Time & Perspective Quote by Ornette Coleman

Coleman is poking at a quiet hypocrisy in Western art culture: we worship originality, but we trust it faster when it comes packaged in the right costume. As a musician who spent his life being called “untrained” and “wrong” before he was canonized, he’s not making a shallow plea for style points. He’s naming appearance as a social language - one that decides who gets read as serious before they play a note.

The phrasing “in the western world” is doing real work. It frames appearance not as a personal quirk but as a cultural system: gatekeeping disguised as taste. In jazz especially, presentation has always been part of the transaction. Suits, stage demeanor, album covers, club etiquette - they’re signals to audiences and industry people about professionalism, respectability, even safety. For Black artists, those signals have historically been double-charged: dress too sharply and you’re “trying to be white”; dress too casually and you’re “not disciplined.” Coleman understands that bind.

The subtext is surprisingly generous. He’s not saying image matters more than the “good stuff.” He’s arguing that someone “out creating” deserves collaborators and listeners who show up with comparable care. Appearance becomes a form of mutual recognition: an acknowledgment that art is labor, not just inspiration. It’s also Coleman subtly defending the theatricality of jazz modernism - the idea that new sounds often need new silhouettes so the world knows to listen differently.