At the New School there are these symposiums every Wednesday at 1pm, where some musician comes in and talks, or answers questions, or plays, or whatever. Today Steve Lacy was the attraction, and I made sure to go, since for a while (in great part because of things I've read here in r.m.b) I've been curious about him (I've never seen him perform and I have almost no familiarity with any of his recordings). It proved to be very interesting. I even took notes on what he said for all you Steve Lacy fans! :)
Lacy started out by showing us how he warmed up, since in fact that was what he would want to do anyway. He has developed a method over the forty years or whatever it is that he's been playing the soprano sax, and he went through it for us. The first thing he does is to "wake up" the horn: he plays each note on the instrument and plays all the overtones. I know enough about wind intsruments to realize that he was making something sound relatively easy that was in fact extremely difficult! For the lower notes, he could play an impressive number of the overtones in the harmonic series, I'm not sure I want to hazard a guess how many, but it was at least 8 or 10... Even for the high notes he could play 4 overtones. He said with a good reed (the one he had wasn't quite up to par) he had a four octave range, maybe up to a high C (one note beyod 4 octaves unless I misunderstand the soprano?). I'm not sure if this is the same as the highest C on a piano or an octave lower, but whatever he was playing, they were high notes, way up there! Lacy's expression for this was "going to the moon". His hands and fingers didn't move at all while he made a note skip up and down the overtones. He said it all depends on "air column, diaphragm, and a certain little smile". :) He also advised people to resist the temptation to "correct" overtones that sounded out of tune or "false" by bending them, but instead let them ring out at the natural pitch for that instrument. He does the notes on the horn in a certain order, based on tritones (I think it was something like Bb E C F# D Ab A Eb G Db F B?), just to make the exercise a little more interesting. Why a tritone? "35 years ago I was into flat fives. Everybody was." :)
The second warmup he does is what he called a "bugle" exercise. This is simply playing arpeggios with only 1s and 5s. Again, he belted these out, with precision and clarity. After this, he does an exercise which he called "ain't she sweet": bending notes. He bent every note a half step down and then another half step down. Even the low notes. Again his control was impressive. He said "it's all done with the jaw, and the air". Apparently he uses virtually the softest reeds he can get, 1.5s, which he said were harder to play, but had more possibilities. After doing the note-bending, he finally plays scales. He said how by this point in his warmup his ears are really sharp and now he can really hear these scales. He plays 42 scales. He doesn't play them fast. He says he thinks people should practice things slow, and then they'll be able to "play like the wind". For scales, he used to play one note for every step he took as he walked around the room. Now he plays two notes for every step. It's a relaxed pace. He plays each scale starting from whatever degree is the lowest scale note on the horn and plays it to whatever is the highest. (ie if Bb is the lowest note, then he would start, say, and F major scale on the Bb, and a C major scale on the B a half step above it) In this "saxophonic" way he goes through the major, minor, melodic minor (b3 #5 according to his terminology...), and then he diminished scales, I think maybe whole tone, and finally a chromatic scale, all of these over the full range of the instrument. He said playing scales should be like "reviewing the troops", you go steadily and surely through every soldier, you don't rush around and screw up and then go back and review some soldiers you already went by, etc. After the scales he does arpeggios: major, minor, "Monk sevenths" (2 3 6 b7), diminished, augmented, 4ths, b5ths, p5ths. He uses the Monk 7ths instead of the usual 1 3 5 7 (9) or whatever because he got bored with that in the 50s. Sheesh, I wish certain Theory teachers at the New School thought that way... :-/
That's his warmup. Each section takes about 10 or 20 minutes, so the whole thing takes him about an hour and a half I think he said. It was an inspiring demonstration. He also described one other exercise, which I don't think is part of his warmup routine. This was the "close quarters" exercise, where one plays two notes a half step apart, and repeats them for about a half an hour. He described how the interval seems to grow and become big, and you "go past boredom, into hallucination". Apparently Lacy has also written a bunch of exercise for soprano saxophone, the first six of which (they get progressively more difficult) are on a record called "Hocus Pocus". Lacy also mentioned how he has a book coming out next year, with all his techniques and stuff, including his crazy fingerings for all the high notes (he was asked about this). If his writing is as good as his speaking then I think it's safe to say this will be an excellent book!
