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Monday, August 15, 2016

Music: Current count 26996 [26901] rated (+95), 357 [420] unrated (-63).

Early last week I got up and found my new jazz queue was practically empty -- at least didn't have anything I particularly wanted to listen to. I wound up playing something from the travel case for breakfast, then took a look at the Downbeat ballot albums list I had saved and started looking things up on Rhapsody. By the end of the day, I had two very solid A-list albums: new works by George Coleman and David Murray I wasn't aware existed. I kept looking up ballot albums for the rest of the week, but didn't find any more A-list. The tally so far: [A-] 2, [***] 4, [**] 4, [*] 7, [B] 2. That brings the percentage of the 186 ballot albums I've heard up from 60.21% to 70.43%. That also skews the grade curve down a bit, although it still centers on mid-B+ (was 26-35-20, now 30-39-27). That leaves 58 albums, the majority most likely not on Rhapsody.

At some point I started wondering why, if the queue was empty, the unrated count was stuck around 440 even though it had been down around 400 before I took my June trip and fell behind. So I took a close look at the ratings database and found nearly sixty albums that I had done but hadn't written down the grade for. The actual newly rated count this week is close to the 36 albums listed below -- a pretty healthy weekly count, but way short of the humanly impossible 96 reported above. As I've explained before, the unrateds shot up over a decade ago when Wichita's local record stores went out of business and I bought boxloads of stuff I still haven't gotten to. The list also includes some LPs I didn't remember well enough to jot down when I first constructed the ratings list in the late 1990s -- of course, I wonder now how many of those I still have, since I sold off most of my vinyl in 1999. There are also a few promos from the mid-'00s that I didn't get to but didn't dispose of, but probably no more than a dozen promos from this decade -- I've been doing a pretty good job of getting through the new stuff even if I haven't made much progress with the old.

At some point I should make a serious effort to knock down that backlog, even if it just means reclassifying things I no longer have (or cannot find). That would be one of those decluttering projects we talk about doing but I never seem to be able to find time for. Besides, even if the promo stream is drying up -- this month's dearth is partly seasonal but last week's haul is one of the lamest ever. (Two more records arrived today, but I'm pretty sure if I hadn't held last Monday's mail back I'd be empty below. As it is, I won't be empty next week, but might not see a rebound either.)

I made phat thai last week, and finally jotted down the recipe I use -- been meaning to do that for some time, especially as I take various liberties with the cookbook (which, by the way, Michael Tatum recommended to me). Laura doesn't like bean sprouts, and I don't like cayenne, so I leave those things out (but I've found that a couple dried Chinese chili peppers don't hurt, as long as I pitch them before serving). Nice thing about the dish is that I can do all the prep, including soaking, and cook the thing in less than an hour. And with shrimp in the freezer, the only thing I have to worry about having fresh is the scallions.

I've had a few recipes online for many years, but I've been pretty erratic about adding to them. In fact, I have two sets, one "old" (which dates to 2000) and "new" (which starts in 2007, using a newer look and feel). At one point I meant to convert all the "old" to "new" format, and develop the code to where everything is cross-indexed by ingredients, cuisine, and even dinner party (so one can tell which dishes went together, even how often I make them -- if I bothered to keep track). But I never finished that code, never converted all the "old" to "new," and have only sporadically added things, mostly when I wanted to pass a recipe on. This is actually one of those, and this time I added some new code to display a picture of the finished dish. Looks pretty good, I think.

New records rated this week:

• Greg Abate & Phil Woods with the Tim Ray Trio: Kindred Spirits: Live at Chan's (2014 [2016], Whaling City Sound, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Karrin Allyson, Many a New Day: Karrin Allyson Sings Rodgers & Hammerstein (2015, Motéma): [r]: B
• Peter Bernstein: Let Loose (2016, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)
• Jim Black Trio: The Constant (2015 [2016], Intakt): [cd]: B+(***)
• Terri Lyne Carrington: The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul (2015, Concord): [r]: B+(**)
• George Coleman: A Master Speaks (2015 [2016], Smoke Sessions): [r]: A-
• Paquito D'Rivera: Jazz Meets the Classics (2012 [2014], Paquito/Sunnyside): [r]: B
• Paquito D'Rivera & Quinteto Cimarron: Aires Tropicales (2012 [2015], Paquito/Sunnyside): [r]: B-
• Paquito D'Rivera/Armando Manzanero: Paquito & Manzanero (2016, Paquito/Sunnyside): [r]: B+(*)
• Oran Etkin, What's New? Reimagining Benny Goodman (2015, Motéma): [r]: B+(***)
• Sullivan Fortner: Aria (2014 [2015], Impulse!): [r]: B+(***)
• Wycliffe Gordon: Somebody New (2015, Blues Back): [r]: B+(**)
• Stacey Kent: Tenderly (2015 [2016], Okeh): [r]: B+(***)
• Kirk Knuffke: Lamplighter (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(**)
• Camila Meza: Traces (2016, Sunnyside): [r]: B
• Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom: Otis Was a Polar Bear (2016, Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(**)
• Murray, Allen & Carrington Power Trio: Perfection (2015 [2016], Motéma): [r]: A-
• Quinsin Nachoff: Flux (2012 [2016], Mythology): [cd]: B+(**)
• Aaron Neville: Apache (2016, Tell It): [r]: B+(**)
• Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit: Ana (2015 [2016], PNL): [bc]: A-
• Adam O'Farrill: Stranger Days (2016, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Arturo O'Farrill Sextet: Boss Level (2013 [2016], Zoho): [r]: B+(*)
• Francisco Pais Lotus Project: Verde (2016, Product of Imagination): [cd]: B+(*)
• Aaron Parks/Thomas Fonnesbaek/Karsten Bagge: Groovements (2014 [2016], Stunt): [r]: B+(**)
• Sergio Pereira: Swingando (2016, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jim Rotondi: Dark Blue (2015 [2016], Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)
• Ches Smith: The Bell (2015 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Bill Stewart: Space Squid (2014 [2016], Pirouet): [r]: B+(*)
• John Stowell/Michael Zilber Quartet: Basement Blues (2012-15 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Miroslav Vitous: Music of Weather Report (2010-11 [2012], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Charenée Wade: Offering: The Music of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson (2015, Motéma): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Don Cherry/John Tchicai/Irène Schweizer/Léon Francioli/Pierre Favre: Musical Monsters (1980 [2016], Intakt): [cd]: A-
• Daunik Lazro/Joëlle Léandre/George Lewis: Enfances 8 Janv. 1984 (1984 [2016], Fou): [cd]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee/Paal Nilssen-Love: Candy (2007-14 [2015], PNL, 7CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Penny Penny: Shaka Bundu (1994 [2013], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)
• Pylon: Live (1983 [2016], Chunklet): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Quinsin Nachoff: Flux (Mythology): September 16
• Nine Live: Sonus Inenarribilis: Nine Live Plays the Music of John Clark (Mulatta): October 7

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

First a few loose ends left over from yesterday's Trump post:

1. For more on populism, see Russell Arben Fox: Ten Theses on Our Populist Moment: He quotes Damon Linker's monumentally stupid claim that "Trump may be the purest populist to receive a major-party presidential nomination in the nation's history," but the Linker also argues that:

   Populism doesn't have a fixed agenda or aim toward any particular policy goal, like liberalism, progressivism, conservatism, libertarianism, or socialism. It's a style -- one that favors paranoia and conspiracy-theorizing, exaggeration of problems, demonization of political opponents (politicians but also private citizens), and most of all extravagant flattery of "the people" (which the populist equates with his own supporters, excluding everyone else).

   In other words, Linker has his own private definition of Populism. To most other people, what he's describing is the propaganda pitch of fascism to the masses (as opposed to the pitch made behind closed doors to the oligarchy). So it shouldn't be surprising that recent examples are mostly Republican ("From Newt Gingrich . . . to Sarah Palin . . . and Donald Trump") as the Republican conservative project is so similar in intent to the fascist project. Fox himself comes up with a more sensible definition ("whatever articulation of economic justice, community protection, and local democracy one comes up with"), but he's ambivalent about calling it Populism. I haven't researched this, but I suspect part of the problem is that Populism has always been a label to attack the movement -- the proper name back in the 1890s was the People's Party -- and it was chosen by high-handed snobs who despised the people even more than the dead-end thinking of isms. Even today, I suspect that most of the people who regard Trump as a Populist do so because they regard "the people" as too ignorant, too intemperate, too irrational even to look out for their own interest. Of course, many of those same people also decry true economic populism as well, hoping that by linking Trump and Sanders they can dispose of both.

2. If you take one thing away from the Trump post, it should be that Trump's real problems are endemic to the Republican Party and its conservative ideologues and propagandists. Sure, Trump lacks the message discipline of a GW Bush and the ideological fervor of a Dick Cheney, but in the end he always retreats to the orthodox party line. And that's what doesn't work, and that's what you should really fear about him or any of the other party leaders.

3. On the other hand, what the party leaders hate about Trump is his loose mouth. They understand that belief in their economic ideas and their foreign policy doctrine depends on strict repetition, on never allowing a morsel of doubt to creep into the discussion. If you ever stop and think about whether the free market optimally solves all economic equations or whether the world would descend into chaos if the US ever stopped projecting its global superpowerness, you might realize that those doctrines, upon which rests so much privilege and luxury for the fortunate few, are in fact remarkably flawed. Trump is so ignorant and so uninhibited that he simply can't be trusted to keep those cherished myths inviolate.

4. One thing that the Trump debacle should impress upon people is that the idea that successful businessmen are really great problem solvers and managers, and especially that those are skills that can be transferred to politics and government, is sheer nonsense. Could be that some are, but circumstance and luck count for a lot, as does starting out with a fortune, as Trump did.

Some scattered links this week:

• Andrew Bacevich: The Decay of American Politics: "An Ode to Ike and Adlai," major party nominees of sixty years ago -- the author's "earliest recollection of national politics," somewhat more vaguely mine as well (I turned six just before the election). I'm not quite as nostalgic about this pair, but Eisenhower was a centrist who, like previous Republican nominees Thomas Dewey and Wendell Wilkie, had no desire much less delusions of rolling back the redefinition of what the federal government meant and did known as the New Deal. And Eisenhower was so respected that if in 1952 he had declared his party differently he might most likely would have been nominated by the Democrats. Stevenson was an eloquent, highly respected liberal, no less adored albeit by a narrower base. From his conservative perch, Bacevich underrates Stevenson, and Hillary Clinton as well, although as a long-time critic of American foreign policy and militarism he has no trouble marshalling his arguments against the latter:

  When it comes to foreign policy, Trump's preference for off-the-cuff utterances finds him committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic regularity. Spontaneity serves chiefly to expose his staggering ignorance.

  By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps, as she recites with practiced ease the pabulum that passes for right thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly militarized "Washington playbook" that President Obama himself has disparaged -- a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of costs. [ . . . ]

  So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States driving off a cliff, a Clinton presidency promises to be the equivalent of banging one's head against a brick wall without evident effect, wondering all the while why it hurts so much.

  Bacevich at least concedes that both candidates are representative of their parties, each having mastered what it takes to get nominated. And as such, he regards them less as flukes than as symptoms of some underlying shifts. He blames "the evil effects of money," and "the perverse impact of identity politics on policy." He doesn't unpack these points nearly well enough, so let me take a shot:

  • Money seems pretty obvious: he links to Lawrence Lessig's "brilliant and deeply disturbing TED talk. Of course, money has bought political influence in America for a long time -- Karl Rove's hero William McKinley would never have been elected president without the backing of wealthy patrons -- but Eisenhower was sought out by backers of both parties because he was already hugely popular, and because in the 1950s popular appeal was still worth more than money. That's changed over the years, utterly so in 2016. The Republican candidates were all selected by their billionaire backers -- Trump, of course, had an advantage there in being his own billionaire, which made him look a little less shady even though his own business history was plenty suspect. Clinton, on the other hand, cornered all the party's big money donors, so she would have ran unopposed had Sanders not come up with a novel way of financing a competitive campaign.

  • The matter of identity politics is somewhat subtler. In a sense it's always existed -- indeed, it seems to be the dominant factor in "third world" countries with weak democratic traditions, like Pakistan and post-Saddam Iraq. If you've read Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), you'll recall that most of his arguments about shifting political alignments were based on demographics. Early in the 20th century the Republican Party was preponderately northern and protestant, mostly white but most blacks who could voted Republican, while the Democratic Party represented a mix of northern Catholics and Jews along with southern whites. Economic factors occasionally appeared, but were often secondary: northern farmers shifted to the Democrats with Bryan, while labor more slowly shifted from R to D, especially with the New Deal. Phillips' scheme was for the Republicans to capture southern whites and northern Catholics -- Nixon started the former with his "southern strategy" and the latter came to be known as "Reagan Democrats." Still, I think Bacevich is getting at something more. Back in the 1950s America was, in self-concept if not quite reality, a homogeneous middle-class nation with a single mass market. Since then, America has become a good deal less homogeneous: immigration, which was suppressed in the 1920s, has greatly increased, as has inequality. But just as importantly, advertisers and media programmers have learned to target specific niche audiences, and politicos have followed their lead -- to the extent that even news and political opinion shows are now targeted to specific factions. In this atmosphere, identity has taken on increased significance.

    Still, political parties have to distinguish themselves somehow, and the main alternative to identity is class, something that became clearer when Franklin Roosevelt sided with the labor movement in the 1930s. Nixon and Reagan tried to counter this by pushing identity to the fore, which should have sharpened the class division of parties, but Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton went out of their way to screw over their labor supporters, and were able to get away with that as labor unions lost membership and clout, and as Republican hostility to non-whites, immigrants, gays, and anyone of a liberal disposition pushed those groups toward the Democrats. That the result appears to be "identity politics" mostly speaks to the fact that the sense of national unity that was forged during the New Deal and World War II has been fractured, most emphatically by economic inequality.

  Bacevich skips over here because he wants to move to say this:

  The essential point here is that, in the realm of national security, Hillary Clinton is utterly conventional. She subscribes to a worldview (and view of America's role in the world) that originated during the Cold War, reached its zenith in the 1990s when the United States proclaimed itself the planet's "sole superpower," and persists today remarkably unaffected by actual events. On the campaign trail, Clinton attests to her bona fides by routinely reaffirming her belief in American exceptionalism, paying fervent tribute to "the world's greatest military," swearing that she'll be "listening to our generals and admirals," and vowing to get tough on America's adversaries. These are, of course, the mandatory rituals of the contemporary Washington stump speech, amplified if anything by the perceived need for the first female candidate for president to emphasize her pugnacity.

  Bacevich then adds a third explanation: "the substitution of 'reality' for reality" -- the idea, facilitated by mass media and the PR industry, that well-managed perceptions count for more than what actually happens. Bacevich cites Daniel Boorstin's 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseydo-Events in America, written a mere decade after Americans started learning to see the world through the selective images beamed to their television screens. He could also have mentioned Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 (1969), on Richard Nixon's PR campaign.

• John Holbo: Is the Cato Institute a, Your Know, Libertarian Think-Tank? Article about libertarians bitching about the Libertarian Party ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. That's not a fight I care to get into, but I will say that, regardless of their stands on issues, Johnson and Weld were two of the more decent and respectable Republican governors of the last few decades. I have less sense of Johnson, but Weld did one commendable thing that I don't think any other politician of either party has done, which is to (admittedly only partially) free up a toll road. I'd like to see a national program established to convert toll roads and bridges to the (free) interstate highway system, and to outlaw the construction of new toll roads. As far as I know that's on no political agenda -- I'm not even sure libertarians would support it, but they should. But that aside, I linked to this piece to quote a comment from "derrida derider" which seems about right:

  When thinking of libertarians I always think of Lenin's aphorism about anarchists -- "fine people, but an ideology for children."

  Because the hook libertarianism always get stuck on is that we are social animals where every action we take affects someone else. So the JS Mill stuff that "you are free to do what you like so long as you don't hurt anyone else" in practice comes down to a choice of "you are free to do lots of stuff which will really hurt other people" or "you are free to anything I judge will not hurt me."

  The first is so obviously untenable that actually existing "libertarians" adopt the second -- that is, they are in fact conservatives engaged in JK Galbraith's conservative project throughout the ages -- to find a higher justification for selfishness. So it's no surprise to find that they are usually in the same political bed as conservatives.

  E.g., the Kochs may think they're for freedom in the abstract, but they're mostly for freedom for themselves, to make money at everyone else's expense. It was libertarians like the Kochs that led Mike Konczal to write We Already Tried Libertarianism -- It Was Called Feudalism.

• David E Sanger/Maggie Haberman: 50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation's Security 'at Risk':

  Fifty of the nation's most senior Republican national security officials, many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump "lacks the character, values and experience" to be president and "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being."

  Mr. Trump, the officials warn, "would be the most reckless president in American history."

  The letter says Mr. Trump would weaken the United States' moral authority and questions his knowledge of and belief in the Constitution. It says he has "demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding" of the nation's "vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges, its indispensable alliances and the democratic values" on which American policy should be based. And it laments that "Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself."

  "None of us will vote for Donald Trump," the letter states, though it notes later that many Americans "have doubts about Hillary Clinton, as do many of us."

  You'd think this would be good news for Clinton, but what they're accusing Trump of not understanding is the unexamined foundation of every foreign policy disaster of recent decades. Trump half discerns this, but in the end he decides they're only doing this for spite and personal gain -- i.e., the reasons Trump himself would use:

  Late Monday, Mr. Trump struck back. The signatories of the letter, he said in a statement, were "the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place." He dismissed them as "nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power."

  Mr. Trump correctly identified many of the signatories as the architects of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But he also blamed them for allowing Americans "to die in Benghazi" and for permitting "the rise of ISIS" -- referring to the 2012 attacks on the American mission in Libya and the spread of the Islamic State, both of which occurred during the Obama administration. At the time, most of Mr. Trump's Republican foreign policy critics were in think tanks, private consultancies or law firms, or signed on as advisers to the Republican hopefuls Mr. Trump beat in the primaries.

  If Trump was smarter he'd figure out a way to turn the tables and cast Hillary as the intemperate, dangerous warmonger and point to the hawks who are abandoning him and (in many cases) embracing her as further proof. It's not happening because he's fully absorbed the party line that all of America's problems abroad are because Obama is weak (or some kind of America-hating traitor), so he feels the need to continually reassert his own toughness, even though he's so shallow and erratic this comes across as recklessness. A good recent example is his refusal to concede that there are any conditions where he'd rule out the use of nuclear weapons.

  Meanwhile, many neocon hawks have moved past dissing Trump and on to supporting Clinton. In particular, see:

  • Zack Beauchamp: One of GOP's biggest hawks explains why he'd vote for Clinton over Trump: Max Boot.
  • Kania Khalek: Robert Kagan and Other Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton
  • Michael Crowley: GOP hawks declare war on Trump
  • Mranko Marcetic: Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise -- They've Always Backed Her
  • Gareth Porter: Hillary Clinton and Her Hawks
  • Michael Vickers: Why Trump Fails -- and Clinton Passes -- the Commander-in-Chief Test
  • Tessa Stuart: GOP Defectors: Every High-Profile Republican Who Refuses to Back Trump: This has the "50" list under August 8.

• Some campaign-related links:

  • Sedgwick County Republican chairman: 'Hold your nose' and vote Trump: Catchy new slogan here in Wichita. Latest SurveyUSA poll shows Trump still leading in Kansas, 44-39%, close enough for 538 to give Clinton a 17.3% chance of winning Kansas. In related Wichita Eagle articles, Governor Sam Brownback reiterated his firm support for Trump (he does, after all, have a lot of experience holding his nose). Also Sen. Pat Roberts was named as a Trump adviser on agriculture (i.e., agribusiness, in whose pocket Roberts has spent much more time than he has in Kansas).

