Creativity Quote by Alexis Korner

Korner is calling out a neat little cultural lie: genre labels feel descriptive until you watch them erase people. His line carries the weary bite of someone who helped build the British blues boom yet kept getting filed under the safer, more “legible” category. In mid-century Britain, “jazz” had infrastructure - clubs, critics, a sense of respectability and technique. “Blues” was either exoticized as imported American folklore or treated as a subset, a flavor, not a discipline. So when Korner says there were no blues players, he’s not denying the music; he’s naming the gatekeeping that made it hard to be recognized as such.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Considered as” signals an external judgment, not his own identity. Then he lands on a paradox: you didn’t play blues, you played “one sort of jazz or another.” That’s a subtle indictment of a scene more comfortable redefining Black American forms through its own categories than meeting them on their terms. Jazz becomes the default container, absorbing anything improvisatory or “rootsy,” while blues gets pushed to the margins as primitive, repetitive, or merely preparatory.

There’s also an artist’s frustration hiding in the taxonomy. Korner’s generation learned from records, not from a local lineage, so legitimacy was policed by critics and promoters. His complaint isn’t just about semantics; it’s about access, billing, audiences, and history. If the culture refuses to name your work correctly, it also refuses to take it seriously.