Steve Lacy - soprano sax master

    

Steve Lacy - Soprano Sax Master

 Looking back at my many years living 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 premier performances of “Futurities” (released as a double CD on Hat Hut in 1985), an astonishing multi-media happening with a 9 piece band, dancers Elsa Wollieston and Douglas Dunn, and 20 poems by Robert Creeley set to music by Steve, as well as a 9 foot tall triangular painting by Kenneth Nolan which was unfurled as a scenario for our live performances. The band on this album included the great bass and drum team of Jean Jacques Avenel and Oliver Johnson, alto sax player Steve Potts, and trombonist George Lewis, as well as Steve's wife Irene Aebi on vocals. The settings of Creeley's poems were completely notated, however there were no chord changes or pre-conceived structures as soon as the vocal ended. Steve demanded that we improvise on the emotional content of each poem and the mood of each composition. The two dancers, from widely different horizons (Elsa was Senegalese and Douglas came out of Merce Cunningham's company) had to find a common ground, and this openness led to widely different performances each night. The seamless blending not only of styles but of artistic disciplines into a meaningful synthesis ("meta-language") was typical of Steve, who was equally at home playing with a Japanese Noh actor/dancer ("Noh, Baby"), Gil Evans’ big band, and perhaps most importantly, Thelonious Monk. Steve played on Monk’s “Big Band and Quartet in Concert”, also released as "Monk at Town Hall" and subsequently recorded several magnificent albums of Monk’s music, including “Reflections”, with Mal Waldron, (Prestige, 1958), the first album of Monk's music recorded by other musicians, decades before Monk was canonized as one of jazz’s greatest composers. While in New York he recorded avant-garde piano legend Cecil Taylor's debut album, “Jazz Advance” and collaborated with many key figures of progressive jazz including trombonist Roswell Rudd. 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 forward-looking musicians “were playing for $5 in coffee shops”. He moved to Paris and began a mainstay of modern jazz all over Europe, collaborating with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, Albert Mangelsdorf, and most of Europe’s leading avant-garde jazz musicians. It was not, however, an easy road to travel, especially for the first 10 years or so. Steve, as he told me, was constantly "Inventing places to play", playing with solo dancers and dance companies, improvising in and composing for a wide variety of instrumental formats, and constantly refining his very personal approach to music and to his instrument. As he put it - "I have a lot of notebooks". His creativity was endless and there seemed to be no end to the formats he devised to stretch his and his collaborators' creativity.

Steve was born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York, July 23, 1934. He played many styles of music in New York, from Dixieland to modern jazz. 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 instrument. Since Steve played only soprano sax, he became an absolute master of the instrument. I saw (and heard) him play the sax blowing into the bell of the horn, and he was able to play well above the normal range of the horn. Relentless intensity would be a good way to characterize Steve's music - he was always searching or new musical and artistic avenues, never offering concessions to commercial tastes or trends. Steve, like many other progressive jazz musicians of the 1950's, used Nicolas Slonimsky's "Thesaurus of Scales and Musical Patterns" as a launching pad for investigations off the beaten path of bebop and into new musical territory (he told me "in the late 50's, every serious jazz musician in New York was using Slonimsky's book"). His musical language, documented in his book "Findings", was often based on scales and scale fragments, as opposed to chord progressions, for which he sometimes expressed deep mistrust (although his tenure with Monk showed that he had no problem "running changes", that is - improvising on a set harmonic structure). I once saw him teach a workshop to a large group of young musicians, during which he compared improvised music to boxing - the way a boxer jabs and feints to find an opening.

     "Futurities" opened to two nights of sold out crowds at the Opera du Nord in Lille and we toured many different countries in Europe. Some of the highlights included a marvelous 3-week tour of the British Isles and a trio performance with Steve and Irene at the Aix-en Provence book fair. One very dramatic moment for me happened during our first night at the Russell Square Theatre in London, when the entire pedal assembly of the (tired) Steinway grand fell off as I was playing. I kept playing, with our sound technician bravely trying to fix the piano as the band played on. The recording was done at the Centre Pompidou in Paris direct-to-two tracks (Oliver Johnson told me "play loud and fast or no one will know you're on the record"!) and is a good interpretation of the music although we certainly hit some higher moments in live shows. I somewhat subversively devised a Latin-tinged 7/4 vamp with a set harmony on one of the pieces that enabled Jean-Jaques, Oliver, and myself to inject some "groove" into the show, which was otherwise strictly based on free improvisation.

