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Friday, June 29, 2007
Israel Envy
Juan Cole quotes GW Bush as saying:
In Israel, terrirosts have taken innocent human life for years in
suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning
democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its
responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're
looking for in Iraq.
Israel envy is one of the most bizarre characteristics of the
Bush regime. The idea that Israel is any sort of success is itself
hard to imagine -- its main claim is to be the last colonial outpost
of Europe to maintain a rigid apartheid system, leaving it with an
endless struggle to suppress the natives, the enmity of nearly all
of its neighbors, and disapproval by most of the world. To call that
success takes a high pain threshold and inordinate fondness for the
exercise of force -- traits that Israelis seem to have, and that
Americans like Bush envy.
Even so, it's damn near inconceivable how to map Israel's "success"
to Iraq. For starters, who in Iraq is there to constitute the Zionist
master class? The Shiites aren't rich enough; the Sunnis have a bad
attitude; the Kurds just want to be left alone. That leaves the US
occupiers, and there just aren't that many of them, no matter how
heavily armed. To some extent the US has managed to find Iraqis to
do its bidding, but that has rarely been more than grudgingly, with
various trade-offs as various factions seek to profit by angling off
the US occupation. The story about how Iraqis never get to where they
can "stand up" is really evidence that they have interests that are
different from what the Americans expect. Indeed, it's unlikely that
you can find any Iraqi politician whose interests are fully aligned
with the US, let alone a whole class of them capable of controlling
the country like Israeli security services do in occupied Palestine --
not that that's exactly a gold standard.
This isn't the first time Bush has looked for inspiration in past
disasters. A couple of weeks ago he was touting America's 62+ year
occupation of South Korea as as a model. Sure, a third of the country
is stuck in a time warp under the world's most brutal dictatorship,
one that can't feed its own people but can threaten the region with
nuclear bombs, but even that looks pretty stable compared to Iraq.
A while back, Bush even wandered into the dreaded Vietnam analogy,
thinking that some events in Iraq had resembled the Tet Offensive,
and thinking that was some sort of US victory. (After all, the only
reason the US lost Vietnam was the yellow-bellied peace movement!
Ah, the perils of drinking your own propaganda.)
I've been arguing for a while now that Israel today is a glimpse
of the sort of country the US is turning into: racist, militarist,
paranoid, and vicious. Following the same path will be difficult
here, mostly because the US is relatively open and inclusive, both
in fact and in principle. Israel, on the other hand, styles itself
as The Jewish State, so there's never any doubt there about whether
one is part of the ruling us or the enemy them. Still, the US has
come remarkably close to a functional definition of us-versus-them
thanks to the Republican Party's voter profiling -- a distinction
the rightwing radio demagogues have no trouble drawing. One thing
the self-appointed us has in common is blind support for Israel.
As Bush shows, it's only a tiny step from there to envy.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Buck Doesn't Stop
From Seymour Hersh's June 25, 2007 article in the New Yorker, titled
"The General's Report":
An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have
provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq
and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must
make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and
inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence
Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined
after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military --
including the Pentagon's covert task forces -- for the purposes of
"preparing the battlefield" could be authorized by the President, as
Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.
There was coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but
also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce
better intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority
before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding would
give operatives some legal protection for questionable actions, but
the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted in writing.
A recently retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during
this period and was involved in the drafting of findings, eescribed to
me the bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency
over the issue. "The problem is what constituted approval," the retird
C.I.A. official said. "My people fought about this all the time. Why
should we put our people in the firing line somewhere down the road?
If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe
Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I'd say, 'This
guy Smith is a bad guy and it's in the interest of the United States
for this guy to be killed.' They don't say that. Instead, George" --
George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A. until mid-2004 -- "goes to
the White House and is told, 'You guys are professionals. You know how
important it is. We know you'll get the intelligence.' George would
come back and say to us, 'Do what you gotta do.'"
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for Tenet, depicted as "absurd" the notion
that the C.I.A. director told his agents to operate outside official
guidelinies. He added, in an e-mailed statement, "The intelligence
community insists that its officers not exceed the very explicit
authorities granted." In his recently published memoir, however, Tenet
acknowledged that there had been a struggle "to get clear guidance" in
terms of how far to go during high-value-detainee interrogations.
The Pentagon consultant said in an interview late last year that
"the C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted." The findings,
when promulgated by the White House, were "very calibrated" to
minimize political risk, an dlimited to a few countries; later, they
were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle
East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to high-value
targets.
What all this adds up to is that from the very beginning the
Bush administration was preoccupied with establishing its legal
defense against charges in the International Criminal Court. Or
so it would seem. Actually, the likelihood that any of them would
ever wind up in a war crimes docket has never been high, mostly
because it's unlikely the US would ever lose so badly in war as
to expose its leaders, no matter how guilty they were. But even
short of arraignment, the stench of guilt might be a political
embarrassment, and there deniability would be useful. Al Gore,
in his book The Assault on Reason (p. 108) puts it
this way:
Usually, he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed,
President Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence
that he knew full well he was telling an artful and important lie,
visibly circumnavigating the truth, over and over again, as if he had
practiced how to avoid encountering it.
So one theory on the table is that the Bush administration's
avoidance of the truth goes beyond being a matter of convenience
to some sort of pathological phobia. About the only thing they've
actually researched has been in polling to refine their propaganda
points, but that's merely instrumental. Their goals appear to be
wholly faith based, although even there one suspects that closer
inspection will reveal baser motives. Brecht once said that what
keeps mankind alive is bestial acts; for Bush bestiality appears
to be rooted in the bottom line.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Destination: Out's 90s Lists
While I'm thinking about jazz, let me point out that Destination Out's
Best Jazz of the 1990s
poll data has been posted. My first instinct when scanning these lists
was to jot down a list of things I don't know/haven't heard. There were
something like 20 lists, but a glance at the "most mentioned albums"
summary should have tipped me off as to how little intersection there
is: only 12 albums got three or more mentions, 27 more getting two.
When I hit bottom I had a list of 102 albums -- 68 in my database
(meaning I've seen and noted favorable reference before) and 34 not.
The list includes 9 John Zorn albums, 8 by Anthony Braxton, 4 by
Cecil Taylor, 3 each by Barry Guy and Butch Morris.
Didn't count how many records I am familiar with. Uh, let's see:
looks like total is 298 votes, minus 68 multiples, so 230; minus my
102 misses, means I'm familiar with 118, 51%. Don't know what to make
of that data: reminds me of some well-regarded albums I never bumped
into, but there are quite a few other albums on the lists that I've
graded B or less, so most likely I've missed more. Also that it's
impossible to keep track of Braxton and Zorn, in particular. (I have
7 Braxton and 6 Zorn albums from the 1990s, amounting to less than
25% in both cases.)
My initial ballot and backup data is still
here.
They just ran my minimal unexplained top ten list with a link to the
rest. The editor's round-up is worth reading -- more rigorously avant
than my own rather catholic tastes, but everything they list has merit.
Horace Tapscott's The Dark Tree missed my own list because it
was recorded in 1989 -- I actually have the original separate volumes,
rather than the combined 2-CD reissue. Similar borderline issues are
common in the lists. Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages is an album
I don't remember very well -- at the time I preferred Highlife
and the earlier solo Guitar. Maybe I should dig it out.
Meanwhile, I think the most striking thing about the poll is its
near-complete lack of consensus. Some of this is methodological: too
many records, too few vote slots, which adds up to an incentive for
idiosyncrasy. But it's also likely that most critics haven't heard
more than my 51%, especially if (like me) they weren't working at the
time. But it may also be the case that differences in jazz albums are
so marginal that consensus building is impossible. I don't know where
I'd begin in trying to predict a consensus list -- a task which is
still relatively easy with year-end rock critics lists, but harder
with jazz.
Records mentioned in poll that I do not have/have not heard (102;
* indicates not in database):
- Geri Allen: Maroons (1992, Blue Note)
- Fred Anderson/Peter Kowald/Hamid Drake: Live at the Velvet Lounge (1999, Okka Disk)
- Derek Bailey: Guitar Solos, Volume 2 (1991, Incus)
- Derek Bailey/Susie Ibarra: Daedal (1999, Incus)
- Gregg Bendian: Interzone (1996, Eremite)
- Bergman/Brotzmann/Braxton: Eight by Three (1997, Mixtery) *
- Tim Berne: Nice View (1993, JMT)
- Tim Berne: Unwound (1996, Screwgun) *
- Dave Binney: Free to Dream (1998, Mythology) *
- Michael Blake: Kingdom of Champa (1997, Intuition)
- Paul Bley: Not Two, Not One (1999, ECM) *
- Borbetomagus: Buncha Hair That Long (1992, Agaric) *
- Lester Bowie: Funky T, Cool T (1991, DIW)
- Anthony Braxton: Quintet (Basel) 1977 (2000, Hat Hut) *
- Anthony Braxton: Victoriaville (Quartet) 1992 (1992, Victo) *
- Anthony Braxton: Wesleyan (12 Altosolos) (1992, Hat Art)
- Anthony Braxton: Trio (London) 1993 (1993, Leo)
- Anthony Braxton: Santa Cruz 1993 (1993, Hat Art, 2CD)
- Anthony Braxton: Knitting Factory (Piano/Quartet) 1994, Vols. 1 and 2 (1994, Leo) *
- Anthony Braxton: Compositions No. 10 and No. 16 (+101) (1998, Hatology)
- Anthony Braxton: Four Compositions (Quartet) 1998 (1998, Braxton House) *
- Michael Brecker: Tales From the Hudson (1996, Impulse) *
- Michael Brecker: Time Is of the Essence (1998, Verve)
- Paul Brody: Turtle Paradise (1995, 99 Records) *
- Bob Brookmeyer: New Works: Celebration (1999, Challenge)
- Peter Brötzmann: The Chicago Octet/Tentet (1997, Okka Disk, 3CD)
- John Butcher: 13 Friendly Numbers (1992, Acta)
- Uri Caine: Urlicht/Primal Light (1997, Winter & Winter)
- James Carney: Offset Rhapsody (1997, Jacaranda)
- Ornette Coleman: Naked Lunch (Soundtrack) (1991, Milan) *
- Steve Coleman: Def Trance Beat (1994, Novus) *
- Steve Coleman: The Sonic Language of Myth (1999, RCA)
- Marilyn Crispell: Overlapping Hands (1990, FMP)
- Marilyn Crispell/Stefano Maltese: Red (1999, Black Saint)
- Andrew Cyrille/Mark Dresser/Marty Ehrlich: C/D/E (2000, Jazz Magnet)
- Deep Rumba: This Night Becomes a Rumba (1998, American Clave) *
- Whit Dickey: Transonic (1998, AUM Fidelity)
- Dirty Dozen Brass Band: Open Up (Whatcha Gonna Do With the Rest of Your Life) (1991, Columbia) *
- Bill Dixon: Papyrus, Vol. I (1998, Soul Note)
- Bill Dixon: Papyrus, Vol. II (1998, Soul Note)
- DJ Krush/Toshinori Kondo: Ki Oku (1999, Instinct) *
- DJ Logic: Project Logic (1999, Which) *
- Either/Orchestra: The Half-Life of Desire (1989, Accurate)
- Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black: Kulak, 29 & 30 (1998, Hatology)
- Douglas Ewart: Angles of Entrance (2001, Aarawak)
- Simon Fell: Composition No. 30/Compilation III (1998, Bruce's Fingers)
- The Flying Luttenbachers: Destroy All Music (1998, Skin Graft)
- Frisque Concordance: Spellings (1993, Random Acoustics)
- The Fully Celebrated Orchestra: Live at the Latch String Inn (1996, Cud) *
- Ground Zero: Plays Standards (1997, Nani) *
- Barry Guy: Theoria (1991, Intakt)
- Barry Guy/LJCO: Portraits (1993, Intakt, 2CD)
- Barry Guy: Double Trouble Two (1995, Intakt) *
- Kip Hanrahan: Tenderness (1990, American Clave)
- Gerry Hemingway: Perfect World (1996, Random Acoustics)
- Joseph Holbrooke: '98 (1998, Incus) *
- Guy Klucevsek: Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse (1991, Experimental Intermedia)
- Art Lande/Mark Miller: World Without Cars (1999, Synergy) *
- Leroy Jenkins: Solo (1998, Lovely Music)
- Last Exit: Headfirst Into the Flames (1990, Muworks) *
- Nguyen Lê: 3 Trios (ACT)
- George Lewis: Voyager (1993, Avant)
- Pat Martino: Nightwings (1996, Muse)
- Jim McNeely/WDR Big Band: East Coast Blow Out (1995, Lipstick) *
- Butch Morris: Dust to Dust (1990, New World)
- Butch Morris: Berlin Skyscraper (1995, FMP)
- Butch Morris: Testament (1995, New World, 10CD)
- Sal Mosca: Recital in Valhalla (1991, Zinnia)
- Paul Motian/Bill Frisell/Joe Lovano: At the Village Vanguard (1995, JMT) *
- David Murray: Sunrise, Sunset (1990, Red Baron) *
- Naftules Dream: Smash Clap (1998, Tzadik) *
- Naked City: Grand Guignol (1992, Avant)
- Naked City: Radio (1993, Avant)
- Naked City: Black Box (1997, Tzadik) *
- Ted Nash: Sidewalk Meeting (2000, Arabesque)
- Painkiller: Rituals: Live in Japan (1993, Toys Factory)
- Phantom City: Shiva Recoil (1997, Virgin) *
- Ponga (1999, Loosegroove) *
- Bobby Previte: Slay the Suitors (1994, Avant) *
- Marc Ribot: Don't Blame Me (1995, DIW)
- Adam Rudolph: Moving Pictures (1992, Flying Fish)
- Maria Schneider: Evanescence (1992, Enja)
- Matthew Shipp: Prism (1993, Brinkman) *
- Matthew Shipp: By the Law of Music (1996, Hat Art)
- Simmons/Evans/Norton: Universal Prayer/Survival Skills (1999, Parallactic)
- Jimi Sumen: Paintbrush, Rock Penstemon (1993, CMP) *
- John Surman: Proverbs and Songs (1997, ECM) *
- Cecil Taylor: In Florescence (1989, A&M)
- Cecil Taylor: Celebrated Blazons (1990, FMP)
- Cecil Taylor: Double Holy House (1990, FMP)
- Cecil Taylor: Almeda/The Light of Corona (1996, FMP) *
- Mark Turner: In This World (1998, Warner Bros.)
- Steve Turre: Rhythm Within (1995, Verve)
- James Blood Ulmer: Music Speaks Louder Than Words (1996, DIW)
- Jabbo Ware: Heritage Is (1994, Soul Note)
- Yosuke Yamashita: Canvas in Quiet (1997, Verve)
- John Zorn: Kristallnacht (1992, Tzadik)
- John Zorn: Masada: Alef (1994, DIW)
- John Zorn: Masada: Vav (1995, DIW)
- John Zorn: Bar Kokhba (1996, Tzadik, 2CD)
- John Zorn: The Circle Maker (1998, Tzadik, 2CD)
- John Zorn: The Bribe (1998, Tzadik)
Jazz Consumer Guide #13: Muscling Up and Rocking Out
My 13th Jazz Consumer Guide column appears in the
Village
Voice this week. Title, thanks to Rob Harvilla, is "Muscling Up and
Rocking Out" -- suggested by the relative preponderance of guitarists
this time out, although like most CG titles it just comes from picking
attractive words and phrases out of the mix.
Space, as usual, is a problem. The following records made it to my
final draft then got cut in the layout -- presumably they'll appear
next time:
- Pablo Aslan: Buenos Aires Tango Standards (Zoho) A-
- Kahil El'Zabar's Infinity Orchestra: Transmigration (Delmark) A-
- Sonic Liberation Front: Change Over Time (High Two) A-
- Frank Carlberg: State of the Union (Fresh Sound New Talent) HM
- Phil Bodner: Once More With Feeling (Arbors) HM
- Jason Lindner: Ab Aeterno (Fresh Sound New Talent) HM
- Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Hot 'N' Heavy (Delmark) HM
- Dave Liebman: Back on the Corner (Tone Center) HM
- Mark Murphy: Love Is What Stays (Verve) Dud
They also cut a line out of the David Torn review, which is ok except
that it removes the point where Berne is identified as Tim. Of course, you
know that -- maybe even that Torn has produced most of Berne's albums over
the past decade. Still, they should at least have given his full name.
I haven't seen the printed copy, so don't know whether they used the
second pick hit cover scan, or even whether they ever got it. Both pick
hits are older records, but new discoveries for me. I've read reports
that Muthspiel is relatively popular in Europe -- frequent comparisons
to Pat Metheny and John Scofield, neither of which I hear -- but he's
certainly little known in the US. I've long admired his early work,
especially 1992's Black and Blue. Even so, the new work is a
revelation, with Friendly Travelers nearly as good as the pick.
(Had I not made Bright Side the pick hit, I would have written
up Friendly Travelers alongside it, and Solo as a low HM.)
Nilsson is younger, more obscure, although being based in NYC makes him
more visible here. I noticed him on Fay Victor's Cartwheels Through
the Cosmos -- an A- record I didn't get written up in time -- and
wanted to hear more, and was especially struck by Blood. I could
have made any of a number of records second pick hit -- Fujii, Lacy,
Lovano, or for that matter Powerhouse Sound, which I deliberately held
back but is thus far my record of the year -- but I liked the idea of
having two guitarists, especially since I'm not normally much of a jazz
guitar fan.
I suppose it's also worth noting that the Honorable Mentions are topped
with three A- records I didn't have a lot to write about, and the Duds
are three not-awful B by artists who typically do better. Truly awful
records remain rare and mostly uninteresting -- the Mark Murphy record
is an exception, on the "optional cut" list only because it's so bad I
might want to feature it next time (although I'd rather not have to play
it again). This time I tried to offer short comments on the Duds, rather
than just list them.
The final cut winds up with 34 albums, 1528 words. Jazz prospecting
covered 218 records this cycle, plus 84 were considered from previous
cycles. Carry over for next time is 16 albums, 705 words, so close to
half done. Last column appeared March 20, so once again this one is
very close to three months -- given the lack of scheduling I'm always
surprised how regularly these have appeared, with (I think) only one
straying more than two weeks from the three month mark. I'll make
another pitch for accelerating the schedule. I'm thinking about
changing the format to something closer to what I do with Recycled
Goods: that would let me write more about things I have more to say
about, and less about things that are simply better. It would also
make it easier for me to write more frequently, but there's little
or no evidence that the Voice wants that. Still, we've done three
columns since Robert Christgau left the Voice, so for this column
at least, plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.
Publicist's letter:
My Village Voice Jazz Consumer Guide column is out today:
link
This is the 13th such column. It covers 34 albums rather tersely
in 1528 words. It actually represents the tip of a rather large
iceberg: in the course of putting this together, I wrote notes
on 218 albums and posted them on my blog (in weekly chunks, on
Mondays). The cumulative prospecting log is at:
http://tomhull.com/ocston/arch/jcg/jcg-13p.php
As usual, I wrote more stuff than fit on the page, so I have a
dozen albums ready for next time. These columns have appeared
quite regularly every three months. I'd like to see them come
out more often, given how much material I have to cover -- well,
wouldn't mind the money either, but I try not to think about how
cost-ineffective this is. That I can do it at all is thanks to
the support of publicists, labels, and musicians, who cheerfully
contribute to my clutter problem. Thanks, and keep me in mind,
especially since I'm becoming worse and worse at tracking down
everything I need to hear.
Notes on albums printed in Jazz CG #13 (purge of bk-print):
- John Abercrombie: The Third Quartet (2006 [2007], ECM):
I'm not sure whether the problem here is Mark Feldman -- a
violinist so classical in nature the only time I've ever found him
interesting was in Masada with John Zorn and Dave Douglas breathing
fire up his ass -- or whether it's Abercrombie himself. The guitarist
has never been as intentionally delicate or precious as Ralph Towner,
but he still sort of typifies ECM's ascetic aesthetic applied to the
instrument, and here he manages to dial it down a couple of notches.
Feldman is equally studious and discrete. Marc Johnson and Joey Baron
do what they can with what they've got to work with, and they have
some good stretches. Normally I would let this pass, but having two
guitarists as Pick Hits suggests that by contrast this should be
flagged as a Dud.
B
- Carl Allen & Rodney Whitaker: Get Ready
(2007, Mack Avenue):
Basic rhythm guys, keying off two Motown covers from
Robinson and Gaye, as old-fashioned today as soul jazz was in the
'60s. But they keep the quiet storm loose and limber, giving Cyrus
Chestnut and Rodney Jones their best outing in years. Steve Wilson
plays warm and fuzzy alto sax.
B+(**)
- BassDrumBone: The Line Up (2005 [2006], Clean Feed):
This is Mark Helias on bass, Gerry Hemingway on drum, and
Ray Anderson on bone. Their first album together was *Wooferlo*
(Soul Note) in 1987, which I didn't think much of at the time. But
one in 1997 called *Hence the Reason* (Enja) was terrific. I
was wondering if this is a once-per-decade thing, but evidently
there are more, buried on obscure labels: *Oahpse* (Auricle),
*March of Dimes* (Data), *You Be* (Minor Music), *Cooked
to Perfection* (Auricle). There's also a record by the trio called
*Right Down Your Alley* (1984, Soul Note) - *Oahpse* looks
like the oldest, dating from 1979. Helias also plays with Anderson in
the Slickaphonics, and produced most of Anderson's Gramavision albums.
The oldest entry in Hemingway's discography, a 1979 record called
*Kwambe*, also features Anderson and Helias. So no surprise
that this trio is so tightly integrated and evenly balanced, but
they don't seem to be able to break out of their integration and
jump to some higher energy level. Good to hear Anderson, who hasn't
released much under his own name since his string with Enja ran out
around 1999. Whatever the problem is there, it's not in the bone.
B+(***)
- Michael Brecker: Pilgrimage (2006 [2007], Heads Up):
I never could fault him on technique, but fast runs have been bebop
calisthentics since Charlie Parker, a standard and by now ordinary
stock in trade. I never cared for his musical interests, and often
found him cold and dispassionate to a worrisome extent. This record
was cut during a brief respite in his struggle with MDS. It benefits
from simplicity of conception and an outpouring of friends -- he has
to juggle two pianists since he could hardly turn down either Herbie
Hancock or Brad Mehldau. So I'm tempted to say: impending death
focuses the mind, thaws the heart, brings out the best in friends.
In fact, that's what I wrote for the column. I'd also say that it's
his best album ever, but I've never given him better than a B before,
and sarcasm doesn't seem appropriate here. It's certainly one to
remember him by. Also note that Pat Metheny stands out among the
friends.
B+(**)
- Uri Caine Ensemble: Plays Mozart (2006 [2007],
Winter & Winter):
Or plays with Mozart, like cat with
rat. Much of the fun here comes from the induced chaos of DJ
Olive's turntables, Nguyên Lê's electric guitar, the tension
of Ralph Alessi's trumpet against Chris Speed's clarinet, the
mischief of Jim Black's drums. Still, improbably, the bit that
won me over was an oasis of solo piano in the middle, which much
as I hate to admit it, could have been faithful to the original.
B+(***)
- Carneyball Johnson (2006, Akron Cracker):
Even when they
were young, Akron new wavers Tin Huey realized they'd have to get the
parts to rule the world. Failing that, Chris Butler tried his hand as
a feminist impersonator in the Waitresses, while Ralph Carney eeked
out a career playing sax for Tom Waits and others. They he met the
useful names of guitarist Kimo Ball and drummer Scott Johnson, not to
mention the useless name of bassist Allen Whitman, and formed Rubber
City's answer to the New York's Lounge Lizards. The likeness is clear
when they take toons like Cream's "White Room" or Desmond Dekker's
"Intensified" and bend them into aural origami. The difference is
that they bounce more, and tango less.
A-
- Club D'Elf: Now I Understand (1998-2006 [2006],
Accurate):
Never did manage to figure out who's who and what's
what, other than that bassist Mike Rivard is at the center of
this amorphuous group and that damn near anyone is likely to
show up as a guest. The machine beats recall Nils Petter Molvaer
circa Khmer, but conventional drums also appear, probably
Erik Kerr. While Rivard's bass grooves are critical, they tend
to be thickened up with keyboards -- mostly John Medeski -- and
turntables -- someone d/b/a Mister Rourke. Plenty of guitars, too.
There's also a strain of mostly middle eastern exotica, which
oudist Brahim Fribgane has something to do with. Several songs
have vocals -- Jennifer Jackson's "A Toy for a Boy" is a marginal
novelty, but the kiddie sample reggae romp "Just Kiddin'" is on
my first ever year-end song list. There are also skits and raps,
and if MF Doom isn't in the house, his doppelganger ist. If none
of this sounds much like jazz, that's just too bad. It doesn't
sound like world-techno-fusion either, because they fuck with
it like jazzbos junk up pop songs. Besides, Mat Maneri's on the
guest list.
A-
- Anat Cohen & the Anzic Orchestra: Noir
(2006 [2007], Anzic):
The strings don't take as much of a toll here as
on Poetica, mostly because they're outgunned in numbers
and in volume. Cohen plays tenor, alto and soprano sax, as well
as clarinet, and she gets help on the saxes from Ted Nash, Billy
Drewes, and Scott Robinson. Plus there's a phalanx of brass, led
by brother Avishai -- not to be confused with the bassist (a tip
I much appreciated, and figured I should pass along). Then there
are the Brazilians, with Guilherme Monteiro on guitar and more
in the rhythm section. Cohen works that connection several times,
including a medley of "Samba de Orfeu" and "Struttin' With Some
Barbecue." The latter is so strong, so crisp, so bright I wish
they had taken a shot at a whole post-Katrina album. But Cohen
and arranger Oded Lev-Ari had other game in mind.
B+(***)
- Les DeMerle: Cookin' at the Corner, Vol. 1 (2005
[2006], Origin):
Going with the spine on this one; the front cover
spells out "Volume One," adds "Live at the Jazz Corner," and lists
the artist as "The Dynamic Les DeMerle Band featuring Bonnie Eisele."
The setup is piano-bass-drums plus singer, but the leader is the
drummer, and he sings some too. In fact, DeMerle and Eisele pair
up like Louis Prima and Keely Smith, even if they play it straight
most of the time. (But not all the time: DeMerle sings one about
a sailor who comes home after three years to find his wife has a
new baby named Bennie. Where'd he come from, the sailor wonders?
"Bennie's From Heaven.") Eisele doesn't enter until the fifth
song, then belts out Ellington, Jobim, "Lullaby of Birdland."
DeMerle's quite a drummer, and pianist Mike Levine bounces in
an all-upbeat program until he gets a lovely ballad at the end.
Nothing groundbreaking, but it's good to be reminded that jazz
was once a form of entertainment. This is a lot of fun.
B+(***)
- Anat Fort: A Long Story (2004 [2007], ECM):
This
is not all slow, but inches along with deliberate thoughtfulness,
Fort's piano framed by Ed Schuller's bass and Paul Motian's drum
haiku. At trio level, this would be add one more worthy name to
the long list of pianists, starting with Bill Evans, that Motian
has coaxed along. But the real treat here is Perry Robinson, who
plays clarinet and ocarina on most of the album. He plays softer
than usual, but adds a jagged edge to the soft piano cushion.
B+(***)
- Joel Frahm: We Used to Dance (2006 [2007], Anzic):
A tenor sax lover's album, plain and simple, with three-fourths of the
late Stan Getz's quartet (Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid, Victor Lewis) --
not that Frahm sounds much like Getz, or plays his songbook. This is
the sort of record I tend to be sweet on, but could just as well be
underrated here.
B+(***)
- Bob French: Marsalis Music Honors Bob French
(2006 [2007], Marsalis Music/Rounder):
B+(***)
- Satoko Fujii Four: When We Were There (2005 [2006], Libra):
Faced with all those big band albums, I chickened out and
threw the plum grade to Fujii's Junk Box trio, figuring it's the
common denominator to an oeuvre that is remarkable in its totality
even if the pieces never seem to quite add up. Still, I worried
that Junk Box wasn't quite up to snuff either. But no such worries
here. This time it's a quartet with Jim Black in place of John
Hollenbeck -- both drummers who can keep a beat as well as free
it up -- and Mark Dresser added on bass. The combination is as
powerful as Zephyros on the straightaways but a lot nimbler on
the curves. There's a lot going on here, and I don't have it
anywhere near sorted, but no quibbling on the grade this time --
unless it eventually goes higher.
A-
- Satoko Fujii/Natsuki Tamura: In Krakow in November
(2005 [2006], Not Two):
Trumpet-piano duet, recorded Nov. 8, 2005,
at Radio Krakow, released on a Polish label that has been doing some
interesting stuff, but has yet to answer my inquiries. I figured,
given the vast number of options for exploring their music, this
would be marginal at best, but this one keeps gaining on me. It is
in Tamura's more moderate vein, with little flash or daring --
solidly built, powerful music.
B+(***)
- Gato Libre: Nomad (2006, No Man's Land):
The ten
pieces here have titles like "In Barcelona, in June" and "In Krakow,
in November." All of the places are in Europe, and they represent
a continent's worth of folk themes elevated to chamber jazz. That
they were recorded in one day in a Tokyo studio matters little --
this could be an Enrico Rava album, but it isn't. The trumpeter,
leader, composer is Natsuki Tamura. He's always been a straighter
shooter than his better half, pianist Satoko Fujii. Here she does
him a favor and sticks to accordion, filling in that prototypical
European folk sound without ever showing him up. The other key
ingredient here is Kazuhiko Tsumura's guitar, especially on the
Spanish-flavored tunes, which he has down pat. But Tamura is the
real treat here. He's been working his colors into Fujii's more
chaotic canvases all along, but here he paints his own masterpiece.
A-
- Jerry Granelli/V16: The Sonic Temple: Monday and Tuesday
(2006 [2007], Songlines, 2CD):
The band is a quartet, so I guess the
band name allocates four cylinders per member, not that that makes
much sense. Switching metaphors, the liner notes describes the band
as "like a chemical reaction." As anyone who's fiddled with chemistry
sets can tell you, that doesn't do them justice. Two guitarists: David
Tronzo is credited with electric slide guitar, Christian Kögel with
plain old electric guitar. Brother J. Anthony plays electric bass,
while the leader drums and attacks steel sculpture. Two discs, one
each for two nights, each live with no edits, each with the same
eight songs in same order but the versions differ significantly.
First night is more experimental, with the drummer figuring more.
Second night tends to slide back into blues mode.
B+(***)
- Gordon Grdina's Box Cutter, Unlearn (2006, Spool/Line):
Vancouver guitarist, mostly sets up the rhythm
that propels François Houle's clarinets through a worldbeat
maze. The latter is largely informed by Grdina's interest
in Arabic classical music -- he also plays oud, but not on
this album -- but the framework seems broader. Houle has
done interesting work with Africans before, but sometimes
sounds like bebop. "Soul Suite" is an exception here, starting
slow and building strong.
B+(***)
- Vijay Iyer + Mike Ladd: Still Life With Commentator
(2006 [2007], Savoy Jazz):
Maybe Pamela Z's "bel canto" vocals were
the turnoff. I missed this first round, but easily skipped past the
joke this time, and straight into Iyer's programming and sequencing.
Still don't get much out of Ladd's words, even when I read the trot
from the Japanese, but then I wonder whether the point isn't just
to sound profound, even if meaningless -- that is the way of our
cosmopolitanism, where commentators help render us as still lifes,
tuned in to a world we thankfully don't have to engage.
A-
- Vijay Iyer & Rudresh Mahanthappa: Raw Materials
(2005 [2006], Savoy Jazz).
Put this on as soon as I got it, and I've
played it three times since, so this isn't really a first impression.
But it really is just an impression: I've been playing the record in
odd moments when I couldn't really focus. It took me a while before
I realized that these pieces are just duets. Iyer is so adept at
marshalling time and filling space that I never suspected anything
to be missing. But my strongest impression of the record is that
it annoys me. I'm inclined to blame Mahanthappa's tone -- a sour,
metallic taste, all edge. I can think of other alto saxists with
a similar bite -- most notably, Jackie McLean -- so perhaps there's
something more bugging me here. Iyer's work here remains impressive --
he's a major figure, and judging from his other work Mahanthappa is
at least a useful one. This leaves me with a conundrum: impressions
thus far have made it clear to me that I'm never going to like this
enough to rate it even as an Honorable Mention; on the other hand,
it's possible that if I played it another 3-5 times I might develop
the grudging admiration that would push it into low B+ range, or I
might get so annoyed to list it as a Dud. Right now I'm not looking
forward to either.
B
- Steve Lacy Quintet: Esteem (1975 [2006], Atavistic):
Following Lacy's death, his widow Irene Aebi started sorting through
over 300 private recordings for a series called "The Leap: Steve Lacy
Cassette Archives." This is Volume 1, and it's easy to see why it
leapt to the head of the list. It is raw and deliciously noisy, old
sounding, yet so far out it's more shocking now than when it came
out. Steve Potts' alto sax provides a second horn. Kent Carter's
bass is plug ugly, and Kenneth Tyler is credited with percussion
because he's hitting things beyond his drum kit. But the revelation
is Aebi herself. I can't stand her singing -- if you go through my
database you may notice that Lacy's records get docked about a notch
for each song she sings on -- but she sticks to cello and violin
here, and you can hear why he fell in love with her. The notes say
"The Uh Uh Uh" was Lacy's tribute to Jimi Hendrix. I'll have to
listen again to see what that means.
A-
- Dave Liebman, Anthony Jackson, Mike Stern, Tony Marino, Marko
Marcinko, Vic Juris: Back on the Corner (2006 [2007],
Tone Center):
How this stacks up against the oft-maligned On
the Corner remains to be seen, but with no trumpet weighing
in the saxophonist works all that much harder, which is good for
him, and with no keyboards, the rhythm people focus on their
mission. I have this slotted as HM, but will list it only under
Liebman's name. He makes it work, and after half a dozen or more
disappointments during the span of Jazz CG, it's good to be able
to give him some credit.
B+(***)
- Joe Lovano & Hank Jones: Kids: Duets Live at Dizzy's Club
Coca-Cola (2006 [2007], Blue Note):
Two recent quartet albums
with Lovano and Jones were, respectively, more and less disappointing.
But really, these two don't need bass and drums to swing or bop or
diddle around. The duets are simply delightful from beginning to end.
A-
- The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project: Simpático
(2005 [2006], ArtistShare):
Palmieri grew up in the Bronx melting
pot, of Puerto Rican descent. I don't know him well enough to place
him, or indeed whether that's possible: salsa draws so promiscuously
from Afro-Cuban that it may make no difference. Lynch is a terrific
trumpeter who plays a lot of everything; his Latin interests started
as a teenager in salsa bands in Milwaukee, then took a leap forward
when he hooked up on a Palmieri tour in 1987 -- juggling travel to
also keep his commitments to Toshiko Akiyoshi. This pulls it all
together, with a steady stream of bubbling percussion, tasty alto
sax from Donald Harrison and Phil Woods, and plenty of trumpet.
Won a Grammy; for once I can't complain.
A-
- Rudresh Mahanthappa: Codebook (2006, Pi):
Whereas
Mother Tongue looked to natural languages for tricks of
transformation, this one moves on to ciphers and encodings, as
when the group members sign their names in Morse code. Either way,
the alto saxophonist's true Rosetta Stone is John Coltrane, and
what lifts him above dozens of others is his association with
pianist Vijay Iyer, who starkly frames his music, and who picks
up the place when he lays out. Still, if that was all it took,
you'd expect more from Raw Materials, a duo album from
earlier this year that never quite stuck together.
A-
- Russell Malone: Live at Jazz Standard: Volume One
(2005 [2006], MaxJazz):
I've noticed myself complaining about Wes
Montgomery a lot lately, and indeed I don't see much value in his
school, or even in much of his own work. Still, when he was on, he
did amaze, as on Smokin' at the Half Note -- which I first
heard embedded in Impressions: The Verve Jazz Sides along
with a lot of Jimmy Smith. Malone is so squarely in Montgomery's
wake that until now he's always struck me as redundant or worse.
Score this one as redundant at best, in part because he pulls more
than sweetness out of the blues. Also because pianist Martin Bejerano
had me thinking of Wynton Kelly for a while. In a different venue,
this could be called Smolderin' at the Half Note.
B+(***)
- Wynton Marsalis: From the Plantation to the Penitentiary
(2006 [2007], Blue Note):
My wife expressed interest in this album,
telling me that she had read a rave review in Counterpunch. I chased
down Ron Jacobs' review anyway, but couldn't get past the third line:
"It's just enough bop and bebop so it doesn't put one to sleep like a
Kenny G solo, but it's not a Coltrane avalanche of sound like those
from Coltrane's thundering Ascension, either." Now, there's no
information there: Marsalis has recorded 40-50 albums since 1981, and
he has never once risked comparison to Kenny G or Ascension.
He started off reminding Art Blakey what narrowly construed hard bop
sounds like. If he's picked up any tricks since then, they've been
old ones, like extending his trumpet mastery from Woody Shaw back to
Freddie Keppard, and fumbling to imitate composers like Ellington. I
had figured this album for his move into Mingus agitprop, but that
doesn't pan out on several levels. He's more song-oriented, but has
less in the way of message, and his hired singer handles his hokey
lines with cool detachment. On the other hand, the music shows he's
working in soundtrack mode: each piece is accompanied by a formal
description -- modern habanera; alternating 2-beat country groove,
soca, cumbia, swing; walking ballad; etc. -- and he's more inspired
as a musicologist than as a polemicist. Indeed, if you could skip
past the words this might be one of his more enjoyable albums. But
if he meant for you to just enjoy the music, he would have left the
words out, right? For one, I find the plantation-to-penitentiary
arc narrow, condescending, and disturbing. It's not that there's
no truth to it, but it's such a cliché I don't see what you can
do with it. I suppose his use of stereotypes is meant to convey
some irony, but in an album that's more scold than rant it's hard
to be sure. "I ain't your bitch and I ain't your ho" comes off as
awkward from him as if Don Imus said it. And speaking of awkward,
the closing rap makes Buckshot Lefonque sound real. (But I doubt
that when he goes to dis "Camus readers" he's really thinking of
George W.) I thought about pitching this for a standalone piece
in the Voice, but Francis Davis beat me to it. I don't feel mean
enough to single this out as a dud. If he had a smarter, hipper
lyricist able to work on a human rather than mythic scale, he might
be onto something. But he persists in surrounding himself with
ideological flatterers like Stanley Crouch, so this is what he
gets.
B
- Wolfgang Muthspiel: Bright Side (2005 [2006],
Material):
I wonder what Pat Metheny's fans would think of Muthspiel.
Probably find him too dry. Penguin Guide speculates that he's "too
individual, I suspect, for the majors." I'm not sure what "individual"
means, but it doesn't mean idiosyncratic. He gets a clean sound from
his electric guitar, little echo or distortion, no effects, nothing
prepared, but he also has no interest in the horn-like single note
lines that have been so prominent in jazz guitar from Wes Montgomery
to Joe Morris. He plays guitar more like a piano, teasing harmony
and rhythm out of it as well as melody. That may be even clearer on
Solo, where he has to dig deeper into his kit, but the payoff
is on this trio with bass-drums from brothers Matthias and Andreas
Pichler. They push him hard, but he's always in control, never breaking
a sweat. Best guitar jazz I've heard since, oh, Black and Blue,
from 1992, same guy. Possible pick hit.
A-
- Anders Nilsson's Aorta: Blood (2004, Kopasetic):
Quartet, two Nilssons, one Carlson, one Carlsson. The leader plays
fast, dazzling electric guitar, over a pumping fusion rhythm. The
Carlson, Mattias, plays tenor sax and "electrified alto sax" but
mostly lurks in the background, a contrasting color. They could
pass for rock on attitude, or jazz on shops. Several Scandinavian
have tried their hands at postpunk fusion -- while most have the
attitude, this one has a guitarist up to the challenge.
A-
- Bob Reynolds: Can't Wait for Perfect (2005 [2006],
Fresh Sound New Talent):
I have a few nits to pick: I wish he'd
lose the soprano sax (one cut), and don't care much for his synth
programming (two cuts). What makes them minor blemishes on this
debut album is that his tone and poise on tenor sax is so superb
you wonder why he'd try to dilute it. Youth, I guess. He projects
to earn his place in the Budd Johnson-Ben Webster line, which
among other things means he very likely has a great ballad album
in his future. We remember those guys from when they were old
and slow, but once they were young, and Webster wasn't called
"the brute" only because he started out in boxing. Reynolds'
band is rooted in funk not swing, and that seems fair to me.
One he shouldn't lose is drummer Eric Harland.
A-
- Vittor Santos: Renewed Impressions (2005 [2006],
Adventure Music):
It's rare to hear Brazilian music with a lead
horn of any sort, much less a trombone, but Santos's rapid-fire
puffs give some much needed heft to the sly rhythms and flighty
melodies.
A-
- Sound in Action Trio: Gate (2003 [2006], Atavistic):
Two drummers: Robert Barry, from Sun Ra Arkestra, and Tim Daisy, from
Triage and numerous Ken Vandermark projects, including the flagship
5. One horn, Vandermark, constantly on the spot. Half originals, all
dedicated to drummers; half modern jazz pieces, with Dolphy offering
a clarinet feature, and Coltrane setting up some extraordinary tenor
sax.
A-
- David Torn: Prezens (2005 [2007], ECM):
Rip Torn's cousin played guitar on some fusion albums in the '80s,
working with such usual suspects as Bill Bruford and Tony Levin,
before moving on to soundtrack work and the group Splattercell,
but mostly he's done production work. He's produced most of Tim
Berne's albums since 1997. Here he employs Hard Cell -- Berne's
trio with keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Tom Rainey -- for
a dark, demonic comeback. Berne's alto sax adds bite to Torn's
power chords, Taborn juices up the electronics, and the always
superb Rainey muscles up.
A-
- Turtle Island String Quartet: A Love Supreme: The Legacy of
John Coltrane (2006 [2007], Telarc):
There are those
who regard the Coltrane Quartet's A Love Supreme as the
crowning achievement of the jazz canon, and they have a case.
But this group manages to drain every ounce of interest from
the score, even Jimmy Garrison's bass, and not just because the
Turtle Islanders wield nothing heavier than a cello. With the
last two movements reduced to 2:44 and 2:47, the acknowledgment
here is their lack of ideas. The album itself is flushed out to
64:17 by the inclusion of other pieces, some by Coltrane ("Naima,"
"Moment's Notice"), some associated with him ("My Favorite Things"
is the one sure shot here), and some written in his honor. But
no "Giant Steps," let alone "Ascension." Maybe that ROVA record
wasn't so bad.
C+
- Frank Wright: Unity (1974 [2006], ESP-Disk):
If it weren't for ESP-Disk's "the artist alone decides what you
hear" motto Wright might have passed in total obscurity. Who else
would have approved the music he released on two ESP records from
1965-67? He was as rough a tenor saxophonist as the avant-garde
produced in the '60s, closer in spirit to the future Charles Gayle
than to his contemporary Albert Ayler. Since then an occasional
live tape pops up, like Raphe Malik's Last Set (1984 [2004],
Boxholder), and now this barnburner from the Moers Festival. The
drummer dances and stings like his namesake, Muhammad Ali. Bobby
Few's piano and Alan Silva's bass are cranked into overdrive,
and Wright really brings the noise. Impulse used to call shit
like this by guys like Shepp and Sanders "energy music," but
even they would have reached for the plug before this finishes.
A-
Notes on albums flushed during/following Jazz CG #13 (purge of
bk-flush):
- Antonio Adolfo e Carol Saboya: Ao Vivo/Live (2005
[2007], Points South):
Father/daughter, from Brazil, the former
plays piano, the latter sings. Adolfo has a formidable reputation
in his own right as a composer and arranger. He opens the set
with a delightful piece before Saboya enters on the second song.
She's a very agreeable singer, but the initial brightness starts
to dim a bit toward the end. The song credits include most of the
usual suspects, starting with Jobim, and only including one by
Adolfo. Not sure whether this counts as jazz in Brazil or just
MPB. I suspect it fits the same niche as cabaret does here.
B+(**)
- Charly Antolini: Knock Out 2000 (1999, Inak):
A big band drummer from Switzerland, whose early career bumped
into Benny Goodman in 1959, turns in a pure drummer's album,
every cut built around a beat up front, even when bass and
percussion intend a fusion groove; the cover pics are all
muscle, but like Buddy Rich, when Antolini wants to turn up
the heat, he reaches for his brushes.
B+(**)
- Nacho Arimany World-Flamenco Septet: Silence-Light
(2006, Fresh Sound World Jazz):
Most cuts have vocals, mostly from
Antonio Campos, whose high-pressured melodrama fits the flamenco
mold, without quite winning me over like Dieguito El Cigala did.
Stretches without vocals are easier to handle and more interesting.
Arimany sets the pace with his percussion, trying to bridge jazz
and flamenco. Pianist Pablo Suárez and guitarist Lionel Loueke
have some good moments, and saxophonist Javier Vercher tops them
all. Harder to gauge Concha Jareño's contribution -- credits read
"flamenco dance footsteps, clapping." Hard to gauge the flamenco,
but minus vocals this makes for interesting jazz.
B+(*)
- Pablo Aslan: Avantango (2003 [2004], Zoho):
The first
of two albums by an Argentinian bassist, now resident in New York. It
more than lives up to the title. You may read about merging jazz with
tango, or jazzing up tango, but the real goal here is to push tango to
unimagined extremes. Still, in the end the bandoneon, violin, and above
all three vocals by Roxana Fontan mark this as uncompromisingly rooted
in the classics, even if the horns and piano beg to differ.
B+(**)
- Ab Baars Quartet: Kinda Dukish (2005 [2006], Wig):
Ten Ellington pieces, played more than loose -- in most cases only
snatches of the familiar themes emerge unscathed. Baars plays
clarinet more than tenor sax, so the heft added by trombonist
Joost Buis is essential.
B+(**)
- The Heckler by Juan Pablo Balcazar Quartet: Heckler City
(2005, Fresh Sound New Talent).
Very similar to the Arthur Kell disc --
a tenor sax-guitar-bass-drums group led by the bassist, but a little
sweeter all around, especially in the guitar (Alejandro Mingot). The
saxophonist is Miguel Villar "Pintxo" -- the quoted part presumably a
nickname, like "Lockjaw" (maybe an influence; for all the Basque I
know it could even be a translation)
B+(***)
- Gilad Barkan: Live Sessions (2004-06 [2007], New Step, 2CD):
Boston-based pianist, born in England, raised in Israel. Second
album, preceded by Modulation, same trio as the first disc here.
Second disc here changes bassists and adds Amir Milstein on flute. The
trio strikes me as sharp, intricate postbop, something that deserves
to be taken seriously but doesn't quite inspire me to do so. Far easier
to dismiss the flute, even though it is pleasantly boppish.
B
- Beatle Jazz: All You Need (2006 [2007], Lightyear):
Fifth album, with David Kikoski (piano, synthesizer) and Brian
Melvin (drums, tabla) the mainstays. The Beatles' songs are so
indelibly ingrained in my mind that I instinctively reject all
variations -- I suppose if I really racked my brain I might be
able to come up with a tolerable mix tape of exceptions, but I'm
not optimistic. Bass duties are split between Larry Grenadier
and Richard Bona; the latter sings one, a risky move that best
comes off rather odd. Toots Thielemans (3 cuts) and Joe Lovano
(2 cuts) also guest. The core group is smart enough I can't pan
them severely. The two Lovano cuts ("The continuing Story of
Bungalow Bill" and "Look at Me") are choice.
