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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”.