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.

STEVE LACY

Duke University Press

Contents

Chapter One

By the time of his first interview, less than a decade after he picked up the soprano saxophone, Lacy had been playing all over New York and traversed the full range of jazz history. He had already recorded several Dixieland sessions as well as first dates with Cecil Taylor's and Gil Evans's ensembles, and he had also recorded his own first two albums, Soprano Sax and Reflections, the latter devoted to Thelonious Monk's music (and the first of many recordings with the pianist Mal Waldron).

Soon after the Monk album came out, this interview appeared in the Jazz Review (September 1959), edited in New York by Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams. Presented as an extended monologue of Lacy talking, it had an unattributed introduction that laid out his itinerary up till then:

Steve Lacy, 25, is a native New Yorker. He has a wife, two children, two cats, and lives in a loft just off the Bowery, over a cellophane bag factory. Being in a manufacturing district enables him to play his soprano saxophone any hour of the day or night. Steve began playing jazz about eight years ago. His first gig was at the Stuyvesant Casino (not far from his present neighborhood), and he was billed as the "Bechet of Today." His work in Dixieland continued for the next couple of years with men like Rex Stewart, Max Kaminsky, Buck Clayton, Pee Wee Russell and Lips Page. He spent six months in Boston at the Schillinger School of Music (described by him as a fiasco during school hours, but at least making possible sessions at the Savoy that proved enlightening). At the school he was a curiosity as the only Dixieland musician and the only soprano saxophonist. It was during this period, through records, that he started to absorb Lester Young and more modern jazz....

Lacy began by speaking about Monk's music:

When I heard Monk's record of "Skippy," I was determined to learn it if it took me a year. It took me a week to learn and six months to be able to play it. I had such a ball learning it that I started to look into his other tunes. I had previously recorded "Work." Each song of Monk's that I learned left me with something invaluable and permanent, and the more I learned, the more I began to get with his system. Soon I realized I had enough material for ten albums.

Monk's tunes are the ones that I most enjoy playing. I like his use of melody, harmony, and especially his rhythm. Monk's music has profound humanity, disciplined economy, balanced virility, dramatic nobility, and innocently exuberant wit. Monk, by the way, like Louis Armstrong, is a master of rhyme. For me, other masters of rhyme are Bird, Duke, Miles, Art Blakey, and Cecil Taylor.

I feel that music can be comprehended from many different levels. It can be regarded as excited speech, imitation of the sounds of nature, an abstract set of symbols, a baring of emotions, an illustration of interpersonal relationships, an intellectual game, a device for inducing reverie, a mating call, a series of dramatic events, an articulation of time and/or space, an athletic contest, or all of these things at once. A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-around good fellow. As this diversity indicates, no matter what you do, some people are going to like it, and other people not. Therefore, all you can do is to try to satisfy yourself, by trusting the man inside. Braque said, "With age, art and life become one." I am only twenty-five, and I trust that I will one day really be able to satisfy myself and at the same time express my love for the world by putting so much of myself into my playing that others will be able to see themselves too. Jazz is a very young art and not too much is known about it as yet. You have to trust yourself and go your own way.

Since there are no soprano saxophone players, I take my inspiration from soprano singers, as well as other jazz instrumentalists, painters, authors, entertainers, and that thing that grows wildly in NewYork, people. I like to observe people on the subways, what they express just by sitting there. I had a ball during the newspaper strike this past year, because people couldn't hide as they usually do. I would like to be able to portray what I feel for my fellow creatures. My horn has a texture, range, and flexibility which is ideal for myself and my purposes. I have been grappling with the difficulties of it for some time now and can very well understand why no one else has attempted to play anything on it more complex than the stylings of the '30s. The instrument is treacherous on several levels: intonation, dynamics, and you can't get gigs on it. At this point, I am beyond the point of no return and my wife and children have agreed to go with me all the way.

The most gratifying and enlightening musical experience for me in the past few months was playing with Gil Evans's fourteen-piece band for two weeks at Birdland opposite Miles Davis and his marvelous group. It was the first time that I had ever played with such a large ensemble and it was the start of my investigations into the possibilities of blending my sound with others. I was the only saxophone in the band and sometimes played lead, sometimes harmony parts or contrapuntal lines, other times obbligato, and quite often I was given a chance to blow with the whole band behind me-perhaps the greatest thrill of my life thus far. Gil is a splendid orchestrator, a brilliant musician, and a wonderful friend. Sometimes when things jelled, I felt true moments of ecstasy; and recently, when a friend of mine who worked with the Claude Thornhill Band in the '40s, when Gil was the principal writer, said that some nights the sound of the band around him moved him to tears, I knew exactly what he meant. So does anybody else who has ever played Gil's arrangements.

The contemporary saxophonists whose work most interests me are John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster, Ornette Coleman, Jackie MacLean, and Johnny Hodges. Being a saxophone player, when I listen to these men I not only can feel what they are doing artistically but also follow their playing as a series of decisions. While working at Birdland those two weeks with Gil, I naturally had a chance to dig Coltrane and appreciate his, at times, almost maniacal creativity. He has a fantastic knowledge of harmony and, like the other members of Miles's group, including, of course, Miles himself, seems to be really searching out the vast resources of scales.

Sonny Rollins, on the other hand, rather than concentrating on scales, has devoted a large portion of his mind to plastic values and the effects of various shapes on each other. Sonny's playing, it can be clearly seen, derives largely from extremely intensive research into all facets of saxophone playing per se. Ben Webster is the master of sound. His use of dynamics indicates the great dramatic sensitivity of this most mature of all saxophone players. His masculinity and authority can only be matched in jazz by that of Thelonious Monk.

Ornette Coleman is the only young saxophone player who seems to be trying for a conversational style of playing and is the only one I have heard who is exploring the potentialities of real human expression, something which has a tremendous impact on me. I have yet to hear him in person but his playing (not his writing) on the album I did hear moved me. Jackie MacLean has the most rhythmic vitality and so far, the least discipline of all these saxophonists. He expresses his own personality with his sound and has tremendous swing and energy. Hearing his blues sounds has always been for me a haunting and, at the same time, exhilarating, experience. I have always loved Johnny Hodges. He is a true aristocrat.

The difference in the personalities of all of these men, who manage to indelibly express their uniqueness in their music, is to me the most profound demonstration of the validity of jazz, because I feel that the communication of human values is the main purpose of any art.

Besides jazz, I enjoy the works of Stravinsky and Webern and certain works of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartk and Prokofiev; also African and Indian music. When I get dragged with everything, I try Bach. I find they all help my ear enormously. As far as the way these musics influence my own playing, all I can say is that everything is an influence. When I say everything, I mean just that, from the rhythm of children's speech to the patterns of the stars. I believe that the only way for me to develop myself is the way thoroughly proven by the men who have made jazz what it is-that is, to play as often and as publicly as possible, with as good musicians as will tolerate me.

Chapter Two

Lacy's discourse on the soprano saxophone appeared in the longtime jazz journal Metronome (December 1961), edited by Dan Morgenstern. The music of Thelonious Monk continued to dominate in Lacy's development, as the source of more than half the material on his next two albums. In 1960 his unusual quartet (with Charles Davis on baritone saxophone) recorded The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy, two months after his summer-long stint playing in Monk's quintet. That same year, after hearing Lacy play, the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane began to take up the soprano and recorded his first album on the instrument, My Favorite Things. A year later, just before the following article was published, Lacy recorded Evidence in a quartet with the trumpeter Don Cherry.

The straight B[flat] soprano saxophone is one of the least familiar of all the saxophones. The jazz audience today is largely unused to the sound or even the sight of the straight soprano, which is not to be confused with the curved, toy-like soprano saxophone that is considerably easier to play and sounds much like a higher, thinner version of the alto. On sight many people think it is a gold metal clarinet.

Back in the '20s, however, the soprano was considered a standard double for the average reed player, but as techniques and section difficulties increased, the intonation problems, which are considerable with this instrument, outweighed the desirability of its use. Only a few players continued to employ it.

