Moldy Figs?

When I first encountered modern jazz in the mid 1950s, it was like entering a vibrant and exotic world which I had been yearning for ever since the grim post-war decades of the 1940s and 1950s. However, I was conscious that most fans around me were enthusing about traditional jazz - which was already twenty and thirty years old. I felt sorry for them for being so out of date. Tonight I slipped Monk's Dream into my CD player. This is music which is still crisp; still spiky and off-beat; and still emotionally and intellectually exciting. But I suddenly realised that I was listening to something that is not twenty but forty years old. My only excuse is that I don't think much has come along meantime to surpass this music. But I suppose the moldy figs thought that too then, didn't they.