Aging & Wisdom Quote by Don Ellis

Ellis is confessing to a problem most artists pretend not to have: mastery can get boring. The line starts with a tiny act of heresy against the romance of struggle. “It came too easy” isn’t bragging so much as diagnosis. If you can “play and chord changes at any tempo in any key,” you’ve essentially beaten the standardized test of jazz competency. The subtext is that technical fluency, in a scene that prizes it, can become a trap: you start performing ability instead of pursuing discovery.

The pivot - “What else is there?” - lands because it’s existential, not merely musical. He’s pointing at the moment when craft stops being a ladder and becomes a room. For a musician associated with big-band modernism and famously odd meters, that restlessness reads like a mission statement. The “old way” isn’t tradition as such; it’s the predictable reward loop of getting better at the same game. Ellis implies that virtuosity is only interesting if it buys you new questions.

“Now I’m finding out” is the most revealing part: the humility after the impatience. He’s not selling a new method; he’s admitting he’s mid-search. Contextually, it’s very late-’60s/’70s: jazz trying to outrun its own orthodoxy, absorbing rock energy, global rhythms, electronics, and the broader cultural mandate to innovate or die. Ellis frames experimentation not as rebellion for its own sake, but as the only antidote to the deadening comfort of being “good.”