Jazz Articles about Steve Lacy

Steve Lacy: The Way

by AAJ Staff
June 16, 2005

By Francis Lo Kee

The great Steve Lacy, recently departed, made many records, but this one captures a great ensemble at the peak of its creative powers. It's a two-CD set from one concert in Basel in 1979, and it's hard to believe that so much great music was played in one sitting. “Stamps has Lacy's signature angular, repeated (almost minimalist, à la Terry Riley or Steve Reich) phrases that function in the role of the traditional ...

Steve Lacy/Jo: One More Time

by Eyal Hareuveni
May 20, 2005

Just before the late soprano sax master Steve Lacy decided to say farewell to Europe and relocate to the States, he conducted a series of farewell solo and duets concerts in Belgium, organized by his loyal fans. Lacy invited some old-time friends to these events, such as a fellow Parisian, master improviser, and double-bassist, Joëllle Léandre, who had played with him many times in the past but never recorded with him in such an intimate context. One More Time documents ...

Steve Lacy and Japan

by Gilles Laheurte
October 9, 2004

Pretty much like “Rosebud," Orson Welles' famous mysterious enigma in Citizen Kane, there was “something" about Japan in Steve Lacy's life, something that no one will ever fully understand. Call it karmic ties, call it subconscious bond, call it deep inner connection, there was “something" there, definitely. Ever since his first tour in 1975 (invited by Aquirax Aida, critic, producer, poet, fan, that Lacy considered as “The Diaghilev of Jazz"), Steve always talked about Japan with a certain inner glow ...

Memories Of Steve Lacy

by Todd S. Jenkins
September 8, 2004

Steve Lacy's return to America in 2002, following three decades in France, was welcomed with as much enthusiasm as Dexter Gordon's triumphant repatriation in the '70s. A quirky and beloved individualist, Lacy, who died in Boston of liver cancer on June 4, 2004, took a mongrel horn and brought it into a permanent place of jazz prominence. Lacy was the first jazz musician since Sidney Bechet to concentrate specifically on the soprano saxophone, and his adeptness inspired John Coltrane to ...

Steve Lacy: 1934-2004

by AAJ Staff
July 24, 2004

It was some time in 1956 playing with my college Dixieland band when our regular reed man could not make a gig. We were intrigued by what we heard about a rising new star on the New York jazz scene. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy was gaining a reputation for playing the old music in a more modern way. And that was exactly what I wanted to be doing, too. If you were to check me out a year later, you ...

A Fireside Chat With Steve Lacy

by AAJ Staff
June 5, 2004

As one of the most recorded artists of our time, conventional wisdom would suggest that Steve Lacy material shouldn't age well. Conventional wisdom be damned because Lacy's records have stood the test of time and moreover, Lacy himself has actually gotten better as the years have passed. For example, his latest recordings on hatOLOGY with his Roswell Rudd quartet, School Days, and with the Steve Lacy 6, We See, are better than his Novus material from the Eighties. His initial ...

Steve Lacy: The Holy La

by Ken Waxman
March 10, 2004

This fine trio CD takes its name from something held sacred by musicians: “la," the pitch to which all instruments are almost always tuned. During the course of these nine tracks, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and his associates also prove that they can do just anything they want with any variations of “la" and the other degrees of the scale most famously celebrated by Rodgers and Hammerstein in the song “Do-Re-Mi." During a career that stretches back more ...