excerpted from: BYLINE: Mike Zwerin After 32 Years In Paris, Saxophonist Says, 'it's Time To Book' SOURCE: International Herald Tribune Lacy is leaving France for a day gig that includes artistic freedom, a generous salary, social and medical benefits, miscellaneous perks and three-month vacations. "It's time to book," he said... But he has come to feel stalled, "local," taken for granted in Europe. So he accepted an offer he couldn't refuse in Boston. He has a contract to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music, and before the start of the next school year, he and his Swiss-born wife, the singer Irene Aebi, and their two cats will move to Massachusetts. The Lacys are having trouble finding a landlord who will accept the cats, and he is aware that, "the transition will be hard." "I have mixed emotions," he said. "But I've had it with Paris. I want to go home. I've been here too long. You have to follow the music. That's why I came here in the first place. The expat thing is over." This coming from America's leading jazz expatriate might just signify the end of an era. Given Lacy's geographical promiscuity, however, the future is anything but clear. After being stranded in Buenos Aires in 1966, he moved to Rome and in 1970 to Paris (it was the height of the Vietnam War and his band was performing only one extended number, "The Woe," which he calls "our war song") and from Paris to Berlin in the 1990s -- a move that was also supposed to be definitive. In Berlin, he was quoted as saying: "There's nothing happening in Paris any more but football." It caused him a certain amount of woe when he did in fact return. ... There is another reason to move. "The 'fisc' is on my case," is the way he put it. The French equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service "wants money I never made. I have three lawyers working on it. It's expensive and boring, and it keeps me from concentrating on the music. There's a guy there who thinks I'm a big American fish with bank accounts everywhere. I always manage to keep busy, but basically I run at a loss. I kept it going on deficit financing from my mother's stocks and the MacArthur." In 1992, Lacy was awarded a $340,000 fellowship -- popularly known as a "genius grant" -- by the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. (He says he paid taxes on it in the United States.) It was spent subsidizing his intellectual, often austere and classically and ethnically oriented projects. He takes a sort of perverse pride in being a sloppy record-keeper. "Like I can't drive a car and I can't play chess, I can't keep books. Not everyone can do everything. Fortunately, I can write music and play the saxophone O.K."