Listening to Prestige 507: Steve Lacy

LISTEN TO ONE: Evidence

Steve Lacy wasn't the first to notice Thelonious Monk's genius as a composer, but he was the to give Monk the kind of serious, focused attention that is given only to the greatest composers, and had never before been given to a jazz composer. His previous Prestige album was entirely devoted to Monk's compositions, and works by Monk make up the bulk of this session (two pieces are by Duke Ellington).

Lacy is a particularly interesting figure in American music. His devotion to the compositions of Thelonious Monk are a part of it, and a not insignificant part. No one before him had treated a composer in the pure jazz

idiom with this kind of seriousness. I'm hedging my bet here, categorizing Ellington as a crossover between jazz and popular song, Gershwin as crossover between jazz, Broadway and classical, thus violating all my principles about pigeonholing people into categories, but what the heck. It's still a valid point. And I don't think any progressive jazz musician had devoted a whole album to Ellington or Gershwin by 1961, either.

Lacy was also unusual in that he began by playing Dixieland, and went straight from there to the avant garde, with none of the usual stops in between. And he was unusual in that soprano sax. which is most commonly someone's "other instrument," was his only instrument. He discussed all of this in a 1980 interview in Calcutta, India, with two jazz enthusiasts, Ajoy Ray and Arthur Gracias. He began with his beginnings in music, at a later date than most, buying a soprano sax at age 16 after hearing a Sidney Bechet record. Interviewer Ray pointed out that the soprano is considered a particularly difficult instrument to play. Lacy laughed and said,  "I didn't know that at the time!" Asked why he stuck with it to the exclusion of all other reed instruments, he said: 

Because I found out how hard it was and therefore, I needed all my time to devote to that, do what I wanted to do, and I didn‟t have the time to do it. It's like having two wives, or 3 wives or 4 wives: couldn't do it, couldn't handle 'em.

By 19, he had progressed enough on this difficult instrument to begin playing professionally ("I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't know I didn't know"), and the love of Bechet's music led him to gravitate toward traditional jazz:

 I started playing with... mostly old guys. These were people 60

years old, old pioneers who were still active in New York, like Red Allen, Hot Lips Page, Buck Clayton, Jimmy Rushing, Zutty Singleton, Pops Foster, the older cats. And I was just a kid, just 19 years old. And they were 65, but they were beautiful. They really encouraged me and showed me a lot of things.

But then...

In the middle of all that, I met Cecil Taylor and he just plucked me right out of all that and put me in the fire! Put me right into the deep waters you know! And I didn't know how deep the water was! So I swum across there for about 6 years with him. From '53 to '59.

That was where I learnt a lot of stuff, playing with him.

Ray: Wasn’t it a big switch; from the New Orleans style to C.  Taylor? From one extreme to another?

Lacy: Yeah, again I didn't know how big a switch it was! Didn't seem so big to me. And it still doesn't, in a way, because Jazz is much the same really. Surface characteristics and all that, it still contains the same spirit. Not so far really. 

Ray Bryant felt much the same way when he would spend afternoons at the at the Metropole Cafe sitting in with Henry "Red" Allen, and the same evening downtown at the Five Spot playing with Benny Golson and Curtis Fuller: "A C chord is a C chord no matter where you find it. I never made a conscious effort to play differently with anyone."

This album features the only Prestige appearance of one of the most significant musicians of that era: Don Cherry, who came to New York with Ornette Coleman for the two weeks that shook the world, their groundbreaking Five Spot stay. Steve Lacy, in the 198o interview, recalls that group.

Oh, that was a revelation for everybody in New York. That was like the Message, the Writing on the Wall. Nobody could ignore that really. Either you're against it or for it. I mean it was like a big flash. Everybody was talking about it. You either liked it or you didn't. I liked it right away. But I had already played with Cecil (Taylor) for 6 years by the time I heard that. So it was revolutionary all right. But I had been involved in another revolution, or maybe the same revolution. So I felt right at home with that. We loved it.