B
- Joe Beck/Santi Debriano/Thierry Arpino: Trio 7
(2007, Whaling City Sound):
Guitarist. Been around at least since
the '70s, when he worked with Esther Phillips. AMG says he had a
"big hit with David Sanborn in 1975" -- there's an album from then
called Beck & Sanborn, but I missed it. Actually, I
missed all of 20+ records Beck's recorded since 1969 -- even the
Phillips records, but the name rings a bell. This is pleasant,
soft-toned, with a little Brazilian seasoning but no nylon. I
find myself focusing on the bassist, who's worth the attention.
Note that Debriano's name is misspelled on the cover.
B+(*)
- Roni Ben-Hur: Keepin' It Open (2005 [2007],
Motéma Music):
Guitarist, born in Israel, moved to New York in
1985, has five records since 1995. He's done impressive work,
but this one is pretty tame, especially when trumpeter Jeremy
Pelt takes the lead. Ronnie Mathews does a nice job on piano,
while Santi Debriano and Lewis Nash do whatever's needed. The
last two cuts move nicely on Latin rhythms, which give Ben-Hur
something to work with.
B+(*)
- Sean Bergin's Song Mob: Fat Fish (2005-06 [2007],
Data):
Plays sax, clarinet, etc. Based in Amsterdam; born 1948 in
Durban, South Africa. He's named his band MOB before, an acronym
for My Own Band. SONG MOB, as he capitalizes it, is his own band
with extra vocalists: Mola Sylla, Phil Minton, and Maggie Nicols.
The latter two are familiar names in English free improv. Sylla
moved to Amsterdam from Senegal, bringing a griot flavor -- most
evident in the first song, which he wrote. Bergin's band includes
some well known names, hardly just his own band: Wolter Wierbos,
Eric Boeren, Ernst Glerum, Han Bennink, Alex Maguire -- didn't
recognize him last week, but do now. The music manages to be odd
and comfortably playful at the same time -- seems to be a Dutch
specialty. I have more trouble with the vocals, not that they
lack for interest.
B+(*)
- Alan Bergman: Lyrically, Alan Bergman (2007, Verve):
Songwriter, lyricist actually -- music credited to Michel
Legrand, Lew Spence, Dave Grusin, Neil Diamond, Johnny Mandel,
Marvin Hamlisch -- taking a crack at singing his own songs. No
recording dates, but presumably it's recent, which puts him in
his 80s (born 1925). Voice holds up fine. Songs are stage and
film fare, famous enough to put him into the Songwriters Hall
of Fame and get him a spot on the board of the Barbra Streisand
Foundation. One problem is that Verve sent him to Berlin along
with Mark Murphy, but he lucked out better with the Berlin Big
Band and Radio Orchestra instead of Murphy's Orchester, plus
he got Jeff Hamilton to help him along. (Well, except for "The
Way We Were," which probably deserved it anyway.)
B-
- Will Bernard: Party Hats (2007, Palmetto):
San Francisco guitarist, gets a smart, light, funky groove
going around organ (Wil Blades and/or Michael Bluestein),
decorated with various horns -- Peter Apfelbaum is present
on most tracks, but Dave Ellis rips off the big tenor sax
solo on "Rattle Trap."
B+(*)
- Michael Blanco: In the Morning (2004 [2006],
Fresh Sound New Talent):
Bassist, born and raised in San Diego,
studied at North Texas (evidently a strong jazz program), moved
on to New York. He puts his compositions forth on a broad pallette
with five or six pieces, and he's managed to draw on first rate
players all around: Rich Perry on tenor sax, Alan Ferber trombone
Aaron Goldberg piano, Bill Campbell drums, plus two cuts with Rob
Wilkerson alto sax. Perry sounds terrific, and of course I love
Ferber's solo. But my favorite moment turns out to be the bass
lead on the closer. Educated postbop, impressively executed.
B+(**)
- Stan Bock Ensemble: Your Check's in the Mail
(2006 [2007], OA2):
Trombonist, based in Oregon, but studied at
Fort Hays State here in Kansas back in the early '70s -- I have
some cousins who went there a bit before. Has a couple of albums
with his semi-large (8 piece) Ensemble, as well as some group
efforts at Latin jazz and Klezmer. This is bright, burly, fairly
boppish, with a group tribute to James Brown.
B+(*)
- The Brooklyn Repertory Ensemble: Pragmatic Optimism
(2006, 360 Degree):
The label, with its bullseye logo around the
number 360 and "from rag time to no time" slogan, reminds me of
Beaver Harris, who had a group called 360 Degree Music Experience.
Don't know that there's any link here, although the director here,
Wade Barnes, is another drummer. Nothing avant here. Just a big
band that goes for heavy brass -- James Zollar is the only trumpet,
but he's complemented by French horn, mellophone, euphonium, bass
trombone, and tuba. The horns tend to undulate with no one breaking
loose or doing anything especially distinctive. The rhythm -- Bill
Ware III on vibes as well as drummer Barnes -- have more going on.
Don't much care for vocalist Tulivu-Donna Cumberbatch, who seems
to have missed Rafters Raising 101 in Sunday School.
B-
- Bobby Broom: Song and Dance (2005 [2007], Origin):
Guitar-bass-drums trio, with Broom the guitarist. Got off on the
wrong foot (with me, at least) by starting with a Beatles song.
Actually, it's very tasteful, not bad at all: "Little Rascals
Theme" isn't too cute, and "Wichita Lineman" isn't too cloying.
B
- Jaki Byard: Sunshine of My Soul (1978 [2007], High Note):
Solo piano, recorded live at Keystone Korner in San Francisco.
Nothing strikes me as new or particularly interesting here, but I'm
not much of a fan of solo anything. That said, Byard has a strong
presence, and he expertly works his way around a broad songbook --
including a Mingus medley, "Spinning Wheel," "Besame Mucho," a bit
of boogie woogie. Don't know how this compares to his other solo
albums, like the early Blues for Smoke (1960) or the later
At Maybeck (1991), both well regarded.
B+(*)
- Havana Carbo: Through a Window . . . Like a Dream
(2006 [2007], MODL Music):
Born in Havana, don't know when; raised
in US, don't know when; refers to NY high school years but also a
marriage to "a Cuban Economics major she met while a student at
pre-Castro's Villanova University in Havana." Started singing in
1984, recording an album, Street Cries, on Soul Note in
1987. So I figure she's probably in her 60s. Her voice weathered,
she goes with slow pieces that don't sound like much at first,
but grow on you, like the subtle attraction of gravity.
B+(*)
- The Catz in the Hatz featuring Steve Johnson: Resilience
(2006, Rhombus):
Featuring singer Steve Johnson, a/k/a Rusty. He touts the same
idols list as Jonathan Poretz, with the minor substitution of "Nat"
for "Bobby." Can't say he sounds like any of them, Nat least of
all. He sounds hollow, which I find growing on me a bit, but not
impressively. The guys in the hatz are OK, with Mike Wiens getting
off a couple of nice guitar solos.
C+
- Amy Cervini Quartet: Famous Blue (2007, Orange Grove Jazz):
Singer, in front of a piano trio. No bio on her
website, although drummer Ernesto Cervini grew up in Toronto
and works in New York, with degrees from both. Album cover is
very attractive: pastel blue-green sky over sea, washed out,
the lettering fuzzy. The music is like that too, which isn't
a plus. Ordinary songs, voice, arrangements. I go up and down
on "Don't Fence Me In" -- that there's a down at all isn't a
good sign.
B-
- Ray Charles/The Count Basie Orchestra: Ray Sings, Basie
Swings (2006, Concord/Hear Music):
First, let's clear this
gripe away: Concord has dropped or fumbled me off their mailing
list. I don't know whether that's accidental or deliberate. Don't
know whether citing Chick Corea and Taylor Eigsti as duds has a
thing to do with it, or they just don't care that Scott Hamilton
has two A- albums and an Honorable Mention to his credit. Maybe
it's both malevolence and incompetence, as suggested by one of the
company's exes who described Concord as "the Bush Administration
of the record industry." So, despite asking for this several times,
and having been promised it at least once, I'm listening to it
courtesy of the Wichita Public Library. As for the record, the
first thing to point out is that it is a case of fraud: Charles
never recorded with Count Basie; Charles's vocals were lifted
from an undated live tape, most likely from the late '70s; the
arrangements were newly recorded by the Basie ghost band, now
directed by Bill Hughes, 22 years after the Count passed away,
and for that matter two years after the singer died. The second
thing is that it sounds pretty near-great, passably realizing
its "what if" concept. Two reasons for this: first, Charles
himself sounds great, even if pieces like "The Long and Winding
Road" and "Look What They've Done to My Song" aren't up snuff;
second, the Basie-trademarked arrangements were fit to the vocals
with a smartness that never would have occurred to them live. It
also helps that originating as a live concert Charles recycles
some dependable warhorses. Docked a couple of stars for fraud.
I could have gone deeper, but don't want you to think I prefer
Genius Loves Company.
B+(*)
- Anat Cohen: Poetica (2006 [2007], Anzic):
This
is a showcase for Cohen's clarinet work, taking a mix of Israeli
and Brazilian songs and pieces by Jacques Brel and John Coltrane.
Half are just quartet, with Jason Lindner on piano, Omer Avital
on bass, Daniel Freedman on drums. The other half add a string
quartet, which is a bit like sprinkling sugar on something that's
already too sweet. It's not without appeal, and at best it gives
you a rush.
B+(*)
- Ornette Coleman: To Whom Who Keeps a Record (1959-60
[2007], Water):
Odds and sods, released Japan-only in 1975 but not in
the US until boxed for Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic
Recordings. Starts with an outtake from Change of the Century
with Don Cherry on pocke trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins
on drums; filled out with leftovers from This Is Our Music with
Ed Blackwell replacing Higgins. At this point this sounds so typical
of the classic Coleman quartet that it's hard to wax ecstatic and
impossible to fault. Art of the Improvisers and Twins
picked over the same sessions first; it's hard to figure why these
cuts were passed over, unless it's the relative prominence of Cherry.
A-
- Scott Colley: Architect of the Silent Moment
(2005 [2007], CAM Jazz):
Colley's bass lines bounce around in
and out of time, giving this a rather inconsistent and unsettling
foundation, making it hard to follow even if it sometimes seems
worth the effort. The core band is a quartet with Ralph Alessi
on trumpet, Craig Taborn on keyboards, and Antonio Sanchez on
drums. Alessi makes a big impression, as he often does. Four
guests also pitch in: Dave Binney, Jason Moran, Gregoire Maret,
and Adam Rogers. The only one I particularly noticed was Binney,
on soprano.
B+(*)
- Graham Collier: Hoarded Dreams (1983 [2007], Cuneiform):
A bassist and well-regarded composer who started out in the late '60s,
a protean period when Britain's modern jazz musicians could still span
avant-garde and fusion, where there was little distance between music
abstractly composed and explosively improvised. This particular piece
was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain for performance
at the Bracknell Jazz Festival. Collier conducts a large group: 5 reeds,
5 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 guitars, piano, bass, drums, including
many recognizable names, both local (John Surman, Kenny Wheeler) and
from far afield (Ted Curson, Tomasz Stanko, Juhanni Aaltonen). Framed
for solos, some quite rivetting, but mostly loud and a bit ugly for
my taste.
B+(*)
- Contemporary America: Another Center (2007, Adventure Music):
A meeting of musicians from seven South American countries:
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela. I don't
quite know what to think about it: sounds more European than what I
think of as Latin, a music for us more centered in the Caribbean, and
therefore more Afro. Most pieces have vocals, and they can gum up the
works, but not always. In any case, it pays to focus on the details,
where the individual musicians register their diversity, and their
virtuosity.
B+(*)
- Coyote Poets of the Universe: Unmistakable Evidence!
(2004-05 [2006], Square Shaped):
Denver group, although I only see one
poet, with all words attributed to Andy O'Leary (or Andy O'Blivion, as
he appears on their website). Gary Hoover (aka Gary 7) helps out with
the music, with both playing guitar and a few other instruments. Others
help out too. The music is fractured guitar jazz, interesting in its
own right, but usually gives way to the spoken words. The latter have
their moments as well, but nothing here impresses me nearly as much as
Jerry Granelli's Sandhills Reunion did a couple of years ago.
B+(*)
- The Crimson Jazz Trio: The King Crimson Songbook Volume One
(2005, Voiceprint):
Drummer Ian Wallace put this group
together after a tour with Frippless Crimson spinoff group 21st
Century Schizoid Band. Nothing in Wallace's background suggests
that he would come up with such a straightforward jazz group --
his resume includes Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, David Lindley, Don
Henley, Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks,
Warren Zevon, Keith Emerson, Crosby Stills and Nash, and so forth.
Fretless bassist Tim Landers is another studio/tour pro with mostly
rock acts on his list, although he can cite Gil Evans, Billy Cobham,
Don Grolnick, and the Breckers. That leaves pianist Jody Nardone as
the only certifiable jazz guy, but working out of Nashville he's
got some mud on his flaps too. King Crimson was, and more or less
still is, an English prog rock group led by non-singer guitarist
Robert Fripp. Although it had some jazz threads, that doesn't appear
to matter much here. What matters here is that the songs have enough
structure to give Nardone something to nibble on, and he rearranges
them enough to make it hard for someone as superificially acquainted
with them as me to connect the dots. Where Crimson does approach the
surface is in the undertow of Landers' bass. Otherwise, this is just
a conventional piano trio that gets a lot of mileage out of songs
that haven't entered the jazz canon.
B+(***)
- Cyminology: Bemun (2007, Challenge):
German group,
led by vocalist Cymin Samawatie, who describes herself as "the daughter
of Iranian emigrants." Group also includes Benedikt Jahnel on piano,
Ralf Schwarz on double bass, Ketan Bhatti on drums, with guest guitar
from Frank Möbus on two cuts. Songs are based on Persian poetry, and
the drums tend to fit that. I disliked the high, arch vocals at first:
reminded me of European vocal traditions, but it may be that the same
attitude is cultivated by all classical traditions. The instrumental
sections are more ingratiating: the piano and bass are well situated
in the jazz world, and the drums -- not specified, but it sounds like
hands are intimately involved -- add a world beat aspect.
B
- Meredith d'Ambrosio: Wishing on the Moon (2004
[2006], Sunnyside):
Seems like a fine example of what a jazz
singer should be -- her voice fine tuned and personable, an
innate musicality to everything she does, presence, nuance,
the skill and control to play, the discipline not to get off
on pointless tangents. All that puts her ahead of about 85%
of the field without breaking a sweat. She has a dozen-plus
albums, but this is the only one I've heard. I'd be surprised
if it wasn't typical.
B+(**)
- Mike Dillon's Go-Go Jungle: Battery Milk (2006 [2007],
Hyena):
Plays vibes and percussion in a bunch of more/less related bands,
including Critters Buggin, Garage A Trois, the Malachy Papers, Billy Goat,
Hairy Apes BMX, and the Dead Kenny Gs, as well as side credits with MC
900 Ft Jesus, Brave Combo, Pigface, Karl Denson, Les Claypool, and Sex
Mob. There must be some kind of genre label for this sort of thing, but
experimental rock doesn't convey how pop it is, and fusion leaves one
wondering what sources it's trying to put together. A couple of raps,
an Aaron Neville soul ballad, various groove pieces, cultural critique
("Stupid Americans"), and one for Bush ("Bad Man").
B+(**)
- Darby Dizard: Down for You (2004 [2007], One Soul):
Annoying website, cruel and unusual punishment even by the norms of
Flash websites. Not much in the way of facts, but aperçus like this:
"I remember scat singing to myself around age 15. I have no idea
why." Well, neither do I. Seven screens later, she concludes: "Every
sound that you hear is there because it has been carefully considered
by not one or two, but four engineers sitting in a room going over
every song with a fine tooth comb. The website designers and CD
designers in France have outdone themselves. I can never thank the
team at One Soul enough for all that they have done to make this CD
the success that I hope it will be." Which reminds me that the album
is pretty annoying too -- as much for the little tchochtkes the
quartet of engineers dropped in as for the obviousness of the '50s
songbook and the singer's penchant for overdramatization. On the
other hand, her voice has some traction, and she handles "In Walked
Bud" well enough.
B-
- Pierre Dørge & New Jungle Orchestra: Negra Tigra
(2005 [2006], ILK):
Herb Robertson adds to a lineup that is already
heavy on brass and pushes them uncomfortably close to the brink.
Crowding ten musicians onto two microphones also adds to the raw
edge of the sound. The pieces demonstate that the this time the
jungle is in Vietnam, although they don't integrate eastern sounds
nearly as well as Billy Bang has done. But the five "Negra Tigra"
fragments that frame the pieces take "Tiger Rag" into the scrappy
jungle of the avant-garde, and that's what they do best.
B+(**)
- Paquito D'Rivera Quintet: Funk Tango (2007, Paquito):
To some extent I try to string these records together, at least when
I see something that follows reasonably close, but when I picked this
out I wasn't expecting to deal with another "Giant Steps." This is
actually an odd mix of things. "Funk Tango" is a song title, but so
is "Final Waltz" and "Contradanza" and "Como un Bolero," any of which
would work just as well -- for that matter, so would "What About
That!" Diego Urcola, playing trumpet and valve trombone, is very
much as prominent as D'Rivera on alto sax and clarinet. Various
pianists, including Ed Simon, with Hector del Curto on bandoneon
for those tango moments. I don't put much stock in their grasp of
funk, but their pan-Latin mishmash sounds fine. Can't say much for
"Giant Steps" -- in this context, a dull closer.
B+(*)
- Ismael Dueñas: Mirage (2005 [2006], Fresh Sound New Talent):
This is the second piano trio I've heard from Dueñas -- liked
the first one, like this one a bit more. Still, this is a tough one
for me to write about -- that Guillermo Klein's liner notes are in
Spanish is more an omen than an excuse. What I like is that this has
some crunch to it, that it turns in unexpected ways then nails the
deal down with a strong chord.
B+(***)
- Duo Baars-Henneman: Stof (2006, Wig):
All the
usual caveats about avant-garde duos apply here: this takes a lot
of patience, including a willingness to let not much happen for
way too long. But I've come to enjoy Ig Henneman's viola scratches
and Ab Baars splotches of clarinet, tenor sax, and Japanese flutes
as discreet sounds and quaint dances.
B+(*)
- Elin: Lazy Afternoon (2004-05 [2006], Blue Toucan):
Full name: Kathleen Clelia Elin Melgarejo. Raised in Sweden, parents
were Peruvian and Irish. After high school in Nörkopping, moved to
Miami to study music. Somehow wound up cast as a Brazilian singer,
with an appropriate rhythm section launching "Fascinating Rhythm."
However, a check of the credits reveals an impressive list of jazz
players: Harry Allen, Anat Cohen, Claudio Roditi, Alan Ferber, Tom
Varner, Hendrik Meurkens, Erik Friedlander. Still, not much comes
from all this promise on paper. They can play Brazilian, but don't
stick with it, so the record winds up sounding eclectic, and most
of the guest stars are wasted -- Anat Cohen is the one who makes
the most of her time. Both band and singer do a notable job with
"Lush Life."
B
- Enders Room: Hotel Alba (2006, Tuition):
Of the three releases on this label, this one at least bears some
resemblance to jazz, mostly because Johannes Enders' first choice
in instruments is saxophone, followed by flute and clarinet. However,
he also plays various keyboards and does a little programming, in
what is basically an update of Krautrock, Eno, and jazztronica --
not unlike some of the records Tucker Martine has produced. Two
pieces with vocals are droll but don't register strongly. I read a
quote asserting that Enders is "Germany's answer to Joshua Redman"
but I don't hear anything to back that up. At least here, the sax
seems secondary to the synths, which at best remind me of Eno's
pre-ambient structuralism.
B+(**)
- John Ettinger: August Rain (2003, Ettinger Music):
San Francisco-based violinist, arrived in 1992 from Arizona. This
is his first album, after kicking around in various obscure bands
and projects, ranging from Clockbrains ("psychedelic punk band") to
LBJ (with Lukas Ligeti) and work with Scott Amendola, who returns
the favor here. The tone and tempo are set by Art Hirahara's Fender
Rhodes, which with Amendola's programmed beats and Ettinger's loops
sustains a bubbly groove most of the way through, providing plenty
of structure for the violin to swing and saw against. The effect is
reminiscent of soul jazz, but lighter in tone -- more fancy, less
grease.
B+(**)
- Family Pet (2007, Foreign Frequency):
This is a slab
of 12-inch vinyl, with no info other than label name and something
about 45rpm. Also have a 7-inch 45rpm which credits A.M. Haines with
keyboard and vocal, Will Berdan II with percussion. Website describes
group as "Maine's free form rock duo." Put the side with one cut on,
and it sounds like free form noise, which doesn't do much for me one
way or another. Then the turntable, an old B&O, lifted the stylus
and stopped spinning. The 33/45 switch works, but otherwise the arm
is stuck and the platter doesn't spin. So that's as far as I got. No
telling when/if I'll ever get back to it, so I will mark it with two
grades: one for what it sounded like when it was playing, and another
for what it sounds like now. Got email from Berdan suggesting it might
be a dud, so presumably he'll be satisfied either way.
B/E
- Pierre Favre Ensemble: Fleuve (2005 [2007], ECM):
Swiss drummer, around since the late '50s, started in Dixieland --
has gigs with Lil Hardin Armstrong and Albert Nicholas on his resume --
then moved to free jazz and dabbles in world beats. Seven piece group,
with guitar, soprano sax/bass clarinet, harp, tuba, bass guitar, double
bass, and percussion/drums. I could do without the harp, but Philipp
Schaufelberger's guitar impressed me, and focusing on the drummer
helps.
B+(*)
- John Fedchock New York Big Band: Up & Running
(2006 [2007], Reservoir):
Trombonist, well schooled in big band
practice and theory by Woody Herman and Gerry Mulligan, debuting
his own New York Big Band to much acclaim in 1992. This is the
first I've heard of five albums -- four big band, a smaller group
for Hit the Bricks (2000). One thing about the concentration
of jazz musicians in New York is that an ambitious arranger can
recruit a name band there -- e.g., anchoring the sax section, Rich
Perry, Rick Margitza, Gary Smulyan. This has moments when the band
sounds great, but it has many more when I don't care, and some of
them are the same. May just be a funk I'm going through, but I
always figured the proof of a great big band is that it snaps you
out of any such thing. This doesn't, although I do dig the trombone
solos.
B
- Ibrahim Ferrer: Mi Sueño (1998-2005 [2007],
World Circuit/Nonesuch):
The Buena Vista Social Club crooner was evidently
working on this when he died in 2005, leaving demos with his strong
and eloquent voice, only needing some filling out. The pieces are
boleros with elegant, uncomplicated arrangements -- they fit his
voice and don't wear anyone out. One track was recorded in by Ry
Cooder in 1998. The others are undated.
B+(**)
- Scott Fields Ensemble: Beckett (2005 [2007],
Clean Feed):
Chicago guitarist, born 1957 (AMG says 1952) way out
on the avant-garde, has recorded a lot since 1995, of which I've
heard little. Eschews labels, but when pressed has described his
work as post-free jazz, neo-revisionist improvisation, transparent
music, exploratory music. Website includes a photo of him bowing
guitar. This record includes a cellist, so not all the bowed sounds
are guitar, but most likely some are. Aside from the dreamy arco
sections, most of this is built from jerky little splotches, with
cello and tenor sax following suit, while John Hollenbeck accents.
B+(**)
- Sammy Figueroa & His Latin Jazz Explosion: The Magician
(2007, Savant):
Bronx-born percussionist. Main instrument appears to be
congas. The album doesn't specify; his website mentions ZenDrum (a MIDI
sampler) and "unusual steel pans." His side discography is pretty thick
from the mid-'70s starting with the Brecker Bros., but this is only his
second album with his name up front. All pieces are by sextets, but the
sax-trumpet-piano-bass-drums players vary, the most consistent being
Alex Norris on trumpet. This mostly sounds fine, but rather generic.
B
- Mitchel Forman: Perspectives (2005-06 [2006],
Marsis Jazz):
Pianist, does a lot of work with electronic keybs
and synth drums, had early credits with Gerry Mulligan and Stan
Getz, but most of his meal ticket has come from fusion and pop
jazz. Song selection includes two originals and a likely range
of personal favorites. I like the cheesy electric take on Herbie
Hancock's "Dolphin Dance" that kicks this off, but two Beatles
songs remind me of how they've been abused as instrumentals.
B+(*)
- The Four Bags: Live at Barbès (2006, NCM East):
Quartet, natch. Interesting instrumentation, with trombone,
accordion, electric guitar, and reeds (soprano sax, clarinet,
bass clarinet), and a Schoenberg cover to add to the oddness.
Still, nothing to really push the album along, so it drags
and eventually wears you down.
B
- Billy Fox: The Uncle Wiggly Suite (2004 [2007],
Clean Feed):
Percussionist-composer, draws on world music from
Cuba to Pakistan plus a lot more, deploying 13 musicians without
ever coalescing into a big band. Lots of interesting details.
Don't know what the big picture is.
B+(*)
- Mimi Fox: Perpetually Hip (2005 [2006], Favored
Nations, 2CD):
One disc with a small group, the other solo. $15.98
list, so you can figure the solo disc as some sort of bonus, maybe
for educational purposes. The group, with Xavier Davis on piano,
Harvie S on bass, and Billy Hart on drums, and a little extra
percusion on two tracks, moves right along. While the solo doesn't
have the same zip, it is thoughtful and well crafted. If I wasn't
already up to my ears in guitarists, I'd be tempted to give her
extra attention. As it is, a solid mainstream album.
B+(**)
- Funky Organ: B3 Jazz Grooves (1997-2006 [2007], High Note):
The packaging and the concept reminds me of those
compilations Joel Dorn threw out to expedite the recycling of
the Muse catalog on his later, now defunct 32 Jazz label. They
represented recycling at its crassest -- arbitrary compilations
sold purely as mood music, but they sold well enough (and were
profitable enough) that Savoy Jazz has kept many (most?) of the
titles in print. The connection is all the more obvious given
that Dorn bought Muse from Joe Fields, who went on to start the
catalogues plundered here. At least there's no attempt to pump
up the historical significance: these records aren't meant for
people who hope to learn something, even on a subject as trivial
as late-'90s soul jazz. The Hammond was funkier in the late '50s
and '60s when soul jazz developed out of r&b, and it's been
increasingly rote ever since -- a staple crop of minor interest.
Even within its limits High Note doesn't exactly have a command
of the market: past-prime Charles Earland and Reuben Wilson,
minor newcomers Bill Heid and Mike LeDonne, two generations of
DeFrancescos.
B
- Towner Galaher: Panorama (2005 [2007], Towner Galaher
Music):
Drummer, looks like he's been around, or at least in New York,
for a while but this is his first album. Leads a quintet, reminiscent
of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, with two extras on percussion. His
pieces run the usual gamut, with the upbeat "Midtown Shuffle" leading
off and slower stuff to close, and three non-originals in the middle.
The most obvious one is "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," given a respectful
reading that sounds fabulous. The horns are Mark Shim on tenor sax
and Maurice Brown on trumpet, both superb. Onaje Allen Gumbs' piano
and Charles Fambrough's bass fill in expertly. Drummer isn't as hard
as Blakey, and this isn't really a throwback, just fine old-fashioned
postmodernism. Official release date is a ways off, but it seems to
be available at CDBaby.
B+(**)
- Hal Galper/Jeff Johnson/John Bishop: Furious Rubato
(2006 [2007], Origin):
Another good mainstream piano trio, a bit
more aggressive than McNeely, a bit less lyrical.
B+(**)
- George Gee and the Jump, Jivin' Wailers Swing Orchestra:
If Dreams Come True (2007, GJazz):
One cut recorded
in 1999; the rest Jan. 3-4, 2007. Gee bills himself as "the only
Chinese-American Swing big band leader." Pictures on his website
show him doing just that: standing out front, an emcee cheering
the band. Walt Szymanski is listed as musical director, credited
with most of the arrangements; also plays trumpet and sings, but
John Dokes and Carla Cook also appear as vocalists. Gee's a big
Basie fan, but also pulls material from Goodman, Henderson, and
others. Good band, including Michael Hashim, a longtime favorite.
Good music. Gee has half-a-dozen albums in his catalog. They all
look to be much the same, even the one titled Buddha Boogie.
B+(*)
- Bebel Gilberto: Momento (2007, Ziriguiboom/Six Degrees):
Bossa nova royalty, daughter of João but not Astrud --
mother is another singer, Miúcha, sister of Chico Buarque. Where
her first album looked forward with electrobeats, this one feels
old fashioned, especially on the delicately fractured "Night and
Day."
B+(*)
- Robert Glasper: In My Element (2006 [2007], Blue Note):
I haven't become a fan yet, but there are things here that
I like, especially the free stretch in "Silly Rabbit," but also
when he keeps the flow basic. If I gave this enough time, I might
even go higher, but I doubt that it would be cost-effective. Some
day he might take one of his ideas to the point where it becomes
worthwhile to sort him out. Meanwhile, it would be churlish to
pick on him just because he has a major label contract when so
many others are consigned to obscure labels. For one thing the
guys with the major label contracts are more likely cut out.
B+(*)
- Juliette Greco: Le Temps d'une Chanson (2006 [2007],
Sunnyside):
French actress, doesn't sing so much as talk her way
through songs with genuine dramatic flair. Born 1927, associated
with Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, Miles Davis. Backed here by
orchestra and guests -- Michael Brecker and Joe Lovano the best
known, accordionist Gil Goldstein the most effective. Non-French
songs I know, like "Volare," seem hokey, but fare like "Les mains
d'or" make an impression. Like Salvador, a legend first heard at
the tail end of a long career, so hard to judge.
B
- Jimmy Hall & the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Collective: Build
Your Own Fire (2007, Zoho):
Hall sung and played harmonica
for Wet Willie, a second- or third-tier Southern rock group back
in the '70s, well back of a pack that included the Allman Brothers
and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Like most of his brethren, Hall's a blues fan
deep down, a point made explicit on Wet Willie's first album cover.
Hall had a couple of 1980-82 albums, not much since. This one is
a tribute to Muscle Shoals guitarist-composer Eddie Hinton, whose
own checkered blues career died in 1995. Not much to it, but when
such second- or third-tier characters get together to honor one of
their own, their minor virtues somehow gain in stature.
B+(*)
- Scotty Hard's Radical Reconstructive Surgery
(2004 [2006], Thirsty Ear):
Hard is credited with drum machines
and samplers, but he's working on top of Mauricio Takara's drums
and DJ Olive's turntables, so it's hard to say how much is his.
The two sets of keyboards are easier to unravel, and far more
central to the record, even though both John Medeski and Matthew
Shipp are credited variously with organ, wurlitzer, and piano --
Medeski also on mellotron and clavinet. Typical Blue Series jam.
I'd be more impressed had it come earlier in the series.
B+(**)
- Taylor Haskins: Metaview (2004 [2006], Fresh Sound
New Talent):
Postbop quintet, with Adam Rogers on guitar instead of
the usual piano player. Haskins plays trumpet; Andrew Rathbun is the
saxophonist. Haskins composed it all. His resume includes a lot of
commercial work, which ties into his knack for melodies, and a lot
of big band work, which shows up in his arrangements. Starts off
with a bit of keyboard for the self-evident "Biorhythm." Closes
real strong with an upbeat choice cut called "Itty Bitty Ditty."
B+(**)
- Bobby Hebb: That's All I Wanna Know (2005 [2007],
Tuition):
Born into a vaudeville family, making his stage debut at
age 3 in 1941. Passed through Nashville, working for Owen Bradley
and Roy Acuff, becoming one of the few blacks to work the Grand
Ole Opry. Wrote "Sunny," one of the big hits of 1966, and had a
couple of other minor hits, but only two albums in 1966-70 before
this reprisal, which doesn't so much try to put him back on the
map as stake out where he's been. His life might make for a TV
movie, but he's a lightweight singer and these are old stories:
the one that works best is his duet on "Sunny" -- still his
calling card.
B
- Anke Helfrich Trio: Better Times Ahead (2005 [2006],
Double Moon):
Pianist, German I think, although her website bio only
starts in 1989 with studies in the Netherlands. This appears to be
her second Trio recording, both with featured guests -- Mark Turner
on 2000's You'll See, Roy Hargrove here. Hargrove plays on
three of nine cuts, including one of two Monk covers. The byword
here is lively: everything comes up bright, shiny, vibrant. Even
Hargrove, who sounds like he's having a lot more fun than he has on
his own records lately.
B+(**)
- Steve Herberman Trio: Action:Reaction (2006,
Reach Music):
DC-based guitarist, plays 7-string, ably supported by Drew
Gress on bass and Mark Ferber on drums. Attractive tone, lean lines,
very tasteful, hard to fault, easy to enjoy.
B+(**)
- Matthew Herbert: Score (1997-2006 [2007], !K7):
AMG files him, dba Herbert, under Electronica, with eight styles
listed, few in evidence in this collection of soundtrack pieces.
His website promises: "Crucially, in most cases, you can also dance
to it. Matthew Herbert's records are true weapons of mass seduction."
Website also mentions political content: "witty culinary metaphors
to attack not just giant food companies but also the death penalty,
body fascism and war in Iraq." Based on this, I can't vouch for any
of that. What is clear is that he brings a wide range of tools to
the soundtrack business, ranging from string-driven chamber music
to a big band "Singing in the Rain" as well as the usual ambient
filler. Which leaves us with the usual problems: pieces that don't
fit together, stripped of the visual clues that they were built for.
B
- The Fred Hersch Trio: Night and the Music (2007, Palmetto):
Bread and butter: one Porter, two Berlins, two
Monks, some originals to fill the gaps, including one from bassist
Drew Gress. He's done this sort of thing so long and so consistently
that I've lost my ability to tell the difference from one record to
another. Or perhaps it's just my will?
B
- Holly Hofmann/Mike Wofford: Live at Athenaeum Jazz, Voume 2
(2006 [2007], Capri):
Flute/piano duos. Wofford
is a fine pianist and an adept accompanist, but Hofmann rarely
overcomes the limits of her instrument. Compared to this their
previous album, Minor Miracle, was aptly named.
B-
- Hugh Hopper: Hopper Tunity Box (1977 [2007], Cuneiform):
Long before I had any particular interest, much less expertise, in jazz,
I developed a peculiar fondness for Anglo prog-rock -- the sort of thing
British art school grads did, as opposed to the much more common dropouts.
At one point I had all seven Soft Machine albums, enjoying the first two
for Kevin Ayers' loopy songs, and Third for Robert Wyatt's loopier
"Moon in June," but not getting much out of the later work. But the
recently released live album Grides makes a pretty good case
for them as a jazz group, as does Elton Dean's subsequent career. Hugh
Hopper was the bassist. This was his first solo after the group folded,
using several shuffles of musicians. Mostly soft-edged fusion things,
although the two saxophonists have some edge when they get the chance:
Elton Dean on 3 cuts, and especially Gary Windo on 4.
B+(*)
- Owen Howard: Time Cycles (2005 [2006], Fresh Sound
New Talent):
Drummer-led postbop quintet, with two saxophonists up
front, Gary Versace on piano, John Hebert on bass. The saxophonists
are John O'Gallagher on alto, Andrew Rathbun on tenor, both playing
a bit of soprano. They tend to play tight together, which usually
isn't a good sign, but the drummer shakes things up enough to keep
the other from clumping.
B+(**)
- Bobby Hutcherson: For Sentimental Reasons (2006
[2007], Kind of Blue):
I think this is Hutcherson's first album
since Skyline in 1999, although he's been prominent on the
SF Jazz albums. This one is very straightforward: a vibes-piano
quartet, all standards, some jazz but mostly pop. Vibes and piano
work well together: the tones are similar, the dynamics varied
enough to provide some interesting contrast. The pianist is Renee
Rosnes, and she makes the stronger impression. But the sentiment
is riding on Hutcherson for a comeback.
B+(**)
- Chie Imaizumi: Unfailing Kindness (2006, Capri):
Japanese composer/arranger, following in Maria Schneider's footsteps,
with help from trumpeter Greg Gisbert, who serves both. Straightforward
arrangements, packed with power, a basic primer in what big bands are
good for. Last track features a vocal with gospel punch -- not my
thing, but not bad either.
B+(**)
- Robert Irving III: New Momentum (2004-06 [2007],
Sonic Portals):
AMG lists Irving's styles as: R&B, Crossover
Jazz, Fusion, Funk. That might be true of Irving's first album
from 1990, but these are conventional piano trios, with a Bill
Evans song, a pair from the Miles Davis songbook, and a bunch
of originals that go no further afield. Irving spent most of the
'80s with Davis -- not a prime period, but it must have been an
interesting gig -- and some time in the '90s with David Murray.
More recently he's worked with Kahil El'Zabar, who contributes
liner notes here, and Wallace Roney. So chalk this up as serious.
I just don't find a pianist trying to split the distance between
Hancock and Tyner all that interesting. But I do like the artwork.
B
- Bob James: Angels of Shanghai (2004-05 [2007], Koch):
I've heard very little of James' smooth jazz, and missed
his famously avant ESP-Disk debut completely. The Angels here
are a group playing traditional Chinese instruments. They set
the mood, but don't dominate, especially when James plugs his
synth in. His piano work is more interesting. One vocal piece,
of no particular relevance, but radio marketing demands one.
Almost works.
B
- Hank Jones/Frank Wess: Hank and Frank (2003 [2006],
Lineage):
From the label website: "Each Lineage recording is an
organic collaboration of living legends and the strongest and most
exciting young performers, created in order to perpetuate the
timeless straight-ahead jazz aesthetic." The young performers
list starts with guitarist Ilya Lushtak -- Russian born, grew up
in San Francisco, moved to New York in 1996, 30 years old when his
website bio was written -- who runs the label and arranges these
collaborations. Jones and Wess, of course, are near the top of
anyone's living legends list, and anything that lets them keep
on recording is fine by me. Nothing new here, except that Lushtak
continues to please as a sideman. Wess plays flute on a couple of
tunes, but few people sound better on tenor sax, so that's what
stands out.
B+(**)
- Jazz After Midnight (1998-2006 [2007], High Note):
Well, no, this is recycling at its crassest. I suppose it's
inevitable that "after midnight" translates to ballads, but that
doesn't explain the choice of flute (James Spaulding) and organ
(Mike LeDonne, Joey DeFrancesco). Indeed, the organ pieces will
never be taken for funky. Aside from those low points, there are
worthwhile cuts -- especially the opener by Houston Person and
the closer by Fathead Newman. Note that both came from better
albums, even though neither made my A-list.
B-
- Norah Jones: Not Too Late (2007, Blue Note):
I've had friends play me their tapes, and more often than not
I've panned them, pointing out that regardless of craft most
lack the sort of distinguishing that would make them stand out
in a field where craft and skill are mere minimums required.
I'd probably say the same about Jones, and evidently in her
case be wrong, but I still can't say why. Perhaps it's because
she's turned ordinariness into a public virtue, and maybe we
crave some sense of a comforting center given the sensory
overkill that everyone else exercises to get our attention.
That she can do it -- that she's the one we chose for this
role -- depends on our understanding that she's not really
ordinary: her voice, her piano, the elegant melodies, the
unobvious words, the sensible arrangements, all serve to
establish her worthiness through their subtlety. That's my
theory, anyway. I still prefer my comforts less enigmatic,
so I can't quite attest to whatever it is that others hear
in her.
<--
Songs:
1. "Wish I Could"
2. "Sinkin' Soon"
3. "The Sun Doesn't Like You"
4. "Until the End"
5. "Not My Friend"
6. "Thinking About You"
7. "Broken"
8. "My Dear Country"
9. "Wake Me Up"
10. "Be My Somebody"
11. "Little Room"
12. "Rosie's Lullaby"
13. "Not Too Late"
--> B+(*)
- Niño Josele: Paz (2006, Calle 54):
Flamenco
guitarist, turned on to jazz when Bronx trumpeter Jerry González
recruited Josele for a flamenco-themed album. This one meditates
on Bill Evans, whose music, starting with "Peace Piece," comes off
even more delicately on solo guitar, occasionally complemented by
matching bits of trumpet (González, Tom Harrell), sax (Joe Lovano),
or voice (Freddy Cole, Estrella Morente).
B+(**)
- KCP 5: Many Ways (2005 [2007], Challenge):
KCP stands
for Karnataka College of Percussion. Based in Bangalore, they are a
trio: two percussionists on mridangam, kanjira, morsing, ghatam, udu;
and vocalist R.A. Ramamani. The latter is the dominant presence, her
voice stretching and swaying in the classical Indian manner, but more
often than not hurried along by the rhythm. 5 stands for two western
musicians: pianist Mike Herting, who comps with or without the rhythm,
and 82-year-old Charlie Mariano, whose unmistakable alto sax is
positively angelic.
B+(**)
- Steve Khan: Borrowed Time (2005-07 [2007], Tone Center):
Guitarist, has recorded steadily since 1977. Evidently
his early work qualifies as fusion, but the only two records I've
heard -- Let's Call This (1991, Polydor) and Got My
Mental (1996, Evidence) -- are eloquent pieces of postbop
guitar craft. This starts promising, with Monk and Coleman done
simply, albeit with extra Latin percussion. But as the record
winds on, the Latin percussion, in one case augmented by tabla
and tambura, takes over and the guitar melts into the smooth
groove.
B
- Ben Bowen King: Sidewalk Saints: Roots Gospel Guitar
(2007, Talking Taco Music): An antidote to the dumbing down of gospel:
instrumentals, featuring venerable songs in old style, plucked out on
what King calls a resonator/slide guitar -- built for volume in the
streets, sounds like it's mostly built from steel. King cites Blind
Willie Johnson and Dock Boggs as influences, credits "Amazing Grace"
to Fred McDowell and "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" to Pops Staples. Covita
Moroney helps out on percussion and the occasional moan.
B+(***)
- Dmitri Kolesnik: Five Corners (2006 [2007], Challenge):
Bassist, based in New York but probably from Russia,
as is his collaborator pianist Andrei Kondakov. Kolesnik wrote
8 of 10 songs; Kondakov the other two. The other musicians are
well known: Eric Alexander, Jim Rotondi, Alex Sipiagin (on two
cuts), and Lenny White. Strikes me as a smart, well crafted but
very mainstream outing; well done, but not much that catches my
interest. Could gain ground if I had the time to give it.
B
- Sofia Koutsovitis: Ojalá (2005 [2006], CD Baby):
Argentine singer, moved to Boston in 2001 for education, and on to
New York in 2005 to work. She wrote about half of the material
here, including one co-credited to Jorge Luis Borges. The covers
cover the map, with stops in Cuba, Brazil, and Peru, and are
shapelier than the originals -- "You Don't Know What Love Is,"
nearly the only one in English, is particularly nice. The Group
works for her, and "Silence 2" is fractured, multiphased Latin
jazz at its best. The slow ones are a bit more awkward, but
overall a very attractive record.
B+(***)
- David Krakauer: Bubbemeises: Lies My Grandma Told Me
(2006, Label Bleu):
Socalled's samples provide a useful postmodern
framing for the leader's clarinet, which otherwise just tends to
whirl away in a dust cloud of mad klezmer. Even better is the rap
that speaks truth to Bubbe. In full charge, this is an exciting
group, but I've played the record many times without convincing
myself it belongs on the A-list. So it must not.
B+(***)
- The Leaders: Spirits Alike (2006 [2007], Challenge):
The group name appeared on four albums from 1986-89, counting one as
The Leaders Trio. The latter was just the rhythm section: pianist Kirk
Lightsey, bassist Cecil McBee, and drummer Don Moye. The whole group
added Lester Bowie on trumpet, Arthur Blythe on alto sax, and Chico
Freeman on tenor or soprano or clarinet or flute, whatever. Bowie and
Moye came out of the Art Ensemble of Chicago; Freeman and Blythe were
building up substantial catalogues, including a few records together;
Lightsey and McBee were guys you'd recognize if you ever read album
credits. So they were a credible group, and Mudfoot (1986,
Blackhawk) was a fine album, with a particularly delightful spin on
Sam Cooke's "Cupid." Twenty years later, only two Leaders remain --
McBee and Freeman -- and the Replacements are more firmly perched in
the mainstream: Bobby Watson (for Blythe), Eddie Henderson (for Bowie),
Billy Hart (for Moye), and Fred Harris (for Lightsey). Harris lacks
credentials as a leader, but acquits himself well enough. But that's
about all anyone does here. Sure, this is elegant, intricate postbop,
crafted by genuine talents. I suppose if I hadn't expected more I'd
be less disappointed.
B
- Tom Lellis: Avenue of the Americas (2004-05 [2006],
Beamtide). Jazz singer, male; AMG reports that his influences include
Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks. Likes to write lyrics to Pat Metheny
and Keith Jarrett songs. Plays a little piano and guitar, but gets
help here from Gary Fisher, Dave Kikoski, Kenny Werner, and Toninho
Horta. I've never cared for Hendricks' hipsterism or Murphy's slick
affectations, but Lellis doesn't register high on either's horseshit
scale. Doesn't register on much of any scale, probably because he has
more obvious problems. Like which is worse: the Beatles suite or the
bossa nova import?
C
- John Lindberg/Karl Berger: Duets 1 (2004 [2007],
Between the Lines):
Bassist Lindberg first met Berger in 1975 when
the latter was director and the former student at Creative Music
Studio in Woodstock NY. Berger was 40 then, originally from Germany,
strongly influenced by Ornette Coleman. He plays piano and vibes, the
latter more often, and more distinctively, with both contrasting well
with Lindberg's bass.
B+(**)
- Michael Marcus/Ted Daniel: Duology (2006 [2007],
Boxholder):
One thing I look for in avant jazz is accessibility:
the chance that a record might cross over and find some kind of
receptive audience beyond those firmly committed to the genre.
Actually, that's true of my approach to all genres; it's just
that so many people have a strong gag reflex with avant jazz.
This fails the test, perhaps inevitably. Free jazz duos on evenly
weighted instruments -- Marcus on clarinet, Daniel on "brass"
(trumpet, flugelhorn, Moroccan bugle, cornet) -- rarely flows
and often clashes. That said, this comes off better than most
such records. Marcus has paired off against other horns often,
and few (if any) get more mileage out of it -- cf. his work with
Sonny Simmons, albeit with the aid of a drummer. Daniel has a
slim discography going back to 1973 -- credits with Dewey Redman,
Andrew Cyrille, Henry Threadgill, Archie Shepp, Billy Bang. One
piece is dedicated to Frank Lowe. A lot of history and art goes
into something like this. Too bad it's so tough to grasp.
B
- Thomas Marriott: Both Sides of the Fence (2006
[2007], Origin):
Seattle-based trumpeter. Has a brother, David,
who plays trombone in a joint group, the Marriott Brothers Quintet
or Marriott Jazz Quintet, but is absent here. Background includes
work with Maynard Ferguson, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Rosemary
Clooney. Mainstream chops, exceptionally fine tone. The sort of
album I have no special interest in, but so well done I hate to
slough it off. Two cuts with Joe Locke on vibes are a plus.
B
- Branford Marsalis: Braggtown (2006, Marsalis Music/Rounder):
Since Coltrane and Shorter, damn few tenor
saxophonists have managed to restrain themselves from adding
soprano sax to their toolkit. Given his influences, ambitions,
and essential conservatism, Marsalis was certain to follow that
temptation. To his credit, he's learned to wax eloquent, but I
still prefer the big horn by a wide margin, not least in his
hands. On tenor he can get gruff, and when the band, a standard
issue piano quartet just like Coltrane and Shorter, gets rough
in turn, he sounds terrific. But that's just one part of his
blend, which to his benefit is a bit stronger than usual here.
