Steve Lacy & Evan Parker “Chirps”, FMP, 1986, reissued in 2022

Sometimes you’re uneasy or unfamiliar, at least at the beginning, with what comes out of your stereo or during a concert onstage, and sometimes this unfamiliarity or this sort of uneasiness is good for you. Terry Riley said once that when we’re at ease with music, it is because we project something about ourselves in it, and this is not completely good. I’m paraphrasing, but this is also what I think.

Not that this Chirps, recorded live in 1985 in Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee, is a particularly difficult record to handle. Not at all, if you still know the music of the two masters involved in this album. Steve Lacy started the most vital part of his career as a sideman for Thelonious Monk, and he transposed that ‘hip’ language, so angular, peculiar and full of spaces between the notes, on his own instrument, the soprano saxophone.

After all, soprano is one of the most difficult horns to play. Being a straight reed instrument, it doesn’t warm or round the microtones every instrument carry with itself. So, instead of try and hide the mistakes, Lacy started to exacerbate them. His peculiar way of playing soprano starts from that point. An italian follower of Lacy, the mourned Gianni Mimmo, once explained that to an AAJ interviewer.

And Roscoe Mitchell once said to me he was try and build new curved sopranos in order to have some more enjoyable and able to be mastered instruments. Strangely enough, but undoubtedly, from Monk another road lead to the soprano. This other path passes through John Coltrane and his tritones, his almost binaural sound.

An idea that had a further development thanks to Evan Parker. Parker is not a simple musician to handle, you cannot put him in a box quickly, because he passed through various phases and his sound and techniques have evolved during the passing of time forming a wider palette. So before listening to this particular record I thought I would listen to two different way of playing soprano and their attempt to mix together in a way or another.

Obviously the album is different from what I thought at the beginning: Parker and Lacy try to come close the one to the other. If Lacy initially seems to be the more keen on his usual style, the one we have described before in this post, Parker demonstrates a great ability to dialogue and fold his techniques in order to create the best music in order to accompany his partner.

Only at the end of Full Scale, the album first track, Parker explodes in something that can be related to his binaural outbursts sculpted into the void, with Lacy following him. For the rest the relationship between full (of sound) and void are fiercely lacy-esque. What changes between this record and others outputs – I think particularly of a 1986 release of Lacy and Potts – is that Parker share a similar idea of time and recollection.

If you’ll listen to the second track, Relations, you’ll hear the usual Lacy’s angularities interspersed with Parker attempts to create a more fragmented sound, something unusual since Lacy looks often for less abrasive, more grandiloquent partners in order to create a contrast and have some propulsion for his own statements.

It seem to me, this way, that this music is really one of the best attempts, even more than Lacy supported by another partner, pianist Mal Waldron, to be loyal to Monk heritage, not literally but as a matter of spirit. The final four minutes of Twittering present another dialogue where some phrases are taken from one instrumentalist to the other in order to build variations and diversities yet in a perspective of unity.

My final advice is not to be disappointed by the shortness of the album (only 41 minutes and 31 seconds) because this kind of dialogues need time to develop themselves; on the other hand it would be easy for such navigated improvisers to try and amaze the audience with longer performances emptying all the pockets with tricks and techniques. The interesting thing about this record is, instead, that the musician kind of want you to take your time and enjoy the music, leaving you with the opportunity to listen to it again more than once. You’ll want more for sure. 

To listen to a track of the album click here