Lacy Brings His Sextet From Europe to Catalina’s

“Any artist has to focus and search after a certain kind of simplicity and economy,” said soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. “There’s a lot of music around, maybe even too much music. The tendency for us is to want to boil it down to the essence.

“To me, there’s a big difference between jazz and gymnastics. Playing a lot of notes is gymnastics or calisthenics or something, exhibition. Music’s not about that really. It’s about meaning.”

That search for essence and meaning drove Lacy, whose sextet makes its local debut at Catalina’s tonight through Sunday, away from what he considered an overly “mechanical” American jazz scene in 1965. He moved to Europe and formed the sextet--Steve Potts (alto/soprano), Irene Aebi (vocals/strings), Bobby Few (piano), Jean-Jacques Avinel (bass) and Oliver Johnson (drums)--a year after he settled in Paris in 1970.

“The sextet is my instrument, really--the saxophone is just a part of that,” said Lacy, 53, in a phone interview from New York. “It’s just like if you find the right woman. You’re the right team and boredom doesn’t have anything to do with it, not when it’s true love.

“The sextet is the minimum working unit I have that can express what we have in mind. It’s basically a living organism that we can slice up or expand in various ways but, when you put it together, that’s completion for us.”

Lacy has been a highly regarded musician since he began performing in New York in the mid-’50s and a frequent winner of jazz critic polls since then. But he’s still largely unknown outside of staunch jazz circles here. Most of his albums in the last two decades have been released on small European labels.

The sextet differs from other units in featuring Aebi’s vocals as part of Lacy’s campaign to bring “the word” back into jazz. “Momentum,” his current album and first for a major American label in 25 years, includes music set to texts by Herman Melville and the late Brion Gysin, the beat-era artist who invented the “cut-up” technique and frequently collaborated with Lacy.

“I was already working in that direction but, when I met Brion in the early ‘70s, it was an illumination for me,” Lacy reflected. “The idea of cutting things up and permutating them is fun to do and it leads to an economy--if you want to find the essence of the thing, you have to cut it up, play with it and turn it around.”

Wasted words hold no more attraction than extraneous notes for Lacy, who was born and raised in New York City. Asked to fill in the personal background pre-dating his emergence in the mid-’50s New York scene, Lacy responded:

“Early ‘50s, in fact, ’50. New Orleans . . . Kansas City . . . Chicago . . . (studying those) different styles and history . . . from the piano to the clarinet to the saxophone via Ellington, (Sidney) Bechet and (Louis) Armstrong. Later on, getting more progressive, more modern, very soon, really, in the early ‘50s . . . then meeting (pianist) Cecil (Taylor) in ’53 and performing with him until ’59.

“At the same time, discovering Monk in ’55 and devoting myself to that (interpreting Monk’s music) for the next 12 years and simultaneously working with (the late arranger) Gil Evans. Also having many groups of my own and playing with hundreds of other people in New York, too.

“In the ‘60s, it began to get hard and I left (for Europe) in ’65 and stayed a couple of years. Went to South America and came back to New York in ’67 and then split again in ‘68, definitively. In Rome ‘68-69 and then Paris in ’70.”

That terse capsule history underplays the fact that Lacy began exploring Monk’s music when the latter was still considered more an eccentric figure than a major jazz composer. His decision to specialize on soprano saxophone came well before John Coltrane (who reportedly was inspired to pick up the instrument by Lacy’s example) popularized it in the jazz community during the ‘60s.

Lacy has been able to establish his sextet as a viable working band in Europe capable of working 50-75 dates a year. But he also records and performs frequently in other formats--last year Soul Note released both “Only Monk,” a solo album of Monk interpretations, and “Sempre Amore, an album of less well-known pages from the Ellington and Strayhorn songbooks performed by Lacy with pianist Mal Waldron.

Lacy also looks back to the examples of Monk, Cecil Taylor and Gil Evans as models of perseverance in confronting any criticism of the “art songs” (those incorporating words and Aebi’s vocals) from those who wish he would stick closer to the traditional jazz vest.

“One day the ‘art song’ will be considered our most popular flavor, but at the moment it’s considered rather weird in some quarters,” he acknowledged. “But other people will travel across a continent to hear it, so it’s partisans, some for and some against. The thing is, why would we bother insisting on that if there wasn’t something to it?

“Eventually, we’ll win that decision, but it could take a minute or two. Interpretation and performing original music, free improvisation, playing ballads, standards--they’re all aspects of music to me. I like all of it.”