Creativity Quote by Rita Coolidge

Gatekeeping almost never announces itself as gatekeeping, but Rita Coolidge’s line comes close. “Jazz pedigree” is a loaded phrase: it frames belonging as lineage, not listening. In eight words she captures a whole ecosystem of cultural policing where taste is treated like bloodline and expertise is measured by proximity to an approved history.

Coolidge isn’t some outsider lobbing stones; she’s a musician who’s moved through genres that get casually sorted into “serious” and “commercial.” That vantage makes the comment read less like snobbery for its own sake and more like a weary diagnosis of how jazz institutions protect their status. Jazz radio, especially in the public-radio era and the “smooth jazz” backlash of the late 20th century, has often functioned as a museum with a playlist: preservation disguised as programming. “Pedigree” is the word you use for dogs and dynasties, which is precisely the point. It implies that jazz, a form built on improvisation, migration, and cross-pollination, gets administered as if it’s aristocracy.

The intent, then, is double-edged. On one level, it’s an observation about industry behavior: programmers and tastemakers prefer credentialed insiders, the artists whose bios read correctly. On another, it’s a critique of the insecurity beneath that posture. If your genre is alive, it doesn’t need a bouncer. By making authenticity sound hereditary, the system quietly narrows what counts as jazz and who gets to narrate it, even as the music itself has always thrived on theft, fusion, and surprise.