Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 35 albums, 3 A-list

Music: Current count 44592 [44557] rated (+35), 18 [16] unrated (+2).

I've had a disturbing week, leaving me all but paralyzed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- "FUD" if you're inclined to laugh at it, but right now I'm not. I suppose it started with a routine out-patient test at a local hospital, which has raised no alarms (although messages to visit the "patient portal" for reports have revealed nothing), but disrupted my day, setting off a series of bad choices: a stop at a new restaurant that disappointed, a bit of custard afterwards that I didn't need (while denying myself the "butter pecan concrete" I would have relished), some pricey and esoteric grocery shopping at Whole Foods, where I bought some skinny trout filets that forced me to fix an unplanned dinner (a sub-stellar trout almondine with sides of zucchini and oven fries). While objectively I've muddled through, I've remained out of sorts all week.

The low point came on the day when I spent a couple hours awkwardly leaning into the front porch door trying to reconnect a broken power wire to a doorbell camera. It's been broken for months, and for most of that time just too small and obscure to see how it could go back together. I finally got the wire in, only to have it pop out again when I tried to reconnect the clip. After that, it was impossible. I finally concluded I'd have to get someone out to if not fix it then suggest a different camera setup. Seems like I've been failing at a lot of these maintenance tasks lately. It's very discouraging. [PS: I did some further research moments ago, which suggests I misunderstood some things. Still probably not salvageable, but replacing the entire clip may be straightforward to someone with the right parts and equipment.]

I also spent a bunch of time this week doing research on buying a new car. I have a big table of models, but I'm still a long ways from figuring it all out. Meanwhile, the old car is on its last legs, or seems to be, and I need to get someone to look at it, because I no longer seem to understand how cars work. There was a day when my highest ambition was to become a mechanic (ok, a race car designer). Dreams like that die hard. (Although I had two cousins who did just that. One was already building and racing go-karts as a teen. Later he spent most of his life teaching mechanics, but wound up doing tricky plastics repairs in a body shop by then managed by the other.) Still, made some progress after months of spinning my wheels. Should be a major focus next week.

Many more projects on hold. The one most relevant here is the Substack newsletter, Notes on Everyday Life. I haven't sent anything out yet, but I've started to get some free subscribers, and I edited their original "Coming Soon" page as Hello World, the title taken from the original demo program in The C Programming Language. The edited text serves as a brief (6 paragraph) mission statement. I'll try to publish an initial post sometime in the coming week. No idea yet what will be in there. I do have one possibly serious problem with Substack so far: with Firefox, the dashboard controls are dead in the water. Thus far I've only been able to work on it through Chrome, which I almost never use. The problem also applies to other supposedly public web pages, like this one (from Chris Monsen's Listening Booth, a mid-year list that is probably very useful).

Probably more I should write about here, but it's gotten too late, so I might as well go ahead and post. One last thing I do need to mention is that I wrote up three answers today.

New records reviewed this week:

• Arcade Fire: Pink Elephant (2025, Columbia): [sp]: B+(*)
• Beach Bunny: Tunnel Vision (2025, AWAL): [sp]: B+(**)
• Yaya Bey: Do It Afraid (2025, Drink Sum Wtr): [sp]: B+(*)
• Brian Charette: Borderless (2024 [2025], SteepleChase): [sp]: B
• Brian Charette: Working Out With Big G (2024 [2025], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(***)
• Eric Church: Evangeline vs. the Machine (2025, UMG Nashville): [sp]: B+(*)
• Clipse: Let God Sort Them Out (2025, Roc Nation): [sp]: A-
• Chick Corea/Christian McBride/Brian Blade: Trilogy 3 (2020 [2025], Candid): [sp]: B+(*)
• Paquito D'Rivera & Madrid-New York Connection Band: La Fleure De Cayenne (2025, Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(*)
• Dawn Patrol Jazz Band: A Tribute to Benny Strickler and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band (2024-25 [2025], self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• McKinley Dixon: Magic, Alive! (2025, City Slang): [sp]: B+(**)
• DJ Haram: Beside Myself (2025, Hyperdub): [sp]: B+(**)
• Open Mike Eagle: Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (2025, Auto Reverse): [sp]: A-
• The Haas Company Featuring Jerry Goodman: Thirteen (2025, Psychiatric): [cd]: B
• Jasper Høiby: Fellow Creatures: We Must Fight (2025, Edition): [sp]: B+(**)
• Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals: A City Drowned in God's Black Tears (2025, Phantom Limb): [sp]: B+(**)
• Rico Jones: Bloodlines (2024 [2025], Giant Step Arts): [sp]: B+(***) [07-25]
• Kokoroko: Tuff Times Never Last (2025, Brownswood): [sp]: B
• Lil Wayne: Tha Carter VI (2025, Young Money/Republic): [sp]: B+(*)
• Niontay: Fada<3of$ (2025, 10k): [sp]: B+(*)
• Pink Siifu: Black'!Antique (2025, Dynamite Hill): [sp]: B+(*)
• Altin Sencalar: Unleashed (2024 [2025], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(*)
• Slikback: Attrition (2025, Planet Mu): [sp]: B+(*)
• Hal Smith's San Francisco Jazz All-Stars: Live at the International Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival '24 Sedalia, MO [Vol. 1] (2024, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Junior Smith and His Remote Rangers: Junior Smith's Remote Round Up (2025, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Snowpoet: Heartstrings (2025, Edition): [sp]: B+(*)
• Laura Stevenson: Late Great (2025, Really): [sp]: B+(*)
• Kelsey Waldon: Every Ghost (2025, Oh Boy): [sp]: B+(***)
• Wet Leg: Moisturizer (2025, Domino): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jessica Winter: My First Album (2025, Lucky Number): [sp]: B+(**)
• Wu-Tang X Mathematics: Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman (2025, 36 Chambers/DNA Music): [sp]: A-
• Brandee Younger: Gadabout Season (2025, Impulse!): [sp]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Sly & the Family Stone: The First Family: Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967 (1967 [2025], High Moon): [sp]: B
• Sly & the Family Stone: Sly Lives! (Aka the Burden of Black Genius) [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] (1967-73 [2025], Sony/Legacy): [sp]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Joe Sanders: Introducing Joe Sanders (2011 [2012], Criss Cross Jazz): [sp]: B+(**)

Grade (or other) changes:

• New York Dolls: In Too Much, Too Soon (1974, Mercury): [cd]: [was: A]: A+

Rechecked with no grade change:

• New York Dolls: New York Dolls (1973, Mercury): [cd]: A

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet: El Muki (Saponegro) [08-15]
• Adegoke Steve Colson & Iqua Colson With Andrew Cyrille/Mark Helias: Glow: Music for Trio . . . and Voice (Silver Sphinx) [08-22]
• Eric McPherson: Double Bass Quartet (Giant Step Arts) [07-25]
• PlainsPeak: Someone to Someone (Irabbagast) [08-15]
• Ned Rothenberg: Looms & Legends (Pyroclastic) [09-05]
• Charlie Rouse: Cinnamon Flower: The Expanded Edition (1977, Resonance) [09-19]
• Miguel Zenón Quartet: Vanguardia Subterranea: Live at the Village Vanguard (Miel Music) [08-29]

Daily Log

Went for my echocardiogram yesterday. Not much to it, but it disrupted my whole day, and I responded irrationally and rather counterproductively. I figured I should treat myself to lunch out, and remembered a place called Paris Baguette that we had driven by but Laura had no interest in. It is mostly a bakery, with a lot of coffee/tea options, but no soda so I just asked for water. They had sandwiches, all pre-made in a display case. I picked the bacon-egg croissant, which they then toasted, which produced the odd effect of a still-cold egg instead a hot, rather burnt croissant. Tasted ok, but not something to order again. I also got a piece of tiramisu cake to go. By the time I got it home, it was melting. I stuck it in the refrigerator and firmed it up, but it wasn't very good.

The place was next door to Andy's Custard, so I walked by and ordered a small vanilla cone, which was fine, but a struggle to eat faster than it could melt. In olden days I would have ordered the butter pecan concrete, but after the morning's weigh-in put me up three pounds, I shied away from the 900-1100 calories (not sure why the range). From there, I went to Whole Foods, wanting to pick up my favorite smoked trout (which was on sale). There I was mostly tempted by snacks, buying various things I didn't need, like sausages and olives. I picked up a nice-looking piece of salmon to salt, and some trout filets. I tried making trout almondine for dinner, with a zucchini-onion thing on the side, and some frozen rosemary french fries.

