ESSAY

Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

as a Free Jazz Critic/Thinking Free Jazz
as an Avant-Garde of the Masses

Matthias Mushinski

Introduction
The analysis contained here was spurred by a seemingly arbitrary affiliation,
and one that requires a brief historical overview if it is to be brought to light. In
November of 1964, Cahiers du Cinéma underwent a significant visual overhaul
that replaced the now legendary yellow covers adorning the magazine’s preceding
issues with a new color palette along with substantial changes in both format and
layout. Accompanying this aesthetic revamping, the magazine’s 160th edition
introduced a new member to the editorial team, Jean-Louis Comolli, who was
anointed the title of Associate Editor by then Chief Editor Jacques Rivette. At the
start of the 1960s, many members of Cahiers’ original roster were busy making
their own films, and as the nouvelle vague quickly became the new purveyor of
aesthetic value, Rivette and his newly assembled critical team seized control of
Cahiers and ushered in a critical militancy that drastically departed from the
comparatively apolitical, nonconfrontational turn the magazine took while under
the guidance of Rivette’s predecessor, Eric Rohmer.
Comolli’s refusal to separate cinema from ideology is well-regarded today
as a crucial turn in film analysis, and articles such as “Cinéma/Idéologie/Cri-
tique” and “Technique et Idéologie” have become indispensable to film theory
anthologies as a result. However, what film scholarship has failed to recognize is
that during Comolli’s coeditorship at Cahiers he regularly contributed to Jazz
Magazine, a Paris-based publication that featured an extensive exploration of
free jazz (popularly coined the “new thing” in France) from 1965 onward. As
a result, Comolli’s critical output during the 1960s has suspiciously succeeded

Framework 57, No. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 138–160. Copyright © 2016 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

in living out a double-life, and how exactly he managed to simultaneously serve

as a coeditor at Cahiers and writer for Jazz Magazine without provoking or
necessitating some degree of crosspollination is difficult to fathom. Perhaps his
contemporary readership managed to identify certain links; yet, in both jazz
and film scholarship today, there is, or at least there appears to be, little effort to
highlight the implicitly multidisciplinary nature of Comolli’s critical initiative
leading up to May 1968.
In turn, the research I am presenting here implicitly suggests that an inves-
tigation of Comolli’s lineage as a free jazz critic allows us to identify a series of
discursive points that may accommodate a reexamination of his ideas relating
to cinema and the critical methodology he employed; but more explicitly, my
analysis insists that the stakes are in fact much higher, and that Comolli’s free
jazz writings offer valuable if not entirely necessary tools pertaining to larger
discussions concerning the specific relationship between aesthetics and politics.
Comolli here serves as a crucial link between Cahiers and Jazz Magazine,
and, by proxy, film and jazz criticism. Yet, if an overlap of personnel is insufficient
to feed the suspicion of a discursive correspondence, another relation is perhaps
more telling: beginning in February of 1965, Jazz Magazine began running full-
page advertisements for Cahiers either directly preceding the table of contents or
on the inside of the magazine’s back cover. It would seem reasonable to suspect
that Comolli’s contribution to both publications had something to do with the
advertising space that was allotted, and my investigation here seeks to build off
this suspicion: notably, the aforementioned placement of the advertisements is
telling, since it strategically featured Cahiers’ entire front cover as if to indicate
that the covers of the two magazines could be viewed as interchangeable.
The task of determining the relevance of Comolli’s critical duality faces a
distinct set of unique challenges that have proven highly instructional in the col-
lection of my research. Ultimately, my goal here is not to determine what exactly
Comolli was thinking with his multidisciplinary project, but rather, what does
his project allow us to think? Amiri Baraka advanced the thesis in Blues People
that jazz acts as a mediated expression of black consciousness, and, if such is the
case, how might this expression, via Comolli, mediate our understanding of art
and its connection to politics?
Correspondingly, the scope of my research is purposely limited in two ways.
Firstly, my main interest concerns the genesis of Comolli’s thought via free
jazz, and the majority of the proceeding analysis is thus devoted to two specific
articles he penned for Jazz Magazine—(1) a short review of Ornette Coleman’s
seminal album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961) published in 1965
and (2) “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing” which arrived less than a year later
and provocatively labeled free jazz as a music of decolonization. As a result,

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Matthias Mushinski

Comolli’s contemporaneous contributions to Cahiers and more well-known

articles “Cinéma/Idéologie/Critique” and “Technique et Idéologie” are given
little mention (although a reader familiar with them can expect many affinities
to arise).
Secondly, the structure of the preceding three sections is intentionally
restricted, for the most part, to the ideas of four main thinkers: Jean-Louis
Comolli, Amiri Baraka, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière. These four
players here serve as a quasi-jazz ensemble, and it might even be said that they act
out a form of call-and-response as a result. Each section is fueled by attuned ideas
concerning the relationship between aesthetics and politics and my stubborn
conviction that the analysis of free jazz—which is to say, music both about and
by excluded political subjects—presents a serious challenge to any intellectual
undertaking concerned with tracing the critical and aesthetic contours of revolu-
tionary artworks. The first section introduces the Parisian jazz landscape during
the mid-1960s, contextualizes Comolli’s review of Free Jazz with the reactions
the new thing provoked in the United States, and draws similarities between
the critical agendas at Cahiers and Jazz Magazine. Section two problematizes
a binary provided by Rancière in Aesthetics and Its Discontents—the resistant
form versus the becoming-life form of art—in order to locate areas of resonance
between Adorno’s unauthoritative (yet well-known) aversion toward swing jazz
and Baraka’s authoritative (yet comparatively lesser-known) assessment of both
swing jazz and bebop in Blues People. And lastly, the third section includes a close
reading of Comolli’s most famous Jazz Magazine article “Voyage au Bout de la
New Thing” in order to examine how free jazz’s inextricable link with black lives
encourages a reframing of the common majority that structures the relationship
between art and politics. In doing so, I make the argument that free jazz both
represents and outlines the possibility of an avant-garde for the masses not by forc-
ing us to question the aesthetic practices of the avant-garde, but by reconfiguring
our presumption of the masses as such.