  • John Cassidy: Why Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters: More hectoring on "right-wing populist movements," charging that Trump is out to create a neo-fascist America First movement that will outlive his own scattershot candidacy. I agree with Steve M's critique, No, he's just parroting what he's heard from Fox and the GOP. But as I pointd out the other day, Trump not only hears Republican "dog whistles," he responds to them like a dog (apologies, of course, to anyone who thinks I just insulted their best friend).

  • Maureen Dowd: The Perfect GOP Nominee: Hillary Clinton, of course: "They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up -- unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else."

  • Lisa Lerer/Ken Thomas: What Have We Learned From Hillary Clinton's Tax Returns? She released them for 2015 last week, presumably to taunt Trump. Headline figure was that Bill and her reaped $10.6 million, which seems like quite a bit for run a foundation and get most of their money (some $6 million) from speaking fees. They've also released earlier tax returns, showing that they've made $139 million from 2007-2014 -- I suspect that's more than any other ex-president has owned, a remarkable reward (not that Clinton, as president, didn't make other people even more money). These figures put them in the lower rungs of the 1%, so one may wonder where their allegiances actually lie.

  • Ryan Lizza: What We Learned About Trump's Supporters This Week: The main thing is that Jonathan Rothwell, a researcher at Gallup, did a deep dive into their polling database to see whether Trump's base of support comes from economic distress caused by trade deals and immigration, and finds that it doesn't. He finds that Trump's supporters "are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and perhaps the contradiction there leads to economic anxiety. They're also socially isolated: it's easier to hold stereotyped views of immigrants if you don't know any. No real news here for anyone who's been paying attention.

  • Mark Joseph Stern: "Second Amendment People" Solutions: Argues "Trump's Clinton 'joke' was no coincidence. The GOP espouses a right to bear arms whose logical conclusion is political assassination."

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton's E-Mails: Well, to save you some scanning, it's that there is none, other than the cozy access donors have to politicians for decades now.

Finally, a few links for further study (ran out of time to comment):

• Kathleen Geier: If Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are "progressive," then the word has lost all meaning.

• Greg Grandin: Hillary Clinton's Embrace of Kissinger Is Inexcusable.

• Jonathan Rauch: How American Politics Went Insane.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, August 13, 2016

One of the more annoying themes pundits like to spin about Donald Trump is how he represents some sort of populist backlash against the elites who run the country. To do so coherently you have to construct strawmen both of the elites and of the people. Coming up with a definition of elites that does not include Trump is an especially daunting challenge: he is, after all, extremely rich, very famous, a guy who flies around in private planes and helicopters, who lives in a postmodern castle in the heart of Manhattan. Sure, elite could mean many other things that Trump decidedly is not: brilliant scientists, stellar athletes, remarkable chefs and fashion designers, actors who can play someone other than themselves. But rich and famous counts for a lot in America: it gets you invited to hobnob with politicians and gives you free access to the media, privileges that, having been born rich, Trump has enjoyed nearly all his life.

Then there are the people. You can't have populism without people, but Trump's people aren't exactly a random cross-section of America -- what Bill Clinton referred to when he said he wanted a cabinet that looks like America (not that the one he picked wasn't a good deal richer and fancier dressed). Trump's cross-section is skewed white, older, and male (in almost exclusively to mostly order). But doesn't populism also have to signify some kind of economic revolt? It did in the 1990s when the Populist Party emerged in response to the worst recession American capitalism suffered (only exceeded by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and maybe the Bush meltdown of 2008). And it's certainly true that there is an economic revolt brewing all across America today, where poverty is increasing and most Americans above the poverty line are mired in stagnant wages, rising prices, and often crushing debt, while business (especially the financial sector) has recovered from 2008 and is posting record profits, with virtually all of the gains accruing to the billionaire class.

But it's not Trump's people who are behind this revolt -- those who really are down and out (or just struggling to get ahead) voted for Sanders or Clinton (if they voted at all). As Nate Silver shows (see The Mythology of Trump's 'Working Class' Support), Trump voters are significantly better off than median (average household income is $72K, about even with Cruz with but less than the $90K of Kasich and Rubio voters). They are, in short, comfortable enough they can afford to indulge their prejudices in false solutions and a candidate who won't help them in the least.

If anyone had any illusions that Trump's economic program would be a boon for billionaires and disaster for everyone else, the candidate dispelled them in two quick moves last week. First, he announced his team of economic advisers. For a quick rundown, see Andrew Ross Sorkin: Donald Trump's Economic Team Is Far From Typical, Patricia Cohen: Trump's Economic Team: Bankers and Billionaires (and All Men) and Evan Popp/Josh Israel: Donald Trump Announces Economic Policy Team: 13 Men -- not sure why these authors chose to focus on sex when the team is homogeneous in more extraordinary ways, such as their finance portfolios, and their PAC experience. Most are billionaires, and most built their fortunes on predatory financial shenanigans -- most notoriously John Paulson, who rigged up the Abacus Fund to bet against the mortgage bubble. A few may dabble in manufacturing ventures -- Steve Feinberg's company makes AR-15 assault rifles -- but only one has a manufacturing company at the base of his resume (Dan DiMicco, formerly of Nucor). None are economists, unless you count Stephen Moore (whose peerless record of bad predictions qualified him to be employed as Chief Economist at the Heritage Foundation).

Two of the advisers do have books that might be seen as signposts of a Trumpian economic nationalism, but they point in different directions, underscoring the incoherence of Trump's own blather: DiMicco's American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness (2015), and Peter Navarro's Crouching Tiger: What China's Militarism Means for the World (2015), but like so much of Trump's thinking they don't exactly fit together. Navarro, for instance, is more concerned with protecting business interests in East Asia against Chinese domination than bringing jobs back to America. I have no idea how DiMicco intends to rebuild America's manufacturing base, but most of Trump's advisers do have proven records of bankrupting companies and sending jobs elsewhere.

The absence of any credible economists is especially striking. Sorkin's article explains that even long-term Republican partisans like Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw are keeping their distance from Trump. Sorkin also lists some major Republican donors who have been staying away -- the people Trump picked mostly paid plenty for the proximity, and are all in position to more than make their investment back if Trump wins. Trump got a lot of credit during the primaries by not being beholden to the billionaires who backed his candidates, but as you can see from this list, that's all over now. Of course, if you're smart you should have realized that being your own billionaire backer doesn't convey one iota of independence from the billionaire class -- it merely harmonizes the corruption.

Perhaps Trump could have clarified all this in his "major economic speech" in Detroit (transcript here), but when it comes down to brass tacks, Trump has little to offer other than tax breaks and deregulation for the already rich, who will then magically take their gains and invest them in American jobs -- just like they did with the tax breaks and deregulation of the Reagan and Bush eras? (Amusing quote from Trump's China-bashing section: "Just enforcing intellectual property rules alone could save millions of American jobs. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, improved protection of America's intellectual property in China would produce more than 2 million more jobs right here in the United States." Collecting more intellectual property tariffs is the major purpose of TPP, which Trump claims he opposes.)

As Isaac Chotiner noted, the speech "was meant for Republican bigwigs as much as for passionate Trump voters" -- actually, I'd say much more for the bigwigs, as he pulled his punches on doing anything meaningful about balancing the trade deficit -- he just expects miraculous effects there from giving businesses free money. (By the way, the trade deficit actually is a boon to the finance industry, and a major driver of inequality. Some of that money shipped abroad goes to workers abroad, but a large slice of it goes to businesses, many of whom reinvest their profits in American banks which help drive up the prices of assets, benefitting the rich, not least the sticky-fingered bankers.)

The speech offers an avalanche of numbers abstracted from dubious sources, so it helps to follow with the fact checkers, like Fact-checking Donald Trump's speech to the Detroit Economic Club, to get a rough idea how selective Trump's writers were with facts and how outrageously they could spin them. I particularly appreciate this for the full context to Hillary's quote about putting "a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business" -- actually very thoughtful on how we need to help workers and regions impacted by technology and trade, touching even. But still, you only get a rough idea -- there's much more in the speech that could have been critiqued (like, e.g., the intellectual property crap I cited above), plus it would help to provide more context for Trump's sources (e.g., when he cites the Institute for Energy Research, are you aware that it's a Koch front group?).

Some critical links in response to the speech follow. I'm again struck by how hard it is for some pundits to let go of the notion that Trump is some sort of populist. As should be glaringly obvious by now, there is no economic dimension to Trump's so-called populism. He is too much a part of the rich in America to find any fault with them. Sure, he finds fault in some trade deals, but not because he opposes trade or wants to restore tariffs -- it's just that those agreements were badly negotiated, something a more skilled dealmaker like himself wouldn't have done and could easily fix. How, however, is mysterious, presumably magic, because he doesn't have any coherent program other than his boundless faith in himself.

So what makes Trump a populist? Well, it's all in the eyes of the beholder, isn't it? Deep down, Trump's campaign is based on little more than demagogic appeals to racism and xenophobia. It celebrates a subset of the nation that is white, native-born, and Christian, and flatters them as the true Americans, the people this country used to belong to, people who feel entitled to take the country back from the traitorous scum that let those foreigners and deviants and gave them jobs and power, and that cultivates their votes.

Trump's pitch is the classic right-wing scam, first pioneered by the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. So why dignify Trump as a populist, a movement from the 1890s which sought to elevate common people (mostly farmers at the time) by reining in the predatory practices of the rich, instead of deriding him as a fascist? I think it's because a certain class of pundit always viewed fascism and populism as two faces of the same thing: an expression of the ignorant prejudices of the lower orders. This betrays a good deal of ignorance both about the history of fascism and the current composition of Trump's movement: both have more to do with middle class fears of the masses but ultimately depend most of all on their real masters, the rich.

Robert O. Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism, argues that fascist movements developed in countries where aristocratic classes had been unable to repackage their political interests to have any real appeal in democratic elections. In essence, the fascists were able to broaden the appeal of conservatives by agitating the middle classes, playing to their fears of communist revolution and their various prejudices and hatreds and offering redemption through a renewed, often violent, cult of nationalism. To my mind, Paxton's focus on democratic appeal is overly narrow, as he uses it to deny that various murderous conservatives like Francisco Franco were really fascists. Curiously, his definition doesn't exclude Trump or, for that matter, much of the Republican Party at least since Newt Gingrich became party leader in the House. For twenty years (at least) Republicans have shamelessly campaigned to increase the power and wealth of the already rich, to vastly increase the degree of inequality among Americans, and they have done this by rallying a large slice -- middle-class and up, white, Christian, patriotic in the sense of being pro-military -- to their cause.

Of course, Republicans haven't advertised themselves as fascists -- Americans fought a World War to rid the world of fascism, and sought afterwards to characterize communism as an allied disorder (coming up with "totalitarianism" to group the two as opposed to our system of democracy and free enterprise). In particular, ever since Nixon launched his "southern strategy" and claimed "the silent majority" as his base, Republicans have been careful to "dog whistle" their appeals to racism. The only thing that makes Trump exceptional is that his anti-immigrant stance has been overtly racist -- certainly it doesn't extend to his Slovenian wife or his Scottish mother or his German grandparents -- and that he has refused to dissociate himself with the hard-core racists who have flocked to his campaign. (Has any presidential nominee ever had fewer American-born ancestors?) I suppose you can see from this why pundits who can't tell you the difference between fascism and populism might get confused, but is there anything more to it?

Well, Mussolini got his start leading a gang that smashed the heads of strikers. Trump hasn't done that, but he has encouraged his supporters to acts of violence against demonstrators, and most recently asked his "second amendment people" to stop his opponent, Hillary Clinton (after his convention chanted "lock her up"). Again, Republicans since Nixon have occasionally "dog whistled" their support for violence against their perceived enemies -- in particular, recall Nixon's embrace of "hard hats" who cracked the heads of peace protesters. And the threats made against Obama and Clinton by lesser Republicans and their fans are beyond counting.

I suppose you could add two more technical issues, but I suspect they're beyond the radar of most pundits. Trump's opposition to trade deals -- what you might call economic nationalism, although to be fair he doesn't -- recalls the fascist concern for autarky. And Trump's more explicit "America First" foreign policy stance threatens to fight wars with no concern for the casualties inflicted elsewhere -- hence his insistence on keeping the option of nuclear weapons "on the table" -- although there is little reason to think he would start wars for foreign conquest (as Mussolini and Hitler did). These aspects have created a huge schism within the Republican establishment, not because they point toward fascism but because they threaten to undermine the profits of global-minded businesses. Republican-leaning capitalists have been remarkably obtuse in not understanding that they've made much more money under Clinton and Obama than under Bush, but many are finally, belatedly realizing that Trump would be even worse for them than Bush was.

Just because Trump is a demagogue preying on the worst instincts of a once-powerful segment of the American people does not make him a populist, even if it makes him somewhat popular. After Detroit, that at least is one term that should never be associated with him. As for fascist, I won't argue no -- as a leftist I've long been hypersensitive to even the slightest whiff of fascism -- but I don't regard Trump as exceptionally fascist (e.g., as compared to Cruz and Kasich). I don't see him doing fascist things, but I don't see him undoing the present security state, and he may make things somewhat worse, especially for people who don't pass muster as white.

That's because what he really is isn't any sort of ideologue. He's simply a dog -- a guy who's been hearing all those Republican "dog whistles" for so long he assumes everyone can hear them, that they define reality. And as such, he campaigned on the basis of what he and all the other Republican dogs heard, oblivious to the tact and decorum the whistlers have worked so hard at cultivating. Trump should be a hugely popular figure in this world, because he's practically the only public person who speaks their understanding of the truth. On the other hand, the true conservatives who have been manipulating this electorate, especially the ones who bought wholesale into economic orthodoxy and the ones who are most obsessed with preserving America's worldwide hegemony are aghast, as well they should be.

Just as I won't deny that Trump is a fascist, I won't deny that his election would be catastrophic. It's not so much what he would do as what him winning would say about the American people: that we're so jaded we'd fall for a crude and ignorant media celebrity who understands nothing and has nothing to offer but discredited clichés, with a side of hate to pin our self-loathing on. Above all, his election would encourage the worst sort of racist revanchists, people who until Trump's rise were consigned to the farthest margins of political discourse. But it would also repopulate government with run-of-the-mill conservative spearchuckers, who would multiply the corrupt rot of the Bush administration, and that may do more damage in the long run.

Trump has been sinking in the polls, even since I started writing this. He seems to have learned that the only way to shift one horrid gaffe from the news cycle is to commit another one -- like his "2nd amendment people" threat, or his claim that Obama and Clinton "founded ISIS." Still, no matter how far Trump sinks, Clinton has been unable to push her share above 50%. If Trump wins it will say more about her than about him. Still, Trump only has one real chance: he needs all his dogs to vote, and he needs much of the rest of America to not bother. For that to happen, Clinton will have to prove remarkably uninspiring and/or a dangerous warmonger (her obsession with the "commander-in-chief test" worries me). But also Trump will have to stop pissing off most of the country, and at this point that seems pretty unlikely.

A few more links on the speech:

• Pat Garofalo: Economic Hustle: Donald Trump's big economic policy speech was no pivot, just pre-prepared fabrications and conspiracies
• David A Graham: Trump's Shotgun Marriage of Populism and Supply-Side Economics: can't let go of the 'P' word. Notes that Jeb Bush also picked the Detroit Economic Club for a major economic address last year (Emily Badger explains The odd Republican obsession with Detroit.)
• Sahil Kapur: Sliding Trump Seeks Solidarity With Establishment He Spurned: "Meanwhile, his emphasis on estate tax repeal drew intense excitement from the conservatives he was seeking to win over on Monday."
• Katherine Krueger: Trump Peddles Slew of Debunked Economic Claims in Detroit Speech
• Paul Krugman: Hair Meets Heirs: "I'm kind of fascinated by how 'populist' Donald Trump came out for elimination of the estate tax, which only hits a tiny number of yuuge estates." Hey, maybe because it hits so close to home?
• Charles P Pierce: Parsing Donald Trump's Lies in Detroit: "What was remarkable, though, is that his speech sold down the river all the faux-populism that his campaign had been peddling for the past 16 months."
• Griffin Tarpley: Trump Joins House GOP Supply Side Fanatics in Detroit Speech Endorsing Trickle Down Economics The intro rundown is pretty revealing as Tarpley lists a lot of things Trump didn't mention, then sums up: "Trump Excels as Ventriloquist's Dummy for Financier Speechwriters; Fascist Billionaire's Economic Panel Full of Hedge Fund Hyenas, Zombie Bankers, Bottom Fishers, and His Creditors."
• Ben Walsh: Trump's Big Economic Policy Address Is Short on Specifics, Other Than Help for Wealthy
• Jon Schwarz: "Capitalism Is a Lot More Important Than Democracy," Says Donald Trump's Economic Adviser: that's Stephen Moore ("also, like Trump, a charlatan").
• Andy Borowitz: Trump Economic Plan Calls for Every American to Inherit Millions From Father: OK, this one is satire, but if it worked for him, it certainly can work for you. Less certain that this one is satire: Trump Blasts Media for Reporting Things He Says.

Pierce, by the way, started his article with a somewhat unrelated reference to "a popular Republican strategist named Rick Wilson," who wrote an op-ed hoping that Trump be defeated so utterly his memory is forever purged from conservative consciousness. Pierce goes on to note:

You will see more of this as the campaign grinds on -- movement conservative Republicans attempting to separate their party from the inevitable consequence of the way they've all done politics since the Reagan people invited the god-botherers into the tent where the racists invited in by Nixon were already jamming up the bar service. [ . . . ]

Jesus H. Christ on a biscuit, can we stop with the Party of Lincoln crapola?

You forfeited the right to that title the moment that Harry Dent sat down to write a memo. You are now the Party of Calhoun, the party of voter suppression. Hell, I don't know what "constitutional conservatism" even means any more, except to note that it seems to involve radical Tentherism and a desire to roll back the effects of Amendments 13-15.

When conservatives set out to take over the country, they set themselves up with a tough task: to somehow convince a majority of Americans to enrich the 1% at their own expense. They did it by assembling as many single-issue constituencies as they could stand under their umbrella, and even then the few victories they scored were often marked by subterfuge -- remember Bush's "compassionate conservatism"? What about his promise to never engage in "nation building"? When Bush cratered the economy, they didn't readjust to the changed reality. They invented their own, in an echo chamber that was totally disconnected from reality (take another look at that fact checking linked to above), and within this world they found their champion in Donald Trump. That puts them in quite a bind: if, having rounded up all the hate groups, and all the fools, they still lose, and lose badly, the only option left for reaching new voters is to abandon their pursuit of inequality, but how can they do that given the way a handful of billionaires dominate the party?

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Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Voted today in Downbeat's Readers Poll: link here, go ahead and vote. Didn't intend on posting this, but took notes and finally decided my ballot might be of some small interest. In the Reader's Poll you only get one vote in each category. They conduct the poll using Survey Monkey, offering you a ballot of many suggestions for each category (usually two to five dozen, but up to 186 for Best Album) and the option to write something in. I almost always vote from the ballot, especially for albums even though my own lists prefer many things they left out. I list the categories below, my pick in bold (or bold italic for write-ins), followed by a few ballot items that I jotted down as possibilities on the first pass. Rarely I add a comment.

This is much quicker than filling out their Critics Poll ballot. My notes on that experience are here.

