Steve Lacy
American musician and composer who, helped introduce a neglected instrument, the soprano saxophone, into modern jazz in the mid-1950s, creating simple, lyric melodies with an individualistic concept of solo form and giving the traditionally high, piping horn a personal warmth and range of expression. While many modal and free-jazz saxophonists followed in his footsteps, Lacy remained one of the rare soprano saxophonists to concentrate exclusively on that instrument.
American musician and composer who, helped introduce a neglected instrument, the soprano saxophone, into modern jazz in the mid-1950s, creating simple, lyric melodies with an individualistic concept of solo form and giving the traditionally high, piping horn a personal warmth and range of expression. While many modal and free-jazz saxophonists followed in his footsteps, Lacy remained one of the rare soprano saxophonists to concentrate exclusively on that instrument.
Il Bestiario
** Temporary super offer, very last copies ** There was never anyone like Maria Monti – and this album is a true testament to her genius! Il Bestiario might be best understood next to albums by artists like Brigitte Fontaine, Scott Walker, and Catherine Ribeiro, all of whom began their careers within the saccharine confines of popular music, before embarking on some of the most revolutionary recordings of the era. It enlisted the radical poet Aldo Braibanti (a man defined “the lone true Italian…
Free for a Minute (1966-72) 2CD
An incredible package – one that brings together two very important albums from reedman Steve Lacy – plus unreleased material from the same time too! First up is the record Disposability – presented here with the first-ever correction to the cymbal sound – a key session in the development of Steve Lacy – and a great one too! The album was one of Lacy's first European recordings – caught in the studio in Rome in 1965, with a very free-styled trio that includes Alberto Romano on drums and Kent Car…
Tips
2015 release. A reissue of Steve Lacy and Steve Potts's Tips, originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1981. Soprano saxophonist Lacy wrote the suite of tunes for Tips to feature the aphorisms of painter Georges Braque, as sung by Irene Aebi. Together with his right-hand-man, alto saxophonist Potts, he and Aebi recorded these 14 anthemic tracks in Paris in 1979, and the young hat Hut Records label issued them on a now-rare LP. The music allowed Lacy to extend and deepen his longstanding interes…
New Jazz Festival Balver Höhle (New Jazz 1974 & 1975)
Recorded live at the cave at Balve, West Germany, July 27/28, 1974 and May 31/June 1, 1975. Box Set with 11 CDs featuring the best of the New Jazz Scene from Europe and the USA in 1974/75. 32-page booklet with concert pictures, posters, flyers and newspaper clippings (in German and English). Includes complete performances and improvisations by Peter Brötzmann, Jasper van’t Hof, John Surman (with the legendary Trio Surman-Osborne-Skidmore) Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink and many more!
RECORDED li…
Eternal Duo
One of the most compelling albums Steve Lacy recorded during the 80s – a spare set of duets with Japanese percussionist Masahiko Togashi, who really helps shape Steve's style on the record! Togashi approaches his instruments with a very introspective, almost tentative style – hardly the bold rhythms of other drummers, and instead this subtle stepping forward that almost feels, at times, as if Masahiko is discovering his instruments for the first time – and figuring out the sounds in a careful wa…
Last Tour
Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone), Irene Aebi (voice), George Lewis (trombone), Jean-Jacques Avenel (double bass) and John Betsch (drums). After a long tour of North America, this quintet concluded by playing two concerts in Boston (March 2004) - most of the first one being included here. The material is five of the Beat poems featuring Irene Aebi, plus three instrumentals, including one (Baghdad) that has not been on record before as it had only just been written. After a lot of working together, …
Morning Joy ...Paris Live
"Reissue as part of the 40th anniversary of Hat Hut Records. What we have here is a one-nighter by the Steve Lacy Quartet at Paris' Sunset Club...The four members of the quartet get a chance to stretch out and you can feel the club energy clearly in the recording - it's a good night at the Sunset...in this era of homogenization - of jazz players who are filled with technique but have gotten their sound from textbooks - there is not enough attention that can be focused on an uncompromising jazz i…
The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note 10
