Charles Gayle/ Milford Graves/ William Parker - WEBO (Black Editions Archive, 2024) *****

By Stuart Broomer

Black Editions Archive was launched a couple of years ago with a devotion to the energy music wing of free jazz. Its first three releases have been a treasure trove of music with Milford Graves, that astonishing percussionist whose career had long periods without visits to a recording studio. The first release was a two-LP set of Peter Brötzmann with Graves and William Parker at CBGB’s 313 Gallery in 2002 one of the great archival recordings of the decade. It was followed by another two-LP set, Children of the Forest, by various groups, all with Graves and most including saxophonists Arthur Doyle and/or Hugh Glover. As substantial as those recordings were, this trio recording -- two performances from the short-lived NYC performance space WEBO on July 7 and 8, 1991, two hours of music spread over three LPs -- raises the bar. It may be (along with Touchin’ on Trane (FMP), recorded in Germany four months later with Parker and Rashied Ali) Gayle’s finest recorded work. It is also very likely the archival recording of the year, from the music to its presentation.

Gayle, who passed away in September 2023 at 84, emerged briefly in Buffalo in the mid-60s, largely disappeared into homelessness and playing on the street, then emerged again, circa 1988, a spectral figure, an insistent presence carrying on the extraordinary phase of free jazz – energy music, spiritual jazz – practiced by its greatest avatars, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, in the mid-60s before their respective deaths in 1967 and 1970. Listening to WEBO, the first release of Gayle’s music following his passing and a monument to his work, with likely the most powerful band with which he ever worked, the special character of his music comes through insistently. The music is far too powerful – its form is literally its intensity – to be regarded as mere imitation. Its sustained forays into high squeals, it’s dirge-like moments with heavy vibrato and its explosive overblown runs invoke the particular power of Ayler and Coltrane’s mid-’60s work. True to his spiritual mission, Gayle sounds like he’s channeling his sources: it’s as authentic, as intense, as cauterizing a wound.

Gayle will sometimes make that unique shift from momentary musing to full-blown energy mode in instants, William Parker describes in a liner note Gayle’s “ability to accelerate from zero to two hundred miles per hour in one minute.” It feels like a kind of possession, a possession that one felt in Ayler and Coltrane’s performances (the author is old enough to have been a witness), paralleling the trance culture of dervishes and other ceremonies (consider alsothe recording The Trance of Seven Colors by Maleem Mahmoud Ghania with Pharoah Sanders’ (Zehra) where the sense of musical healing is as evident as in some gospel music).

The music’s power and urgency are evident from Side A, a 21-minute improvisation which begins with Parker’s ferocious, vocalic, upper register bowing, Gayle responding with a kind of low-register barking. Graves pushes forward with drumming as aggressive and complex as drumming could ever be, sounding at times like a drum corp. The group creates a maelstrom that will characterize much of the coming two hours of music, music named only by its place on the record sides, A1, B1, etc., no after-the-fact titling added on.

In his background note to the first LP, William Parker situates his own playing in the tradition of Wellman Braud. A relatively neglected figure of early jazz, Braun was the founder of the walking bass style and a fixture through the early decades of the music with bands led by Duke Ellington and Kid Ory. Parker’s pizzicato playing here is one of the elements that so deeply roots this music, an anchor in the tumult, while his arco work embodies the tumult itself, the nearest a bass might sound like Gayle’s own work here.

The presentation is a fine tribute to the musicians’ art. Sides A, B and D are single tracks running between 19 and 22 minutes. Shorter tracks are assembled on sides C, E and F. The tracks aren’t given a chronological order, the spoken introduction to “C2” confirming it when Graves refers to the moment as the beginning of the fourth set of two nights. The order seems to optimize the listening experience, while the packaging couldn’t be more respectful and celebratory. The quality of the recording, arranged by the musicians, is very good. The LPs are in a heavy cardboard box with an illustration by Jeff Schlanger that captures the vibrant energy. The LP sleeve portraits of the individual the musicians effectively combine abstract expressionist drips with representation. The liner notes are by William Parker and guitarist Alan Licht, who attended the first concert as a young man. There’s also a reproduction of the original concert flyer and a set of photos from a 2021 reunion at the WEBO site. It’s also available as a download at https://milfordgraves-blackeditionsarchive.bandcamp.com/album/webo .