Creativity Quote by Joseph Jarman

There’s a quiet joke embedded in Joseph Jarman’s line: the world is so noisy that you need other people to curate it for you. “People call” sounds ordinary, even domestic, but it frames information as something arriving through human channels, not through institutions. That matters coming from a musician whose life was spent inside scenes where the “news” is often the movement itself: who’s playing where, who’s organizing, what’s breaking open aesthetically or politically.

The phrase “keep me abreast” pulls double duty. On its face, it’s a modest claim of staying current, the baseline expectation of any working artist. Underneath, it signals distance: Jarman isn’t chasing the churn; the churn comes to him. That inversion reads like a soft flex and a protective boundary. In improvisational music culture, attention can be both fuel and distraction, and Jarman’s wording suggests a deliberate filtering. The network checks in, he doesn’t refresh.

There’s also subtext about community as infrastructure. “People” isn’t the faceless public; it’s a web of peers, friends, organizers, collaborators. For Black avant-garde musicians especially, mainstream channels have historically been unreliable narrators of “what’s going on.” So the phone call becomes a counter-media system: trust-based, relational, resistant to official storylines.

The intent feels less like bragging than calibration. Jarman implies he’s still connected without being consumed. He stays informed the way musicians often do best: by listening, but on his own terms.