Steve Lacy

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.”

“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.”

“The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete.”

“I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”