 Cherry remained in the vanguard of music for three decades, playing with avant garde musicians like Coleman, Lacy and Albert Ayler, playing with mainstream musicians like Sonny Rollins, playing world music, collaborating with classical composers.

Lacy bypassed many of the modern genres--bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, soul jazz. He told his 1980 interviewers:

I got there a little too late. Yeah very profound! I studied that music a lot. Charlie Parker was one of my masters. Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach and Thelonious Monk. I think I was too young, too late for bebop. I started in 1950, and the height of bebop was '46, '47, '48, '49. By the '50s, it had already done its thing. It was going into a kind of repetition, the cool phase and what they call hard bop. I studied it the best I could and I tried to play it, but I was in the next generation, you know what I mean? I was in the generation after that. I tried to play the best I could, but I was too late really.

It's interesting, then, that Lacy should have become such an interpreter of Monk, who is so closely identified with the bebop era. But Monk was always a special case. He was in the bebop era but not entirely of it, and his compositions are his own, a unique music portfolio. The beboppers played Monk's tunes--not as many or as often as you might think--but the staples of their repertoire were standards, and compositions based on the chord changes of the standards, like the near-ubiquitous "I Got Rhythm."

Lacy hardly ever played a standard. He liked to explore the work of other jazz composers, like Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols, and Mal Waldron, with whom he oftened collaborated in Europe when they had both gone the expatriate route.

And Duke Ellington, but you would hardly expect a disciple of Cecil Taylor and a compatriot of Ornette Coleman to play in the style of the Duke. The two Ellington compositions on this album, "The Mystery Song" and "Something to Live For" are not among the composer's best known, and I'm not sure that Duke's mother would recognize these versions of them. 

The structure of these performances is not so strange. It would be recognizable to a bebop fan: head, series of solos, restatement of head. But what solos! Cherry brings his awareness that jazz has changed to this new setting, but he doesn't just bring over his Ornette Coleman Quartet style. He is very much working with Lacy here, and working with Monk. And both of them are creating something new and arresting, abetted by Coleman's drummer Billy Higgins, a presence throughout.

Bassist Carl Brown is something of a mystery. He only has two recording credits, this one and an unreleased trio session for Atlantic, with Billy Higgins. It has been speculated that this is Charlie Haden playing under an alias, but a contributor to a thread on an Organissimo.org forum (one of the best gathering spots for jazz insiders on the web) verifies that there was a real Carl Brown ("I heard him with Billy Higgins and Clarence "C" Sharpe in the Village early sixties").

This is a particularly interesting session, just for the pure enjoyment of the music, but also for the historical interest of two giants of two different avant garde schools of the mid-twentieth century, meeting and finding common ground. And for a new way of experiencing the composing genius of Thelonious Monk.

Esmond Edwards produced. The album, titled Evidence, was released on New Jazz.

 

 

Listening to Prestige 289: Steve Lacy

This is Steve Lacy's second album as leader, both for Prestige. As long and productive as Lacy's career would go on to be, he's not immediately thought of as a Prestige artist, but Weinstock's label is where he got his start, first with Gil Evans and then under his own name.

This one is particularly noteworthy for two things. First, his quartet personnel has changed. Buell Neidlinger returns as bassist, Elvin Jones is the new drummer. Most significantly, he is put together with the Prestige "house pianist," Mal Waldron, a pairing that was to be of great significance to both men when they reconnected years later in Europe.

Second, the entire album is devoted to the compositions of Thelonious Monk. Lacy was an admirer and champion of Monk's work, and tried to include at least one Monk composition on every recording he made, but this is the first time an entire album has been devoted to this great composer's work.

It's an article of faith among many, myself included, that Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington are good candidates for the two most important 20th Century American composers, but that awareness has been slower in coming than you might think. Sure, "Round Midnight" became an instant classic, and so did several of his other works, but Lacy dug deeper into the catalog, and found pieces for which recognition came much slower, if at all.

