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Thursday, February 25, 2016

I suppose I should be looking past 2015 by now, but 77 (of 120, so 64.2%) new records below were 2015 releases. Also, all but three of the 43 2016 releases are jazz, almost all from my incoming queue. I've mostly weaned myself from updating the 2015 EOY List Aggregate file, although I continue to tack on my own grades when I get around to things. Also continue adding things to my own jazz and non-jazz EOY files -- after trailing all year, the new non-jazz A-list now leads the jazz 81-77.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody (other sources are noted in brackets). They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on January 31. Past reviews and more information are available here (7800 records).

Recent Releases

The 3.5.7 Ensemble: Amongst the Smokestacks and Steeples (2014 [2016], Milk Factory Productions, 2CD): Group variously configured as a trio, quintet, or septet, although there's too much fine print for me to sort out which is which: full blown, you get tenor sax, trumpet, clarinet, guitar, piano, bass, drums -- no one I recognize (except maybe pianist Jim Baker). Probably based in Chicago -- one of the few covers is from Fred Anderson (another is a Zimbabwean folk tune). Some stretches make a strong impression, but others drag and in the end I don't much care. B [cd]

Andy Adamson Quartet: A Cry for Peace (2015 [2016], Andros): Pianist (credit is "keyboards" but the piano sketch on the cover looks grand enough), first album (although the publicity photo looks like gray hair), a quartet with Dan Bennett on sax, plus bass (some electric) and drums. Original material, upbeat, sax wails. B+(*) [cd]

Africans With Mainframes: Commission Number 3 (2015, Bio Rhythm, EP): Chicago house duo, Nolelan Reusse and Jamal Moss (better, but not only, known as Hieroglyphic Being), Discogs credits them with nine singles/EPs since 2001. Three cuts, 21:40, fast beats, went by so fast I'm not sure I heard it all. B+(*) [Boomkat]

The Alchemist and Oh No: Welcome to Los Santos (2015, Mass Appeal): Sometime rappers but mostly hip-hop producers, each with more than a half dozen or more records on their own, the schema here is to "present" various artists -- a mix of soul, synthpop, and dancehall with a commercial tie-in to a major video game. B+(*)

Ancient Methods: Turn Ice Realities Into Fire Dreams (2015, Hands, EP): Techno producer Michael Wollenhaupt, initiated this alias in 2007 as a duo with Conrad Protzmann but continues solo. Four cuts, 25:49. Engaging enough, but do I detect a bit of martial music, or just the mechanical percussion of factory work? B+(*)

Dave Anderson: Blue Innuendo (2015 [2016], Label 1): Saxophonist (tenor and soprano), has a couple previous albums, leads a groove-oriented quartet here -- Pat Bianchi (organ), Tom Guarna (guitar), and Matt Wilson (drums) -- something a little lighter than soul jazz but very pleasant. B+(*) [cd]

Thomas Anderson: Heaven (2016, Out There): Singer-songwriter from Oklahoma, based in Austin, cut a self-released album in 1990 that got him some notice and a few records on very small labels before he landed back on his own with an equally fine album in 2012. This one makes eight, and he's never been clearer or more straightforward, but he has rocked harder, and been more amusing. Perhaps like me he never figured heaven would be all that much fun. B+(***)

Annie Girl and the Flight: Bodies (2015, United for Opportunity, EP): Bay Area alt-rock group, has a couple albums before this tight and catchy six song, 19:49 EP. Vocalist (who also plays guitar) goes by the name Annie Girl, and signs her songs Annie. B+(**)

Arca: Mutant (2015, Mute): Alejandro Ghersi, born in Venezuela, raised in Brooklyn, second album plus a couple EPs. Many short pieces, doesn't settle neatly into a groove, restless I'd say, but more method than frenzy. A-

Allison Au Quartet: Forest Grove (2015 [2016], self-released): Alto saxophonist from Toronto, second album, fronts a quartet with keyboards-bass-drums, Felicity Williams credited for voice on three tracks, lively but not exceptional postbop. B+(*) [cd]

Adam Baldych & Helge Lien Trio: Bridges (2015, ACT): Violinist from Poland, along with the Norwegian pianist's trio. Hard to put my finger on it, but there's something special about this, uh, chamber jazz. B+(***)

Eszter Balint: Airless Midnight (2015, Red Herring): Born in Hungary, not sure when or when she came to the US, but she made her acting debut in 1984 (a Jim Jarmusch movie). She's recorded intermittently, this her third album since 1999. A remarkable set of songs. Also remarkable that no one noticed it until Christgau wrote it up. A-

Beans on Toast: The Grand Scheme of Things (2015, Xtra Mile): English folk singer Jay McAllister, much like American folk singers in that he's low tech with simple songs marked by humor and humanity. At some point I should check out the back catalog -- most with the same cover design -- but this one starts with three memorable songs -- his craft ("Folk Singer"), his manifesto ("The War on War"), and more craft ("Fuck You Nashville"), then follows it up with three more memorable ones ("Lizzy's Cooking" is a favorite), or maybe eight. Inspirational lyrics abound, my favorite: "I believe that everyone should just chill the fuck out." A-

Debashish Bhattacharya: Slide Guitar Ragas From Dusk Till Dawn (2015, Riverboat): Indian classical musician, b. 1963, plays lap slide guitar, has a shelf full of records so I don't know if this is a sampler or just another example. B+(***)

Blue Muse: Blue Muse Live (2015, Dolphinium): From Jacksonville, "specialize in playing jazz in church," although they don't come off as especially gospel-oriented: more postbop, with guitar-piano-bass-drums and vibraphone behind Sarah Lee's sax. Nice, melodic, could function as muzak but doesn't fade so gently into the background. B [cd]

Thomas Borgmann Trio: One for Cisco (2015 [2016], NoBusiness): German saxophonist (soprano, tenor, toy melodica), plays free, two twenty-minute-plus improvs with Max Johnson on bass and Willi Killers drums (and voice). One of those limited edition vinyl-only releases. B+(***) [cdr]

Brooklyn Blowhards: Brooklyn Blowhards (2015 [2016], Little (i) Music): Mostly the work of Jeff Lederer (tenor/soprano sax), with Petr Cancura (tenor sax), Kirk Knuffke (cornet, slide trumpet), and Brian Drye (trombone) adding to the horn power, accordion but no bass, three drummers, guest spots for Gary Lucas (guitar) and Mary Larose (vocal). Mostly trad sea shanties mixed in with Albert Ayler covers, gospels that get under your skin. Turns solemn toward the end with "Shenandoah" and "The Seaman's Hymn." B+(***) [cd]

Jean-Luc Cappozzo/Didier Lasserre: Ceremony's a Name for the Rich Horn (2014 [2016], NoBusiness, EP): Trumpet-drums duo, vinyl limited edition of 300, I'm not seeing the length of these two parts anywhere but the vinyl is 10-inch and Discogs is treating it as an EP, and a fair amount of that is sub- or barely-audible. [PS: total time 19:46] B- [cdr]

Brandi Carlile: The Firewatcher's Daughter (2015, ATO): Singer-songwriter, half-dozen albums since 2005, started as a folkie and could pass as country but not in Nashville -- coming from Washington, not her natural milieu anyway. And like Courtney Barnett, she's upped her game by rocking harder, leading with the guitar. B+(***)

Chaise Lounge: Gin Fizz Fandango (2015 [2016], Modern Songbook): DC-based cocktail jazz group, seventh album (counting last year's least awful Xmas thing), guitarist-pianist Charlie Barnett the putative leader. Singer Marilyn Older seems intent on disappearing in the cover photo but is front and center on the album. I'm not seeing song credits, but if these aren't standards, some (e.g., "If I Never Get to Paris") should be. [PS: All Barnett originals except for one Older lyric and "It's All Right With Me" by Cole Porter.] B+(***) [cd]

Christine and the Queens: Christine and the Queens (2014 [2015], Atlantic/Because/Neon Gold): Electropop project of French singer-keyboardist Héloïse Letissier, the US release recycling cover art and about half of the songs from her 2014 album Chaleur Humaine, shifting some songs to English without losing her cool. B+(**)

Benjamin Clementine: At Least for Now (2015, Virgin EMI): Singer-songwriter, b. Benjamin Sainte-Clementine in London, self-taught, busked in Paris, plays piano and guitar, first album, has a broadly dramatic style which picks up bits of classical and French chanson -- Nina Simone stands out among his reference points, although I also hear echoes of David Bowie. Could become insufferably pompous, but for now let's say he's pretty unique. B+(**)

Avishai Cohen: Into the Silence (2015 [2016], ECM): Trumpet player from Israel, not to be confused with the bassist of the same name, has at least eight albums, some as Third World Love, some as Triveni. He composed these pieces following his father's death, and they are centered on Yonathan Avishai's piano. With Eric Revis (bass) and Nasheet Waits (drums), plus saxophonist Bill McHenry on three cuts. Inspiring in spots, but mostly lovely. B+(**) [dl]

