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Music Week [480 - 489]Monday, November 14, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27338 [27329] rated (+9), 395 [394] unrated (+1). I spent Tuesday evening following the election results on a pair of computers -- my main writing (work) computer and a Chromebook I use for travel. I mostly used two websites: I followed 538's 2016 Election Night "live coverage and results," and I used the New York Times' Presidential Election Results page, which was the first one I found that gave me a map with red/blue states I could scroll over to see that state's vote totals. My first hint that anything was amiss was early in the evening when I saw that Trump was winning Indiana and Kentucky with 60-61% -- like everyone else, I expected those states to go to Trump, but those margins struck me as a bit on the high side. Still, at that point 538's monitor was still showing Clinton with a 75% chance of winning, and even when her chances started slipping it wasn't very obvious to me what was happening. I thought the Republicans were projected to hold the House way too early, and the Democrats' chances of taking over the Senate collapsed pretty early in the evening, as Indiana and Florida were called quite early. However, by the time I went to bed (about 4AM CST) I was shocked and rather sick. I remained in a daze for several days (or maybe I'm still in one). I finally sat down and wrote up my analysis on Friday, then sat on it a day, edited some, and finally posted it on Sunday. I figure I'll follow up with a "Roundup" post some time this week (not necessarily waiting until my usual Sunday column -- a practice I'm thinking of discontinuing, unsure as I am of how much "reality" I can stand anymore). You might consider prodding me with questions and/or helping by pointing out particularly interesting links (I've grown rather weary of my usual sources). Music should be a salve in times like this, but my first reaction was to favor silence -- there seemed to be too much noise, too much stimulus, from an Umwelt that suddenly seemed alien, hostile, and more than a little deranged. Since the election I've watched no conventional television news, nor have I returned to the late-night shows we followed regularly during the campaign. I still get stuff from the web, but aside from the numbers I used in Sunday's list, I haven't gone looking for much -- least of all opinions. Nor have I in any way been tempted to go out and protest -- I gather there have been anti-Trump protests, but have no idea how common they are. More generally, I don't see much point in getting worked up over what bad thing Trump and the Republicans might do (e.g., Ryan Plans to Phase Out Medicare in 2017). There will be plenty of opportunity in the future when we'll have tangible threats to try to stop, so you might as well save your energy for that, or prepare quietly out of sight (better to appear genuinely shocked than blanketly obstructionist). When I did finally play some music, it was Leonard Cohen's Live in London. Partly I wanted to only hear real good stuff, partly I didn't want to be critical, and partly I had thought of "Democracy Is Coming to the USA" during a fairly optimistic Tuesday afternoon. I didn't know at the time that he had died (although I played it a couple more time after the news broke). After Cohen, I started playing some old jazz I liked, especially Coleman Hawkins. I mostly relied on my travel cases before I started picking things I hadn't heard in years from a nearby shelf. That's where I found the Sonny Criss set below: I had noticed it when looking for ungraded records in the database, so with it I finally returned to grading. Only late in the week did I give the new jazz queue a chance. The Terrel Stafford looked old-fashioned, and turned out to be a good deal better than his Lee Morgan tribute (not coincidentally because it sounds more like prime Morgan). Rodrigo Amado's album came in the mail during the week, and jumped the queue. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear anything avant -- I had been considering Allen Lowe's latest when the cataclysm disoriented me -- but I have him down for four previous A- records, so he seemed like a pretty good prospect. Still, only nine records rated this past week. Again, everything here comes from CDs. The computer I normally stream music on is unusable (well, it still prints, and I haven't tried workarounds like setting up an X-server or moving the speakers to a machine that still works, so I guess I haven't been trying very hard). I should remedy that some time this week: I've ordered new parts, so I'm pretty much building a whole new computer. The new one should actually be slightly more powerful than my work machine, so that opens up some possibilities for rebalancing my work. I'll get to more new jazz next week -- I've gone through five records today since I started work on this post (none very good) -- and when I get the new machine running I should be able to check out some promising things on Napster or elsewhere. Still would be a good idea to drain the new jazz queue, as the Jazz Critics Poll deadline is December 4 -- well before anything else I'm likely to be invited for. (If you're a critic who hasn't gotten an invite and should, let me know and I'll pass you on to Francis Davis -- or you can contact him directly.) I had rather hoped I'd get my Jazz and Non-Jazz working EOY lists set up by the time I posted this, but it now looks like all you're going to get if you follow the links is stubs. Also, at this point I have to stress that order is very preliminary. I'll get them fleshed out later this week, and will be updating them through the end of the year (and maybe next year as well -- as I've done so far for the 2015 Jazz and Non-Jazz lists). I should