Bad news about Steve Lacy's health

[Guest Chaney]

Another titan gone.

Damn.

[Green Dolphin]

Let's go play the music...

[John L]

I had heard that he was very sick, and just kept hoping.

RIP. Steve Lacy was one of kind.

[EKE BBB]

From AAJ:

Steve Lacy Passed Away Today

Posted: 2004-06-04

A letter from Ken Schaphorst to the faculty and students at the New England Conservatory of Music...

"Dear NEC Students and Faculty:

It is with great sadness that I report to you that Steve Lacy passed away today just after 12:30 p.m. at New England Baptist Hospital.

I know that you will be as devastated by this great loss as I am. And my sympathy goes out to each of you.

Allan and I will be organizing a Memorial Concert in Steve's honor on October 12, 2004 in Jordan Hall. I hope that we can all come together and remember Steve at that time. I'll pass on any other news as it comes my way.

I know that we will all want to express our sympathy to Irene at some point. But I also know that Irene needs to rest right now. I would urge you to not call her right now.

Thanks,

Ken "

[king ubu]

This is so very very sad. I only started getting to know his music.

So glad I went to see his (stellar!) solo concert here in Zurich end of november 2003.

Here are two photos taken on that occasion:

Rest in Peace.

ubu

[RainyDay]

Can we please have a moratorium on death? I'm getting g.d. sick of it. My alternating partner on my WFHB show passed away Monday night.

GOM: I'm so sorry to hear of this. My condolences.

[J.A.W.]

Another sad day for music...

[EKE BBB]

From Jazzcorner:

Here is the obit that New England Conservatory (and Irene Aebi) is circulating.

For Immediate Release:

June 4, 2004

New England Conservatory Mourns Death of Jazz Great Steve Lacy

Soprano Saxophone Master Succumbs to Cancer at Age 69

Steve Lacy, one of the greatest soprano saxophonists of all time and a

New England Conservatory faculty member since fall 2002, died Friday at New

England Baptist Hospital. The jazz master who once defined his profession as

"combination orator, singer, dancer, diplomat, poet, dialectician,

mathematician, athlete, entertainer, educator, student, comedian, artist,

seducer and general all around good fellow" was 69. He leaves his wife and

collaborator, the Swiss singer Irene Aebi.

Born Steven Morman Lackritz in New York City, Lacy was the first avant garde

jazz musician to make a specialty of the soprano saxophone‹an instrument

that had become almost completely neglected during the Bop era. Indeed, he

is credited with single-handedly bringing the instrument back from obscurity

into modern music of all types. He regularly received awards from DownBeat

Magazine as the premier soprano saxophonist and in 1992 received a MacArthur

Foundation "genius" grant. In 2002, he was made a Commandeur de l¹Ordre des

Arts et des Lettres by the French government. A prolific recording artist,

Lacy is represented on many labels including Universal, Senators, RCA,

Verve, Label Bleu, Greats of Jazz, EMI, CBS/Columbia, and Denon.

Throughout his career, Lacy was widely admired for the beauty and purity of

his tone, for his incisive melodic sense, for keeping his music

uncompromising and fresh, and for his eagerness to play with a wide variety

of musicians while retaining long-term musical relationships. For example,

since 1998, he performed often with Panamanian pianist and NEC faculty

member Danilo Perez, but he also played regularly with Mal Waldron, a

pianist he had worked with since the fifties. He was esteemed for his

productivity, and for the consistently high quality of his art. As a

teacher, a role he took on in the last two years of his life, he was revered

for his intense focus and generosity.

During the latter part of his career, Lacy made his home in Paris for 33

years, but returned to the United States in 2002 to begin his first teaching

job at NEC. He was prominently featured in the concerts celebrating the

centennial of NEC¹s Jordan Hall in October 2003, kicking off the festivities

in a Best of Jazz performance that featured other Conservatory jazz greats

like Ran Blake, George Russell, Bob Brookmeyer, and alumnus Cecil Taylor.

Lacy got his start as a sideman in the early fifties playing in Manhattan¹s

Dixieland revival scene. He also worked with some Duke Ellington players

including cornetist Rex Stewart who christened him "Lacy." Although he

initially doubled on clarinet and soprano sax, he soon dropped the former

instrument and found his distinctive voice with the saxophone. It was the

NEC-trained Cecil Taylor who set Lacy on a new course and introduced him to

Thelonious Monk‹who, along with Duke Ellington, would remain the most

important influence in his life. "Playing with Cecil Taylor immediately put

me into the offensive mode" (of music-making), Lacy recalled in his book

Findings: My Experience with the Soprano Saxophone. "This was the avant-tout

garde; we were an attack quartet (sometimes quintet or trio), playing

original, dangerously threatening music that most people were offended byŠ."

