The Penguin Jazz Guide (154 page)

STEVE LACY
^&

Born Steven Lackritz, 23 July 1934, New York City; died 4 June 2004, Boston, Massachusetts

Soprano saxophone

5 x Monk 5 x Lacy

Silkheart SHCD 144

Lacy (ss solo). March 1994.

Steve Lacy said:
‘When I was a young man, I guess I used to haunt Monk. I’d go along to a club and stand right next to the piano. He’d ignore me for the longest time and then at the end look up and say in a tired voice: “Oh, it’s you again, Steven.” ’

Emanem curator Martin Davidson’s point that the daring Lacy showed in his very first solo saxophone performances in the early ’70s was rarely seen again is well taken, but also somewhat misleading. In 1994, Lacy turned 60. At least some of the fire and Eugene Gant hunger for musical experience was stilled. In the early ’90s, he had seemed content to be part of a band, to showcase his own compositions and arguably to take fewer improvisational chances than in the past.

But having spent a good deal of time over the previous few years working with the group and with larger-scale arrangements, Lacy showed every sign of wanting to return to unaccompanied performance. The gesture in itself suggests that his appetite for raw self-exposure hadn’t gone, though of course there are also strong economic reasons for unaccompanied touring. This recording was made during an improvisation festival in Stockholm.

It is pretty much exactly as described, five tunes by the master and five originals, including the familiar ‘The Crust’ and ‘Deadline’, both of them well-established Lacy repertory tunes. His approach to both ‘Pannonica’ and ‘Evidence’ is notable for subtle shifts in the geometry of the tune, changing internal relationships without changing the components, rather like one of those relativity diagrams in which time-space is presumed to be gridded on a sheet of rubber which can then be stretched and folded but not cut or torn. The fabric of Monk’s composition remains intact, but dramatically changed.

& See also
The Straight Horn Of Steve Lacy
(1960; p. 260),
Weal & Woe
(1972, 1973; p. 398)

PETER KOWALD

Born 21 April 1944, Meiningen, Germany; died 21 September 2002, New York City

Double bass

Was Da Ist

FMP CD 62

Kowald (b solo). 1994.

Peter Kowald said (1991):
‘I don’t play jazz and I don’t play any instrument other than the bass, which was intended for European art music and then found itself playing different things, in New Orleans and Chicago and anywhere one floated up. I take sounds from all over, and I pause with respect in front of them, but I only pause: I don’t hesitate to take from any music I hear, and use it.’

One of the most individual of the European free players, Kowald is more often advanced as an influence on other players than for his own work. The catalogue is thin enough, but what is available is of consistently excellent quality, concentrated and intense, with an independence of spirit audible in the voice which recalls Pettiford and Mingus. In the late ’80s, Kowald curated and participated in an epic sequence of improvising duos with European, American and Japanese players that opened up fresh contacts and associations in free music.

It may seem difficult, if not impossibly perverse, to justify our selecting a record of solo contrabass improvisations. We are unrepentant. This is music of the very highest order,
technically adroit, emotionally and intellectually concentrated, and beautifully recorded. Only Derek Bailey and Evan Parker have shown themselves capable of sustained solo performance at this level; what distinguishes Kowald is the light, dry humour he brings to these pieces, philosophical quiddities that seem perfectly content not to be answered. Without other instruments in attendance, Kowald goes for a stronger and more than usually resonant attack which mitigates a slightly dry sound. A record to savour and ponder; a record to return to, as often as time allows.

EVAN PARKER
^&

Born 5 April 1944, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England

Tenor and soprano saxophones

50th Birthday Concert

Leo CD LR 212/213 2CD

Parker; Alexander von Schlippenbach (p); Barry Guy (b); Paul Lovens, Paul Lytton (d). April 1994.

