Dom Joly: Jazz: love the lifestyle, can't stand the music

I think I've always hated jazz music. The whole bepbopdadooscoobydoo scat thing just gets my goat. I'm sure aficionados will say I'm wrong and I'd never pretend to understand it properly. It's just, to me, it's always seemed to be random, tuneless nonsense. The jazz lifestyle, on the other hand, is something I've always been rather attracted to – louche "cats" in shades and polo necks smoking "jazz" cigarettes and most likely reading "jazz" mags in between radical smoky basement sessions surrounded by groovy femmes fatales.

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. I do have to admit to owning Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. It's one of those albums with the word blue in it that it seems to be almost compulsory to own (another example is the completely indigestible Blue by Joni Mitchell, an album of aural torture). I do quite like the Miles Davis album – it's good for wafting over the pool on a sunny day or as a gentle soundtrack to a dull dinner party. If I had a lift then I'd pipe it through my lift speakers. (Who chooses the music for lifts? Just once I'd like to get in one to find it playing Napalm Death or Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.)

But I digress. The reason I'm riffing free-style on the whole jazz scene, man, is that last week I found myself squeezed into a booth in Ronnie Scott's in Soho. A friend had invited me along to see a singer whom he really likes. He wanted to get my opinion on whether we should do something with her for our production company.

The last time I'd been to Ronnie Scott's was when I was about 23 and I took a girl there who was subsequently to break my heart not once, not twice, but three times. It was enough to turn any self-respecting jazzman to heroin. I'd been trying to impress her by appearing sophisticated. I remember sitting in there worrying about how expensive the drinks were and hoping that my card wouldn't be refused, and wondering whether she was enjoying the music. I certainly wasn't, despite doing my very best to nod in time to the syncopated beats and pretend that I was.

Fifteen or so years later, and here I was again. I looked round the intimate little venue – tables of hushed couples sitting around in moody lighting, their faces strained with earnestness. Often, when I'm out and about, I'm hassled by strangers who want to know whether I have my Big Mobile with me. I do my best to hint that those days are well behind me and that I'm now a serious man of letters. This particular evening, however, a familiar feeling started to raise its ugly head. As a particularly sensual and soft jazz ballad was being crooned, you could hear a pin drop. The longer it went on the more I got the old urge to stand up and scream: "NO, I'M IN A JAZZ CLUB LISTENING TO SOME WOMAN WAILING ON... NO, IT'S RUBBISH!" It was really strong, like that disturbing magnetic feeling you get when you're near a cliff's edge and something seems to be pulling you towards it (maybe that's just me). It was like some long-buried addiction coming back to haunt me. I fought the urge hard until the ballad finally ended, and then I bolted.

This was very definitely not my scene, man. As Bart Simpson once put it so succinctly: "Cartoons – America's only native art form. I don't count jazz because it sucks."

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