Jazz is the only indigenous American art form.

Rock is folk music.

There is definitely some overlapping, but folk music is just going to be more popular with "folks." Art forms take a little more effort to appreciate.

This is a most excellent and thoughtful article on a vast topic. Thank you GK.

As I play this jazz material weekly with a hot sextet at a club in Marin to less than 20 people- and that would be the pool and dart league, thank you- I can appreciate that the high octane, 200 watt Marshall stack rock-drug is the new hegemon. Ah! The revenge of the electric guitar. And while I feel supremely lucky to have been at the creation to see the Jimmy Page invent heavy metal guitar and see Jimi burn his, it all pales in comparison to that moment in the middle of Django Reinhardt's "Honeysuckle Rose" that change my life.

The early jazz and swing cats were the rock stars of the day. No, paradigm shift: Louis Armstrong was the father of Mic. They had it all- public adulation, sex drugs but just not that 200 watt Marshall stack. Pick up any records by "Four Boys and a Guitar" (the group subsequently known as "The Mills Brothers") and hear it when it was hot and young as any of the early Stones. Play it with passion and energy- like it's gonna explode off the stage- or put the horm down.

Well, I have to give Gary Kamiya credit for doing such a good job articulating several things that I've grappled with regarding music appreciation.

I, too, have often struggled to understand jazz, felt daunted by it, and wanted it to offer more, and more easily.

I feel the same way about a lot of jazz that I do about a lot of classical music: I really, really want to not only like it, but to understand it. Both are often a challenge: Sometimes you've got to listen 10 times, and re-read the liner notes while scrolling through Wikipedia and fansite articles, just to even BEGIN to "get it."

When it comes to classical music, I've bought dozens and dozens of albums that I'm still just figuring out, 20 years later. I still haven't quite embraced Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." I'm lucky if I work up the nerve to listen to it again. Then there's Oliver Messiaen; I want to like his music, but dang, that stuff can be unpleasant.

I thank Kamiya for mentioning Debussy's "Iberia." I don't know that piece! How did I miss it? Probably listening to that "Gettin' Ready for a Baby Deer Hangin' Out After Mid-Day" tune too much.... Um, "Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun" or whatever they call it.

I also agree with Kamiya that if hard jazz is TOO hard, so is easy jazz TOO easy. I mean, I can't freaking stand Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" piece. Taking a cute song and noodling with it for 10 minutes is not good music, just like eating too much cotton-candy is not a good dinner. It makes you barf.

Thanks also for mentioning Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey, Lee Morgan and Bill Evans. And also Grant Green. I have only one thing to say to that line-up of jazz greats: WHO? Okay, so I've heard some Bill Evans stuff (terrific, that), but I barely know the other guys. What I really need, and what I am sure many other people also need, is some sort of primer that spoon-feeds worthy jazz music to people like me.

The problem with most "Jazz for Dummies" lists is that they're often actually for dummies. That is, they're often over-loaded with music that's super-easy on the palate. I want to hear good recommendations for the challenging stuff, that offer a bit of insight on a given artist/album/piece is so sublime.

So -- I really liked most of Kamiya's article. Here is what I didn't like: The last two paragraphs. Why? Because I think it must have been getting close to deadline, or getting late, and Kamiya had lost his writing mojo.

Kamiya's attempt to compare and contrast rock and jazz turned into more of a treatise on the struggle to understand jazz. Kamiya tries to hard to veer the article back to the compare-and-contrast format, ending with this high-school-level conclusion: "Rock and jazz both mirror certain aspects of our lives," and then compounding the offense with "they simply reflect eternal dualties: mind vs. body, process vs. stasis, freedom vs. solidity." Whoa, Nelly! Your article doesn't earn any of those grand statements! (If jazz is "process," then are you saying rock is "stasis"? Seriously?)

My other problem with this article is: Dude, have you even listened to any rock music in the past 30 years? All of your examples of rock and roll date back to the 1960s: The Who, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles. What about the music being made today?

It's silly to put jazz and rock into a dichotomy when there's so much other music out there. I realize for the purposes of essays, dichotomoies are easier to work with than trichotomies, or octotemies, or frontal lobotomies. But they're less honest.

I also can't believe Gary Kamiya goes for a whole article without mentioning drugs, or the ways that jazz and rock came together through their connections with drug culture. The same time Miles Davis was putting together "Bitches Brew," rock-n-rollers were having too much to dream while flying on gossamer wings to a gadda-da-vida.

Anyway....anybody have any jazz recommendations?

Here are a few gems that I think you should buy, like, tomorrow:

-- Don Ellis: Turkish Bath. Man this is a great album. Great cross between big-band, high-energy style and dreamy psychedelia.

-- Egberto Gismonti: Just about everything he did during the 1970s. Brazilian styles merge with jazz merging with Andean weirdness and Indian ragas and anything else he felt like throwing in. (I anxiously await Gary Kamiya's piece comparing and contrasting Gismonti to Os Mutantes.)

-- Sun Ra: That one album.....something about aliens. Every track on it is as weird as all get-out. I can't believe I didn't hear more about his works earlier. I should have been listening to his stuff when I was first in college, it's crazy-great.