Yes, it's quite funny, but it's not a joke

Soon my colleagues had invented a back-story - I was a jazz oboe player who wanted to follow in the fictional path of the many imagined jazz-oboists who had blown sweet meoldies in the wilds of Northumberland before me.

It was unimportant to them that I am, in fact, a pianist. Truth was unimportant in these exchanges, they said. The oboe, I was told time and again, is a "much funnier instrument" and suited their purpose better.

Of course those witty friends of mine were not setting a trend. Jazz has always been a fruitful subject for comedians.

The Fast Show, and The Mighty Boosh are testament to that fact. It's not even as if they are imagining jazz to be funnier than it actually is.

Take Keith Jarrett, quite simply one of the best jazz musicians there has ever been. But no matter how beautiful his solo, no matter how absorbed the listener is in his playing, there remains something undeniably funny about a man with a strong resemblance to a weasel gyrating at the piano, letting out bursts of air between phrases as if he were being deflated.

It irritates me when people try and set up an 'us-and-them' opposition where jazz lovers take themselves far too seriously and it takes someone from the world of less-fringy music to point out all that is amusing about the jazz world.

I am perfectly aware of the silliness inherent in jazz thank you very much, and I've grown to accept it like an unfortunate moustache on the face of an otherwise beautiful woman.