Colleen: Captain of None (2015, Thrill Jockey): French singer-songwriter, Cécile Schott, has a half-dozen albums since 2003, music is mostly electronic, unusually captivating for ambient, vocals mostly in English, much brighter than trip hop. B+(**)

Jonah Considine: Golden Flu (2015, Nein, EP): Five mixes of one title, total 32:19, the redundancy convincing me to treat it as an EP. Electronic beats, heavy on the one. B+(*)

Roxy Coss: Restless Idealism (2014 [2016], Origin): Tenor saxophonist, first album, self-released five years ago, wasn't much good, but she's got a band, a label, and much more poise now, with a light tone that likes to soar. B+(**) [cd]

Czarface: Every Hero Needs a Villain (2015, Brick): Joint venture of rapper Inspectah Deck and hip-hop duo 7L & Esoteric, their second album together. Basically, underground rap for comic book fans. B+(**)

Diet Cig: Over Easy (2015, Father/Daughter, EP): New York "slop pop band," actually formed upstate in New Paltz, with a couple singles and this short (five songs, 10:06), catchy EP. B+(*)

DJ Sandji: 100% Balani Show (2015, Sahel Sounds): Mixtape of Balani Show hits assembled by a Bamako, Mali DJ. Fast, "regularly pitched up," whizzes right past you. B+(***) [bc]

DMX Krew: There Is No Enduring Self (2015, Breakin): British electronica producer Edward Upton, has been in business since 1996. Keyboards, neat little rhythmic figures, doubt they're bouncy enough to dance to but pleasant as they are, they never fade into ambience. B+(***)

Dog Party: Vol. 4 (2015, Asian Man): Punk-pop duo from somewhere in Northern California, first cut reminded me of '60s girl groups, but they guy they were fawning over was dead, so maybe they're postmodern after all. Post-Ramones too. Second album, unless (like Rhapsody) you dismiss something that crams 13 songs into 29:36 as an EP. B+(**)

Anderson East: Delilah (2015, Low Country Sound/Elektra): Singer-songwriter from Alabama, cut his first album as Mike Anderson before switching names for this major label debut. He draws on various strains but most effectively emerges as a soul man -- I doubt it even helps much to add the "blue-eyed" adjective. B+(***)

Harris Eisenstadt: Old Growth Forest (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): Drummer, from Canada, has at least a dozen albums since 2002 (AMG lists 16). Quartet, Jeb Bishop (trombone) and Tony Malaby (tenor sax) the horns, Jason Roebke on bass. I'm a little surprised that the horns don't make a bigger splash, but the rhythm undercuts whatever they do, and is more interesting for that. B+(***)

Ari Erev: Flow (2015 [2016], self-released): Pianist, from Israel, third album, half trio, adding Yuval Cohen's soprano sax on five cuts, Gilad Dobrecky's percussion on four of those. B+(**) [cd]

Father: Who's Gonna Get F***** First? (2015, Awful): Atlanta MC, also known as Fatheraintshit, promises "12 tracks of pure debauchery," but delivers them with a sly understatement, a precise but cautious monotone over beats which barely register. B+(**) [bc]

Mike Freeman ZonaVibe: Blue Tjade (2014 [2016], VOF): Vibraphonist, first record was called The Vibesman, this one is a tribute to Cal Tjader, although the compositions are all Freeman originals so the connection is in the, uh, vibe -- and bassist Ruben Rodriguez, two Latin percussionists, and Jim Gailloreto's flute and tenor sax. Some time ago I tried to figure out who was the most famous jazz musician I didn't have a single record by, and somehow came up with Tjader, so I'm no expert here. Still, the first half or so of this album is really delightful, and it doesn't wind down badly. B+(**) [cd]

Bill Frisell: When You Wish Upon a Star (2015 [2016], Okeh): Jazz guitarist, perennial poll winner, may have done more than anyone else over the last 30 years to expand the domain of jazz -- in an early album he ranged from Ives to Madonna, but he's been most successful at picking up strains of folk music. Here he mostly goes for movie and TV themes, most bad unless your appetite for kitsch is unbounded. With Eivind Kang on viola, Thomas Morgan on bass, Rudy Royston on drums, and Peta Haden singing about half the pieces -- her "You Only Live Twice" is horrific but she turns in a marvelous "Moon River" and nails "Happy Trails." B [cdr]

Fred Frith/Darren Johnston: Everybody Is Somebody Is Nobody (2013-14 [2016], Clean Feed): Guitar and trumpet, the former with a nice bag of tricks which set the tone here. Johnston never really gets out ahead of this, evidently satisfied to let the senior musician find his way. B+(**) [cd]

Donnie Fritts: Oh My Goodness (2015, Single Lock): Born in Florence, Alabama back in 1942, a keyboard player who found success as a studio musician in Muscle Shoals, co-wrote the occasional song with people you've heard of, cut an album in 1974 and a second in 1997. This one is sort of a career recap, a project that attracted quite a few guests but is held together by his quavery amateur voice. B+(***)

Abba Gargando: Abba Gargando (2015, Sahel Sounds): Tuareg guitarist from Timbuktu in the dessert of Mali, lays out straightforward rhythmic vamps, some with chantlike vocals. Wedding fare, I gather, though the amplifier distortion sometimes gets to be a bit much, a dull but treacherous edge. B+(***)

Charles Gayle/William Parker/Hamid Drake: Live at Jazzwerkstatt Peitz (2014 [2015], Jazzwerkstatt): The leader plays tenor sax on the 28:16 opener, piano on the next three pieces (total 27:54), and returns with his sax for the 10:14 encore. His sax is an old story, raw and searching, and his piano embodies the same spirit. B+(***)

Ginkgoa: EP Ginkgoa (self-released, EP): Nicolle Rochelle (from New York) and Antoine Chatenet (from Paris) do "French songs with an American vibe, American songs with French touch," from pop to swing with electro beats. Four of them, anyway, 13:31, but they're onto something. B+(**) [bc]

Michael Monroe Goodman: The Flag, the Bible, & Bill Monroe (2015, MammerJam): I could do without two of those three, and I suspect that if cornered Goodman would choose Monroe too. OK, maybe that's wishful thinking, but the title song is more sentimental than jingoistic, and his bluegrass-infused honky tonk is well honed. B+(***)

Grandpa's Cough Medicine: 180 Proof (2015, self-released): Urban Dictionary attributes the group's name to the movie Dumb and Dumber: refers to alcohol, the hard stuff, but not necessarily 180 proof. Instrumentally they're a bluegrass band, more fixated on Saturday night than Sunday morning, but they hardly sound as degenerate as they advertise, even when Hank 3 guests. B+(*)

William Clark Green: Ringling Road (2015, Bill Grease): Singer-songwriter from Texas, went to college in Lubbock but was a generation removed from the Flatlanders. Fourth album, chock full of songs with country themes -- "Sticks and Stones," "Creek Don't Rise," "Fool Me Once," "Old Fashioned," "Going Home" -- although I find them a bit hard to hear through the heavy riffs and crashing drums. B+(*)

Haiku Salut: Etch and Etch Deep (2015, How Does It Feel to Be Loved): Instrumental trio from England, three women with many more instruments, some cuts focused in piano, others more with electronics ("loopery and laptopery"). Wikipedia lists genres as "folktronica, post-rock." I toyed with filing the under electronica and even new age but they were better than that. B+(**)

Nigel Hall: Ladies & Gentlemen . . . Nigel Hall (2015, Feel Music Group): Retro soul man, born in DC in 1981, based in New Orleans, first album, half original material, half covers, mostly from the 1970s golden age. Goes for a classic soul sound, and more often than not gets it. B+(***)

Ross Hammond and Sameer Gupta: Upward (2015 [2016], Prescott): Guitar-tabla duo. Gupta is from San Francisco, has some classical training but has also worked on a couple albums with jazz pianist Marc Cary (one under Gupta's name). His tabla leads here, while the guitarist nips around the edges. Enchanting background music. B+(***) [cdr]

Anna von Hausswolff: The Miraculous (2015, Other Music): Swedish singer-songwriter, normally plays keyboards but opts for a "9,000 pipe Acusticum Organ" here, which gives the album a dank churchly air with a whiff of brimstone. B

Heads of State: Search for Peace (2015, Smoke Sessions): Veteran group, some claim to being all stars: Gary Bartz (alto sax), Larry Willis (piano), Buster Williams (bass), Al Foster (drums). Play two Bartz tunes, seven covers -- Strayhorn, Carter, Coltrane, McLean, Tyner for the title cut. Much as you'd expect, except milder -- as if they've found that peace, or are just getting old. B+(**)

Don Henley: Cass County (2015, Capitol): Voice still familiar from way back when, though I don't recall hearing any of his albums -- this is only the fifth since 1982. After a 15 year hiatus, he recruited feature guests like a junior grade rapper, though less to be sociable than, I suspect, to gauge his reputation in Nashville. He draws some more estimable names than his own -- Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Lucinda Williams, Miranda Lambert, also Mick Jagger and Stevie Nicks. He doesn't need them, but he has his own limits. B+(*)

