Innovation vs Tradition

I just bought Cassandra Wilson’s album, “Blue Skies,” recorded in 1988, today. It’s the first Cassandra Wilson album I’ve bought, but I knew a little bit about her. It surprised me that this album is all standards.
During that time in her career, she was pretty involved with the M-BASE (macro-basic array of structured extemporization) movement, sort of spearheaded by saxophonist Steve Coleman. I don’t now too much about the movement, but I know it was more in favor of creating original material than recording standards that had been done over and over. And I know it was more into combining complex funk with jazz discipline.
It’s not like this movement operated within itself: it was responding to history, it was ideological. There were probably a lot of annoying debates in progress about the definition of jazz. I was born in 1988, so I don’t know for sure, but I bet a lot of jazz musicians at this time were having sort of an Oedipal relationship with jazz—about how much to take or leave from a tradition.
So, with that in mind, it’s actually pretty daring that Cassandra Wilson recorded this all-standards album. To me, this ties into our discussion of culture. The 20th century went through quite a bit. By the end of the eighties, innovation and tradition might have seemed in opposition, but they were starting to meld into one another.
I think avant-garde is a pretty meaningless word. If singing standards, with taste and respect, is a daring achievement, then clichés about expanding the boundaries in music become useless.