Farewell to Jazz 497
the pleasure of the cultivated person who is permitted to stumble across
Farewell to lazz
The regulation that forbids the radio from broadcasting "Negro jazz" *uy
have creared a new legal situation; but artistically it has only confirmed
by its drastic verdict what was long ago decided in fact: the end of lazz
music itself. For no mater what one wishes to understand by white or by
Negro jazz,.here there is nothing to salvage . lazz itself has long been in
the process of dissolution, in retreat into military marches and all sorts of
folklore. Moreover, it has become stabilized as a pedagogical mearls of
,,rhythmic education," and with this has visibly renounced the aesthetic
claims that it admittedly never ever made on the consciousness of the
producers and consumers of dance, but did make in the ideology of the
clever arr composers who at one time thought they could be fertilized by
it. They have to look around for something else and are certainly already
doing so; but in the surviving clubs the last interjected false bar fschein-
taktl,t the last muted rrumpet, if not unheard, will soon die away without
a shock.
It is not big-city degeneration, deracinated exoticisffi, and certainly not,
as naive people think, the bizarre quality of stimulating or clashing asphalt
harmonies that appears in jazz and is vanishing along with it. Jazz no more
has anything to do with gylhglqiç Neg5o mggic, which has long since been
falsified and indusrrially smoothed out here, than it is possessed of any
destructive or threatening qualities. Even the disrespectful use of themes
from Beethoven or Wagner, which is intended to irritate and seemed to
_hfftt a! ? rçvglqlignary uldertone, is in truth
nothing but the exprcssion
of the impoverishment of a music fabricaticln that Lr.:.:atnc so standarclizcd
and attuned to consumption that it lost its lrsr litrle l.,it o[ frccdoltt, tht'
musical inspiration, which it thcn stolt'wlr,'t('\'('r tl ,,,ntl,l lirrtl it ()ll('
rff iglf f flf ilf l< ,lf it s9r't 1ll' "lr,,lt'lll ('V;t:;itttt" t,tllr,'r , l,'r't'l ly ill,',)l'l)()l'rrtirttl
I
his cultural heritage in a club. Rather; what hollow ed jazz out is its own
stupidity.2 What is stamped out, along with it, is not the musical influence
i
of the Negro race on the northern one; nor is it cultural Bolshevism. It is
a piece of bad arts and crafts.
Jazzwas the Gebrauchsmusik3 of the haute bourgeoisie of the post-war
period. Two things, in tandem, guaranteed its success. For one thing, it
was available for immediate consumption; it registered the development
of art music only in stunted reflexes, generally of impressionist ha.rmonies.
It remained danceable, on and on, even for the unmusical person, thanks
to the basic rhythm, always marked by the bass drum, even where the
audacious cadences of hot music", sylcopation as plinciple, and the bur-
geoning joy brought on by triple rhythms inserted into a four-beat meter
seem to loosen all the bonds of upbringing and custom [Zucht und Sitte].
