Harold Bloom discusses Bud Powell and influence in jazz

I believe Bloom's interlocutor is Christopher Lydon. The discussion of Bud Powell starts about 43:00.

At 47:00 or so there's an explicit discussion of influence and competition. He's right, cutting contests are part of the jazz tradition. But that kind of highly ritualized bandstand combat is one thing, influence is another. Bloom seems to be conflating the two in his remarks. I've read many anecdotes about jazz musicians listening to records or broadcast performances and being inspired what they hear. That's influence. It takes place over a period of years and is enduring. That runs orthogonal to real-time competition in cutting contests, in which musicians will mirror or complement one another's lines. Whether or not that activity has a permanent influence on a musician's style, that's incidental to the dynamics of real-time musical combat. 

Miles Davis provides a clear example of the sort of phenomenon Bloom talks about. He came up in the 2nd cohort of bebop musicians and played with Charlie Parker for awhile. If you listen to his earliest recordings you'll hear him playing in the fleet multi-noted 'vertical' style of Parker and Gillespie. But by the mid-1950s he'd developed a sparser and more 'horizontal' style. He'd moved to a distinctly different musical territory. That move is widely interpreted as a (creative) response to the overwhelming presence of Parker and Gillespie.