Snakes & Jazz
Back home had enough energy left for a few pages of a superb book that had arrived over the summer while I was away: Steve Lacy : Conversations. Edited by Jason Weiss (Duke University Press) Robert Creeley (it is one of the great pleasures of my life to have been able to introduce him to Steve back in the early eighties) is quoted:
“There’s no way simply to make clear how particular Steve Lacy was to poets or how much he can now teach them by fact of his own practice and example. No one was ever more generous or perceptive. . . . Steve opened a lot for me in the most quiet way. Music was only the beginning.”
While I blurbed the book as follows:
“Steve Lacy is a superb interviewee, extremely articulate in terms of his music, of the history of jazz, and of the cultural situation in Europe and the United States. Lacy’s witnessing to his age is an essential document in the history of post-bop jazz, and in the wider sense, as Lacy’s work is profoundly boundary-breaking, of music in the second part of the twentieth century. Jason Weiss has done a superb job gathering these interviews. The range is breathtaking and the chronological arrangement allows the reader to experience the evolution of Lacy as a musician and a thinker. All subsequent theoretical/critical thinking about Lacy and his music will need to refer to this book.”