Hating Jazz: An Evening with Andrew S. Berish

Tombolo Books welcomes USF professor Andrew S. Berish to the bookstore for an event featuring his latest cultural study monograph, Hating Jazz: A History of its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse.

Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context—we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are.

More about Hating Jazz

A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?

Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures.

Andrew Berish is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Cultural Studies Department at the University of South Florida. His book, Hating Jazz: A History of its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse was published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2025. He is also the author of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s (University of Chicago Press, 2012), a study of big band dance music during the Great Depression and Second World War. He has published articles on singer Vaughn Monroe, 1930s “sweet” jazz, and guitarist Django Reinhardt. His research focuses topics in jazz and American popular music and their relationship to issues of taste, aesthetics, and race. He teaches courses on American culture of the 1930s and ’40s, jazz and civil rights, the analysis of popular music, and the role of place and mobility in American historical experience. Sometimes he thinks he is funny and publishes satire in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

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