Quotes By Steve Lacy

I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination.

Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

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.

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

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.

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.

They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind.

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

When I first started playing music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

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.

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

I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed.

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

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