Adorno himself conceded his jazz essay’s decisive flaws stemmed from missing American experience

Evidence

In a 1959 letter to the music critic Baldur Bockhoff, he admits that the essay ‘indeed has the flaw that the decisive American experiences are still not processed in it, and is in more than one respect primitive, yet contains the core of certain categories which are implicitly required by the later work you are familiar with from Prisms’. Subsequently, in his 1964 Moments musicaux, a collection of essays on music in which ‘On Jazz’ is republished, Adorno confesses an ‘insufficient knowledge of the specifically American aspects of jazz, especiallythatof standardization’whilenoting’theobsolescenceof somecharacteristics of European jazz in the 1930s’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Adorno-Benjamin debate over ‘The Work of Art’ essay and the Marxist critique of cultural standardization; relevant to Frankfurt School intellectual history more generally. — connects to: Methodological experience softened Adorno’s early hostility to American empirical techniques — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 671; Adorno’s basic philosophical positions were fixed before his American emigration — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 298; Adorno believed his jazz essay already satisfied empirical methods — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1013
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Adorno’s self-criticism of ‘On Jazz’ predates and complicates later dismissals of the essay as merely wrong-headed — is his 1959 appraisal the better lens?