Charles Ennis Gayle Jr. was born February 28, 1939, in Buffalo, New York, to a steelworker father, Charles Sr., and a mother, Frances, who kept the house. He graduated from Hutchinson Central Technical High School in 1957 and spent a short period at Fredonia State Teachers College. Piano came first, as a child; the saxophone he taught himself later. His earliest documented playing is a set of informal recordings made in the fall of 1965 in percussionist John Bergamo's living room with bassist Buell Neidlinger, tapes that sat unissued for fifty years before K2B2 Records put them out in 2015 as Gayle Force. He worked around Buffalo through the 1960s and taught music at the State University of New York at Buffalo, an academic post he left behind when he moved to New York City in the early 1970s.

What followed is the part of the story that made him famous, and it is worth stating plainly rather than as legend. Gayle spent close to two decades without a home, playing tenor saxophone on street corners and subway platforms around Manhattan and Brooklyn, living for stretches in a Brooklyn storefront and in a Lower East Side squat, and earning some days less than three dollars. He described it as a decision rather than a misfortune: a stripping away of everything that was not the music. During the same years he was invisible to the record industry. He brought a demo to Bernard Stollman at ESP-Disk in the mid-1970s, but the label stopped operating before anything came of it. The one substantial document of Gayle before 1988 is Ebba Jahn's film Rising Tones Cross, shot in New York in 1984, where his commentary runs alongside that of bassists William Parker and Peter Kowald.

The break came through the Knitting Factory, where a Monday-night residency put him in front of the downtown audience, and through a Swedish label with no reason to be cautious. Over one week in April 1988 at A&R Recording in New York, Gayle cut three albums for Silkheart with bassist Sirone: Always Born (April 10 and 11, a quartet with saxophonist John Tchicai and drummer Reggie Nicholson) and Spirits Before and Homeless (both from April 13 and 14, a trio with drummer David Pleasant). He was 49 years old and effectively making his debut. Knitting Factory Works followed with Repent, drawn from two 1992 nights at the club, and a stream of records that would run for the next thirty years across Silkheart, FMP, Black Saint, Victo, Clean Feed, Ayler, Not Two, ESP-Disk, For Tune and Otoroku.

His most concentrated stretch of recording ran from 1991 through 1993. On June 7 and 8, 1991, he played two nights at the Manhattan loft space Webo with William Parker and drummer Milford Graves; the tapes stayed in Graves's collection until Black Editions Archive issued them as the three-LP set Webo in 2024. That October he was in Berlin, and on October 31 and November 1, 1991, at the Haus der jungen Talente during the Total Music Meeting, he recorded Touchin' on Trane with Parker and drummer Rashied Ali. Released by FMP in 1993 as FMP CD 48, it became the record his name is attached to, and the Penguin Guide to Jazz gave it a Crown. In January 1993 he took a quartet with Parker, bassist F. Vattel Cherry and drummer Michael Wimberly into the House of Music in West Orange, New Jersey, for a two-day session that produced three separate albums: Translations and Raining Fire on Silkheart that year, and Blue Shadows, held back and issued only in 2007. That April he recorded Consecration for Black Saint and appeared with the Cecil Taylor Ensemble at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, a concert FMP released as Always a Pleasure. Two further Berlin dates that August became the FMP trio records Berlin Movement from Future Years and Abiding Variations.

Alongside the music he developed Streets, a character he performed in whiteface clown makeup, red nose and ragged clothes. Streets began in pantomime, acting out love, pain and joy without words, and Gayle described the persona as a release from being Charles Gayle and from being the center of attention. It also became a pulpit. His 1994 monologue "In the Name of the Father" set out his Christian convictions and his opposition to abortion and homosexuality, and later performances included holding up blood-stained dolls; audiences that had come for the saxophone frequently did not want the sermon, and the routine cost him bookings and goodwill in parts of the scene that otherwise revered him. He never separated the two. "I just dedicate my music to God and Christ, that's all," he told an interviewer in 2000.

From the late 1990s he leaned harder on the piano he had started on, releasing Jazz Solo Piano on Knitting Factory in 2001 and the all-original Time Zones on Tompkins Square in 2006, both of which answered critics who assumed he could not handle changes. He taught at Bennington College around the turn of the century. He also kept returning to old company: he played alto in William Parker's four-bass Requiem at the ninth Vision Festival on May 31, 2004, alongside Parker, Sirone, Alan Silva and Henry Grimes, and in 2007 he, Parker and Rashied Ali reconvened the Touchin' on Trane trio under the name By Any Means, taped live at Club Crescendo in Norrköping, Sweden, on October 19 and released on Ayler Records. His European trios of the 2000s and 2010s used drummers Gerald Cleaver and Klaus Kugel and bassists Hilliard Greene and Ksawery Wójciński, and in 2014 he recorded in Peitz, Germany, with Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. On June 11, 2014, at Roulette in Brooklyn, Arts for Art honored him with the Vision Festival's Lifetime of Achievement award; he played three sets that night, including one in the Streets costume.

His last studio and concert recordings date from 2017, at Cafe OTO in London with bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders and in Belgium with Manolo Cabras and Giovanni Barcella, and his last live performances from 2018. He spent part of his final years in Buffalo with family before returning to New York. Charles Gayle passed away in Brooklyn on September 5, 2023, at 84, after several years with Alzheimer's disease. He was survived by three sons, Ekwambu, Michael and Dwayne, and a granddaughter.

Gayle played tenor at a volume and intensity that invited lazy comparison to Albert Ayler, whose vibrato-drenched hymnody and whose religious conception of the music he genuinely shared, and to late John Coltrane, whose Interstellar Space partner he inherited on Touchin' on Trane. The comparison undersells him. Underneath the shrieking upper-register work was a player with full command of the horn, capable of slow ballad playing and of a blues-and-gospel phrasing that traced back to church rather than to the conservatory, and his piano records showed a percussive, Monk-adjacent touch that surprised listeners who had filed him as a noise musician. He did not describe what he played as free: he treated it as an unbroken continuation of the tradition, and he was openly critical of players he thought had abandoned changes. Twenty years of playing outdoors for coins left an audible mark on his sound, an urgency that critics reached for repeatedly when they wrote about him. His late arrival on record, at 49, means that almost the entire documented catalog belongs to a man already fully formed, which is part of why the 1988 Silkheart week and the 1991-1993 run still carry the weight they do.