Art & Creativity Quote by John Eaton

There is a sly, almost disarming pragmatism in Eaton's "frankly". He isn’t pitching microtonality as mystic theory or elite experiment; he’s positioning it as something he stumbled into through a working language: jazz. That one word reroutes the reader away from the conservatory and toward the bandstand, where rules are learned by bending them. In a single breath, Eaton reframes microtonal music not as an ivory-tower deviation from "real" harmony, but as a natural extension of a form built on blue notes, pitch inflection, and the expressive in-between.

The intent feels political in the best sense: to legitimize an unfamiliar practice by anchoring it in a broadly recognized American vernacular. Jazz becomes his passport stamp, a way to say: I didn’t arrive here by chasing novelty, I arrived here by following feeling, swing, and the ear. The subtext is defensive because it anticipates skepticism; "microtonal" can sound like a dare, while "jazz" sounds like a home address.

Context complicates the attribution. Eaton (1790-1856) predates jazz by decades, which suggests either a misattribution or a later John Eaton (the 20th-century composer) being mistakenly recast as the 19th-century politician. That mismatch matters, because the quote’s whole force depends on jazz existing as a cultural reference point: modern, improvisational, historically Black, and perpetually treated as both high art and outsider art. The line works because it smuggles radical tuning ideas in under the cover of something audiences already trust to be adventurous.