[A] Short answer to the former is no, the exceptions so few and far between as to be meaningless. I've always had a strong preference for non-fiction, which may be tied to a very literal mode of thinking, and very little tolerance for allegory and symbolism. This was already evident by middle school, where English was by far my worst subject -- excepting music and athletics, subjects I wound up writing quite a lot about -- which mostly served to turn me against virtually every acclaimed writer in the language (except Shakespeare). When I did belatedly make it to college, I never took another literature or writing course, so what little I've read has been pretty haphazard.

As regards literature, I can divide my life into three periods, roughly from 15-30, 30-50, and 50+, where the first period was one of intellectual curiosity and searching, the second an approximation of normal life, and the third my attempt to focus on my big book. The first could be subdivided into 5-year chunks, where only the first one involved much literature -- mostly plays and poetry, as they were short and I was a notoriously slow reader. In the early years, I actually bought a lot of cheap paperback novels, and read sample bits but rarely finished anything. I was especially into the beats, and Evergreen Review -- Burroughs and Genet are names that come to mind, although also Vonnegut and Coover.

The second five years focused heavily on philosophy and history, especially on Marxism. The third was post-Marxist, which includes my immersion in rock criticism. Novels were infrequent diversions, but Thomas Pynchon's V. left the biggest impression -- I started, but never finished, Gravity's Rainbow. Post-college, I recall several novels from John Gardner --The Sunlight Dialogues was the big one. But by 1980 I was reading very little fiction.

In 1980, I got married, moved to New Jersey, started working as a software engineer, stopped writing about music. I mostly read things relevant to my career (tech, but also business management), plus a lot of popular science -- my favorite subject before a really awful 9th grade teacher turned me off, so like English another subject I completely missed in college. About the only novels I recall from that period are science fiction books my wife read and questioned me about -- I wound up reading everything by Douglas Adams and quite a bit of Robert Anton Wilson.

Since 2001, I doubt I've read five novels. The most memorable one was Tom Carson's Gilligan's Wake, which seemed like it could have been written just for me. (We probably watched the TV show at the same impressionable age, and our lives crossed in New York when we both wrote for Robert Christgau at the Village Voice. Carson ended an article on 1945 by noting that winning WWII was the worst thing that ever happened to America, which is one of the smartest things anyone has ever said.) The most recent novel I've read was Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, which could just as well have been a political tract (and might have read better at that). The best written was Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories, which struck me as being as informative as the best non-fiction, as well as being some of the most dazzling prose I've ever read.

Nothing else really comes to mind, although I'm peripherally aware of much more: I've seen a lot of literary works rendered on film or video, and I know people, including my second wife, who really do read a lot (5-to-10 times as many books as I manage). I have at any rate overcome my intrinsic distrust of fiction -- partly I'm just hugely impressed by the erudition that writers like Pynchon and Proulx put into their work, and perhaps even more so by their ability to turn a phrase. I've contemplated coming to a point where I decide the book project is hopeless, and give up researching it, turning instead to fiction. After the 2024 election, I did pick up Gravity's Rainbow again, but put it down again after a few pages of Slothrop foundering in the dark Baltic Sea. While my bookmark was still in place, the spine of the paperback cracked on opening it, so it wasn't very welcoming.

Perhaps when I give up, I'll have more to say.

[A] I should probably write up some new guidelines for how best to get me to review your music, but I'm going through yet another unsettled bit of time when I'm not even all that sure I want to review any more music, so why make it easier? Still, when someone writes a letter as nice as this one, I feel like I should respond. And I figure it would be good to register the answer here, as this is quite possibly a question that someone else might consider asking.

First, let me make a distinction between artists I'm familiar with and ones I'm not. For people I'm familiar with (and like), I'll probably notice, and may make some extra effort to follow up on. If you're not known to me, I'll probably delete your message quickly, unless you make it personal, with some details that I care about. I get 50-100 emails every day, and dispose of most of them immediately. (I do regularly check my spam directory, because the algorithms suck, but only look at titles there, because anything more is too much work.)

Some attachments may be benign enough that my mailer will include them when I open the message. Otherwise, the chances that I will open an attachment are near-zero. A good rule of thumb is don't attach anything unless I ask for it. You can send me a link to download, or a Bandcamp access code. In those cases, I'm likely to save the email in a "Downloads" directory, but I'm not very likely to do anything with it. Otherwise, I delete nearly all non-personal promo email. I will assume that if/when I need it, I'll be able to look up any bio or other info I need. (For jazz and archival records I like to have the recording dates, and frequently spend a lot of time trying to figure that out.)

