GRUPPO/ARTISTA: Steve Lacy ALBUM: Let's Call This...Esteem
ETICHETTA: Silta Records
DATA: 2009
Clicca e ascolta 30 sec. di ogni traccia dell'album:
01 Introduction Lets Call This.mp3
02 Monks Dream.mp3
03 In a Sentimental Mood.mp3
04 Snake Out.mp3
05 Blues for Aida.mp3
06 Johnny Come Lately.mp3
07 What It Is.mp3
08
Evidence.mp3
09
Epistrophy.mp3
10
Esteem.mp3
Recensione:
Steve Lacy, one of the greatest soprano saxophonists of all time and
a New England Conservatory faculty member since fall 2002, died
Friday [June 4th, 2004] at New England Baptist Hospital. The jazz
master who once defined his profession as "combination orator,
singer, dancer, diplomat, poet, dialectician, mathematician, athlete,
entertainer, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer and general
all around good fellow" was 69. He leaves his wife and collaborator,
the Swiss singer Irene Aebi.
Born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, Lacy was the first
avant garde jazz musician to make a specialty of the soprano
saxophone—an instrument that had become almost completely neglected
during the Bop era. Indeed, he is credited with single-handedly
bringing the instrument back from obscurity into modern music of all
types. He regularly received awards from DownBeat Magazine as the
premier soprano saxophonist and in 1992 received a MacArthur
Foundation “genius” grant. In 2002, he was made a Commandeur de
l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. A prolific
recording artist, Lacy is represented on many labels including
Universal, Senators, RCA, Verve, Label Bleu, Greats of Jazz, EMI,
CBS/Columbia, and Denon.
Throughout his career, Lacy was widely admired for the beauty and
purity of his tone, for his incisive melodic sense, for keeping his
music uncompromising and fresh, and for his eagerness to play with a
wide variety of musicians while retaining long-term musical
relationships. For example, since 1998, he performed often with
Panamanian pianist and NEC faculty member Danilo Perez, but he also
played regularly with Mal Waldron, a pianist he had worked with since
the fifties. He was esteemed for his productivity, and for the
consistently high quality of his art. As a teacher, a role he took on
in the last two years of his life, he was revered for his intense
focus and generosity.
During the latter part of his career, Lacy made his home in Paris for
33 years, but returned to the United States in 2002 to begin his
first teaching job at NEC. He was prominently featured in the
concerts celebrating the centennial of NEC's Jordan Hall in October
2003, kicking off the festivities in a Best of Jazz performance that
featured other Conservatory jazz greats like Ran Blake, George
Russell, Bob Brookmeyer, and alumnus Cecil Taylor.
Lacy got his start as a sideman in the early fifties playing in
Manhattan's Dixieland revival scene. He also worked with some Duke
Ellington players including cornetist Rex Stewart who christened him
“Lacy.” Although he initially doubled on clarinet and soprano sax, he
soon dropped the former instrument and found his distinctive voice
with the saxophone. It was the NEC-trained Cecil Taylor who set Lacy
on a new course and introduced him to Thelonious Monk—who, along with
Duke Ellington, would remain the most important influence in his
life. “Playing with Cecil Taylor immediately put me into the
offensive mode” (of music-making), Lacy recalled in his book
Findings: My Experience with the Soprano Saxophone. “This was the
avant-tout garde; we were an attack quartet (sometimes quintet or
trio), playing original, dangerously threatening music that most
people were offended by….”
Lacy recorded with Gil Evans in 1957 and continued to work with him
intermittently up through the 1980s. In 1958, he and pianist Waldron
recorded Reflections: Steve Lacy Plays the Music of Thelonious Monk,
which led to an invitation to join Monk's quintet for four months in
1960. After that immersion experience, he created a quartet with
trombonist Roswell Rudd that dedicated itself exclusively to Monk's
music. He was still playing Monk as recently as last winter when he
introduced a new quintet at Manhattan's Iridium. Monksieland,
comprised of trumpeter Dave Douglas, Rudd, and Lacy's longtime Paris
rhythm section, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer John Betsch,
played Monk with the freedom and contrapuntal interplay of Dixieland
jazz.
In 1965, Lacy began performing in Europe where he found particularly
appreciative audiences in Italy and France. He met his wife in Rome
in 1966 and by the late sixties, they had settled down in Paris.
During the enormously fertile decades that followed, he created a
quintet that could expand or contract from a duo or trio on up to a
big band. He began collaborations with dancers (Merce Cunningham in
particular), artists and actors. He also started working with poets
like Brion Gysin, composing musical settings of their poems.
Irene Aebi exerted a profound influence on Lacy's artistry. For the
woman he called “his muse,” he wrote his first composition, The Way
(1967), based on the words of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu. He
continued to be inspired by his wife's voice and wrote works for her
based on poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Mary Frazee, Anne Waldman, and
Judith Malina. He wrote an opera, The Cry , with Bengali poet Taslima
Nasreen. And, over a period of many years, he composed The Beat
Suite, a jazz song cycle based on poetry by Jack Kerouac, Allen
Ginsburg, Robert Creeley, and other beat poets. That work had its
official world premiere in 2003 and has been recorded on a Universal
CD. As recently as this spring, Lacy and his wife were performing his
settings of Robert Creeley poems and excerpts from the Beat Suite at
MIT and Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.
At NEC, 36 students, both graduate and undergraduate, worked directly
with Lacy and he affected many others through his active
participation in the musical community. In his teaching, he was
concerned with helping students become complete artists. For
example, he might say of a young player: “He's got imagination, but
he needs to develop his taste a lot more—opera and poetry and
literature and dance. He really needs to broaden his base.” At NEC,
he felt students could get that broadening. “That's what I like about
this school,” he said in an interview last year. “…One can cross
the hall and it's not such rigid departments really. Anybody could
study improvisation or Indian music or symphonic construction or
whatever...”
About Lacy, NEC President Daniel Steiner said: “He was an
extraordinary artist, the kind of person who appears only a few times
in each generation of musicians. His presence at the Conservatory
affected not simply the jazz program but the overall musical life of
NEC.”
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