Musical Style
McPartland's encyclopedic knowledge of jazz standards, highly musical ear, involvement in over 60 years of evolving jazz styles, and rich experience blending with radio guests have led to a musical style that has been described as "flexible and complex, and almost impossible to pigeonhole". She is known as a harmonically and rhythmically complex and inventive improviser: "She was never content to be in one place, and always kept improving. She has great ears and great harmonics. Because of her ear, she can go into two or three different keys in a tune and shift with no problem."
She also is a synesthete, associating different musical keys with colors, stating that "The key of D is daffodil yellow, B major is maroon, and B flat is blue".
Read more about this topic: Marian McPartland
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or style:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.... For me “style” is matter.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)