Nantes based Éditions Lenka Lente are about to publish a new series of essays dedicated to the late US soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Writer Guillaume Tarche asks 41 contributors – including Lacy's collaborator and wife Irene Aebi, Alvin Curran, Jorrit Dijkstra, Seymour Wright, and many more – to share their individual experiences of Lacy, reflecting on his sound and legacy.

This excerpt is by Emanem Records founder Martin Davidson, who maps out his own encounters with Steve Lacy over the years, alongside various shifts and developments in his playing.

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ENCOUNTERS WITH STEVE LACY

Martin DAVIDSON

A somewhat apologetic introduction

Guillaume Tarche asked me to write something for this Steve Lacy tribute book. At first, I could not think what to write, as there has been a considerable amount written about Lacy by various writers at various times. Also I have written quite a bit for the notes to his recordings that I have issued. So Guillaume suggested recalling my experiences of working with Lacy. Therefore the end result must read somewhat like an advertisement for my Emanem label, but I have tried to broaden it out a bit. I generally have not simply duplicated my previous sleevenotes, although there is inevitably some overlap. However, this is not meant to be an overall portrait of the musician – rather mainly about my interactions with him. There are several gaps, which I expect other contributors to this tribute book will fill.

In common with most writings, this piece will probably tell the reader more about the writer than about the subject. I think I am now old enough not to have to kowtow to fashions and/or sacred cows – but then I have always thought that. I hope this piece will be of some interest to some people, even though I am not a great writer – I understand why Dan Warburton gave up critical writing because he ran out of adjectives.

One bit of terminology: there is an area of mainly European composed music that usually gets referred to by the egocentric name of ‘classical music’, as if all other music is ephemeral rubbish. This is a term I generally try to avoid, but I am using it here as this name is so widespread. I happen to consider classical music to be the most popular area of music worth listening to, so I think of it as ‘popular music’!

1. Jazz On The Changes (Mostly)

I first became aware of Steve Lacy in the 1960s, having heard his four quartet LPs on Prestige and Candid and the two Gil Evans records that featured him, namely And Ten (Prestige) and Great Jazz Standards (Pacific), all of which showed him to be a strong and direct conversational improvisor in the general manner of Lester Young and Miles Davis. He made little use of the fast runs that seemed to be an essential part of bebop – not very surprising given that he started his career playing with musicians from the swing and Dixieland eras. All of his work is excellent on these records, and on “Something To Live For” from Evidence he takes what must be considered to be one of the great solos in conventional Jazz.

Perhaps the apogee of Lacy’s first (mainly changes-based) period was the 1961–64 quartet that included Roswell Rudd, Dennis Charles and a succession of bass players. They went into the studio a couple of times, but nothing from those sessions was released until more than 50 years later (on Early And Late on Cuneiform). Around 1974, Evan Parker told me that Paul Haines had recorded the group at a gig, and still had the tapes. So I met up with Haines, bought the recording, and brought it to fruition as School Days (Emanem) with the active help of Lacy and Rudd. Stanley Crouch introduced me to Charles a little later, but it was several years before I met up with the bass player Henry Grimes following his extended self-banishment. (So the rumour that I issued this without the musicians’ permission and knowledge is nonsense.) The session shows all four participants at the top of their game playing Thelonious Monk tunes, and one wishes that more recordings had been made and issued. Later, during a period when I did not have the freedom (money) to reissue School Days, Lacy sold this session to Hat Hut, who reissued it with a little too much echo. I eventually bought it back and reissued it using an Emanem LP as the sound source.

