Axieme – Steve Lacy

One of Lacy’s human and artistic qualities has always been his desire to look beyond jazz and venture into territories with alternative forms of expression: poetry and fiction, above all. As well as being a great fan of Melville he was a close friend of Robert Creeley, one of the leading postmodern poets in contemporary American literature. And it was Creeley himself who spoke a simple, disarming truth about jazz, referring to Lacy: “Jazz gives me the ideal perception of the possibilities of improvisation within an often very simple framework.” There you have it: if there is one word that describes Axieme, it is precisely this: simplicity. We need only agree on the words, however, which do not dwell in the otherworld of sounds: Lacy’s simplicity, laid bare here with his soprano saxophone in dialogue with the silences allowed, is constructed through progressive modules, as is clear from the opening track, ‘Deadline’. A melodic cell, almost a technical warm-up exercise, stretched out in time and exposition.

Meanwhile, The Crust, much like the crisp crust of bread in the title, crumbles into sections in which, from time to time, the New Yorker seems to lean out from blues and pentatonic tones over the abyss of the avant-garde. Throughout the six tracks of Axieme lies all the playful curiosity and gentle nature of this sound-disruptor, here directly confronted with the possibilities for interaction suggested by the emptiness of a hall; and there he is, then, moving away from and towards the microphone, pushing his breath almost to the point of distorting the brass, and, immediately afterwards, almost exiting the stage, to feel just how much the ‘endless spaces and superhuman silences’ are a fundamental part of musical language. At the heart of this live performance, two of the six movements of his Tao Suite shine through; this suite forms the cornerstone of Lacy’s repertoire, built up slowly over a decade, and is freely inspired by the spiritual text of Lao-Tzu.