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Thursday, December 26, 2024

Internal links: Xmas Eve dinner; desk mess; election q&a.

I know I should be working on my big essay for the 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I've struggled with the task in the past, as may be painfully evident if you look back at my 2022 and 2023 essays:

• A Profusion of Geniuses (2022)
• Memoirs of a Pollwatcher (2022)
• Rare Birds (2023): Where, I only now notice, I ducked the main essay responsibility, with Francis Davis picking up the slack in The State of Our Union Could Be Better.

I've been fairly calm about the impending task, at least up until yesterday, which I spent hacking out a fairly wordy Music Week, instead of moving on to the next obvious step, which is to examine the results and write up footnotes on all the various discrepancies (2023 albums that got votes in both years, albums that got votes in wrong categories, albums that could be split or combined, albums in categories that got top-ten votes from critics who left them off their category lists; I also need to count up how many voters skipped the categories altogether, or only included top-ten picks there -- the latter was often at my urging, so barely counts as endorsement of the category). Given that this next step is mere paper shuffling, something that in years past I've been really adept at, I'm baffled at my procrastination. I'm accustomed to avoiding writing, but dread of mere gruntwork is something new and unsettling.

Yet here I am, not just procrastinating but inventing a new blog post: something to do while I'm not doing what I ought to be doing, but also a workaround, a way of sneaking up on the real task. For instance, in adding the links above, I now have the relevant pieces opened in tabs, as ready references, and repositories of ideas I could eventually employ.

But before we circle back to the Poll, I have a couple other things I want to address -- and, as the title suggests, don't expect any thematic organization here, other than that I'm anticipating a wish to occasionally post personal thoughts, as random and haphazard as everyday life (which suggests differentiation as a numbered series; as for "sods" instead of "ends," that comes from the title of a Who album, a compilation of their miscellany and detritus, an Anglicism which has since entered my vocabulary).

I keep copies of most of my blog writings, plus occasional notes I'm less concerned with in sharing, in my online notebook. One thing it's especially handy for is keeping track of past calendar events, including the occasional fancy (or at least hearty) dinners I've been known to prepare. As the dinners are somewhat popular items, I often note them on Facebook, and occasionally mention them in my Music Week posts. I meant to say something about Xmas Eve yesterday, but didn't get to it before I felt the compunction to post. Later last night, I had second thoughts, and added the following section, but didn't post it. This morning, it seemed like it might fit better here.

I did finally take some time off to rustle up a small Xmas Eve dinner: two guests, my nephew Ram and long-time family friend Kathy Jenkins, who had been a regular for that particular event until she moved out of Wichita a few years ago. I wanted to do something easy but still outstanding. In a dream, I imagined roasting chicken thighs on a rack above root vegetables, which would be enriched by drippings. We made a quick shopping run the day before, and couldn't find some things I had wanted, so I wound up doing a lot of improvising.

I had two Ottolenghi recipes in mind for the chicken, but didn't have and couldn't find the complements (fennel and clementines for one, Jerusalem artichokes for the other), so I consulted the web and settled on a sumac-and-zataar variant. For the vegetables, I had onions, yukon gold potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, a turnip, golden beets, delicata squash, and leeks. The beets had to start early, and that turned disastrous: I put them in a glass dish I assumed to be oven-safe but which shattered. I had to cool the oven, clean the mess up, throw them away, and start all over. Beyond that, the main problem was that I had too much of everything for my pretty large roasting pan. And my idea of reducing the marinade to make a sauce never really panned out, although I did brush more, including a few bits of onion and lemon, on top of the chicken, which helped it brown up. So I didn't have the sauce and garnish to finish the chicken.

I also bought a package of baby spinach, figuring I could turn it into a side salad. I was thinking of the Bella Luna salad (a local restaurant), but didn't find a close enough recipe. Instead, I just threw all sorts of things in: cucumber, onion, pepper, and tomatoes from my Greek salad; bacon and sauteed mushrooms (I had bought them thinking I might add them to the roots, but had no space); toasted pecans; creamy goat cheese and gorgonzola; capers; some olive-feta antipasto; golden raisins; and I made a balsamic vinaigrette with mustard and a bit of honey; and a generous sprinkle of sumac and black pepper. Turned out to be a really nice combination of textures and flavors.

I had just enough leftover applesauce to make a cake, so I served it with ice cream for dessert. Here's the Facebook write-up (same pic as above).

I took another picture today, of my main computer workspace, which has turned into a ridiculous mess. One of the main things I need to do before I can make any real headway on my essay is to clear this desk. The really critical problem is the stack of CDs, in front of the three-tier CD shelf unit, with the stack on top of it. I need to be able to find my 2024 Jazz A-List albums (at least the ones I actually possess), few of which I've actually replayed since I initially reviewed them. The shelf unit I assembled and positioned when I was doing the 2023 essay, at which point it was jammed to the gills with 2023 and 2022 CDs -- all really good records, by the way. I need to remove enough of the older ones so I can file the newer ones and find them when I want one. The daunting problem here isn't so much sweeping the desk clear as finding other places to put everything, given that all the other places have similar problems.

The first thing that needs to go is the black basket, which has my promo CD queue with hype sheets. Everything there is 2025, and none of it has to be touched until I'm done with 2024. (For similar reasons, I'm automatically deleting all of my 2025 email, so nothing extraneous gets stuck in my inbox.) Then I need to clear out the baskets to the lower right, refiling them elsewhere, which will open up space for thinning out the shelf unit. Probably not a huge amount of work, but every item needs to be gone over and dealt with accordingly.

While writing about this, I got distracted with the thought that it would be nice to be able to take a wider-angle picture (maybe a fisheye lens? or is there one with less distortion?). I did some shopping, and ordered a 3-lens clip-on for my phone (or so the pitch says). As an engineer who's pretty skilled at figuring out the ramifications of how small changes, I see this as the start of a much more overwhelming project. Still, it's more tangible than imagining an open-ended essay based on an enormous lode of significant data.

I haven't been following politics since signing off with my last Speaking of Which, but I do have some thoughts about what happened in the 2024 election, and why it happened. I'm nowhere near wanting to write them up, but I do have enough grounding to react to this item in today's Xgau Sez:

Harris is the establishment. Trump is viewed by his voters as a counter-establishment force, albeit uncontrollable, self-centered, and potentially dangerous. I also have to disagree with you on your assessment of KH as a public speaker . . . she rambles on, often changing her policies to please the crowd in front of her. Voters sensed, correctly, her duplicity and lack of a moral compass when discussing Israel or the Ukrainian issue. -- Ricardo Pini, New Zealand

May I suggest that unless American politics is your academic specialty or something you refrain from gross generalizations about a nation half a world away from yours. It's certainly true that today's active Democrats have a collegiate/academic tinge/orientation that diluted or strained their moral compass and damaged their appeal to large swaths of the working-class electorate. But the "establishment" is the people with too much money, not the people who inflect a major field of discourse. As far as Harris's lack of moral compass is concerned, do you really believe that being compelled to do some sort of impossible balancing act as regards Palestine, an issue regarding which only a sliver of the American electorate and indeed political class knows how to "solve" unless making Netanyahu and his apparatchiks vanish in thin air suddenly becomes practicable, is what cost her the election? What cost her the election was her gender, her color, her classiness, and the Dems' failure to address the economy in a clear and plausible way.

Pini makes four points here, and they're basically correct, not that I wouldn't shade them a bit differently:

1. While there is no single, monolithic establishment in America, Harris campaigned as if there was one, and she was its candidate in the election. She raised more money than Trump, and made it clear that the changes she championed weren't incompatible with maintaining the prerogatives of great wealth. She, like Biden (and Obama and Clinton) would be good for business. She surrounded herself with billionaires and ultraconservative Republicans, while discounting past moderate heresies. She was the candidate who committed to law and order. She was the one who supported the military and clung to the fantasy of Pax Americana (even as it degenerated into mere cover for Israel's genocide). That, at least, was certainly her message. We can argue over whether it was the right message, and whether she was a credible advocate for it, but the point is fundamentally solid.

   Moreover, this point wasn't very controversial even before the election. Many on the left were deeply bothered by her association with the Cheneys, by the strategy to woo rich Republicans, and by her unwillingness to offer any real hope of ending Biden's wars. Like many people, I tried my best to minimize and to rationalize these faults, always keeping them in perspective of the far more ominous Trump faults. And I trusted the competency of the campaign, even when they zigged when I thought they should have zagged. And it came close to working, and arguably could have with just a few minor tweaks. (One I find especially appealing was the idea of shifting more Harris money to down ballot Democrats, hoping for reverse coattails, by focusing more on issues where Republicans were unpopular. The assumption behind the Cheney ploy was that Trump was weaker than generic Republicans, but the opposite may have been true.)

2. The view of Trump as "a counter-establishment force" was the big surprise of the election. It made no sense to Democrats, who quite correctly recognized Trump as a total fraud, and were quite clear as to their malevolence. But in their scramble for the high ground of the status quo, Democrats blinded themselves to the myriad failures and iniquities of a system that has been so corrupted by greed and violence at least since Nixon/Reagan that they can't imagine anything different. Nobody noticed when Trump switched his campaign slogan from the fatuous "Make America Great Again" to an even bigger lie: "Trump Will Fix It."

3. I don't have a strong opinion on Harris as a speaker, as opposed to her message, but I did notice her stumble a few times, especially in her inability to show any meaningful concern over Gaza. I doubt many other politicians would have done better, but firmer principles might have helped. Bernie Sanders is an example here. Barack Obama was more effective early on, when it looked like he had some, and less later on, when he messed them up.

4. I understand the point about "her duplicity and lack of a moral compass" but I don't feel like condemning her in those terms. Although morals are important in everyday life, they are something of a luxury in politics, where one is weighing relative evils with much uncertainty. Biden made a major mistake in not pressing Israel to halt its war. Harris made a lesser mistake in not breaking with Biden over the issue, and another in not talking about the conflict in terms that made it clear that she would end it. That may or may not prove the "lack of a moral compass," but what's more unforgivable is that it shows poor political judgment. Christgau's notion that there's "some sort of impossible balancing act" involved here is naive to the point of being disingenuous. I'm not going into details here -- I've written millions of words on Israel, Ukraine, and their related wars against "terror" and often for "ethnic cleansing" if anyone cares to consult them.

As for Christgau's last sentence, it's not implausible, but also far from certain (and one that I find both unlikely and unhelpful). The election was close enough that dozens of things could have shifted it enough to change the result. Everyone is free to pick their own fave theories and pet peeves. Mine is that Biden's wars doomed Harris, and not because there's some sliver of voters who think he picked the wrong side, but simply because he allowed them to drag on, with no hope of resolution and recovery. Most people don't have much understanding of the conflicts that led to those wars, but they do realize that whatever they may be, they're not worth the costs of war. Some responsible party needs to shut them down, much like the US and USSR agreed to do -- within just a few weeks, at most -- with Israel's wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973. And Biden failed to miserably at that simple task that some voters chose instead to believe Trump's promise to "fix it."

While I don't doubt that there are people who voted against Harris because of "her gender, her color, her classiness," I doubt that any of those traits were decisive. As for "the Dems' failure to address the economy in a clear and plausible way," I don't even think they failed. Their problem wasn't the insufficiency of their argument, or their failure to advance practical reforms that would help most people. Their problem was that half of America refused to listen to anything they had to say, in large part because they had come to discredit anything any Democrat might say, and indeed to doubt the validity of rational discourse.

The main thing that's become clear to me from the 2024 election is that Democrats don't know how to talk to other people, even when they really want to. Nor do Republicans, 'but for some reason that hurts them less, and may even help them fire up their base. It's going to be really hard for Democrats to turn this around: the foundation of credibility is incorruptibility, which isn't easy to politicians who spend most of their waking hours desperately begging for money. I don't doubt that the pendulum will swing again, but it's much more likely that Republicans will discredit themselves than that Democrats will discover integrity.

PS: I've been toying with the idea of writing something on the 2024 election, tentatively titled, "Did Something Weird Just Happen?" I doubt I have the stomach for wading through the minutiae of Trump campaign agitprop, let alone for interviewing the people who voted for him, but sooner or later someone is going to figure this out -- or at least some of it. (I suspect I have some angles that won't come easily to others.)

I promised to come back to the poll, but at this stage it would be better just to post this and start with the work of footnoting and/or desk clearing. At this point I've finished the leftovers (aside from one last piece of cake for tomorrow) -- something I'm usually not too keen on, but they've been really delicious. I also need to post Christgau's Q&A, which should make it up tonight. (I keep putting off updating the database, which still needs some rather tricky utility work, but is way overdue, and would no doubt help him with his upcoming Dean's List.) And I gave up on trying to figure out which new jazz album I should play next, and settled into five hours of an Elvis Presley box I stumbled and don't begin to understand. It's getting late, and I've avoided useful work for another day.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43380 [43333) rated (+47), 13 [10] unrated (+3).

Voting for the 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll is over now, with ballots counted from 177 distinguished experts (+18 over 2023). They voted for 614 different New Albums, 149 Rara Avis (new releases of older music, recorded in or before 2014; a couple albums got confused votes in both age categories). We also collect votes in three special categories, in hopes of noting more albums that tend to be overlooked overall: Vocals (123 albums), Latin (85), and Debut (89). Album counts in these categories are up significantly this year, as I change the rules to allow voters to vote for 3 (or in some cases more) albums in each, instead of only 1 in past years. About a third of all voters still skipped those categories. Several also skipped Rara Avis. I don't have the numbers handy, but will figure that out in coming days.

After the election -- which I still believe was not just horrific but profoundly weird -- I decided to stop bothering with the extreme time sink that my weekly Speaking of Which columns had become, and put my efforts into making something of the Jazz Critics Poll, which Francis Davis had founded in 2006 and sustained as long as health permitted. I've helped out over the years, and taken over the last couple. I've felt a great responsibility to maintain the poll's reputation as "biggest and best." It's been an uphill struggle, with what seems like a lot of attrition as voters age, their lives change, and they tire of the intense interest expected of critics (not to mention that it isn't a very remunerative career choice).

I've also run into a lot of problems, and perhaps worse still, uncertainty, with email. I lease a dedicated server, which I run a half-dozen websites from. I can run GNU Mailman lists from there, and I have a few, including two I use for the poll: one to message voters, and one for discussing admin issues. These are easy for me to send to, but for reasons unclear to me, several of the major email vendors have decided that to block or reroute mail I send (this applies to personal accounts on the server, as well as the lists). It's very hard to fight back against such judgments, and doing so is very draining. (Needless to say, the election is only going to make shady business practices, especially fraud, both more prevalent and harder to resist.)

My main metric for whether I've been doing a good job has been how many voters I could turn out. In 2022, which is when I assumed responsibility for handling voter correspondence, the number of voters dropped off from 156 to 151. Last year, with a lot of desperate last-minute cajoling, I finally wound up with a record 159. After that, I did some research to build up a more comprehensive index of publications and writers (not that it turned out to be very comprehensive). I tried it out, with some rule tweaks aimed at simplifying the process, in a mid-year poll, but interest there was pretty limited, with only 90 ballots.

Still, that set me up for expanding this year's poll. One thing that has long been obvious is that interest in jazz -- fans, of course, but also musicians -- is worldwide, and we were missing a lot with a 90% American voting base. I haven't tried figuring out the spread this year, but I sent significantly more invites out this year (approx. 280, vs. 220 in 2023, vs. 200 in 2022), and half or so of the increase came from abroad (mostly Europe, and most of that Western, but also Latin America and Japan). I have no idea whether that skewed the top results. It certainly did add to the number of albums that got 1 or 2 votes. Most of the new invitees didn't vote -- how many didn't even get the message? -- but that's the main reason this poll is bigger than ever.

It's premature to declare it the best ever. My big job for the next week will be to sort through the data, and try to figure out what's significant, or at least interesting, and turn whatever insights I may glean into an introductory essay, for Arts Fuse, when they present the poll results -- sometime shortly after Jan. 1. I've struggled with these essays in the past, and don't doubt that I will do so again. But I take some comfort in knowing that in the unknowable and possibly unimaginable vastness of the jazz niche in the world, I have a pretty substantial personal store of knowledge -- perhaps here I should point you to my personal Best Jazz of 2024, where my New Albums A-List has broke 100 for the first time ever (among 795 total albums listed, and listened to) -- as well as the collective intelligence of so many of my peers.

Hopefully the poll, and jazz in general, will get some more attention after it's published. If you have ideas about better ways to publicize the poll, I'd be interested in hearing them. I'm also curious about data analysis tools, and how to present the data for further analysis. And after the dust settles, and we get a breather, I'd like to do some work on rebuilding the website, to integrate all of the accumulated data. I might also add that the more I do this, the more impressed I become with the expertise and care of the critical community, so maybe there's some way to build on that.

Once again, I've been exclusively focused on jazz these last few weeks, so there is very little else below. Maybe I'll pivot back in January, but there is still a vast number of records revealed in the poll that I haven't gotten to. Total rated count for this year is 1155, which seems like a lot but is way down from 1834 in 2023, 1670 in 2022, 1480 in 2021, 1637 in 2020, etc. Part of the reason is that we're still a month or two from freeze point for 2024. Another may be that I've been pretty consistently logging late 2023 finds under 2023 instead of entering them into the 2024 file (marked as '23). Still, evidence suggests I'm slowing down. That's also my subjective impression.

I've done a tiny bit of work on the EOY aggregate, but very little. I'm way behind, and don't even have all of my own grades copied into the file. Moreover, when I went to work on it a bit today, I found my eyes weren't up to the task. It's probably a lost cause.

In recent years, I've allowed Music Week to go all the way to Dec. 31, regardless of whatever day it falls on. I'll try to follow that practice again this year.

New records reviewed this week:

AALY Trio [Mats Gustafsson/Peter Janson/Kjell Nordeson]: Sustain (2024, Silkheart): Free jazz sax-bass-drums trio, founded earlier, but their discography was limited to 5 1997-2002 albums with Ken Vandermark (the last as DKV Trio, his group with Hamid Drake and Kent Kessler). By then, Gustafsson had moved to a new trio, the Thing. Still harsher than most, but they've settled down enough to let you make sense of what they're doing, which is quite a lot. A- [bc]

Lakecia Benjamin: Phoenix Reimagined (Live) (2024, Ropeadope): Alto saxophonist, from New York, debut 2012, fourth album was Phoenix (2023) had a number of guest spots, including Dianne Reeves (vocals), Sonia Sanchez (poetry), and Angela Davis (spoken word). Fewer vocal options here, so she heats the sax up. B+(***) [sp]

John Blum Quartet Featuring Marshall Allen: Deep Space (2024, Astral Spirits): Pianist, first album 2002, not a lot of records but he's made some interesting rounds lately, with a very good 2023 album with David Murray, and now this one with Marshall Allen -- who is counted in this superb quartet, along with Elliott Levin (tenor sax/flute) and Chad Taylor (drums). A- [bc]

Silvia Bolognesi/Dudú Kouate/Griffin Rodriguez: Timing Birds (2021 [2024], Astral Spirits): Italian bassist, first album 2005, mostly shares credit line with others like these: Kouate on percussion (ngoni, kalimba), Rodriguez with electronics, all three credited for voice -- some African chant, some spoken word, various bits that play off nicely against the fascinating groove and ambiance. A- [bc]

C6Fe2RN6: C6Fe2RN6 (2023 [2024], Astral Spirits): Duo of Nick Terry (electric guitar, kalimba, music box) and Rob Mazurek (trumpet, piano, mbira, flutes, bells, synth, electronics), group/album name "is almost all of the elements that make up the color Milori Blue," both musicians also being visual artists (and, evidently, chemists). I'd slot this as ambient, but holds one's interest. B+(***) [bc]

Summer Camargo: To Whom I Love (2022 [2024], Blue Engine): Trumpet player, first album, at least two cuts recorded in 2022 because they feature the late organ player Joey DeFrancesco. Mostly a sextet, with Veronica Leahy (reeds), Jeffery Miller (trombone), Esteban Castro (piano), bass, and drums, plus extra percussion (James Haddad) on 5 tracks. B+(**) [sp]

Devon Daniels Quintet: LesGo! (2024, Sam First): Alto saxophonist, debut album 2020, quintet with Julien Knowles (trumpet), Chris Fishman (piano), bass, and drums, playing five originals plus covers of Charlie Parker, Monk, and Coltrane. A pretty good example of postbop not far removed from its roots. B+(***) [sp]

Vanisha Gould: She's Not Shiny, She's Not Smooth (2024, Cellar Live): Jazz singer, seems to write her own material on this second album, following Life's a Gig in January -- recorded in 2022, and co-credited to pianist Chris McCarthy, who returns in a piano-bass-drums here. B+(**) [sp]

Mats Gustafsson & Liudas Mockūnas: Watching a Dog. Smiling (2022 [2024], NoBusiness): Avant-sax duo, one from Norway, the other from Lithuania, together they cover all the variants, from flute (and slide flute) to bass sax and contrabass clarinet, dropping in some live electronics. B+(*) [bc]

Steve Hirsh/Steve Swell/Jim Clouse/William Parker: Out on a Limb (2024, Soul City Sounds): Drums, trombone, saxophones, bass. Three long pieces, 73:50, high quality free jazz, especially the trombone. A- [bc]

Jasper Høiby's 3 Elements: Like Water (2024, Edition): Danish bassist, side credits start 2000, Phronesis in 2007, Kairos 4Tet in 2011, solo work from 2016. This one complements his 2023 Earthness: both are trios with Noah Stoneman (piano) and Luca Caruso (bass). B+(***) [sp]

Susie Ibarra/Jeffrey Zeigler/Graham Reynolds: Insectum (2024, Golden Hornet): Percussionist, born in Anaheim, raised in Houston, in New York since 1989, this piece a commission as "a sonic exploration of the world of arthropods," with all three listed as "composer/performer": Zeigler is a cellist from Kronos Quartet; Reynolds mostly seems to have done soundtracks since 2001. B+(**) [sp]

Joaju Cuarteto: Avy' a Jave (2023 [2024], Polka Blue): Group from Paraguay, "with predominant Paraguayan rhythms, such as polkas and guaranias in a language that converges with improvisation and jazz aesthetics with their own identities," or so goes the machine translation of one of the few pieces I've found on them/this, even in Spanish. B+(**) [sp]

Mike LeDonne/Eric Alexander [Heavy Hitters []: That's What's Up! (2023 [2024], Cellar Music): No clean way to parse this cover: Top line (large white type on black, all caps throughout: "That's What's Up!" Second line, medium brown type: "Mike LeDonne Eric Alexander." Third line, big type again, but light blue: "Heavy Hitters." Fourth line, small white type: "Jeremy Pelt Vincent Herring Alexander Clafty Kenny Washington." Background is the group's previous (2023) album, titled The Heavy Hitters, under six small print names (LeDonne, Alexander, Pelt, Herring, Washington, Peter Washington). Mainstream, aptly named. B+(***) [sp]

Alex LoRe: Motivity (2022 [2024], Weirdear): Alto saxophonist, also plays C-melody sax here, from Florida, based in Brooklyn, several albums since his 2014 debut trio, label name started off as group name (2019). Trio here with Thomas Morgan (bass) and Johnathan Blake (drums). This has a nice, airy feel to it. B+(***) [sp]

Matt Mitchell: Illimitable (2023 [2024], Obliquity): Pianist, has made a name for himself since 2006, and is clearly an exceptional pianist. Still, takes a lot to focus through 110 minutes (4 tracks) of solo improv. B+(***) [bc]

MTB [Brad Mehldau/Mark Turner/Peter Bernstein]: Solid Jackson (2023 [2024], Criss Cross Jazz): Group name from initials, playing piano/tenor sax/guitar, with a second line of names that are nearly as prominent: Larry Grenadier (bass) and Bill Stewart (drums). For the first four, this is a reunion of a 1994 quintet on the Dutch mainstream label, also credited to MTB, the only change the drummer (Leon Parker in 1994). While everyone is quite capable, the one who really carries the album is Bernstein. B+(***) [sp]

Demetrio Muñiz: Tromboneando con Demetrio Muñiz (2024, Egrem): Cuban trombonist, former musical director of Buena Vista Social Club, Discogs doesn't show many albums under his own name, but he has a fair number of side credits going back to 1982. Fairly wide range of sounds and styles here. B+(**) [sp]

Camila Nebbia/Sofia Salvo/Lara Alarcón/Alfred Vogel: Pnkstrasse53 (2023 [2024], Boomslang): Three musicians from Buenos Aires -- tenor sax, baritone sax, vocals + fx -- plus a drummer from Austria, recording in Berlin, promise "free improvisation with a punk jazz attitude." One thing punk is that the 9 pieces are short: 25:38. B+(**) [bc]

New Regency Orchestra: New Regency Orchestra (2024, Mr Bongo): "An 18-piece Afro-Cuban jazz big band, inspired by the musical melting pot of NYC in the 1950s, but with the punch and power of a whole host of London's best Latin and jazz musicians." I'm not seeing a roster of musicians, but the musical director is Lex Blondin. They offer a pretty fair echo of Mario Bauza and Tito Puente, which may be all you need. B+(**) [sp]

Margaux Oswald Collateral Damage: In Time, Hollow Oaks Become Chapels (2021 [2024], Clean Feed): Pianist, "of French-Filipina origin, both in Geneva, and currently based in Copenhagen." Half-dozen albums since 2021, this group lists two guitarists, three bassists, and a drummer. B+(**) [bc]

Berke Can Özcan & Jonah Parzen-Johnson: It Was Always Time (2024, We Jazz): Turkish drummer/sound designer, in a duo with a New York-based baritone saxophonist, both also credited with "instruments." B+(**) [bc]

Jamie Saft Trio: Plays Monk (2022 [2024], Oystertones): Pianist, albums start 1996, many side credits (especially with Bobby Previte and John Zorn), plays a lot of electric and organ but sticks to piano here, backed by Brad Jones (bass) and Hamid Drake (drums). B+(*) [sp]

Tom Skinner: Voices of Bishara Live at "mu" (2023 [2024], International Anthem): British drummer, mostly jazz credits since 1998, including Sons of Kemet, but also plays in post-Radiohead Britpop The Smile, led his first album in 2022, Voices of Bishara, and here takes them on the road, with two tenor saxophonists (Robert Stillman and Chelea Carmichael, the latter also on flute), cello, and bass I thought the album was pretty great, so I'm not surprised that this is pretty good, but it lacks that extra wallop you hope for in live albums. B+(**) [sp]

Steve Swell's Imbued With Light: Hommage à Galina Ustvolskaya (2024, Silkheart): Fourth in the avant-trombonist's series of hommages to modern-classical composers, first one I've never heard of, a Russian (1919-2006), per Wikipedia: "Known as 'the lady with the hammer,' her music has been described as demanding 'everything from the performer,' uncompromising in her trademark textured homophonic blocks of sound." Septet here, with trumpet, tuba, bassoon, cello, piano, and drums. B+(***) [bc]

Thumbscrew: Wingbeats (2024, Cuneiform): Trio of Tomas Fujiwara (drums/vibraphone), Michael Formanek (bass), and Mary Halvorson (guitar), with three song credits each (plus a Mingus cover), eighth group album since 2014. Each brings real talent, and they mesh well enough, but the album slips past without leaving enough of an impression. B+(***) [dl]

Tomin: Flores Para Verene/Cantos Para Caramina (2020-24 [2024], International Anthem): First name, last is Perea-Chamblee, based in New York, plays reeds (clarinets) and brass (cornet). This "debut album" is a compilation from singles and EPs (as far as I can tell), 24 short pieces adding up to 36:43. Feels a little sketchy. B+(*) [sp]

Tomin: A Willed and Conscious Balance (2024, International Anthem): This is billed as his "debut full-length work," 10 songs, 35:49, where Tomin Perea-Chamblee plays "flute, alto and bass clarinets, trombone, euphonium, bells, sine waves (Casio MT-70) and additional trumpet" -- Linton Smith II is the main trumpet player, with keyboards (Telana Davis), bass (Luke Stewart), two cellos, and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Village of the Sun: Live in Tokyo (2023 [2024], Gearbox): This is Simon Ratledge, who is half of the British electronic duo Basement Jaxx, working with jazz musicians Binker Golding (sax) and Moses Boyd (drums), themselves the notable duo Binker & Moses. Live set, follows their eponymous 2020 album, for three tracks, 32:14. B+(**) [bc]

Liba Villavecchia Trio + Luis Vicente: Muracik (2022 [2024], Clean Feed): Spanish alto saxophonist, has credits going back to 1999 but his own groups really pick up around 2020, trio here with bass (Alex Reviriego) and drums (Vasco Trilla), with trumpet on the side. B+(**) [sp]

Terry Waldo & the Gotham City Band: Treasury Volume 1 (2024, Turtle Bay): Pianist, b. 1944, an interest in ragtime drew him to Eubie Blake, called his first group Waldo's Gutbucket Syncopators, formed his Gotham City Band after moving to New York in 1980. Unclear when or where this was recorded: his releases seem to thin out after 2010, but this is largely the same band as on the 2021 album, and the singer there has nothing before 2019, so the guess here is that this is a fairly recent recording, even if they're direct-cutting 78s and sending them off to Archeophone for restoration. A- [sp]

Cory Weeds Meets Champian Fulton: Every Now and Then: Live at OCL Studios (2024, Cellar Music): Alto saxophonist, albums since 2010, runs the mainstream-oriented label, duets with the pianist-singer. She's a fine singer, but my favorite track is the opener, just sax and piano. Oh, and this isn't their first meeting. B+(***) [sp]

Lucy Wijnands/John Di Martino: Call Me Irresponsible: The Songs of Jimmy Van Heusen (2022 [2023], Night Is Alive): Jazz singer, from Kansas City, father is stride pianist Bram Wijnands, album is sometimes just credited to the pianist (I've seen covers with both names, just his, or none with no subtitle), as well as references to the Night Is Right Band -- with Harry Allen (tenor sax), Dave Stryker (guitar), Peter Washington (bass), and Willie Jones III (drums) -- and no clear release date. The songs earned their standards status, the headliners are well suited, and Allen is better still. B+(***) [sp]

Lucy Wijnands: Something Awaits (2023, 4605843 DK2, EP): Jazz singer, father a stride pianist, neither this nor the album with John Di Martino above appear on Discogs or other discographies, but Will Friedwald, Michael Steinman, and Francis Davis are fans, and not without reason. Six songs, 24:55. B+(*) [sp]

Andrea Wolper: Wanderlust (2024, Moonflower Music): Jazz singer, only her fourth album since 1998, writes most of her own material, but opens with a Ray Charles tune here, and returns for Carole King and Sting. Band is first-rate, with John Di Martino (piano), Ken Filiano (bass), Michael TA Thompson (drums), Charles Burnham (violin), and co-producer Jeff Lederer (clarinet/flute), and she is masterful. A- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Children of the Sun: Ofamfa (1971 [2024], Moved-by-Sound): Basically the same St. Louis group that also recorded as Black Artist Group and Human Arts Ensemble, the most famous alumnus of which is saxophonist Oliver Lake. This particular recording is build around the poems of Bruce Rutlin (aka Ajule). The poetry itself is fairly marginal, but the music, and especially the saxophone, can really take off. B+(***) [sp]

Iancu Dumitrescu: Ansamblul Hyperion (1980 [2024], Corbett vs. Dempsey): Romanian composer, reissue of his first album, originally relesed in 1981, his Ensemble including clarinet, flute, bassoon, viola, cello, double bass, trombone, and percussion, with his piano on one track, and there's certainly some uncredited electronics in the mix. The first piece doesn't go far beyond surveying the sound pallette, but the later pieces are often quite remarkable. A- [bc]

The Jazzmen: Nineteen Sixty-Six (1966 [2024], Corbett vs. Dempsey): Previously unreleased tape by a Poughkeepsie group led by bassist Tyrone Crabb, with the first recording of Joe McPhee on trumpet -- his sax debut, Underground Railroad came in 1969 -- with two saxophonists (Harry Hall and Reggie Marks), with Mike Kull on piano and Charlie Benjamin on drums. Opens with 9:56 wrapped around "One Mint Julep," then a 34:05 piece called "Killed in Vietnam/Milestones." The former is possibly over-constrained by an irresistible melody, while the latter can go off the rails, but that's not such a bad thing. B+(**) [bc]

Louis Jordan: World Broadcast Recordings 1944/45 (1944-45 [2024], Circle, 2CD): Radio shots, recorded for World Broadcasting System (WBS), 48 tracks "including previously unissued alternate takes." Terrific ditties, half familiar, all enjoyable, sound a bit less than ideal. B+(***) [sp]

Nature's Consort: Nature's Consort (1969 [2024], Aguirre): One-shot quintet album, four of five songs written by pianist Robert Naughton (aka Bobby Naughton, 1944-2022, mostly played vibraphone later on, was involved in Creative Improvisers Orchestra and related groups led by Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell), the other a Carla Bley cover, with James Duboise (brass), Mark Whitecage (reeds), Mario Pavone (bass), and Laurence Cook (percussion). B+(***) [yt]

Nisse Sandström Group: Öppet Ett (1965-67 [2023], Caprice): Swedish saxophonist (1942-2021), also plays bass clarinet, three early tracks, adds up to 40 minutes, some psychedelic rock influence with scattered chatter but eventually hits its mark. Mats Gustafsson curated the reissue series and wrote the liner notes -- I haven't read them, but recognize the influence. B+(***) [sp]

Omar Sosa: Omar Sosa's 88 Well Tuned Drums (1996-2018 [2024], Otá): Cuban pianist, moved to Ecuador in the 1990s, passed through California before settling in Barcelona. This is a soundtrack to a feature documentary, so it appears to pick up a range of pieces across his career, ranging from solo piano to big band. All are quite striking. A- [sp]

Charles Tolliver Music Inc: Live at the Captain's Cabin (1973 [2024], Cellar Music): Trumpet player, from Florida, started working with Jackie McLean in 1964 (e.g., It's Time!), produced a number of striking albums from 1968 well into the 1970s, many on the Strata-East label which he co-founded with Stanley Cowell. Sizzling live set here with John Hicks (piano), Clint Houston (bass), and Clifford Barbaro (drums). A- [sp]

Old music:

Steve Swell's Systems for Total Immersion: Hommage à Luciano Berio (2021 [2022], Silkheart): Free jazz trombonist, many albums since 1996, most relevant here are a series of "hommage" albums to modern composers, starting with Bartók and Messaien. I'm not very knowledgeable about any of these subjects, and this one is especially tricky. Ellen Christi sings, which is often a problem for me. Swell plays some pocket trumpet, with Marty Ehrlich on flute and reeds, Sam Newsome on soprano sax, Jim Pugliese on marimba, and Gerald Cleaver on drums, plus odd sounds I can't quite account for. Very tricky, but it never quite turned me off, and started to grow on me. B+(***) [bc]

Terry Waldo's Gutbucket Syncopators: Hot House Rag (1971 [2001], Delmark): Ragtime pianist, started out in Ohio and sought out Eubie Blake. His first album was released as Jazz in the Afternoon by Waldo's Gutbucket Syncopators, as part of Blackbird's "Jazz From Ohio Series." Those eight standards form the core of this 13-track reissue, with ragtime piano at the heart of a classic Hot Seven, the horns brilliant, the rhythm sustained by Bob Sundstrom's banjo and Mike Walbridge's tuba. B+(***) [r]

Terry Waldo: The Soul of Ragtime ([2014], Tompkins Square): Ragtime pianist from Ohio, b. 1944, learned his craft in the 1970s, when Eubie Blake was still around to mentor him. Sixteen tunes, not clear when they were recorded -- there's an earlier, undated album cover, showing a much younger man -- but it was certainly long after the tunes were first punched into rolls. B+(**) [r]

Terry Waldo/Tatiana Eva-Marie: I Double Dare You (2021, Turtle Bay): The singer started with the trad-oriented Avalon Jazz Band c. 2019. Trad/swing band led by the pianist, where Nick Russo's banjo is prominent. Nice duet to close. B+(*) [r]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet: Situation (PlayOn) [01-29]
• Groovology: Almost Home (Sugartown) [01-01]
• Benjie Porecki: All That Matters (Funklove Productions) [01-01]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43333 [43304] rated (+29), 10 [6] unrated (+4).

I wasn't sure when (or if) I'd find time to run a Music Week post this week, but caught up with my daily mail late Tuesday evening, so I took a few minutes to run the break, leaving me just an introduction to write before posting.

I'm preoccupied with the 19th annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, where we are facing a Friday, Dec. 20 deadline. I've counted 93 100 ballots so far. Last year I wound up with 159, up from 151 in 2022. I think we'll probably top these figures, but there's still a fair amount of uncertainty at this late date. The main reason for hope is that I've put quite a few more invites out this year, especially to critics in Europe. On the other hand, attrition (that I know about) strikes me as unusually high, and the unknown looms larger than ever.

Still, even the worst case imaginable (which is probably down around 140) means that this is a very large, very wide-ranging poll, which will generate a lot of tips for readers to explore. I'm generating lists of albums, which show that thus far 388 different new albums have received votes, plus 96 for the Rara Avis category (new releases of older music, recorded no later than 2014).

While I caught up with my mail around 8 pm, the next couple days should be a lot of work (and if not it will be pretty depressing). Meanwhile, I'm listening to whatever I can squeeze in. The only non-jazz album below is one that I stumbled across an open tab on, and figured it's short, so why not now? Glad I did.