As far as its being the sole instrument played by an individual, Sidney Bechet stood almost alone throughout the '30s and '40s. And even he also played clarinet until the last few years of his life. In 1932 Bechet had organized a violent little band with Tommy Ladnier on trumpet. They made half a dozen sides for Victor, which are fiery examples of his remarkable drive. To me these sides remain among the most exciting jazz records ever made: "Shag," "Maple Leaf Rag," "I Found a New Baby," etc. In the early '40s he recorded, again for Victor, an excellent series of sides with Kenny Clarke, Sidney de Paris, Charlie Shavers, Teddy Bunn, Sid Catlett, and others. Throughout his European career he was a featured soloist, sometimes accompanied by a large orchestra. Bechet would sometimes play the trumpet part, the soprano having the normal trumpet range. More often, though, he would fill the traditional embellishing role of the clarinet, sometimes switching to the clarinet itself. As everyone knows, Bechet was one of the pioneers of New Orleans jazz. He and others of that time were largely responsible for the perpetration of the idea of jazz being "hot" music. The heat in Bechet's playing was a result of the intense swing and the passionate involvement of himself with his music. Bechet was no architect. He was harmonically nave and rhythmically unsubtle. However, he had a natural plastic sense and could capture the imagination of his audiences with sweeping melodramatics. He had a very personal sound that will be remembered by all those who heard him play. Many did not care for this sound owing to his excessive use of a very wide vibrato. My own feeling is that this was a means, perhaps, of covering the natural inaccuracy of any given note on the horn itself.

Certain portions of the soprano's range are intrinsically out of tune with the rest of the horn. All instruments have "bad" notes here and there, but the soprano has whole segments of such notes. Several solutions to this problem are available to the serious player. Bechet had one, the above-mentioned wide vibrato. This is stylistically distasteful to many musicians who might rather prefer to use a small chambered mouthpiece and play at a low volume level, thereby minimizing the difficulties. If one wants the power of, say, a Bechet without the vibrato, one must humor each note, bending it to the desired pitch. This requires long and assiduous practice with much frustration, or else a high natural sensitivity, coupled with extreme lip flexibility. The amount of time necessary for complete memorization of all the necessary adjustments discourages doubling the instrument.

Johnny Hodges was an early student of Bechet and is a brilliant alto player. He was also, to my mind, the finest soprano saxophonist until the mid-'40s, when he gave it up for reasons of his own. Most of Hodges's recordings are unavailable on LP, but on the original 78s there are numerous examples of his warm, suave, lyrical improvisations. Outstanding among these are "Indigo Echoes" and "Tough Truckin'," using for that, or any other time, the very unusual instrumentation of cornet, soprano, baritone, piano, and two basses. Other good discs, both with small groups and the full Ellington band, are "Blue Reverie," "Blue Goose," "Tired Socks," "That's the Blues, Old Man," and "Harmony in Harlem." Hodges's great coloristic flexibility and marvelous control, combined with his delicate ear, enabled him to handle the soprano in the same relaxed manner as his own alto, without having to resort to Bechet's vibrato.

Now, largely through my own efforts and those of John Coltrane, Lucky Thompson, Budd Johnson, Barney Wilen, and a few others, the instrument seems headed for a resurgence of popularity.

Coltrane was looking for a relief and contrast to his tenor and also an extension of the higher register, and found it quite naturally in the soprano, which is both in the same key and exactly one octave higher than the tenor. His playing combines great harmonic complexity, a dry, almost Eastern sound, and unflagging propulsion, which when used in his present format (sometimes with two basses droning hypnotically) produces quite an exotic mood.

I heard Bechet on records about twelve years ago and bought my first horn. As my ear was not very good in those days, I was unaware of the pitch problems inherent in the horn. By the time my ear had improved, I was too far gone to dream of switching to another horn. Instead, I gave up the idea of doubling altogether and really started to get down to work. I certainly was not primarily concerned, however, with the promotion of the soprano per se, even though it was and still is a challenge to master this devilish instrument.

This instrument can fulfill an extremely valuable function in today's jazz. Like all saxophones, its range, with practice, can be increased beyond the normal limits to four full octaves. It is the only treble instrument able to be played percussively enough and with enough power and brilliance to fit into the stylistic demands of contemporary jazz. The lowest part of the soprano's range, which is right in the heart of the tenor saxophone range and quite similar to it in sound, can be played with extreme intensity. If the range of the horn is extended upwards to the extreme limit, the top notes are remarkably like those that Cat Anderson can produce. Between these two extremes a great diversity of colors are available, thereby making this instrument potentially one of extreme expressive power.

As Charlie Parker increased the technical and expressive possibilities of the alto, Milt Jackson the vibraharp, Kenny Clarke the drums, and Jimmy Blanton the bass, one of my personal aims is to do the same for the soprano.

(Continues...)

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