It’s a tall order to tackle the impenetrable jazz of the late, great Steve Lacy, and to cover song-for-song a solo live album of Lacy’s seems on the very edge of sanity. And then to replace the “straight” soprano sax horn of Lacy with a burly-sounding bass clarinet? Absolute bonkers.

But those are just the kind of mountains that the Phil Sudderberg-led trio The Flake set out to climb and conquer with their Steve Lacy tribute Plays Clinkers (even the name of this trio comes from the title of a Lacy album). The idea to interpret and recast a jazz master’s solo work was Sudderberg’s, and once he decided to do that, he quickly realized that Lacy was the right subject. Said Sudderberg, “I’ve always been magnetized to Steve Lacy’s playing; the logic of his improvisational development, his boldness in approach to repetition, his clarity of ideas, and general melodic tunefulness all combined to pose a fun challenge for the drums. When I went about sifting through Lacy’s solo music, Clinkers became the clear choice of source material to focus on.”

Naturally, he needed some help fleshing out the vision and naturally, it would require some world-class musicians to perform this tall task. Luckily, he found them right in his home town of Chicago in bassist Charlie Kirchen and bass clarinetist Jason Stein. Together they play Lacy’s originals in the same order as the memento of a 1977 Steve Lacy gig in Basel, Switzerland.

Lacy had originally played “Trickles” in a quartet setting with Roswell Rudd, Ken Carter and Beaver Harris for the title song of his 1976 release, and if anything, injects more melodicism when playing it all by himself. The Flake could have probably taken the easy way out and used the quartet version for its model but instead stay true to its mission and came up with a version that traces the paths Lacy took with this song at Basel along with his puckish attitude. There’s also the added bonus of Stein jousting with Kirchen, and Sudderberg later joining the fray.

“Duck” is where Steve Lacy made his soprano squonk and quack like that game bird; it’s fascinating to hear Stein do these animal sounds on a bass clarinet, skillfully throwing in real notes to form Lacy’s melodic figure that’s locked in a battle with the chirping.

“Coastline” doesn’t have anything competing with the basic harmonic motif, which is a pretty one that Lacy devised. Sudderberg and Kirchen closely follow the staggered path forged by Stein, adding weight to every note he plays even when Stein deviates from the set patterns.

Steve Lacy explored the upper reaches of his straight horn for “Microworlds,” while Stein and Kirchen (an arco bass) combine to introduce Lacy’s main concept before the clarinetist ponders on it staying in the mid-low registers and getting a little rolling thunder assistance from Kirchen and Sudderberg.

The trio tackles “Clinkers” by adding more definition to the shape of the song that Lacy only implied through his tour-de-force twelve-minute solo performance. That’s not to say the three don’t play free; they very much do but are largely moving freely together. Stein’s playing after the head starts with urgency and gets more so after that; the rhythm section seems to push him further out until they return to the theme where the dramatics from the improv section spills right over into it.

The genius of Steve Lacy isn’t that easy to articulate but Phil Sudderberg, Charlie Kirchen and Jason Stein take great care of the soprano saxophone great’s legacy when they play his Clinkers solo masterpiece with all the invention and attitude of the original. Plays Clinkers is now available, through Amalgam Music.

Written by S. Victor Aaron for Something Else!

For the cognoscenti, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy needs little introduction. Throughout his storied career, Lacy – who was something of a jazz vagabond – lived and performed widely, culminating in a vast and seemingly endless discography featuring collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Roswell Rudd, Gil Evans, Evan Parker, and hundreds of others. Lacy and his singular devotion to the straight horn are rumored to be the reason that John Coltrane took up the instrument. One of the more celebrated entries in Lacy’s oeuvre is his classic solo album Clinkers, recorded live at the Restaurant Zer alte Schmitti in Basel, Switzerland in 1977, and released the following year by the Swiss label HatHut. Lacy’s terse, jubilant, playful, and wholly unique stylings are conspicuously on display throughout the recording; one can hear his characteristic reconfigurations of the repetitious and infectious melodies with stunning precision.