The car is getting worse and worse. That needs to become a priority soon. I finally looked at the Car & Driver guide, and was overwhelmed by the indifferent options. I'm beginning to wonder if the definition of a SUV -- a category I've always denied any interest in -- isn't simply any hatchback, as opposed to a car with a distinct trunk. I need to get someone to look at the old car and give me an estimate of what/how much work is needed. The big problem is that the transmission isn't delivering power efficiently, so it's slow to accelerate, although it will eventually reach 60-65 on local highways.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 33 albums, 6 (+4) A-list

Music: Current count 44557 [44524] rated (+33), 16 [16] unrated (-0).

I never really bought the idea of a Reagan Revolution. Although the long-term consequences of the 1980 election were profound, the immediate impact was fairly mild, in part because they still felt the need to disguise what they were doing, in part because the institutions that came out of the New Deal, WWII, and the postwar era up through Johnson and in some cases even Nixon were still pretty robust. Reagan himself remained a sunny tonic, personally much more popular than his policies, although I never even for a moment fell for him. My stock line about the 1980s was that the only growth industry in America was fraud. No surprise that the president himself was one huge, paper-thin charlatan, but he got away with it, mostly because the media and Democrats like Clinton and Obama wanted in on the graft.

On the other hand, the first six months of Trump's second coming does feel like revolution, especially if, like me, you've gotten past the old left sentiment that revolutions advance us toward more just societies. A more clinical view of revolution is that it's a time when the old order turns brittle and cracks, allowing some new parties a sudden rush to unconstrained power. I've been thinking about these issues for most of my life, and I think I have a distinctly different take on the moment. I came out of the 2024 election with the sense that something profoundly weird had just happened. At this point, I think we can start to clarify what that was, why it happened, what it means, and where it's likely to go.

I don't know that I can write all that up, but my plan is to give it a few weeks and see what comes out. Worst case I add it to all the other failed book outlines I've cranked out since the 1990s (or maybe the 1970s, when I had lots of book ideas, but definitely not the 1980s, when the only one was a threaded novel about what killed my wife). I have some ideas about how to put it together. But first, after my immersion in the Francis Davis Poll, I figured I should take a few days and knock out a Loose Tabs piece. I did, after all, have some scraps saved up, plus a good number of open tabs. That wound up taking up all of last week.

This week, I have this Music Week today, and some (probably pointless) medical tests tomorrow, but after that I intend to knuckle down, with several other tasks available for breaks. Some of this is leftover or continuing house work. I figure I should start doing some preliminary Poll work in September: reviewing voter lists, rebuilding the website. The only other thing I feel like mentioning here is that I've set up a Substack newsletter, which I'm calling Notes on Everyday Life -- a name that some friends used for an underground/new left tabloid circa 1972-74. I've held a domain name to that effect for some time now, perhaps hoping to reunite the band, but these days it seems to just be me. My idea now is to demolish the current WordPress blog on the website and replace it with some kind of Mediawiki, that I can use for a topic sort of my scattered writings. I don't know how soon that can happen -- unlikely in the next month or two, unless I can find some help -- but while I see it as eventually related to the newsletter, it's not a precondition.

The newsletter, at first anyway, will offer periodic reports on my projects and thinking. I hope to send my debut "hello world" post out by the end of the week, but I'm pleased to note that I already have two subscribers, so I can rest assured that someone will read whatever I come up with. As this is the first time I've actually mentioned it, perhaps some more of you will sign up by the time I roll out? To keep thing simple, I haven't set up a paid tier, nor am I likely to anytime soon now. I started a planning document, but it's way too messed up to share at this point. I will have one at some point, as I figure things out. Meanwhile, I'd welcome any questions and/or comments.

I will say that what I'm looking/hoping for with Substack is:

1. A way to send push notices out on demand, without the personal hassle of having to manage my own email list.
2. A more concrete sense of how many people are reading, both based on the mailing list and statistical tools
3. More feedback through a comment forum, which again should require a fairly minor amount of my time to monitor.

Those are all points that I didn't see any other easy method of implementing on my own. They mostly address my insecurity as a writer, which goes to motivation. I'm not a fan of the basic Substack paradigm, which is: everyone go into your own room and mount a soapbox no one else will ever notice. If I had a grant (not as a content provider, but as an ISP) I'd design something very different. Still, I probably wasted a lot of time considering alternatives, which only started to differentiate once one had commercial ambitions.

One nice thing from Substack so far: I wrote a comment to Robert Christgau's Xgau Sez, and was surprised to get 9 likes and 1 thoughtful reply -- 2-3 times the best I do on X or Bluesky. The comment was about grading A+ records, and took a bit of research to prepare for.

The research led me to add (or revalue) grades in my database for several items I had missed. As both of our databases were constructed over many decades of listening, both have a fair number of obsolete editions -- long out-of-print and/or superseded by later editions, often with new names/covers (like the Motown set). I never bothered listing the Ray Charles set before, because it was so long gone, but I did have (and love) it -- it was basically my first real overview of his work (although I certainly knew singles from much earlier). However, one of the things you can do with our datasets is explore similarities and divergences, as I did in my notebook. Having the same albums in both facilitates that. I've gone out of my way to listen to most of his A-list albums. I have a list somewhere of items I still haven't heard, which must run well over 100, but the A+ subset is small, so I figured I should close out that gap. I drew a line, however, at doing cover graphics, in each case for its own reason, which you can probably guess.

First non-jazz A- records this week in quite a while, to some extend diminishing returns after all the jazz finds that surfaced in the Poll, but also because I needed a break. Four (of five) come from the June and July Consumer Guides, and they are all strong records by old-timers. The fifth (James McMurtry) could also have been, as Christgau has gone A- or higher on him 5 times since 2004. In this case, however, I got my tip from Christian Iszchak, who also pointed me to Hailey Whitters, Youssou N'Dour, and Little Simz.

I still expect to write up some notes on the DownBeat Critics Poll, but for reasons unknown I haven't gotten my hard copy of the magazine yet. I have found a link to the online edition, but figured I'd wait until I could see better. I mentioned this in yesterday's Loose Tabs (which also includes a couple other music-related sections). I inevitably find more items to add there, but haven't had time today to make more than a couple minor edits.

PS: I was playing Hailey Whitters' Corn Queen when I initially posted this. A few minutes later, I decided to bump the album up a notch, from B+(***) to A-. I think I caught all the tables, but didn't edit do a thorough edit, so things like the A-list count may be off. The Springsteen album was another late add, not reflected in the rated count, but included in the A-list count.

New records reviewed this week:

• Michael Arbenz/Andy Sheppard: From Bach to Ellington: Live (2025, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Elia Aregger Trio: Live (2025, Unit): [sp]: B+(*)
• Willi Carlisle: Winged Victory (2025, Signature Sounds): [sp]: B+(***)
• Dawn Clement/Buster Williams/Matt Wilson: Delight (2024 [2025], Origin): [cd]: B+(**) [07-18]
• Marco Colonna: Icarus Falling: To Mosab Abu Toha (2025, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Big Chief Bo Dollis Jr. & the Wild Magnolias: Chip Off the Old Block (2025, Strong Place Music): [sp]: B+(*)
• Lafayette Gilchrist & New Volcanoes: Move With Love (2025, Morphius): [cd]: B+(***) [07-25]
• Kali Trio: The Playful Abstract (2022-23 [2025], Ronin Rhythm): [sp]: B+(*)
• Hélène Labarrière: Puzzle (2025, Jazzdor): [bc]: B+(**)
• José Lencastre/Flak: Cloudy Skies (2025, Phonogram Unit): [bc]: B+(**)
• Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall (2024 [2025], 4AD): [sp]: B+(**)
• Peter Lin/AAPI Jazz Collective: Identity (2024 [2025], OA2): [cd]: B+(***)
• Little Simz: Lotus (2025, Little Simz): [sp]: B+(*)
• David Lord: Forest Standards Vol. 4 (2022 [2024], BIG EGO): [sp]: B+(*)
• Emi Makabe: Echo (2025, Sunnyside): [sp]: B
• James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (2025, New West): [sp]: A-
• Youssou N'Dour: Éclairer Le Monde - Light the World (2025, self-released): [sp]: B+(***)
• Pat Petrillo: Contemporaneous (2024 [2025], Innervision): [cd]: B+(*)
• Public Enemy: Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 (2025, Enemy): [sp]: A-
• Stefan Schultze/Peter Ehwald/Tom Rainey: Public Radio (2024 [2025], Jazzwerkstatt): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bruce Springsteen & E Street Band: Land of Hopes & Dreams (2025, Columbia): [sp]: A-
• Diala Thukzin: 031 Studio Camp 2.0 (2025, Dlala): [sp]: B+(***)
• Tropos: Switches (2024 [2025], Endectomorph Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Hailey Whitters: Corn Queen (2025, Pigasus/Big Loud): [sp]: A-
• Sarah Wilson: Incandescence (2024 [2025], Brass Tonic): [cd]: B+(*)
• Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts: Talkin to the Trees (2025, The Other Shoe/Reprise): [sp]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Manu Dibango: Dibango 82 (1982 [2025], We Want Sounds): [bc]: B+(**)
• John Lee Hooker: The Charcot Sessions (1969 [2024], Southern Echoes): [bc]: B+(***)
• Grace Potter: Medicine (2008 [2025], Hollywood): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Billie Holiday: Ken Burns Jazz: The Definitive Billie Holiday (1936-58 [2000], Verve): [sp]: A-
• KADEF: KADEF (2023, RR Gems): [sp]: B+(***)
• Motown Classics Gold (1960-72 [2005], Motown, 2CD): [cd]: A+

