Harry Cooper On "Über Jazz"

On "Über Jazz": Replaying Adorno with the Grain
Author(s): Harry Cooper

Source: October , Winter, 1996, Vol. 75 (Winter, 1996), pp. 99-133
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778901
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On UberJazz: Replaying
Adorno with the Grain
HARRY COOPER
What lies below draws the attack upon itself
-Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
WAR
MATERIALISM
FALSE IDEALS
SCIENCE -> MACHINE-ISM > SWING
production
progress
misery
DECADENCE OF THE < Weakening

SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT of reason
Introduction: Zazou O
Accuse Adorno. With a diagram, and the po

With being a reactionary. For there is a note of f
of swing (jazz, rock, what have you) at the dow
isn't that exactly the place Adorno assigned it
stone of his theory of mass culture, the occasion
logic of the commodity and the pathways of
the diagram, and of "Uber Jazz," is the usu
underestimation of the popular, an argument
from its power to its viciousness.1
1. Theodor W. Adorno, "UJber Jazz," Zeitschrift fiir Soz

Gesammelte Schriften 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
OCTOBER 75, Winter 1996, pp. 99-133. ?01996 October Magazine

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But there is
something ap
(to follow th
itself in a dialectical conversion: science->machine-ism->decadence of the
scientific spirit. Swing is only the half-life, the privileged site of decay,
agent responsible: "I will not finish by accusing swing of being at the root of
faults." There is a deeper problem. Explaining the second arrow pointing
the text that accompanies the chart recalls Lukaics on reification: "His [the wo
man's] nervous system was torn asunder by the vibrations of the factory
principal cadence of his life became mechanical. This is the cadence now
'Swing."' Adorno: entertainment as "afterimages of the work process."2
Read this way, the diagram begins to take shape as the very m
Adorno's "Dialectic of Enlightenment," the schema of what he called "th
destruction of the Enlightenment... the destructive aspect of progress."
comes properly late in the circuit, as aftereffect; the crucial turn occurs earli
"machine-ism." In Adorno's analysis (in its historical mode), the advance of
trial capitalism ruptured the fabric of culture, dividing art from pleasur
experience from low-a division that had to be respected in the difficulty
modernist music (Schoenberg) rather than fantastically healed by some pr
modernicity (jazz): the Magic Flute was "the last instance of... reconciliation
With the advent of cultural self-criticism in both Adorno's analysis and t
gram's, of a consideration of the ills of civilization as self-produced, we move
reaction to reflection. Adorno wanted no part of the backlash against the pres
modernity of popular music. First, because it took that modernity-"a quality s
in need of analysis"-at face value, even constructed it-"characterized
resistances" (45). Second, and more basically, it scapegoated the modern
whereas the problem was in our system of values itself, which was its own
and just possibly its own cure: "The issue is not that of culture as a value,
what the critics of civilization, Huxley, Jaspers, Ortega y Gasset and others, h
mind. The point is rather that the Enlightenment must consider itself, if men
to be wholly betrayed."5 Consider itself: the circuit was closed, and any ap
primitive Other, whether as culpable or redemptive, was a hypocritical dis
This is the best Adorno, his relentless self-criticism of "values" constit
ethnocentrism more honest than most multiculturalism.
And it is where Adorno parts company with the diagram. For there is a verti-
introduction by Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse, vol. 12, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1989-90), pp. 39-69. All
citations are to Daniel, but some translations (where noted) are mine. All further references will be
made in parenthetical form in the text.
2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John
Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 137.
3. Ibid., p. xiii.
4. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962) (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), p. 22.
5. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xv.

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Replaying Adorno with the Grain 101
cal invader ("war, materialism, false ideals") tha

where it swings, leading directly to the weake
contrast is recouped as entirely positive and on
quite. Despite first appearances, there is no inte
Adorno's analysis of the double face of culture,
tion as much as of light, as a "ratio" (in the Dialect
is a piece of reaction after all, a lament for the
swing is one manifestation of the decline of our
external: "after ten centuries of culture, we end
Whereas Adorno's "barbaric drum and... monoton
the imagery, did not travel across the water
his/our own culture.6
The diagram is by Henri Vemane, a French
Swing et Moeurs (in which it appears) was publi
years already, "swing" had been a French noun,
the Zazous, zoot-suited proto-punks who re
refusing all meanings and adopting Cab Callo
battle cry. They were pursued by the French equ
hair forcibly shaved, and by 1943 some of them
this was not enough to redeem them in Veman
shame was a nationalist one, the demise of Fran
has been defeated and impotent"), a crisis of cu
the analysis is superficial at best; VWmane's re
religious revival-thus the diagram's final emph
you spend Saturday night in an illegal dance
Sunday-morning mass." And for Schoenberg?
The horror that VWmane denounced in 1943
seems chilling today-was not the Final Solution
see the light of day because of abortions." It can
a little of the same chill: the Nazis are minimiz
was the whipping boy for Adorno's uncomprom
traditionalism, and it was inconvenient for both
tic Cab Calloway type was one of the Nazis'
Adorno might have offered another explanat
cause of the retreat from enlightenment into m
pagan, and other modern mythologies manufact
such a reversal, but in the Enlightenment itsel
6. Ibid., p. 21.
7. Selections from the book, including the diagram, are reprinted in Mike Zwerin, La Tristesse de
Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis (London: Quartet Books, 1985), pp. 157-62. All my citations of
VWmane are drawn from Zwerin's extracts.
8. Ibid., pp. 147-57.

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truth."9 Yet t
could yield up
submits itself
resistances to
tom-tom) and
of antimoder
with which A
This twofold
primitive/in
argues (not ex
however false on one level turns out to be true on another:
The modern archaic stance of jazz is nothing other than its commodity
character. The evidence of originality in it is that which makes it a
commodity: the fixed, almost timeless stasis within movement; the
mask-like stereotypology; the combination of wild agitation as the
illusion of a dynamic and the inexorability of the authority which
dominates such agitation. Predominant, however, is the law which is
that of the market as much as it is that of myths: the illusion must
constantly remain the same while at the same time constantly simu-
lating the "new." (54)
It is a brilliant instance of Adorno's method, this relentless skating on the

(selected) surface until it breaks. But is it right? "Uber Jazz" begins with the recep-
tion of jazz, but the answer turns on its conclusions about form and structure,
which-everyone enlightened hastens to agree-is a violent misunderstanding.
In the same breath, two main lines of defense have been proposed: (1) Adorno was
really writing about the reception ofjazz, even if he did sketch its structure as well;
(2) Adorno was really writing aboutjazz(y) dance music ("sweet" or "symphonic"),
not central, modern jazz ("hot"), of which he was fairly ignorant. The problem with
these "defenses" is that they attack the two pillars of his argument: the unity of
production and reception in jazz, and the underlying unity of hot and sweetjazz.
Let us hold Adorno responsible for these two unities, however coercive and
distorted they may seem today, as intentional and informed parts of his essay. Not
just to accuse Adorno, but to hold his critical results up to his aesthetic theory in
order to begin to criticize the latter as being narrower than it makes out. This
brings us back to the chart, to the question of whether Adorno could have created
it, and to a second question, a loose end in the discussion so far, namely, which
"truth" enlightenment is afraid of, paralyzed before.
I answered the first question in the negative based on the externality of
materialism to the diagram's circuit. For Adorno, on the other hand, the
9. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, pp. xiii-xiv.

