Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Reflections on Steve Lacy

I've always thought that if there really is a God he--got to be a he with that kind of ego--is a great practical joker. One of his favorite little tricks is to drop a genius into a perfectly ordinary family and sit back and laugh his ass off while the gifted one tries to figure out where he or she is really supposed to be and the rest of the family struggles to learn to live with an alien in their midst. Cracks God up everytime.

For many years, my next door neighbor was a beautiful, silver-haired little old widow lady named Sophie Lackritz. Sophie had arrived in New York from Minsk in 1906, married a man in the schmata trade (the garment business, for those of you who don't speak New York), and had three children--Buddy, who followed his dad into the rag business; Blossom, who got married and mothered a future Pulitizer Prize winner, and Steve. Steve was the strange one. As a teenager he found a soprano saxophone somewhere, brought it home and taught himself to play. Soon he was skipping school and hanging out and studying with black musicians like Cecil Taylor. At 22, he played on Taylor's first album. He was 24 when he recorded his first album called Reflections in 1958. He later played in the Thelonius Monk Big Band. To Sophie, who never owned a record player or sat down and listened to music in her life, this was was all a tragedy. "He was starving...we had to take him groceries...he lived in this awful place...he wouldn't listen to us."

Alas, Steve Lacy (by then he had taken a new name) arrived on the scene just as jazz was about to succumb to the British invasion so he did a reverse migration and moved to Paris, where he lived for the next 40 years, writing and recording, touring widely in Europe with his group, and building a reputation as the premiere composer and performer of the soprano sax. My wife and I got to know him from his visits with Sophie and by attending his New York concerts in the 90s. A nicer man never lived.

Although Sophie frequently told us "he don't make no money," he was clearly her favorite. She saved every postcard he ever sent her (which she gave me for safekeeping before she went into assisted living). She was thrilled when he won the McArthur Genius Award because there was finally a monetary value she could associate with his work but she was dismayed that he split it with his longtime band. She never really got the music thing. I once attended a concert that Steve did at one of the big South Bank theaters in London--a brilliant improvisation with a young percussionist he had never met before they walked out on stage together. I brought Sophie the review from the Times of London and she looked at it sadly. "He was a brilliant boy," she said. "He could have been anything if he hadn't gone into that junky music."

Steve returned to the United States in 2002, where he began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music. He died of cancer in 2003 at 69--only three or four years after his mother died in a Buffalo retirement home. In Saxovision, he wrote his own epitaph:

Steve Lacy Concert Tonight: Singer Monika Heidemann, joined by reedists Josh Sinton and Oscar Noriega and guitarist Khabu will perform one set of vocal works by Steve Lacy as part of the Gnu Vox vocal series at Cornelia St. Cafe tonight at 10:00 PM. Cover is $10.

They will focus on the texts of writer, painter, and mystic, Brion Gysin, set to the music of Lacy. Lacy and Gysin had a long and fruitful collaboration that spanned several decades. Together they collaborated on nearly 20 original songs ("Somebody Special," "Nowhere Street," "Dreams," and "Gay Paree Bop" among others) and one record (Songs). Lacy was a teacher of both Heidemann and Sinton.

posted by Jerry Bowles 11/10/2005