The world of academic blogs on economics spans a range of political positions, with the bloggers often referring to articles by each other in support, evaluation, or critique. Among the best known blogs are run by economists who are often also prominent public figures, with a presence in media or policymaking.

The acclaimed and popular Marginal Revolution is a blog run by two professors at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw’s blog is broad in its ambit of reflections, delivered as pithy entries with sharp humor. Cafe Hayek and The Becker-Posner Blog are two other economics blogs of liberal and libertarian oriention.

Somewhat different in their political perspective are Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal and Joseph Stiglitz’s I Dissent: Unconventional Economic Wisdom.  The Project Syndicate initiative also includes Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs’ writings in his blog Economics and Justice and Harvard University professor Dani Rodrik’s blog Roads to Prosperity.  Angry Bear, a blog that brings together contributors from academic and other professions, describes its mandate as “slightly left of center economic commentary on news, politics, and the economy.”

Santa Clara University professor, Marc Bousquet’s blog How the University Works addresses issues of academic freedom, the corporatization of the university, and the relationship of academic labor and capital. Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, describes himself as a “small-l libertarian Republican who studies international relations.”  Drezner comments on policy, globalization, and, as of this week, international relations issues in The Dark Knight!

Columbia School of Journalism professor and South Asian Journalists Association founder, Sreenath Sreenivasan, gives us the “lowercase world” of Sree.net. The site includes access to free talks/ classes on technology, media, and journalism, recent reading, and new blogs discovered by Sree. Boston University journalism professor, Chris Daly reflects on journalism and journalism history in Chris Daly’s Blog.

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Despite the Crowngate and Blue Peter scandals earlier this year, 61 per cent of respondents to a March 2008 online survey said they trusted Beeb journalists “a great deal or a fair amount”, ahead of ITV, Channel 4 and up-market reporters, and way ahead of red-top and mid-market newspapers.

That is the good news. The bad news is the BBC has fallen from grace in the last five years.

The British Journalism Review-YouGov poll, which had 1,328 adult respondents, found 20 per cent less people trusted the BBC now than they did in 2003. Then, 81 per cent of the population had said they believed in the Beeb.

This trend is not limited to the BBC. The whole of British journalism has taken a tumble: ITV and Channel 4 are trusted by only 51 per cent (against the 81 and 80 per cent of 2003, respectively), up-market and local journalists by 43 and 40 per cent (down from 65 and 60 per cent, respectively), mid-market papers by 18 per cent (down from 36 per cent), and red-top scribes by 10 per cent (down from 16 per cent).

Though the BBC rates better than senior police officers (but below local police officers and schoolteachers and family doctors, mind), and ITV fares better than the local MP, trade union leaders and ministers in the current government, that is no cause for celebration.

“What ought to worry all journalists is the massive slide in trust, relative to other organisations or groups, since this question was first asked 5 years ago,” writes Professor Steven Barnett, who analysed the survey findings in a BJR paper titled On the road to self-destruction (2008: 19; 5).

The only comfort from the findings is that tabloid journalists are not at the bottom of the pile anymore. They now have the dubious consolation of being the second-least trusted, with estate agents faring the worst among the 23 professions compared.

Up-market and local journalists are among the top nine on the trust scale, though mid-market scribes have not done well. They are only a notch higher than their red-top counterparts, below NHS managers, ‘people who run large companies’, senior council officials, Labour government ministers and senior Whitehall civil servants, in that order.

There is a sliver of silver lining for the broadcast media in all this. People trust television more than they do the news in ink — BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are among the top nine, while the print journalists are ranked further down the ladder.

Discussing the many reasons for the “crumbling faith in British journalism”, Barnatt writes: “Just as one man-biting-dog story provokes a flurry of canine-biting tales, so exposés of ‘failing’ journalism have become fashionable.”

He feels the media might be adding to the widespread scepticism by exaggerating – at times even inventing – examples of media misconduct.

“Good journalism makes a difference to the kind of society we live in, and to distrust it is eventually to destroy it,” he writes. “That’s why trust matters, and that’s why we should all be worried by the findings of this survey.”

Jameela Oberman can be reached at jameela.interjunction@googlemail.com.

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After a hiatus from public performance between around 1980 till the mid-1990s, Stephen began playing publicly again in Cambridge and other spots in Massachusetts. Since relocating to San Francisco, he performs regularly at various locations in the city, including Café Euro, Simple Pleasures Café, and Bazaar Café. On June 3, Stephen played a set at Bazaar Café that included songs from his new CD, Modal Soul,  other original compositions, and jazz standards. In a conversation with Rohit Chopra, who was there to hear him play, Stephen talks about his approach to Modal Soul, music as a form of spiritual communication, the mystery of inspiration, the musicians who have influenced him and their contributions to the universe of jazz, and how his work as a psychotherapist informs his understanding of the creative process. 

How might you describe your approach to Modal Soul? What were some of the things you wished to achieve with the album?

There were four main threads that led to recording Modal Soul.

First: Undertaking Modal Soul was my acknowledgement to myself that I was improving as a pianist.

Much earlier in life, when I was in my twenties, I had pursued a career as jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. During this period I released two LPs of solo piano jazz (In my Own Time [1975] and The Seasons: A Portrait of the Life Cycle [1977]), and played college concerts in solo, trio and quartet settings. However, in my early thirties, as I was completing graduate school at Harvard and embarking on a very different career, my ‘playing out’ days came to an apparent end. Over the next twenty years or so, I continued to play and compose, but a career in music was no longer my raison d’être.

In hindsight, given my immature attitudes and predispositions during that earlier time, had I been any more successful with my music career as it existed then, I doubt I would have survived it.

However, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. About seven years ago, when I was in my mid-fifties, opportunities began to come my way to play out once again. I was pretty rusty, and it took quite a while to blow enough soot out of the furnace that it could become somewhat serviceable. But it did happen. I landed a regular solo piano brunch gig at Club Passim in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I played for over a year, and it was during this stint that I realized that my playing was actually improving (what a pleasant discovery!). It came to me that my playing had reached a level that warranted recording Modal Soul.

Second:  I was very much taken by the evolution of digital technology as it pertains to keyboards. As a player and composer I have always felt drawn to bass figures as a foundation for both harmonies and rhythms, experienced both with music of the Baroque and with jazz. Indeed, I was very blessed during those earlier years to have begun to develop a facility with playing, and improvising, walking bass lines on piano. I did a lot of gigs with horn players in which the piano was the rhythm section. Amazing practice, that was. Two bass players I knew, John Neves, at the time a well-known jazz player and teacher at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and John Hart, an utterly competent, journeyman bass player living in Cambridge, MA (both of whom are cited in the liner notes to Modal Soul), picked up on what I was developing and encouraged me, expressing the opinion that I had this wonderful, natural feel for the structure of bass lines, and that if I continued to develop this ability, I would “have it all”–meaning, not fame or fortune, but a form of musical completeness. I am indebted to them both.

Back to keyboards: Modern digital keyboards (the good ones) are things of beauty. The piano sounds they produce are “sampled,” meaning that the tones they emit are actual recordings of exemplary concert-level acoustic grand pianos. Also, the best manufacturers have mastered the technical challenges of meaningfully emulating the keyboard action/feel of excellent acoustic instruments. Indeed, some of them go a step further, offering very high quality digitized samples of other instruments. And . . . the ones that truly fascinated me have the ability to “split” the keyboard (at a player-defined point) so that the left side can be made to put forth sounds of acoustic bass combined with ride cymbal, while the right side can remain in the acoustic piano mode. Voila!: the (meager, yet definite) elementals of a jazz trio!!

I had a few opportunities to try out several of these instruments. With their wonderful “sampled” sounds, excellent action combined with split keyboard capability, the best of them were perfectly suited for the kind of playing that had been developing within me for almost forty years. Instrumentally, I was “home.”

Third: I was originally drawn to the keyboard as a young child, finding in it a safe medium through which I could express emotions that dared not be verbally articulated in an abuse-ridden household. In the process I inadvertently happened upon the vehicle that would preserve my sanity. I would only go half-mad (difficult, but remediable)–not the whole route (beyond hope). This special relationship between the keyboard and me, and the music “we” created, lent, as well, a special seriousness to that which music “holds,” and what can be conveyed through it. While unable to communicate with precision what comes so easily to verbal language, music can “reach beyond” the verbally precise to convey ranges of expression, experience and meaning that are “beyond words”– the unspeakable. As composing started to occur for me in my teens (kind of spontaneously), all my compositions (about 100 at this point, including a four movement piano suite) would come to carry (for me, anyway) this sense of yearning and wonder that transcends the verbal faculty.

Fourth: I wanted to teach myself digital recording. On my two earlier LPs I had served as engineer on the first and had hired an engineer for the second. It is difficult to both play and engineer. There is only so much energy to go around, and the engineering mindset is a very different neurological arrangement than the neurology of “creative, risk-taking, performing musician.” On the other hand, I figured that if I could learn some of the techniques of digital recording well enough, it would free me up from the rigid constraints of time (and money) attendant to using a professional (for hire) studio. I thought this possible trade-off might be worth it. I was nervous about the challenge, but I believe my decision to be both engineer and performer on Modal Soul was the correct one, at least this time around. Perhaps I got lucky.

In summary, as I approached Modal Soul, I was striving to celebrate the level my playing had come to over the past several years of returning to “playing out,” combine a lot of “split-keyboard’ playing featuring simultaneously improvised base lines and melodic lines, give musical voice, through the gravitas of the compositions themselves, to life themes that carry some weight and meaning for me (and hopefully for others), and, if I were fortunate enough to be able to pull off the playing, recording, editing, and mastering chores of Modal Soul, have a CD that approaches a kind of transcendent quality that leaves words behind.

I was struck by the many registers in which the album tracks operate, holding or bringing together seemingly divergent imperatives, like lushness and delicacy. The tracks have an incredibly beautiful structure, yet also reflect a sense of freedom and play. The compositions are contemplative, as the title suggests, yet evoke an immediacy, a sense of being in the moment.  Could you share some thoughts on this?

At one level the themes addressed musically in Modal Soul are unexceptional (as all deeply human themes must be). They can, and do, loom large in the individual life, but they are not unique experiences in the context of the human condition. The experiences of “daring to set forth–in pursuit of any worthy goal” (”Walkin”), expressing one’s love, intimacy, devotion and commitment to one’s partner as a gesture of love (”Emily’s Song”), the emotional hangover of “Act in haste; repent at leisure” (”Lament”), wondering about what one is “called” to do in this life, or whether “callings” even exist and, if they do, how one would ever recognize them (”The Call”), wrestling with personal loneliness as both curse and exaltation (”Alone”), attaining a goal, only to discover that all one has achieved is to be (once again) at the bottom of the next climb (”Staircase”), experiencing a degree of torment and perdition that is somehow redeemed in a profound way (”Modal Soul”), and, metaphorically, holding vigil while awaiting the new dawn (”Awaiting First Light”)–are, along with so many others, held in common by most of us who are embodied in a space-time existence. Yet finding a musical resonance that embodies them is a stirring challenge, and on Modal Soul, the challenge is met often enough to make me smile with some satisfaction. Modal Soul is not without warts and dimples, but bear in mind that one person’s warts and dimples are another person’s beauty marks.