Heroes Are Gang Leaders: Highest Engines Near/Near Higher Engineers (2015 [2016], Flat Langton's Arkeyes): Group founded by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, with others in unspecified roles. Starts in a school classroom and moves on, at one point the rush of spoken word fragments coming so fast they become disorienting, kind of like modern life. The saxophones (Devin Brahja Waldman also contributes) are terrific. B+(***) [cd]

Dre Hocevar: Collective Effervescence (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): Percussionist, from Slovenia, has a couple previous albums. This sounded to me like a bassist's album at first -- lots of tortured low rumblings, but there is no bassist: I must have been noting Lester St. Louis' cello and/or Philip White's electronics and signal processing. Also with Bram De Looze on piano and, notably, Chris Pitsiokos on sax. B+(**) [cd]

Inventions: Maze of Woods (2015, Temporary Residence): Electronica duo, Matthew Cooper (Eluvium) and Mark T. Smith (Explosions in the Sky), second album. B+(*)

Jason James: Jason James (2015, New West): Country singer from Texas, has a couple self-released albums before this effective debut. Has the trad country sound down pat, can draw out a ballad and go to the honky tonk. B+(***)

Matt Kane & the Kansas City Generations Sextet: Acknowledgement (2014 [2016], Bounce-Step): Drummer, originally from Hannibal, Missouri, followed his jazz mue to Kansas City. Has a couple piano trio albums, adds two saxes and a trumpet here, playing a program of Kansas City musicians: Bobby Watson, Pat Metheny, Ahmad Alaadeen (a KC-based saxophonist with several albums in the 1990s). B [cd]

Knife Pleats: Hat Bark Beach (2015, Jigsaw): Vancouver alt-rock group, Rose Malberg the singer (as she's been in a series of bands I'd never heard of). Twelve short, snappy songs, nothing over 2:34, total 26:18. B+(*) [bc]

Lame Drivers: Chosen Era (2015, Jigsaw): New York alt-rock group, described as their debut album but they seem to have been around for a while. Chipper, catchy even. B+(*) [bc]

Left Lane Cruiser: Dirty Spliff Blues (2015, Alive Naturalsound): Blues-rock band from Fort Wayne, Indiana, complete with wailing guitar, crunchy bass, pounding drums, and more than a few reefer songs. B+(*)

Urs Leimgruber/Alex Huber: Lightnings (2014 [2015], Wide Ear): Saxophone-and-drums duo. Not specified here, but Leimgruber usually plays tenor and soprano, rather prickly free jazz, doesn't blow you away but keeps teasing at your ears. B+(**) [cd]

Marilyn Lerner/Ken Filiano/Lou Grassi: Live at Edgefest (2013 [2016], NoBusiness): Piano-bass-drums trio, the bassist having an especially good outing, the piano probing, never too settled. B+(***) [cdr]

Mark Lyken/Emma Dove: Mirror Lands (2015, Time Released Sound): Soundtrack, Dove is the filmmaker working in her native Scotland, Lyken an "audio and visual artist." Calming piano, ambient landscapes, scattered voices, including squawking seabirds. B

Made to Break: Before the Code (2014 [2015], Trost): Ken Vandermark group, third album since 2011, with Christof Kurzmann (electronics), Jasper Stadhouders (bass), and Tim Daisy (drums). Another solid free jazz effort, but this particular group has never blown me away. B+(***)

J Mancera: Mancera #5 (2015 [2016], self-released): Alto saxophonist Jaime Mancera, from Bogota, Colombia, came to the US in the 1990s, played in the house band at the Copacabana, not sure what else. Debut album, all originals, backed by guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, drums, percussion -- rich but steady grooves, vibrant sax, the tunes sound to me like classic movie themes, or kitsch, or both. B+(**) [cd]

Will Mason Ensemble: Beams of the Huge Night (2014 [2015], New Amsterdam): Drummer, his Ensemble adding oboe, alto sax, two guitars, bass, and a lot of voice -- rarely my favorite thing. Aside from the voices, the music starts chamber then turns rockish, picking up interest as it goes. B+(*)

Rob Mazurek/Exploding Star Orchestra: Galactic Parables: Volume 1 (2013 [2015], Cuneiform, 2CD): Cornet and electronics from the leader, also big-theme compositions -- "The Arc of Slavery," "Helmets of Our Poisonous Thoughts," "Free Agents of Time" -- done live at a festival in Italy with almost-big band, basically a merger of his Chicago and Sao Paulo Undergrounds plus Damon Locks' spoken word (which at first blush sometimes gets in the way). B+(***) [dl]

Mekons/Robbie Fulks: Jura (2015, Bloodshot): A subset -- aven't found a credits list yet, and some press refers to the band as "Mini-Mekons" -- of the great British country-punk band and label mate, cut after a joint tour of Scotland in 2014 and sneak-released on very limited Record Store Day vinyl. By the turn to English folk, I'd guess that the missing Mekon is Jon Langford. Fulks can't quite fill those shoes. B+(***)

Buddy Miller & Friends: Cayamo: Sessions at Sea (2016, New West): Allegedly recorded on a cruise ship, something I can imagine a journeyman with a serviceable twang doing, although I have more trouble imagining all his "friends" packed on the same boat, only joining him for one stock cover each. A mixed bag, with Kacey Musgraves, Doug Seegers, and Richard Thompson on the plus side, Kris Kristofferson and Lucinda Williams on the other. B+(*)

Whitey Morgan & the 78s: Born, Raised & Live From Flint (2011 [2014], Bloodshot): Honky tonk band from Flint, Michigan with a couple albums under their belt, the titular leader born with the name Eric Allen. Half original drinking and/or cheating songs, half covers ranging no further than Bruce Springsteen, closing with a romp through "Mind Your Own Business." B+(**)

Whitey Morgan & the 78s: Sonic Ranch (2015, Whitey Morgan Music): Third studio album, self-released, can't find credits or such, but nothing wrong with it as straightahead honky tonk/rock and roll. B+(***)

Gilligan Moss: Ceremonial (2015, EMI, EP): New York electronica producer, first EP (four songs, 18:57), vocals prominent but window dressing, takes some surprising bounces. B+(*)

Takami Nakamoto: Opacity (2014, HIM Media, EP): Electronica producer/visual artist, based in Paris, creates a pastiche of fascinating beats and effects, at least for five cuts, 19:28. B+(**)

Marius Neset: Pinball (2014 [2015], ACT): Tenor saxophonist from Norway, studied and lives in Copenhagen. Two early albums didn't much impress me, but this is lively, festive even. Backed by piano trio, with Ivo Neame also playing organ and keyboards, and some guest spots -- strings, flutes, percussion. B+(*)

No Fun: How I Spent My Bummer Vacation (2014 [2015], Concrete Jungle): Yet another garage punk band, from Germany although they sound more like California to me -- all English songs (except for "Ode an die Freude," which seems self-explanatory enough), short ones (12 add up to 26:37). B+(***)

Nonch Harpin': Native Sons (2015 [2016], self-released): Fusion group, I guess, although I'm not sure between what and what -- maybe bebop and smooth jazz? Quintet, keyboards and guitar center, a sax, bass, and drums. Guitarist Andy Markham has most of the writing credits, with one tune credited to King Crimson people, another based on something southeast Asian arranged by saxophonist Chinh Tran. B- [cd]

Novelist x Mumdance: 1 Sec EP (2015, XL, EP): Brit grime MC Kojo Kankam -- just EPs, no albums yet -- working with Brit electronica producer Jack Adams. Short (4 cuts, 11:58), snappy. B+(*)

Eva Novoa: Butterflies and Zebras by Ditmas Quartet (2015 [2016], Fresh Sound New Talent): Pianist, from Barcelona, based in Brooklyn, third album, a quartet with Michaël Attias (alto sax), Max Johnson (bass), and Jeff Davis (drums), all of whom contribute songs -- Davis' Monkish "Justin" is a highlight, but throughout they break melodies up to set the notes free. B+(***)

ObLik: Order Disorder (2014 [2015], Ormo): French free jazz sextet, no one I've heard of: Pierre-Yves Merel (tenor sax), Alan Regardin (trumpet), Alexis Persigan (trombone), Cyril Trocchu (piano), Fabrice Sylvain Didou (bass), L'Houtellier (drums), with the bassist writing the compositions -- something which emphasizes group coherence over freewheeling improvisation. B+(***) [bc]

Matt Parker Trio: Present Time (2015 [2016], BYNK): Saxophonist, mostly tenor, some soprano, second album (plus one for his retro group, the Candy Shop Boys). Trio with Alan Hampton (bass) and Reggie Quinerly (drums), plus vocalist Emily Braden on three cuts -- she can also go swing or modern. B+(**) [cd]

Ken Peplowski: Enrapture (2015 [2016], Capri): Clarinet and tenor sax, a retro guy but not much of a swinger -- an early album presented him as Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool. Quartet, backed by Ehud Asherie (piano), Martin Wind (bass), and Matt Wilson (drums). All covers, ranging from Ellington and Waller to Lennon/Ono and Manilow, all gentle and cool, quite lovely. B+(***)

