Dennis Claxton:
> I can do without out about 99% of contemporary jazz, but for decades
> people made great jazz that had a lot of crossover with other styles.
Well, 99% of much culture is crap, but why miss the other 1% of greatness?
And Jazz has always been a "crossover" music. Since its beginnings, since figures like Jelly Roll Morton mixed ragtime and blues and latin music.
The great thing about Jazz is that it has advanced so far idiomatically that it isn't really Jazz anymore, because it just kept evolving and evolving. Kind of like how birds are sort of dinosaurs, but not really.
For example, a lot of the European free improvisation music of the 1960s that evolved out of Free Jazz but combined it with experimental classical tendencies: Derek Bailey, AMM, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the various musicians around the FMP label in Germany, the Dutch musicians around ICP.
Not to mention the second and third generation free improvisers who took the influence of AMM further, but blended it with electronic music. Christof Kurzmann, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Beins, etc.
Jazz never lost its experimental or groundbreaking character, it just kept evolving until it stopped being "Jazz" in an idiomatic sense. But the lineage is still there. Like this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJw9az9vAf4