Why Jazz Scares Some People

Jan Vranken | November 6, 2025 | Editorial | No Comments

The People Who Can’t Handle Jazz: What a Hollywood Movie Taught Me About Ambiguity, Improvisation, and Why Some Minds Need All the Answers; A longread about the psychological trait that separates those who embrace uncertainty from those who fear it.

My friend Perry and I walked out of the theatre after watching “One Battle After Another”, and he was already shaking his head. ‘It wasn’t realistic enough,’ he complained. The action scenes were too choreographed. The dialogue is too snappy. The resolution is too neat. I stared at him. ‘Perry,’ I said carefully, ‘it’s a Hollywood movie. What exactly were you expecting—a documentary?’

He shrugged, unmoved by the irony. He’d bought a ticket to a big-budget Paul Thomas Anderson film and then spent 161 minutes mentally marking it down for not being a fly-on-the-wall portrait of actual combat. It was like ordering a pizza and complaining it wasn’t a salad. The conversation stuck with me, though, because I’d seen this pattern before, not in movie theatres, but in jazz clubs. Over the years, I’ve watched countless people—intelligent, cultured people—confess with genuine anxiety in their voices: ‘I just can’t listen to jazz. It makes me nervous.’ At first, I thought they meant the historical baggage, the cultural gatekeeping, the intimidating hipness of it all. But the more I talked to them, the clearer it became. What made them anxious wasn’t jazz culture. It was jazz itself. The unpredictability of it. The way it refused to resolve was the way they expected. The spaces between the notes were where anything could happen. They were like Perry in that movie theatre, unable to accept the medium on its own terms. And I started wondering: What if the thing that makes Perry need his Hollywood films to be documentaries is the same thing that makes some people break out in a cold sweat when John Coltrane starts improvising? What if there’s a fundamental trait—a way of processing the world—that determines whether you can handle uncertainty, or whether you need everything to resolve into clear, predictable answers? Turns out, there is. And it explains a great deal more than just music preferences.

The Science of Not Knowing

The trait is called tolerance for ambiguity, and it’s been quietly studied by psychologists for decades. In simple terms, it measures how comfortable you are with situations that don’t have clear answers, stable meanings, or predictable outcomes. People with high tolerance for ambiguity, according to research published in Frontiers in Psychology, actually find uncertain situations desirable—full of possibility rather than threat. People with low tolerance experience the exact opposite: ambiguous situations generate anxiety because they lack the information needed for cognitive closure, triggering stress responses as the brain desperately tries to resolve the uncertainty.

Think of it as two different operating systems. One thrives on open-ended questions. The other crashes when it can’t compute a definitive answer. The construct has four main dimensions, researchers found: a desire for predictability, a tendency to become paralysed in the face of uncertainty, a tendency to experience distress when confronted with uncertainty, and inflexible beliefs about uncertainty itself. This isn’t just about being anxious or neurotic. It’s deeper than that. It’s about whether your brain treats the unknown as an enemy or an invitation. And here’s where it gets interesting: tolerance for ambiguity correlates strongly with a personality trait called openness to experience—one of the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions that psychologists use to map human temperament. Studies have consistently found that people high in openness to experience prefer music categorised as complex and novel, such as classical, jazz, and eclectic styles, while also favouring intense and rebellious genres. It’s not just that open people like jazz. It’s that their brains are wired to find beauty in the very thing that makes others anxious: the absence of certainty.

When Jazz Became the Enemy

To understand why jazz became the ultimate test of ambiguity tolerance, you have to go back to the 1940s, when the music committed what might be the greatest act of artistic rebellion in American history: it refused to let you dance to it. Before bebop, jazz was fundamentally social music. Swing bands filled ballrooms. People moved to it, clapped to it, and courted it. The music had a job: get people on the dance floor and keep them there. That meant steady rhythms, predictable structures, and melodies you could hum on the way home. Then came Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and a generation of young musicians who looked at those packed dance floors and said: what if we made music that demanded you sit down and listen?

To hostile critics, bebop seemed filled with ‘racing, nervous phrases’. The tempos were faster than anyone could dance to. The chord changes came so quickly that they felt like a trick. The whole thing seemed designed to intimidate, to exclude, to announce that jazz was no longer entertainment—it was art, and you’d better pay attention. The new music was no longer primarily dance music, and it no longer defined itself as commercial entertainment. It was music for musicians, by musicians, about the sheer act of creation itself. The response was predictable. Bebop was unacceptable not only to the general public but also to many musicians when it emerged, including Louis Armstrong, who condemned the new music as noisy and ‘un-swinging’.

