<< I guess I should have just said I don't care if he's avant-garde or not, I thought I did though. The point is the term means little to me- you and Remco can define it up and down, tell us who fits in it and doesn't- and it still won't. That term sounded like some kind of a blessing you give an artist, hence I got the impression you were interested more in innovation. >>(Ryan) This all started when I had the audacity to call Vandermark's work avant jazz. Not avant garde. That evidently got Remco's goat. I use this term more than any other because if you put this into any search engine, the artists I like the most turn up. So someone else must be using this term besides me. I never said his music was brand new. If someone told me an unknown artist's work was brand new, I figure here comes a new gimmick. Someone is going to nitpick any term you can come up with. The fact that so many people work in this field makes it a genre. Nothing to be ashamed of. I'm just using the above quote as a frame of reference, I'm not disagreeing here. Cheers, John Threadgould