Lacy, 69, Who Popularized the Soprano Saxophone, Dies: “After performing in New York, his hometown, Mr. Lacy moved to Italy and France, and became the most Europeanized of all expatriate American jazz musicians. He married one of his musical collaborators, the Swiss-born singer Irene Aebi, who survives him. He insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by novelists, poets and philosophers — as well as visual-art and dance components, when time and money allowed.

For someone long considered an avant-garde artist, Mr. Lacy always insisted that nobody could get more avant-garde than Louis Armstrong; his best work was anti-highfalutin and doggedly practical. His most representative melodies, like “The Bath” and “The Gleam,” use gentle repetition and gentle wit; he developed his saxophone tone to be as attenuated as a Hemingway sentence, and his improvised lines as succinct. At the end of his life, hounded by tax problems in France, he returned to the United States, moving in 2002 to teach at the New England Conservatory and live in Brookline, Mass.” (New York Times)