Janet’s blues

REACTING to the ‘banality’ of the vogue for surveys of our supposedly favourite things, Janet street-Porter makes journalistic capital out of a list of her pet hates (Mail).

Well, I, too, have a few, including silliness, superficiality, vanity and ageism, all of which I detect in just one item on Ms street-Porter’s list.

she associates trad jazz with ‘ dad

jazz’ — not helped by the fact that tory grandee Ken Clarke is a huge fan.

I might just as well say that I dislike a newspaper because Ms Street-Porter writes for it or condemn Christianity just because tony Blair is a Roman Catholic.

Ms Street- Porter takes a gratuitous sideswipe at Acker Bilk as ‘having a lot to answer for’, a particularly unpleasant comment given that the clarinettist’s sad loss six months ago is still keenly felt by his family and fans.

His records sold by the million, which can hardly be said of modern jazz that Ms Street- Porter thinks ‘fantastic’. Her superficialityis demonstrated by the fact that modern jazz is so diverse as to be almost indefinable.

No one can realistically pronounce judgment on all manifestations of bop — hard and soft — any more than one could praise all rock music, all classical music or have a penchant for all things Chinese. the silliest comments are in Miss Street- Porter’s composite trad enthusiast, a person with ‘halitosis, corduroy trousers, a check shirt and a dodgy waistcoat’.

Miss Street-Porter, born in 1946, is old enough to remember when trad jazz was in the popular mainstream.

I’ve seen pictures of young people at rock concerts all wearing denim, but I can’t say I’ve noticed any particular sartorial tendency at the thousands of trad concerts I’ve attended. However, I do remember the Seventies when corduroy trousers were very fashionable among the chattering classes, though I never got close enough to them to determine whether or not they had halitosis

Dr I. A. LIDDLE, Bradford, W. Yorks.