Art & Creativity Quote by Norman Granz

Jazz doesn`t get to hide behind marble pedestals in Norman Granz`s worldview. It lives or dies in the bodies of the people who play it. When he says jazz has no permanence "apart from the practitioners", he`s puncturing the comforting myth that art automatically graduates into timelessness once it`s recorded, reviewed, and filed under "legacy". For Granz, permanence isn`t a property of the genre; it`s a temporary loan granted by working musicians showing up, night after night, risking failure in public.

The line carries the hard-earned perspective of a producer and impresario who watched jazz get simultaneously canonized and squeezed. Mid-century America loved jazz as an idea (cool, modern, safely consumable) while underpaying, segregating, and often humiliating the very artists who made it. Granz built Jazz at the Philharmonic and fought for integrated audiences and fair treatment; his quote reads like a warning label on cultural prestige. If you want jazz to last, stop treating it like a museum piece and start protecting the conditions that let practitioners thrive: wages, venues, dignity, artistic autonomy.

There`s also a subtle jab at critics and institutions that talk about "the music" as if it`s a disembodied force. Jazz, by design, resists permanence because improvisation is its engine. The moment matters. Granz isn`t being nihilistic; he`s being practical. The tradition survives the same way it`s created: person to person, breath to breath.