New records reviewed this week:

John Butcher/Florian Stoffner/Chris Corsano: The Glass Changes Shape (2023 [2024], Relative Pitch): Sax/guitar/drums trio, Corsano also credited with "half clarinet." B+(**) [sp]

Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few: The World Is on Fire (2023 [2024], Division 81): Saxophonist (tenor, I think), from Chicago, started out as one of Ernest Dawkins' Young Masters, fifth group album, album credits break into three tiers, with a core quartet (piano-bass-drums), extras -- Corey Wilkes (trumpet), Ed Wilkerson Jr. (alto clarinet), plus harp, cello, flutes -- and vocals (also a Collier credit). The latter aren't the point, but sometimes the world impinges on your art, and you have to fight back. A- [sp]

Elephant9 With Terje Rypdal: Catching Fire (2017 [2024], Rune Grammofon): Norwegian fusion trio -- keyboards (Ståle Storløkken), bass (Nikolai Hængsle), drums (Torstein Lofthus) -- 11th album since 2008, in a live set with the guitarist. Starts tentative, but they do finally catch fire, which is something to behold. B+(***) [sp]

Eliane Elias: Time and Again (2024, Candid): From Brazil, initially established herself as a postbop pianist, married her bassist (Marc Johnson), first significantly Brazilian album was an instrumental Jobim tribute in 1990, then finally sang Jobim in 1998 (quite well). Since then she has mostly gravitated toward playing and singing Brazilian standards, as she does here, with the guitar finally overshadowing the piano. B+(**) [sp]

Peter Evans: Extra (2023 [2024], We Jazz): Trumpet player, started out in Mostly Other People Do the Killing, own albums start in 2004, including many collaborations with various European free jazz figures. Trio here with Petter Eldh (bass) and Jim Black (drums), both electronics, while he plays piccolo trumpet, flugelhorn, and piano. B+(***) [sp]

Kate Gentile/International Contemporary Ensemble: B i o m e i.i (2021 [2023], Obliquity): Drummer, albums since 2015, composed these pieces for a small chamber orchestra -- a group of 7 drawn from the venerable (since 2001) and much larger (34 is the number I keep running across) artist collective, so: flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, vibraphone, piano, and the leader's drums. B+(***) [bc]

Ayumi Ishito: Roboquarians Vol. 1 (2022 [2024], 577): Japanese saxophonist, based in Brooklyn, several albums since 2015, this an "avant-punk" trio with George Draguns on guitar and Kevin Shea on drums. Evidently, Draguns goes back to the 1980s: Discogs calls him a bassist, and locates him in groups like Form and Mess, Storm and Stress, and Slag. The hard edges I associate with punk give way to synth effects here, credited to Ishito, whose horn is less evident. B+(**) [bc]

Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra: Live at the Adler Planetarium (2023 [2024], International Anthem): Trumpet player, groups started with Chicago Underground and eventually led to this Exploding Star Orchestra (debut 2007, this is their 10th album). Fitting, at least to anyone who remembers Sun Ra, that the latter (now 9-piece) group should wind up performing in the Grainger Sky Theater. B+(**) [sp]

Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra/Small Unit: Spectral Fiction (2023 [2024], Corbett vs. Dempsey): The "compact version" of the trumpeter's big band is slimmed down to six, each well known: Damon Locks (voice/electronics), Tomeka Reid (cello), Angelica Sanchez (Wurlitzer), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass), and Chad Taylor (drums). The music is interesting, but how good the album really is will turn on Locks' words, which I haven't been able to really focus on yet. But my first impression is they may be a plus. B+(***) [bc]

Milton Nascimento/Esperanza Spalding: Milton + Esperanza (2024, Concord): Legendary Brazilian singer-songwriter, active since the late 1960s, holds home court in these duets with the young American bassist-turned-singer, who complements him nicely, much as you'd expect. B+(**) [sp]

Eva Novoa: Novoa/Gress/Gray Trio, Volume 1 (2019 [2024], 577): Earlier, more conventional piano-bass-drums trio, although Gress is also credited with modular synthesizer, and the leader with Chinese gongs. B+(**) [os]

Ivo Perelman/Aruán Ortiz/Ramón López: Ephemeral Shapes (2024, Fundacja Słuchaj): Tenor sax, piano, and drums trio, improv, seven numbered "Shape" pieces, plus one called "Ephemeral." B+(***) [dl]

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Magical Incantations (2024, Soul City Sounds): Tenor sax and piano duo, a partnership which goes back at least to 1996's Bendito of Santa Cruz, intensified after 2011, peaking with the multi-volume The Art of Perelman-Shipp (2017), and continuing -- this is the 11th Shipp co-credit I have filed under Perelman since 2018. Impossible to make fine distinctions, but this does seem to merit its title. A- [sp]

Ivo Perelman/Gabby Fluke-Mogul: Duologues 2: Joy (2024, Ibeji Music): Tenor sax and violin duo. Part of a series that started with Nate Wooley, although there must have been dozens of prior Perelman duos, with many more to come. B+(**) [sp]

Ivo Perelman/Ingrid Laubrock: Duologues 3: Crystal Clear (2024, Ibeji Music): Duo, both play tenor sax. This reminds me that I still haven't listened to Perelman's Reed Rapture in Brooklyn (2022): 11 two-sax duos, each given a full CD. Laubrock would have made sense in that company. B+(***) [sp]

Ivo Perelman's São Paulo Creative 4: Supernova (2024, self-released): Brazil's most famous avant-saxophonist, who seems to have played with every peer in America and Europe, returns home for a sax quartet, with Lívio Tragtenberg (bass clarinet/alto sax), Rogério Costa (soprano/alto sax), and Manu Falleiros (soprano/baritone sax). B+(**) [sp]

Neta Raanan: Unforeseen Blossom (2024, Giant Step Arts): Tenor saxophonist, from New Jersey, quartet where Joel Ross (vibes) is very prominent, especially at first. Eventually the group settles down, and gets better for it. B+(***) [bc]

Christian Tamburr/Dominick Farinacci/Michael Ward-Bergeman: Triad (2024, Ropeadope): Trio of vibraphone/marimba, trumpet, and accordion, the first two Americans, but Ward-Bergeman's bio is cagier, with study at Berklee and stops in New Orleans and Vancouver. The accordion is more common in European jazz, but also explains the Astor Piazzolla opener. The trumpet is more at home in New Orleans, which gives us a cover of "St. James Infirmary" -- one of three guest vocal spots for Shenel Johns, starting with a gutsy "I Put a Spell on You" and ending with a torchy ballad. The other guest is Jamey Haddad, on percussion (6 of 10 tracks). Album title will no doubt carry on as the group name. A- [sp]

Teiku: Teiku (2022 [2024], 577): Group led by Josh Harlow (piano/electronics) and Jonathan Barahal Taylor (drums), composers who based this on Passover songs, offered as "liberation music . . . a call for justice for all oppressed peoples," noting that "as Jews, we decry the senseless violence, displacement, and killing perpetrated in our name." Group adds Peter Formanek (tenor/alto sax/clarinet), Rafael Leafar (bass clarinet/bass flute/tenor/soprano sax), and Jaribu Shahid (bass/percussion). B+(***) [sp]

Trance Map (Evan Parker and Matthew Wright): Horizons Held Close (2024, Relative Pitch): Wright is a British "sound artist," using electronics, turntables, and various other contraptions. He released a duo album with the avant-saxophonist in 2011 called Trance Map, and they've had several more group collaborations since, including two albums on Intakt. Back to a duo here, with Parker playing soprano. B+(**) [sp]

Transatlantic Trance Map: Marconi's Drift (2022 [2024], False Walls): Trance Map was a 2011 duo album of "sound designer" Matthew Wright and avant-saxophonist Evan Parker. They've collaborated several times since, including a recent duo, two mixed group albums on Intakt, and this their most complex endeavor: "two ensembles playing simultaneously on either side of the Atlantic ocean, connected through the internet and improvising through the airwaves." B+(**) [bc]

Unionen: Unionen (2024, We Jazz): Two stars each from Norway and Sweden -- Per "Texas" Johansson (reeds), Ståle Storløkken (keyboards), Petter Eldh (basses), and Gard Nilssen (drums) -- their name referring back to the 1814-1905 United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway (and not to the Swedish trade union, which was Google's first suggestion). B+(***) [sp]

John Zorn: New Masada Quartet, Volume 3: Live at Roulette (2024, Tzadik): Zorn puts his name on so many albums he doesn't play on that it's surprising not to see it here -- not that there's no precedent for attributing it as I did (and as I've done for both previous volumes) -- where he plays his usual alto sax on his book of well-rehearsed tunes, backed by Julian Lage (guitar), Jorge Roeder (bass), and Kenny Wollesen (drums). Great to hear him cut loose, but this adds a whole other dimension to Lage's guitar. A- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Tim Berne/Michael Formanek: Parlour Games (1991 [2024], Relative Pitch): Sax and bass duo, Berne playing alto and baritone, in a previously unreleased session that predates their 1998 duo, Ornery People. This is terrific all the way through. A- [sp]

Brian Calvin and Devin Johnston: Some Hours (1999 [2024], Corbett vs. Dempsey, EP): Short album (5 songs, 22:53), recorded by Jim O'Rourke, with Calvin (guitar/vocals) evidently writing the music to poet Johnston's words (who also plays guitar and offer backing vocals). B+(**) [bc]

Johnny Cash: Songwriter (1993 [2024], Mercury Nashville): Just his vocals, scraped from a demo tape from the void between Cash's Mercury albums (1987-91) and his 1994 work with Rick Rubin, with new instrumentals constructed by John Carter Cash and his crew. A couple of new songs appeared later (like "Drive On"), and some go way back (like "Sing It Pretty, Sue"). Short (11 songs in 30:53), very nicely done. A- [sp]

Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Paul Motian: The Old Country: More From the Deer Head Inn (1992 [2024], ECM): The pianist is still alive, but was knocked out of action by a stroke in 2018, so his label has ever since been scrounging around old tapes for more work by their best-selling-ever artist, as if the market for his wares is inexhaustible. This picks up where his trio's 1994 At the Deer Head Inn left off, with a set of 8 standards running 73:29, with the Nat Adderely title piece the longest. B+(*) [sp]

Soft Machine: Høvikkoden 1971 (1971 [2024], Cuneiform): British prog rock group from Canterbury, started 1968 with a set of odd ditties dominated by singer-songwriter Kevin Ayres. After Ayres split, the rest -- Mike Rutledge (keyboards), Hugh Hopper (bass), and Robert Wyatt (drums), joined by avant-saxophonist Elton Dean (curiously, the source of half of Reginald Dwight's stage name, the other bit taken from Long John Baldry) -- stretched out, with Wyatt the only vocalist, and an odd duck at that. (Wyatt's "The Moon in June" side on Third is my favorite Soft Machine track. After a fall left him paralyzed from the waist down, he went solo, working with Eno and Carla Bley -- high points include his vocals on Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports and Michael Mantler's The Hapless Child -- and ultimately releasing some notable agitprop.) While the group's studio albums, at least through Seven in 1974 (I missed three more through 1981, including one with Allan Holdsworth), tended toward pleasant noodling, several interesting live tapes have surfaced recently, as well as periodic revivals (starting with Soft Machine Legacy in 2005). The live albums, especially the Dean years (1970-72), are much more jazz-oriented, contributing to the burgeoning fusion tide. The best example remains Grides, released in 2006 along with the Legacy disc. This at best is comparable, but two long sets unedited can seem redundant and meander a bit. B+(***) [dl]

Old music:

• None.

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Erik Jekabson: Breakthrough (Wide Hive) [01-17]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Thursday, December 12, 2024

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43304 [43255] rated (+48), 6 [12] unrated (-6).

Schedule around here has gone haywire. Last week I posted on Tuesday, but this Tuesday I was frantically struggling to mail out a second round of invites to vote in the 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I finally got my list of 300+ prospects down to less than 50 high priorities, and after midnight sent out 35 emails. (Some names on my list still lacked email addresses, so I saved them for further investigation.) After that mailing, plus a notice sent to previous invitees via my jazzpoll email list, I got a deluge of mail to sort through, which took me through the end of Wednesday.

In between Tuesdays, Laura's cousin came for a 3-day visit, during which I got very little poll work done, but did manage to cook a nice Jewish dinner that compared favorably to the fancy Chinese restaurant and to the barbecue takeout of the other days: roast chicken with tsimmes, latkes with all of the trimmings, mustard slaw, chopped liver, applesauce cake. I didn't collect any photographic evidence, but the chicken was exceptionally lovely, and everything else was just plain yummy. We did manage to get the construction cleaned up before the visit, so now we can rest on our laurels.

As I'm writing this, I'm caught up, with 62 ballots counted, and eight days to go until the Dec. 20 deadline. All year (well, month) long I've hoped for the biggest and best poll ever. It's impossible at this point to tell whether we're on track or not. What I can say is that I've had a lot of warm responses, and that whatever results we wind up with will very interesting to readers who want a better idea of how much really high qualify jazz is being created in 2024.

One of the invitees who has yet to submit a ballot is Tom Hull, who will try to rectify that here and now. The ballot is just a sample from my ever-expanding Best Jazz of 2024 list, which at the moment counts 92 New Music albums graded A- or above (probably an all-time record high, and I'm still a long ways from processing many records I'm only discovering now as I compile the poll results) + 3 late adds from 2023. Also 23 (+1) new releases of older music A- or higher. These top picks are followed at B+(***) with 188 (+8) new music albums plus 26 (+4) old music albums. Lest you think I'm a pushover, the file also lists 355 new and 30 old music albums that I assigned lower grades to (for a total to date of 646 new music albums + 84 old music albums; that's just jazz, as I've also listened to some non-jazz during 2024).

My ballot:

NEW ALBUMS:

1. Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: Louis Armstrong's America (ESP-Disk): two volumes treated as one album
2. Fay Victor: Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way (Tao Forms)
3. Luke Stewart Silt Trio: Unknown Rivers (Pi)
4. Emmeluth's Amoeba: Nonsense (Moserobie)
5. Darius Jones: Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) (AUM Fidelity)
6. Steve Coleman and Five Elements: PolyTropos/Of Many Turns (Pi)
7. Dave Douglas: Gifts (Greenleaf Music)
8. The Core: Roots (Moserobie)
9. Ballister: Smash and Grab (Aerophonic)
10. أحمد [Ahmed]: Giant Beauty (Fönstret) **

RARA AVIS:

1. Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy: The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp (1995, Elemental Music)
2. Sonny Rollins: Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance)
3. NRG Ensemble: Hold That Thought (1996, Corbett vs. Dempsey) **
4. Phil Haynes' 4 Horns and What?: The Complete American Recordings (1989-95, Corner Store Jazz, 3CD) **
5. Charles Gayle/Milford Graves/William Parker: WEBO (1991, Black Editions Archive) **

VOCAL: Above, plus up to +3.

1. Fay Victor: Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way (Tao Forms)
2. Queen Esther: Things Are Looking Up (EL)
3. Catherine Russell/Sean Mason: My Ideal (Dot Time)
4. Betty Bryant: Lotta Livin' (Bry-Mar Music) **

LATIN: plus up to +3.

1. Julia Vari Feat. Negroni's Trio: Somos (Alternative Representa)
2. Dafnis Prieto Sí o Sï Quartet: 3 Sides of the Coin (Dafnison Music)
3. Hermanos Gutiérrez: Sonido Cósmico (Easy Eye Sound) **

DEBUT: plus up to +3.

1. Ivanna Cuesta: A Letter to the Earth (Orenda) **
2. Alfredo Colón: Blood Burden (Out of Your Head)
3. Mathias Højgaad Jensen: Is as Is (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Several notes of explanation:

• The label split the Allen Lowe album into two volumes (each 2-CD), but in the poll we're treating them as one album. (They came out the same day, and actually share the same liner notes.)
• I bumped my earlier ranking of the Ahmed box up considerably to squeeze it into the ballot, just ahead of the group's really superb Wood Blues album. I very rarely cast a vote just to promote an album, but after this album finished surprisingly strong in the mid-year poll, I've been disappointed at just how few votes this extraordinary work has received so far. My vote here should help nudge it into the top 50 that ArtsFuse will publish.
• Unfortunately, the record that fell off the list to make room for Ahmed was James Brandon Lewis Quartet's Transformation. Lewis's record is currently in the top 20, and could wind up in the top 10 (as could his Messthetics album, which is currently running a bit higher, but is one I like a bit less). One thing that softens the cost of dropping Lewis is that he also not just appears but stars in the Dave Douglas album I have at 8. The Douglas album only has 2 votes so far (same as Ahmed), so its chances of winding up in the top 50 are rather slim.
• Three albums on my list have no other votes so far: Emmeluth, Ballister, and Core. I always have about that many albums all to myself. There are many more albums like that among my A-list, the next one down being Roby Glod's No ToXiC. Mike Monford's The Cloth I'm Cut From could have been another, but it does have one vote so far.
• The Ahmed box is the only one of my top 10 albums that I didn't get a physical CD of. (Hint to whoever, although in this case I didn't even get a download link or a piece of junk mail -- although I did for Wood Blues. I also didn't get a CD of Transfiguration. The streamed/downloaded albums on my 2024 list are marked ** -- for non-jazz, that is very near everything; I had stripped, but now have returned those markings to the ballot above).
• Archival recordings are poorly promoted, so it's especially tempting to restrict the Rara Avis list to promos, but I stopped at two, demoting the Miles in France box (which is good and I am thankful for) so I could mention three other albums that are exceptional but not nearly as well known. Rara Avis is a grab bag of several different things that are hard to compare to one another, so you're always making hard choices here. I've made my EOY file conform to the order here, but that wasn't really necessary.
• I originally had Julia Vari both in Vocal and Latin, but dropped the former to squeeze in Betty Bryant. It's rare that I have this many vocal albums rated this high. (In past years, I might have listed Monford here, as the album has a fair bit of spoken word. There may be more where my memory and/or notes are deficient.)
• Miguel Zenón's Golden City ranks high enough to make the Latin list, and at the moment is in a three-way tie to lead the category. My review played down its significance as Latin Jazz, which gave me an excuse to skip over it, in favor of the more obvious (Dafnis Prieto) and the more obscure (Hermanos Gutiérrez, possibly non-jazz but instrumental and definitely rooted in Ecuador).
• Unusual to find as many as three Debut albums on my A-list, so I went with what I obviously had. I also considered Bex Burch's late-2023 There Is Only Love and Fear, which should be eligible, but decided 2024 albums would be cleaner.

One thing I did last week was to write up a shorter version of the invite letter, where I tried to downplay the rules a bit and make it sound less like contract law. I like this part:

Don't sweat the details. If you have fewer than the maximum number of choices, send in what you have. Vocal and Latin are pretty much whatever you think they mean. Debut has a stricter definition (which almost never allows groups to be eligible), but if it feels right, the worst that can happen is the album is ruled ineligible, and you'll have the chance to come up with something else, or leave it blank. If you can't come up with a maximum list (or don't think it's worth the trouble), just leave it short or blank.

The point isn't to judge everything. You're just making your recommendations, and in doing so, we will all benefit from your knowledge and taste. We don't give out plaques or ribbons. All we are really doing is helping our readers to better understand the great bounty of jazz released each year.

I haven't really followed my advice here: this is much more exhaustively overthought than I expect or even want other people to do. But these lists don't just tell us things about the music on the list, but about the voter, what you know, how you work, and how you view the world. These ballots matter not just because they're easy to aggregate and analyze, but because each tells its own story. That's why we make them all available, even if few readers really care to know that much.

Pretty much everything below is jazz, and that pattern is likely to hold for a couple more weeks. I haven't begun to tabulate all the albums I haven't heard yet that have gotten votes in the poll so far, but the number must be over 100. One resource I've only started to look at is the folder where I've been stuffing all my download link/codes for the past year.

I'll try to post another Music Week toward the middle of next week, but cannot guarantee anything. I basically need a break like I had today, and that seems unlikely. Meanwhile, I'm playing stuff almost continuously, and working my way through whatever happens. After the shock and nausea of the election, this kind of busy work is some kind of blessing -- just not the kind that clarifies thinking. Instead, we just do, and hope for the best. The poll, at least, will be a good thing to come from this period. Syria, I'm not so sure about.

I should mention that while I'm way behind, I've done occasional bits of work on the Metacritic/EOY Aggregate file. Charli XCX has opened up a fairly clear lead, but I don't know whether that's due to early UK reporting, or whether it will sustain as I count more US sources (among others, I haven't done Pitchfork or Rolling Stone yet).

I have a question about Speaking of Which that I want to respond to, but I don't want to hold this up for that. Besides, I have another ballot wanting attention, so I need to get to that. Always open to more questions.

New records reviewed this week:

Alfa Mist & Amika Quartet: Recurring: Live at King's Place (2024, Sekito): Group and/or alias for British keyboardist Alfa Sekitoleko, four previous albums since 2017, unclear on credits and recording date, but the string quartet makes its presence felt. B+(**) [sp]

The Bad Plus: Complex Emotions (2023 [2024], Mack Avenue): Originally a piano-bass-drums trio (2000-17), had some crossover success with their Nirvana cover, auditioned a new pianist after Ethan Iverson left, but founder Reid Anderson (bass) and Dave King (drums) are exploring their options: here (as with their 2022 album) with Ben Monder (guitar) and Chris Speed (reeds). They seem to have settled into something merely nice. B+(**) [sp]

Dmitry Baevsky: Roller Coaster (2024, Fresh Sound New Talent): Russian alto saxophonist, based in New York, sought out Cedar Walton and Jimmy Cobb for his 2004 Introducing, third album for Jordi Pujols' label, a quartet with Peter Bernstein (guitar), bass, and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Bark Culture: Warm Wisdom (2023 [2024], Temperphantom): Philadelphia group, a trio led by composer-vibraphonist (Victor Vieira-Branco), with bass (John Moran), and drums (Joey Sullivan). First album. B+(*) [sp]

Nik Bärtsch's Ronin: Spin (2023 [2024], Ronin Rhythm): Swiss pianist, mostly produces extremely enticing rhythm tracks -- an early album was called Ritual Groove Music, before this became his primary group in 2002, with Sha on alto sax and bass clarinet, plus bass and drums. B+(***) [sp]

Body Meπa: Prayer in Dub (2024, Hausu Mountain): New York-based fusion group -- Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (owl guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), Grey McMurray (deer guitar) -- second album, all rich textures and glimmering sufaces. B+(***) [sp]

Willi Bopp/Camille Émaille/Gianni Gebbia/Heiner Goebbels/Cécile Lartigau/Nicolas Perrin: The Mayfield (2022 [2024], Intakt): Many names above and below the title, the sort alphabetical but Bopp's credit (sound design) seems foundational. As for the others: percussion, saxophones, piano, ondes martenot, guitar/electronics. B+(**) [sp]

Karen Borca/Paul Murphy: Entwined (2024, Relative Pitch): Bassoon player, from Wisconsin, studied with Cecil Taylor there, and became his assistant at Antioch, in 1974 marrying his saxophonist, Jimmy Lyons, who she played with until his death in 1986 -- Murphy was the drummer in that same group. Though fairly well known for her side credits, Borca never had an album under her own name until 2024, when NoBusiness collected a couple Vision Festival group sets as Good News Blues. Now comes "her first proper album," an improv duo with drums. B+(***) [sp]

Sarah Buechi/Franz Hellmüller/Rafael Jerjen: Pink Mountain Sagas (2024, Intakt): Swiss jazz singer, sixth album since 2014 on Intakt, second to share credit line with guitarist and bassist, this time adding a "feat." cover credit for Kristina Brunner (Schwyzerörgeli [an accordion]) and Andreas Gabriel (violin). B+(**) [sp]

Anna Butterss: Mighty Vertebrate (2024, International Anthem): Bassist, member of Jeff Parker's IVtet, same concept here with Josh Johnson (alto sax/effects), but different guitarist (Gregory Uhlmann) and drummer (Ben Lumsdaine), with the leader also contributing some guitar, synths, flute, and drum machine, which can add a bit of bounce. Parker guests on one (of ten) tracks. I like the lead track even more than the Parker album, but it loses a step later on. B+(***) [sp]

Charlie and the Tropicales: Jump Up (2024, Nu-Tone): Third group album, led by New Orleans trombonist Charlie Halloran, warms up a mambo, adds a dash of calypso, a cover of "Gee Baby," and plenty more salsa picante, often depending on which guest singer they can line up for what. B+(**) [sp]

Sylvie Courvoisier: To Be Other-Wise (2024, Intakt): Swiss pianist, based in New York since 1998, shortly after her long string of records begins. This one is solo. B+(***) [sp]

Josephine Davies: Satori: Weatherwards (2024, Whirlwind): British tenor saxophonist, originally from the Shetland Islands, debut 2006, released Satori in 2017, initially a trio with bass (Dave Whitford) and drums (later James Maddren), adding Alcyona Mick on piano for this fourth album. Very poised, albeit with a couple of tentative spots. B+(***) [sp]

Caroline Davis: Portals Vol. 2: Returning (2022 [2024], Intakt): Alto saxophonist, based in New York, several albums since 2011, including a Portals Vol. 1: Mourning (2020). Interesting music, guest vocals a mixed bag. B+(**) [sp]

David Friesen: A Light Shining Through (2021 [2024], Origin): Bassist-composer, steady stream of albums ever since 1976, approaching 80 when he took his quartet -- Joe Manis (saxes), Alex Fantaev (percussion), and Charlie Doggett (more percussion) -- to pre-invasion (but not pre-war) Ukraine to record with the Kyiv Mozart String Quartet. B+(***) [cd]

Asher Gamedze & the Black Lungs: Constitution (2023 [2024], International Anthem): Jazz drummer from Capetown, South Africa, with several albums since 2020, this an octet plus vocals (Tina Mene) and words (Fred Moten). The latter are engaging, but the former veer toward opera. B+(*) [sp]

Ginetta's Vendetta: Fun Size (2024, Kickin' Wiccan Music): Group led by Ginetta M. (for Minichiello), who plays pocket trumpet and sings, sixth album, wrote a couple songs while covering tunes like "Moon River" and "Misty." Band includes tenor/soprano sax (Danny Walsh, piano (Jon Davis), bass, and drums. B+(*) [cd]

Louis Hayes: Artform Revisited (2024, Savant): Drummer, from Detroit, played with Horace Silver, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley in the late 1950s, has a 1960 album but emerged as a leader in the late 1970s, and again in the early 1990s. Last heard on his 2017 Serenade for Horace, back here at 86 with a vibrant quintet -- Abraham Burton (tenor sax), Steve Nelson (vibes), David Hazeltine (piano), Dezron Douglas (bass) -- adding a couple originals (and "A Flower Is Lovesome Thing") to a program of bop-era standards. B+(***) [sp]

The Jazz Passengers: Big Large: In Memory of Curtis Fowlkes (2023 [2024], FOOD): Recorded "shortly before [the trombonist's] death," the octet he co-led with saxophonist Roy Nathanson still sounds fabulous ranging "from the wistful and tragic to the vaudevillian and absurd, . . . a living memory, a yearning we all have for something just out of reach," although their vocals rarely approach the same level of craft. B+(***) [sp]

Emiliano Lasansky: The Optimist (2024, Outside In Music): Bassist, from Iowa, studied in Rochester, moved to New York, released an album with the group Kin (2019), moved on to Los Angeles, this counts as his debut, a quartet with Devin Daniels (alto sax), Javier Santiago (piano), and Benjamin Ring (drums), with vocals (Genevieve Artadi) on 4 tracks. B+(***) [sp]

Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey: Brink (2024, Intakt): German saxophonist (tenor/soprano), based in New York, has been playing with the drummer at least since 2008, with several duo albums (especially during the 2020 lockdown). B+(**) [r]

Jeff Lederer: Guilty! (2024, Little (i) Music): Saxophonist (tenor/alto), has several albums under his own name but also works under group names (Brooklyn Blowhards, Shakers n' Bakers) and side credits. Here he revives his "post-modern Traditional Jazz band" Swing n' Dix -- Kirk Knuffke (cornet), Bob Stewart (tuba), and Matt Wilson (drums), with guest spots for Curtis Hasselbring (trombone/electronics) and Mary LaRose (vocals) -- for another round of old-timey sounds wracked by modernist maelstrom. B+(**) [sp]

Luis Lopes Humanization 4tet: Saarbrücken (2021 [2024], Clean Feed): Portuguese electric guitarist, fifth album since 2008 with this group, with tenor sax great Rodrigo Amado and two sons of the American trumpet player Dennis Gonzalez -- Aaron on bass, Stefan on drums. While the saxophonist is always impressive, the guitar is especially distinctive here. A- [bc]

Luis Lopes: Dark Narcissus: Stereo Guitar Solo (2024, Shhpuma): Not sure what the technical gimmick is here, but the tone is metallic, a collage of sound that retains its interest. B+(**) [bc]

Roberto Magris: Europlane for Jazz: Freedom Is Peace (2024, JMood): Italian pianist, led Gruppo Jazz Marca in the 1980s, solo albums start from 1990. This revives his Europlane group, which had recorded three albums 1998-2005: currently a sextet with Tony Lakatos (tenor/soprano sax), Florian Bramböck (alto/baritone sax), Lukás Oravec (trumpet/fluegelhorn), bass, and drums, for a long and often delightful (75:50) live set. B+(***) [cd]

Francisco Mela/Zoh Amba: Causa y Efecto (Vol. 2) (2021 [2024], 577): Drums and tenor sax duo, some voice from Mela, some flute from Amba. Label like to split its sessions into paired volumes then delay the second part. B+(**) [bc]

Eva Novoa: Novoa/Carter/Mela Trio, Vol. 1 (2021 [2024], 577): Spanish pianist, debut 2016, third different trio she's assembled for this label, this with Daniel Carter (tenor sax, trumpet, flute, clarinet) and Francisco Mela (drums). Long first-side piece is beautifully balanced. Second side drops in a bit of vocal (Mela) on one piece, some electric keyb on the other, but Carter is again superb. A- [os]

Adam O'Farrill: Hueso (2024, FOOD): Trumpet player, from New York, father and grandfather are famous Latin Jazz masters, but he's more likely to show up in free jazz contexts. Quartet here with Xavier Del Castillo (tenor sax), Walter Stinson (bass), and brother Zack O'Farrill (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Out Of/Into [Joel Ross/Gerald Clayton/Kendrick Scott/Matt Brewer/Immanuel Wilkins]: Motion I (2024, Blue Note): One of the label's occasional ad hoc supergroup projects, where Wilkins (alto sax) and Ross (vibes) are their latest generation of stars, backed here by well established piano-bass-drums players. They're all superb players, and this could easily pass as a fine album, if you didn't listen to much else that's been coming out. B+(**) [sp]

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet: The Way Out of Easy (2023 [2024], International Anthem): Guitarist, long associated with Chicago but seems to be based in Los Angeles these days, started in post-rock group Tortoise while working with Chicago Underground, Hamid Drake, Joshua Abrams, and others. ETA refers to Enfield Tennis Academy, the site of this quartet's breakout 2022 live album. With better PR/distribution, this album has already [by the day it appeared on streaming platforms] been reviewed by Guardian (4 stars) and Pitchfork (8.4!). Another live album, with Jeff Johnson (alto sax/electronics) riffing over immensely appealing grooves -- Anna Butterss (bass), Jay Bellerose (drums), and the leader's guitar. Perhaps a bit more focused on the landing than on the takeoff. A- [sp]

Ivo Perelman/Fay Victor/Jim Morris/Ramon Lopez: Messa Di Voce (2018 [2024], Mahakala Music): Avant-saxophonist from Brazil, first albums date from 1989, and he's become more and more prolific over the years: this is the 6th I've heard of 9 2024 albums in my tracking file, which I'm pretty sure is incomplete. Victor is a vocalist who is up to the challenge of a horn joust, with the others filling and driving on bass and drums. B+(***) [bc]

Ivo Perelman/Nate Wooley: Polarity 3 (2024, Burning Ambulance): Tenor sax and trumpet duo, their third since 2020. A fairly limited sonic pallette, especially without a rhythm section to move them along. B [bc]

Joe Sanders: Parallels (2021 [2024], Whirlwind): Bassist, based in New York, credits also include "drums, piano, voice, programming." Has a 2012 debut on Criss Cross, mostly side credits after that. Opens with four live tracks from 2021, with two saxes (Logan Richardson and Seamus Blake) and drums (Greg Hutchinson), followed by six undated studio tracks with only two guest spots. Each interesting in different ways, which don't add up. B [sp]

Jenny Scheinman: All Species Parade (2024, Royal Potato Family): Violinist, a dozen or so albums since 2000, plus quite a few side credits. Reflects on her roots in Humboldt County, California, which she returned to after making a name for herself in New York. Carmen Stief (piano) and Bill Frisell (guitar) blend into the countryside, with bass (Tony Scherr), drums (Kenny Wollesen), and additional guitar spots for Julian Lage or Nels Cline. Sprawls over 2-LP, but the 72 minutes fits a single CD. B+(***) [sp]

Jörg A. Schneider/Luis Lopes: Schneider/Lopes (2023 [2024], Schneidercollaboration): Drums and guitar duo. B+(**) [bc]

Shabaka: Possession (2024, Impulse!, EP): One of the most imposing saxophonist to come out of the UK ever, Shabaka Hutchings swore off his instrument last time out, opting for flute and a more ambient/spiritual flow. He continues here, with five songs, 23:37, drawing on hip-hop guests (like Billy Woods, Elucid, and fellow flute devotee André 3000), as well as Esperanza Spalding and Nduduzo Makhathini. B [sp]

Linda Sikhakhane: Iladi (2024, Blue Note): Tenor saxophonist from South Africa, based in New York, he has a couple self-released albums, one on Ropeadope, then this one on his pianist Nduduzo Makhathini's major label. With bass (Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere) and drums (Kweku Sumbry), and a strong sonic (sounds like spiritual) debt to Coltrane. B+(***) [sp]

Ben Solomon: Echolocation (2023 [2024], Giant Step Arts): Tenor saxophonist, based in New York, this got some votes for Debut album, but while Discogs doesn't list anything, his Bandcamp has two previous albums (one from 2023). Quartet with piano (Davis Whitfield), bass (Rahsaan Carter), and drums (Kush Abadey). Includes tributes to Coltrane and Shorter, whose influence is evident. B+(***) [sp]

Joe Syrian Motor City Jazz Octet: Secret Message (2023 [2024], Circle 9): Drummer, presumably from Detroit although this second group album was recorded in Paramus, has a swishy, big band feel but not the body count, swinging eight standards -- from Porter into Lennon-McCartney, Leon Russell, and Stevie Wonder. B+(**) [cd]

Chucho Valdés/Royal Quartet: Cuba and Beyond (2024, InterCat Music Group): Cuban pianist, father was a major bandleader, founded and led the group Irakere, still impressive in his 80s, his group a quartet with bass, drums, and percussion. B+(**) [sp]

Anna Webber: Simpletrio2000 (2023 [2024], Intakt): Canadian tenor saxophonist, also plays flute, born in Vancouver, studied in Montreal, moved to New York, steady stream of albums since 2010, this as advertised with below-the-title cover credit for Matt Mitchell (piano) and John Hollenbeck (drums), who are nobody's idea of simple. The fast stretches are exceptional, but the flute can slow them down. B+(***) [bc]

Ben Wolfe: The Understated (2023 [2024], Resident Arts): Bassist, tenth album since 1998, composed all pieces, most with Nicole Glover (tenor sax), Orrin Evans (piano), and Aaron Kimmel (drums), with guest spots (two tracks each) for Russell Malone (guitar) and Sullivan Fortner (piano). B+(*) [sp]

John Zorn & Jesse Harris: Love Songs Live (2023 [2024], Tzadik): Songwriters, music and lyrics respectively, Harris best known for his 2001-09 work with Norah Jones (although he has done much more since). The singer here is Petra Haden, backed by Brian Marsella (piano), Jorge Roeder (bass), and Ches Smith (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Louis Armstrong All Stars: Lausanne 1952 [Swiss Radio Days Jazz Series, Vol. 48] (1952 [2024], TCB): No real surprises here, as the set list is familiar from other live shots from the period, when the legitimately named "All Stars" that in 1947 featured Earl Hines, Barney Bigard, Jack Teagarden, and Big Sid Catlett, were down to Bob McCracken (clarinet), Trummy Young (trombone), Marty Napoleon (piano), Arvell Shaw (bass), and Cozy Cole (drums). They make for a very hot five, although the program becomes more varied when Velma Middleton enters, followed by features for the various "stars." B+(***) [bc]

Jakob Bro/Lee Konitz/Bill Frisell/Jason Moran/Thomas Morgan/Andrew Cyrille: Taking Turns (2014 [2024], ECM): Danish guitarist, debut album 2003, recorded his first ECM album in Oslo in 2013, a few months before this shelved studio session in New York. Bro original compositions, everyone lays back, though at this point anything by Konitz is welcome. B+(*) [sp]

Bill Evans: In Norway: The Kongsberg Concert (1970 [2024], Elemental Music): Pianist (1929-80), legend enough he has quite a bit of newly discovered archival work out. This is a trio with Eddie Gomez (bass) and Marty Morell (drums), from a strong year. CD runs 79:33, 2-LP runs €49.98. B+(***) [cd]

Al Jarreau: Wow! Live at the Childe Harold (1976 [2024], Resonance): Jazz singer (1940-2017), enjoyed some vogue in the late 1970s as a semipop crossover (five Grammys 1978-82, 5 more in 1986, 1993, and 2007; albums in 1981 and 1983 charted 9 and 13). Christgau dismissed him, "maybe because he neither writes nor interprets songs with the soul to match his freeze-dried facility." I checked him out, didn't care for what I heard, and forgot all but his name. But this newly discovered live tape does attest to his "facility," and largely justifies its title. B+(***) [cd]

NRG Ensemble: Hold That Thought (1996 [2024], Corbett vs. Dempsey): Group originally founded by avant-saxophonist Hal Russell (1926-92), with Mars Williams continuing the group for a few years after his death, notably recruiting young saxophonist Ken Vandermark, who would shortly bring Williams and bassist Kent Kessler into his Vandermark 5. (I didn't realize this until just now, but Russell's original name was Luttenbacher, hence he was the inspiration as well as a founding member of Weasel Walter's no-wave post-rock band, the Flying Luttenbachers.) Williams died last year, and this live set, from Utrecht, was found among his archives. It's an extraordinary piece of work, not just a tribute to past Russell but a harbinger of future Vandermark. A- [bc]

Old music:

• None.

