"They're old fuddy-duddies, old farts," grumbled Marian McPartland, speaking about the jazz radio programmers who dare to tamper with her widely syndicated and much loved radio show, "Piano Jazz.""When I bring on someone who's jazz influenced but out of the traditional realm - a Boz Scaggs, Bela Fleck, Bruce Hornsby or Steely Dan - these bastards refuse to run the episode. Can you imagine, they sit around all day, taking meetings, worrying about these things? I think it's important to stretch the boundaries a bit, not just be conservative and predictable, doing a Tony Bennett one week and an old-line trumpeter the next week. You have to keep looking to the future, not just to the past."
So maybe this is not the sort of chatter one might expect to hear out of a properly raised Englishwoman and grande dame of the jazz scene, a creative soul who's about to celebrate - if you can believe it - her 87th birthday.
But it's exactly the sort of talk and thinking that keeps Marian McPartland feisty and inquisitive and playing with panache, smartly attuned to the times "and as busy as I've ever been."
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