If your full record is already out on streaming platforms -- I use Spotify and Napster -- or Bandcamp, you might note that, and I might even follow up immediately (if I'm sufficiently intrigued). Streaming sources are easier for me to use than downloading files (although they rarely come with adequate documentation). Advances rarely do me any good. I don't like reviewing things before they're available.

If you send me a CD, I will note receipt under "Unpacking," and put it in a queue, which I will eventually listen to and write up. (I am able to play 12-inch vinyl, but don't favor or recommend that.) That's the only way to guarantee I'll cover something. There are some other less tangible benefits to playing CDs -- they sound better, and I don't have to be near the computer when I listen -- but those things only matter if the record is good enough to merit extra listens. I got more junk than I can store, so I don't need unnecessary clutter. (I've never got the hang of selling or otherwise disposing of my excess, so I don't need more.) The mail address is under Contact.

I haven't undated my Music Critic, Emeritus file since 2014. While I should, not all that much has changed. After I wrote that file, most publicists dropped me, but a few kept sending me CDs, and I figured as long as they did, I'd keep writing my puny little notes, as some kind of public service. I've made up the slack by taking notes on streamed or downloaded files. The 2024 Music Tracking file shows I've reviewed 335 CDs and 1072 streamed albums released in 2024, which is not quite my highest total ever, but more than most years, and more than I planned. I'd be surprised if I ever did that much again, but I won't make any predictions.

[A] This is the sort of policy question I've been hoping to field questions on, but monetary policy is the part of economics I'm least interested in, and as such know the least about. As such, I tend to take my clues indirectly from others. There is clearly a huge amount of hypocrisy in the politics of debt, as was as much as admitted when Nixon declared that "we are all Keynesians now" and Cheney insisted "deficits don't matter." As if that wasn't clear enough, Greenspan spent the entire eight Clinton years hectoring him into running a surplus, then as soon as Bush became president, he testified in Congress about the urgent need to eliminate the surplus through Bush's tax cuts. And after Bush permanently red-lined the deficit and crashed the banking bubble, Republicans rediscovered the usefulness of debt hysteria in their effort to prevent the economy from recovering under Obama, who McConnell vowed to bury as a "one-term president."

So pretty much everyone agrees that deficit spending is an engine of economic growth. The initial rapid recovery from the Depression of 1929-34 was driven by deficit spending. The point was driven home even more dramatically during WWII, and military spending as well as massive public works kept the US economy growing dramatically through 1970, and to a lesser extent during the Reagan-through-Obama years. On the other hand, FDR's effort to balance the budget in 1938 led to a Second Depression, and Clinton's balancing, although initially masked by the speculative Internet boom, produced another slump in 2001. Meanwhile, much larger public sector spending in 2008 limited the crash, which started on the same trajectory as 1929, before the "automatic stabilizers" kicked in. Nobody honestly doubts any of this.

What may be debated is how much deficit spending is preferable, and how does it fit in with inflation, which is also a matter of some being better (for most people, and the economy as a whole) than none, but too much being worse. (The Fed has customarily pursued a target of 2% inflation, although as a regulatory agendy largely captive to the banking industry, one may suspect their motives in keeping it that low.) A bunch of other factors come into play here, and it's not something I find it terribly useful to go into depth in. But suffice it to say that most of the anti-deficit arguments are specious attempts to exploit your naivete or ignorance for nefarious political reasons, usually to impose an austerity regime to prevent government from helping the great majority of its citizens.

Over the years, I've read scores of essays on debt questions, many from Paul Krugman. I figured it would be easy enough to cite something by him, but chances are you'll find one or both of these behind a paywall: Why You Shouldn't Obsess About the National Debt [2024-06-06]; The Cowardice of the Deficit Scolds [2023-05-08]; and Federal Debt: More Than You Want to Know [2025-02-23]. Personally, I suspect that Krugman himself errs on the sides of the deficit scolds, and that the ideas behind Modern Monetary Theory (also see this explainer) have more merit than Krugman has ever acknowledged. Another, evidently more balanced, piece you actually can read is Dean Baker's Should We be Worried About the Deficit Now? [2023-11-13].

Circling back to your original argument, beware that lots of complaints about deficits are really covert arguments against spending money on something specific that bothers the plaintiff: often welfare, or education, or social services -- very rarely on things that we actually do spend too much on, like arms, or jails, because the people who are critical of them are usually aware that those are things to oppose spending on with principle and not through stealth arguments about what we can afford. The agenda behind deficit hysteria is almost always austerity. If not, they would be equally open to raising taxes, which almost none of them are.

[A] I've played those now, and they'll appear in Music Week, as well as the February Streamnotes archive (along with a couple more). It's relatively difficult to keep track of what one has and hasn't heard from an artist like Armstrong, given the high degree of redundancy in his catalog: he started 30 years before LPs, so the early material has all been picked up in various compilations, and later material has been relicensed, anthologized, and/or simply bootlegged to a large extent.