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jessica Jones Quartet: Edible Flowers (Reva) [01-03]
• Karl Latham: Living Standards II (Dropzone Jazz) [01-17]
• Noel Okimoto: Hō'ihi (Noel Okimoto Music) [01-01]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43255 [43229] rated (+26), 12 [21] unrated (-9).

Another short week, attempting to revert to a normal (or at least more customary) publication date of Tuesday (or Monday). But also because we're expecting company from late tonight through the weekend, so I'm not expecting much more time to work on this (or anything else).

We finally moved back into our wrecked-and-renovated upstairs room, with all the dislocated clutter if not back in its original resting space at least stashed away somewhere we won't accidentally trip over. I'll still need to figure out some organization for the now empty closet space, but that's no longer on the critical path to something else. And if we do manage to declutter some, we might not even need it.

I wish I could say the 19th annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll was properly shaped up, but I've bumbled through another week of deep thought and lightweight hacking, making only small measures of progress. The initial round of 230 invites went out on or near Nov. 20. (The 8 bounces have since been reduced to 5. Anti-spam problems persist, even within the rather compact jpadmin mail list. (I'm overdue to send a reminder to the more global jazzpoll mail list, but I keep thinking I'll have better news soon.) The website Voter Notes have a lot more detail, but are still unfinished. The more urgent project is to get a second round of ballot invites out, which may take as long as the end of the week. If you're expecting one and haven't heard yet, please nag me.

I've counted 27 ballots, and have 4-5 in my inbox today that I'll get to after posting this. The pace should pick up steadily from this week, although it's impossible to predict whether we will wind up with 120 or 150 or 180 ballots (or maybe even 200 if the second round really explodes). The biggest uncertainty is how much mail is actually getting through to voters, as there is no way (at least that I know of) to ensure or even accurately measure delivery. In the past, I've urged people who read this to spread the word, but I've never seen any evidence of that working.

So I'm torn between feelings of panic and que sera sera, with the coming distraction favoring the latter. No new work on the ultimate Speaking of Which. I glanced briefly at The Intelligencer today for the first time in a week or two, discovering that Biden pardoned his son -- which at least short-circuits the question of whether Trump would have done so (in the hollowest gesture of bipartisanship imaginable). Also Ed Kilgore attacking "Sanders, Warren, and other progressives" for "looking to steal some of Trump's populist street cred" and "just deny Democrats a united front" (against what? street cred?). Nothing there on South Korea yet, where the right does seem to have provoked a "united front" in defense of democracy.

Meanwhile, I've moved from Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air to another old book I've long meant to read, Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. I have two more Hobsbawm volumes lined up after that, with The Age of Extremes on a shelf hereabouts since I bought it hot off the press. I might also note that I did manage to take a break Sunday to fix a very comfy dinner. Had leftovers tonight, and they were delish. With company, hopefully I'll get to cook some more. Helps relieve stress, even though it does tend to come back on you.

I haven't filed my own ballot yet, but will do so this week. For a rough draft, you can look at my Jazz list. I have to reconsider the order, which has always been slapdash, but the leading candidates haven't changed much in well over a month -- the adds have been way down the list, which currently is up to a possible record-high 89 A-list jazz albums. One likely change is that I'll combine the Lowe volumes into one entry and make it my top pick. (The Pollmaster has allowed that to be legal. See the op. cit. Voter Notes.) I'll publish whatever I come up with next week, along with whatever news crops up. Meanwhile, my Non-Jazz list remains relatively lame, with a mere 49 A-list new albums, which Lamar Kendrick barely missed this week. I've done a little bit of EOY Aggregate work, but not much. I'll have time to catch up later. One thing I have zero interest in right now is 2025 releases. My 2024 demo queue is down to 6 albums right now. I should knock them down next week. As for saved download links, not my problem right now.

I've skipped past much bookkeeping work over the last month or so, and doubt I'll make any progress on it for a couple more weeks, but eventually I'll get to it. Looking forward to changes, around here if not out there, after the Poll.

New records reviewed this week:

Jacqui Dankworth: Windmills (2024, Perdido): British jazz singer, daughter of saxophonist John Dankworth and singer Cleo Laine, started in theatre, at least eight albums since 1994. Standards, in orchestral arrangements, does offer a quite nice "Send in the Clowns." B+(*) [sp]

Djrum: Meaning's Edge (2024, Houndstooth, EP): British electronica producer Felix Manuel, has mostly singles and EPs since 2010 (Discogs lists 2 albums, from 2013 and 2018, but counts this 5 tracks, 31:59 as an EP). B+(**) [sp]

Taylor Eigsti: Plot Armor (2024, GroundUP Music): Pianist, ninth album since 1999, won a Grammy last time out, Tree Falls (2021). Many guest spots here, including trumpet (Terence Blanchard), sax (Ben Wendel, Dayna Stephens), and vocals (Lisa Fischer, Gretchen Parlato, Becca Stevens), plus "many appearances by a layered string section." B- [sp]

Floros Floridis/Matthias Bauer/Joe Hertenstein: Temporal Driftness (2023 [2024], Evil Rabbit): Greek clarinet player (mostly bass clarinet here, also alto sax), studied physics and math before choosing music, first albums 1979-80, has a fairly steady stream of albums (not huge, but Discogs places him on five 2024 releases), seems to be based in Berlin now. Free improv trio with bass and drums, working their way through 11 numbered "Drift" pieces, nothing spectacular but a fine example of how it's done. A- [sp]

Joe Fonda Quartet: Eyes on the Horizon (2024 [2024], Long Song): Free jazz bassist, many albums since 1981, Discogs counts 43 under his own name, but that skips many groups he led or co-led -- e.g., the Fonda/Stevens group, and FAB Trio (with Billy Bang). (Discogs has 182 album performance credits). He draws on longtime collaborators here: Satoko Fujii (piano, 5 duo albums since 2015), Tiziano Tononi (drums, 7 albums since 2018), and (going way back) Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet). Exemplary work all around. A- [cd]

Ben Goldberg/Todd Sickafoose/Scott Amendola: Here to There (2024, Secret Hatch): Clarinet player, including bass clarinet, backed by bass and drums/electronics, offers new tunes based on Thelonious Monk "bridges." B+(**) [cd]

Mickey Guyton: House on Fire (2024, Capitol Nashville): Nashville singer-songwriter, second album after several EPs and the breakout single "Black Like Me." Sounds more pop than country. B+(*) [sp]

Tom Harrell: Alternate Summer (2022 [2024], HighNote): Trumper player, debut 1976, by which time he had played with Kenton, Herman, and Horace Silver. Postbop group, all original pieces, with either Mark Turner or Dayna Stephens on tenor sax, Charles Altura on guitar (4 tracks, of 10), backed by a rhythm section of Luis Perdomo, Ugonna Okegwo, and Adam Cruz. B+(**) [sp]

Cliff Korman Trio: Urban Tracks (2021 [2024], SS): Pianist, from New York, has side credits back to 1984, many with Brazilian connections. Trio with bass and drums. B+(*) [cd] [12-06]

Marie Krüttli Trio: Scoria (2023 [2024], Intakt): Swiss pianist, several albums since her first trio in 2015, this one with Lukas Traxel (bass) and Gautier Garrigue (drums). B+(*) [sp]

Kendrick Lamar: GNX (2024, PGLang/Interscope): Los Angeles rapper, started as K.Dot, sixth studio album after a widely admired 2010 mixtape (Overly Dedicated), this one came with no advance hype, and no overarching concept. Some good bits here, but not much I'm connecting with. B+(***) [sp]

Hayoung Lyou: The Myth of Katabasis (2024, Endectomorph Music): Pianist from Korea, studied at Berklee and New England Conservatory, based in New York. Second album, trio with Thomas Morgan (bass) and Steven Crammer (drums). The focus is very much on the piano, wending its way from "syrupy Russian piano music" to the "hard-fought freedom into jazz." B+(**) [cd]

Rob Mazurek Quartet: Color Systems (2022 [2024], RogueArt): Trumpet player (+ piccolo trumpet, bells, electronics), many albums since 1995, practically trademarked the idea of Chicago Underground, and has expanded on that in various directions (even developing a Sao Paulo franchise). Stellar quartet here with Angelica Sanchez (piano), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Chad Taylor (drums). B+(***) [cdr]

Kresten Osgood Quintet: Live at H15 Studio (2017 [2024], ILK Music): Danish drummer, 120 performance credits since 2000, organized this group for a 2018 album, Kresten Osgood Quintet Plays Jazz, with this a live set from the same month (but repeating no songs). With Erik Kimestad Pedersen (trumpet), Mads Egetoft (sax), Jeppe Zeeberg (piano), and Matthias Petri (bass). B+(**) [sp]

Reut Regev's R*Time: It's Now: R*Time Plays Doug Hammond (2023 [2024], ESP-Disk): Trombonist, also plays "flugabone," based in New York, introduced R*Time band in 2009, plays some fusion of gutbucket blues and free jazz, married to drummer Igal Foni -- present here, along with Jean-Paul Bourelly (guitar) and Eric Revis (bass), with Hammond writing the songs and singing most of them. As usual, the vocals are the weak spot, but not without interest. B+(***) [cd]

Sara Serpa: Encounters & Collisions (2023 [2024], Biophilia): Jazz singer, from Portugal, studied in Boston, based in New York since her 2008 debut, dozen albums, some kind of art song, a style (slow, articulate, contorted) I've never cared for. The singing alternates with spoken word stories I have trouble hearing and instrumental backing -- Ingrid Laubrock (sax), Angelica Sanchez (piano), and Erik Friedlander (cello) -- I do enjoy. B+(*) [cd]

Skyzoo: Keep Me Company (2024, Old Soul Music): New York rapper Gregory Taylor, still underground after twenty years. "The only thing that sounds better muted is trumpet." B+(***) [sp]

Margaret Slovak & Chris Maresh: A Star's Light Does Fall (2024, Slovak Music): Nylon string guitar for that delicate touch, duets with acoustic bass, nicely ambient. B+(*) [cd]

Sun Ra Arkestra [Under the Direction of Marshall Allen]: Lights on a Satellite (2024, In+Out): Sun Ra's ghost band, still under the steady leadership of long-time alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who had just passed 100 when he brought the 24-piece band to New York's Power Station to record this double-LP, starting with a 10-minut run through the title song (from 1961), before going earlier and later. After all the space talk, they wind up "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans." A- [sp]

Pat Thomas: The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir (2024, Otoroku): Avant-pianist, based in London, early albums with Lol Coxhill (1993) and Derek Bailey (1997), has drawn on Arabic models, especially for his solo work (starting with Nur in 1999, and most impressively in his Ahmed group). B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Duck Baker: Breakdown Lane: Free Jazz Guitar 1976-1998 (1976-98 [2024], ESP-Disk): Guitarist, acoustic fingerstyle, straddles folk and jazz, first album 1975, scattered solos and duos with Eugene Chadbourne. B+(**) [cd]

Miles Davis Quintet: Miles in France 1963 & 1964 [The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8] (1963-64 [2024], Columbia/Legacy, 6CD): Another treasure trove of live quintet sets, with the young Herbie Hancock-Ron Carter-Tony Williams rhythm section, plus George Coleman (tenor sax) on the 1963 Juan-Les-Pins festival sessions, replaced by Wayne Shorter for the 1964 sets at Salle Pleyel. The 7/27/1963 set mostly appeared in Miles Davis in Europe (1964), but everything else was previously unreleased, with the extra focus on Coleman most appreciated. Overall, sounds about par for live Davis from the period -- which is to say, instantly recognizable and often sublime -- like The Complete Concert 1964 (with Coleman), Miles in Berlin (with Shorter), and the most intriguing path not taken, Miles in Tokyo (with Sam Rivers). [CD packaging is remarkably compact, unlike the earlier Bootleg Series vaults, or the pricey 8-LP.] A- [cd]

Miles Davis: Miles '54: The Prestige Recordings (1954 [2024], Craft, 2CD): Or 4-LP, which is probably the point, but the label takes their remastering seriously, and offers a range of formats. This collects four sessions from the pivotal year in Davis's 1951-56 tenure at Prestige, starting with three tracks (including "Four") from the back half of a 10-inch LP, followed by star-laden sessions eventually released as Walkin', Bags Groove, and Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants -- some with Sonny Rollins (tenor sax) or Milt Jackson (vibes), with Horace Silver or Thelonious Monk on piano, Percy Heath (bass), and Kenny Clarke (drums), with two tracks each for Jay Jay Johnson (trombone), Lucky Thompson (tenor sax), and Dave Schildkraut (alto sax). A- [sp]

B.B. King: In France: Live at the 1977 Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival (1977 [2024], Deep Digs/Elemental Music): Memphis blues guitarist-singer (1925-2015), his classic singles date from the early 1950s, but with 1964's Live at the Regal he started to gain a rock audience, as well as hitting up a few jazz festivals, and he remained a popular figure past 2000. He rolls out the horns here, and puts on a good show, with the flagship 2-LP product squeezing neatly in to one 79:17 CD. B+(**) [cd]

Sun Ra: Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank (1978 [2024], Resonance, 2CD): Confusing to have this reissue share the same title as the new album by the ghost Arkestra -- song title goes back at least as far as 1961's Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow. This was a prime period for the big band, with their consummate knack of making a circus out of their imagined cosmos: while they can fall into schtick, or break down in chaos, their flights of fantasy are as primal as they are astonishing. A- [cd]

Old music:

Sun Ra & His Arkestra: Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow (1961 [2014], Enterplanetary Koncepts): Two New York sessions, shortly after the band moved from Chicago, including their first take on "Lights on a Satellite," the title of two prominent 2024 releases (one a 1978 live shot, the other a celebration of Marshall Allen's 100th birthday). Some early sonic experiments, but the underlying swing is strong, and a bonus track reminds you how hard John Gilmore could play. A- [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Liz Cole: I Want to Be Happy (self-released) [01-28]
• Eugenie Jones: Eugenie (Open Mic) [01-20]
• Doug MacDonald: Santa Monica Session (DMAC Music) [01-01]
• Rob Mazurek Quartet: Color Systems (RogueArt) [11-11]
• Joe Syrian Motor City Jazz Octet: Secret Message (Circle 9) [11-15]
• Vincenzo Virgillito: Precondition (self-released) [01-01]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Thursday, November 28, 2024

November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43229 [43200] rated (+29), 21 [28] unrated (-7).

Having delayed posting of last week's Music Week until Friday (Nov. 22), I was uncertain whether to try to rush this week's post back to its normal Monday/Tuesday time frame, or hold back until the end of November (Saturday, Nov. 30), or even just skip the week and resync next Monday. I figured it would depend on what I had to say when about the 2024 Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll.

My goals for the week there were to whip the website into shape, both as the eventual home of the ballots and totals, and as a useful resource for voters. For the latter, I've mostly focused on a long and detailed Voters Notes file. My other big project was to come up with a second round of invites to vote. The first round went out on Nov. 20 to 228 critics, most of whom have voted in recent polls. I'm looking to add another 40-60 names to the list, or possibly more. (Some early research uncovered over 150 new names, but they still need to be vetted and contacted, and that's slow work.)

To date, I'm fairly happy with the website work -- the Voter Notes file still doesn't have everything I wanted, but it's getting there, while the hypothetical FAQ has been nixxed, at least for now. But I've made damn little progress on the second round voter list -- so little that I've decided to run this without waiting for better news.

I've had to hack on the software to handle the expansion of the Vocal/Latin/Debut categories, but that wasn't too difficult, so I'm generating good ballot and totals pages. I've tabulated 19 ballots, which reference 130 New Albums, 38 Rara Avis, 25 Vocal Albums, 22 Latin Albums, and 15 Debut albums. Lists of albums so far receiving votes are available here (alphabetized by artist, so as not to reveal much about the standings). Still, these lists are good for prospecting. I haven't run numbers this year yet, but in the past I've found that a third or more of the albums receiving votes were not previously in my tracking file. Much of the new jazz this week was suggested by ballots.

Counting the ballots is the fun part of the job. The bane of my existence is the aggravation and especially the uncertainty of email. I sent a message to 202 people on my "jazzpoll" email list, but how many actually received it? I don't know, and don't know how to find out. I sent 228 ballot invites out from my own email address, using a very laborious process that I believe works better than the mass mailing list, but how much better I still don't know. (I do know that 8 of those messages bounced.) This uncertainty haunts me, with visions of imminent failure. On the other hand, the people who do respond are doing great work, and their data input is extremely valuable. In the end, they will make this worthwhile, but the meantime is rough.

We have zero plans for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so maybe I'll get some work done. Perhaps even more urgent than the Poll is wrapping up the wrecked bedroom project. A few months ago, a chunk of ceiling fell in. I got a contractor to come in and patch it, recover the whole ceiling with new drywall, and steam the ugly wallpaper that has covered the walls since we moved in in 1999. The closet had even uglier wallpaper, and even worse surfaces. (This is a 1920 house, so lath/plaster everywhere.) I had bought paneling some years ago for the closet, but never got into it, so that became my piece of the project. It's taken many weeks, during which all the stuff from the room got moved into other rooms, creating endless hassles for both of us. (I just posted a picture on Facebook.) Tomorrow I'll work on the closet, and we'll start to move back into the room. Most of the weight is in books, which will fill three bookcases. Also the futon, a desk, and a piece I made to fit under the east window, with a couple drawers and a surface Laura keeps plants on.

When I made my initial cut on Wednesday, I was thinking that, like, last week, I would post an early draft of this, then update it later in the week. So, expecting to add later reviews, in my last November Music Week, I didn't set up a December Streamnotes file. Unclear right now how I intend to handle this.

I might also note here that while I have no desire to open another Speaking of Which can of worms, I have added a couple more items to my final (post-election) column, pushing the word count up to 37102. The latest add was an Alfred Soto piece, which he promised to be his last word on the subject.

As I didn't get this posted on Wednesday, when I made my initial cut, it will go up on Thursday, a Thanksgiving I have no social plans for, and otherwise am pretty indifferent about. Maybe I'll cook a little something for just the two of us? (I just pulled a pound of beef liver out of the freeezer. I have onions, and for sides some cabbage and pasta. That shouldn't take too much time away from working on house, poll, and blog. And if it does, it's a holiday, right? One more day won't make much difference.)

By the way, here's a Thanksgiving meme for you, courtesy of Richard D. Wolff, where the text (reduced from all caps) reads: "Happy Thanksgiving/Celebrating the day Americans fed undocumented immigrants from Europe."

That's a good note to end on, and get this out of the way. Today's new records, including a low A- from Joe Fonda and a Reut Regev album that needs another spin, should wait for next week, when hopefully I'll have more to report.

New records reviewed this week:

Holman Álvarez: Hidden Objects (2023 [2024], Sunnyside): Pianist, from Colombia, based in New York, nothing much in Discogs but claims five albums (2011-22) from his days in Bogotá. Quartet here with Adam O'Farrill (a standout on trumpet), Drew Gress (bass), and Satoshi Takeishi (drums). B+(**) [cd]

Awon x Phoniks: Golden Era 2 (2024, Don't Sleep): Rapper Antwan Wiggins, goes back to 2013 with the producer "known for his vintage-90's boom bap production style and melodic jazz and soul samples." Flow reminds me of Digable Planets. A- [sp]

Peter Bernstein: Better Angels (2024, Smoke Sessions): Jazz guitarist, several dozen albums and tons of sidework since 1998, I figure he's part of the Wes Montgomery tradition but looking through his discography, the tributes I see are to Tal Farlow and Attila Zoller. Quartet here with piano (Brad Mehldau), bass (Vicente Archer), and drums (Al Foster). B+(*) [sp]

Betty Bryant: Lotta Livin' (2023 [2024], Bry-Mar Music): Jazz singer, 94, website claims 14 albums but Discogs only lists 3, plays piano, wrote 4 songs to go with 5 standards. Opens with a swinging "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," shifts into songs that are talkier (including a delightful take on "The Very Thought of You." Band swings, and the sax is lovely (Robert Kyle). A- [sp]

Scott Colley/Edward Simon/Brian Blade: Three Visitors (2024, GroundUP Music): Bass-piano-drums trio, all long- and well-established, impressive enough on their own, plus a few guest spots: another strong sax spot for Christ Potter, but the rest is less interesting: several vocals, some strings, and percussion (Rogério Boccato). B+(**) [sp]

Steve Davis: We See (2024, Smoke Sessions): Trombonist, started with Art Blakey in the late 1980s, 20+ albums since 1995. Live set at Smoke Jazz Club in New York with a sextet of peers: Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Ralph Moore (tenor sax), Renee Rosnes (piano), Essiet Essiet (bass), and Lewis Nash (drums), jumping right into "Milestones." B+(**) [sp]

Elucid: Revelator (2024, Fat Possum): Rapper, from Queens, mixtapes back to 2002, half-dozen albums but better known as half of Armand Hammer. Too dense to decipher easily, but worth the effort. A- [sp]

Everliven Sound & Slimline Mutha: Echo Chamber (2024, self-released): Duo of Cymar Simmons (Cymarshall Law) and Jaron Simmons (Skit Slam), have an album from 2008, a single back to 2000, working with a "jazzy hip-hop beatmaker" from UK. Has a nice bounce to it. B+(***) [sp]

Ruth Goller: Skyllumina (2024, International Anthem): Bassist-vocalist, born in Italy, based in UK, had a previous album called Skylla in 2021. This strikes me as slow and ponderous, which may be unfair, but that's all I have for now. B [sp]

Paul Heaton: The Mighty Several (2024, EMI): English singer-songwriter, best remembered from the Housemartins (1986-87) and the Beautiful South (1989-2006), followed by often catchy but less compelling solo and duo albums. After several duos with Jacqui Abbott, this one is nominally solo, but guest singers pop up here and there (Rianne Downey, Danny Muldoon). B+(**) [sp]

John Hollenbeck & NDR Bigband: Colouring Hockets (2023 [2024], Plexatonic): Drummer, founded Claudia Quintet in 2001, later expanded to working with big bands, like this group, conducted by JC Sanford. Once again, mallet instruments are featured, with Patricia Brennan joining Claudia's Matt Moran. B+(***) [cd]

Snorre Kirk: What a Day! (2024, Stunt): Danish drummer, sixth album since 2012, composed eight tunes here, band members listed below the title: Giacomo Smith (alto/soprano sax), Joe Webb (piano), Anders Fjeldsted (bass), with a guest guitarist (Alexander Honey Boulton) credited with three tracks on the back cover. Easy going, quite enjoyably mainstream. B+(***) [sp]

Lemadi Trio: Canonical Discourse (2024, A New Wave of Jazz Axis): José Lencastre (alto sax), Dirk Serries (guitar), and Martina Verhoeven (crumar piano), runs a bit slower than the other albums in this series. B+(**) [cd]

Peter Lenz: Breathe: Music for Large Ensembles (2023 [2024], GambsART): Austrian drummer, studied in Graz, Amsterdam, and New York, where he is now based. Has a couple previous albums, back to 2012. Two big band pieces (one called "Eleanor," as in Rigby), two with added strings, one stripped down to "chamber orchestra," with some vocals. B [cd]

David Maranha/Rodrigo Amado: Wrecks (2023 [2024], Nariz Entupido): Electric organ and saxophones duo -- credit uses plural, but tenor is Amado's standard. The organ is dense and ugly, so it takes a while for the saxophone, initially aligned, to rise out of and distinguish itself from the murk. B+(***) [cd]

Claire Martin: Almost in Your Arms (2024, Stunt): English jazz singer, 20+ albums since 1992, well-regarded in Penguin Guide, but I've only lightly sampled her work, with nothing since her 2001 Very Best Of (which now is most of her career). B+(*) [sp]

Nuse Tyrant: Juxtaposed Echoes (2024, M25): Rapper, from San Diego, working with producers Trust One and Clypto. B+(**) [sp]

Adonis Rose Trio + One: For All We Know (2022 [2024], Storyville): Drummer, from New Orleans, director of New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, has several albums, both with them and smaller groups. Trio here with Ryan Hanseler (piano) and Lex Warshawsky (drums), but also featuring singer Gabrielle Cavassa. [Note: Two album cover variations: One with "+ One" and four names; one without the singer. Label Bandcamp page makes no mention of singer, nor does the cover pic at Spotify, but it does have the vocal tracks. So it seems probable that both variants are actually the same album.] B+(**) [sp]

Sophie: Sophie (2024, Transgressive): English electronica producer, released a compilation of early tracks in 2015, a full album in 2018, and was close to finishing a second album when she fell to her death in 2021. This is that second album, with finishing touches by brother Benny Long. Runs long, but gets better toward the end. B+(**) [sp]

Spinifex: Undrilling the Hole (2024, TryTone): Amsterdam-based avant-fusion group, ninth album since 2011, all compositions by Tobias Klein (alto sax), with Bart Maris (trumpet), John Dikeman (tenor sax), Jasper Stadthouders (guitar), Gonçalo Almeida (bass guitar), and Philipp Moser (drums). B+(***) [cd]

Tonus: Analog Deviation (2023 [2024], A New Wave of Jazz Axis): Trio of Dirk Serries (guitar), Benedict Taylor (violin/broken fiddle), and Martina Verhoeven (piano), tends to scattered abstractions. B+(*) [cd]

Transition Unit: Fade Value (2023 [2024], A New Wave of Jazz Axis): Trio of Amsterdam-based Portuguese alto/tenor saxophonist José Lencastre, pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro, and guitarist Dirk Serries. Free jazz, close to the edge. B+(***) [cd]

Twin Talk: Live (2023 [2024], Shifting Paradigm): Trio of Dustin Laurenzi (tenor sax), Katie Ernst (bass/voice), and Andrew Green (drums), third album since 2015. B+(**) [sp]

Tyler, the Creator: Chromakopia (2024, Columbia): Rapper Tyler Okonma, from Los Angeles, the biggest success out of the Odd Future collective, eighth studio album since 2009, all gold except for his self-released debut. I didn't care for his early albums, but he's gotten more solid. B+(***) [sp]

Martina Verhoeven Quintet: Indicator Light (Live at Paradox 2023) (2023 [2024], A New Wave of Jazz Axis): Belgian pianist, Discogs credits her with 14 albums, most multi-artist collabs, most of those with her husband, guitarist Dirk Serries -- present here, along with Gonçalo Almeida (bass), Onno Govaert (drums), and Colin Webster (alto sax), who dominates with fire and fury, which the rest fill out remarkably. A- [cd]

Cole Williams: How We Care for Humanity (2024, Four Corner): Soul-jazz singer-songwriter, plays bass guitar and percussion, born in Brooklyn (mother Jamaican) but based in New Orleans, EP in 2007, fifth album since 2011. Title song is practically a manifesto. B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Emily Remler: Cookin' at the Queens: Live in Las Vegas 1984 & 1988 (1984-88 [2024], Resonance, 2CD): Jazz guitarist (1957-90), recorded six albums for Concord (including a duo led by Larry Coryell, plus one more) in her brief career, which in 1991 were reduced to two Retrospective volumes. This is the first new music that has appeared since her death, and is certain to rekindle interest in her post-Montgomery synthesis. A- [cd] [11-29]

McCoy Tyner/Joe Henderson: Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs' (1966 [2024]. Blue Note): Crackling live set, with Henry Grimes (bass) and Jack DeJohnette (drums), the pianist just out of John Coltrane's quartet, with the tenor saxophonist in the middle of a legendary series of Blue Note albums -- Tyner's first (and best) Blue Note, The Real McCoy, was still a year away. B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

Elucid: I Told Bessie (2022, Backwoodz Studioz): Rapper Chaz Hall, works with Billy Woods in Armand Hammer and other more obscure groups, Discogs credits him with 12 of his own albums since 2007. Even denser and more inscrutable than the new one. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Miles Davis Quintet: Miles in France 1963 & 1964 [The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8] (Columbia/Legacy, 6CD) [11-08]
• Ginetta's Vendetta: Fun Size (Kickin' Wiccan Music) [11-24]
• Roberto Magris: Freedom Is Peace (JMood) [12-01]
• Rick Mitchell: Jazz in the New Millennium (Dharma Moon Press): book

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, November 22, 2024

November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43200 [43153] rated (+47), 28 [26] unrated (+2).

Back on the 18th, I posted this much:

This week's Music Week is being held hostage until I get my initial round of Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll ballot invites sent out (aiming for Tuesday, but probably Wednesday). Meanwhile, you can probably find some new records in the November Streamnotes archive. Not a particularly big week so far, but I'm working on it.

My main reason for posting anything at all today is that I have some links to share:

• The 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll Begins: I posted this on Saturday, after sending out initial mail to my GNU Mailman list on Thursday. I don't have much more news yet, but wanted to make sure this much got some distribution. More in a couple days, but meanwhile, check out the Poll website. Focus right now is to provide information for voters. As we're currently updating the invite list, please feel free to suggest someone (even yourself). I also have set up the poll admin/discussion group, so if you're interested in following our deliberations (even if you're not a voter), let me know.

• Q and A: Two recent questions answered (well, sort of).

• Speaking of Which: No new one (now or most likely ever), but I keep finding things that seem like they belong here (and I feel like saving), so this swan song has grown to 317 links, 33193 words.

• The Best Non-Jazz Albums of 2024: Way back in July, in conjunction with my Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, I compiled The Best Jazz Albums of 2024, and I've been trying to update it as we go, but I put off doing the Non-Jazz complement until now. So, 47 A-list new releases (+ 3 from 2023) and 7 reissues/historic music, which rather pales in comparison to 85 A-list new jazz (+3 from 2023) and 18 reissues/historic (+1 from 2023). Most years I have a large jazz/non-jazz ratio when I initially compile the lists, but that narrows as I catch up with the EOY lists. But I don't think I've ever had this much imbalance before.

• Metacritic Aggregate: I started working on this mid-year, but haven't done a very good job of keeping it up to date. But this week I added the first EOY lists from Uncut, Mojo, and Bleep. This is not a huge priority for me, but it does help guide me to things to check out. There is also one for new compilations of old/various music, but it is very short (44 albums, vs. 1210 for new releases).

I ran the ratings counter and so far I'm +30 on the week, but only one A- so far. Unrated is -1, but I still have some unpacking to do.

Back to work now.

Those links are still useful. I've added some things to the Jazz Poll website, and will update it again before long. I must have added something to that Speaking of Which, as it's now up to 35354 words, but I've definitely slowed down. (My latest add was a long comment on Robert Christgau's latest XgauSez.)

Since then, I revised the Poll invitation -- mostly to clarify changes to the category voting, but also to point out information online -- and ran the template through MailMerge to generate 230 email, which I then mailed out one at a time. While it should be possible to automate the mailing, my ISP threw up many roadblocks, so it wound up taking about five hours to get them all out. Then I was embarrassed to find that I had made an error in the Subject line, not deleting "Mid-Year" from the previous template, or adding "Francis Davis." Only one recipient has noted the problem so far.

More worrisome, I got seven bounce messages (Greg Bryant, Marcela Breton, Matt Marshall, Mike Greenblatt, Richard Brody, Simon Rentner, Stephen Graham), so I need to track them down. I have many more names in various files. I need to go through them, see who I can qualify, and send out another batch of invites. I welcome any suggestions you may have (including self-interests). Please include email address and whatever credentials seem appropriate.

I've set up an advisory discussion list (jpadmin), and have about ten people signed up for it. I've done very little with it so far, but expect to be sending out updates every 2-3 days, discussing a wide range of issues, like future promotion. Right now, the most important things are making sure the website has enough correct information to help voters, and to qualify any additional voter invitations. I've been totall jammed the last week with these isues.

I've also had to do some more programming, due to changes in the handling of category votes. This is tricky work, and has slowed down processing of ballots. I currently have 8 ballots counted, and at least 2 more in my inbox. Agenda for today is:

1. Write and post Music Week.
2. Update the website (mostly with an expanded but still unfinished Voter Notes file); although totals and individual ballots are locked down, the website does offer some public information: critics (who have voted so far), and albums (that have received votes, in each category).
3. Write email to the jazzpoll mailing list, confirming that the initial ballots have been sent, with any additional news.
4. Write email to the jpadmin mailing list, catching up on everything.
5. There's a new And It Don't Stop piece, under Christgau's name but actually by RJ Smith, I need to write a notice for.

The odds that I'll get all this done before bedtime aren't good.

Just a couple notes on this week's albums. For the Attias album, I received a 2-CD set, and mostly played both discs back-to-back, so that made it hard to distinguish between them. However, once I gave the combined set an A-, I couldn't find a cover scan that matched my promo, but I did find that the album had been released in two separate chunks on Bandcamp, so I took artwork from there. (The 2-CD package puts the Vol. II artwork on the back cover, and adds the volume designations to the individual disc titles.) I wound up grading the separate pieces down a notch for various rather peculiar reasons, but for purposes here, I'm including both cover scans.

The old blues comp was one of Clifford Ocheltree's "on the balcony" specials (or maybe his was Vol. 1, and I just lightly favored Vol. 2). The other pictured album is Elucid's Revelator. More about it next week.

Assuming there is a next week. I'm too frazzled right now to even think about schedule. Could be I'll kick out something very short on Monday or Tuesday, or perhaps I'll wait until the end of the month, then try to resync in December. It may depend on how useful this forum is for disseminating info on the Poll.