B+(**)
- Delfeayo Marsalis: Minions Dominion (2002 [2006],
Troubadour Jass):
A long time between records, and this one has
been in the can for a while -- so long that drummer Elvin Jones
passed away in the meantime. I guess the family's allotment of
ego got sucked up by the older brothers. Meanwhile, this is as
good natured a mainstream hard bop album as I've heard in a long
time. Branford and Donald Harrison alternate on their respective
saxes. Mulgrew Miller plays piano. Terrific drummer. And I always
enjoy a lead trombone.
B+(**)
- Hector Martignon: Refugee (2007, Zoho):
Pianist
based in New York. Don't know where he's a refugee from. Website
notes that he attended Freiburger Musikhochschule in Germany and
lived in Brazil for a year. Website claims he's played on hundreds
of albums, but AMG only lists 20, including an early '90s stint
with Ray Barretto. No recording dates here, but website describes
an album scheduled for Fall 2003 that sounds much like this one.
This is his third. Mostly originals (6 of 8), with various groups
that all reduce to piano, guitar, bass, drums, and percussion.
Epicycles of dense rhythm, sometimes stretching to the point of
chaos, but with powerful forward momentum. In other words, sounds
Afro-Cuban to me.
B+(*)
- Nicolas Masson: Yellow (A Little Orange) (2004 [2006],
Fresh Sound New Talent):
Two-horn quartet, Masson playing
tenor sax and bass clarinet, Russ Johnson trumpet, with Eivind
Opsvik on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. More postbop than
avant; both horns have good broken field runs and the jousts
generate some heat, but the harmonizing bogs down a bit.
B+(*)
- MB3: Jazz Hits Volume 1 (2006, Mel Bay):
MB presumably stands for Mel Bay, as in Records, a Missouri label
with nothing but guitarists (classical as well as jazz). The "3"
are guitarists Jimmy Bruno, Vic Juris, and Corey Christiansen --
three generations that hardly skip a beat. The "jazz hits" lean
most heavily on Miles Davis, with Horace Silver, John Coltrane,
Benny Golson, and Herbie Hancock also contributing. Jay Anderson
plays bass; Danny Gottlieb drums. Easy going, relatively surefire
material. Mel Bay's website has a news item about this topping
some jazz airplay chart. You might not notice, but wouldn't mind.
B+(*)
- Jim McNeely/Kelly Sill/Joel Spencer: Boneyard
(2007, Origin):
Mainstream piano trio. McNeely is an impressive,
engaging pianist, ably supported by Sill and Spencer. Still can't
find much to say about it.
B+(**)
- Myra Melford/Be Bread: The Image of Your Body
(2003 [2006], Cryptogramophone):
She's added harmonium to her
piano, via studies in India and Pakistan that have left a mark
on her music. Her quintet leans toward fusion on their own --
at least that's the case with trumpeter Cuong Vu and bassist
Stomu Takeishi; guitarist Brandon Ross has some hip-hop on
his resume, while drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee was last seen
working in Fieldwork -- but the mix here is hard to decipher.
I've played this a lot and never quite connected with it.
B+(**)
- Mike Melvoin Trio: You Know (2006, City Light):
Website says he's been playing piano since he was three, so that gives
him 66 years of practice. Mainstream -- so mainstream I was surprised
to count five originals wedged in among the obvious standards. I was
further surprised to find myself enjoying such straightforward music.
And I was further surprised when I went back to the database and found
I had given his last album a B+. I notice now that the black and white
cover on the self-released album has a thin gold border, just like his
black and white website, so it would appear that he has an aesthetic
beyond DIY. It's too subtle to sink in, but too elegant to ignore.
B+(**)
- Metta Quintet: Subway Songs (2005 [2006], Sunnyside):
From "Morning Rush" to "Evening Rush," most pieces start with a bit of
subway noise then flower into delicate, exquisitely detailed postbop.
Only five pieces, with Mark Gross's alto sax offset by Marcus Strickland
on tenor, soprano and bass clarinet; Helen Sung's tart piano, Joshua
Ginsberg's bass, and H. Benjamin Schuman's drums. Schuman founded an
educational outfit, JazzReach, which this group is tied with. Makes
some sense that they all teach, given how close to the state of the
art their music feels. I usually like it a little rougher, but this
is so slick my druthers can't get much traction.
B+(**)
- Hendrik Meurkens: New York Samba Jazz Quintet (2005
[2007], Zoho):
Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1957; moved to
the US in 1977, first to Berklee in Boston, then on to New York.
He plays Brazilian music with the single-minded devotion of a
native. His instruments are vibes and harmonica. Over time the
ratio has shifted in favor of harmonica, at least two-to-one
here. I've never cared much for his work in the past, but this
is a sharp group -- "New York" is an intenstifying adjective,
putting a charge into samba that is often lacking -- and his
leads stand out on both instruments. His harmonica is especially
revelatory. The instrument's range, tone, and sweep is such that
it's curious how few jazz musicians have taken it up -- Toots
Thielemans has pretty much had the field to himself, but he's
hardly been an obscurity, winning "miscellaneous instrument"
polls with absurd ease. Records like this should open some
ears.
B+(**)
- Mi3: We Will Make a Home for You (2002-03 [2005],
Clean Feed).
Three musicians from the Boston end of the Vandermark
connection, holding court without the reedist. Not a piano trio
either, as Pandelis Karayorgis plays Fender Rhodes this time,
assuming a range from chintzy electric piano to something more
guitar-like. With Karayorgis going electric, bassist Nate McBride
sticks to acoustic, mixed up loud enough to assume a major role.
Curt Newton drums. The program is mostly Monk, and these guys
wear "Ugly Beauty" on their sleeves. Avant-fusion, hooray.
B+(***)
- Stephan Micus: On the Wing (2003-06 [2007], ECM):
Advance copy. German composer, multi-instrumentalist. AMG classifes
him as New Age -- not a good term, but I don't know what would be.
Has 17 or so albums, going back to the mid-'70s, his first one
featuring: voice, guitar, shô, Thai flute, sitar, rabab, Bavarian
zither, shakuhachi. This one has most of those, notably less voice,
and quite a few more, played solo but pieced together into a 10 part
suite. Sounds vaguely South/East Asian, but nowhere in specific. No
doubt interesting musicologically, but pretty static to my ears --
after all, I tend to agree with Ellington on these matters.
B
- The Microscopic Septet: Seven Men in Neckties: History of
the Micros Volume One (1982-90 [2006], Cuneiform, 2CD):
Long before Sex Mob, this was the sound of New York's avant-garde
yearning to be popular. The Micros matched a sax quartet led by
Philip Johnston on alto and soprano with a rhythm section led by
pianist Joel Forrester. Both leaders were clever, writing a little
and appropriating a lot. Johnston trod on after the Micros' demise
with groups like Big Trouble, the Transparent Quartet, and Fast 'N'
Bulbous, while making ends meet by hacking film scores. The Penguin
Guide sums him up aptly: "the perfect Tzadik artist: intellectual,
playful, perverse and generically undefinable." That could also
describe Tzadik honcho John Zorn, but Francis Davis adds that
Johnston's is "a kinder, gentler postmodernism." Unfortunately,
the abundant good humor lacks a killer punch line.
B+(*)
- The Microscopic Septet: Surrealistic Swing: History of
the Micros Volume Two (1981-90 [2006], Cuneiform, 2CD):
Comparisons to the Lounge Lizards were inevitable, but Philip
Johnston points out: "When the Lounge Lizards wore suits and
ties they looked cool and hip and aloof; when the Micros wore
suits and ties, we looked like a bunch of unemployed vacuum
cleaner salesmen." Volume One's Seven Men in Neckties
title reflects the dissheveled eclecticism of their first two
albums. Volume Two's title, referring to the music rather than
the musicians, suggests that they found themselves, and indeed
they finally hit their stride in 1986's Off Beat Glory.
Postmodernism can mean distance from the past, as with the
Lounge Lizards, or it can take a playfully perverse turn by
diving back into a past shorn of its historical bindings and
context. Still, their limits are literal: you can conjure up
a pretty good idea of what surrealistic swing might sound like
even before you play this fine example.
B+(**)
- Charles Mingus: In Paris: The Complete America Session
(1970 [2007], Sunnyside, 2CD):
One day, a batch of old songs, a group
that doesn't rank among his great ones -- Eddie Preston on trumpet,
Charles McPherson on alto sax, Bobby Jones on tenor sax, Jaki Byard
on piano, Dannie Richmond (of course) on drums -- yielded two quickie
LPs on the French label named America, minor blips in the Mingus
discography. The master takes that went into the LPs fit on the first
disc. The alternate takes, including many false starts, fill out the
previously unreleased second disc. None of this is earth shaking, ear
opening, or even moderately important. Still, if you didn't know better,
the first disc could pass for a typical Mingus tour de force, and the
scraps hold together better than they have any right to.
B+(**)
- Paul Motian/Bill Frisell/Joe Lovano: Time and Time Again
(2006 [2007], ECM):
One Rodgers/Hammerstein, one Monk, one by Lovano,
the rest by Motian. Lovano and Frisell play soft and disjointed, kind
of like Motian drums. There's a certain integrity to that, but it's
hard to get excited about. Frisell sounds especially uninspired.
B
- Wolfgang Muthspiel: Solo (2004, Material):
Like
most solo albums, this slows down with no one pushing him, even
dragging a bit in spots. Limited in tone too, although attractive.
Still, he's so sharp connoisseurs will appreciate this for the
study points. [PS: Photo inside sleeve shows him sitting in the
middle of an array of gadgets, so my "no effects" idea may be off.
Also plays some bass here -- presumably electric. May very well
do some overdubbing as well.]
B+(**)
- Wolfgang Muthspiel/Brian Blade: Friendly Travelers
(2006 [2007], Material):
AMG's entire biography on guitarist reads
something like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Interesting
electric guitarist, rivaling John Scofield. Placed in the fusion,
contemporary, neo-bop genres. Not an overbearing player." That's
lame even as a first approximation, and not just because Scofield
can't hold a candle to him. Soft, metallic tone, which he can amp
up; not much into funk grooves or long bebop lines, but he plays
tight, thoughtful melodies, especially on these intricate duet
improvs. I've heard most of his early recordings on Amadeo -- as
far as I'm concerned, Black and Blue was the guitar album
of the '90s -- but this is the first I've heard of a half dozen
or more recent discs on Material and Quinton. Best thing I've
heard from Blade.
A-
- Jeff Newell's New-Trad Octet: Brownstone (2007, BluJazz):
Newell's interest is in gospel, as shown by the two
final pieces: an interesting take on "Amazing Grace" and a rousing
original with vocals called "Fill the Temple." Hard to say what
is new here other than his membership in the so-called New Baptist
Church, but his trad is rooted in pre-jazz -- three Sousa pieces
lead off, then a suite of "March," "Bolero," "Waltz," "Zydeco,"
and "Reprise" called "Hymn Pan Alley." Still, they sound fresh,
not musty.
B+(**)
- New York Electric Piano: Blues in Full Moon (2007,
Buffalo Puppy):
Piano trio, with Pat Daugherty leading on a Fender
Rhodes electric. The soft edge to the piano is distinctive, not as
cheesy as you might expect -- especially when interacting with Tim
Givens' bass. So New York it was recorded in the Catskills.
B
- Judy Niemack: Blue Nights (2007, BluJazz):
Playing
this after Lauren Hooker provides an interesting contrast between
experience and ambition. Niemack's a real pro. She cut her first
album in 1978, her second in 1988, then one every few years after
that: this is her ninth. In many ways it's just another, but she
finds an easy, comfortable groove even working in a vein cluttered
with vocalese. She also commands a more formidable band: guitarist
Jean-François Prins is the only one I'm unfamiliar with, and he does
a lovely job, as does Jim McNeely and Gary Bartz, in particular. If
in the end I prefer Hooker, it's more because I like what she's
trying to do. Maybe someday she'll do it as well as Niemack.
B+(**)
- Anders Nilsson's Aorta: Janus (2005, Kopasetic):
Saxophonist Mattias Carlson shows some real progress here, taking
the lead on occasion and holding it. Nilsson's guitar is still
impressive, but the more varied music works against his strong
suite, especially when it slows down.
B+(***)
- Sean Noonan Brewed by Noon: Stories to Tell
(2006 [2007], Songlines):
Drummer-led group with a lot of
electricity -- three guitars, bass, and Mat Maneri's amped
viola -- and some African percussion. Could be an awesome
fusion group, but they break the pace with four vocal songs.
Abdoulaye Diabaté's griot grates on me, and Susan McKeown's
duet doesn't go anywhere, but Dawn Padmore's jazz ballad is
a nice change of pace.
B+(*)
- One More: The Summary: Music of Thad Jones, Vol. 2
(2005 [2007], IPO):
Another one, with the same all-star band as the first
round: brother Hank on piano; Jimmy Owens on Thad's trumpet; John
Mosca on trombone; Benny Golson, James Moody, Frank Wess, and Eddie
Daniels on sax, flute and/or clarinet; Richard Davis on bass; Kenny
Washington on drums. These aren't session scraps. They were recorded
in a second session three months after the first, but as is often
the case with volume twos, the concept has lost a bit of its edge,
and the songbook may have slipped a bit. Thad was a bebopper who
nonetheless thought that big bands were the natural forum for the
music, so this nine-piece group is about right. After I played this,
I noticed that the street date isn't until Feb. 13, 2007, so I guess
I jumped the gun on this one.
B+(**)
- Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos: Invites Chris Cheek
(2006, Fresh Sound New Talent):
Group aka OJM. Also on cover:
Music by Carlos Azevedo and Pedro Guedes. Credits also cite
Azevedo and Guedes for musical direction, piano, Fender Rhodes.
The Orquestra is full scale: four trumpets, four trombones,
five reeds (six counting Cheek), bass, drums. Strikes me as
quite ordinary as big band productions go: lots of layer and
polish on the brass, forgettable solos, not much going on in
the rhythm. Cheek may be the star, but he doesn't stand out.
C+
- Judith Owen: Happy This Way (2006 [2007], Couragette):
English singer-songwriter, seventh album, according to AMG, where she's
classified as Jazz (Singer/Songwriter, Contemporary Jazz). They also
quote Jamie Cullum describing her as "a female Randy Newman -- not
sure whether that's sexist or just plain wrong. If Newman wrote a
song called "We're Only Human" it would make you wonder more than
this one does. No doubt she's a skilled singer, but the music is
constructed mostly out of string swatches, sounding like wallpaper.
Not impressed with her songwriting either, but there's little here
to make me give it any thought. In a jazz singer that may not be a
fatal flaw, but it doesn't make for much of a Randy Newman.
C+
- João Paulo: Memórias de Quem (2006 [2007],
Clean Feed):
Solo piano. First time I tried to look him up I wound up with
the Portuguese wikipedia page for Pope John Paul. AMG credits him
with eight albums since 1998. Don't know any more than that. Picked
this out at a bad time, but I don't have the time to spend on stuff
I consider marginal. The piano itself doesn't sound all that great,
but I like his rhythmic ideas and find his riffing interesting. If
I gave it more time, it might rise a notch or so. Or not.
B
- Oscar Peterson and Friends: JATP Lausanne 1953
(1953 [2007], TCB):
Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic
concerts were like all-star games: random sets of headliners
turned loose on things like "C-Jam Blues" -- the 19:23 opener
here, where everyone gets their turn to spin, slam, and dunk.
It's ironic that Peterson wound up on top of this belatedly
released radio tape. At 27, he was Granz's handyman, little
known, but a fast, hard swinging pianist who raised the play
of everyone else on the floor. The frontliners here were Flip
Phillips, Lester Young, Willie Smith, and Charlie Shavers --
with the latter's blistering trumpet setting the pace. The
last two cuts drop down to a trio, with Peterson, Smith, and
Gene Krupa: both give Peterson some solo space, and remind
us why Smith was widely regarded as one of the three great
alto saxophonists of the swing era, along with Johnny Hodges
and Benny Carter.
B+(***)
- Enrico Pieranunzi/Marc Johnson/Joey Baron: Live in Japan
(2004 [2007], CAM Jazz, 2CD):
I've cooled on this since my first flush
of enthusiasm -- maybe the informality of the live setting, maybe just
the length. Pieranunzi is a fine pianist, especially on the slow stuff
like was featured on Ballads, recorded about the same time with
the same trio. Johnson and Baron are superb -- no surprise there.
B+(**)
- Bucky & John Pizzarelli: Generations (2006 [2007],
Arbors):
The better known son is a crooner stuck between
his Nat Cole and Frank Sinatra tributes, but he started off as a
pretty sharp guitarist, a chip off the old Bucky, as it were. The
father never ventured far from swing, a graceful rhythm guitarist
but not a great soloist. Father and son previously waxed duos in
the early '80s, collected as The Complete Guitar Duos (The
Stash Sessions), as well as a 1998 album Contrasts
(Arbors) -- both well-regarded, but I haven't heard either. This
this one is tasteful, modestly intricate and intimate.
B+(**)
- Mikkel Ploug Group (2006, Fresh Sound New Talent):
Danish guitarist, aka Mikkel Ploug Petersen, born 1978. Wrote all
the pieces here. Postbop, nice movement. Seems like a decent enough
guitarist, but he's overshadowed in this quartet by tenor saxophonist
Mark Turner. Not sure whether this is near the top of Turner's game,
but anyone with a serious interest in him should like this. Ploug's
website sucks. When I accessed it with the browser he insists on,
I got a bit further, but with further aggravation.
B+(**)
- Roger Powell: Fossil Poets (2006, Inner Knot):
Powell's "retro-future" suggests that there must have been such a
thing as pre-postmodernism, only we were fortunate enough not to
recognize it as such at the time. Powell's resume isn't promising:
even if we discount Bat Out of Hell as a fluke, he played
the synths that drove Todd Rundgren's Utopia over the deep end.
The only jazz credit I find on his CV is a Charlie Rouse album.
This one is marginal genrewise, synth-driven instrumentals with
a steady beat, eschewing both funk and spaciness -- too square
for jazz, too soft for fusion, too old-fashioned for experimental
rock, too much fun for new age. Comes to a nice soft landing with
what sounds like a real piano. I've refiled this under Pop Jazz,
but the smoothies won't like it either.
B+(**)
- Les Primitifs du Futur: World Musette (1999 [2006],
Sunnyside):
Knowing that R. Crumb is involved in this project --
the cover art, of course, but he also plays mandolin and banjo --
makes it all the easier to imagine this as what happens when the
Cheap Suit Serenaders go to seed in Paris. Guitarist Dominique
Cravic is the leader and principal songwriter. Daniel Huck sings
scat, and a cast of dozens play instruments my French isn't good
enough to translate. Starts out sounding old-timey, but before
long the accordions overwhelm the ukuleles and the musette takes
over -- still old-timey, but European, even when they fake a
Chinese waltz.
A-
- Juan Carlos Quintero: Las Cumbias . . . Las Guitarras
(1997-2006 [2006], Inner Knot):
Colombian guitarist, from Medellin,
although he's been in the US since studying at Berklee and New England
Conservatory in the early '80s. Selected from a decade's work, the
pieces offer a remarkably uniform flow -- all instrumental, most with
bass, accordion, and drums/percussion, a couple with piano. Just a
slightly folkie groove that never lets up.
B+(**)
- Ed Reed: Sings Love Stories (2006 [2007], Blue Shorts):
Jazz singer. Grew up in Watts. Claims to have been in
high school talent shows with Esther Phillips and Bobby Nunn,
which pretty well dates him. Also claims to have sung in San
Quentin with Art Pepper in the band, and on his rare occasions
out of jail to have done "open mikes" with Wardell Gray, Hampton
Hawes, and Dexter Gordon. This appears to be his first album,
and he's looking pretty good, and not just because everyone I've
listed thus far is long gone dead. He gets props on the cover
from Tootie Heath and Sheila Jordan. They're not far off base,
but whereas Jordan can take the approach of singers like Jon
Hendricks and Jimmy Scott and add something ineffable, Reed
just has the basic moves. His songbook isn't very interesting,
and he merely does it justice. I might be more impressed if I
had a higher opinion of his peers.
B
- Matt Renzi: The Cave (2003 [2005], Fresh Sound
New Talent).
Simple trio, the leader playing tenor sax and clarinet near
equally. A student of George Garzone, Renzi tries to work four years
living in scattered spots on three continents into his mix, and the
result is thoughtful, almost contemplative, very centered.
B+(***)
- Florian Ross Trio: Big Fish & Small Pond (2006,
Intuition):
In a period when I haven't been able
to do much critical listening, I've played this piano trio a
lot and found it always pleasurable although rarely demanding.
But I do need to move on.
B+(**)
- Nino Rota: Fellini & Rota (1996-2003 [2007],
CAM Jazz):
From 1952 until his death in 1979 Rota composed music
for Federico Fellini's movies. This is presumably the original
music, as collected in a 1996 compilation, with a more recent
coda by pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. As with so many soundtracks,
the logic remains on screen, and the selections -- some quite
marvelous -- don't flow so much has hop all over the map. I've
somehow missed most of Fellini's famous films, but recognize
the circus atmosphere of several of these pieces. Rota was
less innovative than Ennio Morricone in using electronics,
but otherwise worked from a similar pallette.
B+(*)
- Roundtrip: Two Way Street (2005, Jazzaway).
Sax trio, from Norway, led by Klaus Ellerhusen Holm on alto and
baritone, with Ole Morten Vågan on bass and Ole Thomas Kolberg
on drums. Fiercely energetic avant group with a rockish flair --
not sure whether Vandermark influenced this scene or he merely
found a second home among like-minded players. In any case, add
Kolberg to the list of Scandinavian drummers who can really pound
the skins. Fredrik Ljungkvist (of Atomic) wrote the liner notes.
I like this mode a lot. This is a good, but not extraordinary,
example.
B+(***)
- Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Solo (2005 [2006], Blue Note):
Inevitable, although you expect something more upbeat, with a more
pronounced Afro-Cuban rhythm to it. This is pensive, detailed; just
sort of eases its way along.
B+(*)
- Roswell Rudd/Mark Dresser: Airwalkers (2004 [2006],
Clean Feed):
Bass-trombone duo. Seems to me this is more Dresser's
show: he does this sort of intimate abstraction quite often, it's
always difficult to follow but sometimes interesting when you do.
Always great to hear Rudd, and a rare treat to hear him this rough
but still in control. But not a record that will convert anyone.
B+(**)
- Rutherford/Vandermark/Müller/van der Schyff: Hoxha
(2004 [2005], Spool/Line).
Van der Schyff recorded this international
summit in Oregon, then passed the tape on to his Canadian label. The
idea of pairing Vandermark with England's avant trombone legend is
enticing, but it doesn't quite come off. Rutherford is spotty and
chaotic, never on long enough to pull his thing together. Vandermark
plays as much clarinet as tenor sax, perhaps looking for an Evan
Parker vibe, but willing to settle for Brötzmann, Gustafsson, or
whomever. The bassist is mostly lost in the mix, so the drummer is
the only one who really impresses. But the chaos does come together
now and then, especially in "Dagahra" (with Vandermark on tenor sax).
B+(**)
- Jerome Sabbagh: Pogo (2006 [2007], Sunnyside):
Good young mainstream saxophonist, born in Paris, educated in
Boston, lives in New York. Writes all his own material. Plays
tenor and soprano, and is adept enough at the latter that it
doesn't mess up his game -- unlike most of the post-Coltrane,
post-Shorter generation who take the combination as de rigeur.
This is a quartet with Ben Monder on guitar, Joe Martin on bass,
Ted Poor on drums. Quiet spots are beguiling; louder stretches
flow smoothly. A little more polished than North, cut
by the same group on Fresh Sound New Talent a couple of years
back.
B+(**)
- Henry Salvador: Révérence (2007, Circular Moves):
Born 1917 in French Guiana, still alive and active, no recording
dates, but presumably this is recent: French chanson so natural,
so lithe, so effortlessly swinging you have to wonder what's up.
For one thing Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil make appearances,
and there are jazz cats mixed in with the frogs. Salvador's
discography goes back at least to the '40s. I've never heard
him before, so have no idea where this stands in his oeuvre.
A-
- Scenes [John Stowell/Jeff Johnson/John Bishop]: Along the
Way (2006, Origin):
The trio
member names are also listed on the front cover: John Stowell,
Jeff Johnson, John Bishop. Guitar, bass, drums, respectively.
Johnson and Bishop are mainstays of Seattle's jazz scene, but
file this one under Stowell. His thoughtful, intricate guitar
doesn't fit cleanly into any of the usual categories. More than
anything else, this sounds like one of those piano trio albums
where everything sits right, but I'm left with very little to
say.
B+(**)
- Irène Schweizer: First Choice: Piano Solo KKL Luzern
(2005 [2006], Intakt):
Solo piano -- not something I care all that
much for, but this is thoughtful, cautiously elaborate, at times
bracing. After Portrait I hoped to be blown away, but I'm
hard pressed to think of any solo piano albums that move me that
way -- even Art Tatum or Cecil Taylor. Solo piano isn't as limited
as one hand clapping, but it's missing something, even when it's
as thoughtful, vigorous, and inventive as this.
B+(**)
- Secret Oyster: Sea Son (1974 [2006], The Laser's
Edge):
Danish instrumental group, not sure whether they intended
to play fusion or progressive rock, but they're so upbeat they
they missed the boat on krautrock -- probably too busy partying.
B+(*)
- Jan Shapiro: Back to Basics (2006 [2007], CD Baby):
So, I go to her website, and it starts a Flash sequence of photos
sliding into view, starting with a scared-looking child and ending
with a curly brunette morphing into a dyed blonde who's clearly
been through a lot. Then I click enter and get a lecture on how
I not only have to upgrade to Flash Player 8, I have to disable
the pop-up window blocker in my browser. So fuck that. What else
do we know? Born 1959. Educated in St. Louis and at SIU in nearby
Edwardsville. Teaches voice at Berklee. Looks like this is her
third album. Straightforward arrangements of standards, with a
piano-guitar-bass-drums band that does its job. Good singer, even
on the slow ones once she gets your attention. If I were doing
choice cuts, "Sister Sadie" would be one.
B+(*)
- Mark Sherman: Family First (2006 [2007], MHP/City Hall):
Vibraphonist, Bronx-born, studied tympani at Juilliard but
may have learned more from Elvin Jones. Six albums to date. First
I heard was previous one, which I liked. Impossible not to like
this one either. He has the natural swing mainstreamers aspire to,
and gets ample support from pianist Allen Farnham and, especially,
trumpeter Joe Magnarelli.
B+(*)
- Shoup/Burns/Radding/Campbell: The Levitation Shuffle
(2003 [2007], Clean Feed):
B+(*)
- David Sills: Down the Line (2005 [2006], Origin).
Nice mainstream album, with Sills playing tenor sax, Gary Foster
alto sax, Larry Koonse guitar, Alan Broadbent piano, Putter Smith
bass, Tim Pleasant drums. Pleasant indeed. Foster and Broadbent
recorded one of the better Concord Duos albums, so you expect them
to be a well matched team. Sills' website lists eight albums since
1997, including two by the Acoustic Jazz Quartet.
B+(**)
- Judi Silvano: Women's Work: Live at Sweet Rhythm NYC
(2006 [2007], JSL):
Jazz singer, married or somehow involved with
Joe Lovano -- his website makes more of the relationship than hers,
but neither is all that forthcoming. She sings with an all-female
trio here -- Janice Friedman on piano, Jennifer Vincent on bass,
Allison Miller on drums -- tackling 11 songs written by 9 women.
(Silvano and Mary Lou Williams are the repeaters; Friedman adds
one from the band.) Silvano's phrasing and timing are impeccable,
enough to carry these songs without complaint or much surprise.
Especially good to hear Carla Bley's "Can't Get My Motor to Start."
B+(*)
- Zoot Sims: Zoot Suite (1973 [2007], High Note):
Grew up in a vaudeville family, picked up the tenor sax, and made
a name for himself with Benny Goodman and Woody Herman, emerging
as one of the latter's legendary "four brothers" sax section. On
his own, his discography splits into two chunks: he recorded a lot
in the late '50s, with 1956 a bellweather year (cf. Zoot!),
but he faded in the '60s, with nothing between 1966-72. Norman
Granz brought him back in 1975 for Zoot Sims and the Gershwin
Brothers, where his distinct tone and innate sense of swing
reinvigorated the whole songbook, and kicked off a marvelous run
until he succumbed to cancer a decade later. This poorly recorded
archival tape leads into the latter period, one of the few great
second acts in jazz history. The quartet with pianist Jimmy Rowles,
bassist George Mraz, and drummer Mousey Alexander is in gear. The
songbook looks back to Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and Sims' main
influence, Lester Young. Sims even unveils his soprano sax "Rocking
in Rhythm." Not exactly history being made; more like one of those
faint tremors the significance of which emerges later.
B+(**)
- Soft Machine: Grides (1970-71 [2006], Cuneiform,
CD+DVD):
Back in the '70s I had most of Soft Machine's studio albums,
but I don't recall them very well. First one (or maybe two) was led
by Kevin Ayers, so they were mostly short, amusing songs, things
like "Joy of a Toy" and "Plus Belle Qu'une Poubelle." Third
was a double-LP with Ayers gone and the four remaining musicians
each doing one side-long song, but the only side I ever played much
was Robert Wyatt's spacey, loopy "The Moon in June." The remaining
albums, Fourth through Seven, have become a blur --
all I recall is noodling synth pop instrumentals, sublimation into
the machine. Somewhere along that series drummer-vocalist Wyatt
fell out a window and was paralyzed from the waist down. He bounced
back with a cover of "I'm a Believer" and followed it up with a
couple of brilliant albums -- Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard
is one of my all-time favorites; also notable are his vocals on
Michael Mantler's The Hapless Child and Nick Mason's
Fictitious Sports (actually an undercover Carla Bley album) --
and many more idiosyncratic ones. Saxophonist Elton Dean went on to
establish a reputation in avant-garde jazz before he died last year --
have only heard a couple of his records, so he remains a project. Don't
know what happened to Hugh Hopper or Mike Ratledge -- presumably the
main guys behind the blur. The band broke up in 1976. Recently, quite
a few of their live tapes have appeared, but this Amsterdam concert
is the only one I've heard. It was recorded in 1970, which locates it
between Third and Fourth. It remains predictably rockish,
especially in Wyatt's drumming, but also in the keyboards and bass.
Still, Ratledge manages to vary the keyboards enough to keep interest
as well as momentum, and thereby provides a dandy springboard for
Dean to break loose, which he does, raising the temperature throughout
the show. Package also includes a DVD, which I haven't seen yet, or
maybe ever. Priced extra for it too, which is a shame. Wodner what
else I've missed.
A-
- Soft Machine Legacy: Live at the New Morning (2005 [2006],
Inakustik, 2CD):
Half of the '70s lineup, with Hugh
Hopper on bass and Elton Dean on alto sax or saxello, but the
reunion group sounds much tougher with guitarist John Etheridge
replacing Mike Ratledge's keybs. Too bad that Dean died shortly
afterwards. His avant-riffing over steady grooves is a fine
solution to the fusion puzzle.
B+(***)
- Mark Soskin: One Hopeful Day (2006 [2007], Kind of Blue):
Pianist. Not a lot under his own name, but since
1976 has worked for Billy Cobham, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Mann,
Bobby Watson, Pete and Sheila Escovedo, others. Credits Cedar
Walton as an influence, which sounds about right. Wrote 4 of 9
pieces here, but not the best stuff -- "On the Street Where You
Live" is a sweeping, swirling opener. One of those records I
lost interest in midway and punted, then kept hearing too many
good things to simply dismiss. The band is superb -- from back
to front: Bill Stewart, John Patitucci, Chris Potter. Anyone
who thinks Potter's the great saxophonist of his generation
will find more ammunition here. John Abercrombie joins for two
pieces, which are merely typical. Pianist is fine, and takes
the last one solo.
B+(*)
- Mike Stern: Who Let the Cats Out? (2006, Heads Up):
Pretty ugly cats, if you ask me. Stern's guitar is only half ugly,
which is the least he can do for what's basically a fusion album:
lots of electric bass, some gratuitous sax from Bob Franceschini,
two dishes of Roy Hargrove trumpet, two more of Gregoire Maret
harmonica, the usual keybs. Only thing that bothers me much is
Richard Bona's vocals: don't see any point, even as scat, which
is sort of the fallback position once you realize you've nothing
to say. Not sure this is worth a Dud slot, but he did get his mug
on the cover of Downbeat.
B-
- Geoff Stradling: Les Is Mo' (2006 [2007], Origin):
First album by a pianist whose CV starts off with increasingly long
lists of film, tv, and commercial work (Pampers, Swatch, Purina --
just a few that strike my fancy), then trails off into a couple of
dozen album appearances (Alphonse Mouzon, Jane's Addiction). Nothing
there prepares you for this album, an easy swinging concoction with
Rick Keller's saxes adding warmth and a bit of edge, nicely seasoned
with a bit of Latin percussion. Delightful, really.
B+(**)
- Jane Stuart: Beginning to See the Light (2006 [2007],
Jane Stuart Music):
Ellington, not Reed. She's a singer with a nice,
moderate voice; first record, but she has a bunch of stage credits,
including a turn as Joan Baez in Richard Farina's "Long Time Comin'
A Long Time Gone." I like her quite a bit mid-tempo and faster, much
less so on the ballads. The band supports her fine, but doesn't demand
much attention on their own.
B
- Tammen Harth Rosen Dahlgren: Expedition (2001 [2006],
ESP-Disk):
Bassist Chris Dahlgren and drummer Jay Rosen
are familiar NYC names in the avant underground, guys a couple
of adventurous visitors would seek out for a gig downtown. Hans
Tammen plays what he calls endangered guitar -- sounds pretty
robust to me, even if not necessarily in the best of moods.
Alfred Harth (middle or nickname: 23) plays tenor sax and bass
clarinet. Basically an old-fashioned noisefest, but it pulls
together rather impressively toward the end, and in any case
is fun if you can stand this sort of thing. Don't know Tammen's
work, but he has a few albums and may be worth following up on.
B+(**)
- Yosvany Terry Cabrera: Metamorphosis (2004 [2005],
Ewe):
Afro-Cuban saxophonist, usually goes under name Yosvany Terry.
Record doesn't specify which when where -- alto seems to be his main
horn, but I've also seen him play tenor and soprano, and he probably
uses all three here. Avishai Cohen plays trumpet for a contrasting
horn, Mike Moreno plays some nifty guitar, and the usual suspects --
Luis Perdomo, Hans Glawishnig, Dafnis Prieto, Pedro Martinez -- keep
the complex riddims bumping and grinding.
B+(**)
- Scott Tinkler: Backwards (2007, Extreme):
Hails
from Australia, plays trumpet, professionally since 1983, with
half a dozen records, of which I've heard none. The obligatory
list of folks he's played with ranges from Branford Marsalis to
Han Bennink. This album is no doubt atypical, if for no other
reason than he plays solo. I can't think of more than 3 or 4
trumpets players who've done that. It's clearly a tough job
physically, and the results are necessarily sparse. Still, he
holds my attention as well as anyone.
B+(*)
- Gian Tornatore: Blackout (2005 [2006], Fresh Sound
New Talent):
A young saxophonist I like a lot -- his previous album,
Sink or Swim, was a low A- mostly on the basis of his bold,
forthright postbop logic. This one falls off a bit, mostly because
his sax is less dominant, and the rest of the band, including guitar
and Fender Rhodes, doesn't take up the slack. But when he takes
charge, he's superb.
B+(**)
- Trio East: Best Bets (2005 [2006], Origin):
Trumpet-bass-drums trio, not a lot of those out there, with those
that do exist tending toward avant-obscurity. Clay Jenkins plays
the trumpet, making him the presumed leader, so going with the
group name advances him toward his own kind of obscurity. What
he gets for it is an exceptionally well-balanced group effort.
They did an equally good album called Stop-Start (Sons
of Sound) last year, which languished on the cusp of the HM
list until this one arrived to take its place.
B+(**)
- James Blood Ulmer: Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street
Sessions (2006 [2007], Hyena):
The city, natch, is New
Orleans, home of Piety Street Studios, the latest stop on Ulmer's
and Vernon Reid's tour of America's blues studios. Originals like
"Katrina" and "Survivors of the Hurricane" lead off, and near the
end there's "Backwater Blues" from the wake of the 1927 flood. In
between this wanders and wobbles a bit, with a rap-prefiguring
Willie Dixon tune called "Dead Presidents" thrown in "for comic
relief" -- quote from hype sheet; the booklet itself has virtually
nothing to say. Ulmer's jazz background may be the key to keeping
his blues records loosey-goosey, but it's getting hard to tell
them apart. Charles Burnham's electric fiddle is a plus here.
B+(***)
- The Unseen Guest: Out There (2005, Tuition):
German label, owned by Schott. Don't know why I'm getting this.
Two singer-songwriters, Declan Murray and Amith Narayan, with
additional musicians mostly with Indian names, mostly playing
Indian instruments. Management based in Singapore. I shouldn't
spend the time, but this isn't bad. The music is mostly guitar
and mandolin on top of the Indian percussion, with violin and
harmonica for variety on one cut each. Lyrics in English, and
I can't complain about them either.
B+(**)
- Allan Vaché: With Benny in Mind (2006 [2007], Arbors):
They don't list roles here like they did on Bucky Pizzarelli's tribute
to Freddie Green, but the casting is obvious: John Sheridan as Teddy
Wilson, Vincent Corrao as Charlie Christian, and Christian Tamburr as
Lionel Hampton. Phil Flanigan plays bass, Ed Metz Jr. drums, Vaché
clarinet. The songs are as expected, as are the performances, which
is the only possible critique. Goodman's sextet could surprise you
now and then, even today. Tamburr strikes me as someone worth keeping
an eye on.
B+(*)
- Larry Vuckovich Trio: Street Scene (2005 [2006],
Tetrachord):
Pianist, born Yugoslavia 1936, moved to US in 1951,
settled in San Francisco, studied under Vince Guaraldi, worked
for Cal Tjader, spent a good deal of time as the house pianist at
the Keystone Korner, worked in New York for much of the '90s, is
now back in California. I know all those things because the guy
wouldn't try to bullshit anyone. His motto is "straight ahead,"
and that's how he plays it. This sounds like a piano trio ought
to sound like: the slow ones articulate, the fast ones swing, a
hint of blues when called for. He does cheat a bit by bringing
in Hector Lugo's congas for extra percussion on four numbers, but
they slip by without incident. Doesn't do any of the Balkan folk
stuff he's most famous for.
B+(***)
- Waverly Seven: Yo! Bobby (2006 [2007], Anzic, 2CD):
Bobby is Darin, the record a salute to his songbook, which once you
get past his early Atlantic hits could just as well be Frank Sinatra's
songbook. The group is Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Anat Cohen and Joel
Frahm on reeds, Manuel Valera and Jason Lindner on keyboards, Barak
Mori on bass, Daniel Freedman on drums, with Scott Robinson and Vic
Juris appearing as guests. Frahm and Valera get extra credit for
producing. Not sure who did the arrangements, but they're pretty
straightforward -- indeed, for all the talent here the remarkable
thing is how little they have to add. Not even an explanation why
Darin matters, which would be useful 'cause sometimes I forget.
B
- Mort Weiss: The B3 and Me (2003 [2006], SMS Jazz):
Clarinet-guitar-organ-drums. The organ player is Joey DeFrancesco,
unnamed but broadly hinted at. Supposedly Concord held this one up
over their contracts to DeFrancesco -- usually a desire to squash
the competition, although they could just be pissed that he puts
out more here than on his own records. Weiss is a clarinetist who
got back in the game after he turned 65. He's having a ball.
B+(**)
- Kenny Werner: Lawn Chair Society (2007, Blue Note):
I should have written this up first time I played the release. At
least that way my confusion could seem resolvable through further
experience. As it is, I've played this 6-8 times -- often at times
I didn't expect to be able to concentrate on anything but I thought
I'd give it a chance to connect. Bottom line is: it hasn't, but I
can't tell you why. Chris Potter has moments at peak form. Trumpet
player is no slouch either: Dave Douglas. Brian Blade and Scott
Colley navigate the undertow, never more authoritatively than when
they break free. Werner's a good pianist, and I don't mind when he
dabbles in electronics except when it gets slow and gloomy. I don't
know Werner's other work, but that may not matter given how strong
the horns are. Come to think of it, Douglas and Potter have often
confused me in the past. I have no doubt that they are brilliant
musicians, and there are stretches here as elsewhere to underscore
the point, but this isn't the first time they've managed to throw
me.
B+(*)
- Jessica Williams: Billy's Theme: A Tribute to Dr. Billy
Taylor (2006, Origin):
Two caveats here. One is that I'm
not familiar enough with Taylor to figure out how these pieces --
all Williams originals, so most certainly not even in Taylor's
songbook -- link up. The other is that I'm rarely smitten by solo
piano, and when it does happen it's usually someone with enough
left hand to keep a whole rhythm section running. This is not one
of those moments -- the record is patient and introspective, but
I'm drawn into it anyway. Nor is this the first time she's overcome
my prejudices.
B+(***)
- Matt Wilson's Arts & Crafts: The Scenic Route
(2006 [2007], Palmetto):
Another undocumented slipcase promo, good
enough to make the extra work annoying, not quite great enough to
make it rewarding. Kicks off with some terrific trumpet (Terell
Stafford?), slips in some tastefully ungreasy organ (Gary Versace?),
ends with a medley of "Our Prayer" (Albert Ayler?) and "Give Peace
a Chance" (Lennon/McCartney!) -- the latter sung by the so-called
Swayettes.
B+(**)
- Ethan Winogrand: Tangled Tango (2005 [2007], Clean Feed):
Drummer, originally from New York, now based in Spain where
his wife's family comes from, has one previous album. This is a
quintet, more or less, with Gorka Benitez on tenor/soprano sax or
flute and Steven Bernstein on trumpet for the horns, Ross Bonadonna
on guitar, Carlos Barretto on bass (with help from Eric Mingus on
two cuts). Straightforward stuff, lovely tone on the horns, not
much tango, tangled or otherwise, to justify the title.
B+(**)
- Wishful Thinking (2005 [2007], Clean Feed):
I tend to associate trumpet-sax-piano-bass-drums lineups with
hard bop, but that doesn't work here: this is closer to free
than postbop. I look for leaders lurking behind group names,
but four of five musicians here -- the drummer excepted --
write about evenly, and none is bucking for a masters degree
in harmonic theory. Sometimes I pick one by reputation, but I
don't recognize any of these guys: Johannes Krieger (trumpet),
Alípio C[arvalho] Neto (tenor sax), Alex Maguire (piano),
Ricardo Freitas (electric bass), Rui Gonçalves (drums). Let's
see: Neto and Maguire are producers; Luis Delgado mastered the
disc; Neto and Delgado mixed it; and Neto wrote the liner note,
so I guess he wins on points. Neto comes from Brazil, Maguire
from the UK, Krieger from Germany, the others from Portugal.
Lively, complex, interesting, too varied to really get a good
grip on. [PS: Further research shows that Neto and Gonçalves
were in IMI Kollektief; Maguire has played with Michael Moore,
Elton Dean, Sean Bergin, and Pip Pyle -- I've only heard one
of those albums, Moore's White Widow, an A-; nothing
more on the others. It takes a while for names to sink in with
me. Also there are bits of conventional postbop harmonizing,
although the label's assertion of "good hard bop with a funky
electric bass and a wild piano going from the stride tradition
to God knows where" is pretty misleading.]
B+(*)
- Sam Yahel Trio: Truth and Beauty (2005 [2007], Origin):
Plays Hammond B3. Recorded three albums 1998-99; this is his fourth.
In the meantime, he hooked up with Joshua Redman in the Elastic
band. Redman returns the favor here, and Brian Blade fills out the
trio. That looks promising on paper, but the record comes off soft
and unfocused. Redman, unlike his new record, reverts to his slippery
post-Prez style. Yahel cuts back on the soul jazz grind in favor of
postbop niceties. Of minor interest to Redman fans.
B+(*)
- Joe Zawinul: Brown Street (2005 [2007], Heads Up, 2CD):
Sticker says: "Zawinul revisits Weather Report classics for
the first time." His former band never impressed me much, although
there was never any doubt as to the individuals' talents, keyboardist
included. But Zawinul's rhythm section goes Weather Report's one
better, adding African beats to Latin. And the WDR Big Band adds
horn depth, punching up the arrangements.
B+(*)
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Mike Davis: Planet of Slums
Mike Davis's Planet of Slums is a fairly compact survey of
the growth of urban conglomerations in the Third World. While most
of the growth occurs in slums, generally around the periphery of
cities, we also see extensive class stratification, much as we see
in First World countries. The book is sort of a comparative study
organized by thematic slices, each illustrated by jumping around
from city to city to city -- the implication is that the dynamics
have been globalized into rough equivalence, so the differences
between Asia, Africa, and Latin America are negligible. This
approach makes for rather dull reading, especially in the early
going.
Although there is a lot of useful data in the book, I only marked
a few quotes.
Population growth is primarily urban, rapidly approaching an urban
majority (p. 1-2):
The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by
the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report Limits
of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities int he world with a
population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015
there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly
two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are
currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The
world's urban labour force has more than doubled since 1980, and the
present urban population -- 3.2 billion -- is larger thant he total
population of the world when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. The
global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population and
will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for
virtually all future world population growth, which is expected to
peak at about 10 billion in 2050.
During the colonial period urbanization was often suppressed for
reasons of control (p. 51):
A principal barrier, of course, was European colonialism which, in
its most extreme form in the British colonial cities of eastern and
southern Africa, denied native populations the rights of urban land
ownership and permanent residence. The British, always the ideologues
of divide and rule, feared that city life would "detribalize" Africans
and foster anticolonial solidarities. Urban migration was controlled
by pass laws, while vagrancy ordinances penalized informal
labor. Until 1954, for instance, Africans were considered only
temporary sojourners in racially zoned Nairobi and were unable to own
leasehold property. Likewise Africans in Dar-es-Salaam, according to
researcher Karin Nuru, "were only tolerated as a temporary labour
force and had to return to the countryside." In Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)
Africans had to wait until the eve of independence to acquir ethe
legal right to own urban homes, while in Lusaka -- designed as "a
highly ordered city segmented by race, class and gender" -- African
residents were considered to be "more or less temporary urbanites
whose only purpose in town was service to the administration's
personnel."
(pp. 97-98):
In India independence did little to alter the exclusionary
geography of the Raj. Kalpana Sharma, in her book about Asia's largest
slum, Rediscovering Dharavi, emphasizes that "the inequalities
that defined Bombaby as a colonial port town have
continued. . . . Investment is always available to beautify the
already well-endowed parts of the city. But there is no money to
provide even basic services to the poorer areas." For urban India as a
whole, Nandini Gooptu has shown how the "socialist" Congress Party
middle classes -- who during the 1930s and 1940s extolled the garib
janata (the poor common people) in the abstract -- ended up after
independence as enthuasiastic custodians of the colonial design of
urban exclusion and social separation. Gooptu writes, "Implicitly or
explicitly, the poor were denied a place in civic life and urban
culture, and were seen as an impediment to progress and betterment of
society."
Slums can get redeveloped when their land is desired by the elites
(p. 101):
Urban Africa, of course, has been the scene of repeated forced
exoduses to clear the way for highways and luxury compounds. One of
the most notorious and heartbreaking -- rivaling Apartheid's
demolitions of Sofiatown and Crossroads -- was the destruction of
Maroko in Lagos in 1990. A former fishing village at the wampy end of
Lekki Peninsula, Maroko was colonized by poor people displaced in the
late 1950s "so that Victoria Island and Ikoyi could be drained and
developed for Europeans and wealthy Africans." Although improverished,
Maroko became famous for its populist joie de vivre, dark humor
and spectacular music. By the early 1980s, the once marginal Lekki
Peninsula itself was considered a prime site for the extension of
high-income residences. The 1990 bulldozing of Maroko left 300,000
homeless.
