From: "Ralph Dumain" <rdumain-AT-agc.org>
Subject: Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz
Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 00:29:43 -0400


I don't think I shall waste my time addressing Adorno's ignorant piffle
about jazz.  And what I would suggest here, since certain individuals are
raising the issue of credentials--how dare you criticize the great
Frankfurters unless you can prove you're properly certified!--that the
burden is on you to show that you actually know something about jazz and
African-American music before accepting some stuffy German's pontifications
as a serious viewpoint with authoritative pretensions.   Adorno was an
expert on Shoenberg's dismal shit; about jazz he knew zero.  Case dismissed.

Now there is a larger issue worthy of discussion, whether Adorno's general
approach to aesthetic experience can be trusted, or whether he takes certain
shortcuts, such as postulating appropriate aesthetic reactions based on
sociological presumptions about what a work or a form represents.  In the
realm of literary criticism, Adorno's aesthetic ideas have been challenged
by Hans Robert Jauss, rather convincingly, I think.   (Again, I don't have
the material at hand, but I can look it up eventually.)   More generally,
I'm not impressed by the grim, puritanical asceticism that seems to have
motivated Adorno's entire personality and his morbid fear of somehow being
co-opted by daring to enjoy something, God forbid it should be commercially
successful.   A person who can't smile should be strangled with the nearest
pillow, thus putting said useless individual out of his misery and sparing
the rest of us his insufferable snobbery.

Now when we get to the subject of Sun Ra and the history of jazz, there is
much to talk about.  However, the lion's share of the discussion would be an
in-depth discussion of the subject matter itself, before even a syllable is
uttered on behalf of anything the Frankfurters or their academic whores
might have to say about what they don't know.  First, the empirical material
discussed in depth, then philosophical generalization.  The would-be
educators must first be educated, because they think they are starting out f
rom a position of advantage when they are really beginning with their
fingers up their ass.  And that is because the study of the Frankfurt School
in the USA serves a social function quite at variance with its original
objectives.  The purpose is not to analyze American society with the aim of
being able to do original thinking and explain something to someone's rather
it is to take refuge in European  theory as a way of wallowing in one's own
intellectual alienation and constipated professional specialization.  Once
this subtext becomes clear,  the behavior of the mavens of critical theory
becomes much easier to understand.

Now that we have dispensed with the useless noise contained in your post,
let's move on to Sun Ra.  I don't have much to say about Albert Ayler at the
moment, but I do have a lot to say about Sun Ra, of which I'll share just a
little.   There are not-so-flattering volumes to be written about Wynton
Marsalis' place in the music biz, but I save him for later.

(1) It is not merely the music itself that got Sun Ra marginalized in the
standard jazz community.  Others managed to survive doing equally far out
music because they managed to adapt to the way the jazz business works.
Coltrane grew dissatisfied with the nightclub scene, but he was for most of
his career capable of surviving within it.  Coltrane was as much a religious
mystic as Sun Ra, but he was much more subdued in his outward behavior and
the structure of his operation if not the music itself was not inconsistent
with the nightclub business.  Trane wore tuxedos to his gigs.  He had a
quartet rather than a big band.  His musicians occasionally recorded their
own albums and he had a record of working with others on theirs.  In other
words, he was capable of more or less conforming to the way business was
done regardless of the innovations in the music itself.  Sun Ra did OK at
outdoor hippie festivals in the 60s,  but naturally his style did not
conform to the restricted 50s nightclub mentality.  We could add to this
that he was largely a self-contained operation: he lived communally with his
musicians.  Professionally, he and most of his people were set apart from
the rest of the jazz community.  I remember seeing John Gilmore do some
independent  work, but I just don't recall Ra's other musicians moving from
group to group or recording with a whole lot of other groups.  Ra's
mysticism was a major part of his act rather than a private belief.  Imagine
what the old-fashioned DOWN BEAT reader wold make out of Su Ra, set somewhat
apart from the ethos created by that part of the music industry.

Which is not to say that Ra was without his cult following.  But Ra's ethos
is not the same as the nightclub singer who sings "The Lady is a Tramp"
while some patron in a dimly lit room is trying to slip his hand up his
date's dress.  So there are extra-musical reasons why Ra was apart form the
jazz community much more severely than other equally eccentric individuals.
Ornette performed in clubs--didn't he?  Coltrane performed in clubs.  Shepp
performed in clubs.  Mingus, Dolphy .... Not that they had a rosy time in
the music business, but Ra did not fit in to the usual structure of the
business.  Though of course Ra recorded albums with conventional labels as
well as his own.  Ra played club dates as well as concerts.  I used to see
Ra at the Kilimanjaro in DC and got to pee next to Pat Patrick in the men's
room.

Now what are we to conclude from that, either about his music or about other
jazz musicians?  There is much that could be said about the conditioning of
musical forms by institutional parameters and restraints--about all forms of
music. But it's not just the music that set Ra apart.  Hell, I used to see
Anthony Braxton in nightclubs!  So I'm not interested in facile
explanations, e.g. that Ra must have made more advanced music because he
wasn't "popular".

(2) In contrast to Sun Ra's actual music, the only interesting thing about
his extra-musical ideology is how thoroughly reactionary it all is.  Hence
any commentary about slavishness would be laughable were it not so tragic.
Sun Ra was too big to permit his mind to be limited by Alabama, so he made
Saturn his spiritual home.  But even here he reveals the smallness of
Alabama as it has shaped his own thoroughly reactionary ideology.  There is
a Hegelian tragedy here that speaks volumes about the history of Black
America, even its greatest eccentrics.  I believe I have come to understand
it.  But here is where I stop, because you haven't proved that you deserve
to learn more, and you see, there is much more at stake than intellectual
palaver.

-----Original Message-----
From: William Winstead <stimmung-AT-earthlink.net>
Date: Tuesday, May 04, 1999 4:42 PM
Subject: Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz

 >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.