Steve Lacy article

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http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=online&s=bennett101904

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REMEMBERING STEVE LACY.

Saxophone Solo

by Paul Bennett

Only at TNR Online

Post date: 10.19.04

The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who died in June at the age of 69, lived in Paris for 30 years, but his real home remained the vibrant New York of the 1950s--Jackson Pollock's unpredictable splashes, the streetwise verse of Frank O'Hara, the arabesques of Merce Cunningham's dancers. Lacy's quirky, elegant jazz took something from each. He treated everything from Dixieland to the fiercest avant garde as if it were all part of one coherent stream. He set poems to music and played for dancers, open to any situation. Age never dampened his conviction that music could be integral to other arts; a few years ago he played a solo show beside a Lichtenstein sculpture in front of the Seagram Building. As the evening light danced off the building's dark windows, and Park Avenue traffic provided counterpoint, the sculpture and his music became one.

Lacy made some 250 records. The one I happened to first stumble on was Capers, a 1979 live date with the bassist Ronnie Boykins and the drummer Dennis Charles. Lacy generally avoided the quartet format dominant in jazz; the trio, without the harmonic hegemony of the piano, worked better for him. When he did play with a pianist, such as Mal Waldron, with whom he made many recordings, he preferred the intimacy of a duo. But his tunes could be played in any format--solo, duo, trio, big band, with or without voice--which gave him a flexibility rare in a jazz musician.

The tunes on Capers are sinuous and serpentine, the improvisations based not on chord changes but on the actual melodies themselves--their edge, their skin, their implications. The flesh--the harmonic side--is just hinted at (in the interaction with the bass lines), and does not dominate as it does in jazz standards. The names of the tunes--"Quirks," "Capers," "The Crunch"--are wryly onomatopoetic. Lacy's tone is dry and crisp, indebted to neither the lush madness of Coltrane's "sheets of sound," nor the whorehouse wail of Sidney Bechet's giant vibrato. Lacy never plays too fast; his nimble acrobatics always seem genuine, never sleight of hand. He is Rabelais filtered through Beckett; Joyce poured into a glass of haiku.

Like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, Lacy forged a language that drew from jazz yet resisted its autocratic conventions. His was a language of odd intervals, a huge palette of sounds--more than any jazz musician before or after him--and a highly nuanced attention to rhythm. Lacy played briefly with the pianist Thelonious Monk in the '60s, and Monk's tunes became a core part of his repertoire, along with the work of Mingus and Ellington. With the trombonist Roswell Rudd, Lacy was the first to regularly play Monk's music, which he refracted through the prism of his own developing style. This work was a hint of things to come. After settling in Paris, he composed steadily, working with both a small coterie of musicians who grew to know his work well, and others--such as the guitarist Derek Bailey and the saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker--with whom his musical language dovetailed.

What sets Lacy apart from other jazz composers is his devotion to the song form. Influenced by everyone from Weill to Webern, Lacy's settings of poetry borrow from both jazz and classical music yet are beholden to neither. His output--over 100 settings of poets such as Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Kaufman--makes him something of a jazz Schubert. Like Schubert, Lacy wraps a mantle around the words, adding a new layer of meaning with melodies that enhance and illuminate them, as if the music were his own gloss of the text. At gigs without a vocalist--always his wife, the singer Irene Aebi--Lacy would simply read the poem before launching into the tune. His voice deployed the same shades of nuance that his horn did.

Lacy never stopped performing, continually documenting his music in the studio and polishing it on the road. "I have to be out of Paris to be of Paris," he told me when I visited him there ten years ago, horn in hand, for a lesson. Dapper, with reading glasses dangling from a cord around his neck, Lacy greeted me with a smile. His apartment in the Marais was filled with books, records, and memorabilia. The walls were covered with photos and prints, and a piano was tucked into a corner of the room. The curtains were open, but the afternoon light was muted and serene. Lacy's voice was warm, and his speech tended toward aphorisms not unlike those of the painter Georges Braque, whose terse, incisive ideas ("We will never have any peace," "The present is perpetual") comprised for him small pools reflecting light on creativity. They got under Lacy's skin, and he made them his own by setting 14 of them to music, to be played by a soprano and an alto saxophonist, and recording them on an album called Tips. Braque's notebook, Lacy wrote in the liner notes, was "advice to himself as an artist, and to all other artists. Braque's sayings were an enormous help to me, in my own development, and as I kept repeating these things to myself, over a period of many years, they began to seem like tunes."

Lacy's Tips, like Braque's speech, is simple in structure and form--most cuts are two or three measures long--which makes them especially challenging to the improviser. Lacy favors wide intervals, and many of the Tips are clever sequences of, say, fourths and fifths. "Illustrated by the improvised sections," he wrote, "the result is a sort of 'casebook cantata' and a working examination into the nature of free play, in this case between two saxophonists, but also about preparation and spontaneity, and of music and information." Preparation and spontaneity might well sum up Lacy's musical ethos, a balance between the rigid formalism of bop and the unrestrained liberty of free improvisation. He adheres to neither credo, but instead weaves strands from both into his music.

A Zen-like clarity--a wry approach to the ineffable--was at the core of his art. "It's all about intervals," Lacy told me that afternoon in Paris. And yet, he said, these building blocks--atoms of musical "information"--are overlooked, deemed simplistic, pushed aside for the supposedly more important complexities. "An interval is already a word, as well as a world," Lacy said. To explore that world, he created an exercise to grapple with intervals, which he explained to me in some detail. "First, notate all the intervals up to a tenth possible on the saxophone, from each note on the horn--that is, from low B-flat to high E, above which there is only one interval, a half-step to F. Then cut them off the page one by one. Throw them in a bowl, mix them up. Pull them out and paste them on a new page in random order. Then find a way to work with them."

Unlike other major jazz musicians, Lacy founded no movement, left no school, and never achieved the iconic status of a Miles Davis or a John Coltrane--though in the end, his achievement is on equal footing with theirs. Among musicians, even his most fervent admirers acknowledge that his highly personal approach could never be imitated--though perhaps a poet or a painter may try someday.

Paul Bennett is a writer and musician who lives in New York City.

[DTMX]

... whorehouse wail ...

My new favorite phrase.

[pryan]

There is also a very good interview with Lacy in the latest Cadence. It was done in 1988.

[Late]

What do you all think of the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph? I'd have to go along with it, though it seems a bold statement. But ... maybe it's not really so bold? I think time (the passing of it) will only heighten whatever legacy, and I think it's a substantial one, Lacy left for us.

[Late]

[blue lake]

Great article. Lacy was so prolific over such a wide geography and long expanse of time he touched thousands if not millions of people and his music leaves a lot for rediscovery. As an artist of process over style, as someone who took the lessons of Monks (i.e. harmonics as they relate to voicing the ensemble) and personalized them, as an artist who blurred the boundary lines between jazz and other music in the world, as an artist who was always on the offensive bringing his music to the people not trying to second guess the people's desires from a defensive, re-active position, Steve Lacy will be remembered for the integrity of his career. As someone who worked with Rex Stewart and Cecil Taylor he remains a musician to be emulated. Not to mention how well he could improvise or the personal sound of his horn.

[alankin]

There is also a very good interview with Lacy in the latest Cadence. It was done in 1988.

Yeah, that's an excellent interview. There's a lot of what of what he says about musical practice that could be seen as metaphors on creativity. (I think I should give a copy to a friend of mine who's a painter/painting teacher.)