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threat/attraction of a return to matter in its lower

and oblivion which Freud called Thanatos, arose
diagram (this is the beginning of an answer to
dialectic of enlightenment in motion, as the sto
emblematized:
Odysseus is warned by Circe, that divinity of reversion to the animal,

whom he resisted and who therefore gives him strength to resist other
powers of disintegration. But the allurement of the Sirens remains
superior; no one who hears their song can escape. Men had to do
fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical, purposive,
and virile nature of man, was formed, and something of that recurs in
every childhood. The strain of holding the I together adheres to the I
in all stages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with
the blind determination to maintain it.10
The rocks of the sirens' island are avoided only at the expense of withdrawal
practice (for the intellectual) and alienation of labor (for the worker): respec
Odysseus's self-imposed immobility in tying himself to the mast, and the
unconsciousness he imposed on his crew by plugging their ears with wax s
they looked straight ahead, concentrating on their task. Immobility: the Ody
the mythic background to the commodity (recalling the passage cited earlier
to enlightenment as well, the ground of their domination of all impulse or c
The odd weaving of Greek mythology and Marx is basic: "both concepts [Enl
enment and myth] are to be understood as not merely historico-cultural";
Odyssey is "one of the earliest representative testimonies of Western bour
civilization."ll Myth was the means by which Enlightenment clothed its authority
timeless magic, the ancient fiction within its dogma of modern fact, thus the po
where an "immanent" criticism could attack the object with its own tools.12
This is also essential background to the aesthetic theory, which propos
(within another swipe at Ortega y Gasset) a return to matter, however muff
antidote to the compromised, mutilated subjectivity that is Odysseus's legacy
Whereas traditionalists wail about the dehumanization of art . .. by

technology, it is in fact this same technological process that enables the
supreme creations of today to speak in a way which has nothing to do
with the deliberate communication of a humane message or statement.
What looks like reification is actually a groping for the latent language
of things-a language that articulates itself through the radical use of
10. Ibid., p. 33.

11. Ibid., pp. xiv, xvi.
12. For an example of what Adorno means by this term, see his commentary on Brecht in
"Commitment" (1962) in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt
(New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. 309-12.

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technology. T
from the noti
embracing ins
It sounds good
ogy->nature) of
too many sen
nature, mimes
exemplary tec
back to the ac
Whether Ado
to cases, and t
because Adorn
with the histo
prior disciplin
these once pr
sublimations o
they had to b
although not
remain obdur
Adorno protest
for example, c
was dinner mu
and calls for ju
which no long
method which
determine hi
aspects of enli
sense of bein
binding of cri
heard the siren
Revising
While Adorno
sent him a nea
13. Adorno, Aest

Routledge & Kega
14. Ibid., p. 4.
15. Adorno, "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938), in
Frankfurt School Reader, p. 275.
16. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),

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March 18, "I would be very pleased if it [the jaz

your study. Its subject is a very modest one, but
in its decisive points .. ."17 A very modest subjec
at the start of the letter with Berg and Husser
time, and, as if by way of compensation, an amb
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reprodu
the essay Adorno tried to hitch to it was only tr
doubt due both to the general exclusion of jazz
the essay itself, which sounds both shrill and, th
moment, simply strange today. Adorno himself
acknowledging at the end of his life that the ess
was not to hear for the last time: 'Where is the evidence?"'18
To begin again: Adorno over- and underestimates jazz. The overestimation,
in fairness, is not only of its danger but of its social meaning, its value for
criticism. Jazz offered a better cipher of society, a clearer locus of truth, than
"autonomous" art: "If the advertising function is dimmed in the case of serious
music, it always breaks through in the case of light music."19 This double operation
has occasioned a double reception for Adorno's mass culture theory. Long seen as
the epitome of modernist ethnocentrism and elitism, it has more recently been
"brushed against the grain" (in Benjamin's popular phrase, appropriately enough:
seventh thesis on the philosophy of history) to reveal an embryonic theory of the
resistant potential of popular culture, whether in the styles of its consumption20
or in its transformation at the hands of the modernist avant-garde (e.g., Thomas
Crow's 1983 "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts").21 This Adorno-
revisionist trend is responsible for the translation of the jazz essay, as well as three
essays on the phonograph and the emergence of the jazz question.22
pp. 217-51. For bibliographic information that places the draft Adorno read, see Susan Buck-Morss,
The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The
Free Press, 1977), pp. 286-87, n. 98.
17. Adorno to Benjamin, London, March 18, 1936, in Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukdics et al., Aesthetics
and Politics, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), p. 125.
18. Adorno, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America," trans. Donald Fleming, in
The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 340-41.
19. Adorno, "Fetish," p. 278.
20. Max Paddison, "The Critique Criticized: Adorno and Popular Music," in Popular Music 2, ed.
Richard Middleton and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 201-18; and
Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990), pp. 57-60.
21. Thomas Crow, "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts," in Modernism and Modernity, ed.
Benjamin Buchloh et al. (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 215-64. See also
Andreas Huyssen, "Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner," New German Critique 29
(Spring-Summer 1983), pp. 8-38, and Thomas Y. Levin, "For the Record: Adorno on Music," October 55
(Winter 1990), pp. 23-47.
22. Interesting responses have been offered from opposite directions by Adrian Rifkin, "Down on
the Upbeat: Adorno, Benjamin and the Jazz Question," Block 15 (1989), pp. 43-47, and Robert Hullot-
Kentor, "Popular Music and Adorno's 'The Aging of the New Music,"' Telos 77 (Fall 1988), pp. 79-116.

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The revision
as one (equal?
(similarly?) ma
a high art th
questions I ha
on here. Cro
1937-38,23 th
he extends to
dismissed eith
made by art w
conclusions ab
was the "ciph
infinitely fak
However, the
low for Ador
social functio
accorded to a
When it came
form in term
not what it 'i
glance. Rather,
castration, im
Adorno's hot
girls who typ
astrology colu
history of for
are comparable
In the "Oxfor
(which, thoug
Oxford and pr
its "meat-and-
word 'jazz" (p
23. Adorno, In Se
24. Crow, Modern
25. The term is f
1, p. 341, transla
Buck-Morss's discu
26. Daniel translat
as defined in cont
27. Adorno, Aest
28. Adorno, "Fe
29. Adorno, entry
(New York: Philo

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for a pack of bloodhounds, Hatz.30 This may e

Hektor Rottweiler. The horror, Adorno imp
(Schriftbild) of jazz symbolized the threat of ca
yawning piano lids of every Hollywood love due
which revealed a desire to tear into rags (zerfetzen
ured in the music. Such etymological speculatio
strategy of jazz haters. Adorno's analysis of Wagne
some figures of the jazz essay (e.g., the "beating
appears thoroughly grounded by comparison.31
The comparison of Wagner and jazz was d
claimed that the meaning of the "swooning-ye
hero was realized in the regressed, intersexual c
saxophone, neither brass nor wind. But there w
'progress' which the Wagnerian totality still fix
[in jazz]." Wagner's ideal of gesellschaftlichen I
elements was replaced in jazz with the barren
(beliebig auswechselbaren).32 Immanent resistance t
Crow might have cited Adorno's unique compar
Schoenberg and Berg: "The dialectic of jazz sha
most advanced art music"-that is, the precario
drives" of homosexuality and sadism set free a
sexual repression revealed a potential rebel
"earnestly registered" by the "most advanced ar
the form of bizarre tone colors and "muffled fo
although "expressionist," were not to be misunders
And yet: "these are the same [elements] which
distinction is an absolutely crucial one that
concluding that "the saxophone... gave intimatio
jazz, any possible resistance was turned on itself
30. Adorno, "Oxforder Nachtrage" (1937), Gessamelte Sch

mine. The remark about bloodhounds is noted by Martin Jay
the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 19
The Buck-Morss reference is to p. 100.
31. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 33.
32. Adorno, "Nachtrige," pp. 107-8.
33. In the "Fetish" essay Adorno rejects the "atomistic e
antipathy foreshadows Barthes's preference for "geno-son
"dramatic expressivity," in comparing two opera singers in "T
7ixt, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988)
body itself resonates ... does the gramophone have its legiti
Needle" [1927-28], trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October 55 [Win
of a materialist dimension in Adorno's aesthetics is staged in
34. Adorno, "Nachtrfige," pp. 106-7.
35. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 188. It is signific
Stravinsky, which does comprehend self-parody, revolves n

