Armchair Critics, Angry Purists, and Other Garden Pests

I’ve been a YouTube watcher for a long time, and I’ve been posting video since 2009. If YouTube could collect a penny from every anonymous critic who knows how it should be done, every artistic purist who knows what the truth is, and every abusive derider, it would be an enterprise richer than Croesus.

What follows, to be clear, is not about any comments I’ve received on video-ed performances I have created.

If you think the drawing above is ageist, I understand. But my own age gives me some liberty, and if you look at the audience at most jazz concerts, some of us will not see 40 again.

I am very much emotionally entangled with the artists and music I love. Insult me personally and we are on some version of an equal footing, where I can fight back. But write that “Teddy Wilson really fell off bland unclear an no emotion I’m so disappointed, and no evolution, the polar opposite of Tatum,” once I am through mentally correcting the prose errors, I want to ask the anonymous critic, “How would you, obviously analytical, describe Art Tatum’s evolution from 1932 to 1956?”

When I read a musician, who may be superb, criticizing a respected group playing a Joe Venuti-Eddie Lang composition and adding their own flourishes, and the comment is, “mais n’est pas copiée note à note. Dommage,” which translates roughly as “but they don’t copy it note for note. Too bad!” I get up from the computer before I write something impolite.

Those criticisms came in yesterday, and I have copied them accurately. I have no objection to what I would call excited positive enthusiasm, even if I think less of the artist than you do. But this desire to knock people off real or imagined pedestals is puzzling to me. I would hate to think it is the jealousy of the less talented or at least the less seen: “how come he has a YouTube video with a thousand likes when I don’t?”

What follows is emotionally related although from a slightly different angle. As long as jazz has been written about, perhaps because of journalists’ desire for good copy, there have been wars about artistic authenticity and what “the truth” is. I thought the “Dixieland versus bebop” clamor had died down when its noisy proponents on either side had died, but obviously the impulse to argue is, for some, stronger than the impulse to hug.

I originally began this post with the impulse, in part whimsical, to outrage the purists, for they still exist, by posting a video excerpt from Jazz on a Summer’s Day: featuring Chuck Berry leading the jazz all-stars in a performance of his then-current hit, “Sweet Little Sixteen”.

I love this performance. Chuck is having a good time, the band also. Look at Jack Teagarden’s grin. Jo Jones always smiled when he played, but he is catching every note. And even though you might not see them, I am sure that the others—Buck Clayton, Tony Scott, Buddy Tate, Rudy Rutherford (who you do see), Georgie Auld, Ray Bryant, Kenny Burrell, Tommy Bryant—are happy playing the blues for a receptive audience.

I had originally thought of posting this, with some of the same feelings about purist-derision, because I had read a “jazz fan”‘s condemnation of Chuck as not the real thing. That the “fan” couldn’t hear the roots of Chuck’s performance in those by Big Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, Hot Lips Page, and other certified jazz luminaries is unfortunate. I don’t have a shelf of Chuck’s music, but there is nothing to condemn about this jubilant performance.

Or so I thought. Then I read this comment appended to this video:

Jeez, talk about an anemic backing band. These guys are standing around laughing at Chuck and probably resenting all his success that year. FINALLY, the clarinet player grows a pair to take a solo and for a brief minute you get a glimpse of the mayhem and ragged vitality of the New Orleans that gave birth to Jass. It remains one of several highlights of this film for me. Chuck absolutely rises above these smirking assholes to create a poignant Moment for the 20th century.

“Smirking assholes,” aside from being anatomically dubious, got to me, and I wrote to correct the commenter, which I know makes Sisyphus and his boulder seem a rousing success:

Jack Teagarden and Jo Jones are smiling with pleasure: they both had been playing and, in Jack’s case, singing, the blues since their youth. Smirking? Hell, no.

I think that insulting dead artists is particularly foul.

I’ve long since given up on the illusion that polite informed discourse would be the common language. But jazz is such a small ice floe in the greater sea of culture; I foolishly thought that the community of people drawn to it would also be civil adults who knew what they were talking about. I dream, I know. “I don’t like mushrooms” has been supplanted by “Mushrooms are shit and so is anyone who likes them,” in the space of my lifetime. Alas.

And, as an aside, if you prefer your blues played with guitars and drums rather than horns, do we really need to know your personal preference? I have a dear relative who doesn’t like the ice water offered for free in hotel lobbies to be tasting of cucumber, but he has not started a blog to campaign against this pervasive menace.

What’s the hopeful cure for bleakness and spiteful foolishness in public? Music, Schubert’s “holy art.”

I offer you Chuck Berry once more at Newport in 1956, with “Johnny B. Goode”:

People! Be Goode, please. It costs not a cent more.

May your happiness increase!

This essay was originally posted August 2, 2026, on JAZZ LIVES, Michael Steinman’s excellent blog, which may be found at jazzlives.wordpress.com. It is here republished with Michael Steinman’s kind permission and encouragement.