Classic Recordings, Steve Lacy - Morning Joy

It’s usually fairly easy to pick a Classic Recording to write about, but the brute reality of sitting down in front of the blank page and attempting to convey what the album means to me, and how it sounds, is not such a walk in the park. And the more the record means to me the more I doubt my ability to capture the experience, as has been the case with Steve Lacy’s Morning Joy. Recorded live at the Sun Club, Paris, in 1986, this is a record I have probably played more than any other over the past 10 years, and it’s still yielding fresh delights.

Brought up in New York’s diverse music scene in the forties, by the early fifties Steve Lacy was one of the few musicians playing the soprano saxophone, an instrument that had been widely used in the New Orleans and early big band tradition, but was completely overshadowed by the altos and tenors of the swing and bebop era. Lacy played soprano exclusively from the age of 16 when he started appearing in Dixieland groups, his obvious early facility for the instrument being borne out by the legendary names he found himself appearing with - Henry "Red" Allen, Pee Wee Russell, and Kansas City jazz players like Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, and Jimmy Rushing. Lacy would soon move into more avant-garde circles, appearing on Cecil Taylor’s ground-breaking debut Jazz Advance, but the influence of the early reed techniques and the clarity of line in his articulation would remain at the heart of Lacy’s style. The single most important influence on Lacy’s music would be Thelonious Monk however, whose knack for writing memorable yet rhythmically and harmonically quirky tunes Lacy shared. Lacy’s study of Monk’s music would monopolise much of his early output, with classic albums like Evidence and School Days being entirely devoted to Monk interpretations. Lacy managed to play on stage with his hero, in 1960, and can be heard on Monk’s Big Band and Quartet in Concert album for Columbia in 1963.

After spending a large part of the sixties travelling the world, by 1970 Lacy had settled in Paris, where he would be based until the final two years before his death in 2002, and it was here that he assembled a superb band with saxophonist Steve Potts, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer Oliver Johnson, all of whom appear on Morning Joy. After the experimental improv years of the seventies (often in the company of more avant-garde figures like guitarist Derek Bailey), by the time of Morning Joy Lacy’s music had largely synthesised the various strands and influence into his own unique style with a new-found air of authority, purpose, and fun. Crucially Morning Joy is jazz, not improv. For those who are familiar with Lacy’s soprano playing, it reaches its apotheosis on cuts like Work, whereby Lacy joyfully messes with our sense of time by scuttling in and out of metre. There’s very little in the way of extended technique to Lacy’s playing, which could explain why his records haven’t dated in the same way as those of some of his peers.

Lacy found his perfect musical partner in Steve Potts, who gets equal solo space throughout the record in which he constructs some compelling narratives on his horn. His more bluesy style is well demonstrated in his intricate solo for In Walked Bud, and it’s also interesting to note that Potts is often given the first solo, his hotter style preparing the way for Lacy’s cooler, more abstract approach. Even where both are featured on soprano in the same tune, as on the title-track or As Usual, it’s not difficult to identify who is playing what.

As ever with Lacy, the album features two Monk tunes, Epistrophy and In Walked Bud, which perfectly complement the four Lacy originals like Wickets, which by 1986 had become something of a standard itself. Lacy had the rare talent (in common with Ornette Coleman) of being able to compose real melodies (for example listen carefully to the catchy statement of the theme for Prospectus or the title track and it’ll be locked in your head for days) that actively nourish the ensuing improvisations rather than being mere bookends.

A large portion of the success of Morning Joy has to be attributed to Johnson and Avenal’s stellar rhythm section. Perhaps it’s due to their long tenure with Lacy that they are not as well-known in their own right as they deserve, but I often get just as much enjoyment from following their playing as I do from the horns. A glorious example of this comes in the breakdown of Epistrophy, where Avenal’s bass has a fantastic elasticity to it, with Johnson almost telepathically expanding and contracting his beats without losing the discrete sense of funk.

There’s very little angst in this music, its main objective being to share the wonder and excitement the musicians have in playing these tunes and letting them spill over for us to enjoy. Recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience, Morning Joy deserves to be heard at a decent volume by any self-respecting lover of modern jazz, because, in my humble opinion, it really doesn’t get much better than this.