Danish Study

In Danish Neutrality: A Study in the Foreign Policy of a Small State (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1991), I identified and analysed certain ideas and attitudes behind Danish foreign policy in modern and contemporary history. Focusing on situations of crisis or war in the region, I detected two opposing tendencies in Danish reactions, namely towards engagement in and withdrawal from international conflict.

With "Glow of Benares", saxophonist/composer Lars Møller summarises 25 years of working with Indian music. On this recording, whose title refers to the holiest of the sacred cities in Hinduism, Indian melodic ragas and rhythms are combined with the orchestral formats of jazz and western music, as the two Indian musicians Kala Ramnath and Abhijit Banerjee meet the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra and the Danish Sinfonietta.

British pianist Django Bates returns to ECM with one of his very finest constellations, the trio Belovèd, with Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and Danish drummer Peter Bruun, and an aptly named album, "The Study of Touch". All three musicians are highly individual players, subtly challenging the conventions of the jazz piano trio.

Religious scholarship can be offensive to believers, as conflicts from the time of Galileo and Spinoza to the recent critique of Danish religious scholars in the wake of the infamous Muhammad cartoons have shown. Studies of this type of scholarship have been appropriated by believers as a means of reinventing their own identities—as the training of twentieth-century Muslim clergy demonstrates.