I went to a presentation Rannfrid Thelle gave last night to the Wichita Peace Center about Syria. It was offered mostly as historical background ("From Aram to Assad"), PowerPoint bullets with archeological pictures from Rannfrid's 2006 visit to Syria. A couple dozen people were present, mostly the usual crowd, plus two ringers with Syrian connections pushing an anti-Assad, pro-revolution line (but, thankfully, well short of calling for armed intervention). They didn't quite hijack the presentation, but they reminded me how defenseless well-meaning people are when confronted with evidence of brutal repression. The urge to help is overwhelming, swamping the critical recognition that help is something we are unable to offer.

I know I find myself moved by reports of the Assad regime's violent suppression of demonstrations, but when I hear pleas for outsiders to step in and "protect the people," all I know for sure is that if the US were to intervene in any way, all we would do is kill more. It seems clear that the Assad regime has killed more people and done more damage than any of the other targets of Arab Spring -- with the possible, but not certain, exception of Libya, where the US did add to the body count. (And for that matter, Assad has killed more than Iran and Myanmar did in forcibly suppressing major demonstration movements over the last few years.)

No doubt the Assad regime has disgraced itself. However, it is far from the only government that has done such, so why focus on it? (One could, after all, cite the elephant-in-the-room, Israel, which has killed a comparable number of people under its sovereignty, albeit stretched out over a longer timeframe.) Syria moved to the forefront of the news partly because it flowed out of the "Arab Spring" revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, and partly because we in the US have long held a grudge against it. In particular, Bush's generals loudly threatened to invade Syria in 2003-04 if Syria in any way aided the resistance in Iraq: the goal then wouldn't have been to liberate the Syrian people from an oppressive regime, but to get rid of an inconvenient one and replace it with something more to our liking. Indeed, the US did just that in occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea that we might selflessly liberate a country so that its people could run a free democracy was at best a propaganda afterthought.

Rannfrid did a generally good job in outlining Syria's history, but she missed one essential item: in 1948, Syria woke up on the wrong side of the bed and found itself locked into conflict with Israel. What happened was that the British quit their mandate in Palestine without having established any sort of agreement on the shape of its future independent government. In this void, the Zionist organization declared Israeli independence, and marshalled its army to secure as much territory as it could within Palestine, with no concern for the two-thirds of the mandate's population who were not Jewish, and who had agreed to no such division. As the Israeli militias advanced, the Palestinians appealed to the newly independent Arab states for help (like the Free Syrian Army currently begs for outside help). The Israelis like to describe this as all the Arab armies invading on Independence Day, another example of their accustomed blindness to the Palestinian presence.

Those Arab states had various agendas. Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq were ruled by crony kings installed by Britain, and Transjordan was practically invited to invade by the Israelis in the hope that they would pick up the Arab West Bank and prevent an independent Palestinian state from being established. Israel's success, both in expanding its territory way beyond what the UN had offered -- without consent of the people actually living there -- and in driving over 700,000 Palestinians into exile proved to be deeply embarrassing to the junior officers caught up in the 1948-49 war. This, in turn, led to military coups in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria -- to a long series of such in Syria until Hafez Assad was finally able to stabilize control of the government.

Israel signed temporary armistice arrangements to end the war, but refused to sign peace treaties -- mostly because Israel was unwilling to readmit any refugees, but also because Israel was still unsatisfied with its borders. Up to 1967, Israel repeatedly provoked border incidents with Syria, then in June 1967 Israel used the closing of shipping to Eilat as a pretext to invading and snatching large chunks of territory from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Later that year, Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights that it had seized from Syria and depopulated. In 1979 Egypt was able to recover its lost territories by signing a unilateral peace treaty with Israel, which left Syria permanently maimed and powerless to cut its own deal. (Ehud Barak made a token effort at a deal in 2000, then backed away when it looked like Assad might agree.)

America's relationship with Syria has always been a reflection of its relationship with Israel. When Israel sought alliances in the west, Syria had no other defense option but to turn to the Soviet Union, which only hardened US antipathy to them. Syria's relationships with other Arab nations broke up over one issue or another. Syria occasionally made gesture to appease the US, like their enthusiastic endorsement of the 1990 Gulf War against Iraq, but they were easily forgotten -- in large part because for the US Israel always came first. The US at first welcomed Syria's intervention in Lebanon, then ultimately insisted that they leave. It's hard to think of any nation the US has had a more fickle and unprincipled relationship with, although Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan come close, for much the same reasons. That Bush decided not to invade in 2004 most likely had less to do with excuses than with lack of imagination about what to do with the carcass. That in turn may be because Israel seems to like the Assad regime: it's not only the devil they know, it's such a toothless wreck of a government they can bomb it on a whim and know there won't be any consequences.

One major reason the situation in Syria has become so grave is that the regime is so isolated from the rest of the world. It has only partly rebuilt its relationship with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it's unlikely that Russia has anywhere near the deep-seated relationship with Syria that the US was able to exploit in nudging Mubarak out of power in Egypt, even assuming Russia has any desire to do so. The only other countries with any links to Syria are China and Iran, and neither is very sensitive about the rights of pro-democracy demonstrators. One thing we've seen again and again is that the more isolated a nation is, the less its leaders have to lose in resorting to violent repression -- again, consider Iran, Myanmar, Libya. And in Syria's case, it's too late to fix that: now that the regime has so disgraced itself, the pressure is against anyone trying to build relationships.

Meanwhile, the anti-Assad opposition -- especially the exiles who are safe from retribution -- have only become emboldened, ever more militant. They plead for arms, for intervention, to fight not to depose the regime but to conquer it. We are, in effect, being asked to choose sides in a civil war we actually have no stake in and no comprehension of. Sure, we can grasp the brutality of the Assad regime, but not yet the brutality of an opposition that has already decided to resort to killing and maiming its opponents -- a process that the longer it persists the more dehumanizing it will become. Indeed, one theme that emerged in the meeting was the fear that a triumphant anti-Assad movement would take its revenge on the Allawite community that Assad came from and favors. Several people were reminded of Rwanda; my own thoughts gravitated to the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad by Shiite militias as the US decided that the only way to keep Iraqis from uniting against the occupation was to turn them against each other. On the other hand, we had to sort through wild stories about Assad importing Iranian snipers, mass incarcerations, torture, and ritualistic killings. It's impossible to know what's actually true because access is so limited and propaganda is so free.[1]

The dehumanization of the other side is inevitably one of the first things that happens in war, and it's well under way in Syria. The longer and bloodier the struggle continues, the worse it will be for all sides. (The continuing turmoil in the so-called Libya success is an example of what happens when you militarize conflict.) It's dehumanization that leads to atrocities, which leads to more of the same. The sane way out is to back off from anything that implies violence, while maintaining a vigilant concern for any violation of basic human rights by any party. The most effective approach would be to shame the Assad regime into backing down, chilling out, and opening up. That involves engaging with the regime, no matter how distasteful that seems, and it involves rejecting any elements of the opposition who insist on fighting this out in the streets. The end result should be a democratic government where individuals can speak up and protest without fear, and the end result should have nothing to do with the ulterior motives of other countries.

Making this work will take some effort, and more carrots than sticks, but it has worked elsewhere, and the all-stick approach (so dear to John Bolton) has failed virtually everywhere. To take one example, Turkey had built up a pretty rotten human rights record, but over the last 10-20 years they've done much to turn that around. They still have a long ways to go, but the prospect of joining the European Union steered them toward reforms, and the odds of a military coup have gone way down. Latin America and the former Communist states provide more examples, and Myamnar, which only a few years ago brutally suppressed demonstrations, seems to be opening up to diplomatic efforts. The Middle East and North Africa remain in turmoil, but as more nations there become more legitimately democratic Syria will be more tempted to join them.

Aside from the short-sightedness of the Assad regime, the main obstacle to democratic reforms in Syria is Israel and its clumsy, incoherent puppet, the United States. The US has bases all over the region, which do little more than make it a target for local rage and offer opportunities for embarrassing adventures. Israel, meanwhile, has no desire for any form of peace that would entail concessions, like basic human rights, to its Palestinian subjects (let alone refugees). The whole Arab Spring movement makes Israel uneasy: Israel has long prided itself on being the region's "only democracy," but it is nothing of the sort, no longer "only" and hardly in any sense a democracy. What it is, however, is a rogue state -- with its targeted killings and nuclear blackmail -- the threat that generations of Arab dictators have used to rationalize their own corruptions. Solve the Palestinian problem[2], turn Israel into a normal nation, let the US pull back its tentacles, and the whole region will open up.

[1] Helena Cobban, citing Patrick Cockburn, makes this point effectively. Cobban goes on to counter the arguments for outside armed intervention: something you should bookmark and re-read every time you find yourself entertaining the thought that doing so just might work.

[2] The standard solution to the Israel-Syria conflict is for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria, which was pretty much (if not necessarily seriously) what Barak offered in 2000. I wonder if a simpler solution might be for Israel to buy the territory. It might work like a mini-Marshall Plan: I don't know what the price might be, but say $20 billion, offered as credits over 50 years, which works out to $400 million per year. Syria would cash in those credits by buying goods (anything but arms) from Israel, so this would be a domestic stimulus that also provided genuinely useful aid (which is pretty much what the Marshall Plan did, unlike USAID's scams to dump agricultural surplus). Just an idea. They could do similar things with settlements on Palestinian land. I would prefer for Israel to hand over the settlements with the understanding that any Jews who wish to stay become Palestinian citizens (with full and equal rights), but for a lot of (I'd say bad) reasons that ain't gonna happen. It may not be justice to convert your problems into money, but at least it makes them negotiable.

Music: Current count 19545 [19527] rated (+18), 889 [886] unrated (+3). Got a nice jump at the start of last week, otherwise I wouldn't have nothing at all. Spent Wednesday evening prepping a picnic paella dinner then drove to Independence on Thursday, to see my 97-year-old aunt and her three offspring (now 68-71, my closest cousins when I was growing up). Got roped into a basketball game with a very young grandson of one, who managed to heave three baskets in to my one before I slipped or tripped and wound up smashing into a car fender nose first. I was a sore, bloody mess. Had intended to drive on to Arkansas the next day, but limped back to Wichita instead. Slept most of Saturday, then hobbled out to the backyard on Sunday and painted a bit on the shed. Made more dramatic progress today, but had one of the worst allergy attacks in my life afterwards.

Didn't intend to present any Jazz Prospecting this week, but I count a baker's dozen discs below, including a couple good ones. Hard to recall them given all that has happened, and how far under the weather I am. (Was going to cite an article in the Eagle this morning about how bad allergies are right now, and how unusual that is for this time of the year: highs in the low 80s today, bright, sunny, lots of bugs.)

Sarah Elgeti Quintet: Into the Open (2010 [2012], Your Favourite Jazz): Plays tenor sax, soprano sax, flute, percussion; born in Germany, based in Denmark. First album. Group includes a second sax (Marianne Markmann-Eriksen on alto and baritone), guitar, piano (or Fender Rhodes), bass, and drums. Has some interesting postbop sequences, but also dips into bland pop. Ends with a remix that evens things out. B

Nobuyasu Furuya Quintet: The Major (2010 [2012], NoBusiness): Japanese tenor saxophonist, has a previous album on Clean Feed, again recorded this in Lisbon with what looks to be a local group. This one is released in Lithuania on limited edition (300 copies) vinyl, but I'm listening to a CDR. Impressive depth in a free jazz setting, much aided by Eduardo Lâla's trombone -- gives the group a New Orleans polyphony feel, but rougher than that. B+(***) [advance]

Dennis González/Yells at Eels: Resurrection and Life (2010-11 [2012], Ayler): Avant-trumpet player, from Dallas, has a long list of superb albums starting in the mid-1980s and getting a second wind around 2003, becoming even more prolific over the last few years. (I've reviewed a dozen of his records, but notice six more since 2009 that I didn't get but noted on my wish list.) Part of this burst is due to the maturation of his sons Aaron González (bass) and Stefan González (drums, vibes) in their joint group Yells at Eeels (along with trombonist Gaika James). This particular set adds ("featuring") drummer Alvin Fiedler, who frees Stefan to focus on the vibraphone -- the record is awash in tinkly chimes, not necessarily for the better, although the tight horns reward close listening, as does the bassist. B+(**)

David Greenberger with Jupiter Circle: Never Give Up Study (2011, Pel Pel): A writer, b. 1954, trained as a painter but got a job as "activities director" in a Boston nursing home, and built his "art" -- starting in 1979 with a self-published "zine" called Duplex World, extending to radio commentary on NPR and four records released late last year -- out of conversations with old people. The first person threw me off a bit, in part because the reading is so affectless, until the stories don't quite add up -- which takes a while here. Jupiter Circle provide unobtrusive musical backup. B+(**)

David Greenberger/Mark Greenberg: Tell Me That Before (2011, Pel Pel): More conversations from elderly centers, nursing homes, and suchlike -- a long list of credits is provided this time. Greenberg provides the background music -- also a long list of credits, including some bass guitar and drums credited to "DG" and guitar from "PC" (Paul Cebar). One track I should listen to again makes the point that creative people think up way more ideas than they can ever use, so the real skill is figuring out how to budget your time. B+(***)

David Greenberger/Bangalore: How I Became Uncertain (2011, Pel Pel): The elderly stories are short and pithy here, their frequent redundancy and cliché distancing them from Greenberger's first-person earnestness -- also the stories where the narrator identifies herself as a woman. Bangalore is a guitar-bass-drums band, more rock than the others, with Phil Kaplan's guitar sharp contrast. B+(***)

David Greenberger/Ralph Carney: OH, PA (2011, Pel Pel): Carney, who started out playing sax in the Akron rock group Tin Huey, became a long-term sideman for Tom Waits, and has a checkered solo recording career (including some Serious Jass), has done up music for a couple spoken word albums before, so he should be a natural here. However, his score is pretty scattered here, mostly keybs that get in or out of the way. As with the other discs, mostly Greenberger reading the stories of elderly people, but four cuts carry the concept one step further, with Mal Sharpe playing Greenberger interviewing subjects voiced by Greenberger. B+(**)

Steve Lehman Trio: Dialect Fluorescent (2011 [2012], Pi): Alto saxophonist, studied under Anthony Braxton and Jackie McLean, leans toward the latter in this sax trio (Matt Brewer on bass, Damion Reid on drums), closing with McLean's "Mr. E." Also covers Coltrane, Duke Pearson, and "Pure Imagination" by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, mixed in with four (or five) originals. A

Don Mark's Fire Escape: In a New Light (2011 [2012], Niromi): Front cover adds: "Jammin' Rhythm & Jazz Fusion"; I'd try to work "honkin'" in there somewhere. Mark plays tenor sax; has three previous albums, described as "solo projects." Credits are scant and don't match his website, but band includes piano/keyboards, electric bass, and drums: groove enough to set the sax off wailing. All covers, with "St. Thomas" and "Song for My Father" outstanding, as always. B+(**)

