I learned about Steve Lacy from his collaboration with Misha Mengelberg on Regeneration, which I bought in 1986 at The Jazz Inn record store in Den Haag, in The Netherlands. The album features one side with Herbie Nichols’ tunes and the other with Monk's tunes. The quintet consisted of three Americans: Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd, and Kent Carter; and two Dutch musicians: Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink.
This album had a huge impact on my jazz journey. It opened the door to: Steve Lacy; the Instant Composers Pool (ICP), an independent Dutch jazz and improvised music label and orchestra; trombonist Roswell Rudd; and, of course, Herbie Nichols. Nichols’ tunes fascinated me, and Lacy’s playing on them stood out the most. I would keep my eyes and ears open for him. From Regeneration, here is Nichols’ song Twelve Bars:
In 1990, I saw Steve Lacy’s Sextet play at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland. Since Regeneration, I had developed into a huge fan and this was a very rare opportunity to see the expatriate Lacy playing in America, let alone all the way out on the West Coast. The show was fantastic.
I met with Lacy afterward and he signed this The Wire magazine - the landmark magazine’s first issue, which is still going strong today.
He loved that I actually had a copy of this first issue. After all, the magazine takes its name from Lacy’s composition The Wire, from his album of the same name, released in 1977 on the Japanese Denon Jazz label:
This is probably my favorite Lacy album. The string-dominated sound of this group (piano, cello, two bass, and percussion) works extremely well with Lacy’s lone soprano sax. Lacy composed all the songs on this one. When you have some downtime, check out this gem here - at least go to the 24:49 minute mark and listen to Cloudy. It is incredible.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Steve Lacy was born in New York City in 1934. As a young boy, when he heard Sidney Bechet & His New Orleans Feetwarmers’ song The Mooche, he took up the soprano sax and never looked back.
During 1953 and 1954, he studied at Boston's Schillinger House of Music (later the Berklee School) and then at the Manhattan School of Music, before meeting the revolutionary Monk-inspired free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. He played in Taylor's group from 1955 to 1957, until signing with Prestige to record his debut Soprano Sax, released in 1957.
His second album for Prestige, Reflections, released in 1959, features all Monk tunes, the first album devoted entirely to Monk’s music recorded by another musician. This was the beginning of his long obsession with Monk’s compositions. That said, I find this recording restrained, and there’s nothing worse than Monk tunes played with restraint.
In 1960, he worked with Thelonious Monk for four months. A vivid proponent of Monk's music long before it was fashionable, he spent the next 12 years working out the possibilities of Monk’s compositions. Also in 1960, he recorded his third album, the fantastic The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy on the Candid label and, with help from Sun Ra’s baritone player Charles Davis, Lacy starts to loosen up. From that album here is Monk’s tune Played Twice:
From 1961 to 1964, along with ex-Dixieland trombonist Roswell Rudd, Lacy led a quartet that played exclusively Monk tunes. It was this legendary quartet, with Henry Grimes on bass and Dennis Charles on Drums, that Lacy finally started to dig into Monk’s music with abandon. Incredibly, in 1975, Emanem released School Days, a 1963 privately taped live performance of this quartet at the Phase Two Coffee House in New York City - the only recorded document of this fine quartet.
From this album, here is Lacy’s quartet playing Monk’s tune Brilliant Corners:
In 1965, Lacy went to Europe for the first time. In Italy, he formed a band with Italian trumpet player Enrico Rava. The quartet included Johnny Dyani on bass, and Louis Moholo on drums, who in the early 1960s were both members of South Africa's first integrated jazz band, The Blue Notes.
The band’s only album The Forest and the Zoo was recorded on October 8, 1966, in Buenos Aires, Argentina:
After this recording, the quartet returned to New York City. Lacy took the master tapes to the ESP-Disk offices at 156 Fifth Avenue and sold them to owner Bernard Stollman, who had founded the label in 1964.
ESP-Disk released the album in 1967 with an album cover featuring a painting by Abstract Expressionist painter Bob Thompson.
Born in Louisville Kentucky, Thompson studied pre-med at Boston University but soon moved back to the University of Kentucky to study art. In 1958, he moved to New York City, played drums, and befriended bass player Charlie Haden, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and other experimental musicians spearheading the free jazz movement. In fact, on his Impulse! album Mama Too Tight, Archie Sheep dedicated a song to Thompson, Portrait of Robert Thompson as a Young Man.
Thompson spoke the language of jazz and improvisation, which came through in his paintings.
He was a bohemian but had a thing for Renaissance and Baroque art. When he moved to France in 1961, he studied these works in Paris museums.
I saw my first Thompson painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2019. Several paintings in the show evoke the sex, drinking, and merriment characteristic of the bohemians in New York City. One of them, Homage to Nina Simone, shows nude men, women, and children grooving to music in an idyllic, park-like landscape in the style of “bacchanal” paintings of the Baroque era.
You can clearly see the similarity to Nicolas Poussin’s painting Bacchanal with Lute-Player, from around 1630. Thompson had seen this painting in the Louvre.
Thompson painted his tribute to Nina Simone in 1965. The following spring, in Rome, he overdosed on heroin and died. He was 28.
A Thompson painting also appears on Lacy’s “One Fell Swoop” album, released by the Silkheart label in 1987:
While in Paris in 1987, Lacy recorded many fine albums: Momentum with his Sextet; The Window with his trio, released in 1988 on the Italian Soul Note label; and Paris Blues, a duo with Gil Evans, released on the Owl label in 1988. These were the albums that came out while I was in Germany and just starting to dig Lacy’s music. In 1990, when I was back in California, Lacy brought his sextet out to the West Coast for that rare tour.
Although Lacy remained an expat living in Paris since 1970, in 2002, he returned to the U.S. to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Also in 2002, the French Free Lance label released another of my favorite Lacy albums - a CD this time: The Holy La.
During this session, Lacy's band is perfectly aligned. Both French bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and American drummer John Betsch had played with Lacy since the mid-1980s and the band’s synergy shows.
From The Holy La, here is The Wane, which in its simplicity is intense.
Here’s one more for the road. From Lacy’s New Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden 2002, released in 2006 on the Swiss hatOLOGY label, here is DW 1.2 Remix:
I think it’s interesting to listen to this improvisation compared to Lacy’s earlier improvisation on The Forest and the Zoo. Lacy’s music has come a long way.
As Grachan Moncur III did for the trombone, Steve Lacy gave the soprano saxophone a prominent role in modern jazz. He was a true pioneer in American music and deserves much wider recognition.
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in to explore the waters of trombonist Roswell Rudd.
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