Jimmy Giufrre vs Steve Lacy

[JSngry]

"Ambient" music at the house this week has (mostly) been Giuffre's Free Fall & the Lapis portion of Lacy's Scratching The Seventies. One thing that's struck me over the week is how differnt in "perspective" yet similar in "instrumental aesthetic" are both men's approaches to a capella soloing. Giuffre come on like the wide-eyed innocent who discovers all these...things you can do with the instrument besides play it "traditionally", whereas Lacy sounds as if he's both penetrated and been penetrated by the instrument to the point that "he" and "it" are demarcations of a physical, spiritual, and moral separateness that in actuality does not exist.

And yet...one knows that Giuffre had to have gotten intimate with his instrument in order to relate to it at this level with such expertise, and we know that Lacy must have done a lot of "let's see what happens if I do this..." technical experimentation with his instrument in order to relate to it at this level with such intimacy. So, really, aren't we seeing a classic case of "the same thing, only different", and isn't that really a lot of what life really is, when you get right down to it? How we choose to "look at it", whatever "it" is, is at least as much a case of what we bring to it as it is what it brings to us.

Just goes to show ya'!

[Larry Kart]

Reminds me of something I ran across again last week in the book "Morton Feldman Said," a terrific collection of Feldman's interviews, lectures ,etc. At The Club in the early 1950s (The Club being the place in NYC where the inner circle of the so-called Abstract Expressionist painters met), John Cage gave two well-received talks: "Lecture on Nothing" (about his own music) and "Lecture on Something" (about Feldman's). Feldman said that they were very good talks, but that the titles should have been reversed.

Giuffre as you say seems to regard just about everything that he summons up, comes up with, etc, as an object, and responds in a kind of "can you believe this?" manner -- like a kid at the ocean for the first time who is awed by the fact of every shell. I don't know the Lacy material you mention, but he's always struck me as an "essentialist" -- as in "Find the irreducibles [in the music, in himself, and in his instrument] and rub them against each other until you've got something new that's irreducible too."

[jazzbo]

So why do I like Jimmy better?

[Larry Kart]

So why do I like Jimmy better?

Why not? For one thing, Giuffre did discover some stuff that hadn't been found before. And his ability to, in effect, keep his hands off it is pretty remarkable at times. The funny thing about Giuffre to me is that at some underlying level (one that's probably not visible after a certain point in his career) there are good-sized chunks that don't match up -- in particular, his somewhat clunky, walking-the-bar time (those neo-R&B things he made early on were no accident) versus the nice, personal fluidity of time he got when he lightened/softened things up (this in both "free" and metered settings). The most interesting late examples of this are the few sides he made in the late' 50s or early '60s when he was trying to integrate a good deal of Sonny Rollins (plus maybe his response to early Ornette). Some nice stuff, but boy does some of it sound funny -- like Giuffre's playing the first swinging, "muscular" solo ever, and doesn't quite know how to do this. The good part is that there's virtually no net; the funny parts are when he hits the floor.

[garthsj]

So why do I like Jimmy better?

Why not? For one thing, Giuffre did discover some stuff that hadn't been found before. And his ability to, in effect, keep his hands off it is pretty remarkable at times. The funny thing about Giuffre to me is that at some underlying level (one that's probably not visible after a certain point in his career) there are good-sized chunks that don't match up -- in particular, his somewhat clunky, walking-the-bar time (those neo-R&B things he made early on were no accident) versus the nice, personal fluidity of time he got when he lightened/softened things up (this in both "free" and metered settings). The most interesting late examples of this are the few sides he made in the late' 50s or early '60s when he was trying to integrate a good deal of Sonny Rollins (plus maybe his response to early Ornette). Some nice stuff, but boy does some of it sound funny -- like Giuffre's playing the first swinging, "muscular" solo ever, and doesn't quite know how to do this. The good part is that there's virtually no net; the funny parts are when he hits the floor.

A lot of what Larry is talking about is admirably exemplified in a recent Giuffre reissue, "Live In 1960" (Jazz Beat 503). This album combines an album he did for Verve, with a live recordings from a Paris concert. Both Giuffre and Jim Hall (with Buell Neidlinger, b, Milford Middlebrooks, b (Paris), and Billy Osborne, d) are in top form, and very "muscular" in places. There are moments when Giuffre actually elicits r&b-like responses from the audience by using a repeated guttural phrase ... This was obvioulsy a transition period for Giuffre, and one of his last recordings that could be called "straight ahead'. I used to own the original LP and never quite got into it; but for some reason (perhaps my tastes are maturing), this reissue gives me great pleasure.

[Larry Kart]

So why do I like Jimmy better?

Why not? For one thing, Giuffre did discover some stuff that hadn't been found before. And his ability to, in effect, keep his hands off it is pretty remarkable at times. The funny thing about Giuffre to me is that at some underlying level (one that's probably not visible after a certain point in his career) there are good-sized chunks that don't match up -- in particular, his somewhat clunky, walking-the-bar time (those neo-R&B things he made early on were no accident) versus the nice, personal fluidity of time he got when he lightened/softened things up (this in both "free" and metered settings). The most interesting late examples of this are the few sides he made in the late' 50s or early '60s when he was trying to integrate a good deal of Sonny Rollins (plus maybe his response to early Ornette). Some nice stuff, but boy does some of it sound funny -- like Giuffre's playing the first swinging, "muscular" solo ever, and doesn't quite know how to do this. The good part is that there's virtually no net; the funny parts are when he hits the floor.

