Ictus HHV Records 9 Items

Recorded live at Wkcr Radio in New York City in 1978 and issued by Ictus the following year, Environment for Sextet encounters John Zorn at the earliest stages of his career, resting within a sextet of a new generation of stunning improvisers emerging at the tail end of the '70s who would go on to define a vast swath of the '80s sound - Polly Bradfield on violin, Andrea Centazzo on percussion, Eugene Chadbourne on guitar, Tom Corra on cello, and Toshinori Kondo on trumpet - it roughly builds on the series of collaborations that had featured on Centazzo’s 1978 Ictus LP U.S.A. Concerts.

Launching from a total wall of sound - full throttle fire on the boundaries of outright noise - Environment for Sextet takes the listening on an endlessly surprising journey through its players’ inner world, shifting between airy open passages that feature endless combinations of one or more players, to furious moments of sonorous lashings where the group falls in together in brilliant dialogical periods of converstant texture and tonal intervention.

An engrossing and relentless listen from the first moment to the last - featuring two works built from two of Andrea Centazzo’s earliest graphic scores - Environment for Sextet is an absolutely stunning body of improvised work by what were then among the most important rising stars on the free music scene.

The final two LPs in the latest Ictus batch, “The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2”, both draw on the same period that the veteran saxophonist produced “Clangs” and “Trio Live”, both recorded in 1976 during of two weeks that he was touring Italy with Andrea Centazzo, released in 1976 and 1977 respectively, and reissued in 2021’s batch. Gathering four sides of material, issued as two individual LPs, we are offered an incredible insight into that moment’s striking collaborations with Centazzo and the bassist Kent Carter, forming in duo and trio configurations.

“The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2” encounter Lacy - one of the giants of American free jazz - already 2 decades into a career defined by brilliant collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, among others, as well as a sprawling body of visionary work as a leader. Like so much of his work leading into this period, it draws upon the saxophonist’s belief that an artist should play what you feel’, a position that Centazzo - roughly 15 years Lacy’s junior - recalls as having torn down the curtain that separated his technique from his creativity.

The first volume of Steve Lacy pieces from the Ictus Archives features five pieces: “Figment”, “Coastline”, “Swab”, “Hooky”, and “The Duck”, encountering the saxophonist playing solo live renditions of some of his classic pieces from the period (“Coastline” appeared on his seminal FMP LP “Stabs / Solo In Berlin”) and in two duos with Andrea Centazzo, one of which, “The Duck” was previously issued as a solo piece (also on “Stabs / Solo In Berlin”) and now emerges in this new form. The recordings featured across the album’s two sides were captured on February 18th 1976 in a concert in Udine Italy and have never before been issued in such a focus form. Across both LPs - “The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2” - the lyrically of Lacy’s playing sets them apart from the more brittle and textural temperance featured throughout much of the label’s output. While this is especially noteworthy within the three solo gestures encountered on the first volume and the three on the second - “Name”, “The Way", and “Bone”, recorded on December 5th, 1976, in Udine Italy - the two duos with Centazzo on the first, and the trio (“Feline”) on the second, similar stand distinct, with each player issuing rapid fire interventions within an airy sense of space.

Viewed collectively or as individual gestures, Steve Lacy’s “The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2” represents crucial artefacts of the seminal saxophonist at the height of his career, never before encountered in these full concert formations, and thus pushing the historical importance of the Ictus reissue series to the next level.

Cover pictures of both volumes by Roberto Masotti / courtesy of Lelli e Masotti archive.

Originally issued in 1977, Trio Live was recorded in 1976, only a handful of days after Steve Lacy and Andrea Centazzo’s Clangs was laid to tape, presumably capturing another moment on the same two-week tour that had rendered the recordings for its brilliant predecessor. This time, the pair - Lacy and Centazzo - is joined by the American bassist, Kent Carter, a sinfully under-appreciated artist who had worked extensively in Steve Lacy's group, played on the two Jazz Composer's Orchestra LPs, and toured in the bands of Don Cherry, Alan Silva, Mal Waldron, Bobby Bradford, Max Roach, Roswell Rudd, Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Trevor Watts, Steve McCall and many others. The previous year, he had also delivered the stellar LP, Kent Carter Solo With Claude Bernard, as Ictus’ second LP, allowing Trio Live to be understood as a narrowing of an already tight circle, despite its slightly expanded ensemble.

Arguably best defining the first two entries in the Ictus reissue series - Clangs and Drops - is a sense of rigorous and artistry. While no less present across the length Trio Live, what takes the forward charge throughout its five tracks is a sense of joy and pure pleasure in playing together. The sounds and structural interventions are locked in and tight, feeling at ease and intuitively responsive in the ways that players with a history of collaboration are only able to produce.

