Wealth & Money Quote by Norman Granz

Granz is puncturing the romance of the “band of brothers” myth with the blunt arithmetic of the music business. The line lands because it’s not moralizing; it’s ledger talk. Groups don’t fall apart only from ego or creative drift, he implies. They fracture along predictable economic fault lines: who gets paid enough to treat music as seasonal work, and who has to grind year-round just to stay afloat.

The shrewdness is in the phrase “leaders of groups.” Granz doesn’t name villains; he identifies a role the industry rewards. Leadership here isn’t just artistic direction, it’s billing, publishing, and negotiating leverage - the ability to convert collective sound into individual security. “35-40 weeks a year” is a quietly brutal detail, the kind you only cite if you’ve watched musicians tour themselves into exhaustion. It reframes “success” as the privilege to opt out, to buy time, rest, and selectivity. Everyone else keeps saying yes to gigs, not because they’re hungry for the stage, but because rent is due.

Coming from Granz - the jazz impresario behind Jazz at the Philharmonic, notorious for pushing fair pay and integrated audiences - the quote reads like hard-earned realism rather than cynicism. He knew how many forces pull a group apart: uneven pay, uneven recognition, and the way the marketplace crowns a frontman while treating the ensemble as interchangeable labor. It’s a diagnosis and a warning: solidarity is fragile when the reward system is designed to individualize the winnings.