Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen RIP

[vickihb2]

Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen
(Filed: 22/04/2005) Telegraph

Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, who died in Copenhagen on Tuesday aged 58, was described by Oscar Peterson as "arguably the most inventive bassist in jazz"; a supreme virtuoso of the double bass, he was nevertheless one of the most judicious and least selfish of accompanists.

Pedersen, whose name proved such a mouthful that he was customarily referred to as "NHOP", was among the most frequently recorded jazz musicians in history, having taken part in more than 400 albums. There was scarcely a major name with whom he had not played in the course of the last 40 years.

Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, the son of a church organist, was born at Osted, Denmark, on May 27 1946. He began piano lessons at the age of seven, and at 13, when he was tall enough, took up the double bass in order to play in his family band. He made such rapid progress that, within two years, he was playing at the Montmartre Jazzhus, Copenhagen's leading jazz club.

He became a member of the resident band, a trio which accompanied the parade of star soloists who passed through the club. These included the saxophonists Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon, trumpeters Chet Baker and Art Farmer, multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and the pianist Bill Evans. At the age of 17 he was invited to join the Count Basie orchestra, but was forced to decline, mainly on account of his youth but also because he wanted to complete his studies.

Pederson's instinctive grasp of the jazz idiom allowed him to fit in with a remarkable variety of styles, including such avant garde artists as Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler. However, it was in the broad mainstream of jazz that he felt most at home. Between 1964 and 1982, and occasionally thereafter, he was a member of the Danish Radio Big Band, one of the finest jazz orchestras in Europe.

He subsequently recorded an album, Ambiance (1993), which featured him accompanied by this band, in which his extraordinary technique is heard to full advantage. He had developed a method of playing pizzicato using all four fingers of the right hand, enabling him to execute very high-speed passages without sacrificing either tone or definition. Although he used an amplifier, there was always a deep, woody core to his sound.

During the early 1970s, Pedersen joined the American pianist Kenny Drew, then resident in Scandinavia, to perform duets at European festivals. Together they recorded a superb album, Duo, in 1973. He also recorded acclaimed duet albums with the guitarists Joe Pass and Philip Catherine, but it was his association with Oscar Peterson which brought him universal recognition.

From 1974 until 1987, Pedersen toured regularly as a member of Peterson's trio. He was originally hired as an emergency replacement, on the recommendation of Peterson's original bassist, Ray Brown. "He's the only one I know that might keep up with you," were Brown's words, and they proved to be prophetic. Peterson wrote in his memoirs: "His virtuosity on the bass surpasses anyone else that I have known." Perhaps the best of Pedersen's many recordings with the trio is The Paris Concert (1978).

Pedersen remained firmly attached to his Danish roots. In recent years he led his own bands, made up mostly of Scandinavian players. Notable among these were the guitarist Ulf Wakenius, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and pianist Kenneth Knudsen. He also taught at the Rytmiske Musikkonservatorium in Copenhagen. He was married with children.

[Not Andrea]

Another amazing mind has called it quits too at the same age.


Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies at 58
By ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, April 12, 2005


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(04-12) 07:23 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) --


Andrea Dworkin wrote openly about the experiences as a prostitute, rape victim and battered wife that led her to become a crusader against pornography and violence against women — and a lightning rod for the feminist movement.


Dworkin died Monday at her home in Washington, said John Stoltenberg, who married her in 1998 after living with her for three decades. She was 58 and had been ill for several years from ailments including osteoarthritis.


"In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve," fellow feminist Gloria Steinem said in a statement. "Andrea is one of them."


Dworkin, a self-proclaimed radical feminist once described as the Malcolm X of the women's movement, devoted her work and more than a dozen books to fighting what she considered the subordination of women, notably in marriage and pornography.


"She really committed her life to giving voice to the women at the bottom, the women who were battered, raped, who were prostituted, who were made into pornography," Stoltenberg said.


Her first book, "Woman Hating," published when she was 27, launched her lifelong advocacy on the ways pornography harms women.


She campaigned frequently on the subject and teamed with legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon to draft an ordinance defining pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, allowing women to sue for damages. The ordinance was inspired by the situation of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace appeared in the pornographic film "Deep Throat" and later said she had been coerced.


The anti-porn ordinance was originally drafted for Minneapolis but vetoed by the mayor there. It was adopted by other communities, but later ruled unconstitutional.


"Pornography is used in rape — to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act," Dworkin testified before the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986, according to a transcript on her Web site.


She was well known as a firebrand for her views on pornography and her 1987 book "Intercourse," in which some reviewers said she labeled all sex as rape. She denied that, but wrote about marriage laws that she felt "mandated intercourse."


She was often lampooned as a prude or man hater and criticized by other feminists for making women out to be the victims of sex. She filed a $150 million libel lawsuit against Hustler magazine in the 1980s for running sexually explicit caricatures using her name, but courts ruled the cartoons were protected by the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected her appeal without comment in 1989.


Dworkin said repeatedly that she did not hate men, just the subjugation of women.


