Steve Lacy

People don’t want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately and this is one of the biggest problems.

I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

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

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

There are notes between notes, you know.

If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterward.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

We’re here to have a ball.

Jazzmen are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

All of the technique doesn’t matter… only if the feeling is right.