Another highlight of Lacy’s early career was joining Thelonious Monk for 16 weeks, which resulted in two tracks being recorded at a festival in Philadelphia. When Lacy visited me in 1974, he had never heard these tracks, so I played them to him. He was pleasantly surprised at how good he sounded even though he remembered feeling rather overwhelmed during his time with Monk. The recording quality was not very good, but so much better than on its first CD issue by another label many years later. So I decided to add these to the CD issue of School Days. (Regarding my previous likening of Lacy to Lester Young, it also should be obvious that Monk was strongly influenced by Young. Listen to Young in the 30s and try to imagine him playing the piano – in particular listen to his solo on the 1938 version of “When You’re Smiling” by Teddy Wilson & Billie Holiday [either take].)

Lacy appeared on Cecil Taylor’s first two recordings: Jazz Advance (Transition) and At Newport (Verve). These were made in the mid-50s, and the music sounds changes-based but pushing at the boundaries, Taylor’s freer work was a few years in the future. Lacy’s playing sounds much the same as on his more conventional records mentioned above.

2. From Jazz To Free Improvisation

Free improvisation started coming to the fore about 1960. The first musicians to take this route (such as Ongaku in Japan, The Lukas Foss Ensemble in the USA, and Nuova Consonanza in Italy) seemed to come mainly from the classical music world, as some composers started giving performers more and more choice of what to do. Most jazz musicians who ventured to free improvisation did so via the halfway stepping stone known as free jazz. Joe Harriott said of his pioneering forays in this direction: “Of the various components comprising jazz today – constant time signatures, a steady four-four tempo, themes and predictable harmonic variations, fixed division of the chorus by bar lines, and so on – we aim to retain at least one in each piece. But we may well – if the mood seems to us to demand it – dispense with all the others.”

If all these components are dispensed with, then one ends up with free improvisation – a non-idiomatic music that usually gets lumped in with jazz, but which could equally have been seen as an appendage of classical music (or anything else). People with musical acumen have been asking for free improvisation to be taken seriously for more than 50 years, but people with commercial priorities consider that it is not popular enough to have its own category – hence it gets deemed to be an appendage of Jazz, much to the annoyance of many jazz lovers and many free improvisors.

In 1965–66, Lacy leapfrogged from jazz to free improvisation with very little in between. This was documented on two Italian LPs, Disposability (Vik) and Sortie (GTA), both of which were recently reissued with improved sound or completeness on Free For A Minute (Emanem). The first of these albums covers the ground that had been traversed very quickly – from three Monk tunes to one short free improvisation, with various stages in between including the first Lacy composition to appear on record. Lacy did not seem to have to change his improvising style at all – his 50s playing just seems to fit in with whatever is going on. This was the first time that Kent Carter and Aldo Romano appeared on disc with Lacy – not quite true, as Lacy and Carter had previously been on a Jazz Composers Orchestra session. Carter went on to work with Lacy for about 15 years (apparently not long enough for Wikipedia to consider worth mentioning in their article about Lacy) before leaving to concentrate on his own remarkable unpretentious music that sounded like classical music and jazz and neither all at the same time.

Sortie was recorded a few weeks later with the addition of trumpeter Enrico Rava. The music has generally been assumed to be extracts from extended free improvisations, but much of Lacy’s improvising was so melodic that it is sometimes difficult to tell. At times, it sounds to me as if Lacy is playing original tunes. He apparently often enjoyed playing his compositions with an unrelated and/or unpredictable background, so one wonders if some of the tracks involve his tunes. If this was completely improvised, then it was one of the very first albums of free improvisation by anyone.

3. Post-Free

Free For A Minute also contains the main reason that Lacy moved away from principally relying on free improvisation. He was asked to create music for a film soundtrack that required numerous abrupt changes. Although it doesn’t sound as if there was any precomposed music for this quintet, there must have been some discussion about the sonic areas of each piece and where it had to finish. Lacy said: “I realised that total improvisation was impossible in that case – the imprecision of the musical language would not have fitted with the exactitude required for the scenes unfurling on the screen. Therefore, I devised certain limitations of time, timbre, tempo; certain instruments had to play a given part, others had to stop at a given place.”