• Hall of Fame: Anthony Braxton; Han Bennink, Paul Bley, Don Byas, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim, Illinois Jacquet, Professor Longhair, Sam Rivers, George Russell, Pharoah Sanders, Cedar Walton. (I usually pick Russell, but thought Braxton might have more chance. Obvious write-in candidates: Louis Jordan, Jimmy Rushing, Mal Waldron.)
• Jazz Artist: Henry Threadgill; Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Douglas, Fred Hersch, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Wadada Leo Smith, Ken Vandermark.
• Jazz Group: Mostly Other People Do the Killing; The Bad Plus, Microscopic Septet, Rova. (Write-in here. I generally don't like voting for artist name groups, and these made up approx. 90% of the ballot, so I thought an act of rebellion was in order.)
• Big Band: Ken Vandermark Resonance Ensemble; Steven Bernstein Millennial Territory Orchestra, Either/Orchestra, ICP Orchestra, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Vienna Art Orchestra. (Another write-in, doesn't always bear Vandermark's name, but let's be clear. Haven't noticed the other candidates being very active.)
• Jazz Album (Released June 1, 2015 to May 31, 2016): Henry Threadgill, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (Pi '16); other A- on ballot: Amir ElSaffar & Two Rivers Ensemble, Crisis (Pi); Barry Altschul 3dom Factor, Tales of the Unforeseen (TUM); Erik Friedlander, Oscalypso (Skipstone); Fred Hersch, Solo (Palmetto); Jack DeJohnette/Ravi Coltrane/Matthew Garrison, In Movement (ECM '16); Liberty Ellman, Radiate (Pi); Matthew Shipp Trio, The Conduct of Jazz (Thirsty Ear); Mike Reed's People, Places & Things, A New Kind of Dance (482 Music); Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Mauch Chunk (Hot Cup); Nate Wooley Quintet, (Dance To) The Early Music (Clean Feed); Nicole Mitchell/Tomeka Reid/Mike Reed, Artifacts (482 Music); Noah Preminger, Pivot: Live At 55 Bar (self release); Ochion Jewell Quartet, VOLK (self release); Sonny Rollins, Holding The Stage: Road Shows, Vol. 4 (Doxy/OKeh). Two full A albums not on ballot: Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (Intakt 8/15); Aly Keita/Jan Galega Brönnimann/Lucas Niggli: Kalo-Yele (Intakt 1/16). Only one Intakt album on ballot (Aruan Ortiz); guess they had to save room for: Concord/Telarc/MCG Jazz (11), ECM (11), Blue Note (10), Mack Avenue (10), Smoke Sessions (9), Sunnyside (9), Columbia/OKeh (7), HighNote/Savant (7), Motema (7). Clean Feed (5) did best among imports (after ECM, which is distributed by Universal in US so is really in a different league). Pi placed four records; they released six albums in 2015 and four so far this year.
• Historical Album (Released June 1, 2015 to May 31, 2016): Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, All My Yesterdays: The Debut 1966 Recordings at the Village Vanguard (Resonance); other A- records: Blind Alfred Reed, Appalachian Visionary (Dust to Digital '16); Bobby Rush, Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush (Omnivore); Erroll Garner, The Complete Concert by the Sea (Sony Legacy); Miles Davis, Miles Davis At Newport: 1955-1975 The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 (Sony Legacy); Various Artists, The Rough Guide to the Blues Songsters (Rough Guide).
• Trumpet: Wadada Leo Smith; Ralph Alessi, Steven Bernstein, Dave Douglas, Ingrid Jensen, Kirk Knuffke, Brian Lynch, Tomasz Stanko.
• Trombone: Roswell Rudd; Ray Anderson, Jeb Bishop, Joe Fiedler, George Lewis, Phil Ranelin, Steve Swell.
• Soprano Saxophone: Sam Newsome; Jan Garbarek, Evan Parker, Bob Wilber.
• Alto Saxophone: François Carrier; Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Marty Ehrlich, Jon Irabagon, Lee Konitz, Oliver Lake, Steve Lehman, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Joe McPhee, Charles McPherson, Ted Nash, Henry Threadgill, Bobby Watson, Miguel Zenón, John Zorn.
• Tenor Saxophone: Ivo Perelman; Harry Allen, JD Allen, Peter Brötzmann, James Carter, Charles Gayle, George Garzone, Jon Irabagon, Joe Lovano, Tony Malaby, Joe McPhee, David Murray, Larry Ochs, Evan Parker, Houston Person, Chris Potter, Ken Vandermark.
• Baritone Saxophone: Brian Landrus; Hamiet Bluiett, Vinny Golia, Mats Gustafsson, Scott Robinson, Colin Stetson, Joe Temperley, Ken Vandermark.
• Clarinet: Michael Moore; Evan Christopher, Anat Cohen, Eddie Daniels, Marty Ehrlich, Ben Goldberg, David Krakauer, Michel Portal, Perry Robinson, Louis Sclavis.
• Flute: Nicole Mitchell.
• Piano: Myra Melford; Kenny Barron, George Cables, Uri Caine, Marilyn Crispell, Satoko Fujii, David Hazeltine, Abdullah Ibrahim, Ethan Iverson, Vijay Iyer, Keith Jarrett, Misha Mengelberg, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Matthew Shipp, Craig Taborn. Huge ballot omission (was tempted to write her in): Irène Schweizer.
• Keyboard: Jamie Saft; Nik Bärtsch, Uri Caine, Wayne Horvitz, John Medeski, Matthew Shipp, Craig Taborn, Gary Versace.
• Organ: Gary Versace; Brian Charette, Mike LeDonne.
• Guitar: Mary Halvorson; Rez Abbasi, John Abercrombie, Nels Cline, Liberty Ellman, Bill Frisell, Joe Morris, Marc Ribot.
• Bass: William Parker; Ben Allison, Arild Andersen, Omer Avital, Stephan Crump, Mark Dresser, Michael Formanek, Drew Gress, John Hébert, Mark Helias, Dave Holland, Marc Johnson, Eric Revis, Peter Washington, Reggie Workman.
• Electric Bass: Steve Swallow.
• Violin: Jenny Scheinman; Charles Burnham, Jason Kao Hwang, Carlos Zingaro.
• Drums: Andrew Cyrille; Han Bennink, Jim Black, Gerald Cleaver, Jack DeJohnette, Hamid Drake, Gerry Hemingway, John Hollenbeck, Lewis Nash, Bobby Previte, Matt Wilson.
• Vibraphone: Karl Berger; Jason Adasiewicz, Khan Jamal, Joe Locke, Matt Moran, Warren Smith.
• Percussion: Han Bennink; Kahil El'Zabar, Marilyn Mazur, Adam Rudolph, Warren Smith, Dan Weiss.
• Miscellaneous Instrument: Erik Friedlander (cello); Rabih Abou-Khalil (oud), Edmar Castaneda (Colombian harp), Howard Johnson (tuba), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), Grégoire Maret (harmonica), David Murray (bass clarinet), Bob Stewart (tuba).
• Male Vocalist: Freddy Cole.
• Female Vocalist: Catherine Russell; Ernestine Anderson, Patricia Barber, Sheila Jordan, Diana Krall, René Marie, Mary Stallings, Fay Victor.
• Composer: Carla Bley; Ben Allison, Steve Lehman, Henry Threadgill, John Zorn.
• Arranger: Steven Bernstein.
• Record Label: Intakt; Clean Feed, Delmark, No Business, Pi Recordings, anyone that sends me promos.
• Blues Artist or Group: Dave & Phil Alvin; Guy Davis, Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, James Blood Ulmer.
• Blues Album (Released June 1, 2015 to May 31, 2016): Various Artists, God Don't Never Change: Songs Of Blind Willie Johnson (Alligator); only other A- record: The Ragpicker String Band, The Ragpicker String Band (Yellow Dog).
• Beyond Artist or Group: Laurie Anderson; Erykah Badu, Courtney Barnett, Beyoncé, Chance the Rapper, Leonard Cohen, Flying Lotus, Future, Grimes, Carly Rae Jepsen, Kendrick Lamar, Willie Nelson, Parquet Courts, Rihanna, The Roots, Tinariwen, Kanye West, Neil Young.
• Beyond Album (Released June 1, 2015 to May 31, 2016): Parquet Courts, Human Performance (Rough Trade '16); other A- records: Aesop Rock, The Impossible Kid (Rhymesayers '16); Anderson .Paak, Malibu (Steel Wool '16); Ashley Monroe, The Blade (Warner Bros. Nashville); BJ The Chicago Kid, In My Mind (Motown '16); Bonnie Raitt, Dig In Deep (Redwing '16); Carly Rae Jepsen, Emotion (604/Schoolboy/Interscope); Chance the Rapper, Coloring Book (self release '16); Erykah Badu, But You Caint Use My Phone (Motown/Control Freaq); Ezra Furman, Perpetual Motion People (Bella Union); Grimes, Art Angels (4AD); Rihanna, Anti (Westbury Road/Roc Nation '16).

I copied the full album ballots into the notebook as a check on how much I've heard (and still have to dig up). Of 186 new jazz albums, I've heard 112 (60.21%), grades breaking: [A-] 15, [***] 26, [**] 35, [*] 20, [B] 10, [B-] 4, [C+] 1, [C] 1, [C-] 1. I could do the same thing for Historical and Blues but my cut is extremely low. I have nothing to say about Beyond other than that records so labeled aren't what we used to call "far out."

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Monday, August 8, 2016

Music: Current count 26901 [26875] rated (+26), 420 [423] unrated (-3).

Another week that's liable to make people think I'm an easy grader, or at least one that has a few soft spots that make him an easy mark: six A- records, eleven (or twelve counting the grade change) high B+, that's something like 65%. In my defense, several things came into alignment this past week. Main one was that I did a major update of Robert Christgau's website, which got me rumaging through recent EW lists for things I hadn't gotten to yet, which yielded two solid A- records (Konono No. 1, Lori McKenna) and a bunch of just-unders (Leland Sundries, Dawn Oberg, Walter Salas-Humara, older Lori McKenna). I also caught up with a purple patch in the new jazz queue: a batch of Clean Feeds, plus new albums by old favorites Stephan Crump and Steve Lehman. Also stumbled upon some old records I had been looking for (Peter Kuhn, Ellery Eskelin, Audio One), looked up some big-name recent jazz I didn't get in the mail (Kenny Garrett, Charlie Hunter, Joe Lovano, Markus Stockhausen). Didn't leave much time for bottom trawling. In this company, the dud of the week was Garrett's Do Your Dance -- something I might of suspected given that he snagged the cover of Downbeat (nearly all of my old JCG duds had been on Downbeat's cover).

I don't usually make a point of linking to music, but the search for Crump's cover led me to his Bandcamp page. Note that to start with the first cut, you have to scroll down to the song listing and pick it from there. More records there, including some early ones I should check out, but I don't see my favorite one, 2010's Reclamation. I reviewed this from CD, but Bandcamp is one of the best things that's happened for someone who wants to review a broad swathe of records like I do. Also, I think, good for customers, who among other things get to sanity check reviewers like me.

While I'm at it, here's a YouTube link for the song of the week, Dawn Oberg's "Republican Jesus", from her short 2015 LP Bring. Probably the most pointed political song since Todd Snider's "Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight White White American Male" -- actually more pointed since the analysis is deeper and more detailed, but the subject is pretty much the same.

A couple things I could use some feedback on:

• Does Spotify (or any other non-Apple streaming source) have much that Rhapsody/Napster doesn't? I ran into this question because there's at least one Lori McKenna album I couldn't find on Rhapsody or Bandcamp that seems to be on Spotify. I tried Spotify's "free" service back when it came out (at least in the US) and managed to write up a couple albums based on it, but generally hated everything about it (the ads, of course, but also the search and the general greediness of the application).

• Are there any MP3 players which can be managed from Linux more or less as seemlessly as iPods under iTunes on Windows (or presumably Macs, something I refuse to even consider)? I have an iPod Nano which I haven't used since my last Windows computer bit the dust (fittingly, during one of those "automatic software updates"). Someone mentioned Sansa Clip to me: from what I gather you can mount it and poke files into it, but not much more. Searching this question gives me a lot of Linux applications like Amarok, XMMS, and RhythmBox -- something else I should learn more about, but not what I'm asking.

Follow the Contact link for an email address, or comment on Facebook of something like that.

New records rated this week:

• Audio One: The Midwest School (2014, Audiographic): [bc]: B+(**)
• Carate Urio Orchestra: Ljubljana (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Stephan Crump: Stephan Crump's Rhombal (2016, Papillon): [cd]: A-
• Whit Dickey/Kirk Knuffke: Fierce Silence (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Kenny Garrett: Do Your Dance! (2016, Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(*)
• Hieroglyphic Being: The Disco's of Imhotep (2016, Technicolour): [r]: B+(***)
• Charlie Hunter: Everybody Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth (2016, Ground Up/Decca): [r]: B+(***)
• Konono No. 1/Batida: Konono No. 1 Meets Batida (2016, Crammed Discs): [r]: A-
• The Kropotkins: Portents of Love (2015, Mulatta): [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Lehman: Sélébéyone (2016, Pi): [cd]: A-
• Leland Sundries: Music for Outcasts (2016, L'Echiquier): [r]: B+(***)
• Lori McKenna: The Bird & the Rifle (2016, CN/Thirty Tigers): [r]: A-
• Dawn Oberg: Bring (2015, Blossom Theory): [r]: B+(***)
• Jason Roebke Octet: Cinema Spiral (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Walter Salas-Humara: Work: Part One (2015, Sonic Pyramid): [r]: B+(**)
• Walter Salas-Humara: Explodes and Disappears (2016, Sonic Pyramid): [r]: B+(***)
• Susana Santos Silva/Lotte Anker/Sten Sandell/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Jon Fält: Life and Other Transient Storms (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Stirrup: Cut (2016, Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• Markus Stockhausen/Florian Weber: Alba (2015 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Joe Lovano Quartet: Classic! Live at Newport (2005 [2016], Blue Note): [r]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black: Arcanum Moderne (2002 [2003], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Peter Kuhn Quartet: The Kill (1981 [1982], Soul Note): [r]: A-
• Leland Sundries: The Foundry EP (2012, L'Echiquier): [r]: B+(**)
• Lori McKenna: Paper Wings and Halo (2000, Orcheard): [r]: B+(**)
• Lori McKenna: Pieces of Me (2001, Signature Sounds): [r]: B+(***)
• Lori McKenna: The Kitchen Tapes (2001 [2004], Gyrox): [r]: B+(*)
• Lori McKenna: Bittertown (2004, Signature Sounds): [r]: B+(**)

Grade changes:

• Dawn Oberg: Rye (2012, Blossom Theory): [r]: [was: B+(*)] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jim Black Trio: The Constant (Intakt): advance, August 24
• Don Cherry/John Tchicai/Irène Schweizer/Léon Francioli/Pierre Favre: Musical Monsters (1980, Intakt): advance, August 24
• Barbara Dane with Tammy Hall: Throw It Away . . . (Dreadnaught Music): August 19
• Peter Kuhn/Dave Sewelson/Gerald Cleaver/Larry Roland: Our Earth/Our World (pfMentum)
• Francisco Pais Lotus Project: Verde (Product of Imagination): September 23
• John Stowell/Michael Zilber Quartet: Basement Blues (Origin): August 19

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Sunday, August 7, 2016

I want to start with a paragraph from John Lanchester: Brexit Blues:

Immigration, the issue on which Leave campaigned most effectively and most cynically, is the subject on which this bewilderment is most apparent. There are obviously strong elements of racism and xenophobia in anti-immigrant sentiment. All racists who voted, voted Leave. But there are plenty of people who aren't so much hostile to immigrants as baffled by them. They feel left behind, abandoned, poor, ignored and struggling; so how come immigrants want to come here, and do so well when they get here? If Britain is broken, which is what many Leave voters think, why is it so attractive? How can so many people succeed where they are failing? A revealing, and sad, piece in the Economist in 2014 described Tilbury, forty minutes from London, where the white working class look on resentfully as immigrants get up early and get the train to jobs in the capital which, to them, seems impossibly distant. 'Most residents of the town, one of England's poorest places, are as likely to commute to the capital as fly to the moon.'

The evidence on immigration is clear: EU immigrants are net contributors to the UK's finances, and are less likely to claim benefits than the native British. The average immigrant is younger, better educated and healthier than the average British citizen. In other words, for every immigrant we let in, the country is richer, more able to pay for its health, education and welfare needs, and less dependent on benefits. They are exactly the demographic the UK needs.

Not sure of the numbers, but offhand this sounds like a pretty fair description of immigrant America as well -- maybe there is a slightly larger slice of unskilled immigrant workers because the US has much more agribusiness, but a lot of the immigrants I know are doctors and engineers, and I suspect that immigrants own a disproportionate share of small businesses. One widely reported figure is that Muslims in America have a higher than average per capita income, so it's hard to see them as an economic threat to the middle class -- they're part of it. One thing we do have in common with Britain is that anti-immigrant fervor seems to be greatest in places with damn few immigrants. (Trump's third strongest state -- see below -- is the formerly Democratic stronghold of West Virginia, which is practically hermetically sealed from the rest of the US.) Whether that's due to ignorance and unfamiliarity or because those areas are the ones most left behind by economic trends -- including the ones most tied to immigration -- isn't clear (most observers read into this picture what they want to see).

Lanchester makes another important point, which is that the Brexit referendum succeeded because the single question cut against the grain of the political party system: "To simplify, the Torries are a coalition of nationalists, who voted out, and business interests, who voted in; Labour is a coalition of urban liberals, who voted in, and the working class, who voted out." I suspect that if we had a national referendum on TPP you'd see a similar alignment against it (and it would get voted down, although the stakes would be far less). On the other hand, Trump vs. Clinton is going to wind up being a vote along party lines, not an alignment of outsiders against insiders or populists against elitists or any such thing.

Some scattered links this week:

• David Auerbach: Donald Trump: Moosbrugger for President: Long piece, finds an analogue for Trump in Robert Musil's novel, The Man Without Qualities, left incomplete by the author's death in 1942:

  The character who concerns us is Christian Moosbrugger, a working-class murderer of women who becomes an object of fascination for many of the characters in the novel and of the Vienna they inhabit. During his trial for the brutal murder of a prostitute, he becomes a celebrity, due to his cavalier and eccentric manner. [ . . . ] His "discipline" is akin to Trump's nebulous "art of the deal," not a teachable trade but an esoteric, innate property that makes him better than others -- a Macguffin. Trump is not a murderer; unlike Moosbrugger, he does not need to be. Trump was fortunate enough to begin with his father's millions and the ability to achieve dominance without physical violence. For Moosbrugger, violence was the only option available to him. Moosbrugger is no more a "murderer" than Trump is a "politician." They perpetrate amoral (not immoral) acts not out of their characters but out of a lack of character.

  Of course, if Trump becomes president, he will become a murderer -- much like Obama before him, by signing off on the assassination of alleged enemies (and, to use a time-worn phrase, fellow travelers). GW Bush and Bill Clinton too, but they had a head start as governors signing death warrants for condemned felons.

  I also like Auerbach's line:

  Trump's political rise is a product of the commodification of attention. As the ballooning of new media and analytics have facilitated the microscopic examination of consumer attention, the analysis has been performed with indifference to the consequences of that attention. Just as Donald Trump does not care why he is loved, worshipped, and feared -- no matter what the consequences -- we have seen massed content production turn to clickbait, hate clicks, and propaganda in pursuit of viewer eyes. By mindlessly mirroring fear and tribalism, the new media machine has produced a dangerous amount of collateral damage.

