Ernst Bloch on Jazz? A serious question

["L Spencer" <L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>Note the unpsoken presumption here: all that is to be considered is what the jazz age meant to white people, to official society.  To read Fitzgerald, God help us.  For a different take, you might try Ishmael Reed's MUMBO JUMBO, not that Reed is my hero, only that his frame of reference (ideologically loaded in its own way) undermines the sort of assumptions that govern the lives of people like Carl Van Vechten or F. Snott Fitzgerald or some Weimar souse peeing his pants after losing consciousness.

Any serious consideration of jazz and jazz dance, indeed of much of
the history of popular music in this century, would have to include
an understanding of the way in which black and white musicians, black
and white communities played off one another. Much of the innovation
in the whole domain of popular music (including but not only the
music business) has come from black musicians and the black
community. Nowhere is this clearer than in the very phenomenon that
Ernst Bloch rails against in the passage I cited and which has got so
many people steamed up. When whites thought they were being very
daring doing the charleston... upright, uptight, stiff legged but
with plenty of gusto the Harlem dance halls were packing in thousands
of dancers (including some adventurous whites) - with many more
queing in the streets - to do dances that were much looser, more
sexually suggestive, much faster and athletic. Boogie-woogie,
jitterbug, lindy-hop... The dances included all the most spectacular
moves (throwing the woman over your shoulders or between your legs)
that were later to be seen in rock n roll dancing. Dancers who
perfected a particular move might be immortalised by having their
name ( or more usually their nickname) attached to the move.

But from that day to this a lot of the creativity in the whole area
has come about only through the tense convoluted relations between
black and white. Louis Armstrong (the most influential jazz musician
of the century... "influential" note, not necessariy the best) had a
white minder (gangster) protect him throughout his career. Charlie
Parker... One could go on and on. This fraught relationship has
always been involved in popular music, especially in everything in
anyway connected with jazz or blues.

Ernst Bloch talks at various points very intelligently about slavery.
But he never evinces much real feeling for the culture of black
slaves or their decendents. Both he and Adorno are very Euro-centric
in their approach to culture. Benjamin who knew himself to be a
European through and through (and declined desparate pleas to get
him to emigrate to Palestine or to New York) was less culpale in this
regard. In his personal journies he marked out the boundaries of his
cultural landscape venturing to Moscow and to Naples and looking at
exactly the permeablity of the borders, North/South, East/West...

But, hey, who the hell are we to sit in judgement. These guys did not
have MTV, CNN or any of the other technological gimmickry that we
have today to enforce our citizenship of a globalising culture...

Lloyd Spencer

(...thinks...oh... hell, someone is going to think that I am an avid fan of the
satellite TV industry as an antedote to Frankfurt pessimism.)

O.K. Ralph?