From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk>
Date:          Thu, 6 May 1999 16:26:55 +0000
Subject:       Ernst Bloch on Jazz? A serious question


So let me ask the serious question: Does anyone know of a more 
serious consideration of jazz or jazz-related phenomena by Ernst 
Bloch. More serious than the vehement equation of jazz-dance and 
vomit in "The Principle of Hope".

Jazz is such a huge and varied phenomena that it has lent its name to 
the very decades in which Bloch was most active in developing his 
critical ideas. What we think of as Weimar Culture, the age of 
Expressionism giving way to the New Objectivity (sometimes referred 
to as the New Sobriety) was in the USA the jazz-age. And if one reads 
any really good writings about - such as the essay on THE JAZZ AGE by 
Scott Fitzgerald - one is immediately struck by the many parallels 
with all the diffuse and contradictory impulses of the 60s, as 
another explosion of "youth culture". 

[Exploited by the culture industies, Fred van Gelder, but surely not simply 
produced by them alone...]

And if "youth" was showing its silly and contradictory face, then 
both the jazz age and the 60s also witnessed a new assertiveness on 
the part of women, and above all of blacks. I dont want to simplify 
any of this... And I am not out to castigate Bloch for not being even 
more responsive than he was. (And at the age of 90 Bloch was of 
course lionised by the Student Movement and justly so... He appeared 
on their stages and showed how ably the categories of his thought 
were able to serve as a medium for the dreams of the new youth.]

So let us not over simplify... Jazz is many things and many things 
may be called jazz... but as a historical moment 

(1) jazz has a lot to do with popular (even folk) traditions
(2) jazz is played on the same instruments as "classical music" 
(although not only)
(3) like the best classical music, jazz involves close ENSEMBLE 
playing and IMPROVISATION...
(4) the intimate relationship between developments of modern and 
modernist composition (Schoenberg, Stockhausen amongst others) and 
the development of jazz has been shown by the subsequent development 
of these two streams of music. Today in music, and also in serious 
dance... the two are so intimately bound up with one another... 
(5) the emergence of jazz in the 20s and 30s is a very important 
aspect of the cultural shifts whereby modernism moves into late 
modernism and eventually into postmodernism. {I dont want these 
labels to provoke more mud-slinging and the vehement exchange of 
labels. I just want to say that any way you cut it, jazz is a very 
very important and complex historical phenomenon.]
(6) jazz is a historical phenomenon. Some people are so affected by 
the enthusiasms of their youth that their tastes remain frozen. 
"Trad-jazz" is much beloved these days and far from the threatening, 
hard-edged thing it once was. Jimi Hendrix alarmed lots of rock music 
enthusiasts when he first started pushing at the boundaries. He was a 
good musician and his riffs today have a "classic" air and its hard 
for anyone who did not catch the excitement the first time round to 
feel it now. 
(7) the discussion inevitably shifts from analysis, to matters of 
taste, and to responses not necessarily mediated by the intellect 
(although still analysable).....

Adorno's piece on jazz is full of insights. But it is undialectical. 
He accused Walter Benjamin of an uncritical, undialectical 
endorsement of the popular medium of film in his "Work of Art" essay. 
Benjamin, in response pleaded with Adorno that the younger man see 
that the two essays could be read side by side, each pointing to 
dialectical complexities not captured in either prose piece. 

I have every sympathy with this view. I read the two essays in the 
early 70s and both were influential in my developing enthusiasm for 
the perspectives of the Frankfurt School. I still dont feel compelled 
to choose between them.

Finally, anyone interested in jazz and politics in the Nazi period 
should read the introduction to THE BRASS SAXOPHONE by Josef 
Skovercky (sp?!]

Lloyd Spencer
School of Media