Art & Creativity Quote by Jan Hammer

Hammer is naming a quiet kind of censorship: not the government kind, the market kind. When he says it feels "almost impossible" to release music with improvisation or soloing, he is really talking about gatekeeping disguised as taste. The industry is not banning solos; it is optimizing them out. Improvisation is risky, time-consuming, hard to preview in a boardroom, and difficult to package into predictable radio formats or playlist algorithms. A solo is the sound of a musician taking up space, and the business model increasingly rewards music that behaves like a product: standardized, easily segmented, instantly legible.

The line "for some reason" lands like an eye-roll. Hammer knows the reason. It is just impolite to say out loud that commerce treats virtuosity as a liability when it interrupts the hook. The quote also carries the frustration of a player whose whole identity is built on the moment-to-moment decision: jazz fusion, prog, and instrumental rock thrive on the surprise of a line that goes somewhere you did not expect. In that world, improvisation is not decoration; it's authorship happening in real time.

Context matters: Hammer comes from an era when the solo was not a detour but a selling point, when musicians could stretch out on records and still be considered mainstream. His complaint reads like a dispatch from the post-solo era, where the "music business" is less a patron of musicianship than a logistics operation for attention.