Instead of Jazz Prospecting, I'm posting my Jazz Consumer Guide: number 27 in a mostly quarterly series since 2004. The previous one appeared in the Village Voice on May 10. This was was finished and handed in about August 1. The column was started after Gary Giddins was fired by the Voice in 2004. Chuck Eddy was music section editor, but Robert Christgau was the one directly handling the jazz pieces -- a legacy of having edited Giddins for thirty-some years. Those were big shoes -- ones which had long established the Village Voice as one of the world's foremost review of all things jazz -- so Christgau decided on a team approach: Francis Davis would write a monthly feature piece, I would crank out a quarterly Jazz Consumer Guide, and Nate Chinen would write occasional pieces on live performances. After Eddy and Christgau were fired, Rob Harvilla took over and continued the basic idea -- although Davis took leave to work on a book, and Chinen moved on to the New York Times.

Harvilla was replaced by Maura Johnston this spring. My May column came out a few weeks into her regime, and I submitted this column on August 1, expecting the same. Instead, she sat on it, and after much prodding decided it was too dated. Indeed, lateness and lack of space have been chronic problems from the beginning: after the first year it was clear that there would be enough quality material to run every two (as opposed to three) months, but I never pushed it hard enough, and they never found the space. Instead, I found myself writing more cryptically to squeeze more records into less space. Meanwhile, the Voice keeps losing space, tightening money, and shedding its legacy: the days when a business could provide something useful and hope to make some profit along the way have given way to the predatory ideal of sucking every value dry in the name of profit, and the Voice has given up on even trying to be an exception.

When my column was killed, Johnston proposed that I write a weekly blog entry for the Voice, covering 8-12 records. I accepted and asked some questions, but never heard from her again, so it's not clear whether this will or will not happen. Jazz Consumer Guide winds up covering about 200 records per year, so that works out to about four per week. Jazz Prospecting, on the other hand, averages 10-15 per week, so most likely what I would do would be to try to raise Jazz Prospecting to Jazz CG standards, which would entail not writing on everything that comes my way, and hopefully writing better about what I do try to cover. At first glance, I would be able to broaden my HMs down to B+(**), although I could also start writing about reissues and maybe even some non-jazz that strikes my fancy. Such a blog would be more timely -- this column, even had it come out on schedule, has a fairly large number of 2010 releases -- and I'd have space to write more expansively.

Whether it would be worth the effort is hard to say. Seven years of writing this column has been fun, interesting, and ultimately a huge amount of miserably compensated work. My house has been overrun by CDs I'm unlikely to ever play again -- good ones I'm proud to own and would be happy to play, and less good ones I haven't figured out how to get rid of. But I also wind up spending so much time working on them that I have precious little time for doing other things, including writing about things I feel a good deal more competent at than music. I don't know how I'm going to sort this out -- although I must admit that the most likely course is inertia.

I have a lot to do in the next week or two: a year-end jazz piece for Rhapsody, a system to present the individual ballots in Francis Davis's Jazz Critics Poll, a Pazz & Jop ballot, a framework for a couple of websites. Plus more personal stuff, likely to trump everything else. So I'm unsure how to wrap this up. My initial plan was to hold back Jazz Prospecting this week and run it next, as a capstone on the Jazz CG (28) cycle. Then I'll suspend Jazz Prospecting until making a decision sometime in January. In the meantime, I may (or may not) post a Jazz Consumer Guide (28). I never bothered to try wrapping it up because there was never a chance of getting it published, but I have approximately enough written to fill one out. Depends on how much I want to save for use in a blog, although we could do both, or I could wind up not doing the blog.

The Jazz Prospecting for this Jazz Consumer Guide ran from April 11 to August 1, 2011. The collected Jazz Prospecting notes are here. During this time, I made a number of decisions to not cover various records. Those were listed in my surplus file. This file includes fourteen short "consolation prize" reviews, which I've (almost certainly) posted on the blog here some time ago. The A- records extend down into the Honorable Mentions through Conference Call -- one of my space-saving tricks.

I'm very sorry, especially to the kind publicists who gave me the opportunity to hear so much wonderful music, that the exposure here is likely to be far short of what the Village Voice promised. I worked very hard to make this happen, and I'm deeply disappointd that it's come to this. On the other hand, if you're fortunate enough to find this page, you're in for some real treats -- all the way down to the tiptoes of the Honorable Mentions.

Pick Hits

Dan Raphael/Rich Halley/Carson Halley: Children of the Blue Supermarket (Pine Eagle)
The setup is simple enough: Raphael declaims his postbeat poetry, Rich Halley chases every stanza with his garrulous postbop tenor sax, and his son the drummer accents. Not sure how the poetry flows on paper, but the mad rush of images is so vibrant you hang on every word, and the sax drives every point home. A

David S. Ware: Onecept (AUM Fidelity)
His life saved by a kidney transplant, the avant saxophonist's rehab continues: first the solo Saturnian improv with stritch and manzello for variety, now he adds bass and drums -- old hands William Parker and Warren Smith, who can follow him anywhere. He works up subtle schemata, but the main thing you hear is his towering sound. A MINUS

Muhal Richard Abrams: SoundDance (Pi)
Two discs with the AACM guru-pianist, each a duo: an easy one comping behind Fred Anderson's warmest, gentlest free sax, and a difficult one with George Lewis running interference on laptop and trombone, the distilled essence of forty years of breaking all the rules. A MINUS

Rodrigo Amado: Searching for Adam (Not Two)
An imposing tenor saxophonist for more than a decade in groups like the Lisbon Improvisation Players and the Humanization 4Tet, Amado fronts a group that frames him as smartly as his photography. With John Hébert on bass, Gerald Cleaver on drums, and Taylor Ho Bynum on contrasting brass, cornet, and flugelhorn. The group can freewheel, but the focus sticks to Amado, especially when he slows down and dips into the baritone sax. A MINUS

Mathias Eick: Skala (ECM)
Like so many Norwegian jazz players, has a rock background which he still indulges in Jaga Jazzist and Motorpsycho, but ECM focuses him more narrowly: the rhythms shift free, the piano rumbles, sax and harp slip in and out, while the trumpet is warm and bright enough to dispell any thoughts of Nordic chill. A MINUS

Ellery Eskelin/Gerry Hemingway: Inbetween Spaces (Auricle)
Terrence McManus/Gerry Hemingway: Below the Surface Of (Auricle)
A pair of drummer duos: whereas Paal Nilssen-Love is all muscle circling his opponents, Hemingway is finesse, patiently drawing his partners out. Eskelin's tenor sax is fractal, each excursion revealing more detail as Hemingway picks it apart. McManus's electric guitar is louder, more dissonant, the fractures less by design than by stress. Both: A MINUS

Avram Fefer/Eric Revis/Chad Taylor: Eliyahu (Not Two)
Sax-bass-drums trio, more soulful than you expect from free jazz, tightly focused with a humane tone. Named for Fefer's late father, a thoughtful reckoning. A MINUS

Free Fall: Gray Scale (Smalltown Superjazz)
Ken Vandermark's fourth take on the Jimmy Giuffre trio, where Håvard Wiik's piano finaly rivals Paul Bley's for fluid invention, and centers the bass and clarinet abstractions. A MINUS

Humanization 4tet: Electricity (Ayler)
Guitarist Luis Lopes provides the juice, welding the bass and drums of Dennis González's sons into a taut, metallic undercarriage -- just the platform for Rodrigo Amado's sax bombs. Heavy metal but jazz. A MINUS

Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya: Sotho Blue (Sunnyside)
A septet with three saxes and a trombone, just enough tones to let the leader play the band the way Ellington used to, although the piano is more thematic, stitching together the glorious panorama of colors. A MINUS

Inzinzac: Inzinzac (High Two)
A guitar-sax-drums trio playing "rock music in odd time signatures" -- by "rock" they mean loud, and by "odd" they mean odd. Guitarist Alban Bailly, who named the group for his home town in Brittany, drives his pieces, but more often than not Dan Scofield's soprano sax provides the sharp, shiny, metallic edges. A MINUS

Jon Irabagon: Foxy (Hot Cup)
The Sonny Rollins cover takeoff is just as goof, as are the "Foxy"-"Proxy"-"Chicken Poxy" titles. Not cowtunes; more like A Night at the Village Vanguard. And if Barry Altschul wants to play louder than Elvin Jones, the saxophonist cranks it up that much more. A MINUS

Steve Swell's Slammin' the Infinite: 5000 Poems (Not Two)
The dependable, long-struggling avant trombonist drops his best album ever and the main things you notice are how Sabir Mateen has a tour de force on everything from flute to tenor sax, and how new pianist John Blum crashes the rhythm to shards. But the trombone does keep up, and holds the chaos together. A MINUS

Tarbaby: The End of Fear (Posi-Tone)
Looks like a piano trio juggling guest horns on 8 of 12 tracks but Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, and Nasheet Waits pick up energy on their own, just not as much as Nicholas Payton, J.D. Allen, and especially Oliver Lake. Covers from Fats Waller to Bad Brains, originals by all three including a Monkish one by Revis. Everything holds together. A MINUS

Honorable Mention

Eero Koivistoinen & Co.: 3rd Version (1973, Porter)
Avant fusion from Finland, McLaughlin-influenced guitar/keybs with a saxophonist who steps boldly forth.

David S. Ware/Cooper-Moore/William Parker/Muhammad Ali: Planetary Unknown (AUM Fidelity)
More progress: a new quartet with older players than the old quartet, the old fire too.

Honey Ear Trio: Steampunk Serenade (Foxhaven)
Tough young tenor sax trio can still wax sentimental on "Over the Rainbow."

Jerry Bergonzi: Convergence (Savant)
His basic tenor sax tour de force even when he tries something different, like overdubbing his with soprano.

Conference Call: What About . . . . ? (Not Two)
Prodigious avant sax/clarinetist Gebhard Ullman roars and roils over Memphis-based pianist Michael Jefry Stevens.

Mostly Other People Do the Killing: The Coimbra Concert (Clean Feed)
As rough and tumble as you'd expect, beating up not the bebop classics but their own bent deconstructions thereof.

Matthew Shipp: Art of the Improviser (Thirsty Ear)
The craft of the jazz pianist -- a solo disc you have to chew on, leavened by a trio that carries you along.

Harriet Tubman: Ascension (Sunnyside)
Fusion band aims high, adding trumpet and turntables to Coltrane's rafter raiser.

I Compani: Mangiare! (Icdisc)
Bo van der Graaf's soundtrack serenaders take spaghetti westerns and load on the sauce and cheese.

Terrence McManus: Transcendental Numbers (NoBusiness)
With Mark Helias and Gerry Hemingway, so call this BassDrumGuitar, a little more abstract given the higher math.

E.J. Antonio: Rituals in the Marrow (Blue Zygo)
Scratchy raw poetry laced with Joe Giardullo free sax, with a gospel whoop when her blood gets riled up.

Rakalam Bob Moses/Greg Burk: Ecstatic Weanderings (Jazzwerkstatt)
Improv with African allusions, abstract piano in a jungle of worldly drums.

Jaruzelski's Dream: Jazz Gawronski (Clean Feed)
Politically tinged Polish jokes in the Italian group's titles, freebop sax in their grooves.

Sonic Liberation Front: Meets Sunny Murray (High Two) Bata beats and avant-sax, joined by Kevin Diehl's mentor but a bit out of sorts.

Mike Reed's People, Places & Things: Stories and Negotiations (482 Music)
New freebop from Chicago, tapping old-timers from Sun Ra's 1950s for fresh stories.

Ken Filiano & Quantum Entanglements: Dreams From a Clown Car (Clean Feed)
Michaël Attias and Tony Malaby as quirky saxophonists, indeterminacy a fundamental law of their universe.

Stephen Gauci/Kris Davis/Michael Bisio: Three (Clean Feed)
Subtle avant sax riffing around abstract piano and mischievous bass.

Trygve Seim/Andreas Utnem: Purcor (ECM)
Nordic sax-piano duets, some folkloric, some improvised, served chilled.

Júlio Resende: Assim Falava Jazzatustra (Clean Feed)
Beatwise piano, Perico Sambeat's tasty sax, rumbling rhythm, Pink Floyd cover.

The Ullmann/Swell 4: News? No News! (Jazzwerkstatt)
Avant shuck and jive, freewheeling tenor sax or bass clarinet brought down to earth by gritty trombone.

Decoy & Joe McPhee: Oto (Bo Weavil)
World's freest saxophonist combusts caustically with Hammond B3 trio.

Jason Stein's Locksmith Isidore: Three Kinds of Happiness (Not Two)
Bass clarinet-led free jazz trio, kind of like a big buck with velvet horns.

Andrew Lamb Trio: New Orleans Suite (Engine)
More post-Katrina fallout -- sax and bass, flute and didgeridoo -- with Warren Smith declaiming and hitting things.

Scenes: Rinnova (Origin)
John Stowell's guitar trio -- subtle craftsmanship for postbop ambience.

Brian Landrus: Foward (Cadence Jazz)
A postbop smorgasbord, shifting horns anchored by the leader's baritone sax/bass clarinet.

The Dynamic Les DeMerle Band: Gypsy Rendezvous, Vol. One (Origin)
Drummer-singer and better half Bonnie Eisele trade surreal standards in a hot club in Hawaii.

Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Accomplish Jazz (Hot Cup)
Sax-toting gunslingers take a break to attend church with the Louvin Brothers.

Correction: Two Nights in April (Ayler)
Sebastian Bergström's hard-edged piano trio, leans free on a rock solid base.

Barb Jungr: The Men I Love (Naim)
Standardizing Neal Diamond, Todd Rundgren, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Webb.

François Carrier/Alexey Lapin/Michel Lambert: Inner Spire (Leo)
The pianist prefers dense, dark clusters; the saxophonist searches for the light.

Todd DelGiudice: Pencil Sketches (OA2)
Highly improbable sax hero, bright, lush, and never sketchy.

William Hooker: Crossing Points (1992, NoBusiness)
In a duo with altoist Thomas Chapin, the drummer jumps out front and dares the saxophonist to keep up.

The Jazz Passengers: Reunited (Justin Time)
The Peaches & Herb hit, bent and laced with avant-skronk, padded with two Debbie Harry leads from the good old days.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma: For the Love of Ornette (Jazzwerkstatt)
Prime Time bassist sneaks Coleman into the studio and teases him with new turns on old times.

Premier Roeles: Ka Da Ver (Vindu)
Dutch free jazz bash -- the sort of thing that will be touted thirty years from now in some critic's Unheard Music Series.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Chris Floyd: War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America's Aggression Against Iraq: I might cavil and quibble a bit on the intro here, but it is fundamentally correct, and worth saying as forcefully as possible:

  In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

  This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil. [ . . . ]

  And so Barack Obama, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the self-proclaimed inheritor of the mantle of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, went to North Carolina this week to declare the act of aggression in Iraq "an extraordinary achievement." He lauded the soldiers gathered before him for their "commitment to fulfil your mission": the mission of carrying out an unprovoked war of aggression and imposing a society-destroying occupation that led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. These activities -- "everything that American troops have done in Iraq" -- led to "this moment of success," he proclaimed.

