concept and execution in Gayle's attack, even when he steps up to the piano in “Beset Souls" or picks up the bass clarinet for “Yokes." Just as Coltrane never set out to destroy the chord structure of “My Favorite Things" - he simply would not be imprisoned by it - Gayle broadcasts emotions, not immaculately shaped notes. And he swings not in mathematical time but with the raw elasticity of real life, particularly the African-American experience. When his sax erupts in a caged-animal cry in “His Crowning Grace," you can hear the elegiac howl of the Delta blues and the locomotive soul power of a Pentecostal choir.
Does this kind of jazz ever swing - in the way, say, Duke Ellington defined it?
It is not and never has been easy music to describe, nickname or categorize. The saxophonist Archie Shepp used the term “fire music" as the title of a 1965 LP. The African-American author Amiri Baraka coined the phrase “new black music" in the mid-'60s, back when his byline was still LeRoi Jones. White jazz critics with more enthusiasm than imagination simply dubbed it “the new thing." Ornette Coleman unwittingly created the most enduring brand name when he called his seminal 1961 blast of rhythmic and harmonic liberation Free Jazz.
More than 30 years after a generation of visionary black jazzmen led by Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor shattered the relative calm of post-bop and cool-era tonality, quick-fix words still do little justice to the provocative, intensely physical music being made at the outer limits by the hurricane-force tenor saxophonist Charles Gayle, the daredevil pianist Matthew Shipp and the fireball saxman and cliffhanging improviser David S. Ware. Even the freedom implied in the words free jazz must seem like a cruel joke to men who have long been marginalized by a jazz industry besotted with sharp-dressed mainstream re-boppers.
Genre is not an issue, though, in the punk-rock community, where Gayle and company have received a much warmer welcome. Henry Rollins has signed Gayle to his 213CD label and recently put out a new Shipp album, Critical Mass. (Circular Temple, a '92 Shipp session, is a reissue under the archive imprint Rollins has started with producer Rick Rubin.) Sonic Youth guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo have both recorded with the drummer William Hooker, and Moore has released “out" jazz recordings on his living-room label, Ecstatic Peace.
Freak rock and radical black music are actually old bedfellows. Cecil Taylor once shared a bill with the Yardbirds at the Fillmore West. The MC5 liberally adapted compositions by Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders into garage-feedback oratorios; “L.A. Blues," on the Stooges' Fun House, is basically Armageddon jazz with amps. If you have no problem diving headfirst into the white-noise lava pool of Sonic Youth's “Expressway to Yr Skull," you're ripe for the propulsive ecstasies of Kingdom Come.
Now in his mid-50s, Gayle is a veteran of the original liberation-music scene who has only recently come into well-deserved glory after two decades of playing on the New York streets and in the subways. On Kingdom Come - featuring bassist William Parker (a Cecil Taylor veteran) and the free-percussion pioneer Sunny Murray - Gayle never settles for anything less than total catharsis. In “Lord Lord," the album's 21-minute centerpiece, he bolts out of the starting gate, blowing in tongues over the catgut groan of Parker's bowed bass and Murray's hissing cymbals and snare rifle shots. Desperation, joy and rage roar through Gayle's horn, sometimes all at once; multiphonic honks and air-raid-siren shrieks explode with heat, color and primordial exuberance.
Yet there is a startling purity of concept and execution in Gayle's attack, even when he steps up to the piano in “Beset Souls" or picks up the bass clarinet for “Yokes." Just as Coltrane never set out to destroy the chord structure of “My Favorite Things" - he simply would not be imprisoned by it - Gayle broadcasts emotions, not immaculately shaped notes. And he swings not in mathematical time but with the raw elasticity of real life, particularly the African-American experience. When his sax erupts in a caged-animal cry in “His Crowning Grace," you can hear the elegiac howl of the Delta blues and the locomotive soul power of a Pentecostal choir.
Does this kind of jazz ever swing - in the way, say, Duke Ellington defined it?
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