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Wednesday, July 31, 2013Daily LogBradley Manning verdict came down today. While there is some relief that they're not going to execute him, the military trial and the use of the espionage act make it a sham. Later we heard reports that the government declassified some NSA documents, a case of opening the barn door after the horse got out. Wonder who they'll prosecute for that. Had a cold meatloaf sandwich for lunch. Pretty good. Laura wants to tear down the curtains on the front living room window. I suggested 2-inch wood blinds, so we went shopping and ordered a set. Also looked at tile for the kitchen sink backsplash, but found some stainless steel panels that looked like they might work. Bought one square foot to experiment with. Watched The Bridge. Pretty remarkable show. Music today (JP): Christian McBride, Scott Neumann; (RG): Sun Ra, George Russell. Tuesday, July 30, 2013Daily LogOrdered records from Best Buy: Killer Mike: RAP Music; Guy Clark: My Favorite Picture of You; Gogol Bordello: Pura Vida Conspiracy. The latter was Christgau's pick today, grade A -- Tatum and some others predicted this. I was less enthusiastic when I played it on Rhapsody last week, but thought it has more potential. Upbeat, politically astute, some Tex-Mex thing entering into the gypsy punk. I liked their previous record more than Christgau did. Bought a pound of lean ground beef yesterday, thinking about making meatloaf. Don't have my mother's recipe, so all I can do is improvise. This is what I tried today:
Hooked up the Netgear streaming box. First ethernet cable failed to connect, so I pitched it when another worked. Some aggravation to log into Netflix. Watched first episode of Orange Is the New Black, about a cute blonde sent to prison on a dubious drug money laundering charge, although presumably it will develop into something about the imprisoned cross-section of America. Best line was a warden (or something like that) explaining that he's never been able to make any sense out of the system. Before that watched a rerun of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, about a bunch of scumbag literary agents and a writer with a trumped up fraudulent past as a criminal. Pretty awful show. Music today (JP): Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Turre, Paquito D'Rivera, Thisbe Vos; (RG): Sun Ra. Monday, July 29, 2013Music Week/No Jazz ProspectingMusic: Current count 21779 [21748] rated (+31), 580 [587] unrated (-7). Jazz Prospecting is a bit short this week, partly because I'm holding some things back that haven't been released yet. Not sure whether that's necessary, or even a good idea, but I know some critics and/or publications do that, and some publicists prefer that. I've rarely bothered before, mostly because it's been hard to keep track of, but the metacritic file is forcing me to pay more attention to release dates -- I've gotten into the habit of adding records to it as I unpack them instead of waiting till I get around to them, so the information is more accessible now. Four of the records I wrote up last week have future release dates -- one as far out as October 15 -- so they got held back. All were reviewed from finished copies, so I don't know what the delay in retailing them is. And I'm not holding back my grades: they show up in the year list and metacritic files -- just too much room for error if I try to delay updating those files. Two of the records below are reviewed from advances, but their release dates have come and gone without me getting final copies. No big problem, especially when they aren't very good. May change my mind on holding records back. We'll see how it goes. By the way, as fewer and fewer actual CDs show up, I'm getting more offers for download links. They're easy for me to miss in my mail, and a hassle for me to process. They limit my listening options, and therefore my time. The only upside is that if they're average or worse I don't have to find space to store them. Some of these problems could be ameliorated if I could overcome some technical obstacles -- e.g., I still haven't figured out how to burn and package downloaded discs. So beware that any such downloads I get and manage to review will show up not here but in my Rhapsody Streamnotes column. Andy Bey: The World According to Andy Bey (2013, High Note): Singer-pianist, cut his first records 1964-65 as Andy & the Bey Sisters; staged a comeback in 1996, and now has six albums since then. This one is done solo, just voice and piano, meant to be intimate like, say, The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album, but when this really slows down he's neither the singer nor the pianist to pull it off. Much better, however, when "The Joint Is Jumpin'." B Kenny Burrell: Special Requests (And Other Favorites) (2012 [2013], High Note): Guitarist, one of the last remaining from the generation that gained prominence in the 1950s -- Jim Hall and Mundell Lowe are the only others I can think of offhand. Did his best work in the mid-1960s -- Guitar Forms, Ellington Is Forever -- and has been coasting through more or less charming live records lately (worst: 75th Birthday Bash Live!; best: Be Yourself). This is middling, but when he plays "Make Someone Happy" he does. B+(*) Anna Estrada: Volando (2012, Feral Flight): Singer, "Bay Area-based," third album since 2008, more Spanish/Portuguese than English, co-wrote one song, draws on Fred Neil ("Everybody's Talking") and the Beatles ("Happiness Is a Warm Gun/I Want You"), does "Beguin the Beguine" in Spanish, works in some bossa nova (no Jobim, but Jorge Ben's "Mais Que Nada" is probably the best thing here). Musicians slip in and out -- too many for me to track, but unobtrusive to listen to. B+(*) Steve Gadd Band: Gadditude (2013, BFM Jazz): Drummer, fifth album since 2004 although he had an earlier one in 1986. Band appellation is appropriate: guitarist Michael Landau and keyb player Michael Goldings 4 of 9 songs, with Gadd, Walt Fowler (trumpet), and Jimmy Johnson (bass) jointly offering a fifth. Two more pieces come from Keith Jarrett, one from Abdullah Ibrahim, one from Radiohead. Comes off as an attractive variation from the organ groove genre. B+(*) Nancy Harms: Dreams in Apartments (2012 [2013], Gazelle): Singer, from Minnesota, second album. Four originals (three co-credited to producer Arne Fogel), a piece based on Erik Satie, and five standards ("It Could Happen to You," "Mood Indigo," "Never Let Me Go," "Midnight Sun," "While We're Young"). Aaron Parks plays piano, John Hart guitar on the back stretch, Wycliffe Gordon has a guest spot on trombone. She has a subdued, almost whispery voice -- doesn't grab you but sneaks up effectively on the last two covers. B+(*) Julia Hülsmann Quartet: In Full View (2012 [2013], ECM): Pianist, b. 1968 in Germany, sixth album since 2003, third on ECM. Quartet with Tom Arthurs (trumpet), Marc Huellbauer (bass), and Heinrich Köbberling (drums), with all four writing songs, plus three pieces by others -- don't see any reason to call them standards. No rush, no clash, the trumpet providing a pivotal voice. B+(**) [advance] Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra: Jimmy Heath: The Endless Search (2010, Origin): Saxophonist Heath is both the guest star and the composer of the title suite and another piece, roughly the first half of the album, so his name could slide over to the artist side -- or dropped out if you follow the spine. SRJO, directed by drummer Clarence Acox and saxophonist Michael Brockman, dates back to 1995, and this is their third album. Features a long list of Seattle musicians, with Hadley Caliman, Jay Thomas, and Thomas Marriott among the better known. They're a fine ensemble, Heath is a worthy honoree, and when they close out their program with "Haitian Fight Song" and "Creole Love Call," well, can't go wrong with that. B+(**) Mort Weiss: A Giant Step Out and Back (2013, SMS Jazz): Seventy-eight-year-old clarinet player, started late, says this will be his last album, evidently blaming the economy more than his age. Solo with what I assume are some overdubs, a few originals and a bunch of standards which he uses for the basis of free improvs -- a surprise in that he's always been a swing-to-bop man -- but his command of the clarinet doesn't leave you feeling the need for anything else. Some vocal something-or-other toward the end -- he referred to something like that elsewhere as a "brain fart," and that's as good a term as any. A- Mark Winkler: The Laura Nyro Project (2012 [2013], Cafe Pacific): Singer, has a dozen albums since 1985, typically writes much of his own material but here picks eleven Laura Nyro songs. I don't recall any of Nyro's albums (1947-97, her main run 1968-75), but she had a rep for combining pop-jazz-gospel-soul with much sensitivity and no humor. Winkler prefers cozy arrangements, using Bob Sheppard's sax sparely, switching him to flute toward the end, and closing with just Eric Reed on piano. B+(*) Yellowjackets: A Rise in the Road (2013, Mack Avenue): Long-running group, 23rd album since 1981 with 17 Grammy nominations along the way. Only original member left is Russell Ferrante (piano, keybs), with Bob Mintzer (sax) and William Kennedy (drums) veterans, and Felix Pastorius (son of the legend) the newcomer on bass. They sound, at least here, more like hard bop than smooth jazz, except they keep piling ahead: no breaks, not many changes, little of interest other than their usual competency. B [advance] Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture. Had to go yogurt shopping out on Maize Road, so looked for a restaurant there. Wound up at Olive Garden -- first time ever. I remember Anthony Bourdain making fun of their food, and he has a point: it's pretty easy to make better Italian at home, even using things like Contadina ravioli and Mezzetta sauce. Stopped at Best Buy and picked up a Netgear internet streaming box. Salesman said it was the only one with an RCA connector cable. I assumed he meant RGB, but turns out it's only composite. TV doesn't seem to have an HDMI port, so that seemed like the only option. I should recheck that. Also picked up the new Pet Shop Boys album. Put Jazz Prospecting post together last night, just adding a bit to the intro today. Not planning on doing an Expert Witness announcement. Time to take a break from them. Watched Longmire, Major Crimes. Music today (JP): Roscoe Mitchell; (RG): Joe McPhee, Sun Ra. Sunday, July 28, 2013Weekend RoundupSome scattered links this week:
Also, a few links for further study:
I don't have any particularly useful links for the turmoil in Egypt. The military coup continues to avoid US sanction, probably because they've moved hard to shut down the border with Gaza, returning Egypt to its pre-Morsi status as an outpost of Israeli occupation policy. Increased violence against Morsi's party is also very disturbing: it is very likely to push Islamists away from democracy and toward armed resistance, possibly leading to something like the Algerian civil war -- another case where the US backed a military junta against democracy. We're also starting to see problems in Tunisia, as Juan Cole explains. Daily LogAnother home day. Rained all night, and intermittently all day. Had about half of "Weekend Update" stashed away, and had little problem filling it out. Got tired of the usual frozen crap for dinner, so I thawed out a pound of shrimp and a bag of lima beans. Made baked shrimp with feta cheese (half a recipe), stir-fried lima beans, and sliced and sauteed half a tube of polenta. No parsley, so had to fudge the shrimp recipe a bit, but did have some Bulgarian feta left over from last time. Took about an hour from start to finish, with some puzzle time in the middle. Should cook more. As it was, wound up throwing out most of the produce drawer. Just buy stuff and let it rot. Music today (JP): Deborah Shulman; (RS): David Murray, Georg Graewe, Manuel Mengis, Theo Jörgensmann, Joe McPhee. Saturday, July 27, 2013Rhapsody Streamnotes (July, 2013)Pick up text here. Expert CommentsMy announcement:
Post overnight got 9 thumbs up, 3 thumb bombs. Didn't generate any commentary. I'm pretty disgusted with the whole scene. Allen B.:
Daily LogAnother home day, except needed to go out to pick up some groceries in the evening. Rained a bit while I was in the store. Rained more later. I noticed water seeped into the garage at some point. That means my "French drain" project either isn't working or isn't enough. Another blow to my DIY self-esteem. Posted RS. Huge amount of work there but I doubt that anything will come of it. Music today (JP): Jimmy Amadie, Nancy Harms, Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, Anna Estrada; (RS): Laura Nyro, David Murray (will replay tomorrow), Nyro again. Friday, July 26, 2013Book RoundupThrew this one together quick, with no new research, mostly to drain the scratch file -- which means, sure, these are leftovers from one or possibly several previous columns. I usually just run 40 books each time, but expanded that a bit here. Again, the idea is to drain the swamp, so I figured no need to be arbitrary about it. By the way, one thing missing here is any listing of recent conservative books. I've started diverting them into a separate scratch file for a "special" edition. Only have six at present: historically I've ignored most I've seen, but occasionally found something to comment on. Will probably find more, and look at them then. On the other hand, there are quite a few Israel books below -- mostly, I suspect, relatively minor ones since I hit up the more important ones the time before. Thought about doing an Israel special, but again didn't have that many, and I think that when I do I'll want to do a "best of" rather than just sample what's passing in the stream. (Of course, with the US right as it is, no such thing is conceivable.) Jeremy Adelman: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013, Princeton University Press): Cass Sunstein wrote a review of this book, extolling Hirschman as one of the century's "most original and provocative thinkers." Not at all clear to me why, although he had an interesting life, narrowly escaping the Holocaust to land in academia. Elizabeth A Armstrong/Laura T Hamilton: Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (2013, Harvard University Press): Focuses on women, tracking their various paths through higher education, where they find that "the dominant campus culture indulges the upper-middle class and limits the prospect of the upwardly mobile." Charles V Bagli: Other People's Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made (2013, Dutton): Focuses on BlackRock as one of the more spectacular busts of the banking collapse. Jack Beatty: The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began (2012, Walker): Looks like an interesting reexamination of the not-so-inevitable origins of WWI -- an evident contrast to Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Beatty previously wrote Age of Betrayal: The Triumph on Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007), an important book on how money subverted democracy in the Gilded Age. Walden Bello: Capitalism's Last Stand? Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity (paperback, 2013, Zed Books): Leftist author recycles various themes on how capitalism is falling apart. Deglobalization? Age of Austerity? An excerpt I read argues that Obama should have paid heed to Paul Krugman, which is true as far as it goes, but is that all the further a Marxist wants to go? Amy J Binder/Kate Wood: Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (2012, Princeton University Press): Studies young conservatives and how they interact with universities, which for all their reputed liberalism don't seem to be very effective at brainwashing would-be right-wingers. Joshua Bloom/Waldo E Martin Jr: Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013, University of California Press): Black guys with guns serving free breakfast, now what could be scarier? -- at least if you can imagine being J. Edgar Hoover. Big book (560 pp), seems to cover all the angles. Gary M Burge: Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to "Holy Land" Theology (paperback, 2010, Baker Academic): Previously wrote Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians (paperback, 2004, Pilgrim Press). I find the very concept of a "holy land," "holy places," even a "holy mountain" appalling, but people do get wound up in such diversions, and if you do this may help disabuse you of such nonsense. The conflict itself is real. Christian Caryl: Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (2013, Basic Books): One of those attempts to turn history around in a key year, one that featured the Iranian Revolution and its attendant oil shock, a Russian coup in Afghanistan that tempted the US to start the Jihadist war against the West, the key reforms that led by capitalist growth in China, the elevation of a Polish cold warrior as pope, and the disastrous rise of Margaret Thatcher -- Ronald Reagan was still a year away. Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013, Harper): Refers to the domino-like march to war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A more astute analysis would recognize that all the powers of Europe had been continuously engaged in war against Asia and Africa for most of the previous century, and that most had meddled in two wars in the Balkans within the last decade. Moreover, most of the imperial wars had been successful, so both sides expected only further success in bringing the war home, against their real rivals. They may have sleepwalked, but mostly they dreamed . . . foolishly. Also new and more narrowly focused, Sean McMeekin: July 1914: Countdown to War (2013, Basic Books); also new, Charles Emmerson: 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War (2013, Public Affairs). Laila El-Haddad/Maggie Schmitt: The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey (paperback, 2013, Just World Books): El-Haddad previously wrote a down-to-earth memoir of living (and watching people die) in Gaza (Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between), so this sequel seems appropriate. Rest assured, the authors "traveled the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip to collect the recipes presented in this book" (that's 25 miles long and 3.7-7.5 miles wide, a bit larger than Manhattan). Sylvia Federici: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (paperback, 2012, PM Press): Scattered essays dating back to 1975, on issues that were kicked around excitedly back then, less so now. Author was involved in Telos, which I also worked on way back in the day. She also wrote Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (paperback, 2004, Autonomedia). John Bellamy Foster/Robert W McChesney: The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval From the USA to China (2012, Monthly Review Press): Foster is a Marxist economist who's been writing variations on this all his life. McChesney is a media critic who started out worried about the untoward influence of money -- e.g., Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (1999; paperback, 2000) -- and wound up collaborating with the likes of Foster and Noam Chomsky -- Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order (paperback, 2011, Seven Stories Press). Robert Gellately: Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (2013, Knopf): Claims access to newly declassified documents tracking Stalin's strategic moves as head of Comintern and the Soviet Union, although the assumption that his regime's power interests had anything to do with communism is far-fetched and annoying. Gellately blames the Cold War on Stalin, ignoring the fact that conflict existed only if you grant that the US had interests that conflicted with Stalin's interests -- the pre-WWII "isolationist" US would have made no such claims. Richard Hell: I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography (2013, Ecco): One of the key musicians in the mid-1970s New York rock revolution, originally a founder of Television, later ran the Void-Oids. Seems to be a good writer as well as a focal point. Dilip Hiro: Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (2012, Yale