New records reviewed this week:

Eric Alexander: Timing Is Everything (2023 [2024], Cellar Music): Mainstream tenor saxophonist, many albums since 1995, this a quartet with Rick Germanson (piano), Alexander Claffy (bass), and Jasson Tiemann (drums), plus occasional guests. B+(**) [sp]

Eric Alexander/Mike LeDonne: Together (2023 [2024], Cellar Music): Tenor sax and piano duets -- they've worked together before, and to my surprise more often with LeDonne on piano than on organ. Still, nothing this far out of their comfort zones, which is what makes this interesting. B+(**) [sp]

Michaël Attias: Quartet Music: Vol. I + II: LuMiSong + Kardamom Fall (2021-22 [2024], Out of Your Head, 2CD): Alto saxophonist, born in Israel, grew up in Paris and Minneapolis, returned to Paris, then to New York in 1994. I'm surprised he has no Wikipedia page, as he's recorded extensively since 1989 (Discogs lists 95 albums). This 2-CD combines two quartet sessions that are separately released as digital, so I've broken them out below. I'm not normally someone who rates a compilation above its component parts, but while I may be too short and/or II may meander a bit long, both are chock full of delights that build on the rest. A- [cd]

Michaël Attias: Quartet Music: Vol. I: LuMiSong (2021 [2024], Out of Your Head): With Santiago Leibson (piano), Matt Pavolka (bass), and Mark Ferber (drums): 4 tracks, 29:36. B+(***) [cd]

Michaël Attias: Quartet Music: Vol. II: Kardamom Fall (2022 [2024], Out of Your Head): With Santiago Leibson (piano), Sean Conly (bass), and Tom Railey (drums): 8 tracks, 62:05. B+(***) [cd]

George Cables: I Hear Echoes (2024, HighNote): Pianist, now 80, first album 1975, his early albums with Art Pepper are personal favorites, this one a trio with Essiet Essiet (bass) and Jerome Jennings (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Wild God (2024, Bad Seed/Play It Again Sam): Australian singer-songwriter, started in the Birthday Party (1973-83), formed this band in 1984, his main vehicle ever since. This is their 18th studio album, co-produced by Warren Ellis. His popularity and/or critical following has long baffled me, but this seems exceptionally dull. Barbara Ehrenreich used "wild god" in her memoir, but whatever this is about, it isn't that. C+ [sp]

Confidence Man: 3AM (La La La) (2024, Chaos/Polydor): Australian electropop group, their 2018 debut Confident Music for Confident People was fun, back for their third album here, another snappy one. B+(***) [sp]

Day Dream: Duke & Strays Live: Works by Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn (2023 [2024], Corner Store Jazz, 2CD): Ellington tribute trio, with Steve Rudolph (piano), Drew Gress (bass), and Phil Haynes (drums). Same trio did an album under their names (Rudolph) called Day Dream, released in 2023 but recorded back in 2009. Ten songs, 77:09, so could have been squeezed onto a single CD. Slips by if you're not paying close attention. B+(**) [cd]

Hania Derej Quintet: Evacuation (2023 [2024], ZenneZ): Polish pianist, several albums since 2016, this group with tenor sax, trombone, bass, and drums. B+(***) [sp]

Elin Forkelid: Songs to Keep You Company on a Dark Night (2024, Sail Cabin): Swedish saxophonist, tenor mostly, née Larsson, has a previous Plays Trane, several group efforts, quartet here with Tobias Wiklund (cornet/trumpet), David Stackenäs (guitar), and Mats Dimming (bass). B+(**) [sp]

The Fugs: Dancing in the Universe (2023, Fuga): Tuli Kupferberg died in 2016, but he left four demo vocals from 2006 that survivor Ed Sanders and some friends -- they go back to a 1984 revival, and were on The Fugs Final CD (both of them, one from 2003, the other 2010 -- fashioned into a new album, 58 years after their The Fugs' First Album. They're older, well old, resigned never making the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, remembering Johnny Cash, Frank O'Hara, and Emma Goldman. I take some comfort in "Where Have All the Commies Gone?" (after noting such destinations as academia, drugs, and Hillary, "when will they ever learn, when will we ever learn"). But not so much from "We Are Living in End Times." B+(**) [bc]

Halsey: The Great Impersonator (2024, Columbia): Pop star, fifth album since 2016, all charted US 1-2, still not much glitz here, mostly mid-tempo introspection, some muscled up, with more than a few lyrics breaking through, like "I think I'm special because I cut myself wide open," "I'm not old but I am tired," "I still believe in heaven, if they'll never let me in," and "is it love or a panic attack?" A- [sp]

The Hard Quartet: The Hard Quartet (2024, Matador): Billed as a supergroup, but any group that lets Stephen Malkmus sing should be counted as his. Besides, who the hell are these guys? Matt Sweeney (guitarist for Skunk, Chavez, and Zwan), Jim White (drummer from Dirty Three), and Emmett Kelly (guitarist from Cairo Gang; he's the only one other than Malkmus with an album under his own name)? Not my idea of hard, perhaps even a bit thin for Malkmusian, but that much is identifiable. B+(*) [sp]

Alex Heitlinger Jazz Orchestra: Slush Pump Truck Stop (2019 [2024], SteepleChase): Trombonist, several albums since his 2004 debut, composed (7 of 8 pieces) and arranged this for conventional big band. B [sp]

Cassandra Jenkins: My Light, My Destroyer (2024, Dead Oceans): Singer-songwriter from New York, third album since 2017, has a nice flow that slips by pleasantly enough without much traction. B+(*) [sp]

The Jesus and Mary Chain: Glasgow Eyes (2024, Fuzz Club): Scottish group, principally brothers Jim and William Reid, debut album 1986, developed a distinctive sound between new wave and shoegaze, disbanded 1998, regrouped c. 2007 but didn't release a new album until 2017, followed up here. Sound remains distinct, but perhaps more as a medium for songwriting than as an end in itself. B+(**) [sp]

Samara Joy: Portrait (2024, Verve): Jazz singer, from New York, dropped last name McLendon, writes her own songs, got a lot of notice for her 2021 debut, back for third album here. Regina King described her as "a young woman who seems like Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald are both living in her body." I don't get much Ella from her, but her voice evokes Sarah without quite sealing the deal. (I've listened to enough Vaughan to understand why critics are so in awe of her, but I've never much liked her albums.) No doubt this album will be received as a big deal -- easy to see this topping the vocal category in our critics poll -- but I have little desire to hear it again. I will say that the "touring band" (no names I recognize) is terrific -- far better than the orchestras Vaughan was often saddled with. And she's conducting a master class in phrasing, poise, and precision, even when soaring and/or scatting. B+(*) [sp]

The Linda Lindas: No Obligation (2024, Epitaph): Punk girl band, from Los Angeles, had a viral breakout single in 2021, "Racist, Sexist Boy," followed that up with a debut album, and now this second album. B+(**) [sp]

Moby: Always Centered at Night (2024, Mute): Some album I've heard recently and already forgotten about reminded me that I hadn't heard this one, his 22nd since 1992, so I figured why not? Released in June, already available in two remixes, but I went to the original. Some nice stuff here, in line with his previous gospel sampling. B+(*) [sp]

Monolake: Studio (2024, Imbalance Computer Music): German electronic music group, first album 1997 as a duo of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles (later Torsten Pröfrock), now just Henke. Sharp beats with Krautrock airs and extra klang. B+(***) [sp]

Thurston Moore: Flow Critical Lucidity (2024, Daydream Library Series): Sonic Youth guitarist-vocalist, did a solo album in 1995, plus a number of collaborations with jazz and avant/experimental figures, more after the band broke up. Curve fits the milder-with-age trajectory, maintaining his distinct sound post-group, even while attenuated. B+(**) [sp]

Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (2024, Blue Note): Singer-songwriter, plays bass guitar, originally Michelle Johnson, had some success on the r&b charts 1993-2014, since then has landed on a jazz label, but the arc from Plantation Lullabies to Baldwin themes isn't really all that far. Possibly more here than what I can immediately grasp, but I'm not sure how hard I want to work for it. B+(**) [sp]

The Necks: Bleed (2024, Northern Spy): Australian jazz trio, with Chris Abrahama (piano), Lloyd Swanton (bass), and Tony Buck (drums), close to 30 albums since 1989. This is a single piece, 41:10, more ambient than anything else. B+(*) [sp]

The New Mastersounds: Old School (2024, One Note): British funk-fusion band, from Leeds, 20+ albums since 2001, quartet with organ/keyboards (Joe Tatton), guitar (Eddie Roberts), bass (Peter Shand), and drums (Simon Allen). B+(*) [sp]

Peter Perrett: The Cleansing (2024, Domino): English singer-songwriter, a memorable voice from the punk-era band the Only Ones (1978-80), released one more album (1996) as the One, then in 2017 released a solo album, with this his third. B+(**) [sp]

Arun Ramamurthy Trio: New Moon (2023 [2024], Greenleaf Music): Violinist, based in Brooklyn, improvises on a legacy of Carnatic classical music, was a founder of Brooklyn Raga Massive, first album under his own name, a trio with Damon Banks (bass) and Sameer Gupta (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Remedy [Thomas Heberer/Joe Fonda/Joe Hertenstein]: Live at Jazzkammer (2024, 420 CPW): German trumpet player, based in New York, with bass and drums, group named for their 2022 album title, followed by a Remedy II. B+(**) [bc]

Soccer Mommy: Evergreen (2024, Loma Vista): Singer-songwriter Sophie Allison, fourth studio album since 2016, settling in for the long haul. B+(*) [sp]

Tyshawn Sorey/Adam Rudolph: Archaisms II (2023 [2024], Meta): Two percussionists, Rudolph listed first on the previous volume, Sorey's credit for piano/drumset, with three more names in a second tier on the cover: Sae Hashimoto, Russell Greenberg, Levy Lorenzo, each credit "multiple percussion," with Lorenzo's adding "electronic percussion." B+(**) [sp]

Squarepusher: Dostrotime (2024, Warp): English electronics producer Tom Jenkinson, debut (Feed Me Weird Things 1996), I've only heard one previous album, but this popped up as Bleep's best record pick this year. It does have its moments. B+(***) [sp]

Peter Van Huffel/Meinrad Kneer/Yorgos Dimitriadis: Synomilies (2022 [2024], Evil Rabbit): Free jazz trio of alto/baritone sax, bass, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Friso van Wijck: Friso van Wijck's Candy Container (2024, TryTone): Dutch drummer, has side credits going back to 1992, but unclear whether this is his first as leader. Two saxophonists, two guitarists, one bassist, geared for conflict, and sometimes resolution, B+(***) [cd]

Andy Wheelock/Whee 3 Trio: In the Wheelhouse (2024, OA2): Drummer, seems to be his first album (Discogs shows one side credit), trio includes Walter Gorra (piano) and Gonzalo Teppa (bass), but the record is really dominated by the guitar of "special guest" Gilad Hekselman. B+(**) [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Roy Hargrove's Crisol: Grande-Terre (1998 [2024], Verve): Trumpet player (1969-2018), one of the leading lights of the big 1990's hard bop revival, took a shot at Latin jazz in 1997 with his Grammy-winning Habana, takes his concept on the road here, to Guadeloupe, where he found saxophonist André Schwarz-Bart (only Hargrove, trombonist Frank Lacy, and the two percussionists continue from the album). B+(***) [sp]

Andrew Hill Sextet Plus Ten: A Beautiful Day Revisited (2002 [2024], Palmetto, 2CD): Pianist (1931-2007), recorded a series of now-classic Blue Note albums starting with 1963's Black Fire up through 1970, after which, like so many, his discography wanders around Europe -- Shades, on Soul Note in 1986, is a fine example -- but he got more attention on the rare occasions when he resurfaced on American labels: Blue Note in 1989 and 2006, and Palmetto in 2000 (Dusk) and 2002 (A Beautiful Day). I liked the Blue Notes (especially Awakening), but at the time was less happy with the Palmettos, especially the live big band album reissued here, resequenced and expanded (82 minutes), and somewhat better for it. Note credit for Ron Horton: "arranged by, conductor, music director, liner notes," with Matt Balitsaris as producer and engineer. B+(**) [cd]

Charlie Parker: Bird in Kansas City (1941-51 [2024], Verve): They scraped the bottom of Parker's barrel so long ago that at this point that one no longer knows whether to laugh or cry at the news of previously unheard Bird. These 13 tracks are united by being recorded on Parker's home turf, and by sounding just like you expect Parker to sound. First half was recorded at the home of Phil Baxter in 1951, with bass and drums (no names). The second half has a 1944 studio session with guitar (Efferge Ware) and drums (Edward Phillips), and two songs from 1941 with Jay McShann's Orchestra (with vocal). The informality of the first half is most appealing, but far from momentous. Sound is so-so, but I've heard far worse on records that have been praised ridiculously (like Bird at St. Nick's). B+(**) [sp]

Bernie Senensky: Moment to Moment (2001-20 [2024], Cellar Music): Canadian pianist, has a couple albums from 1976 and 1981, picking up the pace in the 1990s, skipping a decade, adding a few more since 2011. Cover gives "featuring" credit to Eric Alexander (tenor sax), Kieran Overs (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums) for the 2001 set (six tracks), slipping in two more tracks from 2020 with different bass-drums. B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

Eric Alexander: Man With a Horn (1997, Milestone): Mainstream tenor saxophonist, recorded his first albums in 1992, so this one, which Penguin Guide rates his best, counts as his eighth. Mostly quartet with Cedar Walton (piano), Dwayne Burno (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums), with added brass on three tracks (Jim Rotondi trumpet, Steve Davis trombone). B+(***) [yt]

Blue Muse ([2019], Blues Maker Foundation): Various artists sampler, no recording dates but presumably recent, as the Foundation/label has been cultivating local talent, but it's salted with a few names most recognize. B+(***) [bc]

Andrew Hill: But Not Farewell (1990 [1991], Blue Note): The pianist's much-heralded return to Blue Note in 1989 (Eternal Spirit) was short-lived, with this set of scraps released only in Japan, so it was "farewell," at least until 2006's Time Lines. Four quintet tracks, with Greg Osby (alto/soprano sax), Robin Eubanks (trombone), bass, and drums. The fifth track is a duo with Osby, and the last two are solo. The quintet pieces are typical of his avant-postbop, and the solos are nice and thoughtful. B+(**) [sp]

Ruckus Juice & Chittlins: The Great Jug Bands Vol. 1 (1927-35 [1998], Yazoo): Nice sampler of vintage jug bands, easily identified by "Jug" in the group name (most famously, Memphis Jug Band, Cannon's Jug Stompers). B+(***) [sp]

Ruckus Juice & Chittlins: The Great Jug Bands Vol. 2 (1927-35 [1998], Yazoo): A second helping. I haven't checked many of the dates, but the cover says "1920's and 30's," and I found this same range quickly enough. No drop-off here: I recognize more songs, and most of the ones I don't have an extra step to them. A- [sp]

Trout Fishing in America: Safe House (2022, Trout): Duo from Houston, Keith Gromwood and Ezra Idlet, two dozen albums since 1979. B+(*) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Holman Álvarez: Hidden Objects (Sunnyside) [11-08]
• Duck Baker: Breakdown Lane: Free Jazz Guitar 1976-1998 (ESP-Disk) [11-01]
• Joe Fahey: Andrea's Exile (Rough Fish): LP+CD
• Ben Goldberg/Todd Sickafoose/Scott Amendola: Here to There (Secret Hatch) [10-25]
• John Hollenbeck & NDR Bigband: Colouring Hockets (Plexatonic) [11-15]
• Cliff Korman Trio: Urban Tracks (SS) [12-06]
• David Maranha/Rodrigo Amado: Wrecks (Nariz Entupido) [10-25]
• Margaret Slovak & Chris Maresh: A Star's Light Does Fall (Slovak Music) [11-01]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, November 16, 2024

Back in 2006, Francis Davis decided to supplement his annual end-of-year top-ten at the Village Voice by running a poll of a circle of critics "currently living in New York and/or writing for New York-based publications." I qualified, not as a resident (although I had lived there in the late 1970s), but because I was writing the Voice's jazz consumer guide -- which, in an effort to fill Gary Giddins' shoes, added breadth of coverage to Davis's depth.

Davis always insisted on printing every individual ballot, but in 2009 the Voice's IT department balked, so music editor Rob Harvilla asked me to post them on one of my websites. When Davis left the Voice, he decided to continue the poll, and went looking for a new host. By then, Harvilla had left the Voice, and landed at the music streaming service Rhapsody, where he could sponsor the poll. Davis asked me to help, so I did, as I continued to do, as the poll later moved to NPR and ArtsFuse. (In 2022, I wrote a history of the poll, at least in terms of my involvement.)

Early on, Davis did everything, and just dumped whatever he had on me at the end. Which turned out, as the poll grew over 100 and up towards 150 critics -- now nationwide, plus a small contingent of international critics -- I felt the need to get organized and mechanized, eventually writing some software to count the ballots and format the web pages. By then I had made myself indispensable, and as Davis in recent years has been beset by declining health, he wound up trusting me to take his baby over. I think 2022 was the tipping point from which I took over (with him lurking).

While we're still in touch, this year it's pretty much just me, so I've started to change things a bit. My first big change was back in June, when I decided to run a Mid-Year Poll. Expecting a light turnout, I changed the point-weights for ranked ballots, compressing the range from 10-to-1 down to 3-to-1. I've never done a systematic study of it, but I've always suspected his scheme of distorting the results. This also gave me a chance to get rid of the 5.5 points for unranked ballots. Unfortunately, that didn't get rid of fractional point values, but they seem like less of an anomaly now. All of that required some hacking, but it's done now, and I'm generally happy with the new scheme (and got literally zero blowback, probably a combination of don't care and didn't notice), so I'm carrying it forward.

I also increased the Rara Avis -- Davis's preferred term, which I've never understood but am slowly getting used to -- ballot choices from 3 to 5 (with the option, as always, of fewer, even zero), which turned out to be widely welcomed. I also dispensed with the special categories (Vocal, Latin, Debut), which often seemed to me like more trouble than they were worth. Davis urged me to reconsider, so I have, but I've rethought how they work. I intend to write this up more precisely and include it in the supplementary documentation on the poll website, but the gist of it is that I want to encourage people who care most about those categories to offer more picks, so that we wind up with a better picture of the category. Davis's rules -- one pick per category, which if in your top-ten has to be the top eligible pick there -- resulted in short lists that were often totally swept by one breakout artist (e.g., Cécile McLorin Savant in Vocal, Miguel Zenón in Latin, and whoever Blue Note's rookie of the year was in Debut; those people will still win under the new system, but at least they'll have some competition).

I have several underlying considerations in making these changes. I bring two basic skills to this poll: I'm a critic (which is to say, someone who observes and deconstructs to figure out how things work), and I'm an engineer (which is someone who builds things to work better). So one big thing I try to do is to make it easier for more people to vote, while also making it easier for me to manage the process. One thing I've noticed in previous years is that we create a lot of churn when trying to enforce arbitrary rules, so I've tried to reduce this by allowing more flexibility. Some time ago, we decided that "Latin" and "Vocal" are whatever the voter thinks they are. This year, I'm further relaxing the rules on New vs. Old music, and on Debut -- I'm still providing guidelines, and I may note what appear to be anomalous choices, but I'm not into forcing things, especially when I can get good data easier.

I started calling this the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll a couple years back, after several voters had coined the term. It seemed like a good idea, not just to honor him but to help keep his vision for the poll front and center. He always saw the voters as colleagues, and the poll as part of the process by which we individuals come to think of ourselves as a community. In continuing this poll, I hope to serve our community, and perhaps to extend it. Jazz is good for us, and good for the world.

One constant struggle I have in running the poll is figuring out who should vote, inviting them, and getting them to respond. Davis did most of that work, even recently, and always struck me as much better connected than I am. I've inherited his lists, and added a few names along the way, and will continue to do so. You might look at last year's voter list, and see if there is anyone else you think we should extend invitations to. (We have sent invitations to several dozen more people. Turnout is usually about 75% of those invited, with the Mid-Year about half that, but the previous voter list is the only one I can share here.)

I have a mail list based on my server with most of these names on it, and I can send notices to them pretty easily, but due to the "poor reputation" of my server it seems that only about half of those messages actually reach their destination. (In many cases, the mail is flagged as "spam" and diverted to the recipient's spam folder, so it's a good practice to check yours, and do whatever you can to allow delivery of this mail.) I sent a notice out yesterday, to kick off this year's poll. For anyone who should have received it but didn't, here is the letter:

Just a brief note to get things going. Yes, we are running another (our 19th annual) Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I missed my self-imposed deadline of sending ballot invitations out by November 15, but you should receive yours sometime in the next week. Meanwhile, if you're on this mailing list, consider yourself invited. You can find a rough draft of the invitation here.

If you want to get this over with now (in which case, bless you), just grab the file, follow the instructions, and email it to me. I'm making a couple tweaks to what we've done in the past. As in the Mid-Year Poll, your Rara Avis ballot can list up to 5 (instead of 3) albums (anything recorded in 2014 or before belong there; anything later in New Releases, but I'm trying to do less bickering as I get older). I'm also reusing the points scheme from the Mid-Year Poll, which allows extra points for higher-ranked records, but no so many as to produce the distortions we got under the 10-to-1 point scheme. Those changes are easy for me, because I've already done the programming.

The other tweak will be in the Vocal/Latin/Debut categories, and this I'm going to have to do some programming for. I'll explain it in more detail when I do, but I figured the idea here was to generate more album lists, so I didn't like capping the list at one album each (I'm allowing 3 now, and if anyone seriously want to argue for 5, I might allow that). Moreover, I'm dispensing with the requirement that if you vote for an album in your top-ten list, you have to vote for it in the category list. I'm going to come up with some way to count eligible albums from top-ten lists in their categories, so what you list under the category is always extra. You can, if that's your thing, pick 10 Latin albums under New Releases, and add 3 more under Latin. It would help me if you designate which New Releases picks you think belong to which categories. We've given voters a lot of leeway on Latin and Vocal in the past. I don't want to impose my definitions on you, so it helps if you help me here.

I don't have a precise definition of Debut yet, but will work on it. We've been very strict about that in the past, and I think we should be less strict. One thing I do think is that this should be an individual, and not a group (maybe if everyone in the groups is strictly a debut, but that rarely happens). So this, too, will be more your choice, with less pushback from me (although I will reject any vote that strikes me as a prank).

The website will be updated as I have more information. I will try to answer most questions there, and you can help by asking me questions. I have a way to print out a list of albums that have votes, and possibly to break them down by category, which could generate a debut list. I know of one album that was released in two physical pieces but is really intended as a single album (I hear the artist blames the label), so I'll rule on and note things like that there.

I use this mail list for announcements, so respond to me, not to the list (which won't work, but leaves me stuff to clean up). While this list is pretty comprehensive, we've been plagued in the past by spam filters that, for no reason I can fathom, just don't like me. I can get around that by mailing individual invites out, but that takes me many hours, so I only want to go through that once. I'm going to sign up for a commercial email list service, and move everyone onto it. Hopefully that will work better, which will allow me to offer updates and nagging. Don't expect (or fear) a lot of mail, but be aware that something different will be coming. I'd advise you to check you spam directories, but if you're reading this, you don't need that advice, and if you're not, it wouldn't help.

I've had a couple people offer to help with various tasks. It's enough that I should probably set up an admin discussion list. If you want to get in on that, either to help or just to lurk, let me know.

One perennial question is who else should be invited? Let me know if you have any suggestions. That, plus nitpicking on the website, are likely to be high -priority discussion items.

I don't really have any news I can share about Francis Davis's health, other than that his participation in this his Poll is greatly diminished. I've been involved in it since its inception, and have done most of the work for several years now. I appreciate the continued trust you've shown in me in taking this over. Thanks.

I should probably clarify one thing. Although everyone on the mail list this was sent to is eligible and invited to vote, not everyone who we mean to invite is on the list. Moreover, history shows that only about half of the people on the list actually see the emails (mostly due to spam filtering). I have a more robust method of sending invitations, which is to run a form letter through Thunderbird's MailMerge extension, which turns it into a separate, customized letter for each recipient. Those drafts are them stuck in an outbox queue, from which I can send them one-by-one. (My SMTP server chokes if I try to automate sending.) This process takes 3-4 hours, beyond writing the letter, so I don't like to do it. I am going to do this when I get the lists sorted out better, hopefully in 3-5 days, but rather than wait that long, I used the mail list, and now this post, to get the ball rolling. Nice that I already have four ballots waiting to be counted.

We're looking for critics with credentials: mostly writers, although we also have a pretty substantial sampling of radio journalists (Davis was much more tuned into that world than I am, but like writers they are cultivated by publicists, so they are exposed to a wider range of new music than normal consumers, and have some practice at picking out what they prefer). Nowadays, credentials can even extend down to personal blogs -- you don't have to make a living as a professional critic (which, in any case, is nearly impossible these days), but to qualify you have to pursue this public service seriously.

We've generally avoided inviting two especially knowledgeable groups of people, who seemingly have conflicts of interest: musicians, and publicists. This isn't a hard prohibition, but I have retained Davis's rule about not voting for any record you have personal involvement in (which for critics often means writing liner notes; many critics also play music, but that seems to cause few problems). I'm open to considering exceptions, but need to see some open-mindedness.

This is not a "readers poll" or "fan poll," although in my experience there are many fans who are knowledgeable and discerning enough to rank as critics. During the Mid-Year Poll, I toyed with the idea of tabulating ballots from non-critics, but in the end I got virtually none. One thing I concluded from this is that readers polls are a measure of how many readers you have. As I have very few, it's hard to get a decent sample. So even if I wanted to run a fan poll, I would be very hard pressed to do so. Still, I would be curious if anyone wants to submit an unsolicited ballot. If you do have credentials, please point them out, which may get you qualified. Even if you don't, I might just factor your list into my EOY Aggregate (which includes most publications, at least as collated by Album of the Year -- which I find most useful among its various competitors -- but also lots of personal lists, mostly from my own social media hangouts).

As noted in the letter, I still have a lot of work to do on the website, as well as ambitions to rework the whole thing to make it more complete and coherent. If you are interested in helping on this, contact me (or use the question form, and I'll consider adding you to a more technical mailing list. (I'm still shopping for mail list software. Depending on what I find, I may break out several lists.)

Since I'm posting, a couple more personal notices. As I explained last week, I've given up on writing weekly Speaking of Which posts. However, I have, added a few more items to last week's post, especially as I've found open tabs with articles I meant to mention, or marginally later "post-mortem" arguments (starting, as these things often do, in the "chatter" section). But I haven't added new news items, such as anything on Trump's post-election appointments (horrifying as they are). Part of this is cost-benefit analysis, but part of it is also post-traumatic stress desensitization. I'm already way too conscious of what's happening to feel the need to research it further.

I've gotten some very nice comments on the last post, which I appreciate. Some were included in questions, which I will in due course attempt to answer. I'm making more regular entries in my notebook, which is available but not something I publicize. I tweeted one article recommendation, and may do more as I see fit. We'll see what else it makes sense to write and post. Music Week will continue on its usual schedule, at least through the end of the year. I'll probably offer updates on the Poll both here and on X. (I was going to do one on X today, then decided it would be better to post this first, then link to it.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43153 [43118] rated (+35), 26 [36] unrated (-10).

After last Tuesday's election, I took a couple days out, basically hiding from the news, as anyone would do when faced with traumatic stress. I had written a full-throated endorsement of Harris, which was driven far less by what I saw as her virtues than with my understanding of the full horror that four more years of Trump as president would bring. Perhaps now I should edit that to say "will," as Trump won, Harris lost, and ultimately we'll be the ones paying for this very bad decision.

By the time I was ready to look at the news, I had decided that the week's Speaking of Which would be my last. My reasoning is in the wrap-up section, so no need to reiterate it here. But the decision helped free me to navigate the morass of punditry (and sometimes news). The result is the longest such column ever, weighing in at 265 links, 26798 words, even before I added a few scattered items today.

I can't swear that I'll never write political commentary again. I'm likely to respond to questions. In general, I tend to be better at responding to requests than at making my own plans. (Indeed, my entire career as a rock and jazz critic only happened because Robert Christgau asked me to write something for him. And when I decided, with my wife's blessing, to try to return to writing around 2001, I had little interest in focusing on music, but Christgau again came through with the requests I wound up spending so much time on. If someone asks me, especially if they have a reputable outlet with the promise of an audience, competent editing, and possible collaboration, I'd give any such offer some consideration. But I've concluded that spending so much time and effort self-publishing huge pieces that get virtually no feedback is no way to live.

This also means that I'm unlikely to renew the domain for the underutilized Notes on Everyday Life. I published the Harris endorsement there in hopes of getting a few comments. All I got was one disagreement (from my wife), and a couple pieces of spam.

More importantly, the long considered, often mentioned big political book is now officially dead. I briefly had the idea of rummaging through the campaign Speaking of Which posts and trying to compile a What I Learned from the 2024 Election book, but that's pretty dead, too. It's not so much that I've lost interest in the key issues of political philosophy, but my idea that we need to find a modus vivendi to work within the Democratic Party has been pretty severely shaken. It's not so much that I've changed my mind there, but I'd rather write about ideas that could actually make a difference, as opposed to pandering to people who seem unserious about either winning or solving any problems.

I'm unlikely to sort out my future writing focus until end of year/early 2025. That's because my immediate shift will be to the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. We usually send out ballot invites mid-November, which is this week. Although I was thinking about this a couple months ago, I've had very little time to do anything through today (or maybe tomorrow, when the contractor returns to fix up some problems in our bedroom/closet project). I need to set up the website, and kick off a letter -- at least a notice that formal invites will be sent in another week or so. That means dealing with the usual email problems, not that they're really solvable (i.e., workarounds rather than fixes).

I'm thinking about setting up a discussion list for people who want to help out with the poll. If you want to help, let me know, and we'll see what's possible. One thing that always needs help is vetting possible new voters. Again, any ideas, let me know. The Arts Fuse will publish the results, again. I'm thinking I'll go with a mid-December deadline, publishing on or shortly after January 1.

I may write more on music in the coming period, or maybe not. One thing I will do is work on the end-of-year files for jazz (which I've been maintaining since the mid-year poll) and non-jazz (doesn't exist yet, but will before long). Also, the tracking file (currently 1919 records listed, 952 that I have heard or at least have in my queue), and the two files for tracking metacritic grades and EOY list mentions: (new music and (old/reissued music.

I'll let this week's music speak for themselves. Good new albums by Steve Coleman and Rebecca Kilgore led me to look up some of their old albums. Two Kilgore albums I wanted to check out but couldn't find were the eponymous 1998 one on Jump (a Penguin Guide 4-star), and a Marilyn Monroe tribute from 2012.

My two recent books read on Israel are good and short. Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Message) took a while to get interesting, but paid off in the end. Ilan Pappe's A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict seemed like stuff I already knew, but I did pick up some finer points, and appreciate the organization.

I had Gideon Levy's The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe on deck, but picked up Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air for some emergency reading material, and was immediately struck by several things. I wanted to drop a big quote (also one from Coates) into Speaking of Which, but didn't manage. I stopped reading critical theory in the mid-1970s (when I got a job, left college, and got into rock criticism), but I did pick up a copy of Berman's 1983 book (my cover is different from the one pictured left, but this is the best I could do). I'm not sure if I'll stick with it, but it seems like an important book.

Note that at least three important musicians died in recent days: Roy Haynes, Lou Donaldson, and Ella Jenkins. See Speaking of Which for obituary notices.

I've mostly ignored new stories on likely Trump appointments, but most since I wrote the second intro -- where I raised the possibility that Trump might pull some of his campaign punches to maintain popularity -- have been truly abhorent, especially Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Kristi Noem for Secretary of DHS (meaning immigration) and (seems to be more of a rumor) Ken Paxton for Attorney General. The odds that the Trump administration will be even worse than expected seem to be growing.

New records reviewed this week:

Ashtyn Barbaree: Sent Through the Ceiling (2024, Artists 3 60): Country singer-songwriter, from Arkansas, has a 2018 EP and and a 2022 debut album which I checked a couple months ago, when I got this promo, and found "nice enough." This second album is nicer still, with some solid songwriting, good voice, and serious fiddle. B+(***) [cd]

Big Bambi: Compositions for Bass Guitar & Bassoon, Vol. I (2022 [2024], Greene Avenue Music): Duo of Maribel Alonso (bassoon) and Jochem van Dijk (bass guitar/electronics), as advertised, interesting as far as it goes. B+(**) [cd]

Steve Coleman and Five Elements: PolyTropos/Of Many Turns (2024, Pi, 2CD): Alto saxophonist, started back in the mid-1980s developing a strain of funk-fusion, especially in his M-Base Collective. I should probably revisit those albums, which I wasn't much into (excepting 1993's The Tao of Mad Phat/Fringe Zones). But his later postbop, from 2013's Functional Arrhythmias on, has been very engaging, especially this live double, with sets from Paris and Voiron. The group is a quartet, with Jonathan Finlayson interweaving on trumpet, backed by Rich Brown on bass, and Sean Rickman on drums. A- [cd]

Caleb Wheeler Curtis: The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (2024, Imani, 2CD): Leader is mostly a saxophonist (tenor, sopranino, stritch), but also plays trumpet. Title is from the first disc, with the second titled Raise Four: Monk the Minimalist. Both are trios with bass and drums -- Sean Conly and Michael Sarin up front, Eric Revis and Justin Faulkner on the bonus. Both impress. A- [cd]

Andy Haas: For the Time, Being (2023 [2024], Resonant Music): Saxophonist, originally from Toronto, where he started in the new wave Martha and the Muffins, based in New York, also worked in groups God Is My Co-Pilot and Radio I-Ching. Mixed bag of experimental releases under his own name, but I much liked 2023's Accidentals (lead credit Don Fiorino). This one is solo, his credits: "saxophone, strap-on tremolo, mm w/hazaral, vinyl LP manipulation" -- so mostly sounds like electronics, or scattered sound effects. B+(*) [cd]

Laird Jackson: Life (2024, self-released): Jazz singer-songwriter, has previous albums from 1994 and 2002, most songs here originals co-written by Jeff Haynes (percussion, bass on one track, vocals on two). This is an ambitious work, a bit slow and ponderous for my attention span, but the "Wild Is the Wind" cover is striking, and there may well be more to it. B+(*) [cd]

Ariel Kalma/Jeremiah Chiu/Marta Sofia Honer: The Closest Thing to Silence (2022-23 [2024], International Anthem): French ambient composer, many albums since 1975, collaborators here did a 2022 album I liked, Recordings From the Åland Islands. Notes on wrapper: "Ephemeral, eylsian electro-acoustic collusion birthing a realized humanized multi-generational poly-technological expression." Another of those Hassel-like "fourth world" vibes. B+(**) [sp]

Pandelis Karayorgis/George Kokkinaris: Out From Athens (2023 [2024], Driff): Piano and bass duets (one solo each), the former born in Athens but long-based in Boston, with many albums since 1989. B+(**) [bc]

Rebecca Kilgore: A Little Taste: A Tribute to Dave Frishberg (2023 [2024], Cherry Pie Music): Standards singer, b. 1949, one of her first albums (1994) had her only backed by Frishberg on piano, a formula they repeated several times since. Discogs says she "retired from performing in 2024 after being diagnosed with dementia with Lewy Bodies," so this looks like it could be her last. In between, she mostly recorded with retro swing and trad jazz artists, especially for Arbors, where she always seemed right at home. I should check out what I've missed. She gets more backing here, including some strings, and limits herself to 11 songs (38:22), but she sounds fine, and the late pianist's songs are as witty as ever, even without his sly drawl. B+(***) [cd]

Lady Gaga: Harlequin (2024, Interscope): Tie-in to the Todd Phillips movie, Joker: Folie à Deux, which she co-stars in (as Harleen "Lee" Quinzel) and wrote the soundtrack for. I don't know how much of this features in the film: one of two originals is "The Joker," but the rest are standards (some with added Stefani Germanotta credits), which suggests continuity from her Tony Bennett duet albums. They are splashy, but not especially interesting. B+(*) [sp]

Brian Lynch: 7X7BY7 (2021 [2024], Holistic MusicWorks): Trumpet player, started mainstream but moved quickly into Latin jazz, especially once he joined Eddie Palmieri. Septet here is a good example of that, with Craig Handy (tenor sax), Alex Wintz (guitar), Luis Perdomo (piano), bass, drums, and percussion. B+(***) [cd]

Lyrics Born: Goodbye, Sticky Rice (2024, Mobile Home): Rapper Tom Shimura, originally from Tokyo but grew up in Salt Lake City and Berkeley, started as half of Latyrx, has a superb string of albums going, with an exuberant beat and extra vocals that appeal to me the same way Parliament did in the 1970s. He's billed this as his "final album." At 52, he may feel he's "cooked," but even if this feels offhanded, he's still got a lot going on. A- [sp]

JD McPherson: Nite Owls (2024, New West): Singer-songwriter, guitarist from Oklahoma, country roots, favors rockabilly, fifth album since 2012, includes a Duane Eddy nod. B+(**) [sp]

Willie Nelson: Last Leaf on the Tree (2024, Legacy): Ninety now, second album this year, 76th "solo studio album" (per Wikipedia), son Micah Nelson produced and co-wrote the one new original (a cover of an older Nelson song is a hidden track). Title from one of two Tom Waits covers. Production is spare and laid back, which suits him fine (not that all the songs hold up). B+(**) [sp]

Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra (2024, Red Hot +): Discogs files under Kronos Quartet, but they don't seem to play on all of the tracks, while numerous "friends" come and go. The label has been producing various artists specials going back to their initial 1990 AIDS benefit (Red Hot + Blue), including a couple tied to the music of Sun Ra. Some interesting stuff here, including Laurie Anderson and Jlin, but it can get pretty scattered. B+(**) [sp]

Cene Resnik/Samo Salamon/Samuel Ber: The Thinkers (2023 [2024], Samo): Tenor sax/guitar/drums trio, the former from the group Siddharta (1999-2007), like Salomon from Slovenia. B+(***) [bc]

Kevin Sun: Quartets (2022-23 [2024], Endectomorph Music, 2CD): Tenor saxophonist, debut a Trio in 2018, has chops plus a deep understanding of sax lore. Two sets here, both with bassist Walter Stinson, one with Dana Saul (piano) and Matt Honor (drums), the other with Christian Li (piano) and Kayvon Gordon (drums). He's impressive here, but stretched a bit thin. B+(***) [cd]

Western Jazz Collective: The Music of Andrew Rathbun (2021 [2024], Origin): Rathbun is a tenor/soprano saxophonist who's been kicking around since his 2000 debut, and he's part of this septet (plus guest), the "Western" hailing from Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI). B+(**) [cd]

Tucker Zimmerman: Dance of Love (2024, 4AD): Singer-songwriter, b. 1941 in Sonoma County, California, debut album Ten Songs in 1969, more through 1983, with a couple revivals since. I'd never heard of him, but evidently David Bowie was a fan, as is Adrienne Lenker, whose Big Thief backs him here, with perfectly unobtrusive music he can talk or sing over, with Lenker and Marie Claire backing. A- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Black Artist Group: For Peace and Liberty: In Paris, Dec 1972 (1972 [2024], WeWantSounds): Avant-jazz group from St. Louis, 1968-72, aka BAG, just one live album before this tape surfaced. Quintet with three members who later became well-known: Oliver Lake (alto sax), Baikida Carroll (trumpet), Joseph Bowie (trombone), Ron LeFlore (trumpet), Charles Shaw (percussion). B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

Steve Coleman Group: Motherland Pulse (1985, JMT): Alto saxophonist, originally from Chicago, moved to New York in 1978, worked in big bands (Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Sam Rivers) and joined Dave Holland's Quintet, with this his first album as leader, an adventurous slab of postbop maneuvers. With Geri Allen (piano), Lonnie Plaxico (bass), and Marvin Smith (drums), plus Graham Haynes (trumpet) on two tracks, and a Cassandra Wilson vocal (possibly the album's high point). B+(***) [yt]

Steve Coleman and Five Elements: The Sonic Language of Myth: Believing, Learning, Knowing (1999, RCA Victor): "Five Elements" has been Coleman's most common group name since 1986, with 23 albums to date, but the lineups have varied -- it would be nice to have one of those Wikipedia-style timelines to plot it all out. Aside from the alto sax, the core group here is Anthony Tidd (electric bass), Sean Rickman (drums), and Miguel "Anga" Diaz (percussion), although only Coleman plays on all tracks, and many others join in on various tracks, including tenor sax (Ravi Coltrane and Craig Handy), trumpet (Ralph Alessi and Shane Endsley), piano (Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran), strings, and vocals. B+(***) [yt]

Steve Coleman and Five Elements: Drop Kick (1992, RCA/Novus): Mostly riffing over funk beats, mostly from Reggie Washington (electric bass) and Marvin "Smitty" Smith (drums), some with James Weidman (piano/keyboards) and/or Michael Wimberly (percussion), and an alternate bass/drums combo on three. Guest spots include Lance Bryant (tenor sax), Grgeg Osby (alto sax), Don Byron (clarinet/bass clarinet), and Cassandra Wilson (vocals). B+(*) [sp]

Steve Coleman and the Mystic Rhythm Society: Myths, Modes and Means (1995, Groovetown/RCA/BMG France): The first of three CDs with the same cover logo: "Recorded Live at the Hot Brass, 24-29 March, 1995." With Ralph Alessi (trumpet) for a second horn, two name keyboard players (Vijay Iyer and Andy Milne), funk rhythm and a few exotic instruments (like Miya Masaoka's koto) and dancers. B+(**) [sp]

Steve Coleman and Metrics: The Way of the Cipher (1995, Groovetown/RCA/BMG France): Same cover sticker: "Recorded Live at the Hot Brass, 24-29 March, 1995." Band is pretty much the same (just Andy Milne on keyboards), but this time features rappers (Black Indian, Kokayi, Sub Zero). B+(**) [sp]

Steve Coleman: Invisible Paths: First Scattering (2007, Tzadik): Alto saxophonist, solo album, pretty long at 71 minutes (16 pieces). B+(*) [sp]

Rebecca Kilgore and Dave Frishberg: Not a Care in the World (1995, Arbors): Standards singer, her second album with the pianist backing, this one adding Dan Faehnle on guitar for 10 (of 17) tracks (none by Frishberg, but you get "South American Way" and a Jobim), ending with a delightful version of "The Glow-Worm." B+(**) [sp]

Rebecca Kilgore & Dave Frishberg: The Starlit Hour (1997 [2001], Arbors): Just voice and piano, some applause, I'm not seeing song credits but they're pretty standard. B+(***) [r]

Rebecca Kilgore: Moments Like This (1998-99 [2001], HeavyWood Music): Standards singer, backed by Randy Porter (piano), Scott Steed (bass), and Neil Masson (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Rebecca Kilgore and the Bobby Gordon Trio: Make Someone Happy: A Further Remembrance of Maxine Sullivan, Volume Two (2004 [2005], Audiophile): Follows her 2001 album, Harlem Butterfly: A Remembrance of Maxine Sullivan, also recorded with Gordon (clarinet), Chris Dawson (piano), and Hal Smith (drums). Sullivan (1911-87) was a delightful singer, but I've only sampled her lightly, and have no sense of her repertoire, and tend to focus on the standards everybody's done. Kilgore does a superb job with them, and I really enjoy the clarinet. A- [sp]

Rebecca Kilgore: Rebecca Kilgore's Lovefest at the Pizzarelli Party (2010, Arbors): With guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, his sone John (guitar) and Martin (bass), and some others: Larry Fuller (piano), Aaron Weinstein (violin), Harry Allen (tenor sax), and Tony Tedesco (drums). B+(**) [r]

Rebecca Kilgore: With Hal Smith's Rhythmakers (2015, Audiophile): Smith is a trad jazz drummer, from Arkansas, side credits from 1972 with many notable bands, leader of his own since 1984, with at least two previous albums featuring singer Kilgore. B+(*) [r]

Rebecca Kilgore With Hal Smith's Rhythmakers: Sings the Music of Fats Waller (2016, Audiophile): The drummer's group is well suited for a Waller program, with Chris Dawson (piano) and Clint Baker (banjo) for rhythm, and all the right horns: clarinet (Bobby Gordon), cornet (Marc Caparone), trombone (Alan Adams), and alto sax (John Otto). B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Michaël Attias: Quartet Music Vol. I: LuMiSong (Out of Your Head) [03-01]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, November 11, 2024

Draft file opened 2024-11-06 2:00 PM. Finally posted 2024-11-11 10:00 PM. Added a couple small bits on 2024-11-12.

