Editorial

 
Would it be inopportune to start with Linda Oh? Here is yet another Bass phenomenon from Australia. Well, she is Malaysian but grew up in Perth and she has the down-under accent, with its essential and innate effect of humility obtained through the shortening of the vowels. Further down we discover, this time from Japan, pianist, Hiromi Uehara.

Jazz, they say, is impossible to listen to. This is the fault of John Coltrane. It is the fault of this editor that he succumbed to the temptation of publishing a number of articles in this issue previously as 'interim'. They are now part of this issue. Spring has that kind of 'in progress' sort of feeling as the world strives to attain the mature look of summer. The cycle turns while inside the great halls of the world's airports, nomadic people wonder from one corner of the globe to the other. Huge pumps keep the air at a constant temperature as power consuming habits refuse to diminish. The cover is a snapshot taken while in transit from Baku to Bologna at the Istanbul International Airport, one of the busiest air transport hubs linking Europe to Africa, Arabia and Asia.

If the current economic paradigm is underscored by expansion, then knowledge too must do its expanding, really into lesser know cultures such as Azerbaijan whose language shares words and grammar with Turkish. How do they see their world, from the point where the european forests would seem to end?