From swinging and chugging to stepped back and sparse combinations of rhythm and tone - moving from the lingering sensibilities of straight-ahead jazz to radically out hard blow fire - Trio Live is a cornucopia of brilliant artistry and improvised music.

In the history of free improvised music, there has been arguably no greater advocate for the idiom’s power and potential than the English guitarist Derek Bailey. Fiercely principled, between his emergence during the 1960s and his death in 2005, he cut a wide path, positioning this music at the height of creativity, transpiring in real time, and a means through which people from diverse backgrounds could come together, express, and commune. For Bailey, “playing is about playing with other people... Improvisation is a process that gets relationships sorted out.”

Among many great examples of this within Bailey’s sprawling discography, a stand out is his 1977 duo LP Drops - originally issued as the third album on Ictus - recorded with the Italian percussionist / drummer Andrea Centazzo. Capturing the guitarist during one of his most prolific and creatively visionary periods - overflowing with explosive clarity, dialogic energy, and imagination - he clearly found a perfect foil in Centazzo, who recalls of the sessions “The kaleidoscopic quality of Drops was created by this restraint of performing limits, i.e. the choice of instrumental timbres, dynamics and metronome speeds to suit each piece. We explored some aspects of our improvisational art, gleaned the best elements from our baggage of music memories and exposed them clearly and confidently.”

Comprising nine individual improvisations, Drops encounters each of its players at their best, finding a strange middle ground between the intuitive logics of their instruments; Bailey’s tones taking on decidedly percussive approaches, while Centazzo’s fractured polyrhythms and beats often veer toward the presence of a notable tonality. Remarkably expressive and diverse in the approach of each piece, Drops presents creative interplay at its most striking and challenging, rethinking the terms of musicality and collaboration every step of the way. Flurries of rattle back and forth, sculpting barbed and pointillistic landscapes of texture, stripped of reference and precedent, and abstract as real time organised sound comes.

Ictus Records' reissue initiative fittingly begins with Clangs, the first LP issued by the label in 1976. Featuring Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone, bird calls, and pocket synthesizer (or "crack box”), with Andrea Centazzo on drums, percussion, whistle, and vocals, the album is the culmination of a couple of weeks that the two artists spent together while Lacy was touring Italy during that year.

Clangs encounters Lacy - one of the giants of American free jazz - already two decades into a career defined by brilliant collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, as well as a sprawling body of visionary work as a leader. Like so much of his work leading into this period, it draws upon the saxophonist’s belief that an artist should 'play what you feel’, a position that Centazzo - roughly 15 years Lacy’s junior - recalls as having torn down the curtain that separated his technique from his creativity.

Comprising a series of duets that investigate timbral relationships, the fragmentation of melody, and abrasive, provocative noise - shifting from the sparse, airy, and restrained, to dance clusters of interplay and back again - Clangs, for all its radicalism and forward-thinking gestures, rests firmly within the historic structures of jazz, deploying the idiom of theme / solo / theme. Lacy’s playing is at the top of his form - fluttering and dancing with a primal touch - met by Centazzo’s rattle and pattern of percussive interventions, the notes and polyrhythms of each respective player being the product of careful listening, response, and raising the bar.

Still shrink wrapped but opened.
Record is close to VG+.

The final two LPs in the latest Ictus batch, “The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2”, both draw on the same period that the veteran saxophonist produced “Clangs” and “Trio Live”, both recorded in 1976 during of two weeks that he was touring Italy with Andrea Centazzo, released in 1976 and 1977 respectively, and reissued in 2021’s batch. Gathering four sides of material, issued as two individual LPs, we are offered an incredible insight into that moment’s striking collaborations with Centazzo and the bassist Kent Carter, forming in duo and trio configurations.

“The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2” encounter Lacy - one of the giants of American free jazz - already 2 decades into a career defined by brilliant collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, among others, as well as a sprawling body of visionary work as a leader. Like so much of his work leading into this period, it draws upon the saxophonist’s belief that an artist should play what you feel’, a position that Centazzo - roughly 15 years Lacy’s junior - recalls as having torn down the curtain that separated his technique from his creativity.

The first volume of Steve Lacy pieces from the Ictus Archives features five pieces: “Figment”, “Coastline”, “Swab”, “Hooky”, and “The Duck”, encountering the saxophonist playing solo live renditions of some of his classic pieces from the period (“Coastline” appeared on his seminal FMP LP “Stabs / Solo In Berlin”) and in two duos with Andrea Centazzo, one of which, “The Duck” was previously issued as a solo piece (also on “Stabs / Solo In Berlin”) and now emerges in this new form. The recordings featured across the album’s two sides were captured on February 18th 1976 in a concert in Udine Italy and have never before been issued in such a focus form. Across both LPs - “The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2” - the lyrically of Lacy’s playing sets them apart from the more brittle and textural temperance featured throughout much of the label’s output. While this is especially noteworthy within the three solo gestures encountered on the first volume and the three on the second - “Name”, “The Way", and “Bone”, recorded on December 5th, 1976, in Udine Italy - the two duos with Centazzo on the first, and the trio (“Feline”) on the second, similar stand distinct, with each player issuing rapid fire interventions within an airy sense of space.

