Well, lots.  Most of it I’d say.

Can you keep it to just one thing?

Hmmm, I’d have to say it’s that the methodology the band’s following is one I observed Steve using.

And that would be?

A kind of concrete materialism.

Ummm, can’t say I’m following.

Well, consider it this way:  Steve Lacy put a body of information out into the human universe.  We can apprehend this information in several ways.  The most common would be listening (to the music) and talking (about the music).  But Steve (among others) demonstrated that there are other ways to apprehend.

Still not sure I follow.

Steve certainly listened to Thelonious Monk’s music and it’s a matter of record that he talked about it, but he also PLAYED it.  That is, he worked on understanding Monk’s information in a different way, a way that can’t be put into words.  By playing that music, by working directly with the materials themselves, he gained an insight unique to himself.  This is what I mean by ‘concrete materialism.’  It’s a methodology where you work directly with the materials (playing it, rehearsing it, improvising on it) and in this way you arrive at an understanding that is substantially different (but not better) from a passive or verbal one.

Well how does this understanding differ from talking about it?

But that’s just the point.  It’s an understanding based in music.  In other words, this understanding is in MUSIC, not words.

So for you to express this difference…

…I’d have to pick up an instrument and start playing.  And then perhaps follow that up with some talking.

So it’s the whole ‘music as language’ metaphor?

No, no, no.  That is not what I’m saying (for the record, I think music and language are fundamentally different activities, else why would we have different words for them?).  What I’m talking about is THINKING IN MUSIC rather than THINKING IN WORDS.

Huh, well I bet this’ll help you sell a hell of a lot of CD’s, this whole “concrete materialism” thing.

Thanks, I appreciate that.  I’m hoping we can get a national tour of all the College Philosophy Departments in the U.S.

That’s gotta provide some better venues than the jazz club route.

Well, there’s a lot more of ‘em.  And I hear they got better chips and dip.

…

For this week’s musical portion of our broadcast, I’ve uploaded another radio broadcast from the 1960’s.  1965 to be precise.  It was recorded at the Cafe Montmarte in Copenhagen, Denmark by Danish radio.  The band includes Steve Lacy: sop. sax., Don Cherry: trumpet, Kenny Drew: piano, Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen: bass and Alex Riel: drums.

Some personal favorite moments from the following include:

-  Don Cherry solo on “Morning Glory” (no Steve)

-  Kenny Davis!!  gotta find more of this guy.  He is so completely on it here.

-  Cecil Taylor’s material treated as part of the jazz canon.  Brilliant casting choice by Steve.  You can hear that it’s distinctly different from the Monk and Ellington yet it comes from the same world.

Once again, I’d like to thank the inveterate record collector Charlie Kohlhase of Boston, MA. for providing me with this bit of audio excellence.

Enjoy!

We See – T. Monk

Introspection – T. Monk

Reflections – T. Monk

Air – C. Taylor

Morning Glory – D. Ellington

Shuffle Boil – T. Monk

Brilliant Corners – T. Monk

Hornin’ In – T. Monk

Dead Weight

SL- sop. sax.  recorded live on Oct. 30, 2001 at Afkikker in Ghent, Belgium.  Released in conjunction with the book Bone.

It starts with a clarion call of repeated intervals but quickly gets down to business.  The melody proper starts at 20s but by 25s it’s already sidestepped into another key a half step away and then it moves away yet again at 28s.  This piece isn’t just consonant, it’s very tonal. And with a very intervallic approach (in this case, the interval in question is a perfect fourth).  It proceeds with great patience culminating at the 1:30 mark and then follows a brief improvisation.  Importantly, the improvisation sticks to the sounds already presented.  Steve does not start introducing auxiliary sounds here, he sticks to pure tones.

The Man I Love

SL – sop. sax., Ran Blake – piano.  Released in 1991 on That Certain Feeling on Hat Hut records.

Steve playing not just consonantly and tonally, but playing a song from the Great American Songbook.  While his love of Monk and Ellington is well-documented, what sometimes get forgotten is that for many years, Steve was a working musician.  That meant he had to know the lingua franca of his student years (approx. 1949-1959), which puts him right in the middle of the Songbook’s heyday.  In a lot of ways, this recording reminds me of the meeting between Art Tatum and Ben Webster.  Ran Blake is all over the keyboard, playing all sorts of beautiful chords with his trademark voicings.  Steve’s response to this is to simply play the melody.  Even when he’s improvising, the listener never loses track of where the melody is.  It’s an incredible juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity.

