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In later years, Lacy always talked about his music — both as player and composer — in terms of long-term study and long-term personal relationships. Two maxims from Monk that he repeated over and over were "Lift the bandstand" and "Make the drummer sound good" ("A remark like that I’m still thinking about," Lacy said with characteristic dryness). Meeting the Swiss-born Aebi, who had been performing as a folk musician, he was inspired to set texts to music, particularly by the poets they both loved. And here, too, it’s difficult to separate work from friendship — poets like Creeley, Bryon Gysin, Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, Anne Waldman. Lacy’s "jazz art song" settings of their work grew out of friendship, even as he also set prose pieces by Matisse, Buckminster Fuller, and Lao-Tzu. Eventually, his holistic view of art took in dance and theater, and one piece included a stage set by painter Kenneth Noland.

Lacy’s music developed from building blocks he learned from Monk. Although he early on spurred wild and woolly "free" group improvisations and developed the "extended" saxophone techniques of squeaks, squawks, and harmonic overtones (one of his funniest and most elegant pieces is an aviary tribute, "Duck"), his work is nonetheless resolutely tonal. Like Monk, he favored short, repeated melodies, broad melodic leaps rich in harmonic possibility, displaced rhythmic accents. He sometimes said that his music was built on "rhythmic intervals" and that his saxophone was "an interval machine." What this meant in terms of his playing was a broad, beautiful tone applied to melodic phrases that grew with motivic logic, like prose sentences, full of funny curlicue digressions and asides and the occasional rude honk, with a distinctive, subtle sense of swing. It’s not for nothing that Lacy explored those extended techniques — he lavished deep love on every note in every register his horn was capable of.

Lacy’s mastery of the soprano saxophone inspired John Coltrane to pick it up, and from Coltrane’s "My Favorite Things" in 1960, the instrument spread through jazz like a virus. But Lacy was its specialist (he never "doubled" on other horns), with unerring control, and a tone like no one else’s. It was cheering to watch him work with students at the New England Conservatory, where he taught his own and Monk’s compositions, and where students and younger colleagues alike hung on his every word as if he were a sage. "His playing is very pure, and free of extra filigree," NEC dean of faculty (and alto-saxophonist) Allan Chase told me shortly after Lacy began teaching there. "Very direct, boiled down to the essence. I hear the same thing in Sonny Rollins and Monk and Miles Davis, and to me he’s on that level."

At that Harvard visit in 1990, where he was enjoying a residency sponsored by the Learning from Performers program of Harvard’s Office of the Arts, Lacy talked with an audience of students and fans in an open forum. One musician tried to provoke him into criticizing Monk’s long-time employment of saxophonist Charlie Rouse instead of a more esteemed player. Lacy’s answer was revealing of his experience as a musician and a bandleader. "Monk didn’t always prefer the supercharged players. Not necessarily. He didn’t necessarily want the hottest thing going. But he wanted the goodest thing going, the rightest thing going, the thing that was happening. And what Monk valued was the minuscule changes that go on night to night from a beloved person. Not the flash from out of the blue once in a while. No, but it’s a kind of love, a kind of continuity, where you play with the same people and every night it unfolds a little bit. And there’s always something new. Not a whole lot like that, but something. And then some nights, it’s really fantastic. But it’s always ongoing. And that’s what Monk valued — that kind of fidelity and that kind of continuity, and that is another kind of swing.

"But at the same time, I know that his favorite horn player was Sonny Rollins. And Sonny Rollins understood his music certainly as well as Charlie Rouse did and in a sense could play rings around Rouse. But Sonny Rollins wasn’t always available for him all the time. And Rouse stayed with him. Rouse loved him and stayed with him for all those years. That’s what’s happening."

There’s perhaps no better statement about a jazz community that supports individual expression. When the economics of the American scene wouldn’t support him, Lacy went to Europe and built his community from scratch — with like-minded players in and out of his band, starting with his wife and extending to Mal Waldron, Steve Potts, Frederic Rzewski, Kent Carter, Bobby Few, Oliver Johnson, John Betsch, Jean-Jacques Avenel, and many more. And it’s that sense of community, and greatness, he brought back to Boston.

The New England Conservatory will present a Steve Lacy Memorial Concert on Tuesday October 12 in Jordan Hall.