Art & Creativity Quote by Billy Strayhorn

A working musician’s blunt little truth hides inside Strayhorn’s clunky phrasing: the mind that performs and the mind that composes don’t simply share a calendar, they compete for oxygen. Coming from the most elegant of jazz craftsmen, the line reads less like a rule than a self-defense mechanism. Strayhorn spent a career in the shadow-and-spotlight economy of Duke Ellington’s band, where the demands of playing were public and relentless, and the demands of writing were private, slow, and unforgiving. In that ecosystem, “either do one or the other” isn’t laziness; it’s triage.

The intent is practical: protect the composing self. Jazz culture romanticizes the total musician, the virtuoso who can blow all night and still conjure a new standard at dawn. Strayhorn, who wrote music of startling harmonic poise (“Lush Life,” “Take the ‘A’ Train”), punctures that myth. The subtext is that writing requires a kind of solitude and emotional bookkeeping that performance actively drains. Playing is extroverted timekeeping; writing is interior architecture. One runs on adrenaline and immediate feedback, the other on patience, doubt, and revision.

There’s also a quiet commentary on labor and credit. As a composer-arranger, Strayhorn’s power lived on paper, yet recognition often followed the marquee. Framing the choice as mutually exclusive hints at a world that forces specialization: you can be the face onstage or the brain behind it. His line is a boundary drawn by someone who knew that a great chart, unlike a great solo, can’t be improvised into existence between sets.