By Robert Spencer

The new Steve Lacy trio double disc set, The Rent, is a beautiful recording of two live sets at the Old Church in Portland, Oregon on November 30, 1997. The great soprano saxophonist took a moment to speak to me about this magnificent recording, recently released by Cavity Search Records of Portland, Oregon.

The best jazz happens in the moment, usually before an audience - and as a consequence of the exchange of energy between audience and musicians. The Rent is a prime example. Play the same tunes with the same people night after night, and every so often there will be magic. There was magic in Portland the night The Rent was recorded. In Lacy's spare and drily passionate solos. In the muscular and searching bass of Jean-Jacques Avenel. In the dynamically precise pyrotechnics of drummer John Betsch. In the beguiling and fascinating music they made together.

Leading up to the night of The Rent were a thousand nights, ten thousand nights, of work, of study of these songs. Without those nights, this night wouldn't have been what it was. For this trio has been a working unit for a long time: Avenel joined Lacy's multiform sextet group in the mid-Eighties; Betsch around the dawn of the Nineties. While that mercurial and wide-ranging sextet is now retired, the trio is in fine fettle, and these three master musicians have honed their musical structures and improvisational interplay to a sharpness rarely seen on the jazz scene these days.

Lacy, indeed, has recorded every piece on The Rent before - most more than once. The opening Thelonious Monk tune, "Shuffle Boil," appears on three solo soprano saxophone discs: Live at Unity Temple (Wobbly Rail); 5 X Monk 5 X Lacy (Silkheart); and More Monk (Soul Note). "Bone" appears on the solo album Remains (hat ART), as well as in duo form with Mal Waldron on The Peak (hat ART) and from the sextet on The Way (hat ART). Nor do these pieces only appear elsewhere in other configurations: "Flakes" appears on Lacy's 1987 trio disc, The Window (Soul Note); "The Bath," "Prayer," and "Bookioni" on the 1996 trio Bye-Ya (Free Lance).

So why another recording? Because it is the essence of jazz to improvise, to find something new in the musical matter at hand, to make it new every night and every time it's played. Lacy planned it that way when he composed the ten original pieces on The Rent, as well as his other music. "These pieces are structures," he explains. "They're language structures. They can be done many different ways. They can be done as a solo voice, they can be done with accompaniment, they can be done with a big band, they can be done with a lot of people - it depends on the situation. Everything I write is like that: it can be done many which ways." That's what he said: "many which ways." Lacy speaks the way he writes music: redeploying conventional forms in surprising ways, venturing subtly into uncharted territory. Many which ways, not any which way, because not anything goes. It's a painstaking process. When Lacy writes a tune, "it has to hold water as a solo. Otherwise, the melody is no good. For me, first comes the melody; that I can play on my saxophone without any accompaniment, and it's got to sound good just like that. Otherwise it's no good. It's a self-sustaining line. When you play with other people, it's another story, but I like all the different situations: duo, solo, a large ensemble, a sextet. It depends on the other players. You know, mostly I play with people I've been playing with for a long time. So they know me, and they know the material."

So the meditative rubato of the solo "Shuffle Boil" becomes jaunty and cheerfully rhythmic on The Rent. The high spirited strains of "Gospel" gain, via the rhythm section, a sharply focused intensity. These men do indeed know each other, and know the material; it shows in every note.

Lacy did venture forth a couple of years ago to put together The Cry (Soul Note), a daring and controversial setting of Bengali poet Taslima Nasrin's anguished and heart-rending verse, but even then he did it in the company of a few familiar faces. The Cry, Lacy says, "is a different story, really. There's three of us in there, Jean-Jacques Avenel, [longtime collaborator and vocalist] Irene Aebi and myself, and the rest was put together in Berlin. We were in Berlin for a year, and that whole thing was cooked up in Berlin. It was written, rehearsed, and produced there. Three of the people live in Berlin. Petia Kaufman lives in Zurich and we've been working with her for years now. But there's no recording. We have a trio with Petia and Irene and myself. It would be a great thing to record, but tell me a record company that would dare do that!"