A lot of what Larry is talking about is admirably exemplified in a recent Giuffre reissue, "Live In 1960" (Jazz Beat 503). This album combines an album he did for Verve, with a live recordings from a Paris concert. Both Giuffre and Jim Hall (with Buell Neidlinger, b, Milford Middlebrooks, b (Paris), and Billy Osborne, d) are in top form, and very "muscular" in places. There are moments when Giuffre actually elicits r&b-like responses from the audience by using a repeated guttural phrase ... This was obvioulsy a transition period for Giuffre, and one of his last recordings that could be called "straight ahead'. I used to own the original LP and never quite got into it; but for some reason (perhaps my tastes are maturing), this reissue gives me great pleasure.

That's the reissue that refreshed my memory of this, though I recall hearing at least one other Verve back then that had similar feeling. Two perhaps related things about Giuffre: Given that early Giuffre (say at the time he wrote "Four Brothers") must have involved that uncommon fusion of some Pres with some honking R&B impulses (though I don't know what Giuffre's attitude was toward the latter), he must have thought of himself as, or been thought of as, something of an odd man out among the actual "Brothers" and their kin (Getz, Sims, Cohn, Steward, Brew Moore, Allen Eager, et al.), who were much more sophisticated as players. Then, of course, there were Giuffre's studies with the seemingly guru-like Wesley LaViolette, who I think had a somewhat Cage-like Eastern spiritual thing going, as well as all the "progressive" contrapuntal material that Giuffre picked up on. Finally, I vaguely recall an interview in which Giuffre said that in the '50s he had a huge, ugly, at times quite uncontrollable ego, which bothered him and bugged a lot of his fellow musicians. Hard to credit, but that's what I recall. I also recall that he said that he began to turn things around as a person when he married George Russell's ex-wife, Juanita Odejnar. I wonder how that all shook out.

[JSngry]

I don't know the Lacy material you mention...

Dude, allow me to urge you to check it out. Shit had me talking back to him as he played, sometimes!

It's in here:

[clifford_thornton]

Lots of very interesting observations in this thread. Thanks.

Those Saravah Lacys are really fine, and Lapis is probably my favorite of the bunch (still looking for Roba!) ...

[ep1str0phy]

The a capella recordings on Free Fall always struck me as a bit of their own piece, and maybe more strident than what Giuffre was doing within the Bley/Swallow trio context at that time. There's of course some sort of intellectual continuity between the output of the trio--from the far more conventional Verves onto the small group tracks on Free Fall--and Giuffre's solo excursions on the Columbia album, but I get the feeling that he's left himself open to a more reckless, more emotional impulse when he's all by his lonesome. I still hear a "cool", or at least lukewarm sensibility about the G/Swallow/Bley trio's output, even at its most heated, but the solo clarinet on Free Fall--maybe less "refined", if technically together--is engaging to me with a sort of gauche tenderness.

-which is different from Lacy, who to me gets out his more emotional side in the group context. Lacy's solo music is a wonder of essentialist construction--and maybe cold because of that, because there seems to be so much discretion behind his note choice, rhythmic sensibility, timbral variation, etc. I can hear the superficialities between Lacy and Giuffre, but the manner in which I engage with one is not the same as that with which I engage the other--it's like hearing with your mind and your gut, respectively.

[clifford_thornton]

There is a ton of Lacy to go through, but some of the solo works are a lot more "instantaneous" than deliberately process-oriented. I think the solo on Emanem is a good example of that - very wooly session, if you axe me.

Obviously, Lacy had a very clear idea of things he was trying to work through, quite often, but there's a ring of what Paul Rutherford said to me in interview:

I remember one case many years ago in Berlin at the FMP festival, and every year they had a special situation for trombone or saxophone soloists or whatever, and there were five or six trombone players from all over the place. One of the guys who played was involved in contemporary music, [Vinko Globokar] and he had to do a solo one night, another night it was me, and I think another night was Gunter Christmann. Anyway, Vinko came up and said “what are you going to play for your solo?” I said “I don’t know. I’m just going to go out and play.” He said “don’t you have an idea what you’re going to start with?” I said “no, and I don’t want any idea. I’m going to improvise, and I’m going to go on to play improvised music.”

Even playing tunes, there's so much freedom in what Lacy was doing.

(And I dig Giuffre, but am not expert enough to offer much to the discourse here.)

[Alexander Hawkins]

I don't know the Lacy material you mention...

Dude, allow me to urge you to check it out. Shit had me talking back to him as he played, sometimes!

It's in here:

I think this has been on Emusic, actually.

There's some fantastic Derek Bailey on the set, too.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

jsngry youre tripping on acid

[JSngry]

Still?

Damn...

[Werf]

My knowledge of Giuffre is scant, but I love Lacy. This past weekend I dug out some CDs that I hadn't listened to in years: "Bye-Ya" the trio recording on Free Lance from 96, "Staples" with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Trevor Watts, John Stevens, and others (including a badass synth noise maker), "Vespers" with his sextet expanded, and the eternally great "Trickles" with Rudd. This world of ours is without Lacy right now, which is sad.