Everything about Steve Lacy totally explained
Steve Lacy (
July 23,
1934 –
June 4,
2004), born
Steven Norman Lackritz in
New York, was a
jazz soprano saxophonist. In 1992, he was the recipient of a
MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the "genius grant").
Lacy began his career at sixteen playing
Dixieland music with much older musicians such as
Henry "Red" Allen,
Pee Wee Russell,
George "Pops" Foster and
Zutty Singleton and then with
Kansas City jazz players like
Buck Clayton,
Dicky Wells, and
Jimmy Rushing. He then became involved with the
avant-garde, performing on the debut album of
Cecil Taylor and appearing with Taylor's groundbreaking quartet at the 1957
Newport Jazz Festival; he also made a notable appearance on an early
Gil Evans album. His most enduring relationship, however, was with the music of
Thelonious Monk: he recorded the first album to feature only Monk compositions (
Reflections, Prestige, 1958) and briefly played in Monk's band in 1960 and later on Monk's
Big Band/Quartet album (Columbia, 1963).
Monk tunes became a permanent part of his repertoire, making an appearance in virtually every concert appearance and on albums, and Lacy often collaborated with trombonist
Roswell Rudd in presenting interpretations of Monk's compositions.
Beyond Monk, he performed the work of jazz composers such as
Charles Mingus,
Duke Ellington and
Herbie Nichols; unlike many jazz musicians he rarely played standard popular or show tunes. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer with a signature simplicity of style: a Lacy composition is often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times. In the 1960s he continued to work with other players involved in the American free-jazz avant-garde and, in the 1970s, the European free improvisation scene, and free improvisation remained an important element in his work thereafter.
Lacy's first visit to Europe came in 1965, with a visit to Copenhagen in the company of
Kenny Drew; he went to Italy and formed a quartet with Italian trumpeter
Enrico Rava and the South African musicians
Johnny Dyani and
Louis Moholo (their visit to Buenos Aires is documented on
The Forest and the Zoo, ESP, 1966). After a brief return in New York, he returned to Italy, then in 1970 moved to Paris, where he lived until the last two years of his life. He became a widely respected figure on the European jazz scene, though he remained less well-known in the U.S.
The core of Lacy's activities from the 1970s to the 1990s was his sextet: his wife, singer/cellist
Irene Aebi, soprano/alto saxophonist
Steve Potts, pianist
Bobby Few, bassist
Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson (later John Betsch). Sometimes this group was scaled up to a large ensemble (for example
Vespers, Soul Note, 1993), sometimes pared down to a quartet, trio, or even a two-saxophone duo. He played duos with pianist
Eric Watson. Lacy also, beginning in the 1970s, became a specialist in solo saxophone; he ranks with
Anthony Braxton and
Evan Parker in the development of this demanding form of improvisation.
Lacy was interested in all the arts: the visual arts and poetry in particular became important sources for him. Collaborating with painters and dancers in multimedia projects, he made musical settings of his favourite writers:
Robert Creeley,
Samuel Beckett,
Tom Raworth,
Taslima Nasrin,
Herman Melville,
Brion Gysin and other Beat writers, including settings for the Tao Te Ching and
haiku poetry. As Creeley noted in The Poetry Project Newsletter, "There’s no way simply to make clear how particular Steve Lacy was to poets or how much he can now teach them by fact of his own practice and example. No one was ever more generous or perceptive."
He also collaborated with a truly extraordinary range of musicians, from traditional jazz to the avant-garde to contemporary classical music. Outside of his regular sextet, his most regular collaborator was probably the pianist
Mal Waldron, with whom he recorded a classic series of duet albums (notably
Sempre Amore, a collection of Ellington/Strayhorn material, Soul Note, 1987).
Lacy returned to the
United States in
2002, where he began teaching at the
New England Conservatory of Music in
Boston, Massachusetts. One of his last public performances was in front of 25,000 people at the close of a
peace rally on
Boston Common in March 2003, shortly before the
US-led invasion of Iraq.
Lacy was diagnosed with cancer in
August 2003, he continued playing and teaching until weeks before his death at the age of 69.
Discography
- Reflections (1959)
- Axieme (1975)
- Sempre Amore (1987)
- Vespers (1993)
- Packet (1995)
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