Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.