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Steve Lacy Quotes


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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

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

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.

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.