Top 26 Quotes by Steve Lacy

I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.

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.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.

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.

Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.

It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up.

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

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.

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.