But the anti-traditionalist move initiated by the New Left couldn't possibly have stopped there. The Greens play at this position, as do most American progressives today. But you would get a different answer from a similar sample of jazz musicians. For a music whose central motive force is improvisation, jazz is shockingly adherent to tradition. Pedagogy and composition anchor themselves in the same, relatively limited number of scales and chord progressions.
Performers play the standards night after night, year in and year out.
The necessary precondition of improvisation, it turns out, is structure. Which is to say that there is another kind of tradition lurking here. And like language, shared traditions make possible shared actions. They can take the tune places it hasn't been before. This is jazz.