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108 OCTOBER
Reading Ado
1937 addendu
tactic is Niet
Adorno's theo
of Morals," w
example)."37 B
with Nietzsc
laughter, whi
indicator of a
was guiltless:
Adorno could
a parody of B
the bad faith
Eliotic descri
suspect the c
face of a pop
with shining
above."41The
of "exploitati
a character s
name of oral
But this kind
the surprisin
gestures are d
made to be in
"Would you
studies are lik
sides."44 Yes
mockery" of jazz
University of Ne
36. Suggested b
37. Friedrich Nie
Homo, trans. Wa
38. Adorno (wit
(1941), p. 26; see
and Aesthetic Theo
39. Adorno, "How
1954), p. 223; "T
Secondary Super
German Critique
40. Nietzsche, "T
41. Adorno, "Fe
42. Adorno, "Te
43. Adorno, "Na
44. Benjamin to
Morss, p. 149.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
agreed with Adorno about the willing participa

mutilation, which is precisely what the ambigu
ment suggests. Thus Benjamin evidently saw
analogous only to the worst of film, the "phony
by Hollywood that the "Work of Art" essay hu
Adorno claimed to agree that jazz and film were
midst of attacking Benjamin's effusion on laugh
film as a whole seems to be apprehended in a d
listening makes the perception of a whole [
mine).45 Adorno's implication here-that he ag
restructuring of attention is laudably "disenchan
criterion of wholeness inserted is all Adorno's ow
letter of Benjamin's idea. But the unexpected ag
What can we make of it? It says less about Benja
not to have given it much) than about the part
between the wars, and the interpretation of pro
from the vantage point of 1936.
In Adorno's case, however, the interpreta
moment, hardening in his later writings on ente
many the verdict of blind elitism. Thomas Levin
impulse, deploring the fact that "Adorno's po
often presented in the context of the polemical
has generally been characterized as a myopic m
and progressive dimensions of mass media su
Adorno the progressive is equally overdrawn. Rea
context reveals a consistent, clear-eyed use of om
in advance of its aesthetic opacity or resultant
resistance. Revisionism just lets him off the hook
tributor to that long, still lively line of desultor
music (cf. Allan Bloom's) that never get past The
Spasm of the Commodity (A
Adorno estimated he spent the equivalent of f

crazed Berlin between 1927 and 1933, visiting h
included Benjamin, Brecht, Weill, Bloch, and Kra
jazz training ground, the "information" in the jaz
with Matyas Seiber, a leading Frankfurt jazz
45. Adorno, "Fetish," p. 288.

46. Ibid., p. 295.
47. Levin, "For the Record," p. 23.
48. Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, pp. 20, 206.

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Adorno learn
explains that
ways: as delet
the regular b
as a "break,"
the middle pa
refrain" (45-
false beat, br
jazz: "The sc
improvisation
the syncopati
mine), where
For this cru
lexicon but s
which he cor
excursion in
Armstrong's
open improvi
"Hot Five" an
link between
capable of cre
Armstrong's
"Potato Head
subverting an
entirely open
say that "the
not be more w
For Adorno,
jazz tradition
false beat: "th
break into the
becomes the v
49. This fact, wh

The Dialectical Im
class at the Hoch '
50. Daniel mistr
another meaning
51. The New Gr
Armstrong still
practice of mode
52. Adorno, revi
books under rev
Winthrop Sargean

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that "the allowance can be made that in ... the middle thirties, there was neither
a theory nor a fairly uniformly used terminology of jazz."53 But it is not just a
matter of terminology. Adorno correctly identifies the complexity, disruption,
virtuosity, highly syncopated nature, and extended improvisation of hot jazz (all
these epithets are his) before reducing it to equivalence with the early New
Orleans break and the often token improvisations of the commercialized jazz
pioneered by Paul Whiteman. His final verdict employs a rhetoric of unwillingness
to facilitate easier denial of the possibility glimpsed earlier that jazz could "tolerate
freedom and the eruption of fantasy" if it were good, live, and hot.54 Radio broad-
casts ("even less impressive" than live performance) and loudspeakers (in "cheap
dance clubs") weakened the already feeble aesthetic and social Interferenz of jazz.
Hot pieces kept orchestras from getting bored, flattered the amateur, and titillated
the upper end of the market, "perform[ing] at best the role of pseudomodern
painters like van Dongen, Foujita, Marie Laurencin, or, even better, of Cubist
advertisements" (49-51).
Perhaps Adorno's central motive for the anachronism is that the term
"break" (in opposition to "norm") offers an irresistible irony, given the fictive
resolution of all contradiction he thinks jazz performs. "Ornamental" and "stereo-
typical," the break is just continuity thinly masquerading as rebellion (53), whereas
high art remains true to the social fractures that emerge in its form, issuing in the
textual Briiche of which Adorno was a proto-Derridean connoisseur.55 But he must
have been told that "break" was out-of-date, for his next jazz piece five years later
refers to "the 'break' of preswing jazz." Undeterred, he simply shifts his ground,
finally acknowledging the "solo chorus by Armstrong" but insisting in the same
breath on "the difficulty of determining where and when improvisation still exists
in actual jazz practice."56
The other oddity of Adorno's terminology is his conflation of jazz and dance.
Jazz is "a type of dance music.., that has existed since the war" (45). Its musical
subgenres are the cakewalk (prejazz), Charleston, tango, fox-trot, rumba, etc. This
is easier to explain. Both as spectacle and in terminology (break, breakdown, break
dance), jazz and black dance have always been allied. With the institutionalizing of
social dancing in American ballrooms of the teens, specific steps got formally
linked to specific musical forms, "fox-trot," for example, denoting a kind of song, or
53. Wolfgang Sandner, "Popular musik als somatisches Stimulans: Adornos Kritik der 'leichten
Musik,"' in Adorno und die Musik: Studien zur Wertungsforschung 12, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz: Universal
Edition, 1979), p. 125. All translations are mine.
54. The "improvisational element of disruption" is only "recognized for the instant of a passing
thought" (ibid., p. 127).
55. Adorno read Kant for its briiche and sought out "the spaces between subjects and objects ... whose
very nonidentity was history's motor force" (Buck-Morss, p. 47). Works of art "must not try to erase the
fractures left by the process of integration [of materials and details into their immanent law of form]"
(Aesthetic Theory, p. 10).
56. Adorno and Simpson, "On Popular Music," p. 25; Adorno, "Reviews," pp. 176-79.

