By Cliff Bellamy

cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744

Friday's concert by the Trachy Lacy Collective will be a homecoming for Russell Lacy, who plays drums and co-leads the band with tenor saxophone player Seth Trachy. The band will perform in the ArtsCenter's space in University Mall, but the main ArtsCenter venue in Carrboro is where Lacy said he heard a lot of live jazz as a middle and high school student. He also performed at the ArtsCenter a lot before moving to New York in 2006.

"The person who I heard who had the biggest impact on me was [trumpeter] Roy Hargrove," who played there in the late 1990s, Lacy said in a phone interview this week from his home in New York. "It was a really amazing show, and it was the first time I had seen that type of jazz group in a fairly intimate setting."

He and Trachy have been playing music together for about two years and have been co-leading the Collective for about a year and a half. In addition to Lacy and Trachy, the band includes David Caldwell Mason on piano and Edward Perez on bass. (At Friday's concert, Pablo Menares will be playing bass.)

In addition to the ArtsCenter, the co-leaders have other North Carolina and local connections. Trachy attended the N.C. School of the Arts in high school. Lacy grew up in Wake Forest, went to middle and high school in Raleigh, and went to North Carolina Central University, where he majored in jazz studies. Lacy also was a founding member of the John Brown Quintet.

In 2008 the Collective released its CD "Lanky," and Lacy contributed four compositions, among them the meditative composition "Guten Tag," and "Carmen's Blues." The structure of the blues piece has a specific purpose, Lacy said. The first part is a traditional 12-bar blues format, with walking bass line. The middle section takes on more of an Afro-Caribbean feel. Blues has its roots in North American slave traditions, but slavery also existed in South American and the Caribbean, and those slaves also expressed their experiences through music. "Carmen's Blues" is his homage to both traditions, Lacy said.

All members of the Collective continue to compose new music, and plan a new release in the next year or so. "We have a fairly new set that we will be playing on this tour," Lacy said. The band members "write more music than we can perform, so there'll be quite a bit of new stuff there."