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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links Social Media My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Music Week [420 - 429]Monday, January 8, 2018 Music Week
Music: Current count 29150 [29119] rated (+31), 368 [364] unrated (+4). Expected rated count would be a bit higher, given that I've mostly been working off EOY lists, but it checks out fairly well. Some quick numbers: rated count for 2017 releases: 1048; length of Jazz A-List: 80; length of Non-Jazz A-List: 55; number of new albums in EOY Aggregate: 1936; number of total albums in Music Tracking List: 2895. The ratio of Jazz/Non-Jazz A-list always starts out high, but usually balances out around by the end of January. Last year it wound up 75/67 (52.8% jazz, up to 59.2% jazz this year). If I recall correctly, in previous years it was closer to even, sometimes even favoring non-jazz. Most likely explanation is that my ratio of jazz/non-jazz grades is higher than usual: currently 673/296 (69.4% jazz), vs. 689/358 (65.8% -- closer than I expected, but still likely to explain part of the greater split). Someone pointed out on Facebook that I hadn't given a single A grade to a new release in 2017. I think it's safe to say that's never happened before, although the numbers have been declining, especially the last few years: from 2010 on { 15, 6, 7, 6, 12, 2, 3, 0 }. Several reasons occur to me: the number of physical CDs I've received has been dropping, and I've almost completely stopped buying CDs; I only listen to streamed or downloaded material while working on the computer, and when I do so it's almost something I haven't rated yet. For instance, back in 2010 I rated 133 A/A- records, of which 36 (27.0%) were streamed. This year I have 136 A/A- records, 79 streamed (58.0%). The increase in the top 30 is even more extreme, going from 2 (6.7%) in 2010 to 14 (46.7%) in 2017. Also note that the jazz split in the top 30 increased from 12 (40.0%) to 19 (63.3%). I've always thought that part of the definition of an A (vs. A-) record was that it held up over many plays over time. Indeed, in past years I routinely promoted 4-6 albums from A- to A at EOY time. This year I got crushed at deadline time and hardly replayed anything, leaving little but memory and notes to help me compile my ballots. It's probably also true that my listening time has declined a bit -- although the number of records processed this year is similar to 2010 (1009 new + 73 old music, vs. 968 new + 81 old in 2017), so maybe I'm rushing more? Of course, there are other possibilities. While it seems unlikely that there is less good music being released these days, it may well be harder to find. More likely is that my own interest is flagging, whether due to age and creeping infirmity or to general depression. Back in my twenties I discovered music to be a psychic refuge from all sorts of everyday ordeals, and that's a big part of the reason I got so deep into it. While I don't think my taste or erudition or even my memory have declined much, it does seem that music has lost a bit of its magic for me. I wouldn't be surprised if I listen to less and less in the future. But I do note an uptick in unpacking this week, so that may keep me going. I meant to write more about the EOY Aggregate files (link above), which I've kept adding to. Major adds in the last week include close to forty top-ten lists from the Facebook Expert Witness group, which has produced major spurts for Jens Lekman, Jason Isbell, Waxahatchee, and Alex Fahey (the only one without a Christgau A grade). I've also added Christgau's grades next to mine, so a mutual A- gets an 8 point boost regardless of how obscure (e.g., Matt North, Conor Oberst, Robt Sarazin Blake, Swet Shop Boys, Starlito & Don Trip, Chuck Berry). Neither of these tweaks, nor anything else, has had much impact on the top of the list, which remains: Kendrick Lamar, Lorde, SZA, LCD Soundsystem, St. Vincent, Vince Staples, The National, then a tight knot of (105-100 points): Jay-Z, Sampha, War on Drugs, Slowdive, and Perfume Genius. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Tuesday, January 2, 2018 Music Week
Music: Current count 29119 [29058] rated (+61), 364 [388] unrated (-24). Initial calculation on rated count was +41, which seemed plausible enough, but when I moved the albums list from the scratch file to the notebook I counted 44, so clearly something was amiss. I went back and searched for unrated albums and found 20 I had failed to update -- obviously going back before last week, in some cases more than a year. I don't have a lot of unrated physical 2017 CDs -- maybe a dozen, including some inconvenient but still playable vinyl -- so I've been doing a lot of streaming, especially items from interesting EOY lists, and a fair number of them have been short: the Dawn Oberg is just three songs, more are legitimately EPs, and with the refocusing on vinyl a lot of regular albums clock in close to 30 minutes. I try to work faster streaming, avoiding replays unless I really feel the need to confirm a good record, and short goes faster still. December's Streamnotes went up on the last possible day, which has in turn pushed Weekend Roundup and this post a day later than normal -- three-day weekends and all that. I got a last minute Pazz & Jop invite, thanks to some strings Bob Christgau pulled. I finally did a quick sort on my Best Non-Jazz list without actually resampling anything, then slipped William Parker's Meditation/Resurrection into the top ten to maintain a little jazz cred. (Also bumps Kendrick Lamar's Damn, which I have little doubt will win without me.) I have no confidence that these are the ten best (mostly non-jazz) albums of 2017, but they are good ones, interesting ones, ones worth noting:
I don't keep track of singles, so I'm hopeless there. One idea that did occur to me was to look up anti-Trump songs. I found lists from Guardian, Mic, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. In the end, I picked (only seven, but I expected zero):
