The jazz essays of Theodor Adorno: some thoughts on jazz reception in Weimar Germany

Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz remain at best a puzzle, and to many an acute embarrassment. To jazz historians they merely contain ‘some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz’ (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300) and are generally dismissed without further comment. Adorno scholars, on the other hand, are unlikely to see in them anything more than preliminary steps to his later and more substantial studies in the sociology of music, or – in the words of Martin Jay (1984, p. 132) – a ‘gloss on The Authoritarian Personality’. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of his Gesammelte Schriften he clearly distances himself from his early jazz writings, referring to his ignorance of the specifically American features of jazz, his dependence on the German-Hungarian pedagogue Mátyás Seiber in matters of jazz technique, and his willingness to draw hasty psycho-sociological conclusions without clear knowledge of the institutions of the commercial music industry. If these essays are belittled by their own author, why should we bother to study them at all?