Grade (or other) changes:

• Ray Charles: A 25th Anniversary in Show Business Salute to Ray Charles (1954-71 [1971], ABC): [ex-lp]: A
• Chuck D: Chuck D Presents Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon (2025, Def Jam): [sp]: [was: B+(*)] A-
• Louis Jordan: Five Guys Named Moe: Vol. 2 (1939-55 [1992], MCA): [cd]: [was: A]: A+
• PinkPantheress: Fancy That (2025, Warner, EP): [sp]: [was: B+(*)]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quintet: Sound Remains (Whirlwind) [06-27]
• David Bailis: Running Through My Mind (Create or Destroy) [08-15]
• Ron Blake: Scratch Band (7Ten33 Productions) [08-09]
• Hannah Delynn: Trust Fall (self-released) [09-09]
• Mike Freeman Zonavibe: Circles in a Yellow Room (VOF) [07-24]
• Steve Tintweiss and the Purple Why: Live in Tompkins Square Park 1987 (Inky Dot Media) [08-07]

Loose Tabs

See blog file.

Daily Log

I was tempted to comment on an Xgau Sez question about A+ records. But first I did some research, starting with a fgrep of all.tbl for "A+" -- effectively the union of Christgau's and my A+ grades. I got 241 lines. When I went back and looked for the intersection, I got 35 lines. Although I had most of Christgau's grades in my file, I had missed some (I had 101 of 128), so went back and filled in the ones I had missed (having to add a couple to the database). That brought the intersection total to 46 (after I upgraded a couple items that I've been listening to often lately). They're good enough to list again:

• King Sunny Ade: The Best of the Classic Years (1967-74 [2003], Shanachie)
• Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1923-34 [1994], Columbia)
• Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection (1955-72 [2006], Geffen/Chess/Chronicles)
• James Brown: Star Time (1956-84 [1991], Polydor)
• The Clash: London Calling (1979, Epic)
• The Coasters: 50 Coastin' Classics (1954-68 [1992], Rhino)
• Culture: Two Sevens Clash (1977 [1987], Shanachie)
• Miles Davis: A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1970 [2005], Columbia/Legacy)
• Iris Dement: My Life (1994, Warner Brothers)
• Derek and the Dominos: Layla (1970, Polydor)
• Bo Diddley: The Chess Box (1955-74 [1990], Chess)
• Fats Domino: My Blue Heaven: The Best of Fats Domino (1949-61 [1990], EMI)
• Brian Eno: Another Green World (1975, EG)
• Ella Fitzgerald: Ken Burns Jazz: The Definitive Ella Fitzgerald (1938-63 [2000], Verve)
• Franco: Francophonic: A Retrospective, Vol. 1 (1953-80 [2008], Sterns Africa)
• Franco/Tabu Ley Rochereau: Omona Wapi (1984, Shanachie)
• Franco: Franco: The Very Best of the Rumba Giant of Zaire (1956-87 [2000], Manteca)
• Franco: Francophonic Vol. 2 (1980-89 [2009], Sterns Africa)
• Lefty Frizzell: The Best of Lefty Frizzell (1950-65 [1991], Rhino)
• Al Green: Call Me (1973 [2004}, The Right Stuff/Hi)
• Al Green: Greatest Hits (1972-75 [1995], The Right Stuff)
• Billie Holiday/Lester Young: A Musical Romance (1937-57 [2002], Columbia/Legacy)
• Howlin' Wolf: His Best (1951-64 [1997], MCA/Chess)
• Michael Hurley/Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Frederick and the Clamtones: Have Moicy! (1976 [1991], Rounder)
• Mississippi John Hurt: Rediscovered (1965-66 [1998], Vanguard)
• Elmore James: The Sky Is Crying: The History of Elmore James (1951-61 [1993], Rhino)
• Louis Jordan: Five Guys Named Moe: Vol. 2 (1939-55 [1992], MCA)
• Madonna: The Immaculate Collection (1983-90 [1990], Sire)
• Curtis Mayfield: The Impressions: The Anthology (1961-77 [1993], MCA)
• Mighty Sparrow: Volume One ([1992], Ice)
• Van Morrison: Moondance (1970, Warner Brothers)
• Randy Newman: 12 Songs (1970, Reprise)
• Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988, Def Jam)
• The Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed (1969, Abkco)
• The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street (1972, Virgin)
• Sonny Rollins: Plays G-Man (1986, Milestone)
• Sonny Rollins: Silver City (1972-95 [1996], Milestone)
• The Shirelles: The Very Best of the Shirelles (1958-63 [1994], Rhino)
• Sly and the Family Stone: Greatest Hits (1967-69 [2007], Epic/Legacy)
• Steely Dan: Pretzel Logic (1974, MCA)
• Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998, Polygram)
• Neil Young: Rust Never Sleeps (1979, Reprise)
• African Connection, Vol. 1: Zaire Choc! ([1988], Celluloid)
• Girl Group Greats (1960-65 [2001], Rhino)
• Motown: The Classic Years (1960-72 [2000], UTV)
• Motown Classics: Gold (1960-72 [2005], Motown)

There are another 36 Christgau A+ albums that I have rated at a nearly equivalent A. Some I could definitely see bumping up -- the first two New York Dolls albums gave me pause as I was going through the list, as did Fear and Whiskey (Mekons), Marquee Moon (Television), Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, and Ben Webster's King of the Tenors.

I have 176 records listed as A+ in my database. These include several albums that Christgau mentioned with accolades but left ungraded, like (I'm adding - for cases where I doubt he would A+; * for cases where he has weighed on on a similar compilation; also I'm skipping redundant compilations, like Chuch Berry's The Great Twenty-Eight or The Very Best of the Coasters):

• The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (1969, Capitol) -
• The Clash: The Clash (1977, CBS [UK])
• Sam Cooke: The Man and His Music (1957-64 [1986], RCA) -
• Duke Ellington: Flaming Youth (1927-29 [1969], RCAl) -
• Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis Again (1957 [1990], Verve) *
• The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969, A&M)
• Aretha Franklin: Aretha's Gold (1967-68 [1969], Atlantic)
• Marvin Gaye: Anthology (1961-77 [1986], Motown)
• Jerry Lee Lewis: Original Sun Greatest Hits (1956-63 [1984], Rhino) -
• Otis Redding: The Otis Redding Story (1962-67 [1989], Atlantic)
• The Temptations: Greatest Hits (1964-66 [1966], Motown) -
• The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967, Verve)
• The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground (1969, Verve)
• Hank Williams: The Ultimate Collection (1947-52 [2002], Mercury) -
• X-Ray Spex: Germ Free Adolescents (1978, Blue Plate) -
• The Best of Doo Wop Uptempo (1954-63 [1989], Rhino)

My only Beatles A+ is Help!, which I don't think he's ever mentioned. (I mean the UK version. The US version was botched with a bunch of soundtrack cuts. My only other Rolling Stones A+ is High Tide and Green Grass, a compilation later superseded by Hot Rocks, which he dismissed as unnecessary. I've never given Dylan or Hendrix (to pick two names you might wonder about) an A+, but had he extended his A+ lists back (as he sort of did with the basic library lists), he almost certainly would have. One could add more names here. He's pretty clear that he doesn't have Pet Sounds at A+, hence the introduction of the "-" notation.

