If you only know Irene Aebi as 'the singer in Steve Lacy's band,' that's fair, but it undersells what she actually did. She trained as a violinist and cellist, studied voice seriously, and never sounded like a jazz singer in the traditional sense — no scat, no bent blue notes, no torch-song phrasing. She sang like someone reading poetry out loud and happening to be in tune with a saxophone.

She met Steve Lacy in the early 1970s, and from that point on their work together became inseparable. He wrote the music, she found the texts — Creeley, Gysin, Taslima Nasrin, sometimes Lacy's own words — and delivered them in a flat, deliberate, almost recitative style that fit the angular lines Lacy was writing on soprano sax. It's not a style built to seduce you. It takes some getting used to.

What she brought that a conventional jazz vocalist couldn't was discipline from the classical side — pitch control, breath, a willingness to sit inside dissonant harmony without flinching. On records like Songs (1981), her voice functions almost like another horn in the ensemble, weaving through the front line rather than sitting on top of it as a featured attraction. She also played cello on many of these sessions, adding a low, sawing texture that gave Lacy's groups a sound nobody else in that corner of free jazz really had.

This was chamber music that happened to be played by jazz musicians, or free jazz that happened to borrow its manners from art song — depends how you want to slice it. Either way, Aebi and Lacy built a working partnership, married and musical both, that lasted over thirty years, through Paris exile and constant touring, until his death in 2004. She kept performing and teaching after that, carrying the songbook they built together into rooms that still remembered what it sounded like the first time.