Steve Lacy
Encyclopedia
Steve Lacy born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City
, was a jazz
saxophonist
and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone
.
Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive Dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and dabbled in free improvisation
, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured.
, 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 Jazz Advance
(1956), 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, 1967). 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 (e.g. Vespers, Soul Note, 1993, which added Ricky Ford on tenor sax and Tom Varner on French horn), 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."
In 1992, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the "genius grant").
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 pianist Mal Waldron
, with whom he recorded a number 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.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, was a jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
saxophonist
Saxophone
The saxophone is a conical-bore transposing musical instrument that is a member of the woodwind family. Saxophones are usually made of brass and played with a single-reed mouthpiece similar to that of the clarinet. The saxophone was invented by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in 1846...
and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone
Soprano saxophone
The soprano saxophone is a variety of the saxophone, a woodwind instrument, invented in 1840. The soprano is the third smallest member of the saxophone family, which consists of the soprillo, sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass, contrabass and tubax.A transposing instrument pitched in...
.
Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive Dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and dabbled in free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured.
Biography
Lacy began his career at sixteen playing Dixieland music with much older musicians such as Henry "Red" AllenRed Allen
Henry James "Red" Allen was a jazz trumpeter and vocalist whose style has been claimed to be the first to fully incorporate the innovations of Louis Armstrong.-Life and career:...
, Pee Wee Russell
Pee Wee Russell
Charles Ellsworth Russell, much better known by his nickname Pee Wee Russell, was a jazz musician. Early in his career he played clarinet and saxophones, but eventually focused solely on clarinet....
, George "Pops" Foster
Pops Foster
George Murphy "Pops" Foster was a jazz musician best known for his vigorous playing of the string bass. He also played the tuba and trumpet professionally....
and Zutty Singleton and then with Kansas City
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
jazz players like Buck Clayton
Buck Clayton
Buck Clayton was an American jazz trumpet player who was a leading member of Count Basie’s "Old Testament" orchestra and a leader of mainstream-oriented jam session recordings in the 1950s. His principal influence was Louis Armstrong...
, Dicky Wells
Dicky Wells
William Wells, , more famous under the name of Dicky Wells , was an American jazz trombonist....
, and Jimmy Rushing
Jimmy Rushing
James Andrew Rushing , known as Jimmy Rushing, was an American blues shouter and swing jazz singer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, best known as the featured vocalist of Count Basie's Orchestra from 1935 to 1948.Rushing was known as "Mr...
. He then became involved with the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
, performing on Jazz Advance
Jazz Advance
Jazz Advance is the debut album by pianist Cecil Taylor recorded for the Transition label in September 1956. The album features performances by Taylor with Buell Neidlinger, Denis Charles and Steve Lacy.-Reception:...
(1956), the debut album of Cecil Taylor
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Percival Taylor is an American pianist and poet. Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and...
, and appearing with Taylor's groundbreaking quartet at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival
Newport Jazz Festival
The Newport Jazz Festival is a music festival held every summer in Newport, Rhode Island, USA. It was established in 1954 by socialite Elaine Lorillard, who, together with husband Louis Lorillard, financed the festival for many years. The couple hired jazz impresario George Wein to organize the...
; he also made a notable appearance on an early Gil Evans
Gil Evans
Gil Evans was a jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader, active in the United States...
album. His most enduring relationship, however, was with the music of Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer considered "one of the giants of American music". Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "Epistrophy", "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser"...
: he recorded the first album to feature only Monk compositions (Reflections
Reflections (Steve Lacy album)
Reflections is the second album by Steve Lacy which was released on the Prestige label in 1959. It features performances of Thelonious Monk's compositions by Lacy, Mal Waldron, Buell Neidlinger and Elvin Jones...
, 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
Roswell Rudd
Roswell Rudd is a Grammy Award-nominated American jazz trombonist and composer....
in presenting interpretations of Monk's compositions.
Beyond Monk, he performed the work of jazz composers such as Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music...
, Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...
and Herbie Nichols
Herbie Nichols
Herbie Nichols , was an American jazz pianist and composer who wrote the jazz standard "Lady Sings the Blues". Obscure during his lifetime, he is now highly regarded by many musicians and critics.-Life:...
; 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
Kenny Drew
Kenneth Sidney "Kenny" Drew was an American jazz pianist.-Biography:Born in New York City, New York, he first recorded with Howard McGhee in 1949, and over the next two years recorded with Buddy DeFranco, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich, and Dinah Washington...
