Why did he hate jazz ?

How come he couldn't recognize Jazz as complex avant garde music?

Don't listen to the idiots above. Read On Jazz, you can find it easily by googling. It's not very long and is a great piece even if you don't agree with his conclusions. Although I don't expect anyone on this board to actually know enough about Jazz to refute Adorno's argument.

How many tweed jackets do you own?

Tired: Adorno was right about jazz, it's capitalist degeneracy encouraging consumption
Wired: Jazz is a product of American impoverished living, so of course some of it will be about being base, and consuming. Because in capitalism that is what the working class does. This shows Adorno had little connection with the working class of the time. Famous Jazz musicians in America visited, temporarily lived in, or even permanently moved to the Soviet Union when the opportunity came after World War I; but most of all during the Great Depression. Many of the greatest Jazz musicians had at the very least Socialist sympathies. Adorno's analysis failed to hit the mark.
Hard Wired: Adorno looks like a hard boiled egg

Hotwired: Adorno turns former child stars into sex symbols

Because when Adorno died there was no avant-garde jazz. Only bebop.

Tired: Adorno
Electrical Fire Wired: Scaruffi

Because despite all his critical theory, he couldn't see the deep intellectualist/mind bias of European culture, where music is supposed to be appreciated by the mind only and not enjoyed by the body. Thank god for black people or western music would still be boring as shit. Kidding but for real, classical music is great but it has very little concept of rhythm.

*smacks lips*

HOL UP

Jazz was a better innovation in music than whatever the hell the "Neoconservative postmodernist" movement ever was

NO NO NO! You're ALL wrong. Jazz was used to refer to all pop music back in the day so he wasn't referring to jazz as we know it today, but pop music in the past.

No it wasn't.

When Adorno mentioned "jazz", what he referred to was actually what we today would call "pop standard" — jazzy songs fronted by charismatic vocalists like Frank Sinatra. Later jazz movements like modal jazz or free jazz embody the avant-garde sensibility Adorno championed.

Yes it was.

because he was a crypto-fascist

Adorno died in 1969. By that time, a million avant-garde takes on the jazz genre had already bloomed. Coltrane's My Favorite Things and Coleman's Free Jazz were both released in 1961.

Even Adorno wasn't immune to the Jim Crow racism of the time. Here's an actual quote by him.

This isn't an Adorno quote you silly sod.

No it really wasn't. Jazz refferred to a specific kind of music, the upper class of the time largely look down upon it in its early years because it was a black music genre. However that did not stop it from eventually generating music.

It really does depend at what time and place you're referring to.

For example, did not become popular until the mid and late 1910s, when New Orleans musicians first rose to prominence in other parts of the USA and the New Orleans style needed a new name to differentiate it from the nationally popular ragtime. Before then, the New Orleans style was frequently simply called "ragtime". There was early resistance to this because it was felt Jazz was a label added after the fact of their popularity, but it mostly stuck. Famed Jazz Saxophonist Sidney Bechet continued to call his music ragtime.

But that still has the label "Jazz" applied to the earliest incarnations of the genre itself. It stuck.

*The term jazz did not become popular until the mid and late 1910s.

Also for a long time originally it was spelled and pronounced as "Jass". So yeah it wasn't applicable to all "pop music"

Why does he hate pop?

...

Adorno is so off the mark on what Jazz represented that it's fair if people underestimate just how wrong he was. He said Jazz was inherently consumeristic, but as it began this was simply not true. Fair, I could see how Adorno got the idea in his time, but "Jass" originated as early as the 1900's. One of the earliest "Jass" musicians was a man named Buddy Bolden, a pioneer of his field.

He was extremely poor, unusual, and was constantly discriminated against, especially do to his unusual temperament and behavior which seperated him from other African Americans in New Orleans from his birth in the 1800's into the 1900's at 20, this made other black communities at the time somewhat disown him, not wanting to get involved with someone who the white upper class in New Orleans would regularly harass.

But eventually he took time up in music and found his calling and studied it by himself, alone. Buddy Bolden was almost single handily responsible for "Jass" at the time blowing up in New Orleans. His contribution to the early genre solidified what would subsequently be known as Jazz in the coming years.

However this was still not to be. He was diagnosed with what today, we call Schizophrenia. Then, it was still brushed under the damning "Dementia praecox". He may have influenced a genre that inspired so many people (such as King Oliver, who would later be the mentor of one of the best known Jazz Musicians of all time, Louis Armstrong), but being a mentally ill black man in the South in the dawn of the 20th century came about as well as it sounds.

He was institutionalized in a bad side of town, penniless for his efforts, where he spent the rest of his life until he died some twenty years later.

Unfortunately

Bolden was buried in an unmarked grave in Holt Cemetery, a "pauper's" graveyard in New Orleans. For those who don't know, that type of graveyard was mostly reserved to the low working class, and the homeless, and the impoverished in general. Basically where they bury all the corpses that didn't think mattered.

Nobody knows where he was buried in specific. Despite single handily launching jazz into what it would eventually become, with jazz inspiring musicians everywhere into new different kinds of music. Most of what you listen to today can be traced back to a man with schizophrenia who died alone in a mental institution he lived in for twenty years, and was thrown aside into what was basically a mass grave when he died.

...

In fact Bolden's contributions to the genre were so vast for the time he was able to play music into his mental decline, he himself coined the word funky. He used it to describe the smell of sweaty people in a packed room.

So in short Adorno is a Jazz Historical Revisionist erasing the music of the working man.

his take on that album pissed me off more than any of the stupid shit he's said; I genuinely really like that album

Why the fuck would you let yourself like that

F

It's sad because while his compositions have survived, there are no known recordings of his music. It was just too early on in time for people to record music for a black man in a really poor side of town. IIRC he was recorded at his height on Phonograph cylinder, but no known copies survived. It's safe to say not many were made outside of New Orleans itself.

We have his compositions, but the passion people said he had in performing is all but lost to time. I suppose, if Adorno was right, he should have been showered in cash for his efforts, but he still was poor and performed for poor people, and he didn't care as long as he was performing. But I think its safe to say he was shut up and institutionalized for so long partly because the man upstairs didn't want the working class black in America to start congregating together and having a good time, who knows what they might do after that.

But their efforts were mostly in vain, Jazz spread like a working class virus among the black community in New Orleans, who before that never had their own kind of music they could call their own. It just fucking exploded, and infuriated business owners everywhere.

And, I guess, ironically considering his political sensibilities, it infuriated Adorno too.

I wish there could be a thread people would be interested in just about music history in the working class.

because it's good

Zero but I guess it is too much to expect the poor downtrodden citizens of Holla Forums to read 25 pages of text before commenting on that text.

Stop trying to indoctrinate me with your jazz music.

What about the Blues

The Blues are the Blues of the working man