MnMo on jazz, sort of

The May issue of Minnesota Monthly magazine includes a section called "Hot Summer Nights" that describes "47 ways to kick up—or cool—your heels after sunset." I'm happy to see they've included jazz. But I'm puzzled by how Andrew Putz, MnMO's editor, introduces the topic:

Here’s the problem with jazz these days: For everyone save true aficionados, it’s too damn hard. Hard to understand. Hard to appreciate. Hard to love. Hell, it’s even hard to find a good place to hear jazz live (at least, if you don’t live near Minneapolis’s Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant or St. Paul’s Artists’ Quarter).

Yee-ouch.

Putz recommends an upcoming show at Orchestra Hall called "DownBeat's Rising Stars," which I plan to see; I expect it will be a highlight of the summer. But he does it in a back-handed way:

This summer, however, the people who put on the jazz series at Orchestra Hall have done something scientists once believed impossible: They’ve made jazz easy.... Indeed, the only way it would be any easier to see great jazz would be to move next door to the Marsalis family.

MnMO is a major lifestyle/culture/arts magazine in the upper Midwest. It has a long relationship with Minnesota Public Radio. MPR has a Saturday night jazz program, "The Jazz Connection," hosted by Maryann Sullivan, who emails a weekly calendar of all kinds of jazz events happening in and around the Twin Cities.

I've sent a letter to Mr. Putz, inviting him to be my guest at a jazz event somewhere besides the Dakota, the Artists' Quarter, and Orchestra Hall.