Creativity Quote by Steve Lacy

Steve Lacy’s line reads like a gentle reality check delivered by someone who spent a lifetime turning private obsession into public sound. Practice, he admits, is solitary: the saxophone is an intimate machine, and mastery is built in rooms where no one is clapping. But the pivot word is “ultimately.” Lacy isn’t praising isolation; he’s ranking it. Shed time is necessary, not sufficient.

The subtext is almost social philosophy: craft is personal, meaning is communal. Jazz, especially the strain Lacy helped define in the post-bop/avant-garde ecosystem, treats performance as a live negotiation - tempo, space, risk, trust. You can perfect your tone and your scales alone, but you can’t rehearse surprise. You can’t simulate the small, electric miscommunications that become a new groove. “With others” is where your choices get tested, contradicted, affirmed, transformed. It’s also where ego gets edited. The horn that sounds heroic in your bedroom has to learn to be generous in a bandstand conversation.

Context matters: Lacy was a modernist who revered composition (Monk, his own thorny suites) while thriving in improvisation’s social crucible. He’s speaking to musicians, sure, but also to any maker seduced by the myth of the lone genius. The line insists that art isn’t finished when it’s perfected; it’s finished when it’s shared, when it risks contact. That’s not sentimental. It’s logistical. Music only becomes music when it leaves your hands and enters someone else’s timing.