Steve Lacy Quotes

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.

There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play.

When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.

I love playing. The keyboard is my journal.

It's always a live experience - anything that happens around you. It's so easy to just put it to a song.

To be a good improviser, you have to study composition as a parallel. Because what improvisation is, on a high level, is spontaneous composition.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

As improvisers, we're acting as composers in front of people.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

I love improv-ing, you know, from very early on when I started acting the school that I went to and everything was very big on ad-libbing and improv-ing and messing things up, so I feel very comfortable doing stuff like that.

Composition is selective improvisation.

Improvisation helps because you get what's on the page and you make it a little more palatable to your tongue. And that's the beauty of creating and being spontaneous. That's the way I love to work.

About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio.

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.

Jazz is my adventure.

I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice.

I don't like to practice ahead of time what I'm going to say.

I like to improvise.

Theatre sports is the best improv training period.

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it's Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.

People make music to get a reaction. Music is communication.

You know. I'll try anything. I'll do anything. I'll explore. Try different takes. All that kind of stuff to do sometimes, to do good performances, but always conducive to having a good time creatively.