Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money’s worth. – Terry Teachout
A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself. – Terry Teachout
I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns. – Terry Teachout
As late as the early ’50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it. – Terry Teachout
For the critic, the word ‘best’ is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely, and you’re likely to get your hand blown off. – Terry Teachout
Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as ‘Stardust’ and ‘The Christmas Song’ that it’s hard to imagine anyone else performing them. – Terry Teachout
The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it’s a purely empirical art form. It’s all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall. – Terry Teachout
I learned more in the rehearsals for ‘The Letter’ than I have ever dreamed of know in the theater as a critic. If it doesn’t make me a better critic, I’m an idiot. – Terry Teachout
I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the ’20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II. – Terry Teachout
I’ve always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. – Terry Teachout
There wasn’t a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri. – Terry Teachout
Life usually tells the best stories – but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. – Terry Teachout
Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. – Terry Teachout
Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original. – Terry Teachout
In a world without any criticism at all, although there are many actors who would think they would be delighted to see that happen, would in fact be a far more problematic world than they could ever imagine. – Terry Teachout
