Success Quote by Norman Granz

Granz is doing two things at once: bragging about jazz’s global reach while taking a bruising swing at the marketplace that’s supposed to reward it. Amsterdam “must have more than a million people” lands like a deadpan setup for a punchline: population isn’t the problem, appetite isn’t the problem, even talent isn’t the problem. The problem is that jazz, in most places, is culturally beloved but commercially relegated to the margins.

His pivot to Japan is the provocative bit. Calling Japan the only place where jazz is “really profitable” praises an audience that pays, listens, and treats the music as an event rather than wallpaper. But the follow-up - “they haven’t been exposed enough” - is a deliberately barbed explanation. It suggests novelty is the real engine of value: once a culture has heard enough jazz, it stops treating it as precious and starts treating it as ambient, a hip accessory, a soundtrack in a bar. Exposure becomes depreciation.

The subtext is Granz’s lifelong frustration with how the West commodifies Black American art: it’s celebrated rhetorically, underpaid structurally. Japan reads here as both refuge and mirror. He’s not romanticizing Japanese exceptionalism so much as indicting the American and European tendency to over-familiarize, over-consume, then under-compensate. It’s also the voice of a hard-nosed impresario: he’s tracking demand like a touring economist, measuring how quickly culture turns wonder into entitlement.