Steve Lacy

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.

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

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.

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

I’m very shy, and I shy away from people. But the moment I hit the stage, it’s a different feeling I get nerve from somewhere; maybe it’s because it’s something I love to do.

I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.

As a young cellist I had played to an audience that had included Pablo Casals and reacted with poor, nervous playing. Casals sought me out after the concert and praised me highly, somewhat easing the pain and thinking him a very kind man.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I ‘d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.