Louis Armstrong

The man who’d essentially invented jazz as a soloist’s art form thought bebop had gone too far. If Satchmo couldn’t handle it, what hope did the average listener have? But here’s the thing about bebop: it wasn’t trying to alienate people. It was trying to expand what music could do. Bebop marked the stage at which jazz completed its transformation from entertainment into art. For the first time, the musicians and their audience became widely conscious that jazz was an art form requiring serious listening. In other words, bebop asked its audience to do something that people with low ambiguity tolerance find almost impossible: surrender control. Stop expecting resolution. Trust the improviser to take you somewhere you’ve never been, without promising you’ll like where you end up. For some listeners, that was liberation. For others, it was torture.

The Modern Equation

Fast-forward to the 1980s and ’90s, and you’d think jazz might have mellowed out, become more accessible. In some ways, it did—the rise of “smooth jazz” made the genre safe for dentist offices everywhere. But the serious players kept pushing. Take the Yellowjackets, a Grammy-winning fusion band that’s been exploring the intersection of jazz, funk, and pure musical complexity for over four decades. Their unique ability to blend complex musical theory with spontaneous improvisation makes each performance distinct, an event unto itself. Their sound has always been a combination of upbeat and complex, with compositions featuring tricky time signatures, rippling runs, and sunny explosions of energy. What makes the Yellowjackets fascinating is that they make complexity sound inviting. Their music is challenging—shifting time signatures, dense harmonic structures, intricate interplay between instruments—but it never feels like homework. There’s joy in it, a sense that all this complexity serves an emotional purpose rather than just showing off.

What makes the Yellowjackets fascinating is that they make complexity sound inviting. Their music is challenging—shifting time signatures, dense harmonic structures, intricate interplay between instruments—but it never feels like homework. There’s joy in it, a sense that all this complexity serves an emotional purpose rather than just showing off. But even with that warmth, even with the grooves and the accessibility, some listeners still find them exhausting. Too much is happening. Too many things are shifting at once. Where’s the verse? Where’s the chorus? When does the damn thing resolve? The answer, of course, is: it resolves when it resolves. Or maybe it doesn’t resolve at all. Maybe it just transforms. And if that answer makes you anxious, well—that’s kind of the point.

Itamar Borochov

The Man Who Lives in Two Uncertainties. If you want to see ambiguity tolerance in its purest form, watch Israeli trumpeter Itamar Borochov play his custom-built, four-valve, quarter-tone trumpet. Borochov creates a hybrid between the Middle Eastern and North African sounds of his Jaffa childhood and the classic jazz exemplified by Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. But it’s not just a fusion of two styles—it’s a fusion of two completely different musical logics. Western jazz is built on the twelve-tone equal temperament system. Middle Eastern music uses maqamat—modal systems that include quarter tones, those notes that fall in the cracks between the piano keys. Borochov plays a custom-made Monette four-valve quarter-tone trumpet, which he uses to incorporate maqams, the Middle Eastern microtonal modes that are the musical language of his traditional upbringing. Think about what that means. He’s improvising in a musical space where the Western ear literally cannot predict the next note. Even if you’re a trained jazz musician, even if you know all the chord changes, Borochov can play notes that don’t exist in your mental catalogue. He operates in the gaps. And he does it intentionally. As he put it: ‘If Coltrane was informed by his father being a preacher, I had to do the same thing. Lee Morgan’s from Philly, and I’m from Jaffa. He brought gospel, and I’m bringing Sephardi synagogue music. What Borochov understands—what every great jazz musician understands—is that ambiguity isn’t a bug. It’s the feature. The uncertainty is where the music lives.

The Israeli Wave

A Culture of Comfortable Uncertainty? Borochov isn’t an outlier. He’s part of something bigger: a wave of Israeli jazz musicians who’ve become central to the New York scene over the past three decades.

Borochov isn’t an outlier. He’s part of something bigger: a wave of Israeli jazz musicians who’ve become central to the New York scene over the past three decades. At least a dozen Israeli players attained an enviable level of recognition, including bassist Omer Avital and the Cohen siblings: saxophonist Yuval, clarinettist Anat, and trumpeter Avishai. Avital soon formed a sextet that combined straight-ahead jazz with Middle Eastern rhythms and melodies, recognised today as one of the most significant groups to emerge on the New York jazz scene in the mid-1990s. Another towering figure in this movement is bassist Avishai Cohen, a different artist from the trumpeter of the same name. Like Borochov, Cohen operates masterfully in the dual worlds of Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions. But Cohen takes this ambiguity even further, bringing it into the heart of European classical institutions. He has introduced this hybrid musical language to major European orchestras, including the Metropole Orkest and the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, creating entirely new musical worlds where jazz improvisation, Middle Eastern modes, and symphonic traditions converge. In these collaborations, the ambiguity multiplies: East meets West, improvisation meets orchestration, ancient meets contemporary. Cohen doesn’t resolve these tensions; he amplifies them, demonstrating that the space between worlds can itself become a destination. What’s remarkable isn’t just the talent—it’s the approach. These musicians are comfortable existing in multiple identities simultaneously. Israeli and American. Middle Eastern and Western. Traditional and avant-garde. They don’t resolve these tensions; they perform them. In a sense, they’re doing what Israel itself does: living in permanent ambiguity. The country exists in a state of perpetual uncertainty—geographically, politically, existentially. Maybe that’s why its musicians are so good at making art from irresolution. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe it’s just that the jazz education system in Israel, particularly at schools like Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, emphasises improvisation and individual voice over technical perfection. Either way, the Israeli jazz scene represents something important: a whole generation of musicians who’ve made careers out of refusing to choose between their various influences. They live in the ambiguity and make it sing.

