Steve Lacy was once a brilliant bebop player. Yet conventional wisdom says the opposite. Many have long argued that a key to the innovative soprano saxophonist’s stubborn originality over a 50-year career was precisely the fact that he never played bebop, the common-practice language of jazz since about 1950.
The Lacy creation myth unfolds like this: Born in New York in 1934, he fell in love with the soprano sax as a teenager after hearing Sidney Bechet, cozied up to pre-bop elders like his teacher Cecil Scott, and made his first records in 1954 at age