Obviously, could have done better had I spent more time, but top four would probably have hung on. I did manage to sample another half-dozen songs, including Fiona Apple's "Tiny Hands" and YG's "FDT" (but didn't get to Brujeria's "Viva Presidente Trump!" -- on virtually all the lists -- until too late). New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, December 26, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 29058 [29021] rated (+37), 388 [389] unrated (-1). Extended the week a day, which helped make up for not playing any unrated music on Christmas Eve -- was busy cooking paella for what's left of the family here. Was pleased to see that Cam Patterson finally posted a picture of his legendary crawfish étouffée -- he contacted me many years ago, mentioning his ritual and urging me to write more about my cooking. You can find a picture of my paella here -- had to drag out the big pot for it. Finally got into the latest batch of Ivo Perelman CDs, and while I choked on Philosopher's Stone (too shrill), the rest proved remarkable. Missing below is Live in Brussels, which I had previously graded B+(**) based on Napster, before I got the CDs. I will give it another shot later on, but seemed unnecessary at the moment. Since I closed off the week, I've discovered Art Pepper's West Coast Sessions on Omnivore. I need to replay to first two volumes, but there's a good chance that all six will wind up at A- -- as did the 5-CD box The Hollywood All-Star Sessions, where I first heard most of this marvelous music. I got into the Rolling Stones boots after Laura wanted to hear Beggars Banquet. I reconsidered Angles 9 after it showed up number two on Chris Monsen's list. Spent several days last week cleaning up the album credits for the Jazz Critics Poll listings. I noted all the new records that got votes in my 2017 EOY List Aggregate, but the process was so slow and tedious I postponed work on reissues and the vocal-debut-Latin side-polls. I got far fewer complaints about errors this year than ever before, although I've found so many since the pages went up that I suspect fatigue or indifference as much as anything else. I saw a tweet from poll winner Vijay Iyer bemoaning the shortage of women critics, but that's only one of many identity groups that got shortchanged -- one I've complained about in the past was lack of European critics. I also got a letter from someone complaining about a shortage of jazz radio dj's (we got more of them than women or Europeans). He included a top-100 chart from Jazz Week, which I'll factor into my EOY Aggregate. He stressed that the JW list wasn't a "smooth jazz" list, which is true, but it isn't very adventurous or even interesting: for instance, I only count four records also on my 79 deep Jazz A-List (Jack DeJohnette's Hudson, Katie Thiroux's Off Beat, Yoko Miwa's Pathways, and Jimmy Greene's Flowers). Part of the problem is that it doesn't include a single album from the two labels Francis Davis singled out as "gatekeepers" to the polls (ECM and Pi) -- labels which scored 9 of the top 30 new jazz albums (6 and 3 respectively; note that Pi only released 5 albums last year, placing 60% of them in the top 17, the others landing at 60 and 94). I could just as well complain about the lack of avant-oriented (or even -curious) voters. For instance, Free Jazz Collective just released their Free Jazz Blog's 2017 Top 10 Lists, collecting 21 writers, only three of whom submitted ballots to JCP. I've never been consulted on who gets invited, and especially have no idea who got invited but didn't vote. I do know that JCP typically gets about twice as many voters as JazzTimes for their annual poll, yet relatively speaking remains more open-minded. I was thinking I'd write something about my EOY Aggregate this week, but I'm running out of time, and it's still in flux even if not changing very fast. But I will list out the current top 20 (my grades in brackets):
All in all, a better bunch of records than I'm used to in EOY lists, although I always find at least one record I can't imagine why anyone would vote for -- this year it's Perfume Genius: I can't hear any reason why anyone would find it attractive, even though on balance it's not so much worse than Father John Misty or War on Drugs. I probably won't spend much more time on this, at least beyond next week. I clearly still have some things that need to be factored in, even if just for my own curiosity. I've currently collected 94 lists, which is a far cry from last year's 557 lists. Those lists have identified 1481 records so far this year, compared to 4978 in 2016. Pazz & Jop typically comes up with about 1500 records. By the way, I didn't get an invite from the Village Voice to vote in Pazz & Jop this year. No idea why, other than that they've changed management in the last year, supposedly to a group less inclined to let things run on autopilot. My Year 2017 list is up to 1001 lines (16 pending, so rated count is 985), which doesn't strike me as bad for a critic. Granted, probably two-thirds of that is jazz -- the Non-Jazz A-List is currently a relatively anemic 51 titles long (compared to 79 jazz), so maybe it's just anti-jazz prejudice taking hold there. Still, feels like a nudge out the door. I published a "quick and dirty" consumer guide to the recordings of the late trombonist Roswell Rudd: The Incredible Honk (one of his album titles). I was so short of time and uncertain of consciousness that I almost let it go, but it finally cleaned up easily enough. I became a Rudd fan in the late 1970s, when Arista reissued a series of album that originally came out in Paris on Freedom Records. They included two Rudd titles: one chunk of avant-squawk I hated, the other (a jaded swing quartet with Sheila Jordan singing) I absolutely loved. I then tracked down his JCOA album (another good one, also with Jordan), and a few years later I grabbed Regeneration, his Herbie Nichols/Thelonious Monk tribute. That was pretty much his last album for more than a decade, until Francis Davis wrote his 1993 profile (see link below). Rudd returned to the spotlight after that, especially after he hooked up with Verna Gillis -- evidently some kind of world music impressario, hence his albums with musicians from Mali to Mongolia to Puerto Rico. It's been a delight to follow him since I started writing JCG. Some Rudd links:
