Year of the Horn: Just Another Gig
A look at the Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet record School Days
In the early 1960s, Steve Lacy co-led a band with trombonist Roswell Rudd. It was an unusual idea to say the least: a quartet of soprano sax, trombone, bass, and drums that only played Thelonious Monk material. It may have started as something of an experiment, but by 1963 Lacy told Down Beat: “it’s no longer just an experiment. It works.”
Well, maybe. By his own admission, the Lacy-Rudd band had something of an open door for a bass chair: Lacy later joked that about 30 people played bass with the group. And he didn’t have much luck with it either: sessions with both Columbia and Verve went unreleased and by his own admission, paying gigs were few and far between.
Thankfully we do have a little evidence of this group: School Days, a live album that’s been released by a handful of labels over the years. Taken from a tape recorded by poet Paul Haines, School Days shows this quartet (with Henry Grimes on bass) playing a show at a coffee house in March 1963 - nobody’s quite sure of the exact date.
The record opens with “Bye-Ya,” played here with a swaggering drum pattern and the two horns kind of winding their way around the rhythm. At times it makes me wonder if Lacy was reaching back to his Dixieland roots for this one. Rudd and Lacy bounce off each other while Denis Charles pushes the push ahead by riding his cymbals. It’s a little raucous but I’m completely here for that. And especially when they trade off short bursts with him at the end. Must’ve been a pretty interesting thing to see live.
Next up is “Brilliant Corners.” Grimes makes a belated appearance: he was late to the gig. It opens a little slowly, but about a minute in the band kicks up the tempo and the two horns start going at a faster clip. Rudd takes the first solo, blasting and blurting, working in the lower register while Lacy occasionally chimes in higher. After everyone takes their solos, Rudd has a nice moment where he blows some more dissonant notes before everyone returns to the theme.
“Monk’s Dream” comes out swinging hard and with the horns sounding punchy. Rudd blows in little stuttering bursts, getting a harsh tone out of his trombone. It’s a nice performance, and one imagines it’s not easy to get those rapid notes out like that while using a slide. Occasionally you hear Lacy chirping away in the background, but he’s mostly out of the way until his solo. He starts in a lower range before working up and down, giving a good example of how his horn can sound like two or three different ones. Grimes steps up for a solo too, but it’s not as interesting.
Things slow down for “Monk’s Mood” which is played with a late-night, almost relaxed vibe: Lacy blows long notes, with Rudd acting almost in counterpoint with quick little flourishes. Here Grimes takes the first solo. His plucking has a percussive quality, like he can’t pull the strings hard enough. I find his playing a little rambly on this and even though his solo is maybe a minute and half, it goes on a little long. Lacy enters about halfway through and plays with a bright, reedy tone. Rudd finishes things off with a solo where he mixes long, sliding notes with shorter patterns.
“Bolivar Blues,” the longest performance of the night, comes next. It opens with Charles banging away at his kit and settles into a swinging groove where Lacy and Rudd play the theme and Grimes holds it down at the low end. Rudd launches into a solo where he plays quick riffs that go up and down the scale, little darting notes mixed along longer ones that almost wobble between tones. Lacy mixes little flourishes into his solo, maybe in imitation of what Rudd’s just pulled off, and does a nice job at bending some of his notes.
The night ends with a brisk performance of “Skippy,” where Lacy rips into the almost circular-sounding theme while Rudd plays longer notes under him. Rudd then launches into an energetic solo where his horn playing mixes harsh sounding blasts between him riffing off the theme. Lacy’s solo has a lot of energy as well and his approach is about the same. Neither player sounds especially free throughout this performance, instead having at least one foot deeply in the bop tradition.
Almost as a bonus track is an incomplete take of “Pannonia,” the third song from Monk’s album Brilliant Corners played this evening. Nice to have, and another example of the band playing as a trio, but nothing special.
School Days is a nice document of an overlooked lineup. There’s a rugged energy to how Rudd and Lacy both approached this music and one has to respect the panache of putting together a jazz band in the early 1960s without a chordal instrument to play Thelonious Monk. The two have a palpable chemistry. That said, Grimes’s playing doesn’t quite mesh with the others and overall, the performance is interesting but far from essential.
The Lacy-Rudd band didn’t last especially long. By 1964 it was dead, with Lacy saying “we couldn’t keep it going any longer,” and the year after he departed for Europe. Rudd meanwhile joined the New York Art Quartet alongside Reggie Workman, Milford Graves, John Tchdcai, and others. Later he’d work as a professor. The two would occasionally reunite on record, however, until Lacy’s death in 2004. Charles did too, occasionally popping up on Lacy records. However Grimes vanished from music not long after this gig, having moved to LA and wrecked his bass in transit. He was rediscovered in 2002 and with a bass donated by William Parker, returned to music. He passed away in 2020.