Steve Lacy

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

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.

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

I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.