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There's a funny thing going on now where it's hard to tell what jazz is really "modern." Down-thread, somebody says that Steve Coleman should not be on this list since "he's almost 60" and his "revolutionary" ideas happened decades ago. While this may or may not be true, I don't think it's necessarily a useful way to look at jazz music now. By this definition, only music produced in the recent past is "modern". 

There's always been this tendency to look at jazz from the "great genius as innovator" perspective, and to ignore the cultural context the genius came from. A example of looking at jazz history this way is Ken Burns treatment of the subject. Looking only at musical innovation, and ignoring cultural context makes it seem like Wes Montgomery for example, was unimportant since, technically he was not a musical innovator. He innovated the hell out of the guitar, but he didn't innovate musically. What does this have to do with modern or not modern?

Ethan Iverson, the pianist of The Bad Plus has a great blog and he discusses things like this far better than I do. Incidentally, he's one of the best "modern" pianists, who recently was doing a duo gig with Ron Carter in NYC. Is that gig modern? 

These days a jazz musician can be influenced by literally any kind of music in the world and from any time period. During Louis Armstrong's time, people had far less choice of what they listened to, and thus were influenced by. Because of this, it was easy up until recently to see really sharply defined periods of jazz history, e.g., swing, bop, "post-bop", "fusion", etc. Starting in the late 70s there was a trend to reexamine the roots of jazz, maybe as a backlash against fusion. 

As it became easier to access more and more recordings, modern musicians can find it useful to be influenced by almost anything. Since there are prominent jazz players who show influence from older styles (Wynton for one), is he not modern? 

tl;dr So I guess this wall o' text is really just a question. What do you mean by modern?
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