It’s quite something when you’re at an age where you’ve forgotten more about the music you love than you can remember. I might have come across Steve Lacy’s The Wire, and I know a magazine took its title from it, but I can’t recall if I ever heard it. But anyway, this is one of the most stimulating albums I’ve heard in a long while. My ignorance of the base material happily ensures that blithe comparison with any other record is out of the question.
The label say: “Lacy’s 1977 album The Wire was groundbreaking; this is merely magnificent. But what saxophonist Bruce Ackley, percussionist Andrea Centazzo, pianist Tania Chen, cellist Danielle DeGruttola, and bassists Henry Kaiser and Michael Manring are doing with their tribute is effectively curating history. With this reprise of The Wire, now a hard-to-find and expensive collector’s item, they’re doing their part to ensure that their mentor, inspiration, and friend does not get lost as memories fade, CDs lose their metallic sheen, and vinyl records accumulate dust.”
Ackley, veteran of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, has arguably the most awkward boots to fill but his approach to the soprano sax owes something to Lacy only in passing and his tone is less rounded.
However, liner-note writer Alex Varty’s assertion that the group creates “a kind of mirror image of Lacy’s mid-70s sound world” is very pertinent, and the lengthy treatment of The Twain gives the idea substance, the line between the written and the improvised being blurred to such an extent that it simply doesn’t matter.
Both versions of Dead Line emphasise Lacy’s penchant for Monkian melodies, although for me the first version has greater tension and a kind of group-based agreement to avoid anything as emphatic as a resolution. That avoidance lends the music uncommon substance.
The second version of Esteem mines a seam of barely earthly lyricism that is hardly heard on record these days, and as such will alienate listeners of a small-c conservative persuasion and indeed anyone for whom demanding music is simply intolerable.
Discography
The Twain; Esteem; The Owl; The Wire; Cloudy; Dead Line; The Twain; Esteem; The Owl; The Wire; Cloudy; Dead Line (74.59)
Bruce Ackley (ss, cl); Tania Chen (p); Danielle DeGruttola (clo); Henry Kaiser, Michael Manring (b); Andrea Centazzo (pc). Megasonic Studio, Oakland, Ca, June 2017.
Don Giovanni Records DG-296