As Usual [fragment]

SL – sop. sax., Steve Potts – alt. sax., Jean-Jacques Avenel – bass, Oliver Johnson – drums.  Recorded live at the Sunset in Paris, February 19, 1986.  Released on Morning Joy on Hat Hut records.

This fragment presents just Steve’s solo statement on this rather funky tune of his.  It’s pretty classic Lacy, an old-school medium tempo (very few people play at this speed now), a super-stretchy rhythm section and long laid-back phrases draped on top.  But the truly deep thing here is that Steve sticks to raw basics: clearly played tones in the form of quarter notes and eighth notes.  Believe me, the easiest thing in the world to do here as a saxophonist is to start screaming or doubling and quadrupling the time.  But Steve refrains from all that.  And in the process he digs an even deeper pocket.  Notice also that he sticks to a mezzo forte dynamic throughout and only occasionally playing at a full-out forte.

Just One of Those Things

SL – sop. sax., Lee Konitz – alt. sax., Dave Kurtzer – bassoon, Louis Mucci – tp., Jake Koven – tp., Jimmy Cleveland – tb., Bart Varsalona – bs. tb., Willie Ruff – fr. hn., Gil Evans – pno., Paul Chambers – bs., Nick Stabulas – drums.  Recorded Sep. 6 & 27 and Oct., 1957 in Hackensack, NJ.  Released on Gil Evans & Ten on Prestige Records.

For me this is where it started.  It’s the first track featuring Steve’s playing that I heard and I listened to it constantly on a mix-tape I made for myself back in high school (thank you Franklin Mint and your “Saxophone Stylists” box!).  It’s frightening to me just how self-assured Lacy sounds here seeing that he’s all of 23 years old (!?) and still hadn’t learned to read music yet (??!!!), but that’s not the most pertinent factor here.  For this discussion, this track is the one that I thing clearly demonstrates what a JAZZ musician Steve was.  He swings so beautifully and so hard on this.  From the offbeat quarter notes at 1:17 and 3:39 to the harmonic fake-out he initiates at 3:45, this is jazz that even this guy can get behind [link].  And while it’s not steeped in the language of Charlie Parker, it clearly is the product of someone who knows his Lester Young and Louis Armstrong.

Out of Nowhere

SL – sop. sax., Tom Stewart – tenor horn, Dave McKenna – piano, Whitey Mitchell – bs., Al Levitt – drums.  Recorded Feb., 1956 in New York City.  Re-released on Steve Lacy Early Years 1954-1956 on Fresh Sound Records.

And for Steve, this is where it started.  It’s from one of the first recordings he appeared on.  He’s 21 years old and has been playing for five or six years at this point.  The track as a whole is charming but not particularly inspiring.  Everyone gets a turn at the melody (a half chorus each), the rhythm section is solid but plodding and very little that’s surprising happens here.  So why did I include this?  Two reasons:  1.)  To reinforce Steve’s jazz bona fides.  While there’s evidence to be gleaned from his treatment of Monk’s, Ellington’s and Nichols’ oeuvres, I think Steve’s commitment to jazz runs deeper than this.  It’s as deep as any classic saxophonist’s (think Rollins, Coltrane, McClean, Mobley) and deeper than many avant-gardists of the 1960’s (see below).  and 2.)  Steve’s solo is clearly indebted to the playing of Lester Young.  This is important for several reasons, but what I find most interesting is that it’s not such a Charlie Parker-inflected statement.  In 1956, Parker had been dead for almost a year so his shadow still loomed very large.  For Steve to shrug off some of his influence is deep, but to really commit himself (harmonically) to an older model (Young was not dead, but would be in less than three years) shows what a staunch individualist he was.  He was going to play the way he heard things no matter what.

If these five things were among the only tracks Steve was known for, he would be remembered as a gifted but firmly traditional player.  Taken in conjunction with the previous post, one’s head starts to spin trying to hold all those sounds in one’s head.  What stands out above all though, is that Steve was committed in the deepest possible way to these sounds.  Whether it was tonal, atonal, noise or prettily consonant, it all had a place and a purpose.  The music was always about something.

