Review of Steve Lacy: LIft the Bandstand

This brief documentary on Steve Lacy has a bare-bones structure entirely appropriate to its subject: compact, precise, and searingly effective. Rather than a succession of talking heads, Bull relies on a single interview shot in a studio where Lacy also performs two brief solo pieces: I'll try to keep it short, Lacy drily observes at the start, before preceding to detail his entire career thus far. Telling his story in characteristically precise, logical fashion, he doesn't dwell much on jazz wars, politics or social circumstance except in brief allusion, touching on inspiration (he abandoned the piano after finding his hands too small to be Art Tatum; hearing Sidney Bechet prompted him to take up soprano saxophone); apprenticeship in bands playing the older forms of the music; finding his compositional voice through his work in modern music with Cecil Taylor and the Gil Evans Orchestra, and in the deep and patient study of Monk's compositions, the latter in particular a life-long resource; constructing a style built on both 'taming' and channelling the soprano's capacity to wildness, shrillness and 'hysteria', and the like. The gem of the film, though, is the footage, from a 1983 concert, of Lacy's long-standing quintet with Bobby Few, Jean-Jacques Avenel, Oliver Johnson, Irene Abei and Steve Potts, which, rare in a film of this sort, is given space to breathe in lengthy sections that present near-complete pieces (settings of Blaise Cendrars and Bryon Gysin). And those performances veritably lift the bandstand, as the title-derived from a gnomic performance injunction once given Lacy by Thelonious Monk-puts it: most notably, early on in the film, as Lacy's piece 'Prospectus' moves from the clipped, weird, interval-leaping composed melody to the simultaneous soloing of Lacy, Abei (first on voice, then violin) and Potts, as one pays attention first to one line, then the other, the camera cutting between them as if unable to decide, and the whole thing then just washing over, an intricately, ecstatically knotted whole. "When it's right, when the music really takes place, well, you're gone, the musician is *gone*, and it's just like...Well, it's just like paradise. Paradise must be like that".