Peo­ple who dig jazz, good lib­er­als they mostly be (if you’re not, you may want to skip the rest of this arti­cle — you might pre­fer this), usu­ally have the empa­thy thing down.  We empathize with the poor, the polit­i­cally oppressed … the musi­cally oppressed. We adopt shel­ter dogs and stray cats, give money (when we have it) to Feed the Whales and Save Ebbets Field, vote for Obama (again, Wing Nuts can go here), and root for the Mets. We’re empa­thetic by nature, quick to feel the pain of the down­trod­den, eager to spare the feel­ings of the eas­ily offended.

That’s all won­der­ful, really it is. But I can think of one area where our empa­thy comes back and bites us on the ass — when we try to shield the un-hip (let’s reach into jazz’s proto-beatnik past and call them “The Squares”) from the hor­rors of our music.

You know The Squares. They’re the peo­ple you encounter in your non-jazz life – your Barry Manilow-loving aunt, for instance. Your co-workers: the woman at the Help Desk who thinks Char­lie Parker is some fella who parks char­lies (“What is a ‘char­lie,’ any­way?”); the guy in the stock room who, when told that you play jazz gui­tar, says “Oh, you mean like Ste­vie Ray Vaughan?;” the woman in Human Resources who tells you as she hands you your pink slip, “Maybe you can get a job with that Wyn­ton Marsalis. I just loved his iPod com­mer­cial!” We’re talk­ing about mem­bers of Con­gress who decided to replace smooth jazz with Sousa marches for callers on hold, since Boney James is appar­ently too mind-bendingly rad­i­cal for ordi­nary folks peti­tion­ing their gov­ern­ment [“Pres­i­dent Garfield’s Inau­gu­ra­tion March (Opus 131), that’s what the good cit­i­zens want!”].

Now, you might say, “No way, man, I don’t shield any­one, I love jazz and want to share it with every­one,” and maybe you do, but tell me you’ve never felt a twinge of irri­ta­tion when some Square asks you, um … shall we say, an unin­formed ques­tion about jazz, and rather than embar­rass him, you’ve mum­bled a few mealy-mouthed words and tried to change the sub­ject. Espe­cially you Free jazz peo­ple; I know all too well how hard it is to explain the appeal of Ornette Cole­man to some­one who wouldn’t know Don Cherry from Cher­ries Jubilee. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve man­aged to avoid talk­ing about jazz to some­one who knows noth­ing about it but expressed an inter­est–how­ever naive – I could buy a full set of Selmer Mark VI sax­o­phones, soprano to bari, with money left over for a new crack pipe.

Who am I help­ing? Not myself, and cer­tainly not the per­son ask­ing hon­est ques­tions. By stum­bling and stut­ter­ing and equiv­o­cat­ing, I’m not sav­ing them from a hor­ri­ble fate, but rather depriv­ing them of an entirely new and uplift­ing expe­ri­ence. Sure, some of them will think me weird, but who cares? Oth­ers might feel appre­ci­a­tion, or even some­thing more pro­found. Maybe one or two of ‘em will feel the same way I felt the first time I heard Eric Dol­phy (“Hot House” from The Berlin Con­certs on the Inner City label; it blew my mind). In that case I will have given them one of the great­est gifts imaginable.

Empathy’s cool, but not at the cost of your psy­che. As for me, I think it’s been the last refuge of a weeny. I’m gonna try to do better.