Quotes By Steve Lacy

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

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

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

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

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

Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.

If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

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

I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete.

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

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

The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity.

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

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.

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

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

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

To me, there is spirit in a reed. It's a living thing, a weed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. It's really an ancient vibration.

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.

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

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.

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.

It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing.

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.

We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn.

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

Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.

Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.

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