Ivo Perelman/Joe Morris/Gerald Cleaver: Family Ties (2011 [2012], Leo): Tenor saxophonist from Brazil, released a cluster of six albums a year or two ago to celebrate twenty years recording: he had to differentiate those, but here he's back to his core strength, blowing fierce free sax. The bassist and drummer create an energetic background, but the focus is rarely away from the sax. Starts with a bit of kazoo, which doesn't channel enough wind, then raises his game. After the hard stuff, he's so relaxed he opens up and soars. A-

Rampersaud Shaw Martin Neal Krakowiak: Halcyon Science 130410 (2011, Barnyard): Canadian group: Nicole Rampersaud (trumpet), Evan Shaw (alto/baritone sax), Wes Neal (bass), Jean Martin (drums, laptop, trumaphone), Tomasz Krakowiak (percussion). Only Martin has much of a discography. Group improvs, interesting moments, nicely balanced, dense but not squawky. B+(**)

Stone Quartet: Live at Vision Festival (2010 [2012], Ayler): One of those ad hoc all-star groups that are so easy to form on the avant-garde, but remain collages of individual talents, in this case: Joëlle Léandre (bass), Roy Campbell (trumpet, flutes), Marilyn Crispell (piano), and Mat Manieri (viola). Two string instruments and no drums keep this within the parameters of chamber jazz. Two pieces: one 32:20, the other 9:20, pure improv. B+(**)

Justin Walter: Stars (2011 [2012], Walter): Trumpet player, b. 1978; looks like he has one previous album, plus an EP, plus side credits, mostly with experimental rock outfits like Nomo and His Name Is Alive (appearing on the latter's Marion Brown tribute). Dense postbop here, most cuts with trombone, two or three reeds, guitar, Rhodes, bass, and drums -- none of which emerges all that distinctly. B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Clarice Assad: Home (Adventure Music)
• Lisa Marie Baratta: Summertime Jazz (self-released): April 27
• Edmar Castaneda: Double Portion (Arpa y Voz): April 17
• Andy Clausen: The Wishbone Suite (Table and Chairs)
• Fly Trio: Year of the Snake (ECM): advance, June
• Jared Gold: Goldenchild (Posi-Tone)
• Anne Mette Iversen: Poetry of Earth (Bju'ecords)
• Steve Kuhn Trio: Wisteria (ECM): advance, May 1
• Willie Nelson: Heroes (Legacy): advance, May 15
• Philippe Baden Powell: Adventure Music Piano Masters Series: Vol 2 (Adventure Music)
• Amanda Ruzza: This Is What Happened (Pimenta): April 17
• Donna Singer: Take the Day Off: Escape With Jazz (Emerald Baby)
• Eyal Vilner: Introducing the Eyal Vilner Big Band (Gut String)
• The Jens Wendelboe Big Band: Fresh Heat (Rosa): April 24

Music: Current count 19527 [19507] rated (+20), 886 [877] unrated (-9). Light week. I lost three or four days, one cooking a very nice Spanish dinner (mariscada in almond sauce), the others painting on the shed and garage. Next week will be light too, as I'm planning a little trip to see some relatives between here and the ancient family stake in Arkansas.

Still, I started with some Jazz Prospecting left over from the previous light week, so there's enough to go with here. The Michael Moore albums showed up in late December, so technically count as 2011 releases -- a publicist would no doubt have jiggered the dates, but these came straight from the source. I was delighted to get them, but they've been a bear to sort out: with each adding seemingly insignificant facets to the whole, I might have been more impressed had he boxed them up and forced me to swallow them whole.

Available Jelly: Plushlok, Baarle-Nassau, Set 1 (2007 [2011], Ramboy): Michael Moore's longest-running group, dating back to an album of that name released in 1984. Moore writes most of the material -- 5 of 7 here, the covers a trad piece from Myanmar and a very striking "Isfahan" from Billy Strayhorn -- and releases it on his label. Sextet, with Tobias Delius (also of ICP) the second sax, Eric Boeren and Wolter Wierbos the brass, Ernst Glerum on bass, and Michael Vatcher on drums. The mischief is in the horns, flipping and flying in all sorts of directions, the harmony all the more humorous. A-

Available Jelly: Plushlok, Baarle-Nassau, Set 2 (2007 [2011], Ramboy): Could have been packaged into a 2-CD set in which case I'd just say, "more is more." Actually, the three Ellington covers had my hopes up, as did a closer called "Kwela for Taylor" (whoever that is), but the rowdiness level is down a bit. Terrific kwela, by the way. B+(***)

Jon Balke/Batagraf: Say and Play (2009 [2012], ECM): Pianist, b. 1955 in Norway, has a dozen albums since 1991, most ECM. Not much piano here. Batagraf is his percussion group: Balke's credits start with tougone, darbouka, and hand drums; Helge Andreas Norbakken adds sabar, talking drums, djembe, metal percussion; and Erland Dahlen just drums, with Emilie Stoesen Christensen's vocals and Torgeir Rebodello Pedersen reading poetry (4 tracks). Beats are mostly African, maybe filtered through Cuba and back again. B+(*) [advance]

Tim Berne: Snakeoil (2011 [2012], ECM): Alto (and sometimes baritone) saxophonist, a protégé of Julius Hemphill, took some time finding himself but must now be considered a major figure. First album as a leader on ECM, although he's appeared as a key sideman a couple times, most notably on David Torn's Prezens (2007). Quartet with Oscar Noriega (clarinet, bass clarinet), Matt Mitchell (piano), and Ches Smith (drums, percussion) -- no bass (or guitar, the instrument of choice in Berne's trio). The horn interplay is complex, often scintillating. B+(***) [advance]

Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack: Cracked Refraction (2010 [2012], Porter): Oboe player, also English horn; b. 1971 in Danbury, CT ("hometown of Charles Ives"), studied at Rice and Michigan, moved to Chicago in 1996, on to Oakland in 2003. AMG lists eight records since 2000, not counting "the art-punk monstrosity" Lozenge (and who knows what else). Started avant-classical, moved into avant-jazz mostly in his Chicago phase which culminated in the album Wrack, with violist Jen Clare Paulson and drummer Tim Daisy both then and now, trombonist Jeb Bishop, and bassist Kurt Johnson. Here Anton Hatwich takes over the bass slot, and Jason Stein's bass clarinet supplants the trombone. A front line of oboe, bass clarinet, and viola may sound like a nice chamber group, but as Wrack they break into all sorts of odd fractures, refracted through the many antipodes of the group. B+(***)

Michael Campagna: Moments (2010 [2012], Challenge): Tenor saxophonist, also plays flute (a lot of flute here). Graduated University of Miami; has taught in New York, and currently in Genoa, Italy. Second album, mostly quintet with trumpet (Michael Rodriguez), piano (Robert Rodriguez), bass (Hans Glawishnig), and drums (Eric Door), plus harp (Brandee Younger) on four tracks. Postbop, aims for evanescence but gets rather squishy with all the flute and harp. B

Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi: Think Thoughts (2011, self-released): Cover only has title, but previous album didn't even have that so is listed eponymously under the artist names. Back cover lists songs and some "Ft." guests but no credits -- John Escreet and David Binney are pretty obvious, and Vikram must be the rapper on the last track. Cole is a drummer, and most of the tracks are built on frenetic beats. Artadi sings. Despite a few jazz connections, figure this as soft-core art-punk. B+(**)

Josh Ginsburg: Zembla Variations (2011 [2012], Bju'ecords): Bassist, first album, composed all eight pieces, then assembled a quartet that could not just play along but add something: Eli Degibri (tenor and soprano sax), George Colligan (piano, fender rhodes), and Rudy Royston (drums). Colligan is well established but rarely plays this fast and free on his own. Degibiri is a young Israeli with a couple of records, none this impressive. B+(***)

Holshouser, Bennink & Moore: Live in NYC (2009 [2011], Ramboy): Accordion player Will Holshouser's name is spelled right on the front cover, but misspelled two different ways on the back. He's the bedrock here, with Michael Moore's reeds building on his tone, but the oustanding performance here is by drummer Han Bennink, whose rat-tat-tat sound distinct from the start and develops into a tour de force. A-

Michael Moore Quartet: Easter Sunday (2011, Ramboy): Plays alto sax and clarinet, originally from California but settled in Amsterdam and has become a prominent member of the Dutch avant-garde scene, including a spot with the ICP Orchestra. Issued a shotgun blast of six albums at the end of 2011, mostly culled from live tapes, the sheer number and consistency of which make it hard to grade on any sort of curve. This is a quartet with piano (Harmen Fraanja), bass (Clemens van der Feen), and drums (Michael Vatcher). Runs 70:24. All originals, except for an especially nice "It Might as Well Be Spring." B+(**)

Michael Moore Quintet: Rotterdam (2008 [2011], Ramboy): With Eric Vloeimans' trumpet complementing the leader's clarinet and alto sax, Marc van Roon on piano, Paul Berner on bass, and Owen Hart, Jr., on drums. All Moore compositions, recorded live, runs 67:33. Has a light and playful air, the horn interplay developing into something remarkable. B+(***)

Michael Moore Quartet: Amsterdam (2010 [2011], Ramboy): Same lineup as the later Easter Sunday: Harmen Fraanja (piano), Clemens van der Feen (bass), Michael Vatcher (drums, saw, percussion). There are stretches where Moore's clarinet scales the heights so deftly that I find myself thinking this must be the pick of the litter. Then I wonder. B+(***)

Luis Perdomo: Universal Mind (2010 [2012], RKM): Pianist, b. 1971 in Venezuela, based in New York. Picks up a lot of side credits, notably with Miguel Zenón. Fourth album, a trio with Drew Gress and Jack DeJohnette. Nice, tight set, but within the postbop frame, not against it. B+(**)

Pete Robbins Transatlantic Quartet: Live in Basel (2010 [2012], Hate Laugh Music): Alto saxophonist, b.1978, based in New York, AMG lists four albums since 2002. Quartet with guitar (Mikkel Ploug), electric bass (Simon Jermin), and drums (Kevin Brow), offering Ploug a lot of space. B+(*)

Matthew Shipp: Elastic Aspects (2011 [2012], Thirsty Ear): Nominally a piano trio with Michael Bisio on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, although much of this is done solo, and a couple pieces feature Bisio solos -- deep arco things that contrast with the hard percussive piano spots. B+(***)

Ben Wendel: Frame (2011 [2012], Sunnyside): Saxophonist, specifies plural here, plus bassoon and melodica. Third album, postbop with piano (split between Gerald Clayton, Tigran Hamasyan, and Adam Benjamin) and guitar (Nir Felder), bass and drums -- robust in the middle, with striking sax leads. B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Amadou & Mariam: Folila (Nonesuch): advance, April 10
• Joe Chambers: Moving Pictures Orchestra: Live at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (Savant)
• Dan Cray: Meridies (Origin)
• Ari Erev: A Handful of Changes (self-released): April 17
• Wayne Escoffery: The Only Son of One (Sunnyside): April 10
• Lisa Hilton: American Impressions (Ruby Slippers)
• Sara Leib: Secret Love (OA2)
• Aruán Ortiz: Santiarican Blues Suite (Sunnyside): April 10
• Dudley Owens Aaron Wright Band: People Calling (Origin)
• Eric Reed: The Baddest Monk (Savant)
• The Ben Riley Quartet: Grown Folks Music (Sunnyside)
• The Duke Robillard Jazz Trio: Wobble Walkin' (Blue Duchess): April 17
• Jenny Scheinman: Mischief & Mayhem (self-released)
• Andrew Swift: Swift Kick (D Clef): April 17
• Take 6: One (Shanachie)
• Tholem/Parker/Cline: The Gowanus Session (Porter): April 17
• Twopool: Traffic Bins (Origin)

Before we get to the usual scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week, two front page items in the Wichita Eagle today:

• Joby Warrick, Carol Morello, Krissah Thompson: Suspect and family were stressed by deployments: Another background piece on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who massacred 16 Afghans the other day. More heart-warming stuff about what a fine soldier he was, great family guy, etc.; also financial strains: an underwater mortgage, passed up for a promotion; also his wounds, plus seeing a fellow soldier blown up just a few days before. Also this:

  Army comrades described him as a model soldier who was polite, professional and exceptionally cool under fire. A student of Middle Eastern history and customs, he often admonished younger GIs to treat noncombatants with courtesy and respect.

  "Some guys had a pretty negative attitude, but Bales wasn't like that at all," said Capt. Chris Alexander, who served with Bales in Iraq. "He said there was no need to be a jerk. Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet if you need to."

  The first two parts of his formula are advisible for anyone dealing with the public. However, it's hard to overstate how peculiar the third is, but then there's nothing else quite like being an American soldier occupying a foreign land.

• Roy Wenzl: Jobs require technology; video games can help: Starts out:

  Kaitlin Albright likes to kill computerized people in video games. She is a native of Caldwell, Kan., a little town on the Oklahoma state line; she is a 19-year-old freshman at Wichita State University. She has killed people in video games since she was 2 years old.

  She is one of those kids that baffled parents complain about, because she's addicted (her own word) to these video games. She estimates that she has spent more than 10,000 hours of her life killing people or doing other fun things in games like Call of Duty, or the Assassin's Creed, or other games. Ten thousand hours, by the way, translates into 250 work weeks, or 5 years of work.

  "Killing people is fun," she says.

  When I read she's studying to become a neurosurgeon, my gut reaction was that'll give her more opportunities to kill people. Actually, that's better than becoming a drone pilot, which is the most direct application of her skills and mindset. She's pretty much the flipside to Bales: he was trained to be desensitized so he could kill people more efficiently, whereas the issue never arose for her -- the people she learned to kill so routinely never were real, so she could easily joke about it. The argument that video games makes people smarter has been made several times (e.g., Steven Johnson: Everything Bad Is Good for You; Tom Bissell: Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter). I suspect that is precisely wrong as well: I don't doubt that kids who have them can sharpen their smarts playing video games, but I don't believe that one leads to the other. (I am pretty sure that my own vast exposure to television as a child contributed much to what I know, but I don't find much evidence of that in other people.)

And on to the usual links:

• Gail Collins: Dogging Mitt Romney: Background on the story that won't go away (v. also the New Yorker cover stage right):

  I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter on the roof of the car.

  Seamus, the dog-on-the-roof, has become a kind of political icon. You cannot go anywhere without running into him. There are Seamus T-shirts and endless Web sites. This week, the story was a New Yorker cover, with Rick Santorum playing the role of the Irish setter. [ . . . ]

  At some point -- possibly in response to the excitement about being passed by tractor-trailers while floating like a furry maraschino cherry on top of the car, Seamus developed diarrhea. And Romney, who had designated all the acceptable rest stops before beginning the trip, was forced to make an unscheduled trip to a gas station. Where he kept the family in the car while he hosed down the station wagon and the dog, then returned to the highway.

  "It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management," [Neil] Swidey wrote.

  People, does any of this sound appealing? Elect Mitt Romney and he will take the nation on the road to the future. Some of us will be stuck on the roof. The rest of us will be inside singing camp songs and waiting for the day when the master plan lets us stop to visit the bathroom. Plus, anybody who screws up on the way to the future gets the hose.

