I started listening to jazz when I was around 15. My entry point was a common one: Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, which I bought on cassette for $5.99. I also heard John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme early on, after which I started gradually, haphazardly picking up albums here and there with no real method or guide; I would just hear about something somewhere — and this was pre-internet, and I wasn’t reading jazz magazines, so I was mostly limited to what I found out about from Rolling Stone or Spin — and try to find it in my local record store or grab something from my local library.

My mom was always pretty tolerant of my musical tastes. She wouldn’t let me play AC/DC in the house, because she hated Brian Johnson’s voice, but she thought Iggy Pop had a pleasing baritone, so he was OK. Most punk was fine, Judas Priest and Motörhead too, and there were even some things we bonded over, like Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and New Order’s Substance 1987. But when she heard Miles Davis coming from my room, she said one of the funniest, meanest things I’ve ever heard. “You know,” she told me, “jazz is music for people who think they’re smart.”

I thought about that line a lot while reading Andrew Berish’s Hating Jazz: A History Of Its Disparagement, Mockery, And Other Forms Of Abuse (University of Chicago Press, 2025). See, jazz is subject to disdain, scorn and ridicule far out of proportion to its commercial stature, to the point that it’s almost weird at times. Take, for example, this standup routine by Paul F. Tompkins.

It’s funny, because Tompkins is a skilled comedian with a highly developed comic persona. He’s not some knuckle-walking douchebag — can you imagine, say, Joe Rogan trying to do a joke about jazz? It’s easy to flip the routine on its head and believe Tompkins might be someone who does like jazz in his offstage life poking fun at the music’s more absurd aspects. Because yeah, I’ve been in clubs where musicians have played something that entertains themselves and leaves the rest of us going, “Yeah, okay, I guess that was cool…”

This joke is one of the things Berish talks about in his book, along with the exchange “You’re not stupid. Jazz is stupid!” “Yeah — just play the right notes!” from The Office, and an infamous New Yorker story presented as an interview with legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins where “he” says things like, “We always dressed real sharp: pin-stripe suits, porkpie hats, silk ties. As if to conceal the fact that we were spending all our time playing jazz in some basement.”

That piece, originally published in 2014, provoked a wave of fury in the jazz community like nothing I’ve ever seen. Everyone who shared it on Facebook (and oh, did it get shared on Facebook) said something like “This piece is listed as humor in The New Yorker, but it doesn’t seem all that funny” or “I expect better from The New Yorker. But I won’t in the future” or “I hope Rollins sues them for this.”

Me? I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d read in the magazine years. To me, it was a hilarious, biting look at the dark side of the artistic temperament and the dismal fate awaiting most artists in a capitalist society.

But I suspect that the jazz critics who got so angry about the piece reacted that way because they’ve devoted even more decades than I have to listening to jazz, learning its history, interviewing the players, and writing about it, and they’ve done so from the perspective common to most jazz critics: that the music they like is great art, much more than mere entertainment, and deserves the highest honors our culture can bestow, all the time. It should certainly never be poked fun at or satirized — that’s for performers they think of as lesser, like Miley Cyrus or whichever other pop figure they happen to have somehow heard of. (Your average jazz critic’s unfamiliarity with contemporary pop culture would make a normal person weep with baffled laughter.)

I remember reading something a long time ago to the effect that you could tell when an ethnic group had successfully begun the process of assimilating into American society when they started to become the subject of jokes in movies. Not hostile, racist, dehumanizing jokes, but jokes poking welcoming fun at these new people and their weird folkways.

Jazz fans should welcome jokes about their music’s unlistenability and dismal commercial status. Why? Because it proves people still give enough of a fuck about jazz to make fun of it. Do you think they would have written a satirical interview with Jimmy Sturr, complaining about how awful the accordion sounds and how much he hates polka? Do you think anyone would have read it if they had?

But Berish’s book isn’t just about jokes at jazz’s expense. He also deals with a broader hostility to jazz, which takes many forms. There are musicians who hate jazz because of what they perceive as its innate qualities, so they’ll say things like, “Oh, those guys can play a million notes, but they can’t write a song…” There are the social conservatives of the pre-rock ‘n’ roll era who hated jazz because they saw it as licentious, or the music of Black people corrupting innocent white children. Then there are people who hate it because they think of it as snobby, elitist music. So Berish’s challenge was to bring all of these things under one umbrella, and he does so quite well.

