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. Steve Lacy
Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same. Steve Lacy
The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original. Steve Lacy
The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity. Steve Lacy
There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language. Steve Lacy
They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind. Steve Lacy
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. Steve Lacy
We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn. Steve Lacy