I have Otis Blue at A+, plus the compilation I listed. He has a different comp, and different albums in his library lists, so I included my comp (the one of several I like the most). Including Jerry Lee Lewis and Aretha Franklin, and excluding Loretta Lynn were close calls. I have an A+ Loretta Lynn comp he didn't review, but it is similar to one we both have an A for, and one he left ungraded but I have at A-. The Flying Burrito Brothers was the album that made me think I should compile this supplemental list. The Clash and X-Ray Spex were UK-only imports that he didn't review in his chauvinist 1970s. I have personal experience to indicate that he would have given The Clash an A+ at the time. (He gave the inferior 1981 US reissue an A, as did I.) He probably wouldn't have rated X-Ray Spex so high at the time, but might now (especially as the CD added "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!," which he definitely did know and like).

I finally wrote a comment on this to Christgau's Substack:

I was thinking about the A+ question, then killed the day doing some research. Bob has 128 A+ albums. I have 172, but that's a smaller percentage of rated albums, especially for music after 2000 (or, hell, 1980). But "Very" is an A+ in my book, and illustrates that for me at least, the grade has much to do with how much you play (or feel like playing) the album. I was working in the UK when it came out, and had very few CDs with me, so I wound up playing it literally every day for months. I've never done that since, especially since I started reviewing again, and very rarely even before, when I had less to choose from and was more impressionable ("Dark Side of the Moon" probably came closest, or maybe "Pet Sounds" or "Another Green World"). One reason I rarely play A+ records these days is that when I do, I can't get them out of my head. Last week I started a day off with "Welcome to the Beautiful South" and "It's Not Me, It's You," and they still resurface whenever whatever music I've been playing finishes and I have to face a bit of silence.

I got this reply from Fred H:

I do use your website as well Tom, and the proximity in your two "Very" ratings was maybe what prompted me to ask this question. The R.E.M.s were wishful thinking. Considered the Beautiful South too, but that seemed more of a leap. Even I find Paul Heaton occasionally too quaint, and I'm actually English which makes me an authority on quaint.

Daily Log

Hegel quote: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Need to replace a porch light. Old one is: Greenlite 11W/LED PAR30D/FL/27K 2700K 850 Lumens 11 W 120V 60 Hz 120 ma 40; 3.75 in diameter, 4.7 in high. It seems the difference between PAR30 and BR30 is that the former has a flat face flush with the can, so directs light down, while the latter has a rounded race that extends a bit beyond the can, so projects light wider. I've preferred the flush lights in the past, because they look a bit neater, and because the white light attracts bugs (so the porch is quickly covered with spider webs). But we went with a BR30 bug light in the center, which has worked well, so I ordered more BR30 bug lights. They're non-dimmable, 11W, 2000K, 900 Lumens.

Monday, July 14, 2025

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 32 albums, 1 A-list

Music: Current count 44524 [44492] rated (+32), 16 [18] unrated (-2).

Last week's Music Week was delayed until Tuesday, as I was trying to wrap up my essay and a bunch of last-minute corrections for the Mid-Year 2025 Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. So this week's report only covers six days, although it feels like much longer. I handed my essay with standings in on Wednesday, and Arts Fuse published it on Friday, with an improved title: Sharing What We Know at Mid-Year. Jon Garelick also wrote a complementary essay, Listomania! Confessions of a Bad Voter. I unlocked the website so you could see the complete results: New Jazz Albums (441); Rara Avis (134), and all of the voters/ballots.

Once the poll went up, my next job was to get the word out, and I kind of fumbled the ball there. I did post tweets on X and Bluesky. I even posted on Facebook, and shared that with two groups there. And I blasted off a letter to the voter email list. Arts Fuse also sent out their usual notices. But that's about it. I got a couple of letters back, but not many. And when I searched for acknowledgments, I found very little (but I collected notes on what I found; see link below).

At the time, I thought the most useful thing I could do would be to write up my own blog post. I didn't expect to write a lot, but I was feeling cramped by character count limits, and somewhat nauseated by the fleeting artifice I was seeing everywhere in social media. I wound up writing well into Saturday (although the initial Friday post date still stands). I started with my original essay title, Our Second Mid-Year Critics Poll, and started out with the table of essential links. What followed was less about the poll winners and also-rans than it was about the work behind it, and how I saw that work in the present world context.

By the time I finished, I was feeling exhausted, or at least weary. I find my writing increasingly lapsing into memoir -- a feeling I need to explain everything in terms of how it affected me personally, perhaps some kind of fear of losing oneself as you get old and increasingly irrelevant, or just because I'm more aware than ever of how far estranged I feel from the majority. But I do want to make one thing clear here: I'm not disappointed with the reception the poll has received. I'm pretty satisfied with what we've done. And I'm looking forward to doing it again this fall. But I might be a bit relieved that I don't have to keep plugging it right now.

No doubt part of this is because the feedback I have gotten makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity. For instance, this email, from one of our voters, popped up while I was writing the above:

Want to compliment you for an informative Mid Year Poll. Your commentary was insightful and the results exceptionally enlightening. But most importantly, I want to thank you for your dedication to this project. Trying to imagine the countless hours you spent on this makes my head swim.

I also got one letter in the questions queue from a reader in Toronto:

Really enjoy reading your blog and getting new lines of inquiry for jazz.

Can't get into the political side too much as it drives me to the brink of madness, how human beings can be so stupid, but, I guess we're wired that way, I suppose. Social norms just took a turn somewhere back in our forebears time and it just went downhill from there.

I always keep in mind that homo sapiens were always fighting for food, lodging, etc.

Can't escape our animal instincts, it seems.

Anyway, keep up the good work and keep the polls going.

I'm sure that, even though people might not acknowledge you or your work, it is doing some good.

The jazz part is kind of like triage, where you quickly sort through the bodies to pick out a few worth rescuing, even as you know you simply don't have the time or energy to give so many others anything approaching the respect they no doubt deserve. The political/philosophical questions interest me more: I've found myself favoring "philosophical" over "political" recently, because I'm more concerned with how people think, and less so about the distribution of power -- the limits of power might be something else, leading us back to philosophy. I'm not sure my ideas have achieved any real clarity yet, but it does occur to me that much common thinking is profoundly and/or pathetically atavistic, governed by concepts that once seemed valid but are no longer viable, and in some cases plainly ridiculous.

One example is the habit of gravitating toward the leader who shows the most self-confidence in a crisis (e.g., the 90% approval ratings of GW Bush after 9/11, even though he was obviously wrong in every conceivable aspect; I saw that at the time, so why did so few others?). One thing I've thought a great deal about lately is how much the world has changed in my lifetime (which gets us back to 1950), and in the several generations before me (my parents' grandfathers fought in the Civil War, against the Slave Power). At some point I radically reoriented my own thinking to break with theirs, and to take a fresh look at the changed world. Exploring that would be the point of delving deeper into my memories, as I seem to be doing. Along the way I've heard a lot of music, so that's necessarily part of the story, but only part.

When I did another search for jazz poll references today, I only came up with one more piece: Nate Chinen: Take Five: Midsummer Magic. He mentioned that DownBeat's Critics Poll[*] came out the same day as our poll, and admitted that he hadn't voted in either of them: "it has been a challenging season for work-life balance, and I simply got overwhelmed and missed the deadlines." Chinen's essay ends early with only one album under his "Take Five": perennial poll favorite Cécile McLorin Salvant's Oh Snap, which according to my notes isn't due for release until Sept. 19 -- far enough out that no one in our poll jumped the gun (although we did get votes for several August releases)[**]. Supposedly there's more for paid subscribers: we're entering into Substack here. Although he promises he's going to vote in our year-end poll, he wouldn't be the first jazz writer to take his thoughts and bottle them up out of sight and mind.

I don't mean to grouch. I figure everyone's entitled to their own business plan. I'll be unveiling one in the next week or two, although I'm not sure it qualifies as business. I signed up for a Substack account today, and did a bit of preliminary configuration, but haven't written much less published anything yet. The name is "Notes on Everyday Life": a few of us published a political rag named that back in St. Louis in the early 1970s. I registered a domain name like that a fair while back, but I never did much with it. I have some new ideas, where the domain name hosts a sprawling pile of writing about everything, and the Substack offers a view into the pile. The main value I see is:

1. A system for push notifications.
2. A fairly reliable email list that I don't have to host and/or maintain.
3. A comment system that should be fairly safe and manageable.
4. Some statistical measures of how much interest there is in my writing.