One would be inclined to think that a cover album of Clinkers would be a tall-order and hard to accomplish convincingly, yet Chicago drummer Phil Sudderberg and his trio – who go by The Flake – with bass-clarinetist Jason Stein and bassist Charlie Kirchen achieve the result with aplomb. On their aptly titled The Flake Plays Clinkers which is to be released by Chicago imprint Amalgam on October 22nd, 2020, the three highlight their enviable trio rapport throughout arrangements of the classic Lacy repertoire, which they treat reverentially but pepper with a modern sensibility.

Sudderberg has been steadily making a name for himself as one of the most inventive and stalwart drummers in the Chicago creative music scene, playing in MacArthur Fellow Ken Vandermark’s most recent unit Marker – and myriad other improvisational contexts – in addition to art-rock projects like Spirits Having Fun and Wei Zhongle. Sudderberg credits the genesis of this Lacy project to an invitation to perform at the highly-lauded OPTION series at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio during their 2018 season. Sudderberg decided that he wanted to focus on interpreting and reimagining another instrumentalist’s solo music for the drum kit and once he started thinking about Lacy’s music it became apparent that it was a natural fit. Sudderberg explains: “I've always been magnetized to Steve Lacy's playing; the logic of his improvisational development, his boldness in approach to repetition, his clarity of ideas, and general melodic tunefulness all combined to pose a fun challenge for the drums. When I went about sifting through Lacy's solo music, Clinkers became the clear choice of source material to focus on.”

The OPTION series has a two-set structure built in, and Sudderberg knew that following his solo set he wanted to assemble a trio also focused on Lacy and began thinking about which colleagues to enlist. His first thought was that bass clarinetist Jason Stein would be a natural choice. Stein, an incredibly versatile clarinetist and one of the more internationally recognized musicians in Chicago, may have played free jazz in front of more people than ever in history when his Locksmith Isidore trio had the unprecedented opportunity of an arena tour opening for comedian Amy Schumer, performing his strain of free music for tens of thousands of perplexed comedy fans. Of Stein, Sudderberg quipped that, although he can do virtually anything on bass clarinet, he “really excels at blurring the lines between playing very abstractly and freely and playing very melodically and swingingly,” something which certainly comes across throughout this record. Stein’s ebullient and bountiful melodicisms, as well as his more extended timbral work, abound throughout the record and are seemingly never ending while his robust bass clarinet tone immediately distinguishes itself from Lacy’s tart soprano. Bassist Charlie Kirchen – who now resides in Manhattan while working towards his PhD in music theory at Columbia – is an astute, intuitive, and unostentatious player whose subtle and sophisticated use of repetition fit perfectly within the gestalt that Sudderberg envisioned for his trio. Sudderberg says that Kirchen “treats passing melodic ideas with a certain degree of egalitarianism,” and that he “mines the totality of an idea, as simple or complex as it may be, respectfully revealing all of its contours, in a way that reminded me of Lacy's approach to the improvisations I heard on Clinkers.”

Once the trio was configured, the three had the idea that the Clinkers material could best be digested when learned aurally and they set out to memorize the music collectively. This process led to a kind of investigative detective work where, in their rehearsals, the three musicians wondered about various contingencies within the recording, and how to treat various anomalies that cropped up under close inspection – Did Lacy intend for the melody to be stated three times in the beginning and only twice on the head-out? Does this moment start the beginning of an improvisation or is it still meant to be a part of the composition? These sorts of questions allowed for a more intimate relationship with the material than they would have had previously and rendered the compositional material hardwired into their musical DNA.

The results are stunning and startlingly unique. The Flake are able to jointly swell into collective catharsis; elastically balance between tension and release; articulate phrases which seamlessly lead to more legato repose; and utilize Lacy’s material to their own ends in a way which both pays tribute to the master but also isn’t burdened by the influence.

- Sam Weinberg, 2020