Lack of cred as a badge of honour

Music critics are often blamed for being smug know-it-alls, but is that attitude really worse than the one displayed here?

TO this reviewer, jazz music seemed to be nothing more than a lot of people making too much noise and, if they were lucky, getting a slight tune out of it.

It would take something extraordinary for me to warm to a genre that sounded like a thousand sauce-pans clattering and that extraordinary thing came to the Waterfront Hall in the shape of fast-rising jazz king Jamie Cullum.

I wonder if his opinion of jazz is commonplace. More generally, how can you crown someone "king" (be it jazz or any other genre), when you have absolutely no knowledge or appreciation for anything else in the genre?

What do I make of the genre now? By the next day, Jamie had certainly jazzed up my CD collection.

But I won't be buying any other jazz CDs any time soon, right?