Lacy recorded with Gil Evans in 1957 and continued to work with him

intermittently up through the 1980s. In 1958, he and pianist Waldron

recorded Reflections: Steve Lacy Plays the Music of Thelonious Monk, which

led to an invitation to join Monk¹s quintet for four months in 1960. After

that immersion experience, he created a quartet with trombonist Roswell Rudd

that dedicated itself exclusively to Monk¹s music. He was still playing Monk

as recently as last winter when he introduced a new quintet at Manhattan¹s

Iridium. Monksieland, comprised of trumpeter Dave Douglas, Rudd, and Lacy¹s

longtime Paris rhythm section, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer John

Betsch, played Monk with the freedom and contrapuntal interplay of

Dixieland jazz.

In 1965, Lacy began performing in Europe where he found particularly

appreciative audiences in Italy and France. He met his wife in Rome in 1966

and by the late sixties, they had settled down in Paris. During the

enormously fertile decades that followed, he created a quintet that could

expand or contract from a duo or trio on up to a big band. He began

collaborations with dancers (Merce Cunningham in particular), artists and

actors. He also started working with poets like Brion Gysin, composing

musical settings of their poems.

Irene Aebi exerted a profound influence on Lacy¹s artistry. For the woman he

called "his muse," he wrote his first composition, The Way (1967), based on

the words of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu. He continued to be inspired by his

wife¹s voice and wrote works for her based on poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Mary

Frazee, Anne Waldman, and Judith Malina. He wrote an opera, The Cry, with

Bengali poet Taslima Nasreen. And, over a period of many years, he composed

The Beat Suite, a jazz song cycle based on poetry by Jack Kerouac, Allen

Ginsburg, Robert Creeley, and other beat poets. That work had its official

world premiere in 2003 and has been recorded on a Universal CD. As recently

as this spring, Lacy and his wife were performing his settings of Robert

Creeley poems and excerpts from the Beat Suite at MIT and Boston¹s Institute

of Contemporary Art.

At NEC, 36 students, both graduate and undergraduate, worked directly

with Lacy and he affected many others through his active participation in

the musical community. In his teaching, he was concerned with helping

students become complete artists. For example, he might say of a young

player: "He¹s got imagination, but he needs to develop his taste a lot

more‹opera and poetry and literature and dance. He really needs to broaden

his base." At NEC, he felt students could get that broadening. "That¹s what

I like about this school," he said in an interview last year. "ŠOne can

cross the hall and it¹s not such rigid departments really. Anybody could

study improvisation or Indian music or symphonic construction or

whatever..."

About Lacy, NEC President Daniel Steiner said: "He was an extraordinary

artist, the kind of person who appears only a few times in each generation

of musicians. His presence at the Conservatory affected not simply the jazz

program but the overall musical life of NEC."

Remarks by Ran Blake, head of NEC¹s Contemporary Improvisation department.

"With the exception of Sidney Bechet and John Coltrane, no other musician

has brought such a personal sound to the soprano saxophone and few other

musicians have tapped into the unexplored repertoire of Thelonious Monk."

Remarks by Danilo Perez, NEC Faculty, Jazz Pianist, and Lacy collaborator:

Steve Lacy showed us that being a jazz musician is the work of a lifetime.

His compositions and improvisations are full of wisdom and life. He taught

us the power of words through his music. Hearing his soprano playing was a

life changing experience, because he approached his sound, improvisation and

technique as if he believed it was a test of man¹s sincerity.

As a friend he was a very encouraging, caring and generous man with a great

sense of humor. As a teacher he was a great educator who inspired all of us

inside and outside the classroom, with the genius of his musical phrasing

and his brilliant remarks.

Last year while playing a duo concert in New York, he took me to an

exhibition of a great Chinese painter. His detailed comments about the

paintings offered a great lesson in color subtlety and form. I found myself

contemplating his words of wisdom all afternoon. That night after the very

inspired concert we played he said;" Danilo we were painting tonight. "

He was very kind to me and to many people who knew him. As he would say

the music and the artist become one as we get older.

Steve, thanks for inspiring and sharing your gifts with the world. Your

great musical legacy will live in our hearts and minds forever .

God bless Steve and his dear Irene.

Remarks by Ken Schaphorst,

Chair, Jazz Studies and Improvisation

The NEC community is devastated by this great loss. I can't think of another

musician who has been involved in so many different chapters in the history

of jazz, from Dixieland to Free Jazz, and everything in between. Steve has

brought his unique combination of open-mindedness, humor, intelligence,

rigor and artistry to his teaching at NEC over the last two years. And

everyone who has come into contact with him has been transformed by his

wisdom and musicianship. We will miss him.