Section I: Cahiers du Cinéma and Jazz Magazine

The height of free jazz’s popularity in France may have taken place between the
years 1968 and 1972; however, as noted by Eric Drott in Music and the Elusive
Revolution, the year 1965 marked a distinct turning point, and one that set the
foundation for French jazz publications moving forward. Critical cohorts at
magazines such as Cahiers du Jazz, Jazz-Hot, and Jazz Magazine were certainly
aware of the controversies stirred by free jazz musicians during the first half of
the decade, yet the stance they took at that time was inevitably dependent on the
testimonies of American jazz critics who, unlike their French counterparts, were

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

Figure 1. Cover of Jazz Magazine, June 1965.

fortunate enough to experience free jazz performances firsthand. This limited

access caused notable grief for French listeners and is suggested by the regularly
translated passages and articles from Chicago-based Down Beat Magazine printed
in Jazz Magazine, a practice that emphasizes the intermediary role of American
critics who unknowingly bore the task of bridging the gap between the American
jazz scene and French jazz aficionados.

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Matthias Mushinski

French free jazz criticism prior to 1965 required the authority geographic
distance prohibited, and the sudden migration of free jazz musicians to Paris
allowed French listeners to not only witness live, improvisational sessions, but
to legitimize and bolster their inevitably foreign critical perspective. In 1965,
tours brought a number of American musicians to France, including Don
Cherry (who had an extended engagement at the Parisian nightclub Le chat qui
pêche), Steve Lacy (who performed at La Bohème), and Ornette Coleman (who
made a much-anticipated appearance at La Mutualité).1 This sudden influx of
American free jazz musicians catalyzed the critical trajectory at Jazz Magazine
for two reasons. Firstly, and as suggested by the aforementioned inclusion of
Down Beat reviews in Jazz Magazine, the niche carved out by French critics
witnessing the new thing for the first time was distinctly informed by stateside
debates surrounding free jazz’s arrival and cultural relevance. In particular, those
American critics who overtly dismissed the music’s supposed incomprehensibil-
ity could finally be countered since French listeners were no longer dependent
on the guidance of American album and concert reviews regardless of the
skepticism they raised.
Secondly, the move to Europe on the part of free jazz players was less
concerned with expanding jazz audiences than finding new ones due to the
growing lack of financial prospects and exhibition avenues in the United States—a
predicament that markedly suggested a divided, American jazz public.
France’s reputation as a haven for African American artists was well-
established, and by luring American musicians overseas French free jazz writers
embraced the responsibility of advocating and financially supporting American
cultural value. Jean-Louis Comolli was certainly part of this group, and although
he had not yet begun his coeditorship at Cahiers du Cinéma by 1965, his willing-
ness to take on the self-appointed role of American cultural consultant distinctly
resonates with the position spearheaded by François Truffaut and adopted
to various degrees by Cahiers’s critical team a decade earlier. At that time, the
critical impetus at Cahiers famously sought, through an emphasis on visual detail
and mise-en-scène, to proclaim the artistic greatness of American film directors
dismissed as mere functionaries of the studio system. And much like the cinéphilic
landscape of the 1950s nurtured by Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française
successfully cultivated a golden age of American film appreciation, the stage was
set in 1965 for a similar valuation of free jazz; where the mid-1950s observed the
proclaimed genius of directors such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and
Orson Welles at Cahiers, the mid-1960s observed the similarly proclaimed genius
of free jazz musicians such as Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and Ornette Coleman
in the pages of Jazz Magazine. However, the challenge French free jazz critics
faced did not involve highlighting stylistic signatures and authorial consistency

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

embedded within mainstream American productions—a practice French press

outlets had previously undertaken with their support of American swing jazz in
the 1940s—but, instead, the defense of an ascending art form that was positioned
by both its practitioners and critics outside the reach of the American mainstream
altogether.
George Lewis provides a detailed account of the overwhelming critical
adversary free jazz musicians faced at the start of the 1960s in A Power Stronger
than Itself, and highlights a particularly severe and representative review of
Ornette Coleman’s This Is Our Music (1960) published in a 1961 edition of
Down Beat.

The technical abominations of his playing aside—and his lack of technical con-
trol is abominable—Coleman’s music, to me, has only two shades: a maudlin,
pleading lyricism and a wild ferocity bordering on bedlam. His is not musical
freedom; disdain for principles and boundaries synonymous not with freedom,
but with anarchy. . . . If Coleman’s work is to be the standard of excellence, then
the work of Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington,
and all the other jazzmen who have been accepted as important artists must be
thrown on the trash heap.2

Such reviews represented a notable majority in the United States, meaning

French listeners were forced to carefully choose their critical affiliations if the
goal was to avoid placing undue emphasis on the type of scathing reviews typified
by Downbeat’s review of This Is Our Music. In turn, Amiri Baraka, one of free
jazz’s most staunch supporters since its inception, became the major if not
singular point of reference for French critics, and Lewis goes so far as to suggest
that Baraka was the “one American critic-historian of black music [that] really
mattered,”3 noting that his essays and book, Blues People, were widely read in
France. Baraka’s unique authority was highly instructive, and in an essay titled
“Jazz and the White Critic” published in a 1963 edition of Down Beat, he directly
addresses the specifically American sensibility of the new music—a matter that
further rationalizes the comparatively hesitant tone French reviews adopted
prior to 1965.

