Jazz and philosophy

[Nate Dorward]

A passing thought today prompted a question--have any philosophers had much of interest to say about jazz?


(To forestall the unsympathetic: I mean "of interest, assuming you're interested in modern philosophy & in jazz".)

[al j]

A philosopher in his own right, HL Mencken thought jazz was "crude and childish."

[chuckyd4]

Theodor Adorno has quite a bit to say about jazz, based on very little knowledge of it, and I think mostly dealing with swing era stuff and before. It makes for interesting reading (if you can parse what the hell Adorno is usually talking about), and all kinds of fun pompous shit to disagree with.

The Adorno Reader - a nice collection - has some of this stuff in it. I would also recommend Minima Moralia, which while not really dealing with jazz has some interesting reflections on American culture in general.

[Nate Dorward]

Maybe rather than "interesting" I should have said "illuminating". "Jazz, Perennial Fashion" in Prisms is one of the stupidest things Adorno ever wrote. People usually defend Adorno by pointing out he made no distinction between jazz & the more banal reaches of pop music, but in that essay he has foolish swipes at Louis Armstrong & the beboppers too.

[walto]

I'll browse around my books and see if I can find any references. I know Aldous Huxley made a few unsympathetic remarks, but he wasn't really a philosopher.

Any particular reason for this query, Nate?

[Nate Dorward]

Pity about the typo in the thread title--maybe I'll ask Lois if she can fix it.

One was just a general feeling that while there's plenty of philosophical writing about music & its philosophical implications my impression was that it was always composed music. The immediate context was my reading Larry Kart's Jazz in Search of Itself & thinking that (1) his elaboration of an explicit theory about jazz as the expression of an "intelligible I" (the words are quoted by Kart from Dahlgren's Esthetics of Music) is I think virtually unique in a jazz-criticism canon that tends to be more historical, narrowly polemical or Leavisian "close-reading" in focus (I'm probably in the last camp myself); (2) Larry's approach seems to me in many ways very akin to the work of one of the more conceptual of contemporary literary critics, Charles Altieri (from what I know of it--primarily Canons and Consequences & Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry), because of Altieri's insistence on the way poetry presents "models" of feeling/world-making/agency; (3) on the other hand in thinking about Larry's book, & wanting to write about it for a friend's magazine, it occurred to me it would be useful to see what alternative theoretical/philosophical/aesthetic positions had been taken explicitly about jazz and improvisation. I think this is ultimately important for how you judge his book because, while to some extent its claims about the claims music makes on us aren't specific to jazz, mostly they do seem specific to jazz & especially to the period of music he's dealing with: the book isn't hostile to contemporary pop music by any means (there's a sympathetic account of Zappa in there for instance) & there's still plenty of contemporary jazz Larry's engaged by (even though it's not explicitly tackled in the book, which mostly deals with things up to the 1980s, breaking off rather depressingly in the middle of "the neo-Con game" as he calls it; but there's a rollcall of some of his favourite contemporary players in the introduction). But the general feeling of the book as a whole (or my reading, anyway) is that jazz is/was an experiment in self-expression that is/was unique in music history & which is now gradually (both within & without jazz as a genre) fragmenting & turning into something else, which will probably set its own aesthetic agenda but which he cannot be as deeply involved in as he was with the jazz that formed his own character & aesthetic thinking.


Pardon the tortuous sentences.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Originally Posted by Nate Dorward

Pardon the tortuous sentences.

Amnesty International has already been alerted.

°°°°°°°°


"For the moment it's the jazz that's playing, there's no melodie, only notes, a host of little jolts. They know no rest, an unchanging order gives birth to them and destroys them, without ever giving them time to recover, to exist for themselves. They run, they hurry, they strike me with a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I should quite like to hold them back, but I know that if I managed to top one, nothing would remain but a vulgar, doleful sound. I must accept their death, I must even will it; I know few harsher or stronger impressions."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea


**


"Too much music deafens the ear, too much taste dulls the palate."

-- Lao Tzu

[Sand]

I don't know. This has been discussed in a long running radio program about Jazz ond Philosophy on National Public Radio (Norway) and I believe the conclusion was that it was a funny link and they're working on making the connection between jazz and philosophy continually. I've got to leave for a party and store these here for later. I may even translate a short paragraph.

Back & Edit:

From one of those Jazz & Philosophy proprams :
...


This change in jazz is decisive for Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng in a philosophical sense. With an MA in philosophy he sat at a club in New York listening to Thelonious Monk Quartet. And he discovered that the style of playing fit the developement in philosophy that interested him perfectly.

Briefly, this change in the history of philosophy - that starts with Kierkegaard, continues with Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre - is about the following, simple observation:
Man is born free, thrown into the world, and is himself responsible for his own life.. Not only that: Even Nietzche notes: Man is like a tree - with roots, and if you forget that we have roots, and focus on the crown (brains, intellect), then the roots (feelings) will riot. Once more: The existential philosophers claims that we are organisms - and that the intellect/mind in no way is more important than gut feelings, hold, laughter, sorrow and joy.



Today they air a program about Woody Herman and Voltaire, twice :-)

[Nate Dorward]

Woody Herman & Voltaire! The mind reels......

[Saxman7]

Originally Posted by walto

I'll browse around my books and see if I can find any references. I know Aldous Huxley made a few unsympathetic remarks, but he wasn't really a philosopher.

Speaking of Huxley:

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible, is music." Aldous Huxley

And then there's this, which while not specifically about jazz, sure describes jazz musicians, or for that matter sincere musicians of any genre:

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
--Albert Einstein

And of course, that wise "philosopher" Charlie Parker, when asked what religion he was, "I'm a devout musician".....

I know the famous Sufi Master, Hazrat Inayat Khan, also a musician, has written a few great spiritual/philosophical books on music & sound.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...557937-0088857

[Sand]

Originally Posted by Nate Dorward

Woody Herman & Voltaire! The mind reels......

That's just fine :-) In this case you must remember that Voltaire was not an original thinker, he passed on the new insights of his time - and he was unique in that respect.
Some of the jazz connections here are far-fetched. It's the process of talking about these analogies that is interesting. Some excamples are well chosen.

Philosopher Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng, however, is dead serious about his anologies.

Kvaløy is one of three contributors to the paper I am mentioning at the end of this post and that paper is related to this paragraph from a short portrait of Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng:

At the moment he is involved in the interdisciplinary NTNU project Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Improvisation, in which researchers from different subject areas such as music, philosophy, and social anthropology seek to explore the concept of improvisation, a concept which up to now has been somewhat neglected.
“We use the word “improvisation” in two ways. First, to imply a fallback solution to which we have recourse when our usual solutions fail. But also as an ideal way forward, based on what we can call acquired readiness-skills, in such artistic fields as jazz, and also as the ultimate solution in many emergencies,” the improvisation researcher explains. It is the second of these conceptions that has intrigued several of the researchers at NTNU, and they study its manifestation on two levels: on the one hand those spontaneous, comprehensive solutions arrived at by individuals, and on the other hand the “improvisation-readiness” possessed collectively by a society. Setreng and the other researchers at NTNU have compared how improvisation functions on these two levels, and they believe that they have gained new, intriguing insights.
“Among other things, these insights relate to the strength and vitality versus vulnerability of both individuals and society as a whole,” says the improvisation researcher.

(For me, my impro posting here, turned out to be very useful for me personally. It may not be serendipitious, but I suddenly found a paper I had been looking for in 2001! Sorry, the paper "Improvisare necesse est" is not in English.)

[Sand]

Now, Nate, would you find this useful?

Improvisation on a triple theme:
Creativity, Jazz Improvisation and
Communication

[clinthopson]

We're all philosophers of a sort, therefore there's a whole buncha philosophy goin' on right here!

[Nate Dorward]

Sand--thanks for the pointer to that piece--I'm just finishing up an assignment for this evening but will look at it more closely shortly.

[Sand]

Originally Posted by Nate Dorward

Sand--thanks for the pointer to that piece--I'm just finishing up an assignment for this evening but will look at it more closely shortly.

Yeah, I know everything about assignments right now :-)
Looking forward to your impressions. Though, that is not an assignment...

[Gary Sisco]

One of the (many) odd things about Adorno is that, for all of his critical theory and yacka yacka, culture for him was necessarily European "high culture." In short, what we might call, um, bourgeois culture. I mean, since we bring it up and all. His knowledge of or even interest in jazz isn't worth talking about, even for him.

This is an oddity about radicals of that generation that I've noticed in many other cases. Very often, music for them is euroclassical music, up to, perhaps, the late romantics, but usually not even that far.

A notable example with a major inconsistency is my good friend and mentor, Murray Bookchin, for whom music *is* euroclassical music up til, say, Brahms. He knows essentially nothing about jazz and isn't much interested in finding out about it, but he absolutely adores Thelonious Monk, whom he heard live in the days at the Five Spot. We've been friends for many years and Monk is our only common musical ground.

[Sand]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

One of the (many) odd things about Adorno is that, for all of his critical theory and yacka yacka, culture for him was necessarily European "high culture." In short, what we might call, um, bourgeois culture. I mean, since we bring it up and all. His knowledge of or even interest in jazz isn't worth talking about, even for him.

This is an oddity about radicals of that generation that I've noticed in many other cases. Very often, music for them is euroclassical music, up to, perhaps, the late romantics, but usually not even that far.

A notable example with a major inconsistency is my good friend and mentor, Murray Bookchin, for whom music *is* euroclassical music up til, say, Brahms. He knows essentially nothing about jazz and isn't much interested in finding out about it, but he absolutely adores Thelonious Monk, whom he heard live in the days at the Five Spot. We've been friends for many years and Monk is our only common musical ground.

What you are pointing out was also pointed out by Eric Hobsbawn in The Jazz Scene. But there are notable exception, you know, sometimes related to geopraphy.

Regarding the pdf I have supplied: It does have further observations by a Monk fan, philosopher, and farmer - if that helps.
Keywords are Complexity, Creativity, Improvisation, Interdisciplinary research, Pedagogy, Philosophy

and Bergson, Kvaløy, Derrida, etc

Don't miss that one.

[Tom Hall]

Not all philosophy, but lots of writing about improv, including an annotaed bibliography. Have Fun!

INTERNATIONAL IMPROVISED MUSIC ARCHIVE
"To provide a permanent, international forum for texts on improvised music"

http://www20.brinkster.com/improarchive/contents.htm

[Pedantic Wretch]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

One of the (many) odd things about Adorno is that, for all of his critical theory and yacka yacka, culture for him was necessarily European "high culture." In short, what we might call, um, bourgeois culture. I mean, since we bring it up and all. His knowledge of or even interest in jazz isn't worth talking about, even for him.

This is an oddity about radicals of that generation that I've noticed in many other cases. Very often, music for them is euroclassical music, up to, perhaps, the late romantics, but usually not even that far.

Actually to give him credit, Adorno was a champion of Schoenberg and his ideas before they had any widespread acceptance; 'high culture' possibly, but not establishment culture. The 20th century 'classical' avant garde - either from the serialist angle or the experimental Cagean one - has not undergone the same level of bourgeois assimilation as late romantic music.

Adorno's objection to jazz (from the little exposure he had to it) was its links to mainstream commodified 'entertainment music'; perhaps if he'd heard something like Albert Ayler he might have been forced to change his mind... doubtful though, I concede. His comments on jazz may be short-sighted, but I would still argue Adorno's writings on aesthetics and their social basis have not lost any of their relevance to contemporary discussion.

[Uli]

Here is a recent review of a book on Adorno that kinda confirms PeeWee's take. sfar as I am concerned, Adorno's aesthetics are dead:

Adorno as Antidote
By Jamie Daniel March 9, 2005

The work of Theodor Adorno, the German-Jewish social and cultural theorist who died in 1969, isn’t likely ever to become “popular.” From the essays on modernist music written in the early days of the Third Reich before he was forced to seek exile in New York in 1938 to the series of densely complex studies of Kant and Hegel written after his postwar repatriation, he produced an intimidating body of work that has consistently provoked antipathy among anti-intellectuals on both the right and the left.

Born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a well-off secular Jewish family, Adorno grew up in a kind of hyper-acculturated environment that it is now difficult to imagine. Weekend afternoons were spent playing double-concertos on the family’s two grand pianos; when he was in his teens, the family hired cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer to tutor the young Teddy in his study of Kant. There is no record anywhere of his ever having had to work for wages. He was a talented musician and for a time was a protégé of Vienna School composer Alban Berg. He decided instead to take a doctorate in philosophy, writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard.

On the eve of a promising career at his hometown university, he was stunned to find himself barred from teaching there because he was a Jew. Like so many other German Jews from privileged backgrounds, he seriously underestimated the threat posed by the Third Reich. Only considerable efforts by his friends convinced him to finally leave Germany in 1934.

But unlike other exiles such as Herbert Marcuse, who became a Californian, if not an American, Adorno never took to the United States. And it didn’t take to him. Regularly criticized by fellow researchers in New York for acting “so foreign,” he would be caricatured again posthumously by American cultural studies advocates of the ’80s, who condemned him as the para-digmatic European elitist because of his aversion to what he derided as the “culture industry.” Adorno famously loathed both American jazz and Hollywood movies, once declaring provocatively that he liked everything about the experience of going to the movies except what was on the screen.

Lisa Yun Lee’s new scholarly study, Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno, signals a welcome shift in the U.S. reception of this challenging theorist. Grounding her study not in the culture wars, but in the questions raised by feminism and other so-called identity-based scholarship, Lee gets beyond the usual reduction of Adorno’s work to a face-off between mass-produced entertainment and the high modernist aesthetics he championed. Instead, she opens up a conversation on the much more important central focus of his work—its persistent analysis of the extraordinarily pernicious impact of capitalism, not just on popular culture but on our perception, our bodily experience and, ultimately, our capacity for humanity.

No one was better than Adorno at dissecting the psychic and emotional brutality of capitalism’s regimes of commodification and the increasing pressure it exerts on individuals to define themselves through consumption. This, he argued, led to the compulsion to shut off one’s capacity for empathy, whether with working people whose labor produces commodities (how could we shop at Wal-Mart otherwise?) or those whose homes, lives and futures are being sacrificed in the name of a market-friendly abstraction called “Iraqi freedom.”

Adorno referred to this “shut off” compulsion in refreshingly severe terms, calling it “the mechanism of psychic mutilation upon which present conditions depend for their survival.” As Lee suggests, he surely would have had much to say about our contemporary equivalent of proto-Nazi “body culture,” in which such perverse phenomena as full-body cosmetic “extreme makeovers” have moved from creepy evidence of psychopathology to prime-time entertainment.

Thus, those who assume that Adorno was politically conservative because he didn’t like American mass culture don’t look closely enough at why he didn’t like it—they miss the deep ideological interconnectedness he traced between subjectivity, consumption, production, the conditions of possibility for empathy and, with this, political agency. Because he saw these questions as interconnected, his work can be very hard to read. Yes, it is stylistically complex to an extent that can repel even those who agree with his analysis—“Critique of Capitalism for Dummies” this is not. But I would argue that the complexity is necessary to accommodate his consistent constellations of concerns.

As was the case for the late Edward Said, Adorno did not consider his responsibilities or values as a cultural critic in any way separable from those that obliged him to intervene in public debates over politics and social questions, especially after his repatriation in post-war Germany. He intentionally blurred the distinctions we’ve come to expect between, say, essays on culture and works of sociology, philosophy or political commentary.

Adorno examined the phenomenon of highly commodified mass culture not to get people to read Beckett rather than go to the movies (although he clearly wished we would). Rather, it was a site he could use to expose the seepage of what SUNY professor Rosemary Hennessy has termed “capitalonormativity” into every aspect of modern life.

In one of the autobiographical essays he wrote before his death, Said wrote, “Those of us who are American intellectuals owe it to our country to fight the coarse anti-intellectualism, bullying, injustice and provincialism that disfigure its career as the last superpower.” As a German intellectual who survived his own country’s catastrophic attempt at empire, Adorno provides us with a valuable counter-model to the dumbing down of public discourse upon which the Bush administration relied to win the last presidential election, and upon which its “bullying and provincial” foreign policy depends.

Lee’s book, which engages this work with a generous combination of critical intelligence and compassion, provides us with ample reasons to accept that challenge.

[Pedantic Wretch]

Originally Posted by Uli

sfar as I am concerned, Adorno's aesthetics are dead:

I wouldn't expect any other sentiment from one who apparently voluntarily left Europe to live the 'American dream'.

[Uli]

Originally Posted by Pedantic Wretch

I wouldn't expect any other sentiment from one who apparently voluntarily left Europe to live the 'American dream'.

It's not a sentiment it's more based on rational thingking, PW. And "My American Dream" is not corponormalty or culture industry which nowadays is much more global than sipmply American.

[walto]

Originally Posted by Pedantic Wretch

Actually to give him credit, Adorno was a champion of Schoenberg and his ideas before they had any widespread acceptance....

Well, if that's true, he's one up on our buddy Warburton, who hasn't yet come around to Schoenberg's serial stuff, apparently.

[Nate Dorward]

Well even Adorno is rather ambivalent about the serialist stuff at times--the retrospective essay in Prisms for instance expresses its doubts, suggesting at one point that it can be just a way of mechanically crunching out serialist gavottes, fugues, &c.

Tom--thanks for the link to the site--some useful materials archived there.

[Nate Dorward]

Sand--truthfully I don't find the essay you linked to very useful--it's OK but just recycles familiar motifs from Berliner, Bailey, et al, or indeed virtually every essay in The Other Side of Nowhere. At least the anecdotes are sometimes entertaining, including the author's own experience accompanying Ben Webster late in life. I'm slightly puzzled that the author cites Thad Jones as the author of this passage:

Here the aesthetics of presence holds unrestrictedly. You give yourself up,
surrender without ulterior motives; egoism and spirit of competition
yield for generosity, presence and interdependence. One develops a presence
that is like telepathic intuition …during such moments, improvisation
is like the language that develops between two loving partners and
that usually is called eroticism.

Did Thad Jones really go in for gradschoolspeak ("aesthetics of presence")? The footnote cites this from a book by a different author & I wonder if there's just been some filecard mixup here or something.

[Gary Sisco]

For me, he killed his ideas himself, with the negative dialectic of reason, a self-created box of despair from which there is no resolution or escape.

Matters not, now, as the world he was describing and reacting to no longer exists.

You can't step in the same river twice, and all of that.

[Sand]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

For me, he killed his ideas himself, with the negative dialectic of reason, a self-created box of despair from which there is no resolution or escape.

Matters not, now, as the world he was describing and reacting to no longer exists.

You can't step in the same river twice, and all of that.

Hektor Rottweiler wrote "Über Jazz" in 1936 to provoke. And 80 years later - here we are.

[Gary Sisco]

Yeah, here we are.

[Sand]

Originally Posted by Nate Dorward

Sand--truthfully I don't find the essay you linked to very useful--it's OK but just recycles familiar motifs from Berliner, Bailey, et al, or indeed virtually every essay in The Other Side of Nowhere. At least the anecdotes are sometimes entertaining, including the author's own experience accompanying Ben Webster late in life.

Thanks for the feedback! You may be right in a way. The bass player is not a professional philosopher. In fact, my colleagues, in the HR field deal with many of the same sources. What you probably won't see rehashed everywhere is the ideas of eco philosopher Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng. The bass player does not elaborate too much on him here. It's too brief.
But that's the lead I was trying to give.

My knowledge of philosophers are mostly second or third-hand. I am not alone. (Thought I'd mention it)

Re eco philosophers, a random clip, as I don't have time for more right now:
Eco-philosophy is a relatively new field of inquiry. Everywhere it is still a small undercurrent in philosophy. The literature is hard to find and translations are rare. Therefore one easily supposes ecophilosophy to be much more uniform than it really is. Also my knowledge of the literature is limited, but fortunately I have obtained a sizeable part of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon eco-philosophical literature, and acquired some grasp of the German one. If one only considers Norway, the pioneer country of eco-philosophy, there were already in 1970's at least four different branches of ecological thinking: Arne Næss' "økosofi" with ethics based on equality among species, Sigmund Kvaløy's "økofilosofi" emphasizing ceaseless change in societies and persons, Hjalmar Hegge's historical criticism of the scientific world-view, and Peter Zapfe's "biosofi" underscoring how humans create the way of their existence.

[Gary Sisco]

Murray Bookchin precedes all of them, with his "Ecology And Revolutionary Thought," from 1964 (written in '63 but published later), and had already developed the ideas of his social ecology, along with libertarian municipalism (its praxis) by the time the others jumped on the wagon. He's also not a misanthrope.