Quotes from Steve Lacy

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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