• Mike Konczal: The 1% Had a Fantastic 2010: Good chance the 2011 numbers will be even more pronounced.

  Well we finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez's updated Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (as well as the excel spreadsheet on his webpage). Timothy Noah has a first set of responses here. The takeaway quote from Saez should be: "The top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery."

  This helps explain why the Republicans (and some Democrats) are so happy to do nothing more that might promote recovery: the economy for their favorite constituency has already recovered, and in relative terms was better than ever. Noah's takeaway line: "This is an economy that was in no hurry to share what little prosperity there was with the bottom 99 percent." More from Konczal:

  The Great Recession dropped income for the bottom 99% by 11.6%, completely wiping out the meager gains of the Bush years. And crucially, while 2010 was a year of continued stagnation for the economy as a whole, the 1% began to show strong gains, even when you exclude capital gains.

  As you can image, this has increased the percentage of the economic pie that the top 1% takes home. As Saez notes, "excluding realized capital gains, the top decile share in 2010 is equal to 46.3%, higher than in 2007." [ . . . ]

  It's also worth mentioning that, pre-Recession, inequality hadn't been that high since the Great Depression, and we are looking to rapidly return to that state. It's important to remember that a series of choices were made during the New Deal to react to runaway inequality, including changes to progressive taxation, financial regulation, monetary policy, labor unionization, and the provisioning of public goods and guaranteed social insurance. A battle will be fought over the next decade -- it's been fought for the past three years -- on all these fronts. The subsequent resolution will determine how broadly-shared prosperity is going forward and whether or economy will continue to be as unstable as it has been.

  So far, that battle has almost always gone to the 1%, in large part because Republicans have been able to obstruct virtually all changes (and in lesser part because Democrats especially fond of the 1%, like Obama, haven't challenged the gross inequities of the current system). But unless significant changes are made, there will be no recovery -- much less advance -- for the 99%. There's just not enough opportunity for growth when 93% of it is slurped up by the 1%.

  You might also look at the Dow Jones chart in Paul Krugman: Taking Stock. This would be even more revealing if you plotted jobs alongside it: a number that has remained relatively stagnant while stock prices have nearly doubled.

• Paul Krugman: Ignorance Is Strength:

  One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the "high school movement" made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education. And after World War II, public support, including the G.I. Bill and a huge expansion of public universities, helped large numbers of Americans to get college degrees.

  But now one of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. [ . . . ]

  It's not hard to see what's driving Mr. Santorum's wing of the party. His specific claim that college attendance undermines faith is, it turns out, false. But he's right to feel that our higher education system isn't friendly ground for current conservative ideology. And it's not just liberal-arts professors: among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one.

  I guess Mr. Santorum would see this as evidence of a liberal conspiracy. Others might suggest that scientists find it hard to support a party in which denial of climate change has become a political litmus test, and denial of the theory of evolution is well on its way to similar status.

  But what about people like Mr. Romney? Don't they have a stake in America's future economic success, which is endangered by the crusade against education? Maybe not as much as you think.

  After all, over the past 30 years, there has been a stunning disconnect between huge income gains at the top and the struggles of ordinary workers. You can make the case that the self-interest of America's elite is best served by making sure that this disconnect continues, which means keeping taxes on high incomes low at all costs, never mind the consequences in terms of poor infrastructure and an undertrained work force.

  And if underfunding public education leaves many children of the less affluent shut out from upward mobility, well, did you really believe that stuff about creating equality of opportunity?

  So whenever you hear Republicans say that they are the party of traditional values, bear in mind that they have actually made a radical break with America's tradition of valuing education. And they have made this break because they believe that what you don't know can't hurt them.

  Probably too low for Krugman's radar, but Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has a signature program to shift funding from college prep classes to vocational training. The disturbing thing about this attack on higher education is that it reflects a significant hardening of the class strata in America. For most of my lifetime college has been touted as the path by which ambitious low- and middle-class progeny can move up in the world, and this was seen as an essential attribute of America (you know, "the land of opportunity"). Now, this Republican shift is saying: forget wasting your time on education, you're doomed to stay within the class you were born into. Meanwhile, the children of the rich go to elite colleges not to study but to be with their own kind, consolidating their class consciousness.

• Rick Perlstein: Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years:

  It suddenly feels like conservatism has gotten crazier than ever.

  Republican debate audiences cheer executions and boo an active-duty soldier because he is gay. Politicians pledge allegiance to Rush Limbaugh, a pill-popping lunatic who recently offered "feminazis" a deal: "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." Thousands of "Oath Keepers" -- "Police & Military Against the New World Order" -- swear to disobey the illegal orders certain to come down the pike once Barack Obama institutes martial law. One major Republican presidential candidate talks up indentured servitude -- and another proposes turning schoolchildren into janitors. Only 12 percent of Mississippi Republicans believe Barack Obama is a Christian. Arizona Republicans push a bill to allow bosses to fire female employees for using birth control.

  And so on and so forth, unto whatever wacky new wingnuttism just flashed over the wires today.

  But are right-wingers scarier now than in the past? They certainly seem stranger and fiercer. I'd argue, however, that they've been this crazy for a long time. Over the last sixty years or so, I see far more continuities than discontinuities in what the rightward twenty or thirty percent of Americans believe about the world. The crazy things they believed and wanted were obscured by their lack of power, but they were always there -- if you knew where to look. What's changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP.

• David Remnick: Threatened: A few years ago Remnick was a reliable apologist for Israel who could always find a silver lining no matter what Israel did, so this is an interesting turnaround:

  A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state. Many of them did their military duty in the Occupied Territories; some learned to despise the Occupation they saw firsthand, but others learned to accept the official narratives justifying what they were made to do.

  Last year, a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that fifty-one per cent of Israelis believed that people "should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the State of Israel in public." Netanyahu encourages the notion that any such criticism is the work of enemies. Even the country's staunchest ally, the United States, is not above suspicion. The current Administration has coöperated with Israeli intelligence to an unprecedented extent and has led a crippling sanctions effort against Iran, yet Netanyahu, who visits Washington this week, has shown imperious disdain for Barack Obama. In fact, the President is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew. Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes. Wolf brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak in his synagogue, marched in Selma, and, in 1973, helped found Breira (Alternative), one of the first American Jewish groups to endorse a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  Netanyahu has distaste for such associations; his gestures toward Palestinian statehood are less than halfhearted. (After he spoke of giving Palestinians their own state, his father, the right-wing historian Benzion Netanyahu, shrewdly observed, "He supports it under conditions that they will never accept.") To Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson -- the longtime casino tycoon and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich -- who owns a newspaper in Israel devoted to supporting him.

• Nate Silver: Live Coverage: Alabama and Mississippi Primaries: A lot of interesting stat-think here, fascinating for someone like me who spent many years thumbing through old almanacs of county by county voting statistics. There are hints but no firm answers why Silver's own estimates gave the victorious Santorum a 12% chance of winning Alabama and a 2% chance in Mississippi. Demographics, maybe: it is clear from the map that the three counties in Alabama with the state's largest cities were the only counties that gave Romney a lead. (Mississippi was a little messier, but Jackson and Biloxi gave Romney leads.) On the other hand, do we really want to know why the dumbest white people in America chose as they did in the nation's most uninteresting political contest?

• Matt Taibbi: Too Crooked to Fail: On Bank of America:

  At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

• Gary Trudeau: Doonesbury: First panel in a series on the political obstructions the gentlemen legislators of Texas have placed in the way of a woman trying to get an abortion. You've probably heard about this because the series has set off another round of newspapers rejecting the strip. (A no-brainer here with the Wichita Eagle, which ran it for a while on the opinion pages then dropped it altogether.) Use "next" to flip through. The rape scene occurs four days in.

• Paul Woodward: Did Israel provoke Gaza escalation to test Iron Dome?:

  Four days ago I suggested that the reason Israel assassinated the Popular Resistance Committee leader Zuhair Qaisi in Gaza may have had less to do with foiling an attack and much more to do with testing Iron Dome. Yousef at The Jerusalem Fund agrees, saying that a successful test of the missile defense system could go a long way to assuage the Israeli public's fears about retaliation from Iran following an Israeli attack. [ . . . ]

  In the glow of the test's successful outcome, Israel's defense minister Ehud Barak didn't even seem to think it was worth the effort to perpetuate the narrative that Qaisi had ever posed an imminent threat. After the militant leader's assassination, Barak said: "it is not completely clear what the plan was and where, or if it had been foiled."

  Jerry Haber (cf. Is Israel a Rational Actor?) suspects the same thing, although he holds out the alternative possibility that Netanyahu and Barak are just fucking nuts. The model assumes that if Israel attacks Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah will respond by attacking Israel, because they're just Iranian agents. That's certainly not true of Hamas, and unlikely of Hezbollah. More likely, I think, that they just wanted to stir the pot, including the fear level of their own people -- and that, rather than proof that their anti-missile defense system works, is the cover they need to start a war with Iran.

The Wichita Eagle front-page headline is "Soldier suspected in killings gets to Kansas," the piece attributed to Kansas City Star staff and wire reports. (I can't find the piece online, but it is apparently based on this piece.) It doesn't acclaim Staff Sgt. Robert Bales as a hero, but isn't everyone who signed up for the post-9/11 Global War on Terror a hero? They're automatically acclaimed when they die, as at least 6,398 have done, or when they're wounded (as Bales was, losing part of his foot), or when they receive medals (Bales is oft described as "much decorated"). So why not when they go berserk? The Army may prefer precise and unemotional control over its violence against Afghan villagers, but Bales' methodical killing of sixteen (mostly) children wasn't far out of the long line of atrocities other US "heroes" have committed. It just underscores how unfit the US military is for the difficult task of nation building, and therefore how hopeless what Obama can only describe as "the Mission" -- an abstract noun that has thus far proven impossible to define -- really is.

Some background on Bales is available here and here, and here. He is 38, was born in the Midwest, is married, has two children (3 and 4). He served three tours in Iraq, and was recently deployed to Afghanistan. He was trained as a sniper, which is to say someone who calmly and methodically picks out targets at distance, and kills them. The Pentagon describes his career as "unremarkable." A neighbor is quoted: "A good guy go tput in the wrong place at the wrong time." Happens all the time.

Problem is, if you're Afghan, this looks like stone cold murder. And if you're Afghan, you probably have a clear idea of what justice should look like -- and it's probably not that it would only be fair to ship the killer half-way around the world to a cozy cell in Kansas to let his shrinks and lawyers come up with arguments and excuses to try show that Bales is the victim here.

There is a case to be made that Bales was indeed a victim: of a president who decided to double down on the same military that had turned eight years of arrogance into abject failure, but Obama was stuck, like Rumsfeld complained earlier, with the army he inherited, and with a political culture that insists that America's heroes will prevail eventually (unless sabotaged by cowardly politicians). No one thought of the welfare of the troops before launching this war, but ever since politicians have been hiding behind their confused feelings, ignoring the fact that they were never fit for the purpose, that their deeply trained lethality ensures a string of atrocities. Anyone who seriously believes the popular counterinsurgency theories should start by building a new army; the real one doesn't work, even if some officers have learned to talk the talk.

Talking the talk, after all, has always been the easy part. What's hard is understanding you can't occupy a country you have no business in, no understanding of, and no awareness of your own alien nature. The US entered Afghanistan seeking revenge for 9/11, and never quite satisfied that itch. Overstaying its welcome, the US set up a puppet regime, then proceeded to delegitimize it by continued dominance -- Bush was too busy starting new wars to bother cleaning up after this one. Then came Obama, proving that America's best efforts were just as futile as America's worst efforts. Now he thinks he can tiptoe away without admitting fault or error, when the entire campaign has been nothing but wrong.

Bales' massacre is deeply embarrassing for Obama because there's no way to scrub away the stain. Either it was policy or not, the latter proof that we cannot manage our policy: we can't control our own troops, nor the Afghans we've trained, even less the Taliban. Even the right is abandoning this war: the carnage doesn't bother them, but they'd rather hate Muslims from a distance than try to divide and conquer them far away. And I suspect more and more we'll see the military itself turn on the mission: as good as it's been for budgets and careers, incidents like this show that the troops are wearing out, that the strain is cracking them up. Maybe they even like the idea of leaving Obama holding the bag. His statements this past week have been the most tone-deaf of his tenure.

Some more relevant links:

• Afghans angry over removal of accused U.S. soldier whose name remains concealed:

  Afghan lawmakers expressed anger Thursday over the U.S. move to fly an American soldier accused of killing 16 civilians out of the country to Kuwait, saying Kabul shouldn't sign a strategic partnership agreement with Washington unless the suspect faces justice in Afghanistan.

  Negotiations over the agreement, which would govern the presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after most combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014, were tense even before the shooting deaths of the civilians, including nine children, in southern Kandahar province on Sunday.

  The killings came in the wake of violent protests last month triggered by American soldiers who burned Qurans and other Islamic texts. Over 30 people were killed in those demonstrations, and Afghan forces turned their guns on their supposed allies, killing six U.S. soldiers.

• Rory Stewart: The West must get out of Afghanistan this year:

  Afghanistan is a tragedy: but it is not one the West can end. For a decade Nato has tried to fix a failed state and defeat the Taliban. This strategy required three things: preventing the Taliban from finding safe haven and supplies in Pakistan, creating an effective Afghan government, and winning the support of the Afghan people.

  None of this has worked. The house-to-house shooting of women and children by a US soldier yesterday feels like a terrible, final symbol. But it follows many dramatic public examples of failure. There was the anger after the burning of the Korans two weeks ago. There was the discovery, last year, that Bin Laden had been living next to a Pakistan military academy. There was President Karzai's statement last week supporting conservative social codes, targeted at women -- on International Women's Day.

• Ahmed Rashid: A deal with the Taliban is the only way out:

  Increasing numbers of Afghans would agree with what the Taliban have been arguing for almost a decade: that the western presence in Afghanistan is prolonging the war, causing misery and bloodshed. [ . . . ] Moreover, faced with an increasingly corrupt and incompetent government, Afghans are seeing fewer improvements on the ground. So-called "nation building" has ground to a halt, simple justice and rule of law is unobtainable and a third of the population is suffering from malnutrition. The people blame not just the Americans but equally Hamid Karzai and his inner circle, which gives him conflicting and contradictory advice, leading him to flip and flop on policy issues.

• Fred Kaplan: Game over in Afghanistan:

  The game is over in Afghanistan. An American presence can no longer serve any purpose. Or, rather, it can only extend and exacerbate the pathologies of this war. It is time to get out, and more quickly than President Obama had been planning. The consequences of leaving may be grim, but the consequences of staying are probably grimmer.

  Sunday's massacre in Kandahar province, in which a veteran U.S. Army staff sergeant sneaked out of his base at 3 a.m., strolled into a village, and methodically gunned down 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, is but the latest sign of a massive unraveling.

