67 Quotes by 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.

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.

Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with.

Make the drummer sound good.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

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

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.

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.