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

Alvin Curran and Walter Prati "Community Garden", Milano, La Fabbica del Vapore, 10.15.2021

I’ve been in the Monumental Cemetery zone in Milan many times in the past. I love to take pictures of the statues in the cemetery with my camera. I have experimented with natural, harsh light, so I suppose sooner or later I’ll came back with a simple direct flash in order to obtain a different effect. But yesterday night I’ve gone to the Fabbrica Del Vapore which is near the Cemetery, in order to see one of the cornerstones of improvised music, Alvin Curran.

Alvin Curran was in the 1960s one of the founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, that hosted musicians and composers as Frederick Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Steve Lacy, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and John Fetteplace during his various decades of activity. MEV was one of the very first groups of musicians to experiment with the sound of synthesizers, giving life to what, in the following years, would have been called “electro acoustic improvisation”.

Friends of John Cage with whom MEV played a composition titled Solo For Voice 2, where Plantamura voice was trasfigurated by a Moog synthesizer, the group featured many collaborations with master improvisors – there’s a beautiful record from 1976 titled Time Zones featuring Teitelbaum and Anthony Braxton. But the main point with EAI is that it helped widen the concept of composition. 

Preparing a piano is, per se, a compositional gesture, as an example. And this is what I have seen first yesterday night as I entered the room where the concert of Alvin Curran with his longtime collaborator Walter Prati would have been played. Curran had at his own disposition a prepared piano (with cardboards, a small plastic bottle half full of water, a ligther, etc.) and a keyboard previously programmed with many sounds (human voices in English and Japanese languages, the sound of many different musical instruments as trumpet and saxophone, natural sounds like water falling, but also many manipulated sounds).

On the other hand, Walter Prati had a couple of laptops and a small electric viola enriched with a couple of pedals and an arco. Even if the concert was presented as a celebration of a recent CD published by the duo and titled Community Garden, disposable both physically and on many streaming platforms, the music the people filling the room with me listened to yesterday was completely new. The musicians themselves, in fact, didn’t knew what they were creating. So, the listener was attending to the music on the same side of the musician.

The more analogic sounds of the prepared piano were interspersed with samples, electronic sounds, manipulated sounds, the electric viola (both pinched and arcoed), giving life to a multilayered effect from whom emerged some curious moments like the sensation of attending to a music blob and more melancholic reminiscences of Ellington blues. But it is really difficult to describe every moment of the music, and maybe it’s also pointless. 

We can say to our readers that all dynamics of sound and silence, of flux and interruptions, and the sonic ranges have been experimented with success. Creating a music is not only a matter of playing, but also of listening and halting, sometimes, as Prati stated at the initial little speech before the concert. As far as me, I can obviously saying this was the most intense and interesting concert I attended this year, between the ones I wrote a review for this blog.

Community Garden has been for sure an intriguing live performance. The prepared piano, historically meaning the attempt to deconstruct bourgeois music as part of the values of one small but imposing part of society, the idea that composing doesn’t mean only to write down a bunch of notes on a piece of paper but creating an environment for creativity, the mix of sound and noise as part of a sound environment, the blurring of the line between the conscious will of the musician and his unconscious or physical response to the partners, is all we heard and saw yesterday night. 

It is important to testify these little moment of creativity and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of our ideals of what music is, because we all are living in a very conservative period, where music is mostly entertainment or a mere wallpaper for different environments, while in fact the sound world is a recall to our first environment and, this way, an important tool to create a new, collective meaning to life. And so I’m grateful to Curran and Prati for sharing with us their thoughts and feelings under the shape of beautiful music. Don’t miss them, if they’re around to play. 

 

Roberto Ottaviano - Forgotten Matches The Worlds of Steve Lacy (Dodicilune, 2017)

“Today, the more I study Lacy's repertoire, the more I deal with the transcription of his compositions, the more I listen to his unreleased recordings, the more I concentrate on his language trying to connect the strings of his inspirations and his soundographies, the more I feel little, tiny”. This is a statement by saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano, who gave light to a double album full of Lacy's music last year.

Roberto Ottaviano is a sopranist born in Bari, Italy, in 1957. He studied saxophone with Lacy himself, while applying to composition and arrangement under the guide of George Russell. Since 1979 he toured and recorded all over Europe, playing with Mal Waldron, Giorgio Gaslini, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille, Albert Mangelsdorff, Keith Tippett, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Barre Phillips, Pierre Favre, Kenny Wheeler, Mark Dresser, Paul Bley, Irene Schweitzer, Tony Oxley and many others.

Roberto Ottaviano

In this double record, full of Lacy's compositions, Ottaviano plays with a quartet (with Glen Ferris on trombone, Giovanni Maier on bass and Cristiano Calcagnile on drums) on the first cd, and in a duo with pianist Alexander Hawkins on the second cd. Ottaviano style on soprano saxophone is less metaphysical, less angular than Lacy's, more rounded.