University Press): Author continues working his way around the troublespots of Asia, focusing here on the Kashmir border, which is to say India and Pakistan, although I wouldn't discount Afghanistan, which in some ways is the shadow of this long-lived, stubbornly fought dispute. Joel Isaac/Duncan Bell, eds: Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (paperback, 2012, Oxford University Press): A dozen scattered essays, no one I recognize and no clear political bent, but a couple look interesting -- "War Envy and Amnesia: American Cold War Rewrites of Russia's War"; "God, the Bomb, and the Cold War: The Religious and Ethical Debate Over Nuclear Weapons, 1945-1990"; "Blues Under Siege: Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and the Idea of America" -- and one that I wonder about: "Cold War culture and the Lingering Myth of Sacco and Vanzetti." Walter Johnson: River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013, Belknap Press): A history of slavery in the US South, especially after the Revolution, the opening of the west, and the cotton boom. Daniel Stedman Jones: Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (2012, Princeton University Press): The other two pictures on the cover: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both looking much younger than Hayek and Friedman. Neoliberalism is a term that never caught on among its right-wing adherents, but this is about them. Idea seems to be to illustrate Keynes' famous maximum about politicians in thrall to dead economists. Paul Kennedy: Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (2013, Random House): WWII was won with Russian (and Chinese) blood and guts, with American industry, and with western engineering -- especially in the atom bomb project one can count a lot of significant refugees from the fascist powers. The Manhattan Project has been much written about elsewhere, so this most likely focuses on less esoteric technology, like radar, and pontoon bridges, and possibly decryption and logistics and the scientific approach to management, some stuff we've even forgotten about as the right has turned against government. Razmig Keucheyan: The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today (2013, Verso): A broad survey of Marxist thinkers in the post-Communist era (since 1993), prefaced by a brief history of the new left (1956-77) and the 1977-93 period "of decline." Not sure how important this is, but one thing that is clear is that post-Cold War triumphalism didn't have much to stand on: capitalism remained alienating, crisis-prone, and only got more so as political alternatives melted away. Denise Kiernan: The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (2013, Touchstone): Oak Ridge, TN, home of the Manhattan Project's uranium enrichment facility, focusing on the numerous women who worked there. William K Kingaman/Nicholas P. Kingaman: The Year Without a Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (2013, St Martin's Press): The volcano was Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, which ejected a vast amount of ash and sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere, altering weather patterns all around the world. Daniel C Kurtzer, ed: Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2012, Palgrave Macmillan): "This book is the antidote to the fatalism and pessimism" -- or so says Tony Blair, who as much as anyone is the cause. Bill Clinton, Javier Solana, and Chuck Hagel also support the book. Kurtzer is a long-time US diplomat, former ambassador to Egypt and Israel, a guy with much experience talking the talk, none at walking the walk. Also wrote the lead piece in The Peace Puzzle: America's Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011 (2013, Cornell University Press). Les Leopold: How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away With Siphoning Off America's Wealth (2013, Wiley): How hedge funds work, and how their managers skim billions off nothing more substantial than bets with other people's money. Author previously wrote The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity (2009). Bruce Levine: The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (2013, Random House): A Civil War history that emphasizes changes in the structure of southern society, presumably the end of the slaveholder aristocracy and its replacement by, well, what exactly? By the time Reconstruction was ended and Jim Crow laws were imposed it doesn't seem like much changed, does it? Antony Loewenstein/Ahmed Moor, eds: After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine (paperback, 2012, Saqi): The "one state" case. One should recall that it was "facts on the ground" that made the "two state" scenario plausible. Before the segregation enforced by expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the subsequent military occupation, the only fair solution was one nation with equal rights for all. Robert W McChesney: Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (2013, New Press): The internet cuts both ways, opening up previously unimagined amounts of information, allowing extraordinarily wide participation, but also a tempting target of control, especially for the rich media empires and their political allies. So it's hard to overstate how important the struggle over control is. Relevant here: Rebecca MacKinnon: Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012; paperback, 2013, Basic Books). Jeffrey Melnick: 9/11 Culture (paperback, 2009, Wiley-Blackwell): Attempts to work out the reflections and resonances of the 9/11 attacks on the popular arts. Lots there to chew through, although now I think we over-indulged, aiding a political agenda intent on making the world worse than it was. My own thought from the very beginning was how do you contain this. Then Black Hawk Down came out. Moisés Naím: The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be (2013, Basic Books): Every tyrant ultimately depends on willing and competent obedience, and the author detects various trends that make such obedience harder to come by. Jonathan Schell seemed to be turned into this notion when he write The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003, Metropolitan), but he neither explained it well enough nor drew many implications from the insight. Vali Nasr: The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (2013, Doubleday): Bloomberg Review columnist, former advisor to Richard Holbrooke, author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future and Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, trying to position himself as a forecaster, has managed to posit this as "a wake up call" rather than a done deal. Seems a little glib to me: the US remains crazy-dangerous, and is almost oblivious to world opinion, even in the relatively sane hands of Obama, as opposed to the nutters he beat along the way. [April 23] Annalee Newitz: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013, Doubleday): Meteor strikes, cosmic radiation, whatever it was that ended the Permian, those are all examples of events so colossal they wiped out the majority of the world's living species, and given that they have happened, you have to concede that they could. So how would humans fare under such brutal circumstances? This is all speculative, of course, but there is a lot one can do with the set up -- like get things wrong, evidently. Still another question might be whether humans will survive the the ongoing mass extinction event they are primarily responsible for -- something for which there is no historical evidence. Diana Pinto: Israel Has Moved (2013, Harvard University Press): Tries to provide a broad strokes portrait of Israeli society today, something likely to be surprising given how profoundly strange Israel has become: it is by far the world's most militarized society; it is perhaps the most rigidly ethnocentric and racist; it is not quite the most isolated (that would be North Korea), but its view of the map is profoundly warped; it is well educated and technologically advanced, but has a profoundly powerful and reactionary religious sector. I have no idea how this sorts out, and doubt that this is anywhere near definitive. Sam Pizzigati: The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph Over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (paperback, 2012, Seven Stories Press): Yeah, but what would you rather have: a boring old middle class where most people are pretty much interchangeable, or Donald Trump? Devon Powers: Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (paperback, 2013, University of Massachusetts Press): Focuses on the early work of Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau at the Village Voice and the founding of rock crit as a serious (as well as fun) intellectual activity. Wasn't much later when I gave up on the Frankfurt School and read little but rock crit. Monte Reel: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventures That Took the Victorian World by Storm (2013, Doubleday): Paul Du Chaillu, who explored equatorial Africa 1856-59, discoverng the gorilla just in time for the debate over Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Marie-Monique Robin: The World According to Monsanto (2010; paperback, 2012, New Press): Pesticides, PCBs, patented GMO seeds, growth hormones, etc. Focuses on one key company. Brant Rosen: Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity (paperback, 2012, Just World Books): Author is a rabbi in Evanston, IL, with a blog called Shalom Rav which he has written since 2006. Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013, Current): Media theorist, won a career achievement award named after Neil Postman, although the only book of his that I've read was his unconventional take on Judaism (Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism). Thesis here seems to be that when you have to absorb everything at once you get overwhelmed. William J Rust: Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954-1961 (2012, University Press of Kentucky): Not so sure about the period in question, but during 1961-63 Laos was more frequently an object of US anti-communist concern than Vietnam. Same sort of muddle and overkill, of course. Robert O Self: All in the Family: The Reallignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (2012, Hill & Wang): Buys into the notion that American politics turns on "family values" and that was the reason for the conservative surge -- sure they'll be flattered by that magic word -- from the 1970s until the Bush crash (and later? maybe the Tea Party was just shrapnel). There's something to that, but I wouldn't bet much on it. Yehuda Shenhav: Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (paperback, 2012, Polity): An engineered solution, most likely astute in its critique of all other so-called solutions, then myopic on its own. What the author is looking for is some sort of binational federation combining autonomy and coexistence in a fair and reasonable way. William L Silber: Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (paperback, 2013, Bloomsbury Press): The architect of the biggest recession between the 1930s and 2008, done on purpose to slay inflation, which effectively translated to crippling the working class. Democrats keep recycling the same hacks over and over, so it wasn't too surprising to see Obama leaning on the man who ensured Jimmy Carter was a one-term president. Maybe not all that bad, but it sure could have been done better. Chip Walter: Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (2013, Walker): The story of human evolution, such as we understand it, over the period of time that separates us from our nearest surviving ape kin, during which many closer species evolved and became extinct, leaving just humans as we know and love/hate them. Ben White: Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (paperback, 2011, Pluto Press): From 1948-67 Palestinians in Israel (those who avoided the expulsions) were subject to military rule, roughly similar to those in the occupied territories since 1967, and even after 1967 they've remained segregated, nominally citizens but constantly aware that "the Jewish State" isn't for them. And as the right wing has grown more powerful (and more extreme) they are increasingly threatened. Previously wrote Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide (2009). Curtis White: The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers (2013, Melville House): Previously wrote The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves (2003; paperback, 2004, Harper One), which would be important if he came up with an answer, but I gather he didn't. (Evidently the book was scaled up from an essay deriding Terry Gross as a "schlock jock.") He also wrote one called The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature (paperback, 2009, Paradigm), so you can get a sense of his sense of big questions. Science doesn't satisfy him, nor does religion, nor do "the new atheists." Nothing easy here, but that doesn't make it right. Keith W Whitelam: Rhythms of Time: Reconnecting Palestine's Past (2013, Ben Black Books): Short (124 pp, looks like Kindle-only) essay on ancient Palestinian history. Author previously wrote The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (1987), The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (1996), and edited Holy Land as Homeland? Models for Constructing the Historic Landscapes of Jesus (2011). James Wolcott: Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies (2011; paperback, 2012, Anchor): Journalist/culture critic, wrote for the Village Voice in the 1970s, where he made a strong impression on me. Later went on to be one of the first successful bloggers, probably out of scope here. Lawrence Wright: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013, Knopf): Author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), a fine book which has no special relevance here, other than to show his skill at making a strange ideology comprehensible without undue sympathy. Still, I've managed to go through life without needing to know a thing about L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, or Scientology, and figure I'll leave well enough alone. No paperbacks this time. Expert CommentsToday's picks: Lil Green: Why Don't You Do Right? 1940-1942, and Dionne Warwick: The Dionne Warwick Collection: Her All-Time Greatest Hits. Have the latter, graded it B+ long ago; also have the redundant (but shorter) The Very Best of Dionne Warwick, which I graded A-. (Christgau has both Warwick collections at A.) Warwick has a few really great songs, but turning them into a best-of has always struck me as a stretch. For some reason I don't have anything by Green, although I've heard this record (and possibly others). Georgia Christgau is a big fan, so I commented:
Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture. Got lunch at Tanya's Soup Kitchen -- famous place but we had never been there before. Shrimp chowder was very good, club sandwich less so. Biggest problem for us is that they're rarely open when we're out: no Sunday, 11am-3pm every other day, 5-9pm Friday-Saturday. We barely got in under 3pm. Chopped up a chunk of tree limb I removed the other day. Tried to work on car. There's a little compartment in the dashboard, and the door had broken. I repaired it once by gluing broken plastic back together, but it broke again. I bought a replacement door, but couldn't figure out how to pop the dashboard piece that holds it out. It's been sitting half-wedged for a couple months now, so I finally pushed it to a conclusion, which was: the thing is hopelessly broken. The door pivots on a couple plastic nubs, and has a spring on each side to snap it back into place. Turns out one of the nubs is bent and would break if I ever managed to straighten it out. Would also be tricky getting the springs tight, but that's secondary to getting the door to pivot. Below the door is the ashtray, which unlike every other ashtray I've seen is (a) plastic and (b) cannot easily be removed. Futzing with it earlier, I managed to lose the spring that snaps the door shot. I eventually managed to get the whole thing out today, which made it possible to get to the bottom clips on the dashboard piece. (Still something holding it in place, or snagging it.) When I realized I couldn't fix the door, I tried reinstalling the ashtray. It, too, pivots on plastic nubs, and after I wasn't able to snap it into place I discovered that one was broken, so it was impossible to get the ashtray back in position. It also has a spring, and the hole the spring slips into looked like it was near breaking. So I gave up. Snapped the dashboard pieces back into place. The net effect for all my trouble was to lose the ashtray, leaving an opening in the dash. I may plug it up at some point, but for now I'm just disgusted. At any rate, something off my "to do" list. Just sad that it turned out this way. (And feeling 0-for-2 after yesterday's cable mishap.) Threw the books post together at the last minute. Dumped 49 books from the scratch file, keeping 4 (+ one not published yet + 6 in the right-wing file). Sometimes I start writing these things then discover they're not that interesting. Sometimes I do a book that's off topic then don't like slotting it when time comes around. Music today (JP): Mort Weiss, John Escreet; (RG): Jeffrey Lewis (2); (RS) rechecked Gogol Bordello, Jeffrey Lewis/Peter Stampfel, the latter improving a bit but neither strike me as A-list records. Thursday, July 25, 2013Expert CommentsChristgau (no idea what elicited this; some typos corrected):
So I don't rate, huh? In the struggle for making a living off my writing I've had a much rougher time than they have. As for critical insights, I don't read Milo or Joe often enough to get much of a sense -- although Milo's much more extensive input to this forum shows both vast experience and critical judgment. On the other hand, Joe shows up maybe once every other month with a rave or pan that I often wind up disagreeing with. I've met both of them, but very casually. Joe expressed an interest in having me write for him at the Voice, but that opportunity is long gone (as is the one I never got at Rolling Stone). As far as I can hazard a guess, Bob sorted his ranking by income. I guess that whoever's posting as "Tegan Rain Quin" is a troll. Much discussion of the Tegan & Sara album Heartthrob, which Tatum graded A- but I had more doubts about: B+(**). Daily LogInternet went out last night shortly before I went to bed. Was still out this morning, as was the phone. Laura called Cox. They scheduled us for tomorrow, but someone came out early afternoon. Futzed with the modem, got it to reboot, swapped out a splitter, and we're back on line. Went to a Peace Center even tonight: Maher Musleh and wife Stephanie McNew-Musleh showed pictures and talked about their recent trip to Jordan and Occupied Palestine -- included Jerusalem, but all the pictures I recall were in the old city, the Arab and Armenian Quarters. Maher has relatives in or near Nablus and Tulkarem, also in Jordan. Sounds like the level of Israeli repression has been dialed back quite a bit since Maher was last there (seven years ago). In particular, they ran into fewer checkpoints, at least around Nablus. (In Pamela Olson's book, based on her experiences around 2004-05, there were checkpoints all around Nablus, and frequent IDF patrols there and in Ramallah.) Still can't say I have the slightest interest in visiting there. Tried hooking up a cable to connect a laptop to the TV, but the connector I bought for the purpose failed. TV has a DVI-D input port, but the passive VGA-to-DVI interfaces have four analog pins which the TV doesn't have openings for. Not sure what the next move there will be. Good chance that all the VGA-to-DVI interfaces are equally flawed. Laura's laptop doesn't have S-Video or HDMI, and the TV doesn't have HDMI. It's inconvenient for streaming Netflix on any of our computer screens -- at least for both of us to view at the same time. Watched Copper and two episodes of Raising Hope -- beginning to think my tolerance for the latter may soon run out. A couple overly pat turns in the former, too, especially the reunion of Corcoran and Maguire -- most likely the Morehouse-Haverford split will be patched up next week, although Little Orphan Annie is getting to be more trouble than she's worth. Music today (JP): Albert Heath, Kenny Burrell, Andy Bey, Mark Winkler, Julia Hülsmann; (RS): Van Dyke Parks. Wednesday, July 24, 2013Daily LogI've been going through metacritic.com's magazine listings, picking out ones that I can't scan online, and work through the listings to see what I've missed. Thus far: Classic Rock, Dusted, The Quietus, Record Collector, Wire. Music today (JP): Steve Gadd; (RS): Guy Clark, Nikki Lane, the Fall. Tuesday, July 23, 2013Annals of Hippie PunchingJonathan Chait's Anarchists of the House makes some useful points about the today's Republican majority in the House of Representatives. For instance:
Having read much in the communitarian anarchist tradition of Kropotkin and Bookchin (and probably too much in the libertarian anarchist oeuvres of Rothbard) I wouldn't have picked "anarchists" as an ideology I'd like to saddle the Republicans with, but it's true that some people who called themselves anarchists (mostly about a century ago) threw bombs and caused mayhem, and if that's all you recall and consider it isn't that wrong. But the Kochs are big on the Rothbard line, and your typical anti-government euthanasiast may consider it a compliment. Moreover, it's the kind of slander that identifies Chait as a "big government" liberal, as opposed to the kind of liberal that considers a state necessary for some things but not altogether without risks. Then Chait goes on to compound his ignorance and prejudice, in this paragraph approvingly cited by Ed Kilgore (which is how I got here, and it turns out even worse):
Kilgore stops the paragraph short, quotes Mario Savio, engages in some gratuitous hippie punching, and pronounces this "a very apt analogy," conceding only that Ted Cruz and Eric Cantor might find it "mortifying . . . to be compared to a dirty hippie." I've never seen Kilgore this far off base. I mean, for starters, how is the poor hippie going to feel being compared to Cruz and Cantor? Much less being blamed for the budget fiasco that caused the US government bond rating to be downgraded? But that's just one of many incredible brain slips that Kilgore and/or Chait have made in trying to build an argument that ultimately amounts to nothing more than calling someone else a presumably disreputable name. It's silly to have to tear this house of cards down, and I'm not going to bother with much of it, but . . . it's not necessarily true that hippies were dirty, at least hygienically (some hippies left the city for farms, and farmers do work with dirt, but we don't routinely speak of "dirty farmers"); hippies had very little to do with the new left -- they overlap historically but one was countercultural and the other political; Mario Savio, by any stretch of imagination, was not a hippie, nor was he a persistent figure in the evolution of the new left -- he appeared, made some speeches, then got on with his life; the new left was never defined by a single coherent ideology -- it was left in the sense that we believed that all people are equal and deserve equal justice, and it was new in the sense that we didn't belong to Leninist parties conspiring to foment revolution; other than that, new left tactics varied according to situation -- direct non-violent action in the civil rights struggle, mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war, electoral activity when worthy (or even some not-so-worthy) candidates presented themselves. Some splinter groups did wrong-headed things, but they were marginal. Most new left ideas entered the mainstream, and much was done by Congress in the 1960s to secure civil rights, and again by Congress in the 1970s on issues ranging from clean air to limiting the president's warmaking powers. The one thing the new left didn't do was to grab institutional power for its own self-perpetuation. One reason for this was that the new left was always distrustful of power, having seen bad examples of its use both in the Soviet Union and in the US. Chait is arguing that if the new left ('60s radicals) had the sort of Congressional power the Republicans currently have, we would have behaved like the Republicans do now. Surely he realizes that there is no policy reason for that. The major fillibusters of the 1960s were to prevent votes on civil rights. Then, as now, the obstructionism was done by the right (same for Truman's famous "do-nothing Congress" of 1947-49). Maybe obstructionism works for the right in ways that it doesn't work for the left? Maybe right and left have significantly different attitudes toward democratic processes? Maybe there's no moral equivalency whatsoever between far right and far left? One clue should be that in forums where Republicans have control today Republicans -- many states, among the most notorious Wisconsin, North Carolina, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas -- don't encourage Democrats to practice the "procedural extremism" they use in Washington. They simply go about implementing their pet policies any way they can. They are utterly opportunistic, and utterly cynical, about procedure. And -- this is the key point -- what lets them be so opportunistic and cynical is their utter contempt for democracy. (Nor should you be surprised: the Democrats actually received more votes for the House in 2012, but the Republicans were able to get more members elected, mostly due to their skillful gerrymandering in 2010. And they've gotten key support from their cadres in the courts, from Bush v. Gore to Citizens United to this year's gutting of the Voting Rights Act.) The rest of Chait's piece is worth reading for his reporting on how the House Republicans plan to use the debt ceiling as hostage to force Obama to cancel Obamacare, maybe even to "privatize Medicare." It's a scary story, but not because Chait likened Republicans to anarchists, or Kilgore called Cantor a "dirty hippie." The Republicans are ruining their own brand name. Just hang them with it. Daily LogStayed home. Knocked out a piece on someone otherwise good knocking the new left -- I'm a bit sensitive on that subject. Had a big storm blow through here tonight, unusually from the northwest. It managed to blow quite a bit of water back up the range vent, dumping on the range top. Only second time that has ever happened. Last time I bought some stuff to try to make it less likely, but never got around to installing it. Should at least take a look at it tomorrow, to see of there's is any damage. Not sure right now whether the vent pipe slants up or down (or at all) -- would have been smarter had we raised it up high enough to get a downward slant on the way out, but that's probably real hard to fix now. Watched Dexter. Music today (JP): Lucian Ban, Yellowjackets; (RG): Sylvester; (RS): Serengeti, Gogol Bordello, Del Lords, Sigur Rós. Monday, July 22, 2013Music Week/No Jazz ProspectingMusic: Current count 21748 [21705] rated (+43), 587 [599] unrated (-12). Another ridiculously high rated week. For my incoming jazz queue, I have two baskets each good for 28 inches of CDs, so figure they hold about 150 CDs. (When I first set up this system I had three baskets.) Right now three rows are down to a little over half full, and the row I set up for low-priority records isn't quite full (I even pulled a few things from it below). So I've been running way ahead of what I've been getting -- which is probably seasonally depressed right now, but the longterm slope is definitely downward. Nearly finished the week without any A-list records, then hit two in a row. Both surprises in a way: one a debut from a previously unknown musician, the other from a very famous one who's gotten some of the lowest grades I've ever handed out -- remember Some Skunk Funk? On the other hand, Brecker's previous Wlodek Pawlik album was the one that really surprised me, and this is just an extension of that -- perhaps a little more emphasis on the pianist. And really, Brecker plays in a lot of interesting contexts on other folks' albums, and even when one goes south, the trumpet's never the problem. And we'll be hearing more from Parker: he also has a quasi-dixieland group called Candy Shop Boys, and their first album is supposed to be in the mail. Note: Made a minor correction to Brahja Waldman last week. The roll-up for July (so far) is here. Robin Bessier: Other Side of Forever (2013, self-released): Singer, from Olympia, Washington; first album, three originals, two from producer Barney McClure, six standards. Darin Clendenin plays piano, Clipper Anderson bass, Mark Ivester drums, and Jay Thomas plays tenor and soprano sax as well as trumpet/flugelhorn. Nice, clear voice with some bounce, pays off especially on "God Bless the Child." B+(**) Ketil Bjřrnstad: La Notte (2010 [2013], ECM): Pianist, b. 1952 in Norway, has close to 40 albums since 1989, 11 on ECM. This one is built around a core of strings -- Arild Andersen's double bass, Anja Lechner's cello, and Eivind Aarset's guitar -- a combo where the volume centers in the cello range and the variation is broader than you'd get with a violin. The piano dices with the strings, Marilyn Mazur adds percussion, and Andy Sheppard adds some nice colorings on tenor and soprano sax. B+(***) [advance] Anna Borges & Bill Ward: Receita de Samba (2012, Brasil): Duo from Boston (married), both sing, Ward also plays guitar and piano; first album, backed with flute, bass, percussion, and more percussion. Sambas by various Brazilians, none named Jobim, light and airy. B Ron Boustead: Mosaic (2013, self-released): AMG's succinct biography: "Jazz vocalist whose sound is reminiscent of Mark Murphy." I'm far from expert on Murphy, but always regarded him as tied, however ineptly, to bop/vocalese, where Boustead is more into smooth jazz and schmaltz. AMG shows three albums; his website four, but mentions an earlier Chet Baker project from 1983. He co-wrote four songs here, and picks up "under-appreciated tunes by James Taylor, Carole King, Jon Lucien and Bill Withers." C+ Randy Brecker: Night in Calisia (2011 [2013], Summit): Title sometimes reported as Randy Brecker Plays Wlodek Pawlik's Night in Calisia. Second time the trumpeter has collaborated with the Polish composer-pianist, following 2009's Nostalgic Journey: Tykocin Jazz Suite, and I'm pretty sure they're the two best records of his career. Trumpet on top of Pawlik's piano trio backed by Kalisz Philharmonic, as swishy as they get, although the score stretches them, and someone (drummer Cezary Konrad?) minds the rhythm. A- Gene Ess: Fractal Attraction (2012 [2013], SIMP): Guitarist, b. in Tokyo, grew up on a USAF base in Okinawa, studied at George Mason and Berklee, played in Rashied Ali's quintet, now has five records since 2003. Lineup here is Thana Alexa (voice), David Berkman (piano), Thomas Kneeland (bass), Gene Jackson (drums). Guitar is adventurously post-bop, with Alexa scatting -- a combo I couldn't imagine working but somehow does. B+(**) Vana Gierig: Making Memories (2013, Enja): Pianist, b. in Germany, studied in Boston, based in New York. First album, all originals, the piano quick and playful. Paquito D'Rivera plays clarinet on five pieces, lifting the album, but strings (violin and cello) on three of them bring it back down. B+(*) Art Hodes: I Remember Bessie (1976 [2013], Delmark): Pianist, b. 1904 in Russia, not sure when he moved to Chicago but he didn't start recording until he moved to New York in 1938. Smith died in 1937, so they could have crossed paths in Chicago, but most likely he remembered her from records. Solo piano, old blues with some swing to them, the style Hodes grew up on and was exceptional at. B+(***) Alan Jones & François Théberge: Another View (2010-12 [2013], Origin): Drummer and saxophonist (tenor, soprano, also wood flute, recorder, and trombone), respectively. The drummer, b. 1962 in Washington, grew up in Portland, studied at Berklee, passed through New York, Vienna, and Paris, winding up in Portland again. The saxophonist, b. 1963 in Montreal; studied at McGill, Concordia, and Eastman; passed through Miami, New York, and Paris. They have about a half dozen albums each, not sure if they have any together before this one, which was recorded in many sessions (10 days) in Portland, Paris, and Portland again. Twenty musicians, no track credits so the implication is that all but two (a Portland viola and a Paris cello) played on all tracks, but it doesn't have a big band vibe. It does have vocals: mostly Marilyn Keller, plus Jones on one track, Rebecca Kilgore on another. B+(*) Eugenie Jones: Black Lace Blue Tears (2013, self-released): Singer-songwriter, based in Seattle, first album, with a notable local band: Bill Anschell (piano), Michael Powers (guitar), Clipper Anderson (bass), Mark Ivester (drums). Two covers ("Take Five," "My Funny Valentine") -- manages to wring a lot of emotion out of the latter -- plus nine originals, most striking. B+(**) Deborah Latz: Fig Tree (2011-12 [2013], June Moon Productions): Singer, third album, wrote three originals here, the rest standards (Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Mancini), a Jon Hendricks scat, an Alberta Hunter blues, the obligatory Jobim and a bonus samba by Ary Barroso and Luix Peixoto to show that she's not just following the template -- also a pretty Greek ballad that seems to be associated with Haris Alexiou. She moves through this range expertly, with nice touches from John Hart on guitar and Peter Apfelbaum on reeds. B+(*) Anne LeBaron: 1, 2, 4, 3 (2002-08 [2010], Innova, 2CD): Harp player, b. 1953, AMG classifies her as classical (making it hard to sort her out), Discogs credits her with seven albums since 1979. These are improv sessions recorded with various other, no more than quartet and often less, including some reputable jazz names -- Wolfgang Fuchs, Georg Graewe, Leroy Jenkins, John Lindberg, Torsten Müller, Paul Rutherford -- and others I don't recognize, like the trio with Kiku Day on shakuhachi and Konoko Nishi on koto. Her harp is sometimes amplified, sometimes combined with live electronics. Interesting sounds, but they tend to fragment rather than cohere, making this rather erratic. B Michael Pagán/Colorado Saxophone Quartet: 12 Preludes & Fugues (2009 [2010], Tapestry): Pagán is normally a pianist, with something like eight albums since 1995. Here he's the composer, arranger, and producer -- if the Colorado Saxophone Quartet had anything else to their name I'd file this under their name and move Pagán into the title, like I do with Bach and Mozart. The CSQ has five members, but on any given cut only four play, with the alto sax split betwen Andrew Stonerock and Kurtis Adams, Clare Church on baritone, and Pete Lewis and Tom Myer juggling tenor and soprano spots. Still, for all the jazz musicians, the classical forms win out in the end, which I don't consider a compliment. B Matt Parker: Worlds Put Together (2012 [2013], Bynk): Tenor saxophonist, originally from Fort Lauderdale, came up through the Maynard Ferguson band (c. 2006), based in New York, first album. Basic band includes piano, guitar, bass, drums, and Julio Monterrey on alto sax, although he strips down on a couple not-quite-solo cuts and adds a party-load of vocals on another. All interesting, whether he's cooing a ballad or smashing up the joint. [Parker and pianist Jesse Elder also have a side project called Candy Shop Boys, which I'd like to hear something from.] A- Preservation Hall Jazz Band: That's It! (2012 [2013], Legacy): Institutional band, founded by Allan Jaffe half a century ago, led by bass-and-tuba-player Ben Jaffe these days. While devoted to New Orleans trad jazz, they wrote new songs this time. The title cut is dynamite, and the gospel-blues that follows is solid enough, not that their vocalists will win any prizes. If they were all that good this would be a breakthrough, but they aren't. B+(**) [advance] Daniel Rosenboom: Daniel Rosenboom's Book of Omens (2012 [2013], Nine Winds): Trumpet player, b. 1982, fifth album not counting a couple of "jazz-rock" groups he's been in (Plotz!, Dr. Mint), or side credits like the Industrial Jazz Group. Quintet with Vinny Golia (contra-alto clarinet, alto flute, tenor sax), guitar (Jake Vossier), bass (Tim Lefebvre), drums (Matt Mayhall). Golia is key, making a lot of noise for the trumpet to slice up. B+(***) Laila Salins/Anne Sexton: Elevator Into the Sky (2012 [2013], Alectrona): Salins is a singer with a couple previous albums. Sexton is the poet, 1928-74. Salins wrote music for twelve Sexton poems, played by a group directed by pianist Jamie Reynolds and featuring Marty Ehrlich on clarinet, soprano and alto sax -- by far the best thing here. I've never read Sexton, and don't find the words much more intelligible sung than printed in the booklet, in microtype on a halftoned gray background. Was initially tempted to complain about her overarching (cognate: operatic) stylings but I found them growing on me. Guitarist Jim Matus is also notable. B+(**) Reg Schwager: Duets (2002 [2011], Jazz From Rant): Guitarist, b. 1962, based in Toronto, had a 1985 album and since 2002 another handful. I wrote about his Trio Improvisations (with Michel Lambert) released this year and the label (or maybe the artist) sent me three older releases. These are all duets with bassists -- Don Thompson, Neil Swainson, Dave Young, Pat Collins. The bassists bring one or two songs each, there's a patch of original credits, and three standards. There's a sweet-toned delicacy to the guitar, and the bassists add depth and resonance. B+(***) Reg Schwager/David Restivo: Arctic Passage (2012 [2013], Jazz From Rant): Guitar-piano duets, mostly the guitarist's tunes although Restivo's piano dominates the play, straightforward as it is. Two old-timey covers are especially notable: "Hard Times Come Around No More" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band." B+(**) Reg Schwager Trio: Chromology (2010, Jazz From Rant): Guitarist, with Jon Maharaj on bass and Michel Lambert on drums. Eight Schwager originals, sandwiched between a trad opener ("Wayfaring Stranger") and closers from Stephen Foster and Victor Herbert. Schwager has a subtle but intriguing style, modestly and tastefully supported. B+(**) Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: In the Spirit of Duke (2012 [2013], Spartacus): The names here, featured on the front cover, are tenor saxophonist extraordinaire Tommy Smith and pianist Brian Kellock -- their 2005 duet album, Symbiosis, remains one of my favorites. The big band is Smith's pet project. They've released a bracing version of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (2009) and now this romp through Ellington's songbook, starting with "Black and Tan Fantasy" with three Ellington or Strayhorn arrangements of Edvard Grieg. Studious at first, they eventually loosen up, especially when they hit "Rockin' in Rhythm" and Smith doing the "wailing interval" between "Dimuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue." B+(***) The Summarily Dismissed: To Each! (2012 [2013], Laureniac Song): Ari Shagal describes herself as the "secret daughter" of Todd Rundgren and Laura Nyro (ok, maybe not literally, but she doesn't give us any more bio to go on). First album, original songs, would dub her a singer-songwriter but she only sings 4 (of 11), the other leads going to Fenma Faye (3), Matthew Lomeo (3), and Kenny Washington (1). Arrangements are jazzy, splashed with horns (Jessica Lurie is the only name I recognize), vibes, congas -- it's all a bit much to figure out, not that I mind listening to it. B+(*) The Swallow Quintet: Into the Woodwork (2011 [2013], ECM): Electric bassist Steve Swallow, of course; 23rd album since 1975 (AMG; Discogs lists 44 and doesn't have this yet). All original compositions, although there are some quotes that can get cheesy. Quintet includes Chris Cheek (tenor sax), Carla Bley (organ), Steve Cardenas (guitar), and Jorge Rossy (drums). B+(**) [advance] Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Expert CommentsRobert Dial Jr. has made several posts in education. I don't feel like quoting it all, but my post takes off from there.
