Jean Derome & Somebody Special - Le sourire (2026) [Hi-Res]

Steve Lacy was a quintessential artist of late modernism. His body of work is ample evidence of his refusal to bypass his forebears in pursuit of so-called ‘innovation.” He had to work through them. He called himself a “materialist,” an idiosyncratic use of the word describing his obsession with the material from which he made his music –– his saxophone as well as the countless artists whose work his oeuvre synthesized. Through such a crystalizing process, his music grew increasingly singular, while always also paying homage to his antecedents, working through the material of, to name but a few, Sidney Bechet, Thelonious Monk, Mark Rothko, or Samuel Beckett.

I don’t know if Jean Derome would call himself a “materialist,” but such a Lacyan ethic adheres throughout his own notable body of work. So, it felt apt when he delved into Lacy songs on Somebody Special (2019), which introduced this superb quintet. Le sourire represents a deeper dive, extending Jean’s loving attention to the material at hand, with Lacy’s settings of Beckett poems in French (the little-known Sands> suite) at its core. Along the way, the band touches on key elements in Lacy’s vast discography: Rushes and Packet (from which the songs that set Akhmatova and Malina derive) with Irene Aebi and Frederic Rzewski, and the two-volume Futurities, nonet settings of Robert Creeley poems and arguably his finest single-author project.

Lacy lived the Georges Braque aphorism that he had also set to music: “Limited means engender new forms, invite creativity, develop style.” Jean, a master multi-instrumentalist, follows suit, limiting himself here to alto saxophone, bass flute, and human voice, but deftly deploying them to render Le sourire (to cite another Lacy piece) multidimentional. Hear for example how the breathtaking poignancy of the flute-voice unisons with Karen Young on Fall is etched more deeply in tonal contrast to Jean’s surrealist alto blues phrasing on Jack’s Blues. And as the sounds refract through the exquisite poem-lyrics that the music animates, seemingly limited means grow richer, evincing a fully wrought style that only a materialist, in Steve Lacy’s conception, can truly achieve.

– Scott Thomson, Montréal