Also added a few more bits, all the way up to 2024-11-18, but I swear, that's the end of it.These later bits have green change bars, as opposed to red for the earlier adds.

Sections:

• Introduction
• Second section to introduction
• Third section to introduction
• Election notes
• Trump
• Harris
• Resisting and coping
• Senate
• House of Representatives
• Other election matters
• Other Republicans
• Other Democrats
• Israel
• Israel and America
• Israel vs. world opinion
• Ukraine and Russia
• Elsewhere in the world
• Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes
• Climate and environment
• Other stories
• Obituaries
• Books
• Chatter
• Christgau note
• Final wrap-up

Trump won. I don't know why. I cannot fathom why anyone, much less an outright majority of voting Americans, could stand him, or could in any way identify with him, let alone entrust him with great power. It is not inconceivable to me that this result was rigged, with every voting machine in the country shaving several points in his favor -- and that all the election denial hoopla of 2020 was just misdirection, while they worked on perfecting the software.

Or, I suppose, it's possible that a thin majority of the American people have become so soul-deadened, demented, and/or deranged that they wish nothing more than to inflict this guy on the rest of us. In which case, the obvious answer is "to dissolve the people and elect another." The phrase comes from a Bertolt Brecht poem, a bit of Communist Party humor, not really applicable here, but it does convey the disconnect when you realize that the people you got are not the ones you imagined or hoped for. We need better politicians, but we also need to become better people, not least to stop them from the temptation to gaslight us.

Personally, I was delighted when Kamala Harris ran away with the Democratic nomination. I didn't think of her in terms of categories or attributes, and was always annoyed when people brought up "first woman," etc., like some kind of milestone. She just seemed like a generic American -- at least in the America I know, which includes many years of living in Kansas, as well as some in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. I knew that she wasn't a leftist, that she was a shrewd and calculating politician, and that she circulated easily among friends in high places. But she seemed personable and relatable, flexible, nimble, like someone who could recognize problems and try to do things to fix them. She seemed much better to me than her predecessors (going back at least to 1992).

Besides, I'm old enough that I'm no longer enamored of utopia, nor patient for the long struggle, so I wasn't inclined to criticize. Surely, I figured, she must know what she's doing? And if not, if she blew it, we could unload on her then. But why give Trump any comfort from division. He was such a clear and present evil -- a word I normally abjure, but why beat around the bush here? -- that nothing could budge my vote from Harris. And now, like Hillary Clinton, and unlike -- no matter how little regard you have for him, Joe Biden -- she has committed the unpardonable sin of losing to Trump.

Still, as I'm writing this intro, I don't feel like tearing into her campaign or other shortcomings. As I collect links, I'm sure I will nitpick here and there. But it's still hard for me to see why she lost, or what else she could have done about it. That wasn't the case with Hillary Clinton: her faults, both personal and political, were obvious from the start, and the sanctimonious scapegoating for her loss only heightened her flaws. I could reconcile myself with the theory that Americans had candidates they disliked, but could only vote one of them off the island, and they chose her, because they knew her better. Surely, this year those same voters would dispatch Trump? Even as his polls held up, I expected a last gasp break toward sanity.

That it didn't happen suggests a much deeper problem, which brings us back to the voters. Or should, if I could figure it out. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that America has been in some kind of moral decline since approximately when I was born -- in 1950, the week before Chinese volunteers entered the Korean War and reversed the American advance, forcing a stalemate, which American sore losers still refuse to accept. Sure, Americans committed many sins before I was born, but we could aim for better, and teach our children to make a better world. The Hays Office made sure that the good guys wore white hats, and triumphed in the end. I certainly grew up believing in all that, seriously enough that when events proved otherwise, I protected my ideals by turning against the actual America. But what I never lost was the notion that in the end, it will all turn out well.

We may not be at the end yet, but Trump sure seems like a serious turn for the worse. He's four years older than I am, but came from a completely different class and culture, and at each step along the way he had different reactions and made different choices, always breaking bad, which sometimes meant embracing deteriorating social morality, and often accelerating it. Oddly enough, he's the one who poses as a pious patriot. Stranger still, lots of people believe him, perhaps because he allows them to indulge their own vile impulses.

As far as I can tell, there are two types of Trump voter. On the one hand, there are people who actually like him, who get off on his arrogance and nastiness, and who like to see other people hurt. (I've previously noted two types of Christians: those who hope to help their fellows, and those who are more focused on consigning those they disapprove of to hell. Trump is practically a messiah for the latter group.) The second type are party-liners, who will always vote Republican, no matter how much they may disapprove of the candidate. The two groups overlap, but each group extends the other, nudging a minority up toward 50%.

Elite Republicans may not love Trump, but they'll do anything to win -- their whole graft depends on it -- so they go along, figuring they can control the damage (as well as profit from it). This is much like the conservatives in Weimar Germany figuring they can control Hitler -- meanwhile, Trump resembles Hitler at least in his political pitch (his ability to rouse the passions of people for whom economic conservatism has little appeal). Such fascism analogies resonate for some people, especially on the left, who know the history, but are meaningless to those who don't -- most Trump voters, although he seems to have some staff who revel in it, as they keep sending dog whistles, not least to provoke charges that never seem to work.

There is a certain genius to Trump/Republican politics, in how they've manage to flip attacks into accolades: charges that would discredit any normal candidate only seem to make Trump stronger, and that rubs off on the rest of the Republicans. The key element here has been the extraordinary success of partisan broadcasting, keyed to fear, flattery, and rage: the net effect has been to sow distrust and deny credibility to anything Democrats say or do, while championing Republicans as defenders of true America. The result is a tribe that has come to reject facts, reason, and/or any hint of moral purpose: all are rejected as tools of the devil.

Trump adds very little of substance to this toxic infosystem, but he does offer some kind of charisma or style, and disinhibition (which passes for candor if you buy it, or cluelessness if you don't), and serves as a lightning rod for attacks that only confirm the bond between him and his fans. This can be very confusing for all who are immune to or wary of his charms: his appeal makes no sense to us, and meaningful response is nearly impossible. On the other hand, they counter with the same logic and even more fervor, making even less sense to us. The double standards are mind-boggling. For example, one might try making a case that Trump has been unfairly targeted by prosecutors, but how do you square that with his threats to do much more of the same, and the "lock her up" chants?

But it's not just that Trump Republicans are easily deluded and controlled by their media. That feat is built on top of much deeper social trends that go back at least to the 1940s, with the founding of the military-industrial complex and the extension of American hegemony to serve global capitalism, with its attendant red scares, both foreign and domestic. Americans had an idealized picture of themselves coming out of WWII, which made the world Trump and I grew up in. But the task of protecting capital turned into nasty business, and we started to divide into one camp that relished the fight, and another appalled by it. We started seeing films where bad guys were recruited to do dirty work for supposedly good guys, who turned bad themselves. Before long, American presidents were ordering assassinations, kidnapping, and torture. Trump started out with his Nazi-symp father, his apprenticeship under Roy Cohn, and his mobster connections. He fit right in. He only had to wait until America became rotten enough to embrace him. Bush's Global War on Terror made that possible.

Well, the other part of the equation is the rise of the super rich, made possible by the ideological attack on the notion of public interest, and by the assertion of "greed is good," and the general belief that "might makes right" (i.e., anything you can get away with is fine). The richer the supers got, the more they leveraged their wealth through lobbies, PR firms, donations, and media to turn government to do their bidding, further increasing their wealth. They usually rented their spokesmen, but Trump, having personified great wealth on TV, gave them a new angle: he could have it both ways, claiming their authority while pretending to be free of their influence.

I'm not sure how much of the election any of this explains, although it may help explain why Democratic attack ads don't seem to be drawing any blood. As with Republican attack ads, they may do nothing more than confirm one's own virtues (or vices if that's your thing). But it does make one wonder if raising money isn't overrated.

We could, of course, look into the many ways Democrats have contributed to their downfall. The losers are always quick with thoughts, so a fair number of them will show up in links below. I may have more to say on this below, but for here I'll pass, except to point out a couple of fundamental dynamics:

1. There is a deep divide and conflict within Democratic ranks, between corporate/neoliberal and populist/democratic tendencies; they both share a fear of the right but are deeply distrustful of each other. That produces acrimony, as you'll see below.

2. Democrats are subject to higher expectations than Republicans. Democrats are expected not just to win elections, but to address issues successfully, and are held accountable for any failures. Republicans only have to win, and there are few strictures on how low they can go to win. When they do win, they can readily screw up, but are rarely held accountable.

3. Democrats are also held to higher ethical and moral standards. Republicans may even embrace their own's misbehavior, while excoriating Democrats for the same faults. (Thus, for instance, Hillary Clinton is horribly corrupt, but Donald Trump is just a rogueish businessman.)

4. Democrats believe in public service, in representing all people, and as such they credit Republicans with legitimacy where Republicans deny any to Democrats, and seek to cripple them wherever possible. Republicans see politics as a zero-sum game.

The net effect is that Democrats campaign at a severe handicap. Republicans can lie, cheat, and steal, but Democrats can't -- and in many cases don't even know how. Democrats want to be liked, even by Republicans (and especially by the rich), so they are careful not to offend. (Even so, a casual reference to "garbage" gets blown up sky high, while Republican references to "vermin" get laughed away.) Republicans can exaggerate for effect, while Democrats pull their punches, and that muddies their messages. Democrats cede critical ground in arguments, seemingly legitimizing Republican stands, which only become more extreme. The media love loud and brusque, so they lap it up, amplify it, spread it everywhere, dispensing with reason and nuance, and especially reality (the most boring subject of all).

Then there are structural factors. America is divided into states, districts, precincts, all of which can be gerrymandered, as Republicans were quick to turn to their advantage. The Senate is grossly undemocratic, and the filibuster there has made it impossible for Democrats to pass meaningful reforms, even on the rare occasions when they seem to have majority power. The Republicans have packed the courts, which they're increasingly using to restrict executive power by Democrats, and to increase it by Republicans. Many judges are protected from any oversight by lifetime appointments. Many reforms, as well as redress by impeachment, require supermajorities, which Republicans use to lock themselves in power, even if they lose popular support. (Orban's system in Hungary has made extensive use of this, and is widely cited by Republicans as a model for America -- although in may have originated here, much like Nazi, South African, and Israeli race laws drew on American precedents.)

But the biggest structural problem of all is money. Republicans worship it -- even poor ones are defined by their deference or indifference to great wealth -- and the rich thank them for their service. The single most certain prediction for a second Trump term is yet another round of tax cuts for the rich. Next up is another round of regulatory loopholes, give-aways, and subsidies to needy (or just greedy) businesses. Lobbyists took Washington in the 1980s, and have only grown ever since. Republicans run "revolving door" administrations where lobbyists are as likely to work for the government as against it. The net effect is that government is as likely to work against the public interest as for it.

Republicans love this, because it reinforces their message that government is inefficient, wasteful, and useless, and should be shrunk (and ultimately "drowned in the bathtub"), except they never actually do that, at least as long as they can use it to feed their political machine.[*] While this is mostly done with money, Republicans are also looking forward to using their power in other ways: in turning the civil service into a patronage system for political operatives; in aligning information services with their political messaging; and in using coercive powers to suppress heresy and dissent, to punish their enemies, and to empower (or at least pardon) their allies.

When Democrats talk so piously and nebulously about the "death of democracy," this is what they are actually referring to. Only it's not a future threat, something that might be avoided if only enough people would vote for a Harris, a Biden, a Clinton, an Obama. It's been happening for a long time -- I used to see 1980 (Reagan) as the turning point, but now that I see it less in policy terms than as a mental disorder, I see much more originality and continuity in Nixon (which has the advantage of making Johnson's Vietnam the breaking point -- it certainly was what turned my own life upside down -- instead of the nascently-Reaganesque Carter). Maybe with Trump redux, Democrats will finally realize that they have to fight back, and stop trying to pass themselves off as some kind of prophylactic, a thin barrier to limit the contagion.

Which brings us back to money. As I said, Republicans worship it. But so do Democrats: maybe not all of them, but virtually all of the kind that run for higher office, because the system is rigged so that only those with access to money can run serious campaigns. (Bernie Sanders is the exception here, and he did come up with a novel system of small donor support, but when he came to be viewed as a threat, big donors dumped tons of money -- Michael Bloomberg more than $500M; compare that to the $28M he spent this year for Harris against Trump -- to quash his campaign.) Harris is no exception here. She raised more money than any Democrat -- or Republican for that matter -- ever. And she lost. So maybe money isn't the answer?

I'm not going to try to tell you what Democrats should do instead, but maybe they should start by waking up and looking at the real world we're living in, a world that they are at least in some substantial part responsible for creating. And that means they need to re-examine their worship of money. There's much more that can be said about this, but I've droned on long enough. I should leave it here.

[*] That machine, by the way, is a thing of wonder, which I don't think has ever been fully dissected, although there is a lot of literature on various aspects of it. If Machiavelli were here, he would write a letter offering advice on how an aspiring young Republican could rise to a position of great power and influence. (As Gramsci noted, real princes didn't need such guidance. The point of the book was to expose their machinations to those with no such experiences.) This would not only lay out the topography of institutions, but the networking, the lexicon of coded language, the spin, and ultimately the psychology of why anyone would want to be a Republican in the first place -- something I still find incredibly alien even though I often take great pains to try to understand others in their own terms.

As of Saturday afternoon, I have 144 links, 15438 words. I was planning on not posting until Monday, so I have time to make another round or two, but I have enough feedback on the election to offer a few bits of speculation about the future. I put little stock in them, given how poorly my predictions have held up. But I can hedge a bit by offering a couple of alternatives.

On several occasions, notably 1992 for the Republicans, and 2016 for the Democrats, incumbent parties seem to have felt permanently entitled to the presidency, and took their defeats bitterly, lashing out blindly. The level of vitriol Republicans directed at Bill Clinton after 1992 was almost unprecedented in the never-very-polite lore of American politics, and set a pattern that they repeated after 2008 and 2020 (arguably the most over-the-top, but by then their character was expected, and the sore loser took personal charge of the rage).

While Democrats didn't behave that atrociously after 2016, when pretty much everyone expected Hillary Clinton to easily defeat Donald Trump, her followers reacted with dismay and a massive round of accusations and scapegoating -- especially directed at Russia, although there were many other factors at work, including how distasteful and provocative Trump was, and that Clinton supporters still had a chip on their shoulders over the strong Bernie Sanders challenge to what organization Democrats expected to be a cakewalk.

Democrats' opinion of Trump has only sunk lower with four years in power and four years plotting his comeback. But so far, reaction has been mild, other than the inevitable shock and sadness. Trump's margin has been sufficient that it's hard to doubt his win. And while Harris seemed promising at the Convention, that may have largely been relief that Biden was out, the assumption that his administration had a good story that was simply poorly communicated, and the pretty conviction belief that Trump was such damaged goods that most Americans would be glad to be rid of him. But it was never really love for Harris, who's proved to be an easy (and rarely defended) target for post-mortems. This also suggests that we misread Trump -- that our loathing of him isn't shared by enough Americans to beat him -- so maybe this isn't a good time to go ballistic on him (as we did in 2016).

Trump's margin opens one new possibility that we haven't considered, which is that if he governed competently, he could actually consolidate his power and become regarded as a significant American president. Admittedly, we have no reason to expect this. His first term was a disaster of unfathomable dimensions. He's spent most of the four years since scrambling to stay out of jail. And his campaign theme has been redemption and revenge. If he attempts to put into practice even a significant share of what he campaigned on, evaluations of his legacy should sink as far below the scale of American presidents as Caligula and Ivan the Terrible.

But will he? I wouldn't bet against it, but it's just possible that having won, as ugly as that whole campaign has been, he'll change course. I don't mean to suggest that he won't be as bad as his voters want him to be on signature issues like immigration. But now that he's president, why should he adopt austerity budgets and demolish services, just to prove that government doesn't work. If he does that, he'll be blamed, and if he doesn't, he'll reap the credit. Plus the whole Fox machine is behind him, so who's going to complain? Certainly not the Democrats, who are always ready to help a Republican president do a good deed. (Remember when they foolishly thought "No Child Left Behind" would better fund education?) He's promised a better ACA. Why not rebrand it like he did with NAFTA, adding a couple tweaks that most Democrats can get behind, and magically turning it into the Republican program it always was? He'd be a hero, whereas had he done any of Paul Ryan's plans, he'd be a goat.

The big difference between Trump now and then isn't just that he has some experience to learn from, but that this time he gets to pick his own staff. In 2016, he left that mostly to Pence and Priebus, who saddled him with a bunch of assholes even he couldn't stand, including the so-called "adults in the room." This could, as most of us feared, be for the worse, but Trump was always hemmed in by regular Republicans, ranging from the Koch-controlled Ryan to the Blob-heads in the national security racket. One big reason he won the 2016 primaries was that he disagreed with hardcore economic orthodoxy. But as a neophyte Republican, he got stuck with a bunch of crooked, deranged incompetents, and their rot killed his whole administration. Granted, he wasn't smart enough to figure it out in real time, and he may still not be, but the new crew were competent enough to run a winning campaign this time. We shouldn't exclude the possibility that they're competent enough to manage him, or to let him manage, some level of competency. For which he'll handle the PR, as that's his thing, and it will probably be more hideous than the actual administration, which above all else has to keep business booming and profits soaring.

One area where he has a mandate and some real power to act is foreign policy, where Biden has been utterly disastrous. It's well past time to settle the Ukraine War, which needs a bit more art and tact than he's shown so far, but is doable without looking like too much of a surrender to Putin (but if the Democrats scream treason, that'll probably make it more popular). The obvious deal there is status quo on the ground, and dial back sanctions as stability and security is ensured. The US actually needs a cooperative relationship with Russia, and that means undoing the sanctions. He needs to do that without looking like a Russian stooge, but Putin seems to be more sensitive to how Trump looks than Trump himself.

Israel is a different matter. He'll give Israel whatever they want, with no complaints or pretense of humanitarian concern. At some point, he'll broker a deal with Egypt, the Saudis, Syria (via Putin), and maybe even Iran, to send the rest of the Palestinians Israel hasn't killed already into permanent exile. Maybe he'll get Israel to concede Lebanon, and that will be the end of it. It's a horrible solution, but in some ways it'll be a blessing. The Democrats were just going to drag it out. [*]

I could go around the world, but in foreign policy, there is virtually nothing he can do (other than start a war, e.g. with China) that wouldn't be an improvement over Biden. In general, he'll depress trade and immigration, and disengage in the internal affairs of other countries. He could easily negotiate peace deals with North Korea, Iran, even Cuba and Venezuela. He doesn't care about human rights in those places. (Biden didn't either, but the pretense was killing.) BRICS will continue to grow, Europe will go its own way, and the American people will be just fine. (Maybe fewer cheap goods and less cheap labor, but nowhere near the scare levels that liberal economists like to predict.) If Democrats complain about this, they'll only dig themselves deeper graves. The era of American global hegemony is ending. Protracting it will only make a bad thing worse.

By the way, Vance is a creep, but he's much smarter, and much savvier both on foreign and domestic policy than Pence ever was. Plus, as the heir-apparent, he has incentives not to turn the administration into the dumpster fire that Pence left with. I could go on and on, but you should get the idea by now. Having shown he can win, legitimately (as these things go), Trump has little reason to destroy democracy. He could even build on the majority he already has. He faces two dangers: one is his own bad instincts; the other is the idiot nihilism of much of the Republican Party. But he owns that party now, and the rank-and-file are basically followers, controlled by the propaganda machine, and the apparatchiki are just hired hands: they do what they're told.

Again, I have very little confidence that Trump will do any of this -- even on Israel, where he will continue to do whatever Netanyahu wants, but Netanyahu is used to and even seems to like it being a forever war, so he may not press that hard.

So it's really just up to him. As for the Democrats, all they can do is react. It's hopeless for me to try to advise, as none of them are ready to listen. They first have to figure out who they are, who they want to represent, and what they want. But this game of conning both the donors and the voters is wearing awfully thin.

[*] I could add some caveats and nuance here, but the key point is that this is what the dominant political coalition of Israel actually wants, and that Trump, both by temperament and in light of his donor support network, is unlikely to offer any resistance to anything Israel demands -- even more so than Biden-Harris, who as Democrats felt the need to express humanitarian concerns and their commitment to democracy. Trump has no such concerns, and may even see the mass expulsion of Palestinians as an exemplary model for his own mass expulsion of "illegal immigrants." But any number of things could limit this "ethnic cleansing." I'll leave this to your imagination, assuming you have enough to see that public opinion all around the world will increasingly shift as Israel approaches genocide's "final solution" -- even in the US, which should be of some concern to Trump, although his first instinct will be to fight and suppress it. He will see it as an opportunity to break pro-Israel donors away from the Democratic Party, solidifying his support, but freeing Democrats from having to toady for Israel, as Harris did and paid for. But ultimately opinion could turn against Trump/Israel here. The tide could even turn in Israel as the costs of war and isolation mount. And a massive influx of Palestinian exiles will be welcome nowhere: the US and EU go without saying, but public opinion makes this a tough sell in the Arab autocracies, which could blow up under the strain -- and which have their own major financial pipeline to Trump (e.g., Kushner's billion dollar slush fund).

I think the most likely scenario is that Gaza is totally crushed and depopulated, but that Israel is pressured to dial back its apartheid and ethnic cleansing measures in the occupied areas (including parts of pre-1967 Israel, where Palestinians are 20% of the population, and have barely-nominal citizenship) to pre-October 2023 levels. But a wide range of scenarios are possible. While Trump's election strengthens Netanyahu, they are fighting a perilous uphill battle (against a world which has been inexorably decolonising ever since 1945), where they may well wind up just retreating into their fortress-castles. [**]

[**] MAGA is clearly such a retreat, on many fronts (e.g., they want to return to a world where stern fathers can spank naughty daughters). Most of their beliefs should be resisted, but their retreat from neoliberal/neoconservative foreign policy is overdue. The world has changed since WWII, when America extended its hegemony over the "free world" and set up its quasi-holy war against the enemies of capital. Most of the capital that American armed and propaganda forces so fiercely defend isn't even American any more, and what is isn't of much value to most actual Americans. (A precise accounting of that capital may depend on how you account for Elon Musk, who I'd argue is case proof that not all immigration is good). Moreover, America's defense of that capital has lost much of its effectiveness, as American soldiers have given up the fight (why risk ruining their lives for oil moguls?), as corruption has made the war machine prohibitively expensive, and as the world itself has become increasingly unconquerable. (Phrase comes from Jonathan Schell's 2003 book, The Unconquerable World.)

Neoliberals will accuse Trump et al. of "isolationism," because that's the slur they deployed against a previous generation of (mostly) Republicans, who were wary of their schemes for one world market, dominated by American capital, and regimented by American arms. Although the US rarely had much of a standing army before 1939, Americans were widely engaged in the world, mostly through trade, not insignificantly through missionary work, but only rarely through imperialist adventures (1898 counts, as does the subsequent "gunboat diplomacy"). This willingness to engage the world on fairly equitable terms, including the resistance to European imperialism announced in the Monroe Doctrine, the pursuit of Open Door Policy to break up imperial monopolies, and the "arsenal of democracy" which defeated the final campaigns of Germany and Japan: all this earned Americans considerable good will around the world, which America's post-WWII abuse of power has only turned into a "legacy of ashes" (to borrow the title of Tim Weiner's history of the CIA). While the "isolationist" taunt will impress subscribers of Foreign Policy, it's a spent term, a piece of liberal cant that will produce more backlash than agreement.

While the "defense Democrats" have been ascendant against Trump and for Biden, I can only hope they will be seen as bankrupt now, and that Democrats will revert to something more like Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy (a kinder, gentler redressing of Gunboat Diplomacy, not that it changed things much), and a renewed interest in the UN, which the neocons sought so hard to trash. Also, I do not expect Trump to be consistent here: even if his tendency is to withdraw, institutional support for militarism and world dominance remains strong, at least as much in the Republican Party as in the Democratic, and it's easy to play on his ego as "the leader of the free world," especially when all he has to do is to follow friendly bribes.

I woke up Monday morning with the thought that I could finally add a third intro here, where I talk about what Democrats should do now that they've been driven from national power. I always planned on a final chapter to my political book where I would offer what I saw as practical political advice to save the world. (Well, in some versions of that book, I tacked on an extra section, which would describe the dystopia that would ensue if Democrats fail and allow Republicans to do all they've wanted. That much, at least, I'll spare you spoilers for.) So I have given this subject a fair amount of thought, and if I had the time (and were still so inclined) I could write about this at considerable length. However, with Monday slipping away from me, and no desire whatsoever to face this file on Tuesday, I'll try to keep this very brief: some reflections and scattered tidbits, but no structure, and no cheerleading. I'm not trying to sell my advice. I'm just throwing it out there.

Monday evening, I find I haven't written this section, and no longer have time. I think I did make many of the points I've been thinking about under various articles, so I'll leave it to you to ferret them out. Anything involving money, credibility, and trust is likely to be relevant. The biggest problem Democrats have is that lots of people don't trust them -- on lots of things, including avoiding war. They have to figure out how to fix that. And funny thing, beating the Republicans at fundraising and at advertising and celebrity endorsements and "ground game" isn't doing the trick.

Why so many of those people trust Republicans instead is way beyond me, but there is considerable evidence that they do. There is also ample evidence that trust in Republicans is foolish and sometimes plain stupid, but until Democrats get their house in order, distrust in them takes precedence. One saving grace may be that most Americans really hate corruption, and they don't much care for incompetence either. Republicans are up to their necks in both. Now if you can just show them, you should be able to score points. But it's hard to do when you're corrupt and incompetent as well.

One thought I'm pretty sure I didn't get to yet concerns "woke." I think of it as something like satori, a state of mind that if you're lucky, you find yourself in through no discernible effort of your own. It's good to be woke, but only you can know that. What it is not is a license for an inquisition, which is how most of the anti-woke have been trained to view it. And it's not that they disapprove of inquisitions in general. It's just that they prefer their own.

Top story threads:

Election notes: Some general pieces here, then more specific ones on Trump (why he won, and how horrible that is) and Harris (why she lost, and who cares) following, then sections on the Senate (flipped R), House (undecided, but probably still R), and other issues below.

• Washington Post: 2024 turnout is near the 2020 record. See how each state compares. I've seen references to a drop in voter turnout in 2024, especially relative to 2020, but this data shows a pretty close match, with 9 states posting new highs (44 year window). Trump won those states 5-4, with all of his wins in battleground states. Of 5 states with turnout under 55%, 4 were among Trump's biggest margin states (WV, AR, MS, OK), while the lowest one anywhere was Hawaii.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • [11-06] Donald Trump has won -- and American democracy is now in grave danger: "Trump's second term poses an existential threat to the republic. But there's still good reason for hope."

  • [11-06] The global trend that pushed Donald Trump to victory: "Incumbents everywhere are doing poorly. America just proved it's not exceptional." I still have, and haven't read, his book, so I know that this is his turf, and he likely has something interesting to say about the rest of the world -- something I, like most people, don't know a hell of a lot about -- but I don't see how this could possibly work: it just seems like another correlation pretending to be a cause. No need to deal with this now, but I will note one line: "Three different exit polls found that at least 70 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country's current direction, and they took it out on the current ruling party." Links in that line to the following:

    • Michael C Bender: [11-11] Why was there a broad drop-off in Democratic turnout in 2024? "Many Democrats failed to turn out to vote at the rate they did in 2020 when they ousted Donald Trump, according to an analysis of election data."

      Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation's most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete.

      The drop-off spanned demographics and economics. It was clear in counties with the highest job growth rates, counties with the most job losses and counties with the highest percentage of college-educated voters. Turnout was down, too, across groups that are traditionally strong for Democrats -- including areas with large numbers of Black Christians and Jewish voters.

      The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

    • Gary Langer: [11-05] Exit polls 2024: Deep economic discontent with Biden drove voters to Trump.

    • Andrew Stanton: [11-05] Exit poll results: 72% of Americans unhappy with way US is going.

    • Samuel Chamberlain: [11-05] Most voters say country is on wrong track, demand 'substantial change': exit polls.

• William Bruno: [10-23] Why foreign policy is the biggest issue this November: "From Gaza to Ukraine, this election will have world-spanning consequences. Now more than ever, we need to push for an anti-war, anti-imperial foreign policy." This came out before the election, so its tactical advice, like "hold Harris accountable," is moot, but the core issues are certainly important.

• Thomas Frank: [11-09] The elites had it coming. Of course, he's mostly talking about Democrats, although fellow traveler Dick Cheney gets as many nods as Barack Obama.

  Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump's appeal -- and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn't figure him out.

• Michelle Goldberg: [11-06] This is who we are now.

  Trump's first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.

  So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning rather than defiance. . . . But eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What's left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us. . . .

  Ultimately, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they're craving. . . . We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism the way George W. Bush -- whose re-election also broke my heart -- discredited neoconservatism.

  The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump's opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years -- saving what we can and trying to imagine a tolerable future.

  One nit here is that no matter how discredited she thought neoconservatism was when Bush-Cheney departed, it still rules the roost, as Biden showed us with his disastrous cultivation of wars, and Harris underscored by welcoming Dick Cheney to her campaign. Even as some especially notorious individuals were put to pasture, the institutions supporting them remain unchecked and unexamined. I'm also less certain of Trump's incompetence. Much will depend on whether he hires competent people who can keep his trust without blundering. Sure, he did a very bad job of that during his first term.

• Tyler Austin Harper: [11-06] What we just went through wasn't an election. It was a hostage situation. This seems about right:

  Heading into Tuesday's vote, a large majority of voters said that the country was on the wrong track and that they were disappointed with the candidates on offer. A plurality of voters said that regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things worse. Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not make them proud of America.

  The blame for this grievous state of affairs lies with the Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which played a game of chicken with the electorate, relying on apocalyptic threats about the end of democracy to convince people that they had no choice but to vote as instructed. Both candidates offered up policies that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their bases. For one candidate, that contemptuous strategy succeeded. But it fails the American people.

  For all his populist posturing, Mr. Trump put forward tax breaks that favor the wealthy, championed tariffs that would almost certainly raise grocery prices, bad-mouthed overtime pay, praised firing striking workers and largely stayed mum while his allies discussed destroying the Affordable Care Act. He insisted abortion be left up to the states even though most Americans, including many Republicans, think it should be legal everywhere, and pledged to oppose any new gun restrictions even though an overwhelming majority of Americans say they should be stricter.

  And what were Trump acolytes to be given in return for greenlighting this unpopular agenda? Elon Musk promised a period of economic pain. Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump would bend the country over his knee and give it a "spanking." Why would any sign on? Because it was either that, they were told, or nuclear war under Ms. Harris. Some choice. . . .

  What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage situation. Our major parties represent the interests of streaming magnates, the arms industry, oil barons, Bitcoin ghouls and Big Tobacco, often without even pretending to heed the needs of voters. A political system like that is fundamentally broken.

  I skipped over the corresponding list of indictments against Biden and Harris, which struck me as (relatively speaking) small potatoes, but most show that the inordinate influence of money isn't limited to Republicans. The first paragraph cites two pieces on the threat to "end democracy":

  • Deepa Shivaram: [19-30] Harris argues that Trump poses a threat to democracy in the final days of the race.

  • Tim Reid: [03-16] Trump predicts the end of US democracy if he loses 2024 election.

• Doug Henwood: [11-08] It was always about inflation: "Simply put, Donald Trump owes his reelection to inflation and to the fact that the Biden administration did little to address the problem in a way that helped working-class families."

  I often say that the Democrats' political problem is that they're a party of capital that has to pretend otherwise for electoral purposes. This time they hardly even pretended. Kamala Harris preferred campaigning with the inexplicably famous mogul Mark Cuban and the ghoulish Liz Cheney to Shawn Fain, who led the United Auto Workers to the greatest strike victory in decades. Those associations telegraphed both her policy instincts and her demographic targeting: Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs.

  Like Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the strategy failed, only worse. At least Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. Harris even lost among suburban white women, a principal target of this twice-failed strategy.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • [11-06] Americans wanted change and that meant Trump. There is something to this, but also several loads of bullshit:

    The simplest explanation, though, may be the most compelling: This was a classic "change" election in which the "out" party had an advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and also because the GOP chose a rival whose constant demonstration of his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest. In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated; and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same people and institutions they did.

    Nobody for a moment doubted that Trump would bring change. And indeed, his signature Make America Great Again slogan and message came to have a double meaning. Yes, for some it meant (as it did in 2016) a return to the allegedly all-American culture of the 20th century, with its traditional hierarchies; moral certainties and (for some) white male leadership. But for others MAGA meant very specifically referred to the perceived peace and prosperity of the pre-pandemic economy and society presided over, however turbulently, Trump. When Republicans gleefully asked swing voters if they were better off before Joe Biden became president, a veritable coalition of voters with recent and long-standing grievances over conditions in the country had as simple an answer as they did when Ronald Reagan used it to depose Jimmy Carter more than a half-century ago.

    The "better off" question is close to meaningless, as most people can't really tell, but as we've seen, are inclined to accept whatever their political orientation dictates. Unlike, say, the pandemic of 2020, or the financial meltdown of 2008, or the deflationary recession of 1980, or the great one of 1929-32 (is that what MAGA means?), there is little objective reason driving voters to change. Granted, there may be unease driven by slower, almost tectonic forces (like climate change), but few people think them through, and those who do tend to prefer orderly change over the kind of disruption Trump promises.

  • [11-09] Democrats lost because of their bad policies, not their bad attitude. I beg to differ, but both could have been better.

  • [11-12] Kamala Harris came much closer to winning than you think. The argument here is that the shift to Trump was less in the highly contested swing states than anywhere else (Harris topped Biden only in Colorado).

• David Sirota: [11-07] Election 2024: How billionaires torpedoed democracy: "Both parties' 2024 campaigns claimed to be about 'saving democracy.' Yet both parties ended up bought and paid for by billionaires."

• Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [11-06] Chronicle of a defeat foretold: "What does history repeat itself after it does farce?" He's very harsh on Harris here. One thing I find curious is an uncredited chart, which if I'm reading it right says that 24% of respondents think Democracy in the US is secure, vs. 74% threatened. Harris leads secure 59% to 39%, but trails in the larger threatened group, 46% to 53%. But isn't securing democracy supposed to be her issue? As an issue, it's nebulous enough that Trump was able to deflect it by claiming that Democrats were the real threat to democracy (after all, they're the ones rigging the polling and the voting!). Democrats could bring up fascism, but the response is simply, you're the real fascists, and who else really knows any better?

