Steve Lacy Quotes

51 quotes in 562 categories

• Make the drummer sound good.
• Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.
• Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.
• 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…
• A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round…
• Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.
• A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his…
• 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…
• If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.
• Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.
• 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…
• Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.
• Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.
• I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed.
• 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…
• When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.

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