Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy, born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive Dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth23 July 1934
CountryUnited States of America
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.
What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.
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 good fellow.
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.
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.
Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.
When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.
You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.
I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever.
Jazz is like wine. When it is new it's only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.
Make the drummer sound good.
Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.
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.