Jazz “experts”

Over coffee with a friend-of-a-friend:

”Do you like jazz?”
“– Oh yes, but I'm nothing like a jazz expert”

But there is nothing like a jazz expert. I thought I knew something about jazz, and then I read a bit of Boris Vian's columns for Jazz Hot, and I knew nothing again. I thought I knew a bit of Jimmy Smith, and then I read Robert Wyatt's comment on Mike Ratledge (French interview, Rock & Folk, 1967), saying his work was probably the most innovative since Smith, and I realised that I had missed what now seems so obvious to me.

I do not believe in jazz experts and I am not even sure jazz allows the concept of a jazz expert. In Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963), there are only two types of audience people: those with jazz, and those without (“squares”). And the fact that a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society allowed for the growth of jazz music must be a proof that no one is condemned to squareness.