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Steve Lacy

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Steve Lacy
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View From the Brink

There are two different kinds of jazz: offensive and defensive. If they are well played, they are both 'on the brink', due to the spontaneous nature and individual character of this music.

I began defensively, 1950, New Orleans style, all the old numbers; then my teacher, Cecil Scott, invited me to sit in when he played with such New Orleans masters as 'Red' Allen, 'Pops' Foster, and 'Zutty' Singleton. Soon I found myself working alongside these great musicians, as well as many others from Kansas City (Buck Clayton, 'Dicky' Wells and Jimmy Rushing), New York/Washington (Willie 'The Lion' Smith and 'Sonny' Greer), etc. Little I knew at that time, I was constanly 'out there', on the brink, learning as I went along.

Pretty soon, Cecil Taylor 'discovered' me and I 'discovered' his music. Playing with Cecil Taylor immediately put me into the offensive mode. This was the avant-tout garde; we were an attack quartet, (sometimes quintet or trio), playing original, dangerously threatening music that most people (musicians, organisers, club-owners, and critics) were offended by, doing everything they could to hold us back and prevent us from getting work. In the six years I worked with Cecil Taylor (1953-59), I received an excellent education, not only in jazz, but also in politics and strategy.

Later when I worked with Gil Evans and Thelonious Monk, I was constantly beyond my depth, sometimes lost and always playing only what I could, on my instrument, the soprano sax, itself being an instrument 'on the brink'. It was completely in disuse when I began. Nobody could teach it to me really, and nobody could tell me what, or how to play on it.

Later, in the '60s, we all went into revolutionary mode, and abandoned all precepts (melody, harmony, rhythm and form), taking the music to the brink of destruction, and afterwards returning to completely refreshed traditional limits (melody, harmony, rhythm and form), but not defensively, only driven by the search for freedom, independence (interdependence really, jazz being collective) and creative invention, no defense being necessary.

Not everyone, of course, likes to live 'on the edge' like that, and there have been very great defensive players, but the musicians that have made the music really move and grow have all been masters of 'brinkmanship'. Some like it hot.

Reprinted from Steve Lacy's Findings: My Experience with the Soprano Saxophone, CMAP Paris, 1994.
Originally appeared in Jazz (11/11/92)

An exhaustive discography of Steve Lacy's voluminous recorded output is located at the website of Northwestern University's WNUR. Additional information can be found at Senators/Steve Lacy's music 'modus operandi'/the only & unofficial website

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