Love Quote by Steve Lacy

A love story with a chain of custody: Ellington writes it, Bechet filters it through that big, brassy New Orleans lyricism, and Steve Lacy catches the contagion and spends the rest of his life chasing the source. The line is deceptively modest, like he’s just reporting a pleasant evening out. Really it’s an origin myth about how taste forms: not from “the instrument” in the abstract, but from hearing a particular voice make it feel inevitable.

The specific intent is to credit the spark, but also to place Lacy inside a lineage that isn’t just saxophone history, it’s Black American music as a living transmission. Ellington stands for compositional elegance and urban modernity; Bechet stands for heat, swagger, and the soprano’s piercing human timbre. Lacy’s “fell in love” sidesteps technique-talk and goes straight to desire, because what he’s describing is not a career decision but an aesthetic commitment: the soprano isn’t a novelty or a side horn, it’s a sensibility.

The subtext is aspiration with a hint of humility. He didn’t fall in love with his own potential; he fell in love with how someone else sounded. That matters for Lacy, who later became synonymous with the soprano in avant-garde jazz. In an era when the tenor dominated and the soprano could be treated as a gimmick, this remembers the instrument’s first modern star and quietly argues that the “new” was always there, hiding in the right performance.