  It seems like it took a couple years after he became president before psychologists started probing the mind of GW Bush, but now we are already blessed with Dan P McAdams: The Mind of Donald Trump -- better safe than sorry, I suppose. Here he is just getting warmed up:

  Researchers rank Richard Nixon as the nation's most disagreeable president. But he was sweetness and light compared with the man who once sent The New York Times' Gail Collins a copy of her own column with her photo circled and the words "The Face of a Dog!" scrawled on it. Complaining in Never Enough about "some nasty shit" that Cher, the singer and actress, once said about him, Trump bragged: "I knocked the shit out of her" on Twitter, "and she never said a thing about me after that." At campaign rallies, Trump has encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters. "Get 'em out of here!" he yells. "I'd like to punch him in the face." From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents "disgusting" and writes them off as "losers." By the standards of reality TV, Trump's disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.

• Gabriella Dunn: Bipartisan frustration over Kansas disability system: 'Legislature be damned': Part of Gov. Brownback's program for making Kansas a model state for emulation all across America and for resuscitating his presidential ambitions was his program to harness the magic of private enterprise to "reform" the moribund bureaucracy of the state's Medicaid program. He called this stroke of genius KanCare. Now, well, it's worked about as well as the rest of his programs:

  The Medicaid system has been riddled with problems recently. More than 3,000 disabled Kansans are on waiting lists for services, and the state says a seven-year wait is typical.

  The state also has a backlog of applications for Medicaid that started mounting a year ago when the state switched the computer system used to process the applications. The committee was told on Thursday that nearly 4,000 Kansans have been waiting more than 45 days for their applications to be processed. In mid-May that number was above 10,000.

  Part of the art of shrinking government "to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub" is to pick on areas that most people don't immediately recognize what's happening. Slacking off on maintenance is one such area, and helping people with disabilities is another. Things have to get pretty bad before they get noticed, and even then the full impact is hard to absorb. Still, even Kansans have started to wise up. For one thing, see GOP Voters Stage Major Revolt Against Brownback's Kansas Experiment. Not really as "major" as one might hope, but until this year Republican primaries have been killing fields for our so-called moderates. This year six Brownback-affiliated state senators, including Majority Leader Terry Bruce, got axed, as did Tea Party favorite Rep. Tim Huelskamp, one of the few "small government" conservatives in Congress to oppose such real government threats as NSA's domestic spying programs -- but his real problem was agribusiness, who flooded the primary with some $3 million in mostly out-of-state dark money. (Huelskamp spent a couple million himself, largely from the Koch network.) Not mentioned in the article is that Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn, who unlike Huelskamp has no redeeming virtues, was also knocked off -- again, his ideological fervor ran afoul of local business interests. On the other hand, the Democratic primary was a very depressing affair, with hardly any competent candidates rising to challenge the unmitigated disasters wrought by Brownback and company.

• Diana Johnstone: Hiroshima: The Crime That Keeps on Paying, but Beware the Reckoning: Each August 6 marks yet another anniversary of our bloody inauguration of the age of nuclear destruction. I found this bit, following an Eisenhower quote expressing misgivings about dropping the atom bomb, interesting:

  As supreme allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower had learned that it was possible to work with the Russians. US and USSR domestic economic and political systems were totally different, but on the world stage they could cooperate. As allies, the differences between them were mostly a matter of mistrust, matters that could be patched up.

  The victorious Soviet Union was devastated from the war: cities in ruins, some twenty million dead. The Russians wanted help to rebuild. Previously, under Roosevelt, it had been agreed that the Soviet Union would get reparations from Germany, as well as credits from the United States. Suddenly, this was off the agenda. As news came in of the successful New Mexico test, Truman exclaimed: "This will keep the Russians straight." Because they suddenly felt all-powerful, Truman and Byrnes decided to get tough with the Russians.

  In his book Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, Gar Alperovitz argued that the US used the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to intimidate Russia. This twist is more plausible: that having used it for whatever reason, it then installed an arrogance in Truman and his circle that made them more aggressive in postwar diplomacy, and that made Stalin more defensive (which in turn, in some cases, made him more aggressive -- e.g., in Berlin and Korea, although in both cases he was largely provoked to lash out).

  Also on Hiroshima, see Ward Wilson: The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan . . . Stalin Did. By the way, I wrote more about Hiroshima in May 2016 and August 2015, and several times earlier (e.g., August 2008).

  Of course, the question of presidential control of "the nuclear launch codes" came up with respect to the notoriously thin-skinned and impulsive Donald Trump, who's been quoted as repeatedly asking his "security advisers" why we can't use nuclear weapons, and who's clung to the "never take options off the table" cliché so tenaciously it's hard to rule out any place he might not bomb. Relevant to this is Jeffrey Lewis: Our Nuclear Procedures Are Crazier Than Trump, arguing against the current "launch under attack" strategy which gives a president "a four-minute window to decide whether or not to initiate an irreversible apocalypse." I would add that I think that the only nation that has ever actually used nuclear weapons against civilian targets, the US should be going out of its way to reassure the world that won't happen again. Instead, Trump and his ilk are so insecure they feel to need to remind the world how terrifying they really are.

• Seth Stevenson: If Sean Penn Were the Democratic Nominee: Possibly the dumbest political article of the year, and that's saying something. The whole idea is counterfactual, counterlogical even: "Imagining a world where the wackadoo candidate is in the other party" -- I guess they can dream, but the fact is that the Republican Party has actively embraced fantasy and myth and carefully channeled rhetoric while decrying science and, you know, that "reality-based" stuff, like facts, so there's little there to guard against unhinged candidates -- indeed, at least half of the original field of sixteen qualified. The closest thing to "wackadoo" on the Democratic side was Jim Webb, who didn't even make it to Iowa. As for Penn, you can look at his Wikipedia page to get a thorough list of his political activism, but as far as I can tell his main transgression against political correctness has been a tendency to get too close to officially despised foreign leaders like Hugo Chavez. I can't say as that sort of thing bothers me (in which case he suggests Kanye West, or "Ben from Ben and Jerry's") -- the point is he assumes there must be some balance on the Democratic side no matter how wacko the Republicans get, and second, he wants to show that a great many Democrats would follow that "unfit, paranoid, unstable Democratic nominee" as blindly as most Republicans are following Trump.

  Of course, this article assumes other fallacies. One is that the individual at the head of the ticket should matter much more than the party the ticket represents. I think nowadays that's largely due to the Commander in Chief fetish, itself due to the fact that the US is (and has been for 75 years now) a state perpetually at war all around the world. We tend to assume that having a decisive Commander in Chief has a huge effect on how effectively those wars are prosecuted, where in fact the built-in, unquestioned forces behind those wars usually winds up dictating how tragically foolish presidents wind up. An older view is that the personal moral character of the president matters a lot, whereas it rarely counts for anything. What we get instead are parties -- each president brings a whole layer of administration into power, and leaves behind a cohort of judges, and those choices are mostly tied to party. So to the extent that parties represents blocks of voters, why is it so strange that those voters would back their party regardless of how qualified and capable the ticket head is? Obviously, a lot of people who vote for Trump will really be voting for their party, some in spite of the candidate, but that applies (perhaps even more than usual) to the Democratic side as well. In neither case does it represent a serious misjudgement. However, only on the Republican side does it reflect a belief in complete nonsense and hysteria unrooted in interests or even reality.

• Some more election links noted:

  • Peter Beinart: Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump? Begs the question: why does Beinart regard hacks like Peggy Noonan (his lead example) and Sean Hannity as intellectuals? Citing Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind, Beinart likens them to Stalinist apparatchiks, but that gives them too much credit: Stalin, at least, represented the established order, whereas Trump is only an aspirant, and not a terribly inspiring one at that.

  • Harry Enten: Clinton's Post-Convention Bump Is Holding Steady: Actually, 538's Election Forecast now has Clinton up to 83.4% chance of winning, with North Carolina tipped blue (D+3.5), and Arizona (R+0.1) and Georgia (R+0.3) getting close. Clinton's chances of winning other red states are also up: South Carolina (37.4%), Missouri (31.5%), Texas (26.7%), Mississippi (25.9%), South Dakota (24.2%), Alaska (24.1%), Montana (24.1%), North Dakota (22.1%), Utah (21.5%), Indiana (20.2%), . . . Kansas (14.5%), . . . Arkansas (10.8%). Trump's most secure states are Oklahoma, Alabama, West Virginia, and Idaho (96.4%).

  • David Ignatius: Why facts don't matter to Trump's supporters

  • Sean Illing: Donald Trump and the Tea Party myth: Why the GOP is now an identity movement, not a political party

  • Mike Konczal: A new American radical liberalism can counter Trump

  • Daniel Politi: Marco Rubio: Pregnant Women With Zika Shouldn't Be Allowed to Have Abortion: Just in case you think the Republicans should have nominated a more sensible, better behaved presidential contender.

  • Greg Sargent: Even after Khan battle, Trump voters support ban on Muslims

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Monday, August 1, 2016

Music: Current count 26875 [26851] rated (+24), 423 [431] unrated (-8).

Not a particularly strong rated count -- especially given that I wrapped up a Streamnotes column, but still finding exceptional numbers of A- records, and they take more time than B or low B+ records. Also, almost everything below is jazz, and most of it (aside from the Hersch oldies) came from my mail queue (down lower now than it's been in about three months).

One mistake from Streamnotes is that I omitted the Rent Romus album cover. I'll rectify that in the faux blog, but probably not in the Serendipity version. (Not sure how the relative performance of those is holding up. I have managed to keep adding new entries to Serendipity, but rarely see them, and find it more work to edit.)

Surprise star this week is Peter Kuhn, who plays clarinet, bass clarinet, and some sax, and recorded a bit 1979-81, dropped out for a long stretch, and re-surfaced last year. I didn't recall the name, but thanks to Rick Lopez' dilligence I did list his albums in the discography to my mammoth William Parker-Matthew Shipp Consumer Guide (from 2003, I think). I tried to find Kuhn's other albums for Hat and Soul Note on Rhapsody (err, ugh, Napster), but only tracked down The Kill (misfiled under Denis Charles -- seems to have been his real name, although I notice now that I used the Americanized "Dennis" last week, something else to fix).

Getting pretty close to doing a major update to Robert Christgau's website: not many new articles -- latest is his review of Jon Savage's 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded -- and no new-old pieces (maybe someone should organize a scavenger hunt), but I finally managed to bring the Consumer Guide database up to the moment (July 29). Now if only I can remember that bug (revision incompatibility) I had to work around to import the new database. I'll tweet when I get it done.

New records rated this week:

• Joey Alexander: My Favorite Things (2014 [2015], Motéma): [r]: B+(**)
• Karlis Auzins/Lucas Leidinger/Tomo Jacobson/Thomas Sauerborn: Mount Meander (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Cortex: Live in New York (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• Fred Hersch: Sunday Night at the Vanguard (2016, Palmetto): [cd]: A-
• Steffen Kuehn: Leap of Faith (2015-16 [2016], Stefrecords): [cd]: B+(*)
• Peter Kuhn Trio: The Other Shore (2015 [2016], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Peter Kuhn/Dave Sewelson/Gerald Cleaver/Larry Roland: Our Earth/Our World (2015 [2016], pfMentum): [bc]: A-
• Joey Locascio: Meets the Legend (2016, Blujazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Merzbow/Keiji Haino/Balasz Pandi: An Untroublesome Defencelessness (2016, RareNoise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Modular String Trio: Ants, Bees and Butterflies (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• William Parker: Stan's Hat Flapping in the Wind (2015 [2016], Centering/AUM Fidelity): [r]: B+(**)
• Roji: The Hundred Headed Woman (2016, Shhpuma/Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: Rising Colossus (2015 [2016], Edgetone): [cd]: A-
• Jerome Sabbagh/Simon Jermyn/Allison Miller: Lean (2014 [2016], Music Wizards): [cd]: B+(**)
• Slavic Soul Party: Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite (2014 [2016], Ropeadope): [cd]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Peter Kuhn: No Coming, No Going: The Music of Peter Kuhn, 1978-1979 (1978-79 [2016], NoBusiness, 2CD): [cd]: A-

Old music rated this week:

• Fred Hersch/Charlie Haden/Joey Baron: Sarabande (1986 [1987], Sunnyside): [r]: A-
• Fred Hersch/Steve LaSpina/Jeff Hirshfield: ETC (1988, RED): [r]: B+(***)
• The Fred Hersch Trio: Dancing in the Dark (1992 [1993], Chesky): [r]: B+(**)
• Fred Hersch: The Fred Hersch Trio Plays . . . (1994, Chesky): [r]: B+(**)
• Fred Hersch: Point in Time (1995, Enja): [r]: B+(*)
• The Fred Hersch Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard (2002 [2003], Palmetto): [r]: B+(***)
• Fred Hersch/Norma Winstone: Songs & Lullabies (2002 [2003], Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Fred Hersch Trio: Everybody's Song but My Own (2010 [2011], Venus): [r]: B+(***)
• Michael Moore/Fred Hersh: This We Know (2008, Palmetto): [r]: B+(**)
• Red Fox Chasers: I'm Going Down to North Carolina: The Complete Recordings of the Red Fox Chasers (1928-31) (1928-31 [2009], Tompkins Square, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)

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Sunday, July 31, 2016

After the big post on the Democratic National Convention and the mad scramble to wrap up July's Streamnotes, I figured I'd skip attempting a Weekend Roundup today. I started this in the Notebook, then decided what the hell, might as well share it. Tried to avoid adding comments. Read the links at your leisure and the comments will probably be obvious. Some links:

• Mark Danner: The Magic of Donald Trump
• Tom Engelhardt: Crimes Against the Future
• Thomas Frank: The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America's wake up?
• David Frum: Why Trump Supporters Think He'll Win
• Glenn Greenwald: As Israel Prospers, Obama Set to Give Billions More in Aid While Netanyahu Demands Even More
• Ben Guarino: Anthrax sickens 13 in western Siberia, and a thawed-out reindeer corpse may be to blame
• Chelsea Harvey: Greenland lost a staggering 1 trillion tons of ice in just four years
• David Harvey: Neoliberalism Is a Political Project
• Ezra Klein: Donald Trump's fight with the Khans is a reminder of his greatest weakness. Also, see Klein's Comparing Obama's 2004 convention speech and his 2016 convention speech is depressing.
• Mike Konczal: A new American radical liberalism can counter Trump
• Ruth Margalit: How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel's Free Press
• Martha C Nussbaum: Beyond Anger
• Samuel Oakford: As the Saudis Covered Up Abuses in Yemen, America Stood By, and The Saudi bombardment of Yemen: Worse than the Russians [in Syria]
• Norman J Ornstein/Thomas E Mann: The Republicans waged a 3-decade war on government. They got Trump.
• Gareth Porter: Hillary Clinton and Her Hawks. Also Porter's earlier Why the Sanders 'Revolution' Must Take on the Permanent War State
• Nate Silver: WHere the Election Goes From Here
• Judith Stein: Why Did White Workers Leave the Democratic Party?
• Matt Taibbi: DNC Leak Shows Mechanics of a Slanted Campaign
• Sofia Tesfaye: Federal court strikes down North Carolina voter ID law: "Passed with racially discriminatory intent" and Ari Berman: The Country's Worst Anti-Voting Law Was Just Struck Down in North Carolina; perhaps Berman's The GOP's War on Voting Is Working could use some minor edits.
• Peter Van Buren: US Awards $1.7 Billion Contract to Buy Radios for Afghan Army
• Philip Weiss: Dem establishment and outsiders need couples counseling if Clinton wants to win

One quote from these pieces I want to single out: from the Frum article, a quote from an anonymous Trump supporter:

"The Putin thing. You think you've really nailed Donald with the Putin thing. Get it through your head: Our people are done fighting wars for your New World Order. We fought the Cold War to stop the Communists from taking over America, not to protect Estonia. We went to Iraq because you said it was better to fight them over there than fight them over here. Then you invited them over here anyway! Then you said that we had to keep inviting them over here if we wanted to win over there. And we figured out: You care a lot more about the "inviting" part than the "winning" part. So no more. Not until we face a real threat, and have a real president who'll do whatever it takes to win. Whatever it takes.

My emphasis. Funny thing is that the first time I heard "New World Order" in the last decade -- I think the phrase goes back to people in the first Bush administration, circa the first Iraq War -- was in the house of a Trump supporter. He attributed it to Obama, and was greatly bothered by the whole idea. Democrats are vulnerable to this because they grew up in the internationalist tradition from Wilson to Roosevelt to Johnson, and the Carters and Clintons and Obamas have just sheepishly followed in line. It started just helping US companies do business abroad, evolved into a protection racket for global capitalism, and eventually became a self-serving monster, starting wars just to punish countries for disrespecting our omnipotence. This never meant anything to most Americans aside from the fears they were dictated, but after Eisenhower beat Taft in 1952 the Republicans were always in on the deal, so nobody had a chance to hear otherwise -- until Trump. This is a big risk for Hillary: her political education has taught her to always spout the Washington establishment's clichés and, if pressed, always to hedge on the side of being more hawkish. Against Trump, especially viz. Russia, she could easily convince people that she's the dangerous maniac (as well as that she's weak -- not willing to do "whatever it takes" because she's hung up on sensitivities to foreigners and international law).

I also might have noted that on Saturday 538's Who will win the presidency? showed Clinton and Trump dead even at 50.0%, with Trump enjoying a slight edge in electoral votes (269.4 to 268.2) but Clinton still leading the popular vote (46.3 to 45.5%, with Gary Johnson at 6.9% and Jill Stein off the chart). Clinton's decline nudged Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and New Hampshire into the Trump column. On Sunday new polls bumped Clinton up to 51.0%, 270.2-267.4 in the electoral college, 46.3-45.4% popular vote, but didn't tip any states. Right now, the closest state is Pennsylvania, only D+0.8, followed by Nevada R+0.9, Florida R+1.2, and Virginia D+1.2. Clinton has been sinking since FBI Director James Comey's press conference put the private email server issue to rest (at least the threat of a possible indictment), so the RNC bounce had some prior momentum. We're not seeing much of a DNC bounce yet -- at least it's not coming as fast as what was taken as a RNC bounce did. (Silver footnote from the article cited above: "Although interestingly, if you chart the numbers, it's not easy to distinguish Trump's convention bounce from a continuation of the previous trend toward him.")

Don't know if this has been factored in, but RABA Research's post-DNC poll has Clinton ahead of Trump 46-31% (7% for Johnson, 2% for Stein), a big bump from their post-RNC/pre-DNC poll, which Clinton led 39-34%. (Still, aren't the undecided remains awfully large here? Seems like a lot of people don't want to face the choice they've been given.)

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Saturday, July 30, 2016

First order of business: I've dropped "Rhapsody" from the column name because the streaming service changed their name to Napster. I started writing these notes in 2007 when Rhapsody kindly gave me a free subscription (I had done some work for them converting Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide reviews so they could use them). That ran out a year later and there's a break in coverage until the following August when I broke down and paid for the service. One of the better investments I've made, the most obvious ROI being that it broke me of the habit of buying CDs just to check them out, only to discover they weren't things I would want to return to. The second effect was that I wound up checking out a lot of stuff I never would have paid for -- some did pan out, and many didn't.

I later decided to cut back on my column writing, bringing to a close Recycled Goods and Jazz Prospecting as separate entities by folding the records I would have reviewed there into here. These days, the default below (the case not otherwise marked) is something streamed on Rhapsody/Napster. Other records are marked with a note in brackets -- [cd] for CDs (mostly promos), [cdr] for advance/bootleg CDs (all promos), [bc] for Bandcamp, [dl] for some other download (or streaming) source. Needless to say, these sources are not all created equal, either in terms of sound quality or personal convenience. Each column has a legend explaining this.

