Life's Pleasures Quote by Steve Lacy

Lacy’s line lands because it flatters and needles two audiences at once: the gatekeepers who pride themselves on “getting it” early, and the latecomers who eventually treat yesterday’s risk as today’s heritage. By comparing jazz to wine, he borrows a whole economy of taste - connoisseurship, scarcity, status - then quietly exposes how cultural value gets manufactured. New jazz, in his telling, isn’t just hard; it’s socially costly. You need training, patience, a scene, the right ears. Expertise becomes a password, not simply a virtue.

The punch comes in the second clause: “when it gets older, everybody wants it.” That’s not a victory lap for jazz’s timelessness; it’s a critique of how audiences often prefer art once it’s been stabilized by hindsight. The same music that once sounded abrasive or “wrong” becomes collectible once critics have named it, institutions have archived it, and the market can package it as a classic. Age doesn’t change the notes so much as it changes the risk profile. Loving old jazz is a safe way to signal sophistication.

Context matters: Lacy was a modernist lifer, attached to Thelonious Monk’s angular vocabulary and to his own searching soprano sound. He knew what it meant to play music that didn’t immediately sell. The subtext is a warning and a shrug: innovation will be misunderstood on arrival, then canonized after the innovators have paid the price.