Art & Creativity Quote by August Wilson

Jazz gets scapegoated as if the notes themselves are failing, when Wilson is really talking about the people holding the instrument. “Jazz in itself is not struggling” is a neat piece of rhetorical judo: he separates the art from the social machinery around it - the institutions, gatekeepers, schools, and audiences that decide what gets funded, programmed, taught, and remembered. The music isn’t gasping for air. The cultural attitude is.

That distinction is pure Wilson. As the architect of the Pittsburgh Cycle, he spent a career arguing that Black life in America can’t be treated as disposable “content” that refreshes every decade. Jazz becomes shorthand for a broader pattern: Americans will praise Black creativity as an exportable vibe while neglecting the historical conditions that produced it - migration, segregation, labor, church, storefront economies, survival. If jazz is “in trouble,” it’s because the culture prefers a sanitized legend of innovation over a messy record of people.

The line about his plays insisting we not “forget or toss away our history” reveals the deeper target: amnesia as policy. Wilson’s theater doesn’t just commemorate; it confronts the bargain America keeps offering Black artists - recognition without responsibility, celebration without reparative memory. He’s warning that when a society loses the attitude of stewardship, it doesn’t just endanger an art form. It endangers the continuity of a people’s story, which is the real rhythm his work refuses to let fade out.