Quotes by Steve Lacy

About Steve Lacy:

Steve Lacy was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive Dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

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

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

Steve Lacy

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

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

Steve Lacy

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

Steve Lacy

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

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

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

Steve Lacy

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

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

Steve Lacy

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameSteve Lacy
  • DescriptionAmerican saxophonist
  • BornJuly 23, 1934
  • DiedJune 4, 2004
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionComposer; Jazz Musician
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program