It’s hard for people to imagine, in this post-poptimist age, how wide the gap between highbrow and lowbrow culture once was. As a result, I struggled for many years to find the right way of writing about jazz. Jazz writing had been invented by journalists delivering short articles on deadline, mostly summaries of concerts and recordings. As a young man, I learned how to write those kinds of articles myself, but I felt instinctively that I needed to aim higher—but where could I find the proper language and attitude to do this? That was almost the same moment when Susan Sontag published On Photography. I had just turned twenty, and I felt that Sontag’s book was exactly the role model I needed at the time. Sontag was a leading literary critic and public intellectual, and you expected her to write about Shakespeare or Dante, not Kodak snapshots and picture postcards. Just seeing this example of smart, iconoclastic criticism applied to everyday and populist idioms gave me confidence and a sense that jazz writing could be a much bolder endeavor than I had previously believed.