What else to say about Lacy? He was my gateway into jazz, which meant a pretty strange path, once through the gate. Lacy led to Roswell Rudd, who led to Herbie Nichols. Lacy led to Mal Waldron, to Cecil Taylor, Marilyn Crispell, Gil Evans – which is how I came to listen to Miles Davis. I always avoided Kind of Blue because it was something I was supposed to like, and that’s no fun. It was also through Lacy that my interest in the poet Robert Creeley was renewed (Lacy did an album of Creeley’s poems set to music, Futurities).

Lacy worked with many poets, both in person and through the page. Not all his choices were on the money; the collaboration with Brion Gysin still makes me cringe. Personally, I think he favored the Beats too much – Lacy’s work with poetry was more interesting when the poets weren’t of that ilk. The work with texts by Russian poets Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova are among my favorites.

At several points in his career (albums: The Gleam, The Cry, and The Beat Suite) Lacy used poems by Anne Waldman, a poet who aligned herself with the Beats, but could not really be said to be one of them. In 1999/2000, when I was newly but heavily into Lacy, and still very much discovering what was out there in terms of his recorded work, I was also working on a scholarly bibliography of the publications of Anne Waldman. Waldman had just sold her “papers” to the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor’s Library. I made an appointment with the archivist to examine her papers, which they had just received and were still very unorganized. If this piece were about Waldman and not Lacy, I’d have much more to say about my days in Ann Arbor, but suffice to say that in her papers was a letter from Lacy inviting her to his (and Irene Aebi’s) place in France to hang out and create something like a song cycle.

Michael Kelleher’s comment on Part 1 of this post got me thinking that it was indeed at the Calumet that I saw Lacy for the first time. It might well have been the same show that Michael saw, but I don’t remember Creeley being there. You might think that seeing Robert Creeley and Lacy bow to each other would be a memorable occurence, especially for a stumbling poet and admirer of poetry like me, but I may have been too entranced by the music (or off to the bar… let’s not get too romantic here) to notice.

I saw Lacy twice more, both times in Saint Paul at a place called the Dakota Bar & Grill. Once with the stalwart Jean-Jacques Avenel and John Betsch, and another time with the same rhythm section plus Irene Aebi and George Lewis on trombone. After the first show, the friend I went with went up to talk to Avenel, who seemed appreciative of my friend’s glowing comments, but very tired. I spotted Lacy at the far end of the four-sided bar, so I got up my courage to go over and talk to him. I sat down next to him, and asked him how his teaching stint went at Naropa University (he and Irene Aebi had been invited to give a class on songwriting). I got no response – Lacy just stared straight ahead and down. I tried again with a simple “I really enjoyed the show!” Nothing. I slowly slunk away and told my friend what had happened.

Much to my chagrin, my friend collared the venue’s manager and told him that we had driven some 300 miles for this show and Lacy wouldn’t even talk to me. The manager apologetically explained that Lacy and crew had been driving to St. Paul from Chicago in snowy weather and had gotten into an accident en route that caused them to have to stay up all night – they were all working on zero sleep. He said that he’d tell Lacy, however, that we came from so far away, and he was sure Steve would be delighted. Completely embarrassed and feeling like a puppy-dog, I walked behind the manager as he went up to Lacy, and listened to him rehash what my friend had told him about our long journey. Lacy did seem genuinely touched and perked up, as though he had been sleeping – meditating? We talked about Naropa, Waldman, and poetry in general for a few minutes, and I thanked him for the music blah blah blah, and he signed my copy of his CD Remains, writing the word “Whatever” above the eponymous word so it would flow into the title as an enigmatic phrase, followed by an ellipsis, and then his signature.

So, whatever remains? That haunting, joyful music. He made so much of it. And there are so many records now unavailable to virtually all but the ebay high-rollers and those who were lucky enough to be in the know in the first place. Disproving the rule that deceased musicians’ recordings become infinitely more available after the death, Lacy’s albums seem to be going out of print on a regular basis. And that’s not even touching the number of albums on labels like FMP and HATArt that don’t seem interested in putting his music back in circulation. He released albums on so many different labels that I imagine it would be hard to get the rights to many of the recordings, but the labels Lacy recorded for that are still thriving should be ashamed that they haven’t put as much of Lacy’s music out as possible.

I’ve since rebuilt my Lacy collection after my trip to Belgium, and even surpassed the original. Without knowing until much later the particular history that Lacy had in Belgium, the great number of intimate concerts he had there, culminating with the duet performance featuring Joelle Leandre, poignantly titled One More Time. Last Friday I was playing School Days, the only recording of the quartet Lacy co-led with Roswell Rudd in the early 60s which played nothing but Thelonious Monk compositions, I borrowed a DVD of the film HAXAN from the library where I work. The film was from the silent era, and a quasi-documentary of the history of witchcraft. It was re-released in the late 60s with a new jazz score written by drummer Daniel Humair. Who? That’s what I would have asked myself, but for the CD Work, released several years before Lacy’s death and featuring the trio of Lacy, Anthony Cox, and Daniel Humair.

Whatever remains? The music. And the worlds – the people, the artists, the listeners – that Lacy connected between the notes.