"I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz"
About this Quote
Steve Lacy compresses a century of jazz into a single life. He began with the New Orleans repertoire and style, not necessarily in the city but in the revival bands that kept that music alive after World War II. There he learned ensemble polyphony, the buoyant swing of collective improvisation, and the clarinet-and-brass vocabulary that gave birth to jazz. Choosing the soprano saxophone as his primary voice linked him to Sidney Bechet, the instrument’s first great modern personality. That choice alone signaled a commitment to lineage even as he set out to extend it.
From those roots he moved steadily forward, working with architects of modernism such as Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, and Gil Evans. He did not treat the past as something to outgrow, but as a grammar to speak through new ideas. The tight melodies and angular intervals he drew from Monk, the attention to timbre and space, and the rigorous, almost ascetic focus on his straight horn turned tradition into a launchpad. Before John Coltrane popularized the soprano in the 1960s, Lacy had already staked a claim for it in contemporary music, using precise tone and intervallic daring to craft a language both lyrical and abstract.
His career in Europe further broadened the canvas. There he found audiences and collaborators ready for experiment, forming groups that echoed early jazz front lines with modern harmonic risk, especially with trombonist Roswell Rudd, and exploring open forms with partners like Don Cherry and Mal Waldron. He also set poetry to music, treating text as another improvisational partner, proof that the music’s history could absorb new disciplines without losing its core.
The line he draws is not nostalgic. It rejects the false divide between tradition and innovation, showing jazz as a living continuum. To say he played through the history of jazz is to claim an artist’s right to inhabit every era at once, making the horn carry memory and invention in the same breath.
From those roots he moved steadily forward, working with architects of modernism such as Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, and Gil Evans. He did not treat the past as something to outgrow, but as a grammar to speak through new ideas. The tight melodies and angular intervals he drew from Monk, the attention to timbre and space, and the rigorous, almost ascetic focus on his straight horn turned tradition into a launchpad. Before John Coltrane popularized the soprano in the 1960s, Lacy had already staked a claim for it in contemporary music, using precise tone and intervallic daring to craft a language both lyrical and abstract.
His career in Europe further broadened the canvas. There he found audiences and collaborators ready for experiment, forming groups that echoed early jazz front lines with modern harmonic risk, especially with trombonist Roswell Rudd, and exploring open forms with partners like Don Cherry and Mal Waldron. He also set poetry to music, treating text as another improvisational partner, proof that the music’s history could absorb new disciplines without losing its core.
The line he draws is not nostalgic. It rejects the false divide between tradition and innovation, showing jazz as a living continuum. To say he played through the history of jazz is to claim an artist’s right to inhabit every era at once, making the horn carry memory and invention in the same breath.
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| Topic | Music |
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