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at least a distin
dancing of som
mances, especi
the newest ste
categories were
Having no form
ulation is spar
fundamental: vi
rhythmic, but
beat and unwa
maintains, "is w
jazz" (47). Why
physical, and a
latter term: "v
for example. B
since the verse
vocal numbers,
this point, Ad
retreats altoge
Parody-dialect
pseudopsycholo
only black elem
in bondage" (5
isons of jazz to
mirrors the ra
the historical
Salonmusik-a kind of classical entertainment that owed much to Strauss waltzes
and was played by strolling violinists in the German cafi concert-and the military
march. The former source had degenerated into the latter via dance, which,
because of its presumed march origins, functioned (like the break) as a demythol-
ogizing relay: jazz is dance is march is fascism. Adorno's notion of "historically
grounding" this idea is to observe that the saxophone and sousaphone were
57. Marshall and Jean Stearns, "Ballroom Origins," in Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular
Dance (New York: Schirmer, 1979), pp. 95-102.
58. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra:Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 125.
59. "Even in the techniques of syncopation, there is nothing that was not present in rudimentary
form in Brahms and outdone by Schoenberg and Stravinsky" (Adorno, "Fetish," p. 296).
60. "In convoluted interpretations of this [right-wing] kind, jazz was held to be derived not from
the ragtime music of St. Louis or from the blues of Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton in New
Orleans, but from the old Scottish 'snap' and the Franco-Italian melodies of the Second Empire. Even
Debussy was seized upon as a precursor by reason of his cakewalks" (Ralph Willett, "Hot Swing and the
Dissolute Life: Youth, Style and Popular Music in Europe 1939-49," in Popular Music, vol. 8, no. 2
[1989], p. 161). These points are made in Andr6 Coeuroy's Histoire gindrale du jazz: strett, hot, swing
(Paris: Editions Denoal, 1942), which Zwerin quotes (p. 151).

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
originally military and marching instruments (6

to contribute is a slight element of disruption,
"Breaks have their dialectical precursor [ Vorform]
if the "bourgeois gait" of jazz dance is a would-
itself... has an immediate reference to coitus
fact, to be trusted. Here Adorno offers up s
reverse" insofar as sexual union is "intensifi
innuendo of the text and music" (62-63). Beneath
and sexual ability in the orgiastic dance or jam
feared sexual inability and social unbelonging. "
dream-jazz text as a whole, "once I have allow
returned to formation (66).
In "forcing" this social meaning from the
declares that "the social function of jazz" can
This important turn in the argument anticipate
that all the references to tangos and fox-trots
which salon and march elements are, Adorno gru
For a moment Adorno appears to accept a real d
the rest of the field, but he quickly insists that
springs not from any essential difference with
identity with it. The false pretensions of hot jazz to
visations "which sound right only once the last
stumbling over and turning around" (and why
rhythmic "analysis" is entirely unclear) are music
reinforce the authority of the barely syncopated
Eccentric and ridiculous: hot jazz proposes a s
the supposed prewar dance origins of jazz-the e
terms are linked in a Debussy title) who fancies
while playing to the crowd, and his opposite num
his own pathetic attempts to gain favor and ass
the jazz subject develops from the one to the oth
of The Little Tramp and Harold Lloyd, whose ant
break and the "whimpering" (67) vibrato of jazz
neurosis, a "psychoanalysis in reverse."62 Devot
psychologically normal (noneccentric), a "true in
from successful Oedipal resolution: "The rhythm
themselves eccentric categories. The syncopation
61. Adorno, "Nachtrdige," p. 102.

62. The phrase, attributed to Leo Lowenthal, appears in Ado
Down to Earth" Adorno calls the advice of the astrology colu
what is id should become ego" (p. 52).
63. Adorno, "Stars Down to Earth," p. 55.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
114 OCTOBER
of Beethoven
itself against
this point th
them at all, h
jazz improvis
lishment of au
Now the essa
brought to b
Fashion--Jaz
novelty act
reassembles h
Adorno has i
Adorno was v
redundant, f
weakness are
knowing exac
seized. Soon t
become grote
music, too so
existence. On
word of the
blance of hu
glimpsed in
hides, yet wh
one qualifica
directed indi
unable to tole
Self-parody
parting comm
fool, and clow
has been ent
practices: "Th
the [modern
64. Adorno, "Per

Press, 1982), pp.
also seizes on Vir
eighteenth centu
65. Buck-Morss,
66. The jazz mar
to reflect a sim
Encyclopedia of
borrowings as an
prematurely "cla
67. Adorno, Aes

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
cubistic manifestations, and Dadaism. ... 'In the e

dance musicians .., improvised so-called spasm
horns, pebble-filled gourds, and rude bass viols
rattles, railway whistle, and motor hooter."'68s C
ground of condescension here, finding in jaz
secondhand materials: improvisation in its unfo
unlike Crow, Adorno gives these transgressions
only self-mockery in the humor of jazz (and no
tice of quotation in improvising, had he addres
show heritage of early jazz performance, which
and was indeed carried on by early German jazz
acrobatics, silly sound effects, racially ster
understood as subversive anthropology than
difference with Crow is Adorno's concern not to
brush, only "certain cubistic manifestations." H
recalls Clive Bell's slightly different tactic in his
anxiety of an aesthetics under threat can be fel
once relieved to observe that 'jazz is dead" (u
instance of that famous refrain) and quick t
painters-Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, F
settled on their own lines of development befor
riffraff has been affected." Bell pushes the argu
jazz a step further than Adorno would, into the
sarcasm, but by jeers and grimaces does jazz ma
are for the grown-ups."70
Adorno's theory of self-parody in jazz does h
as a theory of advertising. (Jazz was the commo
engaging in a continual "plugging.")71 Behind th
substantially altered the classical false conscious
commentary on Marx in the "Fetish" essay sugge
of advertising--the ironic contrast between the
restrictive copyright notice appearing just belo
lifts its veil.72 (Barthes: "It is this constant gam
meaning and the form which defines myth.")73
68. Adorno, "Reviews," p. 170; Adorno's citation is from Hob

69. See Krin Gabbard, "The Quoter and His Culture," in J
Meanings of Jazz, ed. Reginald Buckner and Steven Weiland
1991), pp. 92-111.
70. Clive Bell, "'Plus deJazz,"' in his Since Cizanne (New York
216. I am indebted to Jeffrey Weiss for reminding me of the e
71. Adorno, "On Popular Music," p. 27.
72. Ibid., p. 36.
73. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
116 OCTOBER
subject: "In th
represents a l
of innuendo,
blatancy conv
explanatory im
advertising.75
become a mer
Jazz," admits
standards for
Here Adorno
music, and he
original, toke
which the con
hook (54-55).
Recep
Crow and Da
the reception
dictum that '"j
(52), nothing o
form collapse
its "subject" e
being78 but a r
of an objectiv
sistibly inte
74. Adorno, "Sta

75. See Mark Cri
Press, 1988), for t
76. Writing near
how far 'rational
in whose product
of expression, as
manipulated pseu
this is exaggerated
in texts that mak
77. Daniel: "'Ube
vehemence of his
being heard" (p.
"It remained in th
of a European Sc
78. Adorno's lat
Lazarsfeld is well
Down to Earth" (
actual audience (a
appeal to "penis e