Another reason he gave was that free improvisation often sounds like “soup” with each piece melding into a homogenous morass. Having said that, it must be noted that numerous free improvisors have subsequently found ways to avoid this and keep the music alive. Lacy didn’t completely abandon free improvisation, as witness the particularly audacious Distant Voices (Denon) made in Tokyo in 1975 with two modern classical musicians, Yuji Takahashi and Takehisa Kosugi. Another fine example is the 1978 duo with Maarten Altena, High, Low And Order (Claxon, then hat ART).

Lacy started composing in the mid-60s, eventually resulting in a considerable amount of material that could be used in performance. Given that he had spent a lot of time performing and studying Thelonious Monk’s tunes, it is not surprising that many of his tunes have a similar logic and strength to those of Monk’s. There were often repeated phrases in the tunes, but these were kept to a reasonable amount, not going to the extremes of certain composers who concentrated on repetition to create minimal content over maximum length. (Lacy did not follow the fashion of jazz groups playing jazz rock. The main theme of his one overt foray in this direction, “The Uh Uh Uh”, seems to self-destruct with the strong opening four notes both resolved and destroyed by the weak final one.)

In the mid-60s, Lacy met Irene Aebi whom he described as the vocalist he had been looking for. She was also a string player, and subsequently became his wife. This gave Lacy the incentive to write songs – settings of poetry – of which he wrote about 150, most of which have not been recorded. Lacy and Aebi were voracious book readers, and the poems set to music had been written by a wide variety of poets and other writers, over three millennia, in several languages. Aebi is a very European singer, perhaps most akin to Lotte Lenya. (She turned down requests to sing Kurt Weill’s songs as she considered that Lenya had made the definitive recordings of them.) She has probably never sung the blues or scatted. As Scot Hacker wrote in 1993: “It is unfathomable that Irene Aebi is so frequently maligned by the jazz press. Perhaps people are stymied when a vocalist so clearly does not descend from the legacy of Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald, but in a medium that is ostensibly about high degrees of artistic freedom, why must a woman still walk in the stylistic footsteps of the great torches and canaries to earn respect from the establishment?”

Aebi’s early prowess can be heard on a recent compilation, The Sun (Emanem), which covers the years 1967–73. The title track is a virtuoso recitation of a Buckminster Fuller text, not the sort of material that many people would think of setting to music – it’s great, it’s American, it’s a song, but it is about as far away from the Great American Songbook as one can get. Also on this compilation are two beautiful versions of The Way, the first of the 2600 year old Tao poems by Lao Tzu that Lacy set. “Chinese Food” also contains anti-war texts by Lao Tzu, while “The Woe”, a 1973 protest against and portrait of the Vietnam War, is also included. Like all decent thinking people, Lacy and Aebi were very anti-war. One reviewer complained that this suite is ugly, but war is ugly, so surely art which depicts aspects of the human race’s most appalling activity should be ugly!

Another part of the picture was the arrival of saxophonist Steve Potts, whose improvising was more overt and less succinct then that of Lacy. Their approaches were so different that it was generally possible to tell them apart even when they were both on soprano saxophones. Hearing them play the original tunes using intervals of seconds was always a joy, enhanced by Aebi’s vocals on the songs. Lacy described the theme statements by the two saxes as “playing with a forked tongue”. He said the idea of two saxophones came from the late 20s recordings of Jimmy Noone and Joe Poston. I find the role of Potts with Lacy somewhat akin to the role of Charlie Rouse with Monk or Pharoah Sanders with Coltrane.