point out that Robert Christgau has a piece on Leonard Cohen: Our Man, the Sophisticate. Christgau also tweeted a recommendation for another Noisey piece on Cohen: Rajeev Balasubramanyam: An American State of Grace: Darkness and Light in Leonard Cohen's Political Imagination. Most likely there are many other worthy pieces on Cohen: e.g., see Richard Gehr, Rob Sheffield, Adam Sweeting. Comparatively little has been written about another music death last week: Leon Russell. For a few years in the 1970s I thought he was one of the greats (especially his eponymous debut album, plus his work on Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen), and with Hank Wilson's Back it looked like he could be a credible country singer. A couple of really awful albums followed (Stop All That Jazz and Will o' the Wisp) and I quickly lost interest, so I can't say much about his last forty years. I reckon I could say he was the Mac Rebennack of Tulsa, but Tulsa doesn't give a brilliant pianist and outrageous singer much to work with. Still, something else to mourn in one helluva awful week. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, November 7, 2016 Music WeekMusic: Current count 27329 [27287] rated (+42), 394 [423] unrated (-29). Actual rated count is probably 19 records -- at least that's how many are listed below. Counts for previous weeks are 15-9-19, so I'm in some kind of protracted rut. When I originally computed this week's count I came up with 18, but noticed that was less than I had listed, so I knew that I had failed to record some grade in the database. So I wound up listing all of the unrated records, and compared them to several other sources, and found a couple dozen records I hadn't counted correctly. Almost everything below was listened to on actual CDs -- I see three exceptions, two from Napster and one from Bandcamp. Reason there is that the computer I use for streaming effectively died last Monday/Tuesday, so I haven't been able to do any of that almost all week. (It's also kept me off Facebook.) The computer isn't actually dead. I can remotely log into it, but either the screen is permanently locked or the display circuitry is dead. I replaced the power supply in that computer a couple weeks ago, and it did seem to resolve a clicking/popping problem in the audio. Also could be that a software "upgrade" triggered the problem -- screen lockouts are not unreported, although the fixes I've seen haven't solved the problem. My current plan is to order new guts and rebuild the computer, pretty much from scratch (salvaging my new power supply and old hard drive, and re-using an old tower case, but not much else). I've started to shop for components, and have had a tough time settling on anything beyond an AMD FX-8350 AM3+ eight-core processor (for some reason Intel doesn't offer anything cost/performance-competitive). Anyhow, that CPU and comparable components might persuade me to consolidate my writing work on the new listening machine, at which point I can finally upgrade software on my "main" machine. Upgrade the network too. Important things I've been procrastinating on for way too long. Second time in last three weeks I have no A- (or better) records to report. BassDrumBone was my big hope, and I have both discs three spins, finding much to like but not enough to get excited about. The Richie Cole album is really lovely, Eric Hofbauer strikes a fine balance for Ives-in-jazz, and Nat Birchall adds another worthy chapter to the St. John Coltrane gospel. So, some good records here -- just none cracking the 97 A-list albums already on my 2016 list. I figure I'll format this list into best-of-year format sometime in the next two weeks -- EOY lists traditionally start appearing around Thanksgiving, and it turns out I never ever froze last year's lists (split for jazz and non-jazz). Also heard that NPR will once again support Francis Davis's Jazz Critics Poll, so I'll help out some there. Making slow progress collecting jazz reviews. I haven't made any changes to the 21st Century book -- everything I'm scraping up is going into a scratch file for future processing -- but I have continued to add directly to the 20th Century non-book, which recently inched over the 300-page mark. I'm still thinking that what I've written there is far patchier than is needed for a real record guide, but it's getting to where I may have to take it seriously. I have, by the way, continued to use the high grade scale (A- = 9, B = 5) as I've been updating, as opposed to the low scale (A- = 8, B = 4) I used in the first pass at the Jazz CG data. When I get back to the latter, I'm pretty sure I'll switch to the high scale. Pretty much everyone I consulted preferred the low scale, but I haven't made any meaningful distinctions between A+ and A in decades, and it doesn't seem either fair or reasonable to downgrade everything else because I want to insist on some concept of perfection. I don't expect to get much work done this coming week. For one thing, I'm sad to report that one of my oldest friends, Tony Jenkins, has died. He was 60, has struggled with liver cancer over the past year. He grew up next door, and wound up owning that house -- he was living there when we moved to Wichita in 1999, although he also had another house about a mile northeast, that he and his wife bought when they married. It was one of those tiny houses built for aircraft workers during WWII, and he transformed it into something special, tearing the roof off and building a second story with a master bedroom and bath that spanned the whole house. I spent a lot of time with him while he was doing that, trying to be helpful (but wasn't really), and he inspired much of the work I've done on our own house ever since. Haven't seen him much in the last few years, so his illness really came as shock and regret. He