Looking back on my many years of residence in Paris, one of the musical associations of which I am most proud was touring and recording with the marvelous soprano sax player and composer Steve Lacy. He called me in 1984 to help him prepare the recording and performances of “Futurities” (Hat Hut, 1985 – 2 LP’s/CD’s), an astonishing multi-media event with a 9 piece band, two dancers – Elsa Wolliaston and Douglas Dunn, 20 poems by Robert Creeley set to music by Steve, as well as a 9 foot tall painting in the form of an inverted triangle by Kenneth Nolan which was unfurled as a scenario for our live performances. We premiered the show at L’Opera du Nord in Lille and toured much of Europe, including a memorable 3-week British Arts Council Tour. And I got to do the show as a trio with Steve and Irene Aebi at the Salon du Livre in Aix-en-Provence. The recording was done direct to 2 tracks at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This blending of seemingly disparate elements was typical of Steve, who was capable of playing with a Japanese Noh dancer, Gil Evans’ big band, Thelonious Monk (aside from playing on Monk’s “Big Band and Quartet in Concert”, Steve recorded several magnificent albums of Monk’s music, including “Reflections”, with Mal Waldron, (Prestige, 1958) – decades before Monk was canonized as one of jazz’s greatest composers), Cecil Taylor (Steve played on Cecil’s debut album, “Jazz Advance”), Roswell Rudd, Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, and most of Europe’s leading avant garde jazz musicians.
Steve was born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York, July 23, 1934 – and died in Boston June 4, 2004, shortly after returning to the USA after over 3 decades in Paris. Inspired by Sidney Bechet to adopt the soprano sax, a rare instrument in the 1950’s. Lacy in turn influenced John Coltrane to take up the soprano as his second instrument. Avant garde jazz didn’t pay a very well in New York in the 1950’s and 60’s. Steve told me that before he left NYC in the mid sixties, he, Taylor, Rudd and other creative jazz musicians “were playing for $5 in coffee shops”! Steve moved to Paris and it worked for him, although he told me that his first few years there were not easy – “We were inventing places to play”. Steve knew chord changes inside out, although he preferred not to use them in his improvisational setups. This was brought home again to me recently when I heard his featured solo on “It Was Just One of Those Things” with Gil Evans from a 50’s Evans release. But he would call you out in a second if he thought you were not improvising within the elements of each of his compositions. It was definitely “structured out”! Steve was a master musician, and I learned so much about opening up my improvising “game” through playing his music with him, for which I am truly grateful.