Giant Steps

When Even Coltrane Needed a Map, but let’s get back to the fear. Because if you want to understand why some people find jazz genuinely anxiety-inducing, there’s no better example than John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”.

Vox described the piece as ‘the most feared song in jazz’ due to its speed and rapid transition through three keys: B major, G major, and E-flat major. There are 26 chord changes in the 16-bar theme, providing a formidable challenge for the improviser with its quickly changing key centres. To put that in perspective: most pop songs have maybe four or five chords total. “Giant Steps” has 26 chord changes in 16 bars, moving through three different key centres, at a tempo so fast that you barely have time to hear one chord before it shifts to the next. When Tommy Flanagan, the pianist on the original recording, sat down to record it, he’d never seen the chart before. Coltrane, in typical fashion, just brought it to the studio and said: Let’s do this. Flanagan’s solo on the master take is famous among jazz musicians—not because it’s brilliant, but because it’s honest. You can hear him scrambling, grasping for notes, trying to keep up with these impossible changes. Even Coltrane himself, the composer, relied on patterns. Analysis reveals that Coltrane worked out melodic patterns over the changes in advance and deployed them during his recorded improvisation, using certain patterns in root form some 35 times. Think about that. The guy who wrote the most complex chord progression in jazz history still needed training wheels to navigate it. So what does ‘Giant Steps’ demand of the listener? It asks you to surrender any hope of following along intellectually. You cannot, in real time, track those chord changes unless you’ve spent years studying music theory. You can’t anticipate where it’s going. You can’t hum along. All you can do is trust. Trust that the musicians know where they’re going, even if you don’t. Trust that the chaos is intentional. Trust that resolution, if it comes, will be on the music’s terms, not yours. For people with high ambiguity tolerance, that’s thrilling. For people with low tolerance? It’s like being trapped in a musical panic attack.

The Neuroscience of Letting Go

What’s actually happening in the brain when someone improvises? And what’s happening in the listener’s brain? Researchers at Johns Hopkins stuck jazz pianists in an fMRI machine and had them improvise. What they found was fascinating: improvisation was consistently characterised by extensive deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for self-monitoring and conscious control) with focal activation of the medial prefrontal cortex.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins stuck jazz pianists in an fMRI machine and had them improvise. What they found was fascinating: improvisation was consistently characterised by extensive deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for self-monitoring and conscious control) with focal activation of the medial prefrontal cortex. In plain English: the part of your brain that judges and controls shuts down, while the part that generates self-referential thought lights up. The musicians literally entered a state where they stopped monitoring themselves and just… flowed. Other research confirmed this. Studies found decreased brain connectivity during improvisation, linked to the psychological state of ‘flow’—where you’re completely immersed in an activity. Fewer networks are active, but more focused. Less overthinking, more being. Here’s the thing: listeners can sense that state. When you hear a great improviser in flow, you’re hearing someone think in real time without self-censorship. Every note is a choice, but the choices happen too fast for conscious deliberation. It’s cognition without control. And if you’re the kind of person who needs control, whose brain fires anxiety responses when presented with ambiguous situations, then listening to that process is like watching someone walk a tightrope without a net. You want to look away. You want it to stop. You want resolution.

Back to the Theatre

So let’s circle back to Perry and that action movie. What was really happening when Perry complained that the Hollywood film wasn’t realistic enough? He was experiencing a failure of ambiguity tolerance. He bought a ticket to one thing—a big, dumb, entertaining action movie—but his brain couldn’t accept it on those terms. His need for cognitive closure demanded that the film be something else: more realistic, more coherent, more resolved. It’s the same mechanism. Perry can’t let a Hollywood movie be what it is, the same way some people can’t let jazz be what it is. And it goes deeper than entertainment. This trait affects everything. Medical schools now test applicants for the need for cognitive closure, because physicians with low tolerance for ambiguity struggle with the daily reality that medicine is fundamentally uncertain. You rarely have perfect information. Diagnoses are probabilistic. Treatment outcomes vary. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers found that people with a high need for cognitive closure experienced significantly higher stress and anxiety, because pandemics are the ultimate ambiguous situation. The rules keep changing. The experts disagree. Nothing resolves cleanly.

