I'm not anti-jazz at all - that would be stupid anyway since there are so many different forms of jazz as has been said and anyway I have a decent selection in my library.

I just don't understand the deification of certain musicians of which Miles Davis was just one example. I think quite a lot of their status derives from their lifestyles and personalities that somehow become legendary, much like James Dean did in the movies.

One of the problems, and something we're getting hung up on, is the "intellectual wank" thing.  Jazz is not intellectual wank any more than Punk is a "f*cking racket* and Rock 'n' Roll was going to subvert the youth of America and Europe, even if it did.

If you like it, you like it.  If you don't like it, you insult it.  Every insult should probably be followed by a "to me," or prefaced with an "In my opinion".  We're not allowed to state, definitively, that fuses can't improve your hi-fi or that grounding boxes are expensive sand castle containers, but we are still allowed our opinions.  Same with Jazz.  If it really does upset your musical sensibilities, there is no obligation to listen to it.  Personally, there is a "type" of Jazz I don't like, but I don't listen to it, but I do own some.

As Sir Thomas Beecham put it, “Try everything once, except folk dancing and incest.”

Personally I enjoy a bit of daily wanking, oops I mean listening to Jazz, oh dear I think I am becoming too excited thinking about.   l'll go and put on some COOL JAZZZZ! 

On a more intellectual front it might be worth considering where Jazz comes from, for example did Jazz sporn the Blues or visa-versa, or was something else involved, perhaps you should consider early vaudeville music, as well as call and response songs and music of Africans that were slaves in the Americas and elsewhere through the 1700's and 1800's. And of course you would be remise to forget Ragtime and its direct influences on the aforementioned.

Also you need to consider the emergence of swing jazz, Dixieland, boogie-woogie, stride-piano and Jazz & Blues.

In the 1940's Bepop came out of aspects of this wiki "Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical phrasing, and intricate melodies." Prior was the swing band era with up around fourteen or so musicians and careful orchestrated arrangements, whereas bebop groups were small and whilst they adhered to basic tunes and chords structure for songs introduced elements of improvisation.

Rock'n'Roll in parallel evolved in the USA in the 40's and 50's and  wiki "It originated from African-American music such as jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, gospel, jump blues, as well as country music. While rock and roll's formative elements can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until 1954."  "Rock music as it became to be called in the mid to late 60's is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the US , developing into a range of different styles from the mid-1960s, particularly in the U.S. and the UK." We all know that Rock exploded later on to many genres.

And we must not forget wiki "Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the US and the UK During the 1950s and 1960s, pop music encompassed rock and roll and the youth-oriented styles it influenced. Rock and pop music remained roughly synonymous until the late 1960s, after which pop became associated with music that was more commercial, ephemeral, and accessible."

Going back to Jazz, in the mid 50's onwards Modal Jazz started be explored, wiki "significant compositions of modal jazz were "So What" by Miles Davis and "Impressions" by John Coltrane."So What" and "Impressions" follow the same AABA structure and were in D Dorian for the A sections and modulated a half step up to E-flat Dorian for the B section." This is probably the birth of modern jazz and much greater experimentation, with the use of key transformations, along with even more adventurous improvisation using different keys superimposed over others. 

So actually if you think about it we probably all most of the time listen to music that has some derivation or roots in Jazz, so we are all probably enjoying some form of intellectual wank on a daily basis, musically speaking that is. 



As a sub-note, just to be clear it is extremely difficult to clearly separate the origins of blues and jazz, it is not just about musical structures but also rhythms, many of which derive from African music of various forms. In the early 1900's to 1930's many aspects as explored above crossed over each other and new musical types or genres came into being.

I actually wrote a paper on the history of modern music for a course in music I was attending at one time about 15 years ago. What I found most interesting is even though we have a huge amount of musical variety today, the basic foundations of most modern western music lies specifically in 3 or 4 forms of original music going back 200 years of so, Blues, Jazz and Folk & Country. Over the last 30-40 years this has become even more complicated as globalisation has occurred and "World Music" has been influencing different styles and genres, the internet and accessibility to almost anything instantly has has a huge impact on this in recent years as well. 

So go and get you daily Jazz fix. 

Which is the ONLY thing that matters.