Art & Creativity Quote by Les Baxter

Baxter’s line has the swagger of a working musician staking out territory: “good” isn’t a matter of polish or pedigree, it’s a matter of movement. Coming from a figure associated with midcentury exotica and lounge orchestration, the claim reads less like a manifesto from the avant-garde and more like a defense of misfit ambition. His world was often treated as kitsch background music; insisting that “good music” must innovate is a way of dragging the wallpaper into the foreground and arguing that novelty, not respectability, is the real test.

The phrasing is deliberately absolutist. “Must” turns taste into a requirement, a dare to audiences and gatekeepers who reward familiarity. Baxter’s subtext: if you’re only repeating what already worked, you’re not making music, you’re manufacturing reassurance. That’s especially pointed in commercial genres, where the safest route is to sand off the weirdness and sell the recognizable hook. Innovation becomes both aesthetic virtue and survival strategy: the only way to avoid being replaced by the next competent imitator is to offer a sound no one can quite name yet.

There’s also a quiet hedge inside the bravado. “Innovation” doesn’t have to mean academic experimentation; it can be timbre, arrangement, mood, even the audacity to take “low” materials seriously. Baxter’s career sits in that space, translating global signifiers and studio tricks into something new-ish, seductive, and market-ready. The line sells an ideal, but it also reveals the hustle beneath it: originality as the one currency that can’t be counterfeit for long.