Top 35 Steve Lacy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.”

— Steve Lacy

2. “In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.”

— Steve Lacy

3. “Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.”

— Steve Lacy

4. “Bamboo is not a weed, it’s a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.”

— Steve Lacy

5. “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

6. “Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.”

— Steve Lacy

7. “It starts with a single sound. If there’s something in that sound, then it’s worth continuing.”

— Steve Lacy

8. “I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.”

— Steve Lacy

9. “Make the drummer sound good.”

— Steve Lacy

10. “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

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

— Steve Lacy

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

— Steve Lacy

13. “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.”

— Steve Lacy

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

— Steve Lacy

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with.”

— Steve Lacy

18. “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

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

— Steve Lacy

20. “You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.”

— Steve Lacy

21. “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.”

— Steve Lacy

22. “You must have the music to justify an instrument’s extensive use.”

— Steve Lacy

23. “The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.”

— Steve Lacy

24. “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

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

— Steve Lacy

26. “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.”

— Steve Lacy

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

— Steve Lacy

28. “I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever.”

— Steve Lacy

29. “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

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

— Steve Lacy

31. “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

32. “Jazz is people’s music, a collectivity.”

— Steve Lacy

33. “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

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

— Steve Lacy

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Steve Lacy