Evan Parker says:
‘It came in the period after I had left Incus and before psi was up and running, so I was reliant on other independents to record. Leo Feigin called and said: “But Evan, it muuuust be recorded. Leave it to me.” He used all his old BBC connections to make sure it was done well. He got two good sets. Those two trios are still working, and people are still buying the CD. It was a great night.’

‘The echoing border zones …’ Robert Graves’s poetry seems the ideal source for titles for these performances, which again combine Parker’s gritty involvement in ideas and history, though this time the history is his own. The two trios represented his most important long-term associations. Despite the essential Englishness of much of his aesthetic (not the Englishness of the pastoralists or the Georgians, but of those who built an empire on empiricism and craft), Parker has always gravitated to the European scene. As he describes in an unwontedly personal liner-note, bassist Peter Kowald, promoter and label boss Jost Gebers and pianist Alex von Schlippenbach were largely responsible for widening his musical horizons, in terms of playing partnerships. The Schlippenbach trio with Lovens is the perfect counterbalance to the more familiarly documented work with Guy and Lytton. This is probably the only small group with two separate entries in this editon of the
Guide
: see under Schlippenbach (p. 401). The textures are more open and more concerned with radical harmonics. Lovens and Lytton are occasionally confused – verbally – even by people who know the scene well. They couldn’t be mixed up even on the briefest hearing. Lovens is immensely detailed, a microsurgeon of the pulse, while Lytton tends to favour broader and more extended areas of sound, opening and unfolding like an anatomist. The long opening piece with Schlippenbach, ‘Hero Of Nine Fingers’, is supremely well argued, with Parker and the pianist trading ideas at a dazzling pace. This isn’t energy playing, but it generates its own energies moment to moment. The only quibble is that disc one is just 45 minutes in length (and disc two a mere 40); but that does not alter the sheer brilliance of conception and execution.

The remaining pieces with Guy and Lytton seem particularly focused on this celebratory occasion. Rising 50 himself, Guy has regularly rethought his musical parameters, and one can almost hear him refining his language as he plays. Lytton is flawless on the long ‘In Exultation’, though he’s the one musician on the set who probably isn’t well served by the sound. The occasion, recorded in Dingwalls Club in north London, was very special. These documents are no less so. It would be hard to imagine music less ephemeral.

& See also
The Snake Decides
(1986; p. 506),
The Moment’s Energy
(2007; p. 728);
SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Quintessence
(1973–1974; p. 406)

CLAUDIO RODITI

Born 28 May 1946, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Trumpet

Free Wheelin’

Reservoir RSRCD 136

Roditi; Andres Boiarsky (ss, ts); Nick Brignola (ss, bs); Mark Soskin (p); Buster Williams (b); Chip White (d). July 1994.

Claudio Roditi said (1999):
‘My mother’s sister married an American man and it was spending a holiday with them in Bahia that opened up jazz to me. My uncle was interested and he told me about Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Miles, modern things. There was a great Frank Rosolino album, too, with Sam Noto on trumpet on the
Stan Kenton Presents
series.’

An eclectic musician who never sounds like he’s butterflying from one style to the next, Roditi came up from Rio to study at Berklee and then settled in New York, though these days he turns up almost anywhere, doing a mix of things from Latin to relatively orthodox hard bop. Roditi doing a tribute to Lee Morgan sounds like a recipe for overcooking it. Yet
Free Wheelin’
comes close to being exactly the classic album the trumpeter might have in him. This is the best band he’s had in the studio: Boiarsky is a heavyweight, and the rhythm section, especially the inimitable Williams, are right there with the horns. But it’s Roditi’s concentration of his own powers that impresses here. Without trading in any of his fire, he keeps all his solos tight and impeccable, which makes flare-ups like those on ‘Trapped’ and ‘The Joker’ all the more exciting. ‘The Sidewinder’ follows the original arrangement – in his notes Roditi confesses that he couldn’t see any point in messing around with the original charts – and still sounds entirely different from Morgan’s original. Nine of the ten tunes are from Morgan’s own pen, but the new twist on ‘A Night In Tunisia’ – with trumpet overdubs and a two-soprano section – is a startling departure. Brignola guests on three and is a welcome visitor.

