In jazz and improvised music, free/creative playing is just as much about liberating instrumental possibilities as opening up rhythm, melody, chord structure, and form. It was in the 1960s that instruments like the bass clarinet and cello found their way into progressive jazz environments under the direction of artists like Eric Dolphy and Joel Freedman. While the favored instrument of traditional jazz players like Sidney Bechet and the well-regarded bebop saxophonist Lucky Thompson (a favored tenorman on Thelonious Monk’s early sides), under the watch of John Coltrane, the soprano saxophone became associated with high, wailing, and dervish-like cycles emerging from modal-jazz frameworks. Those who followed in Coltrane’s footsteps similarly employed the higher-register axe, which, to paraphrase bassist Kent Carter on his association with Steve Lacy, can “cut through an ensemble like gold.”
Lacy (1934-2004) was a Dixieland soprano player who jumped into the deep end of creative music with both feet, quickly becoming known with pianist-composer Cecil Taylor in 1956 and leading his own groups exploring the music of Monk shortly thereafter. His esteemed quartet with trombonist Roswell Rudd devoted itself to the search for something harmonically and structurally “beyond” in Monk’s music, leading to the saxophonist’s embrace of free music in the early 1960s. Based in Europe from 1966 until shortly before his death, Lacy began to create a significant solo saxophone repertoire in the early 1970s, which resulted in numerous concerts and recordings, one of the finest being 1977’s Clinkers (Hat Hut). Like most of Lacy’s records from the close of the 1960s onward, Clinkers presented pieces — Lacy’s headlong leap into freedom resulted in a unique and painstakingly detailed compositional approach (almost as though the other side of “freedom” was structure). Recorded in concert in Basel on June 9, 1977, Clinkers was a little less than three-quarters of a storied performance, and the remaining 20 minutes consisted of a rare improvised duet with another saxophonist, Joe McPhee. McPhee, an acolyte of Lacy as much as Albert Ayler, had opened the concert with his varied solo palette including tenor, soprano, and pocket trumpet, and Lacy invited him to play duets on the straight horn. This was intimidating for McPhee, who had been playing saxophones for less than a decade (he started on trumpet and added reeds in 1968). Titled The Rest, its issue on a one-sided Roaratorio LP is the music’s first appearance anywhere. Despite a bit of print-through, dropouts, and hiss on the tape — McPhee’s cassette was the only known copy — their duo is rousing, moving through fragments of Lacy’s tune cycle “The Way” and singsong vortices, ending up in breathy clambers and pinpricks mirrored by ghostly tape flutter. Both players are jovial in conversation and carve out spaces for one another, but their differences in approach are stark — melodic abstractionists and pure-sound improvisers whose understanding of a comparable field results in an obliquely parallel relationship, in togetherness and opposites. The Rest is a fascinating view into the working process of two improvisational architects in their only recorded meeting.
Coltrane’s music on both tenor and soprano was a guiding force for English saxophonist Evan Parker, who, along with such figures as guitarist Derek Bailey, percussionists Tony Oxley and John Stevens, trombonist Paul Rutherford, and bassist Barry Guy, is a certifiable architect of English free music (not to mention European free-improvisation). Though free improvisation is certainly group music, like many of his compatriots (save Stevens) from the 1970s onward, Parker has also been heavily invested in solo playing. Following two solo LPs on Incus (the label he co-ran with Bailey and Oxley), Parker embarked on a solo tour of North America, which up until now had only resulted in two rare LPs for pianist Greg Goodman’s Beak Doctor label, both recorded in Berkeley, California. Another piece of that tour has now emerged in Vaincu.Va!, recorded at the Western Front art gallery in Vancouver and recently unearthed as a celebration of their 40th anniversary in a handsome LP-only release. Crisply recorded and yielding one piece over two sides, Vaincu.Va! fits right into Parker’s 1978 release slot, which also includes the fantastic direct-cut solo LP Monoceros, and, if not quite as alien and overpowering as that set, it’s a staunchly immediate presentation of Parker at work. As tenorist Ivo Perelman astutely observed in conversation with this writer, “Parker hypnotizes himself so that there is a sort of dialogue between his rational mind and his hypnotized mind. He gets lost in the process and establishes a binary approach, I think.” The intensity of Parker’s auto-dialogue (if we’re to call it that) is formidable, overlaying cycle upon cycle in real time so that multiple interconnected strands emerge. It would be unfair to call this music “minimalist” because it’s so detailed and massive, yet repetition and nuanced variation are endemic to Parker’s solo art. There are restive pauses and warped phrasal nattering, as well as elegant curlicues and astounding progressions, but it is the complexity of his closely valued multiphonic shapes that make his solo work unlike that of any other saxophonist.