[N.B.  Two paragraphs ago I made light of Steve’s “commitment” to jazz and insinuated  that it was “deeper” than some of his fellow musicians.  Let me be clear what I mean by this.  I’m writing of Steve’s commitment to an older generation’s notion of what jazz is.  And that notion centers on community.  It’s the idea that jazz signifies a group of people who are committed to upholding certain (musical) values and to communicating these values amongst each other.  In real-world terms, this plays out as a series of demonstrations.  Artists who subscribe to this definition of jazz believe that one has to be able to demonstrate the ability to do certain things (swing eighth notes, improvise on songs from the Great American Songbook, etc.).  In contrast, someone like Roscoe Mitchell I believe has little patience with this.  He could care less what people think of his jazz bona fides, he’s going to play his music no matter what anyone says or does.  In a slightly similar but different vein, I think Mitchell’s colleague Anthony Braxton is actively involved in redefining and expanding what these values are.  I have no hard evidence for my opinion, but I do know for a fact that Steve was one of the most staunchly traditional/old-school jazz musicians I ever met.  He chastised me and other students at NEC for not being able to play a blues properly, disliked scat singing and generally assigned rolls to instruments in student ensembles based on what their rolls would have been in a New Orleans small jazz group.]

The question that lingers for me after all these exegeses is why doesn’t Steve Lacy have more students?  That is, why don’t more jazz musicians model their sound and approach on the sounds and approaches he pioneered?  I think there’s a lot of answers to this one, but I think it has something to do with Steve’s choice of musical models (Lester Young, Monk and Ellington), his home (he spent half his life in Europe) and his refusal to play to nostalgia (he never played the way he ‘used’ to play).  Be that as it may, Lacy left a lot of information to ponder and no shortage of good reasons to investigate it.

Special pre-release copies of our 2nd CD will be available for sale.

Free beverages will also be available.

Tickets will be $10 advance order or $15 at the door.  Tickets can be purchased in advance here, or at the door of 58 North Six.

Where it is:  58 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn (Williamsburg).  walking distance from the Bedford stop on the L train.

[N.B.  ‘Dissonance’ is a word that gets bandied about a fair bit without any real clarity of meaning.  Of course, like any frequently used word, it has a lot of meanings.  For the purposes of this essay, I’m using dissonance to mean this, this or this (scroll down to “Quality” and click on Minor second, Major second, Tritone, Minor seventh or Major seventh).]

I’ve selected five of what I consider some of Lacy’s most dissonant pieces.  I left plenty out, but these are pieces that range from the cryptically strange to the downright harrowing.  What they all share is that they are clearly the work of an exceptionally musical mind that has as deep an understanding of dissonance and its expressive possibilities as it does consonance.

The Forest [fragment]
SL – sop. sax., Enrico Rava – tp., Johnny Dyani – bs., Louis Moholo – dr. recorded live on Oct. 8, 1966 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Released on The Forest and The Zoo on ESP records.

I bought this CD after one of my first lessons with Steve.  At the time I had very few records that featured him (like two) and I asked him which of his records he really enjoyed.  He rubbed his chin with his fingers and then drawled, “Well, I like this one called The Forest and the Zoo.  I don’t know if you can still get it, but that one still holds up.”  Luckily, it’s been in steady circulation for the past ten years from ESP and it’s still one of the more idiosyncratic free records out there. In many ways, it’s a 60’s counter-culture counterpart to New Orleans Jazz.  Louis Moholo’s steady and forceful thrumming is quick, but not loud.  Simultaneous with this Lacy, Rava and Dyani throw down splotches of sound at a seemingly leisurely tempo.  What’s truly remarkable about all this is how calmly all four are inhabiting their own sonic universes, but still listening to each other.  It’s counterpoint in the sense of independent voices, but it’s also quite definitely dissonant.

The Woe [fragment]
SL – sop. sax., Steve Potts – alt. sax., Irene Aebi – vc.&voice, Kent Carter – bs., Oliver Johnson – dr. recorded live on Jan. 26, 1973 in Zurich, Switzerland. Released on Weal & Woe on Emanem Records.

Jazz as protest song.  The Woe was a four-part suite written by Steve to protest the Vietnam War.  He played it frequently in the late sixties and in fact, this recording is the final live performance of it after a solid two years of playing nothing but it at concerts (the peace treaty was signed the day after this concert).  Of the five samples, this is the most conventionally dissonant (it’s LOUDLY dissonant).  Still, the unique Lacyean hallmarks are still present.  The opening figure is a simple, almost nursery rhyme, up-and-down phrase voiced strictly in minor seconds by two saxophones.  It starts off prickly and by the eighth iteration it’s an all-out war with the instruments playing along to a homemade soundtrack composed of exploding bombs, rattling machine-guns and whistling missiles.  This is a five-minute fragment of a twenty-minute section.  While the events are a bit hoary, the sentiment is just as relevant today.  Take a moment now to realize that since the Vietnam War, the U.S. has always been involved in an armed conflict of some kind somewhere in the world.  The behavior Steve was protesting forty years ago continues to this day and has not significantly changed.  That’s a pretty disturbing (dissonant?) thought.

The Cryptosphere
SL – reed and sop. sax. (Ruby Braff on tp. in background). Recorded in Sep. 9-10, 1971 in Paris, France. Released on Scratching the Seventies on Saravah.

From violently aggressive to coyly mysterious.  “The Cryptosphere” is a solo multi-tracked piece from Steve’s first solo studio record Lapis. This is about “another music, hidden in the corner, on the ground and behind the furniture.”  The dissonance here is more cognitive than anything else, but still there is the irritant of controlled saxophone ‘kisses.’ It’s a piece inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the relationship is clear upon first listening.  Like one of Duchamp’s assemblages, it arranges a few discreet musical objects (a Ruby Braff record, a saxophone reed being run through his hair and lip buzzing done on a mouthpiece-less soprano) in front of the listener and invites them to create the relationship. And again, part of what makes this track so unique is it’s low volume level.  The listener’s participation is requested rather than demanded.

The Wire
SL – sop. sax., Steve Potts – sop. sax., Irene Aebi – vc., Michael Smith – pno., Kent Carter – bs., Kenneth Tyler – perc. Recorded Feb. 18-21, 1974 in Paris France. Released on Scratching the Seventies on Saravah.

For those that don’t know this piece already, this is a.) a musical portrait of the final moments of Albert Ayler’s life ticking away and b.) the piece from which the British-based music magazine gets its title.  The first time I heard this piece I was shocked and saddened.  The harrowing string glissandi (perpetrated by Irene Aebi and Kent Carter), the insistent piano clusters () and once again, two soprano saxophones with a child-like chanting voiced a minor second apart.  It all adds up to a pretty carefully controlled portrait.  There isn’t any need for this piece to rise above a mezzo forte or forte, it’s already plenty confrontational.  It also clocks in at a manageable 5:13, more than enough time to make its point, but at the same time leaving the listener dazed and wondering if it all really happened or was it just a dream.

Nowhere Street [fragment]
SL – sop. sax., Steve Potts – sop. sax., Irene Aebi – vocal & vln., Bobby Few – pno., Jean-Jacques Avenel – bs., Oliver Johnson – dr., Brion Gysin – words. Recorded Jan. 28-29, 1981 in Paris France. Released on Songs on hat ART records.

This is from 1981’s terrific collaboration between Steve Lacy and the painter/writer Brion Gysin.  Like the longer selections, I’ve abridged this one to make my point with a little more brevity.  So when the tune fades in, it’s halfway through the opening melody and just before the blowing begins.  All the hallmarks of mature Steve Lacy are now in place:  the embrace of dissonance for its own prickly sake, a regular and singable rhythm, and a harmonically ambiguous mode (it sounds Phrygian, but just how Phrygian is it?).  But added to this is a really thrilling and mature group dynamic.  Irene Aebi goes to town here.  She might not have the finest technique, but this has to be one of the most beautiful freely atonal solos committed to a recording.  Everyone gives her plenty of room, (Steve Potts carefully and periodically dumping a controlled squall, quiet whistles and moans from Lacy, prickly clouds of arpeggios from Bobby Few) and the combined effect is an excruciating portrait of Gysin’s Nowhere Street.

