Steve Lacy

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Steve Lacy (July 23, 1934 – June 4, 2004), born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York, was an innovative jazz soprano saxophonist.

Lacy began his career working with dixieland music with masters such as Henry "Red" Allen, George "Pops" Foster and Zutty Singleton and then with Kansas City jazz players like Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, and Jimmy Rushing before jumping into the heart of the avant-garde by performing on the debut album of Cecil Taylor, and making a notable appearance on an early Gil Evans album. His most enduring relationship, however, has been with the music of Thelonious Monk: he recorded the first all-Monk album (Reflections, Prestige, 1958) and played in Monk's band briefly in 1960 and 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. Beyond Monk, he rarely performed pop-music standards, specializing instead in the work of jazz composers such as Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols. He also became a highly distinctive composer with a signature simplicity of style: a Lacy composition often is built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times. In the 1960s he also became deeply involved in the American free-jazz avant-garde and, in the 1970s, the European free improvisation scene: free improvisation became another important element in his musical personality.

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 near the end of his life. He became a widely respected figure on the European jazz scene, though (perhaps because he was living abroad, perhaps because of the demanding purity of his style) remained somewhat underrated in the U.S. except among his avid fans, who became used to tracking down Lacy's prolific output on a variety of imported European labels.

In the 1980s the core of Lacy's activities for much of his Parisian period 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 (e.g. Vespers, Soul Note, 1993), sometimes pared down to a quartet, trio, or even a two-saxophone duo. Lacy also, beginning in the 1970s, became a specialist in solo saxophone, an innovator who 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 (he frequently made musical settings of his favourite writers: Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth, Brion Gysin and other Beat writers, haiku, Herman Melville...). 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 important 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.

Diagnosed with cancer in August 2003, he continued playing and teaching until weeks before his death at the age of 69.