is survived by his wife Kathy and a rather large dog -- when they got married nearly four decades ago they told us they were going to practice with dogs, and they stuck to that story. Tony once told me he had been surrounded with death all his life, which struck me as excessively morose. But his brother Bobby, who was a couple years older than me (so about eight years older than Tony), was killed in Vietnam -- more than any single thing his senseless death turned me against that atrocious war. He also had a much older brother, Wayne, who died in a car crash before he turned sixty, but I don't think they were close. (I barely knew Wayne, mostly by reputation as a legendary local athlete who turned down a chance to play pro baseball to pursue a lucrative business career.) I don't know when Tony's parents died, but they've been long gone -- certainly before Tony got through his 20s, though probably not while he was still in his teens. He was a tremendous talker, the sort of guy you might be tempted to wind up a bit just to see where he takes it. He had low expectations in school -- I once prepared a very nice poetry notebook for him (not at all like the blasphemous one I prepped for my brother, the one that got him kicked out of school), and Tony declined to use it because he figured no one would believe it to be his own work. You could call that integrity -- he certainly had that. He worked in construction, doing siding for a while, then mostly ironwork for cement. Hard work, took a toll. But what he did learn, he could be downright perfectionist about. Early on I probably looked down on him as not very smart, but eventually I came to admire him, to respect his very real talents, and to appreciate his steady friendship. He was unique. He is missed, his absence an unfillable void. New records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, October 31, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27287 [27272] rated (+15), 423 [418] unrated (+5). Another light week. Spent Friday evening through Sunday working on an overly ambitious birthday dinner. I doubt I'll ever try that again -- at least at such scale. Wound up scratching five dishes from the menu -- a couple I'll finish up tonight to keep from wasting the ingredients, a couple more can wait indefinitely. Theme was Greek, with three main dishes, baked and fresh veggies, pita bread, dips, stuffed grape leaves, and various hot mezze, with walnut cake for dessert. The bread was disappointing, the dips mixed, the grape leaves tasty but mostly ignored, the mezze reduced to meatballs and sweetbreads (especially good). The main dishes -- fish, shrimp, rabbit, and briami were all spectacular. Cake was fine too. Biggest problem was logistical, as I was unable to get the food out in proper order, and we ran out of table space -- we probably would have been better off setting it up as a buffet, but we don't really have room for that either. Smaller dinners for six or so still seem workable, and the main dishes were pretty simple preparations -- long bakes or slow braises. Thanks to Elias Vlanton, Greek was the first non-American cuisine I fell in love with, but aside from Garithes Yiouvetsi I've rarely cooked it, having moved on and made Turkish cuisine my specialty. So it was nice to get back to basics recently. I posted October's Streamnotes on Saturday, just before I started cooking, so there's virtually nothing new listed below. I posted a notice on Facebook, and was surprised to find that nearly all of the commentary concerned my ACN background grades on Bruce Springsteen. I often use Streamnotes as a tool for going back and checking out records I had missed, but since I didn't bother with previously rated records I figured that at least listing them would provide some useful context. German avant-pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach was a case in point this past month, as I reviewed his latest plus six older ones, then listed 18 others (including Globe Unity and a couple of joint projects with wife Aki Takase). I started doing Springsteen after watching his appearance on Stephen Colbert plugging his memoir and a tie-in CD of odds and sods. Next I moved on to Live 1975-85, his famed 5-LP/3-CD live archive, then figured I might as well mop up the rest. Can't say as I discovered anything -- certainly nothing I wish I had bought earlier. As is well documented (e.g., here and here and here) I developed an intense dislike for Springsteen c. his Time cover -- partly my rather instinctive leanings toward antihype, partly revulsion over the hyperbolic dramaturgy of Born to Run (e.g., "Jungleland") and Darkness at the Edge of Town, and partly because I had become partisan in my fondness for the era's British pub rock movement (e.g., see the numerous references to Ducks Deluxe, op. cit.). One commenter wrote "a universe where BTR is a B+ is a chilly place indeed." Actually, my original Born to Run grade was B-. I certainly didn't feel chilly at the time. Lots of other things I loved at the time, and it's always been relative. I've mellowed considerably since then, acknowledging the title cut as magnificent (despite some terrible lyrics, like "And strap your hands 'cross my engines") although "Jungleland" still sucks. The album that started to turn me around was The River, where he cut out most of the crap and started to hone his sound down to something classically rock but still distinctive. Took me a while, but he eventually turned into someone I liked (took him a while too) -- e.g., I don't get the problem some commenters have with The Seeger Sessions. Still, I'm not here to argue that you shouldn't like something you actually do. If you have your own considered views, God bless you. I figure I'm mostly useful because I write about so much stuff you've never heard of, or never taken