Creativity Quote by Marian McPartland

Aging shows up first in the places a musician can’t hide: the hands. Marian McPartland’s line sounds offhand, even chatty, but it’s a quietly radical claim about authority. She starts with the unglamorous truth - “My hands look terrible” - a refusal of the camera-ready myth of the virtuoso. Then she pivots to the real flex: “but I can do anything I want to do.” Not anything in the abstract, not athletic dominance, but musical agency. At her stage of life, the body may fray; the imagination doesn’t have to.

The subtext is a critique of speed-as-value, that competitive conservatory idea that greatness equals “dashing up and down the piano.” McPartland frames taste as a higher order skill than sheer velocity, and “playing all around” hints at a veteran improviser’s map of the instrument: harmony, voicings, time feel, space. In jazz, “good taste” isn’t prudish restraint; it’s decision-making under pressure, choosing the exact note that makes the band sound inevitable.

Context matters: McPartland built her legacy not as a flashy headline soloist but as a collaborator, interviewer, and curator of the canon on Piano Jazz. This quote reads like a late-career manifesto: technique is a tool, not a throne. The hands can look “terrible” and still tell the truth, because the real instrument is judgment.