Art & Creativity Quote by Gerry Mulligan

Gerry Mulligan’s line lands with the casual precision of a musician who’s heard every “new sound” marketed as destiny. “People are approaching electronic levels in music” isn’t just an observation; it’s a diagnostic. The phrasing makes electronic music feel less like a genre than a threshold - a technical altitude you climb toward, where texture, timbre, and processing start to matter as much as melody or swing. Coming from a cool-jazz architect whose art prized breath, space, and the conversational friction of live players, “approaching” also carries a faint warning: progress can be a drift, not a choice.

The second clause is the tell: “although not all of it happens to tickle my fancy.” Mulligan sidesteps the standard old-guard sneer. No sermon about authenticity, no moral panic about machines. “Tickle my fancy” is almost comically light, a deliberately underpowered critique that signals sophistication: taste is personal, not a decree. The subtext is generous but firm - he recognizes the direction of travel, he’s not pretending the future isn’t coming, he just refuses to confuse novelty with necessity.

Context matters: Mulligan lived through amplification, multitrack recording, synthesizers, and studio-as-instrument experiments that reshaped jazz and pop. His quote captures a late-20th-century artistic tension: musicians adapting to technology that can simulate, replace, or radically extend human performance. He’s not anti-electronic; he’s pro-discernment. The real point is curatorial: evolution is inevitable, but enthusiasm is earned, not owed.