Although he wrote music ranging from straight-ahead jazz to intensely abstract music, Lacy is often considered strange by the uninitiated. However, throughout Ideal Bread’s performance, Sinton emphasized the warm and earnest side of Lacy’s personality. Lacy, who addressed all his pieces to friends, teachers and other inspirations, even went so far as to paste pictures of people into the scores dedicated to them. For each song performed, Sinton revealed the story behind the person to whom the piece was dedicated, and read the poems on which some of the pieces were based to broaden the portrait of Lacy and his inspirations.
Although Ideal Bread is dedicated to the performance of Steve Lacy’s music, no one in the band plays the soprano saxophone, and no attempt is made to recreate Lacy’s unique approach to performing. In these ways, and many others, Ideal Bread goes beyond mere reiteration and truly reinvents the repertoire. The group played with a clear and coherent collective sound through sensitive interaction, and deep familiarity with the music and with each other that is undoubtedly a result of this band’s five years of work together.
Part of Ideal Bread’s success is the creative yet simple variation with which all the pieces are arranged: a quartet became a solo, then a duo or trio, a process that kept each tune moving in its own direction. The harsh and unapologetic dissonance and repetitiveness of many of Lacy’s melodies were rendered beautifully by the group’s front line of Sinton and cornetist Kirk Knuffke. The darkness of each player’s sound turned what might be harsh sounds in other hands to moving, shimmering timbres. One piece found the melody line harmonized in half steps throughout the piece, the two horns blending into one big, fuzzy sound that was larger than the sum of its parts.
For a musician so often associated with an intensely intellectual approach to music, Ideal Bread’s playing of Lacy’s music gives it a warm, personal quality made even more apparent in live performance. Ideal Bread, and Transmit are both highly recommended for anyone interested in Steve Lacy’s music, and even those who are not. The band’s unique versions of this seldom-heard repertoire will be refreshing for any jazz fan.
