ABOUT THIS BOOK

A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.

A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?

Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures.

Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context—we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Andrew S. Berish is associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ‘40s, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

"With Hating Jazz, Andy Berish has crafted a uniquely wide-ranging and thought-provoking study on aesthetic affect and 'taste.' His work not only chronicles the long history of jazz hatred, it also offers new perspectives on how our seemingly personal responses to music are always shaped by shared social, historical, and cultural circumstances. One of the most penetrating and relevant jazz-related books of the current century."

— David Ake, author of 'Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop'

"Andrew Berish uses claims by people who say they hate jazz music as a point of entry into a broader, provocative, and persuasive exploration of the causes and consequences of taste cultures. He shows that intense feelings about music are not just personal dispositions but rather socially generated and shared phenomena. By revealing how judgments about jazz are immersed in affective attachments and aversions to social identities such as race, gender, generation, and class, Hating Jazz offers an empowering new way of thinking, talking, and writing about art and music."

— George Lipsitz, author of 'Footsteps in the Dark and Dangerous Crossroads'

"Can a book that depicts jazz culture as a seething cauldron of anxiety, fear, anger, disgust, and contempt induce in readers who love jazz even deeper ardor and devotion? I wouldn’t have thought so before reading Hating Jazz. By showing how the music has incited what Samuel Johnson called a 'violent commotion of the mind,' Andrew Berish helps us understand how intense feelings provoked by this music channel deep social and psychological currents in modern life. Hating Jazz is an absorbing and entertaining cultural history, a vivid tableau of moldy figs, Nazis, Kenny G vilifiers, and insufferable jazzbros that puts Freud, Adorno, Donald Barthelme, and Stanley Crouch into contrapuntal conversation with The Simpsons and The Office."

— John Gennari, author of 'Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics'

"Like the 'death of jazz,' hating jazz is a perennial source of bemusement to those who don’t. Andrew Berish plumbs the affect for its surprisingly deep relationship to taste, race, power, cultural capital, sex/gender anxiety, cruel humor, envy, and disgust, only to discover extreme modalities of engagement and even discernment. Genuinely eye-opening."

— Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism

"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."

— Stereogum

"Separate from its main thesis, the brief, understated skewering of “jazz bros” and jazz misogyny is particularly enjoyable."

— California Review of Books

Berish’s counterintuitive approach makes for a scintillating read. Berish writes not to condemn jazz but to honor it, stating, “I should be clear at the beginning that I love jazz.” In writing a survey of jazz’s detractors, he hopes to “explore how jazz—really all music—gives shape and meaning to our lives.” Celebrating a musical form by looking at how it’s been dismissed and derided may sound counterintuitive, but it does offer a new way to think about what has been called “Black classical music” and how it relates to America’s sense of itself.

— Spectrum Culture

Berish offers detailed yet cogent overviews of these topics (affect theory, humor, and the social basis of personal experience of music) that may be particularly helpful to graduate students expanding their theoretical frameworks for
cultural analysis of music. Berish opts to consider a limited number of instances to exemplify the forms of jazz hate in each chapter, and while I might have enjoyed reading his thoughtful exposition of more cases, the strategy he chose allows for more in-depth consideration of each case, and gives readers tools with which to think about the many further instances they may run across.

— Music & Musical Performance

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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