Danilo Pérez/John Pattitucci/Brian Blade: Children of the Light (2015, Mack Avenue): Piano-bass-drums trio, all well known to mainstream jazz fans if not exactly household names. The pianist was born in Panama but has never been very close to Latin jazz, and this is a thoughtful, finely detailed mainstream effort. B+(**)

Physical Therapy: Hit the Breaks (2015, Liberation Technologies, EP): Daniel Fisher, has a handful of EPs and DJ Mixes since 2012, comes up with six hard-hitting beat tracks, good for 28:30. B+(**)

PINS: Wild Nights (2015, Bella Union): Manchester alt/indie quartet, all women, Faith Holgate singer-guitarist. No idea why all sources capitalize group name. Second album, previous is reportedly punkier but this one is crystal clear. B+(**)

Pixel: Golden Years (2015, Cuneiform): Norwegian group, bills itself as a pianoless quartet (like Baker-Mulligan, maybe even Coleman-Cherry) with Jonas Kilmork Vemøy on trumpet and Harald Lassen on sax, but bassist Ellen Andrea Wang also sings, which gives them some pop appeal. B [dl]

Valery Ponomarev Jazz Big Band: Our Father Who Art Blakey (2014 [2016], Zoho Music): Russian-born trumpet player, emigrated to US in 1973 where he found employment in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1977-80). Benny Golson, who goes back even further with Blakey, guests on two tracks. Mostly tunes from Blakey's bands, with Ponomarev adding to the credits. The band does its job, especially on familiar gems like "Moanin'," and the trumpet solos sparkle. B+(***)

Protean Reality: Protean Reality (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): Spine has the title twice, so I'll accept that at the group name. Still, I filed this alto sax trio in my database under Chris Pitsiokis' name. Born 1990, he's been on a tear the last year or two. This one has Noah Punkt (electric bass) and Philipp Scholz (drums). Impressive show of free jazz technique, wears a bit thin. B+(***) [cd]

Radical Dads: Universal Coolers (2015, Old Flame): Alt/indie band from Brooklyn, a trio with two very hot guitarists -- singer Lindsay Baker and her husband Chris Diken -- and a drummer from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Robbie Guerlin (evidently the other singer), enveloping smart songs with cyclonic sound. A-

Jemal Ramirez: Pomponio (2015 [2016], First Orbit Sounds Music): San Francisco-based Latin jazz drummer, first album, co-produced by vibraphonist Warren Wolf who is very prominent here. With Howard Wiley (saxes), Joel Behrman (trumpet), Matthew Clark (piano), John Shifflet (bass), and John Santos (percussion). Wolf and Behrman contribute tunes, the rest coming from jazz sources -- Kenny Garrett's "J'Ouvert" is choice. B+(*) [cd]

Renku: Live in Greenwich Village (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): Avant-sax trio -- Michaël Attias on alto, John Hébert on bass, Satoshi Takeishi on drums -- named for their 2004 album. Fine group, nice balance, much of interest, almost state of the art. B+(***) [cd]

Rhythm Future Quartet: Travels (2015 [2016], Magic Fiddle Music): Acoustic string band -- violin (Jason Anick), bass (Greg Loughman), two guitars (Olli Soikelli and Max O'Rourke) -- plays a chamber variant of gypsy jazz, unencumbered by drums but with no shortage of rhythm. B+(*) [cd]

Pete Rock: PeteStrumentals 2 (2015, Mello Music Group): Hip-hop DJ/producer, had some hits as a 1994-94 duo with rapper C.L. Smooth. Since then he's worked with other groups, occasionally dropping a solo album like his first PeteStrumentals back in 2001. This belated successor isn't all instrumental, but the vocals tend to be repeat riffs, not open raps. B+(**)

Roswell Rudd/Jamie Saft/Trevor Dunn/Balasz Pandi: Strength & Power (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): Free jazz quartet, everything joint-credited, presumably improvised on the spot. The trombonist has done things like this in the distant past, none recently, and never has he got the mix this right. Saft has emerged as an exceptional free jazz pianist, and the bassist and drummer know the game. A- [cdr]

Samo Salamon Bassless Trio: Unity (2014 [2016], Samo): Guitarist, from and still based in Slovenia, has been prolific since 2003 or so. I don't quite get the significance of this trio being "bassless" -- basically it's a sax trio with Julian Argüelles (sic: should be Arguëlles) on soprano and tenor, John Hollenbeck on drums, and a guitarist who can take charge instead of a bassist to fill out the harmonics. Really takes off when he does. A-

J. Peter Schwalm: The Beauty of Disaster (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): German composer, plays guitars, keyboards, drums, and other electronics here, accompanied by various guests here and there. He's cut a couple ambient albums with Brian Eno, and that's roughly where this goes: a very calm, rather lovely piece of furniture music. B+(**) [cdr]

Travis Scott: Rodeo (2015, Grand Hustle/Epic): Houston rapper, Jacques Webster, can't say I'm getting anything out of this but also can't say why. Not underground, no bling either. B

Seinabo Sey: Pretend (2015, Virgin): Afro-Swedish pop singer, born there but father was a renowned Gambian musician. Debut album after a couple EPs. Reportedly influenced by Alicia Keys and Beyoncé, I hear more distant echoes of Nina Simone. B+(*)

Shatner's Bassoon: The Self Titled Album Shansa Barsnaan (2015, Wasp Millionaire): Jazz group from Leeds -- no one here named Barsaan let alone Shatner, and no bassoon. Group name refers to a part of the brain which under suitable drugs produces time distortion. No idea what the title refers to. Two drummers (one, like the bassist and the guitarist, doubling in electronics), electric keyboards, and Oliver Dover on saxes and clarinets. Amusing sound mix, much promise, but runs way long. B+(*) [bc]

Shopping: Consumer Complaints (2014 [2015], FatCat): British post-punk trio -- Rachel Aggs (guitar, vocals), Billy Easter (bass), Andrew Milk (drums) -- sharp enough, could amount to something if the lyrics bear out their "healthy distrust of capitalism." Looks like this was self-released in the UK in 2014, then reissued last year when they were picked up by a label. B+(***)

Shopping: Why Choose (2015, FatCat): Second album, Christgau regards the two as "pretty much interchangeable," and that's probably true, but this one struck me as a bit cleaner and clearer, and minus a minor stumble in the middle. A-

Shopping: Urge Surfing (2015, self-released): Not the British post-punk band above, a self-proclaimed "subway surf punk" band from Brooklyn, or more precisely, "one dude in his laundry room with 3 mics, a couple of guitars and a crappy, high latency interface," plus "his lady" and a friend or two who happened to drop in. Still, he/they make a lot of noise, excitement even. B+(*)

Shopping: Gizzard Shingles (2015, self-released): Cover reads "shopppping" -- their first album, 2014's Tuff Noogies, read "SHOPPPING" so let's just say their identity is confused. I'm a little confused too. B

SK Simeon & Yaw Faso: Maskya (2015, Big Dada, EP): Two Melbourne, Australia-based artists, at least one with roots in Uganda although the dominant vocals are rooted in Jamaican dancehall. Beats by the aptly named Machinedrum. Four cuts, two attributed to each, 13:46. B+(**)

Dr. Lonnie Smith: Evolution (2016, Blue Note): Organ player, got on the bandwagon around 1967, closer to fusion than to soul jazz. He produced records regularly up to 1979, two in 1993-94, and he refound his groove after 2000. First Blue album since 1970, produced by Don Was who draws on labelmates from Robert Glasper to Joe Lovano. flute, and a lot of rhythm. Strikes me as cluttered. B

Mike Sopko/Simon Lott: The Golden Measure (2015 [2016], self-released): Guitar-drums duo, the artists' names not on the cover but the packaging is pretty minimal, like the concept: punk jazz about sums it up, but being jazzbos there's nothing so basic as pounding out a chord to a speeded up 4/4. But the attitude fits, and punk has always been more about attitude than technique. B+(***) [cd]

The Souljazz Orchestra: Resistance (2015, Strut): Ottawa, Canada-based group, seventh album since 2005, basically a combination of Afro-beat and vintage funk -- I flashed on Charles Wright at one point -- with horns and extra percussion. B+(***)

Vladimir Tarasov/Eugenius Kanevicius/Ludas Mockunas: Intuitus (2014 [2016], NoBusiness): Drums (percussion, cimbalom, hunting horn), bass (electronics), and reeds (soprano and tenor sax, clarinet, bass clarinet). Free jazz with some quirks. B+(**) [cdr]

Bruce Torff: Down the Line (2014-15 [2016], Summit): Keyboard player, second album, lined up some accomplished musicians -- Lew Soloff (two cuts, his last date, two weeks before his death), Joel Frahm, Pete McCann -- but didn't hire a bassist (Ben Wittman is the drummer). B [cd]

Tribu Baharú: Pa'l Más Exigente Bailador (2015, self-released): Colombian afro-champeta, from the Caribbean coast (a champeta is a knife used by fishermen to descale fish), marked by sweet soukous guitar, upbeat percussion, and whoops and shouts with more affinity to zouk and reggaeton than to salsa or cumbia. Some rough spots, but they overpower them. A-