As you may recall, I missed a big chunk of June travelling, so that month's haul was much shorter than usual (66). This month's is probably longer than usual (135). The "new releases" generally came out in the last 2-3 years, with most being 2016 releases. The "recent reissues, compilations, vault discoveries" were also released in the last 2-3 years, but usually are older music (recorded more than ten years ago), but I sometimes slip in more recent "various artist" compilations (like the Blind Willie Johnson tribute this month). The "old music" section contains older releases that I'm late getting to -- mostly catch-ups on artists or labels I've been thinking about and found on Rhapsody (er, Napster, hate that name), plus the occasional stray that I just happened to notice. This section was very slim this month until at the last moment I decided to dive into old Fred Hersch records.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody (other sources are noted in brackets). They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on June 30. Past reviews and more information are available here (8364 records).

Recent Releases

The 1975: I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It (2016, Dirty Hit/Interscope): British guitar band, second album. No denying that some of this is catchy, bouncy, sharp, smart, but it's also extremely long at 73:55 (17 songs). B+(*)

Anohni: Hopelessness (2016, Secretly Canadian): Antony Hegarty, formerly of Antony and the Johnsons, name change seems to be related to a gender change. Produced by Hudson Mohawke, with input from Oneohtrix Point Never, so the protest music is devoid of folky cliché. He/she oversings -- some things are beyond change. B+(*)

The Avalanches: Wildflower (2016, Astralwerks): Australian group, built their first album wholly from samples (2000's Since I Left You) -- about the time when they reportedly started working on this second album, finally released 16 years later. Ridiculously mixed bag here, the calypso-oom-pah mashup "Frankie Sinatra" is amusing enough, but other jokes wear thin, if indeed they are funny at all. B

Ricardo Bacelar: Concerto Para Moviola: Ao Vivo (2015 [2016], Bacelar): Brazilian pianist, a live recording from the Guaramiranga Jazz and Blues Festival in Ceara, Brazil; draws on 1970s pop/fusion like Weather Report and Yellowjackets and throws in some Jobim, of course. Flows, lilts, even rocks out a bit. B+(*) [cd]

Jon Balke: Warp (2014 [2016], ECM): Norwegian pianist, more than a dozen albums since 1991. Solo piano, slow and thoughtful enough for Manfred Eicher, also credits for field recordings and vocals but nothing I much noticed. B+(*) [dl]

Aaron Bennett/Darren Johnston/Lisa Mezzacappa/Tim Rosaly: Shipwreck 4 (2015 [2016], NoBusiness): Tenor sax, trumpet, bass, drums -- your basic two-horn avant quartet, no chordal instrument to harmonize the horns. Should be freewheeling, but isn't quite. B+(*) [cd]

James Blake: The Colour in Anything (2016, Polydor): British electronica artist, gained a lot of attention for a series of dubstep-influenced EPs c. 2010, which he's followed up with a pair of much hyped (but to my ears underwhelming) albums. Blake picked up help here from Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Rick Rubin, stretching the album out to a monumental 76:13. I can see why some people are impressed, but I find it dreary and depressing -- not something I look for in pop music. B-

Carla Bley/Andy Sheppard/Steve Swallow: Andando el Tiempo (2015 [2016], ECM): Piano, tenor/soprano sax, bass, playing five Bley compositions. Swallow is Bley's third famous husband (after Paul Bley and Michael Mantler). Sheppard is a Brit who produced some exciting albums from the late 1980s, and has been close to Bley for well over a decade now. Like their previous Trios, a lovely piece of chamber jazz. B+(***) [dl]

Blood Orange: Freetown Sound (2016, Domino): Dev Hynes, previously recorded as Lightspeed Champion, now has his third album as Blood Orange. R&B, slick beats and soft croon but it all comes out twisted in various ways. A-

The Michael Blum Quartet: Chasin' Oscar: A Tribute to Oscar Peterson (2015 [2016], self-released): Guitarist, won Downbeat's Rising Star a year ago in something of a scandal (he didn't finish in the top 21 this year). Quartet includes piano (Brad Smith), bass (Jim Stinnett), and drums (Dom Moio). The Oscar Peterson theme offers easy standards (plus two originals by Stinnett), and Blum sings a couple -- not very well, but not without charm. B+(*) [cd]

Bobby Bradford/Hafez Modirzadeh: Live at the Open Gate (2013 [2016], NoBusiness): Trumpet and alto sax, respectively, with Mark Dresser on bass and Alex Cline on drums, a perfectly enjoyable but unspectacular avant set. B+(**) [cdr]

Brazzamerica: Brazzamerica (2016, self-released): Brazilian (or Brazilian-American? -- this album, presumably their debut, was recorded in New York) piano trio: Leco Reis (bass), Cidinho Teixeira (piano), Edson Ferreira (percussion). Engagingly upbeat, very pleasant. B+(**) [cd]

Brothers Osborne: Pawn Shop (2016, EMI Nashville): John and T.J., country-rockers transplanted to Nashville from Maryland, not to be confused with Kentucky bluegrassers Sonny and Bobby, aka the Osborne Brothers. First album, country rock with emphasis on the latter, but country for their clearly articulated down home themes -- almost a little too clear, nothing you'd think twice about. B+(*)

Toronzo Cannon: The Chicago Way (2016, Alligator): Chicago bluesman, fourth album since 2007 getting a late start -- he's now 48, basically a journeyman working in a long tradition. B+(*)

Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial (2016, Matador): Singer-songwriter Will Toledo, wrote eleven homemade albums worth of songs in four years before landing an indie label contract. His debut featured re-recorded old songs, but this sophomore effort is newer and bigger, his twelve songs running 69:16, nearly everyone with substantial crunch and hook -- so much meatier than anything from his lo-fi days. Can't say as I care yet, but I am impressed. B+(***)

Cavanaugh: Time and Materials (2015 [2016], Mello Music): Underground rap duo, Open Mike Eagle and Serengeti, beats are subtle, raps representing characters -- as usual I have trouble following, but what I do hear is interesting. Eight tracks, 25:56. B+(**)

Corey Christensen: Factory Girl (2015 [2016], Origin): Guitarist, has a handful of grooveful albums, group includes Zach Lapidus on keyboards, plus bass, drums, and extra percussion. B+(**) [cd]

Brandy Clark: Big Day in a Small Town (2016, Warner Brothers): Quite some songwriter, storyteller too, but she turns so many clever phrases with heaven and hell (e.g., "since you've gone to heaven the whole world's gone to hell") and love lost and scorned ("if you want the girl next door, go next door . . . and don't look back"). A-

Frankie Cosmos: Next Thing (2016, Bayonnet): Greta Kline's second album, at 28:28 still considered an EP by Rhapsody but anything with fifteen songs deserves more respect. (Her previous Zentropy finished ten songs in 17:16.) Better than lo-fi sound, better than DIY songs too. B+(***)

Sylvie Courvoisier/Mark Feldman/Ikue Mori/Evan Parker: Miller's Tale (2015 [2016], Intakt): Piano, violin, electronics, soprano and tenor sax, respectively. Feldman is the most classical-sounding of jazz violinists and seems to dominate at first, but the more you listen the more interesting the fractured piano and sax become. Still not sure about the electronics. B+(***) [cd]

Dan Cray: Outside In (2015 [2016], Origin): Pianist, sixth album since 2002, a quartet with Dayna Stephens (tenor sax), Clark Sommers (bass), and Mark Ferber (drums). Four originals, three covers (Bud Powell, "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," "Where Are You"), nothing too settled or pat. B+(**) [cd]

Theo Croker: Escape Velocity (2015 [2016], Okeh): Trumpet player, grandson of Doc Cheatham -- would have been 11 when the New Orleans trumpet legend died at 91, but Donald Byrd is the more explicit reference. Like Byrd, Croker aims for jazz-funk as if he's on the verge of a commercial breakthrough. Drawing on a wider range of funk, he gets a bit closer aesthetically, but in today's marketplace still remains marginal, even with the Dee Dee Bridgewater vocal. B+(*)

Orbert Davis' Chicago Jazz Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble: Havana Blue (2013 [2016], 3Sixteen): Big band plus some strings, the bulk of the record taken up by "Havana Blue Suite" followed by a few standards (including "Manteca"). The suite has a delicate air. B+(**) [cd]

Suzanne Dean: Come to Paradise (2016, Ship's Bell Music): More songwriter than singer -- credit here is "background vocals and ukulele"; lead vocals are by Nicole Zuraitis -- with the songs in a folk-rock vein (paradise and dreams and such), starting with guitar then gradually adding in keyboards (Rich Ruttenberg) and horns (John Daversa and Bob Sheppard). B [cd]

Debo Band: Ere Gobez (2016, FPE): Boston band led by Ethiopian singer Bruck Tesfaye and saxophonist Danny Mekonnen, doing a fair approximation of Ethiopian pop/Ethio-jazz. B+(*)

The Diva Jazz Orchestra: Special Kay! (2013 [2016], self-released): Drummer Sherrie Maricle's all-female big band "celebrates the life and music of Stanley Kay" -- last name Kaufman, also a drummer, died in 2010 at 86 after a "70+ year career" which included a stint as Entertainment Director for the New York Yankees, but he's also credited as founder (in 1992) and "creative force behind" the Orchestra. He also composed the ten pieces, which swing ferociously. Done live, with lots of shout-outs to the soloists. B+(**) [cd]

Drake: Views (2016, Cash Money): Canadian rapper, took a fairly modest underground style and blew it up into a big hit, and keeps spitting it out although I've never found much reason to care. Runs 79:45. B+(*)

The Evenfall Quartet: Evenfall (2015 [2016], Blue Duchess): Boston group, first album, very mainstream tenor sax (Mark Earley), piano (Joe "Sonny" Barbato), bass (Brad Hallen), drums (Jerzy "Jurek" Glod) outfit. All standards, leading with "That Old Black Magic," passing through "Time After Time" and "Old Devil Moon" and "After You're Gone" to wrap up with "Stardust." Earley's background is playing in blues bands (Duke Robillard, Roomful of Blues) and he doesn't have the rich vibrato of a Bob Rockwell much less Ben Webster, nor does the band aspire to anything retro (like a Scott Hamilton). In short, as a critic I should insist on them working harder, doing something more ambitious, but in fact my idea of a perfectly lovely album. A- [cd]

Fail Better!: Owt (2014 [2016], NoBusiness): Avant-jazz quintet from Portugal -- Marco dos Reis (guitar), Luis Vicente (trumpet), João Guimarães (alto sax), José Miguel Pereira (double bass), João Pais Filipe (drums) -- recorded live at Coimbra. The guitar generally leads here. B+(**) [cdr]

Alan Ferber: Roots & Transitions (2016, Sunnyside): Postbop trombonist, assembled a nonet here to fill out his compositions, thick and more than a little turgid. B

Cheryl Fisher: Quietly There (2015 [2016], OA2): Standards singer (wrote one song here), from Canada, eighth album since 2004, quietly sneaks up on you, in large part because the band -- Seattle musicians from John Bishop's crew -- provides subtle support in all the right places. B+(**) [cd]

Anat Fort Trio/Gianluigi Trovesi: Birdwatching (2013 [2016], ECM): Pianist, born in Israel, based in New York, fourth album since 1999, trio means Gary Wang (bass) and Roland Schneider (drums), together at least since 2009. Trovesi plays alto clarinet, returning to the lineup of her 2007 ECM debut. B+(***) [dl]

Dori Freeman: Dori Freeman (2015 [2016], Free Dirt): Folky singer-songwriter from Appalachia doesn't make a show of her roots or authenticity but lets them quietly seep through her songs, produced by Teddy Thompson, most effectively when he slips in a rock band, or lets her take a work song with nothing but finger snaps. A-

Fresh Cut Orchestra: Mind Behind Closed Eyes (2016, Ropeadope): Ten-piece group from Philadelphia led by Josh Lawrence (trumpet), Jason Fraticelli (bass & cuatro), and Anwar Marshall (drums), who share writing credits pretty evenly. Latin tinge, much emphasis on rhythm, especially irresistible on the closer "Gallo y Gallina." B+(***) [cd]

Fresh Cut Orchestra: From the Vine (2015, self-released): First album, mostly consists of the seven-part "Mother's Suite," starting off with irritating bird sounds then gets symphonic. Mixed bag after that, including passages that show a lot of promise (and not just the fast ones). B+(*) [bc]

Fred Frith Trio: Another Day in Fucking Paradise (2015 [2016], Intakt): Guitarist, many albums since his early Guitar Solos (1974) when he staked his avant-garde claims by working with prepared guitar. This is still fairly far out, scratchy avant guitar backed by Jason Hoopes (electric and double bass) and Jordan Glenn (drums, percussion). Some slavic-sounding voice, but it doesn't stick around. B+(***) [cdr]

Fruit Bats: Absolute Loser (2016, Easy Sound): Chicago alt/indie band, starts with the Velvets' guitar sound and adds some pop sparkle, with Eric D. Johnson writing neat little songs. B+(**)

Gaudi: EP (2016, RareNoise, EP): Daniele Gaudi Cenacchi, b. 1963 in Italy, based in London, has a dozen albums since 1991 and many more shorter forms. Plays minimoog and other keyboards here, also credited with programming, for two cuts, 15:39, backed by 5-6 musicians (no intersection, the better known ones like Bill Laswell and Merzbow are on "Electronic impromptu in E-flat Minor." Groove spins off easily enough you wouldn't mind him running longer. B+(**) [cdr]

Sara Gazarek/Josh Nelson: Dream in the Blue (2015 [2016], Steel Bird): Nelson plays piano -- has a couple albums on his own. Gazarek sings, mostly standards but Nelson wrote three songs, two with Gazarek. A fairly intimate affair, never really takes off. B [cd]

Domo Genesis: Genesis (2016, Odd Future): LA rapper, Dominique Marquis Cole, debut album after several mixtapes. Good chance this could grow on me, given how many times the first pass reminded me of Stevie Wonder. B+(***)

Robert Glasper: Everything's Beautiful (2016, Legacy): Co-credited to Miles Davis, who is extensively sampled (or reproduced) for a tie-in with Don Cheadle's movie, Miles Ahead. Still, Davis died 25 years ago, and while it's amusing to imagine what he might have made of hip-hop, the result is clearly the work of someone who grew up straddling both worlds. More polished than previous efforts, with some imagination but also a tendency to let the soundtrack unwound. B+(**)

André Gonçalves: Currents & Riptides (2016, Shhpuma): From Portugal, plays keyboards, guitar and computer, but they mostly boil down to electronics. Two long tracks, one with Pedro Boavida joining in on Fender Rhodes, the other with bass (Rodrigo Dias) and guitar (Gonçalo Silva). The quirky first piece is especially enticing. The second is more ambient drone, but that goes down easy too. B+(***)

The Goon Sax: Up to Anything (2016, Chapter Music): Australian alt/indie trio, basically lo-fi guitar jangle and voice, with occasional echoes of the Go-Betweens, perhaps expected in a band led by Robert Forster's son Louis. B+(***)

Ariana Grande: Dangerous Woman (2016, Republic): Pop star, got her start as a teenage TV star, third album -- another pile of glitz with a vast array of writers and producers and featured guests (Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Macy Gray, Future), which should be good for some ear candy but rarely rises to that level, let alone portends the promised danger. B+(*)

David Greenberger, Keith Spring, and Dinty Child: Take Me Where I Don't Know I Am (2016, Pel Pel): More spoken word texts from conversations at a nursing home in Jamaica Plain, MA 1979-83 -- back far enough you get a good story about Joe Louis. The others (and Keiji Hashimoto) provide the music, which is jazzy for the opener on "Three Spaniels" and moodier toward the end, not least for the nonogenarian who hopes to die soon. A- [cd]

Tord Gustavsen: What Was Said (2015 [2016], ECM): Norwegian pianist, working with vocalist Simin Tander and pianist-drummer Jarle Vespestad. The voice is arresting, and without the voice the piano grows even grander. B+(**) [dl]

Rich Halley 5: The Outlier (2015 [2016], Pine Eagle): Tenor saxophonist, has an impressive run of albums since he retired from his day job, mostly quartet affairs with Michael Vlatkovich on trombone, Clyde Reed on bass, and son Carson Haley on drums. The fifth here is Vinny Golia (baritone sax, bass clarinet) -- one of Halley's early albums was recorded on Golia's Nine Winds label. This is something of a mess, but frequently turns magnificent, as if rising up from chaos is a good thing. Guess it is. A- [cd]

Hard Working Americans: Rest in Chaos (2016, Melvin): Todd Snider and several guys with long resumes in bands I never bothered with -- sort of Nashville's answer to the Waco Brothers, but they rarely live up to the concept. B+(**)

Tim Hecker: Love Streams (2016, 4AD/Paper Bag): Ambient electronica artist, his electronics finding a fair amount of what sounds like radio static and given a sacred music aura by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble -- none of which I find especially appealing, even when it's oddly moving. B

Fred Hersch: Solo (2014 [2015], Palmetto): Didn't get this last year when it polled well -- guess the publicist knew that I rarely fell for solo piano albums, even by pianists I've long admired. Starts with a Jobim, then "Caravan," two originals, "The Song Is You," "In Walked Bud," "Both Sides Now" -- each taken at a leisurely stroll for no less than 7:30, where it just envelops you with warmth and feeling. Good chance that if it wasn't so difficult to deal with downloads I'd like it even more. A- [dl]

The Fred Hersch Trio: Sunday Night at the Vanguard (2016, Palmetto): The pianist's fourth Vanguard title, although when I saw this title I flashed not on his own previous efforts but on Bill Evans' justly legendary Sunday at the Village Vanguard -- Hersch has always had a thing for Evans, but in the liner notes he only mentions the first time he sat foot in the Village Vanguard, in 1976 for Dexter Gordon's homecoming (the only time I ever went there). Trio with John Hébert and Eric McPherson mostly staying out of the way -- not my recipe for for a great piano trio but the pianist is on such a roll he's fascinating anyway. A- [cd]

Marquis Hill: The Way We Play (2016, Concord Jazz): Trumpeter, won a Monk prize in 2014 which carries with it Concord's commitment to release an album. This revisits the hard bop tradition (Gryce, Silver, Monk, Hancock, Byrd, some standards), in a group with Christopher McBride on sax and Justin Thomas on vibes in lieu of piano, with Makaya McCraven's drums lighter and fleeter than any hard bop drummer. Meagan McNeal introduces the band, and Hill drops a couple rhymes. B+(***)

Hinds: Leave Me Alone (2016, Mom + Pop): All-female garage rock band from Spain, a little too grungy to pass for pop -- or maybe I just mean out of tune. B

Mike Jones Trio: Roaring (2015 [2016], Capri): Mainstream pianist, cites Dave McKenna as his main inspiration, his early albums on Chiaroscuro (longtime home of Ralph Sutton). Trio with Katie Thiroux (bass) and Matt Witek (drums), a bunch of swing-ready standards. B+(**) [cd]

Joonsam: A Door (2014 [2016], Origin): Bassist, last name Lee, from South Korea, first album, all originals, key player is pianist Aaron Parks, although you also get guest spots by Ralph Alessi (trumpet, 5 cuts), Ben Monder (guitar, 2), and Yeahwon Shin (vocal, 1). B+(*) [cd]

The Julie Ruin: Hit Reset (2016, Hardly Art): Third album by Kathleen Hanna under this name: after a one-shot in 1998 and a second thought in 2013. Hanna's previous bands were Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and this continues their grrrl punk legacy even while it sounds more pop than ever -- punk is just the backbone. A-

Kaytranada: 99.9% (2016, XL): Louis Kevin Celestin, born in Haiti in 1992, grew up in Montreal, his current base. First album after more than a dozen remixes. Strikes me as a less gloomy though not quite happy take on trip-hop, a pleasant beat-album one can repeatedly fall back on. In 2016, I guess that's something. A-

The Corey Kendrick Trio: Rootless (2016, self-released): Piano trio, with Joe Vasquez on bass and Nick Bracewell on drums, from Michigan, a mix of standards and Kendrick originals. Postbop, has some zip to it. B+(*) [cd]

