Creativity Quote by Sonny Rollins

Rollins is doing something sly here: he starts with jazz as a proven global language, then swivels to the uncomfortable fact that the country that birthed it still treats it like a niche hobby. The first clause is a flex and a defense at once. By stressing “all around the globe” and “for many decades,” he’s puncturing the old American habit of calling jazz “difficult” or “elite,” as if the problem were the music rather than the gatekeepers. If audiences in Tokyo, Paris, and São Paulo have been showing up for generations, the “market test” has been passed. The hesitation - “I think… let’s say” - reads less like uncertainty than diplomacy, a musician choosing understatement over grievance.

“Official recognition” is the loaded phrase. Rollins isn’t begging for applause; he’s naming the gap between cultural export and domestic respect. In the U.S., jazz is constantly praised in the abstract (“America’s classical music”) while the people who make it fight for arts funding, fair pay, education programs, archival support, and institutional attention that arrives late, if at all. The subtext is about who gets canonized while they’re alive, who gets taught in schools, who gets public money, who gets a place in the national story beyond museum glass.

Coming from Rollins - a towering improviser who chose long silences and comebacks on his own terms - the line lands as a measured demand: honor the art not as nostalgia, but as policy.