Steve Lacy

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

Lacy began his career 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; he rarely played pop standards of the day. 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: 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 he remained somewhat underrated 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 (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; he 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 poetry and 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 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.