Charles Gayle / Milford Graves / William Parker – WEBO

Black Editions

Black Editions have really cemented themselves as the solidly excellent Japanese music reissue house in the last few years — I’ve got the Masayuki Takayanagi, Keiji Haino, Kazuo Imai and Shizuka records, but I’d happily lap them all up if money wasn’t an issue. So it’s great to see them turning their hand to this archive recording of a free jazz trio that were, on the evidence of this record, hotter than a motherfucker.

I have this thing with free jazz where I tend to enjoy it live but have less time for it on record. By and large something gets lost in translation, or the live situation means there’s nothing else to concentrate on and the sound is large and physical. This set though — it’s got everything you’d want.

Charles Gayle (tenor sax) is perhaps the lesser-known figure of the three and he’s got a storied history — this record comes at a time of renewed musical work and, seemingly, improved personal circumstances. What this means for the record is that his playing is fucking incredible — at turns positively ferally ferocious, elsewhere spare and lyrical. “C3” (all track names are LP coordinates) opens with some plain, soulful and simple lines from Gayle, but quickly blisters into a maelstrom.

By and large William Parker does what we know him for — holds down a tonic, gives enough room for other players to drift into space. There’s a few sections where he opens up into walking the bassline and “E2” has a really gnarly, knotty bass solo that’s like ripping apart polystyrene.

If you don’t know Milford Graves this is as good an introduction as any — one of the most impressive players to sit behind the stool, jazz or otherwise. He has fourteen limbs. But most importantly he works incredibly with Parker — genuinely one of the best rhythm sections I can think of. Unbelievable invention, huge capacity for contracting and expanding the rhythmic figures, careful listening and never overshadowing the other players. He gives a lot of rhythms for the Parker and Gayle to lock in with, but he’s far from a basic functional drummer.

The three players here are all older, but not so old that they can’t lay it the fuck down — Gayle 51, Graves 50, Parker 39 — so there’s a sense that these are people who can still blow to absolute fuck but have sharpened up youthful exuberance. Parker is obviously the dashing young blade of the set, but even so is old enough to have his own voice and space. I note also that Gayle did a release on Tokyo’s PSF in 1997, so if you’re reading, Black Editions, that’s probably due a reissue while you’re picking from the PSF archives.

Free jazz can be a pretty isolated idea, tone, mood; but the oddity with this is that there’s a huge amount of dynamic and, dare I say, emotional range. Subdued, enraged, get down and get dirty (“B1” particularly elicited this from me), slow and malevolent (“E1” had that effect on me). Tempo is a difficult thing to speak of, especially when you’ve got three players locked into their own personal demon-baiting, but there’s certainly a feeling of density and expulsion, like gas canisters overfilled with some darkly brilliant blowing.

There’s not much in the way of solos — everyone has a wee go and Graves’s solo on “E1” is — as you’ll no doubt imagine — entirely peerless. But by and large this is strongly a group effort. Three Black men laying down jazz at a time when free jazz wasn’t so hip (I gather, I was still in primary school) and sounding like the whole thing is as fresh and unhewn as when it was but a twinkle in Ornette Coleman / Eric Dolphy‘s (delete as appropriate) eye.

I was a little apprehensive about reviewing this. I trust Black Editions but ‘unheard free jazz live show’ doesn’t necessarily fill me with joy; but I’m glad as fuck I picked this up. I don’t know what the gold-standard ‘listen to this first’ record is for free jazz, but someone’s going to have to make a good argument for me to not say this record because it is everything you’d want — hard hitting, expansive, super musical, absolutely dangerous and sexy in a way that would make D’Angelo blush.

Top marks, Black Editions.

-Kev Nickells-