Despite its brevity, 94 pages plus another 27 of detailed footnotes, Jazz As Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited is not an easy book to summarise. In her interrogation of the ghost of Theodor Adorno, Fumi Okiji eschews notions of proof of her arguments based on reasoning from first principles or logic. Instead, she offers a multi-layered, rich critique of the philosopher's views on jazz utilising his own methods (negative dialectics) to explore the shortcomings of those views and present the case for jazz as a critical musical practice.

In both ‘Űber Jazz’ (1936, in Leppert Reference Leppert2002) and ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’ (1953, in Adorno Reference Adorno, Samuel and Weber1981), Adorno dismissed any claims jazz might have for authenticity or for its capacity to contain the kind of emancipatory spark that he found in free-atonal music or the writings of Samuel Beckett. For him, jazz was a commodity fetishised by a public that falsely found within its rhythms hints of rebellion or promises of other ways of being. In a telling passage from ‘Űber Jazz’, referring to connections between jazz and black gospel music, Adorno wrote, ‘The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as such combined the lament of unfreedom with its oppressed confirmation’ (O'Connor Reference O'Connor2000, p. 269). The sentence sums up Adorno's arguments against jazz but also denies African-Americans both subjectivity and the expression of that subjectivity through the music they create. No wonder that Krin Gabbard could doubt that anyone could tease a ‘jazz aesthetic out of essays such as Perennial Fashion – Jazz’ (Gabbard Reference Gabbard and Gabbard1995, p. 105).

So why not simply ignore Adorno altogether? As Okiji notes with admirable succinctness, ‘It is very difficult, after reading Adorno, to write on music without taking into consideration, what this expressive form has to say about society’ (p. 33). Any author wishing to argue that jazz might in its practices offer an immanent critique of human relationships under capitalism must confront Adorno, even though he himself dismissed that possibility.

Okiji's entry point into this discourse is through questions of individuality and subjectivity. It is here that her exploration of Adorno and of black expression is at its most incisive and helpful. Much of the writing of Adorno and other theorists of the Frankfurt school was focused on the distortions and debasements of human relations under capitalism. In Adorno's writing in particular, Okiji identifies a certain regret at the passing of the ‘bourgeois subject of earlier and less malignant permutations of capitalism’ (p. 7). Instead, for Adorno, that subject has been replaced by the fractured self of ‘administered society’, where ‘each statement, each piece of news, each thought has been pre-formed by the centres of the culture industry’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2005, quoted p. 13). For Adorno, jazz was little more than an element in that industry's armoury of persuasion with its promises of false freedom and pseudo-individuality. That it might be something far more ambivalent, reflecting the necessary ‘double-consciousness’ of the black modern, was outside Adorno's frame of reference (pp. 31–44).

Seen in terms of claims made by many authors for jazz as the music of the individual and as a totem for American democracy (pp. 14–18), Adorno's misgivings regarding jazz might have some validity. Okiji, however, disposes of the jazz-as-democracy argument, pointing out instead that, while ‘Black America’ might through ‘its expression in jazz’ contribute to ‘democratic symbolic action’, it challenges the very understanding of terms such as ‘America, freedom, and democracy’. White liberal appropriation of jazz in this way could not be more ironic when African-Americans have been and still are denied the full humanity and complexity of character accorded to other (white) sections of American society (p. 19). As she notes, following Frantz Fanon, ‘the blackness of one's skin obliterates any trace of human particularity’ (p. 26).

This leads Okiji to consider Adorno's suggestion that, once conscious of the distortions and deformations of modern life, one's only honest response is ‘not to be at home in one's home’. (p. 55) Uprooted from their homes in Africa, denied for centuries even basic rights as citizens, the majority of African-Americans were left without any stake in the American dream with its folksy white American images of hearth and home. Although Okiji does not state this explicitly, in jazz and the blues, African-Americans fashioned a music of ‘no home’.

The problem for Adorno in understanding jazz, Okiji argues, was essentially two-fold. Firstly, his Eurocentrism and commitment to European high art culture left him blind to how other cultures in their enforced interaction with Western culture might be capable of producing authentic and critical works of art (pp. 33–36). Secondly, his emphasis on composition and the principle of structuration in that high art context obstructed him from understanding and valuing music that was structured in different ways (pp. 60–65). The possibility that an enslaved and later free-in-name-only people might, owing to very contradictions of their position in the world, evolve a music that spoke of those contradictions and pointed up the very unfreedom of all under capitalism, white as well as black, escaped Adorno.

Okiji argues that jazz is a musical practice in which ‘performance is writing’ (p. 63), exposing both the shortcomings of Adorno's position and revealing the radical, critical potential in jazz. A jazz performance is never finished, is always an unfolding of previous performances and offers the promise of performances to come. Here, Okiji uses Walter Benjamin's notion of storytelling to suggest that jazz is best characterised as ‘an endless boundless rehearsal’ that ‘can bring to light endlessly evolving sites of expressive and cultural significance’ (p. 69). Moreover, these sites are places where both the individual (black or white) and the collective as participants in the telling may receive acknowledgement of both the reality of their suffering and a glimpse of its possible relief.

Jazz As Critique rewards several readings. Okiji's decision to present her case more as a picture rich in detail and nuance is appropriate to both aspects of her subject, Adorno and jazz. As with jazz, our appreciation of what she has to say emerges afresh from each rereading and her tale, like jazz, continues to unfold. Jazz As Critique may not be the best place for those new to Adorno to begin but Fumi Okiji offers an important staging point further along the line. Further, she has succeeded in making Adorno dance, if somewhat reluctantly, with Duke Ellington and Count Basie.