Steve Lacy Quotes

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Steve Lacy

Profession : Musician

Birth : July 23, 1934

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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.

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy