Steve Lacy quotes:

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

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

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

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

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

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

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.

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

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

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.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing.

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.

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.

A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Make the drummer sound good.

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

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

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

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

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