I've been a jazz critic for a decade and while I personally love the music, I fear for its future. If jazz continues its slow, sad slide into musical irrelevance, pretty soon you'll only be able to find it in museums and a line or two if that in history books.

1. The most popular forms of jazz barely qualify as jazz. This week's Billboard contemporary jazz charts has Tony Bennett's collaboration with Lady Gaga is #2 and Annie Lennox follows at #3. If you want to call Bennett a jazz singer, I won't kick, but Gaga and Lennox? Pop stars slumming gets a definite "No."

2. Jazz is highly fragmented. Contemporary-straight ahead jazz fans into a Wynton Marsalis don't have much use for avant-garde, experimental types like a Cecil Taylor or John Zorn and both loathe "smooth" jazz as practiced by a Kenny G. or Dave Koz. The problem is jazz is such a tiny portion of overall music sales (down to under 2 percent in 2014) , there's really no place for elitism and exclusion. There simply isn't enough slices of the pie for anyone to be thumbing their noses at the subdivisons of jazz.

3. The collapse of the record labels and radio stations still playing jazz as a format have sped the decline of the genre's popularity. If you can't hear it on the radio, you're probably not going to find out about new and older artists still making music and clubs aren't going to book jazz artists and you're not going to able to find venues to hear live jazz. As far as TV goes, fuhgeddabouit. My, what a tangled web we weave...

4. Schools are chopping their music classes and there goes a feeder system for kids who aspire to play something more complex than turntables and ProTools. If you can't hear jazz, see jazz or play jazz, where's the next generation of new blood coming from to replace the old blood?

5. America is ignorant of its jazz history and heritage which is why so many musicians spend their summers touring Europe and Japan. If you're not playing across the pond, you had better find a side gig as a session musician or educator to pay the bills.

6. Jazz has made itself a genre for snobs, hipsters and pseudo-intellectuals. It needs to find a way to attract the masses.

There's many more reasons, but those are a few I've encountered as a jazz critic and it's convinced me of one thing: jazz needs far fewer critics and far more fans.