Steve Lacy Quotes
Top 43 wise famous quotes and sayings by Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Steve Lacy on Wise Famous Quotes.
People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.
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.
When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.
If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.
When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.
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.
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.
Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.
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.
When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.
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.
What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.
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.
I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down.
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.
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.
In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.
Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.
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'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.