Turnpike Troubadours: Turnpike Troubadours (2015, Bossier City): Red Dirt band from Oklahoma, although their label name -- title of their first album -- is a town in the northwest corner of Louisiana. Fourth album. Lots of fiddle mark them as primeval country, but otherwise they're pretty ordinary. B

Twin Talk: Twin Talk (2014 [2016], Ears & Eyes): Sax trio -- Dustin Laurenzi on tenor, Katie Ernst on bass, Andrew Green on drums -- not an avant thing. Ernst also sings several songs. B+(*) [cd]

Ursula 1000: Voyeur (2015, Insect Queen): EDM project of Alex Gimeno, a Brooklyn producer with nine albums plus EPs and singles and remixes since 1999, spanning glam rock and cha cha and exotica, though this one mostly pushes my disco buttons, the beats sometimes reminding me of DJ Shadow. Ends with a change of pace, a movie theme called "The Shadow of Your Smile" tarted up like in a James Bond film. A-

Carlos Vega: Bird's Ticket (2015 [2016], Origin): Saxophonist, seems to be based in Chicago but teaches at Florida A&M. First album I'm aware of -- AMG has it attached to a singer-keyboardist who died in 1998. Quintet, Victor Garcia on trumpet, plus piano/Rhodes-bass-drums. Latin jazz vibe, some strong sax runs. B+(*) [cd]

Ward Thomas: From Where We Stand (2015, WTW Music): British country music duo, 20-year-old twin sisters Catherine and Lizzy Ward Thomas. Their country fetish doesn't amount to much more than a hejira to Nashville to record, but their straightforward songs have some appeal, as do their harmonies. B+(*)

Dan Weiss: Sixteen: Drummers Suite (2014 [2016], Pi): Sixteen musicians -- counting three vocalists who don't exactly sing -- but only the leader/composer is a drummer. (Well, Stephen Cellucci is credited with percussion, and like Weiss and guitarist Miles Okazaki with "vocal percussion" -- whatever that means.) Some remarkable music here, very slippery, but I invariably gag on the vocal dressing, if not the flutes and harps. Safe to say this will fare well in year-end ballots, just not mine. B [cd]

White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again (2015, Polyvinyl): Garage punk band from Louisville, quartet, includes a keyboard for cheesy hooks that have been likened to bubblegum -- the sound reminds me of punk jokesters like the Rezillos (and, yes, the Ramones), although they probably have more in common with recent bands like the Go! Team. I'm sure I would have loved them back when I was fourteen. B+(***)

Saul Williams: Martyr Loser King (2016, Fader): Spoken word artist, i.e., more poet than rapper, six albums since 2001, missed them all so maybe he should be a SFFR. Actually, nearly all of this is sung, not that the lyrics don't jump out from the sometimes catchy, often indecisive music. Politics too, but I'm not getting as much there as I hear I should. B+(***)

Worriers: Imaginary Life (2015, Don Giovanni): Brooklyn garage punk band led by singer-songwriter Lauren Denitzio, debut album, rips through 12 songs in 28:04, catchy and crunchy. B+(**)

The Yawpers: American Man (2015, Bloodshot): Alt band from Colorado led by Nate Cook, who may thank God he's an American man but doesn't feel too blessed -- more like ashamed. Took a third play to get past the first two songs and see everything else fall into place. Reminds me of the Drive-By Truckers, minus the cornbread and molasses. A-

Yelawolf: Love Story (2015, Shady): Michael Wayne Atha, white (well, part Cherokee) rapper from Gadsden, Alabama; started underground, signed to Eminem's label, diversified -- I don't get why this was an EOY pick at Saving Country Music [maybe the fiddle stomp?], but he takes a wide range of rap stances (including a couple of Eminem-like rants) and sings a lot. B+(**)

Young Thug: Slime Season 2 (2015, self-released): For some reason Rhapsody only has this volume and not the slightly earlier Slime Season 1 (September 16) or the later Slime Season 3 (February 16) -- such a prolific mixtape artist can really keep the whatever flowing. He never struck me as much of a thug, but his warbly voice is an endless fount of rhymes, some rising to wit, most just enjoying his lowlife self. B+(***)

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

The Great American Music Ensemble: It's All in the Game (2001 [2016], Jazzed Media): Doug Richards has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University since 1979, founding its Jazz Studies program and forming the Great American Music Ensemble (GAME), which played annual Kennedy Center concerts from 1990-97, but while I've found a 1992 Geoffrey Himes piece raving about them, I've yet to find any evidence that they recorded -- until now, that is, and this has been sitting on the shelf since 2001. I don't recognize anyone in the big band, but they exemplify Gary Giddins' notion of repertory concert jazz as well as I can imagine. And special guests violinist Joe Kennedy Jr., singer René Marie, and especially Jon Faddis -- whose Armstrong is as uncanny as his Gillespie -- go the extra mile. Mostly familiar tunes, but that's half the fun. A- [cd]

Sheila Jordan: Better Than Anything: Live (1991 [2015], There): A simply marvelous singer, well into her 80s now with nothing new recorded/released since 2008, so these scraps from the past -- like HighNote's 2012 release of Yesterdays, her 1990 duo with Harvie S -- are especially welcome. This one, from a year later, also features the bassist along with pianist Alan Broadbent. She's still remarkably facile, singing out her band announcements, working in impromptu bits to breakneck songs, making scat look easy. B+(***)

Joëlle Léandre: No Comment (1994-95 [2016], Fou): Avant bassist from France, has a large discography going back to 1982. Solo, nine numbered "No Comment" pieces picked up from two performances, one in Vancouver, the other in Italy. The bass is fascinating enough, but I can't stand the few short voice bits. B [cd]

Nouakchott Wedding Songs (2015, Sahel Sounds): From Mauritania, the northwest corner of the vast expanse of Sahara Desert. Eleven tracks by eight artists -- Hussein Moktar, Sidibou ould Siyed, and Idoumou ould Jeich are the repeaters -- no idea how old vintage or anything else, although they promise a 12-page booklet with the CD. Rough going, but not without moments of exhilaration. B+(**) [bc]

Soft Machine: Switzerland 1974 (1974 [2015], Cuneiform): An important prog rock band founded in Canterbury in 1968, but by this Montreux Jazz Festival performance singers Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt had left, their seven numbered albums history, leaving only keyboardist Mike Ratledge from the founders, with Allan Holdsworth (guitar), Karl Jenkins (keyboards), and Hohnet Planet (soprano sax, oboe) among the replacements. B+(*) [dl]

Old Music

The Catheters: Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days (2002, Sub Pop): Seattle group, seem like serious Stooges fans, singer Brian Standeford sometimes affecting a remarkable Iggy impression. Loud, a little clunky for punk. Phil Overeem loves it. B+(***)

The Catheters: Howling . . . It Grows and Grows!!! (2004, Sub Pop): Second (and last) album (having skipped the EP), uncommonly fierce as these garage-punk bands go, not without an occasional hook either. B+(**)

Sheila Jordan: Confirmation (1975 [2005], Test of Time): Second album, released on East Wind thirteen years after her 1962 debut (Portrait of Sheila), a year after she appeared on two remarkable Roswell Rudd albums (the long out-of-print Numatic String Band and Flexible Flyer, one of my all-time favorites). Backed by Alan Pasqua (piano), Cameron Brown (bass), Beaver Harris (drums), and Norman Marnell (tenor sax). She shows remarkable poise, especially on the first two songs ("God Bless the Child," "My Favorite Things"), though some of the rest slip past me. B+(***)

Sheila Jordan: Believe in Jazz (2003 [2004], Ella Productions): Recorded during her 75th birthday tour, in Switzerland with the Serge Forté Trio. Everything she did in this period was masterful, but few pieces are more definitive than her "Everything Happens to Me" here. A-

Sheila Jordan & E.S.P. Trio: Straight Ahead (2004 [2005], Splasc(H)): With Roberto Cipelli's piano trio -- Attilio Zanchi on bass and Gianni Cazzola on drums -- with "special guest" Paolo Fresu (trumpet, flugelhorn). Title song comes from Abbey Lincoln/Mal Waldron, but nothing with Jordan is very straight at this point, as the takes difficult songs and makes them utterly personal. At this point she usually just worked with a bassist, but Fresu is a treat. A-

Eva Novoa: Eva Novoa Trio (2010 [2012], Fresh Sound New Talent): Pianist from Barcelona, in a trio with Masatoshi Kamaguchi (bass) and Marc Lohr (drums). All original material, impressive debut. B+(**)

Eva Novoa: Eva Novoa Quartet (2010 [2013], Fresh Sound New Talent): Pianist, composed all tracks, adding alto saxophonist Ernesto Aurignac to Masatoshi Kamaguchi (bass) and André Sumelius (drums). Recoded in Barcelona, Novoa's home base, very smart postbop, impressive all around. B+(***)

PINS: Girls Like Us (2013, Bella Union): First album. Punkier mostly in the sense that the songs are shorter, but not always faster. B+(*)

Saul Williams: Saul Williams (2004, Fader): Second album, reportedly a musical advance although the help Williams brought in comes not from hip-hop but left-leaning rockers -- Serj Tankian, Alex de la Rocha, Ikey Owens. Brings some intensity, but I can't make much out of it, even with politics on one's sleeve. B+(*)

Saul Williams: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! (2007 [2008], Fader): Third album, music mostly provided by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails and various soundtracks). Title echoes David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, but the album leans forward, often hard. B+(**)

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section.