I'm fairly agnostic about the monetization features, which I haven't set up, and may quite possibly never try to use. I'm moving slowly through the various configuration options, trying to figure out what to use, and how to use it. I think it's still premature to publish the URL and solicit subscribers. When I'm ready, I'll announce it first through Bluesky, then here. One bit that I will share here and now is the "Publication short description" -- not really a plan, just something that popped into my head when asked:

Fifty-some years ago I discovered that the personal is political, and wrote about that under this name. Now I'm trying to make it personal again, or at least anti-political.

I'll leave you to ponder what that means. I do expect to write something on it within the week.

After two mammoth weeks for A-list jazz, this week came up pretty short. Perhaps diminishing returns, or flagging energy. Maybe it's time to play something other than jazz -- despite my essay's recommendation that jazz is what the world needs in these perilous times.

[*] I'm not finding a useful link, although Chinen offered this one, which gives you a cover scan featuring Anthony Braxton, who won their Hall of Fame category this year, and touting other winners, like our 2024 album of the year (Patricia Brennan, Breaking Stretch) and rara avis runner-up (Alice Coltrane, The Carnegie Hall Concert). The most interesting claim for me is "it's the largest & most comprehensive Critics Poll in Jazz History" -- largest has been our claim for several years (177 last year; last time I counted theirs was a couple years back, at something like 113, so when I saw Frank Alkyer bragging about the size of his poll, I was skeptical. But according to Chinen, 251 ballots were cast, which is indeed impressive. I'll be interested in seeing who all voted, and how many new names they pulled off of our lists. Also how the larger electorate shifts their various standings. Aside from Brennan and Coltrane, two other major category winners (James Brandon Lewis and Mary Halvorson) have always fared better in our poll than in theirs. I've voted in DownBeat's poll for many years now, and have usually taken copious notes when doing so (see mine for 2025).

By the way, let's also link to All About Jazz's Best Jazz Albums of 2025: All-Star Break Edition. This is also AAJ's second mid-year poll: their first was hastily thrown together after I sent out invites to ours, and this one is much larger, although still only 3 albums deep per voter. I don't know whether our poll spurred these others on, but I'd be happy if it did.

New records reviewed this week:

• Eric Alexander: Chicago to New York (2024 [2025], Cellar Music Group): [sp]: B+(***)
• Andy Biskin/Peter Hess/Mike McGinniss/Sam Sadigursky: Reed Basket (2025, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
• Ingi Bjarni: Hope (2023 [2025], Losen): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jane Ira Bloom: Songs in Space (2024 [2025], Outline): [sp]: B+(**)
• Antonio Borghini & Banquet of Consequences: Resta Chi Va (2024 [2025], We Insist!): [sp]: A-
• Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra: Jorden Vi Ärvde (2024 [2025], Thanatosis): [bc]: B+(**)
• Milena Casado: Reflection of Another Self (2025, Candid): [sp]: B+(*)
• Theo Croker: Dream Manifest (2025, Dom Recs): [sp]: B+(*)
• Theon Cross: Affirmations: Live at the Blue Note New York (2025, New Soil): [sp]: B+(**)
• Angel Bat Dawid & Naima Nefertari: Journey to Nabta Playa (2025, Spiritmuse): [sp]: B
• John Ellis: Heroes (2023 [2025], Blue Room Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Elliot Galvin: The Ruin (2023 [2025], Gearbox): [sp]: B+(*)
• John Hart: Love Is (2023 [2024], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(**)
• Ryan Keberle & Collectiv Do Brasil: Choro Das Aguas (2023 [2025], Alternate Side): [cd]: B+(***) [07-18]
• Joe McPhee: I'm Just Sayin' (2025, Smalltown Supersound): [sp]: B+(**)
• Amina Claudine Myers: Solace of the Mind (2023 [2025], Red Hook): [sp]: B+(**)
• Qasim Naqvi: Endling (2024 [2025], Erased Tapes): [sp]: B+(*)
• Camila Nebbia: Rastro O Vacío (2025, Lilaila): [bc]: B+(**)
• Gilbert Paeffgen Trio: Der Mann Auf Dem Trampolin (2024 [2025], Rabbit Hill): [cd]: B+(***)
• Evan Parker/Bill Nace: Branches (2024 [2025], Otoroku): [bc]: B+(*)
• Eric Scott Reed: Out Late (2025, Smoke Sessions): [sp]: B+(**)
• Toms Rudzinskis: Interception (2023 [2024], Jersika): [sp]: B+(***)
• Aki Takase/Daniel Erdmann/Kazuhisa Uchihashi: Tanto (2022 [2025], Innocent): [bc]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Gato Barbieri: Standards Lost and Found 1 (1968 [2024], Red): [bc]: B+(***)
• Gato Barbieri: Standards Lost and Found 2 (1968 [2025], Red): [bc]: B+(***)
• Blackbyrds: City Life (1975 [2025], Craft/Jazz Dispensary): [sp]: B+(*)
• Jaki Byard: Blues for Smoke (1960 [2025], Candid): [sp]: B+(**)
• Walter Davis Jr: A Being Such as You (1979 [2025], Red): [sp]: B+(*)
• Dexter Gordon: Landslide (1961-62 [2025], Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
• Green Cosmos: Abendmusiken (1981-82 [2025], Frederiksberg): [sp]: B+(**)
• Keith Jarrett: New Vienna (2016 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(***)
• Sun Ra: Uncharted Passages: New York Piano Soliloquies 1977-79 (1977-79 [2025], Modern Marmonic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Sun Ra: On Jupiter (1979 [2025], Saturn/Strut): [sp]: B+(**)

Old music:

• None

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• None

Daily Log

I went shopping for eyeglasses today. I have two new bifocal prescriptions, one for full range, the other intermediate range (computer use). I've had progressive bifocals in the past, and have gotten used to them, so that's what I'm inclined to buy. I went by the optical shop affiliated with my optometrist, and got some pricing: $390 for progressive lenses, extra for coatings (anti-scratch, anti-glare, transitions; I forget the exact costs, but ballpark is $50-150), average price $220 for frames, which adds up to approx. $700. I asked about clip-on sunglasses, and they showed me a magnetic clip-on for about $100. The magnets are drilled into the upper corners of the lens, so the suggestion was that they could be added to any frames. Second pair discounted by one-third, so would be about $500. Medicare covers part of the cost for post-operative glasses.

I went shopping today, and checked out two places: Warby Parker and Eyeglass World. Warby Parker is offering progressive glasses with their $95 frames for $320 or $395, the difference being how wide the progressive window is. (Eyeglass World has three levels of progressive lenses: classic, enhanced, and HD. Warby Parker seems to only offer the first two.) Scratch/UV resistant is standard, but anti-glare would be extra. They also have a batch of $145 frames, and maybe some $195, so those would be extra. They offer a 15% discount on two pairs, which would reduce $790 to $671.

Eyeglass World has a basic buy one, get one free deal, although it requires that both pairs be in the same price groups, and it doesn't cover extra coatings. Frames range up to $209, Polycarbonate progressive lens options are $260, $310, and $350. As I'm in the market for two pair of glasses, their marketing may work best for me: basically $529 for two pair, but AR coatings could kick it up to $629.

I looked for frames with clip-on sunglasses, and found a mail order outfit, FramesDirect, which handles a brand called EasyClip. The EC371 frame is $115.74. Progressive polycarbonate lens is $119.99, and standard anti-reflective coating is $40.00, so one pair would come to $275.73. Other frames that look ok: Takumi TK1115 ($115.74). I'd only have need of sunglasses for outdoors, so I could split my order, buy this one less expensively by mail, and get the more important indoor-only computer glasses locally.

Someone on reddit likes Crizal AR (Sapphire). Feeling sems to be that anti-glare is especially valuable with computer screens.

Daily Log

I'm getting seriously pissed at both X and Bluesky. My link to the Mid-Year Poll only got 34 views after 6.5 hours on X, which suggests it's pretty close to useless posting anything there. (Today it's up to 188 views, with 1 repost, but still no likes or comments.) The "For You" X feed is almost totally full of crap videos. Actually, worse than crap, since they're just seductive enough to keep you watching, and get you hating yourself as your mind melts.

Meanwhile, Bluesky keeps logging me off, and I never get a chance to save my password in Firefox. I can tell when I'm logged off because the feed becomes totally generic crap, or zero interest whatsoever. When I tried to manually add my password to Firefox, I found that I had lost the URL to apply it to. I figured I could log out and log in again, but I can't even find a logout function. I did spend some time going through their settings, and found that I could uncheck: Autoplay videos and GIFs; Enable trending topics; Enable trending videos in your Discover feed.

I considered the option to create another account. Seems like that could be useful for Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, but I balked after clicking on it, then found I couldn't back out.

