Creativity Quote by Lee Konitz

Nostalgia can be smuggled in as a technical detail, and Lee Konitz does it here with a working musician's shrug. "Remotes" is the tell: not tours, not gigs, not glamour, but broadcasts - bands piped live from ballrooms into American living rooms. In one plain sentence, he evokes an era when jazz wasn't a niche with a grant application, it was infrastructure: Saturday-night entertainment, commercial radio's content engine, the soundtrack of courtship and social status.

Konitz's intent feels less like romanticizing than quietly reminding you what the job used to be. Ballrooms around the country meant a circuit: predictable pay, constant playing, a musical language refined in public, under pressure, in real time. The subtext is the scale of opportunity and exposure. You didn't have to be a critic's darling; you could be a professional, heard widely, because the medium demanded it. "A lot of bands" matters too: jazz as a crowded field, not a heroic narrative of lone geniuses.

There's also an implicit contrast with what followed - the postwar fragmentation, the club economy, the shrinking mainstream bandwidth for instrumental music. Konitz, a modernist who thrived artistically after the ballroom era, still notes the old system's reach with a kind of dry wonder. The line works because it's all logistics and no self-pity: a small factual window that makes the cultural loss - of shared listening, of national circuits, of live music as broadcast routine - land on its own.