Steve Dalachinsky

In 2019, Steve Dalachinsky released his third and last collaboration with The Snobs, Pretty in the Morning, on french label Bisou Records. The album was recorded live at Espace En Cours in Paris in october 2017 with an extended line-up of the band to accompany his voice: Duck Feeling (guitar, Mellotron, synthesizer, drum machine), Mad Rabbit (bass, sampler), Devil Sister (theremin, trumpet, xaphoon), Fuzzy Weasel (guitar, effects).

Dalachinsky died of a stroke on September 16, 2019 at a hospital in Long Island, New York at the age of 72, thirteen days before his 73rd birthday.

He received the Franz Kafka Prize, Acker Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. He lived in Manhattan with his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo.

In 2015, he released a heavy metal album, Leave The Door Open. Culture Catch stated "Dalachinsky's self-deprecating Brooklyn humor and existentialist beat musings, more usually accompanied by free jazz, prove highly compatible with this doomier sound keyed on Lozupone's electronically combined bass and guitar. Really, what better to accompany a 9/11 poem that starts, 'I thought it was the end of the world/And then the end of the world happened again'?"

In 2011, he collaborated with French duet art-rockers The Snobs on Massive Liquidity, the first of three records with the band, including the electronic and rock sounding ec(H)o-system in 2015. In 2015, he worked with Alex Lozupone's group, Eighty Pound Pug on a jazz-metal album; and with German visual artist Sig Bang Schmidt on Flying Home In 2017, he collaborated with his wife on two projects, Frozen Heatwave and Black Magic. Dalachinsky penned liner notes for recordings of several musicians: Roscoe Mitchell, Charles Gayle, Anthony Braxton, James Blood Ulmer, Matthew Shipp, Roy Campbell, Assif Tsahar, Derek Bailey and Rashied Ali. Additionally, he collaborated with musicians: William Parker, Susie Ibarra, Matthew Shipp, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Mat Maneri, Federico Ughi, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Rob Brown, Tim Barnes and Jim Rourke.

For 19 years, starting in the 1980s, he wrote some of his poems while listening to live jazz music, going to free jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle's performances, creating poems on scraps of paper. In 2006, Dalachinsky published a book of poems devoted entirely to Gayle, with the poems appearing chronologically in the order of the venues where Gayle performed at. The collection was honored in 2007 with a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. The book is also unusual because not only is it documenting the music, but also Dalachinsky's state of mind at the precise moment of capturing a musical phrase. Sometimes when Gayle's performance came with a sermon or lecture, commenting on topics like abortion or racial separatism, Dalachinsky would react with his poems reflecting the mood:

Steven Donald Dalachinsky (September 29, 1946 – September 16, 2019) was an American downtown New York City poet, active in the music, art, and free jazz scenes. He wrote poetry for most of his life and read frequently at Michael Dorf's club the Knitting Factory, the Poetry Project and the Vision Festival, an Avant-jazz festival held annually on the Lower East Side of New York City. Dalachinsky also read his works in Japan, France and Germany. He collaborated with many musicians, writing liner notes for artists: William Parker, Susie Ibarra, Matthew Shipp, Joe McPhee, Nicola Hein, Dave Liebman, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Joëlle Léandre, Kommissar Hjuler, Thurston Moore, Sabir Mateen, Jim O'Rourke, and Mat Maneri

Dalachinsky was born in 1946, Brooklyn, New York, "right after the last big war and has managed to survive lots of little wars", which is how he is frequently described. He grew up in the Midwood section of the borough that was mostly an Italian and Jewish neighborhood with parents that were working class. Dalachinsky said he was "always writing" at an early age and was also "involved in art". His earliest notebooks of his writings that have survived go back to when he was between the ages of 13 and 15. He was once kicked out of a Hebrew school because he was "wearing a cross", and hung out with the Italian kids in the neighborhood which "framed his perception of being Jewish", according to him.