I've been toying with the idea of writing an essay on political strategy, tentatively titled A Letter to the Democrats. It would start with a survey of American political eras: one thing I'm struck by is that for 1800-1856 the Democrats only lost two elections (both to short-lived Whig generals); from 1860-1928 the Republicans were dominant with only two Democrats were elected president (two terms each for Cleveland and Wilson); from 1932-1976 only two Republicans won (two terms each for Eisenhower and Nixon); and from 1980-2016 only two Democrats (again two terms each for Clinton and Obama). Mark Lilla talks about "two dispensations" for the last two eras, but that seems like a quaint term. There are plenty of reasons to think that the poles may switch in 2020 -- not least that each era shift was preceded by an exceptionally unpopular one-term president (Buchanan, Hoover, and Carter), and it's hard to imagine that Trump is any different (indeed, he's probably the weakest of the four). On the other hand, the current Republican phase is anomalous in many respects: especially that it represents a shift to the right, whereas all previous era shifts moved toward more democratic/liberal foundations. But there's a lot more interesting stuff that flows from this framework. The main question is how should candidates position themselves to realize the transformation that is possible. From a practical standpoint, I figure I'd have to knock this essay out in 4-6 weeks, hoping to get it published in March/April so that it might have some immediate effect on the 2018 elections. So it will have to be short, quick, and pointed. I won't be able to do a lot of research, but I thought I'd at least start to make a survey of books I should be aware of. One of the things I did today was to search Amazon for "democrats" -- which turned up nothing of interest. I then tried to refine the search and tried "democratic party prospects" and got what has to be the most useless Amazon results page ever:
I was expecting to find some more recent/less dated strategizing along the lines of E.J. Dionne: They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996) and John Judis/Ruy Teixeira: The Emerging Democratic Majority (2004), but I'm finding very little of that. Sure, Dionne does have a new book, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported, as does Teixeira, The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think -- but I don't find their cheery optimism at all convincing. I did read Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal, which got me thinking along these lines, but mostly because of its defects. There must be something else worthwhile. Or maybe I've discovered a market gap? Regardless, I've procrastinated so long already that if I do decide to do something, I need to move fast. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, December 18, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 29021 [28995] rated (+26), 389 [388] unrated (+1). Spent most of the week sorting out the Jazz Critics Poll ballots, but got slowed down the last few days. Every year we do a Hanukkah party: no religious significance, basically just an excuse to fry up some latkes for friends. Over the years I've added a few side dishes: I salt-cure a chunk of salmon, make some chopped liver, make my own applesauce (we still buy the sour cream). Last year I baked some rye bread to go with the chopped liver. This year I did honey rye rolls (from The Gefilte Manifesto), and whipped up a batch of their "everything bagel butter." I also had some sauerrubben (salted turnip) left over from a previous meal, and the citrus-carrot horseradish, so I made a terrine of gefilte fish (used dover sole) to go with that. I also fried up and pickled some frozen perch fillets I found in the freezer. The centerpiece were the potato pancakes: 3 lbs of russets, 3 onions, 3 eggs, fried in grapeseed oil in three skillets. I don't get to eat until the frying's done, by which time everyone else are pretty well sated. For a light dessert, we had a bowl of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries with a wine-sugar syrup and a second bowl of vanilla cream. I recently bought a 12-cup food processor, which made quick work of the onions and potatoes, the chopped liver, and the other tasks I presented it with (although it wasn't great at mixing up or kneading the bread). Prep work was pretty relaxed. The frying caused problems, first tripping the smoke alarm, then the range hood shut down. Doesn't seem to be a permanent problem, but it's never been so fussy before. I played golden oldies while cooking, hence the low rated count. Also lost more than a few hours to a carpentry project: a new pantry rack that'll attach to the basement door. Bought some more paint for that today. Should get it up in a couple of days. One casualty of this work was no Weekend Roundup yesterday. You can, at least, check out Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest policy stories of the week, explained: A Democrat won a Senate election in Alabama; Republicans wrote their tax bill; Sexual harassment accusations kept roiling Congress; Net neutrality (i.e., the end of, so your ISP can start auctioning you off to the highest bidder). Given that a candidate as inept and disgusting as Roy Moore still managed to get 650,000 votes (48.4%), I doubt the good news about Alabama will last long. Everything else is more/less horrible. The takeaway is that Republicans don't care about doing vastly unpopular things as long as they advance their owners' agenda. Even if they blow up and cost them a couple elections, like 2006-08, they believe they can claw their way back to power. Yglesias' piece, a piece arguing Why Trump's tax cuts won't be repealed, reveals part of the reason: a profound lack of ambition from the Democrats. Another thing I didn't have time for was working on the EOY Aggregate List. Picked up a couple lists, but nothing much changed. Much of what I did come up with was suggested by various jazz lists, but still lots of things not on Napster or Bandcamp. Finally wound up with Ron Miles' I Am a Man on YouTube, but that's hardly a fair medium for reviewing. Note three B+(***) records among the vault discoveries: Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Oscar Pettiford all did well in the Jazz Critics Poll, but one spin (especially for the 2CD items) wasn't enough to convince me. Indeed, I also had Call Super pegged at B+(***) before I chanced an extra spin this afternoon, and enjoyed it enough to nudge it over the line. I was saddened, and given that he was only 61 years old, shocked to hear