Perception is an interesting group of phenomena. Not long ago, I read a controversial article about human color perception. As long ago as a few thousand years, humans may not have been able to see purple and maybe not even blue. What is not controversial is that the human perception of color has changed in a relatively short period of time.
Similarly, in the history of music 2,000 years ago or so, if a pitch was outside a given pentatonic scale or various similar scales around the world, it was considered discordant. In the middle ages in Europe, the fourth was taboo and gave rise to the tritone, the devil's chord, because of its discordant sound. With the advent of the diatonic and accompanying minor and modal scales and eventually equal temperament, discord was acceptable and evoked emotion as long as it resolved. The expression of nearly chromatic be-bop players like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and others and chromatic jazz players like Coltrane and Liebman and tons of others seek to breach the boundaries of perception and challenge the nature of discord and resolution.
Single-tone instruments like the saxophone are challenged in that they cannot play chords, but either have to fit into or over background accompaniment or deconstruct chords as a series of notes.
So, if you told John Coltrane or Dave Liebman to their faces that you do not like their music, I think they would say, "That's cool, I really don't expect most people to get it." And, BTW, I think that this is why jazz struggles. It was meant to be cutting-edge, not popular; expressive, not mundane; and evocative, not trite. Whether or not it is still all of those things is up for debate.
The most interesting thing to me about perception is the difference in a generation. My daughter is classically trained on piano, bassoon, and voice and plays several other instruments. She starts grad school in composition this Fall. A year or two ago, she wrote a fanfare for a brass ensemble. To me, it sounded like the most horrendous cacophony of a discordant mess. Then, she explained it to me the very sophisticated juxtaposition of harmonies. I still thought it sounded awful, but the brass ensemble loved it. In this post-modern era, it is entirely possible that they perceive harmony more broadly than I do.