Clive Davis

SWINGERS

Islamist godfather Sayyid Qutb wasn't the only conspiracy theorist to take a dim view of jazz ("A type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies...".) Author Edward Renehan reproduces the words of Henry Ford:

Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

As for the orgiastic angle, it's easy to forget how widely held Qutb's views used to be. After all, the J-word itself started out as a euphemism for "sex". Ross Firestone's stylish biography of the "king of swing", Benny Goodman describes how the outraged director of the New York Schools of Music ran a series of experiments "that showed that when boys and girls were left alone, they conversed together as usual if classical music was played, but started necking freely as soon as the music was changed to swing."

To which I can only say I wish more of today's jazz could do that. There are still plenty of good musicians out there (which is why the Mobo award organisers were wrong to drop the category from tonight's ceremony.) But too many of the others generate all the passion of a commuter doing a crossword puzzle.

Sexiest piece of jazz in my record collection? How about Ahmad Jamal's version of Poinciana, the smoky club equivalent of Ravel's Bolero? Or there's Stanley Turrentine's tenor sax solo on Kenny Burrell's Mule.

CURVATURE

The claws are out in the blogosphere:

Sooooo... apparently, Jessica writes one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention. Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?

Poor Jessica is aggrieved. Now I know I'm getting old. I thought I was an expert, yet I didn't even notice anything when I looked at the picture. Perhaps you need a woman's eye in this case.

BTW, it does seem odd that Bill can go to Harlem and not find a black blogger. But that's another story.

CHARM OFFENSIVE

Tom Gross's latest Mideast Dispatch links to a video clip of the anti-Pope demo outside Westminster Cathedral on Sunday.

IMAGERY

             

Look at this picture, and what do you see? Richard Woodward, in the Wall Street Journal, follows up the curious story of the 9/11 shot taken by German photographer Thomas Hoepker. A parable for our times... Columnist Frank Rich assumed - understandably, you might think -  that the New Yorkers in the foreground were simply being callous. A couple of them have now responded. As for Hoepker, Woodward gives this harsh assessment:

He has Photoshopped it in his mind so that it now belongs neatly in a more contemporary storyline of this nation's culpability for world unease. The German press has reproduced the photograph widely and seems to have read it, as Mr. Rich did, to upbraid Americans for their hedonism and short memories.

THE POPE (CONTINUED)

Not surprisingly, there's more than a hint of "a plague on both your houses" in Christopher Hitchens' secularist response to the Benedict affair:

To read the bulk of the speech... is to realize that, if he had chanced to be born in Turkey or Syria instead of Germany, the bishop of Rome could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim...The familiar problem is that, if you question another religion's "revelation" and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own. Which is just what has happened in the present case.

And a final twist of the knife:

It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way.

Naturally, theologian Richard John Neuhaus offers a much more sympathetic overview. He thinks the fevered reaction to Benedict's speech underlines the limits of inter-faith dialogue:

Of course, we must cultivate optimism and hope, or at least hope... But many of our influential commentators in the West are in deep denial, believing that candour in the quest for truth is dangerously provocative, and we must therefore conform to the violent demands that we say nothing to offend Muslim sensibilities. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, to surrender in advance.

USUAL SUSPECTS

Sad to see Ian Buruma lumping bloggers along with "talk radio blowhards", ratings-driven news executives and reckless post-modernists as a threat to democracy. There are good bloggers and there are bad bloggers. That's all. Besides, for the sake of balance, he could have considered adding overweight, baseball cap-wearing documentary-makers to his list.

BENEDICT'S TROUBLES

Catholic columnist Melanie McDonagh, in today's Telegraph:

The very fact that the Pope cited the adjectives "evil and inhuman" was taken as evidence that he agreed with them. As a British Muslim youth organisation, the Ramadhan Foundation, said crossly, "If the Pope wanted to attack Islam… he could have been brave enough to say it personally without quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor." In fact, the Pope was out to attack something very different – the contemporary, secular idea that faith is simply a matter of personal opinion...

The irony of this row is that it is the opposite of what the Pope was trying to achieve. Benedict ended his speech by hoping for a new dialogue between the sciences, religions and cultures "which is so urgently needed today". It looks, from this miserable episode, as if you can only have a conversation that deals – however remotely – with Islam on Muslim terms.

And another excellent post from the Crunchy Con:

Yesterday I thought Benedict would have been wiser not to have said what he said. Today I'm glad he said it, because the fanatically intolerant Muslim response may finally wake people up to the kind of challenge those of us in the West -- Christian, Jewish, secularist, moderate Muslim and otherwise -- who believe in freedom of speech and freedom of thought really do face.

ANOTHER REASON NOT TO LIKE THEM

So we can take it that Louis Armstrong will get a roasting in Hell once the men in beards take control of the known universe? Norm picks up a choice description of that wicked art form known as jazz, courtesy of the godfather of Islamism, Sayyid Qutb:

A type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies - their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal...

And yet, as all jazz buffs will be aware, Qutb chose to name his magnum opus after a classic Miles Davis record. So he can't have been all that bad. Perhaps it was just dixieland he didn't like. Mysterious, very mysterious.

FORTHRIGHT

"Spinelessness is an affliction of our civilization. Sometimes it is called 'prudence.' "  Something tells me Martin Peretz's new blog isn't going to be terribly soft-spoken. Definitely one to add to the blogroll.

On the other hand, is it a cop-out to decide against re-printing those Mohammed cartoons if you think they're going to offend Muslims? I never felt comfortable with the publish-at-all costs argument, which is why I'm really not sure it's a good idea for Andrew Sullivan to run one of the images as part of his 9/11 commemoration. I'm all in favour of upsetting and ridiculing Islamists. But is this the way to win over the moderate majority we keep hearing about?

Or is it my turn to be spineless?

CHRONIC

John Le Carré's long-running bout of Bush Derangement Syndrome isn't getting any better. Here he is on the struggle against terrorism in a lengthy interview in today's Indy. (Again, not on-line yet, so far as I can see.)

My own dark suspicion is that the neo-conservatives in the US - the powerful and secretive few that they are - actually believe that they can use these kind of provocations to homogenise the Islamic threat, bring everybody forward, radicalise them, and then bomb the hell out of them.

Such insight, such sophistication. Can a Nobel Prize be too far away?