JOHN ZORN

Born 2 September 1953, New York City

Alto saxophone

Bar Kokhba

Tzadik TZ 7108

Zorn; Dave Douglas (t); David Krakauer, Chris Speed (cl); John Medeski (org, p); Anthony Coleman (p); Marc Ribot (g); Mark Feldman (vn); Erik Friedlander (clo); Greg Cohen, Mark Dresser (b); Kenny Wolleson (d). August 1994–March 1996.

Publisher of
The Wire
, Tony Herrington, says:
‘The man is quite remarkable. He is up at 5 a.m. and he spends half the day on the phone to this huge constituency of people who know him as musical collaborator, teacher and guru, label boss, producer, landlord and friend. He has a whole culture shaped around him.’

A good deal of Zorn’s music falls outside the remit of this book, and this book is too small to deal adequately with the range of Zorn’s music, which has covered free improvisation governed by game theory, quasi-bop projects, interpretations of Jewish traditional music, large-ensemble scores for movies and pretty much everything else in between.

A single sample does no justice to the man or his work, but we console ourselves with the thought that this applies to pretty much everyone else in the book and that choosing 50 Zorn projects wouldn’t get much closer to exhausting his diversity.

A lifelong New Yorker, Zorn studied briefly in St Louis but made his mark with the circle of improvisers based in New York in the mid-’70s. He steadily came to wider attention through relentless work, composing, performing and eventually gaining major-label recognition, though this was soon sidelined in favour of his own label, Tzadik, which releases most of his work. Groups down the years include Naked City, Painkiller and Masada. Outspoken, furiously prolific but ruthless about quality control, Zorn has fashioned his own multiple-idiom music, of which jazz remains a buried but tangible part.

Zorn’s major creative enterprise of the last 15 years has been a steady and passionate (re-)discovery of his own Jewish musical heritage. On Tzadik he has curated a sequence of records called ‘Radical Jewish culture’, but his own most direct input has been the improvising quartet he calls Masada, which has produced a very substantial body of work based on small, folkish-sounding themes that stand in the same relation to Zorn’s work as Anthony Braxton’s ‘Ghost Trance’ and ‘language music’ compositions do to his, with all the obvious differences accounted for. Masada has also incorporated other instrumental elements over time and
Bar Kokhba
is a fine example of how confidently Zorn expands the concept. These are exquisitely voiced folkloric essays, executed without strain. Zorn’s own part in these ensembles is more distant than in the quartet, where he is inevitably the lead voice. The quartet is also more obviously a ‘jazz’ ensemble, where here the music sounds as if it arises out of the culture intact and without mediation, which is considerable testimony to his powers of synthesis and persuasion. It is exquisitely beautiful and often very moving. Douglas and Speed are the most effective solo performers, though Dresser’s rich bass-playing is a huge asset. And yet, it is Zorn, as always, who dominates as composer/historian if not this time as instrumentalist. That, though, is worth a footnote, for it is often forgotten just how fine an alto saxophonist Zorn is, fleet and boppish and with an unmistakable tonality that predates his active interest in Jewish musical culture; even then, its ‘blue notes’ always seemed to come from another place.

RICH PERRY

Born 25 July 1955, Cleveland, Ohio

Tenor saxophone

Beautiful Love

Steeplechase SCCD 31360

Perry; Jay Anderson (b); Victor Lewis (d). October 1994.

Rich Perry says:
‘I listened to it yesterday, and as I thought, I’ve improved so much since that recording. I should record those tunes again; maybe I will because I’ve no other ideas at the moment! I must say I liked “But Not For Me” best. I remember Nils Winther also recorded me with Paul Bley that same week with Jay and Victor, kind of a package deal. Wish I could do that one over again, too! I came late to small-group recording, but the experience I got on those early Steeplechases really paid off down the road.’