Creativity Quote by Joseph Jarman

There’s a particular kind of hurt that only comes from being invited into the room and still being treated like you’re not really there. Joseph Jarman’s gripe isn’t simply that Equal Interest didn’t get a trophy or a mention at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival Awards; it’s that the machinery of “jazz” could use the sound, the labor, the electricity of a group like his and remain oblivious to what it was consuming.

The repetition - “Even thought of! Even thought of!” - reads like a musician catching himself mid-sentence because the insult is too absurd to stay calm. It’s indignation sharpened into a punchline. Jarman frames the band as “vital energy,” not repertoire, not product. That matters: he’s talking about a living, animating force that festivals love to book when they want credibility, edge, or the illusion of adventurousness. Then the awards category, the gatekeepers, the institutional memory - “that element” - acts like it “doesn’t even know it exists.” The subtext is that recognition isn’t an afterthought; it’s a deliberate architecture of exclusion.

Jarman came out of the AACM ecosystem where innovation was communal, rigorous, and often treated as a threatening cousin of “real jazz” by mainstream industry narratives. His complaint maps onto a larger pattern: institutions that monetize experimentation while laundering it out of the story they tell about the music. The real sting is existential. If the official jazz world can’t even register you, it’s not just snobbery - it’s erasure.