[JSngry]

Damn.

[Lazaro Vega]

That is just too young. Had the pleasure of bringing the band to Grand Rapids twice and enjoying his incredible company. Saw him play in Chicago and Ann Arbor, too, including a twin evening of duets with Roscoe Mitchell (one night playing Lacy's music, the next playing Mitchell's). His quintet's instrumentation (when his wife wasn't singing) was based on the Jimmy Noone Band of the 1920's. What a man, and what a musical thinker -- his idea that you're either on the offensive or defensive as an artist is something to be taken to heart. I'm very sad to hear he has left at such a young age.

[gslade]

condolences to family and friends

loss is so very difficult

His gifts to the arts were so substantial

he will be missed by many

[Joe G]

What an inspiring career!

[B. Goren.]

Steve Lacy was one of my favorite. I am happy I had the opportunity to see him playing together with Mal Waldron here in Tel-Aviv 5 years ago. It was a memorable concert. Rest in peace Mr. Lacy.

[danasgoodstuff]

I, too, am deeply sadened by this loss. I was at the concert here in Portland that produced the album The Rent. Fine as that is, I don't think it, or any other I've heard, fully captured his sound.

[7/4]

Aw fuck.

[White Lightning]

Fuck fuck fuck

[sidewinder]

RIP and my condolences. I am still shocked at hearing of this very sad loss of a great artist who still had much more to give. At least I can console myself at having seen Mr Lacy live on one occasion - a superb club gig in Long Beach. My over-riding impression is of a guy, well into his 60s, still pushing at the edges and with the purpose, drive and shear inquisitiveness/enthusiasm of a much younger man. I'm really saddened at the thought of not being able to check Mr Lacy out live again.

Edited June 5, 2004 by sidewinder

[B. Goren.]

From the New York Times:

Steve Lacy, 69, Who Popularized the Soprano Saxophone, Dies

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: June 5, 2004

teve Lacy, an American soprano saxophonist who spent more than half of his 50-year career living in Europe and helped legitimize his instrument in postwar jazz, died yesterday in Boston. He was 69.

The cause was cancer, according to an announcement from the New England Conservatory of Music, where Mr. Lacy had been teaching since 2002.

After performing in New York, his hometown, Mr. Lacy moved to Italy and France, and became the most Europeanized of all expatriate American jazz musicians. He married one of his musical collaborators, the Swiss-born singer Irene Aebi, who survives him. He insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by novelists, poets and philosophers — as well as visual-art and dance components, when time and money allowed.

For someone long considered an avant-garde artist, Mr. Lacy always insisted that nobody could get more avant-garde than Louis Armstrong; his best work was anti-highfalutin and doggedly practical. His most representative melodies, like "The Bath" and "The Gleam," use gentle repetition and gentle wit; he developed his saxophone tone to be as attenuated as a Hemingway sentence, and his improvised lines as succinct. At the end of his life, hounded by tax problems in France, he returned to the United States, moving in 2002 to teach at the New England Conservatory and live in Brookline, Mass.

Mr. Lacy formed musical partnerships and made records at an astonishing rate. He led working bands of up to eight musicians for nearly 30 years; he also performed and recorded often as a solo saxophonist and in duos with partners as different as the American pianist Mal Waldron and the Japanese percussionist Masahiko Togashi. One of his discographies lists 236 items up to the year 1997, including more than 20 solo saxophone albums.

Mr. Lacy was born Steven Lackritz and grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City. Clarinet was his first instrument; then, inspired by hearing Sidney Bechet's version, recorded in 1941, of a Duke Ellington song, "The Mooche," he decided to pursue Bechet's instrument, the soprano saxophone. At the time — it would still be a few years before John Coltrane would make it popular with his recording of "My Favorite Things" — he had little competition.

At the age of 21, he was performing the standard Dixieland repertory on both instruments at Stuyvesant Casino and the Central Plaza in New York; he shared stages with musicians like Henry Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Buck Clayton and Hot Lips Page, and his teacher, Cecil Scott. And he was also playing at the Newport Jazz Festival with the pianist Cecil Taylor, who was terrifying audiences by doing away with traditional structure and tonality. Mr. Lacy worked with Mr. Taylor for six years and with other bandleaders as well, including Gil Evans; he always described this mix as the best possible training for a jazz musician.

