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Sounding Autonomy: Adorno, Coltrane and Jazz

Theodor W. Adorno's writings on jazz call out endlessly for interpretation. The observations of this master of the rhetorical and philosophical paradox seem to have lived on beyond their allotted time—a time perhaps delimited by his reliance upon Winthrop Seargeant's Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (1938) and the term "bebop," whose hollow ringing deforms the Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1961).¹ Adorno perversely denies jazz the most fundamental insight of his aesthetic theory: that "art at every point participates in concepts." Instead, he dismisses it as a pure instantiation of the culture industry.² His thought rigidifies whenever he returns to...