Most jazz critics were (and are) not only white middle-class Americans, but
middle-brows as well. The irony here is that because the majority of jazz critics
are white middle-brows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middle-brow
standards of excellence as criteria for the performance of a music that in its most
profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards; in fact,
quite often it is in direct reaction against them.4

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Matthias Mushinski

His concluding sentences continue this determined shaming of white middle-class

sensibilities and also predict the critical mandate a new generation of French free
jazz critics would purposefully adopt.

In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all.

Negro Music, like the Negro himself, is strictly an American phenomenon, and
we have got to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend
on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and
local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid
critical writing or commentary about it.5

This is not to say that, by 1965, the critical methodology endorsed by Baraka
and employed at Jazz Magazine was immediately apparent; rather, Comolli’s
contribution to the journal’s February edition demonstrates the type of critical
tentativeness characteristic of French reviews at that time while simultaneously
foretelling the starkly oppositional stance they would eventually catalyze. In the
regular section “Le disque dont on parle,” Comolli reviews Ornette Coleman’s
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961), and in this short review we may
begin to identify the setting of a critical foundation that anticipates the highly
contested position Comolli would adopt only a year later with “Voyage au Bout
de la New Thing.”

If one must offer a first reaction, an initial and fugitive resonance to wave of
shock, if one must, before probing and founding, dream again of the launch of
a dream, so I say softly that this Free Jazz is shocking not due its revolutionary
or bold aspects, but due to its innocence and freshness.6

Here, Comolli begins his review with two critical maneuvers. Firstly, his
determined hesitancy—“If one must”—resonates with a position notably
familiarized by Theodor Adorno in “On the Contemporary Relationship
between Philosophy and Music”: that “there is something enigmatic that is
apparent in all music”7; that “Music gazes at its listener with empty eyes, and the
more deeply one immerses oneself in it, the more incomprehensible its ultimate
purpose becomes.”8 Comolli’s willingness to attempt an interpretation of the
uninterpretable undoubtedly raises the stakes, but also takes refuge in music’s
supposed inaccessibility—a gesture that served to simultaneously validate and
protect the grandeur of statements set to follow. Secondly, he swiftly acknowledges
a revolutionary component to Coleman’s recording, yet affiliates the music’s
sense of shock to innocence and freshness. In doing so, he indirectly cements
Jazz Magazine’s oppositional stance in relation to the American jazz critics who

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

greeted Coleman’s atonal playing with vehement negativity as evidenced in Down

Beat’s review of Free Jazz published two years prior.

If nothing else, this witch’s brew is the logical end product of a bankrupt phi-
losophy of ultraindividualism in music. “Collective improvisation? » Nonsense.
The only semblance of collectivity lies in the fact that these eight nihilists were
collected together in one studio at one time and with one common cause: to
destroy the music that gave them birth.9

Whereas the American critics who inflammatorily denounced Coleman as

anti-jazz attributed Free Jazz’s shocking character to its supposedly deliberate
fragmentary nature, Comolli’s review identifies innocence at the foundation of
Coleman’s artistry—an underlying artistic impulse American jazz criticism was
unable to detect. Naturally, ascribing both innocence and revolutionary shock
to free jazz would seem contradictory, particularly when considering the well-
documented difficulty most jazz listeners faced when greeting the new music.
Lewis notes that,

Moreover, for many critics, the nature of the music itself militated against any
hope of audience success. “Avant-garde jazz,” claimed [Ronald] Radano, “is not
music for the masses—black or white,” and on this view, the musicians’ attacks
on the establishment provided “an excuse” for their “lack of recognition by both
the black and the jazz communities.”10

Nevertheless, the limitations set by the small space allotted to Comolli’s

review of Free Jazz in Jazz Magazine may have prevented a more succinct
articulation of the new direction free jazz criticism ought to take. But the review
does succeed in explicating the need for a new criterion of artistic value while
simultaneously alluding to the inadequacy of the critical models free jazz criticism
inherited. Beginning his closing paragraph, he writes that “there is no transition
between modern jazz and Free Jazz: there is a departure, it is a jump one must
make,”11 and although this jump may here be framed as exclusive to jazz, a reader
familiar with the politicized direction Comolli mobilized at Cahiers would have
undoubtedly located a shared sentiment across both publications.
Comolli was well versed in jazz history thanks to Baraka’s jazz writings, and
if we are to accept his proposition that free jazz represents a departure that “seeks
to destroy”12 and is “determined to construct,”13 there is reason to believe that free
jazz demonstrates a specific type of innocence and revolutionary character that
is absent in previous jazz forms. To call free jazz innocent would seem to suggest
that the music’s revolutionary component is somehow uncorrupted or in some

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Matthias Mushinski

way unintentional—that its artistic imperative is unmediated by the comparatively

guilty actions of previous jazz forms—and, if this is the case, an analysis of those
previous forms becomes necessary.

