Quotes By Steve Lacy

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

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.

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.