Steve Lacy Quartet - One Fell Swoop (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Yet another excellent album by Lacy, the expatriate soprano saxophonist." 

Francis Davis, Philadelphia Enquirer, 31 March, 1988

"The Music of Lacy and Tyler, providing a strong dose of unadorned creativity, is quite happily unconcerned with being fashionable or appropriate." 

Paul Baker, Jazznews International, April 1988

There are many things in this life that are hard to understand – not only the solid repugnance which greeted Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy at the beginning of the sixties, but also such observables as the fact that the only people with long hair these days are those (middle-aged car salesmen and Chinese waiters) who in the self-same sixties had short hair and vehemently expressed the wish that long haired youth should he shipped off to concentration camps. Or, the extreme indignation that characterized the white American Olympic tram in Berlin in 1936 when it became evident how the Germans were treating the Jews – which is much the same as the way in which the blacks were treated in the U.S.A. (but without the white indignation).

However, many things have improved as the years have rolled by. IRCAM, in Paris, is a fine example of governmental initiative and this is where Keith Knox and I decided to record Steve Lacy and Charles Tyler between June 11th and 14th, 1986, because, for one reason among many, Charles too (since 1985) lives in Paris. Steve has lived there for the past 15 years, of course. I've listened to Steve since the fifties and have something like 30 recordings by him, of which my favorite is a solo album from Théatre du Chêne Noir, made August 7th and 8th, 1972. The first time I heard Steve Lacy in person was in Stockholm on October 13th, 1982. The first time I heard Charles Tyler live was in New York on December 15th, 1973. Charles had moved from the west coast that day. He had arrived in New York City and gone that same evening to sit in with Dewey Redman's group at Sam River's Rivbea. I still recall with great clarity those careening solos, bursting with ideas, that Charles ripped off that evening. I've bought every one of Charles' records since then. 

The conditions for the recording session in studio five at IRCAM could have been better. Steve's group had an engagement at the Sunset Club that very same week, which began at 11:00 each evening and went on until 3 or 4 in the morning. Charles had been traveling in the south of France and had had no opportunity of working with Steve. Studio time was limited, but the place was staffed by an extremely competent recording team – David Wessel and Didier Arditi.

IRCAM is a highly prestigious establishment. Well known personages came and went. One day Mauricio Kagel came in and listened to a take. It was a very tough rehearsal and recording assignment for all concerned, but especially for Charles with his big heavy copper baritone – a new experimental horn from Buffet. It was anaconda versus cobra, Hershey's Milkyway versus Wrigley's Spearmint, Ingres versus Mondrian – the emotional and eruptive playing of Charles versus the businesslike appearance and watchlike precision of Steve. Steve was pretty much determined that his soprano should be featured throughout the recording – and, although there was some discussion of whether Charles should alternate between his instruments, he was interested primarily in Charles playing baritone as a supporting horn.

Clearly, there was a degree of tension between the two saxists, which lent a dynamic aspect to the various takes. The pressure was eased by Oliver with his odd jokes. When the air conditioning made the studio too chilly for instance, Oliver suddenly shouted, "Let's go out and hunt animals!". Easier said than done, 20 meters from Centre Pompidou where we used to sit and have a beer after each session.

During one of these café visits, Steve and I began to talk about a black American painter I'd been interested in for a long time, Bob Thompson, who lived a brief but hectic life (he died in 1966, at the age of 29), was known in jazz musicians' circles and turned out to be an old and dear friend of Steve's.

Archie Shepp dedicated a tune to Thompson on his 'Mama Too Tight' album (Impulse A-9134 "Portrait of Robert Thompson as a Young Man"), and Steve has made a recording called 'The Forest and the Zoo' (ESP 1060) on which the backliner includes a photograph taken in Rome with Steve, Bob and bassist Johnny Dyani and the front cover features a painting by Bob.

The reproduction of Bob's painting on the ESP album was not very good and Steve thought it was a splendid idea, because of this, to let the front cover of our record consist of a painting called "The Hairdresser", that I knew of. In Steve's mind – and he has considerable familiarity with Bob Thompson's work – the voodooistic hairdresser is intimately coupled with the inner significance of the album title, 'One Fell Swoop'. Strangely enough, it turned out later when we demounted the canvas for photographing that it was painted in 1962/63 precisely in Paris, according to a note on the back of the painting.