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
products which are interested in being discovered by h

reception at all, it is reception in advance, by decree. A
and sociology of jazz reception only to provide confirm
working.
We have seen the repertoire of psychological roles that Adorno claims were
offered: clown, masochist, joiner, fascist. To some extent these break down
according to class: the bourgeois listener appreciates the apparent immediacy and
liberation of hot jazz, if only as a perverse "pleasure in his own alienation"; the
working-class listener understands a "danceable beat" he wants to join with,
although he may also fetishize the "urbanity" of the music as a means of identifica-
tion with a class he wants to join even more. The alignment is plausible (although
see note 112 below), even banal, but what is more important for Adorno is the way
jazz cuts across class, achieving the reactionary and false collective it offers as an
image: "the more democratic jazz is, the worse it becomes." It can be accepted
across the board because it appeals to a "mutilated instinctual structure" that
transcends class divisions (49-50). The subject (like the music) is double, bourgeois
and proletarian-"both quivers and marches" (48). Adorno grounds this figure in
a double history of jazz reception.
The primary background of the essay, although Adorno never identifies it,
is a "Jazz Age" upon which he can now look back with some perspective. The
American and European jazz craze of the twenties mixed primitivist projections
of sexual rhythm embodied in the mythic "vitality of blacks" (46) with modernist
images of mechanical perfection and objectivity. To some extent these
metaphors can be separated chronologically. The primitive phase lasted from the
prewar vaudeville and minstrel shows that made their way to Europe through the
live introduction of jazz by black American soldiers (James Reese Europe's
orchestra) and the first jazz record of 1917 (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band,
ironically a white group) up to Josephine Baker's 1925 Paris debut, her bare-
breasted, feather-skirted "danse sauvage" carefully choreographed for the Parisian
male imagination by Jacques Charles. "Jazz itself seemed to young European
artists and their supporters to resist all measured rationalism and foregrounded
positivism."80 Along with other American themes like the cowboy and Chaplin,
jazz and dance were darkly embraced by Expressionist artists and ambiguously
satirized by Dadaists.81
By the mid-twenties, primitivist descriptions were yielding, parallel to the
shift within artistic avant-gardes and particularly the rise of Sachlichkeit in Germany,
79. Adorno, "Fetish," p. 293. "Popular music commands its own listening habits" ("On Popular
Music," p. 26).
80. Wolfgang Widmaier, 'jazz-ein wilder Sturm iiber Europa," Melos (1966), p. 14.
81. Beeke Sell Tower, 'Jungle Music and Song of Machines: Jazz and American Dance in Weimar
Culture," pp. 87-105, passim, in Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs by George Grosz and
His Contemporaries, 1915-1933 (exhibition catalogue, Harvard University, Busch-Reisinger Museum,
1990).

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
118 OCTOBER
to machine m
bananas on Ba
from 1925, and
precision.83 T
grotesque dist
purging "all d
with its devas
the death of ja
Adorno's essay
What would ha
Such periodiz
classic ambigu
maker of the
telephone."88
while the aud
like a kangaro
1922 to play "
Stefan wrote in
time .. chaos,
Kessler likene
forests and sky
82. Ibid., p. 95; Ek

(Darmstadt: Math
83. Tower, 'Jung
"Musik am Bauhau
Maur (Munich: P
Vergleiche zwischen
1925); and PeterJe
84. Cited in Albr
Zum Bedeutungsw
Stern (Berlin: Arg
85. Adorno, "Fet
86. Kater notes a
Ernst Krenek's jaz
1929 and 1932. Re
24 (1932), p. 738. M
(August 1988), pp
87. Jean-Claude
music of today,"
could be traced
Hybridisation: The
Cambridge Univer
88. Cited in Bern
vol. 12, no. 1 (Fal
89. Cited in Dilm
90. Harry Graf K
Berlin Cabaret, p. 1

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
Although by no means the first to notice thi

and the contemporary within the Imaginary of m
the principle of the commodity itself and then l
critique: "to awaken congealed life in petrified
scrutinize living things so that they present
Philosophy appropriates the fetishization of com
commodity (we saw in the introduction) is a "ma
and movement, where "stereotype" has the d
connotation of doubleness, a doubleness tha
doubling-back, in two movements: (1) Rather th
instincts as its "recourse to false origins" cl
masochism, "new, repressed, and mutilated instin
masks of those in the distant past," resulting in
clothes or the detective novel. "The archaic st
'primitives' who fabricate it" (52-54). (2) Jazz
Objectivity," yet (in Adorno's dialectical reve
ment, and functionalism in general, was old no
"However much jazz may act like a product of '
new.., .its 'objectivity' is no more than a pasted
us about the extent to which it is merely an ob
Sachlichkeit (in fact, mere objecthood), Adorno o
of true music (aesthetic opacity), suggesting (con
to say) that it will not dissolve into "pure imm
(48). Jazz, of course, is not aesthetic objectivity
substitute dong.
With this decoding, Adorno has moved from
their production within the object, a reversal un
represents its audience in advance. But the ar
historically specific than I have suggested so far.
the military march as sources of jazz reflects (b
awareness of the jazz reception of liberal Weim
precisely for leaving these musty, favorite Wilh
Tucholsky of the Weltbiihne, the rhythm of jazz w
beat of the 'Prussian parade march."' For Alfred
teacher, jazz was "a healthy alternative to the s
bereft of salons."93 Without naming names, Ad
claims to jazz's matter-of-fact, democratic imm
out above all in the interest of the bourgeoisie.
91. He himself quotes Apollinaire's "ici m~me les aut

("Perennial Fashion," p. 125).
92. Adorno, "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin," in Prisms, p.
93. Kater, "The Jazz Experience," pp. 148-49.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
120 OCTOBER
distance for c
forms, the m
most varied f
reference fro
obvious conte
tion of folk s
referent is pr
of musical "at
(Gleichschaltun
Thus a count
liberals to den
the mutation
these psychic
another subte
addressed pop
hopefully, to A
progressive tr
even after Mod
from my arti
The reason: b
socialism," th
democracy. T
concepts of au
pathos of dis
its mystificat
unique phenom
is not distance
its own prete
the "urge ... t
"fetishization
"unreal edific
audience mem
and immediac
jazz can easily
tolerated, but
films, have th
94. Adorno, "Fe

95. Aesthetic The
of the musical po
touch with may b
social by nature" (
96. Adorno, "Fe

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
These two lines enclose the seven sentences Ad

policy:
In Italy it is especially well-liked, as are cubisty arts and crafts [kubistichen

Kunstgewerbe: translation mine]. The ban against it in Germany has to do
with the surface tendency to reach back to pre-capitalist, feudal forms
of immediacy and to call these socialism. But, characteristically enough,
this ban is a powerless one. The struggle against the saxophone has
been appeased by the musical organizations and the instrument
industry; jazz itself continues vigorously, under other names, on the
radio as well. Only the more advanced, newly objective "hot" jazz for the
upper-middle classes, which the layman cannot understand, has fallen
victim to the ban.
There is some validity to this account. "Entertainment... assumed an increasingly