Daily LogOrdered some books today:
I've linked to an interview with Braverman, and that one's been in the shopping cart ever since. Mike Konczal raved about the Mirowski book, and linked to the intro to Schlefer's (26 pages in a PDF). Alperovitz and Graeber are sort of activist strategy books more/less linked to the Occupy movement. I've read quite a bit by Alperovitz, and I'm a big fan of his work toward employee-owned businesses. Chopped a bit off a tree in the backyard. Only used a 6-foot ladder, so didn't get very high. Music today (RG): John Carter/Bobby Bradford, Franz Koglmann, Ellery Eskelin; (RS): Willie Nile. Sunday, July 21, 2013Weekend RoundupRather little and late, but some scattered links this week:
Also, a few links for further study:
Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture. Bought some cables to try to hook her notebook PC to the TV. Went to Abuelos for dinner -- overpriced Mexican, at least by Wichita standards, but not bad, then to two grocery stores. Came home and washed the car. Also started to trim some tree branches, but didn't get very far. Watched Endeavour and The Killing, where they caught the presumed killer then immediately splashed doubt on it, while Holder went into a self-destructive tailspin after acting like an asshole at the end of last/beginning of this episode. It's a pretty good cop show for ambience and the pacing is more realistic than it is for genius cops who solve crimes every episode, but you really feel the writers trying to kick you around: they seem to think fiction means they can make anything up as they go, instead of investing their characters with enough, well, character to be consistent and truthful. They'd rather play a guessing game with you than make sure the whole story coheres, and that eventually takes a toll. Music today (JP): Randy Brecker, Matt Parker; (RG): John Carter/Bobby Bradford; (RS): Jay-Z. Latter got almost exclusively negative reviews, and I didn't see any real reason to quarrel with them. The two jazz records got A-. Thought I had given Brecker's previous one an A- but turns out it was just high B+, so I may have compensated a bit this time. Then the Parker was better. Saturday, July 20, 2013Expert CommentsCam Patterson today:
I played the Lewis-Stampfel record, which Christgau gave a full A to, yesterday and was disappointed by it -- gave it B+(*) -- probably the first time ever I didn't respond to Stampfel as favorably as Bob. (Bob gave Stampfel's The Sound of America [**] earlier this year, and I wound up at A-. Lewis is a different story: I had 12 Crass Songs at A- but Bob gave it a C-, possibly the largest grade diff between us ever; on the other hand, Bob gave Em Are I and A Turn in the Dream-Songs A- where I had them at [**] and [***], respectively. But we both had the previous Lewis-Stampfel collab, Come on Board, at A-. All my Lewis is from Rhapsody or Bandcamp, so usual caveats apply.) So I was gratified that Cam had a similar reaction to this one (don't recall his previous comment, though). As for my not "nucleating," later. Then there was this post from Ioannis Sotirchos:
No real idea what he meant by that, other than he could have been referring to my "boring" comment further back. Milo responded:
I've corresponded with Sotirchos and he's always come off as a fan, so I don't know where the hostility comes from. Before I could, Greg Morton responded:
I finally wrote:
Got Raul Roque's name wrong, corrected above. Sorry about that. Christgau, obliquely referencing Sotirchos:
Needless to say, job prospects for anyone in their mid-20s have gone way downhill from when we were that age. (Looks like I about split the age difference between Bob and Milo.) Nicky got into a Ph.D. program in English at Brown, so there was some debate over how worthwhile that is, with a surprising lot of people pooh pooh-ing it. I didn't take a position, but Brown has one of the most prestigious programs in the country, so while getting a generic English Ph.D. may not be the best economic proposition, the chance to become one of the very top professors in the nation is something to pursue, regardless of the money. From my own experience, I don't regret the career that I had, but I do sometimes wonder whether it would have been more satisfying and worthwhile to have stayed in school, gotten my Ph.D., and taught and wrote books and all that academic stuff. I didn't do that because I got caught up in a stupid personal crisis and wasn't savvy enough to figure my way out of it, and had no real help or guidance. Sotirchos has developed a peculiar style of slang-slinging, the ineptness of which isn't fully explained by the fact that this isn't his native language (e.g., his implied equivalence of "motherfuckers!" and "kick out the jams!"). For example:
Blame the ****-shit on MSN's war on obscenity. Asked to clarify, he explains: "Basically, it breaks down to what I consider to be Bob's ridiculous overvaluing of much indie-rock/pop/rap (or what we used to call 'college rock' in the bad old days)." Richard Cobeen wrote:
Meanwhile, over on Facebook, Jan linked to this "Old Fashioned Custard Pie" recipe:
I think I have one of those pie shells in the freezer. Need to use old stuff there. I posted this on Facebook, with a link to the blog:
Daily LogMusic today (JP): Steve Swallow, Summarily Dismissed, Laila Salinas, Anna Borges/Bill Ward, Anne LeBaron, Michael Pagán, Randy Brecker; (RS): Mount Kimbie. Obviously not much else happened. Friday, July 19, 2013Book RoundupI accumulate these things both on bursts and occasionally when I stumble across something, but I've had trouble getting them collated into regularly timed chunks of forty. Once again, I have at least another batch's worth in the queue, and in burst mode to see what I may have missed that backlog is growing. One indication that I've waited too long this time is that I've already read two of these books (Rashid Khalidi, Pamela Olson). One more I've bought and hope to read soon (Jeremy Scahill), and three more are likely to follow (Gar Alperovitz, David Graeber, Philip Mirowski). And several more are possibles (e.g., Robert Kuttner, Michael Pollan, Hedrick Smith), and there are others I'd like to read but don't forsee the time or opportunity (e.g., Mark Blyth, William Dalrymple, Michael Hudson, Gary May, Seamus McGraw). Even George Packer might prove interesting. So one advantage of waiting so long is the opportunity to be more selective. Next books post, at least if it happens soon, won't be so lucky. Ervand Abrahamian: The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations (2013, New Press): Of course it was, something never much understood at the time. Previously wrote A History of Modern Iran (2008), so this is a sort of prequel, an attempt to understand where all the later mess came from. Gar Alperovitz: What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution (paperback, 2013, Chelsea Green): Historian -- the first to take a look at what the Hiroshima bombing meant for US-Soviet diplomacy -- but by now perhaps even better known for exploring the limits of conventional capitalism in America -- cf. America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (2004; 2nd ed, paperback, 2011, Democracy Collaborative). Especially interested in worker-owned companies, cooperatives, etc. Mark Blyth: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013, Oxford University Press): Dangerously bad, and dangerously popular, both right-of-center where wrecking the economy is viewed as a political virtue, and among centrists like Obama who don't know what's good for themselves. John Quiggin added a chapter to his Zombie Economics to try to beat it down. More here. Samuel Bowles/Herbert Gitlin: A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (2011; paperback, 2013, Princeton University Press): Bowles is one of the best-known leftist economists, editor (with Gintis and Melissa Osborne Groves) of Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success (paperback, 2008, Princeton University Press), and author of The New Economics of Inequality and Redistribution (paperback, 2012, Princeton University Press), as well as more general texts. Gintis has written a great deal on things like game theory and education. What they're trying to do here is situate the human capacity for cooperation within evolutionary theory, a tricky task as anyone who's bumped heads with sociobiology should be able to attest. Comes with a daunting amount of math, too. Richard Breitman/Allan J Lichtman: FDR and the Jews (2013, Belknap Press): Digs deep into this limited topic, attempting to "banish forever the notion that Franklin Roosevelt was a blinkered anti-Semite who made little effort to stop the Holocaust" -- not that there isn't some truth in those accusations too. Andrew Scott Cooper: The Oil Kings: How the US, Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (2011, Simon & Schuster): Focuses on the 1970s, when two "oil shocks" hit the stagflationed US economy -- the OPEC embargo of 1973 and the Iranian revolution of 1979. Using newly declassified documents, tracks how the US tried to cope with these events: not very well, no surprise there. William Dalrymple: Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 (2013, Knopf): Historian, has mostly written about India -- e.g., The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (2007) -- here turns his attention to what is now called the First Anglo-Afghan War, when the British initially occupied Kabul with ease but wound up with their entire mission army destroyed -- only one soldier escaped. I suppose the Americans think they've done better, but they haven't got out yet. Mary L Dudziak: Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000; paperback, 2012, Princeton University Press): Looks at the civil rights movement in light of America's cold war crusade. Communists had been first and foremost supporters of the civil rights movement in the US, and could make good propaganda use of US racism, ultimately becoming one reason the federal government intervened. Certainly not the only reason, but one. Chrystia Freeland: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (2012, Penguin Press): Inequality viewed from the top, the breakaway rise of the top 0.1%, and hopefully something on what this does to the rest of us. Author previously wrote Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (paperback, 2005, Abacus), on the making of the post-Soviet oligarchy. Joshua B Freeman: American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home 1945-2000 (2012, Viking): Parenthetically, "Penguin History of the United States," suggesting a part in a series, but the only other such book I've seen is Hugh Brogan's one-volume (up through the 1980s). Covers a big chunk of history in 512 pp. -- about the same size and subject as HW Brands' American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (2010, Penguin Books). Eduardo Galeano: Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (2013, Nation Books): After his classic book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Galeano has written a number of elliptical meta-histories -- John Berger calls them "bedtime stories -- of which this is either more or perhaps some sort of summation: a vignette for each day of the year, meant to reveal much more. Other books in this vein: Genesis: Memory of Fire, Volume 1; Faces and Masks: Memory of Fire, Volume 2; Century of the Wind: Memory of Fire, Volume 3 (all three: paperback, 2010, Nation Books); Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (same); Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (paperback, 2001, Picador); Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (paperback, 2007, Picador). Barbara Garson: Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession (2013, Doubleday): Not very well, but most working people have been practicing for the downfall for decades, as companies have squeezed them, cut down on benefits and kept up the pressure for more hours and more productivity. Garson talks of a "long recession" dating back to around 1970. Martin Gilens: Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press): Another book on the effects of growing income inequality in the US, an effect that is not just reflected but amplified in terms of political power. Previously wrote Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (1999; paperback, 2000, University of Chicago Press). Melvin A Goodman: National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism (paperback, 2013, City Lights): Ex-CIA analyst, wrote Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA (2008), certainly a good place to start on his bigger theme. David Graeber: The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013, Spiegel & Grau): Anthropologist, wrote the widely admired (or at least debated) Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011, Melville House); was deeply involved in Occupy Wall Street, so this is first-draft history from the middle of the action, hopefully with some deep thinking tossed in, especially about democracy. Raymond G Helmick: Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed (2004, Pluto Press): A Jesuit priest, Professor of Conflict Resolution, and mediator during the Camp David talks, places blame for the failure of the summit on the unwillingness of all parties to recognize applicable international law and position their goals within that framework. Based on what I know from Charles Enderlin: Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002 (2003, Other Press), and Clayton E Swisher: The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (2004, Nation Boks), that makes sense. Michael Hudson: Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents 1: Interviews and Speeches, 2003-2012 (paperback, 2012, Islet): Also wrote The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis (paperback, 2012, Islet), and going back a ways, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamental of US World Dominance (new edition, paperback, 2003, Pluto Press), an unorthodox economist who has been exceptionally sharp at predicting the 2008 collapse. This collects his map of the path to the brink, while The Bubble and Beyond shows us the chasm beyond. Neil Irwin: The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire (2013, Penguin Press): Focuses on central banks in the US (Ben Bernanke), UK (Mervyn King), and Europe (Jean-Claude Trichet), how they've handled the financial meltdown from August 2007 forward -- and hopefully pointing out how they haven't handled it very well. Daniel Cay Johnston: The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind (2012, Portfolio): Muckracker, previously wrote Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else (2003), and Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill) (2007). Here he discovers what Woody Guthrie knew all along: some people will rob you with a fountain pen. Dylan Ratigan is stalking the same beast, but appears to have fried his brain on the title: Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires From Sucking America Dry (paperback, 2012, Simon & Schuster). Rashid Khalidi: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013, Beacon Press): Could be about any number of areas in the Middle East where the US has sold arms and worked against peace -- Khalidi's Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Hegemony in the Middle East (2009) takes such a general view -- but this one is specifically about Israel/Palestine, focusing on three episodes where the US not only failed to bring Israel to the peace table but arguably collaborated with Israel's right-wing hawks to undermine the US's own stated intentions: Reagan's 1982 plan, Bush's 1991 Madrid Conference, and Obama's 2009 initiative. Mattea Kramer, et al. [National Priorities Project]: A People's Guide to the Federal Budget (paperback, 2010, Olive Branch Press): Basic info on what the budget is, how the process works, etc. -- subjects lots of people are woefully ignorant of. Doubt that it goes much further, but clearly fills a need. Robert Kuttner: Debtor's Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility (2013, Knopf): Not only is austerity economically counterproductive, at least within a recession, its attraction is purely political, as is the decision to follow its dictates. Kuttner knows this, and presumably has some worthwhile suggestions, but right now it is mainly a test of political will -- something Obama, in particular, doesn't seem to understand. Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? (2013, Simon & Schuster): Previously wrote You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010), and is credited as "the father of virtual reality." Argues that "the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class," and proposes some things -- short of Luddism, which probably wouldn't work anyway -- to ameliorate all that. I don't buy the causal argument, but he may have some points on networks exacerbated other trends that are primarily political. Gary May: Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (2013, Basic Books): An important story in the civil rights movement: why voting mattered, how bitterly white supremacists fought it, how their violence turned much of the nation against them, resulting in a landmark law the Supreme Court has just gone out of its way to gut. Mark Mazzetti: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (2013, Penguin Press): Book cover has a helicopter but it's really the drone that has transformed the CIA's mission from gathering and analyzing "intelligence" to a rogue organization of assassins. Seamus McGraw: The End of the Country: Dispatches From the Frack Zone (paperback, 2012, Random House): We're working through a cycle where as we deplete relatively easy oil and gas resources, we try to tap into more difficult resources with more advanced technology. One such is gas trapped in narrow seams of shale: only recently it's become possible to drill into those seams then horizontally to open up more of the seam; then a toxic chemicals is pumped into the well and an explosion set off, driving the chemicals to fracture the rock and release more gas (this is called "hydrofracturing" or "fracking"). This book focuses on Pennsylvania, where pretty much everything that could go wrong with this technology has gone wrong. Philip Mirowski: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013, Verso): As I recall, there was a fleeting instant during the early days of the meltdown when at least a few people started to wonder whether there wasn't something seriously flawed in capitalism -- at least our recent, highly financialized version of it -- at the root of the crisis. But it turned out to be nothing like the air of revolution kicked up by the 1930s: no sooner than the banks got bailed out their apologists reverted to the party line. Pankaj Mishra: From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (2012, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Focuses on Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (from Iran, despite his assumed name), Rabindranath Tagore (India), and Liang Qichao (China), figures who became prominent around 1900, which is to say well before the major anti-imperialist successes following WWII. I know a fair amount about al-Afghani, who's been given wildly erratic interpretations depending on which axe which writer wanted to sharpen. Ultimately, while such early reactions (at once modernist and reactionary) to European imperialism are interesting, I suspect they are fleeting as later generations learned more about both their enemies and themselves. Mishra has several books poking at this beast; most recently, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (2007). Pamela J Olson: Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair With a Homeless Homeland (paperback, 2013, Seal Press): American, from Oklahoma, graduated with a degree in physics then decided she wanted to see the world, picking Occupied Palestine in a perverse reaction to anti-American sentiments following Bush's invasion of Iraq. She lived in Ramallah for two years, collecting this informal, and increasingly politically astute, travelogue. George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Character sketches: tobacco farmer turned "new economy evangelist" in the rural South; Rust Belt factory worker; Washington insider "oscillating between political idealism and the lure of money"; Silicon Valley billionaire; interweaved with "biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics" -- I mean, how else would someone who's proven himself incapable of critical thought go about taking the temper of the times? Michael Pollan: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013, Penguin): The food guy discovers chemistry. Unlikely there is a single thing here not already in Harold McGee: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, not that he hasn't earned the right to tell the story his way. Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013, Nation Books): Previously wrote about US use of mercenaries in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007). Here goes from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia, the cutting edges of American "black ops" -- the undeclared, undebated skirmishes today that will become the quagmires of tomorrow. James C Scott: Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (2012, Princeton University Press): Examples of anarchist values against the backdrop of state-ruled society, a pragma for the real world, skepticism about the state rather than an idealist rejection of it. Previous books include: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987); Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999); The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2010). Roger Scruton: How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012, Oxford University Press): Acknowledges that environmental issues are real concerns, but insists on "local initiatives over global schemes, civil association over political activism, and small-scale institutions of friendship over regulatory hyper-vigilance." It would be easier to imagine such small-scale volunteerism working if corporations were also small-scale and local, and if communities were held together by mutual concerns instead of torn apart by the current inequitable distribution of wealth -- hitherto the main mission of conservatives. Tavis Smiley/Cornel West: The Rich and the Rest of Us (paperback, 2012, Smiley Books): While the Middle Class is being decimated, those who don't quite rank with them are getting hit hard too, if for no other reason than to put the fear of failure into the Middle Class. Authors do some radio; they should have much to rant about. Hedrick Smith: Who Stole the American Dream? (2012, Random House): Scottish journalist, previously wrote The Power Game: How Washington Works (1996) and Rethinking America (1995), as well as a couple books on Russia. Covers much the same material as Donald Barlett/Richard Steele: The Betrayal of the American Dream and several other books (some use Middle Class almost interchangeably). Ehud Sprinzak: Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (1999, Free Press): Not a new book, but first I've seen of it, and it does cover many well known examples where Israelis resorted to murder to advance of their political agenda -- Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir being pivotal figures in wrecking the 1990s Peace Process, and one can think of other cases going back to the heyday of the Stern Gang. Amelia Stein, ed: The American Spring: What We Talk About When We Talk About Revolution (paperback, 2012, Arcade): Brief "conversations with artists, activists, and thinkers," more or less tied to Occupy Wall Street but often notable in their own right. Occupy-themed books are starting to roll out, mostly short ones: Janet Byrne, ed: The Occupy Handbook (paperback, 2012, Back Bay Books); Carla Blumenkranz, ed: Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (paperback, 2011, Verso); Lenny Flank, ed: Voices From the 99 Percent (paperback, 2011, Red and Black); Susan van Gelder, ed: This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (paperback, 2011, Berrett-Koehler); Writers for the 99%: Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (paperback, 2012, Haymarket); Todd Gitlin: Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (paperback, 2012, It Books). David Stuckler/Sanjay Basu: The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (2013, Basic Books): Both authors are doctors, focused on public health and epidemiology. I've seen books that map out bad health outcomes from growing inequality (e.g., Richard Wilkinson/Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger). Austerity, a politico-economic doctrine that makes economics weaker, mostly at the expense of the poor, should have the same effect, and evidently does. Cass R Sunstein: Simpler: The Future of Government (2013, Simon & Schuster): Maybe those people complaining about the Obama administration's hyperactive regulatory syndrome actually have something to talk about. The co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the manifesto of "libertarian paternalism," has long been a prominent Obama adviser, and headed the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for three years. Here he touts all the stuff he did, or wanted to do, and why it's good for you, even if you never noticed the difference. One problem with Sunstein's brand of paternalism is that it's something liberals are always accused of, and while it may be a good thing up to a point -- the opposite camp seems to want to go out of its way to make government complex and mysterious, to sabotage any sense that it might be good for things -- it's easy for people who think they know what's good for you to get carried away. Odd Arne Westad: Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (2012, Basic Books): Survey of Chinese foreign policy since they invaded Burma in the 1760s to the present, not that you'd think there was much to write about before 1948 (or 1938). This may provide some fodder for those who see China as a big threat to yet another American Century. Hard to extrapolate, but history does come back in strange forms. I haven't done any new research here, but it occurs to me that some of the paperback notes -- reprints of books I wrote about when they originally appeared -- are so dated I should kick them out as soon as possible. Don't have any book page notes to link to -- as you may have noticed, those pages disappeared after some authors and/or their lawyers got huffy about "excessive" quoting. So here goes: Peter Beinart: The Crisis of Zionism (2012, Times Books; paperback, 2013, Picador): Liberal pundit with bad instincts but smart enough to sometimes think past them, as he did when the Iraq War soured, faces up to his beloved Zionism and finds a nation at war with his sense of justice, and even makes a case for limited BDS. Would be more useful if he didn't seem to be even more bothered by American Jews marrying goyim. Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (2012, Knopf; paperback, 2013, Vintage): Focuses on Helmand, home of a longstanding, never fully successful US hydro-project called "Little America," showing how wave after wave of US military power never managed to do anything constructive in one of the most intensively patrolled areas in Afghanistan. Steve Coll: Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012; paperback, 2013, Penguin Press): Corporate biography from the Exxon Valdez disaster to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, with plenty of bumps along the way, as well as extraordinary profits, much on the tricky relationship between bookable reserves and stock price (with the reserves moving ever deeper into unconventional oil), tenacious defense against suits, and intense political lobbying, especially to keep the government from doing anything about greenhouse gasses and global warming. Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (2012, Metropolitan Books; paperback, 2012, Picador): Mostly focuses on the rise of the Tea Party movement, and how it was funded and manipulated by a few billionaires. David Graeber: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011; paperback, 2012, Melville House): Anarchist anthropologist argues that credit/debt goes way back, predating money, not to mention much of what we call civilization. Consensus seems to be that he's "a brilliant, deeply original political thinker" (Rebecca Solnit) who occasionally goes off the deep end. Michael Hastings: The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2012, Blue Rider Press; paperback, 2012, Plume): The author's drinking binge with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff in Europe got the hero of the COIN surge in Afghanistan sacked, but even more devastating is his coverage of McChrystal's succesor, Gen. David Petraeus -- who managed to get away with his incompetence in Kabul, only to blow up a few months later. Tony Judt/Timothy Snyder: Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012; paperback, 2013, Penguin): Structured as an interview, laced with memoirs repeating others of Judt's post-ALS books (e.g., The Memory Chalet), but expanded to provide a final reckoning with 20th century European thought (and America, and Israel). His last book, one to savor. Paul Krugman: End This Depression Now! (2012; paperback, 2013, WW Norton): Reasserts the important insights of macroeconomic theory, especially Keynes and Minsky, but he also cares about the human cost of letting the depression bottom out. Could have gone deeper into the political roots of the nonsense you hear about debt and inflation and austerity instead of just demolishing them on economic grounds. Michael Lewis: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011; paperback, 2012, WW Norton): Thumbnail portraits of several countries suffering from the the finance meltdown: Greece, Ireland, Iceland, the United States. Very readable, draws sensible conclusions. Tracie McMillan: The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table (2012; paperback, 2012, Scribner): Research done by working for the companies that handle America's food. Lawrence Mishel/Josh Bivens/Elise Gould/Heidi Shierholz: The State of Working America (12th edition, paperback, 2012, ILR Press): Since its first edition in 1988, the basic stats and analysis of what it's like to work in America. Juliet B Schor: True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (paperback, 2011, Penguin Books): Reissue with new (and better) title of Schor's 2010 book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Schor previously wrote several books on how we are overworked and how we've been conditioned to overspend, so this is a proper summing up. Ben Shephard: The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (2011, Knopf; paperback, 2012, Vintage): A history of postwar relief efforts (mostly American) to deal with people displaced by WWII -- Jews you are probably vaguely familiar with, but there were many more, moved to escape armies, moved to work in plants (both voluntarily and impressed), some with homes to go to, many without. Ron Suskind: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (2011; paperback, 2012, Harper): Mostly on Obama and his inner circle of economic experts, especially the controlling influence of Larry Summers and the divided loyalties of Tim Geithner (actually, that's probably too charitable; Geithner actively sabotaged Obama orders that would have further curtailed the big banks). Could have done more with the title, since one of Obama's big mistakes was thinking that the economy would heal if only he could restore confidence in it, so therefore he projected an excessively optimistic stance, which crippled his options while fooling no one. For the record, I've read most of the books in the paperback section (mostly in hard cover). Specifically: Beinart, Chandrasekaran, Coll, Frank, Hastings, Judt, Krugman, Lewis, Schor, Shephard, and Suskind; i.e., not Graeber, McMillan, Mishel. Wouldn't have bothered writing up the latter ones had I not been interested. Daily LogAnother home day, hottest one in a while (95F and pretty humid), although I hear it was hotter in Boston and New York. (Yglesias thought he was being clever recommending that people move to Minneapolis, where it was only 84F, but a look at his map shows that it was cooler than that in El Paso, and cooler still in San Diego.) Worked on the books post, not getting it done until a bit after 2AM so I backdated it a few minutes. Also listened to some music, including today's EW selections. I didn't much like anything that Christgau recommended this week: three low B+(*) and one B-. Mailed Tatum asking whether this was Bob's worst week ever. Watched an rerun of Cold Case -- one of Laura's shows that I had only rarely watched. Found it rather creepy -- not the gay/AIDS theme but the efficiency with which they unraveled a 30-year-old case and coaxed a confession for which they had no evidence. Music today (JP): Scottish National Jazz Orchestra; (RG): Lurrie Bell, (RS): Peter Stampfel & the Worm All-Stars, Peter Stampfel/Baby Gramps, Jeffrey Lewis/Peter Stampfel, Ariel Pink's Hidden Graffiti, Lurrie Bell. Thursday, July 18, 2013Martin-Zimmerman RoundupSpecial Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman edition links:
Other links of some interest:
Finally, there's this Dexter/Zimmerman image. If you don't immediately get the joke, you probably don't know Dexter, a TV show now in its eighth season where the hero is a psychopathic serial killer who's not such a bad guy because he's been programmed only kill other serial killers who otherwise can't be brought to justice. Some debate as to whether Zimmerman is really worth Dexter's attention -- after all, he isn't really a serial killer . . . yet! Dexter, whose hero, by the way, works as a cop, is one of many examples of how far US popular culture has gone toward embracing real criminality. I date this back to a 1968 television series called It Takes a Thief -- I recall especially that the hero there used to describe prison time as "graduate school." He was released from jail to steal things for US government "secret intelligence agency." Of course, by then characters in I Spy (1965-68) and Mission Impossible (1966-73), not to mention the real life CIA, were doing similar things (admittedly, the CIA not as competently). It wasn't long after (1974) until Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson in Death Wish) was roaming the streets of New York hoping to get mugged so he could "defend himself" and kill the malefactors. I don't recall the first time I saw a movie where clearly identified good guys managed to get rich by ripping off drug dealers -- there must have been dozens of them, with some coming undone and others living happily ever after. Eventually you get to something like Breaking Bad where it ceases to even matter whether the hero is evil, except insofar as you wonder how evil can he really get, and how much of it you can stand. (I gave up on that one after the first season.) I don't blame popular culture. Rather, I think it reflects the nation's declining moral state, as exemplified by the CIA, the FBI, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the War on Drugs, Iran-Contra, the War on Terror, Obama's drone war and secrecy prosecutions, alongside which we've allowed and encouraged business to be ever more greedy and rapacious, while the vast expansion of gambling shows how we've come to view money as a plaything rather than a measure of work -- a confluence of greed and violence that an earlier America strived against, but which are celebrated today. And that's the world that made George Zimmerman, and some people -- I've already lost that Ann Coulter link, but you know she's one -- regard him as a hero. I'd worry more about them than Zimmerman. Daily LogAnother home computer day. Tried making a frozen fish-for-two dinner (salmon), which was so-so. Grilled some polenta and stir-fried lima beans, both better. Decided to move the Martin-Zimmerman items I had stashed away, so found some more and wrote some more. I had originally written that I gave up on Breaking Bad after three seasons. Laura remembered it differently. As I think on it, she didn't start watching until the third season. We picked up the first two on DVD, and I watched the first season and some of the second on DVD, and read some shit about the upcoming third season with spoilers for the rest of the second, and decided it just wasn't worth it. (Looking at Wikipedia's episode log, I've probably seen seven, maybe eight, episodes -- not sure if I remember Saul or just read about him, or just heard Laura talk about him. Definitely didn't get up to Gus, or deal with the airplane crash, or the death of Jesse's girlfriend/neighbor/landlady.) Leaning toward picking it up when the final half-season starts in a few weeks. Wondering how far they can go, and having watched Hannibal and a bit of Dexter (and for that matter most of Revenge), I figure I can take it. Don't know what this shit is doing to our brains. Probably no good, but that's true of lots of things I can't stand, like blockbuster action movies. On the cult of criminality, I could have pointed to a 1964-65 TV show called The Rogues, which was about an "international crime family" but was really just a series of scams to trick and fleece the very rich (often unscrupously so). The family heads were played by Charles Boyer, David Niven, and Gig Young, and while you rarely saw more than one of them in an episode, Robert Coote and Gladys Cooper provided continuity. So a marvelous cast, clever writing, more worldly than I could imagine at the time -- I don't think I've ever been so taken with a TV series. And really, they weren't much more roguish than Maverick (1957-62), but I guess it's a slippery slope. Music today (JP): Ketil Bjřrnstad, Vana Gierig, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Alan Jones/François Théberge; (RS) Daniel Wohl, Carmen Villain, Phoenix, Mayer Hawthorne. Wednesday, July 17, 2013Expert CommentsChristgau wrote:
I answered:
Sharpsm quoted me, writing:
Took me a while to track it down, but here's the list:
Daily LogAnother day wasted at the computer, listening to music and typing away -- should have a books piece before long. Watched Dexter for the first time -- in its eighth season, Laura has been following it from the beginning, although she may have missed a couple years. In case you don't know, Dexter continues America's love affair with criminality: the hero is a serial killer who only kills other serial killers, so that makes him, in the most relativistic sense, a good bad guy -- kind of like Obama, who only orders killing terrorists, although as a fictional character Dexter is a good deal more precise and artful than the CIA or US Special Forces. Also saw the The Bridge, which seems to be about a serial killer (not revealed yet, so he's not the hero) who tries to make clever philosophical points about immigration law, corruption, and the ever-venal media. I read that it's based on a Swedish-Danish series, so they've taken some liberties. Music today (JP): Ron Boustead, Deborah Latz, Eugenie Jones, Robin Bessier; (RS): Pet Shop Boys, Slava, Daniel Wohl (JG's pick). Tuesday, July 16, 2013The Coming Civil WarI took a look at Nate Silver: Senate Control in 2014 Increasingly Looks Like a Tossup, following a link from TPM with the grimmer title "Nate Silver Predicts GOP Holding 50-51 Senate Seats After 2014 Election." In a nutshell, he sees Democratic incumbents Begich, Hagan, Landrieu, and Pryor as vulnerable, with only the slightest chance of upsetting Republicans McConnell and Collins, and Republicans having huge edges in contests to replace retiring Democrats in Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia, versus a very slight (20%) chance of the Democrats picking up the empty Republican seat in Georgia. This is all fairly reasonable, but it's early and lots of things can change. I remember when Silver had a Kansas senate seat all but locked up for a likely Democrat -- before Kathleen Sebelius wrecked her career by becoming Obama's HEW Secretary, leaving a void that was filled by a Democrat who raised something like $20,000 against several million for Jerry Moran. And in 2012 he figured Republican seats in Missouri and Indiana were safe, and even at the very end he still had "red state" North Dakota in the Republican column. So it's still very early, and Silver knows that better than TPM. I read through this stuff not because it's very important. At this stage it isn't, although it does suggest that the Democrats' laissez-faire attitude toward party politics continues to hurt them (and needless to say us) by not recruiting and advancing credible candidates and backing them up with functional organizations (like the ones Clinton and Obama built for their own purposes). It's just that long ago I got about as deeply into political geography as Kevin Phillips (back when he wrote that hideously prophetic book, The Emerging Republican Majority), so I have an especially informed sense of the lay of the land. Still, I wouldn't be writing about this bit of trivia except as I was scanning through the comments I ran across this (from steelers01):
Then there is bevus:
I'm struck here not just by the level of delusion but by the itch to turn these fantastical notions into a gun fight. And also with the characterization of "worthless Americans" -- one of those cognitive steps in dehumanization that turns a person into a target, although it may also be a play on "wealthless," an accurate description of most Americans. The idea that the "worthless" masses are out to destroy is an old conservative trope -- true only insofar as the old order is inflexible and violent, which seems to be the commenter's conviction. As for the charge that liberals buy votes, I'm reminded that in 1860 the Republican Party's slogan was "vote yourself a farm, vote yourself a tariff" -- probably the best deal in American political history. (One that brought my great-great-grandfather to Kansas. He acknowledged the favor by naming his first son Abraham Lincoln Hull.) Back then the Republicans were the liberals, the Democrats the defenders and apologists of slavery -- roles that have pretty much swapped 150 years later. Indeed, in 1861 we did have a civil war, as the conservatives of the day fought to defend their racist empire from the "worthless people" who voted for farms and tariffs and an end to slavery. We haven't degenerated that far yet, but when conservatives see every attempt by voters to electe a government that serves the people's interest as a sign of their worthlessness, we aren't far off. Not every right-wing comment is as deranged as these two, but nearly every one is misinformed and/or careless. But even there the same memes have taken deep root: the notion that the nation is being sapped by undeserving parasites, that those people are always someone one doesn't know, and that we're better off hurting ourselves than letting them get away with it. So you start with ignorance and moral superiority, add spite, and pretty soon you're stockpiling arms and ready to start a civil war against the most powerless, hardest struggling people around. Sixty-some years ago Lionel Trilling said that the conservatism of the day amounted to nothing more than "irritable mental gestures." Today is has mutated into something far more insane, and far more dangerous. But it isn't enough to point out a few examples, like I did above. You need to understand that all this is caused by a deep breach in the trust that holds society together. It hasn't fully broken yet, otherwise you couldn't stand to go to work, to shop, to do anything outside your gated community and gun-secured house and nervous family. But we have hit the point where an awful lot of business is predatory, where companies tread all over workers and deceive customers, where no one can ever have enough money to ensure their future security, where people go around telling you you have to be armed to defend yourself against the government you voted for. Without trust our world falls apart, and once broken trust is all the harder to earn back. Daily LogTook Laura to accupuncture. Tried cutting out a piece of reflective bubble insulation as for the front windshield. Big, unwieldy thing, that didn't work very well. Will try to refine it a bit before I give up. Could use something to keep it tight up against the windshield -- maybe a couple pieces of foam that can be slid in above the dashboard? Went to Le Monde for lunch. Had a couple unfortunate run-ins with publicists. The net result looks like I'll have less pull than ever. Makes me think about giving up, but also makes me think about re-launching Terminal Zone. I'm in a state of great confusion, frustration, doubt, dissatisfaction, and today has been much worse than most. Did write a short post -- actually the first time I've done that