Regarding interlacing elements of structure and play, your comments about Modal Soul are most generous and heartwarming. Song form is important to me. Much (though not all) of contemporary jazz composition presents musical elements as a kind of gymnastic routine, in which one’s ability to improvise is “tested” on an obstacle course–often excruciatingly demanding–of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements. Such compositions, or ‘tunes,’ are written as vehicles for improvisation, rather than as complete musical statements unto themselves. The beauty of song-as-composition–as a composition containing it’s own dignity (what I’ve called gravitas)–is often sacrificed, or lost altogether. In such cases, virtuosity trumps musical completeness. There is nothing necessarily wrong with having challenging musical elements in jazz compositions. However, for me, I want, and need, to feel that when I perform–when I am about to play a “song,” “tune” or “composition”–I am approaching a whole train of pre-existing musical thought that is already complete unto itself, and sufficient without me. Should I dare to approach it, I better be damn ready to risk having something, both in the arrangement and improvisation that I bring to it, worth hearing–something that contributes to its beauty, its style, its flair, its essence.

One other point: I don’t possess a profound musical talent, however such talent as I do possess has managed to mature very slowly–along with the rest of me–and, combining with the richness of a much more extended and fuller life experience, is now capable of rendering meaningful musical statements that carry a sense of completeness to them. This process of maturation and fruition continues to develop, within me, on all levels. Given all this, I am a happy camper, indeed. Maybe this “happiness,” that at nearly 62 years of age I am playing better than I ever have through all my 54 years of involvement with the piano, colors the music in a way that makes it more engaging along the lines that you cite in your question. Increasing age certainly brings with it increasing degrees of freedom. One is less bound by conventional anything; life, overall, becomes, moment to moment, more a series of spontaneous, continuous acts of self-creation. Maybe my motto should be “As in life, so on keyboard.”

At the performance at Bazaar Café, you mentioned that at times the muse works in concert with one and at times quarrels with one. Could you speak to the nature of inspiration in jazz, with regard to composition as well as performance.

The immediate question that remains unanswered prior to any performance is whether the Muse will show up at all. There is nothing more hilarious, in a self-defeating way, than to have good technique happening, in the absence of any inspiration. Of course, sometimes the Muse may be there, and energy is rampant, but one’s technique is not up to the task of rendering her inspirations suitable pathways of expression. This is also frustrating–especially for her. Under either circumstance, one would, I think, do better selling shoes. The relationship a musician has with his/her Muse (Euterpe, in this instance–the Muse of music–one of the Nine Muses of Greek antiquity–notice that the words “muse” and “music” are cognate!) is a fascinating intrapsychic adventure. Inspiration–the Muse–is very mysterious, a consciousness unto itself, with an agenda that can run in a very different direction than the musician’s (or composer’s) conscious orientation. In the realm of composition it can make its presence (she can make her presence) felt as musical snippets injected into the mind that are as catchy as Velcro, and dedicated to pester their unwitting host until they are worked with and developed. The force here is possessive. One can’t shake it; one can only tame it (momentarily) by working with it. When turned over and over, such snippets assemble into full-blown inspirations that yield beauty, or simplicity, or stunning discordant atonalities, or complexity, or haunting dissonances within arresting melody, or harmonic progressions that are different, and more inspired, than anything the composer has done prior to this siege or even thought about doing, or rhythmic syncopations that have no apparent precedent, or new chordal voicings carrying unfathomed nuances of emotion. Out of this (often) unruly mix precipitates a new piece, or composition. The fact that the energy or inspiration seems sourced elsewhere is somewhat borne out by the fact that the composer him/herself may well feel a sense of awe, once the piece is composed, as its innate structure and form, now set forth, reveal an elegance that is beyond the composer’s conscious ability to have conceived of a priori. The Muse in all this is the thankless taskmaster, although experiences with her are what composers pray for. In her absence, a composer turns barren. Yet the madness of possession can only be tolerated so long. It finally remits, a relief is felt . . . then, over time, a wondering creeps in as to whether she will ever visit again (along with a worry that she won’t), then arise the deep pangs of longing for her to return.

In the playing/performing realm it’s the same Muse (or maybe her evil twin) but a slightly different dynamic, as jazz performance is largely spontaneous, and the Muse is often moody.

However, let me back up a bit: Especially as a solo player/performer, there are three major consciousnesses in play: the personal identity consciousness of the musician, the consciousness of the instrument (yes, I do believe in ‘machine consciousness’ as a form of consciousness that an be actively engaged and worked with), and the Muse. The personal consciousness of the musician is beset with the prosaic challenges of everyday life–the wratcheta-wratcheta of day in, day out existence. The instrument, especially if the musician has chosen it and cared for it lovingly, has the consciousness of a loyal friend always at the ready to do our bidding. It really wants to “give back.” (On the contrary, if a beat-up instrument is imposed on the player, as in a nightclub setting, or the instrument is one the musician owns but does not take proper care of or respect, such instruments may become saboteurs that await their opportunity to misbehave and thwart the intentions of the musician, often to his embarrassment.) The Muse, on the other hand, is an energy that is capable of using the musician’s neurology mediumistically, “coming through” to realize momentary corporeal existence simultaneous with engaging in expression through the act of playing.

Although, as previously mentioned, there can be no guarantee that the Muse will show up, it is unmistakable when she does. Neurology realigns, the multiple dimensions (more than can be consciously followed) involving (among others) harmony, melody, rhythm, phrasing, voicings, et al., start to orchestrate with each other in ways that are mutually reinforcing. “Lift-off” occurs in which the playing, and the conceptions that inform it, are given immediate execution without any intervening interval of contemplation. The channel is open. The energy streams forth. There is an immediate flow through from conception to execution. Indeed, conception and execution are the same act.

The Muse is nothing if not coquettish. I have had innumerable experiences of her effervescence and her evanescence–her bursting upon the scene and her sudden departures. For instance, occasionally, prior to playing out, I will be filled with a surge of desire to be playing. My hands will be grasping chords on an imaginary keyboard, and my fingers will be engaging in runs in the air. When I feel like this, I know that She is pressing me to provide her an outlet–waiting in the wings for me to let something come through from her. The anticipation is very exciting. I have no idea what she will come up with or, rather, what we will come up with together. Yet I know that we are going to dance! Then again, there are evenings when she is staunch in her insistence to be admitted, only to suddenly vanish halfway through an engagement. (Those evenings can be very long, indeed.) On other evenings, I may be feeling so exhausted from other life obligations, worries, insecurities, etc., that I am simply too piss-beat to venture forth at all. Yet, one aspect of the profession of being a “playing out” musician is that if you have been hired to play, you show up and “make noise” no matter what. It’s part of the deal of being a musician; it’s also part of the discipline. Starting an evening from such a place, it can feel as if I’m facing an evening where I am in waist-deep water in a stream, trying to walk along the streambed against a four-knot current. Molasses. Then, without warning, the Muse sometimes swoops in. Energy changes, conceptual synapses start to shake out and line up, stamina and inspiration are just suddenly there, and things start happening. Some of my best evenings have occurred while coming from a place of exhaustion–even depression–and suddenly catching a wave of the Muse’s energy, and surfing it. It is one of the most ineffable, yet tangible realities for those of us who have been a part of its play. The experience of Her, through various encounters, can take on the ruddy hue of reality.

Could you speak about some of your influences?

There have been many. Here are some who come to mind.

Dave Brubeck: I have to give Dave Brubeck credit for introducing me to small combo jazz. His albums featuring Eugene Wright on bass, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, and Joe Morello on percussion were wonderful for their time. Brubeck wrote terrific songs, and his polyrhythmic playing, as spurred on by Morello’s boundless creativity and precision, were very inspiring. I heard him in concert at MIT in Cambridge, MA in about 1960 (after Time Out (1959) had been released). Later, his two LP Carnegie Hall Concert (1963) set thrilled me. I think it was through Brubeck that I felt motivated to pursue a career in jazz. His Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (1958) remains on my top ten list of great albums. Once, at a school in Pennsylvania, we were both a part of the same concert series. That was a thrill for me.

Thelonious Monk: I don’t really know if Monk ever said this, or if I just imagined (after all these years) that he did. The quote is: “There are no wrong notes; there are only wrong people to hear them.” Monk was one of those challenges I could not avoid. I was completely ignorant as to his exquisite genius when I first heard him. However, I was determined to befriend him, in the form of his music. I bought a copy of Monk’s Dream (1963-an album on Columbia). It just challenged me silly. I listened to it over and over, and thought I was hearing a stream of fluffs and other technical gaffs. I didn’t see how Monk could get away with releasing music like this. Good God, was I ever ignorant!! Then, little by little, I started to actually “hear” him. He played lines that were so syncopated–that could run from “corny” to taking your breath away without so much as a self-conscious sniffle. His sense of time was impeccable (Ben Riley, his drummer on one occasion when I saw him in New York in 1966, said that to me when I asked him about it), and because it was, he could take liberties with it that exulted in eccentricities of all sorts. That extraordinary sense of freedom and devil-may-care exuberance were just wonderfully liberating. His rhythm sections that were so solid and could swing so hard, his long-term association with alto saxophonist Charlie Rouse, his compositional genius (”Round About Midnight,” “Crepuscule with Nellie” and so many others), his unassuming stage manner (when not playing Monk would sometimes just stand up and, eyes closed, turn round and round in circles, in a reverie over what his group was doing without him), he was one of the most remarkable and, arguably, the most original of all the great jazz artists of the twentieth century. Our paths crossed once, and I learned a lesson from an encounter with him I shall never forget. It’s private.

