Frances to Derek and others...
My knowledge of musical and graphical history is limited, therefore others more qualified might perhaps correct my guesses about good artworks that could be graded as low and high in regard to their overall worth and impact. Since about 1900 it seems that good jazz was always smaller and simpler than say good symphony, but held as art nonetheless, albeit likely as low art. >From about 1800 it seems to me that the same may have occurred then with music art, as well as other forms of art like graphic pictorial art and plastic sculptural art. Many lofty painters of renown for example are reported to have made smaller and simpler paintings in a modest figurative vein that were also held in high regard, but probably as low art. It seems to me that there may be a correlate here from art history that might support the contention that good jazz today may very well be at least low art. Furthermore, a good jazz combo mixed on stage or record with a classical symphony orchestra has been done with great success, and the results have easily been deemed by experts to be high art. It somehow bothers me that all good jazz might justly be denied the status of being an aesthetic object, and hence be excluded from the realm of aural art as fine art or as folk art in an applied craft, although it might perhaps be justly excluded as any kind of aural musical art and certainly within the domain of fine art. (For purposes of this debate, the global class called art might perhaps be held as either an objective material fact or as a subjective mental notion, but a typical class in any event.) PS... You call jazz music, but seemingly bad music, yet also say jazz is other than music. This implies to me that for you there is jazz that is not music, and jazz that is music either as bad or good music. You seem to be throwing jazz out of art with reluctance, or to stimulate controversy. Derek partly wrote... For me jazz is an impoverished musical form. It is empty music. It is the reverse of what music should be. For me an evening of jazz is musical torment. It is a slight step above pop or rock.
