A: Start out with at least two million dollars.

I do PR and marketing stuff for the baddest band in Las Vegas, Santa Fe and The Fat City Horns. 14 of our best casino show players who do this soul/salsa/jazz band on the side, for mental health. I used to play for a living. I pay more in taxes than I used to gross when I was gigging.

These cats make less money on this gig than I made in my last band in the early 1980's.

At least our horn section got picked up by Bette Midler for her new show which starts here Wednesday (check my blog).

Nice observations about jazz vs rock cats, Gary. I feel ya.

Two jazz grammys in 50 years? Stan Getz, 1965; okay. But what about Norah Jones, 2003, and Ray Charles, 2005? And I guess you don't count Sinatra, 1960/1966/1967. Sure, some are debatable records - but they're all jazz artists, at least in my book.

And rock hasn't won all that many awards, either, for the most popular music form. Country, rap, and folk poke their way in surprisingly often.

I wouldn't sweat it anyhow. The Grammys are merely a popularity contest - and so the most popular forms of music usually win.

To understand jazz, especially advanced jazz, from the inside, you have to simultaneously follow every note of a solo and relate it to the melodic and harmonic background -- but that can start to feel strenuous, non-sensuous, almost mathematical.

As a classical musician who plans to do jazz in his next life, I was saddened that anyone would even partially have this reaction to jazz, as people often do to new "classical" music as well. You only need to "understand" the music "from the inside" if it's your job to play it - and sometimes not even then. Many people intimidate themselves out of great artistic experiences by imagining that they need to understand how it works.

In the end, all I know is that I like the idea of jazz far better than jazz itself.

This is such a problem, and I think it is because people are told to listen to the wrong jazz. You have to move from popular tunes to more abstract stuff--if you ever make the move at all--not because it is "supposed" to be good, but because you have a yearning to hear it.

I have the Grant Green album Idle Moments mentioned by Gary in his article and I don't dislike it, but I don't love it either, and I find the 15-minute title track unnecessarily bloated and tiresome. Tastes simply differ. To me The Swinging Guitar of Tal Farlow is a much better album and more accessible.

[You can listen to free samples of these albums on A**zon.com]

To start with get Louis Armstrong: Let's Do It--best of the Verve years. Wonderful songs, wonderful singing, duets with Ella Fitzgerald, Pops blowing his horn in short, but powerful solos, Oscar Peterson tinkling the ivories in the background. American music at its finest by the man who virtually single-handed invented the jazz solo.

A piece like this makes me want to like it even more than I usually do. In fact, I do like jazz -- as an idea. I believe jazz is important and potent and a sharp, lovely concept.

But then I listen to some jazz, and after a few minutes I want to listen to something else.

I don't know why. In the end, all I know is that I like the idea of jazz far better than jazz itself. So I enjoyed your piece, and it made me want to listen, and might even help me listen in a new way. Who knows? Maybe this time something will stick.

No, no, no! Jazz is wonderful, beautiful, passionate music. In a hundred, two hundred years from now jazz will be resurrected as fresh as ever, but rock will be forgotten, dead and buried, just as the great jazz artists are today.

I am the world''s number one jazz enthusiast and listen to jazz every day of my life, but I still disagree with nearly all of your article.

The fact is that jazz WAS the popular music of America during the jazz age and the jitterbug era.

Louis Armstrong was greeted when he arrived at the train station in Copenhagen, Denmark in 132 by 10,000 cheering fans throwing flowers and garlands--though thirty years later in the US he still had to sleep in the van due to segregation.

Clarinettist Artie Shaw (1910-2004)is my favorite jazz player. I listen to his music almost daily. It is like a drug. He was a good looking musical virtuoso who was the rock star of his day. He married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, and other wives.

By 1990 he had sold 100 million records. He had seven gold records including Beguine the Beguine, Stardust, Frenesi, Moonglow, Summit Ridge Drive. Frenesis was the #1 hit single of its day for 13 weeks.

After World War II the big band scene started to fall apart.

Shaw had a wonderful big band in 1949 but it was a complete flop. Audiences wanted him to play his hits so they could jitterbug, Shaw wanted to play music that was good to listen to. Shaw hated being a pop star, he hated the music business. The music was superb [Artie Shaw And His Orchestra 1949], but no one wanted to listen.

Many jazz players started to play bebop, a type of jazz that focuses on individual virtuosity on the instrument, and audiences fell away in droves.

Shaw made some quite wonderful small group recordings that are hardly available today. [Artie Shaw Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased & More Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased] which are a brilliant testament to his musical ability, then he laid down his clarinette and never picked it up again. He turned to writing.

He hated the music business that much.

The invention of hi-fi recording and the long playing record gave jazz a fillip in the early fifties and many of the great big band figures recorded extended versions of their greatest music with smaller groups. Albums like Duke Ellington's Masterpieces by Ellington, Goodmans BG in Hi-Fi, Side By Side with Johnny Hodges and Ellington, the Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks, the duets with Ella and Louis Armstrong, great albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Sun Ra were laid down for posterity and are still wonderful listening, but by 1960 jazz was practically dead.

Part of me secretly thought that jazz was a little, well, square. At its worst, it just seemed to be a bunch of technically proficient middle-aged men taking turns soloing on schmaltzy old tunes.

Miles Davis continued to record and had great name recognition, and many of the jazz musicians who were still standing played concerts on the college circuit in the late 60's. I saw Roland Kirk playing three horns at once with a flute up his nose. Great fun, but his recorded output is poor.

I saw Louis, I saw Mingus, I saw Sun Ra.

But now they are all gone. Jazz flourished for about thirty years--from the mid twenties to the mid fifties-- and then it faded away.

Jazz is America's greatest treasure and its neglect is a huge scandal. If I had my way it would be played 24 hours a day in all federal buildings, prisons, and customs halls too, to remind new arrivals what this country is about.