The days passed by with the demanding work of rehearsals and with Steve's group at night in the Sunset – Steve, Steve Potts, Jean-Jacques Avenel and Oliver Johnson.

On Friday the 13th, Steve decided that we should include the Monk tune, "Friday the Thirteenth". On Saturday the 14th, Steve had his instrument fixed by the 'horn doctor' and didn't appear at the studio until noon. While we were waiting, I asked Charles to record one of his own tunes with the trio; he was nervous about doing so because it was Steve's gig. As things worked out he recorded an old tune of his, "Ode to Lady Day", and Steve was quite pleased about it because a nice bit of variety was introduced.

Also on Saturday the 14th, Steve Potts was not able to participate at the Sunset because of a huge anti-racist meeting at the Bastille, where 300,000 people were gathered under the banner "TOUCHE PAS A MON POTE".

To finish the recording, we had agreed to rent the studio for several additional hours on Sunday the 15th, during which we completed the project.

I went home to Steve's place afterwards to discuss a further album which was to be recorded in New York. I had an early lunch later with Charles at which we talked, among many other things, about the improbable chain of events that led up to this production. A few lines come to mind from an interview Peter Bull made with Steve Lacy for his film documentary, Steve Lacy: 

Lift the Bandstand. "But these things are sort of mysterious, they sort of fall from the sky and you take them up. It's not really a logical step-by-step... it's more like a series of leaps into the unknown. And each time, well I remember once, I was a kid... I was in a record store and I had never heard any jazz really, and I saw some Ellington records there. And it said, Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra. Well I was just a kid and I wondered why his orchestra was famous, and... so I had some money from my birthday and I bought these records without having heard them. Just... it sort of like smelled interesting, this... it was an album of four records, four 78's. And I took it home, and that was it. That was the beginning of my whole story that I'm still living now. Now, these kind of flashes... like that... are intuitive and mysterious and you can't say much about them."

That's how it was here. The evening I met Charles in New York in 1973 which led to his European tour a few years later: the painting of "The Hairdresser" which I saw at Martha Jackson's in New York in 1976, quite by chance. Charles Tyler introduced me to Keith Knox in Stockholm in 1982, the year I met Steve at Fasching.

It's true: "These things are sort of mysterious, they sort of fall from the sky and you take them up."

Lars-Olof Gustavsson

1. One Fell Swoop (Take 2) 07:52

2. Ode to Lady Day 07:34

3. Wickets 09:46

4. Keepsake 08:44

5. The Advantures Of 07:17

6. Friday the Thirteenth 04:53

7. One Fell Swoop (Take 1) 07:07

Steve Lacy soprano saxophone

Charles Tyler baritone & alto saxophone

Jean-Jacques Avenel bass

Oliver Johnson drums

Steve Lacy Sextet - The Gleam (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"The Steve Lacy Repertory Co. (featuring Irène Aebi's heartily distinctive voice – supported by a gruff voiced Lacy on Usual) is wide awake and fired up on The Gleam, their Silkheart debut. Lacy's assertions concerning the advantage of having a regular working unit with the opportunity to dig into material to make the music thrive and grow are certainly born out here." 

Milo Fine, Cadence, May 1988

You see, one group is built on the group preceding it. It's built on the experience and the sound of the precedent groups and all these different groups that you have, they'll ultimately lead to the group that you stay with. And that's the group that I have now, it is a long enduring group of twelve years now.

My present group has existed since the early seventies. It was formed in Paris and with a couple of personnel changes here and there it's been fairly stable for over a decade now. This is a big advantage, and the reason is that playing with the same people over a period of years you can take chances together because you have a chemistry that works and you have a long experience together and therefore, well, you can be more free together. It's very important to be able to play with the same people all the time, I think, because that way you can make some progress. Because they're friends and they trust you and you trust them. And you have the freedom to take risks together and the possibility of making magic because you know each other so well that you can achieve, well, magic is the only word for it. Not every night, but sometimes.

The other advantage is to play the same material over a period of years so as to know it better, so as also to be able to take more liberties with it. Because you know it over a period of ten years and therefore you can really take chances with it, you can really take it on out. So, if you have the same people playing the same material over a long period of time you can play it very well, but you can also risk to go to sleep if the material is not interesting enough. So this was my whole quest all these years, for interesting enough material played by good enough players so as to really find something truly challenging and alive. And I really think we've got it now with the current band.

