Art & Creativity Quote by Don Ellis

Ellis isn’t just defending complexity; he’s throwing down a boundary line between art as invitation and art as capitulation. “I expect the audience to come up to my level” is the kind of sentence that sounds arrogant until you hear the era it’s speaking into: a late-’60s/’70s music economy increasingly optimized for radio-friendly formats and marketable sameness. For a bandleader obsessed with asymmetrical time signatures and big-band futurism, “palatable” isn’t a neutral adjective. It’s code for sanding down the angles that make the work his.

The intent is almost managerial: he’s setting terms for the relationship. Ellis frames listening as labor, not consumption. That’s the subtextual provocation: the audience isn’t a customer to be pleased but a collaborator expected to meet the music halfway. By calling the “mass” “assumed” and “sub-standard,” he reveals he’s arguing less with actual listeners than with the cultural story told about them-by labels, promoters, gatekeepers, even critics. The insult is strategic; it forces the question of who benefits when “accessibility” becomes the default virtue.

Context matters because jazz, especially post-bop and experimental big-band work, was being squeezed between rock’s commercial dominance and jazz’s own internal debates about elitism. Ellis refuses the apologetic posture artists are often coerced into: that difficulty needs justification. He’s betting that a demanding aesthetic can create its own audience, and that respecting people sometimes means not pandering to the lowest expectations set for them.