The Rent, on the other hand, is his second recording for tiny Cavity Search Records in Portland's Old Church; the first was the stunningly beautiful solo disc Actuality. But Lacy says it was not only the beautiful sound of Actuality that brought him back to Portland and Cavity Search: "It's not only the physical place, but we have a lot of friends out there. Friends and fans and supporters, so we have a nucleus of people there who really follow what we do and go for it and go to bat for us. That's what keeps bringing us back there."

Deciding which live performances to release takes as much consideration and preparation as the performances themselves. When deciding whether or not to release a recording, Lacy notes that "it would depend on the condition of the music at the moment. For example, we just recorded a thing here with a quartet with [the legendary trombonist] Roswell Rudd and Betsch and Avenel and myself, and Irene's going to sing a couple of pieces there. But I mean, if you caught us on the road before then, working on the same pieces, I would refuse to record it, because they're not ready. We record when we want to record, we don't like to record shotgun recordings."

And there are all too many of those: "Now it's so easy to make a CD out of anything, that we get mail of instant CD's that people recorded the night before. They put it on a CD and they send me a copy and they say 'Don't worry, we'll never do anything with this.' That happens to me all the time now." But the saxophonist is expansive about this recording explosion: "Some of those [bootleg recordings] do not disturb me, and some of them do. It all depends on the vibration. There are some that bring the music in a good way to people who can't afford full prices. They don't bother me, although they're pirated. There are others who just want to make money and rip you off. They're gangsters."

So back to The Rent: how were these pieces selected for the trio? "We have a lot of pieces. We have hundreds of pieces, and we can't play more than ten in an evening. So it's a matter of choice and it's a matter of what turns the musicians on. I don't want to put something in front of somebody that's gonna disturb them and keep them awake at night. I want something that will turn them on and make them sound good - and they can make it sound good. So there's various material for various people. Some people like to read and some people don't. And so it's a matter of selectivity, really, and discrimination, and preparation.

"If I work with Derek Bailey and I put some piece of paper in front of him, he's not going to pay any attention. If I give Mal Waldron a set of chord changes, that's fine. But if I put a whole structure in front of him that he has to read, that's going to turn him off. Whereas somebody else - if I work with Frederic Rzewski, the pianist, I can put a whole thing in front of him, and he'll just eat it up. Everybody's different, you know?"

Working with the trio, as opposed to other configurations, involves "a different premise, really. I think the word 'premise' is useful here. The pieces are premises. They're something to start you off.

"When I played with Monk, man, we used to play his theme song at the end of every set. "Epistrophy." So sometimes we played it like five times a day. And it was never the same. Monk always played something unheard-of. There was always something I never heard him play before. So I mean, these pieces are built to sound different each time. You could try to play it similar, but it's always gonna be different. Otherwise it's boring.

"A lot of the pieces have no chord changes at all. They have modes, they have vamps, they have material given in the introduction, they have two-note structures. "Deadline" [a recurring Lacy theme] is completely free except that - it's the end. As the deadline approaches, you can only play so many things, because the deadline is upon you. But aside from that, you can play anything you can get in.

"If it's a convincing premise, it's good. It's a matter of conviction, man. If this stuff works, if it's convincing, then that's fine. If it's unconvincing, it's not fine. It's as simple as that, man.

"Really, it's a matter of life or death. If it's lively, it's OK; if it's deadly, it's no good."

Is it alive? Listen to The Rent and see - from the meditative landscapes of Avenel's solos (on "Bone" and "Retreat" he is particularly fine, but he stakes his claim throughout the discs to being virtually peerless among contemporary bassists) to the sturm und drang of Betsch's solos (see especially "Blinks" and "Bookioni"), it's all here. In particular, Lacy himself covers everything, from the sunny understatment of "The Bath" to the swirling lyricism of "Retreat" and the heart-cry of "Bone."

Steve Lacy is an overlooked modern jazz master. Don't for any reason miss The Rent, which is a microcosm of his breathtaking musical versatility.

"Well," he says of his music, "that's all I do, so it should cover everything. Somehow."

And it does. Marvelously, beautifully, craftily, easily, it does.

Read Glenn Astarita's review of The Rent.