• Sheila Jordan: Portrait of Sheila (1962 [1989], Blue Note): A-
• Sheila Jordan/Harvie Swartz: Old Time Feeling (1983, Muse): B+
• Sheila Jordan: The Crossing (1984 [1986], Blackhawk): B+
• Sheila Jordan: Songs From Within (1989, M.A.): B+
• Sheila Jordan: Lost and Found (1990, Muse): A-
• Sheila Jordan/Harvie S: Yesterdays (1990 [2012], High Note): A-
• Sheila Jordan: Heart Strings (1993, Muse): B+
• Sheila Jordan: From the Heart (1982-93 [2000], 32 Jazz): B+
• Sheila Jordan/Cameron Brown: I've Grown Accustomed to the Bass (1997 [2000], High Note): A-
• Sheila Jordan: Jazz Child (1997 [1999], High Note): B
• Sheila Jordan: Little Song (2002 [2003], High Note): A-
• Sheila Jordan/Cameron Brown: Celebration (2004 [2005], High Note): A-
• Sheila Jordan: Winter Sunshine (2008, Justin Time): B+(**)

Notes:

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

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

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Seems like these book blurb columns involve a lot of "hurry up and wait," or vice versa. Last one was August 9, and before that August 4, August 1, and July 31, 2015. At that point I was so backlogged I was able to pump out four 40-book posts in a little more than a week. I don't have nearly that much backlog now -- certainly enough for one more post, but at the moment a bit shy of two (current backlog count is 61, including a couple books that won't be out until April). Still, if I keep researching, I may get that third post.

I'm so far behind that I've managed to read several of these books: Padraig O'Malley: The Two-State Delusion, Roberto Vivo: War: A Crime Against Humanity, and Sarah Vowell: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. I've also started Jane Mayer: Dark Money, and have Robert J Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth and Joseph Stiglitz: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy waiting on the shelf.

Diane Ackerman: The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (2014; paperback, 2015, WW Norton): She has written poetry, children's books, and some fifteen non-fiction books, some quite personal but a couple taking on very broad topics -- like A Natural History of the Senses (1990) and A Natural History of Love (1994). This one explores the many ways humans have reshaped the world to their own tastes and interests, an extraordinarily profound story, one that's hard to wrap one's mind around if only because the change has been so pervasive.

Mary Beard: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015, Liveright): A history described both as sweeping and concise (608 pp) of Rome and its Empire from foundation up to 212 CE when Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all non-slaves throughout the empire -- as good a date as any to avoid having to deal with the Empire's decline and fall.

Bill Bryson: The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain (2016, Doubleday): An American who writes humorous books about the English language and travels (thus far to English-speaking countries) and occasionally stretches for something like A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003). Born in Iowa, he's spent most of his adult life in Great Britain, writing Notes From a Small Island (1996) before moving back to the US, and now this second travelogue to Britain after returning. Probably charming and amusing, smart too.

Hillel Cohen: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (paperback, 2015, Brandeis): Israeli author, has written two important books on Arab collaborators before and after Israel's founding -- Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration and Zionism, 1917-1948 (2008), and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (2010, both University of California Press) -- reviews the pivotal 1929 Arab riots, which led to expansion of the Haganah forces, and in 1936-39 the much larger and deadlier Arab revolt. As for "year zero," historians can pick and choose; e.g., Amy Dockser Marcus opted for 1913 in Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2007, Penguin).

Michael Day: Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall From Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga (2015, St Martin's Press): Biography of the Italian media mogul who parlayed wealth and power into three terms as prime minister of Italy, which helped him gain even more wealth and power, give or take occasionally getting "bogged down by his hubris, egotism, sexual obsessions, as well as his flagrant disregard for the law." All the timelier given how Donald Trump threatens to repeat the feat. By the way, Berlusconi is currently estimated to be worth about three times what Trump is ($12-to-$4 billion), but that's after Berlusconi has been prime minister, and before Trump becomes president.

EJ Dionne Jr: Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (2016, Simon & Schuster): Journalist, leans liberal, has covered politics for a long time and written books like Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996), Stand Up, Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004), Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008), and Our Divided Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012). Much wishful thinking there, oft frustrated by the increasingly fervent (do I mean desperate?) right-wing, which he finally tries to face up to here.

Reese Ehrlich: Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (2014, Pegasus): It may be decades before anyone writes a definitive history of the many facets of Syria's civil war, if indeed it is over then. Meanwhile, we get small facets of the story from many scattered observers, and I doubt this one is any different (despite the forward by Noam Chomsky, who is nearly always right, unpleasant as that may be). Other recent books on Syria (aside from ISIS, which are probably more numerous): Leon Goldsmith: Cycle of Fear: Syria's Alawites in War and Peace (2015, Hurst); Nader Hashemi/Danny Postel, eds: The Syria Dilemma (2013, The MIT Press); Emile Hokayem: Syria's Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant (paperback, 2013, Routledge); David W Lesch: Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (rev ed, paperback, 2013, Yale University Press); Jonathan Littell: Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising (2015, Verso); John McHugo: Syria: A Recent History (paperback, 2015, Saqi); Christian Sahner: Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present (2014, Oxford University Press); Bente Scheller: The Wisdom of Syria's Waiting Game: Foreign Policy Under the Assads (2014, Hurst); Stephen Starr: Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising (rev ed, paperback, 2015, Hurst); Samar Yazbek: The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (paperback, 2015, Rider); Diana Darke: My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution (paperback, 2015, Haus); Robert Fisk et al: Syria: Descent Into the Abyss (paperback, 2015, Independent Print); Robin Yassin-Kassab/Leila Ali-Shami: Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (paperback, 2016, Pluto Press).

Jack Fairweather: The Good War: Why We Couldn't Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan (2014, Basic Books): I remain stumped about what was so good about the war. The fact that American public opinion was more unified in favor of attacking Afghanistan than Iraq didn't make a bit of difference. The war may have polled as high as the war against Nazi Germany, but there was no depth, no commitment, beyond the polling, and even less understanding. The book is probably stronger on why it all went so wrong.

Richard Falk: Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope (paperback, 2014, Just World Books): A collection of essays since 2008 when Falk was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights issues in Occupied Palestine (his tenure there ended in 2014). Falk was a law professor who took an early interest in war crimes, especially regarding the Vietnam War -- cf. Crimes of War (1971, Random House), written and edited with Gabriel Kolko and Robert Lifton. He also has a newer essay collection out, Chaos and Counterrevolution: After the Arab Spring (paperback, 2015, Just World Books).

Henry A Giroux: The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine (paperback, 2014, City Lights): Canadian educator and culture critic, has written books like Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (2011, Peter Lang). Essays include "America's Descent Into Madness" -- "The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem. The mainstream media spin stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible -- stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging their pedagogical influence under the glossy veneer of entertainment" -- and "The Vanishing Point of US Democracy."

Robert J Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016, Princeton University Press): For 100 years after the Civil War, technological advances dramatically stimulated growth and raised living standards. However, from about 1970 on, growth rates have slowed markedly, and we seem to have entered a period of long-term stagnation. James K Galbraith, in The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth, made a similar argument, but this goes much deeper into the changes wrought by the century of high growth. As for the future, we've already seen one consequence of slack growth: to keep profit levels up to expectations, investors have sought political favors and increasingly engaged in predatory behaviors (something often called financialization). Sooner or later the other shoe is bound to drop, as workers (and non-workers) who had been promised growth and wound up suffering from stagnation inevitably seek to regroup. Meanwhile, as Gordon points out, things like increasing inequality further dampen growth, further fueling the need for change.

Greg Grandin: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman (2015, Metropolitan Books): More like America's premier war criminal, a point we need to keep stressing as he continues to woo war-friendly politicians of both major parties. Grandin, whose books include Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006), wants to delve deeper, going beyond Kissinger's own acts to explore his influence on America's peculiar self-conception as an empire. I'm not sure how much neocon nonsense can really be pinned on Kissinger, but if I did wonder this would be the place to start. Amazon thinks if you're curious about this you'll also be interested in Niall Ferguson: Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (2015, Penguin Press). You won't be.

Ran Greenstein: Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (paperback, 2014, Pluto Press): Surveys various political movements and thinkers based in Israel/Palestine who rejected the politics of Zionist dominance, starting with Ahad Ha'am in the 19th century, continuing through the Communist Party, the various Palestinian movements, and the Matzpen movement up to the 1980s.

