I'm listening to the gorgeous LP Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges. The liner notes by Nat Hentoff contain a pearl of wisdom that I'd like to share with you all:

Commenting on the shallow view of some critics that men like Hodges have become superannuated, Mulligan says that "the compulsion to say something 'new' every day is a significantly immature way of looking at life. The constant drive to force musicians and other artists to constantly invent something 'new' is one of the banes of the creative life; and this particular kind of pressure, incidentally, also reveals something of our whole culture. In any case, if there are people who cannot hear how thoroughly mature and individual Hodges is, I'm sorry for them."

That's the truest thing I've read in a long, long time. And it was written in 1959.