seriously. (Black Bombaim is a good case in point, or 75 Dollar Bill -- although Jason Gubbels and Robert Christgau got to the latter way before I did.) And when I do touch on something familiar, maybe that will help you correlate, as well as providing my own sanity check. Wouldn't want to miss anything important, especially if it's a widespread pick (like Springsteen, unlike Schlippenbach). More useful was Dan Weiss' complaint that I underrated Rae Sremmurd. One of those acts I always seem to come out low on. A comment that's more likely to trigger re-evaluation is Michael Tatum's on American Honey: "Genres that aren't supposed to mix, artists I don't care for, even songs I never liked . . . no one listens to all this stuff at the same time. But somehow it works." I could blame Spotify (Napster only has like seven cuts), but I heard all that and still couldn't decide whether it justified what's basically a mixtape. New issue of Downbeat came in the mail today, featuring their 81st Annual Readers Poll results. I've rarely felt further isolated from the jazz fans represented by the magazine (looks like about 15000 voted). The HOF winner was the late Phil Woods, a worthy candidate who narrowly edged out Wynton Marsalis -- not a personal favorite, but over 35 years now he's probably produced as many A- albums as Woods, maybe more. Woods also won for alto saxophone, where he was trailed by (get this): Kenny Garrett, David Sanborn, and Grace Kelly. Marsalis won trumpet, followed by a guy I'd never heard of, Roger Ingram (he's mostly played in big bands, going back to Louie Bellson and Woody Herman). Most disappointing for me was the album standings -- not so much that Maria Schneider won (most critics adore her) as that she was followed by Grace Kelly, Gregory Porter, Arturo Sandoval, and many others. I count two A-, two B+(***), and various lower grades. What the hell, let's list them:
I haven't assembled my 2016 lists yet (working list here), but compare my Best Jazz Albums of 2015, which intersects the earlier (and larger) half of this list, and considers a lot more. Hard to overstate how disgusted I am right now with the FBI over Hillary Clinton's emails -- easily the most boring subject in American politics for over a year now. (And while I don't doubt that Anthony Weiner is a creep, why the hell are they investigating him?) Before this broke I was actually thinking that both candidates had been treated unfairly. After all, the real primordial scum of American politics is Ted Cruz, but to go after him you'd have to talk about issues, and that's the real fear and dread of all sorts of media in America. I minor exception to this is the Wichita Eagle, which has published detailed position charts on various candidates. Trump's isn't as awful as you'd expect, and Clinton's isn't as good as you'd hope, but that race at least is pretty clear cut. But I was saddened by how awful the Democratic congressional candidates are this time -- Patrick Wiesner for Senate and Dan Giroux for House. Given the Republican incumbents, I'll probably wind up voting or both (although I know a few people who prefer independent Miranda Allen over Giroux), but neither has much of a chance. I'll be voting for Clinton too, although I fear my prediction that she'll be dogged by one stupid scandal after another for her entire term will turn out prescient. Very doubtful my wife will vote for her. Since the email thing broke open again, she's been hashtagging "itoldyouso" and heaping special scorn on those who claimed "she's been vetted" back in the primaries. Turns out none of the candidates were very well vetted, because the vanity and hubris presidential candidates all but require are endless generators of petty scandal. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, October 24, 2016 Music WeekMusic: Current count 27272 [27263] rated (+9), 418 [412] unrated (+6). One of those weeks that was just blown to shreds, as I came down with a stomach bug on Wednesday, spent a couple days pretty much stuck in bed, and still feel exhausted and a bit unsettled. Before getting sick several records got a lot of plays without quite convincing me they're A- material (Cables, Schlippenbach, American Honey). The only Schlippenbach Trio album I've given an A- to was 2015's Features, which I don't recall as being a close decision, so I thought I should at least go back and replay 1972's Pakistani Pomade -- perhaps a little wilder than the new one, but not nearly as vividly recorded. I've been playing more old Schlippenbach today, but nothing that can't wait until next week. Birthday tomorrow, will be 66. Spent some time today wading through the Social Security online form, so maybe I'll start drawing some income (and slow down the savings burn). Had planned on cooking tomorrow, but the illness forced a postponement -- maybe Saturday. I usually pick out a national cuisine and try to overdo it. I thought Greek would be fun this year: first non-American food I learned to cook, thanks to my dear college friend Elias Vlanton. I visited Elias back in June and we cooked up a pretty smashing dinner, using The Jerusalem Cookbook and a few other Mediterranean recipes, so he's been on my mind. Finally worked out a tentative menu last night: a delicate balance of feasible and awesome. Made very little progress on the jazz book(s) last week. I'm up to October 2005 in the notebook. I've reached a point where nearly all the reviews I'm finding had been copied to the Jazz Prospecting and/or Recycled Goods archives. Not sure yet if that means I can skip the rest, but good chance I can. For now I have one more Golden Oldies column to post, so that series will probably end with 2005. I should get around to a Streamnotes post later this week. Currently have 102 records, which isn't a huge amount, but if quantity doesn't force a post, the calendar will. Might give me some extra motivation to cherry pick the largest incoming queue I've had in several years. Sad to note the death of Tom Hayden, a founder of the new left even before he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War. As a teenager I read his book Rebellion in Newark, and of course rooted for him in the Chicago 8/7 trial. I was pleased to see him go into mainstream California politics, and can't say much about that. (Although I did roast him for endorsing Hillary over Bernie earlier this year: post here.) In 2012, he spoke to the annual meeting of the Peace and Social Justice Center here in Wichita, and did a nice job of tracing out the continuity from the New Left to today's progressive politics. