Steve Lacy was born in New York in 1934. He is not the most well known of our saxophonists in this Advent Series, but many sax players of today hold him in very high regard.
Lacy first started out playing ‘Trad.’ Jazz but quickly moved onto the Avant Garde scene during the 1960s. A short spell with Monk’s band in 1960 led to a lifetime’s association with Monk’s music and Lacy featured a Monk composition on nearly all of his subsequent albums.
Branford Marsalis cites Lacy as a big influence on his own soprano playing, and he’s possibly less well known as he lived in Paris from 1970 until two years before he died of Cancer in 2004.