King: We Are King (2016, King Creative): Vocal trio, twins Amber and Paris Strother and Anita Bias -- first album. Soft soul, rather dreamy. B+(*)

Ron King: Triumph (2016, self-released): Los Angeles trumpet/flugelhorn/keyboard player, first album as far as I can tell but he has a lot of movie/tv/soundtrack work including a Grammy nomination. Not quite pop jazz, but upbeat with little empty space, and his horn does stand out. B [cd]

Lefteris Kordis: Mediterrana (Goddess of Light) (2013-15 [2016], Inner Circle Music): Greek pianist, has several albums, this a relatively nice one with richly evocative piano and lush support. B+(*) [cd]

Peter Kuhn Trio: The Other Shore (2015 [2016], NoBusiness): Kuhn plays b-sharp and bass clarinet, tenor and alto sax, backed here by Kyle Motl on bass and Nathan Hubbard on drums. He came out of the late '70s loft scene, recorded obscure albums with Arthur Williams and/or Denis Charles (recently reissued by NoBusiness), and mostly vanished after 1982, until recently. This picks up where the old records left off, and while it won't shock or startle, this is the sort of inside creativity one listens to free jazz for. A- [cd]

Peter Kuhn/Dave Sewelson/Gerald Cleaver/Larry Roland: Our Earth/Our World (2015 [2016], pfMentum): Kuhn plays more sax (alto, tenor) than clarinet here, with Sewelson weaving below (baritone sax) and above (sopranino). Three long pieces, rougher than Kuhn's trio, more given to squeals and growls, but also more propulsive (note drummer). A- [bc]

Elektra Kurtis & Ensemble Elektra: Bridges From the East (2016, Elektra Sound Works/Milo): Violinist, "of Greek origin," raised in Poland, studied in Finland, wound up in New York. Most resumes are inflated but I'm struck by the mix of names in hers, including Edward Vesala, Max Roach, Simon Shaheen, Gerry Mulligan, Israel "Cachao" Lopez, Nona Hendrix, Butch Morris, Billy Bang, Steve Coleman, and Nas. Not sure how old she is but many names on that list are dead, and her Ensemble Elektra has an album dated 2000. Group includes a second violin, clarinet, bass, and drums. Music comes from all over her map, with Greek and Polish folk themes merging into tango and a little M-Base does Bartok. B+(***) [cd]

Mathias Landaeus: From the Piano (2016, Moserobie): Swedish painist, has ten or so albums since 1996. Claims he's "using only sounds from his 1919 Steinway Moderno Grand Piano," but many don't sound like piano at all -- various plucked string resonances and percussion, gives it an avant-electronica feel but not evidently synthetic. And the piano bits are lovely. B+(***) [cd]

Jessy Lanza: Oh No (2016, Hyperdub): Singer/electronica producer from Canada, started singing backup for Junior Boys and gets production help from Jeremy Greenspan on her second album here. One bass riff reminds me of Chic, but more often she works over elemental synth beats, a winning combination. A-

Låpsley: Long Way Home (2016, XL): Singer-songwriter from Britain, dropped a gratuitous accent onto her middle name for a Scandinavian effect; still in her teens but well beyond teen pop on her first album after two EPs. Mid-tempo electro-beats, arty voice, most striking song is called "Hurt Me" to show you she's tough enough to take it. B+(*)

Alison Lewis: Seven (2016, self-released): Standards singer. Second in a row to start off with "Blackbird" (cf. Sara Gazarek), which she paws at more mischievously yet ultimately makes it even more annoying. She follows that up with comparably tortured versions of "Cheek to Cheek" and "Like a Rolling Stone." Somewhat better are two originals. B- [cd]

Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Play All the Notes (2016, Hot Cup, EP): The third of four promised EPs this year, to be rolled up into a box later this year. Group has two formidable saxophonists -- Jon Irabagon (alto) and Bryan Murray (tenor, prepared tenor, and balto, here dba Balto Exclamationpoint) -- with MOPDTK leader Moppa Elliott on bass and Dan Monaghan on drums. Probably the best of the series thus far, not least for the leader's strong solos, but I still have qualms about the marketing concept, and it's short (three tracks, 26:44). A- [cdr]

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis: This Unruly Mess I've Made (2016, Macklemore): Second album by Seattle hip-hop duo, the first a surprise hit when its fourth single went viral. This, as advertised, an unruly mess with several songs kneejerk reactions to a success he's none too comfortable with, mixed in with speed raps, light opera, inadvertent comedy, and other oddities I can't get too worked up about. B+(*)

Magnet Animals: Butterfly Killer (2016, Rare Noise): Guitarist Todd Clouser project, he wrote all the pieces, sings (or speaks), more alt-rock than jazz but has jazzy touches, not really fusion. With Eyal Maoz (guitar), Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz (bass), and Jorge Servin (drums). B+(**) [cdr]

René Marie: Sound of Red (2015 [2016], Motéma Music): Jazz singer, started late, in her 40s, but quickly established herself, showing great range. Not sure about credits, but she wrote all these songs, with "This Is (Not) a Protest Song" touching and unsatisfying. B+(*)

Tina Marx: Shades of Love (2007 [2016], self-released): Standards singer, seems to be her first album, group is billed online as Tina Marx & the Millionaires. This builds on basics: good songs, a nicely unaffected voice, and a band that understand how to swing. B+(**) [cd]

Vic Mensa: There's Alot Going On (2016, Roc Nation): Chicago rapper, original name Vic Mensah. This is billed as a prelude to his first studio album, and at seven cuts, 32:53 sometimes gets slagged as an EP. Doesn't feel short. Standout track is "16 Shots" on the police killing of Laquan McDonald. B+(***)

Michete: Cool Tricks (2015, self-released, EP): Foul mouthed trans rapper from Spokane, key cuts are "#Fuckboy" and "Me & My Bitches," pretty amazing for four, maybe five, cuts ("Closet Case Fags"), but could use some remix to flesh out the back half. Nine cuts, 24:07. B+(***)

Michete: Cool Tricks 2 (2016, self-released, EP): The torrent of obscenities abates as he/she/whatever works harder at being cleverer, maybe even approaching the realm of storytelling -- and needless to say, that stretches the nine tracks out to something (29:33) I wouldn't call an EP except that it's a sequel to one. I should be impressed by the newfound maturity (if fantasizing about sucking FDR's dick qualifies) but I got more of a kick from the debut's puerile enthusiasm. B+(**)

Joel Miller With Sienna Dahlen: Dream Cassette (2014 [2016], Origin): Dahlen sings, but so does Miller, who also plays sax, piano, acoustic guitar, tanpura and percussion, plus he composed all the songs (except one he added lyrics to, but Dahlen is credited with lyrics elsewhere). Jazz label, but I'm hearing echoes of Smile-era Beach Boys, other harder to pin down art rock, and some pretty decent sax wails. B+(***) [cd]

Russ Miller and the Jazz Orchestra: You and the Night and the Music (2015 [2016], Doctheory): Big band, leader plays alto sax and flute, standard horns and rhythm section plus extra percussion when they want to do that Latin tinge thing. Jeannine Course-Miller sings appealingly, though the standards which sound so luscious at first wear a bit thin by the end. B+(*) [cd]

Bob Mintzer: All L.A. Band (2016, Fuzzy Music): Tenor saxophonist, longtime member of the Yellowjackets, a group I'm not terribly fond of but the bright spot in their records is invariably his sax. He also has a couple dozen albums under his own name, many big band efforts. This one revisits his big band writing, produced by drummer Peter Erskine. Band includes the usual suspects, which in LA means Bob Sheppard on sax and Larry Koonse on guitar. B+(*) [cd]

Mitski: Puberty 2 (2016, Dead Oceans): First-name artist, last name Miyawaki, born in Japan; lived in Congo, Malaysia, China, and Turkey before settling in New York. Indulges in harsh effects but doesn't need them -- can just as well inhabit a cushy ballad. Reminds me a bit of PJ Harvey (but beware I'm not much of a fan). One shouldn't underestimate her. B+(*)

Modern Baseball: The Nameless Ranger (2011, Lame-O, EP): Faked out by Rhapsody's 2015 date, turns out this five song, 14:54 EP is the Philadelphia alt/indie group's debut. Ragged sound, but that's a good start. B+(*)

Modern Baseball: Holy Ghost (2016, Run for Cover): Rhapsody flags this one as an EP at 27:20, but eleven songs generally makes for an album. Punkish thrash, short songs, probably not about baseball. B+(**)

Maren Morris: Hero (2016, Columbia Nashville): Texas country singer-songwriter with a big voice gets the big Nashville production treatment, which overwhelms whatever redeeming social value she has to offer. B

Anthony E. Nelson Jr.: Swift to Hear, Slow to Speak (2016, Music Stand): Saxophonist (soprano/tenor), fourth album, a sextet with trumpet, alto sax, piano, bass, and drums. Slick postbop, easy on the ears. B+(*) [cd]

Bryan Nichols: Looking North (2016, Shifting Paradigm): Pianist, based in Minneapolis, first album (I think), a solo affair, thoughtful and rigorous. B+(**) [cd]

Os Clavelitos: Arriving (2016, self-released): New York-based samba band, mixed sextet of American, Brazilian, and Japanese musicians (singer Sheiko Honda and percussionist Arei Sekiguchi). B- [cd]

The Paranoid Style: Rolling Disclosure (2016, Bar/None): Guitarist from the Mendoza Line, a clever reference for a band that barely got by, and singer-songwriter Elizabeth Nelson, first LP (if nine songs, 28:56 counts) after three EPs. Not sure I get the political analysis ("a society seized with crushing economic inequality, a smug, feckless and entrenches political class, and an emotionally suicidal relationship to total immersion in divertissement," sure, but the lyrics are more like "I am not a pacifist . . . I will never stop fighting the last war" and "you know that I'll suck anything that doesn't fuck me first" and "it can't all be that bad because it's also entertaining"), but the vigorous thrash lifts me up -- not bad for divertissement. A-

Jeff Parker: The New Breed (2015 [2016], International Anthem): Chicago guitarist, probably best known as a member of post-rock Tortoise although I know him better as an avant-leaning jazz guitarist. Splits the distance here, playing a lot of keyboards and samplers with electric bass (Paul Bryan), drums (Jamire Williams), a slippery sax solo by Josh Johnson, and daughter Ruby singing one. B

William Parker: Stan's Hat Flapping in the Wind (2015 [2016], Centering/AUM Fidelity): Actually just Parker's compositions, performed by Lisa Sokolov (voice) and Cooper-Moore (piano), with a bit of cello on a piece dedicated to the late David S. Ware (other dedications for Miguel Piñero, Ornette Coleman, and Butch Morris). Remarkable singer, although Parker's songs may be too straightforward for her. Helluva pianist, too. B+(**)

Joey Purp: iiiDrops (2016, self-released): Another Chicago rapper, like Vic Mensa a founder of Savemoney, also one half of the Leather Corduroys. His second mixtape, a mixed bag, where the raps are sharp and the pounding blare on some songs annoying -- I like a couple more stripped down beat tracks much better. B+(***) [dl]

Marc Ribot/The Young Philadelphians: Live in Tokyo (2014 [2016], Yellowbird): In theory, a fusion of two divergent strains from the mid/late 1970s, disco and Ornette Coleman's harmolodic funk. For authenticity, Ribot recruited bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer G. Calvin Weston from Coleman's old Prime Time outfit, Mary Halvorson for a second guitarist, and a Japanese string section, to play a set of disco hits -- like "Love Epidemic," "Fly Robin Fly," "TSOP," "Love Rollercoaster," "The Hustle." In practice, the hits triumph, and the harmolodics just seem messy. No one takes credit for the vocals, nor should they: they sound like something you'd shout out yourself on the dance floor, confident not even your partner could hear you. B+(**) [cd]

Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: Rising Colossus (2015 [2016], Edgetone): Alto saxophonist, I've become a big fan of his work in recent years. Here he goes big, with a septet that sounds larger still, doing pieces "he's commissioned from younger Bay Area artists," fellow altoists John Tchicai and Anthony Braxton, plus one original. Hits a couple nubs that gave me pause, but ultimately they power through everything. A- [cd]

Daniel Schmitz/Johannes Schmitz/Jörg Fischer: Botanic Mob (2016, Sporeprint): Trumpet, electric guitar, drums, respectively, scratchy and choppy as is often the case when avant-jazzers tangle. B+(**) [cd]

Sheer Mag: II 7" (2015, Wilsuns RC/Katorga Works, EP): Philadelphia punk group, releases four-song digital albums they suggest are 7-inchers -- this one runs 14:13, which is fair EP length before hyperinflation. Sound's a little harsh, particularly when whoever is singing. B [bc]

Sheer Mag: III 7" (2016, Wilsuns RC/Static Shock, EP): Four more songs, 13:37, sound a bit cleaner and guitar plenty sharp, but the singer still escapes me -- although "Nobody's Baby" doesn't. B+(*) [bc]

Skepta: Konnichiwa (2016, Boy Better Know): Joseph Junior Adenuga, English grime rapper, Nigerian descent, brother is JME, called his first album Greatest Hits, has four plus some mixtapes now. B+(***)

Slavic Soul Party: Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite (2014 [2016], Ropeadope): New York jazz guys started this Slavic dance band on a lark, have six albums now, but as I said, despite various lineup changes they're still New York jazz guys. This lineup is a nonet with accordion, tuba, and Matt Moran playing percussion instruments I'm unfamiliar with. Still, they stay pretty close to the text -- one of my all-time favorite suites of music. I miss Johnny Hodges, of course, but still find this irresistible. The original, of course, is greater still. A- [cd]

Tommy Smith: Modern Jacobite (2015 [2016], Spartacus): Tenor saxophonist, playing with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, opening with something awful by Rachmaninoff (5:57), followed by Smith's multi-part title suite (29:57) and a quick skewering of Chick Corea's "Children's Songs" (11:15, co-credit to Smith). The Orchestra is fully geared for classical music, and for once the sax isn't quite able to overcome the ballast. B- [cd]

Jim Snidero: MD66 (2016, Savant): Mainstream/postbop alto saxophonist, has at least 17 albums since 1987, some I like a lot. This one is a classic quintet, with Alex Sipiagin on trumpet, Andy LaVerne on bass, Ugonna Okegwo on bass, and Rudy Royston on drums. Comes in a bit below average unless you're a huge fan of the trumpeter, who hogs the spotlight. B+(**) [cdr]

Sound Underground: Quiet Spaces (2016, Tiny Music): Tempting to call this no-drums, no-bass trio a chamber jazz group, especially when the horns wax harmonically. Consists of alto sax (David Leon), trumpet (Alex Aldred), and guitar (Jonah Udall). B+(*) [cd]

Peggy Stern: Z Octet (2015 [2016], Estrella Productions): Pianist, a dozen albums since 1985. Septet actually, oriented for gentle flow (clarinet, flute, trombone, cello, bass, drums) plus singer Suzi Stern on a couple tracks that slouch toward choral music. B+(*) [cd]

Tegan and Sara: Love You to Death (2016, Vapor): Sister act, started folkie (low budget) in the late 1990s but has gradually drifted into electropop. This suits them well, adding sparkle and drive to their usual insightful relationship songs. A-

Todd Terje/The Olsens: The Big Cover-Up (2016, Olsen): Synth orchestrator, born Terje Olsen, with drummer Olaf Olsen leading the band assembled for Terje's live concerts. I've seen this billed as an EP, and you can make that case for the first slab of vinyl (4 songs, 25:48), but it also comes with a second disc of remixes, adding another 4 cuts, 26:09, and Discogs shows two more cuts (both "Untitled"). First cut seems ham-fisted, but everything else is pretty danceable. B+(**)

Thumbscrew: Convallaria (2015 [2016], Cuneiform): All-star trio -- Mary Halvorson (guitar), Michael Formanek (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums) -- adopting the title of their 2014 album as group name. Dicey guitar, reflecting the unpinnedness of the rhythm, impressive as such things go, but never quite transcends the basic concept, something extra the debut had. B+(***) [dl]

Tweet: Charlene (2016, eOne): Born Charlene Keys, had two albums 2002-05, the former with a modest hit single featuring Missy Elliott -- who gets another feature here, a break from the soft soul dreaminess Timbaland massaged. B+(**)

Two Fresh: Torch (2015, self-released, EP): Hip-hop production duo, twin brothers, reportedly "a nationally-ranked tennis doubles team before beginning their career in music. Six pieces, 19:22, some seriously deranged beats featuring Joey Purp, Vic Mensa, and a few others I know even less about. B+(*)

Carrie Underwood: Storyteller (2015, 19/Arista Nashville): Hints of songcraft here as several pieces start basic before the volume swells and the kitchen sink production becomes oppressive. B-

Leon Vynehall: Rojus (Designed to Dance) (2016, Running Back): British "deep house" producer, second album plus the usual smattering of shorter forms. Dance music, starts pretty hard and cranks it up even further, the last cuts irresistible (to my ears at least). A-

Brahja Waldman: Wisdomatic (2016, Fast Speaking Music): Alto saxophonist, also plays synth here, has several albums, this a quintet with Adam Kinner on tenor sax, D Shadrach Hankoff on piano, Martin Heslop on bass, and Daniel Gelinas on drums. Most songs build off a mechanical up-down, push-pull rhythm, just enough framework to elaborate something enticing on. A- [cdr]

Wet: Don't You (2016, Columbia): Brooklyn trio behind singer Kelly Zutrau, considered "indie pop" or "indie electronic" but not sounding like much of either ("indie," sure) -- a little mopey, thin, pale, deprived of sunshine. B

Wire: Nocturnal Koreans (2016, Pink Flag, EP): Leftovers from the recording sessions that produced last year's eponymous Wire, comes to eight songs, 25:55, all sounding almost perfectly like you'd expect the original post-punk band to sound nearly forty years after they first emerged -- almost as if they've recycled and found lost outtakes from, well, not Pink Flag, but maybe Chairs Missing. A-

Nate Wooley/Hugo Antunes/Jorge Queijo/Mario Costa/Chris Corsano: Purple Patio (2012 [2016], NoBusiness): Prolific avant trumpet player goes to Portugal, picks up a band with bass (Antunes) and three drummers. Still, everyone seems to be waiting for the star to do something, and all he does is his usual scratchy shtick, leaving holes the drummers don't know how to fill. B [cdr]

Young Thug: I'm Up (2016, 300 Entertainment/Atlantic): Considered a mixtape, available as download product, yet is short enough -- 9 songs, 38:03 -- they could released it on vinyl. Most songs feature someone I haven't heard of, but they flow and are tight and catchy. A-

Young Thug: Slime Season 3 (2016, 300 Entertainment/Atlantic, EP): Yet another mixtape, three weeks after I'm Up, but this one seems to be grabbing all the attention -- I didn't know about I'm Up until I looked this one up -- despite being shorter (8 cuts, 28:20) and, well, not as good. Actually, the beats are comparable, so maybe it's the rapper -- presumably YT as the "featuring" count is way down. B+(**)

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Angry Angles: Angry Angles (2005 [2016], Goner): Memphis punk band, formed by James Lee Lindsey (aka Jay Reatard) and Alix Brown, released a handful of singles before breaking up, with Lindsey going on to cut a smattering of albums before his early death in 2010 (age 29). This sweeps up everything the group recorded: 16 songs plus an unreleased take of the single "Things Are Moving." Band had real promise, but is stretched thin here. B+(**)

The Cucumbers: The Fake Doom Years (1983-1986) (1983-86 [2016], Lifeforce): Two EPs and a 10-cut album that came out before the New Jersey group's eponymous coming out, one of my favorite albums of 1987. The EPs offer glimpses of the their masterpiece, and brighten up the not-quite ready debut album, and it's nice to have them all together. A- [dl]

