Aging & Wisdom Quote by Steve Lacy

Lacy frames his origin story with almost stubborn simplicity: 12 years old, a radio, Duke Ellington. It lands because it treats “falling in love” not as a mystical calling but as exposure plus readiness. Jazz, in this telling, isn’t discovered in a conservatory or bestowed by lineage; it’s caught in the air of a city and transmitted through a speaker. That matters for an artist like Lacy, who built a career on the soprano sax and on the kind of modern, angled improvisation that can sound less like nightlife and more like architecture. He’s quietly arguing that the avant-garde doesn’t start in the avant-garde. It starts with a kid hearing Ellington’s elegance and learning, before anything else, that swing can be sophisticated.

The New York radio detail does heavier lifting than it seems. Mid-century radio was a public commons: porous, democratic, noisy with competing signals. Lacy’s memory evokes a time when jazz still functioned as mass media, not boutique culture. That subtext sharpens the melancholy: the pipeline he describes, where a future innovator stumbles into Ellington on the dial, is largely gone.

Ellington is also a strategic name-drop. He’s the bridge figure: experimental inside a big-band suit, composing with the ambition of “serious” music while remaining unmistakably popular. By rooting his love in Ellington, Lacy positions his later adventurousness as continuity, not rebellion. The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s a credential and a thesis: the tradition was always wider than its gatekeepers admit.