Description
Book SynopsisA sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive. Nevertheless, Adorno does have faith in the critical potential of some musical traditions. Music, he suggests, can provide insight into the controlling, destructive nature of modern society while offering a glimpse of more empathetic and less violent ways of being together in the world. Taking Adorno down a path he did not go, this book calls attention to an alternative sociality made manifest in jazz. In response to writing that tends to portray it as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, Fumi Okiji makes the case for jazz as a model of "gathering in difference."Noting that this mode of subjectivity emerged in response to the distinctive history of black America, she reveals that the music cannot but call the integrity of the world into question.
Trade Review"A lucidly argued, historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and timely book,
Jazz as Critique redraws our maps of the relationship between black cultures, jazz music, and critical theory." -- Alexander G. Weheliye * Northwestern University *
"Fumi Okiji combines a serious understanding of Adorno with a powerful portrayal of the black experience in the United States and melds it all with an encyclopedic knowledge of and respect for the jazz tradition. The world needs a book like this, as much as it needs jazz." -- Martin Shuster * Goucher College *
"This important and engagingly written study offers new angles of vision on Adorno's notorious 'jazz critique,' on the nature of the jazz work, and on jazz's utopian promise. Informed both by a judicious reading of Adorno and by considerable jazz literacy, it illuminates the intersections of critical theory, jazz studies, and African American studies." -- Lorenzo C. Simpson * Stony Brook University *
"
Jazz As Critique serves as an invaluable resource for thinking about the types of listening and conversations that need to take place in order to confront today's outstanding racial injustice and inequalities." -- Alexander K. Rothe, Core Lecturer * Columbia University *
"Okiji's book is a rare treat, unexpected in its outcome, and unconventional in its methodological approach." -- James B. Haile III *
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *
"At stake in Okiji's text is not whether Adorno could have changed his mind about jazz but rather whether Black expression can, and should, change its mind about Adorno." -- Mark Christian Thompson *
Monatshefte *
Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Jazz, Individualism, and the Black Modern chapter abstract
This chapter seeks to establish the socio-historical basis of an alternate subjectivity, a gathering in difference in jazz, in contrast to the claims presented by some commentators—shown to relate more closely to the historical trajectory of the bourgeois. The inattention of both Adorno and jazz critics to the significance of a distinctive black American subject is shown to be a crucial oversight. It is argued that the notion of personal sovereignty (and its loss) must be seen as subordinate to fundamental everyday, often passive, battles between black life and how society tends to define it beyond recognition, the sequela of the dehumanization of African captives. This distinction is crucial to appreciating the manner in which jazz and other black expressive forms contribute to a model of a possible praxis.
2Double Consciousness and the Critical Potential of Black Expression chapter abstract
According to Adorno, autonomous works of art, by virtue of their peculiar attuned-outsider perspective, are ideally positioned to provide a kind of social critique. Although implicated socio-historically in the advance of techno-rationality—in fact, because they are so implicated—musical works are able, in rearticulating available musical material, to expose the poor state of human relations within late capitalist society. It is essential to consider black expression's attuned-outsiderness within the specific historical and material conditions from which it emerged. These provide an alternative vantage to that of radical music of the European tradition. Resting on Nahum Chandler's illuminating interpretation of W.E.B. Du Bois's ideas concerning double consciousness, this chapter draws to the fore the importance of African America's contradictory nature, the critical character of its obligatory retention of conflicting positions. The chapter culminates in a discussion of jazz syncopation as a manifestation of this.
3Black Dwelling, a Refuge for the Homeless chapter abstract
This chapter frames some key turns of the study's central argument within a universalist inclination in black radical thought and expression. The chapter focuses on the opportunity the disjuncture between blackness and the world presents, and how it allows us to speculate on the broad ethical implications of black living in critical reflection on the world. Black wordlessness and homelessness are put into conversation with Adorno's ethics of resistance, particularly the imploration to not be at home in one's home. It is suggested that an embrace of blackness is a way to give up one's place in the world, and the prerequisite to any utopic future.
4Storytelling, Sound, and Silence chapter abstract
This chapter establishes the aesthetic terms of jazz's social character by showing that the tension between wanting to tell communal stories and doing so with distinction permeates jazz work and tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," on black thought, and on the music itself, a descriptive formulation of collaborative work in jazz is advanced. Storytelling in jazz scholarship has traditionally been associated with the linearity and coherence of the individual solo, with values modeled closely on those of the modern European tradition. The inadequacy of such approaches is discussed. The chapter shows how the elision between sound and sense (an evasion of designation but also a refusal to relinquish meaning) enabled black music to continue to communicate content of social significance, despite being faced with traumas comparable to those that have robbed Benjamin's storytelling community of its ability to communicate experience.
5Postscript: Some Thoughts on the Inadequacy and Indispensability of Jazz Records chapter abstract
The study concludes with a dialectical riffing on the indispensability and the inadequacy of jazz recording as a representative of the music's principles of structuration. It is suggested that jazz recording is destructive, that it congeals and obscured how jazz work is done and compromises the incompletion, partiality, and imperfection encoded the practice. And yet, jazz records are shown to be of crucial importance to the way the tradition has developed, particularly for how it has democratized study and has facilitated inter-generational collaborations while retaining the features of oral tradition.
Introduction chapter abstract
This introductory chapter sketches the broad strokes of the argument that unfolds over the course of the book. A recording of the Charles Mingus Sextet at Cornell University anchors the chapter. In it is heard socio-musical work that appears to instantiate Adorno's ideas of art's potential for providing social theory. It prepares the ground for the extended conversation staged between the critical theorist and black thought and expression.
