Steve Lacy - The Forest and The Zoo

ESP 1060

Steve Lacy’s recordings of small-group open improvisation are few, despite the importance that jumping in with both feet (albeit after a steady process of dips) held in his musical evolution. While taking part in fantasias by composer-pianist Giorgio Gaslini and working in an expat small group with Carla Bley and Mike Mantler (Jazz Realities, Fontana, 1966), Lacy’s own music from the mid-60s is harder to come by. In Rome, he and trumpeter Enrico Rava (a holdover from the fantastic Sortie, GTA, 1966) hooked up with the South African rhythm section of bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo and shortly thereafter the quartet got a gig in Buenos Aires at a happening/festival for the Centro de Artes y Ciencias, one which infamously left them stranded in Argentina for several months with no bread and little other work.

The Forest and The Zoo is Lacy’s lone effort for ESP, recorded in concert in Buenos Aires shortly before the group disbanded and returned to Europe (Moholo, Dyani and Rava) and New York (Lacy). The set consists of two sidelong free improvisations hinging on relentless percussive expansion and contraction, Dyani’s thrum felt more than heard as Moholo’s patterns of cross-rhythms provide a buoyant rhythm field. “The Forest” begins with long held tones in unison that splinter into collective ducking and diving, Rava’s bright and ringing approach in direct contrast to Lacy’s pensive warbling, dervish-like squeals and lengthy quotes from “Let’s Call This.” “The Zoo” is slightly more tuneful at the outset, a Monkish cadenza soon erupting into collective playing. Lacy’s transitional phraseology is universally evident in these improvisations, shifting from deft singsong airs to clicks, growls and subtonal whirrs. He’s still at the point where two thematic devices – song and sound – are divided and don’t obviously grow from one another. Soon, of course, he’ll reconcile them, but at this point the “other side” is not without glances backwards.

It’s entirely appropriate that a detail from a Bob Thompson painting is Lacy’s chosen cover image. Thompson’s oeuvre combines fauvist colors and primeval imagery with color-field swaths and rhythms derived from jazz and African music. Looking backward and forward at the same time, it’s no wonder that he and Lacy were expatriate kin.