  This gets to the heart of what I feel even sadder about than all the senseless destruction: that we haven't, and most likely will not, learn anything from our mistakes; that we won't recognize our crimes, and won't take measures -- least of all punishment of those culpable for the entire war -- to make sure anything like this can never happen again. There was a report last week about how half of our schools get failing grades. One tends to assume that the political campaign to starve the public sector is mostly responsible, but what Iraq shows is that we have a nationwide blindness to learning, something which politicans cater to even when they don't have to. Throughout the 2008 presidential election process, many (and ultimately most) Americans sought out the most utter rejection of the Bush administration they could find. Yet the change Obama promised turned out to be an empty promise, covering up the crimes of his predecessors, turning a blind eye to the scams of the banks, pretending all is right with a nation that is sick to its soul.

• Alex Pareene: When Hitch Was Wrong: Somehow, I missed the whole period when the late Christopher Hitchens was regarded as some kind of leftist, so it's never been clear to me what we lost when he turned into a Muslim-hating warmonger. But we didn't lose much more by him dying.

  Upon the death of the unlamented Earl Butz, Hitchens excoriated editors who published sanitized obituaries of a man remembered solely for a vulgar racist remark made in public. Hitchens leaves a rather more varied legacy, but it's just as important not to whitewash his role in recent history.

  There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn't really matter to Hitchens.)

  And so we had the world's self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell's legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government's war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.

  Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he's shilling for a the latest war.

  Also see: Glenn Greenwald: Christopher Hitchens and the Protocol for Public Figure Deaths:

  Corey Robin wrote that "on the announcement of his death, I think it's fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself," and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens' post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket ("those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won't be able to say, 'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.' No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words"), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was "exhilaration" because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call "Islamofascism": "I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost."

  Hitchens, of course, never "prosecuted" the "exhilarating" war by actually fighting in it, but confined his "prosecution" to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. [ . . . ] Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker's John Cook, who -- in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary -- detailed Hitchens' vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being "sluts" and "fucking fat slags" for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: "it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong"; indeed: "People make mistakes. What's horrible about Hitchens' ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made."

• Jon Wiener: David Montgomery, 1927-2011: A name from my distant past, one of the radical historians who had a large impact on my intellectual development in the late 1960s. I read his major book at the time, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872, published in 1967, and regarded it as one of the essential books in American labor history, but I lost track of him after that, and am unfamiliar with his other work:

  I've taught Montgomery's Fall of the House of Labor (1987) many times, and it remains a rich and compelling work. While most of us preferred to focus on the glory days of the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, David looked long and hard at its defeat between the 1890s and the 1920s. He started here with a vivid picture of the variety of workplace experiences in America at the turn of the century, from unskilled workers on the docks to the elite iron makers; he showed how these diverse groups united to form the Socialist Party of 1912, which won a higher proportion of the presidential vote (for Eugene Debs) than any left-wing party before or since; and he asked why this immense and powerful organization did not survive the repression of the Red Scare and return to life in the 1920s.

  David was always an organizer for labor and civil rights groups. When Yale's clerical workers went on strike in 1984 for union recognition, "he was the inspirational leader for faculty supporting locals 34/35 before, during, and after the strike," says Jean-Christophe Agnew of the Yale history department. "David's firmness about solidarity and the honoring of picket lines emboldened many faltering colleagues, especially the more vulnerable junior faculty. He was a rock."

I noticed that Alex Pareene had been pretty quiet the last couple weeks, but it turns out he was just working on his end-of-year list -- not records or movies or such like, but a very useful compilation of the worst hacks working in media these days. The run-down:

1. Mark Halpern: "the world's laziest dispenser of conventional wisdom."
2. Jennifer Rubin: "hateful and repetitive."
3. Bernard-Henri Levy: "a living parody of a blowhard foreign intellectual."
4. Erin Burnett: "a relic of a bygone age . . . still surviving on our airwaves as a zombie idea."
5. Katie Roiphe: "not just a one-note anti-feminist hack, no!"
6. Erick Erickson: "combines vitriol with stupidity."
7. Robert Samuelson: "can't stop rehashing ancient, discredited Reagan-era dogma" (e.g., "super rich people are in fact hard-working small business-owning job creating Regular Americans").
8. Piers Morgan: "alternates between fawning sycophancy and obvious contempt."
9. Mike Allen: "trades in meaningless minutiae and serves the Beltway elite."
10. Naomi Wolf: "feminist intellectual keeps downplaying serious rape accusations."
11. Bill Keller: "the former Times editor isn't sorry enough about his warmongering to stop writing his awful column."
12. David Brooks: "hides appalling opinions behind 'reaonsable' language."
13. Megyn Kelly: "Fox's perpetually outraged anchor will sell any dubious talking point with a sneer."
14. Joe Scarborough: "a chauvinist 'civility' crusader with a badly inflated ego."
15. Wolf Blitzer: "watching closely and thinking rarely."
16. Andrea Peyser: "saps the fun out of scandals with her toxic hatefulness."
17. John Stossel: "the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as maverick because he's 'politically incorrect' (a term that when self-applied invariably means 'an asshole')."
18. Jon Meacham: "for a political aficionado, he's remarkably dim on politics."
19. Ruth Marcus: "makes up for her bland liberalism with her unquestioning fealty to authority."
20. Brian Williams: "an annoying throwback to the outdated newsreaders of yesteryear."

Wolf seems to be on the list exclusively for her defense of Julian Assange against extradition to Sweden on rape charges. Seems to me that Pareene's being a little squeamish in this case. Maybe also that he's looking to create a sense of being above the fray by finding someone on the left to knock. Assange did the world (and the American public) a huge favor in making so many secret documents public. This doesn't give him carte blanche to behave badly, but it does mean that one should be exceptionally skeptical when some government tries to prosecute him -- a point underscored by the persecution of Bradley Manning (no other word comes close to describing what's happened to him).

Only 20 slots this year versus 30 in 2010. My guess is the the drop represents limited time/patience/stomach on Pareene's part rather than a diminished round of candidates. Indeed, he added a brief update, Hack List Alums: Where Are They Now? to account for the missing (Tina Brown, Pat Cadell, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Friedman, Jonah Goldberg, Mickey Kaus, Bill Kristol, Marty Peretz, Marc Thiessen, George Will.) How Friedman, Goldberg and Kristol (and for that matter Kaus and Will) avoided repeating is still mysterious.

I keep procrastinating, holding off on publishing Jazz CG (27) and stretching out Jazz Prospecting. Looks like it'll be another week for both. Also, I need to write an end-of-year jazz piece for Rhapsody to go along with the Jazz Critics Poll, and figure out how to organize a jazz blog -- as well as pick off the more promising looking prospects from the pending file.

Meanwhile, I keep adding to the metacritic file, both catching up on this year's reviews and factoring in a few end-of-year lists as best I can. One thing I can say is that the album-of-the-year winner in UK publications is exceptionally clear cut: it's PJ Harvey: Let England Shake. The record clearly signifies there in ways that don't translate well over here, where it's taken as a second tier good record, along with Radiohead, Wilco, and TV on the Radio.

On the other hand, there is no clear leader among US polls -- and by the way, Pazz & Jop is on at the Village Voice, with ballots due December 23 to be published January 18. At present I'd say the contenders are: Bon Iver: Bon Iver (Jagjaguwar); Tune-Yards: Whokill (4AD); Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop); and St. Vincent: Strange Mercy (4AD). (My grades for them are, respectively: *, *, B-, and **, so one thing I don't have is a rooting interest.) Still, Metacritic only credits Bon Iver with topping two polls so far -- same as better albums by Shabazz Palaces, The Weeknd, and Girls. Harvey has won 7 polls (all UK, I think), and Adele 3 (includingRolling Stone, never a bellweather). Fleet Foxes won at PopMatters (whose risk-free list hit all of my file's top ten, and 33 of the top 40). Tune-Yards and St. Vincent haven't won yet.

Of course, if I was really interested in what other people think, I'd take the Grammys seriously, but I don't. I use these lists for prospecting, in which case the more idiosyncratic the better.

Jason Adasiewicz's Sun Rooms: Spacer (2011, Delmark): Vibraphone player, based in Chicago, the one guy everyone out there goes to for the craft. Trio with Nate McBride (bass) and Mike Reed (drums). First-rate musicians, but the effort is a little thin all around. B+(*)

Mario Adnet: More Jobim Jazz (2011, Adventure Music): Jobim orchestrated for a not-quite big band -- runs 7 to 11 pieces -- which clears up Jobim's characteristic lightness, adding not just density but sumptuous warmth. A sequel to Adnet's 2007 Jobim Jazz, with a Baden Powell tribute in the meantime. B+(*)

Stefano Battaglia Trio: The River of Anyder (2009 [2011], ECM): Pianist, b. 1965 in Milan, has 30 albums since 1986, four on ECM -- two early ones tied explicitly to Bill Evans. Has a knack for impressing me without offering a hook on which to hang a review. B+(**)

Dan Blake: The Aquarian Suite (2011, Bju'ecords): Saxophonist (doesn't specify further), based in New York. Has a previous, self-released record called The Party Suite. This is a two-horn quartet, with Jason Palmer on trumpet, Jorge Roeder on bass, and Richie Barshay on drums. Vigorous, expansive postbop, grabs you at high speed, loses a bit when they slow it down. B+(**)

François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: All Out (2011, FMR): Alto sax-drums-piano trio, the first two long-time chums from Quebec, Lapin a Russian pianist who joined them for a slightly earlier album on Leo, Inner Spire. The two records are roughly equivalent: open-ended free improvs, more group than individuals, the piano adding something but rarely distinctive. B+(***)

Cinque: Catch a Corner (2011, ALMA): I filed this under organ player Joey DeFrancesco, but closer examination would have given it to bassist-producer-arranger Peter Cardinali -- the songs are attributed to the group (with Robi Botos on piano/fender rhodes, John Johnson on saxes, and Steve Gadd on drums) except for two covers at the end, one each from Cedar Walton and Paul Simon: "Still Crazy After All These Years" -- they wish. B

Lajos Dudas/Hubert Bergmann: What's Up Neighbor? (2011, Jazz Sick): Clarinet-piano duets, writing credits evenly distributed, although much of this feels improvised. Leans a bit toward the wayward abstract, not unlike the 1960s work of Jimmy Giuffre and Paul Bley. B+(**)

Volker Goetze Orchestra: NY 10027 (2011, G*Records): Trumpeter, from Germany; has a previous album with kora player Ablaye Cissoko listed first. This is a big band, recorded in New York, with modern tendencies, not afraid to get a little mussed up, noisy even. B

Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone: Departure of Reason (2011, Thirsty Ear): Guitar-viola duo: Halvorson is a frequently astounding young guitarist, Pavone an erratic violist, both sing some, and together they trend towards folk music, or anti-folk, or something slightly stranger. B+(*) [advance]

Denman Maroney: Double Zero (2008 [2011], Porter): Plays hyperpiano, his term for a piano that is played not just from the keyboard but by using various implements to strike, bow, or otherwise agitate the strings. The effect is to add elements of bass (or higher-pitched string instruments) and percussion, some in combination with the conventional piano sounds, some instead of. Solo hyperpiano here, one titled piece in nine parts; runs on and doesn't sustain interest although it has its moments, especially when the inner and outer approaches work in tandem. B+(*)

Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton: Play the Blues: Live From Jazz at Lincoln Center (2011, Reprise, CD+DVD): The guitarist picked the tunes, anticipating that this would turn out to be a jazz album based on blues rather than a blues album with some extra horns. I suspect his early exposure was to British trad stalwarts -- Chris Barber, Ken Colyer, Humphrey Lyttelton and their kin -- although he's enough of an Americaphile that he must know when he's treading on Louis Armstrong, and maybe even George Lewis. Marsalis arranged the pieces and went for a King Oliver front line -- two trumpets (Marcus Printup), trombone (Chris Crenshaw), clarinet (Victor Goines) -- forgoing the tuba for Carlos Henriquez's bass, adding Don Vappie's banjo, Dan Nimmer on piano, and Ali Jackson on drums and washboard. Clapton, in turn, brought along his old keyb player, Chris Stainton. Clapton has often been nicked for his lack of blues voice, but he's plenty strong here -- while managing to duck the last three songs, one going to Crenshaw, the last two to guest Taj Mahal. Can't claim that the DVD is worth the extra $6-9 it will cost you: it's a straight concert film, a bit more patter and some shots of rehearsing, all of which helps. A-

Nicolas Masson: Departures (2010 [2011], Fresh Sound New Talent): A prodigious, important label; unfortunately, I've only gotten their work via artist publicists for the last couple years. Masson is from Switzerland, b. 1972, plays tenor sax here, and bass clarinet elsewhere. Fourth album since 2001, a quartet with Ben Monder (guitar), Patrice Moret (bass), and Ted Poor (drums). Postbop, sophisticated and slippery, as is Masson's tenor tone, the steel framework provided more by Monder's guitar. B+(**)

Marilyn Mazur: Celestial Circle (2010 [2011], ECM): Percussionist, born in US, raised in Denmark, assembled this group as artist-in-residence at Norway's Molde Jazz Festival in 2008: Josefine Cronholm (voice), John Taylor (piano), Anders Jormin (double bass). Mazur's percussion is delicate and tends to get lost, although the vocals and everything else compete to be unobtrusive. B+(*)

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood: MSMW Live: In Case the World Changes Its Mind (2011, Indirecto, 2CD): I don't see much evidence of minds changing, here or elsewhere. John Medeski, Chris Wood, and Billy Martin were probably more responsible than any other group for the resurgence of groove-heavy funk in the 1990s. True, if you listen to Martin's percussion discs and follow Medeski's side projects you'll run into some more adventurous music, but they always seem to return to form together. Guitarist John Scofield is a natural fit: he gives them an elegant lead instrument, and they rival his best organ groups from the 1980s. Plus, going live means you get to recycle. B+(**)

Martin Moretto: Quintet (2009 [2011], self-released): Argentine guitarist, based in New York. First album, a quintet with Bill McHenry (tenor sax), Phil Markowitz (piano), Santi Debriano (bass), and Vanderlei Pereira (drums). The guitar is elegant and seductive. Not sure what it means that I can't recall the sax. B+(*)

Anthony Wilson: Seasons: Live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011, Goat Hill): The title cut is a four-part song cycle commission for guitar quartet -- Steve Cardenas, Julian Lage, and Chico Pinheiro help out -- running Winter to Autumn. After that each guitarist gets a solo piece, then one last group piece. The quartets sound like soft solos to me, with a slight Spanish/classical feel. The solos have about half the presence. Didn't watch the DVD. B-

Andrea Wolper: Parallel Lives (2011, Jazzed Media): Singer, AMG says b. 1950 (but I don't quite believe that), from California, based in New York, has three albums since 2005, two books (one called Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives). I had little to say about her previous album, but looking back at my notes I'm struck by the musicians she lined up -- Ron Affif on guitar, Victor Lewis on drums, Frank London on trumpet -- but this time even more so. In fact, her website has a daring quote from yours truly arguing that any album with bassist Ken Filiano and/or drummer Michael TA Thompson "is practically guaranteed to be superb." So she's hired Filiano and Thompson, added Kris Davis (whom I've praised repeatedly) on piano, and Michael Howell on guitar -- didn't know him, but he's a Kansas City guy, has a couple of long-forgotten 1970s records, was a sideman on Art Blakey's Buhaina and Dizzy Gillespie's Bahiana in 1973-75. She doesn't push this band very hard, but they are impossible to fault, with Howell proving to be a tasty soloist. Wolper wrote 3 of 12 songs, one more than Joni Mitchell, one from Buffy Sainte-Marie (maybe she is my age), only a couple safely wedged in the canonical songbook. Her originals are more interesting than the covers, and while she doesn't blow you away as a singer, she carries the songs. B+(***)

These are some even quicker notes based on downloading or streaming records. I don't have the packaging here, don't have the official hype, often don't have much information to go on. I have a couple of extra rules here: everything gets reviewed/graded in one shot (sometimes with a second play), even when I'm still guessing on a grade; the records go into my flush file (i.e., no Jazz CG entry, unless I make an exception for an obvious dud). If/when I get an actual copy I'll reconsider the record.

