It’s good to get these memories down, better at the time, but time has its own way of filtering information, so perhaps collecting and collating long after the fact has a unique value, too. Retrospect. Rashomon. Revisiting. Revising. Something.
In any case, the great jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle died this week, age 84. He was a powerful player, born in upstate New York in 1939. When I moved to Manhattan in 1988, a couple weeks after graduating from college with an English degree and a desire to write about music professionally, I was already used to visiting the Knitting Factory. Soon enough, by the end that year, I’d live a couple blocks away from the Knitting Factory’s Houston Street location, thanks to my then boss at a graphic design firm on Broadway, a few blocks north of Houston, having an empty bed in an alcove in his under-heated Crosby Street loft apartment, a couple blocks south (a stretch you’ve seen if you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s film After Hours, released three years prior). That was in the autumn, when most of the New York sublets had dried up because their inhabitants had returned from summer in Europe, or at the east end of Long Island, or some other locale.
I’d heard word of this fantastic player, Gayle, who was reportedly homeless. Folks like the late Irving Stone (for whom John Zorn’s eventual club, the Stone, would be named) and his cheerful wife, Stephanie, who always had candy in her purse, would talk about Gayle at Knitting Factory concerts before and between sets. (Since I’m down Memory Lane, I might as well add that there was a guy we’d sometimes sit with who sold tape cassettes in Washington Square Park of Jack Kerouac readings and bootlegged jazz concerts. Maybe he’s still out there. If so, hello.)
One day I saw a little photocopied flyer affixed to a telephone pole. I can’t recall exactly where the show it advertised was, but it was on the east side of town, below 14th and above Houston. When I got to the address, the sun had long since set, and far as I could tell this was an abandoned building, undergoing on-and-off re-construction toward some indecipherable new purpose. Maybe I had the address wrong. Maybe the flyer did. Maybe the concert was canceled. Or had already ended.
The entrance was boarded up, but there was, somehow, a way in — light, sound, promise; dim, muffled, ambiguous. The interior was at first narrow, and everything was covered with dusty drywall. I handed a little cash to someone near the door (or “the door”), and made my way back. If memory serves — a big if — the only illumination was from bright bulbs connected to long, tangled extension cords. Gayle was already playing when I got there. What I had mistaken for normal boisterous New York City street noise was, in fact, his band — a trio, unless I’m mistaken, which is clearly quite possible — bleeding onto the street from the deep, windowless, interior space.
I no doubt later saw Gayle again at the Knitting Factory proper, but that show, at what I took to be a squat, was the first — and clearly most memorable — time I had the pleasure. He was in full force, playing free, with a ferocity that suggested John Coltrane channeling a hurricane, or Eric Dolphy at his least congenial. In many ways, I feel like I’ve been trying, ever since, to recreate — to relive, or in the context of the Disquiet Junto music community, to encourage — that specific concert-going experience the remainder of my life. It’s part of the reason that the graffiti-strewn steps at the Luggage Store Gallery performance space in San Francisco feel so welcoming. It’s part of why when I discovered a (now defunct) club in the Sendagaya neighborhood of Tokyo that was behind a building (and down some stairs) I felt so at home. And it’s part of why whenever I travel I seek out small spots and keep my eyes out for little flyers.
Enjoyable reminiscence!