Charles Gayle

365人收藏

风格: #先锋爵士　#自由爵士
地区: United States of America 美国

艺人介绍

Charles Gayle (born February 28, 1939) is an American free jazz saxophonist, pianist, bass clarinetist, bassist, and percussionist.

Charles Gayle was born in Buffalo, New York. Some of his history has been unclear due to his reluctance to talk about his life in interviews. He briefly taught music at the University at Buffalo before relocating to New York City during the early 1970s.

Gayle was homeless for approximately twenty years, playing saxophone on street corners and subway platforms around New York City. He has described making a conscious decision to become homeless: &I had to shed my history, my life, everything had to stop right there, and if you live through this, good, and if you don't, you don't. I can't do the rent, the odd jobs, the little rooms, scratchin', and all that, no!& At the same time, this allowed Gayle to devote most of his time to playing music, although he often earned less than US$3 a day from busking:

First of all, I played to play because I need to play. Second of all, the money, a dollar meant a lot to me at that time. Playing out there is obviously different than playing on a stage but that is so rich out there. It's such a whole 'nother world of playin'. I mean I used to walk from Times Square, for instance, all the way to Wall Street playin'. I could walk back and never stop playing. I didn't think about it as anything other than what it was. These were people and I wasn't overly concerned with what they thought. I was playing, I had to play. Also I had to eat some way and I'm not the type to put my hand out. I'd stand there playing with a coffee cup sometime and people would put money in my coffee [Laughs] and you don't get that on the stage. That's beautiful.

When Gayle first set out on the streets, he did not imagine he would remain homeless as long as he did, although he estimates that this period lasted closer to fifteen years than twenty.

In 1988, he gained fame through a trio of albums – all recorded in one week – by a Swedish label, Silkheart Records. Since then he has become a major figure in free jazz, recording for labels including Black Saint, Knitting Factory Records, FMP, and Clean Feed. He has also taught music at Bennington College.

Gayle's music is spiritual, and heavily inspired by the Old and New Testaments. Gayle explains, &I want the people to enjoy the music and if it, in anyway can suggest something about the Lord, for their benefit, that would be first in my mind.& He has explicitly dedicated several albums to God. His childhood was influenced by religion, and his musical roots trace to black gospel music. After his church experiences, Gayle credits among his influences Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Thelonious Monk, and Art Tatum. He has performed and recorded with Cecil Taylor, William Parker, and Rashied Ali.

Gayle's most celebrated work to date remains the album Touchin' on Trane (FMP) with Parker and Ali. Though he established his reputation primarily as a tenor saxophonist, he has increasingly turned to other instruments, notably the piano (which was, in fact, his original instrument) and alto saxophone. More controversially, he has sometimes included lengthy spoken-word addresses to the audience in his concerts touching on his political and religious beliefs: &I understand that when you start speaking about faith or religion, they want you to keep it in a box, but I'm not going to do that. Not because I'm taking advantage of being a musician, I'm the same everywhere, and people have to understand that.& Gayle sometimes performs as a mime, &Streets the Clown.& &Streets means to me, first, a freedom from Charles. I'm not good at being the center of attention…. It's a liberation from Charles, even though it's me on the stage, it's a different person.&

In 2001, Gayle recorded an album entitled Jazz Solo Piano. It consisted mostly of straightforward jazz standards, and is a response to critics who charge that free jazz musicians cannot play bebop. In 2006, Gayle followed up with a second album of solo piano, this time featuring original material, entitled Time Zones. He has also recently released several albums on Clean Feed and Ayler Records that include traditional jazz standards.

====================================

by Chris Kelsey

Charles Gayle made his first significant impact on the free jazz scene with a series of critically acclaimed New York performances at the Knitting Factory in the mid- to late '80s. The tenor saxophonist's hyper-kinetic free expressionism draws on stylistic devices pioneered in the '60s by the late free jazz icon Albert Ayler. Like Ayler, Gayle employs a huge tone which, more often than not, he splits into its individual harmonic components. Timbral distortion is a key aspect of Gayle's work. His improvisations feature long, vibrating, free-gospel melodies, full of huge intervallic leaps, screaming multiphonics, and a density of line that evidences a remarkable dexterity in all registers of his horn (especially the altissimo). Gayle is also capable of great lyricism, imbued with the same bracing intensity present in his high-energy work.

Gayle began playing music at the age of nine. Except for a couple of years of piano lessons as a child, he was self-taught. Piano was his first and only instrument until he picked up a saxophone when he was 19. He listened to jazz as a teenager in the '50s. Gayle was intrigued by bebop; hearing Charlie Parker was a crucial experience. Gayle attempted to learn conventional harmony by analyzing sheet music and working things out on a piano. African-American church services had an profound effect on his music. Gayle moved from Buffalo to New York City in the '60s, where he became involved in the city's nascent free jazz movement. Gayle reportedly taught a jazz course at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969, where one of his students was the saxophonist Jay Beckenstein. There is at least one account of Gayle playing with drummer Rashied Ali's group around 1973, but little else is known about his activities during this period (he is not inclined to go into details when asked by interviewers about his past). Gayle took to playing his horn on the streets and in the subways, relying on donations from passers-by for income. Gayle lived a mainly precarious existence for the next twenty years. He was poor and homeless most of that time. Following his &discovery& in the '80s, gigs and tours coordinated by the Knitting Factory began to earn him a modest, if relatively steady income. Still, Gayle scuffled, though he was eventually able to rent a small apartment on New York's Lower East Side. In 1988, Gayle recorded a series of albums for the Swedish-based Silkheart label. Their release in 1990 gave his music worldwide exposure. Subsequent recordings for Black Saint, FMP, and the Knitting Factory house label garnered him more of a reputation.

In the '90s, Gayle took to performing on piano and bass clarinet in basically the same style that he displays on tenor, though the latter clearly remains his strongest instrument. Gayle's preferred ensemble instrumentation usually consists of himself, a bassist, and a drummer. His concerts are almost wholly improvised, and a single improvisation can last the length of a set. By the turn of the millennium, Gayle's concerts had taken on aspects of performance art. Gayle began dressing as a character he called &Streets the Clown,& complete with costume and face paint, whereupon he would perform his music and preach a religious message to his audience. Indeed, Gayle's in-concert expressions of his religious and political views are a source of dismay to some critics and fans, and threaten at times to overshadow his music.

Charles Gayle　查尔斯·盖尔

艺人介绍

最新简评（共11条）

Charles Gayle 查尔斯·盖尔

艺人介绍

最新简评（共11条）

Charles Gayle　查尔斯·盖尔