Steve Lacy: Conversations [Paperback]

Jason Weiss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 2006

Steve Lacy: Conversations is a collection of thirty-four interviews with the innovative saxophonist and jazz composer. Lacy (1934–2004), a pioneer in making the soprano saxophone a contemporary jazz instrument, was a prolific performer and composer, with hundreds of recordings to his name.

This volume brings together interviews that appeared in a variety of magazines between 1959 and 2004. Conducted by writers, critics, musicians, visual artists, a philosopher, and an architect, the interviews indicate the evolution of Lacy’s extraordinary career and thought. Lacy began playing the soprano saxophone at sixteen, and was soon performing with Dixieland musicians much older than he. By nineteen he was playing with the pianist Cecil Taylor, who ignited his interest in the avant-garde. He eventually became the foremost proponent of Thelonious Monk’s music. Lacy played with a broad range of musicians, including Monk and Gil Evans, and led his own bands. A voracious reader and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, Lacy was particularly known for setting to music literary texts—such as the Tao Te Ching, and the work of poets including Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, and Taslima Nasrin—as well as for collaborating with painters and dancers in multimedia projects.

Lacy lived in Paris from 1970 until 2002, and his music and ideas reflect a decades-long cross-pollination of cultures. Half of the interviews in this collection originally appeared in French sources and were translated specifically for this book. Jason Weiss provides a general introduction, as well as short introductions to each of the interviews and to the selection of Lacy’s own brief writings that appears at the end of the book. The volume also includes three song scores, a selected discography of Lacy’s recordings, and many photos from the personal collection of his wife and longtime collaborator, Irene Aebi.

Interviews by: Derek Bailey, Franck Bergerot, Yves Bouliane, Etienne Brunet, Philippe Carles, Brian Case, Garth W. Caylor Jr., John Corbett, Christoph Cox, Alex Dutilh, Lee Friedlander, Maria Friedlander, Isabelle Galloni d'Istria, Christian Gauffre, Raymond Gervais, Paul Gros-Claude, Alain-René Hardy, Ed Hazell, Alain Kirili, Mel Martin, Franck Médioni, Xavier Prévost, Philippe Quinsac, Ben Ratliff, Gérard Rouy, Kirk Silsbee, Roberto Terlizzi, Jason Weiss

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A phenomenal interviewee. . . . Whether [Steve Lacy] was making bold predictions on future directions of the music, describing his fascinating projects, laying forth broad challenges to himself and other artists, or making succinct observations of the musical world he inhabited, Lacy’s words proved to be almost as interesting as his music.”—Down Beat, on inducting Lacy into the Down Beat Hall of Fame

“Steve Lacy’s soul-rending sounds emerge out of the chaos of our times like the announcement of the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. In the passionate intelligence of his compositions, every note is the sound of freedom.”—Judith Malina, actress, writer, and co-founder of the Living Theatre

About the Author

Jason Weiss is the author of The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris and the forthcoming novel Faces by the Wayside. He is the editor of Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (August 9, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822338157
• ISBN-13: 978-0822338154
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,300,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Petite Fleur for Steve Lacy, August 27, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Steve Lacy: Conversations (Paperback)

It's hard to get excited about a book that consists entirely of interviews conducted over years by a wide variety of scribes, and yet STEVE LACY CONVERSATIONS emerges as a triumph for editor Jason Weiss. It's nearly as good as Kenneth Goldsmith's edition of inter views with Warhol that came out a few seasons ago (I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR). Like Warhol, Lacy was sometimes interiewed by hacks who sometimes muddled or confused his message, and a few times here you have to imagine what Lacy really might have replied before the tape or whatever got transcribed incorrectly. That makes for some fun though, and it forces the reader into working out the sense, allowing the reader to become involved in the process as well.

Weiss tells us that he became interested in Lacy's music primarily through his, and Irene Aebi's, connections to Brion Gysin, whose READER Weiss edited a while back. For nearly two decades Lacy and Gysin were co-conspirators, a "songwriting team," Weiss suggests, like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Greenwich and Barry. Lacy had an equally long, well longer, intimacy with the work of his mentor, jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, and then, from 1960 to his own death, he was frequently a pilgrim to the shrine of Thelonius Monk, whose work he revered beyond all others.

His wife, Irene Aebi, had many connections in the beat world, and their last LP together, BEAT SUITE, is a song cycle using texts from many canonical Beat poets (and such allied figures as Jack Spicer) whom Aebi knew from her youth. French Canadian musicians interviewed Lacy in 1976 in Montreal and New York; their interview is one of the best here, with some probing, intelligent questions designed to elicit thoughtful replies. This is es[pecially good on Lacy's Russian heritage (he was born Steven Lackritz in New York in 1934). Rare and unusual photographs decorate and illuminate the work here, including one of Lacy blowing it out in his beautiful ivy-laden Paris garden in the late 1990s--the paradise he left a little bit later to take that last job in Brookline, Massachusetts. His hairline travels between photos but he's always the same appealing, deeply American man of the world.

"When I used to work with Monk," he recalled, "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." (From a 1979 interview with Brian Case.) Well, we know that somehow in the process, Lacy did discover how to "lift the bandstand," and somehow I suspect he knew how all along, even before the revelations of Taylor, Gysin, Aebi or Monk.