LACY, STEVE

LACY, STEVE (Steven Lackritz; 1934–2004), U.S. soprano saxophonist. Before Steve Lacy reinvented it, the only major jazz musician to play soprano saxophone as a solo instrument was Sidney Bechet. Lacy would not only bring the instrument, admittedly a difficult one to master, to the forefront of jazz but, along with John Coltrane, whom he inspired, would turn it into a major voice in contemporary improvisational music. Lacy was born in New York and raised on the city's Upper West Side. Like Bechet before him, he began his musical career as a clarinetist but after hearing the older man's 1941 recording of Duke Ellington's "The Mooche" on soprano, he took up the horn himself. By the mid-1950s, he was engaged in a most unusual balancing act, playing traditional New Orleans jazz with the likes of Buck Clayton, Pee Wee Russell, and Henry "Red" Allen, and the most difficult of avant-garde music with pianist Cecil Taylor. Lacy would spend six years with Taylor and always said that the combination of two such radically different musical experiences was the best possible training a musician could have. It certainly prepared him for the next phase of his career, playing with Thelonious Monk, then leading a band that played nothing but Monk's compositions. Lacy's astringent tone and dry wit combined with his deceptively simple melodies with their sudden swerving lines to make him the perfect horn player to interpret Monk. He said of Monk's music, "(It's) not too high, not too low, not easy, not at all overplayed and most of all, full of interesting technical problems." Monk's compositional techniques clearly influenced Lacy's own writing; his own compositions, like many of his mentor's, are deceptively simple-sounding but freighted with harmonic and melodic surprises. The audience for avant-garde jazz, never large in America, had dried up by the mid-1960s and Lacy went into exile looking for an artistic outlet. After false starts in Buenos   Aires and Rome, he settled in Paris, where he would spend the next three decades. There he found a core group of sympathetic musicians with whom he would perform in various permutations: cellist-vocalist Irene Aebi (his wife), pianists Mal Waldron and Bobby Few, bassist Steve Potts, and drummer Jean-Jacques Avenel. He recorded prolifically, his output covering well over 300 albums, including more than 20 solo sessions, but he returned repeatedly to Monk, Ellington, and Charles Mingus as well as his own seemingly endless flow of inventive composition. "He developed his saxophone tone to be as attenuated as a Hemingway sentence, and his improvised lines as succinct," Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times when Lacy died. At the time of his death, Lacy had returned to the U.S. and was teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music, giving birth to yet another generation of soprano saxophonists. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: I. Carr, "Steve Lacy," in: Jazz: The Rough Guide (1995); M. Martin, "Steve Lacy," in: The Saxophone Journal (Nov./Dec. 1991); B. Ratliff, "Steve Lacy, 69, Who Popularized the Soprano Saxophone," in: New York Times (June 5, 2004); G. Rouy, "Farewell Paris: Steve Lacy Returns to America," in: Downbeat (Oct. 2002). (George Robinson (2nd ed.)