4. Unaccompanied Solos 1972–80

I first met Lacy when he visited London in 1973 to play a concert. (I was in the US when he first visited London in 1966.) John Stevens brought him over to our flat, as he knew Madelaine and I were thinking about starting a record label. Lacy was carrying a clutch of small reel-to-reel tapes containing his first two unaccompanied solo concerts which were recorded in Avignon the previous year. He had been carrying them with him for some time in the hope that he would find a record producer who would be interested in them. This turned out to be a futile exercise until he found me – nobody else at that time seemed to conceive of a solo saxophone record without a rhythm section. After hearing a few minutes, I was hooked. Subsequent listening showed that most of the pieces were in the general free jazz form – theme/improvisation/theme. The relationship of the improvisation was not always obvious, but eventual hearings of other performances showed that the improvisation on each tune did not vary much over the years. So I began to think of the improvisation as part of the composition, rather like a symphonic movement incorporating a trio section or some such. Some of the themes themselves contained phrases that involved a considerable internal variety often caused by large intervallic leaps, while some of the improvisations included elements that seem to come more from Albert Ayler than the earlier Lacy.

There was little for me to do for the project, as Lacy had worked out which versions of which tunes to use, their sequence, their titles, descriptive notes and dedicatees. He came to London the following spring and stayed with us for a very enjoyable week during which we got to know each other quite well. The main object was to get everything together for the LP, which we did quite painlessly. I also interviewed him for the short lived magazine called Into Jazz (transcribed at http://www.emanemdisc.com/addenda/ stevelacy.html). One day I suggested that he walk to the end of our road to see a hyper-kitsch front garden where he found a plaque on which were the hyper-kitsch words he used for “The Kiss”.

In 2011, I wrote: “Getting the LP pressed was not a pleasant experience as there was a shortage of good vinyl in 1974. The test pressing sounded as though he was recorded in a hail storm – there being no drummer to cover up the noise – but that was the best that could be done at the time. (Later on, it both amused and bemused me when certain collectors insisted on getting a first edition, even though it was so noisy.) Also, we received several phone calls from the pressing plant stating that there must be something wrong with the tapes as they could hear some completely different music in the background of one track (“Stations”)! Thus was Emanem born.”

Listening to the original tapes decades later confirmed that Lacy had, not surprisingly, made the correct choices – in particular the other version of “Stations” was somewhat boxed in by the radio playing Ravel’s Bolero instead of Brahms songs! Since the CD reissue was no longer restricted to the time limitations of an LP, I decided to add his four short versions of rare originals from the two concerts.

In 1975, Madelaine and I relocated to the US, and the following year we coordinated a solo tour for Lacy. It was hoped to have a tour of various cities in the US, but none were adventurous enough except for New York, where he played the Tao suite among other things. So the main part of the tour was to about six Canadian cities where he was very well received. He felt the best one in terms of audience and performance was Montreal, which included a definitive version of the Tao suite. He wanted this concert to come out on three LP sides, with the fourth side containing the aforementioned quintet recording of “The Woe”. I issued one LP, Crops, containing four solo pieces and the quintet suite, but was so disgusted with all the noise and distortion caused by the LP that I did not issue the rest at the time.

Once the LP era with all its limitations and frustrations was over, it became possible to release the whole Montreal concert on one CD, by just omitting the one aborted piece, and the applause. (Musically speaking, I find applause to be a horrible noise which often spoils the ambience built up by the music, so I often edit it out.) I eventually went on to issue five CDs’ worth of Lacy’s first decade of solo performances (1972–80), including some major solo suites: Tao, Clangs, Shots, Sands and Hedges. With all its variety, originality and inventiveness, this has become one of my favourite bodies of music – Lacy had certainly become a prolific composer since the mid-60s.

5. Two Imperfect Specials 1973–74

To rewind a little bit: Val Wilmer had a photographic exhibition in 1973 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. There were three concerts associated with this event respectively featuring Albert Nicholas, Steve Lacy and The Brotherhood Of Breath. The budget was not copious enough to import many American musicians (even from Europe), so the quintets of Nicholas and Lacy included London based musicians for the occasion. Lacy brought Steve Potts and Kent Carter with him from Paris, as they were essential to play his instrumental tunes. To make up the quintet, he chose Derek Bailey and John Stevens, both of whole he had previously worked with. Madelaine and I decided to put on a second concert for the Lacy group a few days later at a jazz club, and I decided to record this on my first Revox tape recorder (which was somewhat faulty).

