"I like minor tunes"
About this Quote
“I like minor tunes” is a deceptively plain statement from Marian McPartland, a musician whose whole career was built on turning understatement into revelation. On the surface, it’s just a preference: minor keys, minor modes, the darker shades of harmony. In practice, it’s a quiet manifesto about taste, temperament, and the jazz musician’s attraction to complexity.
Minor doesn’t just mean “sad.” In jazz, it’s a playground for ambiguity: tension that never fully resolves, beauty that doesn’t need to pretend it’s uncomplicated. McPartland’s phrasing matters here. She doesn’t claim minor tunes are better, or more “authentic,” or intellectually superior. She likes them. That modesty is part of the power. It frames depth as appetite, not ideology.
The subtext is also cultural. Jazz history is full of performers asked to translate their choices into grand narratives. McPartland, a woman who navigated male-dominated bandstands and later hosted Piano Jazz with a diplomat’s poise, resists the urge to oversell herself. She implies that emotional range and harmonic sophistication can be a personal refuge rather than a brand.
Contextually, her era spans swing through bebop and beyond, periods when minor-key standards and modal experiments offered a way out of the neat, major-key optimism of pop. McPartland’s “minor tunes” are the sound of a life lived with ears open: drawn to shadow not for gloom, but for nuance.
Minor doesn’t just mean “sad.” In jazz, it’s a playground for ambiguity: tension that never fully resolves, beauty that doesn’t need to pretend it’s uncomplicated. McPartland’s phrasing matters here. She doesn’t claim minor tunes are better, or more “authentic,” or intellectually superior. She likes them. That modesty is part of the power. It frames depth as appetite, not ideology.
The subtext is also cultural. Jazz history is full of performers asked to translate their choices into grand narratives. McPartland, a woman who navigated male-dominated bandstands and later hosted Piano Jazz with a diplomat’s poise, resists the urge to oversell herself. She implies that emotional range and harmonic sophistication can be a personal refuge rather than a brand.
Contextually, her era spans swing through bebop and beyond, periods when minor-key standards and modal experiments offered a way out of the neat, major-key optimism of pop. McPartland’s “minor tunes” are the sound of a life lived with ears open: drawn to shadow not for gloom, but for nuance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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