Steve Lacy
- Issue #1 (May 82) | Interviews
- By: Brian Case | Featuring: Steve Lacy
- Printable version
The man who liberated the soprano sax talks about the spark, the gap - and the leap. Brian Case watches the road
"Music has a mind of its own, and at the time you have to just watch the road. Something like that...
"The spark... the gap... the leap. Robert Musil talks about that for three big books. (The Man Without Qualities). Zen literature, too. What we're talking about is magic. That's what's interesting in any kind of art - or athletes, or cooks.
"When I used to work with Monk, he used to say, 'Let's lift the bandstand'. That's magic, man, when the bandstand levitates. I didn't know how to do it - but I knew what he was talking about. Old dreams but they're still valid."
Any artist sharing Steve Lacy's above-stated belief in the near-priestly function of art is in for a thin time in our society. Touring England with Company, Steve has been occasionally depressed by sparse audiences.
"In the kind of music we do together, the whole thing is - is it interesting? Is it alive? There's nothing else to say. All the other criteria fall by the wayside.
"England is rough because of the quantity of rock'n'roll going on, the proportions. It's hard to cope with all that. I used to love Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, Otis Redding, but the ordinary bulk just makes me sick. I can't stomach it at all.
"Last night, I was walking by the university here, and I heard some ordinary rock they had coming out of a party there - just some typical stuff - and loud, you could hear it for three blocks!
"Me, personally I got sick to my stomach. I couldn't stand it. It's just like everything I do is against what this is. And that was current normal stuff with loads of people having a good time to it, no problem - except I was walking down the street and I was suffering, and I was the only one who was.
"It's hard to deal with a phenomenon like that. You have to consider that you're a specialist, you're a freak - and you have to live with it.
"The only thing important in music, as in anything else, is life and death. Any kind of style, any kind of way is valid, if it's alive. Life and interest are two things I equate. Once a thing is sufficiently interesting, it becomes alive. I don't care whether it's Dixieland, Flixieland, Pixieland, or a private or public joke or no joke at all - if it's alive, I'm for it.
"In my own case, I don't want to be put to sleep, so I don't want to put others to sleep."
You can sometimes judge a man by the company he keeps. In the case of Steve Lacy, it is possible to infer a high seriousness and heft from his title dedications. A man of vast cultural grasp, tributes to writers like Elias Canetti, Kafka and Dostoyevsky and painters like Paul Klee appear alongside the more expected jazz masters in his personal pantheon.
"The spark... the gap... the leap. Robert Musil talks about that for three big books. (The Man Without Qualities). Zen literature, too. What we're talking about is magic. That's what's interesting in any kind of art - or athletes, or cooks.
"When I used to work with Monk, he used to say, 'Let's lift the bandstand'. That's magic, man, when the bandstand levitates. I didn't know how to do it - but I knew what he was talking about. Old dreams but they're still valid."
Any artist sharing Steve Lacy's above-stated belief in the near-priestly function of art is in for a thin time in our society. Touring England with Company, Steve has been occasionally depressed by sparse audiences.
"In the kind of music we do together, the whole thing is - is it interesting? Is it alive? There's nothing else to say. All the other criteria fall by the wayside.
"England is rough because of the quantity of rock'n'roll going on, the proportions. It's hard to cope with all that. I used to love Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, Otis Redding, but the ordinary bulk just makes me sick. I can't stomach it at all.
"Last night, I was walking by the university here, and I heard some ordinary rock they had coming out of a party there - just some typical stuff - and loud, you could hear it for three blocks!
"Me, personally I got sick to my stomach. I couldn't stand it. It's just like everything I do is against what this is. And that was current normal stuff with loads of people having a good time to it, no problem - except I was walking down the street and I was suffering, and I was the only one who was.
"It's hard to deal with a phenomenon like that. You have to consider that you're a specialist, you're a freak - and you have to live with it.
"The only thing important in music, as in anything else, is life and death. Any kind of style, any kind of way is valid, if it's alive. Life and interest are two things I equate. Once a thing is sufficiently interesting, it becomes alive. I don't care whether it's Dixieland, Flixieland, Pixieland, or a private or public joke or no joke at all - if it's alive, I'm for it.
"In my own case, I don't want to be put to sleep, so I don't want to put others to sleep."
You can sometimes judge a man by the company he keeps. In the case of Steve Lacy, it is possible to infer a high seriousness and heft from his title dedications. A man of vast cultural grasp, tributes to writers like Elias Canetti, Kafka and Dostoyevsky and painters like Paul Klee appear alongside the more expected jazz masters in his personal pantheon.
Posted 17/01/06
Share