    This is an aside, but fits here as well as anywhere. I haven't found an article making this point so far, but could Kelly's fascism comments have been a plant? (Like one of Roger Stone's dirty tricks?) If Trump's operatives know that being charged with fascism will only solidify their support -- not because their supporters identify with fascism, but because they see it as stereotypically leftist infantile name-calling (unlike "libtard," which they know is just a joke). But mainstream Democrats generally shy away from such a loaded term, so how do you get someone like Harris to use it? You give her permission, by allowing her to quote someone like Kelly. This whole notion of "permission" is sick and pernicious. There's a quote somewhere about how the Cheney endorsements of Harris give Republicans permission to vote against Trump: it becomes something real Republicans can do without surrendering their identify. Harris may have had some doubt about "fascism," but she couldn't resist the Cheney honey trap, as she saw it as a way to steal some significant slice of Republican votes, putting her over the top. I have no reason to believe that Kelly and the Cheneys were plants, other than that they precisely had that effect. That they did, of course, was Harris's gaffe (and yeah, I'm following Kinsley rules here, otherwise I would have said "blunder").

  • [11-08] The crack-up. Title from F Scott Fitzgerald. Selected bits:

    • This "white wave" electorate didn't reject progressive ideas; they rejected the candidate who failed to advocate them for fear of alienating Big Tech execs and Wall Street financiers. Voters in both Alaska and Missouri approve increasing the minimum wage to $15. Voters approved paid sick leave in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska. Voters in Oregon approved a measure protecting marijuana workers' right to unionize. Alaska voters banned anti-union captive audience meetings. Arizona voters rejected a measure that lowered the minimum wage for tipped workers. Massachusetts approved the right of rideshare workers to organize for collective bargaining. New Orleans voters approved a Workers Bill of Rights. Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York approved measures granting a state constitutional right to abortion.

    • Harris lost the popular vote by five million votes. Jill Stein only garnered 642,000 votes, just 25,000 more than RFK, Jr., who'd long since withdrawn. In no state did Stein get enough votes to cost Harris the state. Good luck blaming the Greens (which says much about the politically emaciated condition of the Greens). Even in Wisconsin (where Harris lost by only 31,000 votes), Stein, who captured only 12,666 votes, didn't fare well enough to be blamed (or credited) for costing Harris the state. In Pennsylvania, Harris lost by 165,000 votes. Stein collected only 33,591 votes. In Michigan, where Stein had her best showing in a battleground state, winning 44,648 votes (0.8%), Harris lost to Trump by 82,000 votes.

    • Murtaza Hussain: "Suppressing the Bernie movement in 2016 effectively destroyed the Democratic Party. That was a turning point year GOP also had an insurgency with Trump but they ultimately worked with him to some new kind of synthesis. The Democrats never got past their decrepit ancien regime."

    • Some of you may remember that it was the Obama brain trust, irritated at Trump's role in promoting the birther conspiracy, who worked feverishly in 2011 to make Trump the face of the post-Tea Party GOP. Obama's former campaign manager and policy guru, David Plouffe later explained the thinking: "Let's lean into Trump here. That'll be good for us." That worked out about as well for the Democratic base as the bank bailouts.

  • By the way, St Clair also wrote The wolf at the door, which is a fund drive piece, but also a history of a publication that's still bristling with anger 30 years after inception. There's not just a lot to be angry about today, but much more coming down the pike. Be sure of that.

• Freddy Brewster: [11-05] Leonard Leo's dark money web is sowing election day chaos.

• Israel/Palestine considerations:

  • Raja Abdulhaq: {11-07] Instead of looking inwards, white liberals are blaming Arab Americans for Trump's victory. My impression is that there is less deflection and scapegoating now than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton and her fans felt more entitled, were less inclined to admit their own errors, or to credit that Trump had tapped into something they had missed. But anti-genocide voters made the point of being conspicuous, setting themselves up for just this kind of reaction.

  • Sami Al-Arian: [11-08] Trump did not win this election. Harris was defeated by a Gaza-inspired boycott. I think the author is taking too much credit for something that no one should be proud of. That the boycott existed at all is a blight on Harris's campaign. She could have done a few simple things to neutralize it, like listening to them, and explaining how much worse a Trump win would be for Palestinians. Showing concretely how Trump would be worse could have worked on virtually every issue, but she very rarely did it, opting instead for generic slanders (like "fascist") that were easily deflected.

  • Hamed Aleaziz: [11-06] For many Arab Americans in Dearborn, Trump made the case for their votes. Unofficial results for the city showed Trump 42%, Harris 36%, Jill Stein 18%.

  • Michael Arria:

    • [11-06] Donald Trump rides disillusionment with the Biden administration back to the White House.

    • [11-07] The Shift: Trump's predictable comeback.

  • Samer Badawi: [11-07] After Trump's victory, Palestinians cannot afford to wait until the next US election: "Palestinians and their allies must build on down-ballot wins, while recognizing the limitations of electoral politics in the face of Israel's genocidal campaign."

  • Peter Beinart: [11-07] Democrats ignored Gaza and brought down their party.

  • Nada Elia: [11-07] We warned you that Gaza would define the US elections.

  • Axel Foley: [11-06] Karma for Kamala: Ignoring Gaza has lost Harris the US election.

  • Joe Gill: [11-08] How liberals react to Kamala Harris' defeat -- blame the voters: "American voters tired of Biden's endless wars and backing for genocide, but their supporters refuse to reflect on the reasons for this defeat."

  • Shamai Leibowitz: [11-08] Harris lost because her party represented war mongering, q.e.d.

  • Jacob Magid: [11-01] On campaign trail for Harris in Michigan, Bill Clinton defends Israel's war in Gaza: "Recalling efforts to broker peace during his own presidency, Clinton urges voters in crucial swing state to think 'what you would do it if was your family' killed on October 7." So he went to one of the cloest swing states, the one with the highest share of Arab-American voters in the nation, and this was his pitch? The likelihood of anyone there having relation suddenly killed was about 100 times greater by Israel since October 7 than by Hamas on that day. But at least his speech got reported on . . . in Israel. What can matter more than that?

  • Ziyad Motala: [11-06] The US at a crossroads after Trump's return.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [11-09] The role of the Gaza genocide in Kamala Harris's loss: "The cause of Kamala Harris' disastrous failure in the 2024 presidential election will forever be debated, but there are good reasons to believe the Israeli genocide in Gaza played a significant role." This misses what I've always suspected of being the most important one, which is that Gaza is the sort of bad news that makes people, especially ones who don't really know much about the subject, recoil against incumbents.

  • Arno Rosenfeld: [11-06] Gaza didn't cost Harris the election. But her approach pointed to a broader problem: "Pro-Palestinian organizers say the problem was her focus on courting moderates, including Republicans, rather than motivating the party's left flank."

  • Richard Silverstein: [11-11] Harris and Gaza: why she lost.

    Harris had an opportunity to set out a more independent policy. Instead she doubled down. In every speech which addressed these issues, she emphasized her unshakable support for Israel. She offered little for the Palestinians being slaughtered there, aside from bromides about being heartbroken at the suffering. She claimed she was "doing everything possible" to end the war and free the Israeli hostages. While she refused to do anything concrete.

  • Matt Sledge: [11-06] In Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib did nearly twice as well as Kamala Harris.

  • Alfred Soto:

    • [11-05] Election Day 2024: awful but cheerful. I had this in an open tab, discovered too late to make even the first update, but as next week's not coming, I figured I should go ahead and file it.

      More disappointing is Harris' mush-mouthed foreign policy. First, on the genocide in Gaza. Certainly she and Bibi will never hug like he and Joe did, but not once has she suggested the radical demolition of State Department dogma, not merely received and Methuselan but venomous. Next, she supports "border security" and "tighter" immigration. If she has explained in any public address how the forcible removal of illegal immigrants from jobs, schools, churches, and putting them in camps, as the Trump campaign has vowed, will, apart from its grotesque moral horror, devastate the economy that Trump vows to heal. The depressing part is how Harris might point to the Democratic polity's hardening position on immigration; in times of economic doubt, blame foreigners.

    • [11-07] What now?

    • [11-24] Among the reasons we lost in 2024. Long quote from the Shahid piece I've already cited. Let this be my last add to this file.

  • Megan K Stack: [11-05] I voted for Harris, but Gaza's horrors weigh on my conscience.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [11-06] Did Israel hurt the Harris vote in Michigan? "Foreign policy was low on voters minds, but in these critical counties, Harris was underperforming."

• International reaction:

  • Ellen Ioanes: [11-07] From Bibi to Putin, here's how the world leaders reacted to Trump's win. Aside from Netanyahu, they've mostly kept silent (Putin included).

  • Isabel Kershner: [11-06] In Trump, Netanyahu sees a more favorable US president.

    Only a few hours had passed since Donald J. Trump was elected president, when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, announced that he had already spoken to the U.S. president-elect, noting he was "among the first" to call him.

    It was further evidence of the enthusiasm Mr. Netanyahu's right-wing government feels -- it had already been celebrating Mr. Trump's victory since breakfast local time on Wednesday as if it had just won the American election itself.

    Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's ultranationalist minister of national security, posted a festive "Yesssss" on social media, along with emojis of a flexed biceps muscle and the Israeli and American flags, even before the last polls had closed in Alaska.

  • H Scott Prosterman: [11-08] Netanyahu, delirious at Trump's return, dumps his Defense Minister to pursue complete occupation of Gaza.

Trump:

• Peter Baker: [11-06] 'Trump's America': Comeback victory signals a different kind of country: "In the end, Donald J. Trump is not the historical aberration some thought he was, but instead a transformational force reshaping the modern United States in his own image." This piece came out immediately after the election was called, showing once again that no one beats the New York Times when it comes to sucking up to those in power.

• Walden Bello: [11-07] How did I "predict" that Trump, despite his repulsive persona and politics, would prevail? "Democratic Party leadership has been discredited and there's room for new progressive leaders to take the helm."

• Jamelle Bouie: [11-09] What do Trump voters know about the future he has planned for them? Not much, partly because they don't believe what he says, and they believe even less what Democrats say he says. At some point in this post I should quote something Jeffrey St Clair wrote recently: [10-25]

  More than half of Trump's supporters don't believe he'll actually do many of the things he claims he'll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris's supporters hope she'll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won't. And that pretty much sums up this election.

  What we should add to St Clair's observation is that the Trump understanding was much more credible than the Harris take. Trump lies all the time, sometimes just to provoke a reaction. Harris, well, doesn't have Trump's track record, but she's a politician, and how far do you trust politicians, especially to do the right thing?

• John Cassidy: [11-11] Donald Trump's victory and the politics of inflation: "Joe Biden's strong record on jobs and Kamala Harris's vow to reduce the cost of living couldn't prevent the Democrats from succumbing to a global anti-incumbency wave." One thing that bothers me in virtually every article this week that even mentions inflation is that no one seems to have a clear understanding of what it is, of how it works, of what is bad (and in some cases good) about it, of what can and should be done about it. I can't do it justice here, but I do want to stress one point: it creates both winners and losers. Good government policy would try to limit the winners (perhaps by taxing off their windfall) and to compensate the losers (the "cola" in Social Security is one example of this). The press seem to buy the notion that it is an always bad, which mostly means that they are carrying water for the side that wants less inflation (e.g., for bankers, which is largely why the Fed is so hawkish against inflation). I wouldn't say that there was no real inflation coming out of the pandemic: I suspect that some inflation was inevitable, but the winners and losers (and therefore who felt the pain, and who needed help) were largely determined by pricing power, which has been tilted against workers and consumers for some time, but became more acute when inflation was added to the mix. Policies limiting monopolies and price gouging would have helped, but Biden and Harris got little credit for them, even from supposedly liberal economists. Trump offered nothing but an outlet for rage. Why anyone thought that might be any kind of solution is way beyond me, but according to polls, many people did. They were deceived. Whether they ever learn from such mistakes remains to be seen.

• Jelani Cobb: [11-07] 2016 and 2024: "We will be a fundamentally different country by the end of the next Administration." Indeed, we already are.

• Ed Coper: [11-08] White noise: why hatred of Donald Trump fuels his success as much as his supporters' love: "A network of organised disinformation sows doubt, kills policy reform and keep us ad adds as we debate Trump-mania." Some misdirection in his first paragraph:

  Historians will long scratch their heads that a Republican candidate who -- despite an inability to string a coherent sentence together, being grossly underqualified and rife with extramarital affairs -- would go on to not only win election but become one of the most popular presidents in US history.

  Turns out the subject here was Warren Harding, elected president in a 1920 landslide. How it advances an understanding of Trump isn't clear, but even stranger stories ensue.

• David Corn:

  • [11-04] Trump and his voters: they like the lying: "He's a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect. The question won't fade: How does he get away with it?" "Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy."

  • [11-06] America meets its judgment day: "Trump's victory signals a national embrace of the politics of hate and a possible fascist future."

• Ben Davis: [11-09] None of the conventional explanations for Trump's victory stand up to scrutiny: "This election has blown a hole in the worldviews of both leftists and centrists. The pandemic may be a more important factor." This piece covers a lot of ground, quite sensibly. The section on Covid is really about something else:

  I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.

  Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump's term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.

  I've often thought that the Democrats took way too little credit for the first big pandemic relief bill, which Pelosi and Schumer largely wrote and pushed through, while Trump had to acquiesce because he was mostly worried about the falling stock market. The sunsetting made it palatable to Republicans, and made sense given that it was relief for an emergency. Democrats figured they could run on extending key parts of it, but did they? Not really. Worse than that, Trump claimed credit for the immediate effects, then blamed inflation on the act's largesse. Democrats were, once again, screwed coming and going, mostly for not following McConnell's formula of just letting the country go to hell, just so voters would blame the incumbent president.

• David Dayen: [11-08] The triumphant return of corruption: "A look at the biggest stock gainers since Trump's election shows that paying tribute to the next president will have its benefits." He identifies several especially large gains, from outfits like MoneyLion (up 61%, "investors believe, correctly, that consumer protection, which made a comeback in the past four years, will be destroyed again"), CoreCivic (up 72%, a "private prison" company), GEO Group (up 61%, another "private prison" contractor), and Coinbase (up 41%, "the crypto exchange"). "We can get ready for four years of pay-to-play deals, corporate back-scratching, and a public unprotected from scam artists."

• John Harris: [11-10] From Trump's victory, a simple, inescapable message: many people despise the left: "The tumult of social media and rightwing propaganda has successfully cast progressives as one judgmental, 'woke' mass." I don't doubt his point, but the examples mostly make me think that most of the people who "hate the left" have little if any idea what or whom the left is. That suggests some kind of communication problem, which makes most sense in the US, where we don't have our own party, and are often stuck under the dead carcass of a Democratic Party, whose leaders hate us as much as the right thinks it does. But there must be more to the story than that: some deep, dark psychological factors that are never really acknowledged and near impossible to dislodge There must be a literature researching this. We certainly have research on why people become fascists, which overlaps significantly with hating the left. On the other hand, my own study of history has shown that everything decent and valuable that has ever happened in America has its origin in the left. Why can't anyone else see that?

• David Hearst: [11-07] Trump has a choice: Obliterate Palestine or end the war: Most likely he won't even think of it as a choice, but simply following the directions of his donors. The question is whether he can see the many downsides of doing so. He has several odd talents, but clear thinking and foresight aren't among them.

  Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.

  And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump's first term as president, the US was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right -- the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.

  Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.

  Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the US embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.

  Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump's sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.

  This was -- and still is -- a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.

  This led directly to the Hamas revolt, and the Israeli reprisal, not just collect punishment but a systematic plan to render Gaza uninhabitable, so credit him there, too. As I noted in my intro, I expect he will simply cheer Netanyahu on to "finish the job." I don't think he has any idea what that entails, how it will look, and how it will reflect back on America, and on him personally. Nor do I think he cares. He's one of those guys who strictly lives in the present, trusting his instincts will never fail him.

  There is much more to this piece, including a concluding section on "Hope for the future," where he notes: "It may be that as Biden departs, we have seen the party's last Zionist leader. That in itself is of immense significance for Israel."

• Murtaza Hussain: [11-06] Trump is eyeing Iran hawk Brian Hook as first foreign policy pick.

• Lauren Markoe: [11-07] Who is Howard Lutnick? Trump transition team leader is a billionaire supporter of Jewish causes and Israel.

• Michael Mechanic: [11-07] Why did Trump really win? It's simple, actually. "When the economy thrives while half of America struggles, something has got to give."

• Lorrie Moore: [11-07] A fourth-rate entertainer, a third-rate businessman, and a two-time president: "The 2024 election, like the one in 2016, had the same nutty and vapid Donald Trump, the same retrograde gender politics, and the same result."

  He is a third-rate businessman and fourth-rate entertainer, a husband to fashion models, a wannabe standup comedian who cannot land a punch line but floats language out into the air, hoping it will cohere, then flare, though it usually wanders into vapor and fog. As with much current standup, it can get raunchy and crass, but the MAGA people accept this lack of dignity. I was struck with puzzled admiration at his forty minutes of quiet swaying to "Ave Maria." It was like performance art. He also did a skit at McDonald's and one in a garbage truck. He will do most anything to avoid talking about actual governing, which he does not know that much about. He perhaps understands that most voters don't want to discuss that and want to just leave it to their elected officials. We are a country that is about money and entertainment. Trump was running as the embodiment of these. One PBS commentator used a Hollywood metaphor to explain him: Trump is a franchise blockbuster, familiar and splashy; Harris is an independent art-house film with subtitles.

• Elie Mystal: [11-07] There's no denying it anymore: Trump is not a fluke -- he's America: "The United States chose Donald Trump in all his ugliness and cruelty, and the country will get what it deserves." This is certainly one viewpoint. Still, I have to ask, how many people didn't understand the choice this clearly? And for those who did not, why not?

  We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid. . . .

  Everyone who hates Trump is asking how America can be "saved" from him, again. Nobody is asking the more relevant question: Is America worth saving? Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures. A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited, its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be hunted doesn't really deserve to be "saved." It deserves to fail.

  Trump is not our "retribution." He is our reckoning.

• Rick Perlstein:

  • [11-05] Garbagegate, with a twist: "The media's penchant to balance the two parties and control the narrative didn't quite work when it came to a Trump insult comic's comments about Puerto Rico."

  • [11-13] How to hear a fascist: "Trump was supposed to be in decline, losing it. He lost it all the way to the White House."

• Kelefa Sanneh: [11-07] How Donald Trump, the leader of white grievance, gained among Hispanic voters.

• Timothy Snyder: [11-08] What does it mean that Donald Trump is a fascist? "Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs." This is an article that we must admit, he's competent to write, but hardly anyone else is competent to read. I bookmarked it because it's an issue I take some perverse interest in. I haven't read it yet, because I doubt that I'll learn much -- e.g., I already knew the Marinetti story, and that's pretty obscure -- and the rest will probably just be annoying.

• Rebecca Solnit:

  • [11-07] Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do: "Americans will be stuck cleaning up after MAGA's destructive streak because men like this never clean up after themselves."

  • [11-09] Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want.

• Elizabeth Spiers: [11-06] Trump offered men something that Democrats never could.

• Asawin Suebsaeng/Tim Dickinson: [10-03] 'American death squads': inside Trump's push to make police more violent: "Trump's recent call for a 'violent day' of policing is part of his plan to push cops to be as brutal as possible and shield them from accountability." Pre-election piece I should have noticed earlier (or should have been better reported).

• Michael Tomasky: [11-08] Why does no one understand the real reason Trump won? "It wasn't the economy. It wasn't inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer."

  The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media -- Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk's X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan's, and much more -- sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

  Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper's Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. . . .

  I think a lot of people who don't watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don't understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it's the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

  I haven't even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes -- inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is "the envy of the world." But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world's easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won't take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the "roaring Trump economy" will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

  Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my "Ulan Bator question." If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? "You would know that she is a very stupid person," Gertz said. "You'd know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she's a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you."

  Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he's been "the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years," that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is "doing it all for you."

  To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side's view of things. It's simply "the news." This is what people -- white people, chiefly -- watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you've seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That's reach, and that's power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it's owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

  Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff.

  Also, this ends with another key point/example:

  The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

  The reason? The right-wing media. And it's only growing and growing. And I haven't even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it's too late, which it almost is.

• Katrina vanden Heuvel: [11-07] Americans are desperate for change. Electing Trump was a misguided message: "The causes of Donald Trump's victory will be endlessly debated, but misdirected discontent is clearly a major factor."

• Julio Ricardo Varela: [11-08] Trump broke a record with Latino voters. History can tell us why. "Trump exploited an 'us versus them' mentality that has long existed among Latinos living in the US and those outside this country."

Also, some more speculative pieces on what a second Trump term might do (some issue-specific, some more general). Most of these assume Trump will try to do what he campaigned on, but I suggested an alternative scenario in the second section of the intro (but even it doesn't argue against most of the forebodings here):

• Matt Bruenig: [11-07] What does Trump's win mean for the NLRB? "Donald Trump will probably sack National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has been friendly to unions, on day one of his presidency."

• Jonathan Chait: [11-08] Trump can prosecute anybody he wants, transition leader says: "Department of Justice is now Department of Trump Justice."

• Rachel M Cohen: [11-06] Trump won. So what does that mean for abortion? "It will be easier to restrict reproductive rights in the president-elect's second term."

• Tim Dickinson: 'You can't despair. Because that's what they want.' "Experts tell Rolling Stone what resisting authoritarianism in America will look like in Trump's second term." And if you have a subscription, you can find out what they have to say.

• Abdallah Fayyad: [11-06] This one chart foreshadows Trump's immigration crackdown: "Investors in private prisons think they've hit the jackpot with a second Trump presidency."

• Jonathan Freedland: [11-08] Think you know how bad Trump unleashed will be? Look at the evidence: it will be even worse. I can think of many risks, but I'd hardly put "the end of Nato" second (or anywhere) on my list. It's not going to happen, because NATO is really just an arms sales cartel, and Trump loves a good racket. His threats to withdraw from NATO were just meant to shake down more tribute. He won't back out, not least because that would only incentivize Europe to build up their own arms cartel.

• M Gessen: [11-15] This is the dark, unspoken promise of Trump's return: An expert on Russia, learned the hard way, looks back there for insight.

  For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. "Liberal democracy," he says, "offers moral constraints without problem-solving" -- a lot of rules, not a lot of change -- while "populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints." Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn't interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect's appeal in terms of something more primal: "Trump promises that you don't have to think about other people."

  Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one's own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this "morally unconstrained collective egoism."

  While there are people in Trump's circle who look to Orban as a guide to how to lock into power, Trump has many other sources of inspiration, even without cracking open his copy of Mein Kampf. For instance, the crypto-creep in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who was reelected with 84% of the vote, his popularity largely credited to his war on gangs. That's the sort of publicity Trump would gladly kill for.

• Andrea González-Ramirez: [11-08] What to know about Susie Wiles, Trump's next Chief of Staff.

• Karen J Greenberg: [11-07] It's not just about the president: "It's about the presidency."

  Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer . . . in their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that "Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability."

  And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. "The often-feckless Trump," they wrote, "also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump -- but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect." . . .

  A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral presidential powers to a new level. . . . New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump "and his associates" plan to "increase the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House."

• Ken Klippenstein: [11-12] Read the leaked Rubio dossier: "Trump camp details 'lightweight' Marco Rubio's liabilities." I restrained myself from noting reports that Rubio is in line to become Secretary of State, but couldn't resist reporting this.

• Paul Krugman: [11-11] Why Trump's deportations will drive up your grocery bill: Seriously, a week after the election, and this is the best he can do? Alternate title: "Did you know that the pennies you saved on groceries were paid for by exploiting undocumented immigrant labor?" At least he paid off the "tarrifs will drive inflation" story he's already done a dozen times.

• Avery Lotz: [11-10] Trump rules out Haley, Pompeo admin posts: No surprise with Haley, who still has a lot of sucking up to do. Pompeo, however, was always so good at it. The mark against him, beyond his very brief presidential campaign, could be policy. He is remembered as one of Trump's stealthiest hawks, and was especially influential in sabotaging Trump's North Korea diplomacy. Suppose Trump remembers that?

• Rachel Maddow: [11-10] Dead last: "Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet." More than you, or I at least, need to read right now about Huey Long, Spiro Agnew, and anti-corruption hero Viktor Navalny (who is inconveniently dead). This sounds like an AI distillation of her recent books, which sound like they were written by someone else -- not that, by this point, we have any idea what her authentic self might sound like.

• Branko Marcetic:

  • [11-02] Trump is planning a third red scare: "Donald Trump and his allies aren't making a secret of it: if they win, they're going to launch a campaign of repression to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement and the organized left."

  • [11-08] Trump is planning a presidency of, by, and for the rich: "Now that the 'pro-worker' GOP led by Donald Trump holds the reins of government, what does it plan to do? A program of handouts for big business and austerity for the rest of us."

• Dylan Matthews: [11-06] Trump proposed big Medicaid and food stamp cuts. Can he pass them? "What Trump's return means for America's poor people."

• Jane Mayer: [11-08] Donald Trump's Supreme Court majority could easily rule through 2045: "Democrats failed to make the Court itself a major campaign issue, but what comes after the Dobbs decision could very well be worse, and more far-reaching."

• Julianne McShane: [11-06] After win, Trump fans admit "Project 2025 is the agenda".

• George Monbiot: [11-07] Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth -- and it will take a progressive revolution to stop him.

• David Remnick: [11-09] It can happen here: "Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that Trump's reëlection is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are."

• Tony Romm: [11-11] Trump eyes pro-crypto candidates for key federal financial agencies: "The incoming administration has explored new personnel and policy that can deliver on Trump's campaign promise to turn the United States into the 'crypto capital of the planet.'" Something else that Trump is going to do that is going to be really horrible, although in this case not without an element of farce.

• Jennifer Rubin: [11-11] Trump can keep campaign promises or be popular. Not both. This is pretty much what I said in my second intro. The problem here is that Republicans don't see the need to be popular, or even want to. They want to rule. They want to be feared. And they think that they can extort and/or terrorize enough people to vote for them that, with their other dirty tricks, they can stay in power, and do all the sick and demented things they've been dreaming of. Remember the 2000 election? Lots of pundits thought that Bush, with his "compassionate conservatism" spiel, and coming off a relatively moderate record as governor of Texas, would show some modesty -- he had, after all, lost the popular vote, and only won when the Supreme Court prevented a recount in Florida -- and tack to the center. But as soon as Bush was inaugurated, Cheney took over and declared that Republicans had come to power with a purpose, and they were going to do everything they wanted, just the way they wanted it. Getting re-elected wasn't his department. He was there to break things, and that's exactly what he did. (Then, somehow, Rove managed to wangle Bush a second term anyway, despite the fact that nearly everything he had done in his first was massively unpopular.)

• Matt Sledge: [11-07] Crypto sweep puts Congress on notice: vote with us or we'll come after you with millions: "In all likelihood, crypto deregulation is coming."

• Peter Wade: [11-10] Trump tells GOP to bypass Senate confirmation process, block Biden judicial appointments: "Despite an incoming Republican majority, Trump wants new party leadership to agree to recess appointments." That way he can appoint people even Republicans could object to. (Obviously, RFK Jr. jumps to mind.) Here's another report:

  • Mariana Alfaro: [11-10] Trump, allies signal they will try to call the shots for Republican-led Senate: "President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday demanded that the next Senate GOP leader allow him to make appointments to his administration and the courts without approval."

• Joel Warner: [11-07] What can we expect from a second Trump presidency? "From unleashing more dark money in politics to expanding fossil fuel production and assaulting reproductive rights, here's some of what we can expect from a second Donald Trump administration.

PS: Trying to wind up on Monday, I'm starting to see a number of early appointments (e.g., Trump picks Rep. Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations), which are beyond the scope of this post and section, as well as damn near impossible for me to keep up with. I will say that they do show that he's actually thought about transition and administration this time (unlike in 2016), he has a plan, and is executing it quickly. This certainly argues against the notion that he might not govern as viciously as he campaigned. I should also note that the Wade story above shows that he intends to dominate Congress (or bypass them wherever possible), rather than have to negotiate with anyone (even mainstream Republicans). He is basically confirming the fears of all those who predicted that Trump would turn the presidency into a dictatorship.

Harris:

• Kat Abughazaleh: [11-08] Democrats need to clean house before they screw up again: "It wasn't just the people running Kamala Harris's campaign who failed. The leadership of the entire party is at fault."

• Dean Baker: [11-13] Did bad economic reporting doom Harris?

  This is the time for everyone to do their election autopsy, where everyone pushes their preferred story of what went wrong for the Harris campaign. Mine will focus on what I consider the simplest and most obvious, the media painted a picture of a bad economy which was virtually impossible for the Harris campaign to overcome. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the alternative reality folks at Fox, I mean the New York Times, Washington Post, and other bastions of the establishment media.

  Just to provide context, there is little doubt that people's views of the economy were hugely important in determining the vote. Exit polls consistently put the economy as the number 1 or number 2 issue in people's minds as they went to vote. And those rating the economy as a top issue voted for Trump by a huge margin.

  I find it completely unfathomable why anyone worried about the economy would look to Republicans (especially Trump) for relief. History, as far back as Herbert Hoover, is unanimous on this point, at least for most (working/middle class) people -- higher-income people may have done relatively better with Republicans, but with the possible exception of the top 1% (at most), they too have fared better with Democrats. Or you could look at policy preferences, which again favor Democrats by a huge margin. As Baker points out, a big part of people's evaluation of the economy is simply partisan, but that doesn't explain why a majority (actually well above the actual vote) thought better of Republicans.

  Baker continues:

  At the most basic level, the media have continually chosen to highlight the negative about the economy. University of Wisconsin political science professor Mark Copelovitch did an analysis last year showing that mentions of "inflation" and "recession" dwarfed mentions of unemployment, even as the latter was hitting record lows and we never had a recession.

  The inflation we did see was part of a worldwide burst of inflation related to the pandemic, where the US rate was little different than the inflation seen in countries like France and Germany. We were told people don't blame the pandemic, they blame Biden. That is undoubtedly true, but that is because the media didn't remind people that the inflation was due to the pandemic in the same way they always reminded people that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was "disastrous." . . .

  Most people are not getting their news from the New York Times or Washington Post, but the information presented in these outlets does spread to other news outlets and to social media. When people hear the bad economy story in the elite media they help its spread elsewhere.

  It's true that most regular consumers of these outlets supported Harris, but that misses the point. . . . They helped to advance a bad economy story that was at odds with reality. Given the importance of perceptions of the economy in people's voting, it would have been all but impossible for Harris to overcome this negative economy story, and she didn't.

• Josh Barro: [11-09] This is all Biden's fault. He starts with Biden picking Harris as his VP in 2020.

• Chris Bohner: [11-02] Kamala Harris is not doing well with union voters.

• Jonathan Chait: [11-06] Why America rejected the Biden-Harris administration: "It's not that people love Trump. Democrats simply failed." As usual, Chait swims in his own tide:

  The seeds of Harris's failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump's 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting blinders on the Democrats' decision-making elite.

  So, after Hillary Clinton failed, they should have moved further to the right? How was that even possible? No mention of what the Democrats did in 2018, after moving so far into left-wing peril. (They won both houses of Congress.) But Chait then claims Biden in 2020, who "won because he abstained from that rush to the left, keeping him closer to where the party's voters had remained" -- maybe he should recheck his old columns complaining about Biden getting hoodwinked trying to appease Sanders voters?

• Aida Chavez: [11-07[ Harris ran to Trump's right on immigration -- and gained absolutely nothing for it: "Harris could have focused on how US foreign policy pushes immigrants to leave their homes. Instead, she ran on border security."

• Maureen Dowd: [11-09] Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics: Inevitable that someone would bring this up. Who are these "normal people"? And when does one ever get a chance to really talk with them? Yet somehow, they always show up to second guess you.

• Liza Featherstone:

  • [11-01] The far right's weird obsession with Kamala Harris's IQ. This is a good example of the sort of thing that Republicans routinely say and believe that makes no sense at all, but clearly shows how detached from reality their world is.

  • [11-08] The Democarats can't afford to ignore climate change ever again: "Kamala Harris chose to stay silent on climate change. Activists mostly let her. And now the White House and likely both houses of Congress will be controlled by climate deniers."

• Malcolm Ferguson: [11-08] Democrats say Kamala Harris ignored their dire warnings on Liz Cheney.

• Daniel Finn: [11-07] Corporate donors guided Kamala Harris to defeat: E.g., Mark Cuban.

• Oliver Hall: [11-09] I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost.

  You should know what I didn't hear during the hours speaking to US voters. I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than 1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false: the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.

  After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women, despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters just didn't care.

  For reasons that I'm sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks, people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls, I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.

• Benjamin Hart: [11-09] Why Kamala Harris's campaign was doomed from the start: Interview with Amy Walter, publisher/editor of Cook Political Report.

• Bob Hennellyk: [11-11] Progressives aren't the problem in the Democratic coalition: "Ignoring low-wage and low-wealth voters cost Kamala Harris big."

• Sarah Jones:

  • [11-06] Kamala Harris squandered her opportunity to win.

    Donald Trump had bet on a sense of aggrieved masculinity as the return path to power, and while there's much we don't know about who turned out to vote and why, his strategy did not alienate white women in the numbers Harris needed to win. Misogyny and racism should receive due attention in postmortems to come, but they can't explain Tuesday on their own. The story is more complicated, and dire. Though she spoke of freedom, of forward motion, of change, voters did not trust her to deliver. Some will blame the left for this, but Harris tried centrism as did Biden and Clinton before her, and that didn't work, either. Leftists do not control the Democratic Party and never have; only consider the party's intransigence on Gaza. If the Democratic brand is poison now, blame its grifter consultants, who never fail out of politics no matter how many pivotal races they lose. Blame Harris, too, whose message was simply too anemic to overcome decades of Democratic failure.

  • [11-12] Bigotry is not the answer to Donald Trump: There's a Seth Moulton quote in here that is horrible not because he's slandering trans people (maybe he wanted to, but I doubt he's referring any actual people) but because it shows how clueless some Democrats can be when it comes to facing Republican talking points. Democrats have to get much smarter at that. Some decent humane principles wouldn't hurt, either.

    Even so, the Democratic Party's problems did not start with Harris or with her economic policy, or with a few pro-trans remarks that she made before she ran for president. The party's inconsistency -- its refusal to reliably champion working Americans -- left trans people vulnerable to attacks from the right. Had voters believed that Democrats would lower the costs of housing or health care or other basic necessities, perhaps Harris would have won, or at least run a closer race. Instead she courted elites, as generations of Democrats have done before her, and handed the country to an aspiring tyrant.

    Now some Democrats and their liberal supporters would rather help Trump divide the working class against itself than admit the party failed. Liberals project their own intellectual and moral failings onto the left, which they accuse of rigidity and a certain wishful thinking. When Maureen Dowd wrote that "woke is broke" in her post-election diatribe, she imagined a country that is nothing more than a mirror of herself. When the hosts of Morning Joe read her column on air in its tedious entirety, they revealed themselves, not some hidden truth in the national soul. Their conclusions are far too convenient to be realistic. How lucky for Dowd that voters share her exact biases, that their enemies are her enemies and their fears her fears.

    Democrats need to deal with the electorate they have, but they can and should do so without denigrating trans and nonbinary people. Liberals and electeds who say the party should move further to the right do so because they aren't interested in serving the working class. They'd rather absolve themselves while avoiding the hard work of introspection. That way lies a political dead end. If the Democratic Party is to be fit for purpose, it will have to offer voters real answers, not technocracy or elitism or scapegoats. Trans people didn't cost Democrats the election. Liberals did that all by themselves.

• Tim Jonze: [11-06] 'George Clooney - who cares?' Did celebrity endorsements actually harm Kamala Harris?

• Eric Levitz:

  • [11-08] The debate over what Democrats do now hinges on one question: "There are two ways of interpreting Harris's loss." Actually, there are lots of ways to interpret the loss. The question isn't which one is right. (Even if you could do that, what good would it do you? A book? A posh job in academia, or at some think tank?) The only real question is: what, given the new reality, do you do about it? And no single Democrat is going to answer that. As Will Rogers explained back in the 1930s: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." Today's Democrats aren't more organized or ideologically coherent than they were in Rogers' day. Ever since the Civil War, the Republicans have been the core party -- calling themselves the G.O.P. was brilliant, shape-shifting PR -- and the Democrats were whatever fell off the margins: tariff-adverse traders and bankers, big city immigrant machines, neo-Confederates, rural populists, any stray Catholics or Jews. Under FDR, they picked up labor support, and briefly became the majority, but Republicans never lost their conceit that they are the one true American party, and as they became more conservative, they evened up the balance by welcoming white racists (while Democrats attracted blacks and other estranged minorities, while losing their older ethnic groups to the Republican melting pot).

    After losing Congress in 1994 and 2010, Democratic presidents could consolidate their control over what was left of the Party, and respond to the losses in a coherent manner -- which guided both Clinton and Obama to second terms, but offered damn little help for other Democrats (either politicians or the party base). But this loss, like the McCain loss in 2008, leaves the Party with no leadership. Harris has liquidated her political capital, as have her predecessors (Biden, Obama, the Clintons), who were all very much (in retrospect, much too much) of her campaign.

    Which basically sets up a free-for-all to see who can rise up and lead a revived Democratic Party. Sure, some pundits and consultants are going to advise accommodation to the right winds, but who among the rank-and-file really wants to compromise on abortion bans, book burning, or genocide arming? At some point, you have to decide that enough is enough, that the right and the rich already have much more than they deserve, and that we have to fight back. And as that happens, new leaders will rise from the ranks. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is once again setting an example of a politician who intends to defend us -- from Trump, of course, but also from the defeatists in our own ranks.

