I'm guessing that their argument, while somewhat hyperbolic in nature, is pretty much right.
This has a lot to do with "developments" in straight ahead post-bop music in the Wynton and post-Wynton era.
Guy
Maybe but more to do with developments in the MINDs than in the actual MUSIC itself. Throughout the 80s and 90s contemporary jazz musicians never stopped turning to material by Prince, Radiohead or Nirvana for inspiration, seemingly in spite of Marsalis. It's just that this was no longer perceived as proper jazz. No one had any problem with Coltrane turning My Favourite Things into a jazz standard even though it came from a a dodgy Rogers and Hammerstein musical sang by famed jazz heavy weight Julie Andrews. So why does the establishment have a problem with Nirvana? At least they played their own instruments! I think that the only real difference is that the people who confer "jazz standard' status on music, stopped listening to contemporary music in 1980, the year of the "last jazz standard'. Meanwhile, the label non-obessed world kept listening, borrowing and copying from whatever source around them, just like Coltrane did decades earlier. Perhaps more jazz musicians would've played stuff like Karma Police, Kiss or Come as you are, had the establishment been as ready to give them "standard" status as My favourite things in 1961
Wow, I can't wait to get a four-disc box of jazz versions of Kiss songs.