Time & Perspective Quote by Sonny Rollins

Rollins is pointing to a blunt cultural fact that still stings: America invented jazz, then often treated its inventors as disposable, while Europe built stages, reputations, and livable lives around them. The repetition of "over there" does heavy lifting. It sounds casual, almost conversational, but it’s really a map of exile - physical distance standing in for moral distance. Jazz, in this telling, becomes an export that had to be validated abroad before it could be honored at home.

The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s a quiet indictment wrapped in biography. "Provided many venues" is economics, not romance: steady work, contracts, tours, an audience that shows up. "Hailed" is dignity - the social permission to be taken seriously as an artist rather than tolerated as entertainment. Rollins compresses decades of racist gatekeeping and industry exploitation into a few plain clauses.

Then he lands the hardest line: musicians who "lived over there, and died over there". That’s not just a travel anecdote; it’s a finality. Europe wasn’t a gig, it was a refuge - for Sidney Bechet, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, and others who found, if not paradise, at least oxygen. Rollins knows the irony: the so-called Old World acted newer about Black modernism than the country that birthed it. The subtext is a warning, too. When a culture can’t sustain its own innovators, it shouldn’t be surprised when the music - and the people - leave.