Creativity Quote by Woody Herman

Herman’s point lands because it refuses nostalgia the way jazz fans so often demand it. He’s talking about the big-band era, but he’s really puncturing the myth that there was some lost golden age when every record swung and every club was staffed by geniuses. The phrase “fodder recorded and played” is deliberately unromantic: music as product, not prophecy. He reminds you that the machine was always there - labels, ballrooms, radio slots - and that musicians, like everyone else, learned to feed it.

The subtext is partly defensive, partly corrective. As a bandleader who survived the churn of styles and economics, Herman is pushing back against lazy gatekeeping that treats “today” as uniquely commercial or uniquely mediocre. His “just as there is today” isn’t a shrug; it’s a rebuttal to the endless complaint that modern music is ruined by markets. No, he’s saying: markets have always shaped what gets amplified. The difference is that we selectively remember the winners.

Then he delivers the real corrective: “more bad bands than good bands.” It’s a bracing act of historical honesty, and it doubles as advice for listening. If you’re comparing the entire present to the curated highlights of the past, you’ll always think culture is in decline. Herman invites a fairer math: most of anything is forgettable, and the great work survives precisely because it was rare. That’s not cynicism; it’s a musician’s realism about how taste, time, and commerce edit the record.