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

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

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

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

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.
Steve Lacy

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

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

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.
Steve Lacy

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

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

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

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

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

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