Steve Lacy And Roswell Rudd Meddle With Monk's Madness

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and trombonist Roswell Rudd will release a new, Thelonious Monk-dedicated album on Verve next week, but like their previous Monk recordings, the two avant-garde improvisers hardly bow down to the altar. Working out over a few Monk tunes and originals, the two forty-year friends plan to levitate the bandstand in 15 cities in March, joined by Lacy's extra-sensory trio of bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer John Betsch.

The new album "Monk's Dream" gives Monk two workouts ("Monk's Dream" and "Pannonica"), but also develops three Lacy tunes that are mainstays of his live shows--during which Lacy paces the music's intensity by talking the audience through daily life in an apartment, then playing its musical counterparts: first, an unexpected visitor who knocks at "The Door," another quotidian regimen with "The Bath," and finally the hard truth of having to pay "The Rent."

The album, recorded in France last June, sets out three new Lacy pieces, too: "Traces," "A Bright Pearl," dedicated to tremendous Lacy/Cecil Taylor drummer Dennis Charles, and "Grey Blue," which Lacy wrote last year after the death of a friend. Irene Aebi sings on the first two (the lyrics were inspired by Zen poetry); for decades, her elocution and multi-lingual abilities have formed the basis for the literary dimension of Lacy's work , most recently heard during last year's performances of Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs texts set to Lacy's music.

Live, Lacy's trio with Rudd should prove to be a rambunctious affair, fully rigging the sails of Rudd's gutbucket glissandi on Lacy's modal masts. Bassist Avenel is the group's communications nexus, and after the group imbibes its customary bottle of Scotch on the break, he becomes an even more interesting medium as the horns wind around him and play off Betsch, who is as tricky and as lithe as they come. Show promoters around the country know that that this is one of the most highly communicative groups in jazz, so several venues have rightly booked the band for two nights apiece. (Lacy, who is very particular about only recording when he's ready, once said he tolerates bootleggers who don't sell the material and rip him off. Bets are on that the minidisc recorders will be spinning on this tour.)

Lacy, a Paris resident, and Rudd, who has been living in upstate New York, briefly reunited for a few dates during Lacy's trio tour last year. Coming together for a full record again is just another snapshot of their continued re-deployment of Monk's challenging oeuvre--which Lacy got into when he joined Cecil Taylor's band in 1955, and which Rudd plotted out composition by composition during the same period. The two formed a group in the late '50s to play Monk exclusively, and though the band didn't gig much (Monk's music was considered freakish), the material opened the door for concepts of improvisation and form that carry through in both musicians' work today.

According to Lacy's American manager, if he can book Lacy in the States for 200 dates a year, then jazz's greatest soprano saxophonist may actually pack up and move back here. Jazz cognoscenti say they'll believe it when they see it; part of Lacy's aesthetic mode has been to live outside America, the source of the music that called him fifty years ago.