There was a time in jazz when dissonance like this was much more the norm.  So much so, that the aural landscape became over-saturated with ‘unlistenable’ sounds.  It makes sense that the cultural pendulum has swung back the other way in the past several decades towards the side of  ‘pretty’ music.  Maybe it’s time for it to swing back.  Not so much to a place of full-out assault, but to an egalitarian place where all sounds are treated and represented equally.

For those of you interested in hearing a more musical take on these matters (and a few others), Ideal Bread (js, Kirk Knuffke, Reuben Radding, Tomas Fujiwara) will be celebrating the release of their second CD Transmit on Cuneiform Records with a special Live In-Studio appearance on Sunday, June 6^th at 58NorthSix Media Labs in Williamsburg Brooklyn.  Advanced tickets are available for $10 if you click here or $15 at the door. Free beverages and special advance-issue copies of the CD will be available.  We’ll be recording the evening’s events so come and be famous for a night (at least in our eyes).

Every Friday starting tonight I will upload something to the (W)ords + (M)usic section of this site.  Each of these pages will include both words and music pertaining to Ideal Bread and/or Steve Lacy.

This is in preparation for the release of Ideal Bread’s 2nd CD “Transmit” on June 8th.

I’ll be doing this until the last Friday of June.

hope you all enjoy it!

It’s quite simple:  To me, “tribute band” specifically connotes Steve Lacy the individual, whereas “repertory band” more clearly refers to Steve Lacy’s art, his compositions.

But can you really separate the two?  The artist from the art?

Well, I just did…

I mean, isn’t that separation illusory?

Probably, but it’s a very useful illusion.  You see Steve Lacy the man, the human, is certainly a fascinating topic.  But in many ways, it’s a topic better suited to lingual exploration.  His art however seems much more susceptible to a musical investigation.  There are also the practical considerations:  if our art is about Steve Lacy the person, then it most certainly needs to research the soprano saxophone and that’s a topic I’m simply not interested in.

What, you don’t like the soprano?

To listen to?  Love it.  To play?  Absolutely zero interest.  There’s also the fact that from a content-perspective his art is a far richer source than his life.

So are you saying his life isn’t interesting?

Not at all, but there is a limit to what one can say about his life.  And no matter what stories you tell and discover, it doesn’t get you any closer to answering questions about his mysterious works of art.

That sounds like two different responses.

It is.  And by the first, I mean that one can play his music in a nearly infinite number of ways and it’s still recognizably Steve Lacy art.  But the life?  There are a fairly finite number of facts you can report on.  But beyond that, it becomes conjecture or outright fiction.

And your second response?  What “questions” are you referring to?

Fairly simple ones:  Why am I attracted to this piece (or not)?  Why does this piece repeat so much?  Why would someone with such a fantastic ear for harmony restrict himself to such a harmonically static palette?

I thought you said you weren’t interested in Steve Lacy the person?

Disregarding your clear disinterest in what I’ve already said, I will say this:  1.  Steve Lacy was a very good piano player and had a very good ear.  2.  It is fair then to assume he had a very good ear for harmony.  3.  He wrote music that seemed to have a restricted/flat harmonic palette.  Therefore, by implication:  4.  Steve must have heard a lot of rich harmonic implications in what seemed to be simple (almost mundane).

I still don’t get it…

Look!  It’s simple!  There must be some kind of deeper harmonic meaning in what outwardly sounds like such limited material!

Oh.  Well why didn’t you just say so in plain English?  No need to get huffy…

…

The following three tunes are from the Thelonious Monk Quintet’s appearance at the Quaker City Jazz Festival held in Philadelphia on August 26, 1960.

The personnel on the three tunese are:

Steve Lacy: soprano saxophone

Charlie Rouse: tenor saxophone

Thelonious Monk: piano and compositions

John Ore: bass

Roy Haynes: drums

Mitch Miller: announcer

The tunes are:

1.  Evidence

2.  Straight, No Chaser

3.  (end of Straight, No Chaser) Rhythm-a-ning

This is a recording from the CBS radio broadcast.  I would like to thank Charlie Kohlhase for giving me this recording.  Pitch correction was done with the Amazing-Slow-Downer.

This was recorded 10 weeks into what would be Lacy’s nearly four-month stay in Thelonious Monk’s working band.

Esteem

Papas Midnite Hop

Quirks

Kitty Malone

Cliches

the final trio

ickle

garbage can blues

5 duos & a trio