Originally from Camden, N.J., Dworkin graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1968 with a degree in literature.


She was arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War when she was 18 and sent to prison, where she said she was subjected to a body cavity search by prison doctors. She also said she married a man who beat her, was raped and at one point became a prostitute.


Her many books included "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation," which in 2001 won an American Book Award, given to honor cultural diversity in American writing. She was writing a book with the working title "Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation," when she died, Stoltenberg said.


She and Stoltenberg were both openly gay but had lived together since 1974.


A public memorial will be held in New York, said Stoltenberg. Arrangements were incomplete.


___


On the Net:

[isaacs]

Nice puff piece on Andrea Dworkin. Yes, it is "amazing" that one mind could delude itself into thinking that the best way to fight hate is to hate even harder. Give me the pure love of NHOP anyday.

[vickihb2]

I will never forget watching NHOP play at the MIJF, what an amazing experience. So much talent and so much dedication, I am grateful that I was able to hear him play live.

I've read only two of Dworkin's books, ten years ago one of them obvious biographical 'fiction'. I thought at the time she was a very sad and deeply wounded woman but I found that some of her arguments were/are valid.

Some of her points, I recall, on heterosexual penetrative sex were very interesting. A the time some my girlfriends idolised her, but I was hanging with the women's jazz mafia of south London, when there were still women-only gigs! I must re-read some of her work and see if I still agree.

The UK press Guardian, Independent, and BBC were a little kinder to her than this woman (below) but in the nature of balance here's another puff piece.

Woman's Hating
The misdirected passion of Andrea Dworkin

Cathy Young

Writing about Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist author and activist who died on April 9, is no easy task. Decorum requires accentuating the positive when speaking of the recently deceased; here, there is little positive to accentuate, except for a badly misused talent and a badly misdirected passion.

Still, with Dworkin's admirers hailing her as a titan of modern feminism, obituaries describing her as a controversial but noble crusader against pornography and violence, and even some of her feminist critics paying homage to her alleged achievements, it's important to set the record straight.

To put it plainly: Dworkin was a preacher of hate. Her books are full of such declarations as, "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman." ("Patriarchy," of course, covers contemporary Western societies.) "Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women's lives, can run wild." "Hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right."

In Dworkin's world view, the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper seem to be representative of all men (though she made an exemption for some men in her own life). Meanwhile, women who defend their right to enjoy heterosexual sex are branded "collaborators, more base than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority."

Dworkin's defenders insist that she has been unfairly maligned as equating all heterosexual sex with rape when she merely assailed male sexual dominance. Yet in her 1987 book, Intercourse, Dworkin argued that penetration itself is a form of "occupation" and "violation of female boundaries," however enthusiastically enjoyed by "the occupied person." She wrote that "intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior" and is "the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women." "All sex is rape" is fairly accurate shorthand for these ravings.

While allowing that intercourse could survive under gender equality, Dworkin was skeptical ("intercourse itself may be immune to reform"). In the 1976 book Our Blood, she proclaimed, in language too blunt to be reproduced here, that the feminist transformation of sexuality requires male impotency—though how she would achieve this goal remains unclear.

Dworkin's admirers laud, and wildly exaggerate, her role in the battle against domestic violence and rape; if she deserves "credit" for anything, it's helping infect feminist activism on these important issues with anti-male bigotry and paranoia. Her biggest "contribution" to the women's movement was to redirect a lot of its energy into a futile, divisive crusade against pornography.

While Dworkin spoke passionately on behalf of women who are battered and raped, her advocacy was undercut by her bizarre claims—for instance, that the high rate of Caesarean sections in the United States is driven by the sexual sadism of doctors. Her melodramatic assertion that the everyday life of women in our culture is an "atrocity" could only trivialize real atrocities. Her depiction of all women as perpetual victims–"Being female in this world is having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us"—is profoundly demeaning.

On some level, Dworkin deserved compassion as a troubled woman with a history of sexual and physical abuse. Unfortunately, she took her battle with her private demons into the public square, and ended up doing far more damage to feminism than any right-wing cabal. (Ironically, some right-wingers eagerly embraced not only Dworkin's antiporn zeal but her argument that sexual liberation has hurt women.) Men, too, have been casualties of a climate in which a Vassar College official could tell Time magazine that a false rape charge might be a beneficial consciousness-raising experience for male students.

Critics of radical feminism have been often accused of exaggerating the importance of a handful of male-haters in the movement. Yet Dworkin was never relegated to the lunatic fringe where she belonged: Her texts have been widely assigned in women's studies courses, and prominent feminists from activist Gloria Steinem to philosopher Martha Nussbaum have offered their praise, treating her hatemongering as extremism in defense of the oppressed. I prefer the view that hate is hate.

Even "pro-sex" feminist Susie Bright, a frequent target of Dworkin's, now gushes that she "loved it" that Dworkin dared to "attack the very notion of intercourse" and name men as the problem. If this is feminism, no wonder it's become an f-word.

Andrea Dworkin is dead. Maybe feminism won't live again until it has exorcised her sad ghost.




Cathy Young This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.