Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most, I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, 16 or 17. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolised by words and the exercises of the intellect.
I read Hobsbawm’s famous trilogy on the “long nineteenth century,” as well as his famous book on invented traditions, but I was never quite as impressed as a lot of distinguished people have been by his work. And I certainly don’t admire his “loyalty” to communism. Unfortunately, it was not only jazz that allowed him to release his emotions. Like not a few shy, diffident scholars, his soul was also moved by the dream of absolute power, of the right of the “Revolution” to crush its enemies. What is wrong, after all, about demanding limitless sacrifice in the name of the “just” society? Stalin’s problem wasn’t that he killed so many people, but that the trains didn’t run on time. If the trains had run on time, things would have been different.
