One of the most durable ideas in the history of jazz is the idea that jazz is dead. The idea has been expressed at regular intervals since the mid-1920s. It is predictably revived with every new development that is perceived as making the music more formal — which is virtually all of them.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the rich knew jazz primarily as part of the forbidden pleasures of visiting the Cotton Club and other Harlem venues where black musicians and singers performed.The accepted name for this activity was “slumming.” This was a very patronizing term, but the concept is apparently still preferred by some people who consider themselves jazz fans.

In the current issue of Gentleman’s Quarterly — which,as a wise man once pointed out, is neither published quarterly nor read by gentleman — a writer named Tom Moon has asked the question his own way, “How did America’s most revered music evolve from sublime art form to brunch soundtrack?” and answered it by placing the blame squarely on Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Mr. Moon has even come up with a new, allegedly amusing headline: “Why Jazz Blows.”

Mr. Moon starts from the presumption that Mr. Marsalis and his Lincoln Center organization are responsible for the total state of the jazz world today — a claim that even Jazz at Lincoln Center’s squadron of public relations experts wouldn’t make publicly. But Mr. Marsalis can take solace knowing he is in good company.

When Benny Goodman found a way to make the music more widely heard and accepted and then, when he and Duke Ellington began following Paul Whiteman’s example of playing in formal concert halls,they were all accused of taking the soul out of jazz by taking it out of the sporting house that gave birth to it. The same accusations were leveled against any presenter who opened up new avenues for the music — from Norman Granz to George Wein and now Wynton Marsalis.

In the decade following World War I, most African-Americans thought it was a good thing when Harlem became the first widely known and celebrated community for the black middle class. But even then there was a conservative African-American segment that accused “the Race” of getting too “dicty” — which, in the parlance of the day, meant too prissy and even bourgeois — by leaving the rural South to live like Northern white urbanites.W.C. Handy parodied this attitude in his “Harlem Blues.”

Mr. Moon seems to have based his attack primarily on the press releases issued by Jazz at Lincoln Center in the months before the new Rose Hall opened. He offers no comment on the music, if any, that he heard there. In fact,he neglects to specifically mention any music played at any of the three Jazz at Lincoln Center facilities. He would rather denounce Mr.Marsalis for wearing “natty” suits and Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola as “swanky” (the minimum and cover charge are competitive with other jazz clubs) and refers to a “$14 martini” (think of it — in Midtown Manhattan, yet).

Worst of all, Mr. Moon looked out the window and saw a building owned by Donald Trump and thinks that should have been taken into account when a location was selected. One would have to go to Clarksdale, Miss. to avoid being forced to gaze out onto a Trump property.

Mr. Moon quotes several prominent modern musicians on the downside of the current jazz scene. Dave Douglas accurately points out, “when a music becomes a dogma, it can’t really say anything honest.” Joshua Redman expresses the opinion that there are too many homage and tribute albums being done and original composition isn’t encouraged enough. Neither criticism specifically addresses Jazz at Lincoln Center — in fact, both Mr. Douglas and Mr. Redman are appearing there this month. Mr. Douglas’s band shares the stage with Mr. Marsalis’s tomorrow night, and Mr. Redman appears at Jazz at Lincoln Center with his San Francisco Jazz Collective for three nights beginning March 24.

Mr. Moon is trying very hard to have it both ways. He rightfully celebrates the music of Mr. Douglas, Jason Moran, Joe Lovano, Keith Jarrett, and other contemporary stars, yet he somehow fails to recognize that these musicians are the mainstream as it exists in 2005. They all record for major labels and appear in big halls like Carnegie and Rose and at the big festivals. They are hardly fringe artists on the margins.

Even if Mr. Moon finds nothing to admire in the music of Mr. Marsalis, he’s too smart to deny that there’s still an awful lot of good jazz currently being produced.He also devotes several paragraphs to Jamie Cullum, discussing the British singer-pianist’s “cheeky” irreverence. He misses the point that Mr. Cullum works in traditional settings and with the standard repertoire, and he has no basis for his claim that Wynton Marsalis wouldn’t laugh at Mr. Cullum’s antics just like everyone else. (Incidentally, Mr. Cullum also wears expensive suits and plays in rooms where the martinis are at least $14.)