A wonderful run of music from the great Steve Lacy – all of the larger group recordings done for the Black Saint/Soul Note label – nearly 20 years of really inventive albums! Lacy's solo and smaller group material were already collected in another excellent box in this series – but this collection shows Steve stepping out in a mode that's not nearly as well-represented on other labels – some of his more intense, complicated efforts – done with both familiar associates, and some surprising choice…
Cycles (1976-80)
Solo saxophone performances of three of Lacy's rarest cycles. The eight-part SHOTS (Moms / Pops / The Kiss / Tots / The Ladder / Fruits / Coots / The Wire) comes mostly from a 1977 Roman concert, with a couple of missing pieces taken from other contemporaneous performances. The only other complete (duo) release of this material was on a long deleted (Musica) LP. The rest of this 2-CD set comes from a 1980 solo recording session and concert in the lively acoustics of an old church in Porrentruy i…
Avignon and after - Volume 1
The 1972 Avignon concerts were Steve Lacy’s very first solo concerts, although he did make an excellent overdubbed solo record for Saravah the year before. (For ‘solo’ read ‘alone’ or ‘unaccompanied’ rather than the usual music business meaning of ‘very accompanied’.) Thanks to an introduction by John Stevens, I first met Lacy when he visited London in 1973. He brought with him some of the Avignon tapes in order to try and interest a record producer to issue this music. However, record producers…
The Sun
It is a disturbing fact that most of the major disputes throughout history have been settled by physical fighting involving killing. Have we really risen much above the rest of the animal world? On the contrary, many animals do not kill members of their own species even though they may fight. It used to be that battles were fought in a remote location between two armies that comprised a small percentage of the population. But let us not forget that military fighters, whether voluntary, conscript…
School days
“In 1962 I went to New York for the first time. My father had worked for Boac for so long that the flights were free - I had only to pay 7/6 (=37½p) airport tax. I stayed in NY for two weeks, only leaving Manhattan to take the standard tourist boat trip around the island. A lady on the plane had taken an interest in my plans, and when I told her that I didn't think there would be time to experience more than what Manhattan had to offer, she implored me, 'Please don't judge America by what you se…
The Rest
In June of 1977, Steve Lacy and Joe McPhee shared a double bill in Basel, Switzerland. Lacy invited McPhee to join him for a duet to close his set, for which McPhee elected to bring out his own soprano saxophone. The main part of Lacy’s performance was issued on the classic Clinkers LP; after 36 years, here is The Rest. This one-sided, limited LP marks the first and only time that these two master musicians played together, but the simpatico meshing of their distinctly individual voice…
Yuji Takahashi / Steve Lacy / Masahiko Togashi
'Egg Farm' is a private concert space in an egg farm (really!) in north of Tokyo. Originally, the space was established in early 80's and named 'Space Who'. Owner of the egg farm organized many live show of free improvisation at the space (Takayanagi, Evan Parker, Richard Titelbaum, Arthur Doyle and more. especially she loves Kosugi and Steve Lacy).
Hooky
Virtually the whole of the 1976 Montreal solo concert -- one of his best -- including the complete Tao cycle and several other pieces, one of which ('Hooky') is not on any other record. Reissue of half of Quark LP 9998 with over 50 minutes of previously unissued material from the same concert.
Saxophone special +
Music for four saxophones (Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Steve Potts & Trevor Watts) with guitar (Derek Bailey) & synthesizer (Michel Waisvisz). Plus highlights from an earlier London concert by Lacy, Potts, Bailey, Kent Carter & John Stevens. Improvisations on original compositions. Reissue of Emanem 3310 (plus an extra piece from the same concert) and the better half of Emanem 304.
Weal & woe
If you have only heard the more recent, understated recordings of this giant of the soprano saxophone, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Just listen to this seminal album and you should understand right away why Lacy is such a formidable force. The initial eight tracks are a reissue of the first LP issued by Emanem, which was Lacy's first solo recording. Each is a gem: radical, accessible, and fascinatingly offbeat. One uses a random radio selection as a backdrop, another mimics duck wa…