Secondhandsongs.com is a fascinating website which tracks the cover versions of songs. It doesn't list every song ever composed, though they keep adding to it, and there's no guarantee they're going to catch every cover, but they are a wonderful resource. Here's what they have on the tunes from this album:

• Hornin' In: Recorded for Blue Note in 1952 and released in 1956. After Lacy's version, no one paid attention to this tune for 40 years, until Sonny Fortune in 1994. Since then, very little. Sphere, the group founded after Monk's death and devoted to his music, recorded it, as did two European jazz groups, and that's it, except for an unusual interpretation by rockers Terry Adams and NRBQ in 2015. YouTube offers a couple more recent live versions, and there is no reason why this wonderful piece of music should not be a jazz standard except that it's in competition with so many other classics from this composer.


• Skippy was recorded by Monk in 1952 for Blue Note, and seems to have only been released on a 78 RPM single. It's complex, stirring, uptempo. Lacy's version features a terrific solo by Mal Waldron, among other delights. Lacy recorded it once more two decades later with a different quartet (Roswell Rudd, Henry Grimes, Dennis Charles), and then it lay fallow until 1988, when Buell Neidlinger recorded his own version, and Anthony Braxton covered it. In 1994 it was picked up by Paul Motian among others, and this millennium it's been rediscovered by a number of young jazz esnembles, both European and American, to the point where it can legitimately be called a standard. But 'twas not always thus.
    Monk's own version features Kenny Dorham, Lou Donaldson and Lucky Thompson, from the same session that produced "Hornin' In."


• Reflections is Steve Lacy's title cut. It is an absolutely beautiful melody, from an early Prestige trio session. It captures both Lacy and Waldron at their most lyrical. Monk was an important influence on Waldron, but not an early influence. Certainly this session with Lacy must have affected him deeply.
  
  
    "Reflections" is certainly a standard, covered four times as often as Holland-Dozier-Holland's same-titled song for the Supremes.. J. J. and Kai (Savoy) and Sonny Rollins (Blue Note) both recorded it before Lacy. But then it also was pretty much forgotten until 1982, when Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes did it. Since then, it's become ubiquitous, with secondhandsongs listing 66 versions. But a tune this important in the monk canon went a long time ignored.


• Monk's version of Four in One (Sahib Shihab, Milt Jackson, Al McKibbon, Max Roach) was
  released by Blue Note in 1952 on 78 and on the Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2 album. Lacy's version features some driving Elvin Jones work along with the solos by Lacy and Waldron. Then again, a long period of neglect. Monk's death in 1982 brought about a renewed interest in his music, and one of the first stirrings of this was a very odd album in 1984, That's the Way I Feel Now, a tribute to Monk by an eclectic bunch of musicians, most of them rockers. "Four in One" was covered by Gary Windo, a British avant-gardist who played his own brand of music, more often lending it to rock than jazz performers, and Todd Rundgren. Windo played alto sax, Rundgren supplied synthesizers and drum machines, for a performance that's manic, chaotic, geared to a rock-steady beat, and still recognizable as Monk.
    Since then, it too has entered the Monk mainstream, with 33 versions listed by secondhandsongs.


• Bye-Ya is one of the pieces that Monk and Coltrane performed on their 1957 Carnegie Hall concert, a recording of which was only recently rediscovered and released. It's such a familiar tune that it seems impossible that it, too, could have languished throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but it did. This started to make me curious, and I checked secondhandsongs for some of Monk's best-known compositions, starting, of course, with "Round Midnight." Composed in 1940, first recorded by Cootie Williams (who took co-composer credit), it became an instant classic when Blue Note released Genius of Modern Music, Volume 1 in 1951. Since 1955, scarcely a year has gone by without several recorded renditions of it. "Blue Monk," first released on Prestige in 1954, has proved nearly as popular, with "Straight No Chaser" and "Ruby, My Dear" not far behind. So at least Monk was getting royalties from some of his classics during his lifetime. "Bye-Ya" has five lifetime, 48 posthumous, and secondhandsongs has somehow missed the Carnegie Hall concert.


