Hating Jazz

""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, University of Miami ""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'