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, October 17, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27263 [27244] rated (+19), 412 [401] unrated (+11). Rated count back way down again -- it was 15 two weeks ago, then jumped up to fairly normal 33 last week (not counting a bookkeeping windfall which made the posted total 46; September's weekly totals were 34, 38, 25, 30). Several obvious factors: good records get more spins than not-so-good ones, and that was especially true this week; I took a fair amount of time off for yardwork and cooking; and the machine I use to listen to Rhapsody has had some problems, so I've had it down for a couple days (hopefully a new power supply will help -- finally got it installed today and so far, so good). Up to February 2005 in my trawl through the online notebook for lost reviews. I've started to find some of the Jazz Consumer Guide surplus (before I started posting them in meta-columns in December 2005), as well as quite a few reviews of older jazz albums. I'm saving the latter in a Recorded Jazz in the 20th Century book file, currently a bit over 260 pages long (recent PDF here). I haven't updated the Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century PDF recently (you can still download the 144-page first pass here). New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Added grades for old LPs:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, October 10, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27244 [27198] rated (+46), 401 [390] unrated (+11). High rated count, partly inflated by finding some old grades in old notebooks that had never been registered in the database (see below). Still, most of the rated count comes from checking out a bunch of top-rated albums from this year, at least as tabulated by Album of the Year. Best album I found there was the new GOAT -- indeed, I'm not real sure Requiem isn't as good as 2014's A-listed Commune. As for the others, it's possible that more time might have put one or more of Savages, Angel Olsen, Kevin Morby, Future of the Left, or even Solange over the top. Two A- records from Robert Christgau's Noisey column. I couldn't play the YouTube link for the Youssou N'Dour mystery album (or whatever it is -- not sure it's even a thing). Both are rather marginal finds, but distinctive in their narrow niches. I'm still undecided about Black Bombaim but will probably wind up saying the same thing about it. Working fairly hard on the jazz book(s), although they're still in the very boring collection phase. (As I wrote that, I had a strange sense of deja vu, like I've tried to do this before.) I finished collecting reviews from Jazz Prospecting. Before moving on to Rhapsody Streamnotes, I thought I'd take a look at the old notebooks, and it's turned out that at least through 2004 there are quite a few reviews/notes there that didn't get worked into the various columns. (I hadn't broken out Jazz Prospecting Notes until JCG(7) in December 2005, so I was wondering whether I had bothered to write up anything on them later. I recall that at some point I started dumping the prospecting notes into the notebook, but those should be redundant with files I have already rummaged through.) I'm collecting the post-2000 releases in a flat file which is currently 98625 lines long (8454 albums, although minus redundancies probably closer to 6000; 833903 words). I'm also formatting the pre-2000 album reviews/notes into book form, currently 210 pages. I'm rather surprised that the latter has grown so large, given that I picked up most of my 20th century jazz before I started writing so much. My guess has long been that the amount of work it would take to turn those writings into a fairly decent guide book would be prohibitive, but for now it certainly doesn't hurt to organize what I do have into something more accessible. I haven't updated the 21st century book, and probably won't until I finish collecting Rhapsody Streamnotes, at which point I'll have collected virtually everything I've written on the subject. Then I figure I can go through the database and try to edit something coherent from all these widely scattered scraps. Scary what a huge job that's bound to be. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Added grades for remembered LPs from way back when:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, October 3, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27198 [27183] rated (+15), 390 [381] unrated (+9). Low rated count. Best explanation I can offer is that I took big chunks from a couple days to work on a drainage project in the back yard, and also spent a day cooking for friends (Mexican recipes for ceviche and corn-on-the-cobb rolled in cotija, Cuban recipes for red beans & rice and a chicken fricasee, fried plantains, and key lime pie). But also many of the records below took a lot of time: the three Springsteen titles (leftover from last week) total seven discs, and at least five of the others got three or more plays (up to six). Actually, when I went to close the week out last night, I only had 14 new rated records -- added Danny Brown and John Lindberg today (two of those multiplay albums). Or maybe I've just been bummed. Seems like everything is getting hard these days. Aside from the physical wear and tear, I had to deal with a server outage last week -- one of those things that periodically make me wonder whether it's worth the trouble to pay for the damn thing. Even more tedious, I've been collecting reviews from Recycled Goods for possible use in my book-in-progress, Recorded Jazz in the 21st Century: A Consumer Guide. Took me a couple seconds to concatenate 115 columns (427k words) and about three weeks to scroll through them and pick out the jazz reviews. I added the post-2000 records to a working file which currently has about 5000 reviews to add to the 21st century book. Still have Jazz Prospecting (110k words) and Rhapsody Streamnotes (641k words) to go, and I might as well do that before I start integrating all that material into the book. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to open a second book file, Recorded Jazz in the 20th Century: A (Haphazard and Woefully Incomplete) Consumer Guide, and stuffed most of my Recycled Goods pre-2000 jazz reviews into it (currently 136 pages). You can look at a PDF here. I haven't set up a download page for it. It's not even a real project at this point, just a repository. I will say, though, that by the time I got through the Recycled Goods columns, I was wishing I had set up a similar file for other things, especially African music. The database shows I have 703 rated African (and Middle Eastern, mostly from North Africa) albums. That's a fair start toward a record guide, but barely. I figure Robert Christgau would be in a better position to do a Consumer Guide to African Music: his African Set List adds up to 613 albums, but it looks like I haven't updated the list links since sometime in 2003 (max artist id = 5394 (of 7331), max album id = 11171 (of 16849). A quick search for albums with higher artist ids or VA albums with higher album ids generated a list of 2185 albums, but the actual number that should be added to the set list is probably less than 200. (If anyone wants to sort them out, please let me know.) Christgau's review of Drive-By Truckers is here. He also flagged the Handome Family's Unseen as a HM. For what little it's worth, I had Unseen as an A- last week. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 26, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27183 [27153] rated (+30), 381 [376] unrated (+5). Most of this week's list already appeared in last week's Streamnotes. Since then I saw Steven Colbert's show-long interview with Bruce Springsteen, checked out his new sampler, and decided I should go back and finally listen to the back catalog I had ignored -- one studio album (The Ghost of Tom Joad), a bunch of live albums, and today I've been slogging through the Tracks box set. Also spent a lot of time last week combing through the old Recycled Goods files, in preparation of adding a bunch of records to my draft book, Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century: A Consumer Guide (if you haven't downloaded the 144-page first pass yet, go to the form here). After 2-3 weeks toil, I still have about 25% of the columns to process. From there the next large cache of writings is the Streamnotes archive -- about twice the size of Recycled Goods (821k words vs. 427k). While going through Recycled Goods, I decided it would be cleaner if I also stashed the reviews of older jazz into another book draft file, so I opened one called Recorded Jazz in the 20th Century, and it's currently up to 75 pages. I figure that's a much lower priority, and seriously doubt I'll ever make a serious effort to clean it up and flesh it out, but it's kind of nice to have around. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 19, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27153 [27128] rated (+25), 376 [374] unrated (+2). First, I screwed up last night and misnumbered my Weekend Roundup post, so for various technical reasons the link I tweeted last night needs to be removed. Since the half-life of tweets seems to be less than two hours, the old one should soon be forgotten. Second, here again is the download link for my book-in-progress, Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century: A Consumer Guide. It is currently at what I call Stage One, which is to say that I've collected and sorted reviews from all of the 2004-11 Jazz Consumer Guide columns, but haven't done much further editing. Stage Two will add reviews for many more records: things I'm currently collecting from my Jazz Prospecting, Recycled Goods, and Rhapsody Streamnotes files. I currently have all of the JCG prospecting notes collected, and about one-third of Recycled Goods, so I'm at least a week away from starting to revise the draft. The PDF file is unchanged from last week, so no need to download it again, but if you haven't yet, please do. I've made a couple of piddly decisions on formatting since then: to remove the bold from the parenthetical label/year, and to change the year notation from '## to -## -- the latter because I've started to use "smart quotes" and getting all that consistent is going to be difficult. I'm also considering making a fairly substantial change to the grading system. I thought it might be better to convert the letter grades (with their 3-star subdivision of B+) into a numeric scale (1-10). My first attempt at a conversion was: 10 = A+, 9 = A, 8 = A-, 7 = B+(***), 6 = B+(**), 5 = B+(*), 4 = B, 3 = B- or C+, 2 = C or C-, 1 = any D, 0 = any E. Two problems there, one at the top of the scale, the other near the bottom. The former started when I initially applied my letter grade scale to my records list, A and A+ made sense only for records that