Sans préparation ni prévision, sans preuves ni provisions, sac vide au dos, cheminer librement, improviser.
Foncièrement gratuite, joyeusement désintéressée (improductive, diront certains), la pratique de l'écoute partagée et de l'improvisation recèle d'étranges forces de résistance et de subversion. Elle requiert aussi de ceux qui s'y vouent une porosité active et réactive doublée d'une capacité à ne pas s'oublier. L'articulation de cette présence à soi et de la nécessaire présence à l'autre induit disponibilité et disposition à « l'insécurité; le poète n'a que des satisfactions adoptives. Cendre toujours inachevée ». On pourrait craindre que, dans le crucial contexte du duo, les univers autarciques de Lacy et Bailey, trompeusement étanches, n'arrivent à s'aboucher ; il n'en est rien.
Dans ces années 80 où l'effectif du sextet lacyen se constitue et se stabilise, où l'interprétation d'art songs (avec Gysin ou Creeley) prend quelque peu le pas sur la stricte improvisation, le sopraniste n'en oublie pas pour autant la très fructueuse british connection des premières années 70 ; de Company en Dreams, des invitations réciproques... et rares.
Mues par une irrépressible envie cinétique, les asymptotes de Derek Bailey et de Steve Lacy dessinent des trajectoires finalement (à l'infini) compatibles et paradoxalement sécantes. En épissures inouïes s'entremêlent les échafaudages de bambou du guitariste, lignes hérissées ou estompées, salves sobres ou crénelées, raclements batailleurs, textures fouaillées, avec les roulades, flèches et figures transposées du saxophoniste, architecture souple dont les confins résonnent de growls secs. « Le poème est ascension furieuse ; la poésie, le jeu des berges arides. » À bout d'idiome, hors d'eux-mêmes, il leur faut prendre cette langue commune qui s'invente en se faisant : « Parole, orage, glace et sang finiront par former un givre commun. »
Sans forme a priori, ce langage neuf se conçoit dans les opérations qui le réalisent : outre-manche, Bailey inventorie et exténue le vocabulaire (depuis 1960), tandis que Lacy (auquel on doit l'éclaircissement de la voix du saxophone soprano dans les années 50) tâche d'épuiser, outre-anche, la syntaxe. Le rôle de l'auditeur et de sa mémoire, réflexive et non linéaire, s'avère naturellement vital ici ; c'est lui qui complète l'œuvre, la rendant présente en toutes ses parties.
Ils n'écriront « pas de poème d'acquiescement », et la musique de ce recueil, furieusement mystérieuse et inespérée, sans début ni fin, reste un défi à l'industrie moderne du sommeil, la marque d'un « amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir ».

Guillaume Tarche

Les citations sont extraites d'œuvres de René Char.

Frequently, when discussing duo recordings, writers and listeners alike get caught up in the concept of conversational dialogue, implying either a most rudimental give and take, or perhaps an encounter where two players run each other through an endurance test of will while putting their own manifesto across. Other schools assert tales of microsecond adjustments, where deft, seemingly telepathic communication takes place, as one player anticipates the other’s next move. Not surprisingly, the duo of guitarist Derek Bailey and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy fails to fit comfortably within any of these preconceived boxes.
Perhaps the best analogy in (non-musical terms) for this unique musical arrangement, is a partnership between significant others. Consider if you will, a first time duo, which can, like a young romance, be full of awkward politeness, and sheepish fumbling, while trying not to say (or in this case play) the wrong thing. Bailey and Lacy, despite relatively infrequent collaborations, are more akin to a well-seasoned courtship: one that permits the space for autonomy, interjection and debate, and selective inattention. Above all, in this instance, both of the involved parties retain their own distinct identity while relishing in, and learning from, characteristics.
That both Bailey and Lacy are compatible impro-visers who coexist artistically while sacrificing none of their own personality should surprise no one. Strangely, this recording marks only the second time their collaboration as a tandem has been documented. The other from 1976 was released as Company 4 on Incus records and has yet to be reissued, while three other recordings from the early to mid-seventies (The Crust, Saxophone Special, and Dreams) find Bailey working within larger Lacy ensembles. Why these two have worked together so infrequently is a bit of a mystery, for when two of the music’s true visionaries share the stage, it is bound to be at the very least intriguing. On this Paris night, from the summer of 1983, there was no shortage of magic at the Dunois club.
Lacy is a compulsively analytical melodicist, extracting all he can from a line before moving on to the next musical kernel. The saxophonist obsesses over his phrases, reworking, reshaping and re-conceptualizing his angle until there is simply nothing left. Bailey, on the other hand, is a wily improviser who seems to operate under the premise that the most logical path is the one to leave out. His convoluted arpeggios and humming volume pedal swells focus more on pitch and context than they do a conventionally understood meter or melody.
What seems on the surface, two potentially disparate voices, on this night found an interesting neutral zone, a no man’s land where each player’s voice overlapped into some vital developments. While Bailey is clearly listening, his attack and sense of pacing is quite different from Lacy’s deeply involved, meandering excursions. Rather than merely accompanying him, Bailey antagonizes with a barrage of textural tension, which frequently sends the saxophonist reeling with some of his most jagged and vigorous playing committed to record in some time.
This duo works precisely because it does not rely on a conversational-like improvised dialogue. Instead, each player brings his own attitude and dogma to the table and forces the other into breaking from the tried and true comfort zone, and therefore eggs him into getting involved. Both players come away knowing more about themselves as musicians, and likely as human beings. Isn’t that the whole point of playing music with other people?

