EDDIE GALE — Black Rhythm Happening (review)

EDDIE GALE — Black Rhythm Happening album cover Album · 1969 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Gale’s second album is more or less the logical continuity of Ghetto Music, in both sonics and musicians taking part into it (more or less unchanged), despite a somewhat different format (four of the eight tracks around or below three minutes). Recorded and released the following year, still on Blue Note, Black Rhythm Happening does feature some guests, the better-known being Elvin Jones and the Noble singers are under the leadership of Fulumi Prince, this time.

Opening on the short title track, with some banter, rants and jeering over a (un-credited) electric guitar in a happy mood piece. The following even-shorter Gleeker (whatever that is) features heavy brass and wild drums, while wife Joann handles lead vocals. The slow-starting Song Of Will features slow plaintive chants before a brass blast over dissonant drums and bass blows it apart. Ghetto Love Song is a poignant song Mexico Thing has an expected Spanish feeling, mainly induced by Gale’s trumpet

Opening the flipside, Ghetto Summertime is an intense piece with that guitar coming back for added tension while Gale’s trumpet blows a mean tune. It Must Be You sports a slight Middle-Eastern flavour in its bass line. The album’s Teyonda centrepiece closes the album and it is a haunting and tense piece, but halfway through, the declamation of the Zodiac signs and a mumbo-jumbo astrological monologue shows its late-60’s origins.

Despite plenty of qualities of its own, BRH fails to match its predecessor’s success, partly because the surprise is now gone, but the shorter tracks are often not bringing the same flavour that the longer ones did in GM. Nevertheless, Gale’s second solo album is still an excellent disc, but sadly it would be his last for the next 30 years, and from what I heard his three “recent” albums don’t hold the same sense of urgency that these two did.
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