on a Tuesday in quite some time. Had a lot of trouble figuring out where to go with it after the first two quotes, and took a break. Finished the jigsaw puzzle. Watched Copper and Under the Dome. Music today (JP): Art Hodes, Daniel Rosenboom; (RS): Ezra Furman, James Holden, The Ex. Monday, July 15, 2013Music Week/Jazz ProspectingMusic: Current count 21705 [21665] rated (+40), 599 [608] unrated (-9). Another big rated week, split between the Jazz Prospecting below and stuff that will go into July's Rhapsody Streamnotes column (the latter file currently at 27 titles). I'll probably try to slow down over the next month or two -- maybe do that basement remodel work I started on back in January and never did much with. Also need to work on some non-music writing: yesterday's post on the self-defense fetish, and Saturday's on the Kochs, and the one a week ago on civil rights -- Buckling Toward Injustice, you might want to re-read that with the Zimmerman trial fresh in your mind, as well as the post-Zimmerman Weekend Roundup just below -- are all things that could be expanded greatly. Also thinking about a long road trip, which would really throw a wrench into the music machinery. But the jazz queues are down to about half-full. No Monday records in the "unpacking" this week, because I didn't get any. No A-list records this week, and only David Murray at high B+, so I'll re-run a cover from last month's Rhapsody Streamnotes. Don't have the actual record, which is why I reviewed it there instead of here. Other new jazz records I didn't get, but are in the Rhapsody Streamnotes, file: Eliane Elias: I Thought About You (Concord); Zeena Parkins: The Adorables (Cryptogramophone); John Scofield: Überjam Deux (Emarcy); Miguel Zenón: Oye!!! Live in Puerto Rico (Miel Music). I used to be on all those lists (not that it hasn't always been a chore to get Zenón's records) -- more evidence that we're in an age of diminishing returns. Susanne Abbuehl: The Gift (2012 [2013], ECM): Singer, b. 1970 in Switzerland; third album since 2001. Group includes Matthieu Michel (flugelhorn), Wolfert Brederode (piano, harmonium), and Olavi Louhivuori (drums, percussion) -- rather spare accompaniment. Abbuehl wrote the music for poems by Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, and Emily Bronte, plus one each by Wallace Stevens and Wolfgang Lackerschmid. So spare that it seems to all hang on the words, something I often have trouble following. B [advance] Brian Andres and the Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel: San Francisco (2013, Bacalao): Drummer, based in San Francisco, second album, with a large band, including several who contributed songs: Aaron Germain (bass), Jamie Dubberly (trombone), Javier Cabanillas (conga), Carlos Caro (bonga, other percussion), Gloria Amaral (vocals). B+(**) Tim Bedner: Of Light and Shadow (2012, self-released): Guitarist, teaches at Carleton University, seems to be his first album, a trio with Norman Glaude (bass, chromatic harmonica, percussion, synth strings) and Jeff Asselin (drums, percussion). Back cover suggests the whole thing is meant as a suite. Hangs together fine, the harmonica a nice touch. B+(*) Michel Camilo: What's Up? (2013, Okeh): Pianist, b. 1954 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; twenty records since 1985. This is solo, something he's done more than a few times in the past. Seven originals, four covers, his "Take Five" especially enjoyable. B+(**) Raquel Cepeda: I'm Confessin' (2012 [2013], Peonia Music): Standards singer, from Venezuela, holds a degree in geological engineering and a daytime job in the Texas oil industry. First album, some in Spanish, some sambas, "How Deep Is the Ocean?" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me." Didn't care for the languorous "Bésame Mucho" but later cuts are winning. B+(*) Ryan Cohan: The River (2013, Motéma Music): Pianist, studied at DePaul, based in Chicago, fifth album since 1997. Uses three horns for a frequently lush sound -- John Wojciechowski (tenor and soprano sax, flute, alto flute), Geof Bradfield (tenor and soprano sax, bass clarinet), and Tito Carrillo (trumpet, flugelhorn) -- and adds Samuel Torres' percussion to Kobie Watkins' drums for that Latin tinge. Still, strongest when the piano is out front, as in "Last Night at the Mannenberg." B+(**) Dan DeChellis Trio: Strength and Anger (2013, self-released): Pianist, b. 1970, twelfth record since 1999. Nearly everything here is built on rumbling chords, a rhythm-first approach that sustains interest. With Scot Hornick on bass, Steve Decker on drums. B+(**) Eldar Djangirov: Bach Brahms Prokofiev (2012 [2013], Motema): Pianist, b. 1987 in Kyrgyzstan; moved to Kansas City at age 10, and was touted as a prodigy at age 18 when his first Sony Masterworks album appeared (after two previous records on D&D). It may be unfair to typecast him as one of those Soviet products who moved from classical to jazz -- he's said the first piece he recalls playing was "C Jam Blues" -- but he's paid his dues on the classical repertoire, and probably figured "why not?" when the label asked for a classical release. Solo piano, moldy classics from obvious sources with no discernible jazz interest, capped with 1:07 of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee." B- [advance] Eldar Djangirov: Breakthrough (2012 [2013], Motema): His classical album is a snore, but the trio cuts here establish both his primary interest in jazz and his prodigious command of the piano. Two cuts with a guest -- Joe Locke on vibes, and Chris Potter on tenor sax -- are even better: I'm not sure I've ever heard Potter so frenzied, and I've heard him play a lot. Also promising that his closing "Good Morning Heartache" holds your attention even after he slows it way down. Two caveats: when he gets cranking he's still more likely to remind you of Rimsky-Korsakov than Tatum or Hines; and the last time I can recall that title was on an exceptionally great Don Pullen album, and this isn't anyway near that. B+(**) [advance] Michael Hackett Quintet: New Point of View (2012 [2013], Summit): Trumpet player, originally from Oregon, spent some time in New York but not clear where he is now -- most side credits are with Buselli/Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, so maybe Indianapolis? Second album. Quintet with sax, piano, bass, and drums -- the classic hard bop lineup but more of a postbop feel, especially in the harmonics between the horns. B+(*) Drye & Drye: Open Letter (2011 [2013], NCM East, 2CD): Baritone saxophonist Howard Drye and trombonist Brian Drye -- the latter is better known, playing in groups like the Four Bags and Bizingas. Each wrote a full CD's worth of songs, for a sextet adding Jeff Hermanson (trumpet), Nate McGinniss (clarinet, alto/soprano sax), Dan Fabricatore (bass), and Vinnie Sperrazza (drums). Several songs have dedications, mostly to Ellingtonians, also Horace Silver, but the interplay is more free -- especially on Howard's disc. B+(**) Alan Ferber: March Sublime (2012 [2013], Sunnyside): Trombonist, fifth album since 2001, previously with septet and nonet groups -- here he goes whole hog with a big band. Six originals, two covers -- Björk and Hoagy Carmichael, the latter the nicest piece here, perhaps because it comes off a bit lighter, but also it comes late in the album, after the postbop murk started to cohere, and the star-packed NY band -- the reed section: John O'Gallagher, Rob Wilkerson, John Ellis, Jason Rigby, Chris Cheek -- has started to shine. B+(*) David Murray Infinity Quartet: Be My Monster Love (2012 [2013], Motéma): Paul Krugman likes to refer to Joseph Stiglitz as "an insanely great economist"; Murray, for much the same reason, is an insanely great tenor saxophonist: his solos here are monumental, taking off in flights of fancy that no one else can think of much less do. Unfortunately, he decided to do songs here, or more precisely, of texts improvised into something song-like. Three of the texts come from Ishmael Reed, whose own deadpan authority made them work on Conjure. Here, Macy Gray sings the title piece in her own idiosyncratic mien, and Gregory Porter tries to croon the others, plus a bit by Abiodun Oyewode on the importance of children. The texts mean well, but the hymn about "making a joyful noise" is doubly ironic: if only Porter would shut up and let the sax man wail. B+(***) Carline Ray: Vocal Sides (2008-11 [2013], Carlcat): Singer, b. 1925; father played in James Reese Europe's band. She studied at Juilliard, playing piano and bass. She joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in 1946, sang in Erskine Hawkins' Orchestra, and eventually formed a trio with Edna Smith and Pauline Braddy. She married Luis Russell in 1956. No previous albums under her name, but I see a few widely scattered credits: Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Ruth Brown -- those three on bass -- and more recently vocals for David Berger and Catherine Russell (who took an interest and produced this album). Not a notable voice, but she can get to you, and while I don't care for the gospels, at least I've heard her vitriolic version of Williams' "Lazarus." B+(**) Kristin Slipp + Dov Manski: A Thousand Julys (2013, Sunnyside): Singer and keyboardist, both from Maine, studied at New England Conservatory, now based in Brooklyn. First reaction was that this may be some kind of joke: Manski's arrangements of very familiar standards are sketchy at best, and Slipp has trouble finding all the notes. Then it started growing on me, partly because so many of the songs are irresistible -- "I Get Along Without You Very Well," "You Go to My Head," "The Way You Look Tonight," "I Concentrate on You," "Just One of Those Things," "End of a Love Affair," opening and cosing takes of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" -- and partly because something in her approach reminded me of Lisa Sokolov. Nowhere near that audacious, of course, and not all that unlikely this will turn plain annoying. [PS: Some further research: I have her Twins of El Dorado record at B-; also didn't like the one cut I sampled from The Adorables, but I don't have the record.] B+(**) Rick VanMatre: Lines Above (2013, Summit): Saxophonist, lists soprano before tenor; first album, backed by piano (Kim Pensyl), bass, drums, vibes on five cuts, percussion on one. Mostly postbop, occasionally cutting in something a bit more avant. B+(*) Brahja Waldman's Quartet: Cosmic Brahjas/Closer to the Tones (2011-13 [2013], self-released, 2CD): Alto saxophonist, from upstate New York but based in Montreal. Second album (or second and third), the quartet on the first disc including piano (Shadrach Hankoff), bass, and drums; on the second, the pianist is replaced by tenor saxophonist Adam Kinner. Both discs are loose-free, soft-edged, interesting, with a few more interruptions on the first. B+(**) Mike Wofford: It's Personal (2012 [2013], Capri): Pianist, b. 1938, about twenty albums since 1966. Solo, four originals (including one for Earl Hines), nine covers (including a medley of two songs named "Once in a Lifetime," including the Talking Heads one). B+(*) Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Expert CommentsFrom Cam Patterson:
I easily recoup the cost of my Rhapsody subscription by making more informed decisions as to what is really worth buying. In particular, I'm no longer buy (mostly bad) records just to find out what they sound like (usually not very good). Of course, there is a lot of stuff not on Rhapsody that I could still waste money trying out, but I don't have that kind of money (at least not anymore), and at some point I figure I have to draw a line. And, by the way, even when I was buying a dozen or more records per week, I almost never paid $15 for any of them. That was a galling price point when it first appeared twenty-some years ago as the premium for the supposed benefits of CDs (and has returned lately, plus some inflation, as the premium for the supposed advantages of vinyl). I posted the following:
Milo commented back (at least I got this in mail):
Daily LogMonday, so put Jazz Prospecting together. Had some rain in the morning, which pulped the unbagged newspaper, so missed the Wichita Eagle today. Laura hoped to go to the "Justice for Trayvon Martin" demonstration, but didn't make it. I hear that 450 people turned out -- strikes me as a remarkably good showing. High in the 80s, so that probably helped. I cooked up a batch of curried parsnip soup -- one of Laura's favorites -- and tried a Chinese pickle recipe on some cucumbers and green beans. (I thought it best to cook the green beans, although when I finally looked at the recipe it called for raw. Good chance the cooked ones will never revert to anything resembling crunchy, but should absorb the flavored brine better.) They're supposed to sit for four days. I'd like to do more; in fact, I'd love to pick up a proper Chinese pickling vase. Watched Endeavour (the early Morse Mystery spinoff). Went out for some groceries, then watched Longmire later. Music today (JP): Reg Schwager (three albums); (RG): Ray Anderson; (RS): Ciara, Mavis Staples. Laura played one of Anderson's BassDrumBone records tonight, which got me to search him. Found the first Pocket Brass Band record, and had to play it. Sunday, July 14, 2013Weekend RoundupSome scattered links this week. But first, this week's Richard Crowson cartoon, which would have been a fine illustration for last night's Koch post, or indeed on anything else on Kansas over the last two years: Today's "Opinion Line" was roughly divided between comments critical of the Kochs and ones that echoed their smug lines: "I fail to understand why it is 'greed' to want to keep your hard-earned money but not 'greed' to take someone else's money." "The biggest problem with this country is that there are too many people sitting in the wagon rather than pulling the wagon. Unless our government quites giving able-bodied people free rides, we're doomed financially." Somehow I find it hard to think of Charles Koch's income as "hard-earned money," and if anyone's "riding in the wagon" it is he. In other Wichita news, five people were shot last night, one dead, but the paper had no details. Earlier a guy was killed in his apartment, where he retreated after having fired shots in a local K-Mart. Not clear on the details there, either. Then there was this front-page article: Lawyer says robbery victim 'stepped over the line': Someone tried to rob a coin shop, using a BB gun that looked like a 9mm handgun. The clerk handed over $2,800 in loot, then pulled out a real gun, and they fought over it, leaving both clerk and robber shot, but the robber was able to break free and escape. The clerk then took another gun and shot the fleeing robber in the back. The robber survived: he was quickly caught, was convicted of the robbery, and sentenced to 12 years (a long time, but he had a history and was on probation). Hard to say that the latter act was self-defense, but for once I wouldn't be inclined to charge him (even if the robber had died). The continuity of the acts counts for something, and it's hard to recognize just when the threat ends (especially if you've been threatened with a gun, beaten, and shot). On the other hand, I worry that the conclusion armed robbers will draw from this is to shoot sooner, and I'll note that if the clerk hadn't had the guns nobody would have been shot. Our ultra-lax gun policy is creating a cult of aggressive self-defense that will lead to a sort of arms race between criminals and target-victims, with lots of borderline cases and extraneous victims. I wrote about a case a few months ago -- Over a Barrel -- where a Wichita man named Cheever was charged with second degree murder. He took a gun and a friend with him, entered the back yard of a neighbor (Gammon) he suspected of stealing his motorcycle. Gammon challenged the intruder, and had his own gun for emphasis. The intruder, Cheever, then shot and killed Gammon in his own backyard and claimed he did so in self-defense. The trial was underway when I wrote, so I didn't know the verdict then, but the jury bought the self-defense argument, so Cheever was acquitted. Had Gammon shot first he almost certainly would have been acquitted too, if indeed he had even been charged. It occurs to me now that if Cheever had intended to kill Gammon from the start -- and they seem to have had a long history of mutual hatred -- what he did was a perfectly good scheme to get away with it. As you all no doubt know by now, a while back a white guy in Florida, George Zimmerman, shot and killed a unarmed black teenager and claimed it was self-defense. (For a straightforward account of the uncontested facts of the case, see this piece by Roberto Martinez.) Since Florida is a state with a sordid past of allowing white guys to kill blacks and get away with it, this became a big news story, and it ultimately resulted in Zimmerman being charged with and tried for second-degree murder (with a manslaughter option). The jury acquitted Zimmerman. It's not clear what this proves: one possibiity is that Florida is as racist as ever, but another is that we've gotten very soft in the head over claims of self-defense. (Here's a thought experiment: what if Trayvon Martin, the black teenager, had his own gun and had shot first?) TPM quoted a letter from "a criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin," who tried to figure out what happened and attributes much of it to nuances of law specific to Florida:
Well, it's a system that we've talked ourselves into constructing because we've bought into the argument that people need to be armed to defend themselves. Lots of things go into that argument: declining respect for the law, for the police, and for the courts; distrust of government, which is often justified because the government reports to, and is preoccupied with, the rich. This is yet another area where increasing inequality has been poisoning the culture: today's mantra is we have to be responsible for ourselves, and can only depend on ourselves, which soon degenerates into the notion that the last true friend and ally we are allowed is a gun. The more people with guns there are, the more people get shot: accidentally, of course, like this incident, where two toddlers were playing "cops and robbers," or in all sorts of fuzzy gray areas, like Zimmerman and Cheever. And this, in turn, has led to all sorts of perverse scenarios, like the "recommendation" of the defense attorney above. My own theory is that the right, attempting to cling onto power despite the fact that virtually nothing they've done in the last 30 years has worked even on its own terms, have actively adopted a program of inculcating mass stupidity. This is just one of many examples. But I also have to admit that I can't hear the words "self-defense" without thinking of Israel. If you want some idea of how far a "right to self-defense" can go toward covering up cold-blooded murder, take a look at Israel's recent history (like ever since Qibya in 1953). On to the links:
Had to cut this short because I lost a few hours to a power outage along the way -- not to mention the long preamble. Leaves that much more for later, I guess. Daily LogRained today, even kept the temperature down -- if I'm reading this right, high this afternoon was 81F (but high for the day was 85F just after midnite), down from over 100F the last few days. I balked from taking a walk with Laura -- sun came out and it was pretty humid, but I did 15 minutes on the treadmill to make up. Hadn't done that in years, so basic things like balance were a bit dicey. Need to do more of that. Wrote quite a bit on guns (above), then started to gather a few links. Then the power went out: was down about two hours, from 6:45 to 8:45, but seemed longer. Trimmed on the hedges a bit, and tried working on the puzzle using my headlamp. When power came back on, had some trouble getting the computers up right again. Finally posted the above, rather arbitrarily cutting it off. Watched The Killing and the first two episodes of Under the Dome. Music today (JP): Alan Ferber, Eldar Djangirov, Michael Hackett, Rick VanMatre, Tim Bedner. Saturday, July 13, 2013Land of the Economic FreeBig article in the Wichita Eagle earlier this week: Charles Koch launching Wichita campaign about economic freedom, government overreach. Koch is the billionaire who along with his brother David Koch inherited Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in America. While David Koch is cultivating his links with the power elite in New York City, Charles Koch lives in humble Wichita and runs the family company. Both Kochs are concerned citizens. They do a lot of philanthropy, but in Wichita that mostly means we have a lot of buildings reminding us who the richest guy in town is. And they spend a lot of money on politics, not just to promote their own narrow interests -- they have lawyers and lobbyists for that, not to mention Rep. Michael Pompeo and Sen. Jerry Moran -- but to share and spread their unique insights into what makes a nation rich. After all, it worked for them, so why shouldn't it work for everyone else? OK, you may think that just because they inherited an oil company and you didn't, they had some sort of unfair advantage over you, but their real secret is that they grew up believing in the gospel of "economic freedom." (Their father, after all, was Fred Koch, who not only built their oil company but set a model for them as a big backer of the John Birch Society.) The Kochs have been pushing this line for a long time now. Their most prominent front group is called Americans for Prosperity. Given their success, and the uncontroversial cloaking they use for their message -- I mean, who in American isn't for prosperity? or economic freedom? -- you have to wonder what they're really up to. The article explains:
As near as I can tell (and I'll note that Koch wrote more about it here), Koch's notion of "economic freedom" is pretty much limited to the freedom of business owners (like himself) to run roughshod over everyone else. Nothing aggravates a boss more than the possibility that someone else can tell him "no" -- least of all the government he thinks his taxes supports. Maybe he accepts the limits of the market -- that a customer may choose not to buy, or a worker may choose not to work for him -- but if the market will bear it, he's saying government has no business butting in, and that when it does it's trampling on his economic freedom, undermining his prosperity. That much may be even be true, but then he makes an intellectual leap that is invalid: he assumes that when government limits his prosperity, it is limiting the overall prosperity of the whole nation. In other words, he is assuming that the gain that government denied him -- the gain that he should have been free to realize -- would not have come at anyone else's expense. That may indeed be the case, but much more likely isn't: with few exceptions, government regulations exist to protect someone against some possible abuse of power -- laws against fraud, for instance, or regulations against pollution (the victims of which are potentially all of us). There is some reason to think that even Koch recognizes that some of his fellow entrepreneurs are up to no good. From the same piece:
But if he was sincere about opposing "cronyism" in Washington -- and Topeka and Wichita, where his voice is even louder -- you'd think he'd start a campaign to get the corrupting influence of money out of politics. But he's not articulating anything like that: the only time he actually knuckles down and works against "cronyism" is when it's seen as an alternative to the oil business: when it comes to stopping ethanol subsidies and wind power, he'll stand on the highest principle available. But mention a carbon tax, which is a relatively benign way of assigning an externalities cost to the conversion of fossil fuels into a gas that turns the entire planet into a greenhouse, he goes ballistic. (As Jane Mayer recently documented, Koch is the guy pushing an "anti-carbon tax pledge" among Republicans.) Aside from his hypocrisy about cronyism, is it really true that no other company is advancing Koch's agenda? When you get down to the actual candidates that Koch puts money behind -- Pompeo and Moran are prime examples because they invested so heavily in both -- what you get is your basic "tea party" Republican, the same sort getting backing from corporate cranks all over the country. Nor for all his ideological pretensions is Koch all that much of a purist: he's happy enough with Republicans like Sam Brownback, who's squishy on wind power and absolutely nuts on abortion, and Tim Huelskamp, who's squishy on nothing and so anti-government he feels threatened by the PATRIOT ACT. He was even on board with Mitt Romney -- he sent out memos to all his employees directing them to vote Republican. Of course, "economic freedom" is a fine slogan. I'm for it, too, but you have to put these things into a viable context. Freedom is a wonderful state, but not at someone else's expense. You can't have a viable society if everyone is allowed to do anything they think might be in their interest. Such a society would be rife with crime, fraud, deception, and chaos: conditions under which prosperity would collapse. One might assume that even Koch wouldn't go that far, but I can't assure you. (Back in the 1970s one of my jobs was to typeset reprints of Murray Rothbard books for Koch. Rothbard was so opposed to government he proposed that justice be privatized, so each and every business would have to contract with its own police, courts, etc. How this differs from mafia cartels was never clear to me. Of course, Koch's thinking may have evolved since then, but he hasn't strayed much.) On the other hand, it certainly is the case that some government acts -- laws, regulations, discretionary enforcement -- do inhibit economic freedom for no good reason, and I would be happy to join Koch in opposing them. The main things I can think of are patents, which create artificial monopolies and encourage trolls and other parasites (including one's own lawyers). I also worry about excess concentration of corporate power, which can distort free markets even if it is well short of monopoly, and can also leads to unfair relations with employees. Interestingly, Koch himself expressed concern about "anything that reduces the mobility of labor." Of course, given that his statement immediately followed his complaint about the minimum wage, he may only be concerned with the downward mobility of labor. Otherwise, were we to take his statement at face value, we might decide that there was a need for more government intervention. For instance, one thing that would make labor more mobile would be to make education freely available (and not just the cost of education but a stipend to live on). That way, when new job opportunities open up, people can (relatively painlessly) flock to them. Another would be to make it easy to move from one place to another with more job opportunities. Nor should be labor mobility be limited to changing jobs. We should also encourage workers to go into business: by reducing the entry cost, by making it easier for new businesses to raise capital, by reducing and/or buffering the risks of failure. These are all examples where greater "labor mobility" would result in workers finding more productive jobs, and that in turn would directly add to the prosperity of the nation -- as well as the more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth. But that sort of "labor mobility" isn't something the private sector can ever be expected to do on its own. Businesses see labor as an expense: something to be squeezed, automated, or outsourced. Only some benign charitable organization could deliberately decide to systematically improve the upward mobility of labor, and for all practical purposes that means government. Of course, a given government may be unwilling to help workers -- indeed, ours has largely been captured by corporate interests that differ little in this regard from the Koch brothers. But if you posited a real democracy, where every voter is free and able to understand and advance his or her self-interest, the government they would elect would work toward greater and more widespread prosperity, and it would do something much like what I just described. The biggest intellectual con job of the last few decades is the notion that business owners are "job creators" and we should cater to their every whim else they withdraw even the paltry jobs they currently offer. There is much more to this than taxes, but tax policy offers a clear example of what happens when we follow their prescriptions. Government, at least in theory, belongs to all of the people, and serves all of the people, whereas companies belong to the tiny (and mostly rich) fraction that owns them. When we cut taxes on the rich, as we've done repeatedly since 1999 -- Clinton's big tax cut on capital gains, followed by all the Bush cuts, then the Obama cuts -- the rich keep (and accumulate) more and we (via the government) get less. And when government revenues decline, so do services -- starting with those that serve the poorest, least powerful people among us. In Koch's Kansas this same dynamic has been carried out to even greater extremes: Brownback has cut the income tax and carved out a complete exemption for "small business" income (Koch's $40 billion empire is privately held, so it qualifies, as does the real estate and gambling fiefdom of Wichita's other billionaire); meanwhile sales taxes, which are paid by the "takers" Romney complained so about, the 47% of Americans who don't make enough money to owe income taxes on, have increased. This is supposed to make Kansas friendlier to business -- to increase our "economic freedom," to use the Koch parlance. The net result so far is that education is becoming more expensive and other services scarcer. Meanwhile, any business that will consider moving to Kansas will insist on kickbacks from a shrinking pie, and nearly every business in the country is enjoying that race to the bottom. Boeing, for instance, left Wichita because they were getting sweeter deals in Texas and South Carolina. Pizza Hut moved to Colorado to take advantage of another sweetheart deal. Even Koch has played that game, threatening to move their headquarters to Houston unless the public provide direct air connections. But at least they're still here: nearly every other important company that was built here has either moved out or sold out -- Beech, Cessna, Lear Jet, and others have just become profit centers for global capital, which has no community interest in Wichita. The thing I find most striking about the Kochs isn't how narrow-minded and ultimately destructive their ideology is, but how naturally they come by it. They were born rich and sheltered, moving straight into the company throne, and yet they think they earned every cent of it, going so far as to complain about "the culture of dependency" that those who weren't born rich like them are mired in. It's part of human nature to assume that other folks are pretty much like yourself. Still, it's remarkable that anyone so unique would be unaware that they're not the ideal template for the rest of the world. "Economic freedom" works great for the Kochs. But it's not the be-all, end-all answer for everything. It's a part, possibly just a small one, but only if you get past the rest of the claptrap they spout. And all the money they put behind it just gives the lie away. They have to propagandize their ideology because you won't believe it otherwise. And they think they can because they have all that money, plus utter contempt for democracy and nearly all of the people it represents. Here's a shorter version that approaches what I wanted to say in a slightly different way: a "letter to the editor" by Jack E. Niblack, published in the Wichita Eagle today: I can certainly understand Charles Koch's frustration with and disdain for an economic and political system that has only allowed him to become a multibillionaire ("Charles Koch to launch Wichita ad campaign," July 10 Eagle). I've no doubt that were it not for ill-conceived, shortsighted, and unnecessary rules and regulations that make it more difficult for Koch's companies to pollute our air and water, demand that meters used to determine how much oil his companies are extracting from Native American lands be calibrated, and require him to pay workers, at a minimum, the lavish sum of $7.25 per hour, he would have attained the status of multitrillionaire. Perhaps he would then be more successful at buying national elections. He's already been quite successful at the state level. Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture. Ate at Red Lobster. Did some grocery shopping. Warm and humid early on, turning to hot. Declined a chance to see Beasts of the Southern Wild on TV: heard mixed things about it, the negatives more persuasive. Finally settled into writing the Koch post above. One thing I didn't work in was this Charles Koch quote: "We are under attack from various directions, both with threats of violence against us personally, and with threats of attacks on our businesses." Just like Koch to play the victim, just as it was just like him to insist that no other corporation is standing up against cronyism like his is. Another thing I didn't work in: according to Steve Coll's book, ExxonMobil decided to support a carbon tax, at least as the lesser evil to cap-and-trade. Otherwise, there's not a lot of political distance between the two companies, so Koch's fanaticism on the carbon tax stands out. Coll also quotes ExxonMobil execs routinely denying that they want any special favors from Washington -- all they want is a level playing field, with no government-picked winners (least of all solar or wind), etc. Of course, the US oil industry only exists (at least as it does) because the government allowed private ownership of oil fields. The result of that law led to depletion of those fields in record time -- Spindletop dried up in something like three years -- but another result was the creation of the most conceited, self-entitled, and arrogant class of business executives in the history of mankind. Spent pretty much the whole week dicking with the metafile, so feels good to actually write something. Finished Gretchen Eick's Dissent in Wichita. Not sure what comes next, but one of these days I have to read Stiglitz. Music today (JP): Dan DeChellis, Drye & Drye; (RS): Foals, more Foals, Primal Scream (big surprise, for me at least). Friday, July 12, 2013Expert CommentsRyan Maffei's paean to the Expert Witness commenters ("the witnesses"). Presumably I'm one of the "light sprinkle of professional cohorts and descendents." Also found Ryan's My Super Punctual 2012 Rundown, sensibly dated March 15, 2013; and 25 45s from the '50s (as per Christgau). Daily LogSaw my cardiologist today. Had an echogram first, which he says is almost "a carbon copy" of my last one, two years ago. Also said something about the heart being "stiff" which I let go since he seemed to generally be positive. Googled "stiff heart" later and found cardiac amyloidosis. Presumably I don't have that, since the life expectancy there is less than a year. I think these guys are more aggressive (not to mention too greedy) to let a dying patient wait six months until next appointment. Weight was down six pounds since six months ago, but some of that is probably clothes (July vs. January). Need to lose more. Music today (JP): Michel Camilo; (RS): Frikstailers, Miguel Zenón, Disclosure. Thursday, July 11, 2013Daily LogRained a little this morning, which broke the heat streak, at least until the sun came out -- even so, 93F seems to be the top. Watched the third episode of Under the Dome. Guess I should catch up on the first two. (I never watched Lost, so I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about, but that's the vibe I got. Also noticed a similarity between the bearded bad-guy/anti-hero and Banshee.) Also two episodes of Futurama -- not that good. Music today (JP): Ryan Cohan, Susanne Abbuehl; (RS): Bell X1, Anais Mitchell (bumped to A-), Hurray for the Riff Raff, Frightened Rabbit, White Mandingos, Dessa, Inc. Wednesday, July 10, 2013Expert CommentsDon't know about sharing this, but here's a mid-year list from Tiny Machine Tapes:
Also have a more conventional list from The Guardian:
From Clash (link to "part three" will point you to the first two parts):
From Gigwise:
From Paste (Josh Jackson):
From Potholes in My Blog:
From Rolling Stone (not numbered, but probably ordered):
From Spin (looks alphabetical):
From State (Irish mag; I'm adding it to the metafile).
Also ran across a Chuck Eddy essential old school rap album list, from Spin.
Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture, then to YMCA where we had appointments with a trainer -- generally useless. Was supposed to be less hot today, but easily topped 100F (104F by the car thermometer). Music today (JP): Brahja Waldman; (RS): Zeena Parkins, Sing Me the Songs, Cyclist. Tuesday, July 09, 2013Daily LogWent to YMCA, and finished paperwork for joining. Have an appointment to go back tomorrow for introductory consultations. I'm not much looking forward to this. I did join a gym after Rebecca died. I went three times a week until I moved in with Laura, and lost about 40 pounds during that time: winding up the least I've weighed since then, or for that matter for twenty years before. Also went to a gym for a few months when I came back to Wichita during the 1990s. So it would probably be a good thing if I did it, but I sure don't feel like it. Went shopping for a gym bag afterwards, but didn't find anything I was willing to pay for. Did pick up a cheap keyed padlock, which will do for now. Had dinner at Sabor. Surprised myself by ordering the "polenta vegetable tower": two chunks of crisp polenta acting as a sandwich around mushrooms and tomatos, with a pile of spinach on top and pureed black beans all around. Was pretty good. Laura had the papusas -- bit on the spicy side. Watched Major Crimes and Copper on TV. Music today (JP): David Murray, Brian Andres, Kristin Slipp; (RS) John Scofield; (RG) John Scofield (noticed I had Still Warm ungraded in database, and it was available; surprised to find it wasn't good enough to get me interested in filling out my listings). Monday, July 08, 2013Music Week/Jazz ProspectingMusic: Current count 21665 [21611] rated (+54), 608 [620] unrated (-12). Huge rated week -- I don't think I've ever done that many, except perhaps in one of those weeks where I found a lot of missing bookkeeping. Worked the first few days adding to the Recycled Goods 1960s special, and kept going long enough to collect three Young Rascals albums for some future column. At that point, was short on Jazz Prospecting, and had a few days where nearly everything resolved in one play. (The one A- record, which I did play a lot, came at the start of the week. I had just published my mid-year jazz list and fretted that this year I'm way ahead of my usual pace. But none of the high B+ albums below ever came close, and only the Ban/Maneri strikes me as something any significant number of others might like more than I do.) I could keep plugging away at this pace -- mostly played Rhapsody today and last night, so I have that file up to 10 records now. Also fiddled with the metafile, and will note that the new Jay-Z looks like a critical wipeout -- almost as bad as Lil Wayne (whereas Kanye West has moved into the year's top five-rated albums). Or I could take a break and do something else. But it's finally gotten hot here -- 103F this afternoon -- so the cool spot may be near the stereo. Laura Ainsworth: Necessary Evil (2013, Eclectus): Singer, website also says "comedian," father played in big bands, second album, all covers although I doubt that she left them all unscarred. Brian Piper plays keybs and produced. The "necessary evil" is sex, and she never lets it wander far from mind, either as "necessary" or "evil." B+(*) Anomonous (2012 [2013], Prom Night): Josh Sinton (amplified contrabass clarinet), Denman Maroney (hyperpiano), Ben Miller (synthesizers, samplers). Sinton is perhaps best known for the Steve Lacy tribute band Ideal Bread, although I also liked his album with Jon Irabagon last year, Holus-Bolus. Hyperpiano is Maroney's term for a set of techniques for playing the piano from inside the box (as opposed to the keyboard). So this is a kind of electronic music with complex acoustic resonances. B+(**) [bc] Lucian Ban/Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Concert (2011 [2013], ECM): Piano and viola, the concert recorded in Romania, near Ban's birthplace. He studied at Bucharest Music Academy, moved to New York in 1999, has a handful of records since 2002. Maneri was also b. 1969, but in New York, the son of microtonal clarinetist Joseph Maneri, and has more than 15 albums since 1995. B+(***) [advance] Beat Funktion: Moon Town (2013, DO Music): Swedish six-piece funk band, all instrumental, Karl Olandersson's trumpet in the lead; second album, with extra studio musicians (including some vocals, plus one credit for "breathing"). B Joel Behrman: Steppin Back (2012, self-released): Trumpet player, originally from St. Louis, studied in Miami, wound up in Bay Area. First album, a hard bop sextet with Dayna Stephens as the sax player, Danny Armstrong (trombone), Matt Clarke (piano), Marcus Shelby (bass), and Howard Wiley (drums). Has a nice mainstream vibe, especially with traditionalists like Shelby and Wiley driving the rhythm. B+(*) Larry Corban: The Circle Starts Here (2012 [2013], Nabroc): Guitarist, based in New York, second album, a trio with Harvie S on bass and Steve Williams on drums. Soft metallic lines (some nylon), S does a fine job of beefing up the sound. B+(**) Paulette Dozier: In Walked You (2012, PF&E): Singer, co-wrote three songs with pianist Mike Levine, adding nine standards (if you so consider Billy Joel, Bobby Hebb, and Seals & Crofts). Third album. She evidently does a stage act as Billie Holiday, but I can't reconcile the voice. Looks more like Sarah Vaughan -- doesn't have her voice either, but it's closer, more practical, good enough to salvage most of these songs, even some that shouldn't. B+(*) Giovanni Guidi Trio: City of Broken Dreams (2012 [2013], ECM): Pianist, b. 1985 in Italy, has a handful of records since 2007, this his first on ECM, a trio with Thomas Morgan on bass and Joăo Lobo on drums. Smartly done, but on the quiet side, something you have to stick with. B+(**) [advance] Iro Haarla Sextet: Kolibri (2010 [2013], TUM): Pianist, b. 1956 in Finland, married drummer Edward Vesala in 1978 and only picked up her career after he died; sixth album since 2001; group has three horns -- Verneri Pohjola (trumpet), Jari Honigsto (trombone), and Karl Heinilä (tenor sax, flute, alto flute) -- plus bass and drums. Slower pieces enjoy a lot of color, but the clash of the faster ones is more interesting. B+(**) Joel Harrison 19: Infinite Possibility (2012 [2013], Sunnyside): Guitarist, at least 14 albums since 1996; 19 is his big band, presumably 19-piece although 23 musicians are credited, with JC Sanford as conductor (tenor sax and tuba are clearly two slots with alternating musicians; the two vocalists occur on one track each, so may not be considered a slot). Mixed postbop bag, even a bit of avant chaos, some impressive passages, a lot of stuff I don't much care for. B Ethan Iverson/Lee Konitz/Larry Grenadier/Jorge Rossy: Costumes Are Mandatory (2012 [2013], High Note): Piano, alto sax, bass, drums -- you should recognize all the names. Konitz is 85, has had a brilliant career; he doesn't break any new ground here, but is a joy to hear. Iverson, best known for the Bad Plus, has a few tricks up his sleeve. He does an interesting deconstruction of "Blueberry Hill" that breaks with the song in many ways yet remains instantly recognizable. That's in the middle of a record with two takes of Iverson's "Blueberry Ice Cream" on the ends. B+(***) Bob James & David Sanborn: Quartette Humaine (2013, Okeh): The pianist is past 70 now, b. 1939, his first two records were called Bold Conceptions and Explosions, the latter daringly avant, but he settled into pop jazz in the 1970s and has produced very little I've listened to since. The alto saxophonist was b. 1945, has about 30 albums since 1975, mostly in the pop jazz vein. I've checked a few out, and wound up being blown away by 1991's Upfront -- he's clearly a very talented guy when he gives it a chance. Quartette here adds James Genus on bass and Steve Gadd on drums, settling into the mainstream with a little honk to the sax. B+(**) Kikoski Carpenter Novak Sheppard: From the Hip (2006 [2013], BFM Jazz): David Kikoski (piano), Dave Carpenter (bass), Gary Novak (drums), Bob Sheppard (saxes, mostly tenor). The pianist, b. 1961, has at least 17 albums since 1989, notably with Dutch mainstream label Criss Cross, but this is the first I've heard. Sheppard only has four albums (since 1991), but has a long side-credit