#Irene Aebi

[cdlistening]

Steve Lacy, 'Vespers' CD (Soul Note)

Thursday, January 6, 2022, 12:59pm (full listen)

Generally speaking, I like Steve Lacy a lot, thanks to his dry, acerbic tone, and angular, Monk-ish phrasing and sense of melody; I like him solo, I like him in a duo (especially with Mal Waldron), and I like some trios I've heard him in, but the larger groups are where it can start to get iffy for me, and it doesn't get any iffier than it does on this disc. This is largely due to the presence of his partner and frequent collaborator, singer Irene Aebi, who has this certain ponderous style of jazz singing that instantly makes me cringe; singing in free/avant jazz contexts rarely does anything for me, I think largely because the melodies in this music are often kind of obtuse, compared to, say, the melodies of jazz standards - which is fine in an of itself - but with the human voice animating the rather "arty" melodies here, it just comes out sounding deeply ostentatious and, to this listener, off-putting. The tenor sax player here, whom I'd never heard of and I didn't retain his name, is also a weak link, here giving the impression of merely reflexively working his fingers on the keys furiously, trying to summon up a big blustery noise rather than anything of substance; the other elements of the group and the disc are fine, but I'd be hard pressed to find myself returning to it anytime soon.

[donospl]

Guillaume Tarche „Steve Lacy. (Unfinished)”

Guillaume Tarche „Steve Lacy. (Unfinished)”

Lenka Lente, 2021 Francuskie wydawnictwo Lenka Lente dysponuje niezwykle unikalnym katalogiem publikacji. Wiele z oferowany przez nie książek poświęconych jest muzyce jazzowej, w szczególności tej o bardziej awangardowym obliczu. Pełna lista książek wydawnictwa Lenka Lente znajduje się tutaj: http://www.lenkalente.com/ Latem roku 2021 francuski wydawca zaprezentował książkę poświęconą…

[dustedmagazine]

Day & Taxi — Devotion (Percaso)

Photo by Jordan Hemingway

DAY & TAXI / DEVOTION by Christoph Gallio

How do you take your jazz? Some prefer trad, others free and still others, vocal.  Of course, some like it smooth. Swiss saxophonist Christoph Gallio offers another option — slightly sour. His tone on soprano recalls Steve Lacy’s, and his alto playing has a bit of Henry Threadgill’s lemon-sucking pungency. Only when he turns to the relatively scarce C-melody sax does he stir in a bit of sugar. But his phrasing on all of these instruments is varied, responsive to his partners, and very much his own.

While Gallio usually has several projects of various size and duration operating, he’s kept his trio Day & Taxi going alongside all of them for over 30 years. Its current line-up includes American expatriate Gerry Hemingway on drums and bassist Silvan Jeger on basses, sequencer and voice. These accompanists provide the combination of forthrightness and sensitivity necessary for such an exposed setting, and Gallio’s compositions put them exactly where the need to be. On “Mare (to Kaissa Camara, 1998-2018),” Jeger’s electronics provide a backdrop that billows behind the trio’s interactions like a wall hanging moved by a breeze while his patiently plucked double bass points the way for the saxophone’s deliberate, slightly stretched-out tones. Hemingway gently activates cymbals or stays silent, using quietness to paradoxically magnify the horn’s presence. But skip to the next tune, “South For North,” and the drumming can best be described as maximalist. The skipping hi-hat, muted cymbals, and loping, hand-stuck drums operate independently enough to sound like a calypso drum section instead of a kit. Then, as Gallio’s playing becomes more impassioned, they converge to form an emphatic barrage.  

Three times, Jeger steps up to the microphone to deliver words by the poet, Friederike Mayröcker. The pairing of his interval-leaping, unjazzy croon and Gallio’s closely shadowing reeds one more brings to mind Steve Lacy, and particularly the music he made with his wife, Irene Aebi. But while even that duo’s most severely reduced performances trace and retrace a melody, here pithiness rules. The longest of the three selections still lasts less than a minute, underscoring the concentrated ephemerality of the poet’s constructions.  

