By the way jazz itself was focused on innovation right from the start. Guys playing legit gigs (as they came to be called by jazz musicians) -- that is, performances where every note they'd play was composed and written in advance-- would stay around afterwards and play around with the stuff they had been playing, have fun with it, yes, innovate. They'd improvise with the structure of the piece, the melody, and that's how the whole art form was born.

Beauty, "musicality" as musicians tend to call it, is of central importance, but it and innovation aren't separate things. Doing one doesn't exlude the other.

Oh and the people listening to those guys back then said the same thing that people had said about the impressionists. "That's not music, music is what's written down, this is just playing around, innovating for its own sake"