Jazz Critics - A Thought

I have always been bothered by jazz critics who feel it a requirement of their craft to rely on impressionistic sociology to fill in the gaps of their articles, liner notes and books. Richard Cook & Brian Morton, in their otherwise useful The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (many editions), rely on medical gossip to characterize recorded performances. I only single out Cook and Morton because my recent reading involves their book. But examples of this kind of "drug-addict journalism" should be a thing of the past. For rock legends drug addiction seems to be charming and beneficial for their musicianship. Anyway, in my reading of Sir Donald Tovey's Beethoven I came across his sane words which I shall quote without comment:

To study the lives of great artists is often a positive hindrance to the understanding of their works; for it is usually the study of what they have not mastered, and thus it undermines their authority in the things which they have mastered. To undermine that authority is an injury much more serious than any merely professional technicality. Even if the works of art show characteristics closely resembling the faults of the author, we have always to remember that the business of the work of art is to be itself, whereas neither the science of ethics nor the structure of society can thrive for long on the denial that it is the duty of a man to improve himself. [1]