Jeff Rubard
2010-02-03 18:24:06 UTC
The American Pastime: Modernism (A Meadian Theory of Jazz)
“If you have to ask what jazz is, you ain’t never gonna know” —
Louis Armstrong
At this particular time, I would like to do something other than
“celebrate American tradition” by speaking of jazz music. All
throughout American history, various people have dreamt of “making it
new”: a new life in the New World, clean and scientific and modern and
meaningless. This is, unfortunately, not the quiddity of life in the
Republic: an absolute modernism that turns on the true “moment” and
the involution of “projection possibilities” fails to keep faith with
a history that keeps recapturing us and teaching us the lessons of
every second. From the man who could not tell a lie on to “the now”,
to accept the modernist charges has meant coping with a symbolic world
that does not achieve “closure” in the thoughts and dreams of the
concrete mind.
It is this way, too, with jazz. The story beloved of those who found
records from straight out of the vaults of freedom, c. 1960-1969,
unbelievable music is not quite true: Albert Ayler’s military music,
like the martial dance-steps of the itinerant city youth, evokes a
black musical tradition older than jazz. “Jazz” is from somewhere
else, and for something else: in short order, nowhere and nothing.
No music could be more wholly other than music as it had existed up to
a point where an “independent city” created a generation of people
capable of, among other things, speaking of Michelangelo in straitened
circumstances; as Harvey Pekar has pointed out, systematically
removing the traces of functional harmony and the “theologically
vaulted cosmos” predated the opening of the New York record industry:
from le jazz hot on, the only things being rung were changes.
When blue eyes were smoky like an opium den, life was not always so
nice: and to counterpoint Walter Benjamin, the modernism of jazz was a
“disequilibrating” force — with superior musicianship to no end, a
person is alone in their thoughts and their world, and the forward
momentum of a “plan” becomes less than questionable. The
connosieurship of jazz makes for one of the hardest truths around.
However, I would like to end the note by explaining the redemptive
promise of jazz, in the spirit of the American sociologist George
Herbert Mead. Mead’s signal innovation in pragmatist philosophy was a
theory of “taking the attitude of the other”, the mechanism by which
human beings come to have human uses for each other: systematically
considering the “history and theory” of another person’s mind. The
Meadian lesson of jazz is that we are not “all together in this”, we
are not moving ever-upward, our most intimate familiars have thoughts
we can never understand — and that one ought not to “exterminate all
the brutes”.
------ [!!]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iJ7bs4mTUY&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU_RxWXijz0&feature=player_embedded
------ [!!]
http://www.amazon.com/Arcades-Project-Walter-Benjamin/dp/0674008022
[ROLF TIE-DE-MAAAAAN! DO DO DA DA DA DA DA]
http://www.amazon.com/Technological-Reproducibility-Other-Writings-Media/dp/0674024451/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2
[Peace to Responsible Harvard and CPGB]
“If you have to ask what jazz is, you ain’t never gonna know” —
Louis Armstrong
At this particular time, I would like to do something other than
“celebrate American tradition” by speaking of jazz music. All
throughout American history, various people have dreamt of “making it
new”: a new life in the New World, clean and scientific and modern and
meaningless. This is, unfortunately, not the quiddity of life in the
Republic: an absolute modernism that turns on the true “moment” and
the involution of “projection possibilities” fails to keep faith with
a history that keeps recapturing us and teaching us the lessons of
every second. From the man who could not tell a lie on to “the now”,
to accept the modernist charges has meant coping with a symbolic world
that does not achieve “closure” in the thoughts and dreams of the
concrete mind.
It is this way, too, with jazz. The story beloved of those who found
records from straight out of the vaults of freedom, c. 1960-1969,
unbelievable music is not quite true: Albert Ayler’s military music,
like the martial dance-steps of the itinerant city youth, evokes a
black musical tradition older than jazz. “Jazz” is from somewhere
else, and for something else: in short order, nowhere and nothing.
No music could be more wholly other than music as it had existed up to
a point where an “independent city” created a generation of people
capable of, among other things, speaking of Michelangelo in straitened
circumstances; as Harvey Pekar has pointed out, systematically
removing the traces of functional harmony and the “theologically
vaulted cosmos” predated the opening of the New York record industry:
from le jazz hot on, the only things being rung were changes.
When blue eyes were smoky like an opium den, life was not always so
nice: and to counterpoint Walter Benjamin, the modernism of jazz was a
“disequilibrating” force — with superior musicianship to no end, a
person is alone in their thoughts and their world, and the forward
momentum of a “plan” becomes less than questionable. The
connosieurship of jazz makes for one of the hardest truths around.
However, I would like to end the note by explaining the redemptive
promise of jazz, in the spirit of the American sociologist George
Herbert Mead. Mead’s signal innovation in pragmatist philosophy was a
theory of “taking the attitude of the other”, the mechanism by which
human beings come to have human uses for each other: systematically
considering the “history and theory” of another person’s mind. The
Meadian lesson of jazz is that we are not “all together in this”, we
are not moving ever-upward, our most intimate familiars have thoughts
we can never understand — and that one ought not to “exterminate all
the brutes”.
------ [!!]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iJ7bs4mTUY&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU_RxWXijz0&feature=player_embedded
------ [!!]
http://www.amazon.com/Arcades-Project-Walter-Benjamin/dp/0674008022
[ROLF TIE-DE-MAAAAAN! DO DO DA DA DA DA DA]
http://www.amazon.com/Technological-Reproducibility-Other-Writings-Media/dp/0674024451/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2
[Peace to Responsible Harvard and CPGB]