• Stephen M Walt: Why Afghanistan was Obama's biggest mistake:

  A brutal reality is that counterinsurgency campaigns almost always produce atrocities. Think My Lai, Abu Ghraib, the Haditha massacre, and now this. You simply can't place soldiers in the ambiguous environment of an indigenous insurgency, where the boundary between friend and foe is exceedingly hard to discern, and not expect some of them to crack and go rogue. Even if discipline holds and mental health is preserved, a few commanders will get overzealous and order troops to cross the line between legitimate warfare and barbarism. There isn't a "nice" way to wage a counterinsurgency -- no matter how often we talk about "hearts and minds" -- which is why leaders ought to think long and hard before they order the military to occupy another country and try to remake its society. Or before they decide to escalate a war that is already underway.

  And the sad truth is that this shameful episode would not have happened had Obama rejected the advice of his military advisors and stopped trying to remake Afghanistan from the start of his first term. Yes, I know he promised to get out of Iraq and focus on Central Asia, but no president fulfills all his campaign promises (remember how he was going to close Gitmo?) and Obama could have pulled the plug on this failed enterprise at the start. Maybe he didn't for political reasons, or because commanders like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal convinced him they could turn things around. Or maybe he genuinely believed that U.S. national security required an open-ended effort to remake Afghanistan.

  Whatever the reason, he was wrong. The sad truth is that the extra effort isn't going to produce a significantly better outcome, and the lives and money that we've spent there since 2009 are mostly wasted. That was apparent before this weekend's events, which can only make our futile task even more impossible.

Music: Current count 19507 [19482] rated (+25), 877 [874] unrated (+3). Posted Rhapsody Streamnotes last week. I thought it hit a lot of the key records so far this year, and wound up supporting two records that have been given scant respect, but I got virtually no feedback on it. It also included two jazz reviews. Makes more sense to me to include jazz that I pick up on Rhapsody with the Streamnotes rather than listing them under Jazz Prospecting. For one thing, jazz is an integral part of a healthy musical diet, and slipping some into the Streamnotes acknowledges that. The other is that Jazz Prospecting is an on-and-off project these days. It's still probable that I'll get a jazz blog together, but I haven't managed to focus much on it lately. I wound up spending most of last week priming the pump for April's Streamnotes -- thus far I have four A- records lined up (see the year-end (in progress) list if you're curious), not counting the new Todd Snider (which is expected to show up here any moment now).

No Jazz Prospecting until next week. Don't really have enough of it, and more importantly I'm midway through Michael Moore's six live releases and having a tough time singling out any one -- excellent all, none really exceptional (although the first Available Jelly may have a slight edge). Should get that done, and more, next week.

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Carter Calvert: Carter Calvert and the Roger Cohen Trio (self-released)
• Devin Gray: Dirigo Rataplan (Skirl)
• Ross Hammond Quartet: Adored (Prescott)
• Billy Hart: All Our Reasons (ECM)
• Anders Jormin: Ad Lucem (ECM)
• Masabumi Kikuchi Trio: Sunrise (ECM)
• Leslie Lewis with the Gerald Hagen Trio: Midnight Sun (Surf Cove Jazz)
• Joe Locke/Geoffrey Keezer Group: Signing (Motéma): April 10
• Aaron Novik: Secret of Secrets (Tzadik): advance
• Alan Rosenthal: Just Sayin' (self-released)
• Andy Sheppard/Michael Benita/Sebastian Rochford: Trio Libero (ECM)

Some links and comments, trying to get back onto some sort of weekly schedule:

• Tom Engelhardt: The 0% Doctrine: During AIPAC week, Obama said some things that seem intended to derail Israel's drive toward war with Iran, but he also said some things that committed the US to take charge of implementing Israel's war -- a war that, we should remind ourselves, would be unthinkable if Israel would only agree to a fair resolution of its 64-year conflict with the Palestinian people living under its occupation. Obama reiterated the cliché about all options remaining on the table: US options include the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, sufficient to turn every acre of Iran into a long-term nuclear wasteland, as well as the world's largest and most heavily armed invasion force (one that has already been used effectively on two countries bordering Iran), plus all sorts of less extreme options, like the current effort to strangle Iran economically through sanctions. What would trigger more drastic actions is evidence that Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons -- evidence which thus far has been limited to Israeli hallucinations.

  Whether he meant to or not, in his latest version of Iran war policy President Obama has built on the Bush precedent. His represents, however, an even more extreme version, which should perhaps be labeled the 0% Doctrine. In holding off an Israeli strike that may itself be nothing but a bluff, he has defined a future Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon as a new form of aggression against the United States. We would, as the president explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, be committing our military power against Iran not to prevent an attack on the U.S. itself, but a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

  And by the way, note that he didn't say, "We don't bluff." His formulation was: "I don't bluff." And that "I" should not be ignored. The Bush administration promoted a cult of presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a "unitary executive." No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term "Global War on Terror," but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified.

  The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president's private war. In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or "targeted killings" as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric Holder has just claimed for the president the "authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation." In doing so, added Turley, "Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a 'trust me' pledge." With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other words, is increasingly becoming the president's private preserve and strikes on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment. [ . . . ]

  The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of unprecedented extremity at a moment when there is no evidence that the Iranians are pursuing a bomb -- not yet at least. The "supreme leader" of their theocratic state has termed the possession of nuclear weapons "a grave sin" and U.S. national intelligence estimates have repeatedly concluded that the Iranians are not, in fact, moving to build nuclear weapons. If, however -- and it's a giant if -- Iran actually got the bomb, if a 10th country joined the nuclear club (with others to follow), it would be bad news, and the world would be a worse place for it, but not necessarily that greatly changed.

  What could change the world in a radical way, however, is the 0% doctrine -- and the trend more generally to make war the personal prerogative of an American president, while ceding to the U.S. military what was once the province and power of diplomacy.

  One thing we can be glad of is that Obama's 0% Doctrine only seems to apply to Iran. Had it been in effect when North Korea was on the verge of developing its bomb we would have been obligated to attack, launching a second Korean War. The North Koreans were better prepared to respond to such an attack, with thousands of artillery aimed at nearby Seoul (pop. over 10 million), plus hundreds or thousands of missiles that could hit more distant targets -- notably Japan. Such an attack would probably have resulted in a million or more deaths, yet was avoided by the US not having an insane policy based on political posturing to appease a foreign lobby.

  Fortunately, we've found out that we can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, and for that matter a number of other nuclear-armed states we may or may not especially like. Despite the obvious danger, no one has actually used nuclear weapons since the US lost its monopoly on them -- and they've never been used against a nuclear-armed foe, like the US or Israel. So why should Iran be any different? I can't think of any serious reason. (If, for instance, you think they're obsessed with killing Jews, wouldn't you expect them to at least discriminate against their own Jewish community? I mean, long before the "Final Solution" became policy the Third Reich had established a horrific record of villifying and attacking German Jews.)

  Paul Pillar explores this question and sensibly concludes We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran. Pillar looks at all the arguments now in circulation as to why a nuclear-armed Iran would be disastrous, and carefully picks them apart. He looks at the arguments for going to war, and at some of the ways Iran could fight back. Even if such a war didn't escalate into a huge disaster for all concerned, "surgical" air strikes are unlikely to do more than marginally slow down Iran, and certain to increase Iran's resolve to develop a deterrent against further attacks:

  In return for all of these harmful effects, an attack on Iran would not even achieve the objective of ensuring a nuclear-weapons-free Iran. Only a ground invasion and occupation could hope to accomplish that, and not even the most fervent anti-Iranian hawks are talking about that kind of enormous undertaking. Panetta's estimate that an aerial assault would set back the Iranian nuclear program by only one or two years is in line with many other assessments. Meanwhile, an attack would provide the strongest possible incentive for Iran to move forward rapidly in developing a nuclear weapon, in the hope of achieving a deterrent to future attacks sooner rather than later. That is how Iraq reacted when Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981. Any prospect of keeping the bomb out of Iranian hands would require still more attacks a couple of years hence. This would mean implementing the Israeli concept of periodically "mowing the lawn" -- a prescription for unending U.S. involvement in warfare in the Middle East. [ . . . ]

  Why would anyone, weighing all the costs and risks on each side of this issue, even consider starting a war with Iran? The short answer is that neocon habits die hard. It might seem that the recent experience of the Iraq War should have entirely discredited such proclivities, or at least dampened policymakers' inclination to listen to those who have them. But the war in Iraq may have instead inured the American public to the extreme measure of an offensive war, at least when it involves weapons of mass destruction and loathsome Middle Eastern regimes.

  Indeed, we see exactly the same fools pushing for war with Iran as led the charge into Iraq. The failure to learn anything from the last decade is as shameful as what the US did during those years.

• Paul Glastris/Ryan Cooper/Siyu Hu: Obama's Top 50 Accomplishments: A laundry list, including some stretches (e.g., 13. Improved America's Image Abroad) and sleight of hand (e.g., 5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan). Someone could take these apart point by point (e.g., top three were: Passed Health Care Reform, Passed the Stimulus, and Passed Wall Street Reform) but most are merely inadequate steps forward -- they showcase Obama's "realism" but also his essential conservatism, lack of understanding, lack of commitment to the people who elected him, and his inability or unwillingness to stick his neck out. And some (e.g., 21. Tightened Sanctions on Iran) mask major failures. Also note that none of the 50 (not even 21) refer to Israel/Palestine, the object of one of two special envoys Obama appointed among his first acts in 2009. Another item not on the list is Obama's signing of a law that helps the government prosecute embarrassing protesters.

• Arthur Goldwag: The Right Wing's Pornography of Resentment: Faced with loss of advertisers, Rush Limbaugh apologized for a couple of words, but more telling than mere name-calling is the quote below:

  The sliming that Sandra Fluke has endured -- from Rush Limbaugh, of course, but also from his rabid cheering section like Atlas Shrugged's Pam Geller ("She is banging it five times a day . . . . Calling this whore a slut was a softball") and the blogger Ace of Spades ("A shiftless rent-a-cooch from East Whoreville") -- is bizarre and over-the-top enough.

  But even weirder was Limbaugh's proposition: If "Miss Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis" expect us to pay you to have sex, "we want something for it," Limbaugh said last week. "We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." (Those words were later erased from Limbaugh's official transcript of the show; Atlantic Wire preserved them.)

• Ann Jones: Playing the Game in Afghanistan: This piece appeared before today's news that a US soldier went house-to-house in Kandahar to murder sixteen Afghan (mostly children). That's just one of many incidents showing how the US occupation in Afghanistan is self-destructing, losing "hearts and minds" not just of Afghans but of the US soldiers as well. It remains politically taboo to say anything critical of the US army and its heroic soldiers, but you have to wonder about an organization that isn't able to impress on its workers the critical importance of not burning korans or pissing on Afghan corpses. Also disconcerting is the tendency of late for Afghan soldiers to turn their guns on their trainers. The idea had been to hand the country off to reliable local troops (although I don't ever recall hearing the term Afghanization, perhaps recognition of how poorly the idea played out in Vietnam and Iraq), but Jones explains in several ways -- through history, economics, and "the Afghan sport of buzkashi" why that was bound to fail.

  Many people who know Afghanistan well, however, have warned from the beginning against this plan to train up an armed force. I'm among the naysayers, and I'll tell you why.

  First, consider what the plan proposes. The number of Afghan soldiers and police to be trained varies widely from one report to the next, but the last estimate I received directly from the Kabul Military Training Center called for 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police (who, incidentally, are also called "soldiers" and trained in a similar manner). That brings the total proposed Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) to approximately four times the number of current coalition troops in the country.

  It costs the U.S. $12 billion annually to train the army alone and the estimated cost of maintaining it beyond 2014 is $4 billion per year, of which the Afghan government says it can pay no more than 12%. Clearly, Afghanistan does not need and cannot sustain such a security force. [ . . . ]

  Second, take just a moment to do something Washington has long been adverse to -- review a little basic Afghan history as it applies to Plan A. Start with the simplest of all facts: in the country's modern history, no Afghan national army has ever saved a government, or even tried. More often, such an army has either sat on its hands during a coup d'état or actually helped to overthrow the incumbent ruler. [ . . . ]

  Another objection to spending billions on training an Afghan National Army is this: you never know whom they will shoot. The problem is not the odd rogue soldier or Talib infiltrator. The problem is that the Afghan moral code is different from ours, though still apparently invisible to our military and political leaders. [ . . . ]

  In short, for their own safety and advancement, Afghans back a winner, and if he goes into decline, they ditch him for a rising star. To spot that winner is the mark of the intelligent survivor. To stick loyally to a losing cause, as any patriotic American would do, seems to an Afghan downright stupid.

  Now, apply this to the ANA as American and NATO troops draw down in 2014. Any army intended to defend a nation must be loyal to the political leaders governing the country. Estimates among Afghan experts of how long the ANA would be loyal to Afghan President Hamid Karzai start at two weeks, and remember, 2014 is a presidential election year, with Karzai barred by the constitution from seeking another term. In other words, Obama's Plan A calls for urgently building up a national army to defend a government that will not exist before our own combat troops leave the country.

  And if that election is riddled with fraud, as the last one was? Or inconclusive? Or violently contested? Has President Obama or Secretary of Defense Panetta or anyone else given any thought to that?

  These days, as Afghan men, mostly in army and police uniforms, shoot and kill NATO soldiers on a remarkably regular basis, the American military still publicly writes off the deaths as "isolated incidents."

  But the isolation may be an American one. The connections among Afghans are evident to anyone who cares to look. [ . . . ] While some commentators speak of Afghan treachery and others detect a Taliban plot to infiltrate the security forces, I suspect something quite different. Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point. What we are watching unfold in Afghanistan is the desertion of chapandazan who have already found new khans.

• Ed Kilgore: Beyond Mitt's Small Donor Problem: The most striking thing about the Romney campaign is the concentrated money behind it. To some extent I think this is happening because it can happen: with unlimited campaign funding it makes more sense to target bigger donors.

  It's pretty well known that the virtually certain 2012 presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, has financed his campaign so far with an exceptionally successful corporate fundraising effort and has built the largest, best-financed, and above all most abrasively negative Super-PAC operation ever known. But Mitt's failure to attract small-dollar donors is less well-known, and as Paul Waldman notes at the American Prospect today, the gap between Romney and the other candidates on this score are pretty shocking. The percentage of total money raised from contributions under $200 are as follows: Rick Santorum 49%; Newt Gingrich 48%; Ron Paul 46%; Barack Obama 42% -- and Mitt Romney 10%.

  I suspect that Obama will get less from small donors this time around, partly because his first term has vindicated the idea that big donors are making sound investments, and also because so much big money in the arena makes a mockery of democracy. Rarely has any candidate presented himself so blatantly and exclusively as a tool of the top one percent as Romney (well, Steve Forbes, of course, but he wasn't much of a contender).

• Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman: Some choice quotes:

  To the extent that sacrifices need to be made, shouldn't the people who've made out like bandits this past generation be first in line? The problem with getting out of the slump is that we need to spend more. It's not that somebody needs to spend less. We have idle workers who have the skills and the willingness to work. We have idle factories. Dealing with this is not about saying somebody needs to suffer. It's saying that we need to be prepared to open the taps. We should not be using the language of sacrifice to talk about how we deal with the current slump. It's a little shocking that that shorthand rhetoric about "shared sacrifice," which is what people say when they want to sound serious, infiltrated the rhetoric from the beginning, even with a Democratic president. That's a major part of the reason we're still in this slump. [ . . . ]

  Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom. He's a certain kind of policy wonk, the kind that looks for things that are sort of centrist in how Washington defines centrist. He was talking about Social Security cuts during the 2008 primary. That's how you sound serious in our current political culture. He wasn't sufficiently distanced to step back and say that a lot of our political culture is completely insane. [ . . . ]

  I think the choice we made, really without understanding that we were making the choice, was to make Walmart jobs low paying. They didn't have to be. In a different legal environment, a megacorporation with more than a million employees might well have been a company with a union that resulted in decent wages. We think of Walmart jobs as being low wage with 50 percent turnover every year because that's the way we've allowed it to develop. But it didn't have to be that way. If the rise of big-box stores had not taken place under the Reaganite rules of the game, with employers free to do whatever they wanted to block union organizing, we might have had a different result. Part of the hysterical opposition to the auto-industry bailout was the notion that we were bailing out well-paid workers with union jobs. [ . . . ]

  What we know is that the New Deal era produced a big leveling; it basically turned us into a middle-class country, and it stuck. The question is not why it happened but why it stuck. It was unions. The thing about unions is they don't just negotiate higher wages for their members. They also have an effect on people who are not unionized. It's probably true that the union movement was a big factor in our having a largely middle-class country. The destruction of unions outside the public sector is an important factor in our no longer being a middle-class country. People say, "Oh, we can't maintain unions in the modern globalized economy." But then you see advanced countries where it works -- Canada has had some decline in unionization but nothing like ours. It was a political decision. The best generation of economic growth we've ever had was the 25 years or so after 1947, which was a period of high unionization and high marginal tax rates. This is just an excuse for what amounts to pushing down the standards of U.S. workers.

• Jane Mayer: The Kochs vs. Cato: Background on the Kochs' lawsuit to take over the Cato Institute. They helped found it, put money into it, and figure they should own it. After all, they own everything else they put money into. They even have a technical term for this: freedom.

• Alex Pareene: Sarah Palin's Hollywood Ending: On HBO's adaptation of Game Change, or at least the juicy parts on Sarah Palin.

  The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to "unfair" -- Sarah Palin doesn't know that the head of Great Britain's government is the prime minister, not the queen -- are basically plausible. This isn't Andrew Sullivan's conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It's an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to "the base" because of Palin's heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn -- "if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!" -- after "winning" her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention.

  One brief scene did reflect favorably on Palin: her contemptuous brush-off of putative future son-in-law Levi Johnston before he was paraded before the GOP Convention as a family values icon. The single most hideous trait of that convention was how they tried to spin Bristol Palin's unwed teen pregnancy into a vindication of pro-life principles, as if more unwed teen pregnancies was the movement's entire raison d'être. On the other hand, the candidate who got a free pass was McCain. Every day I'm thankful he got beat, and all the more so this week when he made headlines advocating arming dissidents in Syria.

A bizarre thing happened after the Democrats won overwhelmingly in 2008, with a record turnout of American voters electing a black man as president, with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress (including that much-touted "filibuster-proof" Senate majority): the Republican mainstream vanished from sight, and the party was taken over by the only mass force that still held a soapbox: talk radio and Fox TV. They orchestrated the faux protest movement marketed as the Tea Party, and they demanded and enforced the Republicans' no surrender/no compromise legislative strategy. The result has been a massive dumbing down of the party faithful, as their brains have become imprisoned in the contradictions of their knee-jerk rhetoric. One early indication was the insistence that government keep its hands off Social Security. Opposition to bank bailouts was matched by opposition to any kind of regulation of banks -- especially the kind that seeks to protect customers from credit card usury. Similar dynamics play out everywhere.

But the most extreme idiocies are no longer the exclusive property of the shock jocks: the long Republican presidential primary process has put the candidates out on the front lines. (Not that Rush Limbaugh hasn't tried to keep his edge, as when he insisted that if insurance companies cover the costs of birth control for women, they owe it to us to return the favor by posting tapes of themselves having sex.) But the overwhelming majority of really stupid things the right has said in the last few months has come from the mouths of front-running presidential candidates. Rick Santorum, for instance, has decided that people shouldn't go to college where they might be exposed to liberal ideas. And Mitt Romney knows that as president he won't have to care about the poor because they have their safety net. And everyone but Ron Paul wants to make sure we go to war with Iran, because diplomacy would only make us look weak. And Ron Paul wants to collapse the economy by returning to the gold standard.

A good example of this is a quote from Ryan Lizza: Life of the Party:

Santorum told the devout in Kalamazoo that the Obama Administration was a threat to their liberties, but that Romney would be only a minor improvement. "There's this angst in America," Santorum said. "Our freedoms are being taken away. Our economic freedom -- Obamacare!" The crowd booed loudly. During the debate over Obama's health-care bill, Santorum said, he bumped into the liberal broadcaster Juan Williams in the greenroom at the Fox News Channel studio in Washington. Williams, according to Santorum, said that he had just talked to someone at the White House, who told him why Obama was pushing so hard to pass the bill. "We believe Americans love entitlements, and once we get them hooked on this entitlement they will never let it go," the unnamed Obama official allegedly confided. (A spokesperson for Fox says that this is quite different from what Williams actually told Santorum.)

Santorum paused for a second to let the shock of this revelation settle in. "You see? That's how they see you," he said. "A group of people to be hooked. Like fish, like mindless fish who can just be snagged and then pulled around." And, like Obamacare, Santorum explained, Romneycare was aimed at hooking fish and snuffing out religious liberty. "So much for freedom! Governor Romney imposed on Catholic hospitals a requirement that they have to provide the morning-after pill," he said. The choice for Republicans, Santorum insisted, was just like the one they faced in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was ridiculed for being too extreme to defeat a sitting President. "The people in the Republican primaries realized that replacing Jimmy Carter with something just a little bit better wasn't enough!" he shouted. "We are great. We're Americans! We can do anything!" The crowd cheered.

Where to start? A nitpick, I guess: Fox flunky Williams is only Fox's idea of a liberal; a real liberal would never use the word "entitlement." A more apt word would be "right": we believe that Americans (all people, really) should have an equal right to high quality health care services -- something that doesn't exist today because there's more profit to be made by private agencies rationing health care in an opaque, unfree market, and those who make those profits have been able to corrupt the political system to work in their interests as opposed to the interests of the vast majority of Americans. "Obamacare" is another misleading term: the law Obama signed (officially, the Affordable Care Act) isn't a system, just a band-aid on an existing system that no one should want to lend their name to.

But what exactly makes Obamacare the one-word definition of taking away "our economic freedom"? The main effect of the law is to make it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage, and to (eventually) make it easier for people to afford to be insured. So how does more (and better) insurance impact economic freedom? For most of us, having health insurance frees us from the worry of an illness or accident we cannot afford. The alternatives are either to save ahead (the idea behind health savings accounts, which locks up a large amount of money for a worst case scenario which may never happen, and is in any case an option only available to people who have more money than they know what to do with), or hope that someone else will pick up the bill if illness or accident strikes. It's hard to see how either alternative would make one free. Of course, if you're a corporation selling health care services, free may mean something else to you: like being free to extort ever-higher prices, being free to advertise benefits and hide adverse outcomes, being free of regulation or recourse like malpractice suits. Unfortunately, the ACA doesn't do much to limit those freedoms, if that's what you want to call activities that in most other spheres of life are considered crimes.

The whole thing about Catholic hospitals smells too. Religious freedom is necessarily personal, otherwise religions would constantly battle to impose their beliefs on each other. A hospital that denied services to patients based on the religious principles of its owners would be the denier, not the observer, of religious freedom. Of course, this is a subtle point that wouldn't impress Santorum, who has repeatedly decried the separation of church and state -- showing that his misunderstanding of freedom of religion is total.

The fish thing is equally bizarre. What he's basically describing is his fear that a government that does things for the people might in turn be supported by those people. That would seem to be the very essence of democracy, so you have to wonder about someone who thinks that people who understand democracy and vote their interests are "mindless fish." From the dawn of democracy the rich have feared that their enfranchised lessers would use their votes to help themselves, but they've usually seen education as a way of training the masses to respect their betters. Bush's desire to turn schools into test-taking factories reflected this position, but conservatives like Santorum distrust any process that even suggests the possibility of learning and thinking, especially one that costs the rich money -- an unconscionable transfer since the rich have their own schools, as do Santorum's religious favorites.

Santorum's defense of extremism is, of course, crassly self-serving and otherwise ludicrous -- even the idea that a second helping of Reagan would be a good thing is a horrendous thought. But then he does do something classically Reagan-like, as he reduces his campaign take-home message to a self-flattering chant. Why, after all, try to present a logical argument, especially after deciding that reasoning is enemy turf, when you can just whip yourself up into a nonsensical frenzy?

Santorum is probably the most extremely dippy of the Republicans' remaining presidential candidates, but they're all more or less like that. They've given up on reason, and have no real plans other than to make the rich richer and to further reduce the safety net for everyone else. They hate government and campaign to take it over so they can wreck it further. And all they have to draw on is the emotional fever pitch of truisms that are ultimately no deeper than "we're great" -- plus a lot of money and a well-oiled media.

No big surprise, but Rick Santorum won the Kansas Republican caucuses today, with 51.2% of the vote, compared to 20.9% for Mitt Romney (so much for Kobach's endorsement), 14.4% for Newt Gingrich, and 12.6% for Ron Paul (so much for Koch's commitment to libertarianism). By the way, total vote in the caucus was 29,857, which works out to 1.7% of the number of registered voters in KS. Ain't democracy grand?

I mostly blame the shortfall here -- I think this is the second shortest list of the last several years -- on the Detroit trip, which wiped out at least a third of the month. Until close to the end I thought I'd come up with an especially short A-list, but three items fell into my lap in the last few days -- two thanks to tips (Tatum for Prinzhorn, Monsen for Gayle). Could be some of the nine high-B+ records just need a little more time. (Cloud Nothings, Imperial Teen, and Sleigh Bells all got bumped up once already after rechecking.) One change from past years is that I've decided that Rhapsody jazz will appear here instead of in the currently off-and-on Jazz Prospecting. I'm also leaning towards putting previously unissued vault material here instead of in Recycled Goods -- Thomas Anderson is one case where that made sense.

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 February 3. Past reviews and more information are available here.

Air: Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (2012, Astralwerks): The French electronica duo, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, attempt a retrospective soundtrack to Georges Méliès's 1912 film (which you may more likely recognize from Martin Scorsese's film Hugo). From the first drum rumble this doesn't sound like a soundtrack: the music not only develops in the foreground, the occasional words are more than enough to drive the "fantastic trip to the moon." A-

Oren Ambarchi: Audience of One (2012, Touch): Australian guitarist, of Iraqi-Jewish descent, with twenty albums since 1999, with connections to metal and avant-garde. Mostly plays guitar, often tricked up. Four pieces here, the big one a 33:22 piece of industrial grunge called "Knots" -- takes its time coming around, but it has plenty of time. The other three pieces are 8:20 max, a cover called "Fractured Mirror" from Ace Frehley's 1978 solo album (recently graded D+ by Tatum). It's actually just a repeated riff that could go on a lot longer before wearing its welcome out. B+(***)

Thomas Anderson: The Moon in Transit (Four-Track Demos, 1996-2009) (1996-2009 [2012], Out There): Singer-songwriter originally from Oklahoma, cut an obscure album I liked a lot in 1988, a few more of note after that, but never became big enough for this to qualify as "odds and sods" -- more like a slow-gestating next album. Several striking songs ranging from the Donner Family to antihistamines to Warren Smith, packed with spooky aura to fill out the four tracks. A-

Carolina Chocolate Drops: Leaving Eden (2011 [2012], Nonesuch): Trio, inspired by the black string bands of the 1920s, with banjo and fiddle, and mostly old-time songs that don't sound so old-timey, perhaps because the band feels free to build on them without hewing to convention or stereotype. This does jump around a lot, the various looks not quite cohering although there are remarkable bits -- not least Rhiannon Giddens' acapella closer ("Pretty Bird"), not that you'd want many more like that. B+(***)

Chiddy Bang: Breakfast (2012, Virgin): Philadelphia hip-hop duo, Chidera "Chiddy" Anamerge and Noah "Xaphoon Jones" Beresin; the former held the Guinness record for longest freestyle rap, but this is pretty tight, playing both sides of the underground/pop divide, the latter with sampled choruses and even some Nelly "oohs" on top of deft rhymes. One song identifies with U. Penn, enough to suggest they're the reason Rick Santorum doesn't want the youth of America to go to college. Actually, they went to Drexel. A-

Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory (2012, Carpark): Guitar-bass-drums band from Cleveland, has a lo-fi garage sound, a slightly squeak voice in Dylan Baldi. They can tighten up tunes, or break out a bit, and the more you play it the more they turn their ordinary skills into something impressive, albeit limited. Second or third album, give or take an EP -- which this one barely exceeds: eight songs, 33:47. B+(***)

Coldplay: Mylo Xyloto (2011, Parlophone): Arena-level band, dominated by Chris Martin's piano and given to soaring space pop -- something I've often found myself enjoying, although I can't recall them ever hitting so many sour notes before, or just getting on my nerves. B-

Chick Corea/Eddie Gomez/Paul Motian: Further Explorations (2010 [2012], Concord, 2CD): The bassist and drummer suggest that Corea has developed an interest in Bill Evans, and the songlist bears that out: of 19 songs, 5 are by Evans, others are closely associated; one each is by Gomez, Motian, and Scott LaFaro, and Corea wrote an original called "Bill Evans" (one of three, plus a group credit). Of course, this doesn't much sound like Evans: Corea is an incurably extroverted player so this has a brashness to it you almost never got with Evans. But, like his Bud Powell project from a while back, this does bring Corea back to his jazz focus. B+(**)

Dion: Tank Full of Blues (2012, Blue Horizon): Smart move, refashioning himself as a blues singer since 2005's Bronx in Blue, much as he turned into a folksinger in the 1960s when doo wop went out of fashion and Bob Dylan came in. B+(**)

Escort: Escort (2011 [2012], Tirk): Brooklyn disco group, principally Dan Balis and Eugene Cho with a live and that grows to 17 members. First album after singles and remixes going back to 2006. Leads off with a Kid Creole move, but that's only one of many rips they know. Nearly every song got sharper on the second play, and I could imagine dancefloor exposure bringing them home. B+(***)

Jay Farrar/Will Johnson/Anders Parker/Yim Yames: New Multitudes (2012, Rounder): Lyrics by Woody Guthrie, whose name looms larger on the cover than the artists who had to write some music to give the songs life -- Farrar best known for Uncle Tupelo, Johnson for Centro-Matic, Yames (as Jim James) for My Morning Jacket. They go for a country rock sound with extra guitar overhang -- that seems to be Parker's specialty. B+(**)

