Literary free jazz? Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise: language and meaning

African American Review, Spring, 2007 by Keren Omry

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Adorno cautions that a music that seeks to be absolutely free falls into one of two traps: music that rejects all structural limitations finds itself either incomprehensible and thus effectively limited, or inevitably these rejected formal impositions arise in new manifestations. In other words, the first thing that could happen is that in rejecting all recognizable formal restrictions, the music becomes unintelligible, which was, for Adorno, a prime evil. Musical authenticity was of the highest value for Adorno, and for music to be authentic, it must contain truth-value, a quality that music achieves by being communicative, relating to human experience on some level: musical aesthetic, cultural, social, political. Free music thus becomes in effect irrelevant or, to avoid precisely that incommunicability while still avoiding the limitations that it casts aside, free music will--Adorno contends--inadvertently but inevitably give rise to precisely the same musical structures that it sought to reject:

   in aesthetics the universal and the particular do not constitute
   mutually exclusive opposites.... If informal music dispenses with
   [these crystallized musical co-ordinates]--in other words, with the
   musically bad universal forms of internal compositional
   categories-then these universal forms will surface again in the
   innermost recesses of the particular event and set them alight.
   (Adorno 273)

In other words, Adorno effectively suggests that absolutely free music is, by definition, an unattainable ideal. Any semblance of absolute freedom will crumble immediately under the natural tendency to seek comfortable limitations rather than freedom, order rather than chaos. Moreover, even if music were able to be somehow absolutely free, through our very attempt to listen to it, we would uncontrollably seek to understand it and thus superimpose a linguistic or conceptual framework onto it. The necessary participation of the listener in the impossible realization of the utopian ideal is a point I will return to at greater length below.

Enter free jazz. Incidentally recorded in the year that Adorno wrote "Vers une Musique Informelle," Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz does something similar to musique informelle. Although Coleman's Free Jazz is not the only and was not the first record to put forth many of these ideas, in the history of jazz it realized various musical forces and became the turning point in the development of jazz. Others central to developing these ideas are Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. In particular, Coltrane's Ascension presents an example that offers an equally potent analytical mechanism as does Coleman's Free Jazz. The renowned music critic Gary Giddins compared Coltrane's achievement in Ascension to the radical effect of modernist painting: "after you paint a canvas that's completely white and hang it up in a museum, you've gone as far as you can go ... what are you going to put on it? That's what happened with the avant-garde: Coltrane got to the white canvas with Ascension..... Coltrane had given us a new canvas and we could begin on that again" (qtd. in Shipton 804). The critical relevance notwithstanding, the fiery impact of Coleman's recording on the music world has determined my choice.

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Literary free jazz? Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise: language and meaning

African American Review, Spring, 2007 by Keren Omry

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