Art & Creativity Quote by Billy Strayhorn

A jazz composer insisting that "All music is beautiful" isn’t offering a Hallmark benediction; he’s staking out an ethic. Coming from Billy Strayhorn, a writer of sophisticated harmonies and sly, urbane melodies, the line reads like a quiet rebuke to the gatekeepers who sort sound into the “serious” and the “cheap.” It’s also a defense mechanism: in mid-century America, Black musicians were celebrated onstage and circumscribed off it, their work praised while their personhood was policed. Declaring beauty everywhere is a way to refuse the humiliating audition for legitimacy.

The intent is radical in its softness. Strayhorn isn’t saying every song is equally good; he’s saying every music carries a truth worth hearing if you listen with the right posture. That posture matters in jazz, where standards are constantly reauthored, where “mistakes” become style, where a melody can be rescued from sentimentality by a single reharmonization. Beauty, here, is not polish but possibility: the chance that any rhythm, any timbre, any vernacular can hold complexity.

Subtextually, it’s also self-portrait. Strayhorn lived in the margins even within the Duke Ellington orbit, often under-credited, and he lived as a gay man in an era that demanded discretion. “All music” doubles as an argument about all lives: the worth doesn’t depend on institutional permission. In a culture addicted to hierarchies of taste, Strayhorn’s line is a scalpel disguised as a smile.