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Ku-Umba Frank Lacy was born in Houston, Texas, 1959 and grew in the ghetto. Frank is the sixth child of a family of twelve children. His father, a teacher, played guitar with Russell Jacquet, Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, Johnny Fontenett and Arnett Cobb. His mother was a gospel vocalist.
At the age of 8, young Frank took up piano lessons and began to play the trumpet soon after. While in junior high school, he began to play the Euphonium and the Tuba. To play trombone he started at the age of 16. After musical studies at the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Rutgers University in New York he toured with greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Abdullah Ibrahim, Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, The Eurythmics, Carla Bley and Don Pullen. He was member of the first Bobby Watson Horizon Band and he spend a year and a half as musical director of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Work with own groups started, besides touring with Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and the big bands of McCoy Tyner and David Murray. In recent years he could mainly be heard with the Mingus Dynasty Band and the Mingus Big Band, where he also functioned as musical director.
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