Creativity Quote by Steve Lacy

There is a sly generosity in Steve Lacy praising Kenny G, and the slyness is the point. Lacy, an avant-garde soprano saxophonist who built a whole language out of angular melody and disciplined risk, isn’t suddenly endorsing smooth jazz as an aesthetic North Star. He’s doing something more surgical: reframing a culture-war punchline into evidence.

“Kenny G” functions here less as a person than as a symbol of mass-market legibility. By the time Lacy is talking, Kenny G has become shorthand for sanitized saxophone, the kind of sound that sells the instrument as lifestyle accessory. In jazz circles, that can read like betrayal. Lacy’s move is to dodge the snob reflex and pivot to a musician’s pragmatism: any widely heard approach, even one you dislike, expands the public’s understanding of what the saxophone can be. The gratitude is real, but it’s gratitude with teeth.

The subtext is also about permission. Lacy spent his career arguing, implicitly and explicitly, that the saxophone isn’t confined to the approved vocabularies of bebop or swing, nor even to jazz at all. If Kenny G can bend the horn toward pop romanticism and stadium-scale sheen, Lacy can bend it toward Monk-like abstraction, microtonal inflection, and composition-first rigor. The instrument survives the extremes; it gains range, not purity.

It’s a quietly democratic idea: technique and intent matter more than tribe. Lacy’s line isn’t absolution; it’s a reminder that “different kinds of ways” is the entire game.