One of them was Thelonious Monk, who became a guiding aesthetic master to Mr. Lacy for the rest of his life. Through playing with Monk in a quintet and big band, and studying his music assiduously, Mr. Lacy was able to absorb the elder musician's wit, economy, insistence on simple rhythmic patterns and range of melody. He once described Monk's music as perfect for the soprano saxophone: "Not too high, not too low, not easy, not at all overplayed and most of all, full of interesting technical problems."

In 1966, with no work at home, Mr. Lacy began his long trip away from America. He took a group to Argentina and ended up stranded there for nine months because of political unrest. Later he headed to Rome with Ms. Aebi, where they worked with Musica Elettronica Viva, a quartet that blended modern-classical tendencies with improvisation and included two other American expatriates, Frederic Rzewski and Alvin Curran. After a brief stay in Rome, Mr. Lacy and Ms. Aebi moved to Paris in 1970, in the beginning of the era that he often called "post-free": all experimentation came grounded in scale and melody. And with his long-lasting sextet, which he started shortly after he arrived in Paris, he found an original compositional style: lilting and singsongy with a bitter twist, often compared to nursery rhymes, though Thelonious Monk's sense of melody was probably a greater influence.

Mr. Lacy preferred to collaborate with artists from other fields. Most of the time that meant setting words to music, and in his group Ms. Aebi sang poetic texts by Herman Melville, Robert Creeley, Gregory Corso and Lao Tzu, among many others; in other works he collaborated with dancers, painters and stage designers. "To me," he said in a 1990 interview, "music is always about something or somebody, or from somebody or something. It's never in the blue, never abstract."

Mr. Lacy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992; he published a book of writings and saxophone exercises, "Findings," in 1994. The French government's ministry of culture appointed him Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1989 and Commander in 2002. In addition to his wife, his survivors include a sister, Blossom Cramer, and a brother, Martin J. Lackritz.

[alankin]

Very sad.

He's been one of my favorites since shortly after I started intensely listening to jazz. I admire his directness, intensity, imagination and sense of humor. The best soprano saxophone player. One of the best (the best?) interpretors of Monk.

I'm happy that I was able to see him perform live three times and sad that I won't be able to again.

At least we still have his recordings.

He's made (more than) a few!

[mikeweil]

Irreplaceable one, may you play in the peace in the band of angels you are now part of.

69 may seem too young, yes, but he has played and recorded enough music for three lives!

[chris olivarez]

RIP.

[Hardbopjazz]

Steve Lacy Interview

Interview Menu

| Stan Getz | Charles McPherson | Steve Lacy | Wayne Shorter | Billy Pierce | Lee Konitz | Mel Martin (Bell) | Mel Martin (SJ)

| Joe Henderson | Benny Powell | Rufus Reid | Benny Golson | Bobby Watson | James Moody | Frank Foster | Johnny Griffin |

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steve Lacy

by

Mel Martin

Reprinted from Saxophone Journal

Volume 16, Number 3 Nov/Dec

1991

I was very fortunate to have caught up with Steve Lacy when he performed at Koncepts Kultural Gallery in Oakland on April 12, 1990. His very influential career has spanned some thirty-five years. Steve Lacy's productive, multifaceted career, judging by the musicians he has been influenced by and the many he himself has influenced, has been marked by many unique and precious experiences.

Born in New York City in 1934, Lacy took piano lessons as a youngster before switching to the clarinet. Enthralled by Sidney Bechet's recording of The Mooche, Lacy began studying the soprano sax in earnest. After spending nearly a year at Schillinger House in Boston, Lacy returned to New York and spent 1953-54 working with the likes of Pee Wee Russell, Rex Stewart, Buck Clayton, Jimmy Rushing, Dicky Wells and Walter Page. Not only did Lacy learn to tame his instrument's inherent, peevish problems with intonation, but he was among the first (if not the first) of the soprano saxophonists to transform the "straight" sax into a woodwind capable of stratospheric flights. Lacy progressed from Dixieland music to bebop, and ultimately to nonchord-based nirvanas of the avant-garde. Yet all the while he has maintained his melodic inventiveness and keen sense of organization as both composer and soloist.

Lacy left for Europe in the mid sixties where he took up residence in Paris, and it is where he currently resides. He has recently been touring the United States on an annual basis and his recordings have gained more visibility due to his contract with RCA. I had never met him or heard him live prior to this occasion. We struck up an informal conversation concerning his solo recording of an obscure Thelonious Monk song called Gallop's Gallop. His open, easy going and warm manner, encouraged me to request an interview to which he responded immediately by inviting me to his motel the next day. That happened to be Friday the 13th. Coincidentally that is the name of a famous Monk tune. It was indeed a great pleasure interviewing the pioneer of modern jazz soprano saxophone. He expressed views that were wide ranging, knowledgeable and fascinating.

