A point that I would retain from this: That sometimes your teachers have very different tastes from you, and sometimes you have to fight your impulse to please

A point that I would retain from this: That sometimes your teachers have very different tastes from you, and sometimes you have to fight your impulse to please them by absorbing their tastes and giving up your own. Like Sivers, I've tried to learn about how you are "supposed to write songs." And then I've realized that a lot of songs I love do not actually do any of the things that you're "supposed" to do. And that is OK. I would also agree that rotely learning jazz songs from 50 years ago... is not the spirit in which these songs were originally invented, and isn't what 60s/70s jazz musicians were doing at all, as they were trying to invent new things... That being said, if you start reading about that generation of jazz musicians, a lot of them were pretty conscious about what had come before, too. There is some kind of balance.