Section II: Theodor Adorno versus Amiri Baraka—Resistant Form Artworks

versus Making-Life Artworks
So what are we to make of Comolli’s reading of innocence, and, more specifically
how does this so-called aspect of Free Jazz relate to its revolutionary constituent?
Placing emphasis on the suspicious omission of racial politics in the review offers
us a point of departure and allows us to observe how Comolli situates free jazz in
relation to both previous jazz forms and political art in general. Here, the issue
of race might not be explicitly addressed, but a closer look suggests that Baraka’s
ideas greatly informed Comolli’s position as early as 1965. He writes that “in order
to understand what Free Jazz is and what it wants, we must first decipher what it
isn’t and what it refuses,”14 and adopting this strategy allows us to further assess
the supposed “leap” Comolli associates with the music and what it departed from
as a result.
Theodor Adorno never had the opportunity to experience a free jazz
performance or recording during his lifetime, yet his infamous denouncement
of the music’s preceding forms provides an instructive contextual basis for the
comparatively sympathetic approach adopted by Comolli and Jazz Magazine
during the 1960s. Editor Richard Leppert notes in Essays on Music that Adorno
used the term “jazz” in reference to the particular type of big-band, orchestra dance
music that was prepackaged and exported to Europe in various watered-down
formats during the 1930s and 1940s, and, as a result, his unabashed willingness to
make generalized statements about a musical form he was only marginally familiar
with has incited many jazz scholars and supporters to seek critical refuge in the
vast territory left uncharted by his historically limited scope.
Yet the peculiar fact that Adorno considered jazz capable of harnessing a
social function worthy of such vicious decoding remains peculiar if not wholly sus-
picious, and his restricted outlook must not prevent us from striving to explicate
the reasons for his critical assault—especially since, upon further examination,
Adorno’s demand for a music capable of calling “for change in the coded language
of suffering”15 aligns with Baraka’s assessment of the American jazz landscape at
the start of the 1960s.
Accordingly, in the following paragraphs I treat Adorno and Baraka on
equal footing in order to examine their evaluations of jazz music and culture
as they relate to Jacques Rancière’s delineation of the resistant form versus the
becoming-life form of art—a binary that explicitly privileges Adorno’s dialectical

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

process at its structural base and implicitly discloses major affinities with Baraka’s
musicological mission. In doing so, I intend to show that although Adorno
continues to provoke claims that he simply failed to “get” jazz or have an ear for
it, these assertions are shockingly refuted, rather than fortified, by a comparative
analysis of his jazz writings with Blues People and Baraka’s uniquely authoritative
position. My goal is to make sense of Comolli’s equivocal claim that free jazz
demonstrates a dually innocent and revolutionary character, and in the process
I propose that free jazz may be viewed as an avant-garde of the masses via an
examination of how avant-garde artworks both constitute and presume the
existence of the masses as such.
Rancière begins Aesthetics and Its Discontents by addressing the idea of politi-
cal art as it relates to the conditions and transformations of collective existence. In
doing so, he outlines two artistic methods and critical attitudes—(1) the resistant
form and (2) the becoming-life of art—and identifies the usage of the term “art”
as the framing of “a space of presentation by which things of art are identified as
such”16 and differentiated from “ordinary forms of sensory experience.”17

Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments
it conveys concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because
of the manner in which it might choose to represent society’s structures, or
social groups, their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very
distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space
and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and
peoples this space.18

The distance taken by the resistant form seeks to preserve the material difference
of art in relation to common experience. Politically radical art from this position
preserves a “singular power of presence,”19 since art must refuse to get involved in
the decoration of the mundane world in order to conserve its political potential.
As such, artistic form formulates its political promise by distinguishing itself
from common forms of life and thereby affirms that the social function of art is to
have no function at all: to be obsolete, unfit for consumption, and subsequently
protected by a perceptible boundary that separates artworks from what may be
deemed common existence.
In contrast, the becoming-life artwork does the exact opposite: it seeks to
eradicate the distance that establishes art as a separate sphere of life in order to
unify the different arts with forms of nonart by rendering their systems of presen-
tation invisible—it is “a way of redisposing the objects and images that comprise
the common world as it is already given, or of creating situations apt to modify our
gazes and our attitudes with respect to this collective environment.”20 Whereas the

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Matthias Mushinski

resistant form “takes up a combat against culture, instituting a frontline on one

and the same side of which stands the defence of the ‘world’ against ‘society,’ of
works against cultural products, of things against images,”21 the becoming-life of
art institutes a promise of community by “relinquishing its sensible otherness”22
and becomes a form of life in doing so.
The resistant form and becoming-life of art are thus differentiated by the
distance, or lack of distance, they effectuate in relation to a preexisting common
life. For this reason, it becomes crucial to emphasize the forerunning nature of
the common as outlined by Rancière. He writes that,

In the political community, the excluded is a conflictual actor, an actor who

includes himself as a supplementary political subject, carrying a right not yet
recognized or witnessing an injustice in the existing state of the right. . . . [This]
supplement is no longer supposed to arise, since everyone is included. As a result,
there is no status for the excluded in the structuration of the community . . . the
excluded is merely the one who accidentally falls outside the great equality of
all—the sick, the retarded or the forsaken to whom the community must extend
a hand in order to re-establish the “social bond.”23

The emphasis here on the accidental nature of the excluded is significant,

especially when viewed alongside Baraka’s claim that free jazz had “an accidental
implication of social upheaval associated with it.”24 Recognizing this, we may
concur that both the resistant form and becoming-life of art as conceived by
Rancière typically, if not exclusively, operate from a position of inclusion: resistant
form artworks purposely exclude themselves from common forms of life, whereas
becoming-life artworks purposely access them—gestures that both attest to their
fixed status as part of the common community. As previously noted, Baraka
advanced the maxim in Blues People that jazz acts as a mediated expression of
black consciousness, and if we should presume, as I am doing here, that African
Americans in the United States innocently and accidentally “[fall] outside the
great equality of all,”25 there is reason to suspect that jazz should prove capable of
destabilizing and redistributing Rancière’s binary.
The separation between resistant form and becoming-life artworks is by no
means self-evident, and considering how swing jazz and bebop fit within the two
categories makes this clear. As previously mentioned, the resistant form distinctly
echoes Adorno’s condemnation of jazz as light music, and Rancière even goes so
far as to explicitly associate Adorno’s musicological project with it.

