As an internationally famous contemporary jazz venue starting a second lease of life, the reopened Vortex jazz club has, appropriately, devoted a high-profile concert to the kind of musician that inspired its existence in the first place.
Steve Lacy, the great American soprano saxophonist who died a year ago last Saturday, consistently worked with musicians at the cutting edge - from Gil Evans, Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk to the virtuosos of the European improv scene. Lacy's experimental, asymmetrically shapely, highly personal music ignored fashions, encouraged shared ideas and tried to make each new moment count. This concert, directed by composer and pianist Hans Koller, assembled a group of like-minded improvisers to pay tribute.
The show began with Koller's arrangement of Blinks, the typically skeletal piece that gave its title to the the gig as a whole. It was a shrill, brittle melody ascending and descending in four-note clusters, lightly powered by the pattering brushwork of Steve Arguelles, with a deep countermelodic undertow provided by Oren Marshall's agile tuba and Julian Siegel's bass clarinet. Kenny Wheeler, on flugelhorn, then explored the elliptically rapturous melody of a Lacy dedication to Ellington saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Wheeler sounded insecure at first, but after a gently prodding piano solo from Koller he returned at the close to unfurl a lustrous, sweet-and-sour variation on the music's drily romantic mood.
Singer Christine Tobin and saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock and Julian Siegel delivered a typically haunting Lacy blend of voice and horns, with Tobin and Laubrock strong and vivid, while Siegel concentrated on timbral contrasts and longer sounds. Saxophonist Evan Parker, who had known and worked with Lacy since the 1960s, told diverting stories of Lacy's indomitable independence and caught his angle on Thelonious Monk's treacherously devious Four in One and the jig-like original The Dumps. Flakes, which closed the first set, showed exactly how the composer's pungent, spiky minimalism and unusual sax voicings could trigger correspondingly lateral departures from the soloists.