Stefon Harris/David Sanchez/Christian Scott: Ninety Miles (2011, Concord Picante): Three mainstream jazz stars, more or less, visit Cuba, hooking up with two local "piano-led Cuban jazz quartets" (meaning piano-bass-drums+percussion), one led by Rember Duharte, the other by Harold López-Nussa. The visitors have some trouble finding their bearings (especially the vibraphonist), but once Scott rips off a blistering trumpet solo the tide turns, and the percussion carries the day. B+(*) [Rhapsody]

Kidd Jordan: On Fire (2011, Engine): Avant saxophonist from New Orleans, b. 1935, has recorded infrequently because there's no market for avant-garde in New Orleans. With Harrison Bankhead, who grew up under Fred Anderson's wing, on bass and cello, plus Warren Smith on drums and vibes. Starts off squawky -- always a risk with Jordan -- but steadies on slower fare, a superb bass solo, and resourceful percussion. B+(**) [Rhapsody]

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

Unpacking: Found in the mail over the last week:

• Aimtoronto Orchestra: Year of the Boar (Barnyard)
• The Ames Room: Bird Dies (Clean Feed)
• Baloni: Fremdenzimmer (Clean Feed)
• Carlos Bica: Things About Carlos Bica & Azul (Clean Feed)
• Bobby Bradford/Mark Dresser/Glenn Ferris: Live in LA (Clean Feed)
• Marty Ehrlich's Rites Quartet: Frog Leg Logic (Clean Feed)
• Dennis González/João Paulo: So Soft Yet (Clean Feed)
• Lama: Oneiros (Clean Feed)
• Metta Quintet: Big Drum/Small World (Jazzreach/The Orchard)
• Evan Parker/Wes Neal/Joe Sorbara: At Somewhere There (Barnyard)
• Rampersaud Shaw Martin Neal Krakowiak: Halcyon Science 130410 (Barnyard)
• Mike Wofford/Holly Hofmann Quintet: Turn Signal (Capri)

Before I get to the "scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week," three pieces from the Wichita Eagle this morning:

• Rick Plumlee: The Big Question: Was Iraq Worth It?: Front page lead article, does a good job of mapping the costs back to Kansas, including a full page of pictures of 50 dead Kansas soldiers:

  Kansans have sacrificed for Iraq. Their bodies have been broken -- 409 have been injured. And 50 have died.

  Now nearly nine years of war in Iraq is ending for the United States. Only 12,000 troops remain, down from a peak of about 170,000 at the war's height. Virtually all are expected to be gone by the end of the year, except for about 200 attached to the U.S. embassy. The end comes with a high price tag: nearly 4,500 American dead, a bill approaching $1 trillion.

  Was it worth it? No one knows better than those who sacrificed in some way. Their feelings are mixed.

  This is, of course, a most minimal accounting. The tally of soldiers doesn't include the mental stress and fractures. The cash accounting doesn't anticipate future care costs for those soldiers, let alone the interest due on the debts for financing the war without taxes. Neither begins to contemplate the opportunity costs: what could have been done with the money and people had we not squandered it in Iraq. Let alone the political rot: would Bush and the Republicans have won the 2004 election without the war? If not, would the economy have been spared?

  Moreover, the article makes no mention of how the war affected the Iraqi people, as if no Iraqis were killed, none displaced, no property destroyed, no damage to their economy. Nor did the author make any efforts to find pluses to balance off the negatives. All you get is the occasional mother's sentiment that her dead son must have meant to do something good, or the conviction of a "lifer" that her "passion runs so much deeper after going over there."

  And the article draws no conclusion. It's easy to accept ambivalence because history itself is always fraught with trade-offs, but doing so means learning nothing and allowing past mistakes to be reiterated time and again in the future. But this isn't an unanswerable question: even if you factor in every positive you can imagine, it is clear that this war was wrong from the start, a disaster that could never be spun into something worth the price. Failure to acknowledge that lets those who launched it off the hook, and makes it all the more likely that such mistakes will be reiterated in the future.

• Douglas Birch: U.S., Iran Locked in Secret War: The web article has a less provocative title -- "Loss of plane peels back layer in US-Iran spying" -- but the paper title makes the key point: we have locked ourselves into a long-term, self-escalating war with Iran, for no particular reason other than a clash of attitudes. The US feels no compunction about flying spy aircraft anywhere over Iran. Iran, on the other hand, feels that its sovereignty is violated by such flights. (The US would no doubt feel the same if the shoe were on the other foot; thankfully, "American exceptionalism" exempts the US from the notion that etiquette and ethics should bind any two countries equally.)

  Iran has charged the U.S. or its allies with waging a campaign of cyberwarfare and sabotage, and of assassinating some Iranian scientists. The U.S. has accused the Iranian government of helping kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan and plotting to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

  "It's beginning to look like there's a thinly-veiled, increasingly violent, global cloak-and-dagger game afoot," Thomas Donnelly, a former government official and military expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said at a Washington conference.

  The covert operations in play are "much bigger than people appreciate," said Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser under President George W. Bush. "But the U.S. needs to be using everything it can."

  Hadley said that if Iran continues to defy U.N. resolutions and doesn't curb its nuclear ambitions, the quiet conflict "will only get nastier." [ . . . ]

  Iran protested Friday to the United Nations about what it described as "provocative and covert operations" by the U.S. The Tehran government called the flight by the drone a "blatant and unprovoked air violation" that was "tantamount to an act of hostility."

  American officials said Friday that U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Iran played no role in the downing, either by shooting it down or using electronic or cybertechnology to force it from the sky. They contended the drone malfunctioned. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the classified program.

  US-Iranian hostility dates back to the 1979 revolution against the Shah, or more properly back to the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew a democratic Iranian government installed a dictatorship under the Shah. To prevent the CIA from fomenting a countercoup, Iranian students took over the US embassy and held its staff hostage for over a year -- a rather embarrassing moment for the world's great superpower. Ever since then the US has carried a grudge, but what's made it worse has been Israel's decision to target Iran as its great existential threat, beginning in the late 1990s -- way after the revolution, and indeed much after the revolution started showing signs of moderation -- with a series of faulty predictions that Iran would develop nuclear arms "within five years." Israeli pressure stepped up considerably in 2009 when Obama took office and promised to work on a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Since then Obama caved in to Israeli demands, aided by an election (probably fraud-influenced) in Iran that found anti-American rhetoric to be politically convenient. So now, with hard-liners secure in Tehran, Jerusalem, and Washington, we see this "cold war" redux. (If only some journalist had the gumption to decry it as farce instead of tragedy!) Comparisons to the U2 shot down over Russia in 1960 are à propos, but Iran doesn't have the resources (or most likely the desire) to reply by stationing missiles in Cuba. Indeed, Iran's relative vulnerability is what makes this situation so dangerous: if only they did have nuclear weapons Washington's warmongers wouldn't be bragging that "all options are on the table."

• Erica Werner: Obama Makes His Move to the Middle: Original title: "Obama decides high-profile issues ahead of 2012."

  On issues from air pollution to contraception, President Barack Obama has broken sharply with liberal activists and come down on the side of business interests and social conservatives as he moves more to the political middle for his re-election campaign.

  Without a Democratic challenger who might tug him to the left, Obama is free to try to neutralize Republican efforts to tar him as a liberal ideologue by taking steps toward the political center.

  That, of course, is where he's always wanted to be. Werner, like the Republicans, tries to make something of the decision to delay the Canadian shale oil pipeline until after the election as some sort of way of triangulating pro-environment interests, but misses the most important point. Had Obama approved the pipeline, Bill McKibben and company would still be protesting, and not just in some general sense against the oil lobby but specifically against Obama. In many ways Occupy Wall Street works in Obama's favor in that it focuses attention on the banks' ability to manipulate polticians of every stripe, making Obama's own exceedingly modest gestures as reform seem downright reasonable. But the pipeline was too clear cut an issue, and McKibben is so convinced of the utter folly of digging up the world's largest shale oil deposit and converting it to atmospheric carbon dioxide that he was never going to drop the issue, least of all for the convenience of Obama's reëlection campaign -- so the real story here is score one for the protesters.

While we're still on the Eagle, here's Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon this week (more on Gingrich below):

• Mike Konczal: Frank Luntz, Occupy and the Battle for Economic Freedom:

  Last week, Republican strategist and wordsmith Frank Luntz shared his concerns about the Occupy movement with a group of Republican governors in Florida. "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death . . . They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Chris Moody wrote a must-read article on the matter, including the ten dos and don'ts that Luntz suggested to his audience.

  As Seth Ackerman pointed out, there's an entire industry around Democrats and liberals trying to get an edge on Luntz with even more carefully polled wordplay. However, by talking directly about the power of the 1 percent over our lives, the broken political process, burdensome debts, and a collapsed labor market, the Occupy movement has gotten Luntz's attention in a few short months. As Ackerman puts it:

  For twenty or thirty years, Democratic politicians . . . have been paying what must amount to billions of dollars by now to consultants, pollsters, and think tank gurus to tell them how to talk to the public about inequality in some way that might spark sustained public engagement . . . Then the Occupy movement comes along and after two and a half months shifts the national consciousness so palpably that Republican governors are scrambling to ask their Rasputins how capitalism can be defended to their constituents back in Peoria.

  Luntz suggests 10 sets of words, phrases, and concepts to abandon and has some easily defended ones to use instead. "Jobs" and "entrepreneur" are out. "Careers" and "job creators" are in. [ . . . ] Luntz suggests retreating to "economic freedom" as an easily defensible phrase conservatives can use to describe the economic status quo. This is astute, as there's been a long, 30-year conservative project to locate freedom in the laissez-faire marketplace.

  It hasn't always been this way. [ . . . ] Economic freedom as freedom from coercion was once a core part of progressive thought. Economic freedom as economic security was a central part of the New Deal and Roosevelt's four freedoms. And economic freedom as freedom from domination in the workplace is a central aspect of what unionization brings to the country. This was thought of as essential to the lives of the individuals and democracy itself -- as Samuel Gompers said, "Men and women cannot live during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates."

• Paul Krugman: Things That Never Happened in the History of Macroeconomics:

  Via Mark Thoma, David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

  These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

  So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot -- and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker. Warsh is even crueler about this than I would have been; he compares Hayek (or rather the "Hayek" invented by his admirers) to Rosie Ruiz, who claimed to have won the marathon, but actually took the subway to the finish line.

• Paul Krugman: Send in the Clueless: On the Republican presidential race:

  So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless.

  Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He's not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts -- but that doesn't stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn't stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama's "massive defense cuts."

  Mr. Romney's strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn't a stupid man -- but he seems to play one on TV.

  Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party's nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless.

  And that's why the Republican primary has taken the form it has, in which a candidate nobody likes and nobody trusts has faced a series of clueless challengers, each of whom has briefly soared before imploding under the pressure of his or her own cluelessness. Think in particular of Rick Perry, a conservative true believer who seemingly had everything it took to clinch the nomination -- until he opened his mouth.

  As for Newt Gingrich, he seems to be able to weather his insincerity better than Romney while making more of his cluelessness than Perry. (Krugman: "And my sense is that he's also very good at doublethink -- that even when he knows what he's saying isn't true, he manages to believe it while he's saying it.") So he may be not so much what the party faithful desires as the best they can do.

  Also see Krugman's All the G.O.P.'s Gekkos (as in Wall Street's "greed is good" Gordon Gekko), although the only real contender there is Romney:

  The Los Angeles Times recently surveyed the record of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mr. Romney ran from 1984 to 1999. As the report notes, Mr. Romney made a lot of money over those years, both for himself and for his investors. But he did so in ways that often hurt ordinary workers.

  Bain specialized in leveraged buyouts, buying control of companies with borrowed money, pledged against those companies' earnings or assets. The idea was to increase the acquired companies' profits, then resell them. [ . . . ]

  So Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980.

  Now I've just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular? Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That's a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts -- and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both.

  For more on Gingrich, see Alex Pareene: Newt Gingrich Will Babble His Way to the White House:

  What Newt is good at -- and it's the exact thing Romney is awful at -- is defending himself against charges of apostasy. Gingrich has been all over the political spectrum during his career, but when you try to nail him on some sort of offense against conservative orthodoxy, he talks his way out of it. Glenn Beck says Gingrich compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt, lately a "Progressive" villain. Gingrich responds with a history lesson and a defense of very basic public safety regulations that no one would argue with. Beck criticizes Gingrich's support for ethanol subsidies, Gingrich responds with crowd-pleasing nationalism about competitiveness with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and a bit of Obama-bashing.

  When directly confronted with his attack on Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, an attack that almost ended his campaign before it began, Gingrich defended himself by saying that he was right and also he'd vote for Ryan's plan.

Shortest monthly take all year -- 31 records below, vs. 36 in April, 43 in July, 45, 46, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59 in August, 110 in two sets back in January in what was clearly an excess of year-end mop-up. Don't really know why I collected so few this month. I slipped behind a bit in my metacritic file research, and I've been a bit less pro-active in chasing down well-reviewed albums of no real personal interest -- My Morning Jacket, Ryan Adams, Laura Marling, for instance, currently in the 48-52 range, although the only record above that level I haven't heard or searched for on Rhapsody was the Foo Fighters. This month I mostly looked for things I was curious about -- e.g., 12 of the 31 albums are hip-hop, with most of the rest either electronica or alt-country.

Wussy, by the way, appeared on my hard drive thanks to a mystery donor. I wasn't hip enough to snag a copy of Funeral Dress II, which both Christgau and Tatum have raved about recently. In fact, I only decided that original Funeral Dress is worthwhile in Recycled Goods this week, and still have reservations about their second and third albums. Still, I've never had the problems with them I have with Tune-Yards (see the remake/remodel section below). One story I didn't manage to work in below is that 6-9 months ago I went to a poetry slam bar here in Wichita and they had a young woman singer do a set. As I recall, she was from Springfield, MO, and working her way to Portland, OR, but I don't recall the name -- had one self-released album I should have requested. She was doing the exact same thing Merrill Garbus is noted for: singing or playing (mostly druming) fragments into a sampler which would be repeated as her rhythmic backup. Interesting, I thought; don't have any idea how common that is. But from where I sat the distance between Garbus and nobody wasn't that great.

These are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on November 9. Past reviews and more information are available here.