had stood the test of time and many plays. However, after JCG started my working methodology changed so that I almost never managed the several dozen plays those older records had enjoyed. I basically stopped using those grades. For instance, the one and only A+ I've given to a jazz record released this century was James Carter's Chasin' the Gypsy, and that was released in 2000. (I'm pretty sure my most recent A+ was Lily Allen's It's Not Me, It's You in 2009, although it didn't get promoted until several years later.) Actually, there's not much A+ jazz earlier either: I count 41 albums, one each (or more in parens, but some are redundant) for: Louis Armstrong (5), Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis (2), Duke Ellington (9), Ella Fitzgerald (3), Coleman Hawkins (2), Billie Holiday (2), Fletcher Henderson, Johnny Hodges (2), Louis Jordan, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Art Pepper, Don Pullen, Sonny Rollins (3), Roswell Rudd, Jimmy Rushing, Pharoah Sanders, Horace Silver, Frank Sinatra, Art Tatum. That's out of 14032 jazz albums rated, so 1/334 (0.2%). That's, well, even I have to admit that's pretty picky -- rarefied even -- especially if the concept is to grade on some sort of curve. There are a good deal more A records, ten times as many (419, or 2.9% of the total), but they too are concentrated among older artists. From 2000 onward, I've given out 65 A grades (counting Carter's A+), an average of 4 per year (exactly, not counting 2016, which so far has 1). I don't have an easy way of counting the sample size there, but it's at least 5000 and probably closer to 7000 so we're looking at a number that will round off (probably up) to 1%. Seems to me like I could combine A and A+ at 10 and still have no more than 1% at that level -- less than 100 records covering two decades. The other problem is at the bottom. Keeping the three subdivisions of B+, which I think is well justified by my recent practice, pegging A- at 8 pushes B down to 4, and forces me to combine lower grades. This is less important, but intuitively it seems to me that B should be 5, and that the distinction between B- and C+ is meaningful (not that the difference between 4 and 3, or 3 and 2, is really going to sway any of your buying decisions). Below that matters less, not least because I put so little effort into discerning qualitative distinctions between records I actively dislike. In recent years my impression has been that each of the three B+ levels were fairly evenly distributed (possibly with a slight bulge in the middle, at **), with A- and B tapered off, and sub-B grades rare -- partly because I don't seek out records I'm unlikely to like, and partly because many of their publicists have given up on me. But I've never counted until now. I did three counts, first on the entire rated database (27526 albums), then on the jazz subset (14032), and finally on the post-2000 jazz subset (undercounted a bit at 8268), which breaks down thus: A+ 1 (0.01%), A 63 (0.76%), A- 883 (10.7%), B+(***) 1445 (19.0%), B+(**) 2122 (27.7%), B+(*) 1730 (22.6%), B 1064 (12.9%), B- 364 (4.4%), C+ 81 (0.97%), C 30 (0.36%) C- 15 (0.18%), D+ 2 (0.02%), D 2 (0.02%), plus 455 additional B+ albums (divided proportionately for the percentages; the overall B+ percentage is 69.56%). This actually looks rather like a pretty normal distribution, left-shifted by various factors biased in favor of selecting better records (ones I bought, sought out, or that savvy promoters sent my way) in an idiom that I broadly respect and enjoy. Or it may just be that the left-shift is to be expected, just because the skillset jazz demands is so exceptional. Taking all this into account, a few days back I proposed to shift my grade scale a bit leftward, combining A/A+ at 10 (still just the top 1% of rated albums), moving A- to 9 (10%, so the top decile), the B+ tiers to 8-7-6 (all records that will repay your interest), B to 5, B- to 4, C+ to 3, C or C- to 2, all D to 1. Of course, the latter ranks will be underrepresented. The only real reason for flagging a bad album is to warn consumers who might otherwise be tempted, but most bad records never tempt anyone -- they come from people you don't know or care about, and quickly vanish without a trace. So I wrote my proposal up and sent it around to various critics, most of whom didn't like it. For example, Robert Christgau wrote back: "I definitely think everything shd be a notch down, with perhaps a somewhat lenient view of what constitutes an A plus than in my system." So I should shift some A records to 10, leave the rest at 9, peg A- at 8, and let everything else fall accordingly, combining various lower grades I rarely use anyway. Splitting out more bins on the left would provide a more even distribution, but keeping 9 and 10 reserved for less than 1% also suggests a fetish for perfection that hardly anything can achieve. I'm not sure that's either useful or achievable. A couple others mentioned the Spin guide as a familiar model, with the implication that A- should be pegged at 8 (or maybe split between 7-8). However, my copy defines 10 as "an unimpeachable masterpiece or a flawed album of crucial historical importance" and 7-9 as "well worth buying, sure to provide you with sustained pleasure," and they even have kind words for 4-6 if you're "deeply interested in the artist or genre." I'm not sure what I'd be curious to see a histogram of those grades: how does the distribution line up with my own data? My mapping would put A- through B+(**) into the 7-9 range, as various degrees of records I recommend (indeed, that I store separately from recent jazz graded lower), while the 4-6 range gets B- to B+(*) -- the latter are records that I respect and sometimes even admire but don't much feel like playing again (those usually go to the basement, but