Charles Gayle, 1939-2023
Daniel Ross Goodman
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Biblical monotheism was born when Abraham followed God’s call to leave his home and go toward an as-yet-unknown destination. American Transcendentalism emerged when Henry David Thoreau decided to leave his home in Concord, Massachusetts, to go live in the woods. It remains to be seen if a new musical movement was born when the saxophonist Charles Gayle left his home to live and play music on the streets of New York City. But he joined a long and venerable line of religious and artistic pioneers whose abandonments of their homes for voluntary temporary homelessness aided their creativity and expanded their reach.
Charles Ennis Gayle Jr., who died this week in Brooklyn from Alzheimer’s disease, was born on Feb. 28, 1939, in Buffalo, New York. His father was a steelworker, and his mother was a homemaker. He took up a variety of instruments over the course of his life, including piano, drums, bass, and viola, but the instrument with which he would carve out his place in the story of modern music would prove to be the tenor and alto saxophone. After teaching music for a few years at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Gayle produced his first recording with bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer John Bergamo in 1965. But when Gayle moved to New York City in the early 1970s, he did not immediately begin climbing the big-city musical career ladder. Instead, he did the exact opposite: He left everything behind so that he could live on the city streets and see if he could make music for the masses. “I just walked out one day, and that was it,” he recounted decades later, giving no reasons for his abrupt abandonment of conventional living. “That was one of the greatest experiences I had in my life.”
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He emerged again in the late 1980s, beginning to produce albums (Always Born, Spirits Before, and Homeless) that established him as an artist to watch in the jazz world. In the 1990s, he began to play in jazz clubs in Europe and recorded what would become his most widely praised album, Touchin’ On Trane, with bassist William Parker and drummer Rashied Ali. Thereafter, Gayle began to be known as one of the foremost figures in avant-garde (or “free”) jazz, a modern version of the American musical form that allowed for a more liberated and personal yet more atonal and discordant musical style.
Gayle may have needed his years of homeless, monasticlike wandering on the city streets in order to develop his new brand of music, a style of jazz that bears fingerprints of other masters such as John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and, in its emphasis on freedom from harmony, is reminiscent of the great English poet John Milton’s “blank” verse, which, because it did not rhyme, was controversial for its lack of harmony in its day as well.
And he was unashamed to pronounce and honor his deep faith in his music. Several of his songs, such as the explicitly religious “Eden Lost” and “Good Shepherd,” were either titled based on biblical themes or addressed religious concerns; some did both. In an interview with Cadence magazine in 2013, in which Gayle was challenged about his devoutly held Christian beliefs, which included his strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, Gayle declared that he would not and could not separate his music from his faith: “People have told me to shut up and stuff. I understand that I can turn people off with what I say or do. The problem that people have with me is not me. It’s Christ they have a problem with. 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.”
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.