#w

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

#called #die #find #go #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. ↗

— Steve Lacy

#armstrong #better #free #hear #listen

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

#give #going #invent #lot #most

My work has social implications, it functions in a social arena. ↗

— Andres Serrano

#functions #implications #social #work

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention. ↗

— Steve Lacy

#interested #invention #just #more #mozart

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

#catch #happened #monk #more #original

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

#become #call #else #go #going

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

#contain #does #living #living thing #me

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

#hear #heard #learn #learned #peanuts

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

— Steve Lacy

#discouraged #getting #how #i #learned