• Ask Me Now has had a similar fate. Steve Lacy, PeeWee Russell and Ronnie Mathews during Monk's lifetime, 91 posthumous versions.

Secondhandsongs doesn't have information on "Let's Call This."

Reflections was released on New Jazz in 1959.


Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this music.

                                                                                                                                                --Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 257: Steve Lacy

In my last post, Paul Quinichette's Basie tribute, I talked about the 1950s in jazz as an era where the entire history of jazz coexisted, styles and eras side by side: New Orleans traditional, Kansas City blues, swing (both white and black), bebop, rhythm and blues, hard bop, cool, avant garde. And these styles overlapped and fed off each other. The break that begat bebop came from a Kansas City jump blues number: Charlie Parker's solo on Jay McShann's "Sepia Bounce." Rhythm and blues jumped out of the horn of Illinois Jacquet on Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home." Pop balladeer Billy Eckstine put together a big band that jumpstarted the careers of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Benny Goodman integrated jazz first behind the scenes by hiring Fletcher Henderson as arranger, then out front with Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton. Gerry Mulligan took the ideas he had been working out with Miles Davis out to the West Coast and sparked a whole new geographically eponymous school. Veterans like Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz were developing an avant garde that would soon be taken over and pushed beyond boundaries by younger musicians like Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler.

The original beboppers came out of the swing era. Most of them had played in swing bands, and many, like Zoot Sims and Wardell Gray, carried a lot of the swing sensibility into their modern playing. That sort of progression was radical, but it was also incremental.

Steve Lacy was another story. Born in 1934, he had his first professional gig at age 16. That's 1950, when bebop had already passed its infancy and entered its mature phase, but Lacy didn't start with bebop, or even with swing. He went back to an earlier era, playing traditional New Orleans jazz with musicians like Henry "Red" Allen and Zutty Singleton. And then, in a quantum bounce, he leapfrogged over the dominant sounds of his generation and the previous generation, and landed foursquare (well, hardly square) in the avant garde, playing on Cecil Taylor's debut album, Jazz Advance, in 1956.

This Prestige session was Lacy's own debut as a leader, and it finds him somewhat more in tune with the times than the visionary work with Taylor would have suggested.  But he was playing his instrument of choice, the soprano saxophone, and that in itself set him apart. After John Coltrane took up the soprano sax, others started experimenting with it, but in 1957, it was pretty much Steve Lacy alone. So that sets him apart. He is working with the general structure of improvisation from a melody, but he's already heard the call of a muse in a different room.

If it's 1957, and you're going to be looking for new directions...well, of course, bebop was a new direction, which is why Charlie Parker was so important, and continues to be important today. In 1957, his innovations were still fresh, and people were still finding important things to say under the bebop umbrella, but there were other new directions too. And if you were searching for your own way, the path was likely to lead through Thelonious Monk, who had always been in bebop but not of it. Cecil Taylor had included a Monk tune, "Bemsha Swing," on Jazz Advance. Lacy included Monk's "Work," and it was the beginning of a long fascination with one of jazz's most original composers. He would later become the first jazz artist to record a whole album devoted to Monk's music, and would play briefly in Monk's band.

Wynton Kelly had made his Prestige debut with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis on a couple of 78s in 1950, and had appeared on an Art Farmer album in 1954. By 1957 he was seriously in demand, appearing on a couple of dozen albums in that year alone, on virtually every significant jazz label. He would appear on a handful more Prestige albums in the ensuing years, but never a session as leader. Red Garland and Mal Waldron were the label's go-to piano guys.

Kelly was the straight-ahead side of Lacy's debut sound; Buell Neidlinger and Dennis Charles were the avant garde. Both had been on Jazz Advance, and both would have long-time associations with Taylor. Niedlinger would go deeper into the avant garde later, working with composers like John Cage and George Crumb.

Reflecting the uniqueness of Lacy's instrument, the album would be called Soprano Sax.

Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 253: Gil Evans

Gil Evans is best known for his early work with Claude Thornhill, where he began to sow the seeds for modern jazz big band arranging; for his seminal work with Miles Davis on the Birth of the Cool sessions, thought by many to be the most important jazz album of the 50s (although recorded in the 40s); and the great orchestral albums he made with Miles for Columbia: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain. He had already recorded Miles Ahead at the time he went into Rudy Van Gelder's studio on three dates in September and October to record his first album as leader. He used 21 pieces on Miles Ahead.

According to the excellent Evans biography Castles Made of Sound, by Larry Hicock, Evans's work with Miles was far more extensive than the album credits would suggest. He had input into virtually every recording Miles made, and during his angriest, most anti-white periods, Miles still spoke to Gil nearly every day.

This is Evans's first album under his own name as leader, and if it doesn't register with the same historical force as the Miles Davis sides, it surely registers musically. Evans works with eleven instruments, including some of the Miles Ahead crew (John Carisi, Louis Mucci, Willie Ruff, Jimmy Cleveland, Lee Konitz and Paul Chambers), and including himself on piano (Wynton Kelly had done the Miles sessions). I hadn't realized what a good piano player he was.

But his greatest strength was as an arranger, and a group this size gives him all the room he needs to work with textures, dynamics, the shifting and balancing of parts.

The first day's work was two songs, Irving Berlin's "Remember," and "Ella Speed," a blues ballad best known in its 1944 recording by Lead Belly, and a continuing favorite of folk singers.

"Ella Speed" was rejected. Not "unissued," meaning put on the shelf, but sooner or later it might turn up on a later album or compilation. Rejected. One imagines Bob Weinstock's response: "Hey, Gil, what is this shit? We're a progressive jazz label. If you want to do folk songs, go over and see Moe Asch at Folkways."

But if such was the case, Evans was not dissuaded. He came back a week later for his second session, and this time led off with "Ella Speed." And this time, it was accepted, and it became a part of the Gil Evans canon.

And rightly so. There's something about a simple folk melody that lends itself to being a showcase for brilliant arrangements. Around the same time that Evans was recording "Ella Speed," British jazzman Johnny Dankworth made a record called "Experiments With Mice," in which he played "Three Blind Mice" in the styles of the great bandleaders and arrangers of the day: Billy May, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gerry Mulligan, Sauter-Finnegan, Stan Kenton. And Victor Borge, on Broadway, was doing baroque and romantic variations on "Happy Birthday to You." And so "Ella Speed" really shows off Evans at his best.


Miles Davis and Gil Evans

Leonard Bernstein's "Big Stuff" isn't quite a jazz standard, but it could be. It was written for Bernstein's first theatrical venture, the score for Jerome Robbins' ballet Fancy Free. "Big Stuff" is the ballet's prologue, and was written with Billie Holliday in mind, but at the time Bernstein thought Lady Day was out of his league, and didn't show it to her. As it turned out, Bernstein was right. Holiday loved the song, and later recorded it. The Evans version is the only other jazz recording of it that I've found.

Some of Evans' musicians: Willie Ruff was already starting to make a name for himself as half of the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, a name he was to continue to inhabit for the next 50 years. He and Dwike Mitchell became international ambassadors for jazz, the first jazz group to play in China and the Soviet Union.

Steve Lacy was at the beginning of a career that would make him one of the most versatile and widely recorded jazz stars of all time, and he was already showing his versatility, having recorded with Dixieland groups and with avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. He may have been the first significant musician to bring the soprano sax into modern jazz, well before John  Coltrane.

Of the lesser known players, Lou Mucci was revered as a teacher. I particularly loved this story from one of his students:

I went to see Louis Prima at the Paramount Theater. The trumpet players had very shiny trumpets and I wanted one. I asked Mr. Mucci if he would give me a note for my parents so that they would buy me a shiny trumpet. He tried my horn and said that I did not need a new horn and that he was doing the Patti Page TV show and he would use my horn.

That is a good man.

Gil Evans and Ten was released on Prestige, and later rereleased on New Jazz as Big Stuff.

 



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