From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 201significance. It would appear then that he had given his essay the wrong
title. His subject was not jazz proper, but what jazz had become now
that it had been transformed into dance music and light music, follow-
ing on in the wake of the popularization of blues and ragtime. He was
really talking about so-called ballroom jazz, without making it clear just
what he was doing. No wonder, then, that he scarcely refers by name
to musicians who might be thought to represent jazz proper. Only Duke
Ellington receives a mention, and, apart from him, the Revellers, an
American group on whom the Comedian Harmonists, a famous pre-war
German ensemble, had modelled themselves.
Even if Adorno did not distinguish sharply enough between jazz
and popular music, and constantly referred to them in one breath, it
must not be supposed that he did not have his own experience of jazz.
Both in Frankfurt and in Berlin, as well as on his different travels, he
had plenty of opportunity to hear jazz. And after his emigration to
Britain he found himself confronted more directly with the different
trends in jazz.^60
Most of the information he needed for his discussion of jazz came
from Mátyás Seiber, whom he knew from Frankfurt. Seiber, a Hungarian
by birth and a pupil of Kodály, had been in charge of the famous
jazz class at the Hoch Conservatory since 1928. In 1933 the class was
disbanded by the Nazis, and Seiber emigrated to Britain. There he
frequently met Adorno, not least in order to play him jazz records on
the gramophone. In addition, he had compiled some handwritten notes
about his personal experience with jazz. He sent them simultaneously to
Adorno and Horkheimer under the title of ‘Observations on the State
of the Jazz Market’. Adorno read them in the summer of 1936 and,
taking them as confirmation of his own opinions, he suggested that they
should establish a ‘sociological jazz archive’.^61 He duly acknowledged
the suggestions that Seiber made orally and in writing in a preface to
the printed version of ‘On Jazz’.
The collaboration between Adorno and Seiber was originally intended
to be rather broader and longer term,^62 since at their meeting in Paris
Horkheimer had encouraged Adorno to undertake a large-scale empirical
sociological study of jazz. Horkheimer was doubtless influenced in this by
the links he saw between the major studies on Authority and the Family
that the Institute of Social Research was just in the process of finishing
in New York and Adorno’s theories about the jazz fan’s authority
fixation, an idea that was connected in its turn with Erich Fromm’s
psychoanalytical interpretation of authoritarianism in the bourgeois
family.^63 Adorno was delighted to hear Horkheimer suggesting that a
larger collective study of jazz would be a good idea. At the end of 1935,
as he spent the Christmas holidays partly in Berlin, partly in Frankfurt,
he composed a first draft for a large-scale research project: Jazz: Exposé
of a Sociological Study.^64 This draft contained the first sketch for ideas
that he would formulate more precisely in the planned essay ‘On Jazz’.