Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.
- Steve Lacy Quote

Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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

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 Quote

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.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register.
- Steve Lacy Quote

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.
- Steve Lacy Quote

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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.
- Steve Lacy Quote

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

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

You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good.
- Steve Lacy Quote