I heard it said (paraphrasing) that jazz stopped moving forward when Miles Davis wasn't around to push it. Obviously that's not strictly true, and wouldn't app

I heard it said (paraphrasing) that jazz stopped moving forward when Miles Davis wasn't around to push it. Obviously that's not strictly true, and wouldn't apply to other styles of music, but I think the sentiment is true. Some of it was counterculture as you mentioned; some wasn't necessarily "counterculture", but was more experimental, striving to go further down the same path. But however you term it, it seems to me that a lot of music has grown stagnate out of repeating known formulas instead of exploring. Considering jazz again, there's a lot of "new" music categorized as, say, "neo bop". Would Diz and Bird have been doing "neo bop"? I doubt it. They were trying new things. I don't suspect they were particularly attached to bop music per se, but they wanted to push the boundaries -- take swing music and see what new things they could do with it. To me, most "neo" anything sounds about as bland as you'd expect; rehashing old ideas without the creative energy that made those old ideas work in the first place. I sometimes find new music that I really like, but I mostly listen to the same music I was listening to ten years ago. And a lot of that was old even then.