list -- AMG's credits list runs 222 lines, lots of singers (including Rod Stewart and Linda Ronstadt) -- another mainstream player, always a plus. B+(***) Annie Kozuch: Mostly Jobim (2013, self-released): Singer, does some acting but nothing I've seen or heard of; second album. Only song not by Jobim is "So Nice" -- a dead ringer. Band credits are buried in a small print paragraph, beyond my eyesight to dig out, but they get a little samba groove going with flutes but not too many, and she handles all the songs, some in Portuguese. Nice, indeed. B+(**) Dave Liebman/Michael Stephans: Lineage (2010 [2013], Whaling City Sound): Sax and drums, respectively, with Liebman listing soprano ahead of tenor. Stephans has a previous album and side credits going back to 1986, mostly with big band leaders (Bob Florence, Bob Brookmeyer). Liebman has too many albums to count, and brings along long-time associates like Vic Juris (guitar) and Bobby Avey (keybs) as well as protégé Matt Vashlishan (alto sax, soprano sax, flute, EWI, clarinet). Front cover says "Rock and Pop Classics Revisited": two Beatles songs, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, "Tequila", some surf rock, "Love Me Tender." I don't quite see the point -- it's not like they're either as clever or as cultivated as, say, the Lounge Lizards -- but it's not bad either (except, of course, for the utterly jazzphobic "Eleanor Rigby"). B+(*) Steve Lindeman: The Day After Yesterday (2012 [2013], Jazz Hang): Credit continues: "with BYU Synthesis" -- Lindeman teaches at Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, so this is their big band, plus Lindeman on organ, some extra percussion and tuba, and a Kelly Eisenhour vocal. First album. All pieces by Lindeman, a veritable catalog of bad orchestral ideas -- although I did rather like the Latin piece ("I Remember"). C+ Michigan State University Professors of Jazz: Better Than Alright (2012 [2013], self-released, 2CD): I've run across several names here -- Etienne Charles (trumpet), Michael Dease (trombone), Rodney Whitaker (bass) -- but don't recall others -- Diego Rivera (sax), Reginald Thomas (piano), Perry Hughes (guitar), Randy Gelispie (drums). Compositions are split between Charles (4), Rivera (3), Whitaker (3), Thomas (2), plus one by "guest" Mardra Thomas (who sings two blues), and one cover. Hot solos, cohesive swing, really impeccable hard bop. B+(***) Ben Monder: Hydra (2013, Sunnyside): Guitarist, seventh album since 1997, always seemed like a good rhythm side man but I never thought of him as fusion before. Basically, guitar-bass-drums meant to generate a strong flow. Where it gets, well, weird isn't the right word, more like unpleasant, is when he adds up to three vocalists, notably Theo Bleckmann. Only "Charlotte's Song" has lyrics, cribbed from E.B. White. B- Chris Morrissey: North Hero (2013, Sunnyside): Electric bassist (should try to remember that come Downbeat poll time), second album, quartet: Mike Lewis (sax), Aaron Parks (piano), Mark Guiliana (drums). Lewis plays in a Minneapolis band called Happy Apple with Dave King, who produces here. Guiliana is a fair soundalike for King, Parks is a striking pianist in his own right, and Lewis is a double threat: a honker on the faster ones and a swooner on the ballads. Morrissey wrote both. A- Chip Stephens Trio: Relevancy (2010 [2013], Capri): Pianist, fourth album since 1995, with Dennis Carroll on bass and Joel Spencer on drums. Three originals; covers from Carla Bley and Bill Evans on the ends, great American songbook in the middle. All done fast and boppy, so bright I can't find a minute to wonder whether it's really all that exceptional. B+(**) Sweet Talk: Glitterbomb (2011-12 [2013], Prom Night): First record from New York trio: Jake Henry (trumpet), Dustin Carlson (guitar), Devin Drobka (drums). Henry was b. in Toronto, studied at McGill (in Montreal), wound up in New York. Interesting free interplay at first, but it slows down and enters a less appealing drone phase that ends abruptly, probably because there's nothing left to do. B+(*) [advance] [bc] Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Added grades for remembered LPs from way back when:
Daily LogStarted adding loose ends from Exclaim to the metafile last night. Instead of having a single reviews queue, they have half a dozen by genre. Turns out they have an astonishing amount of metal reviews: I wound up adding 152 metal records to the file, plus they have reviews on almost everything that I already had listed. Really long, tedious slog, and since I usually say the purpose of the file is to help me find things of possible interest, entirely pointless. Their "improv & avant-garde" section barely ran one page, but includes some surprises, like Rich Halley and Nick Fraser. Music today (JP): Laura Ainsworth, Raquel Cepeda, Carline Ray, Mike Wofford; (RS): Brandt Brauer Frick, The-Dream, Transplants, Queens of the Stone Age. Sunday, July 07, 2013Weekend RoundupSome scattered links this week:
Also, a few links for further study:
Daily LogLazy day at home. Added a couple items to my Weekend Roundup stash and posted that. Music today (JP): Lucian Ban, Sweet Talk, Beat Funktion, MSU Professors; (RS): Hermitofthewoods, Thundercat, Mac Miller, Austra. Saturday, July 06, 2013Buckling Toward InjusticeI could have held this for tomorrow's "Weekend Roundup" but didn't want it to get lost in the shuffle. You should make a point of reading Louis Menand: The Color of Law. It refers to several recent books -- especially Gary May's Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (2013, Basic Books -- and spells out in detail how bitterly white supremacists fought the challenges of democracy, and how their violence eventually disgusted enough Americans to pass the Voting Rights Act. Menand details three murders of civil rights workers: Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo, all centered on Selma, Alabama and the marches first John Lewis and Hosea Williams then Martin Luther King led from Selma to Montgomery. And Menand reminds us of the background:
We're not talking about ancient history here: I was 14 at the time and recall much of this, and Anthony Kennedy, who should be ashamed for his Supreme Court ruling cutting out a key part of the Voting Rights Act, was 28: of sufficient age that he, too, should have been aware of what was happening. You don't hear much talk of "white supremacy" these days, but the parts of the south that were singled out for special treatment in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 still vote solidly for the self-selected white folks party, and that party is still up to all sorts of tricks to strips blacks and others of their franchise. Or, as Menand concludes:
The US civil rights movement is usually held up as an example where non-violence paid off, although one can argue that it did so only by appealing to the conscience of a power capable of much more violence than its opponents could muster. The Selma-to-Montgomery march, for instance, was stopped once by a white police riot, and was stopped a second time by the threat of another. It only succeeded when the National Guard was called up to protect the marchers. Had it not been for the appeal the civil rights movement had to federal power, the South would never have voluntarily given up white supremacy. It wasn't, after all, the conscience of white Southerners that recognized the injustice. And indeed even today, when you look at the solid white Republican voting block all across the South, it's hard to say that anything real has changed. For another case, consider the Palestinians in Israel's Occupied Territories. During the Second Intifada various Palestinian groups tried to match Israeli violence, peaking in 2002 when Palestinians killed 419 Israelis. Since 2005, the numbers of Israelis killed by all Palestinian factions have declined: { 51, 23, 13, 35, 9, 9, 11, 7 }, up through 2012. (The corresponding number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces peaked in 2002 at 1032, then topped that again in 2009 with 1034 -- figures from B'Tselem, probably accurate for Israelis but undercounted for Palestinians.) So for the last 5-7 years, Palestinians have challenged Israel non-violently and have paid a significant price -- for the same years, the Palestinian death series is { 190, 665, 385, 887, 1034, 82, 118, 254 }. Or, if numbers seem too cold for you, watch films like Budrus and Five Broken Cameras, where demonstrators are repeatedly met with tear gas and rubber bullets. But where for the Palestinians is the conscience of a higher power? The US has turned a deaf ear. The Europeans -- the elites who run countries, at least -- are more afraid of offending the US than they are committed to justice. Russia doesn't much care and doesn't much matter. The UN cannot function. It makes you wonder whether one of the key assumptions of the civil rights movement -- that in the long run the moral compass "bends toward justice" -- is still true. The Supreme Court decision is just one example of bending the wrong way. There are good reasons to stick with non-violence even if it has no foreseeable chance of winning -- at least it keeps you from becoming like them. In the meantime, it is all the more important to recall past struggles, both for their setbacks and victories. Menand's piece recounts essential history. Read it. Daily LogWorked on the piece above, plus a lot of music stuff since I had shortchanged Jazz Prospecting early in the week. Went out to dinner at Cafe Asia, then shopped for Diet Coke. Music today (JP): Chip Stephens, David Kikoski, Larry Corban, Joel Harrison, Giovanni Guidi, Anomonous, Joel Behrman, Annie Kozuch, Paulette Dozier, Dave Liebman. Friday, July 05, 2013Recycled Goods (110): July, 2013New Recycled Goods: pick up text here. Total review count: 3746 (3302 + 444). Daily LogDecided to wrap up and post Recycled Goods: the big 1960s edition. Seems like the explorations there have been pretty arbitrary -- that I ought to come up with some sort of systematic plan. Maybe next time (probably September). Music today (JP): Ethan Iverson; (RG): Isaac Hayes, Bobby Bland, Young Rascals. Thursday, July 04, 2013Expert CommentsSome EW comments appeared on the subject of grading scales. I wrote:
Christgau replied:
As best I recall, for the 1970s CG book Bob had the ambition of finding every B+ record (US released, rock). That ambition proved elusive, and eroded during the 1980s. He switched to the "A-List" format in 1991 -- the ambition there was more modestly to find as many A- records as possible, and the HMs were prospects that fell short: a few words to salvage several hours of listening. But I've found that lots of solid B+ records never sounded like serious A- prospects. Presumably Bob culls those immediately, so, yeah, he doesn't write about some/many of the B+ records he hears (as well as the many more he doesn't). Daily LogJust music nonsense until we went out to dinner chez Rannfrid Thelle, along with her husband Stuart Lasine, Alice Powell, Janice Bradley, and Laura. Kafta, hummus, potato salad, spinach salad, ice cream spiked with cinnamon and served with berries. All good. Served coffee after dinner -- something I never do but should probably get the hang of. Ran across something called "Key Wiki" which uses Mediawiki to try to build some sort of worldwide database of leftists, probably for no good purpose. They talk about "unlocking the covert side of U.S. and Global politics," but most of their data is scrapped from open letters, like "A Open Letter to Barack Obama on Iran." They have a page on Laura but nothing other than that letter. They have a page on Rannfrid including a picture. Music today (JP): Bob James/David Sanborn, Steve Lindeman; (RG): Temptations, Mama and Papas, Barry Sadler, James Brown, Albert King. Wednesday, July 03, 2013Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture. Went to Hanna Wok for lunch. The bulgogi wasn't spectacular but nicely filling, and they serve a kim chi plate with pickled green beans and cucumbers as well as cabbage. Went to Target for groceries -- they only store in town that still carries Yoplait Thick & Creamy vanilla yogurt. Came home and rewrote my short Temptations squib as a top section review. Occurs to me that since the 1960s is a much deeper pool than I can explore in the next week or so, I should cut the Recycled Goods column loose soon, then return to the 1960s in a couple months. Jason Gubbels' post today picked MOPDTK and Harris Eisenstadt, albums I had previously picked, with Kenny Barron a "near pick" -- another basic agreement. Music today (JP): Iro Haarla; (RG) Temptations. Tuesday, July 02, 2013Expert CommentsChristgau finally weighs in on Yeezus, listing it first in an Odds and Ends. I didn't like it that much myself, but then I didn't give it much of a chance. Review: "Sign spotted on church in the wild: Death Grips--Be Lke Them." Death Grips is a group I like far less than Christgau does, so maybe more chance wouldn't have helped much. Christgau asked if any other reviewers had made the connection to Death Grips. Joey Daniewicz:
Christgau:
Daily LogFelt blah all day. Finally went to Home Depot: took back a bathroom shower splash guard that I had bought a week earlier, but it didn't fit well, and was plug ugly. Looked to see if I could figure out a way to build something that would work. Wound up picking up a piece of Lexan (32x16 inches, I think), a piece of vinyl moulding with a 90 degree angle and a slot the Lexan fits snugly into, some silicone adhesive, and a plastic cutter. I figure I can cut the Lexan down to something 32-inches high, 5-inches wide, with a wider base, and glue it into the moulding, then attach the whole thing from the front corner of the bathtub up along the wall. Not sure whether the adhesive will be enough to hold it up, especially since tile and ceramic aren't the best of materials to glue to. Also picked up a couple tools: a small nail puller and a ratcheting adjustable wrench. Watched The Killing and the 2-hour pilot of Crossing Lines, about an international "super police" force working for the ICC in Belgium, trying to find a serial killer who takes each victim to another capital city in Europe. Laura seems to have lost interest in the show. I thought that the European locales and cast (aside from two pivotal Americans) was refreshing, but agree that the lack of humor weakens the show. Music today (JP): Chris Morrissey, Ben Monder; (RC): Stevie Wonder, the Temptations. Monday, July 01, 2013Music Week/Jazz ProspectingMusic: Current count 21611 [21584] rated (+27), 620 [625] unrated (-5). Backed off a bit on Jazz Prospecting to wrap up last week's Rhapsody Streamnotes, and will probably spend much of next week working on Recycled Goods: if I don't carry through with my 1960s project there, I'll wind up with an empty file. But I still don't have a good sense of what I should try to cover there, or indeed how much is possible. I've seen some midyear lists like this one by Matt Rice. I've heard and rated 454 albums released so far this year, which hasn't left a lot of time for living with them or really enjoying the best ones. I don't have a good sense of how non-jazz records sort out, but I can offer this mid-year jazz list. Only curious thing about it is that it's much longer than the non-jazz split of the A-list: 37 to 24 (usually my lists break out about 50-50).
Unpacking way down this week. Probably just a blip. Finally asked for the new David Murray album, and I'm told it's coming. Also have emails for a new batch of Clean Feeds, which should show up eventually. Billy Bang: Da Bang! (2011 [2013], TUM): Probably the late, great violinist's last recording -- in Helsinki, about two months before he died. Quintet, with trombone (Dick Griffin), piano (Andrew Bemkey), bass (Hilliard Greene), and drums (Newman Taylor-Baker). Six cuts -- one original, the title cut by Barry Altschul, other pieces from Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, and Sonny Rollins. Far from his greatest work, but his solos are unmistakable, and trombone is a nice contrast. Plus you can't go out on a more ecstatic note than "St. Thomas." I'm in no mood to quibble. A- Bill Frisell: Big Sur (2012 [2013], Okeh): Nineteen-piece suite commissioned by Monterey Jazz Festival, composed over ten days in retreat at Glen Deven Ranch, played by the group previously known as the 858 Quartet -- Jenny Scheinman (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola), Hank Roberts (cello), Rudy Royston (drums) -- plus Frisell on guitar. Typical of his recent work, but heavier. B+(**) Guillermo Gregorio/Steve Swell/Pandelis Karayorgis Trio: Window and Doorway (2011 [2013], Driff): Clarinet, trombone, and piano, respectively, everyone contributing pieces. The clarinet-trombone combo is attractive but soft-edged and the lack of a rhythm section lets them amble, noodle, splatter color about, at least until the piano gooses them along. B+(*) Drew Gress: The Sky Inside (2011 [2013], Pirouet): Bassist, fifth album since 1998, about 170 side credits since 1989, a major figure although his intricate postbop compositions have yet to make much of an impression. But his connections give him an all star band: Ralph Alessi (trumpet), Tim Berne (alto sax), Craig Taborn (piano), Tom Rainey (drums). They have their moments here, as does the bassist. Runs long, 72:23, not that the title cut doesn't justify its 11:48. B+(**) Gregg Kallor: A Single Noon (2012 [2013], Single Noon): Pianist, has two previous albums, one a trio with Kendrick Scott, the other a duo with "mezzo-soprano" Adriana Zabala of "Dickinson and Yeats Songs"; so has staked out ground straddling classical and jazz. This is solo, all originals, something he calls "a nine-movement suite." Fred Hersch admires it. B+(**) Pandelis Karayorgis Trio: Cocoon (2012 [2013], Driff): Pianist, b. in Greece, moved to Boston to study at New England Conservatory in the 1980s and stuck around, with a dozen or more records since 1994 -- his 2007 album as Mi3, Free Advice, was a pick hit here. This is a piano trio with Jef Charland on bass and Luther Gray on drums, not as difficult or explosive as the pianist gets, but vigorous and inventive by any standards. B+(***) Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet: Circuitous (2012 [2013], Driff): Recorded in Chicago, with bassist Nate McBride the link between the Boston-based pianist and the Chicago-based all-star band: Dave Rempis and Keefe Jackson (saxes/clarinets), and Frank Rosaly (drums). Sounds great one moment, questionable the next, in an oscillation that's almost an aesthetic. B+(**) Rob Mazurek/Exploding Star Electro Acoustic Ensemble: The Space Between (2013, Delmark, CD+DVD): Mostly electronics, intriguing to start, with Mazurek's cornet as a counterpart, a text, then it builds up to something ungainly; bits of flute, piano, electric cavaquinho; another text. The DVD presents the same music with a video by Marianne M. Kim, mostly abstractions with bits of her dancing. Can't say as I enjoyed it, but the music is ambitious and adventurous. B+(*) Gary Peacock/Marilyn Crispell: Azure (2011 [2013], ECM): Not sure why the bassist comes first, although he is older and more famous (especially given his long tenure with Keith Jarrett). The pianist has a slight edge in compositions, plus the louder and more traditionally leading instrument, although she plays so softly here that it's almost a wash. Crispell's name came first on two previous ECM meetings, but they were trios with the no-longer-available Paul Motian. The record could use some of his misdirection, but gets by with remarkable tastefulness. B+(**) [advance] RJ & the Assignment: The Stroke of Midnight (2013, self-released): Keyboard player from Chicago, based in Las Vegas, group rotates bassists and the record is chock full of guests, including singers Jocelyn Winston and Windy Kairigianes and "spoken word" rapper Khari Bowden. B The Michael Treni Big Band: Pop-Culture Blues (2013, self-released): Trombonist, originally from Maine, studied in Miami, taught there and at Berklee; went into tech business in 1985, left in 1996 and returned to music. Big band, old school verities, first song is called "One for Duke," rest have "Blues" somewhere in the title. B+(*) Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: Latin Jazz-Jazz Latin (2013, Patois): Bay area Trombonist, ninth album since 2000, moved quickly into Latin jazz and has served up a steady diet of it. Quintet includes piano, guitar, drums, and percussion, plus he draws on a long list of extras, featuring flute and violin on three songs. B+(*) The Whammies: Play the Music of Steve Lacy Vol. 2 (2013, Driff): Sextet, an interesting Dutch-Chicago-Boston hybrid: Jorrit Dijkstra (alto sax, lyricon), Pandelis Karayorgis (piano), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Mary Oliver (violin, viola), Nate McBride (bass), Han Bennink (drums). Eleven songs by Steve Lacy, plus one by Monk. First volume was terrific, and the new one, a new session (not leftovers from the first), carries on. A- Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Expert CommentsTatum put up a big note on metacritic.com: specifically, making fun of Wonder Years: The Greatest Generation being their top-rated record of the year (aside from that Fleetwood Mac box), with Deafheaven's Sunbather second. Shit! When I checked last Deafheaven was on top! I assume this had something to do with the "metacritic" list I posted earlier.
Daily LogTook Laura to acupuncture, then we went to movies. We had hoped to see Mud, but they shifted the time 45 minutes later, so we got impatient and saw This Is the End. The set up is a bunch of Hollywood actors playing themselves, attending a lavish party at James Franco's mansion, when the rapture (cf. "Revelations") happens. The party empties out when a huge chasm opens up in Franco's front yard, sucking in all but Franco, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and Craig Robinson. They retreat to the house, barricade it against the mayhem, and are joined by uninvited Danny McBride and, temporarily, an axe-wielding Emily Watson. Not without laughs, but it degenerates into a horror movie of monsters and demonic possession, where the only escape is sacrifice yourself and be sucked up into heaven, where there's another party happening. [B]. Went to dinner at Dave's Famous Barbecue. Worked on my weekly Jazz Prospecting post. No TV. Didn't even get this note done until the next day. Music today (RS): Wilson Pickett, the Byrds.
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