On first looking into Adorno’s Jazz

On first looking into Adorno’s Jazz

 

The man lived through the passage of phrases

monastic intensity coupled with mindful pleasures

aesthetic concerns triumphant as a whip crack

it’s crucial to make certain playback is accurate

vital to know that one’s own concerns are met

impossible to write

poetry after death camps.

~

The world yes

the mélange of real and symbol and whim

the ‘world’

is surely – his world – surely dead.

So no

there is no

system that permits one to accept

two dirty notes as the new

and no fair trade

pan flute for a snare drum

smudge chords as you play

and welcome barbarism?

Music is too important to be left   —   far too imperative to be right.

~

Who was this hoodoo man

this voodoo princeling

this old bourgeois Marxian

this brilliant inheritor of German

musical economy

political psychology?

~

But Teddy there was tone

and melody

and structure

              and time that would not submit

to 12-toned angels.

Incommensurate–

your knowledge and that jazz:

~

ColtraneDavis  //  EllingtonBasie  //  ParkerDizzy

~

You should have let the Angel play her game with history

in the mood for love

after kulture got gang-raped and gunned down

April in Paris

shaved heads and complicity

my melancholy …

so blown and squeezed into soft atonal slaps.

~

Herr Doctor all is forgiven in the text

and wrong on one score old sir

we can let that page blaze

and listen still in sore and torn amaze,

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Published in Rampike Vol 16#1 (Conceptualisms Issue)