The Dialectics of Jazz: A Critique of Theodor Adorno’s “On Jazz”
Improvisation is a type of freedom as such, and demonstrating that freedom, in front of those who wish to deny you of it, is what jazz means
Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, was a leading critical theorist of the Frankfurt School in the 20th Century. Along with his social and cultural critiques — critiques substantiated through the class analysis of Marxism — he was also a musicologist, composer, and philosopher.
What interested him, as a musicologist and composer, was to juxtapose the creative rationalisms of the classical masters, those who approached their realities with confrontation (a struggle, of sorts), who also never avoided the strains of musical discourse, with the kitsch that looks for “short-cuts,” the atypical 1–4–5 chord progression. A kitsch which Adorno would possibly reproach with disdain as an exemplar of a “cultural fetish,” one marked by the ontology of its “standardization,” which manifests as “commodity fetishization.” He bridged the notion of commodity fetishization with reification, which is the way in which people forfeit their inner freedom by committing to objects outside themselves. For Adorno, their freedom was fossilized within objects that represent them.
