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Jimmy
Lyons : The Box Set
by Joe Milazzo
December 2003
 In the
summer of 1975, as Ben Young's invaluable annotations to Jimmy
Lyons: The Box Set relate, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons was but
three years into the decade and a half (or so) of his most concentrated
work as a bandleader. By 1975, Lyons' reputation as one of free jazz's
pre-eminent soloists, ensured by his creative partnership with pianist/composer
Cecil Taylor, was further enhanced by a two-year residency at Antioch
College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (again, under Taylor's leadership),
a period during which Lyons was able to mentor several musicians of
the next generation. His association with Sam Rivers also gave Lyons
quick entry into New York's loft scene, where, on the evidence of
a June 1975 trio concert—with two Antioch students: bassist Hayes
Burnett and drummer Henry Letcher—given at Rivers' Studio Rivbea,
the alto saxophonist distinguished himself yet again as a player of
unusual passion and intelligence. In other words, by 1975, Lyons'
career would appear to have turned the proverbial corner. But it is
only now, in 2003, that I can write about these June 30, 1975 performances,
which, in this reviewer's opinion, constitute some of the strongest
music Lyons ever made.
But consider that this reviewer is also sitting, with his feet up
no less, in a cushy armchair of retrospection and is far removed from
the clamor, steam and grit of Lyons' downstairs workshop. Ed Hazell,
in the clear-eyed reminiscences he contributes to the 5-disc set's
notes, speaks at some length about Lyons' personal standards of perfection.
Perhaps it is a good thing for all of us that the saxophonist, who
passed away at a young 54 in 1986, is no longer in a position to second-guess
his work or claim that these tapes existed merely for the purposes
of furthering his own study and refinement of his playing. The relationship
of "posterity", or, to be a little looser with the vocabulary, "history",
to an aesthetic predicated on the realization of the present, the
moment, is indeed a curious one. I don't mean to mislead you, though;
Jimmy Lyons: The Box Set is anything but a cenotaph. In terms
of presentation, this extremely limited edition (500 copies worldwide)
can hardly be faulted. The elegant packaging is familiar from Ayler's
previous releases of new and archival material, and manages to be
an appropriately somber celebration simply by virtue of avoiding anything
remotely frivolous. Executive Producer Jan Ström, Ben Young,
Per Ruthström, et al—everyone who contributed to what is
clearly a great labor of love is deserving of the highest accolades.
If most of what we have previously known of Jimmy Lyons is that he
was a career sideman—a permanent resident of Elsewhere—then
this document is our passport to whatever country Lyons called home.
The 1975 trio session is, without question, a key document in the
Lyons discography, largely because of the several ways in which it
is not representative of Lyons' music. "Family" and "Heritage"—apparently
inspired in part by Sonny Rollins' "East Broadway Rundown"—are
very lengthy but wholly proportionate collective improvisations, with
Lyons well-centered in the mix, playing with incredible power and
concentration. This is also "energy music" ("fire music"?) of rare
exhilaration. One can only marvel at Lyon's creative stamina over
the nearly hour-and-a-half extent of this concert. Lyons demonstrates
that he does not just play very rapidly—he thinks at almost
super-human speeds. It's here, as Lyons stretches out, that one can
really begin to appreciate what sets him apart from other free alto
players of his generation. He does not draw upon the same blues resources
Ornette Coleman does (however, check out the totally personal blues
inflections of the 1984 trio version of "Shakin' Back"). He does not
have the intervallic bravado or penchant for tonal melodrama of Eric
Dolphy (this ability to generate entire passages of garishly distorted
phrases is what allowed Dolphy to function successfully in hard-bop
settings). He's not the Satie of free jazz alto a la Marion Brown.
Lyons is a master of fragmentation via rhythmic distress. His phrasing,
herky and careening though it may seem, glides and slips off-beat.
