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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Monday, January 11, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26097 [26050] rated (+47), 389 [395] unrated (-6). Most of the following list appeared in last week's Rhapsody Streamnotes, so no news there. I think I ran the program that counts the ratings on Thursday when I cloned the file and was surprised to find the ratings count at +32, normally a good week's work. Or maybe that was Friday when it was posted. The new draft file, which I set up as "January 2016 Part 2" currently has 20 records, a pretty healthy start. (Actually, I think I seeded it with three 2016 releases I had already written up -- Friday's RS had no 2016 releases.) The 2016 releases thus far are jazz items I shoved to the end of the queue to concentrate on 2015 releases. I haven't begun to look for new 2016 streamables, although I did notice a new David Bowie album on Rhapsody last night, and with the news of his death I'm spinning it now. (Marks a return of the "thin white duke" crooner, with orchestral swing and quite a bit of sax adding a jazzy air, the dramatic flair reminding me of Ziggy Stardust as much as anything else. Bowie produced a lot of lousy records following 1983's Let's Dance -- itself a very mixed bag -- and I thought his much-touted 2013 The Next Day came up short, but I can imagine someone more sentimental than I falling for this record. Will play it again for next week. Maybe I'll also get around to that 1993 album still marked 'U' in my database.) I expect good things from Intakt, but still was surprised to find my first A record of 2016, an African-born, balafon-driven jazz trio called Kalo Yele. The balafon player, Aly Keďta, comes from Côte D'Ivoire, but the other two musicians are recognizably Swiss, yet somehow managed to be born in Cameroon (once a German colony, divided between France and Britain after 1919, independent in 1960 with the British dragging their heels until 1961). Lucas Niggli is a well-known drummer I need to look into further -- I do know that he was a protégé of Lucien Favre, who's long been fascinated by African drumming. But I've never heard of clarinetist Jan Galega Brönnimann, who provides the perfect complement to the percussion. Marvelous. I also came close to A-listing Intakt's other January release, a piano trio with Aruán Ortiz, Eric Revis, and Gerald Cleaver. A lot of piano trio fall into my "nice" trough, and this one -- largely thanks to the rhythm section -- rose above that, but only a few each year really dazzle me, and this didn't quite. One piano trio that did dazzle me was released in 1953 as Introducing Paul Bley -- as much as Revis and Cleaver impressed me, note that Bley managed to get help from Charles Mingus and Art Blakey. Bley's second great album came in 1958 when he expanded to a quintet by hiring a young alto saxophonist named Ornette Coleman: I first ran across this as Live at the Hilcrest Club, but my current copy is simply The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet. And in 1961-62 he was in one of the most famous avant-garde trios in jazz history, with Jimmy Giuffre and Steve Swallow. He was also famous for having married two brilliant musicians, the composer-pianist Carla Borg (better known under his name) and the singer-songwriter Annette Peacock (don't know her maiden name, but her first husband was bassist Gary Peacock, later an important collaborator of Bley's), and he recorded several albums of their compositions. Bley continued to record through 2008, mostly solo and trio albums, some exceptional (1965's Closer and 1989's BeBopBeBopBeBopBeBop are personal favorites but I've only heard about a third of them). Anyhow, he died a week ago, and should be remembered as a giant of modern jazz. I rarely listen to multi-disc sets on Rhapsody because they are invariably too much to swallow in one stretch, and it's hard to break up the experience like I would normally if I had separate discs. However, I took a chance with a 4-CD box that Phil Overeem has been touting, Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush last night when I was working on my screed about ISIS, and it fit the bill perfectly, running on and on with deep blues and soul grooves and the occasional chintzy cover. Rush missed the heyday of Chicago blues, failed at Philadelphia International, then spent three or four decades working the chitlin circuit, a nice career for a guy who never came close to stardom. I wrote my review before the last disc finished, only to find that the last few cuts tailed off quite a bit. I thought about docking the grade then, but decided to let it slide by. Having only heard one previous album (out of at least three dozen), I'm going out on a limb saying that he probably doesn't have a single A- record in his catalog so there's something inherently unseemly about grading a 4-CD box that high, but he was so steady he grows on you, and over the course of a long career one winds up admiring that. Maybe I'll find an appropriate time to try The Complete Matrix Tapes. Last time I looked, The Cutting Edge wasn't there, at least in a recognizable product configuration. (The Dylan bootlegs, by the way, completely buried the Miles Davis bootlegs in my EOY Aggregate: Old Music, 37-15, with Ata Kak's Obaa Sima (one of those Awesome Tapes From Africa) in third place. The list is pretty idiosyncratic, largely because it's built from 20-30 lists, less than 10% of the new release albums lists I've compiled, and partly because the longer lists skew toward obscure electronica (although it looks like most are so obscure I haven't flagged them). Meanwhile, I keep adding to the EOY Aggregate (although I haven't touched it in a couple days). Current standings (with Pazz & Jop coming out later this week; my grades in brackets):
My grades here are pretty evenly distributed: 8 A-, 8 ***, 5 **, 8 *, 5 B, 3 B-, 3 ungraded. Robert Christgau, who's always a bit more in step with the critical consensus, graded eight (or nine with Adele) of these records higher than I did, moving five over the A- line: Jamie XX, Sleater-Kinney, Oneohtrix Point Never, Miguel, Jason Isbell. Other aggregate lists pretty much agree, regardless of depth or method -- I'd say they're probably more consistent this year than most. P&J will shuffle these around a bit, but I don't forsee anything major, unless Holter or Washington take a dive (Sleater-Kinney will probably pass them, maybe Vince Staples and/or Oneohtrix Point Never too. UK favorites typically fall off, but that mostly means Blur and Sleaford Mods. The closest thing to a late gainer (like Beyoncé and D'Angelo in recent years) is Adele, which could go either way. Also not a lot of lower-ranked albums with much P&J upside potential. The best outside shots I see are: Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon (46), Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (47), Jlin: Dark Energy (48), ASAP Rocky: At.Long.Last.ASAP (52), Arca: Mutant (57); Hop Along: Painted Shut (59), Chris Stapleton: Traveller (62); Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (76), Ashley Monroe: The Blade (102), James McMurtry: Complicated Game (107), Heems: Eat Pray Thug (113). Bob Dylan has also always run much higher in P&J than in aggregates, so either Shadows in the Night (81) or, more likely, The Cutting Edge bootlegs could crack the top 40. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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