Creativity Quote by Marian McPartland

You can hear the pianist’s shrug inside the sentence: a mix of taste, restraint, and practical curiosity. Marian McPartland is talking about a musician’s oldest temptation - take a tune everyone knows, tilt it into a new meter, and call it a fresh arrangement. Her “not too fond” is an aesthetic boundary. Waltz-ifying can be a parlor trick, the jazz equivalent of putting a sepia filter on a photo: instantly “different,” sometimes cheaply so.

But the second clause (“but sometimes that works”) is where the real McPartland lives. It’s not dogma; it’s ear-led pragmatism. Jazz isn’t supposed to be a museum, yet it also hates empty novelty. Changing a song into 3/4 can unlock new melodic stresses, create breathing room, or expose harmonic corners that 4/4 smooths over. It can also reveal whether the arranger actually understands the tune’s inner engine. Some melodies bloom when you give them that circular, dancing pulse; others lose their spine.

The subtext is a quiet manifesto about musicianship: transformation is only justified when it serves the material, not the ego. Coming from McPartland - a player celebrated for conversational intelligence and unshowy command - the line reads like advice delivered in passing at the piano bench. The context matters too: she spent decades in settings (clubs, radio sessions, standards-driven jazz culture) where the challenge wasn’t inventing from scratch, but making the familiar feel newly alive without vandalizing it. That “sometimes” is the whole ethic: experiment, but keep your standards.