    After the utter disaster of the Bush-Cheney regime in 2008, the Republican grandees were left aimless and speechless. Then the Tea Party broke out, and moved the Party radically to the right. The Tea Party didn't take over the Party, but the Party revived, largely on their energy, and bounced back remarkably fast. This will be harder for Democrats, because everything is harder for Democrats, but it won't be for lack of issues and critical analysis. And if the money powers get in the way, we need to learn to live without them, and show them to be the villains they actually are.

  • [11-15] The left's comforting myth about why Harris lost: "Progressives need an accurate autopsy of Kamala Harris's campaign, not an ideologically convenient one." Too late to mount a critique of this one, but that may be a worthy future project, especially as Levitz expands on his ideas in his new The Rebuild newsletter. I shouldn't get too defensive about Levitz's seeming turn against "the left," as the real bottom line here is how to make the Democratic Party more viable in general elections. The left needs an effective Democratic Party to implement our preferred policies (which are the best policies for everyone -- that's why we prefer them). But the Democratic Party also needs a strong left to keep them focused on real problems, steering away from the temptations of donors and their special interests.

    Answering those questions will require Democrats to analyze their predicament with open minds. If we seek ideologically comforting explanations for the party's problems -- rather than empirically sound ones -- the coalition will march deeper into the wilderness.

    Unfortunately, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris's loss, virtually every Democratic faction has produced its share of motivated reasoning. In future newsletters, I plan to take issue with some centrists' analysis of the party's difficulties. But today, I want to explain why I worry that the left is allowing wishful thinking to cloud its vision of political reality.

    Since November 5, some progressives have drawn a sweeping lesson from Trump's second victory: Harris's loss proves Democrats gain little from "moderation" or "centrism" and must "embrace radical policies" in order to compete. I admire many of the writers making this argument. But their confidence in this narrative strikes me as wildly unfounded.

    It is true that Harris pivoted to the center on border security, crime, and, to a lesser extent, economics. There are plenty of sound arguments -- both moral and political -- against Democrats moderating on specific issues. Yet it's hard to see how anyone could be confident that Harris lost because she moderated, much less that her loss proved that moderation is electorally counterproductive as a rule.

    I habitually respond to world events by imaging the kind of book I'd like to write about them. I've had a practical political book in mind at least since the 2004 election where I would methodically detail how Republicans are evil-hearted, lame-brained bastards leading us to ruin, and try to convince Democrats that they could not only win elections but actually solve problems by drawing on left ideas. While my faith in the healing power of those ideas remains, the 2024 election has demolished my faith that better ideas can win elections.

    So that kills off the old book concept, and intrdouces a new one: What We Learned From the 2024 Elections. I don't know the answer to that yet, but I what I suspect is that it has very little to do with issues and policies, and even less with the left-right axis, but turns around credibility and trust, on how you talk to people.

• Jill Lepore: [11-10] Democrats tried to counter Donald Trump's viciousness toward women with condescension: "The Harris campaign felt the need to remind women voters that they can vote for whomever they want. Women understood this. The campaign failed to."

• Damon Linker: [11-07] Kamala Harris failed to read the room.

• Milan Loewer: [11-05] If Harris loses today, this is why: "To win working-class voters -- and possibly today's election -- Democrats need to attack economic elites. But the Kamala Harris campaign hasn't consistently offered an anti-elite counter to Donald Trump's right-wing populism." On the other hand, Republicans are very adept at channeling rage against elite Democrats. Why can't Democrats turn the tables on the some of the most entitled, selfish, greedy people in America?

• Martin Longman: [11-07] I'm not sure the race was ever winnable. A big chunk of this is based on a pre-election piece:

  • Nate Cohn: [11-02] Why are Democrats having such a hard time beating Trump? "The national political environment just isn't as conducive to a Harris victory as many might imagine." I don't really buy the argument for a global tide toward conservatism, and there's much else I'd nitpick in his left-and-right momentum survey, but he's certainly right that Harris leaned against progressive policies that just four years ago Biden leaned into, and that undermined both the Democrats' credibility and the message that Trump and the Republicans are nihilist lunatics with no plans that could actually solve anything.

• Branko Marcetic: [11-06] Democratic Party elites brought us this disaster. I'm tempted to quote lots of this rant, but can't quite hone in on any single section. I also rather doubt that the Trump vote is being driven by economic hardship -- not least because Trump's offering nothing to help, whereas Harris actually is. The problem there seems to be that mass of people who believe Trump on everything and Harris (or any other Democrats) on nothing.

  As a general rule, politicians campaign for donors early on, and make amends to donors after the election, but during the closing stretch, they focus on trying to appeal to voters. That's the point when, for Democrats at least, their messaging leans left, toward things that might actually help people. Voters have good reason to be skeptical, and I can think of cases where it didn't work well, but at least the politician is showing them some respect. I can't say as I was paying a lot of attention, but I didn't notice Harris doing that this campaign. Rather, they were raising money like crazy, and she doesn't seem to have taken the necessary step of changing that money into votes. I think that goes back to credibility, which has been in short supply since Clinton started triangulating. Even if it seemed to be working, as with Clinton and Obama, you look back years later, and see what the donors got out of the process, but can't remember what you got.

  Clinton like to quote Harry Truman as saying, "if you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote Democratic." Problem there is that when folk start living like Republicans, they start voting Republican, so you lose them -- especially the snots who will kick the ladder out so no one else can follow them (which, by the way, seems to be part of the problem why Democrats are losing Latino voters). Meanwhile, the people who didn't make it up start blaming you, and some of them vote Republican (or just don't vote) just to spite you, so it's lose-lose.

• Nicholas Nehamas/Andrew Duehren: [11-09] Harris had a Wall Street-approved economic pitch. It fell flat. "The vice president vacillated on how to talk about the economy, and ended up adopting marginal pro-business tweaks that both corporate and progressive allies agreed made for a muddled message." I wonder if her late start didn't have something to do with this. She wound up spending way too much time talking to donors, and not enough to voters. She adopted much of what the former told her, and little from the latter. Most campaigns shift from one focus to the other (then the donors get a second shot after the votes are counted), but she was relentlessly, obsessively fundraising up to the very end. That worked to raise a lot of funds, but they never managed to turn those funds into votes -- possibly because the interests aren't the same. Or maybe she had enough time and help to figure things out, but just liked the donors more. And wanted more to impress them, perhaps because that's where her personal future lies (now more than ever).

• Lydia Polgreen/Tressie McMillan Cottom: [11-07] Democrats had a theory of the election. They were wrong. Transcript of a conversation between two of their non-right opinion columnists:

  Polgreen: On Tuesday we found out that the nation really, really wanted a change. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency, but Republicans took the Senate and made gains in blue states like my home state of New York and big gains in New York City, too. . . .

  McMillan Cottom: I don't live in New York full time, I live in the South. I spent a lot of time with working-class people, people living in the mountains and rural parts of the country. And I also saw a sort of acceptance and integration of Donald Trump's vision of an America where no one has to give up anything to win. And it appeals a lot to Hispanic voters, to working-class voters, especially working-class men. It appealed a lot to people in rural parts of the state of all races. That concerned me and concerned me the entire campaign.

  Polgreen: I think I was a bit more optimistic, in part because, to me, this election really turned on this question of who has a stake in the system as it currently exists and who feels that they could benefit from just blowing it all up. . . .

  I think I felt hopeful that here we had a generic Democrat who had these plain vanilla policies that were not that exciting. They tried to address around the edges some of the issues that people needed from government.

  I thought maybe that could work. Maybe there's just enough chaos, just enough of a sense that this is too dangerous. That gamble was just wrong, and ultimately you were right.

  McMillan Cottom: Again, I take no pleasure in that because if I am right, I am right because I thought -- and now have evidence -- that the anger that Americans feel cannot be directed toward the truth.

  More interesting things in here, including:

  Polgreen: The other thing is that we are living in this zero-sum moment where people think giving something to someone else means taking something away from me.

  There was that moment where JD Vance was talking about how if immigrants made countries rich, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the richest city in the world, and the United States would be the richest country in the world. Well, news flash, the United States is the richest country in the world. . . .

  McMillan Cottom: One of the things that JD Vance is actually very good at that Donald Trump is not good at, is he figured out how to take something that is a problem about relative differences and make it feel like an absolute loss.

  The point here isn't that Vance is really clever, but that he finds a way to get back to his basic campaign proposition. He's not unique -- I've seen Bernie Sanders do this many times, but the secret here is not dogged repetition, but having a point to get back to. Continuing:

  McMillan Cottom: But that relative loss, despite the fact that objectively, they are still doing OK, is enough when turned into anxiety and fear and aggression, which Donald Trump is very good at doing, feels like an emotional catharsis. And then JD Vance comes behind and says, "Not only are you losing, but yes, your loss is coming because someone else is gaining."

  What we do not have on the other side, to your point, is either a center or center-left and, I'd even argue, a Democratic center-right story that captures that emotion in the same kind of way.

  Also:

  Polgreen: Yeah. And I think that the idea that the Democratic Party has to work within a set of defined rules of the existing order is just a brain disease.

  I had initially skipped over all the New York Times pundits, until I was pointed here by:

  • Steve M.: [11-07] Voters think every party is the leopards eating people's faces party:

    What this suggests to me is that millions of voters didn't think they were voting on a choice between chaos and stability. They think both parties destabilize the country. So they chose Trump's promise of a form of destabilization they found appealing over the status quo, which they see as an unappealing destabilization.

    In the famous meme, a supporter of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party says, "I never thought leopards would eat MY face." Donald Trump won because millions of voters think Democratic policies lead leopards to eat their faces, and Trump's policies will make leopards eat the faces of people they don't like.

    In particular, young men of all ethnicities think liberal culture has created a pro-queer gynocracy that's eating the faces of straight males. They want leopards to eat the faces of people they think are benefiting in this culture. . . .

    A majority of Hispanic men appear to have voted for Trump despite the fact that some will be caught up in his crackdown on undocumented immigrants. These Trump voters believe that only the undocumented will have their faces eaten, and they're fine with that. (Harris campaigned on a border crackdown, so she didn't talk much about how heavy-handed Trump's immigration policies are likely to be.)

    Trump chose popular victims of the leopards -- women, trans people, immigrants, criminals. Democrats could have chosen the rich, but bashing the rich reportedly scares some moderates. It sets off alarm bells in the "liberal" commentariat and reduces the big-money contributions that are necessary for Democrats to run one of our country's staggeringly expensive presidential campaigns.

    A day earlier, M. also wrote:

  • [11-06] Trump is a toxically masculine Andy Kaufman, and other unorganized thoughts: "A few thoughts on one of the worst days in American history." Section heads (some with a bit of quote):

    • Eeyore: I was right to be pessimistic, and it's clear that I should have remained pessimistic even after Kamala Harris entered the race.
    • Democrats and Republicans agree that Democrats are bad [longer quote to follow]
    • Maybe ground game is meaningless
    • But didn't voters think Trump is crazy?
    • Which brings me to Biden: But the race might have been different for her or Biden if Biden had been able to persuade voters that he cared and was working hard to make their lives better [but he couldn't, and she wouldn't].
    • And also, America is massively sexist: I don't think I'll live to see a female president. There are too many trad Christians and too many whiny boy-men -- and they just elected the biggest whiny boy-man of them all.

    The point about Democrats cited a comment from Frank Wilhoit that is worth quoting here:

    People vote their emotional compulsions, which, by definition, are purely destructive; that is why all voting is negative-partisan. Trump will get one vote: his own. The votes that are recorded as his will be votes against, not Kamala Harris, but the Democratic Party and its constituencies. Comparably, Harris will get no votes at all; the votes that are recorded as hers will be votes against, not Trump, but the Republican Party and its constituencies.

    History is on the side of the Republicans here, because they understand what is going on; that is why they focus exclusively upon degrading the Democratic brand. We do not understand. . . . We should have spent every moment of the past forty-five years screaming total rejection of the "conservative" pseudophilosophy, and nothing else. . . .

    It is too late now; one cannot suddenly "discover" a problem that has been in being for decades and try to whip up any urgency around it.

  • Patrick Healy/David French: [11-06] It's time to admit America has changed: Two more conservative New York Times pundits discuss the election.

• Stephen Prager: [11-15] Don't you dare blame Harris's loss on the left: "Some prominent pundits are trying to blame 'woke' for the Democrats' embarrassing defeat. It won't work."

• Waleed Shahid: [11-18] The left didn't sink Kamala Harris. Here's what did. "It's easier to blame activists, but far more powerful forces have led Democrats to neglect the real crises facing Americans." Much of this is to be expected, but the ending is stirring:

  History reveals that oversimplified approaches often sidestep the harder questions. Success doesn't come from rejecting the complexity of a diverse coalition but from learning to navigate it. To win, Democrats must inspire the public in a fractured information age, engage meaningfully with the cultural shifts around race, gender, family, and migration, make democracy work despite obstructionists like Manchin and Sinema, and -- most critically -- deliver tangible results that improve people's lives. And if the corporate, status quo -- loving forces within the party are standing in the way of that mission, they must be moved aside.

  Success will come not by pointing fingers but by telling a story of transformation -- with clear villains, bold vision, and conviction that democracy can, indeed, make a difference.

  The first part of the last line could use some editing: you do need to point fingers, but at the clear villains that are essential to your story. The one thing you have to grant Republicans is that they're good at identifying villains. It shouldn't be hard to name our own:

  1. Greedy, arrogant billionaire donors (or more broadly but also more succinctly, the 1%). These are the people who feel entitled to run the world.
  2. Right-wing media. These are the people who will lie and cheat and play any imaginable games to control your minds.
  3. The theocrats who want a new inquisition, to force you to live as they think you should. These are the people who will take away your rights and freedom.
  4. The scammers, scoundrels, crooks and frauds. These are the people who will steal whatever else you have left.

  That's not a lot of people, but they have a big impact on very many lives. And bear in mind that the goal in identifying these villains isn't the all-too-popular wish to "lock them up" or to "take them out." The goal is to significantly reduce their power over and impact on everyone else.

• Norman Solomon: [11-07] Democrats ignored every warning and the results are catastrophic: "Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension."

• Andrew Prokop:

  • [11-06] One striking pattern hidden in the election results: "Were voters rejecting Democrats -- or just the Biden-Harris administration?" Or, I have to ask, just Harris? I haven't entertained the possibility, at least in print, that they simply don't trust a person with any/all of her attributes, which most obviously include: woman, color, from California, both parents immigrants. None of that bothers me, nor does it bother most people, and nearly all of the people who think of such things were going to vote Trump anyway, but if you can't win the kind of landslide you deserve on issues alone, maybe think about that. As for the pattern:

    But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there's a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump.

  • [11-06] Why Kamala Harris lost: "Trump won because Harris inherited a tough situation from Joe Biden -- and ultimately could not overcome it." I'll nominate this piece for a bracket elimination tournament to find the most intellectually lazy explanation for the loss. He offers three reasons: a global trend ("in the years since the pandemic, incumbent parties have been struggling in wealthy democracies across the world"); "Biden's unpopularity" (which Harris "had to figure out what to do about that"); and "Harris's own record," by which he means Harris's 2019 presidential campaign, when she "embraced progressive policy positions that Democrats now view as politically toxic." As I've said, I don't know what the answer is, but it's got to be something more than that. As for the "tough situation" Biden left Harris in, his only detail was that Israel-Gaza had "divided Democrats' coalition." (I'd submit that it didn't divide the coalition that actually identified as Democrats, but it turned off a lot of other voters that Harris needed.)

  • [11-11] The debate over why Harris lost is in full swing. Here's a guide. "Was she a weak candidate? Was it Joe Biden's fault? Did Trump have unexpected strength? Or was it a global trend?" This appeared too late for me to explore, but I have one suggestion: instead of looking for things that might have moved the needle a point or two, start from the assumption that Trump (and most Republicans) were be any objective criteria so bad they should have lost by at least 10, possibly 20 points, and see if you can identify any problems at that scale? I'd start with money and media structure, and then consider the difficulties of establishing trust against those odds. Harris wasn't a weak candidate so much as one not strong enough to overcome those bigger obstacles. Same for Biden, who had some additional weaknesses that Harris only partly made up for. We can go on down the list, but we keep coming back to what happened to the world to make Trump seem credible, while Harris was ultimately judged by many to be some kind of phony.

• Nathan J Robinson: [11-06] Once again, the Democratic leadership has failed us all: "In 2016, we warned that Hillary Clinton's campaign was not resonating with Americans. In 2024, we warned about Kamala Harris, and we were ignored again. Now, the worst has happened. So, what do we do? A leftist analysis can help us chart a path forward."

  Since we're here, let's file some "I told you so" links cited in the article:

  • Andrew Duehren/Lauren Hirsch: [10-14] How Wall St. is subtly shaping the Harris economic agenda: "The vice president has repeatedly incorporated suggestions from business executives into her economic agenda."

  • Dan Friedman: [09-13] Harris' embrace of Dick Cheney was just one way she courted national security hawks: "On Gaza, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, the VP signaled she won't ditch DC's interventionists."

  • Yasmin Nair: [08-23] Kamala Harris will lose.

  • Nathan J Robinson:

    • [10-23] Is Kamala blowing it? "Her campaign began with huge fanfare. Now she's slipping in the polls and making seemingly obvious mistakes. What's going on?"

    • [08-21] Politics should not be parasocial: "We are electing a head of state who will wield immense power and control a massive nuclear arsenal. 'Policy' is not peripheral or dispensable, it's the only thing that really matters."

    • [04-02] What Trump understands about war: "Donald Trump's militarism is even worse than Biden's. But he's keeping relatively quiet on Israel-Palestine, probably because he knows the public doesn't like war."

    • [2022-07-02] The ACA marketplace is a scam covered with a veneer of "choice": "Purchasing health insurance on the marketplace is so confusing that it is impossible for consumers to make rational choices."

  • Ken Silverstein: [11-07] While Harris torched at least $2 billion during humiliating defeat to Trump, former top staffers and advisors for the Veep, Biden, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Sanders, and Warren got rich: "Ten political consulting firms with close ties to the Democratic establishment raked in more than $100 million from Harris's campaign coffers."

  • Alex Skopic/Nathan J Robinson: [08-06] It's a bad idea for Harris to abandon progressive policies: "In recent days the Vice President has quickly ditched some of her boldest initiatives, needlessly making herself look unprincipled."

• Bret Stephens: [11-06] A party of prigs and pontificators suffers a humiliating defeat: I can't stand Stephens, who even spoils his conversations with Gail Collins -- their latest, The Trump era never really ended, has a title that could develop into interesting analysis, but doesn't. This piece, too, is mostly crap, but he gives you a good taste of how the Republican mindset caricatures Democrats. (Do you suppose his Harris endorsement was another plant? He doesn't seem to have the faculties to have based it on reason -- well, as he explains later in the piece, his first reason for voting for Harris was Ukraine, followed by trade policy. The only time Republicans ever go bipartisan is when they suspect an opportunity to make Democrats look bad to their voters.) Here's a sample:

  The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. [bogus examples follow, starting with trans athletics]

  The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today's left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don't like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

  Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. [more bogus examples] And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

  Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how's that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

  This is massively unfair, but it's the bread and butter of right-wing media, so Democrats have to get better at handling it. That doesn't mean inching closer to Republicans, not least because that never works, but better framing is possible, and trust-building is essential. I don't see that working with a hack like Stephens, but most people are more open-minded than him (or minded, for that matter).

• Bhaskar Sunkara: [11-08] The Democrats lost because they ran a weak and out of touch campaign: "The party, increasingly divorced from workers, leaned too much on an activist base instead of a voting base."

• Michael Tomasky: [11-06] Latino men were the big defectors -- but they weren't the only ones: "Here's how Harris failed to replicate Biden's 2020 victory over Trump."

• Bernie Sanders: Sanders endorsed and campaigned for Harris. After the election he posted this:

  It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right.

  Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

  I don't have the links handy, but right after Sanders made his statement about Democrats abandoning the working class, I saw a bunch of flak on Twitter charging Sanders with hypocrisy because during the campaign he praised Biden's record for labor (most pro-labor president since . . . ?). Pretty low bar, but during a campaign you take what you can get. Afterwards, you go back to what you want, which is a candidate who is more effective for working people. Sanders wants that. His detractors don't seem to.

  Other articles that focused on Sanders:

  • Jessica Corbett: [11-07] Sanders slams 'big money interests' that control Democratic Party after loss to Trump.

  • Krystal Kyle: [11-06] Bernie would have won: "The Democratic smothering of the Bernie coalition reaped its reward today."

  • Branko Marcetic: [11-07] Bernie Sanders is right to be incensed at the Democrats.

  • Natalie Shure: [11-12] Bernie would have won. Seriously. "Trump keeps winning because the Democratic party refuses to be the party of the working class." Sanders has one thing that few Democrats have, which is credibility. The counterpoint is that if the Democratic Party had nominated Sanders, rich Democrats like Michael Bloomberg would have bagged the election, throwing it to Trump -- much like previous generations of Democratic elites did to Bryan (1896) and McGovern (1972).

  • Jared Ryan Sears: [reply to a tweet that featured Sanders' post-election statement, the one with charging the Democrats with abandoning the working class]:

    • Unions are the strongest they've been in decades.
    • Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.
    • The child tax credit was expanded.
    • A minimum corporate tax was enacted.
    • A tax on stock buybacks was added.
    • High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.
    • Millions of jobs were created.
    • Unemployment has remained low.
    • Manufacturing returned to the US.
    • Prescription prices were lowered.
    • More Americans have healthcare than ever before.
    • -Billions were given to student debt relief.
    • -The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered Cobra payments, and even directly gave Americans money.

    Let's stop pretending that nothing was done by this administration when it inherited a pandemic, a migrant crisis, and high inflation and managed not only to address all of those issues through Republican obstruction but accomplished much more as well.

    There's always more to do, and mistakes happen, but to act like Democrats abandoned the working class is ridiculous.

    Lots of comments follow, some agreeing with Sanders, but most attacking him, the vitriol especially strong from points farther left -- attacks on his endorsements of Clinton/Biden/Harris (I always filed those under "go along to get along," a game he's played rather skillfully) and charging him with genocide (he did reflexively support Israel after the Oct. 7 revolt, but as it became clear that Netanyahu's game plan was genocide, he has shown exceptional clarity and bravery in opposing US arms to further that genocide). I've generally insisted that people of the left are good-hearted, well-meaning, and thoughtful, but by evidence here, at least a dozen are simple-minded assholes, not unlike thousands (or millions?) on the right.

    PS: On second thought, I think these comments were to Sanders' original thread, not to the Zachary Carter tweet that led me to it. It is quite possible that he is heckled like this all the time, and that the "extreme left" attacks are deceptive trolls. Sorry for opening that can of worms.

Resisting and coping: I've generally put the "what comes next" pieces under Trump (second section), but the corresponding "what do we do now" pieces are likely to have nothing to do with Harris (not that the idea doesn't crop up in the various pieces critical of the Harris campaign). I wasn't really expecting to do this section, but found one piece, and thought there may be more (e.g., I moved the Ganz piece in from elsewhere).

• John Ganz: [11-06] I hope I'm wrong: "About Trump and other things." Many worthy thoughts in this post:

  There's a political lesson there, too, though, that applies to the present moment: having a clear vision of things, even if it is unpleasant or dark, beats no vision or an unclear one. Trump's campaigns had a clear mythos: a story about what America is and was and where it is going. No Democratic candidate that's run against him has been able to articulate an opposing vision. This is not particular to this or that candidate, although all of them had individual weaknesses. We can litigate that forever. But it's really a problem of American liberalism: liberalism is unsure of itself and ameliorative, it's not a bold vision of the future as it once was in its heyday under LBJ or FDR. Trumpism may be reactionary, but liberalism too, has become too backward-looking -- look at my references in the previous sentence. It longs for an old age of consensus instead of gamely going to war to win a new one. American liberalism has also become a land of smug statisticians and wonks who want to test every proposition and shrink from striking out in a new direction, from testing rhetorical appeals in the public arena rather than the statistical survey. Trump and his campaigns were willing to venture boldly and that's part of what appealed to people. He said, "Follow me and make history," a dubious claim made by others before him, but it excites people.

  He also admits that his command of the history of fascism may not have helped:

  Antifascism is a century-old tradition now and the critics of who see in it a longing to recreate an old order are on to something. It's a politics of memory and meaning that are fading from this world. But it at least has a certain imaginative dimension, it's an ethos: its mythical core contains a struggle between good and evil. Unfortunately, it doesn't resonate at this moment. For voters for whom "democracy" was an issue Harris was the obvious choice, but that wasn't enough people. It's perhaps too idealistic, too abstract and airy, and not focused enough on practical issues, although for me it's a social democratic impulse, uniting the struggle for democracy and people's day-to-day needs. In any case, it's not a story that the American people get anymore.

  He also points out that "resistance" has its legacy rooted in the struggle against fascism, which may not be the best model right now. In particular, Trump's popular margin has given him a clear path to power, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, who used their demagoguery to gain a power base, but in the end resorted to force to seize power.

• Natasha Lennard: [11-06] The answer to Trump's victory is radical action: "As ever, don't expect the Democratic Party to save us. Now is the time for grassroots action."

• Nicole Narea: [11-16] Democrats got wiped out in 2004. This is what they did next. "The last time Democrats lost the popular vote spurred a reckoning." Both times the presidential race was close, but was combined with Republicans winning both sides of Congress, leaving a leadership vacuum in the Party. Howard Dean campaigned to run the DNC, and worked hard to rebuild it from the grass roots up, leading to a major success in 2006. After that success, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seized the throne, turning the party back into an extension of their personal campaigns, and left the rest of the party for dead, but that's another story. Sub-sections here:

  1. They pursued a 50-state strategy
  2. Democrats reevaluated their messaging
  3. Democrats sought to become a party of ideas

  Last section is "the limits of political strategy," so some caveats.

• Nathan J Robinson: [11-14] Here's the silver lining: "Horrible Republican policies are inevitably unpopular and will generate backlash. As Trump's presidency becomes a chaotic failure, a new left movement can rise." While it is a near certainty that Republican policies will fail to solve the problems they target (even by their own measures), and that they will generate backlash that will propel a Democratic resurgence (assuming we still get to vote -- a risk Republicans are all too aware of). But his "the dog that caught the car" metaphor is dead wrong. Republicans know exactly what they want to do with the car once they've caught it. And while Bush in 2000, Reagan in 1980, and Nixon in 1968 offer some precedents, Trump is moving much more aggressively than any previous president-elect.

  Robinson further tweeted: "this is not to diminish the terrible harm that will be done. It's going to be utterly awful, but it may spark unexpected popular uprising that lead to a transformative political movement." I responded:

  The "dog that catches the car" metaphor doesn't work here. Trump may seem clueless -- I've quipped that he doesn't know how to devise "dog whistles"; he's just a dog who responds to them -- but his crew know exactly what they want to do, and are doing it at record speed.

  Another commenter, perhaps facetiously: "Thank you for your role in giving the American people this convenient accelerant. When you think about it, in the end it was Hitler who brought lasting democracy to Germany after the war."

• Timothy Shenk: [11-08] It's time to resist the resistance: "Resistance" in the sense of reflexive opposition that focuses on Trump personally:

  The origins of Resistance politics go back over a decade, even before Mr. Trump entered politics. In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama's team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. "Let's really lean into Trump here," Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. "That'll be good for us."

  And it was, for a while -- so good that when Mr. Plouffe joined Kamala Harris's campaign over the summer, it still seemed like the basis for a winning coalition. . . .

  But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It's reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.

• Robert Wright: [11-08] How to fight Trump mindfully. This is good, but that he's actually quoting himself from seven years ago is a bit inauspicious:

  The premise of the Mindful Resistance Project is that understanding and addressing the root causes of Trumpism is important -- so important that we shouldn't let Trump's antics and outrages get in the way of this mission. To put a finer point on it: 1) We need to respond to each day's news about Trump wisely -- with moral clarity and forceful conviction but with awareness of the way overreactions to his provocations can play into his hands. 2) Meanwhile, we need to get a deeper understanding of the forces that led so many people to vote for Trump. These forces include globalization, demographic change, the loss of jobs through automation, and a political polarization that is grounded partly in the tribalizing tendencies of social media. This polarization is also grounded in what you might call the psychology of tribalism, in cognitive biases that afflict us all -- so fostering an understanding of how our minds work will be among the goals of this project.

Senate:

• Nia Prater: [10-07] Where does control of the US Senate stand? As of Thursday, Republicans defeated Democratic incumbents in Ohio and Montana, and picked up the seat in West Virginia (not reported here), with races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada still undecided (with Pennsylvania looking like another Republican gain).

House of Representatives: I thought I'd have more in this section, including specific races, but I never even got around to looking at the numbers.

• Ashlie D Stevens: [11-11] House control in sight for Republicans, paving way for Trump's agenda: "Ballots are still being tallied, but if successful, Republicans would hold the presidency, Senate and House."

Other election matters:

• Gerry Condon: [11-10] November 11 was originally Armistice Day, a peace holiday: I didn't realize the holiday until I got a bunch of email this morning offering special deals to veterans -- reminding me that my "service," which mostly consisted of trying to get and keep us out of bullshit wars, is still very much unappreciated. Condon's a member of Veterans for Peace, so he deserves thanks on both counts.

• Ed Kilgore: [11-07] The pro-choice ballot winning streak ends: "Voters in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota rejected constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights." In Florida, the amendment got 57% of the vote, but 60% was required to pass.

  On the other hand, abortion-rights initiatives won in seven states, including four carried by Trump. Margins of victory in these red states ranged from 4 percent in Missouri to 16 percent in Montana, 22 percent in Arizona, and 28 percent in Nevada.

  Three blue states predictably passed sweeping abortion-rights measures by comfortable margins. In Colorado (62 percent "yes") and Maryland (74 percent "yes"), state constitutional amendments were approved providing for unconditional abortion rights. In New York, abortion rights were advanced via a much broader "equal-rights amendment" that won 62 percent (despite earlier fears it was in trouble).

• Charles P Pierce:

  • [11-05] There's only one reason anyone votes for Trump: "I'm running out of ways to say that a vote for him is a vote for a crueler, dumber, and more vicious America."

  • [11-06] With the election of Donald Trump, our fellow citizens are about to get exactly what they want: "There is nothing that God, man, or the Constitution can do about it, because we did it to ourselves."

  • [11-06] How we built this American corporate oligarchy -- and how we can free ourselves from it: "The only thing about money pwoer that ever changes is the name of the person wielding it."

  • [11-06] The Never Trumpers are the most useless people in America: "It turned out that campaigning with Liz Cheney didn't matter a damn."

• Jordan Smith: Missouri voters overturn abortion ban in decisive win for reproductive rights.

• Jessica Washington: [11-06] Voters overwhelmingly chose to protect abortion -- even when they didn't choose Harris: "In every state it was on the ballot, reproductive care was more popular than Kamala Harris."

Other Republicans:

• Griffin Eckstein: [11-09] Jones calls for "Nuremberg Two" against Democrats following Trump win: "The conspiracy theorist and radio host said the Trump DOJ had a mandate from God to prosecute Dems." The subhed is no surprise, but the invocation of "Nuremberg" shows a mind-boggling level of ignorance (specifically, about Nazi Germany) and contempt for truth, and indeed for everyone. Of course, that's hardly news with this guy.

• Adam Clark Estes: [11-07] We're all living inside Elon Musk's misinformation machine now: "As Musk gains even more power, X gains more influence." More on Musk and Big Tech:

  • John Herrman: [11-08] Big Tech's loyalty era: "Elon Musk's big bet paid off. Tech leaders are adjusting -- and warming -- to a new reality."

  • Timothy Noah: [11-08] Dump Twitter: "If you stick with Elon Musk, you're complicit."

    Whatever you call it, the social media site was Musk's primary tool to elect Trump. In Bloomberg's Tech Daily newsletter for November 7, Kurt Wagner writes that Musk "turned his feed into a Trump-inspired billboard for his more than 200 million followers," that it "became a major source of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories," that Musk "re-shared posts from the former president's supporters, not all of them accurate," and that Musk turned X into "a much more powerful version of Truth Social."

    Still, hard for me to see how shutting down my account, with 3000 posts, 650 followers, and 49 following, is going to make a dent in Musk's bottom line, much less his brain.

• John Feffer: [10-30] The cruelty of crowds: "The far right has weaponized the Internet."

• Casey Wetherbee: [11-03] The GOP playbook for sabotaging environmental regulations.

Other Democrats:

• Kate Aronoff:

  • [11-07] Why Bidenomics failed to win the white working class: "The administration bet that subsidies to rebuild American manufacturing would bring voters back to the Democratic Party while lowering emissions. That bet has failed."

  • [11-05] The underestimated power of the climate voter: "New data suggests environmentally motivated voters might matter mmore than previously thought. But their priorities haven't gotten much airtime this election season."

• Ryan Cooper: [11-07] Time for Democrats to abandon the mainstream media: "The 'liberal media' was in the tank for Trump. Democrats should take their subscription dollars elsewhere."

• Nicole Narea: [11-07] Why Democrats couldn't sell a strong economy, in 3 charts: "Top-line indicators pointed to cooling inflation and a strong economy. What did Democrats miss?" Section heads:

  • There was a real inflation backlash (even though chart shows that "overall wage growth has outpaced inflation")
  • The job market is tougher (chart shows: "more people are facing long-term unemployment")
  • Americans have less money and are taking on more debt (chart: "Americans are saving less after the pandemic"; doesn't look like much less, after a big spike during the pandemic, but credit card debt and delinquency rates are up)

  By the way, here's more on the credit card thing:

  • Steve M: [11-08] The election explained, in two charts. I probably missed the significance of this because I don't have any credit card debt, and had no idea the interest rates were this high (21.9%, up from a little over 14% just a year ago?). Part of the problem has to do with Biden reappointing Trump's Fed Chair pick, but the larger part is that we got rid of the anti-usury laws that used to provide a cap on this kind of loansharking. Harris could have came out with an anti-usury platform, and when questioned about it, told folk to look it up in the Bible. That, plus writing off most student debt -- which only exists due to political malfeasance, and which while Biden attempted some remedies, Harris hardly ever talked about -- would have had much broader and more tangible appeal than the silly notion of exempting tip income (a Trump idea that Harris adopted and helped legitimize -- every time you create a haven for untaxable income, you undermine our ability to tax the rich. How hard would it have been to point out that if we taxed rich folk at levels they had to pay before they paid off politicians for their tax cuts, people who depend on tips to make up for subminimal wages, as well as everyone else who is underpaid in America, could be taxed less, and get better benefits in the bargain?

    By the way, M. points out (and I can relate, not least by being a bit older):

    Ordinary people were already struggling more than their parents, then inflation struck in 2021. It hurt incumbent parties all over the world.

    Yes, it has receded in America. Yes, we now have the strongest economy in the world.

    But the two charts at the top of this post show how the economy looks to people who were already struggling to pay their bills every month when inflation hit. In all likelihood, they pulled out credit cards to buy necessities, and now they can't pay those credit cards off.

    My wife and I can afford to pay our credit card bills in full every month, but I don't look down on people who can't. If your family is bigger than ours, if you're younger (we're in our sixties), if you've ever had a stretch of unemployment or big medical bills, you have it harder than we did. If you went to college or grad school in the past twenty years, you'd be shocked at how small our student loan burden was in the 1970s.

    By economists' criteria, this is a booming economy. It's pretty sweet for people who can afford it. But I completely understand that it doesn't look so sweet if you're living paycheck to paycheck.

    I tried to run a one-person business for a while in my twenties and early thirties and got myself in debt. It sucks. It sucks to pay a partial bill and see no decrease in the debt because the interest keeps compounding and compounding. I managed to get out of that debt and never looked back, but when you're in the thick of it, it's miserable.

    If you've never been in that situation, count your blessings. If you think everyone who gets into debt is a bad person, well, I guess I was a bad person.

• Wiley Nickel: [11-11] What should Democrats do now? Form a shadow cabinet. "The venerable British institution of the opposition would serve America well today." I've loved this idea ever since I first found out about it. It's more natural in a parliamentary democracy than it would be in America, but it could be done here, and it would give Democrats some leadership visibility in each specific area of government. Nickel is proposing drawing the cabinet from Congress members, which would make it a lot like the committee minority members. I think it would be better for the DNC to organize and raise money for a shadow government, mostly of technical experts (which could include some notables, like Pete Buttigieg in Transportation, or Robert Reich in Labor, or former members of Congress), selected by the Democratic caucus in Congress, possibly adding Democratic governors, maybe even party chairs in the underrepresented-but-still-important red states.

• Osita Nwanevu: [11-08] The long Obama era is over: "The democrats must learn to speak to voters who don't believe in the politics of old and aren't interested in returning to it." I never thought of there being any "Obama era," probably because he made so little effort at delineating it from the "Clinton era," which he jumped the line on to little if any practical effect. The more customary term for them both, on through Biden and Harris, is "neoliberalism," except that one already lost its cachet before Biden.

  The long Obama era is over. The familiar homilies -- about how there are no red states or blue states and Americans share a set of common values and working institutions novelly and externally threatened by agents of chaos like Trump -- never described political reality. They now no longer work reliably even as political messaging. The hunt should be on for alternatives.

  The word "homilies" is striking here. Obama specialized in them, as if he had to constantly remind us that he was utterly conventional, someone who could be counted on to always say the correct thing. I remember my surprise at one point when Trump made fun of Obama for always ending his speeches with "God bless America." It's the most anodyne statement ever for an American politician, and yet it gives these yokels, who claim to put God and America above all else, an excuse to laugh at him.