Jon C. Morgan

La déchirure en guise de trait d'union, le suraigu comme caresse, l'imprévu pour cohérence, la surprise telle une certitude et l'aléa devenu loi. Ou l'aventure quasi mathématique et la rigueur du délire. Et tout se passe comme si le mélodique, l'harmonieux, le contrapuntique, le swingant, le lyrique avaient été transposés, simplement déplacés à un niveau autre que l'habituel, pour offrir l'un des plus doux et contrastés, l'un des plus vifs et sereins (cool) duos.

Philippe CarIes l Jazz Magazine l Avril 2000

Le tout jeune label Potlatch [...] ne cache ni son substrat idéologique pour le moins "marqué" (l'Internationale Lettriste, Debord) ni ses engagements esthétiques tout aussi radicaux, en se consacrant exclusivement à la production et à la diffusion de la musique improvisée sous toutes ses formes (é)mouvantes et spontanées – instants bruts enregistrés sur le vif et restitués tels quels dans la folle beauté de leur émergence.
Les premiers volumes déjà parus donnent une image tres cohérente de la belle vitalité de cette scène clandestine peuplée de renégats magnifiques: les saxophonistes Daunik Lazro et Michel Doneda, le pianiste flamand Fred Van Hove ou encore la contrebassiste Joëlle Léandre, tous figures majeures de la free music européenne; mais également le duo Kristoff K.Roll par exemple, remarquable représentant de ce nouveau courant de la musique électronique entièrement dédiée a l'improvisation.
Pour autant, ce n'est pas parce que l'improvisation libre est par nature vouée a l'éphémère – qu'elle n'a pas son histoire. Et c'est une excellente initiative que, en marge de la célébration du "vierge, vivace et bel aujourd’hui" quelques moments oubliés de sa geste soient tirés de l'oubli. C'est le cas pour ce duo magique et magistral entre deux musiciens "historiques", le guitariste britannique Derek Bailey, fondateur du collectif Company, et le saxophoniste soprano américain Steve Lacy, enregistré a Paris au Dunois en 1983 et restitué ici dans son indéfectible actualité. La guitare "bruitiste" et concassée de Bailey; les lignes obliques du soprano subtilement déroutées – échos de matières, trajectoires croisées, architectures évanescentes: c'est de son ineffable fragilité que cette musique relationnelle et situationnelle tire toute sa force poétique.