that Ralph Carney has died. He grew up in Ohio, played clarinet (saxophone, all sorts of other instruments) in the Akron-based new wave rock group Tin Huey -- kind of a big deal c. 1979, with Chris Butler going on to form the Waitresses -- and released a few albums from 1987 on. I'm especially fond of two of the jazzier ones: Carneyball Johnson (2006) and Ralph Carney's Serious Jass Project (2009); also fine, by the latter group, was Seriously (2011). I wrote him once for records, and he was uncommonly gracious and generous, leading me to his work on several fine "spoken word" albums: Ira Cohen's The Stauffenberg Cycle, Robert Creeley's Really!!, and David Greenberger's OH, PA. He was probably most widely known for his long association with Tom Waits, but he did much more than that. Keely Smith (originally Dorothy Jacqueline Keely) also passed away last week. She got a job singing for bandleader Louis Prima in 1949, married him in 1953, divorced him in 1961. Prima did some good work as far back as 1934 and had some hits in the '40s, but their period together (along with saxophonist Sam Butera, aka "the wildest") made them stars, especially in Las Vegas. Especially notable is their 1958 Live From Las Vegas. She continued recording up to 1965, then made brief comebacks around 1985 and 2000. The only album I noticed came out in 2005, a thoroughly enjoyable recapitulation of her heyday called Vegas '58 -- Today. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, December 11, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 28995 [28950] rated (+45), 388 [390] unrated (-2). First time I calculated the rated count I came up with 31, which looked way low. A closer look kicked it up to 37, and then I went back and rechecked everything in the rated list and found a bunch of records missing grades. I also recalled that I had played two Yaeji EPs, so fixed that. Final rated total winds up pretty close to the upper bounds of a good, solid week. Contributing were two things: one was that I was recuperating from the previous week's cooking madness, taking it easy with hardly any distractions; the other was that I used a good deal of my chill time aggregating EOY lists, which suggested a lot of records to check out. Can't say as they've generated a lot of finds thus far, although one list pointed me to the legendary Kenyan band, and their label's Bandcamp page led me to the Andina compilation. My tip for the '90s pop compilation came from Robert Christgau (at the time I couldn't find the other one he liked, Now That's What I Call Tailgate Anthems, but I've found it now, so next week). I finally got the Jazz Critics Poll ballot data last night, so I'm swamped with work to do to check and format that data. Still not sure when NPR is going to run -- probably this week, quite possibly before I get my part done. Otherwise I'd write something about how the EOY list aggregate is shaping up, but I suppose you can see for yourself. As I initially suspected, Kendrick Lamar's Damn is well ahead, with the next four slots very close (83-78 by my count, compared to 114 for Lamar and 55 for 6th place Vince Staples: Lorde, LCD Soundsystem, SZA, and St. Vincent. I've compiled far fewer lists than I have in recent years, but I'll note that AOTY's 2017 Music Year End List Aggregate currently shows the same top six albums in the same order (although they have Lorde opening up a clear gap over a virtual tie between LCD Soundsystem and SZA). Their top ten rounds out with War on Drugs, Father John Misty, Sampha, and National, with Slowdive 11th. My top 11 has the same records, order slightly shuffled. After that we disagree more, with Mount Eerie dropping from 12th on their list to 28th on mine; Tyler the Creator from 13th to 19th; the XX from 21st to 38th, Taylor Swift from 36th to 68th. There are fewer dramatic improvements on my list, although the early UK bias certainly helps Jane Weaver (from 40th to 16th). I'll know more, and be able to say more, next week. One thing I will note is that my list has picked up on so few jazz lists that it's completely useless for predicting the Jazz Critics Poll. One final note: after reviewing it, I discovered that Octopus is actually scheduled for Jan. 28, 2018 release, so it doesn't appear in my 2017 Jazz List. I did find the FCT album after I cast my Jazz Critics Poll ballot, so as usual it took me just a few days to find an A- album I had missed. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, December 4, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 28950 [28931] rated (+19), 390 [391] unrated (-1). I spent most of last week planning, shopping, prepping, and cooking a massive dinner for the Wichita Peace Center's 25th Annual Dinner, with major (indispensable) help from Janice Bradley, Max Stewart, and Russ Pataki, with a few others pitching in on dinner days, notably including people I didn't know who hung around to help clean up. I fixed a range of Indian dishes: lamb and potatoes in a cream sauce (rogani gosht), tandoori chicken in a tomato-butter sauce (makhni), fish tikka, patiala pilaf (minus the fried onions), a sweet potato/chickpea curry, mattar paneer (peas with cheese), bharta (smoked eggplant), cabbage, kali dal, cucumber raita. We served appetizers at the tables, including a minted aloo chat (potato salad), coconut relish, pineapple sambal, a hot tomato chutney, paratha (flatbread), tapioca chips, a couple of store-bought chutneys (brinjal, lime pickle). Had spice cake and a Moroccan fruit salad for dessert. Best compliment I had was when one friend came up to me and cooed in my ear, "the food is divine." I had my quibbles with the fish and rice -- partly frustration as they were the last things done and both ran into unexpected problems. Mark McCormick was the featured speaker (buy his new book here). He gave a nice speech, and was even better fielding questions, stressing how we've become disconnected and desensitized to the problems around us. Partial proof of that was evident in the disappointing turnout: a little over 40 people this year, compared to 60 last year. (Not getting an accurate RSVP count until too late, I prepared food for 60, so we had a lot left over.) I was pretty much a wreck by the time it was done. Doubt I'll be able to do it again, but afterwards Max was trying to figure out ways to spread the work out -- I've never