First Aid Kit: The Lion's Roar (2012, Wichita): Two sisters, Johanna and Klara Soderberg, from Sweden, dabble in Americana -- been described as "the Swedish answer to the Pierces," speaking of questions you never would have thought to ask. The harmonies are rich at first, then overly so. And they don't always stay in character, and can get real lost when they don't. B-

Galactic: Carnivale Electricos (2012, Epitaph): New Orleans jazz-funk-jam band, about a dozen albums since 1996, first I've heard. Some zydeco samples (or guests) shuffled into the heavy funk beats, as well as various Nevilles and Mystikal. The guests offer some variation to the loud, monotonous beat but not much more. B

Charles Gayle Trio: Streets (2011 [2012], Northern Spy): Tenor saxophonist, former street busker, found God through Ayler and carried on the flame, now into his 70s. Trio with Larry Roland on bass and Michael T.A. Thompson on drums. He always runs the risk that his discordance will blur into one long shmear, but he sticks to basics here, as clear and forceful and transcendental as anything he's done in many years. A-

Grimes: Visions (2012, 4AD): Singer-songwriter from Vancouver, Claire Boucher, based in Montreal, self-released two cassettes in 2010, debuts on a well-distributed label. Music electronic, choppy but soft-edged, with thin, high vocals adding to the effect, for now a bit distant. B+(*)

Himanshu: Nehru Jackets (2012, Greedhead): Aka Heems, of Das Racist, with one of three mixtapes reportedly spawned by the combine this year -- the only one people talk much about, probably because it's got the whole package going for it, including the denser song the progression of Das Racist tapes has been aiming toward. Plus more cameos -- not necessarily a plus, but seems to be part of the cost of fame. A- [dl]

Homeboy Sandman: Subject: Matter (2012, Stones Throw, EP): Six songs, 22:08, claims his songs break new ground for hip-hop, and there's something to that -- "Canned Goods" is not just about charity but about making charity work. Some of the rhymes appear forcibly twisted, but he finds rhythm in that. B+(***)

Homeboy Sandman: The Good Sun (2010, High Water Music): Full-length debut, opposite problem of the EP: way too much stuff to sort through, at least with the attention span I'm stuck with here. Beats are tight, rhymes can feel forced, but any given couplet is likely to register. B+(***)

Hospitality: Hospitality (2012, Merge): Brooklyn band, had an eponymous EP in 2008 and now comes out with an LP with the same name. Amber Papini sings, plays guitar, gets her name on all the songs along with the band's name. Guitar band, but takes a surprising turn here and there. Ten songs, 32.53. B+(*)

Imperial Teen: Feel the Sound (2012, Merge): Possibly the most consistent alt-rock group to emerge in the 1990s, partly because they take their time -- this is only their fifth studio album since 1996. Male and female harmonies, gives them a light sound with some snap and depth. Still don't quite feel it all, but the front-loaded fast ones snapped in on the second play, and I wouldn't bet against this growing. B+(***)

Ital: Hive Mind (2012, Planet Mu): Electronica from Daniel Martin-McCormick, debut as Ital but has worked through several other aliases/groups. First piece works off a repeated title riff of "Don't Matter (If You Love Him)" for ten minutes; the rest dispenses with the vocals, keeping tight beats with an underwater feel. B+(***)

K'Naan: More Beautiful Than Silence (2012, Octone, EP): Somali-Canadian rapper with some stopgap product -- five songs, 19:08 -- three years after his second terrific album dropped. Nelly Furtado helps on the opener. The optimism of "Coming to America" ("I hope we're going to have a really good time") strikes me as misplaced, and the rest has yet to add up. B+(*)

Lambchop: Mr. M (2012, Merge): Nashville band, albeit securely ensconsed in the commercial netherworld, even after a dozen albums and countless ephemera. Kurt Wagner is the mainstay, opting for a low-key ballad groove, framed initially by movie music strings, all very noir. Wonder if the storytelling fleshes out the mood music? B+(*)

Mark Lanegan Band: Blues Funeral (2012, 4AD): Ex-front man of Screaming Trees, a 1980s group I never bothered with until way too late, his solo career starting in 1990 before the band expired in 2000. As straightforward as its blues reference suggests, his voice haunting, best suited for dirges which can go loud like "Quiver Syndrome" or soft like "Harborview Hospital" but "Tiny Grain of Truth" makes me wonder about even that. B

Kellie Pickler: 100 Proof (2011 [2012], BNA): Finished 6th place on American Idol, generally the kiss of death, but went country, listened hard to Tammy Wynette, picked up Miranda Lambert's producer and a whole lot of pedal steel guitar, and stuck close enough to neotrad convention that her third album sounds real fine, even if the depth of her sass doesn't extend much beyond "stop cheating on me/or I'll start cheating on you." B+(**)

Prinzhorn Dance School: Clay Class (2012, DFA): A husand-wife duo, Suzi Horn and Tobin Prinz, although sources also cite Dr. Hans Prinzhorn as a name source. Second album. He plays drums and takes most of the vocal leads, while she sketches out bass lines that recall, in vastly simplified form, Gang of Four, New Order, Cabaret Voltaire (especially), while they nail their clinical dance vibe precisely. A-

School of Seven Bells: Ghostory (2012, Vagrant): Electropop group, formerly with the Deheza twin sisters harmonizing, now with just Alejandra Deheza. Something of a loss, although the churning beats of "When You Sing" make up lost ground. B+(*)

Skrillex: Bangarang (2011 [2012], Big Beat/Atlantic, EP): Sonny Moore, has several previous EPs, seems to prefer the short form perhaps because it would be hard to handle anything hour-long that's this loud and cartoon loopy. This one ran seven songs, 30:08, when it came out as digital on Dec. 27, but the CD adds a 6:54 bonus track: "Skrillex Orchestral Suite by Varien" -- trips my classical gag reflex from the start, although I'm half-tempted to find humor in it somewhere. But then I'm less amused by his other excesses. B

Sleigh Bells: Reign of Terror (2012, Mom + Pop Music): Duo: Derek Miller writes songs and Alexis Krauss sings them. Second album, not as consistent as Treats because they're trying more different things, starting with a bit of live "True Shred Guitar," winding on between pop and metal, thin and brittle, the pop hooks buried waiting for fans to dig them out. B+(***)

Ringo Starr: Ringo 2012 (2012, Hip-O): The slightest Beatle, not that George and Paul didn't wind up making it a race to the bottom, but he's been steadily productive, with 20-some records over 40-some years. Not that he works hard: nine songs including two covers and co-authors on the rest, lots of friends to lend a party atmosphere not to mention Beatles-y guitar licks. The drumming and extra percussion, at least, is his signature -- good to hear, but even that wears thin, even over 28:50. C+

Tennis: Young & Old (2012, Fat Possum): Husband-wife duo from Denver (Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley), plus a drummer (good move, that). Second album. She does most of the singing, and he keeps up their jangly guitar sound. B+(*)

The 2 Bears: Be Strong (2012, Southern Fried): UK duo -- Joe Goddard (of Hot Chip) and Raphael Rundell (aka Raf Daddy) -- on their first album after three EPs last year. Synthbeats and synth horns, leans heavily on Jamaica without falling into a dub pit. Neither singer has much, but they sweeten up in harmony, and "Time in Mind" opens up so nicely I looked up the credit (but didn't find one). B+(*)

Sharon Van Etten: Tramp (2010-11 [2012], Jagjaguwar): Singer-songwriter from New Jersey with a stop in Tennessee; has a bit of a folkie rep I don't hear, but when the roots get this turgid you lose interest in sorting them out. Sometimes I get the feeling of Kate Bush trapped in Stuart Dempster's echo chamber: dub without any step. B-

Wire: The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011 (2011 [2012], Pink Flag): Live, not vintage enough to be part of their bootlegs series. I don't know their songbook well enough to be able to pick out what comes from where, how much is new (or at least recent), etc., but sonically they jump around the eras, the denser the better. After getting more applause than seems warranted for "Red Barked Trees" (title song from their latest), they launch into a 10:48 "Pink Flag" (title song from their first), which doesn't leave me missing their lost brevity. B+(*)

Betty Wright and the Roots: Betty Wright: The Movie (2011, S-Curve): A minor soul singer who broke in young but late in 1968 and has little to show since 1993 gets a revival in a soundtrack tie-in. Not sure whether this is all new, although the rap refrains thrown in by her backing band must be, and the band can do retro on demand. Runs long, stretching 14 songs to 77:41. B+(**)

Zola Jesus: Conatus (2011, Sacred Bones): Nika Roza Danilova, b. 1989 in Wisconsin, has a couple albums and/or EPs -- sometimes hard to tell. Also has a voice that portends gloom, and a drumbeat that defies it, an effective combination. B+(*)

Music: Current count 19482 [19444] rated (+38), 874 [874] unrated (-0). Posted Recycled Goods and A Downloader's Diary this past week. Rhapsody Streamnotes is up next -- probably tomorrow. Didn't get much done in February, so the month's haul will be light. Meanwhile, there's barely enough Jazz Prospecting to bother with, so I'll include it here.

A couple other things are worth noting. There's a 1969 EWPnJ poll going on, so I dumped out my database and tried scanning through the Discogs 1960s list (only about 5000 US records) to build up a 1969 Record List. The list is sorted alphabetically within grades, so isn't easy to read as a ballot. However, what I sent in looked like this (extended to 30 slots, since you miss a lot if you don't):

1. The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground (Verve) 20
2. The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin (A&M) 14
3. The Flamin' Groovies: Supersnazz (Epic) 12
4. The Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed (Abkco) 10
5. Miles Davis: In a Silent Way (Columbia) 10
6. Creedence Clearwater Revival: Willy and the Poor Boys (Fantasy) 8
7. Amalgam: Prayer for Peace (FMR) 8
8. The Band: The Band (Capitol) 6
9. The Original Delaney & Bonnie: Accept No Substitutes (Elektra) 6
10. The Stooges: The Stooges (Elektra) 6
11. Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bayou Country (Fantasy)
12. Sly and the Family Stone: Stand (Epic)
13. Neil Young: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Reprise)
14. Harry Partch: The World of Harry Partch (Columbia)
15. James Brown: Soul on Top (Verve)
16. Taj Mahal: Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home (Columbia)
17. Aretha Franklin: Soul '69 (Atlantic)
18. Miles Davis: Bitches Brew (Columbia)
19. Dusty Springfield: Dusty in Memphis (Atlantic)
20. Eddie Gale: Black Rhythm Happening (Blue Note)
21. Creedence Clearwater Revival: Green River (Fantasy)
22. Miles Davis: Filles de Kilimanjaro (Columbia)
23. Charles Wuorinen: Time's Encomium (Nonesuch)
24. Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin (Atlantic)
25. John McLaughlin: Extrapolation (Polydor)
26. Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica (Reprise)
27. Johnny Otis: Snatch and the Poontangs (Kent)
28. Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air (Columbia)
29. Elvis Presley: Suspicious Minds (RCA)
30. Mississippi Fred McDowell: I Do Not Play No Rock 'n' Roll (Capitol)

Jazz Prospecting

Not a lot here, but enough to report, especially since I've started to dig into some of the better prospects I socked away for the trip then didn't get to. Still pondering what to do about a longer term gig/framework, although I'm wearying of thinking about it.

Juhani Aaltonen and Heikki Sarmanto: Conversations (2010 [2012], TUM, 2CD): By no means the only important figures in Finnish jazz, but the tenor saxphonist and pianist, respectively, were its first notable figures, their ambitions announced in their early-1970s group the Serious Music Ensemble -- not that there wasn't a certain amount of joking even there. Sarmanto's early 1970s groups drove fusion to the edges of avant excess, while his 1990s UMO Orchestra placed bets on jazz tradition. With Sarmanto and on his own, Aaltonen has always offered a clear and eloquent voice. And while I'm actually an admirer of his albums with strings and his frequent forays into flute, I'm pleased to note that he sticks to tenor sax here, simply accompanied, as soulful as ever. A-

Tony R Clef: Tuesday Afternoon (2011, Big Round): Guitarist, first record, AMG saw Purcell as the first composer and slotted it as classical, but he also does three Brazilian tunes, two relatively arty Beatles/Kinks tunes ("When I'm 64," "Sunny Afternoon"). Solo guitar, light and airy but distinctly picked. B+(*)

Scott DuBois: Landscape Scripture (2011 [2012], Sunnyside): Guitarist, has a couple albums, notably Banshees (2008). Quartet, with Gebhard Ullmann (tenor sax, bass clarinet), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Kresten Osgood (drums). If I'm a bit more ambivalent about this one, it's probably because Ullmann, uncharacteristically, stays well within the lines. B+(***)

Floratone: Floratone II (2012, Savoy Jazz): File under guitarist Bill Frisell. All of the pieces are group-credited, with Matt Chamberlain (drums), Lee Townsend, and Tucker Martine -- the latter two are credited with "production" which ranges from sax-sounding synths to electronic beats to other disturbances of the aether, but there are also guests to account for (notably Ron Miles' trumpet and Eyvind Kang's viola). B+(***)

Vijay Iyer Trio: Accelerando (2011 [2012], ACT): From Iyer's liner notes: "today's context sounds like acceleration: rising inequality, populist revolution, economic crisis, climate change, moore's law, global connectivity. as the flow of information gets faster, denser and more intricately networked, our attention shifts to the larger forms, the slower tempos that gracefully evolve like the spiral arms of a hurricane." Some issues there: I'd say information is getting sucked into individual fractal wormholes, so the more you have the less good it does you, leading not to a bigger-picture view but to an ever tinier one. For that matter, those graceful slower tempos are less striking than the frenetic ones, but this piano trio is all about motion, not just speeding up and slowing down but dodging in and out. A-

Jeremy Pelt: Soul (2011 [2012], High Note): Trumpet player, b. 1976, early in his career was tabbed as a "rising star" due to his exceptional chops, but nine albums since 2002 don't offer much more than the whiff of talent. This seems at cross purposes at first, as he clearly wants to take it slow and aim for quiet storm, but saxophonist JD Allen would rather burn, and the rhythm section -- Danny Grissett on piano, Dwayne Burno on bass, Gerald Cleaver on drums -- is happier with Allen. Joanna Pascale contributes a vocal to the slow side. Pelt can hang either way. B+(**)

Tan Ping: Paradise (2011, Goody Heart Productions): Singer-songwriter, grew up in Taiwan, don't know much else. First album, brimming with hopefulness, good wishes, determination; not a cynical bone in her body. B

Wallace Roney: Home (2010 [2012], High Note): Major league trumpet player, 16th album since 1987. Basically a hard bop quintet with electric keybs, split between three drummers (none taking command). Once again, brother saxophonist Antoine Roney does most of the heavy lifting, with the trumpet weaving around expertly. Sound strikes me as thin, distant, murky. Perhaps more volume would open it up? B+(*)

Matt Wilson's Arts & Crafts: An Attitude for Gratitude (2011 [2012], Palmetto): Drummer, has a dozen albums since 1996, composed 3 of 11 pieces here, plus one each from group members Gary Versace (piano, organ, accordion) and Martin Wind (bass). The other group member is Terell Stafford (trumpet, flugelhorn), and he's the one who carries the melodies. Covers hop all over the place, from "Happy Days Are Here Again" to "Bridge Over Troubled Water" via John Scofield, Jaco Pastorius, Cannonball Adderley, and Hugh Hopper. I read a blindfold test with Wilson where I was struck by his ability to find merit in everything. He adds merit too. B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Conrad Herwig/Richie Beirach/Jack DeJohnette: The Tip of the Sword (RadJazz)
• Jim Holman: Explosion! (Delmark)
• Anders Nilsson: Night Guitar (Soundatone)
• Jeff Parker Trio: Bright Light in Winter (Delmark)
• Karen Johns & Company: Peach (Peach)
• Thea Neumann: Lady & the Tramps (self-released)
• Enrico Pieranunzi: Permutation (CAM Jazz)
• Ro Sham Beaux (Red Piano)
• Andrea Veneziani: Oltreoceano (self-released): March 13

Short month, especially with that two-week donut hole in the middle when I took a break from the warmest winter in memory to chill out in Detroit. Only reason there's much to show for here is my attempt to match up Concord's OJC reissues with gaps in my experience. I thought I might add some more recent reissues under "Briefly Noted" but Concord's own website makes this difficult: they list the Terry and Tyner records as new "Orrin Keepnews Editions" but every other source dates those reissues to 2007, and I gave up trying to figure out what's what. Thought I'd find more winners there, but I had already picked out the classics -- see the previously-graded list at the end of "In Series."