Why don't we start with you telling me the set-up you're currently playing.

I have a Super Action Series I Selmer that I've had about six years. Before that I had the previous model, the Mark VI. It's like a car. You stick with one name brand and trade in the old model for the new one when it comes out. I'm waiting for the newest Selmer to come out. I'll probably take that and give them my old one. But I love the old one, it's been great.

You were saying that you feel they have made certain gains but with these come certain losses.

By now I've gotten used to those losses, and they don't even bother me any more. They were small things but they really are important. For example, the left hand pinky action. The difference between the Mark VI and the Super Action was radical and unnecessary. The Mark VI worked perfectly well. But in order to conform with the other members of the family, the tenor, the baritone, etc., they changed all the fingerings on the left hand, including the pinky. For soprano it didn't make sense to match the roller mechanism. The older ones were a lot simpler and worked much better. It's like the old thing, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But they fixed it! The overall gains were much more important and I go along with Selmer and their tooling philosophy and all that. I've tried the new soprano model which is in preparation now, and it's pretty good.

Do they take your input in developing the instruments?

Yes, they call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too.

As opposed to the other kind

(laughter).

Really, they call all kinds of so-called experts who test them out and give them their opinion and advice. Selmer and I are very much in tune, and that's important. Another important thing about living in France is that the reeds come from the South of France. This is very interesting. Recently I visited the factory down south where the reeds I use come from and I got to know the process in person. It's a small company called Marca (distributed by Leblanc), which means Manufacturer Anche Reeds Coast Azure. It's like a family concern, and they sometimes supply the cane to Vandoren.

I don't know if you're familiar, but over here there's been severe reed problems for a number of years now. Most of the professionals and students alike are crying the blues pretty badly over lack of good cane. Many well known products seem to have fallen down badly. They are cutting them fine, it's not that they don't have good quality workmanship, it's just that they're not getting good cane.

It's a vicious circle. Like it was explained to me, reed is a weed which grows wild all over this region called the Var in France and only the wild variety is good - the stuff growing by the roadside and all that. If you try to plant it, it's no good.

That's what they found. They can't duplicate that natural chemistry.

Let's call it spirit, because to me, there is spirit in a reed. It's a living thing, a weed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. And they say these areas make sound when the wind comes. It's really an ancient vibration.

Apparently, part of what their problem was in obtaining good, wild, French cane is that land developers have moved in on a lot of that land, and also severe winters hit the cane crops quite badly. Even Vandoren doesn't get all their cane from France anymore. They seem to have always had the better quality of cane, how-ever, I don't always enjoy their cuts. Are there such things as bamboo reeds?

No, cane is not bamboo. Bamboo is different. Cane is rushes, or Rousseaux in French - Junkus.

When I went to the Roy J. Maier factory down in Los Angeles, I thought that was bamboo they cut the cane out of.

They are stalks like bamboo, but it's a different plant. Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant, but these are weeds that grow wild to about twenty feet. They're not like bamboo which can make a forest and bloom once in a hundred years. Bamboo is a magnificent plant. These are crude weeds, this is what they make baskets out of.

Ah-ha. So you are able to get good French cane, but from a small company.

I order directly from them. I've seen them in Japan, and I believe you can get them in places like Charles Ponte in New York. Specialized places probably know about them. But I use very soft ones and I must order them directly.

You use a pretty open mouthpiece, too?

Yes, Otto Link made three identical mouthpieces for me a number of years ago and I use them. It's a number twelve, and larger than their usual sizes. They normally go up to a ten. I had an eleven which got stolen so I asked for one a little bit bigger and that was it.

I heard you play into the stratosphere. Notes that are up there and I'm wondering how you do that on a soft reed on an open mouthpiece.

It's in the reed. There's a lot more flexibility with a soft reed, so you can go much higher. A hard reed is limited. After you reach a certain point, the door is closed. I arrived at using the soft by going through the hard. I used to play hard reeds, and plastic reeds, and metal mouthpieces, etc. I went through those phases over a period of thirty years before I gradually arrived at the best solution for me. I can have the maximum flexibility and sound possibilities. I can release all the harmonics in the horn without killing my lip. When you go to the moon like that, it hurts, and you can't do it that often and it's got to be controllable.

I have been listening to you over the thirty years you're talking about and I always hear a great deal of control in your playing, especially compared to many current soprano players. Most soprano players obviously play it as a double, and you have dedicated your life to playing the soprano. Did you ever play any of the other saxes before?

I did. I started on clarinet. When I went to school, they wouldn't accept clarinet, so I had to play alto. I got interested in the tenor for awhile, and I also played baritone and flute. I dropped them one by one because the soprano had so many interesting problems in it, that it was enough for me to deal with.