Stratification produces rich suburbs as well (p. 115):
These "off worlds" -- to use the terminology of Blade Runner
-- are often imagineered as replica Southern Californias. Thus,
"Beverly Hills" does not exist only in the 90210 zip code; it is also,
with Utopia and Dreamland, a suburb of Cairo, an affluent private city
"whose inhabitants can keep their distance from the sight and severity
of poverty and the violence and political Islam which is seemingly
permeating the localities." Likewise, "Orange County" is a gated
estate of sprawling million-dollar California-style homes, designed by
a Newport Beach architect and with Martha Stewart decor, on the
northern outskirts of Beijing. (As the suburb's developer explained to
an American reporter: "People in the United States may think of Orange
County as a place, but in China, people feel Orange County is a brand
name, something like Giorgio Armani.") Long Beach -- which the New
York Times designated as "the epicenter of faux L.A. in
China" -- is also north of Beijing, astride a new six-lane
super-highway. Palm Springs, meanwhile, is a heavily guarded enclave
in Hong Kong where affluent residents can "play tennis and stroll
through the theme park, where Disney comic strip characters are
surrounded by mock Greek columns and neo-classical pavilions." Urban
theorist Laura Ruggeri contrasts the expansive imported California
lifestles of residents in their large semi-detached homes with the
living conditions of thei rFilipino maids, who sleep in
chicken-coop-like sheds on the rooftops.
More (pp. 116-117):
This "architecture of fear," as Tunde Agbola describes fortified
lifestyles in Lagos, is commonplace in the Third World and some parts
of the First, but it reaches a global extreme in large urban societies
with the greatest socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil,
Venezuela, and the United States. In Johannesburg, even before the
election of Nelson Mandela, big downtown businesses and affluent whit
eresidents fled the urban core for northern suburbs (Sandton,
Randburg, Rosebank, and so on) which were transformed into
high-security analogues of American "edge cities." Within these
sprawling suburban laagers with their ubiquitous gates, housing
clusters, and barricaded public streets, anthropologist Andre Czegledy
finds that security has become a culture of the absurd.
And more (p. 120)
Fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, disembedded
from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization's
cyber-California floating in the digital ether -- this brings us full
circle to Philip K. Dick. In this "gilded captivity," Jeremy Seabrook
adds, the Third World urban bourgeoisie "cease to be citizens of their
own country and become nomads belonging to, and owing allegiance to, a
superterrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth,
nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere."
The IMF Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) attack government
spending on social services (pp. 192-193):
Kinshasa, like the rest of Congo-Zaire, has been wrecked by a
perfect storm of kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural
adjustment, and chronic civil war. The Mobutu dictatorship, which for
32 years systematically plundered the Congo, was the Frankenstein
monster created and sustained by Washington, the IMF, and the World
Bank, with the Quai d'Orsay in a supporting role. The World Bank --
nudged when needed by the State Department -- encouraged Mobutu to use
the collateral of his nation's mineral industries to borrow vast sums
from foreign banks, knowing full well that most of the loans werer
going straight to private Swiss bank accounts. Then the IMF, starting
with the first SAP in 1977, stepped in to make sure that ordinary
Congolese paid off the debt with interest. The early conditionalities
(enforced by an IMF team at Banque du Zaire and French personnel at
the Ministry of Finance) decimated the civil service: a
quarter-million public employees -- the largest formal occupational
group in the economy -- were laid off without benefits. Those who
remained punctually turned to embezzlement and graft ("Article 15") on
an epic scale, with Mobutu's public endorsement.
A decade later, with the Congo's once-impressive infrastructure
rusted or looted, the IMF imposed a new SAP. Tshikala Biaya describes
how the 1987 agreement "sought to give 'legal power' to the informal
sector and make it a new milch cow which would replace the welfare
state that the IMF and the World Bank had just destroyed." The Club of
Paris rolled over Mobutu's debt in exchange for further retrenchment
in the publi csector, more market openness, privatization of state
companies, removal of exchange controls, and increased export of
diamonds. Foreign imports flooded Zaire, home industries closed down,
and another 100,000 jobs were lost in Kinshasa. Hyperinflation
promptly destroyed the monetary system and any semblance of economic
rationality.
On politics (p. 202)
The demonizing rhetorics of the various international "wars" on
terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they
construct epistemological walls around gecekondus,
favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about
the daily violence of economic exclusion. And, as in Victorian times,
the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling
prophecy, guaranteeing to shape a future of endless war in the
streets. As the Third World middle classes increasingly bunker
themselves in their suburban themeparks and electrified "security
villages," they lose moral and cultural insight into the urban
badlands they have left behind.
While the chapters on slum ecology are particularly harrowing,
I couldn't help but think that many of these Third World slums are,
at least superficially, much like First World slums of the 19th
century -- the sort of thing Charles Dickens wrote about. As such,
I wonder to what extent they are simply transitional effects of
primitive capitalist development that are likely to be ameliorated
in the future as living standards improve and workers gain broader
access to political power. Over the last 50 years we've seen that
happen in some cities -- Singapore is the prime example -- but not
in others. The outcome depends on many factors, most basically the
resource base to support so many people -- a level which, one may
note, has never been tried before.
Needless to say, failure to integrate and stabilize the world's
growing urban population will lead to struggle and fortification,
basically a war between rich and poor, which will take a tragic
toll on both. We appear to be headed in just that direction. Any
downturn in essential resources -- oil is the most obvious one --
will only exacerbate the problem. It's possible to view the rise
of the right in the US since 1980 as a response to the economic
downturn of the 1970s -- the rich, not satisfied with their share
of growth, started to turn against the rest. That has yet to blow
back severely, although it has resulted in the US having the world's
highest incarceration rate. Also, the US situation has been mitigated
by transfers from the rest of the world, including access to foreign
oil as US supplies lagged, trade deficits, loans, and sale of assets.
But the situation in the Third World is far more volatile, borders
that baffle crises are becoming less effective, and there's nothing
outside the earth's boundaries that we can fall back on when we've
used up everything here. So slums that in the past may have been
a troubling transitional phenomenon may in the future be something
altogether different.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Recycled Goods #44: June 2007
Recycled Goods #44, June 2007, has been belatedly posted at
Static
Multimedia. I actually turned this in pretty close to the normal
June 1 date, but Static had some weird access problems at the time,
resulting in the delay. I was trying to close out Jazz Consumer Guide
at the same time I wrote this, so tried to cut some corners, but it
wound up only slightly shorter than usual.
The '60s theme came out of thinking about Sly and the Family Stone,
but an unusual concentration of other artists fit in: James Brown,
Leonard Cohen, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape. Other concentrations
include old and/or exotic jazz prospecting redundancies and a fair
amount of world music. One thing I didn't get to was the John Lee
Hooker 4-CD box, which is actually a good deal better than the late
period reissues reviewed here -- the fourth disc repeats much of
The Best of Friends, but actually improves on it.
The album count is up to 1874. Should top 2000 in September. Next
month is likely to have a lot of jazz reissues -- at least that's
what I have written up thus far. Quite a bit of world music on the
shelves, but not much else. I haven't been chasing much down lately,
so more than ever what you see is just what I get.
Here's the publicists letter:
Recycled Goods #44, June 2007, is finally up at Static Multimedia:
link
43 records. Index by label:
Barbes: Slavic Soul Party
Calle 54: Nino Josele
CIA: Desert Roses, Oojami, Turbo Tabla
Cumbancha: Andy Palacio
Cuneiform: Graham Collier, Hugh Hopper
Drifter's Church: Chris Knight
High Note: Jaki Byard, Zoot Sims
Laser's Edge: Secret Oyster
Points South: Antonio Adolfo/Carol Saboya
Putumayo: Women of the World Acoustic
Shout! Factory: John Lee Hooker (3)
Sony/BMG: Tony Braxton, Celebrate! (2), Leonard Cohen (3),
Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Sly and the Family Stone (8)
Thirsty Ear: Nils Petter Molvaer (2)
UMG: James Brown, Funkadelic, Mary J Blige
Water: Colin Blunstone
WEA (Nonesuch): Ibrahim Ferrer
This is the 44rd monthly column. Thus far I've covered a total of 1874
albums in Recycled Goods.
Thanks again for your support.
Music: Current count 13295 [13271] rated (+24), 828 [824] unrated (+4).
Mostly worked on house, not listening to any new jazz or much recycled
material. Instead, I pulled out old unrateds figuring I could quick rate
some, making some progress there without having to write much. All things
considered, the rated count held up pretty well. Got a lot of mail, so
the unrated count actually rose.
- Hellooo Baby! The Best of the Big Bopper (1954-59
[1989], Rhino): One great hit on his own ("Chantilly Lace") plus
one he wrote that George Jones does better ("White Lightnin'")
and a bunch of misses, some of which are amusing enough. The old
man, at 29, on the plane that killed Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.
B+
- The Box Tops: The Ultimate Box Tops (1967-69
[1987], Warner Special Products): Alex Chilton's old group, good
for one big hit ("The Letter") and a few minor pop hooks. He got
better, but not more successful.
B+
- Willem Breuker Kollektief: Heibel (1990 [1991],
Bvhaast): A group I've never gotten into, probably because they
indulge their fancy for classical music much too often for my
taste. Still, the first half is rather bracing avant-garde with
the sort of dadaist humor that seems to be a Dutch specialty.
The second half is a "mini opera" called "Der Kritiker (The
Critic)" with Greetje Bijma's screeching soprano spouting the
words. For once, the histrionics make for amusing dramatics,
music even.
B+
- Ron Carter: Etudes (1982 [1994], Discovery):
Originally released on Elektra/Musician, re-released, and now
out of print. Quartet session, with Art Farmer on trumpet, Tony
Williams on drums, and the lesser Bill Evans on tenor sax. The
latter threw me at first -- I had forgotten about him, and still
don't ever recall him sounding as substantial as he does here.
(The Evans I remember died in 1980; this one was working for
Miles Davis at the time, creating a link of sorts even though
Carter and Williams had moved on.) Farmer is superb -- some of
his best records came out later in the '80s -- and the bassist
is a delight.
A-
- Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards: Singin' in the Rain
(1924-42 [1999], ASV Living Era): The ukelele is remembered as a
novelty instrument, but Ike's vocals are too conventional to be
funny. He had several hits, starting with "Fascinatin' Rhythm"
in 1924 and peaking with #1s "I Can't Give You Anything But Love"
and "Singin' in the Rain" in 1928-29. Most of these songs are
well worn standards by now, performed ably with relatively
minimal accompaniment.
B+
- Peter Erskine/Alan Pasqua: Live at Rocco (1999
[2000], Fuzzy Music, 2CD): Actually, a piano trio, with bassist
David Carpenter getting a plug on the front cover but not on the
spine. Seems to me that Pasqua is key here. I suppose Erskine is
better known based on his time with Weather Report, but that won't
help anyone out here. Good drummer. Good pianist. Long, but
consistently appealing.
B+
- Esquire All-American Jazz Concert: Metropolitan Opera
House, January 18, 1944 (1944 [1995], Jazz Archives, 2CD):
All-star games usually confirm what you already know, and this
one is no exception. Given the recording ban, Esquire turned to
critics to make the picks, and arranged for a concert to fête
the winners. The only surprise is Barney Bigard over Benny
Goodman, but the fine print tells us that Bigard was the 2nd
place sub for an unavailable Goodman, who nonetheless phoned
in one cut to make the marquis. Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday
were two non-winners -- behind Art Tatum and Mildred Bailey --
who appeared anyway, and Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo managed
to tie on Miscellaneous Instrument. Only one sax -- Coleman
Hawkins over Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, and Lester Young --
but two trumpets: Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge, who else?
B+
- Absolutely the Best of John Fred and His Playboy Band
(1964-69 [2001], Fuel 2000): Louisiana group, led by John Fred Gourrier,
with an ear for the Brit Invasion, yielding one hit -- "Judy in Disguise
(With Glasses)" -- and plenty of solid filler, sometimes reminiscent
of the Animals.
B+
- Carlos Garnett: Fire (1974-77 [1997], 32 Jazz):
Saxophonist, played with Miles Davis which likely pointed him toward
funk fusion. Cut five albums for Muse in 1974-77. This is a sampler,
with one cut from each and an extra from Journey to Enlightenment,
generally regarded as the best of the batch. At points this reminds
me of Gato Barbieri's early Impulse records, where the percussion is
just the landscape the sax soars freely over. In fact, one cut here
is called "Señor Trane," which could have been Barbieri's nickname.
I could have gone up or down on this, and further study might well
move it up, but I backed down on the rating due to the total lack of
information -- who played, when recorded, where released. Joel Dorn
doesn't believe in that sort of thing -- he's a one-man Dark Ages.
And this is no longer in print, so doesn't even have that saving
grace. Someone (other than Dorn) should look into restoring these
recordings.
B+(***)
- Dizzy Gillespie Quintet: Copenhagen Concert (1959
[1992], Steeplechase): No surprises here: alto saxophonist Leo Wright,
pianist Junior Mance, bassist Art Davis, and drummer Teddy Stewart are
proficient, but barely hold a candle to the trumpeter. You've heard
the songbook before. You'll enjoy hearing it again.
B+
- Tom Harrell: The Art of Rhythm (1997 [1998], RCA):
This starts rather unpromisingly with a Brazilian rhythm, a bit of
what sounds like flute (turns out to be clarinet) over guitar, but
it gradually develops into something much more substantial. Latin
rhythms predominate although they're almost a sideshow; a huge cast
of players move in and out; almost every piece develops, and while
Harrell crowns most with flugelhorn (8-2 over trumpet), many guest
spots are memorable.
A-
- Tom Harrell/Kenny Werner/Andre Ceccarelli/Paul Imm: Sail
Away (1991, Musidisc): Harrell did another album with the
same title for Contemporary back in 1989. This is a live one cut
in Paris with a straightforward quartet, with Harrell on flugelhorn
and Werner's piano extensively featured. Nothing much wrong with
it, but doesn't register all that strongly.
B
- Tom Harrell: Upswing (1993, Chesky): Sextet, with
three horns -- Joe Lovano and Phil Woods as well as Harrell -- plus
rhythm. Harrell can be spectacular as a soloist, but he likes to
lurk behind multiple horns, and may do it better than anyone --
not that it doesn't help having saxophonists of such stature, but
Lovano and Woods show themselves off as good teammates more than
as great individualists.
B+
- Tom Harrell: Time's Mirror (1999, RCA): Another
big band thing, which really seems to be Harrell's forte, although
the players are less distinctive here than on The Art of
Rhythm. Bob Belden produced.
B+
- Sheila Jordan/Cameron Brown: I've Grown Accustomed to the
Bass (1997 [2000], High Note): A live set, just singer and
bassist, just a few of her standard pieces including an extended
Charlie Parker-inspired medley. Not as good as her later birthday
party, Celebration, but damn close.
A-
- Red Nichols & Miff Mole (1925-27 [1998],
Retrieval): Originally recorded by The [Six] Hottentots, The
Arkansas Travellers, and most famously The Original Memphis
Five, all recorded by white jazz legends in New York; Nichols
was a cornet player from Utah, known later for his Five Pennies;
these early cuts with Mole on trombone and others including
Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet hit such a consistent mild-mannered
groove they constitute an oasis of cool in the hot jazz desert.
A-
- Panama! Latin, Calypso and Funk of the Isthmus 1965-75
([2006], Soundway): A label that specializes in discovering old
African pop branches out into the diaspora, picking out comparable
obscurities, albeit less consistent -- perhaps because Panama is a
rather indistinct crossroads; the mambo and calypso sound authentic
enough, at least to one raised on neither, and the trumpet on the
lead cut is searing, but the funk loses its perch north of Miami.
B+(***)
- Doug Raney Quartet: Raney '96 (1996, Steeplechase):
Guitar, with Ben Besiakov on piano, Lennart Ginman on bass, Herlin
Riley on drums. Not familiar with Besiakov, but he matches up well
with Raney's eloquent postbop guitar.
B+
- String Trio of New York: Faze Phour: A Twenty Year
Retrospective (1997 [1998], Black Saint): Bassist John
Lindberg and guitarist James Emery go back to the founding, but
the violinists have come and gone: Billy Bang, Charles Burnham,
Regina Carter, here Diane Lincoln, later Rob Thomas. Here Lincoln
gets to learn the songbook -- two each by Lindberg and Emery; one
by both; one each from Monk, Mingus, and Ellington; and one from
Lincoln herself.
A-
No Jazz Prospecting
I took a break from jazz prospecting last week. I tried to work on
projects around the house, culminating in an event Sunday where I tried
to solicit help by promising food. That, indeed the whole week, can be
described as semi-successful. We had too much food and not enough work
on Sunday, but did get through some of the most pressing projects. The
intercom and cameras are working, the structured wiring box is full of
wires, the doors are trimmed, some odds and ends have been taken care
of. The main thing I didn't get done is a much needed reorganization
of my workspace and work materials, which is a hellacious mess. Also
the new Windows computer still won't load, and there's a monster in
the attic. Next week should be more of the same, but less pressure.
Of course, I did listen to music nearly every waking moment of the
week. I just didn't write much about it, and where I did I went after
easier game: some recycled goods, old unrated jazz that I picked up
several years ago when used stores were going out of business, and
some big compilations like Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune --
the first of four 9-CD boxes, anyway -- and the Chano Pozo box, El
Tambor de Cuba. Also Network's excellent Golden Afrique
boxes, now up to three volumes. I did find a few exceptional records
in the old shelves:
- Ron Carter: Etudes (1982 [1994], Discovery)
- Tom Harrell: The Art of Rhythm (1997 [1998], RCA)
- Sheila Jordan/Cameron Brown: I've Grown Accustomed to the
Bass (1997 [2000], High Note)
- Red Nichols & Miff Mole (1925-27 [1998],
Retrieval)
- String Trio of New York: Faze Phour (1997 [1998],
Black Saint)
Also B+ stuff by Willem Breuker, Peter Erskine/Alan Pasqua, Carlos
Garnett, Dizzy Gillespie, Tom Harrell (two, plus a B), and Doug Raney.
Carter and Harrell have new records I haven't gotten to yet. Next week
will be more of the same: more housework, more backlog -- in particular,
I want to work through a pile of classic Cuban records recommended in
Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music. But I expect I'll be able
to get to the new jazz shelves later in the week. For one thing, I
need to: the unplayed shelf is jammed.
Some news: Jazz Consumer Guide will be in the Village Voice this
week, nominally Wednesday. I've gone over the edits, but don't know
how it fits so I'm not sure how much of what I handed in will get
cut. I'll write more on that when it appears, and then will finish
the rest of the bookkeeping rollover to officially start on #14.
Recycled Goods is also belatedly up at
Static
Multimedia. I'll do a separate post on that.
Unpacking:
- The Best of Air Supply: Ones That You Love (1976-86, Arista/Legacy)
- Stefano Battaglia: Re: Pasolini (ECM)
- Paul Bley: Solo in Mondsee (ECM): advance, Aug. 21
- Boca Do Rio (Vagabundo)
- Kenny Burrell: Birthday Bash: Live at Yoshi's (Blue Note)
- Daniel Carter & Matt Lavelle: Live at Tower Records (Tubman Atnimara)
- Frankie Cicala: Frankie Plays! (3B's)
- Introducing Kenny Cox and the Contemporary Jazz Quintet (1968, Blue Note)
- Culture: Two Sevens Clash (30th Anniversary Edition) (1977, Shanachie)
- Kelly Eisenhour: Seek and Find (BluJazz)
- Eye Contact: War Rug (KMB Jazz)
- Pierre Favre Ensemble: Fleuve (ECM)
- Frank Foster: Manhattan Fever (1968-69, Blue Note)
- Frode Haltli: Passing Images (ECM): advance, July 24
- Joel Harrison: Harbor (High Note)
- Andrew Hill: Change (1966, Blue Note)
- Fred Katz: Folk Songs for Far Out Folk (1958, Reboot Stereophonic)
- Love Finds Its Own Way: The Best of Gladys Knight and the Pips (1961-83, Buddah/Legacy)
- Nils Landgren & Joe Sample: Creole Love Call (ACT)
- Sinikka Langeland: Starflowers (ECM): advance, Aug. 21
- Matt Lavelle: Cuica in the Third House (KMB Jazz)
- Matt Lavelle: Trumpet Rising Bass-Clarinet Moon (Matt Lavelle)
- Matt Lavelle and Daniel Carter (downtownmusic.net)
- Nguyên Lê Duos: Homescape (ACT)
- John McLaughlin/Jaco Pastorius/Tony Williams: Trio of Doom (1979, Columbia/Legacy)
- The Essential John McLaughlin (1963-2006, Columbia/Legacy, 2CD)
- Stephan Micus: On the Wing (ECM)
- Roscoe Mitchell/The Transatlantic Art Ensemble: Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2, and 3 (ECM)
- Frank Morgan: A Night in the Life (High Note)
- The Essential Jaco Pastorius (1976-81, Epic/Legacy, 2CD)
- Jimmy Ponder: Somebody's Child (High Note)
- Putumayo Presents: Latin Jazz (Putumayo World Music)
- Louis Sclavis: L'Imparfait des Langues (ECM)
- Jimmy Smith: Straight Life (1961, Blue Note)
- Spark Trio: Short Stories in Sound (Utech)
- John Surman: The Space in Between (ECM): advance, Aug. 21
- Holla: The Best of Trin-I-Tee 5:7 (1998-2002, Gospo Centric/Legacy)
- Gianluigi Trovesi: Vaghissimo Ritratto (ECM)
- Stanley Turrentine: A Bluish Bag (1967, Blue Note)
- Christian Wallumrod Ensemble: The Zoo Is Far (ECM): advance, July 24
- Robin Williamson: The Iron Stone (ECM)
Purchases:
- The Apples in Stereo: New Magnetic Wonder (Yep Roc)
- Miranda Lambert: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Sony/BMG Nashville)
Monday, June 25, 2007
Credible Partners
Rami Khouri on Hamas and Hizbullah:
Hamas and Hizbullah are among the most effective and legitimate
political movements in the Arab world: They have forced unilateral
Israeli retreats that no Arab army could induce; won elections
democratically without resorting to the gerrymandering or ballot box
stuffing that most American-supported Arab regimes live by; provided
efficient service delivery and local governance to their constituents;
and sustained resistance to Israeli occupation that appeals to the
desire of ordinary Arabs to restore dignity to their battered lives
and to their shattered, hollow political systems.
We should criticize such Islamists for some of their policies and
ambiguities. But it is a big mistake to confront and fight them mainly
because they challenge Israel, are friendly to Iran and Syria, and
represent vanguards of regional Islamism; for these three attributes
precisely define much of their indigenous efficacy and
legitimacy. Those who wish to fight Hamas and Hizbullah would do
better to help address the indigenous grievances in Lebanon and
Palestine that gave birth to these groups and continue to underpin
their popularity.
My own take is that you have to recognize and deal with Hamas
and Hizabullah precisely because they are popular and strong. It
does little good to try to deal with groups that can't deliver a
solid agreement. It also does little good to insist on terms that
aren't acceptable. That's pretty much what Israel did with Arafat
in the Oslo Accords: by agreeing to an unacceptable deal, Arafat
showed how weak he really was; then, as the terms hardened, he
had to back-peddle to save his leadership. That ultimately left
him unable either to deal or to deliver, so he did nothing and
took the blame for everything.
But neither Israel nor the US, at least under Bush, wants any
sort of deal. They want to show that force works. They're having
a hard time making their case, but as long as it's the only tool
in their kit, it's the only one they have to fall back on. Back
when the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report was due, it was
totally clear that nothing Bush had done had worked, and that the
only sane thing to do was to shift course. So what did Bush do?
He announced the Surge, arguing that we had to give force one more
chance. Pretty much everyone predicted then it would fail, and six
months later the only thing the Surge has achieved is a significant
increase in the number of dead American soldiers. Now Bush is still
biding for time -- September is the latest magic date, but even now
they're hedging their bets. And come September, what will the new
plan be? Another plea to give force one more chance.
Israel is in a similar boat. No matter how many walls they build,
how many checkpoints they throw up, etc., the only thing that will
provide security to Israel is if Palestinians choose not to attack
or strike back. To do that they need a deal; to do that they need
a credible partner, who can accept a reasonable deal -- minimally,
one that allows Palestinians to live normal lives with full rights
and justice -- and make it stick. Hamas may or may not be a partner,
but Abbas certainly isn't -- the US and Israel just destroyed what
little was left of his credibility.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Greg Grandin: Empire's Workshop
Greg Grandin's book, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United
States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006, Metropolitan;
recently reprinted in paperback) provides a rather cursory overview
of US domination over Latin America. The emphasis here is on "New
Imperialism" -- how the US kicked Vietnam Syndrome to flex muscles
as the world's sole superpower. Grandin argues that the path passed
through Central America, where Reagan's "new morning in America" is
linked to 300,000 deaths and a legacy of subterfuge of American and
international law, orchestrated by many of the same people who under
Bush moved on to the Middle East.
Grandin starts off with a chapter called "How Latin America Saved
the United States From Itself"; a section called "The Porcupine
Problem" suggests some reservations against outright empire
(p. 24):
But if expansion enjoyed broad support, the idea of direct
colonialism did not. A nativist racism, unlike the imperialist variant
expressed by Joseph Strong, led many in the United States to refuse the
responsibilities of presiding over large populations of nonwhite
peoples. William Jennings Bryan's declaration that the the "Filipinos
cannot be citizens without endangering our civilization" reflected
this sentiment, but it also signaled a wish to protect America's
working class from the competition of cheap labor. Republicans like
Beveridge and Taft promoted first a mighty navy and then a commanding
air force as a way of protecting American shores and projecting
American power but fought against the expansion of the army, which,
they felt, would inevitably lead to overseas wars and increasinging
involvement in the messy waters of international poitics. Sequential
invasions and military occupations did indeed prove costly --
particularly in the Philippines, where a bloody insurgency killed
4,000 American soldiers and 200,000 Filipinos -- turning the public
and many political leaders, including eventually Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson, against formal empire. When an aide suggested to
Roosevelt that he annex the Dominican Republic to quell political
disorder and head off the threat of a German invasion to collect
debt, the president replied that he was no more inclined to do so
"than a gorged boa constrictor would be to swallow a porcupine
wrong-end-to."
The Cold War added an ideological dimension to the
gunboat-reinforced Monroe Doctrine and Open Door Policy
(pp. 41-42):
One reason for this turnaround was, of course, the Cold
War. Washington found that it greatly preferred anti-Communist
dictatorships to the possibility that democratic openness might allow
the Soviets to gain a foothold on the continent. Because of a "growing
awareness of Soviet Russia's aggressive policy," wrote the State
Department's Division of the American Republics, the United States now
"swung back toward a policy of general cooperation [with dictators]
that gives only secondary importance to the degree of democracy
manifested by [Latin America's] respective governments." Another
reason was to protect investment, as democracy led to a wave of
strikes calling for more humane standards of living, better wages,
health care, social security, and land and labor reform. Threatened by
escalating labor unrest, U.S. corporations demanded protection from
Washington and stepped up their patronage of local conservative
movements. For their part, Latin America's landed class, Catholic
Church, and military took advantage of the United States's new Cold War
policy to launch a continental counterrevolution, overturning newly
democratic governments and forcing those constitutional regimes that
survived to the right. By 1952, when Fulgencio Batista took power in a
military coup in Cuba, nearly every democracy that had come into being
in the postwar period was upended.
Moreover, by the early 1950s, Washington found that it was
increasingly difficult merely to support dictators from the
sidelines. The frustration of postwar democracy combined with
increased political repression to radicalize a generation of young
nationalists, who began to identify the United States not as a model
but as an obstacle to reform. In the face of such growing opposition
to its hemispheric authority, the United States began to take the lead
in efforts to "arrest the development of irresponsibility and extreme
nationalism," as Thomas Mann, Eisenhower's assistant secretary of
state for inter-American affairs, wrote in 1952. The first "arrest,"
as it were, carried out directly by the United States came two years
later [overthrowing Arbenz in Guatemala].
On Nixon vs. Chile (pp. 59-60):
The overthrow of Allende [in September 1973] was a quintessential
expression of détente, which sought to eliminate any and all threats
to the bipolar world then being designed by the United States and the
USSR. Allende's Popular Unity government rejected both Soviet-style
suppression of civil liberties and American economic dominance,
believing it could steer Chile down a peaceful road to socialism while
maintaining political freedoms. Chile's challenge, therefore, was not
that it would be turned into another Castro-style dictatorship but
that it wouldn't. "I don't think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry
[Kissinger] saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than
Castro," remarked one NSC staffer. "If Latin America ever became
unraveled, it would never happen with a Castro. Allende was a living
example of democratic social reform in Latin America. All kinds of
cataclysmic events rolled around, but Chile scared him." Another aide
recalled that his boss feared that the effects of Allende's election
would spill over into Western Europe, particularly into Italy, where
the Communist Party had broken with Moscow and was trying to chart a
middle path similar to Allende's. "The fear," according to Seymour
Hersh in his biography of Kissinger, "was not only that Allende would
be voted into office, but that -- after his six-year term -- the
political process would work and he would be voted out of office in
the next election. Kissinger saw the notion that Communists could
participate in the electoral process and accept the results peacefully
as the wrong message to send Italian voters."
The bulk of the book is on Reagan's Central America policies
(p. 71):
Once in office, Reagan came down hard on Central America, in effect
letting his administration's most committed militarists set and
execute policy. In El Salvador, over the course of a decade, they
provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal
counterinsurgency campaign. In Nicaragua, they patronized the Contras,
a brutal insurgency led by discredited remnants of the deposed
dictator's national guard designed to roll back the Sandinista
revolution. In Guatemala, they pressed to reestablish military aid to
an army that was in the middle of committing genocide, defending the
country's born-again president even as he was presiding over the worst
slaughter in twentieth-century Latin America. All told, U.S. allies in
Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people,
tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.
On El Salvador (p. 104):
Yet despite all the talk of modernization, the Reagan White House
was ideologically disinclined to promote the kind of state-managed
development that could create employment or to break up Salvador's
extreme concentration of political and economic power. By 1983, the
United States had all but abandoned its celebrated land reform -- by
that point planters and their military allies had already executed
hundreds of individuals who tried to take advantage of its provisions,
rendering the reform dead in all but name. Far from promoting
industrialization and a more equitable distribution of the nation's
wealth, the Reagan administration insisted that Duarte orient the
economy toward free trade while at the same time cutting back on
social spending, which only served to estrange the Christian Democrats
further from their working-class supporters. By 1986, the Salvadoran
government was spending less on schools and health care than it had a
decade earlier.
This turned into a neocon workshop (pp. 118-119):
It was in the exercise of Central American policy that conservative
militants turned statesmen learned how to maneuver around their more
cautious colleagues in the State Department and most consistently
disregarded the opinion of multilateral institutions. When the
International Court of Justice ordered the United States to pay
Nicaragua billions of dollars in reparations for mining its harbor and
conducting an illegal war of aggression, Washington balked and
withdrew from the court's jurisdiction -- a "watershed moment,"
according to legal scholar Eric Posner, in the United States's
relationship with the international community, one that Bush's
ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has cited as evidence
for why the United States should not support the new International
Criminal Court. It was in Central America that unconventional warriors
learned to bypass congressional oversight by creating a semiprivate,
international network to carry out a clandestine foreign policy and to
undermine post-Vietnam efforts to limit the use of military power for
other than clearly defined, limited objectives. And it was there that
the New Right, now in power, began to instill a culture of loyalty to
the cause and incuriosity about the world: "To raise a question was to
be a negative thinker," complained CIA agent Nestor Sanchez of the
administration's fixation on Central America.
On the politics of the new imperialism (pp. 121-122):
For many of the policy and opinion makers who seized on 9/11 to
promote their vision of an imperial America, placing the nation on a
permanent war footing was as much a form of domestic collective
therapy as it was an international crusade to reshape the
world. "Nothing less than an unambiguous victory will save us from yet
another disappointment in ourselves and another despairing disillusion
with our leaders." The attacks provided a chance for Americans who
"crave 'a new birth' of the confidence we used to have in ourselves
and in 'America the Beautiful.'" Such desires to overcome the
factionalism and disenchantment that had plagued America since the
1960s were not confined to the political right, as many liberals
likewise hungered for a renewed sense of national purpose. The New
Republic's Peter Beinart, for instance, called on Democrats to
join the struggle against Islamic fascism and to rediscover their
"fighting faith" in political liberalism. For their part, essayists
Max Boot and Charles Krauthammer have expressed optimism that the
brutality of the protracted global war on terrorism would finally form
a callus over the national psyche, dulling the undue sensitivity to
pain that spread in the wake of Vietnam.
More on politics, the roots of the later cynical manipulations
practiced by the second Bush administration (pp. 130-131):
The point of all this activity was not to create majority support
for Reagan's Central American policy. White House director of
communications Patrick Buchanan admitted as much at a 1986
Low-Intensity Warfare Conference when he said that the consensus that
existed between 1941 and 1966 was gone and was not coming back: "There
are many Americans out there . . . that will tell you that the great
enemy of America is our support for right-wing dictatorships. . . . We
do not have agreement among ourselves. We are not going to have
agreement. We haven't had it for 20 years. And it seems to me that
there is no sense waiting for that agreement before acting." The goal,
rather, was to prevent an oppositional consensus from forming.
To that end, Public Diplomacy, much like rational-choice
counterinsurgency, helped shift the debate in favor of the White House
not by winning over domestic hearts and minds but by making it too
costly for mainstream journalists and politicians to challenge
policy.
By flooding the media with questionalble facts and allegations, the
Office of Public Diplomacy forced Reagan's opponents to dissipate
their energies disproving allegations rather than making their own
positive case for nonintervention. Confronted by government
spokespeople and sympathetic experts ready to rebut unfavorable
coverage, no matter how slight the criticism or how marginal the
source, reporters came to dread the amount of fact checking it took to
cover Central America. "I work for a network very concerned with cost
and image," complained Karen Burnes of ABC News in 1987. "It takes
months and months," she said, to do a critical story on Reagan's
Central American policy. Spending that much prep time on a story that
would take up only five minutes of airtime, she said, was "not a way
to be successful."
By offering alternative interpretations, no matter how far-fetched,
to discredit charges of atrocities committed by U.S. allies, Public
Diplomacy muddied the waters and made it difficult, if not impossible,
for human rights organizations to establish the facts of a case.
This same media dominance eventually paid off in wearing down the
Iran-Contra investigation, allowing Reagan-Bush officials to escape
punishment.
More on the media (pp. 134-135):
It was on the front line of the Central American conflicts that the
Pentagon learned how to finesse the news at home by controlling
reporters at the source. Defense strategists had analyzed the
relationship between the press and the military after Vietnam and
concluded that the problem in Southeast Asia was that journalists had
become too independent in developing their own channels of
information. In response, the Pentagon and the CIA granted privileged
access to certain reporters in Central America, laying the groundwork
for protocols that would be developed further in Grenada, Panama, and
Iraq. John Waghelstein recounts that when he first arrived in El
Salvador in the early 1980s he found that "many of the stories were
written from within guerrilla-controlled areas and some of the
eye-witness accounts had a pro-guerrilla bias." He took "serious
steps" to change this, conducting a "series of one-on-one
backgrounders with a few of the more respected journalists" and
holding an "informal weekly press session." "Good Salvadoran
commanders were highlighted" and "problems were discussed candidly."
He also authorized network camera crews to film the Salvadoran army in
action. Such controlled access gave U.S. military advisers a way to
establish cordial, respectful relations with the in-country press
corps, allowing them not only to present their side of the war but to
accustom select mainstream reporters to that access and make them
loath to write anything that might jeopardize it.
It also created a bonding experience in which privilege was
transformed into sympathy for the institution granting the
access. Fred Barnes, now of the Weekly Standard but then of the
New Republic, was even allowed to don a uniform and play
"Contra for a Day." The only critical note in his chronicle of life
among the anti-Communist insurgents was that the "coffee wasn't hot
enough" and he had to sleep on a "plywood slab."
Iran-Contra ends with a whimper, allowing its malefactors to return
(p. 136):
The fallout from the [Iran-Contra] scandal itself had largely been
contained, as the Senate refused to investigate the assumptions
driving the policy and instead focused on procedural violations. The
special prosecutor's inquiry dragged on for years with little result,
stonewalled by the Department of Justice -- with John Bolton taking
the lead in playing defense -- and increasingly ignored by a press
unwilling to bring down another president. Not only were those
convicted or indicted pardoned, but many of the key players in the
affairs -- Abrams, Negroponte, Weinberger, and Reich -- went on to
take jobs in George W. Bush's administration. The anti-imperial moment
was over.
In opposition to "liberation theology" the neocons offered their
own fundamentalism (pp. 147-149):
As did their mainstream coreligionists, fundamentalists formulated
their free-market moralism as a quarrel with liberation theology --
which they described as a "theology of mass murder" and the "the
single most critical problem that Christianity has faced in all its
2000-year history." They of course dismissed [Michael] Novak's
liberalism but like him saw capitalism as an ethical system, one that
corresponded to God's gift of free will. Man lives in a "fundamentally
scarce world," Christian economist John Coper argued, not an abundant
one only in need of more equitable distribution, as the liberation
theologians would have it. The profit motive, rather than being an
amoral economic mechanism, is part of a divine plan to discipline
fallen man and makes him produce. Where Christian humanists contended
that people were fundamentally good and that "evil" was a condition of
class exploitation, Christian capitalists such as Amway's Richard
DeVos, head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, insisted that evil is
found in the heart of man. Where liberation theology held that humans
could fully realize their potential here on earth, fundamentalist
economists argued that attempts to distribute wealth and regulate
production were based on an incorrect understanding of society -- an
understanding that incited disobedience to proper authority and, by
focusing on economic inequality, geneated guilt, envy, and
conflict. God's Kingdom, they insisted, would be established not by
war between the classes but by a struggle between the wicked and the
just.
Like Novak, evangelicals sought to rebut liberation theology's
critique of the global political economy. Third-world poverty,
according to evangelical economist Ronald Nash, has a "cultural,
moral, and even religious dimension" tha t reveals itself in a "lack
of respect for any private property," "lack of initiative," and
"high-leisure preference." Some took this argument to its logical
conclusion. Gary North, another influential Christian economist,
insisted that the "Third World's problems are religious: moral
perversity, a long history of demonism, and outright paganism." "The
citizens of the Third World," he wrote, "ought to feel guilt, to fall
on their knees and repent from their Godless, rebellious, socialistic
ways. They should feel guilty because they are guilty, both
individually and corporately."
Evangelical Christianity's elaboration of a theological
justification for free-market capitalism, along with its view of an
immoral third world, resonated with other ideological currents within
the New Right, laying the groundwork for today's embrace of empire as
America's national purpose. In a universe of free will where good work
is rewarded and bad works are punished, the fact of American
prosperity was a self-evident confirmation of God's blessing of
U.S. power in the world. Third-world misery, in contract, was proof of
"God's curse."
More theology (pp. 154-155):
This transformation of conservative activists into world
revolutionaries entailed adopting an ethics of absolutism, sacrificing
any qualms they may have had about means at the altar of ends. The
violence of counterinsurgent war stoked the fires of evangelical
Manichaeanism, leading Falwell, Robertson, and others to ally with the
worst murderers and torturers in Central and Latin America. "For the
Christian," wrote Russ Walton, a fundamentalist activist, "there can be
no neutrality in this battle: 'He that is not with Me is against Me'
(Matthew 12:30)." Robertson befriended Roberto D'Aubuisson -- who was
behind the murder of, among untold others, Archbishop Oscar Romero --
celebrating both men on his Christian Broadcasting Network. And more
than a dozen New Christian Right organizations, including the Moral
Majority and Pro-Life Action Committee, presented D'Aubuisson with a
plaque in 1984, honoring his "continuing efforts for freedom."
On to Iraq (pp. 159-160):
Immediately after his arrival (and before handing the reins to old
Contra hand John Negroponte), L. Paul Bremer, America's proconsul
during what was hoped would be the consolidation stage of the
occupation, imposed a package of economic reforms that
institutionalized corporate power. He eliminated or lowered tariffs to
no more than 5 percent, reduced the top personal income and corporate
tax rate to a flat 15 percent, curtailed the right of labor to
organize and strike, removed restrictions on foreign corporate
ownership, allowed foreign businesses unlimited repatriation of
profits, laid off public-sector employees, and privatized state
industries. The U.S. occupation has imposed on Iraq a massive state
intervention on behalf of multinationals, insured by U.S. taxpayers an
dsubsidized by the U.S. defense budget. Not for nothing is the
U.S. First Cavalry Division in Iraq carrying out "Operation Adam
Smith," aimed at teaching Iraqis -- despite their centuries-long fame
as entrepreneurs, traders, and merchants -- business practices that
conform to the new global corporate order. Bremer's "Iraqi Order 81"
even prohibited Iraqi farmers from saving heirloom seeds from one year
to the next, obliging them to buy them anew each season from
corporations like Monsanto and Dow Chemical -- so much for the 2002
National Security Strategy's promise that free trade would "unleash
the productive potential of individuals in all nations."
It was a "stunning example" of free-market nation building, wrote
the Wall Street Journal, one that made "Iraq's economy one of
the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it
among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor." Whatever the
motivations of either the occupation or the insurgency, the
dismantling of state industries, abolition of food subsidies, and
throwing open of Iraq to imports and foreign capital stoked the fires
of resentment, conscripting thousands of unemployed men into the ranks
of the armed opposition.
On the rise of the new right (pp. 178-179):
The death of New Deal liberalism came in 1973, when the United
States was hit by the twin blows of sharply rising oil prices and a
seventeen-month recession, described by political scientists Thomas
Ferguson and Joel Rogers as "the longest and deepest economic downturn
the United States had experienced since the great Depression." The
contraction led to a sharpened sense of class consciousness and unity
of action among corporate leaders -- many of whom had previously
supported the New Deal coalition but now rapidly increased their
funding of conservative political action committees, advocacy
advertising, ad hoc lobbying groups, and right-wing policy and legal
think tanks dedicated to the dismantling of economic regulations and
social entitlements. The number of pro-business political action
committees jumped from 248 in 1974 to 1,100 in 1978. The Olin, Smith
Richardson, and Scaife funds, representing chemical, pharmaceutical,
and petrochemical interests, paid scholars and journalists to produce,
as corporate activist William E. Simon, Nixon's undersecretary of the
Treasury, put it, "books, books, and more books" to rejoin the
"relationship between political and economic liberty."
Again (p. 180):
With détente offering no relief from the crunch generated by
increased global competition and a third world hostile to
U.S. capitalist investment, the Forbes 500 knights of the Business
Roundtable made their peace with the renascent right and set out to
retake the third world. Putting aside their qualms about a potential
inflationary risk, non-defense industry CEOs joined in the call for a
renewed arms buildup. Executive officers from corporations that used
to be squarely in the Democratic camp began to work closely with
right-wing think tanks and policy institutes such as the American
Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which promoted both
a dramatic expansion of America's military might abroad and the
shredding of the New Deal at home.
The right's promotion of inequality (p. 182):
Reagan's policies halted and then began the reversal of what some
economists had identified as a dangerous trend -- namely, the
democratization of wealth brought about by union power, a progressive
corporate and personal tax code, education spending, low unemployment,
and social welfare programs. Over the course of the previous three
decades, the amount of income claimed by the nation's top 1 percentile
dropped from 16 to 8 percent. Reagan's tax cuts and increased defense
spending reversed this process, creating permanent budget shortfalls
and slowing bleeding New Deal and Great Society programs. When
unsustainable deficits compelled Reagan to raise revenues, he did so
by largely shifting the burden to payroll taxes, which only helped to
further weaken support for government programs -- understandably so
since real wages had begun to decline for many working-class
families. Tight money led to rising unemployment and to the gutting of
organized labor's bargaining power. Automatic cost-of-living salary
increases, job security, and guaranteed pensions were thereby
consigned to the ash heap of history. Corporations began the scuttling
of America's industrial base, moving production to the Southwest and
overseas.
The link between Reagan and Bush (pp. 230-231):
It was in Central America that the public relations people who
advised the Reagan administration first made an important rhetorical
shift when they polled the public and found that the word
terrorism, intangible as it is, generated more negative
connotations than did Communism to describe America's
enemy. After 9/11, terrorism gave way to the even more gossamer
evil, a word that, whatever role it plays in the specific
cosmology of the president and his New Christian Right base, resonates
broadly with America's sense of itself as a purpose-driven
nation. Bush's ability to stay incuriously on message, like Reagan's
communicative skills, is undoubtedly high on the list of PR
"exploitable assets." The combination of big-money power, Madison
Avenue expertise, and grassroots energy with which to intimidate
political opponents into supporting a hard line in Central America is
replicated in any number of campaigns, including the Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth broadsides against John Kerry, which were as much
about imperial policy as they were about a domestic presidential
election.
The military's success at establishing cordial and respectful
relations with journalists covering Central America, while at the same
time cultivating their loyalties through promises of privileged
access, paved the way for the tight control the Pentagon exercised
over the media in Iraq. Likewise, the appointment of Negroponte,
associated as he is with Reagan's Contra war, as director of national
intelligence is a reminder that many of the post-9/11 intelligence
"reforms" were first proposed in the 1980s to monitor the Latin
American solidarity movement. Oliver North's plant o place dissenting
Americans in detention centers in the event of a U.S. invasion of
Nicaragua, along with the FBI investigation and harassment of CISPES
activists, is today ratified by the Patriot Act and other successful
efforts to restrict constitutional guarantees and human rights in the
name of national security, such as the practice of "extraordinary
rendition." Rendition allows suspects in the war on terror to be swept
off the street in whatever country they find themselves and whisked,
without record of their capture, to a third country, where they can be
held and interrogated indefinitely in secret prisons -- a
globalization of the system of disappearances that reigned in Latin
America during the Cold War.
In fact, all of George W. Bush's abuses of power -- the
manipulation of intelligence and the media, the building of an
interagency war party that operated autonomously from Washington's
foreign policy establishment, the illegal wiretaps, and the
surveillance of antiwar activists -- have their most immediate
antecedents in Reagan's Central American policy, which in retrospect
has to be understood as the first battle in the New Right's crusade to
roll back restrictions placed on the imperial presidency in the wake
of Vietnam, Watergate, COINTELPRO, and other scandals of the
1970s.
More on religion (p. 232):
In particular, Reagan's wars in Central America created an affinity
between neoconservatives and Christian evangelicals: both came to
share a crisis-ridden view of the world and a sense that America was
in decline. But they also shared a belief that decline could be
reversed through a restoration of moral clarity and authority and a
recognition that evil existed in the world. Along with militarists and
conservative intellectuals, the religious right has long nurtured a
suspicion of America's ruling elites and the multilateral institutions
that trespass on national sovereignty. Yet their experience in the
1980s has drawn them nearer to the strange optimism of the neocons
regarding the capacity of American power to mend the world. For some
the lodestar may be Winston Churchill, for others Jesus Christ, but
today a broad consensus prevails among the most passionate
constituents of the conservative movement as to the righteousness of
American power and its place in the unfolding of history. Thus, when
Pat Robertson suggested in the summer of 2005 that Washington
preemptively assassinate Hugo Chávez before U.S. relations with
Venezuela worsened, he was merely taking to a logical conclusion the
principles elaborated in Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy.