Ann Hagedorn: The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security (2014; paperback, 2015, Simon & Schuster): As I recall, when Bush I set out to attack Iraq in 1990, the US moved over 600,000 troops into position. When Bush II decided to invade Iraq, the US went with a little over 100,000 troops. The main difference was that in the intervening years the Military had contracted out vast numbers of support jobs -- logistics, food, that sort of thing. Over the course of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the outsourcing expanded to security, and the mercenaries they hired became increasingly common and unaccountable for their actions. (You may recall, for instance, that when Fallujah first revolted, the Americans they hung from that bridge were contractors.) That's what this book is about. I'm a little surprised Hagedorn wrote this book, since the main thing I had read by her was a magnificent slice of history, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (2007; paperback, 2008, Simon & Schuster).

Jeff Halper: War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (paperback, 2015, Pluto Press): Head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and author of one of the most trenchant short analyses of Israel's "matrix of control" over the Palestinians, takes a deeper look at Israel's technologies of control, including how they are exported elsewhere in the world.

Doug Henwood: My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (paperback, 2015, OR Books): All the dirt on Clinton, at least as viewed from the left, a perspective which reveals her as a corporate shill and inveterate warmonger. Henwood mostly writes about economic issues, in Left Business Observer. Other books tackling Clinton from the left include: Diana Johnstone: Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (paperback, 2015, CounterPunch), and Liza Featherstone, ed: False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (paperback, 2016, Verso [June 16]).

Alistair Horne: Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century (2015, Harper): Argues that the many major wars of what the late Gabriel Kolko summed um as Century of War (1994) turned on excessive hubris of one side or the other ("In Greek tragedy, hubris is excessive human pride that challenges the gods and ultimately leads to total destruction of the offender" -- in reality the US has been a repeat offender without paying the ultimate price). Huge topic, but to provide depth of battle detail Horne limits his study to six cases: Tsushima (1905), Mononhan (1939), Moscow (1941), Midway (1942), Korea (1950), and Dien Bien Phu (1954).

Michael Hudson: Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (paperback, 2015, Islet): Unorthodox economist, has seen this coming for a long time and written many books about it -- most recently The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis (2012), and more presciently an essay on "the coming real estate collapse" in 2006. As I've tried to point out, the function of debt today has little to do with putting savings to productive work, and much to do with allowing people who can't afford it to keep up appearances until they crash. Needless to say, this is unsustainable -- not that governments haven't struggled heroically to keep the bankers solvent.

Rafael Lefevre: Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (2013, Oxford University Press): I pulled this out of the long list of Syria books (see Reese Ehrlich) because it stands out: the focus is on the 1982 Hama uprising and Hafez Assad's brutal suppression (over 20,000 killed, mostly in an artillery barrage of the liberated city). The Muslim Brotherhood led the uprising, and returned two decades later as an activist faction in Syria's "Arab Spring" demonstrations -- also met brutally, resulting in the civil war that has killed another 200,000 (not that any of these estimates are proven).

Les Leopold: Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice (paperback, 2015, The Labor Institute Press): Labor economist, previously wrote a couple of primers on how Wall Street has ripped off America -- The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity (2009), and How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away With Siphoning Off America's Wealth (2013). Has lots of "easy-to-understand charts and graphs," goes beyond explaining predatory finance to note how other key issues ("from climate change to the exploding prison population") are connected to economic inequality, and offers activists a guide for doing something about this central problem.

Mike Martin: An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, 1978-2012 (2014, Oxford University Press): Author was attached to British forces occupying Helmand in 2006 -- a Pashtun province on the southern border of Afghanistan, also the locale for Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (2012, Knopf) -- but speaks Pashto and was able to record the bewildered thoughts of the locals, as well as the equally confused thinking of the occupiers. The levels of misunderstanding here should give anyone pause. Noteworthy here that he extends his coverage of the conflict to include both Soviet and US/UK forces, occupations with more than a little in common.

Paul Mason: Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2016, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Argues that capitalism will change in the near future, mutating into something new, shifting the economy away from its basis on "markets, wages, and private ownership." He adds, "This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape the future." I have no idea how he works this out, but I started thinking about "post-capitalism" back in the 1990s. In my case the initial insight was the realization that it is possible to engineer economic systems and thereby consciously direct development instead of waiting for the invisible hand to lead us around. I also realized that the infinite growth required by capitalism must sooner or later give way to ecological limits. These appear to be common themes, but of course the devil's in the details. I would reject, for instance, Hayek's rule that all planning leads to tyranny, but I don't think you can just hand-wave that; there's too much history to the contrary.

Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016, Doubleday): Give a guy a billion dollars and all of a sudden he thinks he can recruit some politicians and hoodwink the public into voting fot them. It's really just a case of extraordinary hubris, a sense of self-appointed privilege combined with utter disdain for democracy. Take the Kochs, for instance -- Mayer has already reported on them in The New Yorker, and they seem to account for a big chunk of this book, but they are hardly alone. As I recall, Newt Gingrich blamed his loss to Mitt Romney in 2012 to only having one billionaire backer vs. five for Romney. In this state of corruption, sometimes a handful of voters can shape history, maybe even prevent democracy from working to the benefit of the majority.

Sean McMeekin: The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (2015, Penguin): The old adage is "history is written by the victors" -- a rule which has served to distort and largely bury one of the major stories of the early 20th century: the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. Even David Fromkin's brilliant A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 skips over the revolt of the Young Turks and the two Balkan Wars that set the stage for the Ottoman entry into the Great War, which has the effect of making much of what the Ottoman triumvirate did during the war seem nonsensical (and possibly insane). McMeekin attempts to correct this partly by starting earlier, but also by researching deeper into newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives. But also, I suspect, because history has finally shown the Anglo-French "victory" to be hollow and bitter indeed.

Aaron David Miller: The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President (2014, St Martin's Press): Washington on the cover. His most striking trait was a desire to be seen as disinterested, a leader who only sees to the public interest, never to his personal one. Needless to say, such people are scarce today, not so much because they don't exist as because they don't promote themselves in the manner of would-be presidents. On the other hand, there are great egos who would dispute this thesis, notably Donald Trump, who hope to lead a nation to its greatness, doing all manner of great things. For such cases, I can imagine two books: one explaining why they will fail, the other why what they sought was never desirable in the first place. I doubt that Miller has written either.

Ian Millhiser: Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted (2015, Nation Books): Reminds us that throughout history the Supreme Court has more often than not been an entrenched conservative activist -- it is only thanks to Franklin Roosevelt (and a few successors, with Nixon starting the revanchist return) that we have been fortunate enough to have grown up with a Court that actually expanded human rights. Of course, the recent growth of the conservative cabal has given the author more to complain about. Indeed, the subtitle could well be the Roberts' Court's motto.

David Niose: Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America From the Attack on Reason (2014, St Martin's Griffin): Legal director of the American Humanist Association, has focused defending the secular nature of American democracy -- his previous book was Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans (2012; paperback, 2013, St Martin's Griffin) -- but is worried not just by the right's religiosity but by its increasingly dogmatic attacks on reason.

Padraig O'Malley: The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine -- A Tale of Two Narratives (2015, Viking): Author has extensive experience in the reconciliation of conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa, giving him some perspective here. Hard to tell whether the focus on competing narratives is just a license to spin bullshit, but he's right that the power imbalance is what precludes every effort at reconciliation. Actually, I'm curious how he works this out -- as someone who occasionally thinks of writing a book along these lines: why is something so seemingly easy to reason out so impossible for the people who need to do it? The answer, of course, has to do with relative power: in particular, the one side who feel they don't have to do anything.

Dirk Philipsen: The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What do Do About It (2015, Princeton University Press): Gross Domestic Product is a measurement of the overall size of an economy (usually expressed per capita), but it is at best a very coarse number, tied to growth in marketable goods and services, but not so much to a better, let alone a sustainable, standard of living. Many other writers have questioned the value of GDP as a measurement; e.g., Joseph E Stiglitz, et al., Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up (2010).

Ted Rall: After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan (2014, Hill & Wang): A "graphic journalist," Rall made two extended trips to Afghanistan, one shortly after 9/11, the other ten years later, recording his observations here, as well as some history -- if you don't know it, at least it goes down fast and easy. Recent Rall books include The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt (paperback, 2012, Seven Stories Press), and Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia Is the Next Middle East (2nd ed, paperback, 2014, NBM Publishing). Before that, The Anti-American Manifesto (paperback, 2010, Seven Stories Press), which I found excessive, shrill, unfunny. More recently, Rall wrote and illustrated Snowden (paperback, 2015, Seven Stories Press) and Bernie (paperback, 2016, Seven Stories Press).

Pierre Razoux: The Iran-Iraq War (2015, Belknap Press): Big (688 pp) book on one of the largest and longest wars of the last fifty years, lasting from 1980-88, costing close to a million lives -- little understood in the West, the US in particular taking an attitude that both sides should kill off the other. This book evidently goes beyond the immediate conflict to look at how other nations related to, and encouraged, the war. Also available: Williamson Murray/Kevin M Woods: The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History (paperback, 2014, Cambridge University Press). Before these books, the standard was probably Dilip Hiro: The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (paperback, 1990, Routledge).