I can relate to why a person would gravitate toward one instrument, especially because at the time you were playing it, hardly anyone else was.

It was wide open, nobody was doing anything with it. It was just laying in the pawn shops. Sidney Bechet was in Europe, and his student Bob Wilber was playing the music of Bechet a little bit in New York. He was the only one touching it at that time. It was like a new instrument. I responded to the sound of it because it's like the treble clef personified. It's a treble instrument which sounds like a human voice range. It's feminine, but it can be masculine, too.

I've noticed in the past, and especially hearing you last night, how you make great use of the low register. Obviously you also have great control of the high register, but you were playing the low register in a way I hear almost no soprano players doing, which was intriguing to me.

Yes, I find the low register very fascinating in the soprano because the low register of the tenor is too low to dwell too long on. But the low register of the soprano is very mellow and right in there. The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity. It can sound like a baroque trumpet, too. It's used instead of the baroque trumpets sometimes for the Bach Concertos.

Have you been heavily influenced by the great pianists?

Yes. I wanted to be a pianist but I couldn't do it, it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down (laughter). When I was a kid I saw Art Tatum and he blew me away so I gave up the piano. Happily, I discovered the clarinet first then the soprano saxophone when I was sixteen.

You've had working relationships with some great pianists such as Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk and Gil Evans.

Yeah, that was not a coincidence. I worked with Cecil Taylor for six years and a lot of that rubbed off. I've been working with Mal Waldron on and off for nearly thirty years. Monk was also a fantastic playing experience. I was associated with him for a couple of years with the big band and then I worked with his quintet for a season, about four months with Charlie Rouse. There's a pirate tape and there are three tunes that were all recorded at a festival in Philadelphia in 1960, Evidence, Blue Monk and Rhythm-a-ning.

You've seen the soprano come from a completely obscure instrument to one that's played by many jazz musician's and even pop stars. How do you feel about this?

That's right, more and more. I have a feeling that there's going to be more dedicated soprano players. I get an awful lot of people that want to come and study and send me tapes. You see, saxophone is one thing, and music is another. You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use. The problem I had on this instrument was that I not only had to learn how to play it, I had to learn what to play on it because there was nothing written for it. I couldn't play Charlie Parker tunes because they were too low.

Yes, they don't lay right for Bb instruments. I always felt that was alto music. Tenor's hard too because they just don't lay in the right registers. They're either too low or too high.

Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register. As I said before, the soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano, but at first, it didn't. I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz and then worked with Cecil Taylor. When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly, so I started really studying his music but I also studied the songs of Webern because that also fit my horn. If someone wants to play soprano saxophone all their life, they must find someone else's music or eventually their own that will make it worthwhile for them, the public, and everybody.

I think that's great advice even for someone who doubles because the thing I hear lacking is that they don't really know what to do on the instrument. It's as if they sometimes try to make it an extension of the tenor, which it sort of is since it's an octave higher.

Coltrane started out that way. It was like a path upward from his tenor.

Right. I think his influence took a lot of people in that direction. He also had a particular tone that I think needed more work.

Well, he did, but he got it after about three years. I heard him all the time when he first started on it because I worked opposite him in the same club. We talked about some of the problems with it, such as pitch control, but two or three years later, he had it tamed, it did exactly what he wished it to do. You must subdue the beast so you can get it to swing quite a bit. Swing is not immediate. You must first get it to walk, and then run.

How long has your band been in existence?

About twenty years.

You've been expatriated, so you've lived in France since 1970. I still see you as being very vital and creative and what you call "on the cutting edge" of the music. There tends to be a viewpoint from this side that people living in Europe tend to lose that edge a bit. How do you feel about that?

It ain't necessarily so (laughter). You must go where you don't lose your vitality. In New York in the sixties my vitality was being sapped and stifled and stymied and subdued, and it was terrifying. It seemed like it was hopeless. Then I went away for a couple of years, came back, and it was worse. It seemed to open up and get a little better in the seventies, when I started peeking back. Since then I go back more frequently.

I think the seventies were a bad period for jazz.

I think it was a period when it was best to be busy doing your own thing because you couldn't count on any community support. It was a very tough time, yet glorious. That was when we did the research that was necessary to refine what we did in the sixties, the breakthrough period, a revolutionary period in jazz. The seventies was the time when you couldn't continue what you did, you had to make it go into a more modern direction in a more acceptable way. What we had found was too chaotic, we had to start shaping it.

If you can describe it to me, what ways did you personally find to shape your music?

