Time & Perspective Quote by Lee Konitz

Konitz’s line lands with the quiet authority of someone who’s spent a lifetime resisting jazz’s favorite bad habit: turning artists into “eras” and then ranking those eras like stock picks. Saying there are “things…great from all the periods” of Coltrane isn’t just polite praise. It’s an aesthetic position. Konitz is waving off the tidy narrative that treats Coltrane’s career as a moral drama - early “safe” Coltrane, peak hard-bop Coltrane, late “difficult” Coltrane - where the listener is expected to declare loyalty to one phase and dismiss the rest as either training wheels or chaos.

The phrasing matters. “Things” is modest, even deliberately unspecific, which is how musicians often talk when they’re refusing the critic’s impulse to freeze music into doctrine. Konitz isn’t building a shrine; he’s describing a working relationship with a body of sound. For an improviser, the point isn’t to endorse a single canonical album but to keep finding usable oxygen: a voicing here, a rhythmic idea there, a risk taken that reopens the room.

There’s subtext, too: Konitz was famously cool-school, skeptical of fashion and grandstanding, and Coltrane became a kind of sacred figure whose later work is sometimes defended like scripture. Konitz threads the needle. He honors Coltrane’s whole arc without pretending every minute is equally for everyone. The generosity is the critique: real listening doesn’t require conversion, just curiosity strong enough to follow an artist through their changes.