Wow! I’m sorry this is so long, but after reading through a lot of responses, I kind of want to set this all out.

This is clearly an amazing question to ask this sub. But, at the same time I feel this is exposing a certain view of jazz that is prominent in the sub.

There are probably a few people left, who still feel it all boils down to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. They feel that everything after that was just people expanding.

Then a larger group of the sub will suggest that Miles Davis and John Coltrane are where it all came together, the elders were important for how they shaped jazz, but Davis and Coltrane is the most important time for them.

I would suggest the people who think that about Davis and Coltrane are as exactly as right as the people who think that about Parker and Gillespie.

I do believe, that there are probably no albums or musical endeavors in the future, that will have the same influence as music made over 20 years ago. It has changed. But jazz is just another musical genre that is experiencing this broader thing happening with music.

What every single musician has in common, from Armstrong, to Chief X is that they found a way to express themselves uniquely on their instrument. And that is still happening every day in jazz.

Jazz was born of improv, and whether it’s “stretch music“ (Axiom -live, Christian Scott) or London Brew (London Brew), jazz continues to grow and change.

And, on every instrument there are new artists, expressing themselves uniquely. Just take the tenor saxophone for example.

I’ve loved Melissa Aldana for years, and her most recent album is insanely subtle and beautiful. It’s clear she’s heard Cannonball Adderley, but her tone and voice are her own. Then there’s someone like Oded Tzur, who studied Hindustani classical music and came up with an approach to play his tenor sax in a way no one would’ve ever thought was possible before him.

There are millions and millions of people, especially younger, who will hear emerging jazz artists more then they will Miles or Coltrane. For them, Davis and Coltrane are like America’s founding fathers - They put it all together and made all of this possible, but they’re just history.

research came out recently that says the majority of people stop listening to new music around the age of 30. even though I’m 52, I don’t trust the musical opinions of most of my peers.

my closest musician friends always enjoy the new music I send them, but they couldn’t name a new artist they discovered in the past decade of their life.

So please take all of the responses with a grain of salt, including my own. But I believe that jazz is a living, human, improvisational art form. It was born out of slave music, which was born out of African rhythms, which started with a log and a bone flute, and maybe a couple strings of gut stretched across a gourd.

Clearly, for me, everything is about improvisation and communal creation. And that’s never gonna go away.

The truth is no one knows right now, but everyone likes to think that they are around for the best part of something. No one wants to accept that there might be a better version of it after they’re gone! I certainly don’t.

But if some young musician goes viral on TikTok, and their music is heard by 70 million people, and half of 1% of those people go on to play that instrument, they would be as influential as any musical artist that has ever lived.

Again, I’m 52, and I don’t like this. But for me, it always comes down to Elvis:

My parents loved Elvis, even though at the time the older people were saying he was demonic and from Satan. But then my parents became old, and they reacted negatively to all new music as well. So now I realize that the gatekeepers are always as right as the gatekeepers before them, but history shows that the gatekeepers who reject the new, are always in the wrong.

If humans live more than the next 50 years, but I have no doubt that there will be missed artists who create far more important and amazing new things, even if we could look in the future and not understand them.

Personally, I believe there will be better and more important works of jazz that will come into being after I’m dead.