Steve Lacy

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

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.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of Jazz.

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.

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

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

Composing is a mindset, a part of who I am.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

I find my inspiration in myself.

The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

I don’t have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapy is in art.