In a 2007 interview with JazzTimes, trumpeter Eddie Gale spoke about the impetus behind his debut album, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music, a record so ambitious that not even Blue Note knew what to do with it. It was 1968, and the venerated jazz label was running on the fumes of the hard bop era with swanky, romantic tunes that didn’t address the despair and unrest unfolding outside: a quagmire in Vietnam, the fight for equal rights in the U.S., the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Gale’s album was something else: it conveyed fire, intensity, and most of all, Blackness. “At that point, I didn’t know of anyone who was playing with two drummers and two bassists,” he said.