Gerard Colby's Thy
Will Be Done goes into the relationship between US
evangelism and empire in Latin America much further back and
in much greater depth. Colby focuses on Nelson Rockefeller --
his family's business, philanthropic, evangelical interests,
and his own political career, which initially focused on Latin
America -- but also covers evangelicals and their usefulness
to the CIA in great depth.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Martin Van Creveld: The Changing Face of War
I don't pay much attention to military history, but Israeli historian
Martin Van Creveld's The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat
From the Marne to Iraq promised to cover a lot of territory in
a brief space: two world wars, innumerable anti-colonial wars, the
so-called "cold war" and its hot flashes, and the so-called "war on
terrorism" -- fascism renascent disguised as liberal democracy. I
haven't read anything else by Van Creveld, although Billmon tempted
me by placing a previous book on his "recent reading" list, and it
didn't hurt when he described Bush's invasion of Iraq as the biggest
military blunder since Augustine invaded Germany. I don't care for
his admiration for Assad at Hana here -- a rare example of successful
counterinsurgency, which he attributes to sheer brutality, as if it
might behoove Israel or the US to toughen up. This fondness for war
is endemic among military historians, distinctly limiting their
value. But looking over the long arc of a turbulent century, the
underlying story comes clear enough: war after war gave us object
lessons on the futility of war. It's a shame we've had to learn
those lessons the hard way, and even worse that so many have yet
to figure them out.
The Introduction starts thus (pp. ix-x):
As of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the mightiest,
richest, best-equipped, best-trained armed forces that have ever
existed are in full decline and are, indeed, looking into an
abyss. Examples of their failure abound. Almost forgotten are the days
when the Israelis had fought against, and triumphed over, all the
armed forces of all the Arab countries combined. Instead, having spent
seventeen years vainly trying to put down the Palestinianuprising,t he
Israelis are even now giving up and retreating from Gaza and parts of
the West Bank -- to be followed, no doubt, by most of the rest. Other
armed forces find themselves in a similar plight. Having spent ten
years fighting in Chechnya, thoroughly demolished the capital of
Grozny, and killed, injured, and "dehoused" tens if not hundreds of
thousands of their opponents, the Russians are still unable to pacify
that country of two and a half million. In Thailand, in Indonesia, in
the Philippines, in a dozen other countries, regular armed forces are
engaged in so-called counterinsurgency operations. In terms of sheer
military power, all are far stronger than their enemies. None,
however, seems to be making any considerable headway, and most will
probably end up in defeat.
Particularly disturbing is the case of the Americans in
Iraq. Whether the American decision to attack Saddam Hussein was
justified will not be considered here. Suffice it to say that the
United States, as the world's sole superpower, has the most powerful
forces by far, with technology at its disposal that hardly any other
country can match. The chosen enemy was a small third-world country
with a gross domestic product so much smaller than its own that
comparisons were meaningless. Twelve years earlier, that country had
already lost two-thirds of its armed forces. The remainder, it soon
turned out, consisted of ill-trained, unwilling levies driving a few
rusting hulks. Instead of getting their aircraft into the skies, they
buried them in the sand; instead of fighting, they threw down their
weapons and went home. Yet no sooner had "major combat operations" --
to quote President Bush's victory speech -- ended than it became clear
that the US forces, which had taken only three weeks to occupy a
country of 240,000 square miles and capture its capital, were unable
to deal with a few thousand terrorists. In early 2005, having lost ten
times as may troops to those terrorists as they did during the war
itself, they were still floundering. So weak had their position become
that their opponents hardly bothered to shoot at them any
longer. Instead, preparing for the day after the inevitable American
withdrawal, the terrorists were focusing on their own countrymen.
On buyer's remorse from the Great War (pp. 83-84):
If in 1914 most people welcomed the war, nowhere was the change in
public opinion after 1918 more evident than in Britain. There, the
replacement of the Liberals by Labor in 1919-20 was accompanied by the
emergence of a powerful anti-militarist, anti-imperialist
sentiment. And once the initial euphoria of victory had passed, the
middle classes, too, turned their faces against anything vaguely
resembling militarism. Writing from personal experience, authors such
as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves described the war as an
exercise in futility filled with endless suffering, vain slaughter,
and generals so obtuse that they sent hundreds of thousands to die in
muddy swamps they had never even set their eyes on. From interviewing
shell-shocked soldiers, Rebecca West presented the war as a mad
episode that generated more madness. By 1933, Oxford students, hardly
the kind of people from whom one would expect revolutionaries to
emerge, were solemnly promising one another not to fight for king and
country. The idea of appeasement was well on its way. Should it be any
wonder then that when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving
a piece of paper and promising peace in our time, he was given a hero'
welcome?
In the United States, the decision to enter the war soon came to be
regarded as a huge mistake, brought about by the nefarious
machinations of industrialists and bankers. Worse still, and even
though Germany and Austria-Hungary had been defeated, the war had
failed to bring about the kind of better world President Woodrow
Wilson promised. Feeling that their idealism had been betrayed, most
Americans wanted nothing more to do with Europe. The Neutrality Laws
of 1936-39, which prohibited the sale of weapons to belligerents,
capped the process. Far from being the handiwork of a few politicians,
isolationism was so popular that when the time came to reverse course,
doing so proved anything but easy.
This antiwar reaction shows how unsatisfying victory proved to the
US and UK. Defeat, on the other hand, primed Germany for a revenge
match, while militarism in Italy and Japan emerged from the 1914-17
war relatively unscathed (pp. 85-86):
Perhaps the most interesting cases were those of Italy, Germany,
and Japan. Italy emerged from World War I as one of the
victors. Although it did not succeed in realizing its territorial
ambitions in Anatolia, it was the only belligerent to gain territory
in Europe that had never previously belonged to it -- a fact that
might have turned it into a "satisfied" nation. This, however, did not
happen, and the Italians soon decided that they had been betrayed by
their allies -- all fuel for the fascist regime that seized power in
1922.
During the first eighteen years of his rule, Mussolini threatened
to wage war against virtually the entir eworld, sometimes citing
reasons, sometimes simply because he believed, or professed to
believe, that fighting was a nice way to spend one's time. However, as
World War II was to show, the slogan "Credere, ubbidire,
combattere" found an echo only among a very small number of
adventurous youths. Neither the aristocracy, which remained loyal to
the kind, nor the settled bourgeoisie, whom Mussolini called "slipper
wearers," nor the broad masses were persuaded by his propaganda.
Germany entered the postwar world by undergoing a revolution of
sorts, doing away with the kaiser but leaving power, for the most
part, in the hands of the center and the moderate right. Once
conditions had settled down, and influenced by best-selling writers
such as Erich Maria Remarque and Ludwig Renn, much of German society
seemed to retreat from war in the same way Britain had. Yet Germany
differed from Britain in that, even during the heyday of the Weimar
Republic, it had a number of right-wing, powerful, and politically
very active veteran organiations with a membership in the
millions. They did not content themselves with celebrating the past,
assuring each other of the horrors of war, and promoting their
members' interests. Instead they called for a war of revenge --
Germans often spoke of "the Day" -- to reverse its consequences,
including both disarmament and territorial loss.
In Germany, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western
Front was a huge best seller, but it was also an exception; far
more numerous were writers, the most famous fo whom was Ernst Juenger,
who relished war and glorified it. Nowhere else was willingness to
engage in paramilitary activities and nostalgia for the so-called
Schutzengrabenkameradschaft (comradeship of the trenches) as
strong. Hitler himself built on these feelings, dressing in the
uniform coat of a simple soldier with only one decoration and thus
separating himself from his entourage of generals with their
glittering arrays of epaulets, ribbons, and medals. Making full use of
the German tendency toward discipline, the Nazi attempt to
remilitarize society made use of every available medium to send the
message, including painting, sculpture, and film.
Japan had been ruled by a military caste for centuries, and its
social values, trickling down from the top, had prepared it for
war. Though the Meiji Restoration of 1868 terminated Samurai rule, the
new Japanese system of goernment was in many ways modeled on the
German one and created a situation where only the emperor (or, since
he did not meddle in day-to-day affairs, those who claimed to act in
his name) commanded the army and the navy. This arrangement, as well
as the series of military successes the country enjoyed from 1895 on,
enabled the armed forces to play a decisive role in social and
political life (though still not sufficiently so for some extremists
who, in 1932 and 1936, attempted to mount mini coups). Japanese
leaders tended to be self-effacing -- then as now, it was the
collective that counted, not the individual. They were also less given
to military display than their German counterparts. Still, in 1941,
the year when the American political scientist Quincy Wright published
his massive Study of War, he ranked Japan as the second most
"aggressive" nation of all.
On R&D (p. 96):
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea that systematic
research and development could result in a never-ending stream of new
inventions had become firmly established, and indeed perhaps never
before in history had the belief in "science" been stronger and more
widespread. Book after book extolled the great inventors as well as
the benefits they had bestowed on humanity; some public opinion
surveys even pointed to Thomas Edison as the most important person of
all. Militarily speaking, the principal innovations took place in the
field of mechanized warfare, air warfare, and naval warfare, where the
development of the aircraft carrier and amphibious landing vessels
during the interwar years was especially dramatic. These elements were
tied together by a vast array of communications and other electronic
devices that, in retrospect, may have been the most important of
all.
On the development of guerrilla war as resistance against colonial
powers, like France in Morocco and Britain in Iraq after 1918 (p. 116):
Of the two, Iraq ultimately proved easier to deal with. Summoned by
civilian advisers who knew the area well, British armored cars roamed
Mesopotamia shooting up any opposition they came across, a feat made
possible by the fact that light, handheld anti-tank weapons in the
form of bazookas and RPGs had not yet made their appearance. British
military aircraft assisted, dropping bombs and machine-gunning
villages suspected of harboring insurgents. As contemporaries realized
full well, the main effect of their operations was on the rebels'
morale, and in fact the number of casualties was very low. What the
oft-repeated air patrols really did was not so much inflict death and
destruction as disrupt daily life sufficiently to convince the village
elders that opposition had to cease. The outcome enabled advocates of
air-power to convine themselves, and their political masters, that
they had found a new, cheap, and easy way ofpolicing a country. It
would not be the last time such a conclusion was reached.
By contast, the Riff uprising in Morocco proved a much tougher nut
to crack. France's original occupation of the country dated to 1906
when the other Great Powers gave Paris permission to go ahead. In the
event, occupying and holding the main towns proved to be one thing;
doing the same in the remote, mountainous, practically roadless
interior, quite a different matter.
What we today would call counterinsurgency operations began almost
immediately and went on practically without interruption until the end
of the First World War. Although such operations achieved little --
and indeed, from 1920 on much of the country was in a state of open
revolt -- it was also true that the rebels' greatest victories were
won not against the French but in the Spanish-occupied part of the
country. At Annual in May 1921 the Riff tribesmen, emerging into the
open, actually succeeded in trapping nineteen thousand Spanish troops
-- out of a total of sixty-three thousand -- killing many of them,
their commander included. This Spanish Adowa was followed by another
rebel victory at Sheshuan, which effectively put an end to Spanish
rule there.
WWII between Japan and the US (p. 165):
This, too, was a war without mercy. At Kwajalein in January and
February 1944, the Americans used 41,000 men and lost 400 killed. For
the Japanese, the respective figures were 8,000 and 7,870 -- probably
a record for a force that size. Japanese atrocities in China, first
meant to intimidate the population, then to combat incipient guerrilla
warfare, and finally to perfect methods for waging biological warfare,
have become deservedly infamous. Waged as it was against the
background of racism that had taken decades, if not centuries, to
form, the war against the Western powers was also marked by intense
hatred. Allied prisoners who had surrendered to the Japanese were
considered by their captors to have forfeited their honor and were
often deliberately humiliated, maltreated, starved, and worked to
death.
The Allies in their turn often refused to take Japanese prisoners
at all. Sometimes they used flamethrowers to exterminate the garrisons
of occupied islands almost one by one, as if they were rats; there
were also instances when body parts, such as fingers and ears, were
severed and taken as souvenirs, and enemy dead subjected to sexual
abuse. Cut off from the world, unable to receive reinforcements, and
ordered to fight to the end, the Japanese troops' fear of what might
await them reinforced their determination and sometimes led to actions
of mass suicide. And so on in a vicious cycle of violencce and cruelty
that, if anything, became worse as the war went on.
On nuclear weapons (p. 179):
We cannot go into all the fantasies, often bearing strong sexual
overtones (as when people talked of "penetration aids"), that for
decades on end masqueraded as serious doctrine and sought to make the
use of nuclear weapons possible. Suffice it to say that, as of the
time of this writing in 2006, Brodie's analysis remains as relevant as
if it had been written yesterday. A reliable defense against nuclear
weapons and their delivery vehicles does not appear more feasible than
it was in October 1945 when President Turman told Congress that "every
weapon will eventually bring some counter defense." Instead, the
attempt to develop it is one more reason why teh United States is
teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Though the Bush administration
has developed a National Security Strategy that advocates pre-emptive
attacks, and though it wants to develop so-called "mini-nukes" in
order to launch a strike, in reality Brodie's warning that such
weapons have created an entirely new situation remains in force. There
is, of course, no absolute guarantee that the United States, or some
other country, will never resort to nuclear weapons, and indeed this
fact itself is a cardinal factor in mtaintaining deterrence and
securing peace. Either don't use your sword or be prepared to die on
it: such has been the central logic of the last sixty years.
On North Korea (p. 185):
North Korea, as one of the msot backward, most isolated countries
on earth, is also located in a rather dangerous part of the world, the
so-called Iron Triangle where it is surrounded on all sides by
countries much more powerful than it. All either have nuclear weapons
or can produce them at short notice -- to say nothing of the presence,
in South Korea, of powerful American forces complete with their
tactical nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles. Under such conditions,
Pyongyang's apparent decision to go nuclear makes perfect sense. Its
objective seems to be to guarantee the survival of a pariah regime
that has practically no assets of any other kind.
Similar logic applies to Iran, concluding "possession [of nuclear
weapons] may increase the mullahs' self-confidence and lead to
aggression, but it may also increase self-confidence and lead to
restraint. Given the historical record since 1945, the second is more
likely than the first." On the other hand, the US (pp. 185-186):
As the country that was the first to introduce nuclear weapons (and
the only one, so far, to use it on an enemy), the United States has
every incentive to prevent other countries from entering the nuclear
club. As a result, each time that club expanded Washington immediately
started painting apocalyptic pictures of the consequences that would
follow. To a lesser but still considerable extent, this policy even
applied to its closest allies, Britain and France, causing the latter
to remove its armed forces from under the NATO command. In regard to
nuclear issues, as to so many others, Americans see their country as
uniquely chosen and uniquely moral. Yet it could certainly be argued
that, long before the Bush administration produced its aforementioned
National Security Doctrine, the United States had behaved less
responsibly than any other country on earth. If it did not actually
use nuclear weapons after Nagasaki, it has certainly threatened to do
so many times and against more than one opponent. Not by accident, the
term brinkmanship itself is an American invention.
Flowing from a discussion of blaming the media for counterinsurgency
failures, such as the US in Vietnam (pp. 225-226):
Nor is it true, as a great many writers have claimed, that the
problems in question are limited to "democratic" societies. At the
time the USSR invaded Afghanistan, it was no more "democratic" than
Vietnamw as when it invaded Cambodia. Indonesia, too, in its struggle
against East Timor, and Russia in its attempt to subdue Chechnya, were
not exactly model democracies. In fact, "democracy," like "media," has
become an excuse for failure.
Granted, totalitarian societies can do a lot of bad things to their
own citizens, silencing them, arresting them, and killing
them. However, as the Italian experience under Mussolini suggests,
making them fight and die willingly is not one of them. Even in
totalitarian countries, bad news will spread whether the rulers permit
it or not. One cannot lie to all the people all the time. The fact
that information must be passed along secretly can even exaggerate its
impact as people invent stories or magnify those they may have
heard. The more secretive the regime and the more it muzzles the
media, the less its credibility.
Thus, by and large, decision makers and others who blame the media
for their defeats are talking nonsense. Indeed, as long as things go
well, those decision makers like nothing better than to bask in the
glory that only the media can provide.
Such being the case, it is no wonder the record of failure did not
stop with Vietnam; what changed was the fact that, whereas previously
it had been the main Western powers that failed, now the list included
other countries as well. Portugal's expulsion from Africa in 1975 was
followed by the failure of the South Africans in Namibia, the
Ethiopians in Eritrea, the Indians in Sri Lanka, the Americans in
Somalia, and the Israelis in Lebanon. In 2005, Israel evacuated the
Gaza Strip -- proof, if proof is needed, that even one of the world's
most advanced, most sophisticated armed forces operating against an
extremely weak opponent could fail. In favor of the armies of some
countries, such as the Philippines and Thailand, it should be said
that they only failed in the sense that they did not succeed in
completely eliminating the insurgents. Many others, though, had to let
go of entir eprovines they had long considered integral parts of their
own territories, whereas others came close to disintegration.
Van Creveld ends by asserting that the threat of terrorism is
worse than the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation. What he
doesn't say is that his assertion reflects that we have not yet
learned to change our behavior to minimize the risks of terrorism,
whereas we have successfully limited the threat of nuclear weapons
by discipling ourselves against acting in ways that would provoke
their use. Nuclear-armed nations simply don't go at each other
like they did before the advent of nuclear weapons. But powers
like the US and many others still cling to the notion that they
can defeat "terrorists" by superior force, thereby pushing the
"terrorists" toward ever more ingenious ways of resistance. But
the actual record of counterinsurgencies that Van Creveld maps
out offers little evidence that such strategies can work -- the
Truman quote above appears to apply to counterinsurgent weapons
as well as nuclear ones. So is there a behavior change that can
draw potential terrorists away from violence and into the normal
political process? That's something to work on.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Atheists Without Attitude
A couple of weeks ago I ran across a sudden spate of articles on
new books on atheism -- one in the Wichita Eagle's Saturday "Faith
and Values" section, another by Anthony Gottlieb in the May 21
New Yorker. The books in question include ones by Sam Harris,
Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. I haven't read any
of them, and doubt that I will, although when Harris first came
out with The End of Faith I thumbed through it with much
anticipation, only to be disappointed. The turnoff was the extent
to which the book appeared to be a mere anti-Islam rant. I reckon
Hitchens is the same: he even shilled for a war to vent his hate.
Not that I'm in any sense a fan of Islam. But I don't see it as,
in principle at least, any worse than any other religion, and I
especially don't like the company of those who put it down with
force or threats.
Although I've gone through stages of being a very protestant
Christian and a pretty militant atheist, I've settled down to a
fairly simple view: that religion is a highly personal matter,
that functions as a measure of the extent one is willing to
accept myth in place of what one does not or even cannot know.
That is to say, there are two limits on religion: the more you
know, the less opportunity religion has to fill in the blanks;
but also, the more you're willing to live with uncertainty, the
less need you have for filling in the blanks. Within religion,
there are further limits that have to do with the credibility of
myths, or to put it differently, with one's credulity. Science
limits religion both by dispelling ignorance and by debunking
myth. But other factors can limit religion: in my own case, the
first that affected me was ethics; later on there was humility.
As a teenager I often said "I don't know" to avoid talking to
my father; as an adult I came to recognize its truth.
I think of my little scheme as deriving from Immanuel Kant
and his followers, but that may be because I mostly skipped over
David Hume. Gottlieb describes Hume as "a cheerful Scottish
historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion
was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail."
He goes on:
In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which was
published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three
men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world
and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he poointed
out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman,
not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he agued, if it is necessary
to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or
what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that
you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his
friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that
Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and
was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of
zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even
superficially pious tone. He wanted to convine his religious readers,
and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would
work. In a telling passage in the Dialogues, Hume has one of
his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism,
being builtin of "indiscretion and imprudence," would not be very
formidable.
Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the
Dialogues and left the book primed so that its argumetns would,
with luck, ignite in his readers' own minds. And he always offered a
way out. In The Natural History of Religion, he undermined the
idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound
as if it were still all right ot believe in proofs of God's
existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it
is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made
it sound as if it were still alright to have faith. And in the
Dialogues he undermined proofs of God's existence, but made it
sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of
revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume
never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at
once.
Way back when I was a tormented teenager, I was shocked and disgusted
at the immorality of so many religious notables, especially regarding
their support of what the US was doing in Vietnam. My instinct was that
any doctrine that could be used to defend that was dangerously flawed.
Indeed, one could look back through history and ascribe all sorts of
atrocities to zealous Christianity. Only later did I notice that many
who shared my ethical views derived them from religious sources as well
documented as those of the warmongers. Returning to Wichita in 1999 may
have crystalized this insight given that most of the antiwar movement
here is firmly faith-based. That does nothing to restore my faith, but
it does go to show that morality is orthogonal to religion. I can't
find the quote now, but one piece I read recently cites someone, maybe
Reinhold Niebuhr, as saying that religion is good for good people and
bad for bad people. I'd prefer to express that negatively: religion
is not bad for good people and not good for bad people.
I'd also say that religion is superfluous, unnecessary, and often
confusing. But it occurs to me that it may still be useful shorthand.
It is a substantial undertaking to master the reason and science that
discredits most religious myths. Perhaps there should be something
easier that still provides comparable guidance?
Commercializing Occupation
Naomi Klein has a piece in the July 2 issue of the Nation that
talks about business in Israel:
At a glance, things aren't going well in Israel. So why, in the
midst of such volatility, is the Israeli economy booming like it's
1999, with a roaring sotck marke tand growth rates nearing
China's? [ . . . ]
In the 1990s, Israel was in the vanguard of the information
revolution. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel had its
worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and new profit vistas opened up
for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal
borders from attack and extract confiessionsz from closed-mouthed
prisoners. Within three years, large parts of Israel's tech economy
had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went
from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling
fences to an apartheid planet.
The key to Israel's supergrowth is not mysterious. Many of the
country's young entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a
fortressed state, and its occupation of Gaza and the WEst Bank, as a
kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom -- a living example of how
toenjoy relative safety amid constant war. Now Israel is exporting
that model to the world. [ . . . ]
Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United
States -- up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel
exported $3.4 billion in defense products -- well over a billion more
than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the
fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.
Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security"
sector: high-tech walls, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video
surveillance, air passenger profiling systems, the training of border
guards and interrogators. Before 9/11 "homeland security" barely
existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in
the sector will reach $1.2 billion -- an increase of 20
percent. Israel has turned endless war into a brand asset, pitching
its uprooting and occupation of the Palestinian people as a
half-century head start in the "global war on terror."
[ . . . ]
Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied
territories, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the
West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of
Israel's homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greaer detail
in a forthcoming book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism), it strikes me that they are something else too:
laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are
being field-tested. Palestinians are no longer just targets -- they
are guinea pigs.
This argues that Israel has a powerful economic disincentive
for doing anything that might reduce or resolve its conflict with
the Palestinians and its other designated enemies, as if political
and psychological factors weren't intractable enough. Normally,
such a conflict should be bad for business, but it looks like
Israel has turned the tables. Key no doubt is to keep Israeli
and American "wars on terror" in sync -- easy enough as long as
the neocons, who follow Israel's worst instincts without showing
the slightest hint of competency, are in power. I've long worried
about the US becoming Israel writ large. With Israel all the more
unlikely to change course, the US is all the more in peril.
One also worries about Israel's non-US exports. To the extent
that Israeli technology facilitates the crushing dominance of haves
over have-nots, it will tempt elites everywhere to fend challenges
off with force rather than reason, leading to much damage on both
sides. It seems to me that we are on the cusp of a momentous point
from which we either recognize the need for forging a more evenly
shared cooperative community or watch perpetual conflict between
increasingly desperate rich and poor as we slide toward Hobbesian
hell. In that event, Israel is well positioned to arm the rich,
largely because that's what they've been doing for 60 years now.
This development just locks them in even deeper.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Music: Current count 13271 [13248] rated (+23), 824 [829] unrated (-5).
Expected a lot of distractions last week, a prognostication that proved
correct. Don't know anything more about June's Recycled Goods or Jazz
Consumer Guide columns. Mostly played jazz reissues and a few non-jazz
reissues, figuring they'd be easy, which for the most part they were.
Don't have any real plans for next week other than more of the same.
But we did make some progress on the house, so may have turned the
tide there.
- Booker Ervin: The Space Book (1964 [1996], Prestige/OJC):
A repeat performance from the same quartet as The Freedom Book --
Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Alan Dawson.
A-
Jazz Prospecting (CG #14, Part 2)
Didn't actually do any jazz prospecting this past week, at least
as far as new jazz is concerned. Waiting for Jazz CG to drop, and
don't really know any more about it. Waiting for Recycled Goods to
appear, which also hasn't happened. Had a lot of housework and other
distractions, so I just looked for low-lying fruit to play without
the pressure or difficulty new music causes. That meant reissues,
and that mostly turned out to be jazz, so I have something to show
for the week after all.
I've had some discussions lately about breadth vs. depth coverage,
so I might as well state up front what I've been saying a lot in
private lately. I don't have the time, or maybe even the mental
focus, to give every record I hear a fair shot or to resolve every
last doubt I might have about it. The fair shot question is less
of an issue with reissues, where everyone below is well known --
well, maybe not Donald Byrd, Maynard Ferguson, and Flora Purim,
who are more like well enough known. But I'm not totally certain
that the Monk and Mingus reissues are rock solid A records, or
that Bud Freeman and Charles Lloyd aren't. I may just be erring
on the side of conventional opinion there, but all four are damn
close to the line. Andrew Hill, too -- possibly a victim of time,
since I didn't want to grade Compulsion higher than others
like Point of Departure and Pax without rechecking,
and didn't take the time. If it's not better, it's sure way up
there.
Art Taylor: A.T.'s Delight (1960 [2007], Blue Note):
Hard bop drummer, did a lot of session work and occasionally got an
album out under his own name, often with titles like Taylor's
Wailers or Taylor's Tenors. The two horns here weren't
well known: trumpeter Dave Burns had been around since the '40s,
mostly working with Dizzy Gillespie and James Moody without making
much of a name for himself, but the young tenor saxophonist turned
out to be Stanley Turrentine. Both are fine here; Wynton Kelly and
Paul Chambers are dependable as usual; a shmear of Patato doesn't
hurt, either.
B+(**)
Dexter Gordon: Clubhouse (1965 [2007], Blue Note):
The end of Gordon's Blue Note period, this sat on the shelves until
1979. Quintet session, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Barry Harris
on piano, Billy Higgins on drums, and Bob Cranshaw on bass --
replaced by Ben Tucker for his own piece, "Devilette." Hubbard
makes a splash early on, and takes a striking solo on the ballad
"I'm a Fool to Want You." Gordon is even better on the slow stuff,
reminding you that he's one of the instrument's great stylists.
The more upbeat pieces are merely typical.
B+(***)
Thad Jones: Detroit-New York Junction (1956 [2007],
Blue Note): Eventually the middle Jones brother became well known
for his compositions, his arranging, and his band co-leadership
with Mel Lewis, while his '50s small group records remained out
of print. This sextet, mostly Detroit musicians moved to New York,
offers a little bit of everything: bebop trumpet, three original
compositions and two Rodgers-Hart standards, clever arrangements.
B+(***)
Jackie McLean: New and Old Gospel (1967 [2007],
Blue Note): Charlie Parker's teenage go-fer developed as a great
alto saxophonist only after he digested Ornette Coleman's sense
of ordered chaos. Here he pays tribute on two gospel-themed
Coleman pieces, adding a complementary suite. Coleman, in turn,
defers to McLean's superior saxmanship by switching to sloppy
trumpet, reaffirming that genius has nothing to do with chops.
A-
Donald Byrd: The Cat Walk (1961 [2007], Blue Note):
Versatile, prolific trumpet player, leading a group with baritone
saxophonist Pepper Adams and pianist Duke Pearson that would just
as soon boogie as bebop; Byrd goes both ways, indecisively, to
mixed effect.
B
Andrew Hill: Compulsion (1965 [2007], Blue Note):
Despite the horn firepower -- Sun Ra's John Gilmore smoldering on
tenor sax and bass clarinet, Freddie Hubbard firing away on trumpet --
Hill's piano has rarely loomed larger or more critically. He stamps
out dense chords and skitters off with abstract fills, his rhythmic
eccentricity prodding Cecil McBee and/or Richard Davis on bass, Joe
Chambers on drums, with an extra layer of Afro-exotica from Nadi
Qamar and Renaud Simmons.
A-
Roy Haynes/Phineas Newborn/Paul Chambers: We Three
(1958 [2007], Prestige/New Jazz): Bop piano trio with a nice, evenly
balanced feel, with drummer Haynes and bassist Chambers holding their
own despite the fact that Newborn was one of the slickest, most
voluble young pianists working then; presumably Haynes got top
billing as the oldest; fifty years of steady work eventually made
him the most famous.
B+(**)
Tadd Dameron With John Coltrane: Mating Call
(1956 [2007], Prestige): In retrospect, as the only horn working
with a set of Dameron's songs, Coltrane makes an especially strong
show of his early, Dexter Gordon-influenced style, exhibiting a
rough hewn muscularity that gets the best of Dameron's usually
refined taste.
B+(**)
Thelonious Monk Trio (1952-54 [2007], Prestige):
Monk recorded four 10-inch LPs for Prestige, released in 1953-54,
reissued as 12-inch LPs in 1956-57, and eventually spun into all
sorts of confusing packages, culminating in the 3-CD Complete
Prestige Recordings. One source of confusion is the naming,
where Monk, Thelonious Monk, and Thelonious Monk
Trio have all been used to describe the same music -- I'm
going with the spine and back-cover title here, as opposed to
the front cover, with its small "thelonious," large "MONK," and
clear "PRESTIGE LP 7027." Like the cover art, this faithfully
reproduces a 1957 12-inch LP that combined a 1953 10-inch LP
and two (of four) cuts from a 1954 10-incher. It's hard to see
why they didn't restore the missing cuts given that the album
only runs 34:27, a limit of '50s technology that is at least
sonically transcended here: the effect is to consolidate most
(but not all) of Monk's trios in a handy package, separate from
the quintets featuring a young and brilliant saxophonist, now
available as Thelonious Monk/Sonny Rollins. Classic Monk
tunes here like "Bye-Ya," "Monk's Dream," "Blue Monk" -- but
the covers may be even more impressive: a solo "Just a Gigolo,"
Art Blakey's percolating rhythm on "Sweet and Lovely," Monk's
own radical take on "These Foolish Things."
A
Roland Kirk With Jack McDuff: Kirk's Work (1961
[2007], Prestige): Soul jazz, a sax-organ quartet, albeit with
a few surprises, like the cover picture of Kirk blowing into
three saxophones; Kirk's flute work is also novel, emphasizing
the instrument's hollow depth.
B+(***)
Booker Ervin: The Freedom Book (1963 [2007],
Prestige): Short-lived Texas tenor, seems like most of his titles
were plays on "Book" -- this followed The Song Book and
The Blues Book; this doesn't qualify as free jazz, but
it does open up and range beyond hard bop, with Jaki Byard's
piano challenging the sax.
A-
Charlie Mingus: Tijuana Moods (1957 [2007], RCA
Victor/Legacy): With Pithecanthropus Erectus in 1956 Mingus
started to make his move as a composer and arranger, drawing
together his experiences with Kid Ory, Duke Ellington, Charlie
Parker, and his own experimental workshops into a synthesis that
spanned the length and breadth of jazz history with his unique
daring and grandeur. A trip across the Mexican border inspired
these sessions, producing four Spanish-tinged originals and an
arrangement of "Flamingo" that Ellington could be proud of, but
the tapes languished until 1962, a mess of false starts and
derailments. When Mingus finally patched them into an album,
he was pleased enough to proclaim it his best ever. That would
be an exaggeration, but he anticipated world-swing moves that
Ellington took another decade to match. Reissues in 1986 and
2002 swept up more and more -- the former, dubbed New Tijuana
Moods, filled out a CD-length disc with alternate takes, and
the latter tacked on a second disc. This time they swing back
the other way, sticking with Mingus's edits for a non-redundant
36:00, but adding on a 10:57 bonus track with Lonnie Elder
rapping over a Mingus vibe.
A
The Essential Maynard Ferguson (1954-96 [2007],
Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): Trumpeter, from Quebec, made his rep in
Stan Kenton's band for his piercing high notes, enjoyed a long
run as a popular bandleader; the '50s sides tend to dissolve
into white light, the '60s and '70s add schmaltz and fad --
"Maria" and "MacArthur Park" are the worst, at least until he
discovers disco; "Caravan" and "Manteca," from his endgame on
Concord, aren't bad.
B-
The Essential Benny Goodman (1934-46 [2007],
Columbia/Bluebird/Legacy, 2CD): The Sony-BMG merger unites most
of Goodman's discography, especially from his peak popularity
period; this carves the bounty up into evenly balanced slices:
live performances, and studio recordings featuring arrangers,
singers, and small groups; they provide a useful introduction
to the King of Swing in his prime, but if anything slight his
still remarkable clarinet.
A-
Just Like a Woman: Nina Simone Sings Classic Songs of the
'60s (1967-78 [2007], RCA/Legacy): Strong voice, can be a
powerful stylist, has no problem convincing you that she's entitled
to interpret anything she wants, which makes her inconsistencies
and flat out muffs all the more annoying. Four Dylan songs here,
two -- "I Shall Be Released," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" --
worth keeping.
B
Bud Freeman: Chicago/Austin High School Jazz in Hi-Fi
(1957 [2006], Mosaic): Small world, that so many of Chicago's trad
jazz greats came out of the same high school, but the lineup here
is actually broader, with Jack Teagarden among the ringers. Freeman
was an easy swinging tenor saxophonist, emerging in the late '20s
as a prototype for the lighter, looser Lester Young sound, and
lasting into the '80s. The three sessions collected here didn't
have to look too far back to find the camaraderie, the freshness,
and the excitement the Austin High Gang grew up with. An early
entry in a promising series of "limited edition" -- 5000 copies,
big deal -- single-disc reissues: a record I've known about but
couldn't find for a long time now.
A-
Charles Lloyd: Of Course, Of Course (1964-65
[2006], Mosaic): On his second album, Lloyd opens with flute
over Gabor Szabo's sweet guitar, with Ron Carter and Tony
Williams shuffling along. Lloyd's main instrument was tenor
sax, and he soon garnered a following by taking Coltrane to
the masses, but this album was more varied and idiosyncratic:
his sax reminds me of Warne Marsh, but the flute suggests the
more flamboyantly eccentric Roland Kirk, tuned more tightly
to the melody, without the special effects. The reissue adds
three later tracks, trying out an appealing tropic groove.
A-The Jimmy Heath Orchestra: Really Big! (Keepnews Collection)
(1960 [2007], Riverside): When Blue Note launched their RVG Editions
they at least promised a sonic face lift by handing the reissues back
to original sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder. The series was successful
enough that Van Gelder cut a deal with Concord too. It's less obvious
what the Keepnews Collection offers. Orrin Keepnews was producer and
co-owner of a series of important labels: Riverside and Milestone in
Concord's portfolio, Landmark in limbo. He's credited as producer here,
but the 24-bit sound has been remastered by Joe Tarantino -- Keepnews'
main contribution is to revisit his liner notes. Still, list price is
the same as the previous Original Jazz Classics series, and occasional
bonus tracks -- one here, an alternate take of "Nails" -- don't hurt.
The choice of records within the Riveside and Milestone catalogs thus
far seem completely arbitrary. Still, this one is an overlooked gem:
a ten-piece band with Clark Terry, two Adderleys, three Heaths, and
plenty of low-pitched horns to flesh out the acrobatics.
A-
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Caravan (Keepnews
Collection) (1962 [2007], Riverside): One of Bu's greatest
bands -- Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton,
Reggie Workman -- but a rather sloppy and indifferent set, perhaps
thrown off by the ill-fitting title track. Still, Hubbard, who
recorded his own Caravan on Impulse, makes a game showing.
B
Chet Baker: Chet (Keepnews Collection) (1958-59
[2007], Riverside): The original back cover touts "the lyrical
trumpet of CHET BAKER," but the more descriptive term is "slow";
in Baker's day, that also passed for romantic -- even if you're
unsure whether the cover girl draped over Baker's shoulder is in
love or merely asleep.
B+(*)
Flora Purim: Butterfly Dreams (Keepnews Collection)
(1973 [2007], Milestone): Sort of a Stanley Clarke groove, George
Duke funk album, with mild spicing mostly from fusion percussionist
Airto Moreira; the singer aspires more to Ella Fitzgerald than to
her Brazilian heritage, resulting in something fast and light but
neither here nor there.
B
Bill Evans: Everybody Digs Bill Evans (Keepnews
Collection) (1958 [2007], Riverside): Second album, with
plugs on cover from Miles Davis, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal,
and Cannonball Adderley, names that carried even more weight then
than they do now. I dig the upbeat stuff and respect but never
quite warmed to the quiet meandering, extended on the bonus cut.
B+(***)
No final grades/notes on records put back for further listening
this week.
Unpacking:
- Chet Baker: Chet (Keepnews Collection) (1958-59, Riverside)
- Art Blakey: Caravan (Keepnews Collection) (1962, Riverside)
- Marc Broussard: S.O.S.: Save Our Soul (Vanguard)
- Jacques Coursil: Clameurs (Sunnyside)
- Ron di Salvio: Essence of Green: A Tribute to Kind of Blue (Origin)
- Bill Evans: Everybody Digs Bill Evans (Keepnews Collection) (1958, Riverside)
- Jimmy Heath: Really Big! (Keepnews Collection) (1960, Riverside)
- Bruce Hornsby: Camp Meeting (Legacy): advance, August 7.
- Jewels and Binoculars: Ships With Tattooed Sails (Upshot)
- Steve Kuhn: Pastorale (Sunnyside)
- Rafi Malkiel: My Island (Raftone)
- Barney McClure Trio: Spot (OA2)
- Alexa Weber Morales: Vagabundeo/Wanderings (Patois)
- Nanette Natal: I Must Be Dreaming (Benyo Music)
- Vince Norman/Joe McCarthy Big Band: Words Cannot Express (Origin)
- Flora Purim: Butterfly Dreams (Keepnews Collection) (1973, Milestone)
- Mark Solborg 4: 1+1+1+1 (ILK): advance, June 4.
- Pietro Tonolo/Gil Goldstein/Steve Swallow/Paul Motian: Your Songs: The Music of Elton John (ObliqSound): advance, July 17
- The Very Best of Praise & Worship Volume 2 (1996-2006, Verity/Legacy)
- Sam Yahel Trio: Truth and Beauty (Origin)
- Paul Zauners Blue Brass: Soil (BluJazz)
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Bush in Wichita
President Bush came to Wichita yesterday. The ostensible reason was
to appear at the dedication of a new Boys and Girls Club building built
by a group run by Russ Meyer, former CEO of Cessna Aircraft. The club
is one of those community favor things to help soft-peddle the effects
of a larger urban renewal project, meant to cut a cordon sanitaire on
21st St. through the old Wichita ghetto. 21st is the main east-west
street through Wichita's north side, extending east past Andover and
west past Maize. Closer in, it connects Wichita State University to
I-135, a stretch that can now be traversed without recognizing that
you're in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood. Further developments
are planned heading west, offering the same courtesy to predominantly
Mexican neighborhoods, with enclaves of Vietnamese. When complete,
21st will be Wichita's "multicultural" business corridor.
What Bush gets out of this is a photo-op with bunches of black
children and a chance to rub shoulders with his base. The latter
took place at a $500/plate fundraiser for Sen. Pat Roberts, where
Wichita's haves got a chance to give thanks to their staunchest
advocate in Washington. Given Roberts' critical role in squashing
any Senate investigation of Bush's Iraq War intelligence, Bush had
reason to give thanks as well. The local media covered the visit as
a big deal, even to the point of recognizing local antiwar protestors.
The Wichita Eagle caught the spirit: the front cover featured a color
picture of Bush surrounded by smiling black kids, while inside they
gave half a page to pictures of well heeled white folks lining up
for the trolley to the Roberts fundraiser.
Warren Theatres, the big local chain, closed their Premier Palace
theatres this week. For the last five years that's been the main
place in Wichita to see what they call Art Films -- movies with low
budgets and passable intelligence. Half of the movies I've seen in
the last five years were viewed there. Supposedly, they'll show some
similar movies in their large Warren East complex in the future, but
the promise of "one or two" theatres is a big drop from the eight
they've just closed. Warren runs all but one of the movie complexes
in town, so they pretty much have a stranglehold on the art here.
You can chalk this up to the dumbing down of America even if you
don't know what's happening to the Premier Palace buildings, but
I might as well tell you: they've been sold to a small Baptist
church, which currently has 175 members but expects to grow with
their new space and more suburban location. When Bill Warren first
announced his plans to sell Premier Palace, he cited "higher use"
as the reason: he was making money there, but figured the land was
worth more than he could make showing movies, so he could sell it
profitably and move his business elsewhere. At the time I figured
that meant converting the space to a car lot or a mini-mall with
some high-end chain restaurants. But this church deal is bizarre,
even in its economics. We live in strange, unfathomable times.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Eyeless in Gaza
Basic reading on the violence between Fatah and Hamas in Israel's
Occupied Territories:
The bottom line is that the sudden decision of Fatah and Hamas to start
shooting each other in Gaza and the West Bank a direct consequence of US
manipulations, as in the US is supplying Fatah with guns and money to use
against Hamas. In this, "US" to a large extent seems to be Elliott Abrams,
the Iran-Contra felon who is Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor for
the Middle East, although there are others -- Paul Woodward reports David
Welch exclaiming how much he loves the violence in Gaza. Abrams seems to
be able to operate with remarkable independence, both in leading Israel
and the US to policies far more extreme than either country would follow
by consensus. He is a prime example of Gary Wills' concept of governing
from the fringes. He is the sort of guy who can nudge Israel into invading
Lebanon by promising complete US support, then get that support by arguing
that if the US failed to back Israel we would look weak and indecisive on
terrorism. He gets away with this because there is no critical debate on
Israel in US political circles -- as such there is nothing to moderate
the most extreme positions imaginable.
The position of neocon Israel boosters like Abrams is that Israel
should never negotiate with Palestinians, let alone grant any rights
or recognition. As long as Fatah held legitimate claim to represent
the Palestinians, they worked to undermine Fatah, scorningits leader,
Mahmoud Abbas. After years of ineffectiveness, tainted by corruption,
Fatah lost popular support to Hamas. This should have legitimized
Hamas as representative of the Palestinians, but what it really did
was to pose a challenge to Abrams and his ilk: to reduce Hamas to
the same level of ineffectiveness as Abbas. First they opted to
punish the people for voting wrong by cutting off the finances
needed by the pauperized Palestinian Authority just to stave off
starvation. But when the Saudis brokered a power-sharing agreement
between Hamas and Fatah, they panicked, organizing a coup led by
their notoriously corrupt retainer, Mohammed Dahlan. That operation
appears to have fallen apart, at least in Gaza.
These events have led some to conclude that the US has failed,
but as long as Abrams is able to spin Hamas as rogue terrorists as
opposed to ordinary Palestinians, his basic goal of preventing the
emergence of "a Palestinian partner for peace" hangs on to fight
another day. Folks like Abrams don't want peace; they want to keep
their enemies under their boot, and delight in making them squirm.
So it's unlikely that any provocation of violence will undermine
them -- even when it goes badly that just adds to the fear level,
which is their adrenaline. I also doubt that they'll spill any
tears over Abbas or Dahlan, who they always regarded as enemies
even when they were useful on the payroll.
The real question is why did Abbas go along with this. Surely,
he can't expect to regain his reputation with Palestinians by
showing himself to be a US-Israeli tool. Nor can he expect to
gain anything tangible, except maybe a comfortable exile. And
he's shown that whatever moral credentials he might claim as a
proponent of non-violence don't apply to his own people. He is
a complete and utter embarrassment. Other questions include the
rubber stamp role of Jordan and Egypt in funnelling arms to Fatah.
Their leaders certainly knew better, but couldn't resist the US,
even on a hair-brained scheme hatched by crazies.
The worst thing in all of this is that none of it had to happen.
If the US and/or Israel had any desire for peace, they would have
welcomed the Hamas election as giving the Palestinians a credible
representative who could make and keep a deal. The basic two-state
deal isn't rocket science. Even with 40 years of deliberate Israeli
sabotage, it's all quite straightforward. The US incurs incalculable
costs by defending the occupation. Israel pays an even steeper price
for the occupation, plus foregoes the opportunities of normalcy in
the region. All for what? But we live in such a mental and moral
state that someone like Abrams can set the policy and no one has
the guts to challenge him.
The real question about Abrams is: what is this man doing out of
jail?
Postscript [2007-06-16]: A couple of minor corrections.
Abrams' first name is Elliott, with two t's. The Iran-Contra special
investigator prepared multiple felony indictments against Abrams,
but in the end he made a deal, pleading guilty to two misdemeanor
counts for withholding information from Congress. He was fined $50,
put on probation for two years, did some community service time,
and was pardoned by the first President Bush, putting an end to
investigating, among other things, just exactly what Bush's own
role was in Iran-Contra. (He had repeatedly asserted that he was
"not in the loop" despite his past experience as Director of the
very-much-in-the-loop CIA.) As Greg Grandin argues in Empire's
Workshop, the Reagan administration's blatantly illegal acts
in Central America set the model for the second Bush's actions in
the Middle East. In fact, many of the principals are the same,
including John Negroponte as well as Abrams. America's failure
to fully prosecute those responsible for Iran-Contra and the
many massacres in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala during
the Reagan-Bush years has come back to bite us.
Abrams has had a variety of titles under the second Bush. His
current one is Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy
Strategy, a title that sounds like a neocon wet dream. Since 2001
he has mostly been involved in Israeli issues, but evidently he
had been involved in the abortive anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela.
His new title gives him even broader sweep. Historians should be
very interested in mapping out all the plots he's involved with.
So, for that matter, should prosecutors at the International
Criminal Court.
However, Abrams at least is a known quantity. When Bush appoints
the likes of Abrams to anything you know what you're getting. The real
shame in recent events isn't Abrams, the US, and Israel organizing and
arming Fatah's goon squads to attempt with violence what they can't
accomplish with diplomacy. The real shame is how other parties who
should know better have stood by and allowed this to happen without
challenge. This includes the UN, the European Union, and many Arab
countries including Saudi Arabia. Supposedly this happens because
nobody much likes Hamas. Indeed, I don't care for Hamas either, but
the difference is that I'm able to recognize that Hamas is the only
group acting in this conflict with any coherent principles. These
events show us not only how desperate and degraded US political
conscience has become; more importantly, they show us how lame so
many others have become in their inability or unwillingness to
stand up to the US. At least Neville Chamberlain capitulated in
public, establishing himself as an exampe. Who, for instance, at
the EU signed off on defunding the Palestinian Authority to turn
the US and Israel loose on Hamas?
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Baruch Kimmerling: Politicide
Baruch Kimmerling's death silences one of Israel's most perceptive,
persistent, and principled critics. With Joel S. Migdal, he wrote the
pioneering The Palestinian People: A History. In January 2003,
he published an insightful and prophetic book on Ariel Sharon, his
political ascendency, and that that portends: Politicide: Ariel
Sharon's War Against the Palestinians (2003, Verso; later in
paperback). I read this book when it came out, before I developed
my habit of flagging paragraphs, so the following quotes are ones
I noticed in thumbing back through. Actually, much of the book could
be quoted here.
The book's main thesis (pp. 3-4):
Israel under Ariel Sharon became an agent of destruction, not only
for its surrounding environment, but for itself as well, because its
domestic and foreign policy is largely oriented toward one major goal:
the politicide of the Palestinian people. By politicide I mean
a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the
Palestinian people's existence as a legitimate social, political, and
economic entity. This process may also but not necessarily include
their partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as
the Land of Israel. This policy will inevitably rot the internal
fabric of Israeli society and undermine the moral foundation of the
Jewish state in the Middle East. From this perspective, the result
will be a double politicide -- that of the Palestinian entity and, in
the long run, that of the Jewish entity as well. Therefore, the
current Israeli Government poses a considerable danger to the
stability and the very survival of all the peoples of the entire
region.
