Being-Jazz in the middle

Abstract

Jazz rhetoric can mean two things. The first is the discourse about jazz, its significance and its meaning. The second is the music itself as an unfolding form performed to an audience. Both have constitutive political effects that function through pathos prior to a distinction between subject and object. This pathos arises through in-betweenness or interality, and can be described in terms of the middle voice, Dasein, and aesthetic experience. This article develops these concepts through a discussion of the jazz rhetorics of Wynton Marsalis and Amiri Baraka.