Time & Perspective Quote by Steve Lacy

There is swagger in this line, but it is the kind earned the hard way: by showing up, listening, and surviving long enough for a scene to turn into a canon. When Steve Lacy says he "started in New Orleans music", he’s not just name-checking a birthplace myth. He’s placing himself inside jazz’s origin story, where repertoire is less a setlist than a lineage. New Orleans stands in for collective invention, street-level discipline, and the idea that jazz was once functional music before it became a museum piece.

Then comes the audacious pivot: "played all through the history of jazz". The phrasing collapses decades into a single continuous gig, as if jazz history is not a sequence of movements but a room you can walk through. That’s the subtext: history isn’t something you study after the fact; it’s something you navigate in real time, with your instrument as proof of attendance. For Lacy, a soprano saxophonist who moved from trad roots into Monk, free improvisation, and the European avant-garde, the claim also reads like a quiet correction to gatekeepers. Jazz narratives love neat eras and approved heroes; Lacy’s career was messier, more migratory.

The intent is both personal and polemical: he’s asserting authority without begging for it. It works because it’s humble in its grammar ("started", "played") and radical in its implication: the musician is not a footnote to jazz history. He is one of the ways it happened.