Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

- Steve Lacy

Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register.

- Steve Lacy

What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.

- Steve Lacy

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

- Steve Lacy

Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.

- Steve Lacy

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

- 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

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

When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.

- Steve Lacy

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

People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.

- Steve Lacy

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

- Steve Lacy

If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die.

- Steve Lacy

I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete.

- Steve Lacy

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

- Steve Lacy

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

- Steve Lacy

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

- Steve Lacy

Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.

- 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

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.

- Steve Lacy