Estilhaços

The late soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy is better represented through recordings than almost any of his fellow jazzmen. The quality of the music is consistently high: Lacy may have recorded often, but he never recorded throwaways. His modus operandi was to assemble groups — quartets and quintets mostly — that stayed together for long periods of time. In some ways, alto saxophonist Steve Potts was Pharoah Sanders to Lacy’s John Coltrane: the untethered voice. Although Lacy and Trane were different types of players, both shared a preoccupation with form and structure. As their visions expanded, they needed to find ways break away from both the structure of the material and their own adherence to playing within conventional (if highly evolved) theoretical systems. Neither could quite bring himself completely let go in his own playing, so they found deputies with less formal understanding of the “rules” to disassemble parts of the music, moving it from “sense” to a realm of pure emotion. For Lacy, the wayward perimeter that he assigned to Steve Potts represented only one small part of the music’s whole. Because he played with his own deliberate, often non-swinging phrasing, Lacy thought it important to use a swinging rhythm… read more »