What I don't understand is why music has to be anything. DDT - you believe that jazz is dying - and then denigrate all sorts of jazz or people ("calcified musicians") that you're not interested in. You talk about the "integrity" of jazz. You say that "pop music overshadows all the truly far better forms of music out there" - but, even if true, so what? Because something might be harmonically more complex than something doesn't make it "better" - as if "better" had any meaning when applied to individual taste.

I'm very fond of all sorts of jazz - Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and many others - but I don't for an instant think it's "better" than, say, Eddie Cochran or Richard Thompson. I can live with "Summertime Blues" just as much as I can live with "St. Thomas" or "Al Bowley's In Heaven" or "The Pearls". Music just IS - regardless of what you want it to be. And, if the attention of the public is drawn to this and that, then so be it. The real aficionados of a particular style of music will always seek it out and gather together to worship their particular gods, regardless of fashion, money or anything else. Aged (and not-so-aged) rockers wearing treasured '50s gear gather in empty holiday chalets in midwinter to jive a weekend away. And aged and not-so-aged musicians play the music for them. Guys and gals in jeans, boots and cowboy hats go line dancing in social clubs all over the UK. Folkies gather together to sing and play. Let them. Nothing wrong with any of it.

I love playing my kind of jazz because, now and then, nothing can beat the feeling of flying, musically, by the seat of one's pants, always on the edge of a great mistake or a bad fluff. Sometimes it doesn't fly - and sometimes you're "in the zone". But even being "in the zone" is no "better" than singing in "Tristan" or having a metal thrash in the back room of a pub. Different - certainly - but not better.