In his sleeve notes Evan Parker recalls asking Steve Lacy's School Days band, a quartet of immense talent (Grimes, Rudd, Charles), to play Monk's ‘Four In One’, ‘the trickiest line I could think of’ when he saw them in a Bleeker street bar called Take Three in 1962. They duly complied. Hearing Lacy lead the ensemble through a programme of music by the great pianist just a year after that encounter took place is thrilling to say the least. The players have totally grasped both the structural idiosyncrasies of the composer's modernism – above all how to make the beat swing without necessarily swinging and how to make a repeated line not sound repetitious – all the while bringing their own strong personalities to bear on the songs. Charles and Grimes bounce and skip with a marching band's momentum while Lacy and Rudd produce a display of growling textural invention and pithy interplay that is joyous without coming over as frivolous or self-indulgent. Some 14 years later Lacy, having settled in France, played solo on several occasions around Europe and Cycles presents a superb overview of some of those performances. It makes for fascinating listening after the School Days album primarily because the immense richness of the soprano saxophonist's sound is thrown into even sharper relief. His ability to sweep from the most raucous, vivid squawking and braying to vibrato-less lines that approximate an oboe's feline purr is remarkable. But it is Lacy's relentless succession of melodic phrases within some pieces that is really impressive. As with the best improvisers, he manages to convey a genuine sense of curiosity – a priceless quality he inherited from Monk – as well as an iron grip on time that would have been manna from heaven to the dancer Pierre Droulers, who accompanied Lacy on the final sequence, ‘Hedges’. This important document of a master is an essential addition to previous releases of Lacy's solo soprano works, Avignon And After (1&11), and Hooky.