Bill Evans provided me with some of the most complete musical evenings I have ever experienced. The way he borrowed, and built on, chordal voicings that have their provenance in the music of Debussy and Ravel–that drew, unabashedly, on classical, romantic influences, and then combined these elements with jazz tempos, made a deep impression on me. Additionally, his conception of the jazz trio was that of an orchestration, often spontaneous, of co-equals. Drums and bass were not just time-keepers and pulse providers and harmonic cellar-dwellers; they were co-creators. This was not “soloist as accompanied by . . . ,” but, rather, “The Bill Evans Trio: Bill Evans, Scott Lafarro and Paul Motian together.” Also, Evans was the one caucasian artist on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, probably a brave move for Miles, and a courageous one for Evans. (I remember hearing Evans on another Miles album that must have been recorded just a bit earlier than Kind of Blue. I can’t remember the name of it. In the mix, the piano playing is unmistakably Evans’s, however the level of the piano in the mix is very low, and apparently no credit was given to Evans for the date. It had me wondering if Miles was himself challenged, at that time, to have a white guy in his group. Maybe Evans was on a probationary stint with Miles, or something like that. I really haven’t a clue. Of course, by the time Kind of Blue came along, any notion of Evans’s being something of a second-class citizen in Miles’ group was long gone. Indeed, Evans wrote those memorable liner notes to the album, where he talks about jazz improvisation and likens it to a Japanese art form. Obviously Miles did not object.) Evans’ work on Kind of Blue continues to inspire me, even after more than nearly fifty years of hearing it. There are always new things to hear! The subtlety of phrasing, gentle yet insistent syncopations, sparse yet elegant lines, the way he teases and toys with the downbeat and shifts so seamlessly through all these moods, is simply one of the most exquisite piano performances in all of jazz, whether in solo or group setting. He is credited with pushing harmonic conceptions into the realm of modal voicings, although it is clear that both McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock were no slouches in making their own contributions to this spatial way of conceiving harmonic structure. My personal note? I was able to have an audition with Helen Keane, Bill Evans’ long-term manager, at her apartment in New York City (1972 or so). She was very gracious, and said that she liked what I was doing, and that if I were serious I would need to move to New York. I wasn’t ready to take the risk.

Oscar Peterson: What can I say about him. Coming up as a successor to the great Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson had a range of technical prowess, sense of swing and gifts as an arranger of jazz trios that was astounding. He was an early, post-Brubeck influence on me. His album Affinity (1959) is one of the most cohesive jazz trio albums ever recorded. The compositions  (including “Waltz for Debby” by Bill Evans) are beautifully set forth, with the song form celebrated through a stunning range of improvisations. The Sound of the Trio (1961), recorded live at The Hickory House in Chicago (you can hear the silverware clanking in the background!) is a tour de force of live piano jazz performance in a laid back setting. Peterson’s sidemen Ed Thigpen, on drums, and Ray Brown, on bass were perfect complements to him. Oscar Peterson was a large talent, and his trios were always about him, with quite carefully arranged intros and exits. However his playing is exceptional, and his composing, as on Canadiana Suite (1964) reveals a whole different level of subtlety and sensitivity that is not always evident in his up-tempo playing. Also, he saluted the music of others; for example, his treatment of Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story (West Side Story: Oscar Peterson Trio, 1962) comes damn close to rendering definitive versions of a number of those songs. No pianist I have ever heard swings harder than Oscar Peterson. He inspired me by way of just knowing that such a gifted creature actually could be out there roaming the earth. He was “out there,” somewhere, doing these impossible things on the piano, while I, struggling, was trying to believe that I might actually have it in me to be a good pianist someday-though never that good!  Personal note: Oscar Peterson was my mother’s favorite jazz pianist. It was a special evening, indeed, when I took her up to Lennie’s on the Turnpike in Danvers, Massachusetts (in about 1973?) to hear him. Between sets, I summoned up the courage to go up to him with my mother and introduce them. It was a thrill for me. At the critical moment, I think my mother may have tranced out!

John Coltrane posed a similar sense of challenge to me as had Monk. I came to him through A Love Supreme, and, though I would not have known how to express it, I realize that it was the devotional aspect of his music that transfixed me. Trane taught me that devotional motivation–the energy of spirituality and the urge to achieve some form of union with one’s Creator–were valid reservoirs to draw on in composing for, and performing in, the jazz arena. This was a new kind of calling. A lot of jazz (and good jazz at that) hangs out in the down-and-out gritty of the nightclub: booze, drugs, indulgence, jive, personal tragedy. Much jazz composition draws its inspiration from these themes. Coltrane flipped that on its ear. While he played in nightclubs (where, at close range, I heard him on several occasions), what he brought to those environments was spiritual quest. You can hear this quest in its nascent state on earlier albums (pre-legendary quartet albums), as in Soultrane (1957), once you get the hang of what this questing sounds like musically–his phrasing, tonality, timber. His Ballads album (recorded in 1962) in which he brings the spiritual quest to lyrical expression of ballads (composed originally to express secular love-related themes), made a deep impression on me. Ditto John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, the one album Trane made with a vocalist (1963). My favorite John Coltrane album is Crescent (1964) recorded shortly before A Love Supreme. This album is a magnificent balance of the fervor of spiritual quest and the lyricism of both elation and suffering on a thoroughly personal, human scale. It is a remarkable achievement. It was through Coltrane that I first came to appreciate McCoy Tyner, a huge influence on me (and just about every other contemporary jazz pianist, if they’re honest enough to admit it). Coltrane’s composing was also top-notch. He could affix the sense of yearning in such pieces as “Naima” and “Giant Steps” among others. He also had a wonderful ear for songs that were not a part of the jazz canon, but could be very exciting as jazz vehicles (”Inch Worm,” “My Favorite Things,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Greensleeves”, just to name  few). Coltrane really appreciated a good composition.

McCoy Tyner swept me away from the lyricism of Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans. He could play lyrically (listen to Coltrane’s Ballads), but his range was much more (increasingly so with the passage of years) modal and bombastic, combining torrents of sound as a watercolor wash for Coltrane’s heavenly (heavenwards) excursions, and punctuating musical clauses with heavy hits of deep-bass octaves. I was completely fascinated with Tyner’s range and drive-not to mention his technique. Three of his earliest LPs as a leader: the trio albums Inception (1962), Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Nights of Ballads and Blues (1963) had an immense impact on me. They are both rough-edged and brilliant, exuberant portrayals of a young player who is bursting at the seams with fire and originality, and, already frighteningly accomplished, has yet to realize, or even guess at, the limits of his abilities. Over the years, I heard McCoy play many, many times. After Trane died in 1967, Tyner (who had already left the quartet) had a very successful career with any number of groups assembled under his name. In trio settings Tyner had a tendency to be accompanied, on club dates, by drummers who would play much too loud, often burying his pianistic fury under a pile of percussive mush. This didn’t seem to bother McCoy at all. One of the most compelling, original facets of McCoy Tyner’s playing is that he had a way of articulating an improvisational line (melody, loosely) that was completely unique, and has not, to my knowledge, ever been successfully emulated (nor, maybe, could it be). I don’t know how to describe this stunning gift in verbal language. It simply has to be heard (and, perhaps, pointed out by someone who knows of what I speak). Recordings that have goodly portions of this brilliance include The Real McCoy (1967) and Just Feelin’ (1991). Fortunately, McCoy Tyner has been extensively recorded. There must be countless other examples of this wonderful, inimitable highlight. Personal note: I had the opportunity, on several occasions, to express my appreciation and gratitude to McCoy for all that he had accomplished, and for his influence on me. I probably managed this best when I said to him: “I hope that it is a source of deep satisfaction to you as you reflect on how many pianists you have influenced over the years, and how a whole school of jazz piano playing has grown up around you as a result of your wonderful gifts.” We were shaking hands as I said this. McCoy, ever reticent, simply smiled gently in appreciation, acknowledging my compliment.

Lee Morgan was one of the most exuberant spirits in jazz, and, to this day, remains my favorite trumpet player. His energy was irrepressible; his joy in high-energy lyricism unexcelled. His playing was uniformly ebullient! He was also a genius. When jazz “Fusion” appeared on the scene in the early 1970s, heralded by Freddie Hubbard’s LP Red Clay (1970), it took the jazz world by storm (and not without criticism). The upright bass was gone. In its place, a Fender bass. The packaging was slick, and commercial. The “hook”: combine jazz improvisation with infectious “rock” rhythms gravitating around funky bits of musical doggerel. This was the “Fusion” formula. It had its advocates, and it had its detractors. However, Lee Morgan had already opened up this territory in an absolutely unique, beautiful and “unslick” manner almost seven years earlier, with his The Sidewinder (1963).

With The Sidewinder, which had a smaller, though thoroughly devoted following of black listeners, Morgan broke ground. The playing is so lively and the ensemble gels so completely as it spins improvisational gold out of the filaments of rhythmic pulse, rendered all the more infectious through being understated, and all built around true, extended, thoughtful song form. One of the most brilliant-and brave-piano solos in all of jazz is to be found on The Sidewinder, in the title cut. Barry Harris was a bebop-trained pianist, and the sensibilities of bebop could not be more different than those of a driving, unrelenting, though understated, rock beat. Harris’ solo, which always warms me up with appreciation when I hear it, is a masterpiece of having to solve, on the fly, the problem(s) of adapting a style mastered for a whole different branch of music to this new alien world. When it’s his turn to solo, Harris is on his own, with nowhere to hide. You can tell the synapses of terror are starting to crackle at the outset of his solo, as if he’s saying to himself, “Oh ____! What have I gotten myself into? What do I do next!!” He then takes technical motifs from the bebop world and “gets down” with them. His efforts are not altogether unclumsy, but they are all the more precious and dear for that-and . . . he turns it around! It becomes a truly wonderful outpouring, and very successful. His solo–his response to being on the spot–has always inspired me.

Personal note: In the early 1970s, I had the great good fortune to meet, and befriend, Eddie Heywood, who had composed “Canadian Sunset” and “Soft Summer Breeze.” This was on Martha’s Vineyard, where he was living. At our first meeting–the first of many–we spontaneously engaged in a “show and tell” in his piano studio that lasted almost six hours. Over the three years to follow, we put in a lot of time together. He was on the comeback trail as a pianist, and had decided to record an LP. The group he brought to the Vineyard (for rehearsals) included the bassist Bob Cranshaw, who was the bassist on The Sidewinder LP. When we were introduced, I wasted no time in unfurling some questions. It turns out that between takes, Morgan would disappear into the bathroom, emerging some minutes later with the sketch for the next piece to be played. He was composing them on the spot! They are brilliant pieces. Cranshaw also told me that the final run-through of the “head,” or basic melody on “The Sidewinder” cut was recorded separately, and later spliced onto the original. When I met him Cranshaw had long since switched over to Fender bass, having had to give up playing the upright bass due to a back injury. Eddie Heywood’s kindness to me is reflected in my citing him in the liner notes to Modal Soul. He mentored me, and I learned much from him just in the act of being around him, and hearing him play. We loved to swap ideas. He has shown up in my dream life as a loving mentor. We really had a wonderful kinship.

