Creativity Quote by Marian McPartland

A jazz lifer doing the math out loud, without melodrama. Marian McPartland’s line lands because it treats aging the way a working musician treats a set: practical, unsentimental, with a beat of dark humor to keep the room from going quiet. The “It’s awful to have to” is the tell. She’s not afraid of birthdays; she’s angry that time has forced the question into the foreground, like an unwanted tune request.

The numbers (86, 90) make mortality concrete, but the emotional center is elsewhere: “At least I’d like to have my brains.” For a musician whose identity is built on listening, memory, and improvisation, losing cognition isn’t just decline; it’s exile. McPartland isn’t bargaining for extra years so much as negotiating the terms. If the body is going to fray, let the mind stay sharp enough to hear the changes, to follow the conversation in the music, to remain herself.

That casual “you know” pulls the audience in as confidants, not spectators. It’s the intimacy of a late-night radio host (which she was for decades) acknowledging what listeners think privately but rarely say cleanly: the real terror isn’t death; it’s living on without the faculties that made living meaningful. The line’s sting comes from its modesty. No grand statement, just a musician protecting the one instrument she can’t replace.