Two Views of Steve Lacy's The Wire re-imagines a historic moment: that time when the American composer and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy went into a Tokyo recording studio with some freshly made Japanese friends, where they recorded a lost classic.
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.
As Kaiser notes: "Steve Lacy must never be forgotten. His contributions to the music are humongous and multiplex."
Lacy was deeply serious about the necessity of "playing what you feel", and that's felt here in another surprising way. When Ackley and Kaiser decided to replicate the instrumentation of the 1975 The Wire sessions, they made one small change: swapping in electric bass guitars for the acoustic upright basses of the original. This posed an intriguing artistic challenge: Kaiser is not really a bassist, while Manring is one of the most accomplished working today. How would they fit together?
Just fine, it turns out. By playing what they feel, and because what they feel includes a deep love of Lacy's inspiration, their low-frequency conversation extends outward to the entire group and the whole picture resonates with love, joy, ferocity, and mutual respect. Lacy's own ensembles always embodied those qualities, and in this he remains a contemporary inspiration even 20 years after his passing.
Forgotten? Not likely.