important role in Goebbels' refined understanding of propaganda. ... Music for
films and newsreels includ[ed] catchy hit tunes and marching songs."97 The
establishment of the RKK (Reichskulturkammer) in 1933, the subsequent gradua
purge of Jewish composers and musicians, the banning of jazz broadcasts in 1935
and of records in 1937, the Degenerate Music exhibit at Dfisseldorf of 1938-
these had real effects, but they were far from straightforward, as Adorno confirms.
Despite official denunciations of jazz, enforcement was uneven and Goebbels fully
realized its propaganda value. But (and this is crucial) only so long as it was as far
as possible de-Negrified, de-Judified, and de-Anglo-Americanized. Ludwig Tersch's
cover for the guide to the Entartete Musik exhibit showed a caricatural black
saxophonist wearing a Jewish star instead of a carnation in his lapel.98 This meant
that hot elements, which tended to signify unacceptable racial and national cate-
gories, were proscribed, whereas more commercial forms were more than
tolerated. As Mike Zwerin puts it, "They [guards and SS men] liked swing, the
popular dance music of the day... not necessarily jazz, though it often involved a
'hot break' or improvisation in the middle somewhere." These bands "did not
threaten the regime; the good ones were rather regimented themselves."99
An exception to this would appear to be Charlie's Orchestra, a "lively big
band" which retooled the lyrics of Cole Porter songs to create a mixture of
97. Michael Meyer, "A Musical Facade for the Third Reich," in Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Gard
in Nazi Germany (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), p. 174. In 1933, before
the cracks in the antijazz policy appeared, Adorno simply endorsed it as "confirm [ing] ... through the
harsh verdict aesthetically--what has been decided technically for a long time: the end of jazz music"
("Abschied vom Jazz," Europaische Revue 9 [1933], reprinted in Gessamelte Schriften 18, cited in Ulrich
Sch6nherr, "Adorno andJazz: Reflections of a Failed Encounter," Telos 87 [Spring 1991], p. 87).
98. Meyer, "A Musical Facade," pp. 180-81; Tower, 'Jungle Music," p. 105. It is remarkable that little
else in the original poster for Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf had to be altered to make this racist image
exactly the same exaggeratedly "negroid" features were used to promote jazz, as in Paul Colin's posters
for Josephine Baker's Revue Nigre performances.
99. Zwerin, La Tristesse de Saint Louis, p. 31.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
122 OCTOBER
urbanity, swi
of Whiteman
to Britain (an
consumption
between hot
measure qua
sounds (honk
By going out
features, the
everything we
aspect of the
his thesis of th
an undeserved
hot jazz and t
attacks led by
classes and Sc
a wedge into
that it was no
ban as a "surf
persecution, s
threat by the
Why did Ado
a case study i
relevant lines
in England, t
a pseudonym
specific virul
itself and pog
tered from
everyone, mas
In a disturbin
great Jewish
leaders as Stef
jazz "teacher."
100. Ibid., pp. 3

Considered," Nati
See Kater, Differen
101. Kater, "TheJ
102. Zwerin's La Tristesse de Saint Louis is a remarkable account of the odd mixture of occasional
tolerance and brutal suppression that marked the Nazi relation to jazz. This is not to say that jazz fans
and musicians were significantly anti-Nazi, especially before the war. See Kater, Different Drummers, pp.
90-110.
103. Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, p. 121.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
All What Jazz?
"Had Adorno ... not spoken all-inclusively of jazz

Paul Whiteman, which he clearly had in his ear, his
reproached with later, would have been taken to h
undertone of self-evidence."104 But Adorno was
unspecific), even though he must have known bet
the connection to the Whiteman style in 1979,
recognition that Adorno was simply limited by his
it, "the products of Adorno's Culture Industry mus
Hollywood Grade-B genre film ... as radio comedy
Paul Whiteman (the proper referent for what Ador
do with the richness of a Black culture we have only l
Jameson's unsolicited mea culpa on behalf of the A
referent of "we," pretends that real jazz was in hid
was for him. But even Adorno, not exactly a cogno
hot jazz had triumphed in America and was gainin
wake of Hugues Panassie's flawed but pioneering L
rapid success of Grappelli and Reinhardt's Quint
formed in the same year, Europeans were becom
commercialized jazz in Europe had been. Traces
Adorno's hesitations. Hotjazz "at least in Europe, has
general public." The "more consequential forms [o
the upper class]l-at least in so far as it is a question
than merely being delivered up ... in clubs for the
It is true, as Sandner points out, that the all-per
thirties Germany was the jazzy dance music purve
arrangements of the Whiteman orchestra.107 Whit
Jazz," made his triumphal Berlin debut in 1926. By
record labels and numerous radio shows devoted lar
Whiteman Orchestra, while showcasing hot trump
his brief career, was most famous for its polished, tig
brilliant brass sound, a juste milieu style, by turns
proved overwhelmingly popular in Europe. Behind
104. Sandner, "Popular musik," p. 125.

105. FredricJameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or; The Persistence o
106. Hugues Panassie, Le jazz hot (1934), in English as Hot Jazz:
and Eleanor Dowling (New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1936).
107. Thus "the strange fact that neither Stravinsky and Mi
Hindemith and Weill in Germany, are known to have heard ja
Hines, Smith]" (John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Per
York: Pantheon, 1978], p. 160). And some popular music escape
once Adorno inexplicably mentions the hit novelty song "Vale
interpretation.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
124 OCTOBER
ing distinctio
hot jazz, whic
pean and Ame
'jazz' was com
[the U.S.], all
five- to seven
blues inflectio
form of jazz w
jazzy dance an
symphonic set
Whiteman, Ge
least in Europ
jazz bands kep
as well as to re
was curtailed").
orchestration
who reinfused
leading directl
forties-to whi
and "sweet" w
"multiple-choi
Collier's pur
encouragemen
1930s jazz rem
as such anywh
issued in smal
especially app
compared to o
inflation, jazz
England (alth
pandemonium
evolved-a sou
1924-29, calls
underground
Melodie-Klub,
But Collier m
highest calibe
108. James Lincol

American Music M
109. Kater, "The
110. Adorno and
111. Collier, The R

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
like Seiber and "younger Germans, mostly urban

late teens, some of whom were to become dedica
swing in the Third Reich."112 Bechet toured Ge
Ellington, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, and others
the Brunswick catalogue offered Teddy Wilso
(albeit with forced designations like "fox-trot te
the Andrews Sisters.113 In Berlin, The Chocolate Kid
Ellington ran intermittently from 1925 to 1927,
itself but with Sam Wooding and his group, Th
may have been behind in jazz, but it was also aware
of Amerikanismus) and made exaggerated efforts to
of the storm that surrounded the establishmen
classes at the Frankfurt conservatory in 1927, w
negro blood" (minus the negroes) incited wild con
Thus Daniel's defense of Adorno in the introduction to her translation-
"Few white Europeans in the 1930s would have been aware" of hot jazz
exaggerates Adorno's more accurate remark: "this music, at least in Europe
reached only a fraction of the general public" (51). An elite knew bette
while it is hard to discover just what Adorno heard, we can be quite sure he
(in addition to the 1930 jazz issue of Melos, which included a piece by Seibe
lead article by Milhaud for a jazz issue of the Viennese Musikbldtter des Anb
based on a 1924 Sorbonne lecture and published in 1925, the same year Ado
began writing for that journal.116 Milhaud was what Gendron calls a
authenticist,11"7 becoming bored once there was nowhere left to slum, bu
112. Kater, "The Jazz Experience," p. 146. In Different Drummers Kater revises this conclusion
ing instead to "a small, upwardly mobile lower-middle class as well as some upper-class segmen
less than middle age" (p. 52; see also pp. 82, 105; and pp. 60-69 for a survey and ranking of G
hotjazz instrumentalists).
113. Zwerin, La Tristesse de Saint Louis, pp. 20-21. See also Kater, Different Drummers, pp. 10-11,
114. Rose points out that the mere three-month run of the Revue Negre in Paris proves by compa
Germany's longer attention span forjazz (p. 125). Wooding's was not the finest hot jazz-Collier
"an ordinary black show band featuring a few jazz soloists" (p. 43)--but it was "not a bad intro
to live jazz for the Germans" (Rose), and Kater writes (p. 145) that "the best American soloists
inspire native German players, as did star trombonist Herb Flemming of Sam Wooding's band
toured Berlin and Hamburg as the first Negro orchestra of note in summer 1925." See also
Different Drummers, pp. 8-10.
115. Rose,Jazz Cleopatra, pp. 125-26.
116. Darius Milhaud, "Die Entwicklung derJazz-Band und die Nordamerikanische Negermus
Musikbliitter des Anbruch 7 (April 1925), pp. 200-205. Also published in French as "Les res
nouvelles de la musique," L'Esprit Nouveau 25 (1925), unpaginated. Translations are mine.
117. As opposed by Gendron ('jamming at Le Boeuf," passim) to Stravinsky the bricoleur and C
the fldneur. Milhaud studied Brazilian music and dance firsthand as diplomatic secretary
Claudel (1917-18), visited out-of-the-way Harlem nightspots, and on returning to France atte
the most ambitious of all fusions of jazz and modernist composition, Criation du Monde (1923
descriptions of Milhaud's various encounters with black music, see his Notes without Music, t
Donald Evans (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), esp. pp. 63-64, 101-3, 117-18, 174.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
126 OCTOBER
gleaned an un
travels, as a p
jazz tonality
following the
We are contin
plexity, the si
obtained by m
to the system
seemingly unr
which makes
Adorno and ot
with noise an
improvisationa
Milhaud's art
inflected, rhyt
to North Am
ring of steel.
of the Pleyela
but as most ap
oversimplified
Adorno system
paired unpub
1929,121 Ador
realm of 'ligh
hit tune, etc.,"
glorify kitsch
focus on jazz an
and was happy
jazz in German
and the jazzy
convenient sy
Although San
118. Milhaud, "Di