been very good at delegating -- and I was wondering whether paella might scale up better. Don't need to decide for nearly a year. I published the November roll-up of Streamnotes last week. on Tuesday. With everything else going on, I didn't expect I'd be able to find anything new to add to what I had noted last Music Week. But I found four of this week's five A- records in the day between Music Week and Streamnotes: the David S. Ware archival set (from 2010, so still new enough) wasn't unexpected, and the two Chicago tenor saxophonists (Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams, dba Made to Break and Boneshaker, respectively) were right up my alley. But Re-TROS, a tip from Chris Monsen's 2017-in-progress list, was totally unexpected: a Chinese alt-rock group, at times (but not all the time) sounding like a cross between Pulnoc and Konono No. 1 (on Bandcamp, by the way). December 3 was the deadline for ballots for Francis Davis' Jazz Critics Poll. I resorted my top jazz picks and submitted the following:
My ranking is highly proximate. Parker is the only download, and I probably haven't played it enough, but the two contrasting quartets reminds me of Ornette Coleman's marvelous In All Languages, where he split a double-LP among two groups (more distinctive ones than Parker's). Each half is potentially great, but I still haven't moved it above the A- bin. I replayed maybe half of the top ten last week, but there's still not a lot of distance from top to bottom, or even throughout the A-list. I was going to make a comment based on something Robert Christgau said in a recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview, but I can't look up the quote due to an "ad blocker" snit fit I don't feel like indulging. As best I recall, he said something about most critics viewing EOY lists as personal branding exercises. My list can be viewed that way. To the extent that I have a brand, or a public persona, it's that of someone who listens far and wide, doesn't follow fashion, and doesn't want to get pigeonholed. On the other hand, this year's list is more avant than usual, and leans toward people I've repeatedly favored in the past -- something I've noticed a lot this past year (while suspecting as some kind of a rut, but not caring enough to break out of). My Best Non-Jazz of 2017 list is even more problematical, not least because I've cared for it less. I haven't, for instance, played 2nd-ranked Run the Jewels or 3rd-ranked Sylvan Esso since I initially graded them, so early in the year that they were necessarily slotted high on the list. I don't have a Pazz & Jop invitation yet. When I do, I expect I'll do a lot of shuffling, if only to "fit my brand" as it's becoming increasingly impossible to believe that I'm sorting out anything objective. But if I had to draw a single conclusion out of these lists, it's that nothing this year matters nearly as much to me as the records I've regularly put on top-ten lists in past years -- especially a decade or more back; e.g., in 2007:
Or 1997, when the sample size was only 155 records:
I don't have earlier lists I can readily tap into, but 1987 and 1977 would be even more memorable to me -- especially the latter, as it came right after I moved to New York City, during my first stretch writing rock crit for the Village Voice, a time when I really cared about my favorite records, and managed to put a lot of time into them. That doesn't happen any more, and while I suspect the variable is me, I can't totally eliminate the music. I mean, doesn't postmodernism start with ironic detachment? Then why shouldn't it end simply with indifference? I'm not saying that music in 2017 sucks. This year is more/less as good as last year and the year before and so on -- the only long term trends worth noting are that there's more to listen to every year and less time to devote to it. But what is indubitable is that the world in 2017 sucks, so it's getting harder for music to overcome all that drudgery. And, sure, that's probably worse for someone my age, because pretty much everything gets worse as you get old. By the way, I have started to aggregate EOY lists, using the same formats and methodology as last year. Thus far I have something like four early lists (Mojo and three British record shops, so all UK) plus three individual JJA top-tens, plus I'm counting my grades as I go along, so take this with several distinct grains of salt. The only thing I'm fairly sure of thus far is that LCD Soundsystem's American Dream is the only record with a decent chance of challenging the obvious favorite, Kendrick Lamar's Damn. Moreover, the three jazz lists I've thus far tallied don't offer a single clue how the Jazz Critics Poll is going to sort out (not a single record appears on more than one ballot so far (nor on mine). If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that Vijay Iyer's Far From Over wins, but it doesn't have a vote so far. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, November 27, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 28931 [28909] rated (+22), 391 [394] unrated (-3). Rated count down, mostly attributable to Thanksgiving, when I fixed a small dinner: roast goose with potatoes, baked zucchini niçoise, oven-braised pumpkin, sweet and sour cabbage. All recipes were new to me, and came out as well as hoped. For dessert I made three pies: maple pecan, chocolate pecan, and key lime. For the first two, I tried two different pie shell recipes, and found the "easy" one not only not as good but also not as easy. The key lime had a graham cracker crust that came out rather crumbly, but otherwise I was very pleased. Further disruptions over the weekend: stereo went on the blink on Saturday, which drove me to listening to so-so albums on Napster. It (for reasons currently unfathomable) started working on Sunday, but I couldn't focus, as I was cooking several Indian dishes to get an idea how several menu ideas for next week's Peace Center Annual Dinner might play out. I'll be directing dinner for sixty on Friday, December 1, and until then I expect to have very little time for music. Menu will be Indian (except for dessert), mostly because I can cook more recipes ahead of time, making the logistics relatively manageable. Still, an enormous amount of work for an amateur like myself. The dinner work already wiped out any