Author Profile
Steve Lacy
1934 – 2004 • American • Musician
46
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 46 quotesWhen 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
When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.— 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
What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.— 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
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
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
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
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
It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing.— 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
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
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