Adebate has simmered in jazz for years: do today's artists have the power or originality of their predecessors. Cynics compare Harry Connick Jr to Frank Sinatra and scoff. Mention Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis in the same breath and they giggle like a toddler with a Snickers habit.
In some ways, they have a point. The jazz that was recorded in the 1950s and 60s - and even as late as the 1970s - has the aura of being richer, deeper and more authentic than many of today's offerings.
A major complaint is that young jazz musicians trot out the same old standards and that risk-taking is dead.
Before last year's Montreal International Jazz Festival, Canadian critic Peter Hadekel wrote: 'Much of the music being recorded today has a bland uniformity to it. In the 1950s and 60s, jazz was a riot of competing noises, a true democracy, a constant surprise.
'But these days, there is little being done that is surprising and much that is devoted to replaying the past.' In the June 1996 issue of Jazziz magazine, saxophonist David Murray was even more critical.
He complained that today's crop of young jazz musicians were not only neo-conservative, but 'neo-con artists', who were 'conning the public into thinking that they're guys who actually created this stuff, when they're just playing a tired version of some music that really had some fire to it'.