Herbie Hancock’s influence on me has been two-fold-both are wonderful. As a piano “comper” (comping is the act of providing chordal/harmonic underpinnings, as a part of the rhythm section, for other soloing instruments–usually horns–during their solos), Hancock is simply the best. His creativity in feeding rhythmically and harmonically attuned chords, and snippets of this and that, have the effect of pushing soloists to new heights by keeping the rhythmic, and harmonic dimensions burning underneath. No one does it better. A great example of this can be found on Miles Davis’ Four and More (1964). As a soloist, Hancock’s originality and range are also of prodigious proportions. His comping has inspired me for decades. His soloing abilities are so colossal as to have the contrary effect: they discourage me from ever wanting to approach the keyboard again with any pretension of being able to play seriously. He is the only pianist I know who has ever, during an improvisation, “quoted” a John Coltrane solo (in this case one from A Love Supreme), working it into a one of the most remarkable piano solos I have ever heard. (This solo, along with the usual magnificent comping by Hancock, can be heard on Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil,” the title tune and track #4 on Speak No Evil (1964). The quote of the Coltrane solo from A Love Supreme can be heard from 6:39 - 6:52 on this track. It is a complete tour de force.)

One other influence (who will remain unnamed) provided me a “lesson in life”: I went to see a first tier, very celebrated, jazz pianist who was perfoming in a trio setting. He, and his trio, were featured in concert at one of the most venerable concert halls in Boston. Despite his undeniable brilliance as a pianist, I came away from the concert disinclined to like this pianist very much personally-not that it matters, or he will ever care. However, the experience was one of profound disillusionment and disappointment for me. It was painful. The trio concert took place several years back (2005?). Here’s what unfolded. As part of a gracious introduction, the impresario of the concert pointed out, with obvious pride, his son in the first balcony, stage right. He announced that this was his son’s first attendance at a jazz concert. The full house applauded politely in appreciation for the fact of this young man’s initiation into the world of jazz performance (another one won over; we can use all the help we can get!). When, a few moments later, the featured artist came out on the stage, he picked up the microphone. The first words out of his mouth were: “Now wasn’t that just one of the stupidest things you ever saw?” He was serious.  The audience was stunned. The young man, riding high with pride and excitement just moments before, likely felt crushed by this remarkable display of pure cruelty. No one saw the impresario’s reaction. That renowned pianist should be on the hook for paying that boy’s psychotherapy bills when, one day, this esteem-puncturing humiliation likely spills out on the couch. So this pianist, whose musicianship and accomplishments are beyond question, and his legacy thoroughly secure, has influenced me in this other way, as well. The problem is that, as a musician, he really is that spectacular. It annoys me when arrogant people actually have the goods that, in some twisted up fashion, enable their arrogance. I’d rather they not have the gift at all if they are going to carry on as colossal assholes. But some of them do. Go figure. As a postscript to this little anecdote, I simply mention that at this trio concert, the heretofore unthinkable happened: his Muse did not show up to enliven him that night, and his playing was flat and lifeless. I never thought his Muse ever let him down. Guess it happens to the best–and worst–of us.

Vince Guaraldi: Known more for his composing and scoring for the “Charlie Brown” television specials, Guaraldi is special to me personally on two accounts. First, he wrote a gorgeous instrumental piece called “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” that was a “cross over” hit on the pop-music charts–always a rarity for a jazz piece. (Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” did it; Ramsay Lewis’s “In Crowd” did it; Eddie Heywood’s “Canadian Sunset” did it: I can’t think of any other examples.) Second, that song was released (track # 5) on an album that is sublime, called Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus (1962). This release is simply one of the nicest piano trio albums ever recorded. The exquisite bossa nova score from the movie Black Orpheus, composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa, is given sensitive and loving treatment by this soulful pianist. His playing is sparse and playful, kind of minimalist, yet the swing is utterly wonderful, and the musical experience is complete. I think that Guaraldi helped me to begin to conceive of the distinction between musical virtuosity and musical completeness. When I play out in San Francisco where I now live, I honor him by playing “Manha da Carnaval” from that album. I wish he were still alive. I would love to meet him.

George Winston: George was originally sized up by some of the critics (if memory serves) as a jazz pianist. But he wasn’t ever one, really. However, what, and who he was, and is, was a ground-breaker. There is now a whole category called “folk piano” that he, single-handedly-OK, maybe dual-handedly-pioneered. I listened to him first on Autumn (1980). I bought Winter Into Spring (1982) and December (1982), in quick succession. Winston’s compositions were lovely and minimalist, and his playing mesmeric. Several years later I saw him in concert a the Berklee Perfomance Center in Boston, and it seemed at that time that he was catering to at least, in part, a jazz audience-but he didn’t really swing easily-and he wasn’t trying to. What I appreciated about him is that, despite taking some critical heat, he knew the path he was on, and he was not deterred. His career shows that he was right. I’ve never heard his music played on KCSM-FM, the Bay Area jazz station in San Francisco (then again, KCSM, thus far, hasn’t, as far as I know, played Modal Soul, either!). But he deserves to be heard. What I learned from him, at a distance, is how to stay true to a vision, critics be damned. There are truly very few visionaries in our world, and the world, by definition, is set up not to understand them. If their spirits are dampened by this lack of being met by the “establishment” in any of its guises, we are all the poorer. George’s was not dampened or, if it was, he wrung it out, let it dry on the line, and kept on going. He plays 150 concerts, more or less, each year, traveling, and spreading that balm of beautiful, arresting piano music wherever he goes throughout the world. That’s a pretty nice legacy.

Kenny Barron is one of the most gifted pianists in jazz, and rightfully considered a gem among the cognoscenti. In his career, he has played man more dates as a sideman than as the headliner. This is easy to understand; he is always in demand because he does everything so well. His comping is brilliant and explosive-the only pianist who, in this department, is on a par, I would say, with Herbie Hancock-and that in itself is saying a lot. His technique is dazzling and not exhibitionistic-totally there in service of his artistry-his soloing so inventive, often fleet-fingered with a deft, light touch. He is a marvel of good taste and apt contribution in any setting. I do not have sufficient releases featuring him. However, one of his CDs, Quickstep (1991) is one of my favorite recordings of all time. His uncanny musical judgment and seemingly effortless execution of a boundless range of musical ideas are wonders to behold. His touch at the keyboard is so deft and light it’s as if he spins silk from moonbeams. In person he comes across as humble, genuinely grateful to have had such a long, productive career. There is nobody more respected.

Ahmad Jamal has the songwriter’s gift. “Poinciana,’ on the LP But Not for Me (1958) is one of the most beautiful, enchanting song-form compositions ever written. As a performer Jamal is a true technical virtuoso, who can, within the blink of an eye, combine hectic, sped up but exactingly articulated lines of Bach amidst an otherwise funky, down home rhythmic pulse. He is also a master “quoter” of snatches of other composers’ songs while improvising. A lot of his playing ping-pongs back and forth, here and there, rounding buoys through a slalom course of musical motifs. When you hear him play several times, you realize that the motifs don’t change that much. It’s really music based on cavorting on a “groove.” That isn’t much of a deterrent to enjoying it, though, because the songs on which the grooving is based are just such good tunes, and Jamal’s treatment of rhythm is so infectious. Jamal demonstrated to me that song form, if the compositions are good enough, can compensate for less than inspired improvisation. It’s a solid lesson to learn, given the fact that the Muse, as far as I know, comes and goes on her own schedule for everyone. (Listening to some John Coltrane out-takes taught me this, as well.)

How has your work as a psychotherapist influenced your understanding of music and playing?

My career in psychology has run a span of nearly 30 years. Involvement in this field as staff psychologist, psychotherapist, addictions specialist, and consultant to industry has definitely, as I’ve gotten older, helped shape my perception of the jazz world generally, the approaches that various luminaries take to their art (sometimes, for some of them, more craft than art), the “returns”—payoffs—various artists are going for in their careers (which is reflected in their art they produce), and, more close to home, my own attitudes towards what I am doing, both musically, and as someone who, at least in some small way, can be thought of, once again, as a “jazz pianist,” and, therefore, involved with the field. Over the years I have also served as psychotherapist to several clients who are active in the jazz field, including pianists, as well as others with careers in different areas of the arts.

During my earlier jazz career I was ignorant about matters psychological. This included an almost complete ignorance about who and what I am (and was then). I had no conscious acquaintance or acknowledgment of principles inherent to my own being—structural elements of my psyche that are near absolute (at least in terms of this life sojourn), by which I must abide if I am to stand any realistic chance of evolving in ways that foster happiness and completeness. As someone with an unexamined life, the arenas of music, generally, and jazz specifically, as areas where I showed some early promise and gained a bit of recognition, were ripe to be abused. What I mean by this is that when a person has certain unacknowledged deficits of character, any area that appears to provide an avenue to “success” can be leaned upon, by the clueless, to provide more of a return than is possible, or healthy. In other words, in my early career I combined a modicum of talent with a misdirected instinctual craving for power, prestige and romance—and “jazz”—read: becoming an object of adulation on a stage and cashing in on it in grandiose, self-destructive ways—was the means through which I was determined to command my craved-for payoffs. This is an oft-told story.

The music I played then, as I developed in those years, was, at times, quite good. The spiritual yearning was there in the playing, and some of the compositions I wrote in those days are still among my best, but , as a house divided (and not knowing it), all my creative efforts were—could not help but be—polluted.

In the process of beginning to gain some knowledge about myself in my early thirties (my hand being forced by the messes I was creating), I found myself reevaluating my career—especially my attitudes I had been bringing to it. Seeing how full of dry rot the whole thing was, how much I had perverted a talent in order to derive unwholesome returns from it, I realized I had to let it go . . . and I did. I wasn’t yet far enough along in education and training to be a psychotherapist, so, while back in school, I became a piano tuner and repairman for several years. The person who just had to be the object of adulation on a stage became the person who was now told “go ‘round the back; take off your shoes by the door; the piano’s over there on the right; let me know when you’re done.” Adjusting to this was a form of going through withdrawal, but I had become keen on gaining some sanity, so I tolerated it, and eventuality became grateful for it.

Once I began to practice as a staff psychologist/psychotherapist/addictions counselor, I found the field so fulfilling and rewarding—especially as I saw that the destructive tendencies of my earlier life were finding some kind of redemptive outlet, that I really did not miss, any longer, being a “jazz musician.” I felt quite liberated from that old pursuit that had (the way I had gone about it) been so constricting of me. What this really tells me, in hindsight, is that I had finally gotten beyond placing an excessive reliance on being a “jazz pianist” as a vehicle to feed and support my addictive appetites. Also (and this happens only when one’s own denial breaks down and one gains the freedom that only comes from facing some hard truths about oneself), I could survey the whole jazz field in a new way, drawing on my growing set of newly minted values to find, if it existed, what the intrinsic worth is of partaking in any artistic endeavor. And . . . (yes, the ‘shrink’ part of me is always operative in me in how I take in and make sense of what I observe) I could gain impressions about how other jazz artists were going about their careers, and whether the music they were producing was consistent with values that matter. I’m overstating this a bit, because it is also the case that I largely detuned from the jazz world when I departed it fully as a performer at age 33. I no longer followed who was up-and-coming, the latest sensation, the most recent newly discovered “monster’ player, etc. That’s one reason why my incomplete list of those who were my influences consists, without exception, of those exceptional individuals whose careers were in flower during the 1960s-70s. Of course, many are now gone, but a small number continue to be fruitful even at quite advanced ages. (Brubeck, Jamal, Hancock, Tyner, Barron). In the jazz world, that’s also a rarity.

The question, largely derived from my earlier music career, as reshaped by some adversity and a lot of psychotherapy, became generalized as: “What is it that makes anything intrinsically worth doing, for its own sake?” The key to safely reentering the jazz arena, once again, as a participant (however modest) hinged on finding the answer to this question, though when I reached a point of being able of frame it, a return to music at the level of playing out or recording was nowhere in my mind (that I was aware of). It was simply a question that I applied to anything, and everything, that was going on in my life.

Of course, one forms opinions, some likely correct, others probably not, about how mental conditions/states of mind affect—and maybe account for—the artistry (and downfalls) of other luminaries in jazz (and many other fields as well). I have some set impressions, but they are private, and it’s not fair, nor would it serve any good purpose, to diagnose and speculate at a distance, let alone in print—and . . . I could be flat wrong. However I can mention briefly, and expand upon, what has been set forth elsewhere (not starting with me). I’ll do this very briefly regarding two luminaries: Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

Monk was probably schizophrenic, and this rearrangement of his neurology likely accounts for his remarkable re-visioning of harmonic and melodic relations that are crystalline in their beauty and symmetry. His affliction got channeled into this amazing, perfect, idiosyncratic art; his personal keyboard visions (likely) became more real to him than his earthly companions. One can only marvel at how such an unruly affliction of the mind, which likely severely limited his life in the interpersonal sphere (What a great middle name!), could yet yield such beautiful structure and form when channeled through his music. Indeed, his affliction became his art. This was not an insignificant triumph. Consider how it has enriched all of us, and Monk’s music, I dare say, receives as much play today as it ever has.

The attention given to him is so deserved.

With Coltrane, as best I can tell, the energy from his drug/heroin addiction in the 1950s, which forced him to take a break from his career for a while (and could easily have cost him the whole enchilada—which, within ten years, it did, as irremediable hepatitis finally claimed him) was redirected, with conscious intention, into coming back to playing in a new way. All of Coltrane’s playing and composing, from the late 1950s until his death in 1967, can be understood as intentional, devotional music. Unlike Monk, whose channeling of his schizophrenia into art was likely a reflexive act—not arrived at through contemplation of what was bedeviling him (my speculation)—Coltrane’s triumph was in consciously, with intention, redirecting the energy of craving relief through alcohol and drugs into his art as a spiritual quest. This is the truest realization of an often misunderstood process in psychoanalytic theory called ‘sublimation.’ For those who know the term, sublimation is often considered to be an unconscious process, in which energy from a relinquished behavior will, unbeknownst to the host (below the threshold of consciousness) seek a new plane of activity. This phenomenon of “energy” from renounced or thwarted activity ‘A’ becoming manifest in activity ‘B’ is really (to borrow another term from psychoanalysis) a ‘displacement.’ The truest from of ‘sublimation’—the one that Coltrane accomplished—is a conscious redirection of the energy from a renounced activity (drug addiction, in Coltrane’s case). In consciously, with awareness and intention, reclaiming this energy—the life force, the vitality—that had been running him so destructively, and redirecting it into an acknowledged spiritual quest, Coltrane’s course was set. His music, for the rest of his life, would never be the same, because his whole way of relating to it had been transformed absolutely. It is the power of transformation as a consciously sought and realized attainment that makes Coltrane’s music so special. The resonance of Coltrane’s spiritual quest reaches deep into those already embarked on their equivalent of it. It also reaches into those who, though not yet embarked, are capable of being awakened to it. Coltrane’s music stirs resonance and finds correspondence with the yearnings, acknowledged or not, of so many of us. His story is one of affliction redeemed.

His legacy will always inspire.

Regarding how my experience as psychotherapist influences my own understanding and involvement with jazz at this later point in life, I can simply state that this influence is profound. The art a person produces, in any area, always reflects one’s inner state, including not only one’s gifts and talents specific to the art form, but one’s orientation towards life in general. Ethical sense (or lack of it), philosophical ruminations, psychological components of character—both healthy and unhealthy—hopes and dreams, triumphs and defeats, suffering and transcendence, it’s all factored in. It is this inalienable truth that makes any art so interesting and compelling, and personal. Speaking just of my own involvement with jazz at this point, my rapprochement with a former career is not a going back, but, rather, a going forward. In its current state my involvement with jazz as a jazz pianist is an exercise in applied philosophy. Here’s what I mean: Solving the riddle of what it is about anything that makes it intrinsically worth doing, freed me up to start to value, and participate in things, exclusively on that basis. When I moved to San Francisco about a year ago, I had been playing out previous to that for several years. Arriving here, I knew no one involved in the San Francisco jazz scene. What’s more, by temperament I am one of the purer introverts you’ll likely ever encounter in your life travels. My music can assume attributes of both introversion and extroversion, but interpersonally I am an introvert, period. So even if I were inclined to rub shoulders, by way of ingratiating myself with whatever the scene is out here in the Bay Area, it does not play to my strengths to do so. In fact, if I were to do this—something that comes so naturally for those who are outer-directed—I would come off like a stiff. It’s just not my nature. In the “old” career days I would force myself to do it (the “hanging out” routine) because I thought one had to, that there was no other way. I always felt horribly awkward doing it. Because it was not a natural strength for me, I only had mixed success.

But I chose to embark on a different path here in SF (as I had started to do in Boston before moving out here), one that agrees with me completely. If finding my way by dint of charm, charisma (which I inherently distrust), and the force of personality was closed to me, what approach could still be open to an introvert like me? For an introvert, it would have to be—could only be—the music itself that could find its intended audience. How to put this to the test? The answer was easy: find a café in search of an identity, and offer to play there for free on a regular basis, and see what happened. Café Euro, a Russian owned café in San Francisco, became my “venue.” It wasn’t a listening room (it’s basically an internet café), but for ten months I played there most every Friday and Saturday from 6 – 9pm. Over the ten months I logged almost 170 hours of “playing out” time at Café Euro, and I met, among a small group of regulars who would frequently come to hear the music, my friend Don, who really listens to my playing (and who probably, out of those 170 hours, heard about 150 of it). In other words, the music itself attracted—found resonance in— a self-selecting group of listeners, and those were the listeners I was meant to have. No hype; no following the latest “in” trend or “happening” thing, just the enjoyment that comes from a recurring, reliable event that some people actually appreciated for the music’s sake. Even street people, who came in regularly to listen, would sometimes grope around for a dollar from their little stash of dough to put in the tip jar, because they were grateful for what they were hearing, and they really wanted to contribute something. I would try, sometimes, to talk them out of it, but they were in earnest. I guess the music, and the nice ambience, were really starting to reach them. Also . . . and this is a big plus . . . with all that playing out time, I was continuing to get better, to improve as a player. Playing occasionally at Simple Pleasures Café, in the Richmond district, also resulted in my finding my intended listeners there, again, few but self-selecting, who were aware that something in the music was reaching them. “Tony” became my stalwart fan at Simple Pleasures Cafe. I then played a few “open mic” spots at a lovely little listening room called Bazaar Café. These were seven-minute spots. The owner, Les, liked my playing very much, and he offered me an evening to play there. Hence the little showcase where you, Rohit, heard me play, which was also attended by “my” listeners from Café Euro and Simple Pleasures Café. And so it goes. Communicating through the medium of jazz piano to see where the music finds resonance, and the listeners and the fellowship that arise from that, is what it is all about. It is a pure undertaking. The same principle pertains to having recorded, and released, Modal Soul: put out the vibe, and see where it finds resonance. I have at least five more CDs of keyboard jazz left in me. It will be the same with them.

I have no objections if playing out situations come along that will be remunerative. I’m open to it. However, money is no longer a prime motivation for playing out. It once was, but that is all gone now. Playing out and composing were always intrinsically worth doing. They always had “intrinsic worth” to them. They were constants in my life, and have been very companionable throughout the course of a lifetime. I owe them. Money comes and goes, and is no longer the “deal breaker” in determining whether involvement in an art form is worth it or not. The ability to reach people, through an art form, in a way that is moving and stirring to them, is its own reward.

And so, the living experiment of having, once again (at a much later stage of life) a career as “jazz pianist,” only, this time, with its anchorage firmly set in a philosophical principle—maybe a spiritual ideal—rather than in more typical bold-faced commerce, continues . . . It feels good.

Surely, and not slowly.

It’s PR that Nick Davies, award-winning investigative reporter and author of Flat Earth News, is talking about here. He believes public relation officials have an alarming degree of control over media content today.

A Cardiff University study shows the average reporter fills three times more news space than in 1985. So journalists are under pressure to produce more copy, and often recycle reports to meet deadlines.

Press ownership is at the heart of this trend, Davies said, and media giants are more concerned with checking their bottom line than checking facts.

“This injected commercialisation is killing the logic of journalism,” he said at a Westminster Media Forum conference in London on PR and Journalism – Government and Health Sector Media Relations.

The Cardiff research, which analysed 2,000 news stories, found more than 80 per cent of the items were composed from second-hand sources. Also, only 12 per cent had been checked for accuracy.

The way the news industry functions now, journalists do not take the time to research the press releases that land on their desks. “Instead of being news gatherers we are becoming information processors,” said Davies, who won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 1999 and the Europe Prize: Journalism for a Changing World in 2004.

So the model of the press as public watchdog is being undermined. Worse, this ‘cut-corner’ approach to filling up news space is resulting in a press that can be easily manipulated – and often misleads the public.

The conference also highlighted the uneasy relationship between the media and the government, projecting it as a particular roadblock to good journalism. Political communication veteran David Hill said while everyone tries to influence the news agenda, the way in which the media sees the government is a cause for concern.

“The media’s attitude shows assumptions that the government is without ethics,” said Hill, who was Tony Blair’s director of communications till 2003, “and that political figures are only in it for private gain.”

