Brief introspection regarding jazz

Jazz bores and irritates me and the aestheticist in me would like to know why. Alas, the following observations will have to remain superficial since, in order to understand the matter properly, I would have to hear a lot more Jazz than I possibly can manage to get through. I am not sufficiently dedicated to the question to put myself through the exercise. The following remarks are therefore trivial; you should probably skip this post.

The irritating bit has two prongs: the first is the matter of the building blocks of the music: like all improvised music it consists of standardized elements -- "lego blocks" -- which one shuffles around -- and I do not like them; this may be merely a matter of cultural association -- they seem perceptibly American to me; but it could perhaps be argued that they are in fact not as interesting as the lego blocks of its older improvised siblings, maquams and raagas. (Consider the rather narrow range of rhythmic options available to the Jazz base section and compare them to the immense variety of tals).

(Certainly the lego blocks out of which raaga's are built are more interesting to European ears on account of being "exotic" -- that is novel, or previously unheard; but, given the amount of time I have spent in India and the amount of exposure I have had to classical Indian music, novelty is clearly not the source of my pleasure in the Indian elements; something else must be; complexity, color and steepness and convolution of melodic line may be some of the answers).

The second bit is the snobbishness surrounding Jazz' status as an improvised art form. This notion is romantic -- "great art reveals something deep about us" -- and as such deeply ingrained in heavily schooled minds; but the truth is that most of us do not have an interior interesting enough to make for an interesting subject of artistic production. The truth about improvisation is that most of it is too dull to stand on its own legs; which is why fellows like Bach and Chopin -- well known in their days for their improvisatory skills -- insisted on composing.

And thus we arrive at the dull bit. There is no such thing as free improvisation: all improvisation follows some sort of rules; the rules observed in Indian classical music are very complex; this has many positive results, one of which is to impose a structure on the concert (basically, that of an accelerando); another is to make artists aware of the need to discuss and agree a plan ahead of time. Jazz performances appear to lack this kind of coherence. Perhaps there are not sufficient rules in jazz to require a structurally coherent work to emerge.

Which leaves me with the odd question why so many European practitioners of western classical music take an active interest in jazz. I suppose the answer to that must be that it feels nice to play jazz.

Surely, playing jazz must feel nicer than listening to it does.