Creativity Quote by Buddy Rich

Buddy Rich isn’t just reminiscing; he’s taking a swing at homogenization. When he says, "There were so many individual styles thirty or forty years ago", the sting is in the understatement. Rich came up in an era when a drummer’s identity was as audible as a singer’s: you could tell who was on the kit by the feel, the ride cymbal pattern, the way the band breathed around the beat. The subtext is a complaint about a culture that’s smoothed out those signatures into something efficient, standardized, and harder to name.

Coming from Rich, the line reads as both aesthetic critique and professional warning. He was famously obsessive about precision and also deeply invested in personality - not the vague branding kind, but the physical, unrepeatable kind that comes from chasing a sound night after night with a live band. Jazz and big band were ecosystems where competition and collaboration forced musicians to develop distinct voices. You weren’t rewarded for sounding "correct"; you were remembered for sounding like yourself.

By the time Rich is looking back "thirty or forty years", the music industry has shifted: tighter studio expectations, more metronomic timekeeping, more genre conventions, more musicians trained on the same records and the same methods. The quote quietly frames "progress" as a trade: better consistency, less character. Rich’s nostalgia isn’t about old days being morally superior. It’s about the loss of risk - the messy, personal fingerprints that make a scene feel alive rather than merely competent.