The Descendants [Music From the Motion Picture] (1930-2010 [2011], Sony Masterworks): The film, set in Hawaii, stars George Clooney as the trustee of a large parcel of virgin Hawaiian beachfront property, inherited from ancestors including King Kahehameha and the haole King family. He is faced with two grave decisions: to liquidate the trust, making his many cousins rich, and to come to grips with his wife's coma and approaching death. The soundtrack cushions the somber subject matter with gentle but equally somber Hawaiian classics dating as far back as Sol Hoopii in 1930. Works as a much better than average primer, probably because it avoids the fake tourist cheer without denying the archipelago's natural lushness. A-

René Marie: Vertigo (2001, MaxJazz): Jazz singer, wrote 3 of 11 songs here. Didn't start until in her 40s, but she's brimming with poise and savvy, nailing songs from "Dem Dere Eyes" to "Blackbird" with original turns, scatting effectively, slotting in choice bits of Jeremy Pelt trumpet, Chris Potter sax, and John Hart guitar without losing her command. Only the title song overreaches, otherwise you wouldn't suspect that she has any limits. She got in trouble some years later slipping "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" into the middle of "The Star Spangled Banner" -- an idea that must have come natural after her mash-up of "Dixie" and "Strange Fruit" here. A- [R]

In Series:

By the 1980s Fantasy Records had picked up a number of significant jazz labels, especially from the 1950s and 1960s -- notably Contemporary, Prestige, Riverside, Milestone, and Pablo. In 1983 they inaugurated a series of reissues under the Original Jazz Classics (OJC) rubric. Since the original artwork was used, the original branding was also easily discerned, so I tend to list them as, e.g., Prestige/OJC. The series eventually totalled more than 1000 titles. When Concord bought Fantasy, they should have folded their own superb catalog into the series, but instead they made a mess of everything, starting with massive deletions. Afterwards, they've done selective reissues, with one series each spotlighting legendary producers Orrin Keepnews and Rudy Van Gelder. In 2010 they started with another, called OJC Remasters with a distinct orange band near the spine. As best I can figure out, there are 20 CDs in this series -- they also seem to be available in a box set, but maybe not in the US.

I figured I'd use this as an opportunity to fill in my gaps: I've previously heard 8 of the records, leaving 12 unheard, so I streamed them from Rhapsody and wrote the following notes. The other 8 are listed below with my old grades. Perhaps no big surprise that the ones I picked up long ago are, on average, far better. That is, after all, the point of using reviews and experience to seek out what you really like.

Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans: Know What I Mean? (1961 [2011], Riverside/OJC): Starts with solo piano, then Adderley's alto sax enters in a warm rush; with Percy Heath and Connie Kay, who (unlike Paul Motian) wouldn't dream of tripping the leaders up: the result is that the oft-introspective pianist flows exuberantly -- needless to say, so does Cannonball. A- [R]

Chet Baker: It Could Happen to You: Chet Baker Sings (1958 [2010], Riverside/OJC): Either you're touched by the poignant pathos in Baker's voice or repulsed; he has no range, scant command of nuance, and no tricks up his sleeve (other than his plaintive trumpet, rarely in evidence here), but for once he is utterly at ease with the melodies: try the bonus "You Make Me Feel So Young" -- probably cut from the original album because he sounds so skillful. B+(**) [R]

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers: Ugetsu (1963 [2011], Riverside/OJC): Live at Birdland, with one of Blakey's strongest lineups: Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, and Reggie Workman, stretched out on CD from 6 to 10 tracks; lots of energy, but the sound could be clearer, and they ramble a bit. B+(**) [R]

Ornette Coleman: Something Else!!!! (1958 [2011], Contemporary/OJC): With his white plastic alto sax, scratch tone, and knack for breaking the rules and making them work, Coleman's debut album portends the shape to come, but the piano has yet to make the break and seems out of place -- despite the impressive chops Walter Norris brings to the job; easy to underrate compared to what he did in the next two years, or to overrate it if you look for prophecy. B+(***) [R]

Miles Davis/Sonny Rollins: Dig (1959 [2010], Prestige/OJC): Davis's first album for Prestige, "featuring" Rollins -- released as a 10-inch at the time, reissued as an LP in 1956, with two bonus cuts added to the 1991 CD; he was 25 at the time, Rollins 21, and unherald Jackie McLean 19; basic bebop, most a dense thrash of rhythm with long, fast horn runs; the slower ones more articulate. B+(**) [R]

Bill Evans Trio: Explorations (1961 [2011], Riverside/OJC): Piano trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, the studio record before the trio's justly famous Village Vanguard records; scattered covers, sometimes remarkable, more often (to me, at least) inscrutable. B+(***) [R]

Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson: Ella and Oscar (1975 [2011], Pablo/OJC): An inevitable pairing as Norman Granz tries to extend his old label magic into his new label; Peterson is personable as always, and Fitzgerald knows her songbook, but this doesn't quite mesh. B+(*) [R]

Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass: Easy Living (1986 [2011], Pablo/OJC): Guitarist Pass produce a widely acclaimed solo album in 1973 called Virtuoso, and he worked that title to death in subsequent years, but he just adds frosting here -- Fitzgerald is the real virtuoso, standing nearly every song up, her timing and phrasing impeccable. B+(***) [R]

Vince Guaraldi Trio: Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus (1962 [2010], Fantasy/OJC): Front cover has the hit song "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" in larger type than the title, and indeed the melody jumps right out at you; otherwise the piano trio's impressions make for minor pleasures, like the slightly oblique "Moon River." B+(**) [R]

Thelonious Monk: Thelonious Alone in San Francisco (1959 [2011], Riverside/OJC): Solo piano, something I've never got the hang of with Monk, probably because I expect that any pianist who would try such a thing must at least use both hands, preferably with a little extra on the left; the dissonances in Monk's original pieces create their own rhythm, especially on an opening "Blue Monk" that holds up especially well, but the most distinct thing about his covers is their simplicity. B+(**) [R]

Wes Montgomery: Boss Guitar (1963 [2010], Riverside/OJC): With Mel Rhyne on organ and Jimmy Cobb on drums, your basic Montgomery album with his sweet, slick guitar turned inward, not nearly as imposing as the title proposes. B+(**) [R]

Cal Tjader/Stan Getz: Sextet (1958 [2011], Fantasy/OJC): With Eddie Duran's guitar and Tjader's Latin vibes, this anticipates Getz's 1964 foray into bossa nova -- again, the sax seems lighter than air, floating away from the bubbly percussion and slinky guitar. B+(***) [R]

Other titles in the series that I already had graded from previous editions:

• Chet Baker: In New York (1958, Riverside/OJC) B+
• Dave Brubeck: Jazz at Oberlin (1953, Fantasy/OJC) A-
• Bill Evans: Waltz for Debby (1961, Riverside/OJC) A-
• Thelonious Monk: Monk's Music (1957, Riverside/OJC) A
• Thelonious Monk: Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (1957-58, Jazzland/OJC) A-
• Joe Pass: Virtuoso (1973, Pablo/OJC) B+
• Art Pepper: Meets the Rhythm Section (1957, Contemporary/OJC) A
• Sonny Rollins: Way Out West (1957, Contemporary/OJC) A

Briefly Noted

Jim Black: Alasnoaxis (2000, Winter & Winter): Avant-drummer plugs in, with electric bass (Skuli Sverisson) and guitar (Hilmar Jensson), and Chris Speed on tenor sax or clarinet to smooth things out or rough them up. B+(***)

Oscar Peterson: Unmistakable (2011 [2012], Sony Masterworks): An update on the old piano roll trick, taking some kind of performance tape and tweaking it to drive a mechanical piano contraption, aiming for pristine sound -- the "binaural stereo" takes are billed as "the ultimate headphone experience" -- and sound personable enough to pass any blindfold test; Peterson is popular and distinctive enough that's an easily attainable goal. B+(*)

Clark Terry Quintet: Serenade to a Bus Seat (1957, Riverside/OJC): After duty with both Basie and Ellington, a straight hard bop set with one of the era's premier rhythm sections -- Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums -- and the ever-combative Johnny Griffin on tenor sax; Terry holds his own, and shines on "Stardust" when Griffin lays out. B+(***) [R]

McCoy Tyner: Horizon (1979 [1980], Milestone): Fast, not least the piano leads, but excessively fleshed out with two saxes or flutes (George Adams and Joe Ford), John Blake's violin, and Guilherme Franco's congas; sweeps you away at first, but grows tiresome by the end. B [R]

Betty Wright: I Love the Way You Love (1972, Alston): Soul singer from Miami on her second album, just 19 but a seasoned pro -- joined her family gospel group at 3 and picked her stage name at 11 -- with her biggest hit ("Clean Up Woman") behind her, but close enough she recaps it here. B+(**) [R]

Legend: B+ records are divided into three levels, where more * is better. [R] indicates record was reviewed using a stream from Rhapsody ([X] is some other identified stream source; otherwise assume a CD). 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 94, see the archive. Total records reviewed: 3181 (2783 + 398).

by Michael Tatum

I was going to extoll the virtues of my new digital, er, "entertainment unit," which plays both hard discs and MP3s, making the additional yuks in the newly expanded trash section possible. Then, my iPod's wake/sleep button stuck. Oh, well -- at least there are ways around that. These are the first of my findings for 2012, with a heavy emphasis on co-ed energy, plus a bit of trash from late, late 2011 I couldn't leave, shall we say, untouched.

Thomas Anderson: The Moon in Transit (Four-Track Demos 1996-2009) (Out There) To give you insight into the quaintness of these "four-track demos," no one records on portable analog studios anymore: technology has evolved to the point where you can not only record dynamite sounding demos digitally, but you can feasibly produce an entire album from the comfort of your own living room and no one would be the wiser you didn't book a week at Sear Sound. So such marks of amateurism as that ungainly drum machine or that seemingly two-stringed guitar might strike some as chintzy to those weaned on Stephin Merritt and Tune-Yards. But in fact, as with Anderson's papyrus-thin tenor and nursery-rhyme-simple melodies, such low-rent conventions only heighten the timelessness of the lyrics, which at their best approach top-drawer John Prine (as Anderson notes of doomed rockabilly minor player Warren Smith: "Could have been a hundred years ago/Could have been today, for all we know"). After a somewhat frivolous instrumental (how many of those did Prine record?) Anderson takes on the Donner Party ("Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/Good one boys, now fill my plate") and Harry Houdini ("What if she screams, 'My God, it's really real?'"), but also tries his hand at more modest sketches: a transvestite babysitting uncle, a former Humble Pie groupie, the perils of following in Fred Gwynne and Boris Karloff's footsteps. But the song that hits the hardest, both musically and lyrically, undoubtedly hearkens back to this former Oklahoman's small-town ennui, a rationalization for a bored high school kid spinning his wheels: "Hear my roar from miles around/Nothing else to do in this dumbshit town." A–

Bhi Bhiman: Bhiman (Boocoo) A busking graduate of the San Francisco BART station, this Sri-Lankan singer-songwriter reminds me of no one more than Ted Hawkins -- his stridently percussive strumming and warmly commanding tenor suggest the experience of someone who knows he has only a few chance seconds to capture your attention before you board that 8:30 train. In fact, although Bhiman overdubs most of the instruments himself, many of the arrangement touches -- hand claps, vibraphone, double bass -- could all conceivably be reproduced on a street corner without the benefit of amplification. Even so, he relies so heavily on texture, atmosphere, and sublimated rhythm that I'm curious what he could accomplish with the help of someone like Tchad Blake, who might have transformed Bhiman's stately pulse into something more scintillating without sacrificing the artiste's innate naturalism. Nevertheless, Bhiman's inventive music is far more postmodern than anything Hawkins ever dared -- he processes one of his many Wall Street reprimands so that it sounds like an old 78, while he nicks the melody for that perhaps overly optimistic retiree from the traditional lullaby "Hush, Little Baby." And the amazing "Kimchi Line" doesn't concern the train you take to your favorite K-town restaurant, but rather a convict imagining away his time in a North Korean prison. Not exactly Ted Hawkins material, is it? A–

Burial: Kindred (Hyperdub, EP) Having generated no major music since 2007's watershed Untrue, killing time with two EPs purposely issued under the radar only in download and vinyl formats, another cavalierly distributed obscurity may strike the impatient as more premature Burial. Certainly, any of the tracks from last year's unobtrusive Street Halo EP could conceivably have been folded into either of William Bevan's regular-release albums as filler -- fine experienced as background music, but too noncommittal and indecisive to justify a standalone release. But this time around, sputtering breakbeats and stacatto keyboard figures grab your attention early and refuse to let up, sustaining an impressively high level of energy for two tracks lasting almost twelve minutes and one almost eight, cresting on a wave of astounding momentum that never once bursts over the dam nor collapses in exhaustion before it reaches the shore -- Bevan even peppers what few rest breaks he allows with the unsettling sound of needles ominously skipping back and forth in out-grooves. Much can be said about the fascinating multipartite structures, cleverly repeated motifs, and occasional moments bordering on the ecstasy that raves and religion merely promise. But I marvel in how Bevan's pretensions condescend neither to his audience nor the house music they love: disembodying those divas from their original contexts and releasing their essence skyward as if doves in a cathedral, he's less outside a tradition than a true believer devoted to bringing that tradition closer to God. Of course, whether or not the mysterious Bevan actually promulgates any religious beliefs, conventional or otherwise, is doubtful. I certainly don't. But no matter whether you spend your Saturday nights on the dancefloor, your Sunday mornings in church, or your entire weekend purveying the outside world from the privacy of your living room couch, this is an incantation whose power you can believe in. A

Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory (Carpark) With major help from his incendiary new band -- especially pitiless drummer Jayson Gerycz -- this indeed improves upon the wiry lo-fi rock of Dylan Baldi's 2010 one man EP: the music is more developed, the noise more articulate, and the reedy vocals slightly more muscular. But with the ad hoc band still slightly embryonic, having only recently been assembled for touring purposes and until now unproven in the studio, the choice of Steve Albini as a producer is somewhat questionable. Nobody questions Albini's technical proficiency -- his abrasive aesthetic is both singular and unmistakable -- but by his own admission, he tends to set up shop, press record, and stay out of the artist's way. So while this burns and blisters as mercilessly as In Utero or Surfer Rosa -- undeniably the touchstones Baldi aims to evoke -- Kurt Cobain and Black Francis' musical visions were so strong they didn't need much intermediary tinkering, which is why they could get away working with someone so laissez faire in his production style. One wonders if someone with a more applied approach might have pointed out to Baldi that, for example, the dirge-like opener wastes too much time getting started, grinding away for three and a half minutes before shifting upwards to the brutal climax that justifies the song's sluggish tempo. But between the song titles -- "No Future/No Past," "Stay Useless," "Wasted Days" -- and Baldi's sardonic admission "No one knows our plans for us/We won't last long," one gets the sense that not only does he no longer consider this band merely a way for him to kill time between classes, but the songs are his way of triumphing over his own boredom and complacency. No wonder he fixates so much on Nirvana and the Pixies -- he's an heir to a grand tradition indeed. A–

Lana del Rey: Born to Die (Polydor/Interscope) From "Leader of the Pack" to Tom Waits, fatalism has always had a place in rock and roll. But as a product of sincere expression it often indicates an immature worldview, as an invention of cynical contrivance it smacks of base audience manipulation, and either way rarely succeeds in reflecting the way the world really works. The former Lizzy Grant however, falls into neither trap. Shrewd enough to surmise she would never hit the big time under her own name, she adapted an alter ego not only to fascinate the fickle blogosphere, but also because it provided her a medium in which she could explore fatalism ironically, as an explicit subject, an aspect of her art which has oddly gone unnoticed in the United States, even at Pitchfork, where they see irony in music the same way Fundamentalist Christians see the face of Jesus in convenience store breakfast sandwiches. Owner of a highly sophisticated, thought-through vocal style that reveals the otherwise decent bonus tracks on the "Deluxe Edition" as the juvenilia they probably are, Lana del Rey passively torches from an alternate universe where good girls live for the thrill of Bacardi chasers, slot machines, red nail polish, open-mouthed kissing, and wife-beater undershirts, who wait out their old man's release from Rikers by sipping Diet Mountain Dew through a plastic straw while leaving the Jesus on the car dashboard alone. The first six songs are pop perfection. After that it's somewhat more hit or miss, but even so each song will grab you by hook or by (ha ha) crook if you put in enough time, especially in regards to Grant's phrasing: the way she shortens the "i"s in the word "vitamin," or coos the phrase "like a fuckin' dream I'm livin' in" so sweetly you'll have to consult the lyric sheet to verify what your ear's not quite sure it's heard. Lindsay Zoladz completely missed the mark when she wrote, "Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique...she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are" -- what does she expect, a coup on the order of what Randy Newman did in 1974 when he singlehandedly solved America's race problem? Ruing the loss of the real-life middle school friends she lost when Daddy sent her to rehab -- which actually ends the record on an appropriately poignant note -- is one thing: it's the only moment in which she imbues her subject with the touch of the genuine. But when Del Rey asks that bad boy, "Do you think we'll be in love forever?" she has no idea what to expect. Lizzy Grant on the other hand knows for sure the answer is no. Get it? A–

Ani DiFranco: ¿Whose Side Are You On? (Righteous Babe) I agree with the consensus that after ten years, DiFranco has finally cured herself of Joni Mitchell's Disease, the artistically crippling malady that deludes its victims into thinking that her highly suspect jazz pretensions supersede their unassailable (but highly specific) songwriting gifts. Perhaps the dire political climate convinced her to forswear the posturing and get back to business, but writing about politics has always been tricky, even for those with instincts as comparably as sharp as DiFranco's. Her Florence Reece appropriation hits all the right notes -- corporations, stolen elections, the not-so-free market, and so forth -- but the titular slogan has become as empty a platitude to the left as, oh, "Buying Ani DiFranco albums means the terrorists have won" is to the right. I cheer her on when she bullet points the rationale for the Equal Rights Amendment and admire how she poignantly incorporates abortion in her painful homelessness song, but even if it's intended as a joke, I wince when she attributes her "balance" to her astrological sign (because horoscope readings only reinforce patriarchy, don't you think?). And while the doobie-on-the-front-porch rumination "J" at least sets itself up to be somewhat unfocused, it's criminal that she aligns an insight as astute as Obama "could be the next F.D.R./But instead he's shifting his weight" next to the Weekly World News-worthy fear that street drugs are entering our water supply (according to WebMD, prescription pharmaceuticals represent a far more worrisome threat, and even those still appear in negligibly low quantities). She reminds me of a vegan acquaintance I once had several years ago, who while well-informed on most subjects, kept insisting that dairy farmers disguised blood-contaminated cow lacteal by utilizing it for chocolate milk. Then again, I never always agreed with Chuck D either, and even at her most trenchant, DiFranco never fails to radiate warmth and empathy, both in her deft singing and underrated guitar playing. Tipping the scales (like Libra, ha ha) is the wise, knowing "Promiscuity," which DiFranco defines as "research and development." Where was that line when I was in college? A–

Imperial Teen: Feel the Sound (Merge) A decade plus past toiling on the major label treadmill and regrouping only when the spirit is willing, these San Franciscans remain one of indie rock's longest running bands, and none of their albums disappoints tune-wise. But if you think tunes are their reason for existing, I say subject yourself to a little test. Listen to 2007's excellent The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band, which begins with a perfectly serviceable "Be My Baby" cop via drummer Lynn Truell, and compare that to the punchy, unstoppable "Ivanka," which jumpstarts 2002's galvanic On. Now immerse yourself in the breathless rush of this album's glossy opener "Runaway" and ask yourself if, like the B-52s before them, this band's music bursts with so much life because these two gay men and their female rhythm section divide their time equally between discos and rock clubs. Although they playfully dirty up such two dollars words as "palindrome" and "affidavit," you may be disappointed initially by the lyrics, which adhere primarily to simple rhymes and automatic tropes: "Book the time, set the tone/Something borrowed, something sewn," preceded by the even more nonsensical "Are these feathers meant for down?/Are these letters meant for noun?" But they structure their songs thusly mainly because they prize rhythm above all else, though every now and then they subvert clichés for a cheap laugh, from "go in, go out" to "I could be you and you be me," topped by my favorite, "If I had my way, my way again/It would come in a spray." And the bracing music pulsates with so much sexiness, whether you're male or female, gay or straight, you'll feel its charge. And for those who like their clever a little more obvious, there's the catty "Last to Know," which concerns a doomed affair with a closet case stashing "steroids in the cabinet" and saddled with "a trophy wife with benefits." Me, I'm hoping it turns out to be about Rick Santorum. A–

Prinzhorn Dance School: Clay Class (DFA) Although this husband-wife post-rock duo's 2008 debut veered precariously close to performance art territory, the audacious "Anthrax" cop that opens this follow-up announces their ambition to re-create the classic Gang of Four sound with half the personnel. It can't be done outside the studio, of course -- although they've toured by themselves with a shared, modified drum kit, the tenser, springier, more sophisticated rhythms this time around demand someone with two hands and undivided attention. Bassist Suzi Horn, who rarely adventures beyond rudimentary single-note lines, is still the weaker link, reminding us once again how lucky Dave Allen was to apprentice in that disco covers band. But while on the debut she clung to those root notes like a child to a teddy bear, here her confidence has increased enough so that she fights a little against the beat, and Tobin Prinz has replicated Andy Gill's choppy signature so masterfully it more than compensates. Initially chagrined that they sang/chanted/hectored primarily in unison rather than playing off each other like King/Gill, I accepted happily that perhaps they don't have that kind of adversarial relationship. True, the album begins with the couplet "I'm glad you're here/Building on sand," which I'm assuming references their marriage, described later as a "fleeting pact" and a "loving prison." But when they jointly attack the "Usurper" that dares come between them, you'll have no doubt where their loyalties lie. A–

Standard Fare: Out of Sight, Out of Town (Melodic) The few critics that know this Sheffield power-pop trio unfairly dismiss them as "twee," but that shortchanges energy and spirit even more in evidence here than on the fine 2009 debut The Noyelle Beat. Bassist Emma Kupa's winsome alto, which dominates over guitarist Danny How's affably conversational baritone, is surer of itself this time around, while How's tuneful six-string cascades and arpeggiatons underscore his debt to Johnny Marr, although he doesn't shy from crunch and crackle when drummer Andy Beswick bears down on the tempo, which thankfully occurs often. With violin and trumpet making occasional cameos, this would be their maturity move, and there's not an unmemorable tune in the bunch. But while they may be dead set on growing up musically, their relationships are still stuck in high school. Kupa's dig at "Older Women" is irresistible, but she lets off that cougar chaser too easily -- he's not interested in the thrill as much as he is in being mommied, something made clear by the lovely separation ballad you'll be caught short to discover begins with the couplet, "I'm not Darth Vader/Luke, I'm not your father." The issue? She's going out for the night with her friends. For the night. I suppose this is a step up from The Noyelle Beat's love interests, one of whom was fifteen (what was that about older women?) and another whom lived an ocean away in Philadelphia. But when Kupa sweetly sings "You're not five years old" -- a line you'd expect would be sarcastic reading it on paper -- the forty-year-old married man listening wonders why she doesn't dump the simp and search for an equal. A–

Honorable Mentions

Schoolboy Q: Habits and Contradictions (Top Dawg) Appreciate his zeal for sex, but if he wasn't always so blunted he might not be reduced to treating sex as some sort of rare event ("There He Go," "Raymond 1969," "Hands on the Wheel") ***

Paul McCartney: Kisses on the Bottom (Merge) Finally as cute as he's always wanted to be, in part because he no longer has the youthful energy to shove his cuteness down your throat ("More I Cannot Wish You," "It's Only a Paper Moon") ***

Dr. Dog: Be the Void (Anti-) Toby Leaman should ditch Scott McKicken and lobby to replace either Taylor Goldsmith or Matt Vasquez in Middle Brother ("Lonesome," "These Days") ***

Hospitality: Hospitality (Merge) Björk and Sebastian, except would you believe it's the former who needs to dial down the twee? ("Friend of Friends," "The Right Profession") **

Nada Surf: The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy (Barsuk) Melodies like diamonds, though the charisma is so devoid of sparkle I wouldn't blame you for mistaking them for cubits zirconium ("The Moon is Calling," "Waiting for Something") **

Kathleen Edwards: Voyageur (Zoe/Rounder) It's like they tell you in therapy: never follow an ultimatum with a bunch of ballads ("Empty Threat," "Change the Sheets") **

The Little Willies: For the Good Times (Milking Bull) Psst, Norah -- "Jolene" wasn't a fucking Childe Ballad ("Fist City," "For the Good Times") *

The Caretaker: Patience (After Sebald) (History Favours the Winners) Has clearly mastered embalming, now should try his hand at cremation ("When the dog days were drawing to an end," "I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man") *

Wiley: Evolve or Be Extinct (Big Dada) Grime kingpin confuses his own phyletic gradualism with punctuated equilibrium ("Boom Blast," "Link Up") *

Wilco: iTunes Session (Anti-) Although the Nick Lowe cameo makes me sad, it does point out the philosophical superiority of "You gotta be cruel to be kind" over "You gotta know how to die to learn how to live" ("Born Alone") *

Trash

Craig Finn: Clear Heart, Full Eyes (Full Time Hobby) Hold Steady albums work when they do -- I'm thinking particularly of the one-two punch of Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America -- when Craig Finn fights to make himself heard over Tad Kubler's guitars and Franz Nicolay's keyboards. Because Kubler and the now-departed Nicolay have been the primary architects of the band's music, this record finds Finn not only in the novel position of having to devise tunes himself, but also leading and arranging his backing band, two highly specialized skills for which he has up to now shown no perceivable knack. As a result, the band mostly chugs along anonymously while Finn delivers his latest missives from the lapsed Catholic front in a passively subdued sprechgesang -- the difference between drunkenly careening into a confessional and blandly wishing "Peace be with you" to the stranger on your right. Regardless of what he claims in song, these days he doesn't learn his lessons from Freddie Mercury or Johnny Rotten -- more like Jackson Browne. B

The Weeknd: Echoes of Silence (free download) Musically, the latest transmission from the House of Buffoons is sharper and edgier than Thursday, itself sharper and edgier than the debut (only eleven months ago, my how time flies). Unfortunately, in this context that's not a plus -- much like Michael Jackson de-evolving from "Billie Jean" to "Dirty Diana," the upped testosterone levels only make Abel Tesfaye's innate gynophobia that less forgivable, and that he chooses "Dirty Diana" for his first cover only illuminates his hypocritical damnation of any woman who sluts it up as much as he does (and by the way, Michael could hit those notes without the benefit of Auto-Tune, though I hope retaliatory testicle squeezing is responsible for the bum note Tesfaye blurts at the song's climax). Although Tesfaye's observation that his latest conquest needs money for a face lift at least encourages me he's an equal opportunity perv (and here I thought he limited his penthouse parties to minors), I wouldn't exactly rank "All that pain you feel/You can tell we ain't makin' no love" high in a list of the all-time great come-on lines. Plus, I'm spreading the rumor that downloading this little item gives you a dangerous virus. The virus? Herpes. B–

Sharon Van Etten: Tramp (Jagjaguwar) A forty-five minute swooping contest between Sharon's voice and Aaron Dessner's guitar that neither seems happy to win. B–

Cate LeBon: Cyrk (The Control Group) Evoking Nico a lot less than she does Lætitia Sadier, she satisfactorily explains her "abnormal fixation with death" to BBC Wales by citing "early experiences with a string of pet deaths." C+

Bahamas: Barchords (Jagjaguwar) Toronto singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen makes like John Mayer channelling Santo & Johnny for the purpose of scoring jeans commercials, which I'm sure are already in negotiations. C+

Laura Gibson: La Grande (Barsuk) Postmodern "country," because without the prefix and quotation marks the mediocrity of the songs would be (even more) obvious. C+

First Aid Kit: Lion's Roar (Wichita) Not to say these Swedes don't nail the twang -- but why do they insist on accenting all the wrong words? C+

Howler: America Give Up (Rough Trade) Sure, they're influenced by the Strokes -- the Strokes of Angles. C

Keepaway: Black Flute (Greedhead) I have no problem with stoner rap, but stoner rock is another story. C

Rick Ross: Rich Forever (free download) Dozens of ways to rhyme the word "nigga," often with the word "nigga" itself. C

This is the 18th installment, (almost) monthly since August 2010, totalling 473 albums. All columns are indexed and archived here. You can follow A Downloader's Diary on Facebook, and on Twitter.