• Stephen Semler:

  • [09-10] US child poverty nearly tripled between 2021 and 2023: This seems like a possibly big deal, not just on the headline topic but on a wide range of economic issues. The key here is a chart of "several key US anti-poverty measures expired or were eliminated after 2021." As the chart makes clear, most of them started with the pandemic of 2020, while Trump was president, and ended 2021-23, while Biden was president. Only the last two items started after Biden became president (child care provider grants, WIC increase). One might read this chart and think Trump was the champion of welfare expansion, and Biden its nemesis. The truth is different: all of the items were pushed by Democrats, mostly by Pelosi and Schumer when they crafted Trump's first pandemic relief bill. To mollify Republicans, they were sold as emergency measures and they included sunset clauses. Democrats tried to extend some of them (things like the eviction and foreclosure bans were never going to be extended), but were frustrated by Republicans plus the sandbagging of a few Democrats (notably Manchin and Sinema, who held the deciding votes on many issues). Biden's support for the measures was less clear, but it's grossly simplistic to blame him for not being able to extend such useful programs.

    The child poverty figures are especially striking, dropping from 12.6% to 5.2% from 2019 to 2021, then rebounding to 12.4% immediately after ending the child tax credit. The lower figure shows what could easily be done with a bit of political will, but that's just one of many metrics here. Few people appreciated that it was the Democrats who made these remarkable changes happen, in part because Democrats who wanted to work with Trump shied away from taking credit. (Trump's subsequent bills were much weaker and less effective.) But also because Democrats didn't want to see them as a first start toward a massive expansion of social benefits, as something to build the future on. The pandemic was a very unusual period in American history -- one that deviated so far from the expectations of both political parties that neither seems to be able to deal with it. Republican delusions are expected, but seems like the Democrats can't wait to forget either, even though if they could, they might discover that they by and large behaved with the care and concern we hope for from the political system, but rarely get. Why couldn't they campaign on that?

  • [11-06] A couple charts to explain a Harris loss: The two charts are: "US food insecurity increased 40% since 2021" ("number of people living in food insecure housholds" increased from 33.8M to 47.4M), and "Poverty in the US increased 67% since 2021" ("number of people living below the poverty line" increased from 25.6M to 42.8M). Both of these charts, which measure pretty much the same thing, show 2020-21 dips before the 2022 rebound. The 2021 columns show the effects of pandemic relief programs, which had sunset clauses and were allowed to lapse, mostly due to Republican opposition (plus a couple bad Democrats). As I noted above, Democrats didn't claim much credit for the improvement, nor blame Republicans for the later pain, which allowed people who didn't know any better to flip the roles. As Semler notes:

    Why did I consider her defeat likely? Because Harris ran on an anti-populist economic agenda and an anti-antiwar foreign policy platform, and neither of those things poll well.

• Paul Waldman: [11-10] Voters punished Biden for problems he didn't cause and effectively addressed: But for some reason couldn't talk coherently about, some of which can be attributed to age, some to his usual awkwardness, but also also to the problem that Democrats have to speak both to donors and to voters, two groups that want to hear different things, a task that even the most eloquent of Democrats have trouble pulling off. Alternate title, which I clicked on before arriving here, is "Trump is about to take credit for Biden's accomplishments."

• Stephen Wertheim: [11-11] The Cheney-loving Democratic party needs a reckoning about war: "Election outcomes have multiple causes, of course. Yet foreign polilcy was one of the reasons Americans gave Trump the largest Republican victory in decades."

• Matthew Yglesias: [11-12] A Common Sense Democrat manifesto: This seemed monumental enough to sneak in the day after. I was pointed here by Jonathan Chait, who tweeted: "I think (or at least hope) this will be an important reference document going forward." (Nathan Robinson heckled back: "shouldn't you probably shut up for a while," with a link to Chait's October 8 article: The race is close because Harris is running a brilliant campaign: "Stop complaining; the centrism is working.") Chait probably likes it because Yglesias's neoliberalism is showing, and because it's written in ways that signal anti-left bias. But the "principles" aren't so bad:

  Different people have different views and different priorities, and principles need to be loose enough to accommodate some differences. But I also don't want these to be total platitudes; I want some people to read them and think, "Fuck this, I don't agree." Over the next few weeks, I'll share posts elaborating on each one individually, but in the meantime, these are the principles I'd like to see the Democratic party embrace:

  1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

  2. The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

  3. Climate change -- and pollution more broadly -- is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

  4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone's identity groups over their individuality.

  5. Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people's basic freedom to live as they choose.

  6. Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

  7. Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

  8. Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

  9. All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

  Before getting to his list, Yglesias explains (and here I'll add my comments in brackets):

  Being a Democrat should mean caring more than Republicans about the lives of poor people, about equal rights and non-discrimination, about restraining big business in matters related to pollution and fraudulent practices, and about protecting social insurance for the elderly and disabled. [I'd add everyone else to "poor people," but you could just say 99% if villains are politically useful. Proper, not means-tested, social insurance becomes more valuable as you go up the income scale.]

  These are important progressive ideas, and because they are important progressive ideas, I think that anyone who identifies as a leftist or a progressive should vote for Democrats. [So why try so hard to drive us away? The charge that leftists are all-or-nothing is easily disproven.]

  But that doesn't mean that Democrats' agenda should be driven by those on the far left [or the right, or corporate neoliberalism, or identity groups, or any faction; it should be driven by problems and practical solutions]. A big-tent Democratic coalition needs leftists. But left-wing candidates are rarely winning tough elections, and too often, they're not improving governance of the solidly blue places where they're elected. [Leftists face many obstacles from entrenched forces, including donor-seeking Democrats, but even so, is this really a valid generalization?] . . .

  Most elected Democrats are not, themselves, actually that far left, and when faced with acute electoral peril, they swiftly ditch ideas like defund the police or openness to unlimited asylum claims [which are effectively caricaturs of leftist ideas, propagated to militate against the left]. But what they haven't generally done is publicly disavow the kind of simplistic disparate impact analysis that leads to conclusions like policing is bad. Similarly, the Democrats are not a degrowth party. [Degrowth is an idea that deserves consideration, but isn't a left political position.] When good GDP numbers come in, Joe Biden and his team celebrate them -- they believe in taking credit for strong growth. But even without being a degrowth party, Democrats are heavily influenced by the views of major environmentalist organizations that do have a degrowth ideology at their core.

  Critics on the right charge that Democrats are in the grips of radical ideology, but the truth is more boring: Many elected officials are just not particularly rigorous thinkers (think of how much backbench Republicans have shifted on various policies since Trump took over). Most only really understand a few issues and do a lot of going along to get along. . . .

  Winning elections is important, because if you don't win, you can't govern. [But if you win on the basis of bad ideas that don't work, your governing will have accomplished nothing, and you'll lose again -- at least until the other party reminds people of their own incompetence.]

  The Republican Party is basically just a racket: they lie, cheat, and steal, whatever it takes to ascend to power, so they can lie, cheat, and steal some more. Democrats have to run against Republicans, but they are also expected to tell the truth, to work earnestly for the public good, and to deliver tangible results. Democrats need the left, not just as reliable votes against Republicans, but because the left has useful ideas to solve or at least ameliorate problems that bedevil us. This repeated cycle of "centrist" or "neoliberal" -- Chait prefers the former term, while Yglesias is one of the few who actually embraces the latter -- blaming the left for many failures of the high-roller Democrats they favor needs to stop. Democrats need to figure out how to sell viable solutions to the people, and to deliver them once they are elected. Since most of those solutions come from the left, they need to stop demonizing the left, and start treating us as respectable and honorable.

  PS: Chait just wrote A farewell to New York, so with his new gig at The Atlantic, I guess I won't have him to kick around any more. One more reason not to subscribe.

Israel: This has been my top section ever since Oct. 7, 2023, only pushed down due to the election.

• Mondoweiss:

  • [11-04] Day 395: Palestinians say Israel is using hunger as a weapon of war as it blocks 3,800 aid trucks from entering Gaza: "Israel continues to bomb Kamal Adwan Hospital over a week after raiding the compound in northern Gaza. Meanwhile, fabricated documents falsely attributed to Yahya Sinwar repudiate Israeli claims of Hamas rejectionism in ceasefire talks last summer."

  • [11-07] Day 398: Israel admits it is depopulating north Gaza, says it will expand offensive to Beit Lahia: "Spokesperson Yitzhak Cohen said the Israel army is close to the complete 'evacuation' of north Gaza, and Palestinian residents will not be allowed to return. This marks the first official admission of the intent to permanently expel Palestinians."

• Haaretz Editorial: [11-06] Israel is unleashing an apocalypse in northern Gaza.

• Tareq S Hajjaj: [11-08] The Israeli army admitted it's staying in north Gaza. Here's the next phase of its plan. "In one month of continuous killing, it is thought that the Israeli army has ethnically cleansed some 100,000 people out of north Gaza. Those who remain are being starved out and exterminated."

• David Hirst: [11-04] Gaza genocide: Is Israel going mad? "Netanyahu gave religious Zionists power. In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond, they now feel they are enacting God's design for His chosen people. This will not end well." Worse, it will not end. I could wind up quoting much of this piece. It is hard for Americans, including ones who think they know Israel, to really get a grip on these people and what they are doing.

  • Zasa Hussan/Daniel Levy: [2023-03-30] Liberal Israelis and the US empowered the settler right. Now it's out of control: "Authoritarian tools forged to control Palestinians are now being turned on elements of the Israeli Jewish population." An older piece, linked to from the Hirst piece.

• Middle East Monitor:

  • [11-10] Israeli prime minister admits responsibility for mass pager explosions in Lebanon.

  • [11-10] Syria says seven civilians killed in Israeli strike near Damascus.

• Qassam Muaddi: [11-07] Israeli army says it is staying in north Gaza and won't let residents return: "The Israeli army has admitted for the first time that it intends to prevent Palestinian residents of northern Gaza to return to their homes."

• Paul R Pillar: [11-11] Israeli ethnic cleansing nears completion in northern Gaza: "An IDF general recently admitted that their goal was to expel residents and provide no options for return.

• Nathan J Robinson:

  • [10-25] The attempt to justify mass killing: "Political commentator Konstantin Kisin says he has heard both sides and carefully concluded that Israel's war in Gaza is just. Let's examine his arguments."

  • [11-05] The killing of Gaza's children: "Trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa on what he and his medical colleagues saw in Gaza and why this is a problem of American foreign policy." An interview.

• Brett Wilkins: [11-05] Erasing 'any sign of life,' Israeli demolition teams razing entire villages in Lebanon.

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

• Juan Cole: [11-10] What rough beast? "President Biden's Gaza policy leaves the Middle East in flames. Although you can certainly blame Biden for not knowing any better, I'm struck by how many disastrous Biden moves here were actually initiated by Trump: especially the cancellation of the Iran JCPOA, and the Abraham Accords scheme to detach Arab support from the Palestinians. While we knew that much of what Trump did in his first term would only impact us later on, it's still shocking how hard these moves kicked back.

• Dave DeCamp: [11-07] Israel signs $5.2 billion contract with Boeing to purchase F-15s with US aid: "Israel will receive 25 F-15 fighter jets with delivery starting in 2031." Also: "Israel signed a $3 billion contract to acquire 25 Lockheed Martin-made F-35 jets, which was also financed by US military aid."

• Mitchell Plitnick:

  • [11-05] What Netanyahu's firing of Yoav Gallant means for Gaza, Israel's regional war, and the US-Israel relationship.

  • [11-01] What will a second Trump presidency mean for the Middle East?: Posted pre-election: "The choice to not vote for someone as deeply complicit in genocide as Kamala Harris must be respected. But we can't afford to be naive about what it means if Donald Trump returns."

• Ramona Wadi: [11-10] Netanyahu promotes genocide and annexation with his choice of Leiter as Israeli ambassador to the US: Yechiel Leiter, who started out as a member of a Kahanist terrorist group.

Israel vs. world opinion:

• Julian Borger: [11-09] 'The UK should know what their government is supporting': the Israeli and Palestinian film-makers shining a light on West Bank violence: "No Other Land has won its directors awards -- but also forced them to leave their families facing the dangers depicted."

• Imran Khalid: [11-08] Targeting UNRWA could harm Israel's own interests: "Israel is strengthening the case for those who question its international legitimacy."

• Anan Lippman: [11-09] I stopped wearing the Star of David because it has become a symbol of supremacy and fascism: "In October 2023, I proudly wore my Star of David necklace to an emergency rally for Gaza, but a year later I could no longer wear it. Israel has made it impossible to divorce this symbol from the unfathomable devastation carried out under its banner."

• Maged Mandour: [11-05] How Arab autocrats enabled Israel's Gaza genocide: "Defeating the Arab democracy movement left autocratic states hollowed out and often reliant on US and Israeli support to survive. Palestinians cannot expect help anytime soon."

• Lubna Masarwa: [11-05] Israel's UNRWA ban will be devastating for Palestinians: "Israel wants to erase the only agency that recognises Palestinian refugees and the right of return of their descendants, but it will never bury the Palestinian struggle."

• Craig Mokhiber: [11-05] Turmoil at the ICC as fears rise over Israel and the US interference: "The delay in issuing ICC warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, followed by the replacement of the presiding judge, has raised serious concerns about the court's functioning and possible machinations behind the scenes."

• Sana Saeed: [11-09] No, there were no 'antisemitic pogroms' in Amstmerdam. Here's what really happened. For more on what did (and didn't) happen:

  • James North: [11-10] 'NYTimes' biased coverage of Amsterdam soccer violence attempts to hide Israeli racism: "The New York Times buried the fact that racist Israeli soccer fans instigated attacks in Amsterdam, and instead pushed a false narrative that the violence was driven by antisemitism."

  • David Broder: [11-09] Israeli fans meant it when they chanted "death to Arabs": "Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rioting in Amsterdam chanted slogans like 'There are no schools in Gaza, as there are no children left.' Far from just extremist provocations, their slogans tell the truth about Israeli war aims."

  • Abed Abou Shhadeh: [11-08] Israeli football hooligans bring culture of genocide to Amsterdam.

  • Daniel Falcone: [11-12] The Amsterdam attacks: the politics of collective violence.

Ukraine and Russia:

• Sam Bull: [11-08] Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine and Europe brace for Trump: "Uncertainty reigns amid Russian gains and active North Korean battalions."

• Guy Faulconbridge: [11-07] Russia says West should negotiate end to Ukraine War based on current reality.

• Jeet Heer: [11-22] Biden's mindless escalation is a final betrayal of Ukraine: "Instead of preparing for inevitable negotiations, the outgoing president adds fuel to the fire."

• Joshua Keating:

  • [11-07] Russia's campaign against the West is getting more aggressive: "The Election Day bomb threats are part of a larger and increasingly dangerous strategy."

  • [11-11] Why Ukraine thinks it can still win over Donald Trump: "Ukraine's new pitch: Democracy out, gas and minerals in."

• Dan Sabbagh: [11-17] Biden lifts ban on Ukraine using US weapons to strike deeper into Russia. This is an appalling decision, even before you consider the transition scenario. Is Biden gambling that Putin won't strike back, because Trump is coming along soon enough? Is he trying to poison the well for Trump? At least there's a precedent for that: Bush sending troops into Somalia after losing to Clinton in 1992. It took Clinton more than a year to untangle that, by which time Al-Qaeda had turned on the US. As Richard D Wolff tweeted:

  US allows a lame duck President, too old to ru n again to escalate the Ukraine war by permitting long-range missiles that risk nuclear war with Russia. Makes Dems the "pro-war party" that will lose more elections. And if Trump now ends the Ukraine war? Is Biden blind too?

• Sveta Yefimenko: [11-08] What Trump's reelection means for Russia: "It's not all plusses for Putin." Some good points here, and I could add more.

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:

• Van Jackson: [10-02] Liberalism has a Heather Cox Richardson problem: I've had this tab open for more than month, and just found it as I was preparing to reboot. Had I noticed earlier, I would have included it here, so how [11-24], why not? It's pretty good, at least up to the point where we slam into the paywall. It centers on a Richardson tweet:

  Important to remember that U.S. alliances and partnerships underpin the rules-based international order. Weaken the U.S. and you destabilize that order, opening the door for dictators with imperial ambitions. Everywhere.

  I'm not going to tear this apart, or just laugh at it. Too late for that. Let's just quote Jackson:

  I don't doubt that she believes what she's saying. Her first book, after all, was called The Greatest Nation of the Earth.

  But this is ruling-class propaganda -- not true at all. She's very much out of her depth pontificating about America in the world. And she has, under the veil of opposing Trump, made herself the voice of the powerful, which is why she gets to go on the talk shows and get paid all the while.

  I try to be sympathetic toward shitlib/cringe lib sentiments because 1) I don't want to live in an illiberal society, and 2) they represent the largest share of the Popular Front for democracy that I'm trying to will into existence. No shitlibs, no antifascist coalition.

  And I'm not mad that she supports Ukraine, or that she wants to critique Republicans for opposing support for Ukraine. Those are both reasonable -- almost commonsense -- positions.

  But her rationale for both supporting Ukraine and condemning Republicans lacks self-awareness, and not in a harmless way but in a way that threatens the democracy that she's dedicated her pen to protecting against Trumpism.

  I'd be interested in reading what comes after "Let me explain," I can't see myself ever using "shitlib" again, but I do recognize the type: to quote from Urban Dictionary:

  Shitlibs are self-serving rich elite politicians who are subscribers of neoliberal economics and governance. The support more deregulation for big business and corporations, but more regulation and inceased taxes for smaller businesses and workers. They support outsourcing, illegal immigrant labor, lower wages, more free trade and privatization (when it benefits them). They often lie about their support of egalitarian and socially liberal ideas but never really enact them. They are often side with tech and media corporations and receive donations from them regularly. They also support more war and interventionism abroad.

  I don't like "neoliberal" either, but that's the more common term.

• Lukas Scholle: [11-09] Germany's coalition collapsed, but recession is here to stay: "German chancellor Olaf Scholz has dismissed his finance minister, Christian Lindner, pitching the country toward elections. Economic woes will be at the center of the campaign -- yet proposals for a break with austerity are are conspicuously absent."

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

• Elie Honig: [11-08] So what happens with all the cases against Trump now?

• Ian Millhiser: [11-06] The criminal cases against Donald Trump are now basically dead: "Turns out all of those indictments were pointless."

Climate and environment:

• Washington Post: [11-11] Nations gather for UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.

  As nations gather at this year's talks, which are scheduled to run until Nov. 22, delegates will also have to contend with their countries' failure so far to deliver on the central pledge of last year's negotiations. The United States, for one, is producing more oil than any country, ever -- a trajectory expected to accelerate when Trump returns to the White House.

Other stories:

• Kyle Chayka: [10-30] The banality of online recommendation culture: "A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations." I didn't have time to write about this piece last week, and don't have time now, but being a guy who both writes and consumers self-styled "consumer guides," this is obviously up my alley. Also as a software engineer, I might note that I was thinking about algorithmic approaches to sharing preference information before many of the better known systems for aggregating such data became available -- none of which, needless to say, I find particularly useful.

  • Ruby Justice Thelot: [09-11] In praise of gatekeeping: "Why we need gatekeepers to resist cultural hyper-optimization." I found this in an open tab next to the Chayka article, so thought I should keep it. I'm not sure that the specifics matter to me. Also, the phrase is a bit loaded. The people I know (or at least the ones I follow) are more likely to be door-openers than gatekeepers.

Obituaries

• Lou Donaldson:

  • Barry Singer: [11-11] Lou Donaldson, soulful master of the alto saxophone, dies at 98.

  • John McConough: [11-12] In memoriam: Lou Donaldson, 1926-2024.

• Roy Haynes:

  • Nate Chinen: [11-12] Roy Haynes, a giant of jazz drumming, is dead at 99: "An irrepressible force who remained relevant over the court of a seven-decade career, he had a hand in every major development in modern jazz."

• Ella Jenkins:

  • Mike Peed: [11-10] Ella Jenkins, musician who found an audience in children, dies at 100.

Books

• Noam Chomsky/Nathan J Robinson: The Myth of American Idealism: How US Foreign Policy Endangers the World:

  Current Affairs: [10-17] What is the myth of American idealism: Robinson, interviewed by two of his staff, on the book he co-authored with Noam Chomsky.

  Nathan J Robinson: [11-07] How standard US history misrepresents the world: 'Reviewing a standard US educational text on international relations to show how the Chomskyan approach calls into question what seems like common sense." For example, consider "a typical book by a member of the US foreign policy establishment, The World: An Introduction, by Dr. Richard Haass."

  • Stephen M Walt: [11-15] Noam Chomsky has been proved right: "The writer's new argument for left-wing foreign policy has earned a mainstream hearing."

• Osamah F Khalil: A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad From Kennedy to Biden:

  • Current Affairs: [11-08] How America imagines a 'world of enemies': "Osamah Khalil on how, both domestically and abroad, American elites have conjured existential nemeses who must be dealt with through never-ending militarization."

• Jonathan Kozol: An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America:

  • Current Affairs: [10-21] The scandal of America's apartheid education system: "Education critic and activist Jonathan Kozol on America's unequal public school system and what we can do about it."

• Patrick Ruffini: Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP:

  • Ezra Klein: [11-09] The book that predicted the 2024 election: I noticed this book in one of my roundups, but didn't believe it enough to even comment. Interview with Ruffini, in light of the election, where there appears to have been a black and (larger) hispanic shift toward Trump, at least among males. The implication here is that shift swung the election. I'm not sure of the numbers, nor how that works, but I do think that racism has changed significantly over my lifetime, including a shift in who gets respect and who doesn't. I always recall the book title, How the Irish Became White, as showing that racism is more about power than pigmentation. As we've seen many times, starting perhaps with Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation, even the most racist Republicans will vote for a black person with the right credentials. I recall Lyndsey Graham saying just that. On the other hand, it's hard to tell any difference between how Republicans regard black Democrats vs. how they used to regard all blacks.

Chatter

• Joshua Frank: [10-24] I wrote a book on how John Kerry blew the 2004 election by catering to the right, ignoring the antiwar vote, and outhawking Bush. Twenty years later, Kamala Harris is following the same losing playbook.

• Aaron Maté: [10-27] If I were the Harris campaign I'd be playing this clip of Trump refusing to support a minimum wage hike on loop. Instead they're palling around with the Cheneys and yelling "fascist" at every turn.

• David Sirota: [10-29] This is so far beyond parody that you could convince me it's a bit. [Response to Hillary Clinton: New Yorkers: Donald Trump may have Madison Square Garden, but we have Carnegie Hall.]

• David Klion: [10-31] I'm confused why the Harris campaign thinks it's a good idea to send Bill Clinton to Michigan days before the election to lecture Arab and Muslim voters on the ancient Jewish claim to "Judea and Samaria."

• Matt Duss: [10-31] It's ridiculous for Trump to claim to be the anti-war candidate and it's also ridiculous that that lane has been left wide open for him.

• Eric Levitz: [11-96] Interesting how much rightwing propaganda outperforms leftwing propaganda across formats. It's not just that Fox beats MSNBC and the right dominates radio: As Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Rogan illustrate, podcasters tend to discover they can maximize their audience by moving right.

• The Onion: Breaking News: The Onion on the verge of collapse after not being able to make up stuff that is more idiotic than the current reality in our political lives in these United States!

• Rick Perlstein: [11-12] Don't quit Twitter. Ignoring fascist spaces is bad. Silence impliles assent, shuts down witness of the lies they're devising & the plans they're hatching. Don't initiate threads; the algo will just bury them. Tell the truth in threads, like leafletting an occupied French village.

• Jeet Heer: [11-12] [Comment in response to Wally Nowinski, who offered a chart I can't read, and said: "Old white folks moved toward Kamala. Every other group moved towards Trump."] This is exactly the result you would get if you ran a pro-system, pro-status quo, hug-the-Cheneys campaign: improvement from those most invested in the system, alienating everyone else.

  [Actually, I find this interesting, perhaps because I belong to the "old white folks" demographic. Could it be that we weren't tuned into social media, so missed a lot of the lies, while we relied on more conventional news sources? Or maybe his point is to lambast us, while blaming the groups with the largest shifts to Trump (topped by black men) on the Harris campaign?]

• db: [11-13] [illustration is House map, showing Republicans with 218 seats, clinching the majority, vs. 208 for Democrats] We did it! Worst possible world. thank you Kamala, thank you Joe, thank you Barack, and thank you to the DNC for strangling left populism in the crib and all but assuring this outcome! Couldn't have done it without you!

• Rick Perlstein: [11-14] I have decided that I hate the adjective "unserious" as shorthand for "evil person who is stupid and dangerous and wrong about everything." The people it is purported to describe are plenty serious.

• Dean Baker: [11-15] It's pretty funny to hear Trump boasting about his huge mandate. No Democrats has ever been elected president with a smaller mandate. I guess we can't expect a reality TV show star to be very good with numbers.
  [Later amended: "sorry, forgot about John Kennedy."]

• David Sirota: [11-24] In retrospect, the campaign was effectively over when Democrats decided that their final October Surprise was touting Liz Cheney and aggressively attacking rather than just ignoring Jill Stein. Looking back, everyone shoulda realized this was Dems surrendering.

• Ken Klippenstein [11-23] Bill Clinton: "in demonizing all establishments and all people who wear a tie like you and me to work and have a good education, we are breaking down the legitimacy of . . . people who actually know things that are very important for us today and very important for our continued growth and prosperity and harmony."

  Nathan J Robinson commented: "[I] wrote a 300 page book on why Bill Clinton is awful and I can assure you that 'wearing a tie' is not one of the listed offenses."

• Nathan J Robinson: [11-22] I'm grateful that The Atlantic and New York magazine have paywalls because they function as a kind of quarantine for bad opinions, making sure they don't escape and infect those not already affected by them.

  [Further down, I found an Atlantic tweet quoting Elizabeth Bruenig: "Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportunt one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics." First line seems true, and worth thinking about. Second line is an example of what passes for thinking in intellectual circles, but isn't really. I can't say that Freud never had an interesting idea, but his hit/miss ratio was about random, and his misses inadvertently self-revealing.]

• Matt Duss: [11-23] It should be noted that the policy area where progressive groups were able to have arguably the least influence, Israel-Palestine, is the one that ultimately destroyed Biden's legacy.

• Jon Schwarz: [11-26] The 35% jump in Tesla's stock price immediartely after the election shows that investors believe the US government will soon be completely corrupt.

As best I recall, I've been pretty consistent in believing that Biden, and later Harris, would defeat Trump, but I saw one scenario as particularly ominous: if the wars in Ukraine and Israel drag on through election day (as they have now done), I predicted that many voters would desperately search for an alternative, which could tip the election to Trump. I relaxed my prediction a bit when Harris replaced Biden, figuring she would be seen as less culpable, but she was in Biden's administration, was involved in much of its disastrous foreign policy, and made little if any effort to distance herself from its failures. Worse still, she started campaigning with hawks like Liz Cheney.

I figured I should go back and find the quotes. I've found several bits I wrote on a possible Trump win, so I'll include them here. The main one was from July 24 (actually quoting a July 18 letter), but we'll keep them in order, starting with this one (I'm adding bold in a couple spots):

June 22, 2024:

I find it impossible to believe that most Americans, when they are finally faced with the cold moment of decision, will endorse the increasingly transparent psychopathology of Donald Trump. Sure, the American people have been seduced by right-wing fantasy before, but Reagan and the Bushes tried to disguise their aims by spinning sunny yarns of a kinder, gentler conservatism.

Even Nixon, who still outranks Trump as a vindictive, cynical bastard, claimed to be preserving some plausible, old-fashioned normality. All Trump promises is "taking back" the nation and "making America great again": empty rhetoric lent gravity (if not plausibility) by his unbridled malice toward most Americans. Sure, he got away with it in 2016, partly because many people gave him the benefit of doubt but also because the Clinton spell wore off, leaving "crooked Hillary" exposed as a shill for the money-grubbing metro elites. But given Trump's media exposure, both as president and after, the 2024 election should mostly be a referendum on Trump. I still can't see most Americans voting for him.

That doesn't mean Trump cannot win, but in order to do so, two things have to happen: he has to make the election be all about Biden, and Biden has to come up seriously short. One can ponder a lot of possible issues that Biden might be faulted for, and come up with lots of reasons why they might but probably won't matter. (For example, the US may experience a record bad hurricane season, but will voters blame Biden for that and see Trump as better?) But we needn't speculate, because Biden already has his albatross issue: genocide in Gaza. I'm not going to relitigate his failures here, but in terms of my "optimistic view," I will simply state that if Biden loses -- and such an outcome should be viewed not as a Trump win but as a Biden loss -- it will be well deserved, as no president so involved in senseless war, let alone genocide, deserves another term.

So it looks like the net effect of my optimism is to turn what may look like a lose-lose presidential proposition into a win-win. We are currently faced with two perilous prospects: on the one hand, Biden's penchant for sinking into foreign wars, which he tries to compensate for by being occasionally helpful or often just less miserable on various domestic policies; on the other, Republicans so universally horrible we scarcely need to list out the comparisons. Given that choice, one might fervently hope for Biden to win, not because we owe him any blanket support, but because post-election opposition to Biden can be more focused on a few key issues, whereas with Trump we're back to square one on almost everything.

But if Biden loses, his loss will further discredit the centrist style that has dominated the Democratic Party at least since Carter. There are many problems with that style, most deriving from the need to serve donors in order to attract them, which lends them an air of corruption, destroying their credibility. Sure, Republicans are corrupt too, even more so, but their corruption is consistent with their values -- dog-eat-dog individualism, accepting gross inequality, using government to discipline rather than ameliorate the losers -- so it comes off as honest, maybe even courageous. But Democrats are supposed to believe in public service, government for the people, and that's hard to square with their individual pursuit of power in the service of wealth.

So, sure, a Trump win would be a disaster, but it would free the Democrats from having to defend their compromised, half-assed status quo, and it would give them a chance to pose a genuine alternative, and a really credible one at that. I'd like to think that Democrats could get their act together, and build that credible alternative on top of Biden's half-hearted accomplishments. It would be nice to not have to start with the sort of wreckage Trump left in 2021, or Bush left in 2009, or that other Bush left in 1993 (and one can only shudder at the thought of what Trump might leave us in 2029). But people rarely make major changes based on reasoned analysis. It usually takes a great shock to force that kind of change -- like what the Great Depression did to a nation previously in love with Herbert Hoover, or like utter defeat did to Germany and Japan in WWII.

If there was any chance that a Trump win in 2024 would result in a stable and prosperous America, even if only for the 51% or so it would take for Republicans to continue winning elections, we might have something to be truly fearful of. But nothing they want to do works. The only thing they know how to do is to worsen problems, which are largely driven by forces beyond their control -- business, culture, climate, war, migration -- and all their lying, cheating, and outright repression only rub salt into the wounds. When people see how bad Republican rule really is, their support will wither rapidly.

The question is what Democrats have to do to pick up the support of disaffected Trumpers. One theory is to embrace the bigotry they showed in embracing Trump. A better one would be promise the grit, integrity, independence, and vision that Trump promised by couldn't deliver on, partly because he's a crook and con man who never cared, but largely because he surrounded himself by Republicans who had their own corrupt and/or deranged agendas.

July 18, 2024:

For what little it's worth, here's my nutshell take on Biden:

1. If he can't get control of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza by early October, he's going to lose, no matter what else happens. For people who don't understand them, they're bad vibes, so why not blame the guy who was in position to do something about them. That may be unfair, but that's what uninformed voters do. And if you do understand them (which I think I do), Biden doesn't look so good either. He sees Ukraine as a test of resolve, and Israel as a test of loyalty, and those views are not just wrong, they kick in his most primitive instincts.

2. Otherwise, the election will go to whichever side is most effective at making the election into a referendum on the other side. That should be easy when the other side is Trump, but it gets real hard when most media cycles focus on your age and/or decrepitude. That story is locked in, and isn't going away. When your "good news" is "Biden reads from teleprompter and doesn't fumble," you've lost.

3. Even if Trump's negatives are so overwhelming that even Biden, incapacitated as he is, beats him (and surely it wouldn't be by enough to shut Trump up), do we really want four more years of this?

September 1, 2024:

Nia Prater: [08-27] RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are joining the Trump transition team: I noted this story last week, dismissing it with "sounds like something, but probably isn't." Here I should note that while it probably isn't, it could actually be something. Kennedy and Gabbard have a lot of traits that discredit them as presidential candidates, but the one thing they do have is pretty consistent antiwar track records, which they are not just committed to, but are eager to use against Biden and Harris, who are not exactly invulnerable to such charges. Moreover, they can say that they left the Democratic Party because they opposed how hawkish the Party had become -- so hawkish that even Trump would be a safer and more sensible foreign policy option. It remains to be seen how credible they'll be, because, well, on most other issues they're nuts, but on this one, they could be more credible than Trump himself to people with real concerns. I've said all along that if Biden doesn't get his wars under control, he will lose in November. The switch to Harris gives Democrats a partial reprieve, but the one thing she is most seriously vulnerable on is the suspicion that Democrats are going to continue saddling us with senseless and hopeless foreign wars. Kennedy and Gabbard could be effective at driving that point home -- sure, not to rank-and-file Democrats, who are generally much more dovish than their leaders, and who are even more wary of Republicans on that count, but to the "undecideds," who know little, even of what little they know.

September 9, 2024:

Robert Wright: [09-26] Is Trump a peacenik? No, but if you're worried that Biden (now Harris) is a bit too fond of war, he says a vote for him will save you from WWIII. And given that American politicians of both parties have long and ignominious histories of lying about wanting peace while blundering into war, and given how little reliable information there is about either, there may be enough gullible but concerned people to tilt the election. Wright reviews some of the contradictions here, and there are much more that could be considered.

I've been worried about just this prospect all along, and I remain worried. I don't have time to explain all the nuances, but very briefly, Biden has done a very bad job of managing US foreign affairs, failing to make any progress dealing with a number of very manageable hostilities (North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, many others) while letting two crises (Ukraine, Gaza) drag into prolonged wars that he seemingly has no interest in ever resolving (at least he doesn't seem to be putting in any effort). The only good thing you can say about his handling of Afghanistan is that he dodged the worst possible option, which was to stick around and keep losing. And while he's made money for the arms and oil industries, both have made the world a much more dangerous place. And then there's China -- do we really need to go there?

One might reasonably think that anyone could have done a better job than Biden has done, but we actually know one person who had every same opportunity, and made them all worse: Donald Trump, the president before Biden. Is there any reason to think that Trump might do better with a second chance? The plus side is that he may be more wary this time of relying on the "deep state" advisers who steered him so badly. (Biden, too, was plagued by their advice, but he seemed to be more in tune with it -- the only changes Biden made in US foreign policy were to reverse Trump's occasional unorthodox lapses, especially what he viewed as softness on Russia.)

On the other hand, Trump brings a unique set of disturbing personal characteristics to the job: he cares more about perception than reality; he wants to be seen as very tough, but he's really just a whiney bitch; he's majorly ignorant, and incoherent on top of that; he's impetuous (but he can usually be talked down, because he rarely has any reasons for what he wants to do); he's vain and narcissistic; he has no empathy with people he meets, so has no idea how to relate with them (e.g., to negotiate any kind of agreement); he has no sympathy for other people, so he has no cares for anything wrong that could happen; he has a weird fascination with using nuclear weapons, so that's one of the things he often has to be talked down from; I know I already said that he's ignorant and implied that he's clueless, but he's also pretty stupid about how most things in the modern world actually work. He does, however, have a keen interest in graft, and a passing admiration for other right-wing demagogues, if only because he admires their art and sees them as his peers. About the only thing I can see as a positive is that he doesn't seem to feel any personal need for war to prove his masculinity -- for that he's satisfied abusing women.

I'm sure there are more, but these at least make the point. After Harris took over, I hoped that she might be held less responsible, and other factors would give her a chance. I also resisted all the hectoring from the left, figuring that's just what we normally do, even if it's not helpful at the moment. Besides, I knew that I couldn't really do anything about it: that the forces in motion were way too powerful for whatever I think to make any difference at all. So I just went with it.

But now I'm left with all these doubts: about my own judgment and understanding, about other people, about the whole notion of sides. I'm getting old, and tired, and frustrated. And while it's premature to say that we have no future, I can't see any viable path for me to continue working like this.

Therefore, this is my last Speaking of Which post. Probably ever, at least not for quite some well. I have a Jazz Poll to run, and that's going to be enough of a time sink to last me to January. I'll keep posting Music Week, probably as long as I'm able, possibly with a new burst of energy but more likely with diminishing returns. The political book I've contemplated for twenty-some years now is definitely dead. Much of it would have been practical advice on how Left Democrats might more effectively frame issues. Clearly, I'm in no position to do that.

I may consider writing up more "blue sky" policy ideas. I've always been very fond of Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, which gives me the perfect subtitle. But each chunk of that would take considerable work to research and whip into shape, and I have little confidence of doing that. The more serious writing project would be to return (or restart) the memoir. I don't know that will be of any interest, but it's a subject I know, have thought about, and often find myself slipping into, and it could be a springboard for anything else I wanted to slip in.

The other obvious project would be to go back and review the several million words I've written (most collected here, from the founding of the notebook and/or blog up to some point in 2022) and see what can be packaged into something useful. A couple people have looked at this, and thrown their hands up in the air. When I look, I see lots of things that still strike me as worthwhile, but I, too, have little idea what to do with them. My ideal solution would be to find an editor willing to work on spec, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that.

If anyone is interested in nattering on about this life decision, you can contact me through the little-used question form.

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