STEVE POTTS, the alto and soprano saxophone, we've been together for about twelve years now and what we do is an indissoluble unity. It's like two players making one sound, and I can never sleep with Steve Potts because he always is going to keep me on my toes at all moments, I need this constant challenge. I think that inspiration is very important and on my right hand I have it all the time.

IRENE AEBI, the vocalist and violin and cello player in the band, well we met in '66 in Rome. And basically, that's the voice, it's like the heart of the music and she's got the ear, the golden ear. It's been a long story of collaboration together but basically hers is the voice that allowed me to find the way to use the word in the jazz. And that's no mean feat, because the voice had almost gone out of jazz in the fifties, largely I mean. When the music really got turbulent in the sixties and all that, there was no place for the voice or for the song for that matter. So my job was to bring the song form back into the jazz and Irene had the voice that allowed me to experiment over a long period of years and ultimately to achieve this result, this new substance, which contains the jazz music and the voice and the words.

Now the texts we use for the pieces we pIay, well there are many of them and they're all different. Each one is a different case that might come from a poet, it might be from a letter, a postcard, a wall slogan, something I find in a newspaper. But the important thing is that Irene being the voice, well the primary consideration is simply is it something she can say? Is it something that she would want to say? Will she want to say it again long enough so as to learn how to do it. So the interest of the text is primary. And then after that, it's a question of careful consideration and setting the text to musical pitches and rhythms and then learning them and performing them.

That takes a long time. Sometimes it could take ten or twenty years between the time that you receive the words and you deliver the song. And I think music like that can sound very surprising at first and it may take awhile before it sounds normal, and that's OK, but it's different with every tune really. And it's different with every time, and you can't generalize about it.

BOBBY FEW is the key to this band, of course, the keyboard man. The piano is very important in this group because it's the best instrument to support the voice when singing. For a singer there's nothing better than a piano for accompaniment. So, I mean, even if we have the drums and the bass and the saxophones and all that, well we need the keyboard. Bobby Few comes from Cleveland and is almost as old as I am and he's one of the reasons I moved to Paris from Rome. Because, as I said before, you need good musicians to play with and I saw that there were more and better musicians in Paris around '69 or '70. And so Irene and I moved to Paris and Bobby Few was one of the reasons. One of the flash musicians I met at that time and now he plays with me in our band. Well, it's like a dream come true for me.

JEAN-JACQUES AVENEL at the bass, is our own discovery. We heard him when he was just out of his teens and almost an amateur, and he's been playing with us a long time in Paris. J.-J. is as good as one can get, and getting better! He has a unique approach to a great tradition and is one of the best bassists in Europe, or anywhere. 

OLIVER JOHNSON at the drums; you know, a drummer is the number one requirement of the jazz to me. Jazz to me without the drums is inconceivable, except as a relief sometimes. But really at the heart of the jazz is the drums and so a really good drummer who knows what to plays is my primary need. I've always been very lucky and been associated with many, many good drummers all the time of my playing career. And, well, Oliver has been with us for about ten years now and he's the greatest, that's all I could say.

STEVE LACY, soprano saxophone. I've been working on the soprano saxophone for quite a few years now, maybe 33 years. I went on with it and after awhile I realized that I was all alone. It had been abandoned by the older players and not taken up by the newer players and it was in a state of limbo. This was both fearful and challenging for me, the field was mine. There was nothing to go by and I had to make it in my own fashion, in my own way. I had to find my own guides and models and my own music, because there was nothing suitable written for it. I looked around for many years and tried to write my own music, but until I was able to do that I nurtured myself on many other musics; Charlie Parker, Anton Webern, Ellington, Kurt Weill, old standard tunes, whatever I could find that would fit.

And then one day I discovered Thelonious Monk's music and, well, that music really fit the horn and myself and was exactly what I was looking for. I really explored that music for a long time, both on the saxophone and on the piano, to see how it was structured. And finally, at the end of that long period I began to uncover my own music and started to write my own pieces, which I'm still playing.

1. Gay Paree Bop 09:04

2. Napping (Take 1) 08:58

3. The Gleam 07:41

4. As Usual 12:03

5. Keepsake 10:22

6. Napping (Take 2) 10:28

Steve Lacy soprano saxophone

Steve Potts alto & soprano saxophone

Irène Aebi vocals, violin

Bobby Few piano

Jean-Jacques Avenel bass

Oliver Johnson drums