Nothing was difflcult ro understand, and if the factory-made product
l
seemed alien to the consumer, it was equally easy to use. Its excesses,
however, recalled the erotic ones of the cinema, those undressing scenes,
dubious trips to the beach, and ambiguous situations, all of which, under lr
the dictates of a censorship that is deeply ingrained in them, stoP short of
L
final consequences. But at the same time, jazz presented itself as progres-
Ti
sive, modern, and up-to-date. There was a world-economic resonance in
I
i
l
the cheap foreign locales that could be imported at will from Montevideo,
L
Waikiki, and Shanghai. The petit-bourgeois narrowness of dance lessons,
I
i
polka, and galopa seemed left far behind; the se.xlgss slxop.honef squawking,
I
declared its quasi-agreemenr with risqué things, and the harmonies, now
l
mellow now biting, not only had a stimulating effect but evoked distant
memories, at once scary and comforting, of new music's realm of disso-
nance, which was otherwise avoided so assiduously and with which, it
seemed, one could safely associate only here. As if that were not enough,
l
as arrs and crafts, jazzwas characterized by the fact that, despite its trans-
parenrly industrial origins, ir was distinguished superficially from "vulgar"
l
music; fhat çolsqmprion could be disguised as art appreciation. The con-
certizing " jazz symphony orches tras" are the obvious expression of this. I
Or, even more to the point: the technique of improvisation, which devel- I
oped together with syncopation and the false bar [Scheintakt]^ The vir-
ir
ruoso saxophonist or clarinetist, or even percussionist, who made his au-
dacious leaps in between the marked beats of the measure, who distorted ti
1lr
the accenrs and dragged our the sounds in bold glissandl-he , àt least,
I
ri
I
shoulcl havc been cxempted from industrialization. His realm was consid- lr
lil
,'r('(l tç [,c tlr,.r',,,rlrrr.rf fr"r'r,rlorn; hcre thc solid wall between production I
I
l
 498 I Music and Mass Culture Fareusell to lazz 499

symmetry would have broken aparç but along with it the tonal harmonic
and reprodu6ion was evidently demolished, the longed-for immediacy re-
structure, as is actually the case in the jazz experiments of Stravinsky.
stored, the alienation of man and music mastered out of vital force.
But then jazz would have lost its consumability and easy comprehen-
It was not, and the fact that it was not constituted the betrayal and the
sibility, and would have turned into art music. In vain, for those same
downfall of j azz. The reconciliation of art music and music for common
of consumability and "class," of closeness to the conclusions, drawn from the dissolution of the old tonal periodicity, had
use fGrbrsuchsmusik],
been arrived at long before, more thoroughly, by art music, before anyone
source and up-ro-date success , of discipline and freedom , of production and
even thought of jazz. Jazz didn't take this kind of risks; it conrented itself
reprodu6ion is untrue in all its aspects. Indeed, all the elements of " art,"
with the boredom of its false effects. Very characteristic, how easily it was
of individual freedom of expression , of immediacy are revealed as mere
able to part with its ferment, syncopation, i.e., the movement of emphasis
cover-ups for the characrer of consumer goods. In jazz, the charm of the
away from the "good part of the measure" [aom gutenTaktteil] of metrical
ninth chords, of the endings on seventh chords, and of the whole-tone
time. Kurt Weill, whom people used to like to link with jazz on account
daubings are shabby and worn ouç it conserves a decayi.g modernity of
of the sound of the saxophone, sacrificed syncopation and false bars in the
the day before yesterday. No different, on second glance, are those achieve-
conscious search for accessibihty and made the primitively symmetrical
ments of jazz in which people thought they perceived elements of a fresh
speech accents of song verses his metric rule. But for the last two years,
beginning and sponraneous regeneration-its rhythms. First, syncopation
i, ne* fot popular music, .hgt"by..n*q-m-e3"n,p*-fuf-*Lt--J5111p*S' In a master like with an eagerness that will not redound to their credit, and that people
have already seen through, the jazz manufacturers have already been
Brahms, for example, it is accomplished with incomparably greater rich-
switching to the kind of patriotic kitsch that now-and perhaps nor by
't
ness and penetraring depth of construction than in the jazz writers, in
,I whose work-as the "rextbooks" of hot music" unwittingly but all the
accident-has been overtaken by u government verdict at the same time
;i as jazz, precisely because it is closely related to it. The military march has
;l more drastically reveal-the apparent variety of rhythmic constructs can
;i
;i
.I be reduced to a minimum of stereotypical and standardized formulae. But
long been lying in wait underneath the colorful arabesques af jazz. But
then-and this explains. the stefg.olypical qqaliçy-;the rhythmic achieve- the social stratum that has consum ed jazz until now even if it has nor
been convinced of its aesthetic inferiority, will be all the more inclined to
ments of jazz are*lng.tg- o1pan.çn!-s above a metrically conventional, banal
architecture, with no consequences for the structure, and removable at will-
give it up politically, because in the context of what is possible to do be-
tween two four-beat measures*jg,Ua"i"*_:imply_.pn"?bl"ç
The bass drum, for which the capers of the other instruments are of no "I"g_ "gffç:.*pX
y"3figty.
