[Dixielandjazz] Steve Lacy OBIT

[Stephen Barbone]

Well, another GIANT is dead. If you are not familiar with Steve Lacy,
please read the obit. He was an exztraordinary DIXIELAND player in NYC
during my time there. Influenced originally by Sidney Bechet and Pee Wee
Russell. He then quickly went on to Modern jazz with Thelonious Monk and
finally Avant Garde with Cecil Taylor. He then made his own music, as an
expatriate in Europe, and he did it very well. Very much his own man and
that's what counts isn't it?

Sadly,
Steve Barbone

June 5, 2004,  NY TIMES

Steve Lacy, 69, Who Popularized the Soprano Saxophone, (sic)  Dies

By BEN RATLIFF

      Steve 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.