Someone in the audience asked Lacy about his experiences with Monk. He said his first experience with Monk's music was when he was with Cecil Taylor. He first heard Monk in 1955. On his first album he did a Monk tune (he sez it had a lot of mistakes) and on his second album, in 1959, "Reflections" with Mal Waldron and Elvin Jones, it was all Monk tunes ("still some mistakes" according to Lacy). And in 1960 he played with Monk in a quintet at the Jazz Gallery for 16 weeks, every day. He said Monk was the kind of player who "made the drummer sound good". Drummers loved to play with Monk. Lacy said he knew the band was playing well when Monk wouldn't play the piano but would dance. If the band wasn't quite happening, Monk would have to play and make them sound good! :)
Someone else asked him about why he lives in Paris. Lacy said that he went there to find musicians for his band, which he did, and now that he has a great band he's not going to leave. Apparently he travels a lot.
Lacy played a song, "The Crust" I think it was called, dedicated to Rex Stewart, a coronet player for Duke Ellington. It was a nice tune, with harmonically appealing use of arpeggios made of wide intervals (well that's my attempt at description anyway; guess I should have written it down; oh well...). It was nice to hear him play. He encouraged everyone do come up with their instruments and he taught them the song, phrase by phrase, and then they played it. I think I might have fallen asleep at this point because I remember very little of it. :( I've gotten something like 3 or 4 hours of sleep total in the last three days or so... I was at the school for more than 12 hours straight today. I played piano in my ensemble class, which was fun. We spent something like two and and half hours playing two tunes, really slow (well, actually I guess we started out playing a blues first). The first was "America the Beautiful" which Arnie (the teacher) played and then made us play by ear. I always find it challenging to do this (play changes by ear). It required concentration. I really enjoy playing things slowly enough so that I can actually try to play what I hear, rather than having to rely on standard voicings or whatever. Also, because of the type of tune it is, the standard "jazz" voicings don't work at all with it. It's much more of a hymn or gospel type thing IMHO. The second tune was "My Funny Valentine". Great tune, also extremely fun to play really slow. I like the fact that if you can play freely, you don't have to have an "official" solo because you're really soloing all the time, just in counterpoint to everything else. I had a great time just "accompanying" the official soloists. Unfortunately, after Arnie left to go to another class, things got a little out of control. I guess not everyone there was into "America the Beautiful" and there did seem to be desire to play fast. I was glad to play fast too, but when we did, things did not hold together. People just got wildly out of synch on "Impressions". I don't think we did it any faster than it should be (ie Coltrane's tempo) but the sax players were completely unable to play the melody in time... They ended up ending the A section about halfway into the B section... etc. etc. etc. Similar problems occured on "Afro Blue". For the solos, the bass player pretty much established the "free F minor" option (like it sez in the Real Book), which was fine with me. But there seemed to be some confusion. You'd think it would be straightforward enough... I think some of what was going on illustrated Lacy's statements about playing slow vs. fast (you know the cliche, that to play fast you have to be able to play slow -- although when Lacy was making essentially this point it didn't come across as a cliche.)
Anyway, after that Dave and Reuben [yo!] showed up to jam, which was fun. At one point near the end, I consciously thought of Reggie Workman's advice (which he's said more than once in the Free Jazz class) that I should "use the whole piano". Sometimes I like to just generate lots of stuff from a certain set of notes, instead of careening all around the keyboard like I guess you're supposed to if you're a free improvising avant-garde pianist? :) No, I'm kidding, both are reasonable approaches! (The former I like to think of as somewhat Ned Rothenberg inspired. Actually, that reminds me, Lacy reminded me a bit of Ned Rothenberg at certain points, except IMHO he hasn't taken those ideas as far as NR has -- mainly I'm thinking of those cool rhythmic pseudo-ostinatos NR does with overtones and stuff.)
Enough! Writing this has extended my day even longer!!
Ciao,
-Ed
PS Oh yeah.... I never got around to posting anything about seeing John Abercrombie last week... Partly cuz it wasn't that great... Abercrombie's OK I guess, he's a fluid player with a nice sound. Maybe with a good band the music would take off. I didn't like his drummer's style. Seemed like one of those "worst of both worlds" fusion syles, ie wimpy rock combined with watered-down jazz. And when he'd do "fills" they didn't fit in smoothly and the pulse would be disrupted. And he was a banger! Really loud... Saw this at Visiones, so it was twice as expensive as the Knitting Factory. Also after the gig the drummer was talking to the people at the table next to ours, of whom I was already a little scared because they seemed like some sort of evil hybrid of corporate marketroid plus musician, I think they were talking about music but they were using all sorts of corporate language, and they seemed to be meeting for the first time after doing business over the phone or something like that. I thought they looked like serious yuppies. And then this drummer comes over and starts babbling with these freaks about a gig he just played at Carnegie Recital Hall with some 12-year-old prodigy at the piano who's already got an album on GRP, produced by the keyboard player of the Yellowjackets, he can do "all that Keith Jarrett stuff", etc. I almost couldn't stop laughing and cracked up; it sounded like something we might invent as a parody, so over-the-top! :)