What it was possible to learn from jazzis the emancipation of the rhyth-
consequence, is already one expression of this. But above all, the way the
mic emphasis from metrical time; a decent, if very limited and specialized
compositions themselves are constructed. For the schema of the eight-
thing, with which composers had long been familiar, but which, through
measure period, with its bisection into half- and full stop, the old, cheap
jazz, may have achieved a certain breadth in reproducive practice. Oth-
schema of dance music-much more meaget for example, than the for-
erwise not much will be left of it, other, perhaps, than the memory of the
mally rich waltzes of the great Johann Strauss-is thoroughly in force in
few pieces that had the élan of first beginnings, like "Kitten on the Keys*."s
jazz. The " false bars, " which essentially constituted the supposed rhythmic
or the singing of The Revelers,u and of an era that was petrified into history
charm of j azz, have their essence precisely in the fact that rhythmically
with a single blow. Jazz has left behind a vacuum. There is no new Ge-
free, improvisational constructions complement each other in such a way
brauchsmusik to take its place, and it will not be easy to launch one. But
that, taken togetheç they fit back into the unshaken schema after all.
this vacuum is not the worst thing. In it is expressed, wordlessly, like the
Hence, for example, ro cite only the simplest and most frequent case in
alienation of art and society, a kind of overall srare of reality that words
point, two measures in three-eight and a measure in two-eight are com-
are lacking to express. This vacuum may be wordless, but it is no false
tir,.d sequentially ro make a four-four measure, as marked out by the
consciousness. Perhaps in the silence it will grow loud.
drum. And what is true of the individual measure is true, âs well, of the
musical period, as can easily be observed in its harmonic and melodic ar- Ugl3; vol. 18, pp. 795-99)
GS,
ticulation. If someone had wanted to terke the syn('oPation and rhythmi- Translated by Susan H. Gillespie
cally improvisational impulses to tlrcir" lo1ii,'rrl ( ()rl..lrtsiolt, the n th,' t,ltl
500 Music and Mass Culture

NOTES BY RICHARD LEPPERT

1,. See p. 492 n. 1
2. Adorno uses an English neologism, Stupiditât. [translator's note]
3. Adorno's use of. Gebrsuchsntusik in this instance serves the purpose of driv-
ing a wedge between the haute bourgeois sense of (sociely autonomous) art music,
.nâ jazz às a music that has the "social function",,6hiah art music supposedly
lacks-an issue that is complicated for Adorno to the extent, paradoxically, that he
sees autonomy as part and parcel of art music's critical social function, while at the
same time acknowledging that autonomy is turned against itself once it is adopted
as a component of the cultural capital of artworks by the very haute bourgeois (rn
this instance) from whom it distances itself. On Gebrauchsmusik, see p. a13 n. 2.
4. The polka and galop were popular social dances in nineteenth-century Ger-
many. The galop was a very fast z/4 dance.
S. "Kitten on the Keys" jgzr), music by Zez Confrey (t895-:-g7a),was a
popular novelty piece often performed by both Confrey and pianist-bandleader
Vincent Lopez. Confrey performed it at Paul Whiteman's famous Aeolian Hall
concert in New York in r gz4, where Gershwin also premiered Rhapsody in BIue.
Confrey's recording of the fast-paced showpiece is available on various ieissues.
6. Concerning The,Revelers, see p. 275 n. 5; and "Revelers" and "shannon
Fout" in Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound in the United States, ed. Guy A. Marco
and Frank Andrews (New York: Garland, rg9)), pp. 586, 6zr.