thus far I haven't discarded any). Of course, if one started from scratch, one could devise an elegant distribution curve (say 4-7-10-13-16-16-13-10-7-4, or 2-5-9-14-20-20-14-9-5-2) and sort everything accordingly. But that assumes you can rank everything before slicing it into tranches, something that based on no small experience I find impossible. But more importantly for me, I need some way to mechanically transcribe the letter grades I have into numerical grades. So while I might get a more pleasing curve if I could move the uper half of my A- records from 8 to 9 and the upper third of my B+(***) albums from 7 to 8 and slide some slice starting at B+(*) down a notch, it would be hell for me to try to figure out how to split my existing levels. (It's going to be bad enough just to divvy up the unsorted B+ records.) Sorry to run on like that. I imagine everyone's eyes glazed over, but mapping it all out like that is helping me think it through. I'll let you know when I reach a conclusion. Meanwhile, feedback always welcome. Minor discrepancy in the rated count, which only includes one of the three Made to Break albums below. I wrote up the others while working on this post, but thought it made more sense to keep them grouped together. The Beatles stuff was in response to the belated CD release of the Hollywood Bowl album. I also played 1962-1966, which I had previously rated at A and found every bit as great. I hadn't previously rated 1967-1970, but knew everything on it. Even so, better than I expected. I also meant to get the third Anthology in, but had some problems with Napster that locked me out for a couple days. Finally got to it tonight and, well, it's not very good. Might as well add it too. New records rated this week:
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Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 12, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27128 [27090] rated (+38), 374 [369] unrated (+5). Fairly ordinary week here. I've mostly been looking for recent jazz beyond what's come in the mail. I don't think there's any non-jazz this week (aside from a Haitian comp that has Jazz in the title). Wound up playing many of the downloads I had been sitting on, including ECM's Peter Erskine (really John Taylor) box, and grabbed some older records while failing to find newer ones. Most turned out to be fairly unremarkable, but I did turn up two A- records fronted by saxophonists I've long enjoyed, one retro and one avant. I suppose the focus on jazz has been a side effect of starting a project to turn my old Jazz Consumer Guide columns into some sort of, well, I call it Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century: A Consumer Guide. I wrote 26 Jazz Consumer Guide columns for the Village Voice from April 2004 to May 2011 (archived here), self-published a 27th column in December 2011, and had a draft file open for a 28th. I managed to squeeze a little more than 1000 records into those columns, and I've collected all that writing in a Libre Office Writer file -- using default page and style formats it comes to 144 pages. Probably the best way to view it is as a PDF file, so I've set up a page you can use to download it (make sure you check the enable box -- my quick and dirty alternative to a captcha). The page has a form which asks for some questions before you download. I thought it might be nice to keep a count of how many times the file has been downloaded, and to collect some basic information, but the latter is strictly voluntary. I'm not sure, even, that I'll use any collected email addresses, but they would make it possible to interact more in the future. At 144 pages, the book is far from realizing the ambitions of its title. But I still have a lot more writing I can slide into the manuscript: starting with the 7th column in December 2005 I kept two extra files with extensive working notes ("Prospects" and "Surplus"), covering everything I listened to but didn't include in JCG. After that I posted Jazz Prospecting and Streamnotes, so I've done a fairly good job of covering new jazz from 2004 to present. There are also reviews in Recycled Goods columns from 2003 through 2013, and a few other scattered reviews (in Static Multimedia and the Village Voice). Thus far I've collected about half of the Prospects/Surplus files, some 330,000 words. Maybe half of that is redundant either with itself or with the published drafts, and what's left needs to be edited more compactly. Still, I expect that when I've done that -- what I call "stage two" -- the manuscript will more than double in size. Then on to "stage three" picking up the post-2011 drafts, which will almost certainly add a like amount. I'm less sure about "stage four," which involves trying to fill in important albums I missed -- most obviously from 2000-04 but also later. Perhaps that's why I've been focusing more on jazz lately. It's beginning to seem like I may have something tangible to show for what in recent years has often felt like a colossal waste of time. Not that I'm looking for sheer bulk, but any attempt to cover even just the highlights of jazz records since 2000 is bound to be massive: a quick check of my Music Database shows that I have listings for 9920 jazz albums where my earliest recording or release dats is 2000 or later. Some of those I haven't heard or rated -- about 10% of post-2000 artists (369/3773) -- so I could wind up expanding the current 144 pages by a factor of something like eight (to 1152 pages). I'm not sure I'm up for all that, but the hard part of the job has already been done. Would appreciate any feedback on the book project. New records rated this week:
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Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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