Jazz Articles about Steve Lacy

Steve Lacy

by Todd S. Jenkins
January 13, 2003

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy is not only one of the few players since Sidney Bechet to specialize on the straight horn, he has become one of the most prolifically recorded musicians in jazz during a career that has spanned nearly fifty years. Though his early roots were in Dixieland, where he freely drew from Bechet's legacy, Lacy's major claims to fame have been as an avant-gardist and one of the premier interpreters of Thelonious Monk's music. Lacy's ...

Steve Lacy: Snips: Live at Environ

by Robert Spencer
February 1, 2001

1976. Lacy, long in exile, appeared in a loft in New York. People sat on couches or on the floor to hear him play solo. The music would have been gone in the air were it not for a young man named Jim Eigo. The recording is a bit dodgy here and there - was the tape recorder in his coat? - but the music comes through with remarkable clarity and force.

Here was Lacy exploring the full possibilities of ...

Steve Lacy: Hooky

by Robert Spencer
January 1, 2001

Steve Lacy playing solo makes a high and lonesome sound - nothing like Bill Monroe, of course, but more like the feeling of wind and snow on the face. It's cool, clear music, pure and high and possessing a deep delight at its core that sometimes remains hidden - only to surprise and enchant the listener when it reappears.

Hooky is a recording of a 1976 concert in Montreal. Four of the tracks were released on a 1979 LP, but ...

Steve Lacy: Hooky

by AAJ Staff
December 1, 2000

Four years after his first recorded solo saxophone concerts, Steve Lacy took the show on the road to North America. Two recently released documents allow today's listener a window into Lacy's approach in the spring of 1976: Snips [JazzMagnet], recorded in a New York loft, and Hooky [Emanem], from a Montreal church performance. The Montreal show was Lacy's favorite, and so it has finally been released in its entirety 24 years later (minus an aborted solo and audience applause).

Listeners ...

Steve Lacy: Snips

by AAJ Staff
September 1, 2000

Saxophonist Steve Lacy made his first American solo appearance in March, 1976. He chose to play at John Fischer's Environ, one of several “loft performing spaces" which prospered in New York at the time. Fortunately for listeners in the 21st century, Jim Eigo was there with a cassette recorder. The sound quality of the 2-disc set which resulted, Snips, is less than optimal--but the performance itself was a major landmark, and the recording remains a beautiful document of the era. ...

Steve Lacy: Snips

by Derek Taylor
September 1, 2000

In the admittedly narrow annals of solo saxophone music Steve Lacy has managed to set standards of prolificacy unmatched by any of his illustrious peers. Even Evan Parker, who is regaled far and wide as the master of the idiom has failed to even come close to Lacy’s numbers when it comes to recordings. Here then is another set of solo improvisations and compositions by the reigning maestro of the straight horn. Is it essential? That would be dependant upon ...

Steve Lacy Three: N.Y. Capers & Quirks

by Robert Spencer
July 1, 2000

The Steve Lacy Trio with Jean-Jacques Avenel and John Betsch has been touring around the country for a few years now, purveying a stylish cool that contrasts interestingly with the trio on this disc: Lacy with bassist Ronnie Boykins and drummer Dennis Charles. This disc, recorded in 1979, captures Lacy during a freer, more fiery period. Boykins, who never got the recognition he deserved for his ground-breaking work on bass in the Sun Ra Arkestra, and Charles, a legendarily incendiary ...