Stéphane Ollivier l Les Inrockuptibles l Avril 2000

Steve Lacy and Derek Bailey have radically different approaches to improvisation. Bailey deals primarily with pure sound, and it often seems that the only reason for notes as such to occur in tris music is because of the basic nature of the guitar, which gives you six tones as a starting place. By using harmonics and open strings as frequently as he does, Bailey tacitly agrees to accept the neutral feeling of the standard guitar tuning as a harmonie reference, albeit one that he just about never acknowledges except by a series of wellconceived devices that turn that reference on its head (using major sevenths or minor seconds with the harmonics, for instance). But there is no conventional progression to the music anyway; things move by textuel and rhythmic rather than melodic or harmonic steps.
Lacy, in contrast, is almost obsessed with intervallic relationships; most of his improvisations consist of brilliantly controlled expositions of just the melodic-harmonic information that Bailey generally ignores. But there is a great deal of flexibility in each man's approach, and they find thousands of ways of bridging the gap during this striking series of improvised duos recorded live in Paris, June 29, 1983. Certainly they use the fundamental tension brilliantly, with Lacy weaving his melodic tapestries almost in spite of the beyond-abstract interpolations of tris counterpart. But the saxophonist opens up more in this context than anywhere else, and just when he's completely committed to the kind of textuel development that Bailey usually employs, the guitarist can turn the tables with the drollest of harmonie associations. Both men are pushing things and clearly inspiring one another throughout this excellent recording, which is a must for fans of either player or of free improvised music in general.

Duck Baker l JazzTimes l August 2000

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Derek Bailey always seems to serve as one of the most stimulating prospects as a duo partner. His method on his instrument is so strikingly abstract and original that those who play with him in such a setting are virtually compelled to bend their styles to his own. Even improvisers as indomitable as Cecil Taylor have been susceptible to his irresistible influence. Lacy's approach to free improvisation is in many ways the flipside to Bailey's as the live recording on makes unusually clear. He is usually resolutely inquisitive when it comes to melody, sometimes to the point of excess, whereas Bailey is famous for just as often completely disregarding it. But like the Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy, these two opposites combine into a stirring and complementary whole on this disc. Both players favor clipped, staccato bursts and splintery phrasing that mesh well into a composite of their divergent approaches. Bailey's craggy and frequently jarring amplified plucks jab and dart against Lacy's fluttering lines in a dance that always seems to border on the adversarial without ever reverting to open confrontation. The lengthy improvisation has been conveniently dissected into component parts, which provide listeners with several points of entry into the pair's often-oblique interplay. This meeting is an important addition to both players' discographies.

Derek Taylor l Cadence l July 2000


Outcome is a duo concert recorded in Paris in 1983, work that's concentrated in the frequency range of Steve Lacy's soprano saxophone and Bailey's trebly electric guitar (...). From the outset, it's about two strong personalities who shape musical space in very different ways. Lacy is insistently linear, whether tris concentration is on puckishly reshaping a kernel of melody or freely stringing together long arpeggiated fines. Bailey uses harmonics for great stretches here, in ways that suggest metallic percussion and African and SouthEast Asian sources. It may be that every great improvising duo involves four musicians, two who are listening to each other and two who aren't, or two remembering and two forgetting. Thus there are moments here of startling concord that will arise with unpredictable suddenness and from which the two will develop quite independent patins. The music is in part shaped by Lacy and Bailey's contrasting relationships to the formal and historical (rhythmic and harmonie) shapes of jazz. Lacy's fines and allusions are directly informed by that continuum, while Bailey's are oblique or tangentiel. At the beginning of Input #2 Lacy directly invokes the jazz of the twenties, specifically Sidney Bechet. It's another dimension to some fascinating music in which Bailey's listening can be so close that his sound seems to be born within Lacy's.

Stuart Broomer l Signal to Noise l July 2000

The hitherto unissued Outcome matches Derek Bailey with American soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. This 1983 set is as much a duel as a dialogue. Lacy and Bailey switched between complementarity and mutual subversion; the former delighted in exploring a melodlc phrase's hidden corners, while the latter hacked out jagged, discontinuous progressions and convoluted pitch-shapes.

Bill Meyer l Magnet l June 2000

The meeting with saxophonist Lacy is more of a contest, in the sense that both participants guardedly preserve their individual voices in ways that do not immediately suggest mutual compatibility. A certain amount of respectful but determined jockeying for pole position takes place as Bailey on electric guitar, grows restless accompanying Lacy's jazz-infused musings and heads off at a tangent A veteran of Bailey's Company sessions in the late 1970s, Lacy shows willingness to push his soprano into alien terrain, but he soon gravitates back to the meticulous melodic idiom that suits him best. The divergence is rather less great than on Bailey's encounter with Lee Konitz, rather more than on his dates with Anthony Braxton. And the same tensions that arise from their respective assumptions also enable the shadow of coherence to take form here.

Julian Cowley l Wire l March 2000