Creativity Quote by Norman Granz

Granz is needling a very particular kind of listener: the person who treats taste like a border checkpoint. Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington are both canon, both technically unimpeachable, and yet their pairing triggers the reflex that there must be a “right” way to sequence prestige. His line lands because it’s framed as an almost polite hypothetical, then punctured by that dry “one might say” - a shrug that exposes how arbitrary these judgments can be.

The intent is less about Streisand or Ellington than about gatekeeping itself. Granz, the famously stubborn impresario behind Jazz at the Philharmonic, spent his career bulldozing the social and commercial rules around jazz: integrated bands, integrated audiences, musicians paid fairly, no humiliating club-owner nonsense. In that light, this becomes a miniature manifesto. He’s mocking the idea that genres are separate dinner parties and you’ll be thrown out for mixing the guests.

Subtext: the “combination” isn’t what’s “not good”; the anxiety is. It’s the fear that loving one thing contaminates your credibility in another tribe. Granz understands that cultural hierarchies survive by policing the playlist. Put the diva next to the bandleader and you reveal the scam: taste is often just compliance with a scene’s unspoken rules.

Context matters, too. In the mid-century music economy, jazz was fighting for seriousness while pop was treated as commerce. Granz refuses that binary. His point isn’t that everything blends smoothly; it’s that the listener’s imagination should be wider than their labels.