It’s a tall order to tackle the impenetrable jazz of the late, great Steve Lacy, and to cover song-for-song a solo live album of Lacy’s seems on the very edge of sanity. And then to replace the “straight” soprano sax horn of Lacy with a burly-sounding bass clarinet? Absolute bonkers.
But those are just the kind of mountains that the Phil Sudderberg-led trio The Flake set out to climb and conquer with their Steve Lacy tribute Plays Clinkers (even the name of this trio comes from the title of a Lacy album). The idea to interpret and recast a jazz master’s solo work was Sudderberg’s, and once he decided to do that, he quickly realized that Lacy was the right subject. Said Sudderberg, “I’ve always been magnetized to Steve Lacy’s playing; the logic of his improvisational development, his boldness in approach to repetition, his clarity of ideas, and general melodic tunefulness all combined to pose a fun challenge for the drums. When I went about sifting through Lacy’s solo music, Clinkers became the clear choice of source material to focus on.”
Naturally, he needed some help fleshing out the vision and naturally, it would require some world-class musicians to perform this tall task. Luckily, he found them right in his home town of Chicago in bassist Charlie Kirchen and bass clarinetist Jason Stein. Together they play Lacy’s originals in the same order as the memento of a 1977 Steve Lacy gig in Basel, Switzerland.
Lacy had originally played “Trickles” in a quartet setting with Roswell Rudd, Ken Carter and Beaver Harris for the title song of his 1976 release, and if anything, injects more melodicism when playing it all by himself. The Flake could have probably taken the easy way out and used the quartet version for its model but instead stay true to its mission and came up with a version that traces the paths Lacy took with this song at Basel along with his puckish attitude. There’s also the added bonus of Stein jousting with Kirchen, and Sudderberg later joining the fray.
“Duck” is where Steve Lacy made his soprano squonk and quack like that game bird; it’s fascinating to hear Stein do these animal sounds on a bass clarinet, skillfully throwing in real notes to form Lacy’s melodic figure that’s locked in a battle with the chirping.
“Coastline” doesn’t have anything competing with the basic harmonic motif, which is a pretty one that Lacy devised. Sudderberg and Kirchen closely follow the staggered path forged by Stein, adding weight to every note he plays even when Stein deviates from the set patterns.
Steve Lacy explored the upper reaches of his straight horn for “Microworlds,” while Stein and Kirchen (an arco bass) combine to introduce Lacy’s main concept before the clarinetist ponders on it staying in the mid-low registers and getting a little rolling thunder assistance from Kirchen and Sudderberg.
The trio tackles “Clinkers” by adding more definition to the shape of the song that Lacy only implied through his tour-de-force twelve-minute solo performance. That’s not to say the three don’t play free; they very much do but are largely moving freely together. Stein’s playing after the head starts with urgency and gets more so after that; the rhythm section seems to push him further out until they return to the theme where the dramatics from the improv section spills right over into it.
The genius of Steve Lacy isn’t that easy to articulate but Phil Sudderberg, Charlie Kirchen and Jason Stein take great care of the soprano saxophone great’s legacy when they play his Clinkers solo masterpiece with all the invention and attitude of the original. Plays Clinkers is now available, through Amalgam Music.
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