By Robert Spencer
He grew up in Brooklyn and one day he heard Sidney Bechet playing soprano saxophone. So he got himself a soprano saxophone and before too long was good enough to play with Dixieland groups around New York. On one of those occasions he literally made a name for himself - or trumpeter Rex Stewart made a name for him, by telling young Steve Lackritz that he should call himself Lacy instead.
All this was almost fifty years before Steve Lacy, full of honors and awards and commemorations, is almost universally recognized as an artist of the first rank and a master of the soprano saxophone.
An almost universally recognized Unsung Hero? Sure. Lacy is one of the legion of American musicians who've sought their fortunes in Europe - Paris in Lacy's case - and by doing so have missed the attention that should have been their due in their home country. (A young man I once tried to teach about music once told me that I should speak to his uncle, who "listened to jazz all the time." Did he know Lacy, I asked one time. No, reported the young man, Uncle had never heard of him. Unfortunately this was not an isolated incident.)
Although his premier influence was Bechet, Lacy does not sound like him when he plays soprano saxophone. The soprano is a notoriously treacherous instrument, hard to play in tune; Bechet met this problem with a wide vibrato that quavered over intonation problems. Lacy, on the other hand, met it head on, developing a crystalline, vibratoless tone and staying in tune by adjustments now made automatically, but developed by arduous work.
Lacy also doesn't sound like Bechet because after just a few years he stopped playing Dixieland. He met a young man named Cecil Taylor, a pianist who hired him for his first recording on Blue Note and did the added service of introducing him to the music of another pianist, Thelonious Monk. Lacy had found the body of work that would preoccupy him for the balance of his lifetime, and which he would do a great deal to show to be classically powerful and worthy of close, careful attention.
In the early Sixties he co-led a quartet with trombonist Roswell Rudd that played nothing but Monk tunes; more, in fact, than Monk himself was playing with his own quartet. He has recorded many albums of Monk compositions, including several on unaccompanied soprano saxophone - inspired by Anthony Braxton, the pioneer of unaccompanied reeds.
Among all this Monkish activity he developed into a noteworthy composer himself, and led a remarkably long-lived sextet consisting of vocalist Irene Aebi, underrated alto and soprano man Steve Potts, pianist Bobby Few, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson (later replaced by John Betsch). This sextet, and portions of it consisting of one to five members, made a large number of noteworthy recordings and drew critical praise. He also became a master of virtually any style, from free to Dixieland and back again.
Lacy has a small but dedicated following in the United States, who greet his trips home enthusiastically. If this were a just world, this following would be much larger.