Arthur's Landing: Arthur's Landing (2011, Strut): A tribute to post-disco maven Arthur Russell, by a group assembled from his former associates -- Russell died in 1992 -- playing many of his songs. Has a singer-songwriter feel while playing, but is swept up in enough flow that it has a dance afterglow -- not sure how they managed that trick. Russell has long been a SFFR for me, but I've never managed the time or the opportunity. This is an oblique approach: I'm not sure where it leaves me, but it's been an interesting ride. B+(**)

Astronautalis: This Is Our Science (2011, Fake Four): Andy Bothwell, originally from Jacksonville, moved to Minneapolis, which I guess is what underground white rappers do these days. Fourth album. Music broadens out into alt-rock territory, even keying off piano, and trends from spoken to sung, not a fatal flaw but losing the sharp sting of the rap. B+(*)

Danny Barnes: Rocket (2011, ATO/Red): Banjo player for the Bad Livers in the 1990s, has accumulated nine solo albums since 1999. I thought his previous Pizza Box showed promise, but this just sort of meanders aimlessly: not enough banjo for folk, not enough twang for country, not even sure what to do with the poison. All originals except for "Bang a Gong (Get It On)," which won't win him any friends in Nashville. B

Childish Gambino: Camp (2011, Glassnote): Donald Glover, born on an Air Force base in California, first or fourth album depending on who's counting what -- downloads mostly, mixes, what not. This connects often enough I wonder if there isn't more to it, but certainly nothing that can be sorted out quickly. Closes with a 7:42 talkie "That Power" that could be a different person, certainly a different persona. B+(*)

Kelly Clarkson: Stronger (2011, RCA): I've never watched more than a couple minutes of American Idol and I've never taken any of its annointed stars seriously, but this is her fifth album, so why not? Actually, pretty solid pop sound, big ballads and some upside on the upbeat. Unfortunately, "The War Is Over" isn't true, and the title track is a hack cliché, also untrue. B

Dessa: Castor, the Twin (2011, Doomtree): Margret Wander, Minnesota rapper, got her degrees in philosophy and has a lit angle on hip-hop rhymes. Previous album, A Badly Broken Code, wound up on my 2010 P&J ballot. This one's giving me a bit more trouble, probably because it is mostly sung, the words gently curved rather than slammed down. B+(**)

Doomtree: No Kings (2011, Doomtree): Minneapolis hip-hop collective, several MCs with albums I've previously noticed: P.O.S., Sims, Dessa. Second studio album (fifth according to AMG). Starts with hard guitar, mostly living there, very rockish sound. Dessa stands out, not least because she provides the most contrast; maybe also the most brains. B+(*)

Drake: Take Care (2011, Universal Republic): Aubrey Drake Graham, parlayed an underground vibe and attitude, or maybe just Canadian good manners, into a huge hit a year ago, winning him the budget to open up, and take up the major issues of our times, like bitches -- and, as Jim DeRogatis points out, "a whole lot of whining about the tax burden required of the one percent." And to quantify "whole lot": 79:49. B-

Florence + the Machine: Ceremonials (2011, Universal Republic): British rock singer Florence Welch, has pipes like Grace Slick and finally has a machine like Paul Kantner only dreamed of. I was prepared to be as unimpressed as I was by her Lungs and certainly don't feel any desire to be sucked into this, but for overwrought arena rock this is actually as neatly organized as it is orchestrated. B+(*)

G-Side: Island (2011, Slow Motion Soundz): Hip-hop duo from Alabama, Stephan Harris (ST 2 Lettaz) and David Williams (Yung Clova). Fifth album, most digital only, including an earlier one from this year (The One . . . Cohesive) I haven't been able track down. Some Southern grit, but always sharp and tight. A-

Chris Isaak: Beyond the Sun (2011, Vanguard): Roots rocker, always influenced first and foremost by rockabilly, so 27 years after his debut album one can't fault him for making the hajj to Memphis and applying his warm voice to a couple dozen tunes associated with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and most of all Elvis Presley. Available in a 14-cut standard edition, or in a "Deluxe Edition" with an 11-cut extra disc. Not strictly Sun -- for Orbison, he goes to "Oh, Pretty Woman." The extra is excess, of course, but so is the initial disc, and he's consistent enough I'd be inclined to grade both configurations the same. B

Etta James: The Dreamer (2011, Verve Forecast): Diagnosed with Alzheimers, suffering from leukemia, this is billed as her last album, but it's remarkably solid all around -- she's in strong voice, in her production element, covering songs from her early (and mostly departed) contemporaries. If it seems a bit haughty, that's her trademark. B+(**)

Joy Kills Sorrow: This Unknown Science (2011, Signature Sounds): Boston folk group, third album, Bridget Kearney sings, or is it Emma Beaton? -- the combination threatens to flutter, if not soar, away. String band backing -- banjo, mandolin -- can sound ordinary then special. B+(**)

Korallreven: An Album by Korallreven (2011, Acephale): Swedish synthpop group, long on the synths which pick up the slack when they run out of things to say, much as they pumped up the beat when their words flittered about meaninglessly. B+(**)

Kuedo: Severant (2011, Planet Mu): Jamie Teasdale, also works with Roly Porter in dubstep duo Vex'd. Electronics, bright and shimmering, shapely forms. Hard to see much more in them, least of all when adding vocals. B+(*)

M83: Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (2011, Mute, 2CD): Synthpop group from France. Over the top in so many directions maybe their world really is flat. B

Mac Miller: Blue Slide Park (2011, Rostrum): Malcolm McCormick, from Pittsburgh, white, Jewish even (via his mom), still in his teens, which means he isn't legal to do anything he exalts in "Up All Night" -- the most exuberant drinking song I've ever heard, informed, no doubt, by sheer fantasy. That song breaks out ten in, and the album makes a turn toward more intersting after that. B+(***)

Ana Moura: Coliseu (2008 [2011], World Village): Portuguese fadista, under 30 at the time but has the robust voice and stature to carry the tradition. Live performance, predates last year's Leva-me aos Fados -- seems original release in Europe was on DVD, then converted here to an audio disc for US release, but I'm unsure of all that. Seemed a bit constrained at first, but grew on me cut by cut. B+(**)

Zoe Muth & the Lost High Rollers: Starlight Hotel (2011, Signature Sounds): Countryish singer and band from Seattle, second outing after a self-released eponymous thing. Not a lot of chops, but the easy gait is infectious, and the songs have substance and gain stature. If Merle Haggard ever gets too worn down to write his own songs, he could make do with "Tired Worker's Song." B+(***)

9th Wonder: The Wonder Years (2011, Traffic Entertainment): Patrick Douthit, from North Carolina, made his mark as a producer, which comes through here in the weird smorgasbord of squiggly effects backing a score of guests -- Terrace Martin shows up on three cuts, Phonte on two, more singletons I've heard of than ones I haven't, but instead of canceling one another out they help keep it fresh. A-

Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica (2011, Software): Daniel Lopatin, seems to prefer vintage synths although there are bits of piano mixed in here that work as well as anything. Sixth album; his fifth, Returnal, got a lot of attention in 2010 (but not on Rhapsody). This one too, but it's too scattered and too fractured to win me over in two plays. B+(***)

Bill Orcutt: How the Thing Sings (2011, Editions Mego): Miami guitarist, came up in bands like Trash Monkeys and Harry Pussy, cut a Solo CD in 1996 and offers another one here -- well, I missed an earlier one this year. Tends to hit his lead chord hard, then diddle it a bit, sometimes getting a blues effect, often something sourer. Some vocals -- groans and grunts, anyway, or was that me? C+

Phonte: Charity Starts at Home (2011, HBD): Phonte Coleman, formerly of Little Brother, then the Foreign Exchange, goes solo. Underground beats, critiques, sentiments, worth following and pondering. Has some upside potential, but hasn't really sunk in yet. One side turn into song strikes me as the sort of amateur failing one could fall for. B+(***)

Pusha T: Fear of God II: Let Us Pray (2011, Decon): Terrence Thornton, been around as half of Clipse, with a few good albums, a whole mess of mixtapes I haven't heard. Dumped the first volume/revision of Fear of God out as a download earlier in the year but I figure this as his solo debut. Big beats, flashy guests, Neptunes hooks, fishscale by the kilo, selling hard if you care. B+(**)

Rihanna: Talk That Talk (2011, Def Jam): R&B diva from Barbados, sixth album since 2005. She gets the usual help with a massive phalanx of writer, producers, and featured guests, mostly cancelling each other out. Not bad at all: she's pretty much hit her plateau. B+(**)

Rocket From the Tombs: Barfly (2011, Fire): Mid-1970s Cleveland band formed by soon-dead rock critic Peter Laughner ("Life Stinks!") and croaky vocalist Crocus Behemoth (David Thomas) before evolving into Pere Ubu. Their 1974-75 demos finally surfaced in 2002, leading to some sort of reunion, a new album in 2004 (Rocket Redux), and now another. Laughner, of course, is still dead, but guitarists Richard Lloyd (ex-Television) and Gene O'Connor (aka Cheetah Chrome, ex-Dead Boys) had nothing better to do. Thomas sounds a bit arthritic, or maybe just anemic, but he rings true, and they found some horns. B+(*)

The Roots: Undun (2011, Def Jam): Released Dec. 6, I figured this as the last best hope for a crossover hip-hop album to storm the year-end lists like Kanye West did last year -- not that they came close with either of their last two albums. Reportedly a conceptual song suite, the title from Guess Who, samples from Sufjan Stevens, a guest list that tantalizes me more with D.D. Jackson than with Bilal. A couple pieces live up to their plateau, but I lost track even before "Redford Suite" got lost in string la-la-land. B+(**)

Rustie: Glass Swords (2011, Warp): Russell Whyte, from Scotland; AMG calls this left-field, hip-hop, IDM, dubstep. I'm more tempted to call it garish, glitzy, gauche. Album cover looks like a 1980s exercise in ray tracing, but even then we were more concerned with using the technique to enhance realism than to just show off our equations. B

Tegan and Sara: Get Along (2011, Vapor): Canadian duo, twins actually; started folkie, which is to say low budget with songs not afraid of their words. After six albums, here's a live one, possibly a best-of -- don't know the originals but most of the songs register and merit the applause. B+(**)

Wussy: Strawberry (2011, Shake It): Alt-rock group from Cincinnati, fourth (or fifth) album, much beloved by Robert Christgau and his followers, present company skeptical. (The parenthetical delta is a live remake of their first album done as a limited edition which dropped out of print as soon as Christgau graded it A.) As alt-rock goes, they're a bit heavy for my taste, the vocals murky, lyrics indecipherable -- maybe just something with my ears. But they're co-led by a couple -- Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker -- and they get a slice of life feel out of that, with no real sense that one dominates or one fronts or both compete. I've heard the other albums (not the paren, unfortunately) but only bought one and never stuck with it long enough to get comfortable. Same here, but "Asteroid" is the first song I recognize a hook in, so maybe this is a breakthrough. A- [dl]

Yelawolf: Radioactive (2011, Shady): Michael Wayne Atha, white trash from the Dirty South, had a couple mixtapes with one remixed for released by Interscope last year. Looks like the reviews likening him to Eminem landed him on the Shady label, with at least one song credit to Mathers -- although he also ropes in Kid Rock. Like Eminem he goes big and flashy, copping more rock than r&b motifs, but neither his flow nor his persona breaks through. His radio play is shameless; his anthem "Slumerican Shitizen" is as ignorant as it sounds. B+(*)

Revised Grades

Sometimes further listening leads me to change an initial grade, usually either because I move on to a real copy, or because someone else's review or list makes me want to check it again:

Ry Cooder: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (2011, Nonesuch): In September I played this, noted some good politics (though I was dismayed over the white folks' lament, "Lord Tell Me Why") but found it overall too messy, too half-baked, concluding "just isn't a very good record." On the other hand, Christgau stuck with it and, after decades grouching about Cooder's Cuban and African forays, rated this above every Cooder record since Paradise and Lunch. I begged a copy and got comfortable with it. Cooder's folk songs are anything but anthemic -- "this land should have been our land" but isn't; hell, "if there's still a God in heaven He's got to hit that lonesome road." Cooder's Tex-Mex has matured a lot since Chicken Skin Music, and he's gotten old and bitter enough to pawn a John Lee Hooker impression. [was: B] A- [cd]

Tune-Yards: Whokill (2011, 4AD): Seems like everyone I follow loves Merrill Garbus, not to mention enough people I don't know to make it a leading Pazz & Jop poll contender. But I didn't make much sense out of her first (Bird-Brains) nor this one -- feeling inadequate to the task, I graded it leniently (suggesting "at best she's like a real American Tom Zé"), hoping to score a copy and figure it out later. But I never did, finally going back to Rhapsody to recheck it and see whether an extra play (or two) would make a breakthrough. As it happened, I was thumbing through Christgau's old Creem CGs and found this -- perhaps the worst one he's ever published, but almost exactly what I was feeling: "I find this record baffling because I'm a critic. For critics, it is an article of faith that one can be baffled by a record -- which is to say, it is an article faith that all music can be analyzed, or anyway, puzzled out. I'm trying to right now -- it's my nature. Not only doesn't [X] agree -- most musicians don't -- but he proves his point, or would if proof were one of his categories. It isn't. The discipline his uniquely aural world requires is technical, not logical or even conceptual, and technically it's unexceptionable." Garbus has some interesting technical tricks but the songs are hit and miss, alternatively attractive and repulsive in a way that adds up to disinterest -- her deepest thought seems to be: "there is a freedom in violence that I don't understand"; on the other hand, her catchiest refrain goes: "I'm a victim now/don't take my life away." I reckon that beats "I'm a survivor," but not by much, a difference that may intrigue a real critic but which I find myself increasingly shying away from. By the way, the last album that made me feel this way was Maxinquaye. On the other hand, I can't say that Christgau's conundrum ever puzzled me in the least: Stevie Wonder, Innervisions. [Was: B+(***)] B+(*)

by Michael Tatum

With no less than six artists tinkering with old material and with one of my grafs a re-think of an honorable mention, the theme to this month's return to quality music is "remake/remodel." Still plenty of items on the back burner, and I'm vowing not even to touch any 2012 music until March or so. Regardless, you can look forward to some surprises in the early months of next year. Hope this will tide you over until then -- and provide some gift-giving ideas, for whatever holiday you celebrate.

