Creativity Quote by Marian McPartland

There is a particular kind of confidence that only sounds like modesty, and Marian McPartland nails it here: the faith that the work will eventually outshine the noise, paired with the knowledge that the machinery deciding what gets heard is rarely fair. "Quietly doing my thing" is musician-speak for discipline, longevity, and a refusal to audition for relevance. It implies a life spent practicing, listening, and playing the long game in a culture that tends to reward the loudest self-narrator.

The second half turns the line from gentle to pointed. "I hope they'll look around" makes success sound almost accidental, as if gatekeepers might simply notice her if they swivel their chairs. That phrasing is doing double duty: it's gracious on the surface, but it also exposes the absurdity of an industry where an artist's visibility depends on someone else's attention span. And "get my record out" is both literal (release the album) and existential (let the story out, let the catalog be present in the world). For jazz, a form that lives in rooms and disappears into air, the record is the proof of life.

McPartland's context sharpens the stakes. A woman in jazz for much of the 20th century often meant being treated as an exception, a novelty, or a footnote. This quote sidesteps grievance without denying it. It's strategic understatement: keep playing, keep building, let the institutions catch up to the reality they've been missing.