The autonomy of the Schoenbergian work, as conceptualized by Adorno, is in

fact a twofold heteronomy: in order to denounce the capitalist division of work

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

and the embellishments of commodities effectively, the work has to be even

more mechanical, more “inhuman” than the products of mass consumption.26

This denouncement of embellished commodities is plainly addressed in “Music

in the Background,” in which Adorno states that if we are looking for music “[we]
have to step outside the space of immediate life,”27 because music no longer is one,
and “find the lost immediacy where it costs the price of admission, at the opera [or]
at a concert: café music may have been shooed off the street, but not to the distant
reaches of formalized art.”28 In order for music to be “tolerated by human beings
amidst their daily affairs without frightening them,”29 it must be “emancipated
from all human seriousness and all genuineness of artistic form.”30 Melodies might
be present, but only to “wander around as ghosts,”31 pacify listeners, and relinquish
the promise of political emancipation, which, if attempted, would inevitably
force their exclusion from the mundane world and subsequent relocation within
a separate aesthetic sphere where they can comment on society from afar.
Adorno was by no means a jazz expert, and it would be futile to chastise him
for failing to predict the music’s oncoming evolution. Yet his harsh opinions,
regardless of their short-sightedness, unexpectedly predict Baraka’s equally
punitive condemnation of swing jazz in Blues People.

Swing had no meaning for blues people, nor was it expressive of the emotional
life of most young Negroes after the war. Nevertheless, by the forties it had
submerged all the most impressive acquisitions from Afro-American musical
tradition beneath a mass of “popular” commercialism. . . . Big-band jazz, for
all practical purposes, had passed completely into the mainstream and served
now, in its performance, simply as a stylized reflection of a culturally feeble
environment.32

Bearing Baraka’s stance in mind, startling credence may be given to Adorno’s

claim that the “extent to which jazz has anything at all to do with genuine black
music is highly questionable; the fact that it is frequently performed by blacks and
that the public clamors for “black jazz” as a sort of brand-name doesn’t say much
about it, even if folkloric research should confirm the African origin of many of
its practices”33—an emphasis here must be laid on Adorno’s appeal to “genuine”
black music, which seems to indicate that swing jazz’s shortcomings stem from
their inability to live up to a genuine black standard. An affinity with Baraka’s
vilification of swing jazz now becomes clear, and one that helps to substantiate
Adorno’s racially insensitive association of the “jazz band which abandons itself
to the eight-bar rhythms of the hit composer”34 with a “wild animal in a cage.”35
According to Adorno, if jazz is to fulfill its political promise, it must do so via a

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Matthias Mushinski

determined resistance rather than appeal to the caged sterility of mainstream

cultural sensibilities.
To reiterate, although swing jazz’s dance-function and nonart exhibition
context (beerhalls, cafes, etc.) agree with Rancière’s becoming-life category, the
music was not expressive of black life as experienced in post-war America—of
note here is the fact that, in many cases, black swing jazz musicians were only
allowed to occupy these so-called common spaces as entertainers, and not as
paying patrons. Regarding the music itself, Adorno writes that “The interjection
of the interpreter or arranger in jazz does not permit, as the improvisations of the
great stage actors still do, a real altering of the material in order to give rise to a
subjective proclamation.”36 Compatibly, Baraka writes that “spontaneous impulse
had been replaced by the [big-band jazz] arranger, and the human element of the
music was confined to whatever difficulties individual performers might have
reading a score.”37 This allusion to a repressed human element reaffirms Adorno’s
claim that the jazz musician “is permitted to tug at the chains of his boredom
. . . but he cannot break them,”38 and that a reproduced swing composition
“respectfully dresses up its bare walls in order to disguise its inhumanity”39—a
point that brings to mind Rancière’s definition of the resistant form as more
“inhuman” than the products of mass consumption. On cue, Baraka aptly
addresses this prolonging of disguised inhumanity, and advances it with an even
more disastrous consequence.

Philosophically, swing sought to involve the black culture in a platonic social

blandness that would erase it forever, replacing it with the socio-cultural com-
promise of the “jazzed-up” popular song: a compromise whose most significant
stance was finally catatonia and noncommunication.40

The becoming-life of swing jazz, as demonstrated by the music’s eager

acceptance by white, middle-class American audiences, “required the silencing
of black culture at the hands of “slick ‘white’ commercializations,”41 which is to
say that the becoming-life of swing jazz allegorized the becoming-white of black
America and the high level of sacrifice cultural assimilation required. In order for
jazz and the black populace it represented to efface their difference as the perpetu-
ally excluded American Other, “the most beautiful elements of Afro-American
musical tradition”42 had to be forfeited since the promise of mainstream inclusion
still emphasized that to be a successful swing musician, one had to be white:
“There was, indeed, no way into the society on one’s own terms; that is, that an
individual be allowed to come into the society as an individual, or a group as an
individual group.”43 The becoming-life of art requires that systems of presentation
become invisible, but with the becoming-life and subsequent commercialization

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

of swing jazz, the “cultural significance of the black man’s three hundred years in
America” had to be made invisible as well.44
The understanding of a new, younger generation of black musicians who
would eventually catalyze the ascension of free jazz reinforced a cynical awareness
that by simply being black one was refused entrance into the common community.
This meant that a music that sought to truly express the lives of African Americans
in America bore the task of restoring the original separateness swing jazz suc-
cessfully masked: the “young Negro musician of the forties began to realize that
merely by being a Negro in America, one was a non-conformist.”45 Accordingly,
if the alienation free jazz enforces reflects a natural condition of being black in
America, it thereby demonstrates that the becoming-life of free jazz must adopt
a position of resistance in relation to what passes as the common community.
Baraka provides a remarkably poignant assessment of the American art scene at
the start of the 1960s that explicitly addresses how free jazz challenges Rancière’s
privileging of a preexisting life to be purposefully resisted.