This concert had some very fine music, and some not so fine. “Flakes” was the only chance most of us have had to hear Derek Bailey soloing over a tango rhythm – an example of the wicked side of Lacy’s sense of humour. In the second half, Lacy invited Bobby Bradford (who happened to be staying with us) to join the group, then he invited Paul Rutherford. Things came to a premature end when an uninvited and underwhelming musician started playing non-stop trumpet. I get the feeling that some people go to Jazz clubs to try and drown out the music by talking loudly, but this was going too far.

It may seem strange now, but Steve Lacy had very few records out at the time, so he desperately wanted to make one from this concert. He cobbled together a selection, including a couple of tracks that didn’t put him in a good light. A few years later, he had a plethora of records available, so that when it was time to reissue, I decided, with his approval, to omit the weaker tracks and add the best ones to recordings from another concert. This resulted in a plethora of complaints from one or two people!

In 1971, a year before the Avignon solo concerts, Lacy made what could be called his first solo record Lapis (Saravah), since he made all the music using overdubbing, something he only did once more on the very different Outings (Nueva) fifteen years later. I suggested that it would be interesting to hear music similar to that on Lapis performed by four saxophonists, and we arranged a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London. Between us, Lacy and I chose Evan Parker, Steve Potts and Trevor Watts to be the other saxophonists. Lacy also wanted what he called a “noise section” comprising Derek Bailey and Michel Waisvisz. I had never heard or even heard of the last named, but Lacy had recorded with him a few months earlier on Lumps (my nomination for the best record on ICP). Hearing what he managed to do on his self-built synthesizer was a revelation, and watching him was also entertaining as most of his hand movements seemed to be those of a Theremin virtuoso.

The concert was arranged several weeks in advance, but in the end became a last minute rush due to the conflicting commitments of the participants. The earliest time that all six could get together was around noon on the day of the concert. Lacy had written three pieces, “Staples”, “Swishes” and “Snaps”, especially for the concert, and arranged his “Dreams” for the group. He also envisioned a total improvisation featuring four soprano saxophones. The sequence was to be repeated in both halves of the concert (unannounced) with only the resulting improvisations being different. However, in spite of the same format, the two halves turned out to be very different (although two members of the audience who walked out complaining about the repetition did not seem to notice this, unlike everyone else that stayed).

The end result was some remarkable music, marred from time to time by inaccurate theme statements and incompatible improvisations caused by the brevity of rehearsal time. No rules were given for the improvisational sections – it was left entirely to the musicians’ sensibilities. From the three recorded versions of the sequence – rehearsal, first set and second set – Lacy chose the best complete versions of each piece to make up a “perfect” set that was released as an LP. (I did contemplate a second LP made up mainly of good fragments of the tracks that could not be used complete, but eventually discarded the idea.)

This was one of the first examples of an improvising saxophone quartet (outside of a jazz big band). It was probably also the first time that four soprano saxophones had played together. Before the afternoon run-through of “Sops”, Lacy was heard to say: “Four sopranos is incredible. Well one of them is bad enough, man, really, but four of them, wow!”

This concert was the only time this group played, although the resultant record did inspire at least one longterm improvising saxophone quartet (Rova) to form. There was another Saxophone Special a couple of years later in Berlin. This had Lacy and Parker with John Tchicai, Willem Breuker and Peter Brötzmann plus Klaus Koch and Günter Sommer. I wonder how that sounded – probably completely different. Note that the name Saxophone Special was Lacy’s response to Kenny Davern and Bob Wilber calling their group Soprano Summit.

Around 1980, Lacy decided to make his improvising more “conscious” just as Lee Konitz had done in 1955. In both cases the music became more consistent and, arguably, less exciting. In Lacy’s case, this change was particularly noticeable in his unaccompanied solo work. This is not to say that all of his subsequent work was of no interest – in fact, some of his free phrasing often turned up and became more prevalent again over the years.

