Time & Perspective Quote by Norman Granz

Granz slips a whole cultural history into a slightly crooked sentence: big bands didn’t start as “art,” they started as work. “First they played for dancing” is the era when swing was a physical technology, built to move bodies in ballrooms, not impress critics. The subtext is classed and communal: big-band music was designed for crowds, for nights out, for release. It’s also a reminder that jazz’s most mythologized period wasn’t initially about virtuoso self-expression; it was about service, groove, and precision under pressure.

“Then they played for singing” marks the pivot from band-as-engine to band-as-backdrop. As the music industry industrialized around records, radio, and star personalities, the voice became the easiest thing to sell and the simplest thing to identify. Bands that once drove the room get reorganized around a front person and a lyric you can hum. Granz isn’t dismissing singers so much as pointing to an economic and aesthetic reallocation of power: the rhythm section and horn charts yield center stage to the human face, the microphone, the intimate story. Swing turns into “songbook.”

Coming from Granz - the hardnosed impresario behind Jazz at the Philharmonic and a defender of instrumentalists - the line reads like a quiet brief for the musicians. It’s affectionate, but it’s also a warning about what happens when a form built for collective motion gets repackaged for individual charisma. In a single contrast, he sketches jazz’s journey from dance floor to spotlight, from community ritual to marketable narrative.