What sounds like several strains is one long strain broken at unexpected
joints. Though a Jackson Pollock painting decorates the original Atlantic
LP jacket to Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Lyons, who trained
himself to articulate note values of almost infinitesimal duration
and specificity, is much closer to that painter in terms of sheer
gesture. Like Pollock's flung drips, the saxophonist's lines begin
in thickness and a certain accumulation of sonic resources, only to
flare out into shrunk but still brilliant streaks and eventually distant
dabs of pigment. The manuscripts reprinted in the box's booklet reveal
that Lyons carefully registered the desired pitches in his scores,
but left strict tempo and meter undocumented. Think of the connotations
of the steeplechase (an old bop line, come to think of it) or obstacle
course; its not about one's route, but how expeditiously one can take
it… In his most rapidly articulated passages, the internal rhythm
of Lyons' phrases, the careful compression and distension of space
within what sound like "flurries" (a random scatter) of notes is advanced
to a level that a very few musicians—the Coltrane of Interstellar
Space, Even Parker in certain of his solo soprano sax recitals,
Roscoe Mitchell—have achieved. He seems an inexhaustible font
of ideas not so much because the content of his solos, phrase by phrase,
well-defined note by well-defined note, is so remarkable. It is because
Lyons knows that it is not just the individual ideas themselves, but
how they interface with each other that matters. All tissue is connective
tissue, in a sense. What is so amazing is that this breakneck processing
of melodic variations, tightly organized but separated utterly from
any sort of harmonic foundation, is the foundation of Lyons' approach.
Lyons departs from a point that most musicians would consider a destination:
his instrumental virtuosity really is a manifestation of self-knowledge.
What is moreover apparent from this trio session is how much of a
leader Lyons truly is. The bands draw their energy from him and he
gets the most out of relatively callow and obscure musicians such
as Burnett, Letcher, and drummer Sydney Smart. This is not to say
that there are not other major soloists to be heard on this set. Both
bassoonist Karen Borca and trumpeter Raphé Malik rise repeatedly
to the occasion here, matching Lyons with an eloquence that is not
predicated on simple economy of means. So, like any diligent band-leader,
Lyons also delegates responsibilities; he does not rely entirely on
his own abilities to realize his own vision of coherence. Given the
level of abstraction and relative absence of emotional specificity—The
Flash, outrunning the cathartic sound of his own horn—in Lyons'
work, it's another measure of the man's self-awareness that works
within his ensembles, and does not attempt to work on them from some
bulging without.
As much as I recognize the value of the 1975 trio concert, this reviewer
has to admit that his personal favorite of all the material gathered
here is the solo session (recorded live at Verna Gillis' Soundscape
in Spring of 1981). I acknowledge that I am getting old and cranky
and less tolerant of the kind of music that made me fall in love with
free jazz in the first place. Here, Lyons' pace is relatively unhurried,
his delivery poise incarnate, and his tone at its most sumptuous.
You could criticize this kind of playing as simple public rehearsal,
but such a complaint seems to miss the point. Is Tai Chi calisthenics
or ballet? Depends on the aesthetic significance one assigns to tension,
control, and the more ritual aspects of redundancy. And this solo
session also presents me with a re-playable occasion upon which I
can really take note of the "bop-a-deedle-ee-dee-bop" figures that
crop up in just about every Lyons solo. But are these bop quotes or
unique cells that just sound like bop quotes? By this point
in his career, bop was no longer Lyons' raw material. Rather, what
he thought about bebop had become his raw material. Alongside these
half-memorable melodies from Lyons' own repertoire, then, and whirling
if systematic rotations through favored licks are little bursts of
singing that bear more resemblance to themes from Albert Ayler's universe
than anything else—folk material of unknown but unmistakably
urban origin. The heterogeneity of Lyons' solo constructions is marvelously
distracting in the sense that it throws stars in the eyes of the idea
that, to paraphrase Breton, originality is convulsive, or not originality
at all.
