The tediously repeated rock-era mantra "jazz is dead" was spread by a cynical recording industry that had contentedly banked zillions during the swing era, that brief period when jazz and popular taste coincided.

But genuine art outpaces fashion. A fresh generation is puzzled that this rich, fascinating music caused its parents to cringe. And now that jazz has finally been permitted to emerge from 30 years of pariahdom, will British exhibition curators continue their shameful neglect of its crucial influence on 20th-century painting, sculpture, film, dance and literature?
Leonard Weinreich
London

I don't feel that Jonathan Jones dwelt enough on the subject of the jazz bore, one possible reason for the form being ghettoised. So, just to pander to the stereotype, I enjoyed the error that gave us a Kind of Blue featuring Holiday and Parker as well as Coltrane and Davis. How much greater would this have made a masterpiece that has crossed over and proven what we all know: that great music is affecting, regardless of genre.
Nick Davey
Cambridge

Jazz can no longer retain any cultural resonance by adhering to the suit-wearing, cymbal- tinkling jazz band of the mid-20th century. I would argue that recent musical movements such as drum'n'bass and hip-hop are more in line with the spirit of jazz in their revolutionary approach to existing musical patterns and methods and, in the case of drum'n'bass, as close as Britain has come to its own jazz music.
Dilip Harris
London

For those of us inhabiting the jazz ghetto, it seems that the rest of the world has lost out, listening to worthless synthetic pop or playing safe with the classics. Once the ear and soul have tuned into Louis Armstrong's exquisite tone and timing, you realise that you are dealing with a direct line to the sublime. The real ghetto is the sterile world outside of jazz.
Nicholas Gill
Bladon, Oxon

There are only two kinds of music. Good music and bad music. Some of the good music is jazz and jazz also incorporates some of the worst music. Any attempt to hitch up the claims of the quality of a piece of music by reference to its genre is mere posturing and has nothing at all to do with the music. Some of my most sublime musical experiences as a member of an audience have been while listening to jazz musicians. But it has also given me some of my most awful moments - moments that appeared invisible to the unmusical poseurs that would automatically clap at the end of each dreadful solo.
Frank Glynn
Fife

The father of a friend of mine once told me, on discovering that I owned jazz records: "I have never heard a convincing argument for why jazz is any good, so I maintain that it is no good." I wish I'd been able to articulate the insights of Jonathan Jones. But such is the automatic association of jazz with pretentiousness these days that I'm sure that at least one passage of his article will appear in Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. And this is the problem, people assume jazz is cerebral, or pretending to be cerebral when it fact it's capable of rendering a listener boringly speechless for hours.
John Maingay
London

As organiser of The Appleby Jazz Festival, a festival dedicated to British improvised music, I read your article on Jazz with great interest. The one thing I would like take issue with in your article is the impression you gave that the emotionally tense and moving experiences that were part of the early American jazz club scene are a thing of the past. This could be down to the fact that you are looking in the wrong places. Jazz with ability to create that kind of experience is is still to be found, I have been present many times when a noisey pub back room being is silenced to the point where even the proverbial pin would have been frozen in the air, by a current British jazz soloist. You invite answers to the question "Is jazz in a ghetto?" The answer is yes, the best of it probably is, it was born in a ghetto and probably thrived because of it. Today's ghetto is a ghetto ignored by mass culture and inhabited by sincere creative artists who put the pursuance of their art first and foremost in their life.
Neil Ferber
Cumbria

As a 21 year old recently graduated trumpet player/composer entering London's jazz/creative music scene I read last weeks article with great interest. I believe the reason jazz and other currently minority musics are such is that many people simply are not aware that different strategies of listening apply to different musics. People who grow up on a diet of only pop music (or equally only jazz or classical music although I suggest this is less common) up until age 11 or 12 only require one way to listen to most music they encounter - to find the beat and dance appropriately from a fairly standard repertoire of grooves and to get a sense of the affect of the word setting (which without placing value judgements upon this is fairly basic). As by this age in most cases many of our approaches to life seem to be fairly instilled by this age, the possiblity of developing other approaches is perhaps not even imagined neccesary.
Tom Arthurs
London