Steve Lacy made a rare Bay Area appearance at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland on Saturday night. Lacy, with long-time collaborators Jean Jacques Avenel on bass and John Betsch on drums, are on a lengthy US tour (plus 3 or 4 Canadian stops) in which they will play some 40 to 50 or so dates in less than 2 months. For those interested, the dates are listed at ex jazz-ler Vincent Laine's Senators site. I was fortunate to catch an excellent performance, as did Steve and George some nights earlier. The concert was held in the James Moore Theater in the Oakland Museum (Koncepts Gallery is not a single venue). The theater seats in the neighborhood of 350 people and was largely full despite minimal publicity for this event. I was a few minutes late in arriving, but somehow managed to snag a front row center seat just as Lacy was being introduced.
Lacy appeared on stage resplendent (not!) in a finely aged lavender corduroy suit. As the trio took the stage, the crowd gave them a rousing ovation that seemed to catch Lacy by surprise. The trio played two sets of original material sandwiched between two Thelonius Monk Tunes, opening with "Shuffle Boil" and closing with "Bye-Ya". The songs were largely drawn from two very recent Lacy recordings, "Revenue" and "Bye-Ya", though some of these songs have been around for many years. ("Revenue" is a brilliant recording and "Bye-Ya" is almost as good.) The second song,"The Bath", is one of his better known compositions (conceived as a tribute to Dexter Gordon). It's a midtempo number with an immediately recognizable melody and affords Lacy the opportunity to indulge in some of his prettiest playing. The highlight of the first set was the "Rent", an uptempo number from Revenue that was played with great intensity and featured a superb solo by Lacy and some fine drum work by Betsch. He is a great master on soprano who meticulously structures pieces out of relatively simple phrases, that are sometimes repeated in different registers creating a onversational or story-telling effect. Avenel is a rather unheralded virtuouso bass player who plays with great agility and finesse. He was given ample room to solo and to good effect, even inspiring Lacy to do a little dancing a la Monk. Actually, he just shuffled his feet for a few beats :-), but it was amusing nonetheless.
Betsch was mostly content to play a supporting role through the first set, though he did take one brief and deliberately underwhelming and humorous drum solo. He was much more of a muscular presence in the second set.
The second set opened with one of Avenel's compositions, "Pi Pande" which featured him on kora (I originally thought it was a thumb piano). This is a gorgeous lyrical piece that has a sort of exotic African flavor to it. Lacy played off Avenel's Kora to great effect. The remainder of the set consisted of tributes to departed artists, which is one of the central themes running through the Bye-Ya album. This included "'The Hoot", dedicated to John Gilmore,"Esteem" which was inspired by Johnny Hodges, and "Absence", a homage to poet Franco Beltrametti (a close friend of Lacy's). On this last number, Lacy recited a poem written by Tom Raworth and originally read at Beltrametti's funeral. On the trio's last recording, the words to this poem are sung by Irene Aebi. The group performed a wonderful rendition of Monk's Bye-Ya, a tune that is alternately joyous and melancholy.
It was a fitting ending to a great performance.