I'd add that it also adds to the rot of American political society,
both as a cause and as a model for American policy.
Kimmerling continues (p. 4)
Politicide is a process that covers a wide range of social,
political, and military activities whose goal is to destroy the
political and national existence of a whole community of people and
thus deny its the possibility of self-determination. Murders,
localized massacres, the elimination of leadership and elite groups,
the physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure,
land colonization, starvation, social and political isolation,
re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are the major tools used to
achieve this goal.
The politicide of the Palestinian people did not begin with Ariel
Sharon's election. Rather, it is a consequence of the 1967 War and,
partially, of the very nature and roots of the Zionist movement, and
has been supported and reinforced by a series of regional and global
events and processes.
Sharon, however, advances the peril (p. 7)
The most crucial element in Israel's recent drift toward fascism is
the defintion of "the other" (in this case the Palestinians of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, and even the Arab citizens of Israel,
collectively) as a danger to the very existence of Israel as a nation
and every Israeli individually. This definition prepares Israeli,
Jewish, and world public opinion for drastic measures against the
Palestinians. What before Sharon was considered unthinkable, or at
least politically incorrect, has now become an explicit and
respectable issue in mainstream Israeli political discourse -- ethnic
cleansing as a legitimate solution to the "demographic problem" of
there being an Arab majority or approximate majority on the land.
This direction has continued to develop since Kimmerling wrote,
especially as formerly far right fringe figures, like Avigdor Lieberman,
have moved into what is ostensibly a "centrist" government. Kimmerling
allows that threats of ethnic cleansing may be "just a psychological
warfare tactic" but we should be cautioned that rhetoric tends to be
self-convincing, and therefore self-fulfilling.
On the consequences of the 1967 war (pp. 15-16)
Quite apart from the economic interest in the territories, a new
complication arose after the 1967 War -- the desir eof Israeli society
as whole, both left and right, to annex the historic heartland of the
Jewish people in the West Bank without annexing its Arab residents. A
formal annexation would mean that Israel would no longer have a Jewish
majority. Demographic changes would destroy the Jewish character of
the state even if the Palestinians were not granted
citizenship. Political and demographic considerations collided with
economic considerations and both contradicted the Kantian moral
imperative as well as the Jewish Sage Hillel's demand not to do the
"other" what you don't wish the other to do you. This triple
contradiction created a built-in crisis, leaving the Israeli state and
society unable to make the important political decisions that are
necessary to resolve the conflict. As time passed, the crisis became
more explicit and the contradictory interests became aligned with
political parties and were absorbed into personal and group identities
and even into various religious streams ("hawks vs. doves," "right
vs. left," or "Zionists vs. post-Zionists").
Kimmerling denies the intent to write a biography of Sharon, but the
bulk of the book traces Israeli history through Sharon's involvement.
One example is the Sharon's orchestration of the invasion of Lebanon,
and his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres (pp. 94-96):
Accepted wisdom regards the massacre as a spontaneous reaction
(revenge, so to speak) to the assassination of Bashir Gemayel two days
earlier, but this is a simplistic attempt to explain and even excuse
this horrifying event. The massacre, when seen in its proper political
context, is even more dreadful. Following the departure of the PLO and
the Syrians from West Beirut and its Muslim neighborhoods, a question
arose as to who was to take over these areas and how, since it was
assumed that a lot of "terrorist" weapons and ammunition remained
there. The Israelis preferred Christian troops like the almost
nonexistent Lebanese Army. [ . . . ] The second
best choice was the Phalangists, and throughout the invasion, Israel
made efforts to merge these two Christian "armies" (and other
Christian militias) without success. In any case, both Christian
military organizations wanted to see Beirut and all of Lebanon cleared
of "terrorists," namely Palestinians, but they demanded that Israel do
the job. In fact, the Christian Lebanese openly blamed Israel for all
their troubles with the Palestinians, seeing the Zionists as
responsible for the uprooting of the Palestinians in 1948 and their
subsequent flight to Lebanon.
When Sharon urged the Phalangists to enter West Beirut, contrary to
his testimony before the Kahan Commission, he was well aware of the
atrocious past and present tendencies of the militia, having been
warned several times by his intelligence and other officers and even
by his colleagues in the Cabinet. One must also keep in mind that in
inter-communal wars and conflicts, massacres and other atrocities
committed against non-combatant populations are not just consequences
of hatred and emotional outbursts, but also the results of calculated
actions designed to force a population to flee to other lands and to
ethnically cleanse an area without the difficult logistical problems
of a forced evacuation.. The Maronite community never hid their desire
to expel the Palestinians from the country. Their only problem was
where the Palestinians should go: neither Syria nor Jordan (nor of
course, Israel) would welcome them. In addition, even their removal
from the Beirut region to a more peripheral area would be only a
partial victory for the Maronites. There was also some conflict of
interest between the Israelis and the Maronites. Schiff and Ya'ari
report that, in the first phases of the invasion, one of Begin's and
Sharon's goals was to push the Palestinian inhabitants of southern
Lebanon -- not only the combatants -- to the north, and for this
reason, as many houses as possible were destroyed by Israel's
artillery and air force and measures were taken to prevent their being
rebuilt. But this policy was not pursued for long because it was
blatantly opposed to the interests of Israel's supposed ally.
After the massacre, the Israeli Government tried to diminish its
significance and gravity and to downplay its own responsibility,
hoping that domestic and international indignation would soon be
abated. The insensitivity and ethnocentric nature of its approach were
demonstrated by Begin's famous pronouncement, "Gentiles kill gentiles
and then accuse the Jews."
The second part of the book, "The Road to Sharonism" opens with an
outline of four key events in Sharon's return to power (p. 105):
These events are the first Intifada, the Oslo Accords, the abortive
negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David under
the auspices of Bill Clinton, and the earlier stages of the current
al-Aqsa Intifada. The major aim of the second part of this volume is
to provide insights into the underlying reasons for two dramatic and
contradictory shifts in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship --
namely, the first major attempt at reconciliation and its collapse
into a bloody inter-communal war that has greatly distorted and
critically demaged both societies, albeit in different ways, and whose
end is not yet in sight.
On Barak's election and government (pp. 126-127)
On May 17, 1999, Ehud Barak was elected Prime Minister on the Labor
Party ticket under a slogan promising the "continuation of the Rabin
legacy." His election raised hopes for the restoration of trust
between Israel and both the Palestinians in particular and the Arab
World in general. Yet, at least during the beginnning of his term,
Barak seemed to be working under the traumatic cloud of Rabin's
assassination. He tried to renew the diplomatic process through a
coalition government composed of a "stable Jewish majority," that is,
without the support of Israeli Arab voters, 95 percent of whom had
cast their votes for him and to whom he owed a great deal of his
success in Israel's first direct election for the
premiership. Instead, from the beginning, the government cooperated
with religious parties and those with rightwing tendencies (such as
the National Religious Party, Shas, and the Russian Immigrant Party),
and brought about the withdrawal from the coalition of the one Zionist
party most dedicated to the reconciliation process, Meretz, simply to
avoid even a resemblance to Rabin's coalition.
In retrospect, many, including Yossi Beilin for instance, suspected
Barak of calculating his steps so that he could make his proposals
look like huge compromises on Israel's part while knowing that they
would be completely unacceptable to the Palestinians. Thus he could
seemingly unmask the true face of the Palestinians and declare "Israel
has no real partner in peace." It seems more likely that Barak
genuinely believed that Israel was strong enough to coerce the
Palestinians into accepting an agreement based on his own
conditions. That is why he spent his first year in office attempting
to reach an agreement with Syria in order to isolate the
Palestinians. In Barak's own words, "achieving peace with Syria would
greatly limit the Palestinians' ability to widen the conflict."
This seems too generous to Barak, who was notably opposed to the
Oslo Accords in the first place, and who while in the IDF had a close
relationship with Sharon. Kimmerling credits Hafez Assad with turning
down a treaty with Barak, but my understanding is that it was Barak
who balked at the last minute. The year Barak spent negotiating with
"Syria first" saw a major expansion of Israel's West Bank settlements,
further undermining his commitments to finalize the Oslo process. After
he failed at Camp David, Barak went out of his way to make it easier
for Sharon to end the entire Oslo process by withdrawing all of his
supposedly generous offers. After Sharon defeated Barak, Barak tried
to secure a position in Sharon's government as Minister of Defense.
While Sharon spurned Barak, he did cut the Labor Party into his
first government (pp.150-152):
Perhaps the wisest political move was made promptly after his first
election tothe premiership, when he offered the Labor Party an
opportunity to join a so-called National Unity Government, despite the
fact that he did not need them to establish a coalition and could have
formed a stable and purely rightwing government. In fact, this was a
well-calculated move directed primarily at Shimon Peres and Benjamin
Ben Eliezer. Ben Eliezer (nicknamed "Fuad") -- who immigrated asa
child from Iraq to Israel in 1950 -- was the first on-Ashkenazi
chairman of the Labor Party and a symbol of the party's efforts to
accommodate itself to changing social realities. Ben Eliezer spent
most of his adult life (about thirty years) in the military, and was
for a certain time under Sharon's command. He was known as a docile
admirer of his superiors (even during the Lebanese War), was
considered a hawk, and filled some peripheral posts in Barak's
Cabinet. Sharon's invitation to serve as Minister of Defense was an
offer he could not refuse, as he hoped to strengthen his weak
political profile. Peres wa another story. An aging politician, he is,
despite his international respectability, considered an eternal loser
in Israel (last time he lost the party's chairmanship to Ben Eliezer)
and a wishy-washy, cynical politician. Peres can adapt his attitude to
any political circumstance, becoming alternately hawkish or dovish, a
supporter of a Palestinian state or an opponent of it. Predictably,
Ben Eliezer and Peres accepted Sharon's offer and explained their
decision to join his cabinet by the need to restrain Sharon, to
counterbalance the extreme right, and to ensure the continuation of
the Oslo process. [ . . . ]
Sharon's gains from Labor's participation in his first government
were obvious: he managed to crush internal political opposition by
forming the largest government in Israel's history and to gain an
unprecedented domestic legitimacy. The man who many consider a war
criminal by any standard, and who had been Israel's most notorious
politician for twenty years, had become the country's most popular and
highly regarded premier.
Labor has remained powerless ever since, unable either to influence
Sharon or to oppose him. After Sharon passed from the political scene,
Labor once again joined a government led by Sharon's successor Olmert,
and once again found itself badly tarnished by its participation in
Olmert's policies, especially the 2006 invasion of Lebanon.
Kimmerling's politicide concept is shrewd but not fully developed.
What should be explained is that it rests on the notion that only
politics matters anymore. Sharon's agenda -- and of course many more
Israelis were involved in this, as well as a few critical Americans,
not least Elliott Abrams -- has been to reduce the reduce Palestinian
political effectiveness to near zero. If Palestinians cannot function
in the political sphere, the only recourse they have left is violence,
excusing Israel from responsibility.
Of course, that depends on Israelis (and Americans) being able
to deny that Palestinians should be entitled to the same political
rights we take for granted. That this has even seemed possible is
a remarkable feat of arrogance and brutality -- traits Sharon's
entire career have been dedicated to.
Monday, June 11, 2007
War in Indian Country
It's getting hard to think of things that could go wrong for the US
in Iraq that haven't already gone wrong. New York Times hack John Burns
is reporting that the US is arming Sunni Arab groups in Iraq, mostly
ex-Baathists, on the promise that they'll use those weapons against
Al Qaeda. No doubt they will, but also no doubt they'll use those same
weapons against US troops, Iraqi troops, Shiite militias, each other,
and anyone else who happens in the way. Burns was on PBS tonight talking
about how this sort of strategy has been tried in the past and doesn't
have a very good track record. He mentioned Vietnam, for instance, but
didn't mention the one case where it did work: arming Indians on the
old west frontier. The strategy is actually older than the US: Samuel
Champlain did it when the French first arrived, and he may not even
have been the first. The European settlers then, like the Americans
today, were comfortable in the superiority of their arms, so they had
few worries about the blowback their arms dealing might cause. Rather,
they saw the big advantage of playing each side off against the other.
The result was genocide with deniability, which is pretty much where
Iraq is heading. Indeed, the new deals with Sunnis are dividends from
previous US deals arming Shiite death squads.
There are also reports that the US is using Sudanese mercenaries
in Iraq. This again points back to the early Indian wars in America,
where European powers would form alliances with various tribes to
fight their proxy wars. It's not surprising that the US would think
of things like this. The US military, after all, continues to be
trained in old west forts like Fort Leavenworth, and Indian wars
play a large part in US military history. Moreover, such analogies
become ever more fashionable when small wars and counterinsurgency
come into vogue. US success in suppressing the Philippine revolt
and in the long-term occupation of Caribbean banana republics is
usually credited to Indian war experience (cf. Max Boot). Injun
Country is still the generic term for unsecured territory. That
it implies a racial and cultural divide that can only be resolved
by US subjugation of the enemy all but defines the conflict.
Nobody much talks about America's Indian experience in relation
to recent foreign policy, but the subject should be investigated
further. Just as America's Jim Crow laws were the inspiration for
South Africa's apartheid, America's Indian reservation system was
the model for South Africa's Bantustans -- a model that Israel has
subsequently refined for its own Occupied Territories. One bond
Americans and Israelis feel for each other is their shared faith
in the success of their colonization efforts. (Israel is much at
a disadvantage in terms of demography and space, but still has
proven resourceful enough that they've managed to get Fatah and
Hamas killing each other. They, too, understand the value of
provoking internecine warfare among their enemies.) I've read
passing references that Hitler likened Nazi Germany's settlement
of the East, with the extermination of the Jews and enslavement
of the Slavs, to America's westward manifest destiny.
Still, these Indian analogies offer the US scant hope. What
made US subjugation of the Indians possible was: 1) overwhelming
demographic dominance; 2) ample land to deal with the reduced
tribes; and 3) a willingness to admit the surviving Indians into
an open and prosperous society. Israel has none of those things.
South Africa was a little better off in terms of land, but worse
off demographically. The Nazis bit off much more than they could
chew and never even managed to establish control. The US in Iraq
doesn't even compute along these lines: all the model means for
Iraq is senseless, quixotic death and destruction, until the US
grows exhausted and weary and crawls home ignominiously.
Even now, the US doesn't have the will or the credibility to
keep Iran and Turkey from shelling, and in Turkey's case invading,
Kurdish positions, let alone the ability to keep the Kurdish PKK
from attacking Iran and Turkey. You'd think that if the US had
anything constructive to offer Iraq it would be to deter foreign
interference, but clearly the US has no such ability. Indeed, it's
hard to see any way the US is keeping Iraq from collapsing. Recent
reports put the number of displaced Iraqis at close to 5 million,
or 20% of the prewar population. The Soviets were hard pressed to
mismanage Afghanistan so badly.
It's often said that those ignorant of history are doomed to
repeat it; here it looks like the Americans are hoping that works
based on utterly misapplying their historical analogies. Last week
Tony Snow looked into his crystal ball and discovered Korea as a
hopeful model for Iraq. Exactly what makes Korea a success story
isn't all that obvious. The war started 57 years ago, degrading
quickly into a stalemate, with a ceasefire that has held for 54
years, despite the near-complete isolation and immiseration of the
North, still controlled by a regime that periodically feels the
need to threaten mass mayhem just to get the occasional handout
of rice or oil. Even if Snow was just trying to point to hanging
tough for 57 years and counting as an accomplishment, that's a
pretty lame definition of success. Otherwise, the similarity is
impossible to find. But it might make sense if you view North
Korea as an Indian reservation -- not exactly subjugated, but
pretty tightly contained. Now if we can only get those Iraqis
packed away safely into a few reservations.
Music: Current count 13248 [13220] rated (+28), 829 [843] unrated (-14).
Spent this week rather leisurely listening to new jazz. Recycled Goods
for June is done but in limbo at Static Multimedia. Jazz CG is done for
Village Voice, but not final edit.
Jazz Surplus (CG #13)
Once I've graded a jazz record, I put my jazz prospecting notes
into one of three files: bk-print if I've actually written a JCG
review; bk-flush if I've decided I'm not going to deal with the
record any further; or bk-done if I think I might possibly be able
to use the record in a future JCG. By the end of each JCG cycle,
I realize that bk-done has grown to an unmanageable extent, so I
go back through the file and hack it back down. By the time this
cycle finished, I was up to 132 bk-done records. I knocked those
down to 66, getting rid of almost all of the borderline B+(**)
records, some higher rated records that had gotten old, and some
duds I've gotten bored with. In most cases I'm satisfied with the
Jazz Prospecting notes,
but in a few cases I felt like writing a bit more. These reviews
wind up in the
Surplus file, along
with long lists of everything moved to bk-flush. The notes for
the latter wind up in the notebook, a relatively convenient
place for me to search. The surplus reviews follow.
The Heckler by Juan Pablo Balcazar Quartet: Heckler City
(2005, Fresh Sound New Talent): Some confusion on the group name or
title or whatever, almost like this was meant as some sort of film
noir soundtrack. Group leader is bassist Balcazar, working with tenor
sax, guitar, drums -- all little recognized outside of Spain. One of
those records I like quite a bit but can't quite describe and never
seem to be able to get back to. Must be postbop.
B+(***)
The Crimson Jazz Trio: The King Crimson Songbook Volume
One (2005, Voiceprint): Standard issue piano trio, led
by drummer Ian Wallace, who played in a Frippless spinoff group
called 21st Century Schizoid Band, with Joey Nardone on piano,
Tim Landers on fretless bass guitar. I'm surprised both that
the songbook holds up so well and that they make so much of it.
B+(***)
Hank Jones/Frank Wess: Hank and Frank (2003 [2006],
Lineage): Would have been a logical tie-in to consider this for HM
at the same time as the Jones-Lovano record, but the two records
don't come close enough, and not just because Wess isn't a match
for Lovano. Third wheel here is guitarist Ilya Lushtak, who runs
an interesting label meant to score gigs with his heroes. He's
actually better working on the Ray Appleton-Melvin Rhyne album.
B+(**)
Tom Lellis: Avenue of the Americas (2004-05 [2006],
Beamtide): Male jazz singer, combines the worst effects of heroes
Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks, but gets a pass on disarming modesty.
Got some help from people I respect, and pretty much wasted it all.
This should have been flagged as a Dud, but I chose not to waste my
ammo on such a nonentity.
C
John Lindberg/Karl Berger: Duets 1 (2004 [2007],
Between the Lines): The sort of modest, minor, but charming record
that gets killed by the numbers game here. One of the world's great
bassist-composers, intimately bound to a pretty interesting guy on
piano and vibes. About what you'd expect within those limits.
B+(**)
Branford Marsalis: Braggtown (2006, Marsalis
Music/Rounder): I recall him quoted as emphatically insisting
that "Wynton's good for the music." I'm not so sure I agree, but
I don't doubt that Branford is good for the music. His label does
good work; even if his Marsalis Music Honors series makes
players like Alvin Batiste and Michael Carvin out to be more
mainstream than they really are (were in Batiste's case), they
provide a real service. And Branford's a damn fine tenor sax
player, not that he always plays up to snuff. He's weak on
ballads; I'd like to hear him without a pianist (and not just
without Joey Calderazzo); and I wish he'd lose the soprano.
This is his average record, with the usual mix of good spots
and not-so-good spots, for all the usual reasons. Actually,
maybe a bit better than average.
B+(**)
Delfeayo Marsalis: Minions Dominion (2002 [2006],
Troubadour Jazz): Most enjoyable Marsalis album in recent memory.
The family trombonist doesn't have the ego or ambitions of his
older brothers, he makes a nice setting for the guests, and he
keeps pretty good company: Branford and Donald Harrison split
the sax chores, Mulgrew Miller plays piano, and Elvin Jones took
on the drum kit -- a special treat. Good trombone, too.
B+(**)
Myra Melford/Be Bread: The Image of Your Body
(2003 [2006], Cryptogramophone): Jessica Williams attacked this
savagely on a recent blindfold test, which motivates me to scratch
both of their recent records from the list. Both are marginal HM
candidates, somewhat more annoying than their grades indicate --
a backhanded testament to their talents. Pace Williams, Melford
is an extraordinary pianist, but that's not fully in evidence
here, with her harmonium experiments and a rather mixed bag of
world-fusion helpers.
B+(**)
Mike Melvoin Trio: You Know (2006, City Light):
A very nice little piano trio -- the sort of thing that folks
who like that sort of thing should like quite a bit, but even
they may have trouble getting excited.
B+(**)
Wolfgang Muthspiel/Brian Blade: Friendly Travelers
(2006 [2007], Material): A casualty of convenience: in picking
Bright Side as my Muthspiel pick hit, I cited this in a
passing line, thereby knocking it off the priority list. The
interplay with Blade is at least as enticing as anything on
the trio album. The main reason I went with the trio was that
I thought the bass resonance made it more accessible, and a
slightly better picture of Muthspiel's unique guitar artistry.
But I came damn close to going the other way, and if I had the
space I'd do both.
A-
Anders Nilsson's Aorta: Janus (2005, Kopasetic):
A second album that got swept up in the pick hit review, but
otherwise is worth citing on its own. More varied than Blood
but less representative of what makes Nilsson unique. Saxophonist
Mattias Carlson has some good moments. If anyone can turn heavy
metal into jazz it's Nilsson, although the result isn't always
as satisfying as you might hope.
B+(***)
Les Primitifs du Future: World Musette (1999 [2006],
Sunnyside): Not really a jazz album, although I kept it in the file
based on the label, and the fact that its old-timey Eurofolk has so
much slop and verve to it. R. Crumb is involved, in more than just
cover art.
A-
Matt Renzi: The Cave (2003 [2005], Fresh Sound
New Talent): Plays tenor sax and clarinet, in a straightforward
trio setting. Studied with George Garzone, then set out to travel
the world. Learned from both.
B+(***)
Irène Schweizer: First Choice: Piano Solo KKL Luzern
(2005 [2006], Intakt): After Portrait I expressed a desire
to hear her everything, then balked on the first new thing that
came out -- tough, acerbic solo piano, natch. Then got struck from
the label's mailing list, missing her later album with Hamid Drake,
a couple of Alex von Schlippenbach 12-tone exercises, and who knows
what else? Can't we be friends?
B+(**)
David Sills: Down the Line (2005 [2006], Origin):
Big toned tenor saxman, mainstream group with some recognizable
names (Gary Foster, Larry Koonse, Alan Broadbent), and a drummer
appropriately named Tim Pleasant. I like records like this so
easily I may wind up being overly hard on them.
B+(**)
Soft Machine: Grides (1970-71 [2006], Cuneiform):
Space crunch here, compounded by the fact that I haven't fully
done my homework. This makes a good case for the band's prog
fusion as jazz, suggesting that studio albums I heard back in
the day hadn't really been heard. Deprioritized after I wrote
about this in RG, but interesting enough I've kept it on the
list much too long. Still haven't watched the DVD.
A-
Mike Stern: Who Let the Cats Out? (2006, Heads Up):
Probably should have been a Dud, but so far managed to dodge that
bullet three times, even though he got his mug on the cover of
Downbeat. Ugly fusion, wasted guests, lousy vocals.
B-
Jessica Williams: Billy's Theme: A Tribute to Dr. Billy
Taylor (2006, Origin): Solo piano, something she's done
a lot of, and manages to sustain a high level of interest despite
the lack of color variation. The trick, of course, is rhythm --
few pianists can compete with her. In particular, Taylor can't,
which makes me wonder how that angle fits in.
B+(***)
Jazz Prospecting (CG #14, Part 1)
Don't have the final edit done on Jazz Consumer Guide yet, but
I've handed my draft in. As I understand it, the column will run
in a couple of weeks -- "late June" is all I've been told. Normally
I'd take a week or two off between columns, but as it turns out, I
spent most of last week playing jazz, so next round's prospecting
starts early this time.
Jerry Bergonzi: Tenorist (2006 [2007], Savant):
Tenor saxophonist, from Boston. Couple dozen albums since 1982.
Broad, breathy tone, mainstream rhythmic sense, can go fast but
prefers moderate paces and pitches a fetching ballad. He fits
a type that I'm particularly fond of, but I haven't followed
his own work all that closely. Quartet this time, with John
Abercrombie's guitar providing the chords. Album gets stronger
as it progresses, and Abercrombie fits in particularly well.
[B+(***)]
The Rodriguez Brothers: Conversations (2006 [2007],
Savant): The brothers are Michael on piano, Robert on trumpet and
flugelhorn. A third Rodriguez, Ricardo, plays bass on four cuts, but
doesn't get any mention in the booklet. Father Roberto Rodriguez,
born in Cuba, produced. Album dedicated to late grandfather Roberto
Rodriguez Nieto. David Sanchez guests on two tracks. I'm tempted to
describe this as hard bop, but the beat isn't hard enough -- on the
other hand, it isn't notably Latin, although there is a whiff. In
any case, both piano and trumpet/flugelhorn stay within conventional
forms, even if often fast and fluid bop.
B
Joey Calderazzo: Amanecer (2006 [2007], Marsalis
Music/Rounder): Mostly solo piano, with Romero Lobambo's guitar
creeping into the background on three songs, Claudia Acuña vocals
on two of those plus one more. The solo material is appealing, no
doubt because I detect traces of stride in the originals, but also
because "Waltz for Debby" is so surefire. Acuña's contribution is
arch and dreary, while Lubambo is so supple you barely notice him.
B
Monk's Music Trio: Monk on Mondays (2005 [2007],
CMB): Si Perkoff on piano, Sam Bevan on bass, Chuck Bernstein on
drums, the latter always listed first -- he's also producer,
executive producer, etc. Songs by Thelonious Monk. Group has
been together since 1999, playing two or three Mondays per
month at Simple Pleasures Cafe in San Francisco. This is their
fifth album -- the third one I've heard. Mondays sounds
like their usual grind.
B
Kendrick Scott Oracle: The Source (2005-06 [2007],
World Culture): Young (b. 1980) drummer, attended Berklee, works
in postbop veins, appears on Terrence Blanchard's latest. First
album, ambitious, complex, rather impressive set of musicians --
e.g., saxophonists are Seamus Blake, Walter Smith III, and Myron
Walden; Robert Glasper plays some piano; Lionel Loueke some of
the guitar -- yet I find it dissolving into texture and failing
to hold my interest, except, say, when Blake takes a solo.
B
Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra: Meeting of the Waters
(2005-06 [2007], OA2): Not all female -- lead trumpet Dennis Haldane,
drummer Jeremy Jones, musisic director/arranger Daniel Barry are the
main exceptions, with some Mikes and Chads on the credits list but
not listed on the website roster. Second album. Seems unexceptional
for a big band, although not without its attractive moments. Sound
quality is a bit iffy.
B
Darrell Grant: Truth and Reconciliation (2005 [2007],
Origin, 2CD): Title from a Nelson Mandela quote: "Truth is the road
to reconciliation." Grant is a pianist, also employing Fender Rhodes.
Born Philadelphia, grew up in Denver, studied in Rochester and Miami,
worked in New York, finally moved to Portland in 1997, where he
teaches. Six albums since 1993, starting with two on mainstream
Criss Cross; couple dozen side credits, including Greg Osby, Craig
Harris, Tom Harrell, and Don Braden; early on worked with Betty
Carter and Tony Williams, but evidently not on record. I don't
get a strong sense of Grant's piano here. Rather, we have a long
series of sly pieces, some songs with lyrics, Grant vocals, and
more/less political themes. Bill Frisell and Adam Rogers play
guitar, which tends to add silky shades to piano; Joe Locke adds
some vibes, to similar effect. Steve Wilson's saxophones provide
the only horns. They're unspecified, but soprano and alto would
be his norm. John Patitucci plays bass; Brian Blade drums -- so
it's possible that the leader is the least widely known player
here (certainly he is to me). Two pieces provide settings for
speech excerpts from Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy, Martin
Luther King, working quite nicely.
B+(*)
Saltman Knowles Quintet: It's About the Melody
(2007, Blue Canoe): Mark Saltman, bassist; William Knowles, pianist.
They met in 1994 at University of Massachusetts. This is their fourth
album, the first three released as Soul Service. Group includes Mark
Prince on drums, Charles Langford on sax, Lori Williams on vocals.
For all intents and purpose this is a vocal jazz album, with Williams
up front on every song, shaping the melodies, slipping around them,
the sort of thing jazz singers do -- some spots remind me a bit of
Sheila Jordan, but not so immediately arresting. Langford has a
good accompanying sound.
B
Golda Solomon: First Set (2002, JazzJaunts):
Solomon describes herself as a "one-of-a-kind 'Medicine Woman of
Jazz'"; alternatively, "poet, and Professor Mom." Writes words.
Speaks them over jazz -- or actually, with her violin-tuba-drums
trio, this sounds a bit like old-timey pre-bluegrass. Has a book
Flatbush Cowboy good for an excerpt here. Other bits on
meeting Dolphy and "The Etiquette of No." Good diction -- reminds
me of Tom Verlaine's pronunciation of that word. Short, EP length:
20:30.
B+(**)
Golda Solomon: Word Riffs (2006, JazzJaunts):
Full length, or close enough (39:18). I suppose we can chalk this
up to Second System Complex. The music has moved from the goofball
accompaniment Bernard Purdie threw together to more creditable
avant-garde, with Saco Yasuma on alto sax, Eri Yamamoto on piano,
Christopher Dean Sullivan on bass, and most importantly Michael
T.A. Thompson on drums. The words were consciously written with
jazz in mind, with three pieces with "Blues" in the title, two
more with "Bop," one called "1960s Jazz Hag," one name dropping
Ellington. On average I'd say it's a wash: more exciting music,
less intriguing words, same rivetting performance. Something of
a learning process, but all things considered she's pretty unique.
B+(**)
The Birdhouse Project: Free Bird (2006 [2007],
Dreambox Media): As one of the few who likes Charlie Parker's
tunes better than his playing, I should be relatively favorable
toward this project. However, I can't much see the point. The
group is a trio: Randy Sutin on vibes, Tyrone Brown on bass,
Jim Miller on drums. The vibes should be the lead instrument,
but actually Brown's bass sets the pace -- an unfamiliar one
for Parker. Brown also manages to hold my attention, which
doesn't say much for Sutin. Does have some novelty value, and
certainly isn't dislikable. Just not much there.
B-
Mark Knox: Places (2006, Dreambox Media):
Knox is credited throughout with keys, and on various tracks
with percussion programming, samples, and vocals. His keys
and beats are light and frothy. The places straddle the map,
with an extended sequence in Japan followed by a Vietnamese
folk song. Most of it is attractive enough. The only standout
is John Swana, whose trumpet burns brilliantly on four cuts.
B
Michael Fein: Four Flights Up (2005 [2006],
Dreambox Media): Tenor saxophonist, from and/or in Philadelphia,
first album, in a six piece group with alto sax, trumpet, vibes,
bass, drums, but no piano or guitar. Mostly originals, but the
two covers are the most interesting things here: an elegant
"Bye Bye Blackbird" and a solo "Days of Wine and Roses" that
shows off Fein's attractive tone. The three-horn front line
doesn't do much of interest, but vibraphonist Behn Gillece
has some nice moments.
B
Dick de Graaf Quartet: Moving Target (2006 [2007],
Soundroots): Dutch saxphonist, tenor plus a bit of soprano, in a
piano-bass-drums quartet. De Graaf has been recording under his
own name since 1986, and lately is listed as leader in two groups:
Trio Nuevo, whose Jazz Meets Tango is in my que, and
Istanbul Connection, which isn't. Website brags about his "hip
big tone" and gives a lot of play to him being selected to replace
the late Bob Berg, and that pigeonholes him pretty well. Straight
Hawkins-style on tenor, works around the melodies, loves how the
sax sounds, group swings.
B+(**)
Trio Nuevo: Jazz Meets Tango (2006 [2007],
Soundroots): Tenor saxophonist Dick de Graaf meets tango more than
half way. The trio includes Michael Gustorff on violin, Hans Sparla
on accordion. The violin-accordion is pretty thick, with the sax
not much evident except for harmony. Vocalist Sandra Coelers joins
for four songs. I don't really know what they're shooting for here.
I suppose what attracts me in tango is the rhythm, at least when
the dancers are light enough to flow with it. But the spectrum also
extends to the heavy, the operatic even, and that's where this seems
to go. If someone told me that this was an attempt to conjure up an
old-style tango, something free of modernist impulses, I'd likely
believe them. But this group makes no such claims. So I mostly find
it lumbering, especially the vocal pieces.
B
Nordic Connect: Flurry (2005 [2007], ArtistShare):
Postbop quintet, led by trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, with her saxophonist
sister Christine Jensen equally prominent. Impressive initially, but
I lost track along the way, eventually wondering why this is still
playing, and when will it ever end. The others are Maggi Olin on
piano, Jon Wikan on drums, Mattias Welin on bass. Any or all could
be Scandinavian, but they met up in Boston and recorded this in
Montreal. It was, however, funded by the Swedish Art Grant Committee,
The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs, and Concerts
Sweden, as well as some Canadian organizations, so I guess those
are the real Nordic connections.
[B+(**)]
Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. 1: The Complete Abashiri
Concert (1981 [2007], Widow's Taste, 2CD): The alto sax
great had as many comeback as he had stretches in prison, with
1956, 1960, and 1975 watershed years. The last comeback proved
to be his greatest, with a steady torrent of recordings until
his death in 1982 -- The Complete Galaxy Recordings, at
16 CDs, never wears out or runs down. No one was more successful
at digesting Parker and Coltrane and still coming up with his
own unique -- an accomplishment equal in craft and eloquence to
what Benny Carter did with a previous generation of saxophonists.
But while Pepper's early work could be seen as West Coast cool
jazz, his post-1975 period was marked by raw emotion, a trait
that became ever more pronounced. This is especially clear in
the live material that occasionally appears. I'm not sure that
widow Laurie Pepper's releases haven't appeared before: this one
lines up with Live in Far North Japan (TDK), but offers
more music. The only surprise here is how raw and frenzied the
early cuts are. His "Besame Mucho" is much rougher than the one
on Art Pepper With Duke Jordan in Copenhagen 1981 from
earlier in the year, but remains one of life's great pleasures.
Another highlight is "Body and Soul": Pepper's verdict -- "That
was one of the nicest things that I think I've played in my life"
isn't hyperbole.
A-
Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. II: The Last Concert
(1982 [2007], Widow's Taste): Recorded at the Kool Jazz Festival
in Washington DC on May 30, less than three weeks before Pepper
died on June 15, this was a typical Pepper set: a fast one, a
tricky one, something with a Latin bounce, a gorgeous standard,
a feature for his clarinet, some talk along the way. He sounds
fine all the way through, especially on the clarinet piece, a
swinging "When You're Smiling" that he dedicated to Zoot Sims.
The latter includes a flashy, almost over-the-top piano solo
from Roger Kellaway, filling in for Pepper's usual pianist,
George Cables. A marvelous closing act.
A-
And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further
listening the first time around.
Don Aliquo: Jazz Folk (2006, Young Warrior):
Tenor saxophonist, plays rock solid hard bop, based in Tennessee,
but helped out by New Yorkers Clay Jenkins and Rufus Reid here.
B
Dino Saluzzi: Juan Condori (2005 [2006], ECM):
Argentine bandoneon player, working with three younger Saluzzis
and a percussionist named U.T. Gandhi. Never got the final copy
of this advance, unlike the later duets with Anja Lechner -- a
puzzle and an annoyance. Saluzzi recorded an exceptional album
in 2001 called Responsorium, which does a lovely job of
summing up his brand of jazz-tango. Since then the records I've
heard have seemed like broken fragments of the same picture.
The larger group here, led by Felix Saluzzi's reeds, suggests
a similar richness of vision, but I also hear stretches where
it slows down and descends to the merely pretty, or maybe even
the merely dull.
B+(*)
Dino Saluzzi/Anja Lechner: Ojos Negros (2006 [2007],
ECM): Bandoneon-cello duets. Drags in spots -- where you'd expect
the tango rhythms to quicken the blood, the cello dampens it. Not
that there is a lot of rhythm. But every time this starts to get
me down, something interesting, intriguing, or just plain lovely
happens.
B
Lafayette Gilchrist: Three (2007, Hyena):
Acoustic piano trio, a fairly conservative form, but played
with such regular rhythm you'd think they're after a groove
record. To show they can do it? That's a rather odd form of
artistic ambition.
B
Dept. of Good and Evil Feat. Rachel Z (2007,
Savoy Jazz): Z is Nicolazzo to her mother, a charming name if
you ask me. Good pianist. So-so singer. Group is a trio with
guests, including some fine Eric Naslund trumpet. Impressive
talent. Less sure about the identity issues.
B+(*)
Third World Love: Sketch of Tel Aviv (2005 [2006],
Smalls): There is something going on here that I don't get, and
don't expect to get in the near future. Website claims the band
"organically blends African, Middle Eastern, rock and jazz . . .
a poetic journey of rhythms, songs, dance and joyful celebration."
There's some of that, but it's hard to sort out, which may be the
point. The group is a quartet, with two fairly well known players
(bassist Omer Avital and trumpeter Avishai Cohen) and two lesser
knowns (pianist Yonatan Avishai and drummer Daniel Freedman). Two
songs with vocals -- one a trad Jewish-Yemenite piece sung by
Avishai, the other sung by guest Eviatar Banai -- strike me as
out of step, but the way Cohen is playing, anything that takes
away from the trumpet seems like a bad idea. With their desire
to more asses as well as minds, chances are there's a great album
in their future.
B+(**)
Avishai Cohen: As Is . . . Live at the Blue Note
(2006 [2007], Razdaz/Half Note): The bassist, not the trumpeter,
leading a quintet with Diego Urcola on trumpet and Jimmy Greene
on various saxophones through a selection of his consistently
impressive songbook, closing with a funked up Middle Eastern
take on "Caravan." It all works pretty much as it should, with
the bright, light informality of a live recording. Comes with a
DVD, still unseen. A fine introduction, calling card, resume.
B+(***)
Brian Bromberg: Downright Upright (2006 [2007], Artistry):
After a career of hacking out pop-funk, Bromberg's new pleasure
in the upright acoustic bass is heartening. This starts off with
a suggestion that it might be possible to work a funk groove into
something of jazz interest, but settles into routine as it goes
along. Not sure whether to blame this on Bromberg's circle of
friends: Rick Braun, Kirk Whallum, and Boney James play with
more vigor and range than they'd ever risk on their own albums.
A more likely clue to the slide is that the first three pieces
were written by Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, and Les McCann,
whereas the rest were written by Bromberg.
B
Donny McCaslin: In Pursuit (2007, Sunnyside):
Dedicated to his mentor, Michael Brecker, offering a ready
explanation why I can't get into him even though he's beyond
any doubt a tremendous saxophone player, but I doubt that it's
so simple. For one thing, he's much better than Brecker. In
fact, I can't think of anyone who plays with more assurance
at breakneck speed. He writes ambitious, difficult pieces.
He plays with first class musicians. He's stepped into Chris
Potter's shoes more than once and bumped the energy level up.
So I really don't know what the reason is. Maybe he's just
too much. Or maybe when he does let up I feel he's letting
us down.
B+(**)
Wayne Escoffery: Veneration (2006 [2007], Savant):
Tenor saxophonist, takes one track on soprano without faltering,
plays fast postbop, holds an attractive tone when he slows down;
basically, has all the tools. Dresses sharp too. Only wrote one
song, which holds up. Ends with superb pieces by Ellington and
McLean. First rate band, with Joe Locke on vibes a special treat,
especially when they race. Hans Glawishnig on bass, Lewis Nash
on drums.
B+(***)
Saco Yasuma: Another Rain (2006 [2007], Leaf
Note): First album by an interesting alto saxophonist, with a
strong quintet that takes risks and plays heady avant -- the
standout is Roy Campbell on trumpet, but everyone contributes.
One song goes slow with the leader playing a bamboo sax on a
Japanese folk theme. Another unleashes Golda solomon for a
torrent of words. Drummer Michael T.A. Thompson is showing
up on a lot of good records lately.
B+(***)
Unpacking:
- Muiza Adnet: Sings Moacir Santos (Adventure Music)
- The Clash: The Singles (1977-85, Epic/Legacy)
- The Claudia Quintet: For (Cuneiform)
- Tom Harrell: Light On (High Note)
- The Inspiring New Sounds of Rio de Janeiro (Verge): advance, July 10
- Tomas Janzon: Coast to Coast to Coast (Changes)
- Sean Jones: Kaleidoscope (Mack Avenue): advance, August 14
- Barb Jungr: Bare Again (ZC)
- Nigel Kennedy: Blue Note Sessions (Blue Note)
- Gloria Lynne: From My Heart to Yours (High Note)
- Prefab Sprout: Steve McQueen (Legacy Edition) (1985, Legacy, 2CD)
- Duke Robillard's World Full of Blues (Stony Plain, 2CD)
- Bobby Sanabria: Big Band Urban Folktales (Jazzheads)
- John Sheridan and His Dream Band: Swing Is Still the King (Arbors)
- Carol Sloane: Dearest Duke (Arbors)
Sunday, June 10, 2007
The Antitrust Fix
The New York Times has an article today by Stephen Labaton on
Microsoft's antitrust angel in the Bush administration Justice
Department:
Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to
break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course
by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and
abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the
recent rejection of a complaint by Google.
[ . . . ]
In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top
antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state
prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by
Google that is tied to a consent decret that monitors Microsoft's
behavior. [ . . . ]
The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had
until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has
represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm,
Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft
matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department,
he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest
issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.
The details of Google's aren't particularly interesting. Like
Netscape's complaint, they are remarkable mainly in that any outside
company was able to temporarily establish any sort of commercial
enterprise by hooking into Microsoft's operating systems monopoly.
Microsoft is uniquely able to manipulate its interfaces, product
packaging, and OEM contracts to exploit network effects, both to
promote its own ancillary businesses and to undermine potential
competitors.
Before Bush took office, Microsoft had been convicted of breaking
antitrust law, but the remedy was under appeal. Microsoft evidently
had little trouble finding the new regime's bag men: Ashcroft soon
settled the case on terms very favorable to Microsoft. I don't know
that the Bush administration has prosecuted any antitrust cases in
the last six years. Hiring people like Barnett, whose background is
defending companies, like Microsoft, against antitrust cases, is one
sure way to get nothing done.
One thing this underscores is that the Bush administration isn't
really all that much about promoting capitalism and free markets per
se; their preference is to make the rich richer, even where that
means protecting monopolies that ultimately rip everyone else off --
even the hallowed rich. Where an earlier generation of progressives
realized that constricting competition hurt the economy as a whole,
not least to keeping new entrepreneurs out of the market, the current
view is to honor each other's scams -- all the better to safeguard
one's own. In large part, this is the difference between a growing,
bustling, innovative economy, such as the US had during the socalled
progressive era, and the stagnant oligarchy we are becoming.
Even before Bush, antitrust enforcement was extremely spotty --
something much more likely to happen when competing powers, like
Netscape and Microsoft, collide, than as a result of anyone looking
out for the public interest. This is one of many cases where just
rolling back to pre-Bush standards won't go nearly far enough. We
should not just enforce existing antitrust laws; we need to start
positively promoting competition -- taxing companies progressively
according to their size, restricting consolidation, putting limits
on intellectual property, subsidizing open research, making more
investment funds available to new entrepreneurs, and eliminating
the advantages companies seek in political favoritism.
Microsoft's antitrust case offers many lessons here. Their
repetitive breaking of antitrust law is only one part of a much
bigger problem, which relates to why we a private company to
control such basic infrastructure as operating systems without
fully disclosing the source code. On the other hand, it would
be easy enough to fix the Microsoft problem by just switching
to open source software alternatives. That this hasn't happened
suggests more evidence of the collapse of clear thinking that
appears to be increasingly endemic in America -- another way
we are already experiencing the coming dark ages.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Recycled Goods #44: June 2007 (Take 1)
For the record, I turned my June 2007 Recycled Goods column in
on June 3, pretty much on time. I'm not sure what's going on, but
Static Multimedia is having some problems -- when I try to access
the website, I mostly get weird proxy server error messages. The
publisher tells me he's working on this, but it's been gummed up
for at least a week now, so I thought I'd put this notice up. As
it turns out, you can read the column now in the usual
archive spot. I'll
post again when the thing officially appears.
Friday, June 08, 2007
George Packer: The Assassins Gate
I finally did break down and read George Packer's book on Iraq,
The Assassins Gate (2005, Farrar Straus and Giroux). Packer
was one of the more prominent liberal hawks helping to feed Bush's
propaganda machine, although he was ultimately disappointed in the
war. The book covers both why he wanted it and why it failed him --
the latter at least gives the book some value.
Early section on the neocons (p. 20):
Against this timidity [Robert] Kagan launched a powerful analytical
attack. The end of the Cold War, he argued, was precisely the moment
not to withdraw but to extend. America shouldn't mourn the loss of a
balance of power but instead use its unrivaled power all around the
world to pursue its interests and its values -- which almost always go
together. No corner of the earth is too distant or obscure to be
allowed to fester dangerously or be deprived of the benevolent effects
of American hegemony, namely democracy and a stable peace. Seeking to
revive the spirit of Reagan, Kagan reached farther back to Theodore
Roosevelt and "the idea that the American people should take a hand in
shaping mankind's destiny, that playing such a role accords honor, and
that the right to such honor must be earned." For Kagan, the extension
of democracy around the world was as much about America's national
destiny as it was about doing good things for unhappy people in
foreign countries. The values might be universal, but only one country
could secure them.
Confusion over Iraq (p. 24):
Why did Iraq become the leading cause of the hawks? It had received
no special attention int he Defense Planning Guidance; it was barely
mentioned in the writings of Kagan and Kristol. A year after the
letter to Clinton, in 1999, Kosovo replaced Iraq as the overriding
concern of PNAC. Still, by 1998 Saddam was beginning to slip out of
the constraints imposed on him after the Gulf War and get away with
it. Economic sanctions were breaking down, and some European
countries, especially Iraq's leading trading partners, France and
Russia, were making noises about lifting them altogether. UN weapons
inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq for security reasons after Saddam
refused to continue cooperating with them; then he denied them
reentry. Saddam was increasingly, in foreign-policy jargon, "out of
his box" -- apparently free to pursue the unconventional weapons that
had been his long-standing desire.
Note that Packer repeats the whole myth about Saddam ejecting
the weapons inspectors as well as his WMD desires. It is true that
the US/UK were losing worldwide opinion in their campaign to starve
Iraq into submission. The human costs of the sanctions policy had
been widely reported, while its political ineffectiveness was
self-evident.
On the seductiveness of killing for peace and love, an attraction
that could only be felt by people with no concept of what war does
(pp. 34-35):
For lifelong doves, the first sip of this drink called humanitarian
intervention carried a special thrill. All the drama, the inense heat
of argument, was generated in the decision whether or not to go to
war. In this moment one's moral credentials were on the line. It was a
kind of existential choice, a statement of values, all the more potent
for being politically unorthodox and sometimes even brave. None of
this made the decisions any less serious or sincere, but the more
mundane questions of what would happen later tended to dissolve in a
mist of high purpose. And because liberal hawks responded to
humanitarian crises, they were less likely to think strategically
about the shape of the world in ten or twenty years; the long-range
answers they offered, such as international criminal courts, UN
resolutions, and regional intervention forces, seemed like noble
wishes rather than practical answers. Over and over, they had to fall
back on the solution with which they felt least comfortable --
American power.