[A] My initial response to this was:

And a fat lot of good I did. You don't need me to tell you things are spinning out of control or what's wrong with that. You also don't need me saying "I told you so." But sure, I do have some ideas that aren't commonplaces. What I need to do is to figure out how and where to present them, and I'm thinking about that.

I quoted this letter in Music Week, where I commented:

Sure, I have things to say. While I've made very little effort to follow the news, and especially to let myself get involved in subjects like Democratic political strategy, I can't live in the same house as my wife and stay unaware of what's happening. And while I'm tempted to just point back to my post-election essay and add a heaping of "I told you so," some things I posited as possibilities then have evaporated, while I didn't anticipate a few things that have happened, or at least marginally shifted beyond my expectations. At some point I'll look into things like this and that more closely. But I'm also painfully aware that whatever I do come up with go nowhere and amount to nothing, at least as long as I'm operating the way I have the last few years.

I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are people, some known and others unknown, who appreciate my writing. I'm just trying to figure out what path makes the most sense for me at this particular time. I can't go into that here, but will write more about it in the near future. What I can do here is leave you with three thoughts:

1. The more radical Trumpism becomes, the harder it's going to break up, because it is based on fundamentally unsound precepts, both about power and people.

2. Opposition to Trumpism is going to be generated from among the people directly affected by it -- which for one thing means not by people like me -- and its form is yet to be determined.

3. When Trumpism ultimately fails, we are going to need to replace it with better ideas as well as morals, so perhaps those of us who cannot fight but can still think would be more useful doing the latter.

I'm not unaware of or insensitive to the very real damage that Trump and Musk -- and it's probably good tactics to treat them as inseparable, with Musk by far the dominant personality -- are doing and will continue to do until they're stopped. I'm also no less opposed to genocide than I've been since I first used the word on October 9, 2023. But as I noted in my post-election piece, the Trump election definitively quashes the notion, which persisted very faintly as long as Biden was president, that anyone involved might develop a bit of conscience and stop the killing short of complete destruction.

One thing I put great emphasis on in my assessment of how bad a Trump election would be is opportunity costs. Trump's election ensure that the US will do nothing to address the very real problems that Democrats spent way too much time pretending to have finessed for at least the next four years -- plus whatever extra time it takes to undo what they do manage to do. Given the speed with which they are wrecking things, I may have underestimated those opportunity costs. One more thing that I likely underestimated was the extent to which Trumpist power is going to brutalize everyone, even those who resist it. Genocide in Gaza is not just a tragedy befallen a mostly helpless people, but a monument to the notion of "might makes right," which will encourage its use elsewhere, while numbing our response. As proverbs attest, such brutality is almost certain to return to haunt us.

I added a PS to a reply:

One thing that seems to have changed is the chemistry of the Republican Party. For a long time, I argued that the rotten core of the Trump administration was the mainstream Republican Party, which Democrats [foolishly] thought they could turn against Trump. But now Trump has his own activist core, and the Party is totally subservient to their agenda. Fair to call the whole thing Trumpist now (as I've started doing).

I might have added that that "MAGA" always seemed like a mere cult of personality, while Trumpism now seems to have emerged as a coherent ideology and plan of action. (I'm not saying that Trump's followers understand and approve of this ideology, but many of them are taking the first steps in moving beyond personality -- the blind faith that "Trump will fix it" -- to partisan action. Unfortunately, the best historical examples are the cadres motivated by Hitler -- an unfortunate analogy that won't go away until we find a better way of talking about it.)

Moeller kindly replied:

Don't underestimate your influence. At this point in time we need EVERYBODY to stand up and be heard. He is now investigating social security, which I receive monthly (I am now checking my bank account to make sure I get the monthly check) I am pretty sure his changes will effect everyone at some point and if not it will effect people close to you. I also worry how in one month he has alienated our closest allies ie: Canada, Mexico, and the EU and has cosied up to Putin. Just so many things that are scary for us citizens.

I will continue to read your blog for both the music and the politics. BTW I posted your Speaking Of Which to my Facebook page weekly to get all the info out (not that may followers though LOL) Again we have to all stand up even if we don't have a forum to do so.

I don't really have a response to this, or maybe I just have too many to bother with. I don't think it does much good to try to anticipate the limits of Trump's power, let alone his will, which will surely be significant. I'm not worried about Social Security, or about America's "allies," or about "cozying up to Putin," as those particular aberrations strike me as oversteps -- either because he doesn't have that much power or because the opposition has ample strength to resist. I worry more about what already falls within his authority, and about the example he sets for his goons and fans. And, of course, for the inevitable disasters he won't be able deal with competently because he doesn't have the temperament, the skill, or the simple decency of concern.

