Time & Perspective Quote by Sonny Rollins

Rollins is sketching a career pivot that’s really a cultural argument: jazz shouldn’t have to apologize for where it’s played. The first move is disarming. He leads with pleasure and intimacy - “I enjoy playing clubs… the closeness” - nodding to the sweaty, eye-level democracy that made modern jazz feel like a secret you stumbled into. That’s not nostalgia; it’s credibility. He’s telling you he’s not above the room. He came up inside it.

Then comes the hinge: “However, after a certain period of time…” That vague clock is doing heavy lifting. It suggests repetition, limits, maybe even indignities that don’t need to be itemized: cramped stages, noisy crowds, precarious pay, the unspoken sense that this art form is background music for other people’s nights out. The half-mangled “New YorkI” feels almost accidental, like the thought is rushing ahead of the syntax - and New York matters here as both the capital of jazz and a marketplace that can trivialize it.

“Prestigious atmosphere” lands with a provocative double charge. On one hand, it’s strategic: better acoustics, attentive listening, institutional backing, and the kind of setting that persuades funders, critics, and gatekeepers to treat jazz like a serious modern art rather than nightlife decoration. On the other, it’s a quiet critique of how prestige gets rationed - who’s allowed concert-hall dignity and who gets stuck hustling in clubs.

The subtext isn’t that clubs are beneath jazz; it’s that jazz is too big to be confined to the places society is willing to tolerate it. Rollins is asking for a stage that matches the scale of the work.