Creativity Quote by Marian McPartland

There is a sly kind of permission baked into McPartland's line: if you feel off, don't muscle through with cheer. Go minor. Let the music hold the mess. Coming from a jazz musician, that advice lands like a practical spell, the kind passed hand-to-hand on bandstands where technique is never separate from survival. Mary Lou Williams, a composer who knew both the church and the nightclub, becomes the authority here not because she's mythic, but because she treated harmony as a psychological tool. Minor isn't just "sad". It's a set of colors that can absorb ambiguity without demanding a clean story.

McPartland's phrasing is tellingly unglamorous. "If you're not feeling right" keeps it bodily and immediate, closer to anxiety than to grand tragedy. "It all comes back, falls into place" suggests something jazz players chase nightly: alignment between inner weather and outer phrasing, the sense that your hands and your head have stopped arguing. The subtext is that major-key optimism can feel like a lie when you're scattered; minor gives you an honest container, a way to play truth without oversharing.

Then she undercuts the folklore: "I don't know if that's true". That's the musician's skepticism, the refusal to turn craft into superstition. And still: "but I do it". Tradition in jazz isn't doctrine; it's a tested habit, kept because it works often enough under lights, in front of people, when you need the next chorus to steady you.