Thinking about the unthinkable (pp. 35-36):
The small, inconclusive wars of the nineties raised but failed to
answer the essential questions of the post-Cold War world: What do
human rights have to do with national security? What should the United
States do about threats that the world insists on ignoring? Is it
necessary for war to have the sanction of an international body? What
are the limits of sovereignty? Can democracy be brought by force?
Whose responsibility does a defeated country become after a war? Most
of all: What role should America's preeminent power play in shaping
the answers? These questions hung in the air unanswered by the time
the century turned. Soon the new administration in Washington would
bring them all into focus, over Iraq.
Long section on Paul Berman's idiot rantings, focused on his
reading of Sayyid Qutb (pp. 47-48):
Qutb's ideas confirmed the theory that Berman had begun to develop,
which was this: The young Arab men who had steered those four
airplanes to apocalyptic death were not products of an alien
world. they weren't driven by Muslim tradition, or Third World
poverty, or the clash of civilizations, or Western imperialism. They
were modern, and the ideology that held them and millions of others
across the Islamic world in its ecstatic grip had been produced by the
modern world -- in fact, by the West. It was the same nihilistic
fantasy of revolutionary power and mass slaughter that, in the last
century, drove Germans and Italians and Spaniards and Russians (and
millions of others across the world) to similar acts of apocalyptic
death. This ideology had a name: totalitarianism. Its great explainers
were Orwell, Camus, Koestler, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn. In Europe its
feverish mood had long since broken by 1989, but in the Islamic world,
where modernity failed successive generations, the sickness had been
spreading.
The method of Berman's madness (pp. 48-49):
Berman set about his project with a fierce and solitary
intensity. There must have been weeks on end when he never emerged
from his apartment. He called it "war duty" -- after all, New York had
become a front line. Berman believed strenuously that it was the job
of intellectuals to explain and mend the rent that hda just been made
in the fabric of our world. For him, the answer lay in literature and
philosophy as much as politics, let alone policy. One night, upon
leaving his post long enough to share a late meal at the bistro, he
announced, "I've found a master text!" It was Camus' The Rebel,
subtitled An Essay on Man in Revolt. Nihilistic terror was
nothing new; the hijackers went back to the French Revolution.
The mind left to its own devices can be a terribly confusing
thing (p. 87):
My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when
there was no one else around. I would run down the many compelling
reasons why a war would be unwise, only to find at the end that Saddam
was still in power, tormenting his people and defying the world. The
administration's war was not my war -- it was rushed, dishonest,
unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances -- but objecting
to the authors and their methods didn't seem reason enough to stand in
the way. One doesn't get one's choice of wars. To give my position a
label, I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently
prowar liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the
voting public had supported Al Gore. This position descended from the
interventions of the last decade in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The
Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy,
but it could bring similar benefits. I wanted Iraqis to be let out of
prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before
he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society
stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world.
One can pick almost any sentence in this paragraph and start
unravelling the illogic. The Iraq war was a war of choice -- it
would never have happened had Bush et al. not made it happen --
so it is disingenuous for Packer to claim he had no choice. He
at least had the choice to point out the reasons why he feared
it could go wrong, but instead he helped Bush to sell it. His
analysis of Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo is weak. It's not clear
that the US actually did the right thing in those cases, or that
it worked, or even what the goals were. (Haiti was reversed by
Bush; he may be opposed to nation building, but he clearly has
no qualms about nation destruction.) But it is clear that you
cannot draw analogies from those cases to Iraq, for reasons that
would be obvious to anyone who gave a minute's thought as to why
someone like Bush might want to invade Iraq. It also takes no
measure of what happens when/if an invaded nation resists the
blessings of American intervention. The short answers there is
that what started off as a parade becomes a real war, with the
immediate effect being that US soldiers change from liberators
to destroyers. In no time at all, Iraqis find themselves in a
new prison -- or for many, literally in the same old prison.
In this context, that anyone who supported the war should claim
to have had any good wishes for the people of Iraq is intellectual
dishonesty of the worst sort. I remember that RAWA, an Afghan women's
group profoundly opposed to the Taliban, opposed the US invasion of
Afghanistan. They understood that it is not enough to defeat the
Taliban -- it matters how they are defeated, and by whom. Packer
had no such good sense, as he eventually came to recognize.
On the prevention of postconflict planning (p. 114):
The experience of peacekeeping specialists in Haiti, the Blakans,
and East Timor was an actual liability in the eyes of the Iraq
planners. "The senior leadership at the Pentagon was very worried
about the realities of the postconflict phase being known," a Defense
official said, "because if you are Feith or if you are Wolfowitz, your
primary concern is to achieve the war." This official and his
colleagues, whose careers had been devoted to preparing for such
contingencies, spent the months leading up to the war in a state of
steadily deepening demoralization. But none of them was willing to
speak up loud enough inside or outside the five-sided building to get
Rumsfeld's attention. The one who did [General Erik K. Shinseki, Army
Chief of Staff] showed the others the price they would pay.
Wolfowitz, on the warpath in Afghanistan (pp. 116-117):
Once, in mid-2002, Wolfowitz visited Kabul just after a disastrous
incident in which an American AC-130 gunship had bombed four Afghan
villages, killing forty civilians, including members of a wedding
party. The fragile new government of Hamid Karzai was enraged, and the
U.S. embassy had sent its Pashtun-speaking political officer to drink
tea with the survivors, attend a funeral, and apologize. No one
doubted that innocent lives had been lost; the only uncertainty was
whether celebratory gunfire or perhaps even anti-aircraft fire from
guerrillas in the area had provoked the attack. But when Wolfowitz met
with embassy officials, he began to grill the political officer: "Why
do you assume there was a wedding party? How do you know?" Maybe,
Wolfowitz said, the Taliban had disguised themselves as revelers --
that was his hunch about the incident. "We shouldn't be so passive in
apologizing. We should be more confident." The officials listened in
silence, appalled. Later, one of them told me, "It was almost like he
was creating this alternate reality." With Wolfowitz,
self-righteousness had a dangerous habit of overwhelming inconvenient
facts.
Postwar planning for Iraq (p. 123):
The danger of looting was discussed, but the planning officers sent
over from Centcom had been instructed not to respond to such
"postconflict" issues, in part because the invasion force lacked
enough troops to address them. Plans for running the Iraqi ministries
were rudimentary -- ORHA had almost no information at all. The chief
of the civil administration team had changed twice: David Kay, who
would later lead the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
replaced the first leader for two days and then quit without telling
Garner why. He was replaced, at Douglas Feith's insistence, by Feith's
former law partner, Michael Mobbs, who had written the Defense
Department's legal policy that exempted prisoners at Guantánamo from
the Geneva Conventions and declared certain American citizens to be
enemy combatants without constitutional rights. Mobbs, a political
appointee, made the decision to award Halliburton, Cheney's old
company, a secret, seven-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to restore
Iraqi oil fields after clearing it with Cheney's chief of staff,
Scooter Libby. Until Kay quit, oil was supposed to be Mobbs's only
responsibility in ORHA.
Here's the Pentagon's postwar plan, not that there's any evidence
they tried to follow it (p. 133):
The night [Rumsfeld's spokesman Larry] Di Rita flew into Kuwait in
early April, he was briefed by ORHA's senior officials, and when the
deputy leader of the reconstruction pillar, Chris Milligan of USAID,
spoke about the need to show early benefits to the Iraqi people, Di
Rita slammed his fist down on the table. "We don't owe the people of
Iraq anything," he said. "We're giving them their freedom. That's
enough." A few days later, by which time ORHA officials realized that
Di Rita had the full confidence of Rumsfeld, the secretary's spokesman
stood up at a meeting of about fifty people in the Hilton conference
room. The State Department messed up Bosnia and Kosovo, he told his
audience (which included many foreign service officers), and the
Pentagon wasn't going to let that happen in Iraq. "We're going to
stand up an interim Iraqi government, hand power over to them, and get
out of there in three to four months," Di Rita announced. "All but
twenty-five thousand soldiers will be out by the beginning of
September."
I guess you could call this Management by Surrealism (p. 145):
On May 12 [2003], Bremer arrived in Baghdad wearing a dark suit. He
was referred to as "Ambassador Bremer." Three weeks later, Jay Garner,
whose fishing buddies had begun to grumble that they'd been set up by
the neoconservatives back in Washington, quietly went home. He was
taken by Rumsfeld to the White House for a farewell conversation with
the president. Garner had written up a two-page memo for Bush and
Rumsfeld, dated May 27, that portrayed Iraq as a country well on the
road to stability and just a few weeks away from full
reconstruction. This good news made it all the easier for Bush to
thank Garner graciously for the work he had done. Garner, in turn,
assured the president that he had chosen a wonderful successor in
Bremer. "I didn't choose him," Bush said. "Rumsfeld chose him." This
was news to Garner, whom Rumsfeld had once called his man in Iraq.
The conversation lasted forty-five minutes, with Cheney and Rice
sitting in for the second half, and yet the president did not take the
chance to ask Garner what it was really like in Iraq, to find out what
problems lay ahead in the weeks and months to come. When Garner had
come back from northern Iraq in 1991, after Operation Provide Comfort,
he had answered questions for four or five days. This time, no one --
neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, nor Rice -- seemed to give a damn what
he had to say.
"You want to do Iran for the next one?" the president joshed as the
meeting came to an end.
Packer goes to Baghdad to report on the good news. He talks to a
Dr. Baher Butti, a hospital chief psychiatrist, who introduces him
to Ibrahim (p. 151):
Ibrahim's father, standing next to the bed, said that his son's
deterioration had begun as a teenager during the first Gulf War, when
he was left alone at home during allied bombing. In 1996, Ibrahim
tried to run against Saddam for president; he made it halfway to the
palace before his father caught up with him and saved his life by
dragging him home. Ibrahim's condition had worn out the whole
family. Four days before the start of the recent war, his delusions
had flared up again and he'd been hospitalized until the fall of
Baghdad. Ibrahim believed in one world government, led by the
Americans. They had demonstrated their fairness by protecting the
Jews, he said, seeming happier the more he talked. they had earned the
right to be the world's policeman and rule with justice. This was a
minority view in Iraq; I never heard it outside the Ibn Rushd Teaching
Psychiatric Hospital.
Packer encounters the ghosts of decades of war and sanctions (p. 156):
One of the first things that struck me in Iraq was the look of the
faces. I noticed it as soon as I crossed the border driving in from
Jordan and saw a group of men hanging around the first filling
station: Compared with the Jordanians on the other side, who after all
were brother Arabs and probably members of the same border tribe, the
Iraqis looked poor and beaten down. Their cheeks, covered with gray
stubble, were leathery and hollow, their eyes downcast and at the same
time quick and watchful in the way of people used to anticipating
dangers and seizing furtive chances. They reminded me of the faces in
postwar Italian neorealist movies, with the roles played by ordinary
men and women wandering through the rubble of bombed cities in search
of work. Even the frayed, long-outmoded jackets the Iraqi men wore and
the eternal cigarette butts dangling from their lips looked the
same. As a rule, Iraqi men always turned out to be at least a decade
younger than my first guess, and this became a sort of bleak joke.
On the occupation (p. 183):
There were a number of British officials in the palace, a few from
other countries in the coalition, the Iraqi-Americans organized by the
Pentagon just before the war, a security detail of Nepalese Gurkhas,
and for a while a unit of Italian carabinieri around the main gate,
looking far more chic than their counterparts from other countries in
tight black T-shirts, sunglasses, and leather gloves. But no visitor
to the palace could have any doubt about which country was in charge
of Iraq. The composition was overwhelmingly American: half civilian,
half military, with men and women from the Departments of State,
Treasury, Defense, and other agencies, wearing casual office clothes
-- khaki pants and blue shirts, it always seemed -- mixed with young
soldiers in desert camouflage, emptied M-16s slung over their
shoulders. There were bomb shelters hard by workout rooms. The
intimate mingling of bureaucracy and war made for a strange sight. One
CPA official described the palace as being full of "people who were
typical pasty-faced bureaucrats, oveweight middle-aged people,
midlevel paper pushers, but all wearing body armor, helmets. It's like
a play: There's this weird alter-world that you're in, where if they
go out on a routine visit they've got to don body armor and face the
prospect of being wiped off the face of the earth."
On the Debaathification Order (p. 193):
For [Drew] Erdmann, who had to fire seventeen hundred Baathist
univesity professors and staff, the German analogy was apt. He
bristled at any notion that academic freedom might be at issue. "In
June 1945 you're not going to have a discussion about the legitimacy
of the Nazi ideology and the legitimacy of the Nazi Party and you're
sitting in Germany," he said. "It's not academic! Hello? It's only a
few months ago, the people are still living next door, they're still
working next door, they're still on campus, they're still around,
they're still threatening."
This suggests that the Debaathification Order was a side-effect
of the prewar propaganda that likened Saddam so much to Hitler --
another gross failure to understand the differences that matter. I
could easily list a dozen significant differences -- relationship
of leader to party, ideological distinctiveness, degree of national
unity, extent of military defeat, surprise of military defeat, etc.
It's also worth noting that despite some rhetoric, there wasn't all
that much Denazification done in Germany: most Nazis quietly buried
their pasts and restarted their lives. The US didn't allow Baathists
to reflect, reform, restart. They were all kicked out to make room
for their historical opponents. In doing so, the US escalated from
regime change to revolution, thereby ensuring further war. I believe
that Debaathification was the single biggest mistake the US made --
at least after invading. Packer doesn't understand that; nor, for
that matter, does Ali Allawi. Again, the point is not just that it
was a mistake, but that the mistake was a consequence of Bush's
self-deception.
On the occupation of Anbar (pp. 222-223):
Ramadi and Falluja are the major cities of Anbar province, a vast
western desert region of conservative Sunni Arabs, home to large
numbers of Iraqi military and intelligence officers. Anbar was the
last province to fall to coalition forces, and it did so without a
shot being fired. By the time American soldiers arrived, local leaders
had taken control of the towns and prevented looting. Anbar is where
the insurgency began, and tribal sheikhs later told me that it had all
been unnecessary. The province was ready to cooperate with the
coalition. If only the Americans had remained outside the cities, then
crowds wouldn't have gathered to protest, and soldiers wouldn't have
fired on the crowds, as they did in Falluja on April 28 and 30,
killing eighteen civilians, and Iraqis wouldn't have retaliated with
grenades and automatic weapons, and the second war wouldn't have
begun.
There is a bit of truth to this account. The American units that
took control of Ramadi and Falluja -- the Third Armored Cavalry
Regiment and the Eighty-second Airborne Division, respectively -- were
ill suited to urban operations, didn't want to be there, and
overreacted when they were provoked. "I was not impressed with the 4d
ACR's operations in Ramadi," [John] Prior wrote, "they did not seem to
have any idea what was going on, there was no sense of urgency, no one
knew what the situation was anywhere in sector, none of the senior
leadership could provide any guidance or answers." Having arrived in
Iraq too late for the war, amid sand and heat and unfriendly locals,
the regiment seemed unable or unwilling to adjust to Phase IV: "They
did not appear to be ready for nor understand the urban/peace
operations mission they had been assigned. Their attitude in terms of
Rules of Engagement suggested to me that they had not made the change
from combat operations to stability operations." Nor did it help that
the house of a tribal leader in Ramadi, who had been cooperating with
the CIA for years, was hit by an American air strike that killed him
and seventeen members of his family. The Eighty-second in Falluja,
clueless about Arab culture and lacking any civilian expertise (the
CPA didn't come to Anbar until August), refused to compensate the
families of the dead from the late April killings. By the time the
Marines took control of Falluja in early 2004 and belatedly offered
blood money, half the families refused it.
One point that few have pointed out is that the US military
promotes officers for their combat experiences and not for their
peacekeeping skills. A big chunk of the invasion forces missed
out on the Major Operations because they had been scheduled to
invade through Turkey and wound up stuck in the Mediterranean.
Those were the soldiers who took over in the north and west,
and they basically made up for lost opportunity by restarting
the war.
More occupation (p. 236):
The American presence in Iraq must be one of the most isolated
occupations in history. There was no real way for soldiers and Iraqis
to mix outside the context of their jobs. Baghdad was a long way from
Saigon; there were no bars where soldiers could unwind and get into
trouble. Relationships with Iraqi women were prohibited by the
military and nearly impossible anyway, given the social
restrictions. Everyone knew that intimacy was dangerous, and it somehow
wasn't surprising when an Iraqi woman who was working at an American
base went into the barracks of a soldier with whom she was presumably
having an affair and ended up dead from a gunshot to her head. Prior,
who worked as closely with Iraqis as any soldier in the country,
entered someone's home as a guest on only one occasion during his
fifteen months in Iraq, when he dropped by the house of his translator
and close friend Numan al-Nima. The sight of two military vehicles
parked outside and surrounded by half a dozen soldiers drew the
attention of the translator's neighbors. He asked Prior not to repeat
the visit.
More occupation (p. 238):
Iraqis liked to complain that the Americans didn't know how to be
occupiers. The British troops int he south, many of them veterans of
Northern Ireland, seemed far more comfortable with the inherent
ambiguities of police work and civil affairs. Americans were both too
soft and too hard. Niceness and nastiness seemed to be conjoined sides
of their personality: Love me or I'll kill you. They had allowed the
looting, Iraqis said, and they were allowing criminals and extremists
to have the run of the country. At the same time, they turned friends
into enemies with impulsive, violent reactions. The New York
Times told the story of a fifty-one-year-old merchant with heart
trouble who was kicked, beaten, and urinated on by the soldiers
arresting him; then he was sent to a military hospital, where he was
treated just as well as the wounded American in the next bed. He told
the nurse, "I'm really confused. At the base,t hey beat me and
tortured me. Here they treat me like a human being."
Actually, the British are overrated as occupiers. I think all that
happened with them is that they realized that they were in a hopeless
situation and made a serious effort not to make it worse, which for
the most part kept them out of trouble. But they never actually ran
anything. The Americans thought they were in control, and when they
weren't insisted on acting like they were in control, on the theory
that might work. This idea that you can do anything you want if only
you set your mind to it is one of the great American myths. It is a
big part of what went wrong.
March 2004 (p. 274):
As the month wore on, Iraq became noticeably more dangerous for
someone like me. On March 9, a young CPA official who had been working
with women's groups, a colleague of hers, and an Iraqi translator were
chased down and shot to death on the road between Karbala and Hilla by
five men wearing Iraqi police uniforms. An hour earlier, I had been
driving back to Baghdad on another road a few miles away. On March 15,
four Baptist missionaries were killed by automatic weapons fire in
Mosul. The next day, two foreign water engineers were gunned down in a
roadside shooting near Hilla. Their corpses became part of the nightly
work at Dr. Shaker's morgue. Perhaps as a warning, he gave me the
clinical details of the Dutchman's case: A Kalashnikov bullet fired at
a distance greater than six feet shattered the right ankle; a second
entered the back of the right thigh, tore off the scrotum, and exited
through the left thigh; a third penetrated the right kidney with
shrapnel; a fourth entered the left side of the neck and exited with
part of the lower jaw, causing death.
As his dreams fall apart, Packer starts blaming others (p. 326):
Over time, it became clear that the ultimate responsibility lay in
Washington, at the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and finally the
White House. The memos on torture and the Geneva Conventions written
by the president's counsel Alberto Gonzalez and others made abuses
inevitable. One administration official who had served in Vietnam
said, "There's no doubt in my mind as a soldier that part of the
responsibility for Abu Ghraib and for Afghanistan belongs with the
secretary of defense and the president of the United States. There's
an old aphorism: Keep it simple, stupid. KISS is the acronym. You
always have personalities in uniform -- I had them in Vietnam -- who
will take advantage of any ambiguity, any lack of clarification in the
rules of engagement, and kill people, or whatever his particular
psyche is liable to do. You don't have rules for your good people. You
have rules for that five or six percent of your combat unit that are
going to be weird. You need those people, because sometimes they're
your best killers. But you need the rules. And when you make any kind
of changes in them, any relaxation or even hint of it, you're opening
Pandora's box. And i fault Gonzalez, the president, the vice
president, the secretary of defense, the chain of command, Myers,
Abizaid, Sanchez, the whole bunch of them."
All of these men kept their jobs. One was even promoted. The
failure to hold anyone in authority responsible ensured that immoral
and, from a practical point of view, worthless methods of
interrogation would continue. Even after the world saw the pictures
from Abu Ghraib, prisoners would go on being tortured in American
custody.
The events of April and May 2004 showed that no one was making
decisions based on a clear, realistic strategy. No one was really in
charge of Iraq. Bremer acted without consulting Washington, Washington
kept stepping in to overrule Bremer, the Pentagon was still battling
State and NSC, the White House had its eye on the political calendar,
Bremer and Sanchez were barely speaking, Sanchez left his division
commanders to pursue wildly different tactics. When something went
wrong, it was somebody else's fault -- a psychopathic sergeant, or the
press corps, or the Iraqis. And the Iraqis turned out to have their
own ideas about their country's fate. Looking back, a senior CPA
official said, "What they needed was somebody in charge in Washington
and somebody in charge in Baghdad, and they needed to be twins, in the
sense that they were really on the same wavelength. Rumsfeld was kind
of washing his hands, it seemed. Jerry over time began dealing more
and more with Rice and Powell. Unfortunately, by then you had a
full-blown insurgency."
A morale check on the soldiers (p. 328):
I went to see [John] Prior there in the middle of June. Highway 8,
the strip down from Baghdad, was closed to civilian traffic, and one
section of the road, a bridge over a canal, had recently been blown
up. The soldiers who escorted me down to the base made no secret of
their feelings about the prolonged stay in Iraq. "I sympathized with
the Iraqis when we first got here," said a young sergeant who had
spent every day of the occupation in Iraq. "But now I'm cold, I feel
no remorse. When you see some of your friends get killed, it changes
you." I asked if he still distinguished between good and bad
Iraqis. "How can you tell them apart? The same guy that waves at you
can shoot you with an RPG."
At the base I heard the same thing from almost every soldier I
talked to. The bitterness extended beyond Iraqis to their own chain of
command. Rumsfeld, who had sent them out here without enough men and
armor and then extended their deployment several times, came in for
particular hatred, and even the president wasn't popular; a number of
soldiers said that they intended to vote for John Kerry, who at least
had served in Vietnam. Everyone was still doing his or her job, but
the heart had gone out of it and a stale air of cynicism hung over the
place as the soldiers waited for their orders to ship out.
Of course, the Pentagon can always find soldiers to get in front of
cameras and proclaim their faith in the mission and their hope that
Americans back home won't let them down, will give them the chance to
succeed. Some such soldiers may believe that, but others are simply
hostages of the warmakers.
More blame shifting (p. 384):
Fred Barnes, an editor of the strenuously prowar Weekly
Standard, parachuted into the Green Zone and discovered that the
only thing wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom was Iraqis. "The need an
attitude adjustment," Barnes wrote. "Americans I talked to in 10 days
here agree Iraqis are difficult to deal with. They're sullen and
suspicious and conspiracy-minded." This wasn't the prewar judgment of
hawks like Barnes, but something had to explain all the bumps in the
road, which would lead to a successful democracy in Iraq only after
"an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one
country has ever done for another."
And blame avoidance (p. 385):
With their eyes turned to such lofty matters, few prowar ideologues
allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they
refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding
the truth, or they continued to take such a long view of history that
a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing
hardly factored. But this was just as true on the antiwar side of the
ledger. Experience taught me that the individual stories of Iraqis
struggling against danger and the odds to create a better life for
themselves and their country were impatiently flicked aside as soon as
I tried to tell them. The retort was swift and sure: "This war is
illegal, it's immoral. Nothing good can come of a lie."
In spite of the enormous stakes and the terrible alternatives, most
antiwar pundits and politicians showed no interest in success. When
Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the
elections as a "Kodak moment." It was Bush's war, and if it failed, it
would be Bush's failure.
America in the early twenty-first century seemed politically too
partisan, divided, and small to manage something as vast and difficult
as Iraq. Condoleezza Rice and other leading officials were fond of
comparing Iraq with postwar Germany. But there was a great gulf
between the tremendous thought and effort of the best minds that had
gone into defeating fascism and rebuilding Germany and Japan, and the
peevish, self-serving attention paid to Iraq. One produced the Army's
four-hundred-page manual on the occupation of Germany; the other
produced talking points.
Just because Packer can put himself on both sides of the political
divide doesn't make him right. It could very well make him doubly
wrong. That "nothing good can come from a lie" seems trite; that
the war is illegal a technicality; but that it is immoral shouldn't
be dismissed so glibly. Packer thinks he can trade off killing a
bunch of people here to save some supposedly greater quantity or
quality of people elsewhere, but it's impossible to calculate like
that with certainty, and it's unclear that one would be right to
do so even if one could. Starting any war runs the risk of letting
it run out of control, as Iraq has done. Starting any war runs the
risk of reducing oneself to the very evils one imagines struggling
against, as scandals like Abu Ghraib plainly demonstrate. In fact,
most antiwar people would object to my phrase "runs the risk" here
because the likelihood is so near certain that there's no value,
and much danger, in conceding any chance that it might not. That
also explains the antiwar movement's lack of enthusiasm for any
notion of "success" coming out of this war. We have a cognitive
problem with the success concept -- we cannot conceive of what
success in war might mean.
Basic Bush (p. 385):
What made this political culture particularly unfortunate for
Iraqis was that the Bush administration, instead of forging the war
into a truly national cause, conducted it from the beginning like the
South Carolina primary.
Packer goes on to lament Bush's failure to convert the national
unity felt in response to 9/11 into national purpose (pp. 386-387):
It was much remarked at the time that President Bush did nothing to
tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger
effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for
suspicious activity. It was Pearl Harbor, and it was a bad day on the
stock exchange; nothing would ever be the same, and everything was
just the same. Joseph Biden wondered, "How urgent can this be if I
tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we're marching to
war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United
States of America?" The tax cuts didn't just leave the country
fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity was bad for
morale. But the president's failure to call for shared, equal
sacrifice wasn't accidental. It followed directly from the governing
spirit of the modern conservative movement that his presidency brought
to full power. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of
collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which
Bush could have stood up and asked what Americans could do for their
country. We weren't urged to study Arabic, to join the foreign service
or international aid groups, to develop alternative sources of energy,
to form a national civil reserve for emergencies -- or even to pay off
the cost of the war in our own time. Its burdens would be borne by the
next generations of Americans, and by a few hundred thousand volunteer
soldiers in this one.
Perhaps it was a shrewd political read on Bush's part -- a
recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11,
would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It seemed fair to ask,
though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours was likely to make
it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we could
export democratic values when our own version showed so many signs of
atrophy; how much solidarity we could expect to muster for Afghans and
Iraqis when we were asked to feel so little for one another.
More likely, it was just Bush's habit to view all matters as
nothing more than grist for his political racket. The hepped up
fever of war was mostly an opportunity to grab stuff -- tax cuts,
missile defense systems, ubiquitous spying, and most importantly
war, which would allow him to campaign for re-election as Commander
in Chief, constantly basking in the patriotic gore of uniforms and
weapons.
Packer flexes his imagination (p. 388):
The president was pursuing two courses are once: to reshape
American foreign policy, and to consolidate his party's hold on
power. Perhaps it was old-fashioned to point out that these courses
might eventually collide, at some risk to national interests. It
wasn't impossible yet, in the fall of 2002, to imagine a policy that
harnessed both parties and America's democratic allies in defeating
tyranny in Iraq. Such a policy would have required the administration
to operate with more flexibility and openness than it wanted to. The
evidence on unconventional weapons would have had to be laid out
without exaggeration or deception. Once the UN inspectors were back in
Iraq, they would have had to be allowed to carry out their work rather
than be undermined by a campaign of vilification. Testimony to
Congress would have had to be candid, not slippery. Administration
officials who offered dissenting views or pessimistic forecasts would
have had to be heard rather than silenced or fired. Experts in nation
building would have had to be welcomed, not shut out, even if they had
things to say that the White House didn't want to hear. American
citizens would have had to be treated like grown-ups, and not, as
Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card once suggested, ten-year-olds.
This is bullshit on several levels. For starters, it asks the Bush
administration to be something it absolutely wasn't -- the long list
starts with honest, but especially founders on representing interests
that would bear up under open scrutiny by the American people. Bush's
people knew full well that if all the facts and fears were plainly
visible the American people would never countenance going to war in
Iraq -- and that the least of their possible reasons for doing so
would be to liberate or save Iraqis. Bush had, after all, gotten to
his perch of power by exploiting the worst instincts of the American
people. He, far more than Packer, knew what buttons to push, and how
to push them.
In the end, even Packer realizes this (p. 390):
Character is fate. What prevented any of this from happening was,
above all, the character of the president. Bush's war, like his
administration, like his political campaigns, was run with his own
absence of curiosity and self-criticism, his projection of absolute
confidence, the fierce loyalty he bestowed and demanded. He always
conveyed the impression that Iraq and the war on terror were personal
tests. Every time a suicide bomber detonated himself, he was trying to
shake George W. Bush's will. If Bush remained steadfast, how could
America fail? He liked to call himself a wartime president, and he
kept a bust of his hero Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. But
Churchill led a government of national unity and offered his
countrymen nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Bush
relentlessly pursued the partisan Republican agenda while fighting the
war, and what he offered was optimistic forecasts, permanent tax cuts,
and his own stirring resolve.
More on responsibilty (pp. 391-392):
I asked Richard Perle whether the top Bush officials ever suffered
doubts about Iraq. "We all have doubts all the time," Perle said. "We
don't express them, certainly not in a public debate. That would be
fatal." Expressing doubts in public would give opponents exactly what
they were waiting for. In public, Perle himself essentially said, "I
told you so." To a French documentary filmmaker he said, "Most people
thought there would be tens of thousands of people killed, and it
would be a long and very bloody war. I thought it would be over in
three weeks, with very few people killed. Now, who was right?" That
was early on. As the war became longer and bloodier, Perle was still
right, but in a different way. If only five thousand INC members had
gone in with the Americans as he had wanted, if only Ahmad Chalabi had
been installed at the head of an interim government at the start, all
these problems could have been avoided. Michael Rubin, one of Perle's
young protégés, left the Office of Special Plans and then the CPA to
start a second career as a writer, and his single subject was the
stupidity of officials in the White House, the State Department, and
the CIA in botching postwar Iraq by not listening to Michael Rubin and
his neoconservatrive allies in the Pentagon -- the agency that ran the
occupation. Every key postwar decision was made by Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, or Rumsfeld's appointee Bremer. None of them
publicly uttered a single doubt, a syllable of self-scrutiny.
Leslie Gelb worked in the Pentagon during the last months of the
Johnson presidency, and he directed the writing of the Pentagon
Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War that had been
commissioned by Robert McNamara before leaving office. I expressed
skepticism to Gelb that Donald Rumsfeld had commissioned anyone at the
Pentagon to write a secret history of the Iraq War. "You can bet your
bippy," Gelb said with a laugh. "Only liberals look back and say they
were wrong." Neoconservatives, by contrast, "say they were stabbed in
the back. It's not accidental that President Bush during the campaign
couldn't answer the question he ever made a mistake. I've never seen
those folks say they were wrong. Vietnam was a liberals' war. This is
not. They're not dumb -- they're very smart. And they're reckless."
Comparing Bush to his own boss, Gelb went on, "Johnson was a tragic
figure. He was driven by the imperative not to lose the war. He knew
he couldn't win. Bush is Johnson squared, because he thinks he can
win. Bush is the one true believer. We're talking about a guy
essentially cut off from all information except the official
line."
What makes the book worthwhile is Packer's willingness to show where
he went wrong. In the end, he comes close to understanding, but still
insists that he could have been right (p. 448):
I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility
for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to
criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own
righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to
accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly
deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to
blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very
reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to
forgive.
Don't believe that next-to-last line for a minute. If you
can't end the war, you can't win it. To end it, you have to
satisfy everyone that it is not worth fighting further. That
means, in essence, that you have no winner, at least in the
sense that conservatives calculate winning: the dominance of
us over them. Liberals might try a different calculus, where
winning is defined as everyone coming out the same -- even if
that means severely battered and bruised. But why then would
a liberal ever trust a war to a conservative? That, in essence,
is Packer's great folly.
For more on Packer, see the
book page,
where this will eventually reside.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Numbers
US soldier deaths in Iraq have officially crossed the 3500 mark. Seems
like it was only late December when it crossed 3000. The rate is clearly
up, aiming for 4000 by year-end -- maybe even by make-or-break September.
One thing we can attribute this to is an increased willingness among the
generals to spill the blood of grunt soldiers. That in turn is the result
of the politicians promoting more gung-ho generals, like Petreaus and
Odierno. The politicians, after all, have always been willing to spill
blood. They probably wouldn't even mind seeing a few generals on the
lists of heroes.
Stephen Kinzer: Overthrow
Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From
Hawaii to Iraq (2006; paperback, 2007, Times Books) provides a
compact survey of twelve instances where Americans, working through the
US government, overthrew other governments to promote American ideology
and interests. The instances are: Hawaii (1893), Cuba (also Puerto Rico
and the Philippines, 1898), Nicaragua (1909), Honduras (1910), Iran
(1953), Guatemala (1954), South Vietnam (1963), Chile (1973), Grenada
(1984), Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). Most are
well known cases, with Kinzer having previously written the book on
Iran: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle
East Terror. Other cases could have been included: he discards in
one line US-supported coups in the Congo, Brazil, and Indonesia, and
doesn't even mention dozens of murkier cases.
The Hawaii story is relatively unknown. The coup there was started
by American businessmen on the island, backed by the US consul and
marines who happened to be onhand. This evidently happened with the
approval of US president Benjamin Harrison, but his successor, Grover
Cleveland, successfully blocked annexation. The US finally annexed
Hawaii in 1898 as a sideshow to the Spanish-American War. In the
long run, Hawaii resembles the case of Texas, which was even more
of a freelance operation.
The Spanish-American War was the US's first big plunge into
overseas expansion. It actually followed from the "open door"
policies which had led the US into conflicts in Japan and China --
more or less directly triggering the Meiji Restoration which set
the Japanese Empire loose on a binge of expansion that only ended
in 1945. In addition to direct territorial acquisitions of Puerto
Rico and the Philippines, the 1898 war kicked off a cycle of US
interventions in and around the Caribbean that only ended with
FDR's "good neighbor" policy in the 1930s. Kinzer focuses on
Nicaragua and Honduras as they were the most directly focused
on regime change, but also mentions Panama, which the US split
off from Colombia in order to gain the Canal Zone. During this
period the US also sent troops into Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.
The nature of US interventions changed following WWII with
the establishment of an ideological enemy (communism) and the
creation of a covert action organization, the CIA. One important
case Kinzer doesn't write about is South Korea, where the US
established a brutal puppet dictatorship that did much to provoke
the Korean War. Also uncovered was US support for the Diem regime
in South Vietnam, although Kinzer does mention Diem's cancelling
the negotiated elections, and covers the US coup that overthrew
Diem, allowing the US to draw the Vietnam War out another twelve
years, leading to the deaths of fifty thousand US soldiers and
a million or more Vietnamese.
The cases from Grenada in 1983 on were run by the US military,
although the CIA was initially in charge of Afghanistan, so they
represent a third stage of American imperialism. The first was
explicitly business-directed and managed through gunboat operations.
The second was more ideological, implemented largely by the CIA,
although the ideology was often subject to explicit businesses,
like United Fruit in Guatemala, IT&T in Chile, and the oil
cartels in Iran. The third is more blatantly a naked projection
of US military power for power's sake.
Quotes:
(p. 3):
In Hawaii and the countries that rose against Spain in 1898,
American presidents tested and developed their new interventionist
policy. There, however, they were reacting to circumstances created by
others. The first time a president acted on his own to depose a foreign
leader was in 1909, when William Howard Taft ordered the overthrow of
Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya. Taft claimed he was acting to
protect American security and promote democratic principles. His true
aim was to defend the right of American companies to operate as they
wished in Nicaragua. In a larger sense, he was asserting the right of
the United States to impose its preferred form of stability on foreign
countries.
This set a pattern. Throughout the twentieth century and into the
beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its
military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow
governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it
cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and
liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic
reasons -- specifically to establish, promote, and defend the right of
Americans to do business around the world without interference.
(p. 42):
Cuban patriots had for years promised that after independence, they
would stabilize their country by promoting social justice. Americans
wanted something quite different. "The people ask me what we mean by
stable government in Cuba," the new military governor, General Leonard
Wood, wrote in a report to Washington soon after he assumed office in
1900. "I tell him that when money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate
of interest and when capital is willing to invest in the island, a
condition of stability will have been reached." In a note to President
McKinley, he was even more succinct: "When people ask me what I mean
by stable government, I tell them, 'Money at six percent.'"
(pp. 83-84):
Americans have a profoundly compassionate side. Many not only
appreciate the freedom and prosperity with which they have been
blessed but fervently wish to share their good fortune with
others. Time and again, they have proved willing to support foreign
interventions that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate
people.
When President McKinley said he was going to war in Cuba to stop
"oppression at our very doors," Americans cheered. They did so again a
decade later, when the Taft administration declared that it was
deposing the government of Nicaragua in order to impose "republican
institutions" and promote "real patriotism." Sine then, every time the
United States has set out to overthrow a foreign government, its
leaders have insisted that they are acting not to expand American
power but to help people who are suffering.
This paternalism was often mixed with racism. Many Americans
considered Latin Americans and Pacific islanders to be "colored"
natives in need of guidance from whites. In a nation whose black
population was systematically repressed, and where racial prejudice
was widespread, this view helped many people accept the need for the
United States to dominate foreign countries.
Speeches justifying American expansionism on the grounds of the
white race's presumed superiority were staples of political discourse
in the 1890s. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana described expansion
as part of a natural process, "the disappearance of debased
civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the
nobler and more virile types of man." Representative Charles Cochrane
of Mississippi spoke of "the onward march of the indomitable race that
founded this Republic" and predicted "the conquest of the world by the
Aryan races." When he finished this speech, the House burst into
applause.
(pp. 104-105):
Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has
confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in
the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in
accordance with their own interests rather than the interest of the
United States, and American influence over them would
diminish. Establishing that influence, though, was the reason the
United States had intervened in those countries in the first
place. Americans had to choose between permitting them to become
democracies or maintaining power over them. It was an easy choice.
If the United States had been more far-sighted, it might have found
a way to embrace and influence reformers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the
Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras. That could have produced a
fairer social order in those countries, with two results. First, it
would have improved the lives of many who have instead lived and died
in poverty. Second, it would have eased festering social conflicts
that periodically exploded into violence and dragged the United States
into new rounds of intervention.
Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as
lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these
rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American
principles, and the rhetoric of American democracy. They were critical
of the United States, however, and wished to reduce or eliminate the
power it wielded over their countries. Their defiance made them
anathema to American leaders, who crushed them time after time.
The course the United States followed brought enormous power and
wealth but slowly poisoned the political climate in the affected
countries. Over a period of decades, many of their citizens concluded
that democratic opposition movements had no chance of success because
the United States opposed them so firmly. That led them to begin
embracing more radical alternatives. If the elections of 1952 in Cuba
had not been canceled, and if candidates like the young Fidel Castro
had been allowed to finish their campaigns for public office and use
democratic institutions to modernize Cuba, a Communist regime might
never had emerged there. If the United States had not resolutely
supported dictators in Nicaragua, it would not have been confronted
with the leftist Sandinista movement of the 1980s.
(p. 106):
American leaders clamored for this [open door] policy because, they
said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its "glut" of
overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While
wealthy Americans were lamenting it, huge numbers of ordinary people
were living in conditions of severe deprivation. The surplus
production from farms and factories could have been used to lift
millions out of poverty, but this would have required a form of wealth
redistribution that was repugnant to powerful Americans. Instead, they
looked abroad.
After WWII, US operations in foreign countries took the form of
covert action under the newly formed CIA. The first major exercise
of this was in Iran. John Foster Dulles, in response to assurances
that Iran's prime minister Mossadegh was no communist (p. 124):
None of this made the slightest impact on Dulles. His deepest
instinct, rather than any cool assessment of facts, told him that
overthrowing Mossadegh was a good idea. Never did he consult with
anyone who believed differently.
(p. 161):
Paul Kattenburg, who had become chairman of the administration's
Vietnam Interdepartmental Working Group, returned from a trip to
Saigon in late August with a very gloomy view. He concluded that the
Vietnamese had become steadily more nationalistic and would never
accept a foreign-backed regime in Saigon. At a National Security
Council meeting on August 31, he suggested that the time had come "for
us to make the decision to get out honorably." His comrades promptly
slapped him down.
"We will not pull out until the war is won," Rusk told him, curtly
and to general approval.
Kattenburg had spoken the unspeakable, and was rewarded for his
heresy with a diplomatic post in Guyana. A few weeks later, though, no
less a figure than Attorney General Robert Kennedy wondered aloud at a
White House meeting whether an eventual Communist victory in Vietnam
"could be resisted with any government." If not, he suggested, perhaps
it was "time to get out of Vietnam completely."
Others at the meeting considered this idea so weird as to be almost
beyond response. Robert Kennedy might have been able to press his
argument if he had thought it through more carefully and prepared a
serious case, but he had not. After he spoke, one person at the
meeting later recalled, his suggestion "hovered for a moment then died
away, a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexamined assumptions
and entrenched convictions."
(p. 199):
[John Foster] Dulles was tragically mistaken in his view that the
Kremlin lay behind the emergence of nationalism int eh developing
world. He could at least, however, claim consistency in his
uncompromising opposition to every nationalist, leftist, or Marxist
regime on earth. Nixon and Kissinger could not. While they were
working obsessively to force Salvador Allende from power -- and while
they supported anti-Communist dictators from Paraguay to Bangladesh --
they were building realistic, cooperative relationships with the
Soviet Union and China. The sophisticated pragmatism that guided them
in their policy of détente did not extend to countries that were far
less threatening to the United States. When they faced challenges from
weak, vulnerable nations like Chile, they reacted with blind emotion
rather than cool assessment of long-term interest that guided their
approach to Moscow and Beijing.
(p. 206):
The coup in Guatemala had another effect that, like many
consequences of "regime change" operations, did not become clear until
years later. During the Arbenz years, scores of curious Latin American
leftists gravitated to Guatemala. One of them was a young Argentine
doctor named Che Guevara. After the coup, Guevara flew to
Mexico. There he met the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro. They
discussed the events in Guatemala at great length, and from them drew
a lesson that has reverberated throughout all of subsequent Latin
American history.
Operation Success taught Cuban revolutionaries -- and those from
many other countries -- that the United States would not accept
democratic nationalism in Latin America. It gave them a decisive push
toward radicalism. They resolved that once in power, they would not
work with existing institutions, as Arbenz had done. Instead they
would abolish the army, close Congress, decapitate the landholding
class, and expel foreign-owned corporations.
(pp. 206-207):
In 1996, under the auspices of the United Nations, Guatemalan
military commanders and guerrilla leaders signed a peace treaty. That
did little to resolve the huge inequalities of life in Guatemala,
where two percent of the people still own half the arable land, but it
did end a long, horrific wave of government repression. It also led to
the establishment of a Commission on Historical Clarification that was
assigned to study the violence and its causes. The commission's report
put the number of dead at over 200,000, and said soldiers had killed
93 percent of them.
(p. 250):
[George H.W.] Bush, however, came into office with the handicap of
being considered weak and indecisive, and had to deal with what
commentators called "the wimp factor." In May, after Noriega imposed
his own president against the will of Panamanian voters, Bush announced
that he was sending 1,800 troops to American bases in Panama, a step
that was intended as a message to Noriega. When a reporter asked the
president what he would like the Panamanians to do, Bush replied that
they should "just do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of
there."
(pp. 305-306):
In the hours after American troops invaded Panama and deposed
General Manuel Noriega, Panama City degenerated into violent
anarchy. This eminently predictable result of the invasion seemed to
take the Americans completely by surprise. It took them several days
to realize that by destroying the force that guaranteed public order,
they had assumed an obligation to replace it themselves until a new
local force could be constituted. By then it was too late.
The main boulevards in Panama City are lined with lavishly stocked
department stores, exclusive boutiques, and specialty outlets that
sell everything from televisions and stereo equipment to diamond
jewelry and Jaguars. Shoppers from around Latin America and the
Caribbean fly there to spend money, competing with rabiblancos
to scoop up the most expensive prizes. The day after the Americans
invaded, poor Panamanians had their chance.
By mid-morning on December 21, 1989, the shopping district's main
streets were clogged with people pushing factory-fresh stoves,
refrigerators, and washing machines. Some appeared with carts and
filled them to overflowing with frozen meat, cases of alcohol,
furniture, and whatever else they could find. It took them less than
thirty-six hours to strip Panama City's famous shopping centers of
almost all their goods. The same thing happened in Colón, one of the
hemisphere's most active free ports, where swarms of looters smashed
freight containers and carried away everything they found. By one
estimate, more than $2 billion of merchandise was stolen during these
hours. Even a small show of force would have stopped this larcenous
frenzy, but American soldiers never appeared.
(p. 315):
Ther is no stronger or more persistent strain in the American
character than the belief that the United States is a nation uniquely
endowed with virtue. Americans consider themselves to be, in Herman
Melville's words, "a peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our
times." In a nation too new to define itself by real or imagined
historical triumphs, and too diverse to be bound together by a shared
religion or ethnicity, this belief became the essence of national
identity, the conviction that bound Americans to each other and
defined their approach to the world. They are hardly the first people
to believe themselves favored by Providence, but they are the only
ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their
political and economic system to others, they are doing God's
work.
This view is driven by a profound conviction that the American form
of government, based on capitalism and individual political choice,
is, as President Bush asserted, "right and true for every person in
every society." It rests on the belief that Western-style democracy is
the natural state of all nations and that all will embrace it once the
United States removes artificial barriers imposed by regimes based on
other principles. By implication, it denies that culture and tradition
shape the human psyche, that national consciousness changes only
slowly, and that even great powers cannot impose their beliefs on
others by force.
(p. 316):
"If the self-evident truths of our founding are true for us," Bush
declared soon after the Iraq invasion, "they are true for all."
Generations of Americans have eagerly embraced this belief, largely
because it reinforces their self-image as uniquely decent people who
want only to share their good fortune with others. More sophisticated
defenders of the regime change idea make a better argument. They
recognize that the United States considers principally its own
interests when deciding whether to overthrow foreign governments, but
insist that this is fine because what is good for the United States is
also good for everyone else. In their view, American power is
intrinsically benign because the political and economic system it
seeks to impose on other countries will make them richer, freer, and
happier -- and, as a consequence, create a more peaceful world.
(p. 320):
Modern history makes eminently clear that when the United States
engages with oppressive and threatening regimes, using combinations of
incentives, threats, punishments, and rewards, those regimes slowly
become less dangerous. The most obvious examples are China and the
former Soviet Union, but the same approach has been highly effective
in countries from South Korea to South Africa. Nations the United
States confronts only with threats and pressures, and isolates from
the international system, like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, never
emerge from their cocoons of repression and anti-Americanism.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Bush Priorities
Phillip Brownlee of the Wichita Eagle sent out a request for
letters: "We're asking citizens to offer their opinions about
what Bush's top priorities should be during his remaining time
in office. We'll print as many responses as we can on The Eagle's
Opinion pages on Sunday." Not that he asked me -- Laura did and
forwarded it to me. I wrote back 110 words, not counting the
second paragraph:
Bush's belief that he could solve Middle East problems through
a show of force has repeatedly backfired. He desperately needs
some way to salvage America's reputation. The easiest way would
be to press Israel to give up sovereignty for Gaza, allowing an
independent state there. This only solves part of the problem,
in that it postpones dealing with the thornier problems of the
West Bank and Jerusalem. But it's a practical and innovative
way to break out of the current impasse. Also, it's consistent
with Bush's own statements promising a Palestinian state.