James Carter: At the Crossroads (Emarcy) When Francis Davis dismissed this as hawking "which-way-back-to-the-chicken-shack clichés," my first thought was that he should listen to more Jimmy Smith, not to mention dig into a big greasy plate of pan-fried chicken -- especially since to my ears, his 2011 Carter of choice, Caribbean Rhapsody, spends its hour plus lounging under an umbrella at the George Town Hilton Garden Inn. In any case, Carter's approach to the organ trio isn't exactly Jimmy Smith, whose distinctive, be-bop influenced style is a great deal more straightforwardly percussive than Carter main man Gerard Gibbs, who favors choppy stabs and swirls of sound. Besides, Carter's bag has never been re-creation as much as re-invention, and here as elsewhere, his band follows the leader -- you could wince at the mawkishly sustained Hammond B-3 chord that introduces Gibbs' solo on Sarah McLawler's ballad "My Whole Life Through," or you could chuckle at how it pokes fun at such sudsy conventions before Gibbs explores more adventurous harmonic territory. No denying the vocal numbers are less successful, however -- nothing wrong with Carter's manly honks on "The Walking Blues," but both the band and Miche Braden overplay the punch lines (check out Jesse Powell and Fluffy Hunter's sexily understated original), while Ellington's "Come Sunday" and the traditional "Tis the Old Ship of Zion" completely betray the concept, dragging the record's tail half into an unwarranted sanctimoniousness not quite dispelled by a slightly unfocused Julius Hemphill reading that takes its sweet time getting started. But ultimately, there really isn't a real concept to betray, other than a vaguely loose aura undeniably stemming from Carter's knowledge that between his two 2011 records, this is the one less likely to shift major units. I say if you really want a concept, how about a blowing session with his quintet, like the scorching numbers I've seen popping up over YouTube? That would be a draw -- rather than all this in-between shit. B+

Class Actress: Rapprocher (Carpark) Once just another "meaningful" folk-pop singer-songwriter, former coffeehouse habitué Elizabeth Harper spent years struggling to get noticed under her woefully bland government name. Then, along came fairy godfathers Mark Richardson (producer) and Scott Rosenthal (engineer/multi-instrumentalist) with a battery of analogue synthesizers and bippity, boppity, boo -- like Madonna and Lana del Rey before her, she transformed herself into a coquettish, raven-haired ingénue, making like a Victoria's Secret model on her fetching album cover. True, Harper is less strikingly photogenic than either of the chanteuses just named (only adds to her appeal, I say) but she bests her electopop exemplars by actually possessing the musical chops necessary to layer her insouciant soprano with beguilingly tricky harmonies. Lucky for her, because one minor limitation of this music is that analogue synthesizers offer very little variations from their factory pre-sets, so although the songs are musically richer than the Human League and Depeche Mode records they take off from, the flat, brittle timbres offer frustratingly minute sonic variation from song to song. So if that makes Richardson and Rosenthal's medium the black and white movie, Harper's lithe singing is the image-softening, Vaseline-smudged lens, while her clever script slyly surpasses standard come-ons: "You made me late for work," we've heard that before, but "you made me late for church?" "I don't need to know any more than you tell me?" "Do you think that I care what we talk about when we talk about love?" Actually, I'm sure she does -- even though she blows the inevitable moment when Electropop Law mandates her to deliver a ballad revealing the heart of gold she keeps beating under the covers. Stanislavski would have seen right through that one. A–

Dessa: Castor, the Twin (Doomtree) This should be the final nail in the coffin for any purist cynically dismissing Minnesota's Maggie Wander as NPR's rapping white girl of choice. Here, she elaborately reworks three tracks from 2005's False Hopes EP and six from 2010's A Badly Broken Code, adding the excellent new "The Beekeeper" -- while rejecting programmed beats and samples in favor of her touring band, with guest spots from not only live string players but a goddamn mandolinist, too. The result is luxurious, grand even, especially if you compare the growth in Wander's singing to the tentative delivery of her EP -- angry moments turn conciliatory, edges elide until what's left is the grace that was always burning brightly underneath: For the Roses with beats, rhymes, and life. The trade off however, comes at the cost of sacrificing the dynamism of the original recordings, as well as the freshness of her initial conception: marrying hip hop innovations (i.e., those rejected programmed beats and samples) to basic singer-songwriter conventions. Take away those innovations and you're left with conventions. This is often beautiful and always intelligent even though it stays within the lines she no longer crosses. But like the "Mineshaft" theme she hammers home in two separate songs, we've been before and we know where it goes: it goes down. B+

Fruit Bats: Tripper (Sub Pop) Other than geographical proximity, or the possibility that James Mercer's perfectionist ethos has alienated every other alt-identified musician on the Pacific Rim, I don't quite see how Fruit Bats leader Eric Johnson fits in with the Shins. True, both bandleaders specialize in meticulously arranged indie rock that looks over its shoulder to pre-punk pop forms. But while Mercer's tightly wound arrangements underscore the ambitions of a guy hell bent on hightailing it out of Albuquerque for Portland even if it meant leaving his girlfriend behind, Johnson's more spaciously elegant aesthetic is as definitively Southwestern as the Meat Puppets or Georgia O'Keefe, the bemused observations of a wide-eyed wanderer whose nomadic ways stem from curiosity, restlessness, and boredom. Fittingly, he populates his lyrics with a motley cast of "broken down punks and zeros" that includes truck-hopping Tangie and Ray, long-suffering cutie Dolly, "the Mayor of Nowheresville," and titular hippie anachronism Tony, who defends his can of beans against an army of spectral snakes in a combustive, hallucinatory fit. And in a nice narrative arc, although Johnson inhabits the voice of a detached narrator rather than an active participant in the ill-fated cross country trip that opens the record, by the Supertramp tribute near the end, he joins that banished exile on her lonely exodus out of town. I wish that exodus didn't take Johnson off the edge of the record, however -- he should save instrumental doodles for his soundtrack work, and it would have been wiser to honor his late songwriting friend Diane Izzo with his own song, rather than meander through her lazily "spiritual" "Wild Honey." But I say any album that claims escape for its underlining theme ending with a song about a picture of a bird rather than the usual ho-hum ode to the bird itself has its pomo bases covered. A–

Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie (429) From Bragg/Wilco to the Klezmatics, the lyrics will be the primary draw on any of Nora Guthrie's projects utilizing her father's unfinished songs, but the window dressing does make a difference. The only constant on this long-gestating multi-artist compilation is bassist and arranger Rob Wasserman (whose fluid style curiously recalls that of Fernando Saunders, whose boss Lou Reed delivers the rueful "The Debt I Owe"), so more than usual, the success rate here hinges upon the delivery of the vocalists. However, while I have no problem with classy types like Kurt Elling, Madeline Peyroux, or (especially) Nellie McKay, I'm not sure if Woody Guthrie would have recognized his voice in theirs -- putting aside their respective political instincts, they neverthless represent the flip side of the dichotomy observed in Ani DiFranco's piece, in which the delicatesstan patrons she observes (and Studs Terkel later brillliantly inhabits) speak the "deep sound" and "full tone" she recognizes as her own. Note also that the lyrics that Elling and Peyroux appropriate are more generalized (and McKay's more sentimental) than DiFranco's and Terkel's more profoundly class conscious entries. But although I'd rather hear Todd Snider ruminate about "High Lonesome" than Chris Whitley, I'd say the remaining odds and ends are well matched to their collaborators, especially the two traditional singer-songwriter plaints. Lou Reed's fingerprints are so perceptible on "The Debt I Owe" it could have been sandwiched in the middle of Ecstasy and no one would have questioned its authorship. And while Jackson Browne normally foregrounds his solipsisms with that vanilla baritone, here his straightforward singing actually works to his advantage -- bereft of the histrionics he couldn't pull off anyway, he makes the lyric the star for fifteen spellbinding minutes. A–

Pusha T: Fear of God II: Let Us Pray (Decon) Initially slated for official Def Jam release until it was sent back for seasoning, this impressive salvage job of the original download-only mixtape demands a point by point scrutinization of the improvement. Four tracks dubiously designated "freestyles?" In the wastebasket. The intro appropriating that hackneyed snippet of Scarface? On the cutting room floor. The "Bohemian Rhapsody" misfire, with its dubious claim that if Wesley Snipes had only followed Pusha's sage advice, Snipes might have avoided time in the slammer? Discreetly disposed of. And the obscenely flaccid Kanye West fellatio plaint "Touch It?" I'm sure everyone involved is pretending that never happened (I know guys, it's hard to get it up when everyone's looking). That leaves by my count five holdovers from the previous record, and while they're undeniably the best tracks, they're also shuttled toward the end of this reshuffle, which should tell you how confident Terrence Thronton was with their quality to begin with. So although the seven superior new tracks are still too Michael Bay to suit me -- especially compared to Hell Hath No Fury's grainy film noir -- the level of care in both the music and lyrics are, as "Changing of the Guard" puts it, "closer to clarity, not parody." What's missing isn't self-reflection -- Lord knows one would be a fool to expect that from this candid narcissist -- but a second dimension. I'm thinking primarily here of his brother Gene, whose upcoming memoir details the Clipse's extracurricular drug dealing, Gene's own descent into depression, and his subsequent return to his religious upbringing. Now I know that scenario is as old as the hills, and with their former manager having plead guilty to masterminding a multi-million dollar drug ring, perhaps suspiciously timely in its convenience. But contrast that with Terrence's somewhat overstated acknowledgment of his culpability in "inner city genocide," his declaration that he's beyond redemption, that only God knows his pain even if the shorties he bangs don't, that he'd stop pushing kilos if we treated him like Michael rather than Tito -- it's cartoonish in comparison. Based on this work, I'd say he's Jermaine plus, and should coax Gene to play "Malice" one more time before the inevitable stint in the ministry. B+

Wire: 12 Nov 1978, SO36, Berlin (Pinkflag) It makes sense that any band with Justine Frischmann's attorney on speed dial would seek control over the torrent of concert bootlegs fans have been circulating for years. As so often is the case however, the question of how much of a difference any of these records might make a difference in your life boils down to utility -- even the 2000 San Francisco gig reviewed below doesn't come close to matching the ferocious set that blew me away in Los Angeles one month previous, despite reprising the same songs and running order. This record however, isn't about nostalgia -- it's a record with a mission. Reprising only the title cut from the masterful Pink Flag, skipping obvious recent high points like "I Am the Fly" and "Outdoor Miner," and ignoring ubiquitous drunken requests for "12XU," the band instead heroically rescues material from Chairs Missing and 154 by severing themselves from both Mike Thorne's intrusively arty production and their own increasingly arch studio personality. Beginning with a scorching "Practice Makes Perfect" that ironically outlines their mission statement (Newman: "Never for money, always for love." Lewis: "A-ha-ha-ha-ha!"), they serenade their appreciative Berlin audience with the Anglophillic confusion of "French Film Blurred," rip through "Former Airline" and "Two People in a Room," and even thoughtfully supply a ponderous intermission with eight minutes of "A Touching Display." I'm sure there are forty versions of these songs already in their catalog, and their legal bootleg series will probably unearth forty more. But having struggled for years with their late '70s material, this album is a tiny miracle -- undoubtedly where I'll return when I want to hear the most beautiful song ever written about Centerville, Iowa. A–

Wussy: Funeral Dress II (Shake It) I suppose to some degree, recommending a record no longer obtainable through legal channels smacks slightly of cruelty. So until Shake It prints more than the five hundred copies they drummed up for Record Store Day, you'll have to procure this from the usual dubious online sources. As well you should -- usually when artists travel down the unplugged route, it's at a point when they lack the juice for high-powered electricity anyway. But Lisa Walker and Chuck Cleaver aren't emoting these eleven wonderful songs for a respectful, middle-aged VH-1 audience -- they knocked this off in eight swift hours, most likely returning afterwards to their day jobs as a waitress and a stone cutter (the latter gig referred to in the opening verse of "Airborne," although I never noticed). And it's a classic nevertheless -- because 2005's Funeral Dress marked their first time in the studio as a band, to some degree they were still sorting out their sonic identity. That certainly signifies as one of its strengths, but by the same token, it shares less aesthetically with the other items in their catalog, which means this redux sounds less like the Ass Ponys and more like the fractured partnership this band would eventually become. Additionally, Lisa Walker returns to this material with increased confidence -- note that six years ago she stuck closely to Cleaver's melodies, but here damn near dances on top of them. And because the acoustic setting foregrounds the lyrics, the songs are imbued with more emotional range as a result. Funny -- here we thought Wussy was their breakup album, or maybe Strawberry. Turns out they were unraveling right from that very first song: "It was just another Thursday, like any other Thursday, except that we were through." Which only points up that for bands like this, there are no ordinary days, musical or otherwise. A

Wussy: Strawberry (Shake It) Robert Christgau aptly dubbed this Cincinnati quartet's self-titled third record as "brutal a relationship album as Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights." But what happens when two world-class singer-songwriters break up romantically but not musically, mutually intuiting their best chance to make a mark professionally is with that ex-lover they're leaving behind? This record springs from the hard truth that falling in love on the job makes for a frustrating mess -- you may not sleep in the same bed or come home to the same one bedroom apartment, but you're stuck toiling away in the same studio, glaring at each other from opposite sides of the stage, making awkward small talk in the tour van. Tough new drummer Joe Klug also produces, and probably functions as mediator/therapist -- he certainly lets principals Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker bash each other with foam bats on the galvanic "Pulverized," and supplies empathetic undertones to the majestic ballad "Grand Champion Steer." "Do you love me or not?" Chuck asks, sitting in the back seat, riddled with doubt. Toking on a "breathing apparatus," she nonchalantly replies, "Sure," while leaving notes to another man for him to see: "You're pretty good, but hard to find." Her boxes packed and stacked around his feet, she removes the ampersand that once connected their names, as he observes: "Looks like I was the last to know." Meanwhile, he holds on by incorporating her vocals into every song he's written about her. She performs her own numbers alone. He passes the time, up in the air. She's changing her mind -- she's already there, and gone. A+

Neil Young: International Harvesters: A Treasure (Reprise) One of a string of "unrepresentative" '80s records that didn't endear the unpredictable artist to David Geffen, it took three years for 1982's Old Ways to hit record stores, and by the time it did, Young had altered its track listing so much he referred to it in interviews as a "sequel" to its original incarnation. As with his Devo detour and rockabilly debacle, his fans reacted with a combination of bewilderment, confusion, and disbelief -- Harvest and Comes a Time were certainly "country influenced," but between the traditional honky tonk structures, Waylon Jennings cameos, and Gogi Grant cover, musical questions on the order of "Are There Any More Real Cowboys?" came off completely disingenuous from a troubadour with real roots in Winnipeg coffeehouses. Maybe that's why his seasoned Nashville crew sounded so stiff on record -- maybe they didn't take his "back to the country" shtick seriously, either. By this tour however, they had loosened up considerably, reworking not only two tracks from Old Ways, but a pair from Re-ac-tor, and two oldies: a lively "Are You Ready for the Country?" and a listless version of "Flying on the Ground is Wrong" that points up how Richie Furay's squarer, sincerer tenor enhanced much of Young's Buffalo Springfield-era juvenilia. Though I'm rankled by the embarrassingly jingoistic cheers for American car manufacturing at the top of "Motor City" (guess they missed the line about that domestic car turning out to be a piece of crap), there's no denying the draw of the unreleased material -- how much top drawer stuff does this guy have lying around in his vault anyway? Highlights unquestionably include the spirited song for his newborn daughter, the sly David Geffen rationalization "Nothing's Perfect," and the wild, blistering "Grey Riders." But the real charmer is the utterly slight "Let Your Fingers Do the Walking," an unabashed throwaway which inhabits Nashville conventions (corny puns, two-step rhythms) with aplomb, yet without condescension -- which is probably why the set list selection from Old Ways tops out at two. A–

Honorable Mentions

Deer Tick: Divine Providence (Partisan) A little too anxious about proving he's more Paul Westerberg than Stephen Stills ("Let's All Go to the Bar," "Funny Word," "Miss K.") ***

Wire: 02 May 2000, Great American, San Francisco (Pinkflag) "I shift the blame/To the guy on the barstool/With the cheap ass tape recorder" ("Silk Skin Paws," "12XU," "Drill") **

Lydia Loveless: Indestructible Machine (Bloodshot) If only her tunes were as indestructible as she pretends to be ("More Like That," "Steve Earle") **

Crooked Fingers: Breaks in the Armor (Merge) Makes me yearn for the days when he feigned ignorance of minor chords, not to mention acoustic guitars ("Typhoon") *

Connie Smith: Long Line of Heartaches (Sugar Hill) A paradox: a relief from 2011 Music Row because it anachronistically hearkens back to Music Row 1971, yet had it actually been released in 1971, its dearth of top shelf material would have been (even more) obvious ("Ain't You Even Gonna Cry") *

Trash

Kate Bush: Director's Cut (Fish People) Like spiritual daughter Tori Amos, Bush attracts legions of acolytes who swear vociferously by her entire output, and hopefully one day one of them siphons from that output the dynamite compilation she no doubt deserves -- with the possible exception of her the fine 1978-85 EMI collection The Whole Story, none of her records lives up to its lofty literary and musical ambitions from beginning to end. So in a way, I'm grateful for these remakes and re-workings of songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes, because it inspired me to a burn a disc of the original recordings for the purpose of comparison, and perhaps even alert me to winners that I had missed. And indeed, I was completely won over by the tart "Song of Solomon" ("Don't want your bullshit/Just want your sexuality") and the gorgeous elegy "Moments of Pleasure," two excellent songs that failed to make on impact on me eighteen years ago. But while the 1989 version of "The Sensual World" was the hottest thing this once-emotionally repressed teenager had ever heard -- the siren song of the saucy librarian who would take my spark in her hand and whisper mmm yes in my ear -- this remake, approved by the Joyce estate and retro-fitted with Molly Bloom's famous monologue from Ulysses, not only proves that she knew more about the erotic than Joyce did, but also that her voice was better equipped to evoke that eroticism when she was young. Similarly, the new versions of "Moments of Pleasure" and the waiting room masterpiece "This Woman's Work," both slowed down and stripped to their essence, are completely robbed of their magic -- when Bush devotes a couplet to the sense of humor she doesn't have, boy is she not kidding. I mean, if you re-record eleven songs under the pretense that you've learned more in the two decades since their first release and the end result is longer by ten full minutes, how much have you really learned? C+

Architecture in Helsinki: Moment Bends (Downtown)

Gabe Dixon: One Spark (Fantasy)

Dubioza Kolektiv: Wild Wild East (Kool Arrow)

Iron and Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean (Warner Bros.)