While the album’s component parts are brief, they’re also numerous. Devotion’s 20 tracks run about 68 minutes altogether, and they cover enough stylistic ground to keep one tuned in for the duration. There are stark, song-like melodies and moments of rubbery funk, and while their brevity makes them easy to take in, the attention to gesture that goes into each note choice and beat repays the listener who comes back for more.  

Bill Meyer

[diyeipetea]

HDO 309. Una hora con... Steve Lacy [Podcast]

Martin Davidson, al frente de Emanem, continúa realizando una labor titánica documentando discográficamente la escena británica de la improvisación. En septiembre de 2017 ha publicado el doble CD titulado free for a minute que recoge material inédito, mejorado o no disponible al completo, del saxofonista Steve Lacy. A lo largo de más de dos horas suenan las grabaciones Disposability (1965) -a…

[catsynth-express]

Henry Kaiser Quartet Plays Steve Lacy at Piedmont Pianos

On an extraordinarily hot Saturday evening in Oakland, we and several others kept cool both physically and musically at Piedmont Pianos. The occasion was a concert of music by Steve Lacy, as interpreted by an ensemble organized by guitarist Henry Kaiser with saxophonist Bruce Ackley.

Steve Lacy is a visionary but often under appreciated musician in avant-garde jazz. He was a prolific composer especially in the 1970s with his sextet and is an influence on many of the musicians were regularly see and perform with. (You can see Jason Berry’s tribute comic to Steve Lacy in an earlier post.) Bruce Ackley and Henry Kaiser have long been interpreters of Lacy’s music. Ackley and other founding members of Rova shared a deep interest in Lacy, and connected with him in both Berkeley and Paris, ultimately recording their own album of his work in 1983. They teamed up with Kaiser for performances of Lacy’s Saxophone Special in the early 2000s and ultimately recorded the piece together with Kyle Bruckman. More recently, Kaiser and Ackley have put together a group to perform the music from The Wire, which included Tania Chen on piano, Danielle DeGruttola on cello, Andrea Centazzo on percussion, and Michael Manring on bass. The performance on this evening featured a subset of this group featuring Ackley, Kaiser, Chen, and DeGruttola.

The concert featured many pieces from The Wire as well as a few others, and demonstrated the breadth of Steve Lacy’s composition from the brightly melodic “Hemline” (dedicated to Janis Joplin) to the extremely percussive and avant-garde “The Owl” (dedicated to Anton Webern), which featured Tania Chen and Kaiser blending the extended acoustic techniques of their respective instruments.

Even at its most percussive and noisy, Lacy’s music is quite melodic and structured. Indeed, many of the pieces were intended as songs, specifically songs for the voice of Irene Aebi. The melodies often revolved around simple repeating motifs, as in “Bound” (dedicated to Irene Aebi). On some pieces, including “Deadline”, DeGruttola and Kaiser acted as a string-based rhythm section, providing a foundation for the soprano-sax to interpret the melody and the piano to fill the space in between. Other moments provided lush harmonies, with Kaiser playing long pitch-bent chords on guitar and Chen playing frenetic harmonic fragments on piano. The energy can be intense at times, but then slower and haunting as in “Clouds”. Although structured, there is a lot of room for improvisation in the music, and the ensemble had great on stage chemistry for listening and playing off of one another, leaving empty space, and allowing Lacy’s original ideas to come out even as the performers added their own. The performance also included the title track from The Wire, “Twain”, “Ecstasy” and more.

This was my first visit to Piedmont Pianos. It is a large, friendly, and inviting space, dedicated entirely to the piano. Many were rather impressive, both in terms of their quality as instruments as well as their sticker prices, including the gorgeous Fazioli grand that Tania Chen played for the concert. However, I found myself most captivated by this remake of a 1930s Bluthne PH Piano, which is a work of visual as well as sonic art.  It is based on a design by noted Danish architect and inventor Poul Henningsen.