But Mr. Moon’s most egregious and logic-defying claim is the idea that Lincoln Center has spent $128 million on a new facility amid the priciest real estate in the world because jazz is dead. Anyone else would assume that for the musical world’s number one cultural institution to invest so much in jazz right now means that the music is more important than ever. But Mr. Moon has seen through this conspiracy.

The underlying tone of Mr. Moon’s article is that jazz belongs on the plantation and that Mr. Marsalis and his cronies are uppity to suggest that jazz deserves an attractive space and musicians not dressed like field hands.This idea is akin to Sam Phillips’s assertion that the authentic blues can only be played by musicians with mud on their boots, but Mr. Phillips said that 50 years ago.

Mr. Moon rightfully points out that you can currently hear the best bands at the Village Vanguard.Yet how can he fail to notice that Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola books exactly the same groups and musicians that appear regularly at the Vanguard, the Iridium, Birdland, and the Blue Note?

To my mind,that’s a genuine problem: Dizzy’s should bring in players and styles not featured in the other upscale clubs — not just mean avant-gardists, but also traditional and swing players. The Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra has employed Bob Wilber as a guest soloist; they should let him bring the remarkable quintet he leads with the equally great Kenny Davern into Dizzy’s.

Jazz at Lincoln Center is still the house that Wynton built and remains too predicated on his personal tastes. Yet clearly things are changing. In 1996, I was surprised that they held a memorial concert for Gerry Mulligan. Nine years later, I’m not surprised to see the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performing the music of Paul Whiteman and Thad Jones.

In 2003, the orchestra commissioned new works from Maria Schneider and Toshiko Akiyoshi — they should keep the ball rolling by doing the same with William Parker, Butch Morris, Bill Holman, Muhal Richard Abrams, and George Russell. There’s no reason not to approach Ornette Coleman (whose music the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra featured last year) and Cecil Taylor directly for new works.

Ultimately, Mr. Moon’s greatest failing is that he refuses to recognize the most fundamental fact of the current jazz scene. “Innovation” and “revolution,” as Mr. Moon understands them, are antiquated, even harmful ideals.To put it bluntly, they place too much value on being different and not enough on being good.

Jazz has progressed beyond the point where it’s a matter of an innovator or group of innovators who come up with a new style, which everybody refines and re-defines until the next big innovator comes along. Rather, we are in a period where all the styles of jazz coexist, where superior players like Scott Robinson, Greg Cohen, and Wycliffe Gordon can play Dixieland one night and free jazz the next.

In that sense, Jazz at Lincoln Center is a fair indicator for the state of the art form. The death of jazz? Hardly. More like the death of the death of it.

“It is only now that I have my doubts (about jazz); it is the present tendencies that seem to be spelling doom in the near future. For the Negro is tired of the Blues and likes to write tunes that are a sort of compromise between his former music and Tin-Pan Alley … When I hear an early record of Bessie Smith’s and then listen to Cab Calloway and see how much more the Negro now enjoys the latter, I realize that the Blues has been superseded and white decadence has once more ironed out and sweetened a vital music.” — Roger Pryor Dodge, 1934

“Jazz in the late ’40s and early ’50s was undergoing some strange and, to me, unhealthy changes. The bop period I considered a dead-end street, a wrong turning point for jazz. … Bop lacked the swing I believe essential to great jazz playing, lacked the humor and the freeflowing invention of the best jazz creators. In their place it offered a new self-consciousness, an excessive emphasis on harmonic and rhythmic revolt, a concentration on technique at the expense of musical emotion.” — John Hammond, 1977

“At Hollywood’s Renaissance club recently, I listened to a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend exemplified by those foremost proponents [John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy] of what is termed avant garde music. I heard a good rhythm section … go to waste behind the nihilistic exercises of the two horns. … Coltrane and Dolphy seem intent on deliberately destroying [swing]. … They seem bent on pursuing an anarchistic course in their music that can but be termed anti-jazz.” — John Tynan, 1961

“Ever since he arrived in the early 1980s, the versatile trumpeter [Wynton Marsalis] argued that the relentless pursuit of the new had become a dead end and advocated, as a cure, a thorough and exhaustive investigation of the past. … Remarkably, the spark of jazz has not been totally extinguished. It’s been trampled a bit, though, and if it’s ever going to flourish again, everyone who still cares about it is going to have to confront what the Marsalis revolution actually wrought. — Tom Moon, 2005