“There were kind of two criteria that guided what I chose to focus on,” he told me when I called him up. “I wanted people who used the word ‘hate.’ That seems really important because of the ambivalence and ambiguities of that word — what’s interesting about hate is that it both represents everything that’s really awful in the world, you know, misogyny, racism, violence, all bad, bad stuff, and at the same time, it’s just a very heightened way of saying you don’t like something, like ‘I hate rice pudding’ or ‘I hate that Christmas sweater,’ right? So that was important; the other was that people had to be using the word ‘jazz’ because …I think we sometimes get down in the weeds if I’m teaching music history class and trying to define it or explain the different definitions, but it’s really that the word takes on all this power and it creates all these meanings to it, right? And it gets deployed in all these different ways. To me, that’s not a problem. That’s what’s interesting …is kind of tracing the debate, not deciding who’s right or who’s wrong, but it’s just super interesting that nearly everyone from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Ornette Coleman to Cecil Taylor to everyone has an opinion about it, because the word has so much accreted to it. I don’t know a good metaphor, but everyone can kind of turn around and look at it and see the thing that they want to see or the thing they wish they couldn’t see in the word.”

The first chapter deals with issues of taste, race, and other social/societal factors that have led to criticisms of jazz from the 1920s to the present day, exploring how the treatment of jazz has often been a synecdoche for broader racial tensions. The second looks at ways in which jazz has been satirized over the years, including the aforementioned Tompkins joke, the New Yorker piece, BuzzFeed articles, and the Twitter account @JazzIsTheWorst. The third chapter is perhaps the most interesting, as it deals with intra-musical hostilities, including Pat Metheny tearing into Kenny G, Stanley Crouch attacking Miles Davis, and Davis ripping apart Cecil Taylor in a DownBeat blindfold test (“Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee”).

In discussing why people claim to hate jazz, or why they express more specific complaints about aspects of it, the issue of race inevitably arises. Whether it was white racists attacking it as jungle music in the 1920s or, decades later, Anthony Braxton’s music being dismissed as not Black enough, it’s always fraught territory. “I think the book was also a way to kind of confront race, because it’s obviously not a very fashionable moment to talk about this, but you can’t… it’s important both empirically to the birth of the music and its history, but jazz has also become a kind of signifier, a way of negotiating a kind of racial color line, a kind of racial boundary, whether it’s white musicians looking for a different aesthetic or they hear something that feels new and different from their side of the color line, or if you’re African-American, musicians or fans or listeners seeing something in jazz that is really important and connects to a broader history as well, at every moment, jazz has been this window, this way of negotiating these racial lines… drawn historically between black and white, and it’s important to understand that and kind of see the music that way.”

Another important thing to remember is that good satire is about “punching up.” Culturally speaking, a shot at jazz is exactly that. It may be dead from a record-sales standpoint, and its stars may mostly play tiny clubs, but on the cultural ladder, jazz is several rungs above rock and pop. It’s considered important music. Of course, that’s helped doom its sales, because nothing sends albums flying off the shelves like guilting people into listening to something that’s supposed to be good for them… but congratulations, jazz critics, you won the battle for prestige. The music you love has been 100% accepted by the elite. It’s the soundtrack to arts benefits, awards shows (the Oscars still big-band up the music from the previous year’s releases), and any scene in a film or TV show where someone needs to be portrayed as classy… or old.

Berish agrees with me on this… sort of. “I think a lot of people making fun of jazz, they feel like they’re punching up at something that has achieved a kind of cultural status that that they feel — if you’re the critic or you’re making the joke, that it’s undeserved and you know, who really likes this music? No one really likes it. You go home, do you put it on? You know, you say you like it because it has cultural prestige and distinction. I do point this out. But from the other side, from within the jazz world broadly speaking, it feels like — and I think this explains some of the reactions to the Sonny Rollins piece — that you are punching down. You think you’re punching up, but jazz achieved its status through a struggle, it was really hard and it was years and years of people making the case and arguing, through commercial ups and downs, so it’s kind of this achievement but yet it feels very precarious in a way, even though jazz is at an institutional place in American cultural life [where] it’s probably stronger than it’s ever been. I mean, you have Juilliard, you have the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, SFJazz, there are jazz programs at many, many colleges and universities and high schools. There’s something interesting there … there’s that weird disconnect or dissonance between people who feel like they’re punching up, but the people on the other side, feel like they’re kind of punching down.”

Debates about jazz’s role in American society and the broader musical world will likely persist as long as people have ears to hear. And there will never be a consensus. Hating Jazz is a fascinating — and fun — book to read because by providing a mix of history, sociological analysis, and theorizing, it allows us to see jazz as something worth getting excited about.

TAKE 10

OUTWARD BOUND

@dearlyblossom Miles always makes me feel better when it’s rainy outside. This is some of his solo on So What from Kind Of Blue that I learned today. ☔️ Does this song sound like a rainy day to you or is it just my phytohormones? 🌸🤨 #milesdavis #miles #sowhat #kindofblue #jazzvocalist #jazzsinger #puppetsofinstagram #puppetry #nycjazz ♬ original sound – dearlyblossom