We look forward to seeing more shows at Piedmont Pianos now that we have discovered it, and of course upcoming shows for all the musicians involved in this evening. Nor is this our last word on the music of Steve Lacy.

Henry Kaiser Quartet Plays Steve Lacy at Piedmont Pianos was originally published on CatSynth

[ozkar-krapo]

Steve LACY

"Stamps"

(2LP. Hat Hut rcds. 1979 / rec. 1977/78) [US]

[dustedmagazine]

Steve Lacy Quintet – Stamps (Corbett vs. Dempsey/Hat Hut)

The superlative “classic” is scrupulously assigned to a select number of historic quintets in jazz. Miles Davis’ pivotal bands with John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter as well as Coltrane’s game-changing groups with Eric Dolphy and Pharoah Sanders represent four of the most readily referenced examples in the modern iterations of the idiom. A credible case can be cobbled for the Steve Lacy group gracing Stamps as well. The expatriate composer/soprano saxophonist had already tillered the ensemble for a handful of years when the two concert recordings that comprise the double-album were released as his 1979 debut on the Swiss Hat Hut label.

The band was an exceptional aggregate of talent and scope from its genesis. Lacy drew abuse that inexplicably still endures today for including his spouse Irene Aebi, a cellist and self-styled vocalist whose sing-song delivery frequently forewent strict pitch adherence for brio and exuberance.  Saxophonist Steve Potts was an easier sell, distinctive and soulful with both alto and soprano and voicing a rich vernacular that could both complement and contrast the sometimes more measured and meticulous vocabulary of his employer. Bassist Kent Carter brought a deep classical background and an elegant artistry with bow while Oliver Johnson conjured equal parts color and energy on drums.

Corbett vs. Dempsey does the package lavish justice, duplicating the gatefold design and original calligraphic font along with interior reproductions of action photos from the concerts. The first disc documents a late-summer of 1977 hit at the Willisau Jazz Festival with a bonus track added while the second preserves a Parisian club date from six months later. The set lists are stacked with lengthy renditions of Lacy tunes of the time, starting with the extended theatrical tone poem “Existence”, which opens with the grand existentialist gesture of invocatory gong and Aebi’s spoken-sung lyrics amidst spiraling horns and arco bass drone.

The other pieces are largely structured in more familiar Lacy fashion with tightly wound and knotted motivic patterns expanding into freer solo and ensemble statements, by turns prickly and buoyant. The stubborn influence of Thelonious Monk on Lacy is all over these originals in the slippery shuffle rhythms and trapdoor twists. Carter and Iebi scrape several layers of rosin from their strings with concentrated sawing on the acerbic “Ire” prefacing the violence and reconciliation of dueling sopranos by Potts and Lacy. “The Dumps” and the previously unreleased “Follies” shift from jaunty prancing earworms into churning abstraction and back in transitions that are at times jarring and disorienting, but always wholly intentional.

From the Parisian hit, the comparatively terse title tune embodies perhaps the best example of Lacy’s ability to contrast punishing, compacting repetition with soaring, optimistic elegance as he and Potts aim for the cloudless heavens above a roiling groundswell of drums and strings.”Duckles” features a blast of mic distortion and Lacy’s debut on Japanese bird whistle, each that feel wholly in spirit with the sharp angles and fractious, rambunctious flavor of the piece. Potts’ alto absolutely owns “Wickets” in a solo that’s near perfection in terms of emotive effulgence and emphatic impact. The composer gladly cedes the win and goes for a different direction in his subsequently limpid and systematic soprano statement.

Lacy would treat the quintet as adjustable template in ensuing years, adding and subtracting players and eventually steering the band into more conventionally structured straits. Potts remained a reliable foil with Jean Jacques Avenel and John Betsch assuming the bass and drums chairs in place of Carter and Johnson. Iebi remained a semi-regular too, attracting ill-considered opprobrium and shrugging it off in equal measure. Those later examples were often excellent, but there’s something unequivocally exceptional in hearing the original outfit holding eloquent and ecstatic court in its incandescent prime.

Derek Taylor