San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Eddie Gale — trumpet stylist, jazz educator
“He was ... a weird Black hippie with a sound like water falling from a cascading sky.”
Howard Wiley, tenor saxophonist
Trumpeter Eddie Gale was the first to admit that San Jose was an unlikely place for him to settle down.
A proud Brooklynite who spent the formative years of his career in the thick of New York’s roiling avantgarde jazz scene, he became a South Bay institution in the 1970s, esteemed for his work as an educator and meditative musical proponent of world peace. Named by San Jose Mayor Norm Mineta as the city’s official Ambassador of Jazz in 1974, Gale died July 10 after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
Gale earned early acclaim as a trumpeter in the bands of Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, visionary musicians who radically expanded jazz’s frontiers in the 1960s. After he left to form his own combo, Gale maintained close ties with both bandleaders, particularly Ra, a prolific composer whose music encompassed jazz’s entire history while imagining an Afrocentric intergalactic future.
“Sun Ra was like a stepfather to me,” Gale said in a 2002 interview of the composer, who died in 1993. “He just walked the streets every day and every night, and he would have me walk with him all over Manhattan, and I brought him into Brooklyn. He would show me different things, his early poetry, word play, hieroglyphics. I would just tag along with this man. He called me the original avantgarde trumpeter because I was able to get into music every which way.”
But Gale made his own eradefining statements with two albums for Blue Note, 1968’s “Ghetto Music” and 1969’s “Black Rhythm Happening.” Combining the hardbop idiom he absorbed as a teenager with gospelinfused soul jazz and the free jazz practices embraced by politically active Black musicians, the projects married Black consciousness with Age of Aquarius universalism.
In his prescient 2012 book, “Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 19651975,” prolific producer Pat Thomas noted that Gale and Horace Silver’s use of singers “changed the sound of Blue Note with consciousnessraising lyricaljazz compositions.”
“Those two albums are unlike anything else that Blue Note ever did,” Thomas told The Chronicle after Gale’s death. “He’s got acoustic guitars, a chorus of vocalists, elements of folk and gospel. They didn’t sell well at the time, but they had some diehard fans.”
With the jazz scene shifting and gigs disappearing in the early 1970s, Gale accepted an invitation from Black students at Stanford University for a semesterlong stint as an artist in residence. At the end of the semester, as Gale told the story, the students prevailed upon him to stay, lining up housing for him and his family in San Jose, though he wasn’t quite clear where the city was located.
“It’s been a great place to live and work,” Gale said in a 2002 story in the San Jose Mercury News. “And the music sounds as beautiful in San Jose as anywhere else.”
He became a regular presence at schools around the region, spreading his love of music. Gale accumulated numerous honors and awards for his work with young musicians, including the prestigious Jefferson Award from the American Institute for Public Service in 2006.
Gale could find his way into almost any musical setting, playing radical hiphop with Boots Riley and the Coup and psychedelic rock with Mushroom. Uninterested in hustling for gigs, he started organizing an annual Concert for World Peace in San Jose in the early 1990s with his Inner Peace Orchestra, featuring a diverse group of musicians to reflect his increasingly pacific sensibility with music “dedicated to meditation and relaxation.”
Oakland tenor saxophonist Howard Wiley started encountering Gale at sessions in the East Bay in the 1990s and was immediately struck by his open, calm demeanor.
“He had an ability to communicate with people,” Wiley told The Chronicle. “And like a lot of these older cats, he was a true personality, a weird Black hippie with a sound like water falling from a cascading sky. He would just talk about the humanity in the music.”
A new generation of music fans discovered Gale about 15 years ago, when Thomas oversaw the reissues of the trumpeter’s Blue Note albums. The friendship blossomed when Thomas’ collective, Mushroom, released 2007’s “Joint Happening,” an avantfunk/ fusion session laced with blasts of improvisation.
In 2018, KPFA DJ Michael Skolnik coproduced a 50th anniversary reimagining of Gale’s “Ghetto Music” with a multigenerational cast of Bay Area musicians, including bassist Marcus Shelby and vocalist Faye Carol.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Gale grew up during a time when the entire history of jazz was available firsthand in nightclubs. He started playing trumpet with the Cub Scouts marching band, enamored with the uniforms and parades. Inspiration was all around him. Brooklyn was home to many leading musicians, and Gale wasn’t too shy to approach the great bebop trumpeter Kenny Dorham for lessons.
He forged his sound jamming with such artists as Illinois Jacquet, Randy Weston, Art Blakey and John Coltrane. Gale recalled that the tenor saxophonist was so startled by the passionate torrent flowing from his horn that Coltrane asked him whether he was on drugs. “No, I just love the music,” Gale answered.
Gale is survived by three of his four siblings, Joann of Washington, D.C., Leticia of Florida and David of Atlanta; his wife, Georgette of San Jose; his former wife, Marlene, and their children, Marc of Hawaii, Chanel, Djuana and Gwilu of California, and Teyonda of Georgia; his oldest daughter, Donna of New York, from a previous relationship; and numerous grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.
The family is planning a car parade tribute for Gale in San Jose on Aug. 15, which would have been his 79th birthday. For more details, go to www.eddiegale.com.