119. Kater, "The
120. The endorse
of L'Esprit Nouve
Corbusier himself.
121. Adorno, "Zum Jahrgang 1929 des Anbruch," Anbruch 11 (January 1929). Reprinted in
Frankfurter Zeitung 73 (January 25, 1929) and in Gesammelte Schriften 19, pp. 605-8. The unpublished
text, dated 1928, is in Gesammelte Schriften 19, pp. 601-2. These are quoted in Levin, pp. 27-29, whose
translations I use. As Levin notes, Adorno analyzed three hit tunes in "Schlageranalysen," Anbruch, vol.
11, no. 3 (1929), reprinted in Gessamelte Schriften 18, pp. 778-87. Adorno quit Anbruch at the end of
1930 over its move to a committed Party line (Buck-Morss, pp. 33-34). See also Adorno, "Abschied
vom Jazz," pp. 795-99; and "Kitsch," p. 793.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
Adorno's analysis of the Whiteman style is. This

replace the image of Adorno the "myopic manda
formidable. "No Foolin"' of 1926 (Victor 20019), one o
is a good example of the kind of song Adorno had
to modern jazz or even big-band swing styles, th
Rhythmically the piece is notable for a near-absence
pation. A two-bar introduction establishes a basic 4
DEE deedle DEE) which is then carried by violins as
extra "deedles" occasionally added). Tuba underlines
in an oom-pah figure that falls especially hard on b
gesture toward syncopation is the linking of eighth-not
the 4/4 measure, resulting in what Adorno refers
structure characteristic of jazz in general, but which
the way certain basic dance rhythms provided a cou
Charleston, often the fox-trot, and to some extent the
Adorno's exact terms are useful in analyzing a s
bridge or B section of the song (stress is shown by
brackets):
I& 2& 3 & 4&
I [ ] WON-der [ ]\
WHO you'll real-LY think you'll MAR-ry \
DON'T [ ] BLUN-der [ ]\
WITH some Tom or DICK or HAR-ry \
In the second line of the first couplet, the tuba departs from its oom-pah role to
join in underscoring the first, fourth, and seventh eighth-notes (WHO, LY, MAR),
exactly producing the 3+3+2 pattern. These "false" beats are thus accented to the
point that they become a "principal rhythm," a new beat or second nature, as
Adorno might have put it. But in the last line, a "falling back" to the 4/4 beat
occurs in the decision to emphasize not the first "or," which would correspond to
the fourth eighth-note and the "LY" in the second line, but rather "Dick," which
corresponds to the fifth eighth-note, thus falling squarely on the third full beat. A
similar falling-back is evident in the instrumental iteration of this stanza in the
first chorus, in that while the first couplet is performed in a marcato style, the
122. The structure is unremarkable: four choruses of sixteen bars each (each chorus having the stan-
dard AABA or "song form" pattern), the first two choruses tutti, the third vocal (sung by Whiteman's
famous "Rhythm Boys"), and the fourth featuring trombone and bass saxophone solos, with two- or
three-bar transitions between each chorus.
123. The 3+3+2 rhythm occurs especially frankly in the tenth and twelfth bars of the first chorus, i
the eighth and sixteenth bars of the second chorus in double time, throughout the three-bar transition
between the second and third chorus, in the saxophone solo, and most prominently in the lyric
themselves.

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128 OCTOBER
second is lega
games, the sill
Other observa
tremulous vibr
of saxophones
Williams descr
versions of me
The "imperis
study of jazz
music, a mode
it: quickstep,
It was popular
Vernon and Ir
various "anim
they had deci
which enjoine
not twist the
hop-glide inst
good work. Th
radical reform
says less about
Nazi's ability t
Does Whitem
the marching
("don't blunde
of the slap- a
not unimagin
tradition as a
hysterical.126
be extended i
"Adorno's anal
and the Sex P
well, but far f
124. Martin Willia

Orchestra 1923-19
Adorno overlooke
the tuba. William
Orchestra and "th
of the same period
within jazz, in thi
125. Stearns, Jaz
126. Adorno, Socio
127. Bernard Gen
Approaches to Mas

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
of pop music by marginalizing categories suc

lyrics that were poor cousins to harmony and m
tradition.
But Gendron's explanation of Adorno's blind spots (if such huge stains
can be so called), whether we are thinking of hot jazz or some forms of pop
music, is too simple. After all, as we have seen, timbre and lyrics did figur
prominently in his understanding of the Whiteman style. Whatever his other
limitations, Adorno's categories of musical analysis were nothing if not wide,
and they could easily have been deployed to find in hot jazz the formal complexit
and self-conscious innovation he demanded-witness Schuller's preface to hi
analysis of the first four notes of Armstrong's "West End Blues": "The way Louis
attacks each note, the quality and exact duration of each pitch, the manner in
which he releases the note, and the subsequent split-second silence before the
next note-in other words the entire acoustical pattern-present in capsule form
all the essential characteristics of jazz inflection."l28 Attack, duration, pitch
release, spacing: ironically, precisely those "horizontal" features that the New
Music also brought to the fore (no doubt informing Schuller's analysis) and that,
appearing differently in jazz, Adorno pushed aside. Instead he chose Whiteman's
caricature of the main jazz tradition as typical, when in fact it was the North Pole
one might say, of an African-European dialectic that, as Adorno eventually, reluc
tantly-?significantly-admitted, continued to define jazz.129 In his social decoding
of jazzmania, the often self-parodying solos of the Whiteman band "reeling with
uncertainty like ... Harold Lloyd" (66), like Mickey Mouse crossed with Pete
Schlemihl,0so served to define a hot jazz style and subject that he knew exceeded
this limited portrait. The Culture Industry thesis is founded on the knockout
punch, itself cartoon-like, of "UJberJazz."
A final note: while endorsing Adorno's unforgiving gaze at Whiteman as for
once productive, we should not forget the variety of European (mis)constructions
of even the most commodified jazz, indeed the fox-trot in particular: they wer
productive in their own way. Hindemith's lost fox-trot, written for a group of
friends, including pianist Walter Gieseking, who met for informal jam sessions
must have been a fascinating rereading of the form.131 Eisenstein, in illustrating
his point that the understated or oppositional solution to a compositional problem
in film direction always "acts more unexpectedly and more sharply," adduces "th
stunning effect of Negro syncopated jazz," quoting a passage from Whiteman's
128. Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), quoted by Don DeMicha
in liner notes for The Genius of Louis Armstrong, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia Records CG 30416).
129. By 1962, Adorno admits that "there can be [little doubt] regarding the African elements i
jazz," but goes on to declare it "no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning
integrated into a strict scheme" ("Perennial Fashion," p. 122).
130. "It is a key to the success of Mickey Mouse that it translates all breaks exactly into visuals
("Nachtrige," p. 105). Schlemihl is invoked to define the 'jazz-subject" two pages earlier.
131. Kater, "TheJazz Experience," p. 149, and Different Drummers, p. 10.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
130 OCTOBER
autobiography
the original w
3+2+3 structur
ofjazz, "the f
flow of soun
music for its
"No Foolin'""34
ings of 1929
Armstrong a
in 1927 Paris:
hard to find.
improvised h
flat on his st
inspiring mat
they cannot b
changes whic
larger musica
in "Uber Jazz
have served m
street below,
denouncing t
the war drums."'37
Conclusion: Materialism Revisited
The answer to the question about the place of materialism in Adorno's

