Why does any kind of music have a “reputation”? I never thought it did. I found it interesting harmonically vis-a-vis traditional classical harmony. As I recall, jazz started its mid-life crisis in the 1990s when the jazz community was pondering what future jazz would be like. A commonly shared idea was that it would be future-focused, i.e. inculcating whatever technology was in development. I think the idea that jazz is a “music of the future” still holds true, and that any music created in the future that is sonically audacious will be a “jazz”.
Jazz was the musical equivalent of the modern art period (~1900–1960) and very often artists would play jazz while creating art — with Jackson Pollock the prime example. What’s particularly interesting about that connection was that it was more or less a meme that took hold in culture. If you think about what might have been playing on the radio in Pollock’s studio it wasn’t Ornette Coleman; it was probably all the music that was in rotation at the time: Ellington, Be Bop, Big Band, and so on. An artist in the 1960s might have been playing that same material, plus Coltrane, Miles Davis and other contemporary jazz, as well as the fusions with rock.
As to the “intellectual” aspect, I think jazz does activate the same brain regions used in scientific fields, so you have the connections with jazz and physics for example — just as art and physics overlap on the Venn diagram.
As a musician, I don’t consider the reputation of jazz when playing Emaj7#11 rather than just an E triad. It’s not something I would avoid just because it might activate the cultural meme that jazz is intellectual. To me, it’s just pressing keys on a keyboard. It could be that people don’t like dissonant intervals or things that are generally angular. Generally speaking, people tend to like things that are smooth and curvilinear and jazz is “geometric” in many ways, which may appeal to visual artists (including architects) at that level. But again, it’s not a conscious choice and something that is simply in the flow of life. Instead of seeing intellect as having a pejorative meaning, you could say that sonic preferences might just be like all preferences in life and are neutral and fungible.
In terms of the “reputations” of genres, certainly, Prog has similar aspersions cast on it, the most obvious example being Punk circa 1978. But if you go on YouTube you can find huge audiences for guys like Allan Holdsworth, a posthumous jazz/prog God, and people probably like it because of its “intellectual” value. Whereas general audiences would pan its angularity and all-over-the-place quality. When in fact, it isn’t “all over the place” when you play it. It could be that the idea of tension and release is not appreciated, which is the machinery that makes jazz work.
Jazz requires some intellectual engagement, as do many genres of art, including ancient art. Certainly, much of that art was created with a huge intellectual component but was perhaps reframed as having a larger collective exoteric value, rather than the esoteric vibe of jazz. The fact that it is esoteric might also be the je ne sais quoi and people are attracted to that as well.
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Originally the response to a Quora question: Why does jazz have the reputation of being music for the erudite?