God Don't Ever Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson (2016, Alligator): Tom Waits at his grizzliest is the only singer here who comes close to Johnson's raw, gruff force, but everyone steps up to the challenge, with Lucinda Williams (like Waits) earning an encore. A-

Peter Kuhn: No Coming, No Going: The Music of Peter Kuhn, 1978-1979 (1978-79 [2016], NoBusiness, 2CD): Plays clarinet, bass clarinet, and tenor sax. Another reissue from the New York "loft scene" years, when avant-jazz went underground, that period after most US jazz labels folded or slunk into fusion and before European labels like Hat and Soul Note picked up the slack (Kuhn, by the way, has 1981-82 albums on both, but little after that). First disc is from same group that recorded Arthur Williams' Forgiveness Suite -- Williams and Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker on bass, and Denis Charles on drums -- is often bracing, a solid effort. Second disc is just Kuhn with Charles, a better showcase for each. Comes with a substantial booklet helping us recover valuable history. A- [cd]

Hailu Mergia: Wede Harer Guzo (1978 [2016], Awesome Tapes From Africa): Ethiopian keyboard player, organ here, with a group called Dahlak Band that some sources co-credit. Third reissue from this label, all quite delightful in their loping flow, just enough edge to stay out of the background. A-

Putumayo Presents: Blues Party (1968-2013 [2016], Putumayo World Music): Modern blues compilation, oldest cut seems to be Magic Sam's, newest Lurrie Bell's, a distance of damn few Chicago blocks, with nearly everything upbeat (first song "I Feel So Good," last "Have a Good Time"), and most cuts coming from the 1990s "chitlin circuit" down south. B+(**) [cdr]

The Rough Guide to South African Jazz [Second Edition] ([2016], World Music Network): The original 2000 edition spanned the years 1958-98. As usual, it's difficult-to-impossible to track down these thirteen tracks (e.g., the opener by African Jazz Pioneers, a group dating from the late 1950s, was on a 1989 album on Kaz which I suspect was a compilation of older material; on the other hand, the second track is by a pianist born in 1986). South African jazz builds on local pop traditions much like swing built on American pop songs, and many of those roots are irresistibly catchy. Still, this reboot sounds less classic than the first edition -- probably because it is newer and glitzier. A-

Carrie Underwood: Greatest Hits: Decade #1 (2005-14 [2015], Arista Nashville, 2CD): American Idol winner, with voice enough to hold her own against the most overblown arena productions Nashville has to offer. Her decade spans four albums, eighteen top-ten singles (twelve number ones), rounded up to 25 cuts, 100:10 here with a Brad Paisley lead and six previously unreleased (three worktapes where she finally lets down her guard). C-

Arthur Williams: Forgiveness Suite (1979 [2016], NoBusiness): One from the vaults of New York's "loft era," a trumpet player who shows up in various groups with William Parker, Jemeel Moondoc, and Frank Lowe, but this may be the only item under his name. Quintet with a second trumpet (Toshinori Kondo), sax (Peter Kuhn), bass (Parker), and drums (Denis Charles). A little somber, but a welcome find. B+(**) [cdr]

Jürgen Wuchner/Rudi Mahall/Jörg Fischer: In Memoriam: Buschi Niebergall (1997 [2016], Sporeprint): Niebergall was a German avant-bassist, 1938-90, played in Globe Unity Orchestra and many key groups of the early German avant-garde (Brötzmann, Hampel, Rolf Kühn, Mangelsdorff, Schlippenbach, Schoof, other household names), although I don't think he ever quite qualified as a leader. The leader is a bassist in the same vein, helped out here by Mahall on bass clarinet and Fischer on drums. B+(***) [cd]

Old Music

Clay Harper: Old Airport Road (2013, Terminus): Owner of an Atlanta pizza chain and sometime musician, started in the 1980s with the Coolies, then moved on to Lester Square, Ottoman Empire, most recently Plus Sized Dan, with a solo album in 1997 and this follow-up 16 years later. Still, for a "solo" album he doesn't establish any reliable presence here, yielding the stage to various guests ranging from "an Arabic-singing massage therapist" to a female rapper praising Red Lobster, or just vamping indeterminately. In a more innocent time, this would be called "eclectic." A-

Fred Hersch/Charlie Haden/Joey Baron: Sarabande (1986 [1987], Sunnyside): Mainstream pianist, not afraid to show his sensitive side, which his famous bandmates were suckers for. Of course, they're also able to keep up when he threatens to run away. A-

Fred Hersch/Steve LaSpina/Jeff Hirshfield: ETC (1988, RED): Piano trio, all covers including two Cole Porters, jazz pieces from Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Frank Foster, and Sam Jones. Sharp, lively. B+(***)

The Fred Hersch Trio: Dancing in the Dark (1992 [1993], Chesky): Piano trio with Drew Gress (bass) and Tom Rainey (drums). All standards, common fare but stretched out in unfamiliar ways. B+(**)

Fred Hersch: The Fred Hersch Trio Plays . . . (1994, Chesky): Cover order: Coleman, Coltrane, Davis, Ellington, Gillespie, Hancock, Hersch, Monk, Rollins, Shorter, Strayhorn, and adds "with Drew Gress & Tom Rainey." Hersch's own piece is "Evanessence," the title of his 1990 Bill Evans tribute. B+(**)

Fred Hersch: Point in Time (1995, Enja): Five trio cuts with Drew Gress and Tom Rainey, plus five more with horns -- Rich Perry on tenor sax and Dave Douglas on trumpet. Still, the latter don't carry much weight, almost as if Hersch is trying to make the point that they're unnecessary. B+(*)

The Fred Hersch Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard (2002 [2003], Palmetto): The pianist's first live album from New York's famous jazz club -- at least the first with Vanguard in the title -- a trio with Drew Gress and Nasheet Waits. Starts with a rousing "Bemsha Swing" showing you how sharp the group can be at full tilt. B+(***)

Fred Hersch/Norma Winstone: Songs & Lullabies (2002 [2003], Sunnyside): British singer, started in the 1960s and wound up with a MBE, has a clear voice not given to idiosyncrasy, given substantial support by the pianist, plus vibraphonist Gary Burton on three cuts. B+(**)

Fred Hersch Trio: Everybody's Song but My Own (2011, Venus): With John Hébert (misspelled on cover) and Eric McPherson, recorded in New York, standards as advertised including two Porters and the title tune from Kenny Wheeler. Takes nearly everything fast, which they can do. B+(***)

Michael Moore/Fred Hersch: This We Know (2008, Palmetto): Moore, who plays clarinet and alto sax, is an American based in Amsterdam, a longtime member of ICP Orchestra with a couple dozen albums on his own Ramboy label. He rarely shows up on American labels, but here you get a duo with the pianist, lovely chamber stuff. B+(**)

Red Fox Chasers: I'm Going Down to North Carolina: The Complete Recordings of the Red Fox Chasers (1928-31) (1928-31 [2009], Tompkins Square, 2CD): String band from North Carolina, a quartet of Guy Brooks (fiddle), Bob Cranford (harmonica), Paul Miles (banjo), and A.P. Thompson (guitar), some (or all) singing. The tunes are twangy folk ballads, some traditional, few exceptional, the remastering scratchy. B+(**)

Revised Grades

Sometimes further listening leads me to change an initial grade, usually either because I move on to a real copy, or because someone else's review or list makes me want to check it again:

Todd Snider: Live: The Storyteller (2010 [2011], Aimless, 2CD): Live double, a staple in my traveling case, so I think one can say it's stood the test of time. A

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section.

• Fred Hersch: At Maybeck [Maybeck Recital Hall Series Vol. 31] (1993, Concord): B+
• Fred Hersch: Last Night When We Were Young (1994, Classical Action): B
• Fred Hersch: Plays Rodgers and Hammerstein (1996, Nonesuch): B+(***)
• Fred Hersch: Thelonious: Fred Hersch Plays Monk (1997, Nonesuch): B+
• Fred Hersch: Songs Without Words (2000 [2001], Nonesuch, 3CD): B+
• Fred Hersch: In Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis (2003 [2006], Palmetto): B
• Fred Hersch: The Fred Hersch Trio + 2 (2004, Palmetto): B+
• Fred Hersch: Leaves of Grass (2005, Palmetto): B-
• Fred Hersch: Night and the Music (2006 [2007], Palmetto): B
• Fred Hersch: Live at the Jazz Standard (2008 [2009], Sunnyside): B+(**)
• Fred Hersch: Plays Jobim (2009, Sunnyside): B+(*)
• Fred Hersch: Whirl (2010, Palmetto): A-
• Fred Hersch: Alone at the Vanguard (2010 [2011], Palmetto): B+(*)
• Fred Hersch: Alive at the Vanguard (2012, Palmetto, 2CD): B+(**)
• Fred Hersch: Floating (2014, Palmetto): A-

Notes

Everything streamed from Rhapsody, except as noted in brackets following the grade:

• [cd] based on physical cd
• [cdr] based on an advance or promo cd or cdr
• [bc] available at bandcamp.com
• [sc] available at soundcloud.com
• [os] some other stream source
• [dl] something I was able to download from the web; may be freely available, may be a bootleg someone made available, or may be a publicist promo

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, July 29, 2016

The first day of the Democratic National Convention put the party's best face forward. It featured Michelle Obama, a couple of prominent senators who could have mounted credible campaigns for what Howard Dean once called "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren -- but didn't dare run up against the the Clinton machine, and one guy who did have the guts to try, and who damn near won, because he had the issues and integrity to pose a real alternative to the party's comfort with the status quo: Bernie Sanders. It offered a glimpse of what might have been, and more than hinted that Hillary Clinton might have learned something from Sanders' "political revolution."

I didn't see Michelle's speech, which was by all accounts monumental. I did catch bits of Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison, and all of the speeches by Warren and Sanders -- both superb, and in the former's slam on Trump and the latter's mapping of his agenda to her platform more than she could have hoped for. Could be that if the occasion presents itself she's opportunistic enough to slide to the left. At least in presenting this night she showed some recognition that she understands what the Democratic base wants. Not that she didn't keep three more days open to pander to the donors.

One retrospectively nice thing about the first night was that I didn't hear a single mention of foreign policy, war, America's vast military-security-industrial complex, and all the mayhem that they have caused. This is odd inasmuch as those issues weigh heavily in any comparison between Sanders and Clinton, but expected in that they still loom as major differences. It's not so much that Sanders has promised much change from fifteen years of "war on terror" -- the self-perpetuating struggle to shore up American hegemony over a part of the world which has suffered much from it -- as that Clinton's instinctive hawkishness promises even more turmoil as far out as anyone can imagine. Of course, the jingoism would come back in subsequent nights, but for Monday at least one could hope for a world where such things would no longer be worth fretting over.

I skipped the second night completely, including Madeleine Albright's neocon horror show and Bill Clinton's soggy valentine ("not quite first-spouse speech").

Also missed the third night when Tim Kaine, Joe Biden and Barack Obama spoke. I gather that Obama spoke in his usual mode, as a pious Americanist, a super-patriot proud of his country's deep liberal roots, validated by his own elevation to the presidency. He may not have reconciled Republicans and Democrats in the real world, but he's unified us all in his own mind, and that's such a pretty picture only those with their heads implanted in their asses can fail to take some measure of pride. Even if he hasn't fully convinced the talking heads of the right, hasn't he at least made it ludicrous for people like Trump and Cruz and Ryan to argue that they can "bring us together" in anything short of a concentration camp?

I paid even less attention to Hillary Clinton's speech, which I gather was superbly crafted and broadly targeted. John Judis faulted her for not weasel-wording enough on immigration -- after all, Trump already set the bar on that issue awfully low, so why not split the difference and still look relatively sane? Paul Krugman tweeted: "I keep talking to people asserting that she'll 'say anything,' but last night she clearly only said things she really believes. Socially (very) liberal, wonkish with center-left tilt on economic and domestic policy, comfortable with judicious use of military power. So, do we people realize that HRC's speech didn't involve any pandering at all? It was who she is." Either that, or Krugman's fooled himself into thinking he's looking at her when he's looking in the mirror.

But rather than ruminating more on this -- at some point I do have to just post what I have and catch up with what I missed sometime later -- let me point you to a long piece on the many complaints people have had lodged against her since she came to prominence in 1992: Michelle Goldberg: The Hillary Haters. Goldberg comes up with a long list illustrated by real people: "She strikes me as so programmed and almost robotic"; "She is disingenuous and she lies blatantly"; "I think she's more of a Republican than a Democrat"; "If I could make her a profit she'd be my best friend"; "She is a sociopath"; "She feels like she's above the law, and she's above us peasants." Reading this list (and the article that expands on them) I'm not sure which I'd rather argue: for one thing, none of these strike me as particularly true, but even if they were true they don't strike me as good reasons not to vote for her (at least given the Republicans she's run against). On the other hand, the Goldberg line that the editors pulled out as a large-type blurb -- "Americans tend not to like ambitious women with loud voices" -- does strike me as being at the root of much opposition to her (and also helps explain why some people, and not just women, like her so much even when they disagree with much of her policy record).

I had rather high hopes for Bill Clinton after his 1992 campaign, which were quickly diminished after he cozied up to Alan Greenspan and capitulated to Colin Powell and sunk ever lower pretty much month by month over eight years. By 1998 I would have voted to impeach him, not because I cared about the Republicans' charges but because I was so alarmed by his bombings of Iraq and elsewhere, acts I considered war crimes (even if I didn't fully comprehend how completely they set the table for the Bush wars that followed). Even so, I thought he might redeem himself after leaving office, much as Jimmy Carter had done. However, it's been hard to see his Foundation as anything other than the vehicle for a political machine, one intent on returning him to power through proximity to his wife. My view was influenced by the fact that through the 1980s most of the women who had become governors in the South were nothing more than proxies for their term-limited husbands. Nor had I ever been a fan of political dynasties, a view that became all the more bitter after the Bore-Gush debacle.

Of course, Hillary was different from all those other Southern governors' wives, and I recognized that -- even admired her at first, a view that diminished as her husband got worse and worse but never quite sunk so low. Still, her own record of policy and posturing in the Senate, as Secretary of State, and campaigning for president, never impressed me as especially admirable -- and sometimes turned out to be completely wrong, as with her Iraq War vote. Given a credible alternative in 2008 -- one that would break the tide of nepotism and dynasty building, and one that offered what seemed at the time like credible hope -- I supported Obama against her. Of course, I was later disappointed by many things that I thought Obama handled badly -- all too often noticing folks previously associated with Clinton in critical proximity -- but I also appreciated how much worse things might have been had a wacko warmonger like McCain or an economic royalist like Romney had won instead. Again this year I found and supported an alternative to Hillary -- one I felt could be trusted to stand up to the Republicans without degrading into what I suppose we could call Clintonism. In the end, she wound up beating Sanders, something I don't ever expect to be happy about. But we're stuck with her, and all I can say is that we owe it to her to treat her honestly and fairly. Which means rejecting all the mean, vicious, repugnant, and false things people and pundits say about her, while recognizing her limits and foibles, and resolving to continue saying and doing the right things, even if doing so challenges her. After all, what really matters isn't whether we're with her. It's whether she's with us. That's something she's actually made some progress towards this week -- not that she doesn't still have a long ways to go.

Some links:

• George Zornick: Welcome to the 2016 DNC, Sponsored by Special Interests: Points out that these are the first presidential conventions since 1968 for which there is no government financing, leaving the parties at the mercy of private donors and loose regulations.

• The Atlantic is doing daily coverage of the DNC, with lead-in pieces and lots of short notes from their many writers. See Day 1: Bernie Gives in to Hillary, Day 2: The First Lady to Become the Nominee, Day 3: Obama Endorses Hillary as America's Best Hope, Day 4: Hillary Clinton Begins Building Her Coalition. The comments jerk in and out of chronological sequence, some are scattered and many are trivial, but they probably give you as thorough an idea of what's happened as sitting on a cable new station (or surfing between them whenever anything annoying happens, which is often).

• Molly Ball: The Long Fall of Debbie Wasserman Schultz: The Sanders campaign has been feuding with the Democratic Party Chair since she tried to stack the debate schedule to ensure minimum press coverage. Her bias was unsurprising given how effective the Clintons were at clearing the field of potential challengers, and of course became even more obvious with last week's Wikileaks dump of her emails, but she would probably have been dumped anyway.

  Few Democrats will miss Wasserman Schultz, who was widely seen as an ineffective leader. She was a poor communicator whose gaffes often caused the party headaches; a mediocre fundraiser; and a terrible diplomat more apt to alienate party factions than bring them together. "Only Donald Trump has unified the party more," Rebecca Katz, a Democratic consultant who supported Sanders in the primary, told me wryly. [ . . . ]

  The litany of Wasserman Schultz's offenses during the primary was familiar to supporters of Sanders and other Clinton rivals: scheduling debates at odd times, shutting Sanders out of the party's data file, stacking convention committees with Clinton supporters. But her tenure was rocky long before that -- in fact, within a month of her being named in 2011 to finish the term of Tim Kaine, who had just been elected to the Senate, Democrats were starting to grumble about her. When her term ended after Obama's reelection, there was more sniping about her leadership, and Obama's advisors urged him to bring in someone new, but Wasserman Schultz made it clear she wouldn't go without a fight, according to reports at the time and my sources inside the DNC. And so the White House chose the path of least resistance and kept her in.

  "Good fucking riddance," one former top DNC staffer during her tenure told me of Wasserman Schultz's ouster. "But she was convicted for the wrong crime." Critics charged that Wasserman Schultz treated the committee as a personal promotion vehicle, constantly seeking television appearances and even urging donors to give to her personal fundraising committee. A different former staffer went so far as to compare her personality to Donald Trump's, describing a "narcissism" that filtered everything through her personal interests.

  The larger issue, many Democrats told me, was the White House's lack of concern with the health of the party, which allowed the DNC to atrophy. "There's a lot of soul-searching and reckoning to be done going forward about the role of the party," Smith said. Obama won the nomination by running against the party establishment, and once he got into office converted his campaign into a new organization, Organizing for America. It was technically a part of the DNC, but in reality served as a rival to it that redirected the party's organizing functions, effectively gutting its field operation. The weakened DNC bears some of the responsibility for the epic down-ballot losses -- in Congress, state offices, and legislatures -- that have occurred during Obama's presidency.

  "The president doesn't give a shit about the DNC, and he's the only one with the leverage to do something about it," said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic consultant and commentator who has advised the DNC. "Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that he didn't care about the DNC, so why have that fight?" [ . . . ]

  The irony to many of Wasserman Schultz's critics was that if she was, in fact, trying to "rig" the primary for Clinton, she didn't do it very well, and by antagonizing Sanders supporters she might have even helped power Clinton's opposition. "She had lost trust from every corner of the party," said Mo Elleithee, a former communications director for the DNC under Wasserman Schultz. "Congressional Democrats had lost trust in her, the White House had lost trust in her, the Clinton campaign was rapidly losing trust in her. So once she started to lose the grassroots, which was her only strength, she had nothing left."