This mindset coupled with the journalistic belief that “only bad news is news at all” has kept the government on the backfoot. But gloomy headlines rake in more profit, and Hill said he doesn’t see a truce being struck till journalists show a willingness to be balanced.

“At the moment,” he said, “there is no incentive for the media to change and no reason for the government to play along.”

While some press offices may be benign, Davies said, it is the structure of the news machine that is allowing their views to be published unquestioned. “Even honest PR makes selections for us,” he said. “We should source it ourselves, we should decide.”

The rise of the internet means more people read news online, which is not profitable for corporations. This has led to job cuts. Which, in turn, has put pressure on reporters to file more copy is less time, and Davies said journalists need to demand more time and more space. Every time they do that, a battle is won.

“Good journalism isn’t dead, it’s just terribly ill,” he said. “But it’s worth fighting for.”

Angelica Jopson is a writer at Interjunction. She can be reached at angelica.interjunction@googlemail.com

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FOR MORE THAN 25 years, Canadian director David Cronenberg has adapted the literary works of others, including Naked Lunch (1991) from William Burroughs’s 1959 experimental novel, Crash (1996) from J G Ballard’s 1973 cult text, Spider (2003) from Patrick McGrath’s dark 1990 account of a mental patient’s subjective universe and A History of Violence (2005), based on John Wagner and Vincent Locke’s 1997 graphic novel.

Even films not seemingly adaptations draw on previously-written material. For example, Dead Ringers (1988) derives directly from Twins (1977), a novel by Jack Geasland and Bari Woods. Cronenberg’s literary awareness is present in abandoned projects, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Total Recall, based on Philip K Dick’s short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

It is also apparent his own acting career, in films such as Nightbreed (1989), where he shares Clive Barker’s celebration of monstrosity and in potential future projects, such as Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989). Looking closely at such texts reveals fascinating features of Cronenberg’s work – his frequent use of a perpetual present tense, narrative structures that might be described as spiral or centripetal, and the direct and unattributed ‘borrowing’ of images, plotlines and dialogue from a range of literary texts.

The idea of using literary texts to illuminate film is not new. In 1969, Peter Wollen asserted that “we need comparisons with authors in the other arts: Ford with Fenimore Cooper, for example or Hawks with Faulkner” and it could be argued that, as Leonard Bernstein believed, “the best way to ‘know’ a thing is in the context of another discipline”.

However, there remains a stubborn Leavisite tendency that implicitly values literary works as superior on the grounds of being the more established art form, that film can only be visual, whilst literature is linguistic, and that film cannot emulate fiction’s ability to convey the profundity of human thought. Theoretical discussion of adaptation is often bogged down in repetitive case studies, partly due to what Brian McFarlane terms ‘the fidelity issue’. Notions of remaining faithful assume that there is an irreducible core meaning to an original source text but it is not always obvious as to precisely what the film-maker should be faithful. More precisely, as Neil Sinyard reminds us, “adapting a literary text for the screen is essentially an act of literary criticism”, which should serve to illuminate both source text and filmic version drawn from it. By drawing on literary texts that are by reputation infamous and experienced primarily on Higher Education courses, and by choosing to retain their titles, Cronenberg appears to seek the endorsement of the very cultural establishment against which he seems to rebel.

Largely missed by critics, in 2005 he produced a coffee-table book, Red Cars, a history of the 1961 Formula One Championship battle between Ferrari rivals Phil Hill and Wolfgang Von Trips, including a script for an unmade movie. The book, hand-bound with an aluminu cover and limited to only 1000 copies, is a self-conscious object d’art and Cronenberg describes how it is a “way for me to create my film without actors and film crew this book linked to a website and to an exhibition”. However, even here the multi-media ‘Red Cars’ project, including lectures and a Cronenberg retrospective, echoed very similar activities by Ballard in the 1970s. Cronenberg likes to cite Borges’s statement that “a phenomenon like Kafka actually creates his own precursors, linking together strings of writers not seen to be connected before”, but it is highly debatable to what extent Cronenberg does create his own precursors and to what extent his work is ever truly free of influence from source texts.

Mark Browning is the author of David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker? He can be reached at markbrowning1@yahoo.com

This article first appeared in the IQ Magazine Spring 2008, published by Intellect, an academic book and journal company based in Bristol, UK. For more info, log on to News from Intellect.

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 Sudeep is also the author of the critically acclaimed and popular novel Tin Fish (Penguin, 2005) and the recently published Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Viking/Penguin, 2008), a work of narrative non-fiction about India’s present-day Maoist rebellion. His second novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta (Penguin, 2008), will be published in August this year. 

In an email interview with Rohit Chopra about Red Sun, Sudeep describes the failings of the Indian state and society that have engendered and sustained Maoist rebellion, the massive denial about the issue, and why prosperous ‘middle India’ needs to be shaken out of its mall-stupor and awakened to the reality of the situation.

What made you write this book? Why did you feel this story had to be told?

I have spent my career as a journalist, both as reporter and editor, tracking India’s economic development, meeting those on the “street”, as well as top ministers, entrepreneurs, and executives from India and abroad; and attending summits from Delhi to Davos. I am a direct beneficiary of India’s ongoing economic liberalization and freedom of expression that India’s urban middle classes have come to take for granted. But there is an issue I did not wish to keep quiet about. Except for perhaps a ‘unity’ based on the rupee, corruption, cinema, and cricket, there is a grave disconnect between urban and rural India and even within urban India. This disconnect is economic, social, and political. Seventy percent of India is away from the ‘growth party’. To imagine that India can be unstoppable with its gross poverty and numbing caste issues is to be in lunatic denial, a display of unstoppable ego.

Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country was a story waiting to be told. There is a fairly large and excellent body of non-fiction writing on the Naxal movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and on various subsequent extreme-Left incarnations through the 1980s, in several Indian languages and in English. But besides the occasional media coverage around the time of major skirmishing between rebels and security forces, there isn’t a book on the movements of today as driven by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that attempts to demystify the Naxal movement.

The second reason for the book was that there is a great lack of telling the human story about and around the present play of Left-wing rebellion. Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessed and the dead are not numbers; they were–and are–people. With Red Sun I have attempted to humanize a very tragic conflict, of a country at war with itself.

A third reason is that learned writing about Maoism in India (which continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) is generally restricted to academic journals and analyses by think-tanks. There is a crying need to mainstream it, tell the lay reader, as it were, about what is going on, shake ‘middle India’ out of its mall-stupor and diminish the delusions of grandeur of India’s lawmakers.

There was every reason to write Red Sun. The truth about this wrenching war has to be told.

It helped, of course, that I have a broadminded editor, who is not risk-averse to going against the grain- to publish a questioning book in the blatant bubble of a good news environment. At a meeting with my editor at Penguin to discuss the progress of my second novel (Once Upon A Time in Aparanta, to be published in August 2008), he and I got talking about current affairs, as we often do. During the course of the conversation, I suggested to him that Penguin ought to be doing a book on the Maoist issue, to awaken ‘middle India’, as it were, and I offered to write it. My editor instantly agreed. I wrote a brief, we discussed logistics and likely deadlines, and it was a ‘go’ project from then on.

I am glad that the reception and sales of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country have borne out the true purpose behind the book. At my book readings and launches, there have been a mix of students, academicians, businessmen, bankers, and other executives, bureaucrats, police officers, security and economic analysts, human rights activists, media, writers, and, I dare say, some Maoists.

And I am quite pleased with what a former chief of army staff told me a few weeks back. He said the problem with Red Sun is that it’s true.

You describe the massive denial in India about the urgency of the Maoist issue. The Maoists are not entirely voiceless. Nearly a third of India, by some counts, is under their control, they do get some media coverage, and bureaucrats and politicians are profoundly aware of the problem. Yet there seems to be a refusal to squarely engage with the issue in all its complexity. What, in your view, are some of the reasons for this state of affairs?

A clarification: Maoists do not ‘control’ one-third of India.  While they certainly control vast forest areas like the Dandakaranya region that encompasses areas of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Orissa, and other forest areas in Orissa, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, in other areas they operate with less impunity. But that reality, too, is extremely significant, as it all suggests abdication of governance by the state in an area that equals a third of India, lack of a justice system, extreme poverty, and social discrimination, and the state utterly taking its own people for granted.

The thing to keep in mind is that Maoists are not only in the forests of India. They are gradually spreading their influence in the non-forested areas of Vidarbha and Marathwada in Maharashtra, industrial hotspots in Orissa, the plains of West Bengal, plantation areas of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, and even in the agricultural hotspots in Punjab and Haryana. Maoists are today allied with numerous groups across India, from those protesting displacement on account of large projects to those protesting ill treatment on account of their caste. Maoist sympathizers number many tens of thousands. A former home minister of Karnataka mentioned that he estimates at least 5,000 families in Bangalore to be sympathetic to the Maoist cause. If these numbers don’t seem significant in a country of over a billion, consider that it took only 19 volunteers and a small circle of planners to bring down the World Trade Centre towers, attack the Pentagon, and trigger an attack on Afghanistan, and the still unwinnable global war against terror.

In this context, ‘threat’ is relative. Insurgency in Kashmir and India’s northeast steadily bleeds India, but even as it demolishes the myth of India being a wholesome nation, it does not currently hold the power to demolish India. The Maoist issue, on the other hand, goes to the heart of India. It has the power to implode India: poverty, dissatisfaction, helplessness, and anger make for potent ammunition. We have great islands of prosperity, but great oceans of discontent. Maoism is not India’s greatest internal security threat. Poverty, non-governance, and corruption are. Maoist rebels are merely mirrors of our own failings as a nation.

And perhaps that is why much of media, administration, and even what passes for “civil society” are at some level unwilling to engage in discussion aimed eventually at solving the issue. Perhaps they don’t understand it. Perhaps they don’t wish to acknowledge it, even if they understand the problem.

Because the government of India and governments of various states have no fingers to point at anyone but themselves. There is no ‘foreign hand’, no xenophobia to feed on, no shrill cries of ‘secessionism’ to blame for the abysmal failure of governance, stunning apathy, and callousness of our rulers and administrators, and the indelibility of how badly we treat our own people. Then, there is the development gravy train. An estimated 10 percent of funds reach the intended in India: who needs a developed India if the skim from ‘developing’ India is so lucrative?

The government of India, the governments of the states of India, and in many cases, the people of India have failed utterly in so many respects to raise the condition of hundreds of millions of their own people. We can think of sending a person to the moon, but there is no great joy in being only a little above sub-Saharan Africa in development indices and human rights. Our record shows that we are an innately corrupt, innately caste conscious, racist bunch of people content to vote criminals back to power over and over again. In Jharkhand politicians have used money to upgrade policing facilities to buy SUVs for themselves. In Maharashtra, distribution of relief in suicide zones of Vidarbha is a success in only that it has become a gravy train. Dalits are beaten, raped, and burnt. Such examples are endless. Why are we surprised when there is anger and resentment? Why are we surprised when some are driven to arms when state agencies fail? No less a person than the president of India is on record saying citizens are increasingly taking justice into their own hands because there is a failure of law and order.

In my conversations with various people, I keep referring to the example of a lady called Sabita Kumari, a tribal person from Jharkhand state. She went to the local police to register a complaint about her sister being raped. The police asked her instead to provide sex. Sabita went into the jungle, was recruited by Maoists, and has sworn to kill “at least 100 policemen” unless she is killed first. Poverty did not drive her. Just a simple corruption, of non-delivery, in India’s criminal justice system. The examples are legion.

By the way, Maoists are patriots by their own admission. Some analysts even call them ‘extreme patriots.’ This is worth thinking about, given our past, given that Bhagat Singh, a hardcore Left-wing revolutionary from the time of anti-British protests, the ‘Freedom movement’, has a bust in Parliament, and the Information Ministry takes out newspaper advertisements on his birth anniversary!

Maoist rebels are fighting to be heard, to be given the most basic rights. If they are heard, and their problems addressed, why would there be any reason to fight? We may not like it, but there it is.

Red Sun shows how for significant sections of the Indian population the Indian state is essentially experienced as a criminal enterprise. How does one make sense of this, especially in light of both the ‘India Shining’ narrative that glorifies India’s imminent ascendancy in the global economy and the celebration of India’s democracy 60 years after independence?

The good news stories about India are mostly true. It is a vast economy and getting bigger. The actual electoral process–voting–works to a great extent (even if pre-process issues, such as rigging of electoral rolls and intimidation, continue in large parts of India!). There is far greater affirmative action than ever. There is finally space for the ‘India Shining’ narrative, as good news stories about India are coming at a much faster clip than ever.The story in India is vastly different from, say, Nepal. That country was at a dead-end politically and economically, which in great part assisted in Maoists there achieving their goal in 12 years-from the first attack on a government office in 1996 to the present, when they are the power in Kathmandu.  In India, there is some forward movement, in certain pockets even astounding movement. India’s Maoists are the first to acknowledge that their task of national domination is made much more difficult precisely on account of India’s growth. But India’s Maoists don’t really need to win; they just need to be there, to show us where we have gone wrong.We have asked for it. It’s called ‘privileging violence’: unless people take up arms, they are not listened to. It’s all very unfortunate.

True development and governance: these are the greatest weapons against anger and resentment. The state can try to steamroll Left-wing extremism–for that matter, any extremism–and it did with Naxalism in the 1970s. But it has only got worse even with so-called development. Surely, there is a lesson somewhere, and that too is a no-brainer. Again, spread development. Ensure development funds actually reach the intended. Ensure efficient administration, policing, and justice. The government knows exactly what it has to do. It appears to have little will to do it.

And, one must remember what happened to the ‘India Shining’ narrative. The Bharatiya Janata Party coined the phrase as an election platform in 2004, against the advice of some political allies. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost the general elections. It was clearly living in a bubble of its own making.

One of the achievements of Red Sun is that it navigates the labyrinthine terrain of Maoist politics and the Indian state in an impartial manner. The state is brutally repressive in its counter-insurgency measures, but one also finds bureaucrats and intelligence officers who are not unsympathetic to the situation of those who join Maoist movements. The Maoists are opposed to the savagery perpetrated upon India’s weakest but they are also guilty of violence and extortion. You cull out these shades of grey in extremely effective fashion. How did you seek to achieve this balanced perspective, both in terms of maintaining a critical distance from various viewpoints and stylistically?

You are very kind. For me, the only way to tell the story was tell it straight, tell it from the heart, and present as many viewpoints as possible. That’s how I work. From the beginning I told all those I met or discussed the project on the telephone or email that I was writing a book, and that Viking/Penguin would publish it. When Maoists asked me if I was talking to the police, I said “yes”; if police asked me about my interaction with Maoists, I acknowledged the interaction. But I never traded in information-that would have been unethical, it would also have been folly. This is an edgy situation. It is life and death for people and, possibly, for the country, in the longer term. You can’t mess with it.

Stylistically, I have always favored the ‘feature’ style of writing, as it brings alive a situation, allows an observer and writer to look deeper. It was clear to me that with Red Sun I would adopt the style that the publishing business terms ‘narrative non-fiction’. It goes well with my preferred approach of mixing on-the-road with background research, color with cohesion, and telling the story in as accessible a manner as possible. After all, rebels know why they are rebelling-they don’t need me or anyone else to tell them that. Equally, state agencies know who and what they are fighting. Therefore, the ‘story’ had to be brought out, as it were, narrated to a wider audience. I would very much like those who palpitate if they can’t source fresh celery sticks for their Sunday afternoon Bloody Marys to read Red Sun and palpitate some more.

Somewhat more seriously, I believe I have also benefited from my relatively recent experience as a novelist. I’ve written two these past four years. Stylistically, reportage has, possibly, merged with skills I am learning as a novelist.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the book is its depiction of the use of extreme violence as negotiation, whether by the Indian state, the Maoists, or other disenfranchised sections of Indian society. On the one hand, the official Indian state position completely runs roughshod over their rights of insurgents as citizens. On the other hand, the Left and Marxist perspectives that see violence committed against the state as justified are surely ethically untenable.  I would be interested in your response to this issue.

I’m afraid there is little to debate here. Let’s consider some facts.

Fact One. India has an appalling record in dealing with its own people: in its incarnation as a bunch of princely states; through a series of colonial dominations; and as a country since 1947. India’s human rights record is appalling and so is its human development record–in the overall scheme of things. Caste, religion, and inequity merely add to the general emotional and physical conflagration. And what the Indian state has practiced in Northeast Indian regions of Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram is little short of genocide.

Fact Two. Despite all the claptrap of spiritual enlightenment in this part of the world, violence is a way of life. (If there wasn’t such misery and confusion, would there be a need to rise above it?)  The state practices violence, and, as I have mentioned earlier, it privileges violence: unless a person shouts, screams, burns, and kills, rulers do not listen. Violence is used both by the state and rebels-and is ingrained in Indian politics–as justification for their own ends.  All political parties have a record of practicing it and encouraging it.

Fact Three. The Indian Constitution and what it contains is mocked and sidestepped in more ways than it is adhered to. ‘Civil society’, ‘right to information’, and ‘public interest’ are still in their infancy in India.

Fact Four. We have a surfeit of glib intellectuals and political theorists who would shame a caveful of spiders with their spin. We have largely successful elections, given the complexity and corruption of India. That is on account of a handful of efficient and fiercely proud officials and electoral momentum from voters who, with increasing regularity, vote out the corrupt and vile every five years only to have someone equally cynical step in. These people think nothing of burning a bus–with people inside it–if it means they can score a political point. The reality of coalition politics and ‘vote-bank’ or special interest group politics lets such people off the hook.

Fact Five. In five Indian states (not counting the 14 states out of 28 affected in varying degrees by Maoist rebellion or activity, which is a stunning statistic on its own) security forces have the freedom to arrest, incarcerate, and shoot to kill on mere suspicion of “anti-state” activity, with immunity to military and paramilitary. In Chhattisgarh, a law permits the state to jail whoever they deem appropriate, without assigning specific reason. There are close to 50 minor and major terrorist and militant groups active and proscribed in India. Jammu & Kashmir is in a state of war and despondency. Riots and lynching occur regularly across India. Your own assertion adds to this point. India is a very violent place in a very violent part of the world–only our size and dogged aspiration keeps us going, offering us the irony of being a relatively safe haven hemmed in by chaos in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

As we are on the subject of violence, let’s discuss Salwa Judum, a government-sponsored vigilante army in Chhattisgarh that sets tribal against tribal to combat Maoist influence. Senior police and security officials from even Maoist-affected states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Orissa, and many from the Center have told me on the record as to what a bad idea Salwa Judum is. So far, there is no move to transplant the Salwa Judum concept into other such states. Even in the Ministry of Home Affairs, there are strong opponents of Salwa Judum even as there are strong proponents.

The truth about Salwa Judum is that it is not spontaneous. It is a monster created cynically from a real grouse that some tribal people and farmers harbored against the heavy-handedness of Maoists in the area. The government tapped into this partial resentment and created Salwa Judum with state support–financial, logistical, and moral.

But by setting brother against brother, Chhattisgarh has created a situation of mutually assured destruction of tribals. Homes are razed, lands are lost, livelihoods are destroyed, and futures erased. It is Vietnam redux, Afghanistan redux, Nagaland and Mizoram redux.

The chaos that Salwa Judum has caused is perhaps the only reason that has kept other states from employing similar methods as strategy. Senior policemen, intelligence officials, and security experts have told me Salwa Judum is a no-hoper. But Chhattisgarh can’t retract it; it has become a prestige issue, a noose.

The Salwa Judum camps are little more than instant slums, laced with sewers, oppression, fear, and dejection. These house wrecked lives of a people who are treated as the lowest forms of life. Think of an abject slum in a city, marry it with scenes of a resettlement camp immediately after a flood or earthquake, populate it with security forces, and you begin to get a sense of it. This hell is created as strategy by the state, mirroring what it earlier practiced in Nagaland and Mizoram in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s absolutely unpardonable.

Perhaps the time has come for Indians to admit that we are not quite as ‘civil’ as we like to think of ourselves; by “ourselves” I mean the bulk of our 1.12 billion. India has numerous achievements and ‘good news stories’ to be justifiably proud of, but as yet they amount to little in the Indian universe. There is little point in benchmarking ourselves with Zimbabwe and Myanmar and breaking out cases of Dom Perignon at the World Economic Forum when we score over that abysmal benchmark.

The language of the postcolonial Indian state resembles the language of the colonial state in documenting its response to insurgencies. The Maoist perspective will probably not be recorded in the official Indian archive for posterity, which is why works such as yours are so important. Do you, as someone who inhabited this world as a journalist, feel that such a history can be written at all?

Any need for documentation has accepted that the Government of India and state governments of India routinely tailor history to their own requirements of expediency, whitewash, hagiography, and posterity.

This is not only with regard to the Maoist perspective, but any perspective that senses a need to be a recorded and heard. (And here, we cannot discount that, were Maoists to come to a controlling interest in India or parts of India, their documentation would become ‘official’ at the cost of other ‘histories’. We will, in all probability, soon see it happening in Nepal, where Maoist history will be ‘true’ history in the same way that monarchic history was for these past 250 years.)

