Some Jazz Records: Steve Lacy Clippings (Part 2)
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Writing about jazz, it is very rare to have research cut out for you, especially in a comprehensive manner. Thanks to the work of writer Jason Weiss, Steve Lacy is one of the few musicians whose interviews have been carefully compiled in book form. Articles referenced below, along with many others, can be found in Weiss’s excellent Steve Lacy: Conversations, published by Duke University Press in 2006.
Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Ellingtonia, Volume One, Brunswick B-1000, 1943, 4 10" 78 rpm; and Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Ellingtonia, Volume Two, Brunswick B-1011, 1944, 4 10" 78 rpm.
Talking to Max Harrison for the British Jazz Monthly in late 1965, Steve Lacy identified a clear turning point in his early interest in music. "One time I was given some money for a birthday, maybe my twelfth or thirteenth [ca. 1946-47], and I decided to buy some records," the saxophonist said. "In the record store I saw the Brunswick set of Ellington records. It said 'Duke Ellington and His World-Famous Orchestra.' I didn’t know who that was, but something about that phrase got to me and I bought the records without even having heard them. I liked them considerably, and still do." Most likely, the set bought by the young Lacy was volume one or volume two of Ellingtonia, two four-record albums attributed not to the "world-famous" but to the "famous" Ellington orchestra. The two volumes reissued older sides in a deluxe "Collector’s Series" under red and green velvet-clad covers.
Gil Evans Orchestra, Into the Hot, Impulse! A(S)-9, 1962, LP.
Garth W. Caylor Jr.'s Nineteen + Conversations with Jazz Musicians, New York City, 1964-1965 remained an unpublished manuscript for 50 years. Only one of the interviews conducted by Caylor had seen circulation before the book’s 2014 publication: his 1965 conversation with Steve Lacy, which had been included in Jason Weiss’s Conversations. "He was doing more than is happening now, to my taste," Lacy told Caylor of his early work with Cecil Taylor. "He did it as an entity, and the elements are hard to discuss apart from the whole thing. He was way ahead, his music was more of everything than I find now. It was more dolorous and more frantic, and more beautiful and more ugly, and it was more alive. That’s what it was, really, more alive. That music was really supercharged. Of course, what he’s playing now is wonderful too. He’s just, you know, a 'champ.' That record he did with Gil Evans [in 1961] is something special, Into the Hot. The three pieces by Cecil—"Pots," "Bulbs," and "Mixed"—are the best examples of his writing on record. He’s a great composer, like Monk and some others. His composition really sticks out."
Ornette Coleman, Something Else!, Contemporary C3551, 1958, LP.
Steve Lacy identified Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman as the two distinct poles who moved jazz forward in the 1950s. Lacy worked with Taylor in New York early on, and he was among the first musicians to pay attention to Coleman when the first signs of what he was doing on the West Coast reached the East. "The contemporary saxophonists whose work most interests me are John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster, Ornette Coleman, Jackie MacLean, and Johnny Hodges," Lacy said in his first published interview, which appeared in the Jazz Review's September 1959 issue. "Ornette Coleman is the only young saxophone player who seems to be trying for a conversational style of playing and is the only one I have heard who is exploring the potentialities of real human expression, something which has a tremendous impact on me. I have yet to hear him in person but his playing (not his writing) on the album I did hear moved me." When Lacy gave this interview, the only Coleman album on the market was his very first, recorded in 1958 for Contemporary.