TT 477: Handbills from Slugs'

the Steve Lampert collection

For my Nation article “Jazz Off the Record,” trumpeter/composer Steve Lampert was my witness. He told me about Slugs’, gave me some great quotes, and let me scan his collection of handbills.

One of the Lampert quotes concerns McCoy Tyner.

“It was absolutely explosive,” he says of a band he saw there led by Tyner. “Waves of energy—it raised you out of your chair and did something healing to your heart.”

The front line that night was Woody Shaw, Sam Rivers, and Gary Bartz, a trio of heavyweights that never recorded together as a unit.

Lampert’s collection from Slugs’:

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Steve Lampert is like nobody else, a true blue idiosyncratic New York City musician. To hear him deal out a great and virtuosic jazz trumpet solo on a hip blues, try the first track, “King Baby,” on Rich Perry’s Hearsay with Dennis Irwin and Jeff Hirshfield.

But rather than playing jazz with a capital “J,” Lampert has gone on another, more private, mission. His own vital music adds in an unashamed dose of advanced European theory like dodecaphony; there’s also a lot of backbeat and synthesizer. The two (insane) Lampert albums easy to find on the streaming services are Music from There and Venus Perplexed. Mark Stryker wrote that Lampert… “Presents a composer equally at home in the sound worlds of Arnold Schoenberg, Conlon Nancarrow, electric-period Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.”

The aforementioned Rich Perry Hearsay is mostly Lampert pieces, while Noah Preminger commissioned Zigsaw, a full-album Lampert composition. The all-star Preminger band includes Jason Palmer, John O’Gallagher, Kris Davis, Rob Schwimmer, Kim Cass, and Rudy Royston.

My good friend Rob is playing microtonal Haken Continuum, one of the most unearthly of instruments. All the Lampert releases seem to embrace a sort of “science-fiction” element.

The Preminger album can be purchased on Bandcamp, where the notices include glowing comments from Joe Lovano and Jason Moran.