Year of the Horn: A New Career In A New Town
A look at Steve Lacy's two mid 60s albums and the box set Free For A Minute
In 1966, not long after his first trip to Europe, Steve Lacy met Swiss musician Irene Aebi in Rome. A classically trained musician, Aebi and Lacy hit it off and a relationship (both personal and professional) that would last the rest of Lacy’s life. Aside from playing cello, she sang and doubled on violin. Their meeting would kickstart a new period in Lacy’s career.
Soon they were on the road. But a series of gigs in Argentina didn’t go so well: “It was right after the colonels and generals had their coup,” remembered Lacy years later. “There were tanks on the streets… it was a complete mistake.” But before the end of the year, Lacy would record his first experiments in free jazz and formed something of a stable group. Two records from this band are included on the 2017 box set Free For A Minute, released via Eminem Records: Disposability and Sortie. The rest of the set is filled with unreleased music from this general period: cues from a movie called Free Fall and a 1972 session called The Rush and The Thing. It’s a generous sampling from Lacy’s early free music period.
Recorded with a trio of Kent Carter on bass and Aldo Romano behind the drum kit, Disposability shows Lacy in transition. There’s a few Monk tunes, a Cecil Taylor one, and four pieces of mostly free music. It opens with “Shuffle Boil” and some nice interplay between Carter and Lacy. Lacy’s solo has him exploring the theme, taking long runs and moving in the space left between the other two players. Immediately one hears more confidence in Lacy’s playing - without another horn or keyboard instrument, he has to carry the music and he’s up for the challenge.
Next come two short, free pieces credited to Lacy. “Barble” has both him and Carter working with high, quick notes while Romano’s drums have a nervous, skitterish quality. Meanwhile, “Chary” has Lacy using a thin, fragile tone in a delicate piece of improvisation. It feels like rice paper - almost translucent and like it could rip and fall apart at any moment.
Side one closes with Cecil Taylor’s “Tune Two” and the session’s longest piece. After two more formless pieces, this one is a tonal shift and has a nice driving energy. Lacy’s playing has a slow building quality, like water on the boil, and while it maybe is a bit rambly, it’s a nice performance.
The second half has Lacy going back to Monk: “Pannonica” and “Coming On the Hudson,” both of which have Lacy firmly in bop mode and weaving his way through the melody. But after several Monk focused records, they don’t really differentiate themselves from his earlier work. Likewise, the two free pieces (“M’s Transport” and “There We Were”) have him moving in slower, more spacious places of sound. At times he goes really high, as if playing with feedback, and at others he’s met with crashes of sound from Romano’s kit.
Disposability closes with a nod back to New York: a Carla Bley piece called “Generous 1.” Lacy had recently spent some time with Bley and Michael Manter in the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra (he’s on Communication) and then did a record with them earlier in 1966. So he was familiar with Bley’s idiosyncratic approach. And with the way he takes little runs and the way Romano pounds at his kit, this one stands out from the rest of the record, brimming with a brightness that’s missing elsewhere. It takes an interesting turn near the end, too, with the band shifting to a looser, more free style, and ends the LP on a high note.
Disc One ends with a session of film cues recorded with a different band: Enrico Rava, Karl Berger, Kent Carter, and Paul Motian. It’s about 20 minutes of fragments and ideas, some better than others, but it’s the sort of thing I can’t imagine most people listening to this more than once.
Disc Two is mostly devoted to an album recorded a few weeks into 1967: Sortie. The rhythm section is the same, but Lacy’s joined by Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava. With him added the entire sense of the band shifts: with two horns, the music suddenly feels more cramped and tense, these two voices competing for space.
“Sortie” starts off busy but quickly settles down with these two at times in unison but also at odds. There’s a similarity to his earlier record Evidence in this meshing of soprano sax and trumpet, and although there’s less chemistry between Rava and Lacy than Lacy had with Don Cherry, it goes give his music a shot of energy in the way they push each other on. It helps that Romano’s drumming comes in waves, occasionally boiling over in a frantic burst of noise. This music swings - not in a jazz way, but like it’s suspended on a rope and going back and forth.
Meanwhile, “Black Elk” comes in hot with Lacy blowing and little bursts from Rava. There’s a nice stop-start quality coming from Romano’s drumming, too, although it means Carter’s left to himself to set a steady rhythm. But finally this music feels free in a way Lacy’s hadn’t before: it’s a giant leap forward from the tentative moves on Disposability. You can hear of this on “Fork New York,” too. The interplay between the horns, the sharp bursts from Rava, the rapping beat of Romano’s snare drum all have the energy of life in the city: cars on streets, someone pounding on the door.
The rest of the record has a sparser, looser feel: “Helmy” is Lacy playing over little flourishes, “Living T. Blues” has Rava hovering over little touches of percussion. It ends with “2 Fou,” which is basically a quick burst of sound to remind you the record’s over.
The set ends with another improvised set but one that belongs to a different period: The Rush and The Thing. This one comes from about six years later and has a different band: Carter is still on bass, but Rava and Romano are gone. In their place is Noel McGhie on drums, Aebi on cello, and Steve Potts on alto sax. The three pieces here are tonally different, with two saxes reaching into the higher registers while the two string players weave a buzzing layer of sound under them. Both Potts and Lacy seem pretty free to move around inside this groove, but ultimately the music both feels like it doesn’t fit with the rest of the set and seems like an extra thumb.
As the 60s turned into the 1970s, Lacy’s music continued to evolve and he’d soon decamp to Paris after a short stint back in the States. And the two albums here kind of drifted to the cutout bins, largely forgotten about - both seem like they were out of print not long after release. But they’re important steps in Lacy’s career. First, as a way of documenting how he went from a Monk disciple to someone experimenting with form (a reputation he’d largely have for the rest of his career) and for the first record of originals. Or at least songs credited to him - we’d have to wait for a full record of Lacy-composed music.
Even with two extra sets padding this out, Free For A Minute is an essential document for Lacy fans for the way it documents this forgotten corner of his music. Regrettably, it doesn’t seem to be streaming or on Bandcamp, and Emanem went defunct late last year after Martin Davidson’s death. If you can find a copy, it’s well worth picking up.