chance at a Weekend Roundup -- possibly the first one I've missed since Trump was elected (though I may have blocked something out -- I do recall at least one threat to throw in the towel). Current plan is to publish November's Streamnotes on Tuesday. Not likely to have much not already in the file, and there's at least a small chance I might not get the indexing done. But it needs to get up before the end of the month, and I won't have any time after Tuesday. Still will have more records than October (current count 114). While I'm at it, I'd like to recommend Mark E. McCormick: Some Were Paupers, Some Were Kings: Dispatches From Kansas. McCormick wrote an op-ed column at the Wichita Eagle, and this collects many of his best pieces, not least on the perennial topic of race relations. Laura Tillem helped edit and design the book, and I helped her a bit with the conversion from one hideous Microsoft format to another. By the way, McCormick will be giving the main presentation at Friday's Peace Center 25th Annual Dinner. By the way, François Carrier sent me a note asking that I mention his crowdfunding project. I routinely ignore requests to post notices, and certainly don't want to encourage more of them, but a few years ago when I got especially flustered I wrote a mass email to everyone who was sending me CDs announcing my intent to stop reviewing. François wrote me back immediately and insisted he was going to keep sending them anyway. As you can see here, few musicians have given me more pleasure more consistently. So by all means, encourage him to play and record more. By the way, I thought the iconic story of last week was when Trump pardoned the turkey on Thanksgiving, and said "I feel so good about myself doing this." (See Jessica Contrera.) When I first read the quote, I thought it the perfect example of his narcissism. Only when I saw the video later did the full perversity sink in. As Contrera notes, the lead up to the quote was: "Are we allowed to touch? Wow." The video looks like Trump groping the turkey as he says, "I feel so good about myself" -- his look suggesting fond remembrances of other birds he's groped. Another iconic moment was captured in this tweet by Daniel Dale (picture here; story here):
Very sad to see John Conyers caught up in the sex abuse scandals. He was first elected to the Congress in 1964 and was one of the first dozen House members to vote against the Vietnam War. Aside from his brief post-9/11 lapse, he has been one of the most consistent critics of American belligerence abroad, as well as a steady champion of civil rights and liberties. Not perfect, I guess -- I certainly don't like his "Pro-IP Act" -- but for a very long time one of the very best Congress had to offer. New records rated this week:
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Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, November 20, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 28909 [28874] rated (+35), 394 [391] unrated (+3). The Best Albums of the Year usually starts around Thanksgiving. I was going to say that I hadn't seen any yet, but it turns out the first few are indeed out: Rough Trade (100); Decibel (40); Mojo (50); Piccadilly Records (100); and Uncut (75). AOTY is aggregating these lists here, where the order is currently (for laughs, I'll include my grades, where I've heard the record):
Note (as if you couldn't reverse engineer this factoid) that four of the lists are British (two record stores, two publications), and the other specializes in heavy metal. Expect much of this list to change as more representative critics chime in. I'd have to rate Kendrick Lamar's DAMN as the odds-on favorite -- AOTY's Highest Rated Albums of 2017 lists it first, barely ahead of Lorde's Melodrama [A-], with LCD Soundsystem at 6 and St. Vincent at 8. The other contender I see on AOTY's list is Vince Staples' Big Fish Theory [***] at 4. I expect that Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me [*] (3), Valerie June's The Order of Time [**] (5), and Jlin's Black Origami [**] (7) to get a few nods but have a tougher time adding them up. Beyond that I don't see many contenders on AOTY's list -- maybe Arca (10) [B], Sampha's Process [*] (16), Algiers' The Underside of Power [B] (25). The Richard Dawson album is 15 at AOTY, but I'd be surprised if it has much US support. Further down the AOTY list you'll find The National (31) and Father John Misty (38). The only jazz album in AOTY's top 50 is Vijay Iyer Sextet's Far From Over [***] (29). I suppose that makes it the famous to win this year's NPR Jazz Critics Poll (run by Francis Davis with some help from myself), although that's mostly because I have no idea which albums will be contenders. Diana Krall's Turn Up the Quiet [***] won Downbeat's Readers Poll. When I look at my own A-list, I see very little that jumps out as likely to get broad support -- maybe Steve Coleman's Morphogenesis, Jimmy Greene's Flowers, Hudson, Rudresh Mahanthappa's Agrima, Eric Revis' Sing Me Some Cry, Tyshawn Sorey's Verisimilitude, Wadada Leo Smith's Najwa, Craig Taborn's Daylight Ghosts, Miguel Zenón's Típico. But most years most of the top-20 come from my [***] and [**] lists, and I have no particular knack or (right now) inclination to try to sift them out. With ballots for the Jazz Poll due December 3, I finally got around to sorting out my own 2017 Jazz and Non-Jazz lists. First thing I'm struck by is how unreliable the ordering of these lists is. One sign is that the order favors albums that came out early in the year, not because they've had longer to sink in but because they got to the top of the list first. A fact of my life is that I almost never go back and replay graded records any more (and when I do, I'm more likely to pick something old and classic, often from my travel cases). I expect I'm going to stir the order up quite a bit before I'm done, but whether that's from replay or just memory remains to be seen. Health rated count this week, once again very jazz-heavy even when I'm streaming off internet -- last week's ratio was 30-2. That will probably hold up until I file my jazz ballot, then pivot as I see more EOY lists. At some point I expect I'll start running my own aggregate of 2017 EOY lists, like I did for last year. Main obstacle is that I expect the next 3-4 weeks to be heavily interrupted. First, I'll