Aging & Wisdom Quote by Steve Lacy

Nostalgia is usually a polite way of surrendering to the past; Steve Lacy turns it into a working method. "I still love the whole history of jazz" isn’t a collector’s brag or a conservatory genuflection. It’s a declaration that the tradition remains usable - not as museum glass, but as raw material. Coming from a musician who made his name pushing the soprano sax into prickly, modern terrain, the line quietly rejects the false choice between reverence and innovation. Lacy is saying: you can be radical without pretending you invented the language.

"The old things sound better than ever" lands like a provocation aimed at the culture’s obsession with the new. He’s not claiming jazz peaked and then ossified; he’s suggesting our ears change. The past gains clarity as the present gets noisier, more commodified, more algorithmically flattened. What once sounded "old" now reads as bracingly direct: swing as architecture, blues as emotional engineering, early recordings as proof that limitations can sharpen intent. There’s also a subtle musician’s flex here: if the old things sound better, it’s because you’ve learned how to listen - and how to play with them, not over them.

Context matters: Lacy came up in the post-bop era, absorbed Monk’s angles, lived in Europe, and treated composition as a lifelong conversation with jazz history. His affection isn’t backward-looking. It’s a reminder that the canon isn’t a cage; it’s a set of tools that only gets more powerful the longer you keep them in your hands.