Man Man: Life Fantastic (Anti-)

My Brightest Diamond: All Things Will Unwind (Asthmatic Kitty)

Over the Rhine: The Long Surrender (Great Speckled Dog)

S.C.U.M.: Again Into Eyes (Mute)

Veronica Falls: Veronica Falls (Slumberland)

This is the 17th installment, monthly since August 2010, totalling 428 albums. All columns are indexed and archived here. You can follow A Downloader's Diary on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Feels like a short month, but comes out close to the year's median -- much better than 8 in January, 13 in September, 14 in March. Working opportunistically, recycling four titles from Jazz Prospecting, happy I could beg a copy of the McGarrigles. Other than that, most of the titles come from exploring back the catalogs of Jay-Z, Mates of State, and Wussy -- all tips from Robert Christgau's Expert Witness, something Rhapsody is especially useful for. The spottiness is because I'm filling in things I hadn't heard while skipping known titles. These don't have anything to do with reissues, but it seemed to make more sense to file them here than to mix up the new release focus of Rhapsody Streamnotes. On the other hand, without getting physical product I'm letting most of the real reissues slide by -- especially the seasonal boxes, which seem like too much to swallow via Rhapsody, and packaging matters most.

I still miss the old Recycled Goods, and don't doubt that given access and time one could return to form. On the other hand, a lot of what I see in the metacritic file isn't very inspiring. I could see sorting through reissues of artist I never cared much for -- like Nick Cave, Mickey Newbury, Queen, Thin Lizzy -- but I find the anniversary megapadding attached to the likes of REM, U2, and Nirvana singularly uninteresting. Then there are the cut-down compos like Universal's Icons and Sony's Playlist that either overtrim worthwhile artists or overpad worthless ones. There's Sony's recent penchant for cheaply boxing up the collected works of artists with a few essential albums and a lot of superfluous ones. On the other hand, I do sometimes run across things of real interest, and there is more I would be happy to do if I could.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Last Time Out: December 26, 1967 (1967 [2011], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): Unofficial tape, probably off the soundboard, found in a closet and dusted off. Brubeck had announced his brief retirement to start at the end of 1967, but in most regards this just extended the hundred-plus concerts the Quartet had given during the year. A long running, immensely popular group, With Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist who had given the Quartet its signature sound since 1951, drummer Joe Morello and bassist Eugene Wright, who had joined in 1956 and 1958 respectively. Lots of interesting stuff, ending in a "Take Five" that leaps right off the stage. B+(***)

Eddy Current Suppression Ring: So Many Things (2003-04 [2011], Goner): Odds and sods collection from an Australian punk band first championed by a fortuitously flattered Chuck Eddy -- I always figured a piece of esoteric electronics, but further research indicates that the guitarist is named Eddy Current and the singer is Brendan Suppression. (The bassist is accurately Rob Solid, the drummer Danny Current.) They got the basic sound perfect from the start, and stick close for the two years of thrashing here -- 22 songs, 71:29, only two covers, including a winning "We Got the Beat." A- [R]

Gorillaz: The Singles Collection 2001-2011 (2001-11 [2011], Virgin): Virtual hip-hop group, where Jamie Hewlett's graphics front for a pool of not-quite-anonymous music talents -- Dan Nakamura, Damon Albarn, Miho Hatori, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and various others (although Wikipedia only lists Albarn and Hewlett). Whenever I've sampled their five albums plus ephemera they seemed vacuous, but suitably concentrated they are tolerably amusing -- especially when I flash back on Dan the Automator, the main talent wasted here. B+(*) [R]

Jay-Z: The Hits Collection, Volume One (1998-2009 [2010], Def Jam/Roc Nation): Third or fourth such compilation, all promising more volumes, no second volumes yet. I count five top-10s here, including features for Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Kanye West and Rihanna, so only two of his own leads -- "Izzo (HOVA)" and "Show Me What You Got" -- but he's an album guy: three cuts each from The Black Album and The Blueprint 3; none from his striking debut. Some stuff I'd pick, some I'd skip, leans harder than I'd like on the noise -- someone must think those are party anthems. B+(**) [R]

Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Tell My Sister (1971-77 [2011], Nonesuch, 3CD): Canadian folk singers, sisters, sing the occasional song in French (and absolutely charming when they do). They swoon when they hear that southern drawl, like to talk about the times they got laid, and have a special fondness for swimming nude. Their first two albums were high points of my first two years in New York, cracking year-end lists dominated by the punk revival because they were so exceptional, also so comfortable -- my affair with gospel peaked with "Traveling on for Jesus." Those two albums are here, both as solid-A as ever, plus a third disc of earlier demos: sparer but hardly rougher takes of songs that appeared on the debut, two takes of "Heart Like a Wheel" (which Linda Ronstadt snapped up and turned into a hit), five ones that got lost. Less essential, of course, but chances are when you pull this package off the shelf it's the one you'll wind up playing. A

John Surman: Flashpoint: NDR Workshop - April '69 (1969 [2011], Cuneiform, CD+DVD): The middle of a very rich period for the 25-year-old soprano/baritone saxophonist, coming out of Mike Westbrook's group, leading The Trio (with Barre Phillips and Stu Martin), his first album under his own name just out and his big band Tales of the Algonquin in the near future, and (this and) other projects falling through the cracks. His NDR workshop assembled four reeds (Surman, Alan Skidmore on tenor sax and flute, Ronnie Scott on tenor sax, Mike Osborne on alto sax), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet, flugelhorn), two trombones (Malcolm Griffiths and Eric Kleinschuefer), piano (Fritz Pauer), bass (Harry Miller), and drums (Alan Jackson). Five pieces: the two featuring Surman's soprano are irresistible vamps, as is the closer after they get past their everyone-raise-hell patch at the beginning. The slower pieces have more trouble gaining traction, although there are crackling solos here and there. The DVD is a straight b&w take of the album -- probably a rehearsal but close to the final mark. B+(***)

Wussy: Funeral Dress (2005, Shake It): The first of five Christgau-rated grade A albums, a level of affection that cannot be gleaned from one or two or probably a half-dozen plays, in that it must be personal because it sure isn't formal. Chuck Cleaver was in a 1990-2000 group called the Ass Ponys, producing moderately catchy, somewhat grungy alt-rock. Lisa Walker joins him as a second, but by no means second, guitar, voice, and brain, plus they have a bassist who plays more than that and a drummer who hangs in there. I've sampled a couple of their later records, admired them respectfully without ever feeling the need to get engaged. Probably would have helped had I started here, mostly because Walker is so much more out front, but either way they take a lot of work. I'm told they're worth it. A- [R]

Briefly Noted

Jaki Byard: A Matter of Black and White: Live at the Keystone Korner, Vol. 2 (1978-79, High Note): Solo piano, well-worn standards -- "God Bless the Child," "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans," "I Know a Place," "'Round Midnight," "Day Dream," among others -- bright and touching. B+(***)

El Rego: El Rego (1966-70s [2011], Daptone): Singles cut from 1966 on into the early 1970s by Theophile Do Rego, a James Brown wannabe from Dahomey born in 1936; this compilation puts him close the the roots of Afro-funk while still working in song forms with only one crossing the 4-minute mark. B+(**) [R]

Kali Z. Fasteau: Prophecy (1990-92 [2011], Flying Note): World traveler, avant-garde gadfly, widow of a clarinet player connected to Coltrane's late work, plays a dozen odd instruments -- sheng, ney, and mizmar are conspicuous here -- vigorously if not always expertly, and sings more than a little -- exuberantly if not all that listenably, with a cast of eight, most notably bassist William Parker. B

Kali Z. Fasteau/William Parker/Cindy Blackman: An Alternative Universe (1991-92 [2011], Flying Note): From the same period as Prophecy, but Fasteau limits herself to rotating pieces on three instruments (cello, soprano sax, electric piano, with no vocals); the cello emerges stealthily from Parker's bass, the soprano squawks wild and free, and the piano reduced to toy percussion, something the others can adds twists to. B+(**)

Jay-Z: Reasonable Doubt (1996, Roc-A-Fella): First shot, hard and cold, a discipline that would work for him even when he's sliding, which this being his first shot he dares not do; the spare beats conserve budget and set him off, rarely forcing a rhyme, gradually building to a stride where he takes delight in his label name, rubbing your nose in it. A- [R]

Jay-Z: In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 (1997, Roc-A-Fella): Second album, first of three numbered volumes, showcases his business acumen starting with his insights into how the rap game matches up with the crack game; beats steady, not flashy, even when enveloped in background vocals and stray gunshots he keeps it simple -- his preferred term may be real. B+(***) [R]

Jay-Z: Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life (1998, Roc-A-Fella): Third album: title cut isn't a joke but is a bit too cute; beyond that his business sense moves from analogies between crack and rap toward mining the former for material, a sign of desperation or compacency -- couldn't just be laziness; looks sharp on the cover, his hard knocks clearly behind him. B+(**) [R]

Jay-Z: The Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse (2002, Roc-A-Fella): Having never warmed to Z's 2001 The Blueprint, I have no recollection of what this sequel's relationship is, but I suspect the gift is Z's talent for credible flow and the curse is the need to keep fresh product rolling off the assembly line; still, the sheer length is impressive, even achieved by force, more rapid fire than when he was coming up, but less wasted ammo. B+(**) [R]

Jay-Z: The Black Album (2003, Roc-A-Fella): Concise and to the point for once, with a story line that brings him from a painless ten pounds to the top of the rap game, the life he chose, not that chose him; strangely enough, when this came out I only heard him over Danger Mouse's Beatles rips, but given the choice I'd take Z's crack beats in a moment. A- [R]

Jay-Z: Kingdom Come (2006, Roc-A-Fella): Bumped up to Def Jam CEO, nominally retired -- barely raising a blip in his discography, or a speed up if you count joint efforts with Linkin Park and R. Kelly -- not that he has much riding on this; on the other hand, post-Katrina, he has things to weight in on. B+(**) [R]

The Klezmatics: Possessed (1997, Xenophile): Where Rhythm and Jews and Jews With Horns announced their presence boldly (and baldly, or do I mean humourously?), this postmodern klezmer band's fourth album was their breakthrough, combining the form with the sense that they (or at least vocalist Lorin Sklamberg) have something new to say -- even when they fall back into Yiddish, or perhaps especially. A-

The Klezmatics: Brother Moses Smote the Water (2004 [2005], Piranha): Looking for the klezmer group's recent Live at Town Hall, I stumbled across this "Live in Berlin" special with black Jewish gospel singer Joshua Nelson and fellow traveler Kathryn Farmer providing a robust gospel fusion on old testament anthems -- all trad. except for the one by Sam Cooke; I'd prefer less fire and brimstone, and for that matter more Yiddish. B [R]

Mates of State: Team Boo (2003, Polyvinyl): Husband/wife group, Kori Gardner on keybs, Jason Hammel on drums, both sing; met in Lawrence, KS in 1997, and moved to San Francisco the following year, with seven albums since then; this early one catches them at their cheesiest, lots of organ, songs about what it takes to get through the night. B+(*) [R]

Mates of State: Re-Arrange Us (2008, Barsuk): Songcraft much improved, both structure and hooks, and the piano adds stature where the organ merely kicked it along; upbeat, suspiciously happy, not least with each other; don't know why I don't find them more appealing -- perhaps a bit too bulked up. B+(**) [R]

Wussy: Rigor Mortis (2008, Shake It, EP): Four studio cuts plus three live ones, the title cut appearing twice, adds up to 24:44; dense and relatively hard for me to follow, but the energy is palpable, as are the "blood and guts." B+(**) [R]

Legend: B+ records are divided into three levels, where more * is better. [R] indicates record was reviewed using a stream from Rhapsody. The biggest caveat there is that the packaging and documentation hasn't been inspected or considered, and documentation is especially important for reissues. But also my exposure to streamed records is briefer and more limited, so I'm more prone to snap judgments -- although that's always a risk.

For this column and the previous 91, see the archive.

Still don't have much of anything fit to print about the status much less future of Jazz Consumer Guide. The Village Voice did finally cough up a kill fee for not running the 27th column, which they have been sitting on since June. I'm thinking I'll post it sometime in the next week or so, but I also have a lot of more timely posts to clean up: December's Recycled Goods and A Downloader's Diary, plus a relatively short but year-end timely Rhapsody Streamnotes. I also have to write a year-end piece for Rhapsody to post along with the Jazz Critics Poll that Francis Davis is continuing despite the disinterest of the Village Voice. I will also, once again, collate and host the individual critics ballots, and that's another sizable chunk of work on my plate.

I was thinking I'd suspend Jazz Prospecting, but as I think about it that doesn't seem possible either. I'm late posting today because I've been trying to squeeze in notes on more records -- if not for Jazz CG, for the year-end piece -- and I got more to go, and I've yet to figure out how to manage my post Jazz CG work for some sort of blog. So I'll have to keep doing what I've been doing until I figure out some better way to do it. Ugh!

Did find some relatively good records over the last two weeks.