As this frustration was building up, I decided to order a copy of Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. This struck me as a trivial issue when I did my Book Roundup, but his previous books are actually very good, and this trivial issue is occupying an awful lot of my attention of late. I also ordered the new paperback of Bernie Sanders (and John Nichols): It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. I should work up some kind of Venn diagram of the OK reasons vs. my reasons, some of which are probably not OK.

I've continued to work on yesterday's post (I'll keep the date, but it still isn't up yet). Moving into a section on promotion, so some notes there:

• In checking on Facebook, I've found (and liked) poll posts by: William Marx, Chris Monsen, Tim Niland, Phil Overeem, Laura Tillem.
• Also liked on Bluesky: Eyal Hareuveni, Brad Luen.
• Also on X: Akira Saito.

Music Week: Our Second Mid-Year Critics Poll

See blog article.

• Tom Hull: Sharing What We Know at Mid-Year
• Jon Garelick: Listomania! Confessions of a Bad Voter
• New Jazz Albums
• Rara Avis
• The Voters

I say "our" guardedly. The 2024 mid-year poll was originally my idea, although based on my experience in helping Francis Davis with his annual year-end poll, especially the last several years, as his health worsened. And while he didn't actually participate in it, he allowed my use of his name, mailing list, and website (which I had built from scratch years ago). So I could say "our" in the sense of "Francis and me," except that he died in April, so his contribution to our project has now become intangible. Still, he seemed pleased when I offered to keep his annual tradition going, in what is now our 20th year. But after his death, I only did so with the blessing and encouragement of his widow, Terry Gross, so now she, too, is a critical component of "we."

But there are larger circles of "we," without which my own efforts would be much poorer, or perhaps impossible. First there is the dozen or so volunteers so serve as my sounding board as I think my way through this fairly complex project, and who often provide invaluable help with specific tasks. Some are old personal friends, but most are voters who stepped up when I asked for help -- or in a couple cases, offered to help even before I asked, and one was a previously unknown reader who caught a mistake on the website and went on to give the whole thing a very thorough proofreading. (I am a notoriously lousy proofreader, so I really appreciate help on that score.) I won't name them all here, but Jon Garelick wrote the keynote essay, freeing me to just focus on the technical details. And William Marx finished the editing and presentation at The Arts Fuse, which gave us a professional look that I seem to be incapable of achieving.

The next larger circle of "we" is the 113 critics who voted in the poll. Without them, we would literally have had nothing to say. These are all remarkable people, who have spent countless hours searching out and listening to the deluge of new jazz, and to sharing their discoveries in print, radio, and/or digital media. It's been a pleasure and an honor to have gotten to know them, and to work with them. And that also includes dozens more who politely declined to send in their lists, mostly because they lacked time and/or felt uncomfortably unsure of their choices. (I sympathize, as a critic who's guessing so often he's gotten used to not letting uncertainty bother him.)

But "we" also extends to the hopefully much broader circle of readers, who find this and other polls interesting and useful in exploring and understanding the vast and dauntingly complex world of jazz and more or less related music. This poll is by some of us, but for all of us. Although I can't say as we ever talked about it -- Francis and I weren't exactly "pals" as one voter recently put it, so much of what we gleaned from one another was between the lines, for which now you only have my word -- but my initial take was that Francis started a poll of his friends mainly to drum up some content for his annual best-of piece, only to find to his delight that it opened doors to an ever-widening community of critics and fans.

And once he saw his creation, he deemed the poll a cause worth continuing, even at personal cost. After he left the Voice, he had no need to crank out year-end pieces. (Or perhaps I should say after the Voice left us. I also wrote for the Voice back then, and had gotten involved with the poll when their IT department scoffed at Francis's insistence on publishing complete ballots -- something they had done for Robert Christgau's much more commercially viable Pazz & Jop poll). But even in those early days the poll was finding a much broader and more demanding range of postmodern jazz than was featured in narrower (but supposedly more popular) publications like JazzTimes and DownBeat. JazzTimes ran a year-end poll of their own writers, and Francis took great interest in comparing their results to ours. Their poll skewed much more commercial than ours, even with most of their writers also voting in ours. Some of this may be ascribed to Francis vetting critics according to his own taste -- not that he didn't respect and entertain other viewpoints. (I'm probably less picky, or maybe just less discerning than he was, possibly because I'm less convinced of my own opinions, and maybe because I'm too aware of how idiosyncratic my views are to expect others to share them.)

One thing I thought about mentioning but didn't find a way to work it into my essay was how much I've missed not having Francis looking over my shoulder, overseeing the project, even batting down my crazy ideas, imparting an air of stability and dignity to the whole affair. I'm not normally inclined to defer to authority, but I held Francis in exceptionally high esteem, and wanted to please him, perhaps because I couldn't imagine actually impressing him. I especially wanted not to fail him, where an obvious metric would have been losing voters. No doubt many of my ideas annoyed him, but I rarely pressed a point, or let my frustrations sour the relationship. Over time, I got better at anticipating and internalizing his way of thinking. I'm still not smart enough to answer the question, "what would Francis think?" But I'm not totally clueless or careless either.

I had written some rock reviews in the mid-1970s, including 10-12 for Robert Christgau at the Village Voice. Some friends had egged me into sending him a sample of my samizdat, and he took me under his wing, as he did a number of bright young writers during the 1970s.[*] In some ways, Christgau was as imposing a figure even then as Davis was when I encountered him much later, but I noticed less at the time, or cared less: probably some mix of arrogance and naivete, not uncommon in one's mid-twenties but something one grows out of with age. We became friends, and remained in touch. He talked me into writing my first piece on jazz reissues in 1996, and several more pieces in the early 2000s. I talked him into letting me build him a website in 2001. I had written some Consumer Guide-style pieces back in the 1970s, and returned to the format for an oldies column I started writing for Michael Tatum in 2003, Recycled Goods. I knew nothing technical about music, so I always felt like an impostor as a jazz critic, but I knew a lot of history, I had a voracious appetite for new music, and by then I had heard enough of it to develop an ear for what was distinctive and interesting. I had pretty systematically explored many references, especially The Penguin Guide, but also the collected works of Gary Giddins and Francis Davis. So when Giddins left the Voice, I wasn't surprised that they would look to Davis to fill his shoes. (Davis had filled in when Giddins took a sabbatical, which was when I first encountered his work.) I was surprised when Christgau asked me to write a Jazz Consumer Guide, but jumped at the chance. I figured the idea was that with Davis doing the big, quality reviews, I could fill in with quantity. And with neither of us were based in New York, they could use freelancers to fill occasional live coverage. It worked pretty well until the Voice went to hell. They fired Christgau in 2006, but Rob Harvilla kept us working up to 2010, when he too split. After that it was effectively over.

By then, Francis needed me to make sure that the ballots would be published in full. He used to collect everything on his own, then dump the whole pile on me when it was done. I wound up spending more time checking his work than it would have taken me to count the ballots in the first place. Somewhere along the line, I managed to make myself indispensable, so every poll started with an email asking whether I would be available to help out, and making it seem like without me the poll would end. For reasons too embarrassing to explain here, I always was. Sometimes I would nominate a voter, or write a bit on the side, and he was usually open to that. But he was something of a control freak: not unreasoning, arbitrary, or cruel, but very much in charge. I could respect that. He was a great man, and I was pleased to be able to help him. Later, as his health failed, he needed more and more help, and eventually had to cede everything to me. But he had that commanding air about him, even as he became nearly helpless in the last poll, when I finally had effective control, and started inviting almost totally unvetted European critics just to mix things up (and make my numbers: I was proud of that record 177 in 2024). And he actually was pretty gracious, so perhaps my insecurity had gotten out of hand.

At some point along the way, one of our voters made a reference to "the Francis Davis poll," and I latched onto that idea. At first it seemed like a harmless bit of flattery, a way of keeping him engaged as he was slipping away. But he didn't object, and once thanked me for "turning him into a brand." But the name now feels like a legacy to maintain, as well as an inspiration to carry on. How long I can continue isn't clear. While Davis seemed like much the senior figure, I'm only four years younger than him. My present plan is to run a 20th Annual Poll in November, then we'll see.

I'd like to, in the meantime, significantly redesign the website. The present one, at least since 2016 or so, has been cobbled together by tacking each new year onto the end: I start with a copy of the previous year, then edit some dates, tweak the programs, and build up a new set of data files. The top level is just an index of polls. And the early years are just scattered files that originally appeared elsewhere, as they predate the software I wrote to generate the web pages. A better solution would be to consolidate the history at the top level: the bits that have changed over time can be documented as such, while the continuities only need to be written up once. I tried to write some of this up in 2022, in an essay I don't recall him as being very happy with. Since he can no longer correct me, it would be good to go back through his files to check what he was thinking: a big and no doubt fascinating project.

