Creativity Quote by Steve Lacy

Lacy’s bamboo line feels like a musician’s manifesto disguised as botany: stop calling what you don’t understand a nuisance. “Not a weed” is a defense against lazy categorization, the kind that flattens anything unruly, fast-growing, or hard to control into “trash.” He corrects the record with almost pedantic calm - “it’s a flowering plant” - and then pivots to pure admiration: “magnificent.” That turn is the point. Classification matters, but wonder matters more.

Coming from Steve Lacy, a figure who lived in the margins between jazz tradition and avant-garde risk, bamboo reads as a proxy for the art he championed. Bamboo spreads. It bends without breaking. It can be invasive if you plant it carelessly, but it’s also structurally astonishing: resilient, versatile, quietly elegant. Lacy’s intent is to reframe a reputation, the way he often reframed melody and standards - not by denying their wildness, but by insisting wildness isn’t the same thing as worthlessness.

The subtext also carries a gentle scolding toward cultural gatekeepers: the people who label a sound “noise,” a player “difficult,” a scene “pretentious.” Calling bamboo a weed is the same reflex as dismissing experimental music as mere disruption. Lacy’s sentence is short, almost childlike, which gives it moral force. It’s hard to argue with someone who’s simply paying attention. In an era when jazz was repeatedly policed by purists and market logic, this is Lacy staking a claim for the beautiful things that grow sideways.