Creativity Quote by Jan Hammer

Jan Hammer isn’t confessing stage fright; he’s drawing a boundary around the kind of labor the public rarely counts as “music.” The line pivots on that quiet clarification: it wasn’t performance he resisted, it was the logistical grind that performance demands when you’re the one expected to be the engine. “Put together a band, rehearse, on my own” is the unglamorous job description of being a brand: recruiting, scheduling, managing personalities, financing time in a room until the magic looks effortless.

The subtext is a musician pushing back against the myth of the lone genius who can simply will a live act into existence. Hammer’s career context matters here: he’s associated with studio precision, compositional control, and high-skill collaboration (the kind where the infrastructure is often already in place, whether it’s a TV production or a well-resourced session environment). When that scaffolding disappears, the task stops being purely artistic and becomes operational. For some artists, that shift feels like a bait-and-switch.

The final “You know what I mean?” is doing more than seeking agreement. It’s an appeal to anyone who’s watched creative work get reclassified as entrepreneurial hustle. Hammer frames his reluctance as reasonable, even obvious: the audience buys the performance, but the artist is asked to also be the tour manager, casting director, and foreman. It’s a small sentence that reveals a big cultural truth: live music isn’t just expression, it’s an organization.