good Steve Lacy appreciation

"What sets Lacy apart from other jazz composers is his devotion to the song form. Influenced by everyone from Weill to Webern, Lacy's settings of poetry borrow from both jazz and classical music yet are beholden to neither. His output--over 100 settings of poets such as Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Kaufman--makes him something of a jazz Schubert. Like Schubert, Lacy wraps a mantle around the words, adding a new layer of meaning with melodies that enhance and illuminate them, as if the music were his own gloss of the text. At gigs without a vocalist--always his wife, the singer Irene Aebi--Lacy would simply read the poem before launching into the tune. His voice deployed the same shades of nuance that his horn did."