The world, it turns out, is a lot more like jazz than like pop music. It doesn’t resolve on schedule. The changes keep coming. The patterns shift. And if you can’t tolerate that—if you need everything to make sense, to land on the tonic, to return to the familiar—you’re going to spend a lot of time anxious.

The Missing Quality

So what’s the missing quality I was searching for? The thing that separates people who get nervous listening to jazz from people who find it liberating? It’s not patience for life, exactly. It’s something more specific: the capacity to remain in unresolved tension without needing to resolve it. It’s the ability to hear Miles Davis say ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’ and feel excited rather than confused. It’s being able to watch a Hollywood action movie and enjoy it because it’s not a documentary, not despite it. It’s understanding that some of the most beautiful things in life happen in the spaces between certainty and resolution. The bebop pioneers understood this. When bebop emerged, musicians felt that their music should be very clean, very precise, something beautiful directed more or less to the people, but beautiful in a way that demanded active engagement, not passive consumption. Contemporary musicians like Itamar Borochov understand it too. They’re not trying to make jazz easier or more accessible by dumbing it down. They’re inviting you into the ambiguity, saying: this uncertainty, this unresolvedness, this is where the magic lives. But you have to be willing to live there with them.

What We Choose to Hear Nina Simone, who spent years pursuing classical perfection before embracing jazz, said it best: ‘I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important. Excellence versus freedom. Control versus flow. Resolution versus possibility. These aren’t just musical choices. They’re life choices. Perry will probably never like modern jazz. That’s okay. But I wonder sometimes if the anxiety he feels when he hears those ‘racing, nervous phrases’ is trying to tell him something. Not about music, but about how he’s processing the world. Because here’s the thing about ambiguity tolerance: it’s not fixed. It’s a skill you can develop. Every time you sit with uncertainty instead of rushing to resolve it, you’re training your brain to handle more. Every time you let a question remain open, let a tension remain unresolved, let a possibility hang in the air, you’re expanding your capacity.

Because here’s the thing about ambiguity tolerance: it’s not fixed. It’s a skill you can develop. Every time you sit with uncertainty instead of rushing to resolve it, you’re training your brain to handle more. Every time you let a question remain open, let a tension remain unresolved, let a possibility hang in the air, you’re expanding your capacity. Maybe that’s why Miles Davis said ‘Do not fear mistakes. There are none. Not because wrong notes don’t exist, but because in improvisation, in life, the only real mistake is being so afraid of uncertainty that you never leap. Some people only hear what’s there. Others hear what’s not there—the space between notes, the tension between chords, the infinite possibilities hovering in that silence before the next phrase begins. And that, more than any technical skill or theoretical knowledge, is what separates those who can handle jazz from those who can’t. It’s not about the music at all. It’s about whether you can live in a world that refuses to resolve on your schedule.

Sources

Scientific Research:

McLain, D. L., et al. (2015). “Ambiguity tolerance in organisations: definitional clarification and perspectives on future research.” Frontiers in Psychology.
Berenbaum, H., et al. (2007). “Intolerance of uncertainty: Exploring its dimensionality and associations with need for cognitive closure, psychopathology, and personality.” Journal of Anxiety Disorders.
Nave, G., et al. (2018). “Musical preferences predict personality: Evidence from active listening and Facebook likes.” Psychological Science.
Vella, E., & Mills, G. (2017). “Personality, uses of music, and music preference: The influence of openness to experience and extraversion.” Psychology of Music.
Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation.” PLOS ONE.
Vergara, V. M., et al. (2021). “Functional Network Connectivity During Jazz Improvisation.” Scientific Reports.
Norgaard, M., et al. (2019). “How jazz improvisation affects the brain.” Neuroscience News.
Roets, A., & Van Hiel, A. (2021). “Need for cognitive closure predicts stress and anxiety of college students during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Personality and Individual Differences.
Hillen, M. A., et al. (2020). “Need for cognitive closure, tolerance for ambiguity, and perfectionism in medical school applicants.” BMC Medical Education.

Jazz History and Criticism:

DeVeaux, S. (1997). “The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History.”
Porter, L. (1998). “John Coltrane: His Life and Music.”
Gilbert, A. (2008). “The Israeli Jazz Wave: Promised Land to Promised Land.” JazzTimes.
Russonello, G. (2019). Reviews and articles. The New York Times. Artist Profiles and Interviews:
Yellowjackets’ official website and Grammy Archives
Itamar Borochov’s official biography and press materials
Avishai Cohen interviews, Jazz Japan
Israel21c feature on Itamar Borochov (2021)
The Tower magazine: “Jazz from the Promised Land”
All About Jazz artist profiles