"What Barber understood was that jazz was never a purist's music, and therein lay its special quality. The only purity it needed was an authentic feeling for its core components: the rhythm, the blues, and the directness of emotional expression in evidence at all the many thousands of performances in which, over the course of more than 60 years, he shared his unquenchable enthusiasm. Long before the invention of postmodernism, Barber and several generations of skilled sidemen were persuading audiences to see the music's many strands as threads of a single cloth".