After many years as an "outsider", Steve Lacy earned a MacArthur foundation "Genius Grant" in 1992, and returned to the USA in 2002 to take a teaching post at the prestigious New England Conservatory in Boston. He died in Boston on June 4, 2004. Playing and recording with Steve, and assimilating his combination of open structure and disciplined improvising without chord changes through the prism of his aural vision, was a great stimulus to me to put into question everything I thought I had known about music. This experience opened up my playing to new and more open areas, for which I will be forever grateful to him.

Eddie Harris - a multi-talented genius of music

Eddie Harris - a multi-talented genius of music      Eddie Harris - saxophonist, vocalist, pianist, trumpeter, composer, and instrument inventor, was one of the underrated heroes of jazz. Born in 1934 in Chicago, he started   his musical life as a singer in a Baptist church. Although he had a million seller record with his version of the movie theme Exodus on the album “Exodus to Jazz”, he  never really “cashed in” as a major touring artist.  Another key record was “Swiss  Movement”, recorded live at the Montreux Festival with pianist Les McCann. This and  Eddie’s band in the 60’s featuring electric piano, electric saxophone (one of Eddie’s  many musical and electronic inventions) were the seeds of what became known as  “jazz rock” and “jazz fusion”. One piece of evidence for this was that Eddie shared a bill  with Miles Davis’ (then acoustic) band and very shortly afterwards Miles incorporated  both the  electric piano and electronic effects into his concept, made famous worldwide  with Miles’ Bitches Brew double album.     I toured Europe for one memorable week with Eddie and long-time Thelonious Monk bassist Larry Gales. Aside from many great stories about jazz artists, Eddie showed  himself to be a warm and caring individual. Eddie told me that he was the person that John Coltrane called for help with the mysteries of Nicolas Slonimsky’s monumental music treatise, “A Thesaurus of Musical Scales and Patterns”. And Eddie said that Coltrane liked to practice together with Eddie because “he liked my time”. He revealed that the smash hit “Swiss Movement” concert was totally improvised on stage - Eddie,  being a more than competent pianist, played looking at Les McCann’s hands and thus  followed and anticipated the chord changes! Ever curious about all musical styles,  Eddie went to Paris to study at the National Conservatory. His command of the tenor  sax was so unusual that some professors at the school knocked on the door of the room where he was practicing to ask Eddie what fingering he used to be able to play 5 B flats on the horn. Eddie replied, “If you don’t know how to do that, then maybe I  should be teaching here!”.  When we met for the first rehearsal, he asked me “what do  you want to play?” I replied, “whatever you want, but we got to play Freedom Jazz Dance." Eddie told me, "Aw, I'm tired of playing that tune". I told him, "I don't care!" - and we played it every night. Eddie’s classic and eternally modern tune, covered by Miles on the  “Miles Smiles” album and on Miroslav Vitous’ “Mountain in the Sky” session, among  countless others, is a study in intervallic composition - coupled with an infectious funk  beat. I found out on the tour that not only could Eddie sing everything that he played on  the sax, but that he could imitate many instruments with his voice - a technique used by Bobby McFerrin and Al Jarreau. In one of his vocal improvisations, he sang an entire  drum solo, complete  with low, medium, and high toms! And when he felt like it, he could make the tenor sound like an entire sax section by using all of its registers simultaneously to create polyphonic textures without overdubs.     Modern masters such as John Scofield acknowledged Eddie’s mastery by calling him  as featured sideman on his “Hand Jive” album. And he is one of the most widely sam- pled of jazzmen - by the likes of Jamiroquai and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Eddie was stylistically  unclassifiable - recording funk, rhythm’n blues, bebop, bossa nova, latin jazz, avant  garde, vocal numbers, and modern jazz. I will never forget him turning on the audiences with his humorous vocal tune “Eddie Who?” as well as the endless creative ideas which poured out of his sax night after night.     Eddie’s discography is wide - including over 70 titles as a leader. Standouts include: “The Electrifying Eddie Harris”, “Mean Greens”, “The Best of Eddie Harris”, “The Genius  of Eddie Harris”, “Step Up with the Eddie Harris Quartet”, and co-leader sessions with  Ellis Marsalis and John Klemmer. And he patented numerous musical inventions includ- ing the Varitone, which enabled the sax to play with a second octave doubling the line  and a device which enabled the sax to sound like a 5 part sax section, as well as reed  trumpets and saxophones, all of which he handcrafted at his home. Eddie revealed to  me that he ghost wrote many Hollywood film scores (signed by other composers). He  also published seven books of his musical ideas and compositions. Always independ- ent, always honest, always a trendsetter, Eddie Harris summed up his musical philoso phy - “I’m not hung up on fads, for the simple reason that they stunt my growth”.