Abstract

Adorno's essay “On Jazz” of 1936 sees jazz as a commodity in the culture industry and as merely a perverted form of symbolic revolt against social injustice. This assessment is often echoed in his later work referring to jazz. He consequently fails to respond to the detail of the dynamic and rapid development of jazz in the twentieth century. This failure can be seen as a result of some of his assumptions about philosophical approaches to music. Adorno's focus on “what jazz is really saying in social terms” is part of his aim to construct “social theory by dint of the explication of aesthetic right and wrong in the heart of the [musical] objects.” Aesthetic judgment is therefore given priority over attempts to understand the practice of jazz in relation to its social and political contexts. The significance of cultural forms like jazz as expressions of social tensions and resistance to oppression is thus neglected. At the same time, jazz's significance as a model of modern expressive sociality, which has played a role in resistance to oppression of Black Americans, can be productively analyzed using other aspects of Adorno's approach to modern music. Adorno himself, though, largely fails to do this.