![]() ![]() Gayle, though, plays with the same biting intensity and beauty as on Seasons Changing. Curiously long breaks between the tracks on the CD heighten this feeling, perhaps inadvertently. These solo interludes, while quite effective in their own right, do have the effect of imposing a general sense of detachment from the tradition that Gayle’s saxophone and piano represent, placing us in that familiar, deracinated space of modern avant-garde music. While many Gayle trios have had shared billing, this one is unusually balanced, with each rhythm player receiving a solo track to himself. The studio setting (increasingly a rarity for Gayle) seemingly imparts a spare and steely mood to the proceedings, as do Barcella and Cabras, whose approach to backing Gayle is more abstract and “loft-like” than the aggressive Seasons Changing rhythm section and the swinging one on Solar System. This is a studio date for Gayle, backed by Italian drummer Giovanni Barcella and the Italian-born, Ghent-based bassist Manolo Cabras. In fact, the latter of the two releases, The Alto Sessions, arrived almost simultaneously with Seasons Changing - a product of the same 2017 European tour - and its mood is similar, although much lower-key. Certainly it took me a while to even realize they existed. In that mix with the above were two titles on the El Negocito label, an incongruously Spanish-named operation based in Belgium and/or Germany whose distribution seems even smaller than the others. (And if only I had known how grotesquely the pandemic would derange two of my other end-of-decade choices, Kanye West and Van Morrison.) ![]() In retrospect, of the decade’s albums, only To Pimp a Butterfly struck me as more urgent, and even that now has a bit of a time-capsule quality in 2022. (The quality is emphasized by the label’s decision to present the music in two undigested chunks, “Set 1” and “Set 2.”) But it also vividly traces the arc of his music from Ornette to the NYC lofts to “Naima” and his favorite, “What’s New,” without losing sight of the need to speak with clarity, love, and fear, to the present. Though all of these discs feature Gayle in a trio with bass and drums, compared to the relatively crowd-pleasing For Tune and Jazzwerkstatt performances, which are full of more or less traditional and swinging jazz gestures, Seasons Changing is obstreperous, inscrutable, even forbidding. But it’s also a significant item for Gayle himself. So clearly it was a significant item for me, subjectively. In 2020 I listened to Seasons Changing almost every day - which is saying something, considering it’s a 90-minute double disc. ![]() Had I waited just a few months to compile my 2010s list, just long enough for the reality of the pandemic to set in, it would have been obvious how monumental Seasons Changing was, how palpably and cathartically it articulated the horror and throttled hopes of its moment. I dutifully reviewed the latter that August, without quite having a handle on it. In the 2010s alone, there was the studio date Streets on Northern Spy (2012), a shattering ’90s archival concert ( Look Up) on ESP-Disk, a genial live date on the Jazzwerkstatt label that made my somewhat premature albums of the decade list even though it’s no stronger than the others, two live recordings on the Polish label For Tune, including 2017’s gorgeous Solar System (surely another album of the decade contender had I heard it in time), and finally, in the summer of 2019, Seasons Changing, a document of a London gig from two summers prior, on London’s Otoroko label. By the end of the night, you had your album. ![]() For decades, it’s been the case that if you wanted to make a Charles Gayle album, you pretty much just had to schedule a gig for him and bring a tape recorder. Meanwhile his release schedule - on the usual assortment of Bandcamp imprints, mostly based in Europe - remained extraordinarily healthy. On alto and piano alike, the display of strength and wisdom was as breathtaking as ever. The previous summer he had played to a characteristically tiny crowd in downtown Toronto ( as documented here), showing absolutely no diminution in his powers. But he entered his ninth decade apparently as busy as ever. Charles Gayle keeps his lonely vigil on this earth, and in a small way I keep it with him: for as Gayle has pursued his uncompromising and utterly individual musical vocation, dragging his saxophones to tiny clubs and tiny labels the world over, latterly I have found myself in the solitary position of advocating for him, not just as an artist of note, but as (and I really believe this) simply the world’s greatest active jazz artist. ![]()
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