Steve Lacy, an American soprano saxophonist who spent more than half of his 50-year career living in Europe and helped legitimize his instrument in postwar jazz, died Friday in Boston. He was 69.
The cause was cancer, according to the New England Conservatory of Music, where Mr. Lacy had been teaching since 2002.
After performing in New York, his hometown, Mr. Lacy moved to Italy and France, and became the most Europeanized of all expatriate American jazz musicians. He insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by novelists, poets and philosophers–as well as visual-art and dance components when time and money allowed.
For someone long considered an avant-garde artist, Mr. Lacy always insisted that nobody could get more avant-garde than Louis Armstrong; his best work was anti-highfalutin and doggedly practical. His most representative melodies, like “The Bath” and “The Gleam,” use gentle repetition and gentle wit; he developed his saxophone tone to be as attenuated as an Ernest Hemingway sentence, and his improvised lines as succinct.
At the end of his life, hounded by tax problems in France, he returned to the United States, moving in 2002 to teach at the New England Conservatory and live in Brookline, Mass.
Mr. Lacy formed musical partnerships and made records at an astonishing rate. He led working bands of up to eight musicians for nearly 30 years; he also performed and recorded often as a solo saxophonist and in duos with partners as different as the American pianist Mal Waldron and Japanese percussionist Masahiko Togashi. One of his discographies lists 236 items up to the year 1997, including more than 20 solo saxophone albums.
Born Steven Lackritz, he grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Clarinet was his first instrument; then, inspired by hearing Sidney Bechet’s version, recorded in 1941, of Duke Ellington’s “The Mooche,” he decided to pursue Bechet’s instrument, the soprano saxophone. At the time he had little competition.
At the age of 21, he was performing the standard Dixieland repertory on both instruments at Stuyvesant Casino and the Central Plaza in New York.
He shared stages with musicians such as Henry Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Buck Clayton and Hot Lips Page, and his teacher, Cecil Scott. He also was playing at the Newport Jazz Festival with pianist Cecil Taylor, who was terrifying audiences by doing away with traditional structure and tonality. Mr. Lacy worked with Taylor for six years and with other bandleaders as well, including Gil Evans; he always described this mix as the best possible training for a jazz musician.
One of them was Thelonious Monk, who became a guiding aesthetic master to Mr. Lacy for the rest of his life. Through playing with Monk in a quintet and big band, and studying his music assiduously, Mr. Lacy was able to absorb the elder musician’s wit, economy, insistence on simple rhythmic patterns and range of melody. He once described Monk’s music as perfect for the soprano saxophone: “Not too high, not too low, not easy, not at all overplayed and most of all, full of interesting technical problems.”
He married one of his musical collaborators, the Swiss-born singer Irene Aebi, who survives him.
