Creativity Quote by Steve Lacy

Steve Lacy makes a plain-looking object -- a reed, basically a strip of plant matter -- feel like contraband magic. On one level he is demystifying the saxophone: the sound doesn’t begin in some abstract realm of “talent,” it begins in a cheap, temperamental sliver of cane that warps, dries out, splinters, and still somehow sings. Calling it “a living thing, a weed, really” is the key move: he drags the sacred down into the dirt, then shows how the dirt is where the sacred hides.

The word “spirit” here isn’t New Age fluff so much as a musician’s shorthand for agency. Anyone who’s played reeds knows they don’t just transmit your will; they push back. A good one feels cooperative, a bad one feels possessed. Lacy’s intent is to reframe tone as a relationship with matter, not a mere expression of self. The subtext is humility: the player is less a lone genius than a negotiator with an unruly piece of nature.

“Ancient vibration” ties that physicality to lineage. Reeds are among the oldest sound technologies humans have used; their buzz is prehistoric and intimate, closer to breath and animal call than to polished concert culture. Coming from a modernist improviser, the line quietly argues that the avant-garde isn’t a break from tradition at all. It’s a return to first principles: breath, friction, vibration, and the strange life inside a “weed” that keeps making new music.