Steve Baczkowski - Cheap Fabric (Relative Pitch, 2024)

By Martin Schray

Although Steve Baczkowski has been on the free jazz scene for almost 20 years, he is not a super-prominent name. Even his outstanding recordings with Chris Corsano, Brandon Lopez (e.g. Old Smoke ), Bill Nace and Paul Flaherty have done nothing to change that. And Cheap Fabric probably won’t change that either, even if it is an absolutely wonderful recording. The album was “mostly recorded (...) on the evening of a lunar eclipse (...). The process and timing created an energy of focused intensity and strong intimacy, which is apparent in the music”, Baczkowski says. What is more, one could almost feel the surroundings of a cold November night in Buffalo, NY., Baczkowski's hometown.

Especially “Threads of the Warp“ shows that, with twelve minutes by far the longest track of the album. But it’s not only intensity and intimacy that can be felt here, the album is also about restraint, although great expressiveness is shown. It’s about a minimal but dynamic approach with simultaneous abstraction. Baczkowski doesn’t show off any technique on this solo album, he hardly displays his instrumental qualities, which he undoubtedly has. Instead, he seems to remove every element from his work that he considers superfluous. He reduces his improvisation to long drones, siren-like passages, isolated, plaintive outbursts, hushed echoes. It’s the refinement of his concentrated yet haunting style, a reduction in which only the truly essential remains. Sometimes it sounds as if the notes of his saxophone have been sawed through, but his lines still remain razor-sharp.

Even though Cheap Fabric consists largely of melody and sound, some of the miniatures that make up most of the album gain their own inner rhythm, with grandiose details being displayed in the whispered and breathy passages (e.g. in “Meteor”, which seems rushed due to the breathing noises, which is also reinforced by the flap noises of the sax that sound like a child's toy gone wild). On the other hand, there are extreme sounds and registers, as in “Soft Landing”, in which the saxophonist exhausts the entire spectrum of his instrument, sometimes to the listener’s pain threshold. The same goes for “Low Orbit“, which sounds as if the saxophone has been squeezed together

It seems as if Baczkowski has been working towards an opus magnum, a concept album, distancing himself from his art until only the truth of the moment remains. The solar eclipse seems to have been the perfect time for this.

Cheap Fabric is available as a CD and as a download. You can listen to it and buy it here: