Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 16:46:21 +0000
From: William Winstead <stimmung-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz


Dear Ralph and others,

Your welcome to provide authoritative bibliographic information for your
views, but what would really interest me is engagement with the ideas
expressed in Adorno's essay on jazz.

I see that an article entitled "Adorno after Sun Ra" is of importance
here. I have admired Sun Ra's music for many years. And it's worth
mentioning in this context that the originality and radicality of his
music insured that he was excluded from the American jazz community
throughout his life. What were Sun Ra's views of mainstream American
jazz? It is a slavish music, he says. Sun Ra says this, not simply
Adorno. Sun Ra goes still further, and says that American culture is
simply too narrowly focused to understand his own music, and that for
this reason he constantly tours Europe, where there is some appreciation
for experimentation. Virtually the same could be said of that other
great jazz innovator, Albert Ayler. To this day, neither has been given
the acknowledgement they deserve by the American jazz community. Indeed,
it should be said, as anyone can see if they turn on "Jazz at Lincoln
Center" on PBS, that American jazz has completely turned its back on
experimentation and impotently returned to a reactionary traditionalism.

But to comment on at least one aspect of your reply: when your finished
applying a hopelessly deterministic framework to Adorno and Bloch ("we
can look back and appreciate what they produced under the conditions
under which they worked") with a naive vanity which is simply astounding
("we are not subject to the same limitations"), perhaps you could, from
your "broader perspective," provide some arguments to support your
assertion that "Adorno, Bloch, and the rest did not understand shit
about New World cultures and arbitrarily misconstrued them." Adorno, for
one, often speaks of American culture. So what *precisely* does he
misconstrue?

Kindest regards,


Bill





Ralph Dumain wrote:
> 
> One matter that can be easily cleared up: I am physically separated from my
> sources at the moment, but as soon as I am able I shall be happy to provide
> full bibliographical references for all the material I have on Adorno and
> jazz.
> 
> Otherwise, I am unimpressed by the unimaginative European cultural snobbery
> displayed by William Winstead.  The nerve of me, who didn't study with Alban
> Berg or Sigfried Kracauer, who knows little Latin and less German, to dare
> to criticize the great Adorno.  This is just too sickening.  The fact is, I
> have great admiration for both Bloch and Adorno, but they were not gods,
> they were fully products of European high culture, which is not the whole
> world.  I would love to see scholars here use their methodologies and
> recreate them for original work in cultural environments quite different
> from those in which they were originally deployed.  But is this what is
> really being done in academia, or just mechanical footnote-whoring that
> beefs up the academic knowledge industry rather than vitally addressing the
> cultural problems of our time as the great pioneers of the Frankfurt School
> and related figures actually did for theirs?   The mentality I see here is
> just shilling for intellectual elitism which means ass-kissing European high
> culture.
> 
> My statement about cultural presuppositions and the traditions upon which we
> now draw is not so mysterious.  I was absolutely frank about the difficulty
> of putting myself or anyone from a comparable background into the shoes of
> these old Europeans.  I can barely imagine what it must have been like for
> the inheritors of European bourgeois culture to strain against the
> limitations of their own culture and grope for something beyond their own
> boundaries.  How else can one explain Picasso chasing after African art,
> Stravinsky's turn to primitivism, Shoenberg's tortured efforts to escape the
> heritage of tonal art music, etc.?  These struggles represent a particular
> cultural trajectory.  This is not the same cultural trajectory of struggle
> that produced the spirituals, the blues, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington,
> Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, the cakewalk, the jitterbug,
> and a million other cultural manifestations of the USA, sepaking of black
> culture alone as its most original ingredient, not even to mention the
> cultural innovations of the Caribbean or Latin America.  The fact is,
> Adorno, Bloch, and the rest did not understand shit about New World cultures
> and arbitrarily misconstrued them.  For them, Europe was all that existed.
> We are in a much better position now, because we can look back and
> appreciate what they produced under the conditions under which they worked,
> but we are not subject to the same limitations, and we have a broader
> context in which to interpret their cultural experience as well as cultural
> experiences outside of their orbit.  What truth could be plainer?