Education Quote by Art Blakey

Blakey isn’t making a tidy genealogy of genres; he’s swatting away the whole policing instinct that treats “jazz” like a sealed, museum-grade product. The repeated “you can’t seperate it” has the force of a drummer counting off: insistence as rhythm, argument as groove. He’s talking to a culture that loves to slice Black music into market categories - jazz for sophistication, rock for youth, R&B for the charts - then pretend those slices were always natural. Blakey’s point is that the borders are late inventions, mostly for critics, radio formats, and record-store bins.

The real engine here is the pivot from history to embodiment: “that’s where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.” It’s a claim about origin, but also legitimacy. By rooting modern jazz’s pulse in church, he frames rhythm not as a technical trick but as a communal discipline, learned in public, in call-and-response, in time kept together. Church stands in for a Black social world that trained musicians before institutions did, a place where intensity, repetition, and improvisation were already native languages.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to the myth that jazz became “modern” by escaping its sources. Blakey argues the opposite: modernity is what happens when those sources keep traveling. Rock and R&B aren’t jazz’s unruly children; they’re siblings raised in the same house, still sharing DNA in the backbeat.