While I think others have said it in some ways, I think for everyone it really does come down to your introduction to concepts that with the octatrack is all together foreign to most people.
Elektron aptly titled the instrument as an 8-track ‘Dynamic’ ‘Performance’ Sampler.
Keep the two word’s in mind.
It’s a sampler. The sampler has been around for decades. However synthesizers were around for decades before Robert Moog came along. Obscure, and not recognized in the larger musical community at the time.
And though with the MPC and J Dilla, the Sampler became more widely recognized as an ‘Instrument’ in the popular culture side of the music community at that time it still wasn’t something common like a guitar or a piano.
The Octatrack wasn’t marketed to the wider musical community when it was released, so far as demo’s are regarded. However it was marketed by Elektron as a ‘Machine’ that ‘Makes Music’ as their main release advert states.
Before that was the Mono-‘Machine’ & the ‘Machine’-Drum.
Just like the synthesizer in it’s tipping point going from an obscure set of modules used primarily in the scientific community in labs for audio research to it’s reception into the wider musical community with Wendy Carlos’s ‘Switched On Bach’ and soon after the other more popular music groups incorporating the Moog Modular System into their music.
So I would say the Sampler, in and of it self is still in some sense, though widely used and accepted in it’s general sense, with the Octatrack really in my opinion it is a combination of the instrumental ‘Dynamic-Performance’ and the ‘Machine’- as you would likely agree from your use of it the time it takes to come to understand how to ‘program’ it’s modular-esque feature set & nature to your performance approach.
And it certainly lends it self to the improvisational model of approach that is what jazz is about. But clearly in the wider jazz community it’s not perhaps as widely understood/accepted or used. For now.
But with the wide spread of the internet, it’s quite synonymous with the ever popular
OP-1, but again it’s still misunderstood because the technical side of it isn’t something people are all educated about.
I’m sure someone who comes from a traditional musical background playing piano, saxophone, or other traditional acoustic instruments has little to no knowledge of an LFO or parameter locking, or a trig-condition.
Those terms get more into synthesis and sequencing, and into exclusive features that were once mainly just introduced from Elektron themselves in a hardware instrument. Perhaps not entirely new concepts in software, or some other obscure instrument or device. So, it really has like the Microkorg come a long way and is still thriving in production, and more and more people know ‘of it’, but still fewer understand and are fully in the ‘know’ of what it brings to the table.
So, I believe from my experience with it that it brings a ‘Dynamic’ to elektronik instruments that is still not quite rivaled, but is becoming more recognized as it’s become more widely known.
Perhaps you will create & shed light from your shared musical expressions that will further that understanding to the larger jazz community, though maybe not today, but perhaps as those who find your music or see your performances witness your realization of your creative, musical imagination expressed through the Octatrack.