The complete domination of American society by what Brooks Adams called

the economic sensibility, discouraging completely any significant participation
of the imaginative sensibility in the social, political, and economic affairs of the
society is what has promoted this hatred of the artist by the “average American.”
This phenomenon has also caused the estrangement of the American artist
from American society, and made the formal culture of the society (the diluted
formalism of the academy) anemic and fraught with incompetence and unreal-
ity. It has also caused the high art of America to be called “an art of alienation.”
The analogy to the life of the Negro in America and his subsequent production
of a high art which took its shape directly from the nature and meaning of his
own alienation should be obvious.46

Looking ahead, although Adorno’s assertions take on an abrasive, general-

izing tone and fail to consider the existence of jazz forms beyond his immediate
grasp, they are enough cause to consider what form of jazz, if any at all, might
prove capable of responding to his claim that music can either turn “into a normal
condition and in the process hold out for quality, when possible,”47 or “ultimately
oppose the tendency by a turn to the extreme.”48 Rancière’s resistant form and
becoming-life categories serve to further emphasize the dichotomy between a
“normal condition” and “turn to the extreme,” yet, as becomes clear with the ascent
of free jazz and the criticism that greeted its arrival in France, a turn to the extreme
questioned the very normalcy of normal conditions—the exclusive and already
given structuration of the masses—and the inability of normal, black innocence to
fit within them. As such, free jazz effectively breaks down the resistant form versus

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Matthias Mushinski

becoming-life binary, and emerges as a unique restructuring of its parameters: the

becoming-life of resisted lives, an art form that both innocently and accidentally
adopts a position of revolutionary resistance in relation to the restricted equality
of the common community.

Section III: Music of Decolonization

Rancière’s resistant versus becoming-life binary stipulates that art’s politics are
achieved not by what they say about the world, but by the distance art takes in
relation to the world, and outlining this distance becomes the task of extra-textual
discursive practices seeking to unearth the relationship between artworks and the
common community they presume to exist. Comolli’s most provocative article
on free jazz, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” accepts this task by polemically
administering an international scope capable of proposing the new thing’s
affiliation with a global majority.
The question raised is a difficult one: If free jazz represents the interests of
colonized political subjects who are excluded from the already given common
community that structures art’s politics, and these colonized peoples do in fact
represent a quantitative, global majority, can we consider free jazz to be an art form
of the masses? Or, to take it a step further, might we consider it an avant-garde of
the masses? My assessment of “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing” here riffs off of a
discursive predicament highlighted by James Baldwin in “In Search of a Majority,”
that “before we can begin to speak of minority rights in this country, we’ve got to
make some attempt to isolate or to define the majority”49; that an investigation
concerning the relationship between art and politics must not simply question
the relationship between art and the masses, but also the very definition of the
masses as such.
“Voyage au Bout de la New Thing” begins with a maxim: that free jazz
inevitably, and despite being ostracized by the majority of American audiences
and critics, reflects both an immediate and oncoming contemporary sensibility.

Undoubtedly, the progression of jazz is married to the progression of the century

that witnessed its birth; each age has its culture, its sensibilities and its specific
ideals of beauty; one beauty replaces another, like one generation pushes another
outside the limits of the contemporary moment.50

Immediately following, he writes that

The worried, audacious, elegant or moving children and students of [the 1950s
jazz musicians] we loved are monsters. They play, for the most part, a music that

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

is . . . grating, disorderly, irritating, deranged, a music in opposition to what we

previously savoured in jazz, which is to say in opposition to our canons of taste
and beauty.51

Such a stance immediately asserts that ideals of beauty and cultural sensibilities are
historically conditioned, and Comolli ends his introduction hastily claiming that
free jazz is an instrument of decolonization. Thus, if we should attempt to deter-
mine the way in which “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing” indicates Comolli’s
understanding of the relationship between art and politics, we must unpack his
usage of the term decolonization by locating the colonized peoples it comprises.
First off, Comolli insists that whether or not we should choose to admit it,
“jazz is the expression of men who were and remain on the margins of our society,
a foreign civilization, excluding our laws, morals and aesthetics.”52 This excluded
position, he writes, represents defining power structures and the governance of
white, mainstream ideals that deceptively swear to be representative of an objective
majority—the exclusive structuration of the common community—rather than
a quantitative majority founded on the power dynamic of the colonizer versus
the colonized.

Blacks in America have finally understood that they are less a racial minority
victimized by the laws of a racial majority than one of the innumerable races,
one of the victimized civilizations, worldwide, of European colonization: one
member of an overwhelming majority subjected to the law of a minority. And
this minority is learning that today the time for decolonization has begun.53

The “present mutation of jazz”54 is, according to Comolli, “nothing other than the
translation, in the domain of art, of this colonization”55—a critical position that
recalls the revolutionary aspect he momentarily alludes to in his review of Free
Jazz. With “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” he makes this so-called aspect far
more explicit, stating that “jazz today is an expression of the Black Nation”56—one
that is not limited to an American minority, but that extends beyond North
America to include other nations subjected to the power of white, European
colonial power and cultural standards.
This adoption of a global perspective allows Comolli to relate free jazz to a
newly conceptualized majority and to expand upon Baraka’s view in Blues People
that the “art of alienation” moniker typically associated with avant-garde artistic
practices is, in the case of free jazz, representative of the unintentional alienation
black artists experienced in real life.57 If this alienation can be extended beyond
the borders of the United States and Europe, then the very relationship between
art and politics is called to the stand: Comolli’s critical impetus directly forces us

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Matthias Mushinski

to reorient the discursive foundation of the forerunning, common community

that structures the real-life distance that frames art’s politics. If this binary is
applied to the West alone, then the common community it presumes to exist is
quantitatively founded—the majority it represents is the life lived by the majority
of (white) Europeans and Americans. But by allowing his analysis to take on an
international scope, this structuration of the masses quickly deteriorates and
thereby inaugurates a newly conceptualized community of the colonized: one
that is decidedly foreign to the Western minority responsible for the fashioning
of ideals that systematically exclude oppositional ideas, voices, and subjects.
So how then does Comolli resolve art’s relationship to politics? Or, more
specifically, what differentiates the former from the latter? Rancière provides an
apt distinction, or lack thereof, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, stating that “art
and politics do not constitute two permanent, separate realities whereby the issue
is to know whether or not they ought to be set in relation. They are two forms of
the distribution of the sensible, both of which are dependent on a specific regime
of identification.”58 If we are to understand jazz as the making-life of resisted lives,
as both Baraka and Comolli seem to suggest, Rancière’s definition of politics
seems compatible with free jazz itself.

Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which defines

the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to
render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had
been perceived as mere noisy animals.59

This is precisely what free jazz’s departure from swing jazz and bebop sought to
accomplish with an uncompromising stance that eventually forced its migration
to Europe. African Americans, as emphasized by both Baraka and Comolli, are
excluded from collective existence, meaning that any art form truly intent on
depicting the reality of being black in America should call to question the exclusiv-
ity of common existence by giving voice to the lives it excludes. Free jazz insists
on its separateness from an already given masses as such, and achieves its politics
once this original separateness is cancelled out and reframed as the reflection of a
normal, human condition. Comolli’s insistence on free jazz as a music of decolo-
nization seeks to bolster this process; to reframe free jazz’s oft-perceived refusal
to partake in a common existence as a fact of life rather than artistic choice, and
to subsequently expand the excluded existence it allegorizes to include oppressed
peoples the European colonizer’s vision inevitably fails to qualify.
To reiterate, in A Power Stronger than Itself, George Lewis insists that Baraka
was the American critic who mattered most to French jazz writers, even though
confirming his influence in Comolli’s articles published for both Jazz Magazine

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

and Cahiers remained speculative rather than confirmed until 1965. However, in
“Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” Comolli quotes Baraka at length in order to
bolster and legitimize his assault on European sensibilities and their inability to
truly ascertain free jazz’s dually innocent and revolutionary impetus.

But expression is the instinctive reflection that characterizes black art and
culture. These [free jazz] musicians transcend any and all of the emotional states
(the human realizations) known by the white man. Black Arts, Culture and Life
speak of a world more beautiful than the one the white man knows. All this is
to say that this music is an invention of black lives.60

The quote works to support a notably sprawling and disjointed sentence offered
by Comolli.

Free jazz, for us, Europeans who are for the most part white, heads filled with
our sense of order and beauty, with the secret thought with which we judge every
artistic manifestation, that we are taken aback by such an aesthetic opposition,
that we are faced with an artistic branch that is monstrous and aberrant in rela-
tion to accepted jazz standards [du bon jazz de papa] that understand nothing of
the most important paramusical phenomenon of our time, it even admits—and
how could we escape such a confession—that we acted as colonizers without
noticing.61

Such a declaration certainly brings to mind Baraka’s claim that no reliance on

European tradition can help jazz criticism in “Jazz and the White Critic,” and
Comolli’s expands upon this notion later in the article.

And if by accident we are not on the side of [European] order and these closed
ideals, the recourse remains to say that, if the new “jazz” is first and foremost a
music of the black revolution, the revolution itself does not bother with color
and includes us all. For this reason, I imagine, we may understand the affiliation
of “free music” with numerous accursed members of America (and Europe),
beatniks, vietniks, and other spoilsports.62

Here, Comolli again builds upon a fundamental assertion Baraka forwarded in

Blues People—that the new music “defined the terms of a deeply felt nonconfor-
mity among many young Americans, black and white”63—which is to say that free
jazz does not solely act as a form of black expression, but also of action; that its
dually innocent and revolutionary nature speaks of a world that is both unknown
and that should be strived for. White “spoilsports” such as beatniks and vietniks

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Matthias Mushinski

could thus join the cause, and Baraka highlights the way in which white members
of American society who were naturally included within the common community
could intentionally exclude themselves from it.

Certainly a white man wearing a zoot suit or talking bop talk cannot enter into
the mainstream of American society. More important, that white man does
not desire to enter the mainstream (because all he would have to do is change
clothes and start “talking right” and he would be easily reinstated). His behavior
is indicative on most levels of a conscious nonconformity to important require-
ments of the society. . . . The important idea here is that the white musicians and
other young whites who associated themselves with this Negro music identified
the Negro with this separation, this noncomformity though, of course, the
Negro himself had no choice.64

It is this type of cultural repositioning that “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing”

strives to effectuate, and a direct line is thus drawn between the article and
Comolli’s earlier review of Free Jazz: the white artist, critic, and citizen may adopt
the revolutionary stance free jazz hosts despite the fact that the music’s innocent,
as opposed to intentional, nonconformity remains inaccessible. Avant-garde aes-
thetics are thus reframed as an attempt to speak on behalf of a previously excluded,
international, and quantitatively determined community of the colonized: a newly
conceived common existence, masses and majority as such.

Conclusion
On the subject of French free jazz criticism, there is plenty more critical territory
left to traverse, and the recent English translation of Free/Jazz Black Power stresses
this point—the book was coauthored in 1971 by Comolli and his Jazz Magazine
colleague Philippe Carles. Indisputably, the book offers film scholarship a
tremendous opportunity to further contextualize, as I have indirectly done here,
Comolli’s film and jazz writings, especially since the book’s original publication
is contemporaneous with the Cahiers’ publication of both “Cinéma/Idéologie/
Critique” and “Technique et Idéologie.”
George Lewis’s A Power Stronger than Itself and Eric Drott’s Music and the
Elusive Revolution withstanding, Comolli’s work as a jazz critic has been given
limited critical attention in jazz scholarship, and perhaps the release of Free Jazz/
Black Power—which notably shares the titling structure of “Cinéma/Idéologie/
Critique”—will provoke film scholars already familiar with Comolli’s critical
output at Cahiers to enact further investigations. The music may have been
relatively ignored up until this point, yet the mere fact that Free Jazz/Black Power