Lacy returned to playing Monk and Ellington, but I rarely found his unaccompanied versions of these to be any more than pleasant. What I do enjoy are the 80s jazz quintet records on Soul Note with Roswell Rudd or George Lewis, Kent Carter or Arjen Gorter or Ernst Reijseger, Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. The last two musicians show themselves to be great unconventional exponents of conventional jazz – too bad they spent so much time playing other things. (In the 70s, Bennink had a hilarious comedy duo with Derek Bailey – something to be seen but not heard.)

6. Post Post-Free

From about 1965 to 1981, Lacy rarely played on the changes over a swinging Jazz rhythm. One example was on Roswell Rudd’s 1976 album Blown Bone (Philips, then Emanem). He plays a solo on “It’s Happening” where he keeps reverting to his very free style over the steady jazz rhythm. The result is somewhat hilarious – no doubt intentionally – with bits of inappropriate playing over the steady rhythm section.

Lacy’s main musical vehicle continued to be his quintet, sometimes expanded to a sextet by pianist Bobby Few, sometimes reduced to a trio with just bass and drums. After Kent Carter left, his place was amply taken by Jean-Jacques Avenel. Oliver Johnson became the group’s drummer fairly early on and lasted several years until he was murdered. He was replaced by the equally excellent John Betsch.

Although starting out as a dense high-energy group as was somewhat fashionable in the early 70s, they gradually seemed to return to playing on the changes, while ironically Lacy’s own playing started moving out again. This end result can be heard on Last Tour (Emanem) recorded in Boston at the penultimate gig by the quintet. Although Lacy was very ill at the time – he died from cancer less than three months later – he plays superbly, possibly spurred by the excellence of his front line partner, trombonist George Lewis, whose double-timing provides a contrast. Apart from a few instrumentals, the programme concentrates on some of Lacy’s settings of some of the Beat poets, sung by Irene Aebi who originally turned Lacy on to their work.

I rarely saw Lacy after the early 80s, mainly due to our both moving around the world asynchronously. We coincidently found ourselves in Tokyo at the same time around 1986. I discovered that he had a solo concert in one of the very small rooms that get used for such occasions in that part of the world. There were people sitting all around the edge of the room. I managed to get a seat next to where he was standing, so my right ear was about 30 cm from the bell of his horn. The last time I saw him was in London in 2001 – he had come over from Paris to play Duke Ellington tunes solo at an art gallery opening for his painter friend Kenneth Noland.

7. Conclusion

I think that Lacy should be considered to be a major jazz musician, even if he had stopped playing in 1964. He virtually single-handedly kept the soprano saxophone in existence in Jazz. He was noticed around 1960 by John Coltrane who was inspired by Lacy to take up the soprano, but was hardly influenced by his playing. After that, everyone and their mother took up the previously rare horn. Lacy did keep his own voice on what had become a very common horn, and some later soprano players were influenced by him. Certain aspects of Evan Parker’s work relate back to Lacy, while Gianni Mimmo started off sounding too much like Lacy before finding his own way.

After 1964, Lacy found his own route through several of the myriad of musical directions that were then possible. He was a pioneer free Improvisor, a longterm leader of a unique group, a major unaccompanied saxophone performer, a prolific tune and song composer, and an all-round nice and interesting person.

Another measure of Lacy’s compositional strength is the number of musicians who have recorded his tunes. I have not heard all of these by any means, but one album that caught my attention was Mikhaïl Bezverkhny’s solo violin rendition of the six “P” pieces, which Lacy himself did not record (Homage To Steve Lacy on Naked Music).

Steve Lacy Unfinished will be published by Éditions Lenka Lente on 10 June.

Wire subscribers can read about Andrew Turner's first encounter with Steve Lacy as well as Brian Case's cover story in The Wire 1 via the digital archive.