Steve Lacy Quotes

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Risk

  Tags in Heart, Jazz

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Important

• 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.

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Play, Boring

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Good

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

   

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Play

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Certainly

• Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interesting

• 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.

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Instruments

• The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Potential

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Original

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Awful, Call

• When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Finally

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Sad

  Tags in First

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Extensive

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Spirit

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Played

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Production

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

  Steve Lacy

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Survival

Steve Lacy (45)

Birth:	23rd July, 1934
Death:	4th June, 2004
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Composer, Saxophonist

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