In such an environment, it is imperative to try to bring to the attention of the reading public as many independent perspectives as possible. Such an initiative needs to go beyond media, which in India is becoming increasingly giddy. India is still relatively low on the curve of ‘indie’ projects. I can only hope the trend accelerates. If the much hyped “Idea of India” concept takes root, those who care about the Indian nation-state in its clinical sense, in its need to find a bona fide place in the sun, then such documentation, such histories, as you call them, will become more common.

One of the implicit historical questions raised by your work is whether the deprivation experienced by tribals, Dalits, and peasants has its roots in colonial political economy or is primarily a product of the policies of the postcolonial state. It seems that this is an important topic for historical inquiry. But from another perspective–that of the rights of the wretched of the Indian earth–what does it matter  where the historical roots of exploitation lie?

I would go entirely with the last point that you have raised. That is indeed my perspective. Being a student of history, a practicing journalist, and a die-hard Indian, colonial and postcolonial attitudes mean little in the face of continuing, explosive exploitation. India, alas, is very likely to pay a heavy price.

A related question: can one make the case that these disenfranchised communities are colonized peoples? Is there any glimmer of this line of thinking among Maoist ideologues? They claim that they are patriots and they use the language of anti-imperialist movements. But do they specifically invoke legacies of anticolonial nationalism (regarding which, the extreme Left in India have been considerably ambivalent)?

Thus far, there is no indication of this being the case. India’s Maoists do talk of “imperialist hegemony” when referring to India’s geopolitical interests in Nepal, which is now Maoist-dominated, but accusations of such behavior, in relation to India, are generally placed at the door of United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and such.

There is a ‘colonial’ narrative that exists in northeastern India, especially in Nagaland and large parts of Manipur, that claims India as the aggressor and invader as these areas were historically and ethnically never part of India and Indian-ness prior to 1947. But this is not led by Maoists. It is an intensely local feeling.

The only aspect of this narrative, that of disenfranchised communities being colonized people, exists in some degrees in the arguments of ‘adivasi’ politics, that tribal people in India’s heartland have been colonized by outsiders, their livelihood damaged and identities shattered–in a narrative similar those of American Indians and Australian Aborigines. Tribal leaders and Maoists have leveraged this feeling, but only as a kick-start tactic in overall strategy, not as abiding policy. Maoists are leveraging anything they can anywhere: displacement of farmers on account of industrialization, caste issues, labor unrest, high debt, and despondency among farmers. In this, a Monsanto or Cargill becomes today’s East India Company in Maoist narrative–but it is not unusual; as you know, there is increasing general activism against such businesses by anti-WTO and anti-GM foods lobbies, both in India and elsewhere. In this, Maoists have found common cause.

A last point: the extreme Left in India have not been ambivalent about anticolonial nationalism, but the Left have. There is a big difference.

Let me move to the question of rights here. The Maoists (as, indeed, Marxist and Left movements) appear to bear a profound ambivalence towards the idea of rights as well as toward the institutions of liberal democracy. This tension is brought out very starkly in your book.  On the one hand, the Maoists dismiss the institutions of liberal democracy as bourgeois, comprador, hegemonic hogwash, and the like, and justify the use of violence and vigilante justice. On the other hand, they also invoke the language of rights, including the right of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, in articulating their cause.

This is a big one. Your observation is spot on, and I agree entirely. With all my anger against India’s venal politicians and bureaucrats, I must acknowledge the fact that I am exchanging ideas with you as a free citizen. That my book, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, is not as yet banned in India (though I could be in trouble in Chhattisgarh).

It all adds up to an enormous degree of complexity.Some weeks ago I was asked at a literary meet in Mumbai what I thought of the Maoist proclivity for absolute domination of ideology or abhorrence of dissent. And, whether I thought if Maoists were in power, would they allow free circulation of Red Sun as it enjoys now. My answer was: I don’t believe in Maoism, I’m merely writing about it and the cause and effect of deprivation in the context of India’s grand claims. Hypothetically, if a Maoist leadership emerged that was as venal and domineering as India’s current masters, I would in principle have no hesitation to rail against them and to offer an independent narrative.

Two unfairly difficult questions about the future to conclude the interview. Recently, on May 29, 2008, Nepal’s new assembly, comprised significantly of Maoist rebels who overthrew the royal government earlier in the year, voted to abolish the monarchy. Elsewhere in the subcontinent, the Indian human rights activist, Dr. Binayak Sen, continues to be imprisoned by the Chattisgarh state government for alleged links with Maoists, despite his clear repudiation of Maoist violence. What do you think about the future of Maoist movements in India and of Maoism as an ideology? And what do you think about the future of India?

Permit me to attempt to answer the last question first, and work backwards. I believe India is headed for several years of rural unrest, primarily on account of dislocation in agriculture. This has the capacity of migrating to urban areas. Indeed, this is a history in motion. Caste-related anger, inequity-related anger, rights-related anger, and farming- and landholding-related anger have not been this primed or this vocal for decades. Something has to give. Half a million BPO employees cannot transform 600 million engaged in farming, or 250 million who earn Rs 12 or less a day.

I have mapped an extreme future scenario in Red Sun–one I sincerely wish does not come to pass, but at present there is little reason to rejoice. I believe that, given current dynamics, India will in the not too distant future move into what I call ‘In-Land’ and ‘Out-Land’. In-Land will constitute massive City States (Kolkata and environs; Mumbai and environs, possibly including Pune; Delhi, Jaipur, Chandigarh; Greater Bangalore; Greater Hyderabad; Greater Chennai; and so on) with captive hinterlands for food, commerce, and of course, governance. Outside these gated City States will lie Out-Land, present day rural India, as ever out of sight and therefore, out of mind. It is entirely possible that Maoists or others like them could control this Out-Land. If some turn rogues, they could turn to ‘warlordism’.

This is not far-fetched. It’s already happening; the trends will merely get firmer. Look at the growth of cities, Special Economic Zones or SEZs, patterns of migration, the debilitation and lawlessness of the countryside. We have mapped our future and we are doing everything in our power to validate this future. And the scary part for urban India will be that, unless growth is more equitable, tensions that currently rent Out-Land will steadily move In. And In-Land too could become an unsustainable pressure cooker.

Consider a few points. Rural and urban India will together have will more than 300 million more people over the next two and half decades. Food grain production needs to more than double in the same time. But our landmass will remain the same. Our cities are tinderboxes–Mumbai, for example, is 60 percent slum. Think about it. This is not the time for ‘Shantaram Tours’ of Mumbai’s slums, based on a book by an itinerant Australian ex-thug who spent some years in Mumbai’s slums to write a largely fictionalized work. This is the time to ensure that there is no need for such grotesque display.

As for Binayak Sen, he, journalist Ajay TG, and others in Chhatisgarh will not be released from jail until the Chhattisgarh government can be made to feel less foolish. These people are soft targets. To my mind, Dr. Sen’s imprisonment is nothing but a paranoid reaction of the state. It’s a classic tactic of retaliation to focus on ‘soft’ targets in order to divert attention from real failures–of governance, administration, policing, and socioeconomic development. In addition, there is the grinding exploitation of tribals and the poor that no amount of finessing or propaganda can hide. The government of Chhattisgarh is now engaged in denying legitimate NGOs space to function in rural areas. It’s a stupid, knee-jerk strategy that will bring immense harm. Besides further fracturing society, it will only serve to escalate the conflict. The Chhattisgarh government is quite obtuse; even looking at things from their point of view, they do not appear to realize that the longer they incarcerate Dr. Sen and others like him, the more people who normally would not be empathetic to the cause of Left-wing revolution would be drawn to it. I, for one, hope public pressure leads not only to the release of Dr. Sen and others, but that it leads ultimately to dialogue between the state and Maoists.

As for Maoism in India, as I mentioned earlier it is different from the situation in Nepal in that, Maoists have nearly attained their goal of ruling Nepal, and they have done so rapidly. It took only 10 years for the revolution–in great measure aided by common people–to steamroll the state, the monarchy. For the past two years, Nepal’s Maoists have been in Kathmandu. They are now the single largest party in Nepal’s Constituent Assembly.

The story in India is vastly different, for while Maoist influence is spreading, it’s nowhere near completion with the rapidity of Nepal. But, as I mentioned earlier, India’s Maoists don’t really need to win, they just need to be there, to show us where we have gone wrong.

History shows us that it’s usually easier to rebel than to rule. It has happened in every ancient civilization and nearly every modern one–barring, possibly and notably, the United States. Mao is as good an example as any. He brought off a stunning rebellion, ruthlessly united a country, and then ruled it at whim. Nepal is today dealing not merely with the absence of war, but the chaos of peace, reconciliation, and a scheming monarchy. I expect there will be more trouble in Nepal till things settle down; in some ways it is where India was in 1947.

But history moves on, as it has in Russia, China, and it will in Nepal. In India, Maoist rebellion–indeed, any rebellion, conceivably even a Dalit one–is providing, and will surely continue to provide, impetus to change. The wise ought to see the writing on the wall and ensure socioeconomic, administrative, and judicial delivery so that Mao and his principles needn’t have to show the way in India. Until this happens, rebellion in India is a no-brainer. We have asked for it. It’s all very unfortunate.

At the core, the Maoist or Naxal leadership of today and the 1960s are similar, because what they are angry about is similar to what the educated and privileged were angry about in the 1960s–and that is the true irony of India’s ‘development’. But times have changed, social milieus have changed, the politics has changed, the revolutionary movement and security apparatus too have changed in their methods of reaction and counter-reaction.

The rebels this time around are savvier, better equipped, and more deliberate. The cadre is much more broad-based that in the 1960s. Many grassroots cadre have assumed leadership positions. They don’t like to roll over and play dead.

I call the current state of play in India Maoism Mark IV. This comes after Mark I in the 1960s across West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; Mark II in the 1980s primarily in Andhra and Bihar; Mark III in the 1990s with the spread into present-day Chhattisgarh and formation of a guerilla force; and the largely consolidated, organized conglomerate of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) of the present day. There will be a Mark V, and many more ‘Marks’, as Left-wing extremism morphs and adapts to the changing contours of sociopolitical and socioeconomic India.

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EXTERNAL LINKS

‘Unification is the only way to advance the cause of the Indian revolution’
Interview with People’s War leader Ganapthy

Karl and the Kalashnikov
82 hours with the People’s War guerrillas

In India, Death to Global Business
How a violent—and spreading—Maoist insurgency threatens the country’s runaway growth

Notes from the Red Corridor
Part reportage and part travelogue, this is an unflinching look at India’s Naxal reality

Free Binayak Sen
An international collaborative effort to seek the release of Dr. Binayak Sen

Shades of grey in red zones 

Himal South Asian’s review of Red Sun