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

is finally being translated would seem to suggest a nearing critical turn, and one
that may greatly benefit from a visitation of the ideas and critical practices that
began to take hold in Paris between 1965 and 1966, along with critique of social,
political and aesthetic sensibilities they mandated.
Jacques Rancière notably affirms that today the “task assigned to the artistic
avant-garde still involves tracing a perceptible boundary that sets artworks apart
from the products of commercial culture,”65 and I have insisted here that thinking
the relationship between free jazz and politics via Rancière, Jean-Louis Comolli,
Amiri Baraka, and Theodor Adorno allows us to take this suggestion a step
further: the task assigned to the avant-garde also involves the perpetual retracing of
the already given common community that sets the politics of artworks in motion.
The text remains the same, however, what French free jazz criticism and Comolli
affirm is the need for discourse—or interpretations of the uninterpretable in the
case of music—which is to say that the politics of artworks require argumenta-
tive action in order to be excavated along with questions pertaining to the very
normalcy of the normal conditions that allow us to think their possibility.
What has been sought here is an idea, a way to think how free jazz ought to
inform our understanding of revolutionary artworks, and how the possibility of
an avant-garde for the masses may be gleaned as a result. For those familiar with
Comolli’s film writings, my research likely suggests that free jazz served as an
absent structuring principle in relation to his film-related ideas: most notably, in
Cahiers’ November 1965 edition, Comolli participated in a roundtable discussion
with some of the magazine’s other contributors published under the title “Vingt
ans après: le cinéma américain et la politique des auteurs.” During the discussion,
he pessimistically proposes that “If you’re looking for ideas in filmmakers, better
look elsewhere”66 and continues his stance stating “I’m not sure they are best
expressed in film.”67
Could free jazz be the “elsewhere” to which Comolli is referring? I am
certainly inclined to believe as much, especially when considering that his review
of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was published less than a year prior. There may
be reason to suspect that Comolli felt free jazz, rather than cinema, was the art
form most capable of expressing ideas, and although we are still left to ponder
why Comolli never sought to explicitly draw a connection between free jazz and
cinema, I hope the ideas presented here give some indication that it is one worth
striving for.

Matthias Mushinski completed his BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University and graduated from
Columbia University’s MA in Film Studies program in 2015. His SCMS conference paper was prompted
by time spent working as a video club clerk at the now defunct La Boite Noire in Montréal. His research

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Matthias Mushinski

interests include the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Jean-Luc Godard, and “the cut” as a
form of thought. He is currently preparing to launch a small capsule collection of “cinéphilic streetwear”
pieces inspired by new directions in continental philosophy, fashion, and hip-hop.

NOTES
1. Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France,
1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 118.
2. George Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 48.
3. Lewis, 235.
4. Amiri Baraka, “Jazz and the White Critic,” in Black Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998
[1963]), 15–16.
5. Baraka, “Jazz and the White Critic,” 20.
6. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le disque dont on parle,” Jazz Magazine 115 (February 1965): 50 (my
translation).
7. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music,” in
Essays On Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002
[1953]), 137.
8. Adorno, “On the Contemporary,” 138.
9. Lewis, 49.
10. Lewis, 49.
11. Comolli, “Le disque dont on parle,” 51.
12. Comolli, “Le disque dont on parle,” 51.
13. Comolli, “Le disque dont on parle,” 51.
14. Comolli, “Le disque dont on parle,” 51.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard D.
Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 [1932]), 393.
16. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 23.
17. Rancière, 23.
18. Rancière, 23.
19. Rancière, 19.
20. Rancière, 21.
21. Rancière, 23.
22. Rancière, 43.
23. Rancière, 116.
24. Amiri Baraka, Blues People (New York: W. Morrow, 1963), 190.
25. Rancière, 116.
26. Rancière, 41.
27. Theodor W. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert

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 Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 [1934]), 506.

28. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” 506.
29. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” 507.
30. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” 507.
31. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” 507.
32. Baraka, Blues People, 181.
33. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Jazz,” in Essays on Music. ed. Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002 [1936]), 477.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays
on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2001), 79.
35. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 79.
36. Adorno, “On Jazz,” 480.
37. Baraka, Blues People, 181.
38. Adorno, “On Jazz,” 480.
39. Adorno, “On Jazz,” 481.
40. Baraka, Blues People, 181.
41. Baraka, Blues People, 175.
42. Baraka, Blues People, 186.
43. Baraka, Blues People, 186.
44. Baraka, Blues People, 180.
45. Baraka, Blues People, 188.
46. Baraka, Blues People, 230–31.
47. Adorno, “On the Contemporary,” 136.
48. Adorno, “On the Contemporary,” 136.
49. James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” in Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison
(New York: Library of America, 1992), 215.
50. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” Jazz Magazine 129 (April 1966): 24
(my translation).
51. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 25 (my translation).
52. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 26 (my translation).
53. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 26 (my translation).
54. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 26 (my translation).
55. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 26 (my translation).
56. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 26 (my translation).
57. Baraka, Blues People, 230.
58. Rancière, 26.
59. Rancière, 25.
60. Amiri Baraka qtd. in Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 27. My translation.
61. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 26–27. My translation.
62. Comolli, “Voyage au Bout de la New Thing,” 27. My translation.

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Matthias Mushinski

63. Baraka, Blues People, 200.

64. Baraka, Blues People, 187–88.
65. Rancière, 42.
66. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-André Fieschi, Géerard Guégan, Michel Mardore, Claude
Ollier, and André Téchiné, “Vingt ans après: le cinéma américain et la politique des auteurs,”
in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s—New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood 1960–
1968, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1965]), 199.
67. Comolli, “Vingt ans après,” 199.

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