Steve Potts came up in the American jazz scene of the 1960s, but the work that defines him happened after he moved to Paris and fell in with Steve Lacy. From the early 1970s on, Potts was Lacy's foil — the alto and soprano player who could match Lacy's angular, Monk-inflected phrasing note for note, then push it somewhere else entirely. That kind of chemistry doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen quickly. It took years of playing the same tunes night after night in small European clubs before the two of them locked in the way they did.

What made the pairing work is that Potts never tried to out-Lacy Lacy. He had his own sound — rawer, sometimes more overtly bluesy, with a harder edge on alto — and he used it to fill in the spaces Lacy left open. Listen to any of the Lacy sextet records from the late 1970s and 1980s and you can hear the two horns operating almost like one instrument split in half, trading the melody back and forth without ever stepping on each other. It's a very specific skill, playing that close to another voice for that long, and Potts made it sound easy.

He wasn't just a sideman who showed up and read charts, either. Potts helped shape the group's identity over the years it spent touring and recording together, including on records like Trickles (1976), where his alto work sits right up against Lacy's soprano in a way that still sounds fresh. He brought a physicality to the music — a willingness to get gritty and vocal on the horn — that balanced out Lacy's more cerebral, angular approach. Together they made a sound that neither one of them made alone.

Potts never became a household name outside of serious jazz circles, and that's fine — some musicians build careers as leaders, others build careers as essential partners, and Potts falls squarely in the second camp. If you want to understand what a truly long-running musical relationship sounds like, one built over hundreds of gigs and dozens of records rather than a single flashy session, put on anything from the Lacy group's Paris years and listen for the alto answering the soprano. That's Potts, doing the quiet, hard work of making somebody else's music better.