il jazz e l'evoluzione lineare

Da un'intervista a Joshua Redman di qualche anno fa:

I've never believed in treating music as a linear evolution. You can tell that story of jazz up to a point. You can say, "the beboppers advanced harmonically and rhythmically on the music of the swing era. After that modality started to break down some of those innovations..." You can string together a historical evolution of jazz up to a point. But past the point of what people like to call "free jazz," where jazz musicians did away with predetermined harmonic and rhythmic structures, after that point where do you go? You can't necessarily make a case for whatever comes after that as being a linear advance. Once you've broken down all the barriers, what more can you break down? But that's not to say that innovation can't continue. It's just that you can't see that innovation in the same linear terms. You may have to see it in more post-modern terms. And I don't want to go too far into explaining that. In a certain sense, you can say that the boundaries have been charted, but there's so much space in between that can be developed. We can take elements of so many things that have been hinted at and synthesize them to create an original voice and do something innovative. I don't see jazz in linear terms, which I think a lot of critics and writers have done. If you do see jazz in those terms, you're forced to make the case that nothing new has happened in jazz since the late sixties. But if you see jazz as an expanding sphere, then you can make a case for jazz continuing to be innovative. In my opinion, if you look at rock and roll in linear terms, then you can't talk about rock and roll being innovative past the early seventies. But, I think that there are a lot of innovative bands out there, even though they're borrowing from things that happened twenty years ago".