Geri Allen: A Child Is Born (2011, Motéma Music): Solo piano/organ/clavinet/Fender Rhodes, plus "vocal soundscape engineering and design" on one track, other voices on two more. Christmas music more or less, mostly attributed to Trad. with two originals added. Sometimes the mind drifts aimlessly, but it's hard to disguise pieces like "We Three Kings" and "Little Drummer Boy." B

Harry Allen: Rhythm on the River (2011, Challenge): Thirteen "river" songs, two by Hoagy Carmichael, the only one without "river" in the title is "Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On" although the musty old Stephen Foster "Old Folks at Home" had to reach into the parents for "Swanee River" -- wonder how they missed "Old Man River"? The band gets such a charge on the four songs joined by Warren Vaché and his cornet that Allen's quartet sounds down at first. Eventually that pays off in drawing out the tenor saxophonist's sumptous balad tone. B+(***)

Charlie Apicella & Iron City: Sparks (2009 [2010], Carlo Music): Guitar-organ trio, with Apicella on guitar, Dave Mattock on organ, and Alan Korzin on drums. Second album. He's studied with Dave Stryker, but he's basically a Grant Green guy -- wrote 3 of 8 tunes, covering Green, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Lou Donaldson, Steve Cropper/Don Covay, and Michael Jackson -- he's a lightweight, but the latter was tastier than anything on Joey DeFrancesco's Jackson tome. Five cuts add Stephen Riley on tenor sax, to little effect. Two cuts add a violinist (John Blake or Amy Bateman), and that's something worth exploring further. B

The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Last Time Out: December 26, 1967 (1967 [2011], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): Unofficial tape, probably off the soundboard, found in a closet and dusted off. Brubeck had announced his brief retirement to start at the end of 1967, but in most regards this just extended the hundred-plus concerts the Quartet had given during the year. A long running, immensely popular group, With Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist who had given the Quartet its signature sound since 1951, drummer Joe Morello and bassist Eugene Wright, who had joined in 1956 and 1958 respectively. Lots of interesting stuff, ending in a "Take Five" that leaps right off the stage. B+(***)

Bryan and the Haggards: Still Alive and Kickin' Down the Walls (2011, Hot Cup): Second group album, not what I'd call enough longevity to justify the title. Two saxophonists -- Bryan Murray and Jon Irabagon, doubling up on tin whistle and penny whistle respectively -- plus John Lundbom on guitar (and banjo), Moppa Elliott on bass, and Danny Fischer on drums. Six songs written by Merle Haggard, plus two he's sung a lot ("San Antonio Rose" and "Sing a Sad Song"), with avant vamps -- the opening "Ramblin' Fever" is a real workout; great shtick, but "If We Make It Through December" gets stuck on Irabagon's clarinet and wobbles on for 10:05, making one doubt that we will. B+(***)

Dead Cat Bounce: Chance Episodes (2010 [2011], Cuneiform): Basically, a saxophone quartet (Matt Steckler, Jared Sims, Terry Goss, Charlie Kohlhase) plus bass (Dave Ambrosio) and drums (Bill Carbone). Fourth album since 1998. The quartet are just creditd with saxophones and woodwinds, and I don't know them well enough to pick them out from the photo (except that I figure Kohlhase for the baritone). Steckler wrote all the pieces, liner notes too. I've always had problems with the monophonic tones and limited harmonics of sax quartets, but the bass seems to tie them all together, as well as pick up the pace, and this group is really impressive when they pick up a full head of steam. B+(***)

Dave Douglas: Rare Metals [Greenleaf Portable Series Volume 1] (2011, Greenleaf Music): One of three new albums, each with different groups pursuing different facets of Douglas's art. This is Brass Ecstasy -- four brass horns, Vincent Chancey on French horn, Luis Bonilla on trombone, Marcus Rojas on tuba, and Douglas on trumpet, along with Nasheet Waits on drums. Third recent album by the group. Five originals, starting with a piece called "Town Hall" that brings the old brass band era back to life, but even more striking is the lone cover, a decidedly ascetic "Lush Life." B+(***)

Dave Douglas: Orange Afternoons [Greenleaf Portable Series Volume 2] (2011, Greenleaf Music): Postbop quintet, with stars Ravi Coltrane on sax and Vijay Iyer on piano, rising stars Linda Oh on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. All Douglas originals. The sort of thing Douglas did a lot of a decade ago -- and which I found annoying more often than not, ultimately throwing my hands up and figuring I'm just not smart enough to follow him. Not sure which of us is mellowing out, but I will note that neither Coltrane nor Iyer break out, which must mean they're pinned down by the compositions. B+(**)

Dave Douglas/So Percussion: Bad Mango [Greenleaf Portable Series Volume 3] (2011, Greenleaf Music): So Percussion is a quartet -- Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, and Eric Beach -- postclassical in orientation (Steve Reich's Drumming was their second album), although like Kronos Quartet they like to circulate. Ten or more albums since 2004. This is their most obvious jazz connection, and their group dynamics are so tight I'm tempted to call this a trumpet-percussion duo. Good spot for Douglas to let it fly, and the opening "One More News" makes good of that. B+(***)

Werner Hasler/Karl Berger/Gilbert Paeffgen: Hasler/Paeffgen/Berger (2010 [2011], NoBusiness): Hasler plays trumpet and dabbles in electronics; b. 1969, based in Switzerland, has a couple previous records. Berger plays vibes; he goes back a long ways (b. 1935 in Germany). Paeffgen is a drummer, b. 1958 in Germany, based in Switzerland. The vibes gives this a light and slippery background, against which the trumpet is meticulously etched. The electronics helps, too. B+(**)

Kieran Hebden/Steve Reid/Mats Gustafsson: Live at the South Bank (2009 [2011], Smalltown Superjazz, 2CD): Hebden does laptronica under the name Four Tet, and is something of a star as those things go. Somehow he hooked up with Reid -- a drummer, had a couple of obscure but quite good 1970s avant records, plus a resume that includes Motown, James Brown, and Fela Kuti; sadly, Reid died in 2010, a couple years into a very productive comeback. Gustafsson is a Norwegian saxophonist -- plays tenor and baritone, not specified which here but sounds like mostly bari -- has a group called the Thing, plays a lot with Ken Vandermark and a little with Sonic Youth. He can be unbearably noisy, but holds to an interesting range here, adding soulful depth to the blips and beats. Length 82:55. A-

Julius Hemphill/Peter Kowald: Live at Kassiopeia (1987 [2011], NoBusiness, 2CD): New old music from two dead guys, likely to be missed if you have any idea who they are, and all the more poignant for being so intimate. Kowald is the German bassist of the 20th century, always intriguing, not least solo -- his solo Was Da Ist is a Penguin Guide crown album. Hemphill was an alto saxophonist, best known for his harmonic explorations with the World Saxophone Quartet and Five Chord Stud, which left him underappreciated as a solo player. First disc here is all solo: three 6-8 minute ones by Hemphill, a 32:20 by Kowald. They feel like studies, something slightly above practice, nice examples of each one's art. Second disc brings them together in three duos, where they start out distinct and gradually merge. I'm sentimental enough to be tempted to rate this higher, but Hemphill plays a lot of soprano sax here, I haven't compared this to such similar fare as his duo Live in New York with cellist Abdul K. Wadud, and I'm unlikely to return to the solos -- although Kowald's is probably a better intro than the daunting Wa Das Ist. B+(***)

Ig Henneman Sextet: Cut a Caper (2010 [2011], Stichting Wig): Dutch viola player, b. 1945, from Haarlem. Her website lists 15 albums since 1981 -- the first two as FC Gerania, two more as Queen Mab Trio. The Sextet has no drums, giving it a chamber feel, but lots of options: Ab Baars (tenor sax, clarinet, shakuhachi), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Lori Freedman (bass clarinet, clarinet), Wilbert De Joode (bass), and Marilyn Lerner (piano). Difficult terrain, but Baars is as sure-footed as I've ever heard him, and Lerner's piano themes always get your attention, perhaps to regroup from the horns. B+(**)

Rudresh Mahanthappa: Samdhi (2008 [2011], ACT): Alto saxophonist, grew up in US, picked up his Indian roots on the rebound, as is so often the case. Cites Charlie Parker as influence, of course, but also Grover Washington, David Sanborn, the Brecker Brothers, and the Yellowjackets -- guess you had to be there, but he does try to fold his more complex ideas back into neatly accessible packages. Also credited with laptop here. Band includes electric guitar, electric bass, and drums, giving him a slicked back fusion sound, but also "Anand" Anantha Krishnan on mridangam and kanjira, reminding you how he's different. A-

Joe McPhee/Michael Zerang: Creole Gardens (A New Orleans Song) (2009 [2011], NoBusiness): Another case where one's reaction to the Katrina catastrophe was to keep doing what one does anyway, although one could credit the tragedy with moderating McPhee, keeping his tone in check, somber and studied. He is brilliant both on alto sax and pocket trumpet. Zerang drums along, accenting and encouraging, doing all he needs to do. A-

Wadada Leo Smith's Mbira: Dark Lady of the Sonnets (2007 [2011], TUM): For such an uncompromising avant-gardist, Smith has been remarkably catholic recently, working in all sorts of combos and forms. No mbira here (although it's a song title): trio consists of Min Xiao-Fen, from Nanjing, China, who plays pipa, and Pheroan akLaff on drums. Min has several albums -- traditional Chinese and classical, I gather. She provides an exotic twist here, but doesn't settle into a consistent role, so she mostly serves to set Smith off. B+(***)

Jason Stein Quartet: The Story This Time (2011, Delmark): Bass clarinetist, b. 1976 in Long Island, studied at Bennington (Charles Gayle, Milford Graves) and Michigan, wound up in Chicago where he hooked into one of Ken Vandermark's less successful projects (Bridge 61). Has three trio albums as Locksmith Isidore, each step showing growth, and a Solo that ain't bad for that sort of thing. Adds a second, sharper horn to get a quartet -- Keefe Jackson on tenor sax and contrabass clarinet -- along with Joshua Abrams on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. The sax works with and against the bass clarinet. A-

John Surman: Flashpoint: NDR Workshop - April '69 (1969 [2011], Cuneiform, CD+DVD): The middle of a very rich period for the 25-year-old soprano/baritone saxophonist, coming out of Mike Westbrook's group, leading The Trio (with Barre Phillips and Stu Martin), his first album under his own name just out and his big band Tales of the Algonquin in the near future, and (this and) other projects falling through the cracks. His NDR workshop assembled four reeds (Surman, Alan Skidmore on tenor sax and flute, Ronnie Scott on tenor sax, Mike Osborne on alto sax), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet, flugelhorn), two trombones (Malcolm Griffiths and Eric Kleinschuefer), piano (Fritz Pauer), bass (Harry Miller), and drums (Alan Jackson). Five pieces: the two featuring Surman's soprano are irresistible vamps, as is the closer after they get past their everyone-raise-hell patch at the beginning. The slower pieces have more trouble gaining traction, although there are crackling solos here and there. The DVD is a straight b&w take of the album -- probably a rehearsal but close to the final mark. B+(***)

These are some even quicker notes based on downloading or streaming records. I don't have the packaging here, don't have the official hype, often don't have much information to go on. I have a couple of extra rules here: everything gets reviewed/graded in one shot (sometimes with a second play), even when I'm still guessing on a grade; the records go into my flush file (i.e., no Jazz CG entry, unless I make an exception for an obvious dud). If/when I get an actual copy I'll reconsider the record.

Søren Kjaergaard/Ben Street/Andrew Cyrille: Femklang (2011, ILK): Pianist, b. 1978 in Denmark; co-founded the label, has a dozen or so albums since 2001. This is the third with Street (bass) and Cyrille (drums). B+(**) [Rhapsody]

Matthew Shipp/Joe Morris: Broken Partials (2010 [2011], Not Two): Piano-bass duo. Shipp is one of the few pianists I can follow all the way down to solo, probably because his attack remains so sharp, but also the flow of his lines makes sense. Morris is best known as a guitarist, but is warm and supportive on bass, and shows more edge than I expected when he gets the lead. B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Sonore: Cafe Oto/London (2011, Trost): Free sax trio: Peter Brötzmann (alto/tenor sax, clarinet, tarogato), Ken Vandearmark (tenor sax, clarinet), Mats Gustafsson (baritone sax). Fourth album for group, although each has played with one or both of the others many times. Each wrote one piece; the fourth is jointly attributed, which usually means improvised on the spot. Even at 38:42 the noise can be wearing, especially since each horn has the same palette to draw from. B [Rhapsody]

Miguel Zenón: Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (2011, Marsalis Music): Alto saxophonist, MacArthur Fellowship genius, seventh album since 2002, third specifically targeting the music of his native Puerto Rico. Tremendous player, his sax repeatedly soaring above his fine quartet -- Luis Perdomo (piano), Hans Glawischnig (bass), and Henry Cole (drums). I'm less pleased with the 10-piece wind ensemble conducted by Guillermo Klein -- flutes, clarinets, oboe, bassoon, both French and English horns -- that sometimes broadens the sound sweep and sometimes just warbles in the interstices. B+(***) [download]

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

Some corrections and further notes on recent prospecting:

Freddy V: Easier Than It Looks (2008 [2011], Watersign): Two mistakes here: I associated Fred Vigdor's old Average White Band with the Southern rock of the 1970s when in fact the band hailed from Scotland. I also misidentified Mo Pleasure as the name of another Vigdor band; actually, Mo[rris] Pleasure started out playing bass for Ray Charles, and has since worked with Earth Wind & Fire and Michael Jackson -- well, also Najee.

For this cycle's collected Jazz Prospecting notes to date for this round, look here.

Unpacking: Found in the mail over the last two weeks:

• Harry Allen: Rhythm on the River (Challenge)
• Gerry Beaudoin: The Return (Francesca): Jan. 30
• Tim Berne: Snakeoil (ECM): advance, Feb. 7
• Marco Cappelli: In the Shadow of No Towers (Mode)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: All Out (FMR)
• The Descendents [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] (Sony Masterworks)
• Joe Fielder Trio: Sacred Chrome Orb (YSL)
• Danny Fox Trio: The One Constant (Songlines)
• Volker Goetze Orchestra: NY 10027 (G*Records)
• Aaron Goldberg/Ali Jackson/Omer Avital: Yes! (Sunnyside): Jan. 17
• Taylor Haskins: Recombination (19/8)
• In One Wind: How Bright a Shadow! (Primary)
• Rudresh Mahanthappa: Samdhi (ACT)
• Youn Sun Nah: Same Girl (ACT)
• Sam Pannunzio: Goin' Home (Eastside Jazz)
• Dan Tepfer: Goldberg Variations/Variations (Sunnyside)
• Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: Frère Jacques: Round About Offenbach (ECM)
• Anne Walsh: Go (self-released): Jan. 3

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Steve Benen: Pick a Wet Blanket: Quotes from an op-ed by the "six Republians from the failed super-committee," John Boehner, Susan Collins, and George Allen, all referring to the "wet blanket" any increase in taxing the rich would place on the economy. It's one of those focus-group-tested phrases that Republicans seem to have an instant ability to align with. On the other hand, failing to extend Obama's payroll tax cut, which would actually give hard-strapped workers more spending cash, doesn't seem to merit a focus group. Benen sees this as The Looming GOP Tax Hike:

  The White House is eager, if not desperate, for the payroll break to go through 2012, with projections showing weaker economic growth next year without it. Republicans have balked and said they want taxes to go up on practically all American workers in January because, well, they haven't exactly explained why they want this. (To see how much your taxes would go up if Republicans succeed, the White House has put together an online calculator.)

  And that leaves GOP lawmakers in an interesting position. On the one hand, they're killing a super-committee deal because they refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy in 2013. On the other hand -- indeed, at the exact same time -- the identical Republicans have no qualms about supporting a tax increase on practically every American who earns a paycheck, which would kick in on Jan. 1, which is just six weeks away.