The second thing would be to consolidate the data in a database. This would allow us to construct queries that cross poll boundaries: for example, we could see how a critic voted from year to year, or how an artists' albums fared each year. Those are simple things I frequently wonder about, but only scratch the surface. The biggest problem here is dealing with the rule changes over time. I suspect we will also find errors made long ago, and will have to explain them one way or another. I don't have a detailed design here, but I do have a fairly good feel for the data, to help organize it in more useful form.

This is conceivably a large amount of work -- even if I don't seriously consider any of the "blue sky" notions that keep popping into my head, like community and resource development -- and I'm not sure I'm really up to it. I've always had a pretty solid work ethic (runs in my family) but I never developed the discipline to really see my ideas through, let alone to satisfy standards that have been diagnosed as perfectionist. Consequently, much of what I do is driven by my personal desire to help friends (also runs in my family), driven by their needs and limited by satisfaction -- which is probably why the Christgau and Davis websites are good enough to serve their purposes, but not nearly as good as they could (or should) be, and also why my own website (and for that matter much of my life) remains a rambling, incoherent mess.

It seems like one area where I always come up short is in getting the word out. When the essays were published on ArtsFuse, I put out my usual notices on X, Bluesky, and also one on Facebook (with further shares to two groups). I also sent mail to all of the voters (not that gmail necessarily delivered it all). I hoped people would take notice and spread the word. So when I later searched through Google, I was rather disappointed at how little I found:

• Avant Music News [07-12] The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll Mid-Year 2025 Results
• Bebop Spoken Here [07-11] Press release: Francis Davis Jazz Critics Mid-Year 2025 Poll
• Jeffrey St. Clair [07-09] Francis Davis and the Best Jazz of 2025, So Far
• Phil Overeem [07-01] Death Don't Have No Mercy: My Mid-Year Francis Davis Memorial Jazz Critics Ballot
• Nate Chinen [07-14] Take Five: Midsummer Magic: Didn't vote, but gives us a mention.
• Also this by poll winner Steve Lehman on Instagram.

I also have a few personal thanks in my inbox (4 in response to the group email, a few more elsewhere). I will likely find more in the days to come, but not much. Previous polls produced more feedback, but not a lot more. Nothing really does. Some of this is probably my fault: I don't make it especially easy to comment or to contact me. My engagement in social media is fairly minimal. Perhaps my style and airs put people off? Or maybe the world is just so saturated with demands for attention that everyone is turned off. The season may even have an effect.

I fairly regularly throw out questions on the off chance that someone might take an interest and answer, but they rarely do. At some point during my ruminations on the poll, I asked for tips on how to get noticed, and I did get one answer back on that. The suggestion was that we needed a logo, so the poll could be used as branding in the promotion of winning albums. And with this logo, we could get publicists to promote their winning albums, and thereby propagate the brand without having to pay for out own PR. I'm not dead set against this strategy. I'm on pretty good terms with quite a few publicists, and I usually try to keep them informed and interested (although I've been remiss so far in notifying them). And while I'd say I'm a "no logo" kind of guy (and not just because of the politics of this), I don't doubt that a little more graphic design would spruce up the website (and possibly seduce the aggregators into giving us a bit more presence). But I was thinking more in terms of trying to get more people (especially voters) to write up their own takes on the poll (or at least blast their own ballots out). That was part of the reason for inviting Jon Garelick to write his essay. (He's a regular Arts Fuse writer, so we already had leverage there.) I even toyed with the idea of offering interviews, which isn't really in my nature, but I know enough about the poll I could probably muddle through. Still, it's not too late to try again. After this post, I'll pivot back to publicity again.

But the logo idea got me thinking about the big difference between our poll and more famous others, ranging from small potatoes like the JJA Jazz Awards to big-time publicity rackets like the Grammys. It's not just the logo that we don't have. We also don't have trophies. Nor do we have dinners, where we can wear formal dress and hobnob with celebrities. Steve Lehman can brag about his win, but it's not going to get him a subway pass or a hot dog or much of anything else tangible. It's not even going to get him the chance to meet some of the critics who admire his work. And the further down the list you go, the less you have to brag about -- although in my book making the list at all is some kind of honor.

If someone approached me with some pro bono graphic design or publicity work, I'd seriously consider it, because I think the poll does good work, and more people should find out about it. But if someone offered to turn it into a spectacle, I'd probably just walk away in disgust. It's true that I've made a little bit of money off my work here, but that was never my reason, and I'm pretty sure that was never Francis's reason either. I've been fortunate in my later years is that I've been able to write and do what I want with virtually no regard to earning an income. That's a rare luxury in a world where there is actually very damn little correlation between the social worth of work and its remuneration. It's about as good a definition of freedom as you can find. So I don't see any point in sacrificing that just to toil in someone else's circus. I'd rather keep doing things that are actually interesting for their own sake, and helpful in a world where everyone is becoming enraged by the growing fear of forces trying to rip you off.

[*] If Trish Romano reads this, follow up your oral history of the Village Voice with one that focuses just on the music section in the 1970s. That was the golden decade for New York rock and roll, and especially for rock crit, and Christgau wouldn't have called himself "the dean of American rock critics" without sensing the centrality and importance of the moment. And delay risks running out of time. Christgau gave up the post of Music Editor early in the 1980s, which allowed him more time to work on his own writing, but the section languished -- or so it seemed to me, but having stopped writing and moved away from New York it could be that I wasn't paying attention, or had just passed the once ominous milestone of a 30th birthday.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 57 albums, 11 A-list

Music: Current count 44492 [44435] rated (+57), 18 [23] unrated (-5).

Music Week got pushed out a day this week, extending an already bountiful list even more. The reason was that I needed Monday to work on my intro essay to the Mid-Year 2025 Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. Voting shut down on July 4, with 113 ballots counted, yielding 437 distinct New Jazz Albums and 134 Rara Avis. About half of those albums weren't in my tracking file before polling, but are now. Nearly everything below comes from checking out albums that received votes. This has overwhelmed my ability to post links on Bluesky to newly discovered A-list albums. The idea there was to gin up interest in the coming Music Week, so there's little point in trying to catch up now. But I will note that had I heard it earlier, The Ancients would have made my ballot (published here last week). As a rule of thumb, I figure it takes an average of 3 weeks after filing a ballot to find another album that was good enough to make it -- and more like 3 days to find a contender, but this week shows how a poll can accelerate that process. I have, by the way, cobbled together a Best Jazz of 2025 file (jazz only, and only the A-list portions).

The poll should be published at The Arts Fuse this week, at which point I'll unlock all the totals and ballots on my archival website. Already you can see the voter list and unranked lists of all the albums that received votes. I'm not perfectly happy with the state of the notes files on the website, but beating them into shape has been a very tiring task, and there's little evidence that people read them anyway. The other thing I would like to do is to set up some sort of framework for data analysis, but that too will likely have to wait. The poll seems to repeatedly go through a cycle of three phases: before voting starts, no real urgency to work on it; once voting starts, no time; and once it closes, no energy left.

I tried to minimize wear and tear this time by cutting back on how much I needed to write at the end, I asked one of Arts Fuse's regular writers, Jon Garelick, to write the keynote essay, while I just write an introduction to the tables and voter list. While the website could still use more work, the essays are basically ready to go.

I had some vague ideas about trying to publicize the poll, including a fairly open invite to let other people see the results in hopes they would write their own explorations. To date, nobody's taken me up on that offer. So, as exhaustion sets in, I'll probably wait until November before going into panic mode again.

In the meantime, I have lots of other projects to work on. After I hit a minor milestone, I stopped working on the woodpile project. Not a lot more to do there: some final sorting, some cleaning, and construction of my recycling kiosk. If the heat isn't unbearable, that's probably a week. I also have parts to build a new computer for my wife. That's maybe an afternoon. But mostly I need to get back to my planning, especially for writing, but also website development.

I'm leaning towards restarting the political book project. I'm sufficiently upset with the state of the world to bring some heat. The old outlines are all in the dustbin. The new one is what I call the "weird" book, because something weird happened in the 2024 election, and I think I can make sense of it now. The trick will be to write as much as I can as fast as I can, which means almost totally off the top of my head. It will be somewhat cryptic, and will need a subsequent fact-check phase, but I want to go all the way through the ultimate utopian/dystopian scenarios. It will mostly be about how I think, and how I think you should think. History offers evidence, but we need to bring mentality and psychology to the fore, because that's where the struggle actually is.