Viewed collectively or as individual gestures, Steve Lacy’s “The Ictus Archives Vol. 1” and “The Ictus Archives Vol. 2” represents crucial artefacts of the seminal saxophonist at the height of his career, never before encountered in these full concert formations, and thus pushing the historical importance of the Ictus reissue series to the next level.

Cover pictures of both volumes by Roberto Masotti / courtesy of Lelli e Masotti archive.

On the same trip to the United States that produced “U.S.A. Concerts” and “Environment for Sextet”, Andrea Centazzo also connected with the San Francisco-based Rova Saxophone Quartet, formed the previous year by Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt and Bruce Ackley (all playing various saxophones). While not as well-known now as they once were, over the last 40+ years the ensemble has produced dozens of albums and collaborated with diverse figures like Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran, Terry Riley, and Henry Kaiser. The first of those collaborations captured on tape was "The Bay", recorded in California during December of 1978.

In Centazzo’s own words: “At the end of the 1970s this group (R.O.V.A.) of four saxophone players appeared on the scene of improvised and jazz music, bringing with them a gust of fresh air in their unusual approach to themes, technical dexterity and daring choices of language contamination”. Launching in with the almost symphonic piece, “Trobar Clus”, which takes up the majority of the first side and deploys complex clusters tones and rhythms to startling effect, the album progresses through a series of pieces that follow Centazzo’s disposition toward working across diverse arrangements of players, breaking down into trios, duos, and full ensemble works, each composed by the quartet, Centazzo, or in collaboration between the two.

Utilizing compositional structures that allow broad spaces for improvisation, while highlighting each player’s highly individual skill set within a various ensembles, trios, duets and solos, to underline the soloist skills of the musicians, and organizes the sound situations into ensembles, trios, duets and solos, “The Bay” is a stunning piece of much neglected creativity, riding the American and Italian scenes, from the mid to late 1970s, as well as drawing the ear back toward the origins of The Rova Saxophone Quartet.

The Italian Ictus imprint was founded in 1976 by percussionist and composer, Andrea Centazzo, and his wife Carla Lugli. Running for just under a decade, until relaunching during the mid-2000s, the label produced a couple of dozen highly celebrated releases, the majority of which loosely fall under the banner of free jazz. Ictus’ second batch of releases from the label’s historic archives logically begins with Andrea Centazzo’s “U.S.A. Concerts”, originally issued in 1978 and out of print on vinyl for the majority of the time since.

“U.S.A. Concerts” draws on the same rough period when Centazzo was working in the United States at “Environment for Sextet”, which was reissued in the previous batch, and features many of the same players - Polly Bradfield on violin, Eugene Chadbourne on guitar, Tom Cora on cello, and Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, and John Zorn on saxophone - in different configurations. In fact, the first, second, and seventh tracks - “Sextet Improvisation”, “Duet Improvisation # 1”, “Duet Improvisation # 4” - were all recorded on the same day at the same location - Wkcr Radio in New York on November 7, 1978 - as the aforementioned album.

Beginning with the brilliant textural and tonal explorations of the full ensemble encountered in “Sextet Improvisation”, the album quickly moves toward quieter and more restrained investigations of roughly similar ground, moving through a series of duo improvisations between the percussionist and Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, and the under-celebrated saxophonist, Jack Wright, whose howling horn is transformed to otherworldly effect by the reverberance of the space within which he works.

From here Centazzo embraces the trio form with an improvisation with two more under-celebrated figures from the American scene - Davey Williams playing guitar and banjo, and LaDonna Smith on violin, viola, and voice - capturing a performance in Jackson, Mississippi on November 19, 1978, during which the three fire responsive statements that hang like barbs in the spacious air, before conceding the LP with a brilliant suite of duos with Toshinori Kondo, Williams, and Smith.

Offering incredible insight into Centazzo’s unique sensibility, as well as into the work of a new generation of stunning improvisers as they emerged at the tail end of the 70s, before going on to help define the 80s free jazz sound, “U.S.A. Concerts” is a crucial artefact of free music at the juncture; fire on the boundaries of outright noise. An endlessly surprising journey between shifting between airy open passages that feature striking combinations of players, it’s sure to knock the socks off more than a few well-seasoned fans.