; he went to Italy and formed a quartet with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava
Enrico Rava
Enrico Rava , is a prolific jazz trumpeter and arguably one of the best known Italian jazz musicians. He originally played trombone, changing to the trumpet after hearing Miles Davis. His first commercial work was as a member of Gato Barbieri's Italian quintet in the mid-1960s; in the late 1960s...
and the South African musicians Johnny Dyani
Johnny Dyani
Johnny Mbizo Dyani was a South African jazz double bassist and pianist, who played with such musicians as Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, David Murray and Leo Smith....
and Louis Moholo
Louis Moholo
Louis Tebugo Moholo , is a South African jazz drummer.He formed The Blue Notes with Chris McGregor, Johnny Dyani, Nikele Moyake, Mongezi Feza and Dudu Pukwana, and emigrated to Europe with them in 1964, eventually settling in London, where he formed part of a South African exile community that made...
(their visit to Buenos Aires is documented on The Forest and the Zoo
The Forest And The Zoo
The Forest and the Zoo is the first live album by Steve Lacy and was released on the ESP label in 1967. It features a concert performance recorded in Buenos Aires, Argentina by Lacy, Enrico Rava, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo.-Reception:...
, ESP, 1967). 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
Steve Potts (jazz musician)
Steve Potts is an American jazz saxophonist, younger cousin of tenor saxophonist Buddy Tate.Potts studied architecture in Los Angeles and took lessons by Charles Lloyd...
, pianist Bobby Few
Bobby Few
Bobby Few is an American jazz pianist.Few was raised in Shaker Heights, a neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, and studied classical piano. He knew Albert Ayler as a youth, and the pair studied jazz and played together in high school...
, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson (later John Betsch
John Betsch
John Betsch is an American jazz drummer.Betsch began on percussion at age nine, and attended Fisk University, Berklee College of Music and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. After playing in organ trios, he released an album as a leader, Earth Blossom, in 1975...
). Sometimes this group was scaled up to a large ensemble (e.g. Vespers, Soul Note, 1993, which added Ricky Ford on tenor sax and Tom Varner on French horn), sometimes pared down to a quartet, trio, or even a two-saxophone duo. He played duos with pianist Eric Watson
Eric Watson (musician)
Eric Watson is a US-American jazz pianist and composer living in France.After graduating from Oberlin Conservatory Watson moved to Paris. In 1982 he completed his first trio recording with Paul Motian and Ed Schuller followed by two solo albums...
. Lacy also, beginning in the 1970s, became a specialist in solo saxophone; he ranks with Anthony Braxton
Anthony Braxton
Anthony Braxton is an American composer, saxophonist, clarinettist, flautist, pianist, and philosopher. Braxton has released well over 100 albums since the 1960s...
and Evan Parker
Evan Parker
Evan Shaw Parker is a British free-improvising saxophone player from the European free jazz scene.Recording and performing prolifically with many collaborators, Parker was a pivotal figure in the development of European free jazz and free improvisation, and has pioneered or substantially expanded...
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
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Brighton, England.-Early life and work:Raworth...
, Taslima Nasrin
Taslima Nasrin
Taslima Nasrin is a Bengali Bangladeshi ex-doctor turned author who has been living in exile since 1994. From a modest literary profile in the late 1980s, she rose to global fame by the end of the 20th century owing to her feminist views and her criticism of Islam in particular and of religion in...
, Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
, Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...
and other Beat writers, including settings for the Tao Te Ching and haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
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."
In 1992, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the "genius grant").
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 pianist Mal Waldron
Mal Waldron
Malcolm Earl Waldron was an American jazz and world music pianist and composer, born in New York City.Like his contemporaries, Waldron's roots lie chiefly in the hard bop and post-bop genres of the New York club scene of the 1950s; but with time, he gravitated more towards free jazz and composition...
, with whom he recorded a number of duet albums (notably Sempre Amore
Sempre Amore
Sempre Amore is an album by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron released on the Italian Soul Note label in 1987. It features duo performances of tunes written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.-Reception:...
, a collection of Ellington/Strayhorn material, Soul Note, 1987).
Lacy returned to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 2002, where he began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music
New England Conservatory of Music
The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, is the oldest independent school of music in the United States.The conservatory is home each year to 750 students pursuing undergraduate and graduate studies along with 1400 more in its Preparatory School as well as the School of...
in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
. One of his last public performances was in front of 25,000 people at the close of a peace
Peace
Peace is a state of harmony characterized by the lack of violent conflict. Commonly understood as the absence of hostility, peace also suggests the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, prosperity in matters of social or economic welfare, the...
rally on Boston Common
Boston Common
Boston Common is a central public park in Boston, Massachusetts. It is sometimes erroneously referred to as the "Boston Commons". Dating from 1634, it is the oldest city park in the United States. The Boston Common consists of of land bounded by Tremont Street, Park Street, Beacon Street,...
in March 2003, shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq
2003 invasion of Iraq
The 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...
.
Lacy was diagnosed with cancer in August 2003, he continued playing and teaching until weeks before his death at the age of 69.