Along these lines, I got another letter from Claudio Vedovati which can serve as a coda here:

I also want to thank you for the great work you do. It has had immense value for me for years, and I think for many others.

But I also want to thank you for the honesty and humility with which you speak about the advent of Trump.

It is a good start and a good example.

[A] Looks like tomorrow, Friday, January 10, probably late afternoon -- i.e., about when most PR-savvy organizations (businesses, politicians, etc.) release bad news they hope will disappear or at least fade before the next week picks up. Not our scheme, but after promising several earlier dates, I just kept writing two long essays -- which, quite frankly, I could have spent another week or two on. The Arts Fuse got my essays on Wednesday, and their editor is doing a good job of turning them around quickly. Once they publish, I'll open up my website, so you can see which albums tied for 613rd place, who voted for them, and what else they voted for. Also links to the essays on Arts Fuse, including a shorter one by Francis Davis.

[A] As for the grades, Robert Christgau gave me my start as a writer, and we remain good friends. I built his website, at the center of which is a database of his short reviews and album grades. He adapted the old school grade system (substituting E for F), so back in the 1990s when I started compiling lists of albums I had, I tagged them with grades using his framework. That way I could readily pick out a particularly good Jackie McLean or Johnny Hodges album, and remind myself of others. He asked me to write a Jazz Consumer Guide, basically in his style, c. 2005, which I did for the Village Voice up to 2011. Since then, as long as I kept getting free records, I figured it would be a public service to write and post a bit about them. The grades are a convenience: they save me from having to craft language to the reader's basic question of how much I liked any given record. Sometimes, when I was short of time and/or just wanted to move on, they sufficed as a review. At least, the reader knows that I listened to the record, gave it a bit of thought, and put it in the context of everything else I've ever heard.

Around 1990, Christgau decided that life was to short to waste time listening to and writing about records he disliked or didn't care about, which given that his focus was to find more records that he really did want to write about, came to include the great mass of records that are accomplished and enjoyable but not quite exciting enough. The latter made up most of his previous B+ tranche, and he came to ignore most of them, but he spent enough time on some that seemed promising that he wound up writing one-liners on them and filing them away as "honorable mentions." When he compiled his 1990s book, he sorted those into three tiers, marking them *, **, and ***, but in the old framework, they were all various shadings of B+.

When I started writing Jazz Consumer Guide, I followed his format, with short reviews of A and A- records up top, followed by a long list of roughly sorted "honorable mentions," and a shorter list of "duds" -- sometimes, as he was doing at the time, I'd pick one out to write something scathing about, which was the least pleasant part of the job, but oddly (or so I thought) the one bit I regularly got fan mail for. I ran across two big problems rather quickly, which were both effects of the basic fact that the overwhelming majority of jazz albums are actually very good: the musicians have superb skills, allowing them to develop and execute complex ideas. Some, for sure, went in directions I didn't particularly care for, and some of those wound up on my "duds" list, not because they were objectively defective records, but because for some reason they rubbed me the wrong way. (The most infamous case was Maria Schneider, which I almost certainly rated too low, but I reacted more harshly back then to what I felt was excessive adulation.)

The bigger problem was that I had many more really good records than I ever had space to mention. It occurred to me that B+ was such a large space that it should be subdivided, so I adapted Christgau's star-system, making sure to include the B+ for clarity. Once I did this, my possible HM lists matched pretty closely with the top B+(***) tier. I also noticed that as much as I liked, or at least was impressed by, the B+(*) tier, they were records I would never return to. The middle tier turns out to be a mixed bag, with elements of very good mixed in with a lot of very competent. Of course, I've also given up any pretense that these grades are anything more than reflections of my own personal quirks -- hopefully everyone takes them as such. They may be found useful by some people who find my views and tastes interesting. And they are no doubt resented by artists who find themselves short-changed (sometimes after careful deliberation on my part, but much more often with only the most fleeting concern).

The little bracketed abbreviations at the end of many reviews indicate the source that I listened to: [bc] means Bandcamp, [sp] Spotify, [yt] YouTube, [cd] and [cdr] are physical CDs (most these days are promos, but the latter indicates that they came with nothing resembling real packaging), [dl] are things I actually downloaded (mostly promos these days), and there are a few more -- the monthly archives have a legend. I started this when I folded several separate review columns into a weekly report. At that time, my streaming source was Rhapsody, so it was the default -- I previously called the column Rhapsody Streamnotes -- but I felt that CDs should be noted as such, and the other variants just fell into line. While in theory it shouldn't matter where I hear something from, in practice these things make for subtle differences.

