Creativity Quote by Norman Granz

Granz is puncturing the comforting myth that money automatically buys culture. “Probably the richest country in Western Europe” sets up the expectation: Germany should be an easy market for prestige entertainment, especially for something as luminous as Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Then comes the thud: “they wouldn’t take any television.” The sentence is built like a booking-agent’s punchline, but the sting is real. He’s not talking about taste in the abstract; he’s talking about gatekeepers, programmers, and the institutional shrug that can erase greatness with one bureaucratic decision.

The subtext is partly about the postwar European media economy: television schedules weren’t neutral reflections of “what people want,” they were curated statements about national identity, respectability, and risk. Jazz - especially Black American jazz - could be celebrated in concert halls while still being treated as marginal in mass broadcast, the place where cultural legitimacy is minted. “Their reaction being that people weren’t interested in it” is Granz quoting the classic alibi of cultural executives everywhere: blame the audience to mask your own conservatism. It’s market research as moral cover.

Granz’s intent, then, is both practical and pointed. As a producer and impresario, he’s documenting a frustrating business reality. As a cultural operator who spent his career fighting segregation and insisting on dignified presentation of jazz, he’s also calling out a softer kind of exclusion: not the openly racist door slam, but the polite insistence that the public simply wouldn’t care. The richest country can still be culturally timid, and “not interested” can be a convenient way of saying “not ready to see this.”