Creativity Quote by Tom Verlaine

Verlaine’s blunt dislike reads less like a blanket attack on a genre than a manifesto about texture. Jazz saxophone, in his framing, gets to be human: breath, grain, strain, a line that can smear into emotion without asking permission. Jazz guitar, by contrast, is the offender that turns that messy immediacy into something polite. When he calls the sound “awful,” he’s not auditioning for jazz-nerd credibility; he’s drawing a hard boundary against a kind of tasteful competence that, to him, sterilizes the room.

The organ-trio detail is the tell. Organ trios can be greasy, churchy, street-level. Add guitar and the mix often shifts toward smoothness: the bright attack, the chordal fill, the “right” notes in the “right” places. Verlaine’s whole aesthetic with Television was the opposite of that containment: guitars as wire, as abrasion, as interlocking lines that threaten to fall apart but don’t. So his contempt for jazz guitar doubles as a defense of his own approach, a preemptive swipe at the idea that good guitar must mean fluid bebop articulation or warm, rounded tone.

There’s also a cultural moment behind the rant. By the time Verlaine is coming up, “jazz guitar” is easily shorthand for fusion flash or lounge gloss. He’s a punk-era modernist, allergic to anything that smells like professionalism. The aggression is strategic: it clears space for a different kind of guitar heroism, one that prefers nerves over virtuosity.