Composition! By finding the appropriate structures to contain the type of improvisational material that we had discovered. What Monk had was the appropriate containers. He wrote the lines that made the guys sound good and that they liked to play. They developed a language and improvisation came naturally out of that material and it was a coherent whole. That was what I was after. The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music. Saxophone is part of that. I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete. You could play them over and over again, even just the heads. You could play them badly and they sounded good!

And he might even have liked them! There's a lot of consciousness about Monk now, but a lot of us were playing Monk when you couldn't get arrested for it. What I found early on was by studying his music it made you play differently right on the spot. If you really learned one of his tunes well and played it with some people, something new would emerge immediately. It would take you to another place to improvise.

That's right, that's a very good point. In effect, he was the brains of the bebop revolution and his pieces were the vehicles.

But a lot of people didn't play them in that era.

What's easy now was very difficult back then to learn and to play. It was very abstract. When I first started playing his music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing, they were "insiders." But as I learned those tunes from the records, the more interesting they became.

Do you feel that studying his music particularly helped you to discover your own voice?

Yes, that was the best model I could find to help me get to my own stuff. I played that as long as I could before I started to uncover my own sound. I still play his music sometimes at solo concerts.

I feel that for a lot of musicians who have delved very deeply into Monk, it has brought out something unique of themselves. It wasn't just that when we started playing his music that it made us play differently, it led us to another direction of how to "sing a song."

Monk himself could do that for the players who played with him: Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Rouse and all those great players.

After they played with him, something opened up for them, too. They all went on to something new.

Yes, that's why I needed to play with him, that's what it did for me. He was a great leader like that.

I love the work you and a friend of mine, Johnny Coles, did with Gil Evans. It's always stuck in my ears. How did you come about playing with Gil Evans?

He heard me play as an amateur on the Arthur Godfrey radio show. When I was a kid I had a Dixieland band on there in 1952. Five years later in 1957 he went looking for me and called me up and asked me to play on his first album under his own name. He wanted me to play the lead sound. This was very important in my life. He was able to recall my sound five years later and then find it. I love that album.

That's Gil Evans Plus Ten?

Yes. It's a record that sounds better with time. That was the beginning of my association with him which lasted until his death. We did the duo record just before he died.

You say he had the ability to remember your sound. I've also heard him talk about others' sounds. It seems he did much what Duke did which was write people's personal sounds into his music.

Duke was his inspiration. He heard Duke in person in 1929 with Bubber Miley. Louis Armstrong also greatly influenced him. He went way back in the music, he was very well educated, and a great talent.

He seemed to understand the significance of individuals. He did a record which featured Wayne Shorter on some tracks. I heard this record only in the last year or so and it completely blew my mind. The record is titled, 'The Individualism of Gil Evans.' He really appreciated individuals.

He was a collector. He used older players mixed with younger players, and it worked.

I try not to ask questions that put words in your mouth, but could you offer some advice to help people develop their own individuality?

Attach yourself to somebody stronger than you and get to the bottom of what they do. Then find somebody else. I think it is in collaboration that the nature of the art is revealed. I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here. I would advise everyone to start from where you are at this particular moment, and think about what you do , what you want to do and who you could work with that would help you get a little further. There must be somebody better than you (laughter)!

I'm quite certain there is. When I hear somebody like yourself say that, it's interesting because from the get-go I heard in you an immediately identifiable voice. When I heard John Coltrane play, I heard the same thing; Sonny Rollins the same thing, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson and all the players from that era seemed to have all developed that individual thing early on. They got better playing with the greats, obviously.

You have a point. It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing. If there's nothing happening in that sound, it's hard to imagine where you'll get with that. You can get to a journeyman stage, you can get to be a technician and recreative and all that, but originality and invention starts with something we haven't heard before.

Would you say it's a state of single mindedness?

It's a new sound. It seems simple, and it's a dangerous phrase, "a new sound," but I mean it. When I first heard Bechet to me it was new but I realized it was an old sound. When I tried to get on that train, what I came up with was a new sound because I really didn't know what I was doing. I was playing the mouthpiece upside-down for a few weeks while experimenting. Then I got lucky immediately. I started studying with Cecil Scott in New York, a bandleader and musician. He used to have a big band, a territory band called The Bright Boys, and a lot of great musicians played with him. He played tenor, clarinet, piano he was a great all around musician and teacher. He really helped me get started, he straightened me out. I studied with him for about a year and a half.

What kinds of things did he lay on you to help you to learn to swing? It's an important question, because I had this come up with a student. He couldn't swing if you hung him and it was really a problem.