[A] While I'm pleased to hear that you enjoy and appreciate my work on the jazz critics poll, etc., I have no interest in checking out your platform, and not just because these days I never engage in "live music experiences." I would be interested in hearing more about you, what interests you in jazz, and what the jazz world looks like from Serbia. Unless, of course, this is just AI-generated spam, in which case I'm slightly impressed, not so much just by the content but by the uncomfortable suspicion that I'm its target.

[A] I have very little insight into the politico-sociology of country music here in America, let alone in Europe, where language issues come into play. ("Americana" does seem to be exceptionally popular in the UK, but that lines up nicely with 1970s "pub rock.") While Christianity and jingoistic patriotism have long been saluted in Nashville, and nods in that direction sometimes get picked up by right-wing media, there has always been a subversive undercurrent in country music, as with virtually all modern forms of art. I grew up in country music country, and absorbed a lot of it, even when I thought I was rebelling against it. Friends like Harold Karabell and George Lipsitz got me to give it a chance, and these days I find about as much human interest and trenchant social commentary there as anywhere else. The notion that country music is stereotypically white ultimately means very little, if it's even true at all. (Plus, nobody likes getting stereotyped.)

I'm not aware of any research on this, but my impression is that right-wingers aren't all that interested in music, or in any form of art. I don't wish to be smug or condescending about this. It may just be that, even living in Kansas where they dominate politics, I know or even encounter very few right-wingers, and that the few I do run into aren't representative. But they're a pretty dull and unpleasant sort. Sure, some country music sinks to their level, but I doubt even they enjoy it.

Briefly, on the other items: I wrote up the "1,000 albums" piece in 2009, and added a few items later, so now it's a bit over 1,000: new albums do make the mark, although my increasingly superficial listening habits make it hard these days to find new music that I love as much as the music I grew up on. I see now that the last revision was in 2020, so perhaps another is due.

As for Speaking of Which, it just got to be too much. I've thought about quitting many times, but as the 2024 election approached, I felt obligated to see it through. Even if the results had been better, I would most likely have decided to give it up. But this backsliding into an even darker version of 2017 is just too much self-torture. While I am thankful that I have readers who appreciate what I've been doing, I'm not filled with the sense that I'm really accomplishing much. And at my age, I don't have to keep doing this, or figure out how to restart. Also, the sense of isolation is taking a toll. It's time for some kind of change.

[A] It is updated every time the website is updated, which is usually when I put a new blog post up. I make a few minor changes to it virtually every day, so in that sense it is always changing. Bigger chunks of work, like going through the AOTY new releases lists to collect ratings, and going through their publication lists to pick up late ratings, have been much more erratic. While it was in pretty decent shape through the mid-year lists, I let it slide after that. But as the first EOY lists have started to appear, I'm getting back into it -- although I'm still very busy with other "higher priority" things. I doubt this year's efforts will ever be as comprehensive as some past years. Getting harder and harder to keep everything going.

I should note that one way to track updates could be the RSS feed, but mine is hand-crafted, and I haven't gotten into the practice of updating it when I make minor changes (which, for some files, is practically daily, or weekly to you). As I'm writing this, I can think of some ways to automate reporting of changes, possibly including line differences (through the old UNIX diff program), but they all involve new programming, unlikely in the short term.

[A] I've written about three GOAT albums (all favorable, and well before your mail), one by The Black Angels (favorable, from 2010), and two by Kali Malone (once before, once after, neither glowing). The "Google Search" form should be able to find you the reviews. I can't say as I remember anything beyond the names at this point.

[A] I wasn't aware that there were any, but when I checked, there were a couple unchecked items in the "shopping list" database, and a couple more I hadn't noted. I started streaming around 2008, and that radically reduced the cost of trying things out, especially things that seemed iffy. I disliked Wilson's 1988 album, and since then only Presents Smile (2004) won any sort of critical favor. Still, Wilson had special significance for me. That I ever became a rock critic was mostly due to Don Malcolm, who was a huge Wilson fan. Tom Smucker, who wrote Why the Beach Boys Matter is also a personal friend, and he matters too. So I went back and checked on a couple of missing items, but they weren't very good, and my records are still incomplete. Enough for now. But back in 2013, I did go back for the Beach Boys' early albums (pre-Pet Sounds), which I knew and (mostly) loved from singles and compilations, most notably the canonical 2-LP (later 1-CD) Endless Summer.

PS: I got another one from this person: "I would love to see your reviews and gradings of the Deep Purple albums you own." That one's easy. That doesn't guarantee that I never heard any -- as I recall, many friends from the early 1970s had one or two of their albums, but nobody I knew played them, and in my pre-critic days, I never saw the point. And when I did, and my aims became more encyclopedic, I had more promising avenues for my time. I still do.