• Timothy B Lee: DNC email leaks, explained: A fair introduction to the Wikileaks dump of some 20,000 DNC emails. Key lines: "The email trove contains some embarrassing revelations but no bombshells"; "The hack included a lot of donors' personal information"; and "There's significant evidence linking the attacks to the Russian government." I'm not so sure about the latter point, which has been repeated so many times that it's turning into an assumption -- see, e.g., Patrick Tucker: Was Russia Behind the DNC Hack? and Isaac Chotiner: Is the DNC Hack an Act of War?. It's easy to be sloppy here because anti-Russian prejudice is such a well-practiced art in Washington that it's almost second nature. (For instance, we routinely hear that Putin is a dictator, even though he's in power by virtue of having clearly been elected in competitive contests. Also, Putin is easily charged with being the aggressor in places like Georgia and Ukraine -- ignoring that the US engaged in covert campaigns in both to turn governments there against Russia.) It's easy to imagine that Democrats jumping on the opportunity to blame Russia -- it certainly helps distract from the embarrassments in the emails itself, and it's the sort of rhetoric that Americans have long fallen for. The big problem here is that the US seems hell-bent to resurrect some sort of Cold War against Russia, as seems clear by the steady advance of NATO forces toward Russia's borders and the imposition of crippling economic sanctions on Russia's already depressed economy. Given all this, it's pretty easy to imagine Russia "striking back" via cyberwarfare -- after all, the US is already heavily invested in that sort of mischief. On the other hand, the stakes -- chiefly embarrassing the already discredited Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- are pretty low.

  On the other hand, this gives Democrats who have already shown a knack for Putin-baiting an opportunity to rehash the supposed ties between Putin and Trump, which must be true because Trump hasn't shown much relish at joining in on the Putin-bashing as have the Democrats -- one of the few areas where Trump has been significantly less crazy and reckless than Clinton. Possibly the most extreme statement of this is Franklin Foer: Putin's Puppet:

  Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West -- and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over the past decade, Russia has boosted right-wing populists across Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France, well-documented transfusions of cash to keep her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited "personally and handsomely" from Russian energy deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it. [ . . . ]

  There's a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO. He's been a patron of Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. [ . . . ]

  Donald Trump is like the Kremlin's favored candidates, only more so. He celebrated the United Kingdom's exit from the EU. He denounces NATO with feeling. He is also a great admirer of Vladimir Putin. Trump's devotion to the Russian president has been portrayed as buffoonish enthusiasm for a fellow macho strongman. But Trump's statements of praise amount to something closer to slavish devotion. [ . . . ] Still, we should think of the Trump campaign as the moral equivalent of Henry Wallace's communist-infiltrated campaign for president in 1948, albeit less sincere and idealistic than that. A foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States has attached itself to a major presidential campaign.

  Most of this is fantasy stitched into conspiracy -- not that I doubt that Putin has pitched some money at right-wing (ultra-nationalist) political movements in Europe, but Russians got a raw deal in the '90s when they opened their doors to capitalism, leaving them defensive and nostalgic for a leader that demanded more respect. One can argue whether he is one, or whether he's succumbed to the corruption of the Yeltsin era, or whether his occasional flex of muscle is productive, but it's absurd to claim he intends to destroy Europe and America, and even more so to think he can do so by cyberhacks -- especially ones that at most reveal their victims to have been fools.

  On the other hand, the neocon idea that they can push and prod a nation with a staggering number of nuclear weapons into a powerless little corner is dangerous indeed -- and that's what Clinton risks by slipping into Cold War revanchism. As for Trump, he's demonstrating a truism: that people and nations that do business together are less likely to confront each other militarily. Indeed, the real distinction between America's "allies" and "enemies" almost exactly correlates with ease of doing business together -- which is why, of course, neocons are so eager to impose sanctions on countries like Russia and Iran (and why they turn a blind eye to the real Islamic state, Saudi Arabia, and why they are so eager to quash Boeing's airliner deal with Iran).

  For more on Trump's business dealings with Russia, see Josh Marshall's initial post, Jeffrey Carr's fact-check, and Marshall's riposte. I do admit that all this leaves me with a serious question: if Trump's business ties to Russia compromise his ability to put his own finances aside and serve the interests of the American people, what about the rest of his business interests? As I recall, the Kennedys put all of their vast inherited wealth into blind trusts when they went into politics. Wouldn't it be fair and reasonable to insist that Trump do the same thing?

  PS: Marshall later tweeted: "Everything else aside, let's stop talking about 'red-baiting,' 'McCarthyism.' Russia's not a communist or a left state. That's silly." Sure, there's no reason to think that Trump has fallen under the spell of Bolshevism, but anti-Russian rhetoric both before and after the fall of Communism has been remarkably consistent -- in both cases Russia is casually charged with plotting the destruction of Europe and America, and motives are rarely discussed (mostly because they would make one wonder "really?"). And today's Putin-baiting works so effortlessly because yesterday's red-baiting so effectively greased the slide. Moreover, although Russia may have moved from left to right since 1990, America's unelected "security state" is still run by the same people who cut their teeth on the Cold War, and who will to their deaths view Russia as the enemy. Does anyone really think that the US is surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic missile rings because we're worried about oligarchy and corruption?

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99 Percent? The political winds have changed since the early '90s brought the Clintons and their "blue dog" DLC coalition to Washington, so opportunist that Hillary has always been, could she blow back the other way? One thing that's happened is that as the right-wing "think tanks" have lost touch with reality, left-leaning ones have matured -- the article here features Felicia Joy Wong of the Roosevelt Institute, and also singles out long-time Clinton economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz (who's moved steadily leftward since the '90s), whose Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy is a full-fledged political platform. Another thing is that Bernie Sanders nearly beat her running further to the left than anyone previously imagined possible. Still, very little here about Clinton:

  To Wong, though, much of the hand-wringing about Clinton is beside the point. People like to kibitz on the subject of who a politician "really" is, to claim that some votes or statements or gaffes or alliances are deeply revealing and others merely accidents, frivolities or improvisatory performances. We isolate and label a politician's essence in the hope we might predict with certainty how she'll behave in the future. But in Wong's view, the question of who a politician is -- and above all who this particular presidential candidate is -- is irrelevant. Her strategy is to proceed in public as if the candidate is certain to rise to the occasion. [ . . . ]

  "After all," Wong said to me more than once, "she is unknowable. Nobody can know her. I certainly can't know her. All I can go by is what is on the public record, and who she's got around her. I'm sure I'll be disappointed again. Over the next few months, we'll all be disappointed again. But I'm only optimistic because there's evidence for me to be that way."

  When people talk about Hillary as a "genuine progressive" I can't help but scoff: where's the evidence, anyone? On the other hand, it has occurred to me that the situation might nudge her in the right direction. I even came up with a precedent, Woodrow Wilson: early in his administration he oversaw a number of progressive reforms, even though he really didn't have a progressive bone in his body -- he also adopted Jim Crow as federal policy, started two fruitless wars with Mexico, blundered into the big war in Europe, implemented the most draconian assault on civil liberties in the nation's history, and was so ineffective in negotiating the end of the war that he was soundly rejected both at home and abroad. Still, if Wilson can be remembered as a progressive, maybe the bar isn't too high for Clinton. Of course, you might argue that FDR was another one who rose to progressivism because the circumstances dictated it.

  Also along these lines: Mark Green: Is Hillary Ready for a Progressive 'Realignment'?, and Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hillary Clinton Can Become the Real Candidate of Change.

• Allegra Kirkland: Conservatives Stunned by How Much They Liked Obama's DNC Speech: There's an old Mort Sahl joke where he quotes Charlton Hesston as saying that he hopes his children will some day live in a fascist dictatorship, then quips that if Hesston was more perceptive he'd be a happy man today. One of the great absurdities of our times is that conservatives have been so hateful to Obama, who has always gone out of his way to embody and celebrate their most cherished and most hackneyed myths. As I've said before, Barrack Obama is a man whose conservatism runs so deep he's incapable of imagining a world where Jamie Dimon isn't still head of JP Morgan-Chase. There has never been a better "poster child" for the American Dream than him, yet many self-proclaimed conservatives have insisted on attacking him, insisting that he is perversely bent on destroying the very nation had flattered him so by electing him president. That's never been credible, but it's taken eight years and the counterexample of Donald Trump for it to sink into these numbskulls.

  Pundits who fundamentally disagree with the majority of Obama's policies expressed grudging admiration for an optimistic speech that praised America's inclusive democracy. It provided a stark contrast to the ominous address about the threats facing the United States that Donald Trump gave at last week's Republican convention in Cleveland.

  Some suggested that Obama's speech, which quoted the Declaration of Independence and framed the U.S. as a "light of freedom, dignity and human rights," did a better job at expressing conservative values than Trump's did.

  In some ways we're fortune that they were so dense. Give his lifelong habit of sucking up to power and his earnest desire for "bipartisan" solutions, there's no telling what "compromises" he might have made had the Republicans not been so obstructionist. His continuation of the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his revival of the war in Iraq and Syria, his expansion of loosely targeted assassinations via the drone program, and his relentless defense of America's secret police against whistleblowers have been among the darket blots on his administration -- all cases where Republicans have cheered him on and taunted him to do even worse. Even today, Obama remains the last significant politician supporting TPP. In time conservatives will appreciate what they missed and lost -- much like today they hail the once-hated Harry Truman for blundering his way into the Cold War. But their blinders are a necessary part of their identity: whenever you look back at American history for something inspiring, something to be proud of, you necessarily have to embrace some aspect of liberal tradition. What makes Obama such a great conservative is his liberalism, and that's what they cannot abide, even less admit -- at least until they've found themselves stuck with Trump, a convervative standard bearer who promises to usher a smaller, poorer, meaner America -- and all he has to do is call it Great. That makes Trump the perfect anti-Obama, logically the ideal candidate for everyone who bought the anti-Obama vitriol of the last eight years. If some conservatives are having second thoughts, maybe they're more perceptive than we thought.

• Shibley Telhami: Are Clinton's supporters to the right of Sanders's on the Middle East? Hardly. Telhami has been polling on questions like this for years:

  Over the past few years, I have asked Americans about their attitudes on American policy toward Israeli settlements. In a November 2015 poll, 49 percent of Democrats expressed support for imposing sanctions or harsher measures on Israeli settlements. In a May 2016 poll, 51 percent of Democrats expressed the same view (within the margin of error of the November poll).

  Those expecting Clinton's backers to be less supportive of such measures than Sanders's are in for a surprise: 51 percent of Sanders's supporters wanted punitive measures imposed, and 54 percent of Clinton's expressed the same opinion -- a statistical tie. In contrast, only 24 percent of Trump supporters voiced support for such measures.

  Telhami asks a number of similar questions, again finding no real differences between Clinton and Sanders supporters' views, so he asks "why are candidates' rhetoric different when supporters' views are similar?" He doesn't really answer this clearly, but two reasons seem obvious to me: one is that Clinton has two levels of donors, and the big shots -- the ones who kick in enough to get personal contact -- are rabidly pro-Israel, so they pull her in that direction; Sanders, on the other hand, draws nearly all of his financing from his base, so he leans that direction. But also, both Sanders and Clinton start out exceptionally pro-Israel, partly because the Israel lobby has become so hegemonic in Washington, partly because the very powerful defense complex is so intertwined with Israel. Sanders is also Jewish, and of an age when Israel was a much more attractive proposition. Still, I would imagine that while there is no general difference in opinion between Sanders and Clinton supporters, those who are very concerned about the issue should favor Sanders -- if only because Clinton has boxed herself into a hole from which she has effectively committed to do nothing whatsoever to help resolve the conflict. Sanders at least understands something that political expediency doesn't allow Clinton to admit: that Palestinians must be treated as human beings. This makes me wonder how many other issues there are where Clinton supporters are well to the left of their candidate.

• Clare Foran: Can Jill Stein Lead a Revolution? Nothing here suggests to me that she can -- not that there's much here to suggest what she stands for or why that matters -- it's mostly about Bernie supporters who aren't reconciled to Hillary, a number that's likely to drop by half come election day. The fact that Stein is in Philadelphia this week suggests she realizes that the real forum for the left isn't her third party effort -- it's the Democratic Party, which Bernie came close to winning over, and even after Hillary's win is still where most of the people "the revolution" needs do their business. Still, neither Foran nor Jordan Weissmann (in Jill Stein's Ideas Are Terrible. She Is Not the Savior the Left Is Looking For) talk about the one idea that could make a difference, which is to play up the fear that Hillary's hawkishness could be even more self-destructive than Trump's brutishness, and that people who believe that America should radically retrench from the ambition to be the world's sole hegemon need to withdraw their votes from both. That at least is an argument, one that needn't depend on the tired homily that both sides are equivalent, and one that might scare or shame Hillary enough that she makes an effort not to alienate the large number of antiwar voters who otherwise see her as preferable to Trump. Of course, Stein will still lose half of her sympathizers on election day (as will libertarian Gary Johnson), just because votes aren't worth so much that they have to be perfect.

• Michelle Goldberg: The DNC Has Been a Rousing Success. So Why Am I Terrified? Basically because she doesn't trust the American people to do the sane thing:

  One of the unofficial slogans of this election, at least among the green room flotsam and millennial ironists on Twitter, is "nothing matters." It's an expression of weary incredulity at each new Trumpian outrage that should be the end of him but isn't. This election isn't a contest of ideology. It's certainly not about experience or competence. It's being fought at the level of deep, unconscious, Freudian drives. Trump promises law and order, but he is the Thanatos candidate, appealing to the people so disgusted by the American status quo that they're willing to blow it up. Clinton is the candidate of dull, workmanlike order and continuity. She once described herself as a "mind conservative and a heart liberal," but her convention has almost been the opposite, with the most liberal platform in decades married to a show of sunny, orderly patriotism. "America is already great!" is as anti-radical slogan as can be imagined. The question in this election is whether the forces of stability are a match for those of cynical nihilism. This convention has been, for the most part, impeccably choreographed. Will it matter? Will anything?

  That "mind conservative/heart liberal" thing tells me that she's bought the conservative line hook and sinker: only conservatives think that liberalism is an ailment of the heart, and only people hopelessly mired in the past fail to recognize that conservatism has become a form of mental derangement. (I would concede that a conservative ethos is a good thing for a person to have, provided you understand that it doesn't work for social/political/economic matters. It's all good and well any person to be self-sufficient, but as a society we need mutual respect, concern, and help.)

  My own great fear is watching Hillary one-on-one in the debates as Trump goads her into World War III.

  On the other hand, see: Jamelle Bouie: The Democrats Make Their Pitch to a New Silent Majority. Not my favorite turn of phrase, but they started making this pitch in 2012, when after four years when it seemed like only the Tea Party could get media attention Obama won the presidential election rather easily. (Still, only 57.5% came out to vote in 2012, less than the 62.3% who voted in 2008 when Obama won even more handily.) I'm less impressed by the Wednesday lineup than Bouie is ("figures of authority -- all white men -- who in different ways sought to delegitimize Donald Trump and persuade the most Republican-leaning whites with degrees to switch sides and abandon the GOP") -- Leon Panetta, Admiral John Hutson, Michael Bloomberg -- but they do suggest that a swath of the establishment realizes they'd be better off with Hillary, and not rocking the boat has much to do with that. I think it is the case that an awful lot of Americans don't like to rock the boat -- otherwise why would they have stuck with so many losers for so long?

Plus a few shorts:

• Harry Reid Wants Intelligence Agencies to Give Trump "Fake" Briefings After Russia Comments: Because, I suppose, he's not misinformed enough as it is.

• No, Donald Trump Did Not Commit Treason When He Suggested Russia Hack Clinton's Emails: Glad we cleared that one up.

• David Frum: Donald Trump Has Turned the Republicans Into the Party of Russia: Piling on, from the guy who coined the phrase "axis of evil."

• Ron Fournier: How TV Networks Can Force Trump to Release His Tax Returns: "broadcast outlets need to apply pressure where it counts -- to Trump's ego." Yeah, good luck with that. But he would be exposing himself to huge liability: I doubt if anyone who makes that kind of money from as many sources as Trump can file a tax return that doesn't have something dodgy enough that it can't be turned into a federal case on close inspection. Then there's the suspicion that he's not actually making that much money and not worth nearly as much as he claims.

• Uri Friedman: What If Russia Invaded the Baltics -- and Donald Trump Was President? My first reaction is if Trump was president we'd have far worse problems. But what do they want him to do? Start WWIII?

• Trump: You Know I Love the Disabled Because My Buildings Are Accessible: Couldn't possibly be because federal law mandates accessability?

• Peter Beinart: Bill Clinton's Lapse Into Trumpism: Actually just a quibble over an unfortunate turn of speech, even if, like most gaffes, it exposes mental rot underneath. On the other hand, Beinart trivializes Trumpism by suggesting it's just about Muslims -- so Beinart matches one gaffe with another.

• Trump Jr.: Obama Plagiarized a Line From My RNC Speech! He further asked, "where's the outrage?" The line was "This is not the America I know." Turns out Obama had used the same line previously, so maybe Trump Jr. is the plagiarist? But others have also used the line, or close variants. Really not a very original turn of phrase -- just another cliché, something political speeches (Obama's included) are full of.

• Nancy LeTourneau: Trump Says That He Wants to Hit the "Little Guy": Watching the DNC, all Trump can do is lash out: "I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy" -- evidently fellow billionaire and New Yorker Michael Bloomberg. LeTourneau suspects the cause was this bit from Bloomberg's speech: "Throughout his career, Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits, angry shareholders, and contractors who feel cheated, and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's run his business. God help us."

• Tamara Draut: The new working class: Trump can talk to disaffected white men, but they don't make up the "working class" anymore: And, one might add, those who do got more urgent things to worry about than immigrants and terrorists.

• Andrew Kahn: How to Tell When Donald Trump Is Joking: Of course, it's hard for people who find Trump utterly horrifying to distinguish when he's merely being sardonic, as opposed, say, to when he's saying something utterly horrifying. Would be easier if he were funnier but, hey, not everybody is.

• John Judis: Trump's very peculiar and unprecedented appeal to Bernie Sanders' supporters: Evidently Trump has been taken in by some of the dumbest political observers in the country -- the ones who see the Trump and Sanders campaigns as parallel efforts by outsiders to counter the deep corruption of American politics. So now he's accusing Sanders of "selling his soul" and hoping that will deflect his followers to the last outsider champion still in the race. In fact, the campaigns have nothing in common, and Trump has no answers for the problems Sanders identified. Still, amusing to watch him try.

• Katherine Krueger: The Reviews Are In: Conservatives Say the DNC Was 'Disaster' for the GOP: As recounted in 14 tweets. Not sure that constitutes a significant sample. Of course, she could have pointed to David Brooks: The Democrats Win the Summer, but maybe that was too long to read (or maybe she already knew better). Brooks quote: "Trump has abandoned the Judeo-Christian aspirations that have always represented America's highest moral ideals: toward love, charity, humility, goodness, faith, temperance and gentleless. He left the ground open for Joe Biden to remind us that decent people don't enjoy firing other human beings."

• Ezra Klein: This election isn't just Democrat vs. Republican. It's normal vs. abnormal. Klein argues that "the Republican Party has become an abnormal political party that has nominated an abnormal presidential candidate," but maybe he should consider why. Since Obama won in 2008, Republicans have done everything they could to prevent the Democrats from delivering on their campaign promises, repeatedly predicting doom if the Democrats succeed, yet during that time the economy has gotten stronger, and almost everything else has improved, at least relative to the eight previous years when Bush was president. So the Republicans have to keep repeating their narrative, even though it's long lost any tether to reality. Consequently, Republicans have abdicated any claim to the status quo, allowing the Democrats to take over the center (in addition to being the only realistic haven for the left). For more, see Klein's Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?

• Greg Grandin: Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn't Learn During His Time in Honduras: One of the blackest marks on Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State was her support for a murderous coup in Honduras. Kaine spent nine months in a Jesuit mission in Honduras, learned Spanish, says that time "made him who he is." Those nine months coincided with the CIA setting up the Contras in Honduras to wage war against Nicaragua, also with targeted assassinations of Jesuits in El Salvador, also backed by the US. "Kaine helps the Clinton campaign transform Honduras from a real place, engaged in political struggle, into an imaginary kingdom of banality."

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