Abstract
In this article we propose to analyse some aspects of the music and musical thought of the musician Steve Coleman through the philosophy of Theodor Adorno. We will deal with Coleman's relationship to tradition and the concept of jazz, the practice of improvisation and the systematicality of his music. These questions will be treated under the prism of the dialectics of identity and non-identity dear to Adorno's Negative Dialectics. The objective is to try to demonstrate some of the contradictions that circumscribe Coleman's work and how it is built through them. We will deal with Coleman's relationship to the jazz tradition, his practice of improvisation and the systematicality of his music.
Highlights
In this article we propose to analyse some aspects of the music and musical thought of the musician Steve Coleman through the philosophy of Theodor Adorno
The aim of this article is to analyse some aspects of Steve Coleman's music; we will not engage in a detailed analysis of Adorno's texts, we will engage in the Adornian method of investigating objects in detail as an attempt to identify their internal contradictions
Steve Coleman can be seen as a paradigmatic jazz musician of the recent decades
Summary
Composer and saxophonist Steve Coleman appears to be one of the most original and important contemporary jazz musicians. Traditional Hegelian dialectics works with the idea of overcoming and subsuming all contradiction, but what is interesting about the Adornian conceptualization of negative dialectics is that the moment of overcoming is itself suppressed, which allows the process to be continuous, but open This type of self-reflective approach appears to be analogous to the way Coleman conceives of improvisation and deals theoretically and in practice with his music. My reason for using Adorno lies in how he allows us to deal critically with Coleman’s writing, influences and music It seems that in all those aspects, the saxophonist embodies some contradictions in relation to certain established norms of the jazz world. My attempt is to demonstrate the dialectical nature of the different relationships within Coleman’s music and how it is through those tensions that his music has developed
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