The aesthetic and cultural merits of Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music cannot be overstated. That it is one of the most obscure recordings in Blue Note's catalogue — paid for out of label co-founder Francis Wolff's own pocket — should tell us something. This is an apocryphal album, one that seamlessly blends the new jazz of the '60s — Gale was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra before and after these sides, and played on Cecil Taylor's Blue Note debut Unit Structures — with gospel, soul, and the blues. Gale's sextet included two bass players and two drummers — in 1968 — as well as a chorus of 11 voices, male and female. Sound like a mess? Far from it. This is some of the most spiritually engaged, forward-thinking, and finely wrought music of 1968. What's more is that, unlike lots of post-Coltrane new jazz, it's ultimately very listenable. Soloists comes and go, but modes, melodies, and harmonies remain firmly intact. The beautiful strains of African folk music and Latin jazz sounds in "Fulton Street," for example, create a veritable chromatic rainbow. "A Walk With Thee" is a spiritual written to a march tempo with drummers playing counterpoint to one another and the front line creating elongated melodic lines via an Eastern harmonic sensibility. Does it swing? Hell yeah! The final cut, "The Coming of Gwilu," moves from the tribal to the urban and everywhere in between using Jamaican thumb piano's, soaring vocals à la the Arkestra, polyrhythmic invention, and good old fashioned groove jazz, making something entirely new in the process. While Albert Ayler's New Grass was a failure for all its adventurousness, Ghetto Music, while a bit narrower in scope, succeeds because it concentrates on creating a space for the myriad voices of an emerging African-American cultural force to be heard in a single architecture.
(by Thom Jurek, All Music Guide)
It is often difficult to gauge the relative importance or message of an artwork, years or decades after its initial release. Truly impressive are those works that not only retain their Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, but also find relevance and significance with the present. Listening to the re-release of 1968's Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music, one not only senses the social awakening of the late 1960s, there is an equal and unfortunate awareness of our current cultural waste. Francis Wolff, co-founder of Blue Note, felt so strongly about this album that he personally financed the production and release of this music in 1968, after recording Gale on Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures and Larry Young's Of Love and Peace.
Along with its companion piece, Black Rhythm Happening, Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music fell victim to the chaos following Liberty Records' takeover of Blue Note. Both pieces never appeared beyond their initial releases, until now.
The good people at San Francisco-based Water Music have taken the initiative and re-released Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music on CD. The success of the album stems from its unique use of folk, blues, gospel, soul and jazz to create a wildly vibrant, urban force. "The Rain," with Joan Gale's soft, assured delivery, sets the pace for the entire album, as it morphs from a single guitar strum into a massive entity of sound, rhythm, and swing. Surprising, since 17 musicians appear on the album, is the precision and efficiency of the music.
On "Fulton Street," for example, the feel of the famous Brooklyn street is captured immediately by the child-like voices pronouncing its name proudly: "Fulton Street, baby!" Then, the low down riff comes in, the singers mimic the sound of the horns, they interchange riffs, and someone runs here, somebody else goes there, and you feel it, you're on Fulton Street, baby. It welcomes you.
Once in, it may well be difficult to relinquish the sensation of songs like "A Walk With Thee" or "The Coming of Gwilu." Both burn as deep, groove as hard, as anything else on the vaunted Blue Note catalog. For that reason, those that rarely venture outside the hard bop fringes of Blue Note will be most rewarded by the music here, as it presents new possibilities without abandoning the "Blue Note sound."
(Germein Linares, www.allaboutjazz.com)
In 1967, an ailing Alfred Lion left Blue Note Records, the label he had founded in the late 1930s and sold to Liberty Records in 1965. Though staff producers Duke Pearson and Francis Wolff put some memorable records together after his departure, Blue Note declined in stature and relevance into the early seventies. Surprising, then, to find a great Eddie Gale Blue Note record from 1968 (and another solid one from 1969)—records inexplicably avoided by the reconstituted EMI-owned Blue Note's own rigorous reissue-and-reissue-again policy—recently made available thanks to Water Records.
Gale is a trumpeter, most famous for his performance on Cecil Taylor's celebrated 1966 Unit Structures album on Blue Note, who also spent significant time with Sun Ra. There's a deep reserve of space in his playing, built cumulatively of longish pauses between phrases, and he has a concise sound that's brassy like Freddie Hubbard, but frayed around the edges like Woody Shaw or Johnny Coles. His melodies and ideas are original and a bit acerbic.
For these two records, his first as a leader—and last for many years except as a sideman—Gale was thinking big: Amalgamating soul, gospel, African music and jazz into a single sound, executed with a jazz group and chorus. The level of ambition, ritualistic clothes (the musicians appearing in monk's robes on the covers of the records) and cosmic philosophy of some of the lyrics point squarely to Sun Ra's influence, but it's Gale's own show to be sure.
Ghetto Music is certainly one of the last great records released by the original Blue Note (another is Herbie Hancock's The Prisoner) and the finest example of voices-plus-jazz-group on the label—more organic than Donald Byrd's famous 1963 album A New Perspective, cooler and more soulful than Andrew Hill's 1969 album Lift Every Voice. The eleven-voice choir is perfectly matched with Gale's two-drummer sextet; sometimes singing over the top of joyful songs, and sometimes weaving chant and syllable singing through the sextet.
"The Rain" is an extraordinary merger of fast jazz waltz, gospel singing, and what sounds like a British folk song influence. It begins with Joann Gale's (Eddie's sister) strummed guitar, and her lovely, measured performance of the tune's folky melody. It wouldn't be out of place on a Fairport Convention or Pentangle album; that is, until the thunderous band rolls into step behind her. "A Understanding" is a swirling spiritual piece, in the style of late-period Coltrane, which sets a platform for some of Gale's finest playing on the record. His solo is remarkable for the single-mindedness with which he pursues a long tension-filled arc. The performance is far enough ahead of its time that it wouldn't sound out of place on a late 90s Matthew Shipp record. "A Walk With Thee" shows off the two drummers, Richard Hackett and Thomas Holman, at their best (and they're excellent throughout). It's reminiscent of some of Masada's music. "The Coming of Gwilu" opens with thumb piano, bird whistle and flute, leaving the urban spirituality of the earlier pieces for a distant natural atmosphere. It opens into a hypnotic rolling 6/4 jazz vamp, over which steel drums announce a beautiful vocal call and response section. Ghetto Music is well paced and cumulatively powerful. It's also one of the better sounding records of the period.
(James Beaudreau, 16 April 2004, www.onefinalnote.com)
Plattentipp 