[A] Aside from some major rhythm masters, I've never been much into solo piano, although I'm pretty sure that I have A-listed a couple dozen exceptions over the years, including Jarrett's The Köln Concert, his big commercial breakthrough from 1975. Even there, I'm pretty sure that I was never got into the original 1.5-LP set I had, only warming to it when I got the whole thing in one straight shot on CD. Even if the five Sun Bear Concerts were as good as the one in Köln, that's a lot of work for variations I'm unlikely to appreciate anyway. I did go back recently and listen to 1973's Bremen/Lausanne, and it's also real good. And I've heard a fair number of later solo albums, all more/less good, none great enough to really single out. Streaming Sun Bear Concerts is probably possible (some big chunks are also on YouTube, but unless I get some reason to go completist, it's just too much for me.

If you're excited by solo piano, you may find The Penguin Guide to be especially useful, as Morton and/or Cook are totally besotted by the stuff. I find they're pretty dependable for sorting among solo piano albums, even if I think they overvalue them in general.

PS: I did play the YouTube link above, and it's really good, without being a retread of The Köln Concert.

[A] I, too, was taken aback the first time I read a rave about major Brecker was. I forget where, but this quote from Stuart Nicholson's 1990 book, Jazz: The 1980s Resurgence, gives you the flavor, naming Brecker as "the most influential saxophonist since John Coltrane," and adding that "any aspiring saxophonist was forced to take account of his tone, technique, energy and his harmonic methodology." I don't have the technical skills or interest to weigh in on half of that, but after going back for a refresher on several albums I had missed, the other half strikes me as good but not really exceptional. If I had to play a ratings game, I'd say that among somewhat similar players his peak performances would rate above Bob Mintzer, but below Chris Potter.

Two of Brecker's better albums are Time Is of the Essence (1998) and Pilgrimage (2006) -- I have them both at B+(**). I don't recommend anything by the Brecker Bros., although "Heavy Metal Be-Bop" and "Some Skunk Funk" appealed to me as concepts. He did a huge amount of studio work, and has side credits on some good-to-great rock and soul (James Brown, John Lennon, Paul Simon, Carly Simon, Steely Dan, Parliament/Funkadelic, Chaka Khan, Lou Reed, Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, Manu Dibango, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Blue Oyster Cult, Average White Band, Chic, Garland Jeffreys, Luther Vandross, the list goes on and on, even includes Willie Nelson and Andreas Vollenweider). Also looks like he played on 50+ other jazz albums -- probably some good records in there somewhere, but not much jumps out at me. (He did one with Mintzer called Twin Tenors, but I haven't heard it.)

PS: I've generally found that anyone who has a huge reputation deserves at least some of it, on some level, if you give them a fair chance. Sure, there are styles, or maybe just quirks, that one dislikes so much no such effort is possible, but it's easy to understand that as your problem, no reflection on the musician. I'm also aware that I tend to react skeptically to exorbitant hype. Charlie Parker was one case that took me a long time to reconcile, but in the end, I could point to examples that both explain the hype and confirm my skepticism.

But Brecker isn't a case like that. No doubt he's technically a good tenor saxophonist, and I'm inclined to grant that he's reliable even when the music around him isn't up to snuff (which is way too often). To understand this better, you'll have to look at who's hyping him, and try to figure out why. I recognize that there are some examples of people making extravagant claims for Brecker, but the first point to make here is that there aren't many people doing so. Penguin Guide, for instance, gives him a lot of 3-stars, but no 4-stars. Parker worship, on the other hand, is almost universal.

[A] I've always listed him under the broad category of rock, following Drive-By Truckers, and I've never thought about him enough to rethink that. But throwing the 'C' flag was easy enough, so I tried it. Put him in the number 1 spot on the C-F-A list, which I find a little creepy, but happens with genre-crossing. (Do metal fans agree that my top EOY-listed metal albums are real metal? I doubt it.)

Why I threw "Americana" on the end of "Country-Folk" is somewhat mysterious. Probably because my view of Country is broader than the Nashville-Austin axis, and that's where the outliers get slotted, but I wouldn't want the definition to creep into including such Americana-ish rockers as Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Neil Young.

[A] I seriously doubt that I ever "equate[d] Hamas with the Palestinian people," or that I ever would. That would be a category error, and a particularly grave one, given that's exactly what Israel's leaders are doing when they claim to be fighting Hamas but are actually inflicting collective punishment on Palestinians in Gaza. Perhaps I let my guard down and spoke imprecisely. It would, for instance, have been snappier to just write "Israel" instead of "Israel's leaders" just now, but people don't think and move in unison, even when their state does.

