Steve Lacy Quotes

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.

You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good.

The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.

If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die.

I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.

Make the drummer sound good.

It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

I've performed solo for 20 years now, but I don't do much of it, because if you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music.

What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.

A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.

A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.

Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with.

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original.

Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register.

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.