The music contained in this collection is more similar to what Lacy did in albums like 'The Kiss' (Lunatic Records, 1987) than in obliques, confrontational records as 'The Gap' (America, 1972). Both the quartet and the duo is far from free playing, and more akin to traditional jazz. To hear such interpretations is strange in a way, since Lacy music is hand to hand with the limits of his instument, while Ottaviano is playing it more like a conventional, melodic device.

Anyway it's important, now that 14 years have passed since Lacy's death, to reinvigorate this music for the new generations of musicians and listeners. Maybe this record can put a new light on Lacy's body of work, reinvigorating his legacy and leading his music to the future.  

Steve Lacy Joelle Léandre - One More Time (Leo Records, 2005)

Nearly 50 minutes of music have been crowded in this CD. In 2002, Steve Lacy gave a bunch of farewell concerts to Europe and came back in the U.S. after 30 years. All gigs were duo performances, with the likes of Japanes dancer Shiro Daimon, Fred Van Hove, Irene Aebi and, finally, on July 28 in Café Belga (Brussels) with Joelle Léandre. As Francesco Martinelli points out in his liner notes, Lacy and Léandre stand as farther apart as possible as musicians, but their paths are parallel. This concert wasn't their firts and last collaboration: Joelle commissioned to Steve "Vetement" (garment), a piece 'you can cut and adapt to season, like a garment', that the bassist played in her recitals along with Cage and Scelsi's compositions; both played with people like George Lewis and Derek Bailey; they talked often together about music, poetry and art; they both loved to play music related to or accompanied with poetry, and inspired to dance or theater; they both were fiercely and devotedly in love with angular and jumping-into-the-void music. This beautiful record show us this couple of musicians playing together for the first time since 15 years, and it's really futile to use words to talk about it. But if you really want to taste the essence of improvising, and the accuracy and deepness of the interplay of two master musicians, this is really a good place to start. 

Line Up: Steve Lacy - Soprano Sax; Joelle Léandre - double bass; Tracklist: 01 - One More Time 1 [32:15]; 02 - One More Time 2 [12:15]; 03 - One More Time 3 [10:10]; 04 - Phone Message [01:00] 

Joelle Léandre – Nanni Balestrini @ Cox 18

(reportage trafelato + colpevole ritardo)

Arrivo di corsa sotto la pioggia e quasi alla fine della serata. Colpa delle abitudini milanesi, leggi 22.10 sul flyer e pensi, non prima delle 23, e invece; ma dal compilare due righe, in attesa di scrivere qualcosa sul lavoro di Balestrini come gli ho promesso, e sulle interviste alla Léandre che prossimamente verranno pubblicate in lingua inglese (da una casa editrice israeliana, se non ho capito male), come mi anticipa lei, non potevo esimermi. La mia prima volta al Cox, spazio di autogestione. Ogni luogo che produce cultura, (istituzioni comprese, e non si dica che è ideologia) dovrebbe essere luogo di soggettivà e militanza, cioè capace di operare scelte in campo artistico e di produrre l’inaudito, il nuovo, possibilmente a partire da un incontro. Non si dà miracolo, diceva Annah Arendt, cioè creazione, nella relazione oggettuale e nelle convenzioni.

“Oui, j’aime ce désordre, ce riche désordre, ce chaos meme qui me donne du fil à retordre, des sons à malaxer, des cordes à tirailler. Il y a là un travail immense de liberté, donc de responsabilité. Vaste sujet! Quelle arrogance, n’est-ce pas?” (Joelle Léandre). Nanni e la sua compagna sono già sul palco, finiscono di recitare una poesia e scendono. Sale Joelle, introduce un suo arrangiamento di The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Spring di John Cage (e Joyce) per contrabbasso e voce; sale di nuovo l’uomo, che recita Tre Studi per un Autoritratto di Francis Bacon (non può essere un caso), mentre lei, la musicista, suona come ho sentito nei suoi dischi, ovvero splendidamente.

Descrivere la sua musica? Per favore, non scherziamo: ci pensa Gilles Deleuze, citato da Franck Médioni in un libro-intervista con la bassista (A Voix Basse, Editions MF, 2009), quello di cui vi rendo conto all’inizio di questo scritto. “Créer, c’est résister”. Con quella virgola in mezzo, quasi una invocazione. Non ho foto, nulla con me se non un baconiano ricordo di una serata passata troppo in fretta. Ah no, ho l’autografo della Léandre (“FOR G. PAOLO, PEACE + LOVE, JOELLE LEANDRE”, e un cuoricino) sul suo disco in duo con Steve Lacy (One More Time, Leo Records, 2005), che girava nel mio stereo, le due e cinquantuno di notte, mentre compilavo queste righe. E una promessa da mantenere a Balestrini.

Sito Ufficiale di Joelle Léandre

Sito Ufficiale di Nanni Balestrini

Sito ufficiale del Cox 18