But at least in Israel, there is a sort of democratic process, one that promotes leaders from a broad class of people (limited as it is to Jewish citizens of Israel). Whether it's fair to blame people for the leaders they elect is debatable, but where there is no free, informed choice, how can that be helped? Palestinians have never been able to choose their own leaders: either outsiders picked them (as the British did in picking Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1920), or they fought their way to power (as Hamas did in Gaza in 2006).

I'm no expert on Hamas, but what little I know hasn't made me very sympathetic. But it's hard to think of any Palestinian leaders who have served their people well. Most obviously, they've always been late at conceding points Israel had previously claimed, but by then Israelis, with their relentless pursuit of "facts on the ground," had moved on. Abba Eban famously quipped that Palestinians "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace," but it's doubtful Israel ever offered any such opportunities. Even when hinted at -- e.g., 1967's "land for peace" promise; 1979's pledge for Palestinian "autonomy"; the 1993 Oslo Accords -- they were never serious, and always found excuses.

You can't really claim much credit for Israeli leaders either. Sure, David Ben-Gurion did a remarkable job of building his power base in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in mandatory Palestine), and raising it to independent statehood. But he wasn't satisfied with Israel's borders in 1950, and he left the country divided and poisoned, leading to a series of expansionist and exclusionary wars, up to the present day.

But to get back to your question, between Hamas and Israel as options, I'd have to the US would be better off dealing with Hamas. It's hard to see how that might work, given that the US is insanely phobic about Hamas, and not just because Israel seems to be able to run Washington as a sock puppet. But a tilt toward Hamas would give Israel pause, which is especially important now that Israel is doing immense damage to its standing in the world by even flirting with genocide. And because chances of negotiation are improved when you give the weaker party a bit more leverage. (And I'm not suggesting that the US give Hamas "blank check" support. Just some legitimacy so it can advance reasonable proposals that Israel could actually agree to.)

Moreover, why shouldn't Americans get a little ticked off by how contemptuously Israel treats us? Including how blatantly Israel interferes in our elections? Maybe if they sensed some risk, they'd act a bit more circumspect.

As for the charges that Hamas is "a criminal enterprise" and "a beard for Iran," sure, that's something some people are saying. For instance, I found an article on NBC that makes those points (not very convincingly, as I discuss in today's Speaking of Which). Iran never had the slightest interest in Palestine, even ten years after the 1979 revolution and the US hostage crisis, until Israel decided it could manage Americans better by playing on their grudge against the Ayatollahs. (Trita Parsi details this in his 2007 book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.) Since then, Iran may offer occasional words and support to Hamas, but not much, and Hamas has no reason to toe Tehran's line.

As to the "criminal organization" line, that's true of lots of states, especially ones that aren't democratically elected, but all the more so here because Hamas has literally been outlawed by the US and its allies around the world. Still, trade and capital flows are so tightly regulated around Gaza that they have to hide what they're doing. Still, it's hard to believe that their actual graft amounts to much. If it did, why would they have risked it all by foolishly attacking Israel the way they did?

PS [2023-12-04]: Response, quoted last two lines, adding:

I'm not suggesting 'graft' per se. Hamas functions more akin to any criminal enterprise. Their 'business' is near global with governance as a sideline. There is little to no 'risk' involved. That activity will continue regardless of any outcome. In that sense the idea that Israel can eradicate Hamas is inane. Far easier to sacrifice the pawns (Palestinians) to accomplish Iranian goals.

The gains? The upside for both Hamas and Iran? Destabilization. Some great PR and, in the short term, the attacks certainly derailed any potential Saudi / Israeli agreements.

I have no information confirming any of this, other than the last line: Israel's extreme reaction has been terrible for their public standing, with the Saudi agreement a likely casualty; and given that the main purpose behind the Saudi agreement was for Israel to bless America selling more arms to the Saudis, that's probably gratifying for Iran.

But in the absence of information to the contrary, the best I can do is work from my understanding of how people and nations operate. So at this point all I can say is that I don't buy that Hamas and Iran are operating as you describe, mostly because it doesn't make sense to me that they would. I'm not so naive that I can exclude the possibility, and I'd even grant that it is probable that there are some bad actors on all sides. But it is also the case that Israel and their allies are producing enormous amounts of propaganda, something we should be very skeptical of. Especially when the intent is to distract from the core issue of the moment: genocide.