• Adam Davidson: The Dwindling Power of a College Degree: Print version had the more evocative title: "When Did the Rules Change?" And subhed: "It used to be that if you worked hard, you were guaranteed a certain kind of life. There are reasons success is no longer a straight shot." Of course, such rules never really existed, and they were never applied universally. Still, this is enough part of conventional wisdom that Davidson can start his article off quoting Obama and Romney speaking in almost identical terms. What Davidson doesn't explain was that these "old rules" were effectively a social contract, which not only promised success to those who followed the regime but which limited the definition of success to something most people could realistically aspire to: the middle class, compared to which both upper and lower classes could be considered freak occurrences, not quite real Americans. This was undone in several assaults: first by the cult of the rich and famous (with its attendant "greed is good" ideology) which ended the idolization of the middle class, then by the economic strategies -- what Davidson calls "the new rules" -- that picked apart the middle class, elevating some and depressing most. The concept of education as a social escalator was one such strategy. What made the concept plausible was the role that expanding educational opportunity (e.g., through the GI bill) during the post-WWII period of intense growth had on social mobility. But the middle class was built from more basic stuff: the ideals of equality and economic freedom promoted by the New Deal and WWII, and on a more practical level, by the unionization of relatively uneducated workers. The "new rules" didn't grow out of the diminishing returns of higher education but the loss of commitment to living in an egalitarian, economically just society. The "new rules" are the direct result of finding ourselves in a world which celebrates the 1% while condeming the 99% for whining. Davidson puts it this way:

  A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill -- things, in other words, that can't be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries. Money now flows around the world so quickly, and technology changes so fast, that people who thought they were in high demand find themselves uprooted. Many newspaper reporters have learned that their work was subsidized, in part, by classified ads and now can't survive the rise of Craigslist; computer programmers have found out that some smart young guys in India will do their jobs for much less. Meanwhile, China lends so much money to the United States that mortgage brokers and bond traders can become richer than they ever imagined for a few years and then, just as quickly, become broke and unemployed.

  One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor's degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill -- charm, by the way, counts -- that employers value. But there's also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

  Davidson writes like this is normal and inevitable, but in fact it is political. The bottom line is that the owners don't need you, and don't want you: you are replaceable. Sixty years ago was a very different story: the elites couldn't fight and win WWII without you, they couldn't grow the economy out of the Great Depression without you, and as a result they felt obliged to treat you better, to make you feel important, like you were part of a great national community. They don't feel that anymore, and they don't care if society unravels under their indifference. They have their gated communities, their private security, their private schools, their police state, their media control, a government bought and paid for. They don't need you, and they don't want you, except maybe to grovel at their feet. And if you don't like it, study more, and learn to grovel better. Maybe they'll throw you a bone.

• Mike Konczal: Unemployment Dips, but That Hardly Makes Up for a Lost Year: The official unemployment rate dropped from 9 to 8.6 percent while adding 120,000 new jobs. This sounds like good news, but the numbers don't add up, as more and more people disappear from the unemployment registers (as I did, quite some time ago).

  In fact, over the past year, employment-to-population has stayed consistently depressed. Every indicator we look at -- job openings, the rate at which people quit their jobs for new opportunities, the number of hours worked in the economy -- has stayed weak during 2011. With job growth failing to exceed population growth each month, and with no serious increase in the percent of Americans working, 2011 was a lost year for the economy.

  Lost years for the economy have major consequences. Beyond the human misery that results, they put the entire project of liberal governance at risk. Choices made early by this administration resulted in no advancement on three fronts that could bolster the struggling economy: fiscal policy (increasing the deficit through spending on investment and temporary tax cuts), monetary policy (increasing the money supply to stimulate growth), and dealing with the problems in the housing market.

  Why? Konczal goes into fiscal policy at some length, but says less about the other points. The big problem with the Fed is that it's only structured to give money to banks, and has (or takes) very little responsibility over what the banks do with the money. (Mostly they've reverted to pre-crisis form, which is good for their profit levels but bad for everyone else.) Housing is also a problem that runs square up against the banks: writing down underwater mortgage debt reflects badly on their balance sheets, but targeting higher inflation to reduce the overhang hurts them even worse. One of Obama's main failures is his inability to imagine a world where the banking industry works differently than it did pre-crisis -- or even to imagine a world where the management of those banks has been rolled over.

  Starting in late 2009, the Obama administration started framing our economic crisis as a "dual deficit problem." In other words, the administration wouldn't push for a larger short-term deficit -- spending more money to stimulate the weak economy, a key tenet of Keynesian economics -- without also cutting the long-term deficit. [ . . . ] So the administration spent much of 2011 engaging in the wrong analysis of the economy, one that looked like that of the far right. Early in the year the administration brought in new advisers, notably Bill Daley as chief of staff, in order to repair relationships with business in the wake of financial reform. This incorrectly diagnosed the problem as a liberal government beating up on unappreciated job creators, instead of weak income and mass unemployment among workers. In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama argued that we needed to "win the future" by investing in education and bringing "discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president." Recent college graduates are suffering from high unemployment and there's no real reason to worry about government debt levels, but you wouldn't understand that from that speech.

  During the debt ceiling showdown this past summer, when the administration was trying to drum up support for long-term deficit reduction, economic advisors like Gene Sperling argued that new confidence in deficit reduction itself would help the economy, ignoring the fact that the markets, with negative real interest rates, were screaming for the government to run a bigger deficit. Meanwhile, President Obama made references to "structural" issues in the labor market, as if the pain of unemployment wasn't shared broadly across all occupations, industries and types of workers.

• Andrew Leonard: How Wall Street Occupied the Fed:

  Bloomberg's fabulous report on the Federal Reserve Bank's "secret" bailout of U.S. banks is an example of dogged enterprise journalism at its very best. The Fed fought Bloomberg's Freedom of Information Act requests to get details of its huge loan program all the way to the Supreme Court. But Bloomberg prevailed, and on Sunday night, the news organization published its long-awaited findings, making it abundantly clear just how much the U.S. banking system -- and in particular, the six largest banks -- benefited from the Fed's helping hands.

  Just to put things in perspective, the Fed "committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year." That's also more than 10 times the size of TARP -- the bailout administered by the U.S. Treasury. It's no wonder that a long line of banking spokespeople and financial institution CEOs refused to comment to Bloomberg for the story.

  That $7.7 trillion figure is worth repeating again. I've read several big estimates of how much money was lent out -- Nomi Prins had one of the highest estimates, but if memory serves reality trumped her by more than two times. Leonard continues:

  The report is must reading for followers of the emerging history of the financial crisis for obvious reasons. But tracking the reaction to the revelations from some liberal commentators to the news has been intriguing. Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias (newly ensconced at Slate), Mother Jones' Kevin Drum and Mike Konczak at Rortybomb are all singing the same tune: The problem, they say, is not that the Federal Reserve moved heaven and earth to shovel trillions of dollars at the banking industry -- that, in fact, is exactly what you want the central bank to do in the middle of a banking panic. That's how Great Depressions are prevented.

  The outrage, they all agree, is that the same determination and all-in blitzkrieg wasn't aimed at unemployment and the foreclosure mess and the myriad woes affecting the rest of America. The 1 percent got a gift-wrapped bonanza, while the 99 percent got the shaft. As soon as the financial panic subsided and stock prices started to rise, policymakers started worrying far more about inflation and deficits than actual human suffering.

• Andrew Leonard: Are U.S. Corporations Good Citizens: Starts with Milton Friedman in 1970, arguing that the only social responsibility of corporations is to raise profits -- a sentiment that sought to free corporations from public obligations, like respect for the environment, their workers, their consumers, or the nation as a whole.

  What are our ethics? How do we want our corporations to behave? And shouldn't we take our business elsewhere if we feel our values are being trampled? Legally speaking, the corporation is an "artificial person." The Supreme Court obviously believes that these artificial people are true citizens insofar as their right to free speech -- in the form of political advertising -- is concerned. But if corporations are people too, with the rights that pertain thereto, shouldn't they also bear some responsibility?

• Alex Pareene: Newt Gingrich Talks About Inventive New Ways to Punish Drug Users: This is the first thing I've read that makes me think Gingrich might actually win the Republican nomination:

  The thing reporters always loved about Newt Gingrich -- and the thing that led many of them to mistake his free-associative rambling for intellect -- is that he will just babble, at length, on any given topic, to any reporter who'll listen. So Yahoo's Chris Moody chatted with the unlikely GOP nomination front-runner at a Books-a-Million in Florida, and Moody got Gingrich to go on for a while about drugs, for some reason, which I'm guessing is not at the top of the Gingrich campaign's list of issues to hit in interviews. (At the top of that list is actually The Battle of the Crater, a powerful Civil War historical novel by Gingrich and William F. Forstchen, available now at fine booksellers everywhere.)

  Here are Newt Gingrich's nuanced, compassionate drug policy ideas: Constant drug testing for everyone (especially poor people) and stiff "economic penalties" for use. (Yes, obviously, what poor people need are more ways to incur economic penalties and more barriers to either aid or employment. Newt Gingrich has so many IDEAS.) Also, the U.S. should be more like Singapore, where people carrying enough drugs to qualify for "trafficking" charges are put to death. [ . . . .]

  This self-contradictory word-salad leads Mike Riggs to call Newt Gingrich a "nitwit," which seems unfair to perfectly harmless nitwits everywhere.

  After all, the last Republican the press was so in love with was John McCain, and for much the same reasons: access and pseudo-candor is all the press really demand (well, maybe a bit of entertainment value). Past frontrunners like Trump and Cain were beneficiaries of this same effect, but were intrinsically marginal and wore out their welcome pretty fast. Most observers figured it's only a matter of time before Gingrich hangs himself up saying something blindingly stupid, but McCain and Bush did that regularly, and somehow never had to pay for it.

  On the other hand, when the media turns on you it's easy enough to dig up embarrassing quotes and moments. The destruction of Howard Dean in 2004 was tragic. Mopping up Herman Cain's campaign is much more amusing -- see Steve Benen: Don't Go Away Mad, Herman, Just Go Away.

Ran across this today and it pinched a nerve: Emma Mustich: Round Table: Are There Too Many "Best Of" Lists? A couple paragraphs each from: Andrew O'Hehir (Salon: film), Robert Christgau (rock), Rob Sheffield (rock), Jason Dietz (Metacritic), Will Hermes (rock), Pamela Paul (books), Simon Reynolds (rock). The rock critics all agree as to the usefullness of the aggregate results of Christgau's Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, and they all testify to their interest in what specific critics think. Sheffield points out that the year-end lists are the one forum which forces critics to think about the lasting value of records: "What I care about is how it sounds to you in time, which is where music happens.

Sheffield sounds like he's happy to see the better lists; Christgau is more inclined to bitch about the bad ones. He name checks me here -- not sure whether for better or worse, but at least he spelled my name right:

The only individual top 10s that interest me especially as a listener and reviewer are by major critics, by the diminishing cohort whose tastes run the way mine do, and by those with specialties in world music and hip-hop, where I often run behind the curve. Aggregated lists -- notably the Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll I started 40 years ago -- are of more significance and use. I find the Pazz & Jop consensus, which sticks to critics with recognizable gigs, more reliable than the online aggregates compiled by my list-loving webmaster Tom Hull and now apparently Metacritic, too. But it's usually in the lower reaches of the polls that I occasionally find treasures.

For whatever it's worth, my main list is here (reissues here).

Metacritic has collected, weighed, and aggregated grades longer than I have, making some sort of business out of it. I draw on their data, but also collect a lot more. Even in the case of their data I present it differently, because my interests are somewhat different, and also because I don't quite agree with their methods. I'm less interested than they are in the opinions of others -- not completely uninterested, because I'm not completely uncurious about popular sensibilities, but I mostly use the lists to find prospects, and as such it's tweaked a bit toward finding things I want to find. I do, for instance, follow everything Metacritic follows, but I also add in a few jazz sources, plus some other roots, hip-hop, and electronica sources (but not much metal, which has at least as narrowly developed genre following). In practice, this doesn't have much impact on the top 100-200 records on the list, but it does cause names to register further down that Metacritic never gets to.

Also, my system is a practical compromise. It would work better if I kept much more data -- especially per-reviewer as opposed to just per-publisher -- but that would be a lot more work. If I had such data we could start running similarity comparisons between reviewers, making it easier to discover affinity networks -- you probably know a few reviewers you find useful, as many panelists noted. I don't weigh my data; I simply establish cutoff grades per publication and count everything above that threshold. Weighted data would probably be more useful for predicting weighted polls like Pazz & Jop. P&J predictability would also improve if my sample more closely matched their sample -- we know, for instance, that my list is more UK-oriented, and also that it tends slightly to underrate black music (relative to P&J, which arguably underrates it even more).

Many other programmatic things could be done to make the file more useful. It would be nice to be able to select a set of pubs and thereby recalculate the file. Or labels. Drop the EPs or present only them. If you grab the raw data file you shouldn't have too much trouble loading it into a relational database where you can make ad hoc queries. (For that matter, you might get more flexibility loading it into a spreadsheet.) I've done a little bit of programming to select genre-specific sublists, but not much. I thought about hiding the backup data and making it visible on demand, but never worked out the coding to do so. Maybe later.

Actually, the line that cut closer to home was Sheffield's: "I really don't give a giraffe's nads what anyone, even myself, thinks of a new album after one listen, or half a listen, or a third of a listen." That seems like qualified data to me -- not what you'd get with multiple careful listens, but snap reactions often prove right, and I'd rather have more data than less -- at least that's why I'm (usually) willing to commit myself after a single play. (I almost never stop early, although I was sorely tempted by a Bill Orcutt solo guitar album last night.)

My basic answer to the title question is: well, sure, if you count all the bad ones; throw those out and one can argue that there aren't enough. I find that there are three major problems with year-end music lists: 1) they come out too soon to really align with the year's production -- I'd wait until March, maybe April to start tallying; 2) they're too short -- since my main interest is in prospecting for good records, I'd like to see all the records a critic feels like recommending (in rank, even if somewhat arbitrary, order); 3) I'd like to see an indication of how broad the critic's record sample is -- how many records did one hear, and what was the genre (or better still, label) breakdown? As for Christgau's beloved "recognizable gigs" I've often wondered how those people stand up against serious independent bloggers. Those "recognizable gigs" should offer more access, but it's often hard to tell just from their ballots.

For whatever it may be worth, this is how my metacritic file ranks the top twenty albums of 2011. Ties (e.g., Bon Iver and PJ Harvey) are resolved alphabetically. Harvey has a pronounced UK bias, so I'd expect her to slip in P&J. I also expect TV on the Radio and Paul Simon to move up there. Tune-Yards is a contender for the top slot. I don't much care for the record (tried to beg a copy but couldn't), but most of the people who do like it love it a lot. St. Vincent and Wilco are probably undercounted here (late releases); same for Tom Waits just shy of the list. The new Roots album is way down, not out until next week.

1. Bon Iver: Bon Iver (Jagjaguwar)
2. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake (Vagrant)
3. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop)
4. Tune-Yards: Whokill (4AD)
5. James Blake: James Blake (Atlas/A&M)
6. Destroyer: Kaputt (Merge)
7. TV on the Radio: Nine Types of Light (Interscope)
8. Fucked Up: David Comes to Life (Matador)
9. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up (Sub Pop)
10. Beastie Boys: Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (Capitol)
11. Wild Beasts: Smother (Domino)
12. Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes (Atlantic)
13. St Vincent: Strange Mercy (4AD)
14. Yuck: Yuck (Fat Possum)
15. Battles: Gloss Drop (Warp)
16. Radiohead: The King of Limbs (XL)
17. Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What (Hear Music)
18. Wilco: The Whole Love (Anti-)
19. Gang Gang Dance: Eye Contact (4AD)
20. Iron and Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD)

Again, as Christgau said, the real finds are way down. I have no idea how to do the math, but you can look at the data. His A-list records are pretty much randomly distributed over the entire list. Mine too, although the large concentration of jazz albums may be concentrated a bit toward the bottom.

At present I've only factored one year-end list into the file (Mojo). More will follow, but I doubt if I'll grab as close to everything as I did last year.