Music is like nothing else so much as language. It is spoken with words (notes) both long and short, of different tone and timbre, a collection of which is called a “phrase.” Even without accompanying lyrics, people innately sense that music tells a story. And so it does.
One of the most difficult musical languages to understand, much less to speak, is jazz. And perhaps the most difficult dialect — the most challenging and most removed from popular conceptions of melody and harmony — is free improvisation. The late soprano saxophonist, Steve Lacy (1934-2004), was a leader in this misunderstood but important style.
Lacy started his career in the early 1950s playing one of the simpler, now often hackneyed, styles of jazz, Dixieland. But his world was turned upside down, and his playing something like inside out, when he heard the music of the avant-garde master pianist and composer, Thelonius Monk.
Lacy played with the “founder of bebop” only shortly, in 1960, but kept Monk’s compositions in his performing repertoire for the rest of his life. Monk, who founded but soon departed the bebop style for a more improvisational and experimental approach, was one of the famous American jazz artists, black and white, who also departed the U.S. for Europe in the 1950s and 1960s.
An entire colony of expatriate jazzers — horn players Art Farmer, Dexter Gordon, Phil Woods Don Byas, Chet Baker; singers Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks; drummers Kenny Clarke and Eugene Bullard — made Europe, and particularly Paris, home. For some, the black artists, the choice was driven by the demands of the art, the need to work, and more tolerant racial attitudes.
For expats like Lacy, though, it was all about the music. He couldn’t get the gigs in the States, and with the rise of the
powerful media conglomerates, his favored styles of free and improvisational jazz were being progressively marginalized. Moving to Europe, then, was ultimately a matter of survival, both artistic and personal.
While in France, Lacy made numerous recordings, with combos as well as in the staggeringly difficult solo style, for the Senators label. The New Albion imprint also has a selection of re-released titles that showcase Lacy’s astonishing dexterity and challenging musicality. Even more can be learned about the man and his music from the book Lacy wrote, Findings: My Experience with the Soprano Saxophone (CMAP Paris, 1994), as well as the complete discography assembled by East Coast radio station WNUR.
His musical travels took Lacy from Dixieland through bebop to free improvisation, from his birth in New York through the jazz joints of 1950s America to Europe. He lived in Paris for almost 30 years before returning to America to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music in 2003. Unfortunately, he passed away within a year.
It may sound condescending to say that few people can understand free jazz, or relate emotionally to music like Lacy played. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s just not meant for everyone, or that it’s an acquired taste. Whatever the case, you’ll never know if the language of free jazz speaks to you unless you hear it, and the eloquent Steve Lacy will be happy to oblige. 
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