Chicago - Nowadays (Finale)

Let me start by saying: What is Adorno's issue with Jazz, and the evolution of Jazz?! I really hated the use of the word "Negro" throughout his Prisms, but I agreed with his point that Blues and Jazz music originated in the cotton fields with the African American slaves throughout the country.

"Jazz is music which fuses the most rudimentary melodic, harmonic, metric and formal structure with the ostensibly disruptive principle of syncopation, yet without ever really disturbing the crude unity of the basic rhythm, the identically sustained meter, and the quarter-note." 121

"Contrariness has changed into second-degree 'smoothness' and the jazz-form of reaction has become so entrenched that an entire generation of youth hears only it and the basic meter. Yet none if this alters the fact that jazz has in its essence remained static, nor does it explain the resulting enigma that millions of people seem never to tire of its monotonous attraction" 121

I strongly disagree with Adorno's views on Jazz! Maybe he was light-weight music tortured with Jazz as a child, but to me - a person from the youth generation in comparison to Adorno - Jazz is timeless and very far from "static". I believe Jazz has many faces and subgenres, I like to think of Chicago's "Nowadays" as a daisy0duke type of jazz, as opposed to the blues/soulful type of jazz that also exists. While Jazz does follow an entirely different structure than most music, it is specifically planned (as Adorno later admits) out and structured in it's own way. I love thinking of the new ways Jazz has been reinterpreted, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA6kXUgZ7lE DIMMI's "Promesses" attached. In this new-age style of Jazz, there are many other genres of music mixed in with the Jazz, but the classical Jazz horn sound allows youth to identify the Jazz genre and begin learning more about the history of the genre as well.