be cooking a small dinner for Thanksgiving. Then I'm in charge of fixing the Wichita Peace Center annual banquet -- last year we had eighty people, so unless I hear otherwise that's on plan this year. Then I'll need to do some work publishing the individual critic ballots for the NPR Jazz Critics Poll. Sometime in early December I'd like to work in a much-postponed trip to see relatives in Arkansas. In this rush, I'll probably go ahead and post a Streamnotes early this month, to get it out of the way. Presumably I'll need to file a Pazz & Jop ballot in mid-December. By the end of December, I vow to finish two other long-delayed projects: compiling my existing reviews into two Jazz Guide files, and catching up Robert Christgau's website. Lot of work for a guy who's increasingly feeling his advancing age. As Stephen Colbert noted tonight: most presidents age visibly in office, but Trump is aging us. One last note on unpacking: got a large batch of CDs (many multiple sets) from University of North Texas, which has the oldest and probably largest jazz education program outside of the Boston-NY corridor -- it doesn't produce as many famous names as Berklee and Juilliard, but as a working critic I've noticed a lot of fine musicians with UNT degrees. Still, good chance I got some of the artist attributions wrong there -- something I'll have to revisit with I finally get the magnifying glass out and try to decipher the fine print. New records rated this week:
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Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, November 13, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 28874 [28842] rated (+32), 391 [396] unrated (-5). Tis the season when most critics (and especially their publishers) start thinking about year-end lists. I expect that before the month is out I'll take my first pass at constructing this year's version of last year's Jazz and Non-Jazz lists. To that end, I started taking a belated look at AOTY's Highest Rated Albums of 2017 list, and picked out a few things to check out (most successfully, St. Vincent's 8th-rated Masseduction). I sought out several albums from Robert Christgau's recent Expert Witness albums (Pere Ubu's 20 Years in a Montant Missile Silo the only thing I've really liked there recently). I also made a point of looking up everything I had missed on Alfred Soto's Best albums of 2017 -- third quarter edition. Rather surprised I didn't find more there. The present Year 2017 file lists 834 albums (28 of those pending grades). That's down from 1075 for 2016 by freeze time (January 28, 2017). Figuring I have 11 weeks left, and I've averaged 18.1 new releases per week over the first 46 weeks, that extrapolates to 1033 records: down a bit from last year, but not much. Down more from previous years, of course, but I won't bother dredging those numbers up. I finally got a bit of work done on compiling the Jazz Guide(s): 21st Century up to 1267 pages (64% through the Jazz '00s database file, up to Ferenc Nemeth); 20th Century edged up to 750 pages as I found a couple stragglers. 21st Century should wind up 1450-1500 pages, hopefully by the end of the year. (So much for my earlier August-September estimates!) Thinking a bit about what should happen next. The drafts are collected using LibreOffice. Obviously, I can export them as PDF, and distribute them as I did the JCG-only version. I don't know the first thing about exporting to ebook formats, but I see there is a Writer2ePub extension, and also a "cross-platform free and open-source e-book reader and word processor" called Calibre. Both of those look promising. It occurs to me that the collected writing would be more useful reorganized as a website. LibreOffice can export as HTML, but I'd need some way to explode the file into many webpages. It's possible that there is an extension somewhere to support that, but thus far is looks like a job for custom programming. That's something I'll need to look into and think about -- not that I haven't thought about pouring my database and reviews into a website for a long time now. It's just that I've always had trouble coming up with an album-based database schema to hang everything on. In recent years I've been gravitating more toward an artist-based schema, even though it doesn't normalize as nicely. That's probably the level I'd try to explode an HTML export of the Jazz Guides. One idea is to dispense with the database and just use Mediawiki, organizing the reviews by artist. In that case one could simply cut and paste from the book to the website. That would still be a lot of work. More troubling for me is the amount of editing that the reviews require. The relatively easy part is stripping out the redundancy that occurs when discrete reviews are stacked up under an artist name. I expect to move dates, instruments, band associations, and other such attributes to a brief artist intro, cutting them out of the album reviews. In many cases that leaves virtually nothing but the credits and grade. It would be nice to flesh them out a bit, but that now appears to be a job for another lifetime, or for someone else. At this point, I'd be happy to let my framework stand as a starting point for someone else to build on, or maybe a whole community. Unclear whether anyone is interested. One thing I neglected to mention last week was Downbeat's 82nd Annual Readers Poll (October 2017 issue). Biggest surprise for me was the late Allan Holdsworth (1946-2017) finishing second on the HOF ballot. I had him filed under rock (1970s) and hadn't rated (or heard) any of his albums. Wikipedia says he "was cited as an influence by a host of rock, metal and jazz guitarists" but the following list of twelve only includes one name I recognize as jazz (Kurt Rosenwinkel). I suppose I should do some research, possibly starting with Gordon Beck's Sunbird (1979; Beck's 1967 Experiments With Pops, with 3rd place finisher John McLaughlin, is a favorite) and two Tony Williams albums not yet in my database. McLaughlin would have been a perfectly respectable choice. I've heard at least two dozen of his albums, with Extrapolation (1969) and Mahavishnu Orchestra's The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) early masterpieces. Fourth- and fifth-place finishers Les Paul and George Benson would have been disgraceful picks, although I