[A] Thanks for the concern. And questions have been scarce lately, so thanks for that, too. But no one needs me to tell you what to think about music you've already heard. Taste is way too variable to trust anyone's but your own. But I did belatedly check out the album, and wrote it up. Long story short, about a fourth of the album is Ornette, and it's instantly recognizable as such, brilliant here but scarcely noticeable had it been embedded in any of his dozen-or-more best albums. As for Howard Shore's soundtrack music, I don't recall complaining about it many years ago when I saw the movie, but I hardly ever find soundtrack music worthwhile on its own.

[A] First, I should clear up the biographical details. I majored in sociology for two years at Washington University, after transferring from Wichita State, where my major was philosophy. I never got a degree, and never did any work in sociology, social work, or anything remotely close. My actual interest was critical theory, so my approach to academic sociology was rather, well, critical.

I worked as a typesetter for several years after that. As I got more interested in computers, I got a job in software engineering at a company that made typesetting equipment. I had natural curiosity about how that equipment worked, and took advantage of opportunities to tackle increasingly technical jobs. This was the early 1980s, when hardly anyone had CS degrees, so most people were self-taught. That's probably changed, but back in my day people who studied CS carried IBM card stacks to be batch processed, and were pretty useless around microprocessors or any kind of hardware.

Still, I suspect a couple tips are still valid. First, read as much good code as possible. Second, find people who are really smart, and make yourself useful to them. They will, in turn, share much of what they know, and possibly open some doors for you. Your education will be obsolete a year or two after you start working, so you have to keep learning. I started working in a shop that had a UNIX source code license, so I could read everything, and my mentors included one of the architects of GECOS (which was a joint venture between GE and Bell Labs). It should be much easier to get breaks like that now: just find some free software to work on. Dig in, find and fix bugs, document and clean up code, come up with ideas to make it better, have them batted around (and often shot down), go back and repeat.

It helps to study the history and lore -- especially things like quality control and project management. You won't have to start as low down as I did -- even chip designers don't have to know how adders work these days -- but it helps to have a sense of the building blocks, how they interface, and where they break. Learn to debug, and not to fear it. I'm not great on that count, but the people who do it best are the best. I imagine AI is going to have a big impact on all this, but the only thing I am certain of is that it's going to create a lot of need for debuggers.

In the long run, I found I could apply insights I had learned in engineering to the study of societies and of political policies, but only if I fully appreciated the complexity of the subjects -- something I must have learned in my initial study of philosophy and sociology. Of course, it's impossible to tell whether my insights are right, because I'm in no position to test them, but it feels like the two worldviews complement each other.

[A] Probably not. Francis Davis has invited a couple dozen "broadcast journalists," so Rollins might be eligible on those grounds, but I have no way of vetting them: I never listen to radio, and even if I did my exposure would be local in a small market. I did add a couple of invites this year based purely on recommendations from other voters. Both Davis and I have solicited voter proposals, but we've rarely gotten anything from the public.

I think there's a general reluctance to invite musicians to participate. There have been a couple exceptions over the years (Duck Baker is probably the best known, but didn't vote this year; John Pietaro is the only one I recall who voted this year). Rollins seems like an outlier, but I don't doubt that there are dozens or maybe hundreds of non-jazz musicians who could be described that way.

I have little doubt that there are hundreds of fans out there who are as knowledgeable as our critics, and who could make a real contribution to the Poll. However, I'm stuck with the concept of a Critics Poll, as Davis originally defined it.

[A] Strange question for me, as I'm on record approximately 100% of the time the subject has come up as declaring that I hate/despise/can't stand Christmas music. I've probably graded 100 of the things, as I try to review everything concrete publicists send me (downloads are a different story), but most of the reviews start with such a declaration, and the grades drive home the point.

That said, I haven't received any Christmas music promos so far this year, which is probably the first year in the last 20. Perhaps that means that publicists are wising up to me, or perhaps it's a side-effect of the decline of promo budgets, or perhaps you're right. My first thought was to check Discogs, but they don't offer Christmas music as a genre or style. So I tried searching for "christmas music," then narrowed the search by decade and year. Just eyeballing a table of numbers, it looks like there's been a fairly steady decline from 1029 in 2014 to 860 in 2020. That continues to 737 in 2021 and 229 in 2022, but I suspect those numbers (especially 2022) reflect the delay in adding entries to the system. I consult Discogs often for new jazz releases, and a 2-3 month delay isn't uncommon. From 2000 to 2014, the lowest year is 940 (2012), and the max is 1273 (2003), with the average about 1100. I didn't table up the 1990s, but the average is comparable to the 2000s (1148 vs. 1130).

I can think of a half-dozen reasons for this long-term decline -- if, indeed, that's what it is, as I can also think of reasons the statistics might be skewed (e.g., maybe Discogs editors are becoming less vigilant?). I'll leave that to you, because I really don't care.