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I may not understand jazz – but I know enough to know it’s wonderful | Adrian Chiles

It’s one of the most baffling of all art forms, and the most mocked. Laugh all you like; these musicians are working miracles, writes Adrian Chiles

I think that Fast Show sketch is partly to blame – John Thomson as Louis Balfour, host of a TV programme called Jazz Club, brilliantly, if unfairly, sending up an entire genre of music. Don’t get me wrong: at school I was more into Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, John Martyn and whatnot, but on the quiet I was also entranced by Mose Allison, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Count Basie and plenty more. After seeing Meat Loaf or somebody like that, along with several thousand others on a Saturday at the NEC, spending the following evening with barely a hundred jazz buffs in a hotel conference room felt almost transgressive, like a secret society of which I was by far the youngest member.

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