Steve Lacy: Conversations Review

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Steve Lacy: Conversations ReviewIt's hard to get excited about a book that consists entirely of interviews conducted over years by a wide variety of scribes, and yet STEVE LACY CONVERSATIONS emerges as a triumph for editor Jason Weiss. It's nearly as good as Kenneth Goldsmith's edition of inter views with Warhol that came out a few seasons ago (I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR). Like Warhol, Lacy was sometimes interiewed by hacks who sometimes muddled or confused his message, and a few times here you have to imagine what Lacy really might have replied before the tape or whatever got transcribed incorrectly. That makes for some fun though, and it forces the reader into working out the sense, allowing the reader to become involved in the process as well.
Weiss tells us that he became interested in Lacy's music primarily through his, and Irene Aebi's, connections to Brion Gysin, whose READER Weiss edited a while back. For nearly two decades Lacy and Gysin were co-conspirators, a "songwriting team," Weiss suggests, like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Greenwich and Barry. Lacy had an equally long, well longer, intimacy with the work of his mentor, jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, and then, from 1960 to his own death, he was frequently a pilgrim to the shrine of Thelonius Monk, whose work he revered beyond all others.
His wife, Irene Aebi, had many connections in the beat world, and their last LP together, BEAT SUITE, is a song cycle using texts from many canonical Beat poets (and such allied figures as Jack Spicer) whom Aebi knew from her youth. French Canadian musicians interviewed Lacy in 1976 in Montreal and New York; their interview is one of the best here, with some probing, intelligent questions designed to elicit thoughtful replies. This is es[pecially good on Lacy's Russian heritage (he was born Steven Lackritz in New York in 1934). Rare and unusual photographs decorate and illuminate the work here, including one of Lacy blowing it out in his beautiful ivy-laden Paris garden in the late 1990s--the paradise he left a little bit later to take that last job in Brookline, Massachusetts. His hairline travels between photos but he's always the same appealing, deeply American man of the world.
"When I used to work with Monk," he recalled, "he used to say, 'Let's lift the bandstand.' That's magic, man, when the bandstand levitates. I didn't know how to do it--but I knew what he was talking about. Old dreams but they're still valid." (From a 1979 interview with Brian Case.) Well, we know that somehow in the process, Lacy did discover how to "lift the bandstand," and somehow I suspect he knew how all along, even before the revelations of Taylor, Gysin, Aebi or Monk.Steve Lacy: Conversations Overview

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