I should confess I’m not familiar enough with this artist to make a declarative statement, but I have a very astute ear and to me it sounded very quantized. I could be wrong. I don’t think that’s really a bad thing inherently, I just know that it is deeply not to my tastes.

I also felt this music was middling and dull and repetitive. It had elements of snappiness to it that were catchy, but it just was missing something at its soul. Maybe again it’s a personal thing but I like to hear music that has something to say, I don’t want to hear passable, I want to hear musicians driving forward with every note and phrase, their heart and soul.

I’m hearing your other thoughts about the identity of jazz changing, and I think that’s essential to what jazz is. It’s always been shifting. I suppose here again it’s a philosophical thing for me, I need to hear humans playing instruments for me to feel like it’s music. To me. I suppose it’s one of those things that can’t be explained with words, it’s a feeling deep inside me when I hear music that sounds a certain way made in a certain way. In a sense I need to see the sky, not a picture of the sky.

Many of my favorite jazz artists, Prince included, programmed a lot of their music, but they had the underlying music intelligence to know that they can’t just let a computer pump out quantized tones at a predictable speed, there has to be something deeper for the human ear to connect to. So much of that is missing in modern electronically produced music. I think music again is loosely used here because it’s more a series of tones, rather than music, music has to have that other thing.

Surprise to me is not the primary element of jazz. Although surprise is an element of jazz, all great jazz should be continually challenging and surprising, that I do not believe is the underlying thing that is at its core. I feel that jazz is rebellion. I feel that jazz is brilliance in defiance of conformity; being brilliant in a way the status quo hates.

I’m seeing both sides in a way, I know that in a lot of ways it’s just perspective, and I’m an old curmudgeon.