can point to at least one superb record each is on. The HOF winner, Wynton Marsalis, is a ho-hum choice: a solid hard bop trumpeter, probably better than Kenny Dorham or maybe even Woody Shaw but less exciting than Lee Morgan and not as versatile as Freddie Hubbard. He also became a huge celebrity, built an empire at Lincoln Center, and wrote some of the most ponderous compositions of the era. I've always liked him best when he was least serious. I credit him with three A- records: his soundtrack Tune In Tomorrow (1990); his Jelly Roll Morton tribute, Mr. Jelly Lord (1999); and his Play the Blues meetup with Eric Clapton (2011). Dorham and Shaw, by the way, have two A- records each, in shorter careers. Elsewhere, the winners were on the stodgy side of mainstream -- the relatively hip picks were Chris Potter (tenor sax), Anat Cohen (clarinet), and I can never fault Jack DeJohnette (drums). Two flat out bad picks: Snarky Puppy (group), and Trombone Shorty (trombone). (Well, Gregory Porter too, but consider his competition.) I don't have time to go deeper down the lists, but for example, Marsalis won trumpet, and I'd have to drop to 13th to find someone I would have voted for ahead of him (in fact did: Wadada Leo Smith; Dave Douglas came in 15th; 4th-place Terence Blanchard gave me pause). Only other down-ballot pick I'll mention is Geri Allen, who came in 3rd at piano. Would have been a pleasant surprise, but she died to get there, and still got beat by Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, who haven't produced exceptional albums since the early 1970s (OK, I did rather like Corea's 2014 Trilogy). New records rated this week:
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Unpacking: Found in the mail last two weeks (sorry I forgot to post last week):
Ask a question, or send a comment. Friday, October 6, 2017 Music Week
Music: Current count 28842 [28813] rated (+29), 396 [405] unrated (-9). After many short weeks, back to semi-normal last week, a swing that would have been even more pronounced had I not gotten distracted over the weekend: cooked a fairly large dinner on Saturday, had guests and a birthday party to attend on Sunday. Monday, too, has largely been chewed up by technical problems, so I'm getting a late start on this post, and not including Monday's unpacking. The short and scattered nature of yesterday's Weekend Roundup was one consequence of my weekend distractions. One thing I did there was to cite Donna Brazile's controversial Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC, as well as a rejoinder by Josh Marshall, before moving on to my own concerns. Shortly after I posted, I noticed Charles Pierce's own anti-Brazile rant: The Democratic Party Is Finding a Way to F*ck This Up, which starts off with this hideous preface:
I mean, sure, it was more depressing than 2008, when Hillary Clinton was denied the Democratic Party nomination and therefore was unable to blow the general election. But even though I was delighted with Obama's primary successes in 2008, Bernie Sanders' campaign was unprecedented, and his near-success even more thrilling. The Republican primaries had more faces, and some stylistic variation, but there ultimately wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the candidates. But there were real, significant differences between Sanders and Clinton, and they were things that mattered -- so how could one not get swept up in the opportunity? I don't know, but I have a hypothesis, based on a few people I know who I think of as having more/less lefty (but pro-Hillary) politics and extrapolating to more establishment-oriented liberals. It involves two factors: one is a cynical belief that substantial progressive change is not possible; the other is blind faith in liberal meritocracy, which has anointed the long line of Democratic Party leaders from aristocrats like the Roosevelts and Kennedys to accommodating strivers like the Clintons and Obama. That cynicism lets such people dismiss Bernie with whatever epithet they fancy (for Pierce, "smug, self-righteous") even though there is no evidence for their assertions, while always giving Hillary the benefit of any doubts, even though her own track record is full of compromises and betrayals. Such people are very hurt, probably more by Hillary's loss than by Trump's victory, because the former calls into question their belief in American exceptionalism, whereas the latter mostly hurts other people. Russia is their perfect villain, a way of blaming their failure not on other Americans but on some external evil. Still, I recently read David Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, and I don't recall a single Russian operative in the entire book. The "ratfuckers" -- the people conspiring to engineer districts and electorates to their partisan advantage -- are Republicans, and they've been very effective at it. I don't doubt that Russia helped them out here and there, but the game plan was hatched in Republican circles, and they were the ones who mostly carried it out. Blaming Russia may make some Democrats feel better about themselves, but it mostly means they're continuing to turn a blind eye to their real enemies. And in their failure to recognize real enemies, they've not only been ineffective at defending against them -- they've lost credibility among the very people who suffer Republican rule the worst. Pierce goes on to attack "SPW" ("Senator Professor Warren"), and to set up scapegoating the left if the Democrat Ralph Northam loses the Virginia gubernatorial race. He's right that the Democrats have various problems achieving unity, even in the face of the most obviously horrid Republicans in history, but it beats me how he thinks he's contributing to solidarity by trashing Bernie. Since I posted, I've run across two more pieces on the Brazile Affair: Glenn Greenwald: Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False -- three attacking Brazile, two of those repeated by Pierce -- and Matt Taibbi: Why Donna Brazile's Story Matters -- But Not for the Reason You Might Think. The lesson Taibbi draws from the story is how the Clinton camp distrusted democracy -- they sought to rig the primaries not because they couldn't win otherwise, but because they didn't think they should have to submit to the voters.
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