Remembrances: Steve Lacy

Originally written 6/7/2004.

The Rent
In lieu of drowning myself in the rampant hero-worship of someone whose greatest accomplishment was spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and scattering their still-deadly nuclear arsenal to the four winds, I'm going to imagine that all those flags are flying at half-staff for the inimitable Steve Lacy, who passed away Friday at 69.

If Sidney Bechet was the godfather of the soprano saxophone, Lacy was its best friend, and the man who brought that instrument into the modern era; he was also one of the dwindling few improvisers who truly transcended any instrument.

During the course of studying and appreciating his music, I started to believe that Lacy's use of this relatively obscure horn helped him to forge his own path through the wilderness of jazz in the fifties. While many other improvisers were content to follow in the footsteps of the avatars of their respective instruments—Charlie Parker on the alto sax, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young (and later, Coltrane) on the tenor, Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge on the trumpet, etc.—Lacy’s choice of the soprano allowed him to avoid the competitive stylistic arms race and focus on developing his own individualistic sound.

Further removing Lacy from the growing trend toward post-Parker bebop orthodoxy was his devotion to the music of Thelonious Monk, who admonished his sidemen not to "play bebop on my tunes." And from the late 1950s to the present the listener can hear his mastery of the instrument increase and his personal vision mature, until he and the saxophone burned away, and all that remained was "the voice." When watching him perform, as with a select few other master improvisers, one got the impression that even if Lacy was standing on stage with no instrument in his hands, somehow the same sounds would be coming out.

My only conversation with him came at an overpriced, dingy basement of a jazz club in New York, during one of his all-too infrequent stateside visits—this was before he returned from his decades-long stay in Europe to Boston, which unfortunately coincided with my own move to the West coast, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of his increased U.S. performances.

Lacy was performing with his longtime trio—Jean-Jacques Avenal on bass and John Betsch on drums—and had just spent the past hour spinning webs and "scramblin' eggs" on his own compositions and a handful of Monk’s tunes.

As he left the stage and began to field questions and compliments from his many admirers, I waited for my opening and jumped in, aware that I was keeping him from a seat and presumably needed rest—so I hoped to be succinct.

I asked him if he ever gave private lessons during his time in the States; he told me that it was difficult since he never stayed long; but he recommended that I first work with his book, Findings, which he said contained most of what he would tell a prospective student anyway, and said, "when you finish working through that, let me know and we'll get together." (Four or five years later, I'm not finished working through it, and unfortunately it's now all I'll get.) Then he asked me what instrument I played.

"Trumpet," I said.

"Ah, trumpet. That's good." I hesitated for a second, then decided this might be my only chance to clarify this, and asked him why it was good. He smiled. "Well, because it's a discursive instrument—you know, it tells a story."

For an improviser, that’s really something to remember, amidst all the necessary technique and theoretical knowledge that goes into learning to play jazz—it tells a story. I ask myself this question as often as I can: Am I telling a story? Or am I just playing notes? Am I saying something, or just speaking words?

In the liner notes to his album The Rent, Lacy talks about the title composition, written in the 1990s for a departed friend (the critic Laurent Goddet). He explains, "the title 'The Rent' is a play on words. When Laurent died, it left a rent – a rent meaning a tear, a hole or a gap. And now, we pay the rent with it."

This really is a terrible loss.