For some time now, I've been wondering how to respond to Dom Joly's recent column entitled “Jazz: love the lifestyle, can't stand the music”. Poor Dom, you see, is attracted to the cigarette smoke, the louche cats, the femmes fatales and the rest of the trimmings. It's the music he can't stand:

“It's always seemed to be random, tuneless nonsense… To me, jazz had always been synonymous with beatniks and Kerouac and hazy anti-establishmentarianism. It's a great shame, therefore, that I've always found the music so totally unlistenable to. Maybe, as with classical music, I just need educating. Sadly, I've always felt that if you needed to be educated to like something then it was most probably bollocks.”

Yes, bollocks indeed. My first instinct was to march to his home and beat him about the head with the latest, 1,600-page, edition of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. But, once I'd calmed down, it occurred to me that Joly was describing a common phenomenon. I have friends who have had a similar experience to his. Full of good intentions, they finally work up the courage to venture out to a club and endure a dull evening listening to long-winded musicians who seem to regard the existence of an audience as a bit of a nuisance.

It does happen. One of the great problems we still face in jazz is that so many players still have no idea of the rudiments of stage presentation.

Dom Joly's real problem, as far as I can tell, is that he doesn't like bebop. Outsiders often think that jazz has to be about manic virtuosity. Too many critics do little to disabuse them. But the fact is that some people are attuned to bebop's rhythms, and some people are better suited to, say, swing. Why don't we jazz lovers allow for that simple fact? Perhaps because too many of us are married to the idea that we have to plug every facet of the music without discrimination. All ears are not created equal. (It took me years to reconcile myself to the fact that I find Thelonious Monk's eccentric themes much more exciting than Parker's.)

Now, of course, there are some people for whom jazz will forever be a closed book. But if I were trying to win Joly over, I would start by noting the obvious fact that he admits to a weakness for Kind of Blue, even if he seems to regard the ultimate Miles Davis album as some sort of dinner party background muzak. So, I would suggest he try the lithe piano improvisation of one of Miles's role models, Ahmad Jamal, followed by a mildly funky Blue Note album such as Kenny Burrell's “Midnight Blue” - one of the first LPs I ever fell for, as it happens.

Louis Armstrong has to enter the picture at some point, but the chances are that a newcomer will struggle with the vintage sonorities of the Hot Fives. Far better to start with the relaxed, goodtime ambience of Satchmo's autumnal encounter with Duke Ellington.

It goes without saying that big-band music is another excellent place to start, but how many people are deterred by the sound quality of so many pre-war recordings? Try something like Benny Goodman's BG in Hi Fi - a beautifully recorded Capitol session - and you sense how the music must have sounded to the kids who made Goodman an unlikely bespectacled pop idol in the 1930s.

Most of all, I would recommend that people stop straining to hear profundities, but simply enjoy the sense of swing. The complexities and the abstruse harmonies can wait until later. Of course, it's possible that none of these suggestions will work on Dom Joly. If that proves to be the case, I shall be reaching for a baseball bat as well as my trusty Penguin Guide.

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