The only vaguely disappointing music here is to be found on disc 5,
a document of a 1985 concert from Tufts University. An unfriendly
live mix, exacerbated by Lyons' only slightly retiring personality
(apparently, Lyons habitually stepped back from the microphone) is
to blame. More to the point is the fact that, although the interplay
of Borca's bassoon and Lyons' sax is as eloquent and witty as always,
there are solos here that meander: an unpardonable sin when one is
discussing improvising as focused and committed to dogged pursuit
of articulation as Lyons' typically is. Finally, since this band and
repertoire is fairly well-documented on Lyons' Black Saint albums
Wee Sneezeawee (1983) and Give It Up (1985), this particular
concert adds only a little to their legacy. If Jan Ström's "Introduction"
to the set's notes are to be trusted and other material was excluded
in order to make room for this concert, I have to admit that, had
I been in a position to program this release, I would have hoped to
include something else. Music more in the revelatory spirit of that
to be found on the trio and solo sets would have been more in the
spirit of a release that is, in part, about how the intent of documentation
can exceed itself.
Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz, although it has been neither revised
nor expanded in the nearly 30 years since it was first published,
nonetheless remains the definitive musicological text on the subject.
In particular, the author's close reading of the most dense and variegated
music produced by Cecil Taylor up to that point in the pianist/composer's
career—Unit Structures (Blue Note, 1965)—is still
unsurpassed in terms of its lucidity and absence of bias (expressed
either as hyperbole or over-emotionalism). But you will search the
index to Free Jazz in vain for an entry on alto saxophonist
Jimmy Lyons, the one musician to demonstrate an actual ability to
withstand and even master Taylor's brilliant excesses. What Bud Powell
was to Charlie Parker, and what McCoy Tyner was to John Coltrane,
Jimmy Lyons was to Cecil Taylor. Like Powell and Tyner, Lyons entered
his association with his visionary partner as a more-than-competent,
technically accomplished conversant in the prevailing musical idiom.
Like Powell and Tyner, Lyons, through the course of his association
with his visionary partner, transformed himself into the improviser
able to prove the universal musicality of another man's work by most
fully engaging and at times struggling with the underlying principles
of what could otherwise have been mistaken as an essentially idiosyncratic
and wholly instrument-bound conception. Lyons was no "popularizer",
but… and perhaps this is his greater accomplishment, for Lyons
transliterated a music from a harmonic instrument to a linear, melodic
one. In jazz history, often the pianists are expounding upon what
the horn players have been doing, formalizing the harmonic and rhythmic
implications of the great solo voices.
What accounts, then, for Jost's omission? The simple answer is that
it is all a matter of perspective. Consider the observance Jost does
make of Lyons, brief as it is:
| Lyons is something of an outsider in free jazz,
because his playing usually sounds like a successful transformation
of Charlie Parker's musical idiom into a new context. While
taking advantage of the freedom Taylor's music offers him, Lyons
achieves a rhythmic and melodic continuity typical of bebop
musicians. (78) |
Which is it, then? Was Lyons a thinker, a proactive player whose pursuit
of his own voice was turbo-charged by the demands of playing someone
else's music? Or was Lyons really just interested in making atonal
free improvisation safe for Bird? Was Lyons' style just that, primarily
style, a reconciliation of surface features that stand up well enough
on their own, but, on closer examination, rest on deep fissures of
incongruity? Of course, I'm setting up a false dichotomy here, but
only in an attempt to recreate some sense of the actual stalemate
of mutually destructive posturing through which Lyons tread when he
joined Taylor's ensemble in the early 1960s. It is fair to note that
it is not necessarily the opinion stated in the previous paragraph
of this review, but rather Jost's assessment, that is representative
of the received wisdom regarding Jimmy Lyons. Not to over-indulge
in refutation, however, but, while it true that Lyons was a proficient
bop and hard bop player—he could count among his instructors
slightly tarnished luminaries such as Buster Bailey and Elmo Hope—it
is not enough to say that he re-engineered the principles of bop-based
motivic improvisation so that they could withstand the gale-force
extremes of the free jazz environment. If it is true that Lyons is
both a bopper and the author of the most sensitive and sustained critical
analysis of Cecil Taylor's music, and if it is true that there is
no contradiction binding these two propositions, then Lyons is pressed
between two giants of the music in a way most other musicians would
find overpowering. Perhaps this is why he has remained so marginal
a figure, such a quintessential "sideman", for so long—because
he chose to remain active on the periphery, a vantage from which one
is better situated to survey the territories that are most distant
from yet contiguous to the center.
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