If I can knock out 80-120 pages in 4-6 weeks, I have little doubt that it can be fleshed out into a respectable book. I may look for help then, or may struggle on my own. One difference this time is that I feel very little pressure to moderate my views to establish some sort of common front with pro-business Democrats. I can go back to my early radicalism, which offers the sharpest critique of all political parties.

And if I can't write that much, it shows I lack the willpower and discipline, and might as well give up (again). I can always go back to writing bits about music and everyday life, to running polls, to hacking on websites, to entertaining occasional guests, and sorting out my stuff. Plenty to do on those accounts, and not exactly worthless or unpleasant, either.

But before diving into that, I figure I should write up a little Loose Tabs, just to get back into the swing of things. How far out of it I've been is possibly shown by my finding an article called A Tale of Two BBBs and wondering what the Better Business Bureau has been up to lately.

In books, note that I finally finished Greg Grandin's monumental America, América: A New History of the New World. The last couple chapters were so sharply critical of US policy in the region that my next book had to be Noam Chomsky's The Myth of American Idealism (co-written by Nathan J Robinson). I haven't ordered it yet, but the next logical choice would be John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics: A History From the Industrial Revolution to AI. Zachary Carter has been recommending the book, and I'm curious about how wide-ranging the critiques are.

Lately I've been taking a fairly narrow view of capitalism, as the system where owners of capital get all the profits, and thereby accrue extraordinary power. The alternative doesn't have to be a system of communal ownership. Basically, any scheme that distributes profits and/or prevents the conversion of profit to power counteracts the dangers inherent in capitalism. I can think of a dozen, at least, including ones that sustain nearly all of the benefits of personal freedom, independent firms, and open markets.

New records reviewed this week:

• Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quintet: Sound Remains (2024 [2025], Whirlwind): [sp]: B+(**)
• Alchemy Sound Project/Sumi Tonooka: Under the Surface (2024 [2025], ARC): [cd]: B+(***)
• Arild Andersen: Landloper (2020 [2024], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
• Arashi With Takeo Moriyama: Tokuzo (2019 [2024], Trost): [sp]: B+(***)
• Omer Avital: New York Now & Then (2023 [2025], Zamzama): [sp]: A-
• Sasha Berliner: Fantôme (2025, Outside In Music): [bc]: B+(**)
• Dee Dee Bridgewater + Bill Charlap: Elemental (2025, Mack Avenue): [sp]: A-
• Alan Broadbent: Threads of Time (2025, Savant): [sp]: B+(**)
• Kevin Brunkhorst: After the Fire (2023 [2025], Calligram): [cd]: B
• Nanna Carling: Melodies for Two (2024 [2025], The End): [sp]
• Joe Chambers/Kevin Diehl/Chad Taylor: Onilu (2023 [2025], Eremite): [dl]: A-
• Chaos Magick: Through the Looking Glass (2024 [2025], Tzadik): [sp]: B+(*)
• Etienne Charles: Gullah Roots (2025, Culture Shock): [cd]: B+(**)
• Chris Cheek: Keepers of the Eastern Door (2024 [2025], Analog Tone Factory): [sp]: B+(*)
• Chicago Edge Ensemble: Paradoxes in Freedom (2024 [2025], Lizard Breath): [bc]: B+(***)
• Laura Cocks: FATHM (2025, Relative Pitch/Out of Our Heads): [sp]: B
• Coco Chatru Quartet: Limbokolia (2024 [2025], Trygger Music): [lp]: B+(***)
• Isaiah Collier/William Hooker/William Parker: The Ancients (2023 [2025], Eremite): [dl]: A-
• Eight Dice Cloth: The Songs and Arrangements of Armand J. Piron (2024 [2025], self-released): [bc]: B+(***)
• Peter Evans/Petter Eldh: JazzFest (2023-24 [2025], More Is More): [sp]: B+(**)
• Freedom Art Quartet: First Dance (2025, self-released): [bc]: A-
• Sinsuke Fujieda Group: Fukushima (2025, SoFa): [sp]: A-
• Champian Fulton & Klas Lindquist: At Home (2025, Turtle Bay): [sp]: B+(***)
• Renaud Garcia-Fons: Blue Maqam (2024, Sound Surveyor Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Nicole Glover: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (2025, Savant): [sp]: B+(**)
• José Gobbo Trio: Confluence (2025, Calligram): [cd]: B+(**) [07-11]
• Mats Gustafsson/Ken Vandermark/Tomeka Reid/Chad Taylor: Pivot (2024 [2025], Silkheart): [bc]: B+(***)
• Hearts & Minds: Illuminescence (2023 [2025], Astral Spirits): [bc]: B+(**)
• Arve Henriksen/Trygve Seim/Andmers Jormin/Markku Ounaskari: Arcanum (2023 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(*)
• Fred Hersch, The Surrounding Green (2024 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
• History Dog: Root Systems (2024 [2025], Otherly Love): [sp]: B+(***)
• Chris Jonas: Backwardsupwardsky: Music From the Deserts (2022-23 [2025], Edgetone): [lp]: A-
• Kaze & Koichi Makigami: Shishiodoshi (2024 [2025], Circum/Libra): [cd]: A-
• Janet Klein & Her Parlor Boys: Mutiny in the Parlor (2024 [2025], self-released): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joachim Kühn: Échappée (2023 [2025], Intakt): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jim Kweskin: Doing Things Right (2025, Jalopy): [sp]: B+(***)
• Los Angeles Improvisation Ensemble: Insubordinate Lunar Transgressions (2021 [2025], Denouement): [cd]: B+(*)
• Chad McCullough/Gordon Spasovski/Kiril Tufekcievski/Viktor Filipovski: Transverse (2024 [2025], Calligram): [cd]: B+(***) [07-11]
• Tyreek McDole: Open Up Your Senses (2025, Artworks): [sp]: B+(*)
• Ava Mendoza/Gabby Fluke-Mogul/Carolina Pérez: Mama Killa (2024-25 [2025], Burning Ambulance): [dl]: B+(**)
• Camila Nebbia/Dietrich Eichmann/John Hughes/Jeff Arnal: Chrononaux (2024, Generate): [bc]: A-
• Joshua Redman: Words Fall Short (2025, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
• Claire Ritter: Songs of Lumière (2024 [2025], Zoning): [cd]: A-
• Kathy Sanborn: Romance Language (2025, Pacific Coast Jazz): [cd]: B+(*) [07-11]
• The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (2024 [2025], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Something Blue: In the Beginning (2024 [2025], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(*)
• Sons of Ra: Standard Deviation (2025, Free Electric Sound): [sp]: B+(*)
• Tessa Souter: Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project (2025, Noanara Music): [sp]: B+(***)
• Larry Stabbins/Mark Sanders: Cup & Ring (2024 [2025], Discus Music): [bc]: B+(**)
• Pat Thomas: The Bliss of Bliss (2024 [2025], Konnekt): [bc]: B+(***)
• Triology Featuring Scott Hamilton: The Slow Road (2024 [2025], Cellar Music Group): [sp]: B+(**)
• Uroboro: As in an Unpicking of Time's Garment (2023 [2024], Discus Music): [bc]: A-
• Jeff Walton: Pack Animals (2023 [2025], Jules): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Frank Kimbrough: The Call (2010 [2025], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Nanna Carling: That's a Plenty (2022, Solters): [bc]: B+(**)
• Janet Klein: Come Into My Parlor (1998, Coeur De Jeanette): [bc]: B+(**)
• Klas Lindquist: The Song Is You (2015, Do Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Klas Lindquist: Handle With Care (2024, Yellow Car): [sp]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dawn Clement/Buster Williams/Matt Wilson: Delight (Origin) [07-18]
• Roger Glenn: My Latin Heart (Patois) [08-22]
• Kelly Green: Corner of My Dreams (La Reserve) [08-22]
• Rico Jones: Bloodlines (Giant Step Arts) [07-25]
• Peter Lin/AAPI Jazz Collective: Identity (OA2) [07-18]
• Gilbert Paeffgen Trio: Der Mann Auf Dem Trampolin (Rabbit Hill) [05-24]
• Pat Petrillo: Contemporaneous (Innervision) [07-11]
• Premik Russell Tubbs/Margee Minier-Tubbs: Oneness-World (Margetoile) [08-01]

Jun 2025

Aug 2025