Of course, it's not consistent with Bush's own acts -- he's
a pathological liar, but it gives him an out. And it could
only be done over Elliott Abrams' dead body, but that's a
plus.
Laura didn't like this -- first paragraph, anyway. Something
about "give up sovereignty" not being clear as long as the US is
out to destroy Hamas, but also wariness over any sort of partial
solution that doesn't include Jerusalem. Of course, what I meant
was that Israel should renounce all of their claims on Gaza --
air space, the coast line, the border with Egypt, their military
incursions, shellings, bombings, sonic booms, etc. The UN would
nominally take over and organize elections. All nations would
recognize the results of those elections, even if Hamas wins,
as the democratic expression of the people. The resulting state
would have all of the prerogatives of other independent states,
but would have no claim to represent Palestinians outside of
its own territory. Space precluded including more details that
would be necessary, such as the repatriation of prisoners --
otherwise Israel would be setting up future conflicts, much as
they have done with Lebanon. Some sort of system for monitoring
and arbitrating border conflicts would need to be set up between
Israel and Gaza.
It's possible that Palestinian political leadership would
reject this whole thing, playing an all-or-nothing game, but
I doubt that. The fact that Gaza houses so many refugees from
Israel proper is certainly a problem, because those people do
still have legitimate claims to return to Israel, which would
not in any way be satisfied by merely granting Gaza freedom.
Similarly, this leaves the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and
the Golan Heights undecided, and it should be clear that nothing
done in Gaza is meant to prejudice solutions elsewhere. A more
general solution would be better, but the Gaza piece strikes
me as separable, manageable, and not totally impossible under
Bush.
In the end, Laura wrote her own letter:
Bush should apologize for invading Iraq and proceed to get our troops
out and thus out of the way of a solution to the mess he has made. The
billions we spend each week supporting our military there could be
used as reparations to fix the infrastructure instead. He should take
regime change in Iran off the table, thus making it possible to
convince them not to build nuclear weapons. In addition, he should
halt military aid to Israel until it agrees to the Saudi peace plan
which calls for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders in exchange for
normalized relations with the Arab world
Sure, that would be better still. The Saudi plan is clear, clean,
and simple, tying together all of the loose ends. US support for such
a plan would go a long ways toward securing Israeli agreement. Still,
I would expect a lot more resistance than carving off Gaza, meaning
it would take much more external pressure, and that would be hard to
muster given how much Bush's base has invested in the conflict. Even
less likely is that Bush would admit error and/or failure in Iraq,
or that he would give up his fantasy of overturning Iran.
Still, deep down, key people in the Bush administration must realize
that they have failed utterly in their efforts to transform the Middle
East: that one result of this is that America has shown not strength
but weakness, that another is that we have garnered no good will for
our efforts. The situation in Iraq is so dire that at least some form
of retreat appears inevitable. As the US retreats, it is reasonable to
expect at least some jihadis to seek American targets out elsewhere --
the downside of making Iraq the "central front of the War on Terror."
In that scenario, doing something about the Israel/Palestine conflict
is one of the few cards left to play. That's why what I proposed makes
sense.
On the other hand, sense in politics is something else. Bush won't
do anything because he thinks it's right for the country. His only
concern is his own political profile. So as long as war with the
Middle East maintains favor with his supporters, he has no reason
not to feed it. In that Israel proves uniquely useful.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
The N-State Solution
I wandered into the a debate on the one-vs.-two state solutions to
the Israel/Palestine conflict today, and couldn't get a word in edgewise.
The answer is actually pretty simple when you think about it. Admittedly,
few people do. They'd rather see conflict in oppositional terms, with
two sides parrying as each gropes toward some sort of advantage. And in
that game, they're given to slinging the turds of history at one another.
Needless to say, there's plenty to go around.
The bottom line is that all Jews and all Arabs, both within whatever
borders apply to Israel and/or Palestine and without, deserve and need
to enjoy full and equitable rights under secure and just law with ample
protections for anyone who finds themselves in a minority. It is easy
enough to imagine that happening in one state, two, or many, so in that
sense the one-or-two state question is irrelevant: either would work,
provided one can achieve equal rights and minority protections.
On the other hand, without equal rights and minority protections,
neither works. For proof of that, you need look no further than the
current situation. You can at present view Israel and the Occupied
Territories as either one or two states: one in the sense that the
whole area is controlled by one government, or two in the sense that
two distinct sets of law and order are enforced. Neither works. In
fact, they function so poorly -- especially for the Palestinians who
make up approximately half of the total population -- that no amount
of fiddling with borders and the like can make any difference. The
only meaningful step would be for Israel to grant full legal rights
to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, either by granting
them full citizenship (one state) or independence (two states). As
a first approximation, either works.
Needless to say, the choice of solution isn't something that the
Palestinians have any real say about. They're in the classic "beggars
can't be choosers" position, but most are desperate enough that either
choice would be acceptable. Where they do have a say is in rejecting
non-solutions, such as everything Israel has actually proposed thus
far. Indeed, in this day it's hard to argue that they shouldn't reject
schemes that deny them basic human rights.
It's also the case that the so-called World Community doesn't have
much say in the choice, even if they wanted to, which judging from
their track record remains to be seen. Israel's intransigence has
been enabled by the weakness of the Palestinians and the indiffeence
of the World Community. Until one or both change, Israel has little
if any motivation to solve anything. (One might point out the moral
rot that sustaining the Occupation causes within Israel, but thus
far voters seem to be willing to live with that.) I won't speculate
on what might move the World Community to make an effort, but if
they did they'd only be able to apply small amount of pressure --
e.g., through bribes for good behavior, and sanctions for bad. Any
thought of forcing Israel's hand is certainly off the table. So it
matters little for outsiders to argue. Both choices are viable.
The real struggle is impressing on Israel the need to make one.
As it turns out, if Israel had to choose, they would certainly
opt for a two-state solution. The reason is because that plan would
involve the least challenge to their founding ideology. They define
themselves not by their borders but by their ruling ethnicity --
their idea of the Jewish State welcomes Jews beyond their borders
and excludes or marginalizes non-Jews within their borders. Theirs
is an ideal that by definition non-Jews cannot achieve equal rights
within -- even though in practice the so-called Palestinian Citizens
of Israel have long been integrated enough that they are not in open
revolt or defiance of the state. Israel is in fact moving toward a
dysfunctional, vastly inequitable perversion of a two-state system,
with its massive wall forcibly segregating the West Bank. Although
international law properly recognizes the pre-1967 "Green Line" as
an appropriate two-state border, one could in theory start with the
wall line and simply demand equal rights and autonomy on each side.
Again, the key point is equal rights. Another way to look at this
is that you can come up with any number of separate, autonomous
territories, but within each territory there needs to be a proper
Single State solution. (One advantage of the Green Line border is
that Israel has already implemented an acceptable form of Single
State within its pre-1967 borders, so would not have to change its
own internal political system to conform to the requirements. It
is often easiest to go with solutions that require minimal change,
especially where there is so little leverage.)
Of course, nothing in either solution is going to be as easily
done as said. Israel has spent 40 years making this as difficult
as possible -- not only through their systematic development of
"facts on the ground" but more importantly through a propaganda
mindfuck that amounts to mass psychosis, applied in various ways
to Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, most especially. They
have preserved their dominance by keeping the conflict brewing,
especially by goading Palestinians into striking back. And having
created such a legacy of oppression, it has become ridiculously
easy to create events they can blame for their actions. All this
resonates powerfully in the US, given the blowback our worldwide
policies have generated. It's no accident that Israel and the US
have marched in lockstep into a perpetual War on Terror.
As I said, there is damn little the Palestinians can do about
this, beyond insisting on their own human dignity, even when that
reduces to self-sacrifice. (Before martyrs started taking others
with them, they were simple witnesses to brutal injustice, and
all the more effective as such.) But one thing the Palestinian
political leadership could do would be to start wherever possible
to live the lives they aspire to. This means that where they do
gain political power, they reform their government into the sort
of One State, with security and equal rights for all, they aspire
to -- and where they don't have power, they can at least start to
put these ideas down on paper. This means, for instance, that
they should welcome and protect and cherish any Jews who wish
to live lawfully among them. It would mean recognizing the Hebrew
language, forgiving illegal settlements and welcoming the settlers.
It may even go so far as to offering a Law of Return to Jews as
well as Palestinians, in competition with Israel. Admittedly,
there's no chance of a demographic reversal in Gaza or the West
Bank, but doing so attacks the most fundamental concept behind
Zionism: that Jews have no alternative but to migrate to Zion.
Moreover, it is the kind of attack that cannot be revenged with
bombs and tanks. It hits Israelis right where they live: in their
myths.
The second thing Palestinians should attempt to do is to settle
whatever can be settled within whatever practical opportunities
emerge. That may, for instance, involve pushing for autonomy in
relatively uncontested areas, like Gaza, first, welcoming such
opportunities when they occur, and making the best of them. One
big thing that could be done would be to start to resettle the
refugees -- providing compensation to find acceptable new homes
with full political rights, thereby reducing the pressure for a
return to Israel. This sort of thing starts to engage the World
Community in constructive investments toward solving the conflict
short of having to overcome Israel's intractable belligerence.
Such steps build trust and commitment toward further, more
difficult steps.
Still, we shouldn't wait for the Palestinians to unambiguously
get their act together on a solution. The conflict is their problem,
but it is also ours. More than any other conflict in the world today,
Israel has managed to undermine the authority of international law
and discredit its potential for resolving conflicts in the future.
The Palestinian refugee crisis dates back 60 years, setting the
pattern that later conflicts have only added to. The spread of war
in the region is directly tied to our inability to solve this one.
Our lack of evident interest in doing so is in and of itself a
stern rebuke on our sense of morality. Israel has become the most
intensely militarist society in the world today, followed by its
ally the United States. Widely viewed threats like proliferation
of nuclear weapons to nations like Iran are a direct response to
US and Israeli militarism. Moreover, our failure to address this
conflict shows disinterest and contempt for the very formulations
of human rights that we put forth in the wake of WWII to break
the cycle of imperial wars that had destroyed Europe and much of
Asia. These are not problems that are just going to wither away
and be forgotten. We need good will and cooperation to face them,
and for that we must regain our claim to fairness and justice.
That makes Israel's bullying of the Palestinians a concern for
all of us.
Postscript: In case I wasn't clear enough, the reason most
Israelis favor two states over one state is to preserve the Jewish
demographic majority and hence the Jewish state identity of Israel.
The 700,000 refugees from 1948 reduced the Palestinian population
within Israel's borders to such an extent that Israel could offer
the rest citizenship -- a nice propaganda point -- while maintaining
a strong Jewish majority. That changed with 1967, to the extent that
even when Israel formally annexed Jerusalem they didn't offer its
residents citizenship. The unity of the 1947-67 Jewish state was
based on its denial of responsibility for the refugees. After 1967,
unity depended on the forced subjugation of a large population of
undesired, and increasingly hostile, residents. Zionist ideology
adjusted accordingly. Much as slavery in the Americas was elevated
into the principles of racism, Israel's occupation sharpened the
differences between Jewish masters and subordinate Arabs. Zionism
was based on the notion that Jews are fundamentally different from
others. As Zionists gained power, they abused it, increasing their
insecurities, repeating the cycle. Israel was formed out of two
overwhelming prejudices: one was the common experience of European
settlers in the third world, invariably seeing the natives as
uncivilized and inferior; the other was their own experience of
persecution in Europe, letting them view themselves as perpetual
victims, therefore intrinsically innocent. That combination turned
the all-powerful Jewish State into their crutch and bludgeon. To
give that up, as they would in allowing the state to represent all
the people who live under it, would discard their identity, and
that's an impossible thing to hope for, especially under stress of
the conflict.
In general, partition is a horrible solution -- one the English
tried disastrously in Ireland and India as well. The truth is that
the Palestinians were right, at least in principle, to reject it
in 1937 and again in 1947. A single, multi-ethnic Palestine, open
both to Jews and Arabs, would have been a much better solution --
but wasn't pursued by the Zionist settlement, nor insisted on by
the World Community, nor was it ultimately enforced by the Arabs,
who mostly weren't clear on the concept anyway. The best one can
say about partition today is that it's not quite so horrible, in
large part because most of the pain of separation has already been
absorbed. The basic two-state solution is built on partition: it
requires Israel to dismantle its settlements, so Jews and Arabs
ultimately have to live apart. One-state advocates correctly see
this as abominable -- Meron Benevisti is one who has argued this
eloquently -- but really the partition has for almost everyone
sunk in so deep that it has turned into reality. It's basic us
vs. them worldview is fundamentally racist -- recognizing that
gives Americans at least some clue of what we're up against. The
same sentiment is no doubt deeply entrenched in the Palestinian
side, but is more maleable there, in part because it has been
shown to be dysfunctional, but mostly because the opportunity
to create an open, tolerant society not only works toward the
best interests of the Palestinians, it offers them redemption.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Music: Current count 13220 [13197] rated (+23), 843 [853] unrated (-10).
Recycled Goods for June is edited and ready to be posted. Worked most of
the week on Jazz Consumer Guide, which is due this coming Wednesday, but
basically done. Nothing to show here this week. It will be nice to spend
the next couple of weeks away from music writing deadlines.
Jazz Prospecting (CG #13, Part 12)
This is officially the last week of Jazz Prospecting for the 13th
Jazz Consumer Guide column. The deadline is this coming Wednesday.
All that's left to meet that deadline is a little bit of clean up.
I've already done an initial partition of the file, holding back 6
records (323 words), leaving 42 records (1873 words) in the draft
file. Some of those will get cut back by the time it's edited and
layed out. Last time I wound up with 33 records (1553 words), so
that's about where this one will land.
The timing is pretty close to three months since the previous
column turned in. It seems like every time I hope to speed things
up a bit, but they wind up back on the quarterly schedule. Again,
there is more music that deserves to be noted than space for it.
The obvious solution would be to accelerate the schedule. As it
turns out, the amount of time it takes to finish a column -- to
write something presentable out of my prospecting notes -- is
far less than the time it takes to sort everything out. I don't
know whether the Voice would have any such interest. As usual,
space is tight, and jazz is not the editor's foremost interest.
Also don't know whether there are any other options. Indeed, at
this point I'm feeling ambivalent about the whole project. It is
an awful lot of work, and it takes a lot of time and energy away
from other things I could, and arguably should, be doing.
On the other hand, I think this looks like a good column --
a few predictable records, at least given my past record, but
also a few surprises, even to me. Still, there is much I wasn't
able to get to, including A-rated records by Chris Byars, Matt
Lavelle, Powerhouse Sound, Fay Victor, and David Ware. In some
cases I didn't have the time; in others words failed me. Also
written but held back are: Maria Anadon, Fred Anderson, Joshua
Redman, and Logan Richardson. Check the
Jazz Prospecting
for them, and look forward to next time. The prospecting file
contains notes on 218 records evaluated this cycle, as well as
a list of 84 carried over from the previous cycle. The
done file has
swelled to 132 records, so the next step will be to cut that
down to a more practicable size. Did manage to cut the replay
shelves down by more than half, but there is a lot of unplayed
new stuff in the queue.
Waverly Seven: Yo! Bobby (2006 [2007], Anzic, 2CD):
Bobby is Darin, the record a salute to his songbook, which once you
get past his early Atlantic hits could just as well be Frank Sinatra's
songbook. The group is Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Anat Cohen and Joel
Frahm on reeds, Manuel Valera and Jason Lindner on keyboards, Barak
Mori on bass, Daniel Freedman on drums, with Scott Robinson and Vic
Juris appearing as guests. Frahm and Valera get extra credit for
producing. Not sure who did the arrangements, but they're pretty
straightforward -- indeed, for all the talent here the remarkable
thing is how little they have to add. Not even an explanation why
Darin matters, which would be useful 'cause sometimes I forget.
B
Maria Guida: Soul Eyes (2007, Larknote): Singer.
Studied with Jay Clayton, who is credited with arrangements here,
and Sheila Jordan, who praises Guida on the cover. Don't know how
old she is, but she drops hints like "I've known bassist Dean
Johnson for 20 years" and "the turning point of her professional
life occurred when she saw pianist Bill Evans play live." First
album, pop and jazz standards, with some vocalese bridging them.
Scott Yanow describes her as "a very appealing singer with a
warm voice and the ability to express the hidden beauty found
in superior lyrics." Actually, she's much better than that: able
to hold your attention on a dull ballad, deftly navigate the
treacherous "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," and surefooted when
she speeds up "Let's Get Lost" and "Four" -- two choice cuts here.
B+(**)
Judi Silvano: Women's Work: Live at Sweet Rhythm NYC
(2006 [2007], JSL): Jazz singer, married or somehow involved with
Joe Lovano -- his website makes more of the relationship than hers,
but neither is all that forthcoming. She sings with an all-female
trio here -- Janice Friedman on piano, Jennifer Vincent on bass,
Allison Miller on drums -- tackling 11 songs written by 9 women.
(Silvano and Mary Lou Williams are the repeaters; Friedman adds
one from the band.) Silvano's phrasing and timing are impeccable,
enough to carry these songs without complaint or much surprise.
Especially good to hear Carla Bley's "Can't Get My Motor to Start."
B+(*)
Harry Connick, Jr.: Oh, My Nola (2006 [2007], Columbia):
Careful study of the booklet leads me to use initial caps on "Nola"
rather than treat it as an acronym, even though New Orleans LA is the
admitted reference. Of course, it could be argued differently, given
that the booklet doesn't capitalize anything. I must admit that I'm
getting tired of New Orleans tributes, but if this isn't the best
record I've heard from Connick, the other one just edges it out. The
theme gives him great material to work with, and he doesn't just sit
on it. The Allen Toussaint songs come close enough to risk comparison,
but pieces by Chris Kenner and Dave Bartholomew are uncovered gems,
his "Jambalaya" breaks into joyous swing, and his nods to Armstrong
and Prima leave plenty of elbow room. Three originals hang in there,
as do three songs by trad.
B+(***)
Sam Yahel Trio: Truth and Beauty (2005 [2007], Origin):
Plays Hammond B3. Recorded three albums 1998-99; this is his fourth.
In the meantime, he hooked up with Joshua Redman in the Elastic
band. Redman returns the favor here, and Brian Blade fills out the
trio. That looks promising on paper, but the record comes off soft
and unfocused. Redman, unlike his new record, reverts to his slippery
post-Prez style. Yahel cuts back on the soul jazz grind in favor of
postbop niceties. Of minor interest to Redman fans.
B+(*)
And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further
listening the first time around.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Chanson du Vieux Carré (2003
[2007], Marsalis Music/Rounder): Connick did the arrangements, but
handed the two vocals off to Rodney Jones and Lucien Barbarin. The
songs are mostly trad New Orleans fare, with a couple of Connick
originals added to Armstrong, Bechet, Barbarin, Pollack, and a
close from Henry Roeland Byrd, Dr. Professor Longhair to you. But
the arrangements are postmodern: you don't feel the polyphony,
nor the swing that arrived later and took over. Instead, they're
projected into some other realm, where they find new life.
B+(**)
Maria Anadon: A Jazzy Way (2006 [2007], Arbors):
Anadon turns her back to her native Portugal and takes a bite of
"Old Devil Moon" and a dozen more show tunes and vocalese skits.
Her Women of the World band, with Japanese Tomoko Ohno on piano
and Israeli Anat Cohen on clarinet and tenor sax, are no less at
home. More proof that sometimes immigrants, discovering wonders
we have come to take for granted, make the best Americans.
A-
Phil Bodner: The Clarinet Virtuosity of Phil Bodner:
Once More With Feeling (1960s-70s [2007], Arbors):
Born 1917 and evidently still alive, with scads of studio
albums but precious little under his own name, this offers
a bit of well-deserved recognition -- something Arbors is
frequently inclined to do. The small groups swing, and the
clarinet stays up front, unifying six sessions with quite
a few different pianists, guitarist, bassists and drummers.
Great songs, much fun, often quite lovely.
B+(***)
Anders Nilsson's Aorta: Blood (2004, Kopasetic):
Quartet, two Nilssons, one Carlson, one Carlsson. The leader plays
fast, dazzling electric guitar, over a pumping fusion rhythm. The
Carlson, Mattias, plays tenor sax and "electrified alto sax" but
mostly lurks in the background, a contrasting color. They could
pass for rock on attitude, or jazz on shops. Several Scandinavian
have tried their hands at postpunk fusion -- while most have the
attitude, this one has a guitarist up to the challenge.
A-
Anders Nilsson's Aorta: Janus (2005, Kopasetic):
Saxophonist Mattias Carlson shows some real progress here, taking
the lead on occasion and holding it. Nilsson's guitar is still
impressive, but the more varied music works against his strong
suite, especially when it slows down.
B+(***)
Fay Victor Ensemble: Cartwheels Through the Cosmos
(2006 [2007], ArtistShare): I guess we can add Victor to the Betty
Carter family of jazz singers, if we could find anyone else to fill
out a family. The voices are similar, although Victor's a shade or
two lighter. The musical rigor is comparable, especially when Victor
slides a verse onto a free rhythm without chaos ensuing. Most of all,
they both run adventurous, cutting edge bands. My discovery here is
guitarist Anders Nilsson, who always has something to say. The others
are bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Michael T.A. Thompson, who rank
as household names, at least in this household.
A-
Joel Frahm: We Used to Dance (2006 [2007], Anzic):
A tenor sax lover's album, plain and simple, with three-fourths of the
late Stan Getz's quartet (Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid, Victor Lewis) --
not that Frahm sounds much like Getz, or plays his songbook. This is
the sort of record I tend to be sweet on, but could just as well be
underrated here.
B+(***)
Roswell Rudd/Mark Dresser: Airwalkers (2004 [2006],
Clean Feed): Bass-trombone duo. Seems to me this is more Dresser's
show: he does this sort of intimate abstraction quite often, it's
always difficult to follow but sometimes interesting when you do.
Always great to hear Rudd, and a rare treat to hear him this rough
but still in control. But not a record that will convert anyone.
B+(**)
The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project: Simpático
(2005 [2006], ArtistShare): Palmieri grew up in the Bronx melting
pot, of Puerto Rican descent. I don't know him well enough to place
him, or indeed whether that's possible: salsa draws so promiscuously
from Afro-Cuban that it may make no difference. Lynch is a terrific
trumpeter who plays a lot of everything; his Latin interests started
as a teenager in salsa bands in Milwaukee, then took a leap forward
when he hooked up on a Palmieri tour in 1987 -- juggling travel to
also keep his commitments to Toshiko Akiyoshi. This pulls it all
together, with a steady stream of bubbling percussion, tasty alto
sax from Donald Harrison and Phil Woods, and plenty of trumpet.
Won a Grammy; for once I can't complain.
A-
Vijay Iyer + Mike Ladd: Still Life With Commentator
(2006 [2007], Savoy Jazz): Maybe Pamela Z's "bel canto" vocals were
the turnoff. I missed this first round, but easily skipped past the
joke this time, and straight into Iyer's programming and sequencing.
Still don't get much out of Ladd's words, even when I read the trot
from the Japanese, but then I wonder whether the point isn't just
to sound profound, even if meaningless -- that is the way of our
cosmopolitanism, where commentators help render us as still lifes,
tuned in to a world we thankfully don't have to engage.
A-
Nicole Mitchell/Harrison Bankhead/Hamid Drake: Indigo
Trio: Live in Montreal (Paperback Series Vol. 3) (2005
[2007], Greenleaf Music): Bankhead and Drake have another trio
record out this year, with Fred Anderson. The rough tumbling
rhythm is the same. The only difference is sassy young flute
in place of wizened but still grizzly tenor sax. Mitchell also
adds the chant to "Stand Strong" -- she does.
B+(***)
Joshua Redman: Back East (2006 [2007], Nonesuch):
Before East takes over with two originals and Coltrane's "India" --
the latter a last session with father Dewey -- Redman has some fun
with the West, including a rollicking "I'm a Old Cowhand." He earns
his right to play soprano sax on three cuts, and his tenor is more
robust than any time since he landed that Lester Young role in
Altman's Kansas City.
A-
Michael Brecker: Pilgrimage (2006 [2007], Heads Up):
I never could fault him on technique, but fast runs have been bebop
calisthentics since Charlie Parker, a standard and by now ordinary
stock in trade. I never cared for his musical interests, and often
found him cold and dispassionate to a worrisome extent. This record
was cut during a brief respite in his struggle with MDS. It benefits
from simplicity of conception and an outpouring of friends -- he has
to juggle two pianists since he could hardly turn down either Herbie
Hancock or Brad Mehldau. So I'm tempted to say: impending death
focuses the mind, thaws the heart, brings out the best in friends.
In fact, that's what I wrote for the column. I'd also say that it's
his best album ever, but I've never given him better than a B before,
and sarcasm doesn't seem appropriate here. It's certainly one to
remember him by. Also note that Pat Metheny stands out among the
friends.
B+(**)
David Torn: Prezens (2005 [2007], ECM):
Rip Torn's cousin played guitar on some fusion albums in the '80s,
working with such usual suspects as Bill Bruford and Tony Levin,
before moving on to soundtrack work and the group Splattercell,
but mostly he's done production work. He's produced most of Tim
Berne's albums since 1997. Here he employs Hard Cell -- Berne's
trio with keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Tom Rainey -- for
a dark, demonic comeback. Berne's alto sax adds bite to Torn's
power chords, Taborn juices up the electronics, and the always
superb Rainey muscles up.
A-
John Abercrombie: The Third Quartet (2006 [2007],
ECM): I'm not sure whether the problem here is Mark Feldman -- a
violinist so classical in nature the only time I've ever found him
interesting was in Masada with John Zorn and Dave Douglas breathing
fire up his ass -- or whether it's Abercrombie himself. The guitarist
has never been as intentionally delicate or precious as Ralph Towner,
but he still sort of typifies ECM's ascetic aesthetic applied to the
instrument, and here he manages to dial it down a couple of notches.
Feldman is equally studious and discrete. Marc Johnson and Joey Baron
do what they can with what they've got to work with, and they have
some good stretches. Normally I would let this pass, but having two
guitarists as Pick Hits suggests that by contrast this should be
flagged as a Dud.
B
Robin Eubanks + EB3: Live Vol. 1 (2006 [2007],
RKM): The basic architecture is trombone-keyboards-drums, but
all three players are credited with keyboard bass, and Eubanks
provides extra loops and beats. The electronics set the whole
thing in motion -- a more technologically advanced take on the
old organ trio formula. In that context, a trombone lead just
adds to the novelty, and fun. Comes with a DVD, thus far unseen.
B+(**)
Will Bernard: Party Hats (2007, Palmetto):
San Francisco guitarist, gets a smart, light, funky groove
going around organ (Wil Blades and/or Michael Bluestein),
decorated with various horns -- Peter Apfelbaum is present
on most tracks, but Dave Ellis rips off the big tenor sax
solo on "Rattle Trap."
B+(*)
Gordon Grdina's Box Cutter: Unlearn (2006,
Spool/Line): Vancouver guitarist, mostly sets up the rhythm
that propels François Houle's clarinets through a worldbeat
maze. The latter is largely informed by Grdina's interest
in Arabic classical music -- he also plays oud, but not on
this album -- but the framework seems broader. Houle has
done interesting work with Africans before, but sometimes
sounds like bebop. "Soul Suite" is an exception here, starting
slow and building strong.
B+(***)
Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid: Tongues (2006
[2007], Domino): Further exchanges, although drummer Reid's
contribution seems diminished. Hebden's ability to synthesize
remarkable music on his laptop or whatever is as impressive
as ever, especially on the first two tracks. Whether this
should qualify as improv or not is impossible to say, but
the only thing keeping from passing the Turing Test is the
lack of real improvised competition.
B+(***)
Tyft: Meg Nem Sa (2005 [2006], Skirl):
Guitar-sax-drums trio: Hilmar Jensson, Andrew D'Angelo, Jim Black,
respectively. Black minors in electronics, especially in his
AlasNoAxis group, which Jensson also plays in. D'Angelo gets a
fairly typical avant squawk. Unlikely anyone would like this who
isn't already well atuned to the noisier end of the avant-garde,
but the guitar-drums rump can produce some interesting fractured
funk grooves, and they close on a mood piece when that's the last
thing you expect.
B+(**)
Carlos Barretto Trio: Radio Song (2002 [2007],
Clean Feed): Bassist-led trio with guitar and drums. Most pieces
cook over a high flame, and guitarist Mario Delgado can dance
to the music. Three cuts add Louis Sclavis, who makes such an
impact that it seems like more.
B+(**)
Richie Barshay: Homework (2004-05 [2007], AVYA):
A very versatile young (b. 1983) drummer, with interests in Cuba
and India as well as mainstream jazz with options of swinging
free. Title suggests he's still in his student phase. Indeed,
this first album has the feel of a recital or clinic, a chance
to show off all the things he can do. Impressive. Now what?
B+(***)
Unpacking:
- The Blueprint Project: People I Like (Creative Nation Music)
- Charmaine Clamor: Flippin' Out (FreeHam)
- Club D'Elf: Perhapsody: Live 10.12.06 (Kufala, 2CD)
- Eldar: Re-Imagination (Sony BMG Masterworks)
- Floratone (Blue Note): advance, Aug. 14.
- Guy Klucevsek/Alan Bern: Notefalls (Winter & Winter)
- Mushroom With Eddie Gale: Joint Happening (Hyena)
- Misha Piatigorsky: Aya (Misha Music)
- Pink Martini: Hey Eugene! (Heinz)
- Solar Fire Trio: Rise Up (Foreign Frequency)
- The Chip Stephens Trio: Holding On to What Counts (Capri)
- Jacky Terrasson: Mirror (Blue Note): advance, Aug. 28.
- Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter & James Cotton: Breakin' It Up, Breakin' It Down (1977, Epic/Legacy)
Sunday, June 03, 2007
War in Somalia?
I noticed a piece in the New York Times today about the US bombing
a village in Somalia: cruise missiles fired against alleged militants.
The report said that this is the third such incident. It did not say
anything about Congress and/or the UN Security Council authorizing war
on Somalia. Googling for information on this returns very little: a
couple of press reports, mostly from Australia. No reports of anyone
in Congress raising a question. Somalia fits the basic profile for
targets of US bombing: a small, poor country, helpless to defend
themselves let alone deter a foreign strike. It also fits the Bush
pattern of reopening wars in countries the US has tangled with in the
past. Something similar is happening in Lebanon, but thus far the US
is only working through proxies.
Self-Infatuation
From
WarInContext:
America as a religion will always be plagued by
self-infatuation. Alternatively, if we were to see ourself as merely
another nation we might be better disposed to recognize our own flaws
and see ourself as one among many rather than the One above all.
[ . . . ]
America as an actuality must first own before it can disown the
ugliness that it hopes to transcend. The greatest challenge for any
people that over-invests in hope is not in striving for a better
future but in facing a stark reality. [ . . . ]
Before we utter our repudiations, first we must engage in a steady
reckoning: take full account of what we are and see what we have
done.
That seems about right, and does a good job of reminding us how
difficult it is to reorient a nation with as much inertia as the US
has built up. The fact is that even things that we more/less agree
now to have been unfortunate, like slavery and our treatment of the
Native Americans, haven't been repudiated so much as quietly buried
in the basement of history. One wonders whether we would have been
so supportive of South Africa up to the end of the apartheid regime,
or of Israel's colonialism, continuing today, had we truly come to
grips with our own past.
This was part of a comment on a piece by Scott Ritter, described
here as "a devout, evangelical, and well-meaning congregant in the
American religion." In between the quotes above there is a sideline
on consumerism: "The insularity and indifference through which the
American people provide their own government with such latitude, is
a product of the consumerism that Ritter (and I) detest. Collective
interdependence has been cast off in exchange for personal comfort
and independence -- a societal transition that would be extremely
difficult to reverse. Having taken care of our own needs so well,
we have little compulsion to be concerned about the needs of others.
Our material comfort sustains our political torpor."
This argument strikes me as off-base -- not wrong so much as
incidental to whatever the real reasons are. One can equally argue
that a sense of material plenty is what frees people to take up the
concerns of others not so fortunate -- student progressivism in the
'60s is a good historical example, and Maslow's psychology provides
some theory to back that up. On the other hand, what matters here is
less the absolute level of material comfort, which has if anything
improved since the '60s, than our satisfaction and security with it,
which has clearly diminished. What feeds the right isn't torpor so
much as it is what Barbara Ehrenreich described as "the fear of
falling."
There was a time when "consumerism" was a word used to describe
consumer advocates, like Ralph Nader, whose primary concern was that
consumers get more value for their purchases. That still strikes me
as a worthy cause, especially if you recognize that the real goal is
satisfaction and not merely more-better-cheaper. The big, possibly
unsolvable problem facing the world today is how do we manage the
trade-offs between satisfying consumers and limiting production and
pollution within the limits of the earth's resources. The answer
lies in some combination of more efficient products and services,
more restrained desires, more fair distribution, and the avoidance
of destruction (e.g., war).
Compared to this, coming to grips with America's imperial fevers
should be simple, not least because they are so plainly dysfunctional.
There is little doubt that over time we will retreat from most or all
such commitments, if for no better reason than that we cannot afford
them. But what we learn depends much on how thoroughly we look at
ourselves -- something politicians of both parties and elites all
over the map have vested interests in avoiding. Patriotism is little
more than self-flattery, which is why it is so readily exploited by
scoundrels. Only uncompromising self-awareness can save us from such
manipulations. Despite all the horrible things that have happened to
us since Bush took office, we are still a long ways from recognizing
ourselves.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Chalmers Johnson: Nemesis
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007, Metropolitan)
is the third book in what Chalmers Johnson decided was a trilogy on the
contradictions -- the curse, really -- of the American empire. The
following are quotes I marked. The last one attempts to sum up the
three books. I haven't read Blowback yet, which is largely
preoccupied with the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) with Japan,
which largely exempts American soldiers stationed in Japan from the
reach of Japanese law -- a point Johnson has returned to in both
of the following books. The Sorrows of Empire introduced
his "empire of bases" concept. I thought the book was one of the
most compelling cases against American empire I've read.
No comments below; just quotes -- mostly a time crunch, which
maybe I'll redress later, although for now I'm trying to hack
through a rather large backlog of books. It's worth noting that
the sections here on space militarization are particularly strong.
(pp. 21-22):
"Some years ago," [Hannah Arendt] wrote, "reporting the trial of
Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the 'banality of evil' and meant
with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the
phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could
not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or
ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction
was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds
were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only
specific characteristic one could deect in his past as well as in his
behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was
something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite
authentic inability to think."
Arendt was trying to locate Eichmann's conscience. She called him a
"desk murderer," an equally apt term for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney,
and Donald Rumsfeld -- for anyone, in fact, who orders remote-control
killing of the modern sort -- the bombardment of a country that lacks
any form of air defense, the firing of cruise missiles from a warship
at sea into countries unable to respond, such as Iraq, Sudan, or
Afghanistan, or, say, the unleashing of a Hellfire missile froma
Predator unmanned aerial vehicle controlled by "pilots" thousands of
miles from the prospective target.
How to ordinary people become desk murderers? First, they must lose
the ability tothink because, according to Arendt, "thinking
conditionsmen against evil doing." Jerome Kohn adds, "With some degree
of confidence it may be said that the ability to think, which Eichmann
lacked, is the precondition of judging, and that the refusal as well
as the inability to judge, to imagine before your eyes the others whom
your judgment represents and to whom it responds, invite evil to enter
and infect the world." To lack a personal conscience means "never to
start the soundless solitary dialogue we call thinking."/p>
If an individual's thinking is short-circuited and does not rise to
the level of making judgments, he or she is able to understand acts,
including evil acts, only in terms of following orders, doing one's
duty, being loyal to one's "homeland," maintaining solidarity with
one's fellow soldiers, or surrendering one's will to that of the
group.
(pp. 71-72):
The expatriate Scot and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically
argues that the British Empir was motivated by "a sincere belief that
spreading 'commerce, Christianity, and civilizaiton' was as much in
the interests of Britain's colonial subjects as in the interests of
the imperial metropole itself." He insists that "no organization
[other than the British Empire] has done more to impose Western norms
of law, order and governance around the world" and that "America is
heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era,
successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of
American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to
shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?" The Los Angeles
Times's right-wing columnist Max Boot thinks that "Afghanistan and
other troubled lands today cry out fo the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs
and pith helmets."
According to journalist Erik Tarloff, writing in the British
newspaper Financial Times, "Claims that the British Raj
redounded to the economic benefit of India as well as the mother
country [are], I should think, irrefutable. Given that for two
centuries -- between 1757 and 1947 -- there wa sno increase at all in
India's per capita income, that in the second half of Victoria's reign
between thirty and fifty million Indians perished in famines and
plagues brought on by the British misrule, and that from 1872 to 1921,
the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20
percent, the idea that India benefited from British imperialism is at
least open to question.
(p. 75):
Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their
political supporters and cheerleads back home, know that they are
hated; that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial
liberals, socialists, do-gooders, and other social critics remote from
the killing fields, who criticized their methods or advocated the
"reform" of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the
imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a
differernce in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends
to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying
out "administrative massacres," to use Arendt's potent term, when
perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance. A split between those
who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of
all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share
extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over "subject
races" and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their
"civilization" on others.
(p. 94):
Meanwhile, CIA covert operations were mobilized in support of
various criminal, dictatorial, or militarist organizations around the
world so long as they wee (or pretended to be) anticommunist. CIA
operatives also planted false information in foreign newspapers and
covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian
Democratic Party in Italy and the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan,
to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany,
Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and
Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as
depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to
damage uncooperative Third World countries, attempting to assassinate
foreign leaders, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or insurgencies in
places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia,
China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela,
North Korea, Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Haiti,
Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and
Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record.
(p. 110):
The Carter administration deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan, which occurred on Christmas Eve 1979. In his 1996
memoir, former CIA director Robert Gates acknowledges that the
American intelligence services began to aid the anti-Soviet mujahideen
guerrillas not after the Russian invasion but six months before it. On
July 3, 1979, President Carter signed a finding authorizing secret aid
to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime then ruling in Kabul. His
purpose -- and that of his national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski -- was to provoke a full-scale Soviet military
intervention. Carter wanted to tie down the USSR and so prevent its
leaders from exploiting the 1979 anti-American revolution in Iran. In
addition, as Brzezinski put it, "We now have the opportunity of giving
to the USSR its Vietnam War."
(pp. 120-121):
Secret police and state terrorist agencies normally try to disguise
what they are doing by hiding behind bland euphemisms for their most
odious operations. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Voltaire
observed, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities." On sanitizing language, the Stanford University
psychologist Albert Bandura writes, "By camouflaging pernicious
activities in innocent or sanitizing parlance, the activities lose
much of their repugnancy. Bombing missions are described as 'servicing
the target,' in the likeness of a public utility. The attacks become
'clean, surgical strikes,' arousing imagery of curative
activities. The civilians whom the bomb kills are linguistically
converted to 'collateral damage.' . . . In the vocabulary of the
lawbreakers in Nixon's administration, criminal conspiracy became a
'game plan,' and the conspirators were 'team players,' like the best
of sportsmen.
Typifying this deliberate whitewashing, the Nazi Party's SS had its
"transportations," meaning the shipping of trainloads of prisoners to
death camps; the British had their "civilizing mission" in Kenya,
meaning the rounding up of members of the indigenous population and
sodomizing, castrating,a nd killing thousands of them; the Japanes had
their "comfort women," meaning girls and women they kidnapped in
occupied countries and forced at gunpoint to work as frontline
prostitutes; and the CIA has its "renditions." This is an unusual
locution. In most dictionaries, a "rendition" is a performance or an
interpretation of a piece of music or a role in a play, as in: "That
was a nice rendition of Duke Ellington's 'Jubilee Stomp.'" But the CIA
uses it as a transitive verb -- to render (as in "render undo Caesar
the things that are Caesar's"), to hand over, to surrender.
(pp. 122-123):
On the basis of the enw agreement with Egypt, between 1995 and 1998
the CIA carried out a series of renditions aimed particularly at
Islamic freedom fighters working int he Balkans, many of them
originally from Egypt. Virtually all the people the CIA kidnapped in
these operations were killed after being delivered into Egyptian
hands. Predictably enough, these kidnappings generated blowback,
although ordinary Americans did not perceive it as such because the
actions that provoked the retaliation were, of course, kept toally
secret. On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad,
in a letter to an Arab-langauge newspaper in London, promised a
reprisal for recent U.S. renditions from Albania. Two days later,
al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a loss
of 224 lives. The U.S. renditions continued with the CIA and FBI
carrying out some two dozen of them in 1999 and 2000. These, in turn,
helped provoke the attacks on the navy destroyer USS Cole in the
Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Former CIA director George
Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission that there were more than
seventy renditions leading up to 9/11.
(p. 136):
The reality was and is that presidents like having a private army
and do not like to be contradicted by officials not fully under their
control Thus the clandestine service long ago began to surpass the
intelligence side of the agency in terms of promotions, finances, and
prestige. In May 2006, Bush merely put strategic analysis to sleep
once and for all and turned over truth-telling toa brand-new
bureaucracy of personal loyalists and the vested interests of the
Pentagon.
(p. 143):
In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unveiled his
"1-4-2-1 defense strategy" to replace the Clinton era's plan for
havinga military capable of fighting two wars -- in the Middle East
and Northeast Asia -- simultaneously. Now, war planners were to
prepare to defend the United STates while building and assembling
forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four
"critical regions": Europe, Northeast Asia (South Korea an dJapan),
East Asia (the Taiwan Strait), and the Middle East, be able to defeat
aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and "win
decisively" (in the sense of "regime change" and occupation) in one of
those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing." As the military
analyst William M. Arkin commented, "[With] American military forces
. . . already stretched to the limit, the new strategy goes far beyond
preparing for reactive contingencies and reads more like a plan for
picking fights in new parts of the world."
(p. 200):
What the Bush strategists and the Pentagon do not seem to
understand is that China has real grievances against Japan and that
American policy is exacerbating them. During World War II, the
Japanese killed apprixmately twenty-three million Chinese throughout
East Asia -- higher casualties than the staggering ones suffeed by
Russia at the hands of the Nazis -- and yet Japan refuses to atone for
or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it
continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of
Asia and a victim of European and American imperialsim. In what for
the Chinese is a painful act of symbolism, Junichiro Koizumi made his
first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo after becoming
JApanese prime minister in 2001, a practice he has repeated every year
sine. Koizumi likes to say that he is merely honoring Japan's war
dead, but Yasukuni is anything but a military cemetery or a war
memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto
shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the
traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in
domestic military campaigns aimed at returning direct imperial rule to
Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine
and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today
Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4
million Japanese who have died in the country's wars, both civil and
foreign, since 1853.
(p. 210):
By manipulating a Republican Congress and creating a missile
defense lobby in both houses, they achieved all their goals, although
actual missile defense remained as distant as ever. General Eugene
Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said, "A
system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability."
Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense for test and
evaluation in the Clinton administration, concluded that the United
States had squandered over $100 billion dollars of taxpayers' money on
a "high-tech scarecrow."
(p. 215):
The head of the Air Force Space Command, General Lance Lord, has
led the charge. "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is
our destiny," he told an air force conference in September
2004. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is
our vision for the future." "Simply put," he said to Congress, "it's
th American way of fighting." We must have "freedom to attack as well
as freedom from attack" in space.
(p. 216):
Simiarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because
one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own
preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for
this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any
kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would
threaten our whole network of military and commercial
spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American -- even
planetary -- way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air
force's "counterspace doctrine" never so much as mentions.
(pp. 219-220):
Thirty years ago, during the period of Japan's high-speed economic
growth, I was in Tokyo talking with an official from that country's
trade ministry. Japan was then, as today, totally dependent on
imported petroleum from the Middle East. I pointed out that Japan's
supertankers were highly vulnerable. What, I asked, would Japan do if
a hostile power sank one of its tankers in the narrow straits around
Singapore? His answer was straightforward: call Lloyd's Insurance
Company. It would be much cheaper to construct a new tanker than to
defend the sea-lanes from Japan to the Persian Gulf by building a
navy. There is a lesson in this for the United States. We cannot
afford our air force's plans to protect our space assets militarily,
and the air force does not know how to do so in any case.
(pp. 228-229):
The Topol-M was Russia's original answer to President Reagan's Star
Wars fantasies. It was designed during the late 1980s, but Russia did
not produce it immediately because of the collapse of the USSR and
because it discovered that Star Wars itself could be rather easily
defeated by decoys and large numbers of conventional ICBMs. However,
on June 13, 2004, the very day that George W. Bush succeeded in
killing off the Anti-ballastic Missile Treaty of 1972, Aleksei
Arbatov, one of Russia's leading experts on military affairs,
advocated in parliament that Russia respond by speeding development of
the Topol-M. A year and a half later, on December 24, 2005, Colonel
General Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces,
attended a ceremony at the Tatishchevo missile base int he Volga
River's Saratov region. He wsa commissioning a new set of Topol-Ms,
which he declared to be "capable of penetrating any missile defense
system." The Topol-M was first put into service in December 1998 but
was deployed only in silos. An off-road mobile version entered combat
service in 2006. It is a truly formidable
weapon. [ . . . ] There is no known defense
against such a weapon. Diplomacy and deterrence ar eth eonly means to
ensure that it will never be used, and the Bush administration has
repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tol of American foreign
policy. The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us at best
the illusion ofprotection against a nuclear attack without reducing
the odds of such an attack.
(p. 230):
The raw monetary figures have been literally astronomic. From
Reagan's 1983 "Star Wars" speech to 2006, depending on which expert
you listen to, the Unitd States has spent between $92.5 billion and
$130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight
-- and that's without even once having succeeded in doing so. One
comprehensive analysis of the ultimate cost of the entire ballastic
missile defense system by its distinctly theoretical date of
completion in 2015 -- and excluding its most expensive and problematic
component, a space-based laser -- is $1.2 trillion.
(pp. 270-271):
On February 6, 2006, the Bush administration submitted to Congress
a $439 billion defense appropriation budget for fiscal 2007. At the
same time, the deficit in the United States' current account -- the
imbalance in the trading of godos and services as well as the
shortfall in all other cross-border payments from interest income and
rents to dividends and profits on direct investments -- underwent its
fastest-ever quarterly deterioration. In the fourth quarter of 2005,
the deficit hit a staggering $225 billion, up from $185.4 billion in
the previou squarter. For all of 2005, the current account deficit was
$805 billion, 6.4 percent of national income. In 2005, the U.S. trade
deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared
to an all-time high of $725.8 billion, the fourth consecutive year
that America's trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China
alone rose to $201.6 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with
any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, the country has lost nearly
three million manufacturing jobs.
To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress
raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $8.96
trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office
that it had to be raised. THe national debt is the total amount owed
by the government and should not be confused with the federal budget
deficit, the annual amount by which federal spending exceeds
revenue. Had Congress not raised the debt limit, the U.S. overnment
would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to
default on its massive debuts.
(pp. 278-279):
In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around
the world.The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for
things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers
to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out
abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This
means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on
September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events
in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against
the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet
another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried
to provide some of the historical background for understanding the
dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on
Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the Middle
East.
The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American
preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup
since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in
other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete
manifestation of our ghlobal hegemony, and many of the
blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the
sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these
overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do
not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such
as the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, brings them to our
attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing
with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women
certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the peoples of
ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims
of foreign colonization.
In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political,
economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is
likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empir
eabroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably
undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military
dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation
understood this well and tried to create a form of government -- a
republic -- that would prevent this from occurring. But the
combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military
Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our
republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the
cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once
a nation is started down that path, the dynamic sthat apply to all
empirse come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of
forces opposed toimperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life
as a free nation.
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May 2007 |
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