Art & Creativity Quote by Steve Lacy

Steve Lacy’s line has the snap of a working musician swatting away empty virtuosity. “You must have the music” isn’t a romantic abstraction; it’s a demand for material worthy of the tool. An instrument can be practiced into obedience, showcased into spectacle, even weaponized into ego. Lacy insists that none of that counts as justification. The only real alibi for “extensive use” is music that needs to exist.

The phrasing is deceptively moral. “Must” turns taste into obligation, and “justify” frames playing as something that can be excessive, even wasteful, unless it serves a higher purpose. He’s arguing against the modern temptation to treat the instrument as the point: technique as content, volume of notes as proof of value, gear as identity. Lacy, a soprano saxophonist who built a rigorous world out of an instrument often treated as a novelty, is staking a claim for discipline without austerity: mastery should be in service of ideas, not the other way around.

Context matters. Coming out of jazz’s mid-century churn - bebop’s athleticism, the avant-garde’s experiments, the constant pressure to sound “new” - Lacy’s careers with Monk and his own long, focused explorations made him suspicious of flash divorced from form. Under the surface, he’s also talking about responsibility: if you’re going to occupy space, take solos, command attention, you’d better have something to say. Otherwise, you’re just exercising.