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.
quote by Steve Lacy
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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.
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When I first started playing music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing.
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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.
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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.
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I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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