There again I was really lucky. Where I was working at the time were these so-called Dixieland concerts where some of the greatest players in the world were playing, guys like Pee Wee Russell, Dickie Wells, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Jimmy Rushing, Max Kaminski, Cecil Scott and Red Allen and all these great cats. I cut my teeth in those places. First I was photographing them and selling the photographs, photography was my game at that time. Then I was studying with him, then I was sitting in, then I was hired. You can't tell somebody now to go out and do that because it doesn't exist. Most of those players are dead.

But those were all strong, original voices even if you put them all in the category of "Dixieland."

There were also schools: the Kansas City school, the New Orleans school, the Chicago school, especially those three. Plus there were some of the New York players and some from Washington and all the New Orleans guys. That was very important for me to be able to work for a season or two with guys like that. Then Cecil Taylor found me and threw me in the deep waters of the oceans.

Sink or swim, eh? I guess you could say that the regional influences are becoming more predominant again. Players are coming out of New Orleans, lots of players have come out of Chicago for years. There was a whole different attitude in Chicago all along. There are many fine players from here (SF Bay Area).

Yes, it depends on the individuals. It can be anywhere. People should learn that it can happen anywhere if you have a few individuals who are crazy enough and can get something going. Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work. What I learned with Cecil Taylor a bit back then was strategy and survival and how to resist the temptations and resist getting discouraged because if you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points and most people give up. If you're well schooled and tough enough, you persevere, like Monk did. Monk persevered and eventually became quite a star, making Time magazine and all that. I was working with him at that time. That music has gone all over the world and is still going very strong. It can happen. Other people like Herbie Nichols never got to hear his stuff performed and died young.

I would love to see more individuality developing in this part of the world. This is a strong subject in my mind.

It depends on what people want. I always had an individual streak; interested in something not everyone else was doing. I was after my own thing without even knowing what I was doing. But not everybody wants to do that. Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention. But performance is part of what we do, too. I'm lucky enough to be able to be involved in the preparation and the performance. That's where the saxophone comes in.

Were there a lot of problems when you first moved to Paris?

I would not recommend anyone coming to Paris and hoping to crack it. It's a rough place. It took me five to ten years before we got to the place where we could swing a bit over there. We had to start from scratch all over again which took a while in a strange place to cope, adhere and to surface above the water. You say the seventies were hard for you, well they were hard here too and that is why you really have to invent work. In the eighties the work was coming in, and it still is. But before it comes in, you have to invent it. If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called "do or die." In the fifties we rehearsed many times with Cecil, but only performed a few times. When I had a band with Roswell in the 'sixties doing all Monk nobody wanted to hear about that. Nobody would hire us. So we went block by block canvassing to find places to play. We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn. Of course, years later the record from that will sell forever. You have to go through hard times. People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world. I think it's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it and you have to persevere or give up. The next day you still sound rotten, and it goes on for quite a while until one day it starts to get a little better. Something is really happening in a phase like that.

That's really developing a drive that people don't usually have.

You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good.

Do you have anything you would like to add for the readers of this magazine?

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. I've been working on the soprano saxophone for forty years now and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination. Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with. You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others. I've performed solo for twenty years now, but I don't do much of it, and I don't do it too often, because it's an exceptional thing to do. If you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music. Jazz is people's music, a collectivity. Also, never play anything boring, but play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same, so you must keep stimulating yourself with good materials to keep your appetite alive.

© COPYRIGHT 1991 Mel Martin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

| Main Menu | Special Features | Upcoming Events | Bios | Sheet Music and Exercises | Education Page | Interviews and Articles | Mel's Bookmarks | Recordings | Bebop and Beyond 2000 | Booking Information | Endorsments and Awards |

| Home |

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Questions/comments about these web pages mel@melmartin.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© 1997 MEL MARTIN

[dz999999]

I have just learned Steve Lacy is dead. I went to see him at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he had just finished his 3 week mentoring of students, and he was supposed to appear for a recital. I was informed he had passed away. Very, very sad. Please post anything you might have, including Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, and his other influences. He was 70 years old.

No news yet on his website:

http://www.stevelacy.com/

You must look at this webpage where he discussed what he had just taught his students at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Intense!

http://www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org/ar.../may/s_lacy.htm

I always cry when great jazz musicians die.

Thanks,

DZ

[JSngry]

No news yet on his website:

http://www.stevelacy.com/

Uh...that's not his web site.

This is: http://senators.free.fr/index.html

[minew]

I was lucky enough to see Lacy twice in the last few years: once with the trio and once with the "Beat Suite" outfit. Both unforgettable performances.

I happened to be at the Velvet Lounge last night (in Chicago) when the news was announced. Despite a pretty solid performance (Sticks and Stones) the atmosphere was seriously (and uncharacteristically) glum all night.