"do we want to simply copy what has been done before or try to advance the music"

I'd say neither. We set out to carry on a tradition and form part of it, and that involves changing, because we can't really do anything else.

Yes, maybe we can copy something off a record note by note, but the person who made the record would have played it a little differently the next day. If we play it exactly the same every time, it won't be playing the same way as the people we are emulating - and if we play it a little differently, it won't be quite the same difference, because we are different people, and in a different time.

But that's not "advancing the music", just because we are living later in time. Maybe it's better and maybe it's not, and it's for future generations to decide that.

Music is a language. When youwe learn to speak a language, we might listen to records to get the accent and the rhythm and all - but if what we could do at the end of the day was just rattle out the Linguaphone records like a perfect tape recording, no one would say that we had learnt to speak the language.