Steve Lacy: In Memoriam

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy died the other day. To call him a giant would be to exaggerate his stature, perhaps. Lacy was a medium-sized man, and a medium-sized talent, but his work exuded a kind of musicality that clearly had very little to do with mere technique.

Lacy came to jazz by an unusual route. He was a photographer who got sucked into the world he was capturing on film. He chose an instrument that was rarely played by anyone, and then only as a “second” horn, and he paid his dues at the two extremes of the genre—first in Dixieland, with Dickey Wells, Buck Clayton and others, and then in the realms of free jazz being conjured in the fifties by iconoclastic pianist Cecil Taylor.

Reflecting later on those difficult and riotous times, Lacy’s observed that club owners were doing everything they could to prevent Lacy and his band from getting work—although he also notes that most people were offended by the music he was playing. (Perhaps there was a connection?) In any case, Lacy and his cohorts continued to press on, “abandoning all precepts of melody, harmony, rhythm and form” until they found themselves in Paris, where the audiences were only slightly friendlier.

But the Lacy many people got to know and appreciate grew from his discovery of the compositions and improvisations of Thelonious Monk, with whom he also played during the fifties. Though Monk’s music had its roots in stride piano, his tunes were angular and his harmonies bluntly dissonant. If any formal conception was capable of capturing the halting edginess that Lacy felt driven to express, it was Monk’s.

Over the years Lacy made a series of recordings of Monk tunes, one of the first, and best, being Impressions. He also made many “out” or “free” recordings, some of which no doubt have a joyous and grating brilliance that can be deeply moving—if you really listen. Though I haven’t followed that side of Lacy’s career closely, Live at Sweet Basil recorded with his vocalist/wife and a second soprano sax, offers noisy mainstream nightclub jazz at its modern best.

In the midst of a highly exploratory career, Lacy always seemed to find time to work with pianist Mal Waldron. Waldron, who early in his career was Billy Holiday’s favorite accompanist, approaches the keyboard in a stolid and rhythmic way, strumming and rattling it far more often that he tickles it or prances across its keys. Heavily influenced by Cecil Taylor’s thorny complexities, Waldron’s own style is more traditional, and often quite sedate. When he and Lacy settle into a series of beautiful tunes, as in the duo albums Hot House, Communique, or Sempré Amore, we feel that we’re listening to two master musicians threading their way unhurriedly through the landscape of modern jazz with exuberance and purity, as if they were conversing on the back porch after a good meal.

Lacy’s style in these recordings is anything but fluid. Unlike those who have used the soprano effectively to create dazzling streams of glittering sound—one thinks of Sonny Fortune and John Coltrane—Lacy’s notes often arrive in slightly clumsy stutters, as if he were having trouble with his reed and needed extra time to force the music out. The lag is so uniform, unmannered, and subtle, however, that the effect is one of sincere emotion—like a hidden sob in the throat—rather than of inarticulateness. Some of the numbers on the duo albums are so slow, they become almost arrhythmic, like meditative forest calls, which makes one wonder if Lacy had ever studied the shakuhachi.

I heard Lacy only once, at the old Dakota Restaurant in St. Paul, where he was performing with a bass-player and drummer he’d brought over from France. A balding man with a large forehead, he wore a blocky square-cut suit made of glistening ash-colored cloth that would have looked ridiculous in any other setting. On Lacy, sitting in the spotlight in a bar in front of forty or fifty fans, it simply looked “cool.” He played a few of his favorite tunes—“The Bath,” “The Rent”—and it was fascinating to sit ten feet from the Master’s little trio as it filled the room with sound.

The bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel was a virtuoso, and he succeeded in sustaining a chordal environment within which Lacy’s thoughtful and insistent trains of melody could flourish. The music was unique, wandering, repetitive, and often intense. Lacy had been playing those tunes for forty years, and it was obvious that he still took pleasure in seeing what kind of life he could draw from them. (Isn’t this what jazz is all about?)

The life was still there, and find it he did.