aesthetics (to gloss the theory at top speed) is that it is hidden: 'Music fulfills its
social function more accurately when, within its own material and according to its
own rules of form, it brings to articulation the social problems which it contains
132. Sergei Eisenstein, "More Thoughts on Structure" (1940), in Eisenstein, Film Essays and a Lecture,
trans. and ed. Jay Leda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 93. The Whiteman biography
is Paul Whiteman and Margaret McBride, Jazz (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), p. 119. Eisenstein seems
oblivious to the fact that Whiteman is not the best example of "Negro syncopated jazz," and that
Whiteman's observation on his demonstration-"jazz is a method of saying the old things with a twist,
with a bang, with a rhythm that makes them seem new"-confirms Adorno's commodity theory and
undetcuts the true "collision" of elements Eisenstein sought as a montage principle.
133. Piet Mondrian, The New Art-The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, trans. and ed.
Harry Holtzman and Martin S.James (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), pp. 161-62, 154.
134. Included on the cassette "Mondrian's Music" produced by the Hague Municipal Museum, EMI
Limited- Edition #RCM 466.
135. Mondrian, p. 219.
136. J. J. P. Oud's description is first cited in L. J. F. Wijsenbeck, Piet Mondrian (Recklinghausen: A.
Bongers, 1968), p. 118.
137. Adorno, "Fetish," p. 292. "They turn their hatred rather on those who point to their dependence
than on those who tie their bonds" ("On Popular Music," p. 44).

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
all the way to the inmost cells of its technique."'38

in the atomized, mechanized structures of twelve
way that is thoroughly digested, made art, by t
and history. Without the mediating effect of a t
and self-reference, art turns from handling reifica
product itself. The relationship between indust
nique must, in a word, be dialectical. Which is w
consistently capitalizes on the ambiguity (absent in
much to the confusion of his translators and rea
which is at the very fulcrum of Adorno's aesthet
problem of its "formalism" hangs in the balanc
Still, whatever its vagaries, here is a theory that
levels. But only if jazz were granted a form and
denies it.
It is a problem of begging the question or going in circles. The phonograph

record is a case in point, perhaps the case, given its essential role in jazz history,
both in transmitting music that was often unscored and played by strictly regional
organizations, and in exerting pressure on compositional length. In "The Form of
the Phonograph Record," which preceded "Uber Jazz," by two years, Adorno
pretends to lament the failure of any music that made real use of new reproductive
technologies, a "radio-" or "gramophone-specific" music, to develop. But he
immediately asserts that the transmission and compression performed by the
phonograph is simply deadly for music, "sacrificing its third dimension: its height
and abyss." The invocation of sublimity here, indeed of the Eroica a little later, is
calculated to exclude jazz in advance-or rather, to include it: by 1941, Adorno
would abuse jazz precisely for its radio-specificity. The two "match each other as if
they were patterned in the same mold." The jazz-dog (recall Hatz) "happily recog-
nizes" his master's voice. The interrupted patterns of domestic leisure are suited to
"dances composed of dull repetitions" that can be turned on and off in response
to "that 'daily need' which is the very antithesis of the humane and the artistic."139
We are beating our heads against the wall. It is time to leave a dance Adorno
shows himself uninterested in joining, but let's leave with an item that Adorno omits
in asserting that "there has been no development of phonographic composers":
I thought I could achieve an inner intensification, such as I had in

mind for the escape scene, only by a complete change of tone color. So
I hit on the incorporation of the gramophone scene, in which I gave
responsibility for furthering the action to a mechanical instrument and
to dance music. For this Tango Angdle (as I called it), I could allow
138. "Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik," part 1, Zeitschrift fir Sozialforschung, vol. 1, no. 1/2
(1932), p. 105, quoted in Buck-Morss, p. 35.
139. "The Form of the Phonograph Record" (1934), trans. Levin, October 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 56-61.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
132 OCTOBER
myself only
studies, I sco
gramophone a
Kurt Weill alw

with a variet
Three in part
Tango in ques
play), mechan
tivity ("recor
that, Adorno
wanting in ja
its 'progressi
reproduction
reactionary."1
and reproduc
arrangers, pr
the "reprodu
Mechanical re
montage is n
impressed m
emphasize ar
attitude to m
increasingly
(see note 20),
music than in
But that is f
in the passag
What do they
faked, only p
cannot be pro
letter's flatte
techniques th
the potential
that the latter
itself. The qu
wants to have
social proces
140. Kurt Weill,

Neues Theater,
Manhattan Schoo
141. Adorno to
142. Ibid., p. 12

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC
not just that the aesthetic process had, unlike m

materials; it had to choose them carefully to
Adorno's tendency to view sublimation as rep
critique of his aesthetics that we can begin t
point. In order for the synthesis of [aesthetic] c
be rooted in the elements where it is latently pr
not be cast too wide lest it drag up trash. Trash, spe
West picture on the bedroom wall and boogie
studio. "No nude Greek sculpture was a pinup."144
143. Aesthetic Theory, p. 85.

144. Ibid., p. 20.

193.54.174.3 on Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:54:10 UTC 12:34:56 UTC

Harry Cooper On "Über Jazz"

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On "Über Jazz": Replaying Adorno with the Grain

Author(s): Harry Cooper

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What lies below draws the attack upon itself

-Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.

Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

SCIENCE -> MACHINE-ISM > SWING

DECADENCE OF THE < Weakening

Accuse Adorno. With a diagram, and the po

1. Theodor W. Adorno, "UJber Jazz," Zeitschrift fiir Soz

OCTOBER 75, Winter 1996, pp. 99-133. ?01996 October Magazine

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cal invader ("war, materialism, false ideals") tha

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It is a brilliant instance of Adorno's method, this relentless skating on the

9. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, pp. xiii-xiv.

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threat/attraction of a return to matter in its lower

Odysseus is warned by Circe, that divinity of reversion to the animal,

Whereas traditionalists wail about the dehumanization of art . .. by

10. Ibid., p. 33.

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13. Adorno, Aest

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March 18, "I would be very pleased if it [the jaz

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for a pack of bloodhounds, Hatz.30 This may e

30. Adorno, "Oxforder Nachtrage" (1937), Gessamelte Sch

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agreed with Adorno about the willing participa

Spasm of the Commodity (A

Adorno estimated he spent the equivalent of f

45. Adorno, "Fetish," p. 288.

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49. This fact, wh

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originally military and marching instruments (6

61. Adorno, "Nachtrdige," p. 102.

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64. Adorno, "Per

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cubistic manifestations, and Dadaism. ... 'In the e

68. Adorno, "Reviews," p. 170; Adorno's citation is from Hob

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74. Adorno, "Sta

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products which are interested in being discovered by h

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82. Ibid., p. 95; Ek

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Although by no means the first to notice thi

91. He himself quotes Apollinaire's "ici m~me les aut

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