Robert B Reich: Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (2015, Alfred A Knopf): Supposedly one of Bill Clinton's longtime buds, taught government, staked out his politics in 1989 with The Resurgent Liberal, then in 1991 wrote The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism which contain two major concepts, one spectacularly wrong (his idea that as trade policies liberalize the US will more than make up losses in manufacturing jobs with new "symbolic manipulator" jobs), the other alarmingly right (that the rich were withdrawing from community life to their gated communities and retreats, from which they will cease to care about the fate of the lower classes). Clinton liked this thinking so much he made Reich Secretary of Labor, a job Reich filled capably if not exactly happily (cf. his memoir, Locked in the Cabinet). Since leaving Clinton, he has continued to wobble leftward, writing optimistic books about politics (Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America in 2004) and business (Supercapitalism in 2007), on the other hand reacting when it all goes wrong (Aftershock in 2010 and Beyond Outrage in 2012, the subtitle still ending with How to Fix It. So figure this as more of everything: after all, the only thing wrong with capitalism is the capitalists, who somehow in their personal greed forgot that the magic system is supposed to make life better for everyone.

Dennis Ross: Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama (2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Author has been an advisor to three US presidents helping them to screw up numerous efforts to bridge the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in the meantime has worked for Israeli think tanks, his most consistent allegiance. In other words, he is an American who can always be counted on to take the position that "Israel knows best" -- his maxim for reconstructing a longer stretch of history. ("Ross points out how rarely lessons were learned and how distancing the United States from Israel in the Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush, and Obama administrations never yielded any benefits and why that lesson has never been learned.") If the title seems oblique, read it this way: the surest way to doom any chance for peace for Israel and Palestine is to involve Dennis Ross.

Andrew Sayer: Why We Can't Afford the Rich (2015, Policy Press): Shows how the rich ("the top 1%") have used their political clout "to siphon off wealth produced by others," and goes further to argue that their predation is something the rest of us can no longer afford -- a far cry from the common notion that we are so obligated to the "job creator" class that we need to sacrifice our own well being to stroke their egos. Author has previously written books like: Radical Political Economy: Critique and Reformulation (1995), The Moral Significance of Class (2005), and Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life (2011).

Kevin Sites: Swimming With Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War (paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial): War reporter, previously wrote In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars (paperback, 2007, Harper Perennial), and The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War (paperback, 2013, Harper Perennial). Sites first entered Afghanistan to join the Northern Alliance in 2001, and on his sixth tour retraced his footsteps in 2013 to ask what has changed. Some stuff, but it's not clear for the better.

Timothy Snyder: Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015, Tim Duggan): The recent author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) narrows his focus on the Nazi Judeocide, not just what happened but on why. He comes up with a rather original theory of Hitler's mind, something about resources and ecology, and adds that "our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was" -- hence the "warning." I wonder whether obsessing on the need to "save the world" isn't itself an invitation to overreach (not to mention overkill). But then I tend to think of the Holocaust as a contingent quirk of history, not some cosmological constant.

Joseph E Stiglitz: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity (paperback, 2015, WW Norton): Practical proposals for reducing inequality, restoring the sense that the United States is "the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work and determination." That reputation has been blighted by stagnation as the rich have managed to use their political and economic clout to capture an ever-increasing share of the nation's wealth. Stiglitz, one of our finest economists (Krugman's preferred term is "insanely great"), has been working on this problem for a while now, including his books The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (2012), and The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (2015).

Roberto Vivo: War: A Crime Against Humanity (paperback, 2015, Hojas del Sur): Born in Uruguay, CEO of "a global social communications media firm" in Buenos Aires, has put together a global history and virtual legal brief to outlaw war. The impulse is sensible -- common recognition of the law, whether from respect or fear, is the main reason we haven't sunk into a Hobbesian "war of all against all" mire -- and indeed at some points enjoyed broad international support. That's probably true today, too, but it only takes one country that insists on flexing its muscles and putting its self-interest above peaceful coexistence to spoil the understanding. In the 1930s, for instance, Germany and Japan were such outlaw countries. Today it's mostly the United States and Israel (and one could argue Saudi Arabia, Russia, and/or Turkey). Vivo makes his case logically and succinctly, but he doesn't really face up to the infantile nations that put so much stock in their warmaking skills and so little in international law.

Sarah Vowell: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015, Riverhead): Starting with an MA in Art History, she went into radio, wrote some essays, and found a niche writing popular history, starting with Assassination Vacation, her travelogue to the historical sites of murdered presidents. Since then her histories have become more conventional: The Wordy Shipmates (2005, on the Puritans), and Unfamiliar Fishes (on the takeover of Hawaii). Here she recounts the American Revolution by focusing on Washington's French sidekick, and the early nation viewed from Lafayette's 1824 return visit.

Lawrence Wright: Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (2014, Knopf; paperback, 2015, Vintage Books): A day-by-day account of the 1979 Camp David negotiations between Egypt and Israel over return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and, as it turns out, damn little else -- still, the only significant time that Israel could be bothered to sign a peace agreement with a neighbor. (I don't much count the later treaty with Jordan.) Wright previously wrote The Leaning Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006, Knopf), a valuable book on the thinking behind the attack.

Next batch of 40 sometime next week.

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Monday, February 22, 2016

Music: Current count 26298 [26267] rated (+32), 420 [422] unrated (-2).

Skipped Weekend Roundup again. Instead, I cooked up a relatively simple two-dish dinner for my wife's birthday (also my nephew's): a variation on paella valenciana (with chicken, chorizo, sea scallops, shrimp, and a couple lobster tails, but no clams) and a salade niçoise (with canned tuna instead of the now-more-fashionable grilled). For dessert, a flourless chocolate cake with ice cream on the side. Prep took several hours, but it all went fairly leisurely. Good thing, as my back was killing me.

The political news I missed commenting on proved uneventful. Trump and Clinton made small, indecisive steps toward eventual nominations: Trump winning South Carolina with about 35% of the vote, Clinton eeking out another close caucus win in Nevada (52.6% to 47.3%). With the party establishment totally behind Clinton, all she has to do to win is not get beat too bad, which thus far has only happened once in three contests.

Trump, who still alarms his party's establishment, has more of an uphill climb, and with 32.5% of the vote hardly looks inevitable. Still, he could hardly dream of facing a lamer set of opponents. With Bush dropping out -- he got 7.8% of the South Carolina vote, barely edging John Kashich (7.6%) and Ben Carson (7.2%) for 4th place -- the establishment appears to be stuck with Marco Rubio as their standard bearer. I was surprised that Rubio edged Cruz for second place (22.5% to 22.3%), but Rubio got key endorsements and South Carolina Republicans seem to be relatively good at following orders. Rubio also got key endorsements last week in Kansas: Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts, both vastly unpopular even among Republicans, as well as neocon Rep. Mike Pompeo. Still, I find it very hard to take Rubio seriously.

Nevada Republicans will caucus on Tuesday, and South Carolina Democrats will vote on Saturday. FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 64% chance of beating Rubio (25%) and Cruz (10%) in Nevada, and considers Clinton a cinch (>99%) in South Carolina. Their odds greatly exaggerate the voting split: the actual polling averages are 57.5% Clinton, 32.0% Sanders, which is about the flipside of Sanders' margin in New Hampshire. We've been hearing conventional wisdom for weeks now that Sanders will falter once the elections move from "white liberal" states Iowa and New Hampshire to ones that are more "diverse" -- but it now appears that Sanders won a majority of Hispanic voters in Nevada. One link I've been meaning to mention is Matt Karp: Why Bernie Can Win: some things to think about next time you hear we have to all get behind Clinton because she's the "electable" one. On the other hand, see Steve Benen: Sanders' turnout 'revolution' off to an inauspicious start: so far, at least, Democratic Party turnout this year is not up to the levels established in 2008 (and more alarmingly, I suspect, Republican Party turnout is up).

Two more links: Nancy Le Tourneau: Post-Policy Republicans Gave Us Donald Trump, which refers back to her earlier post, GOP Chaos: Post-Truth vs. Post-Policy: Over the last eight years, the Republicans have given up on promoting alternative policies -- partly because Republican think tank proposals, like the health care plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts, could be adopted wholesale by Democrats -- and turned into "the party of no." Actually, it would be more accurate to say that they've turned into extortionists, along the lines of "elect us, or we'll really make you suffer." (Note that the only policies Republicans have been willing to work with Obama on are ones intended to split Obama away from the Democratic base: TPP, offshore oil leases, and more war in the Middle East.)

A large chunk of this week's records, including both A- albums (Beans on Toast and Ursula 1000), came from Ye Wei Blog's 2015 EOY list, the HMs including: Nigel Hall, Abba Gargando, DMX Krew, and No Fun. Actually a pretty diverse group of records (English folk, disco, soul, Timbuktu guitar, electronica, and a garage punk band from Germany. A similar number of lower grades: electronica, alt-rock along a punk-pop axis, Saharan wedding songs. Huge thanks to Jason Gross for digging all these up.

The week's jazz releases include four limited edition LP-only releases that NoBusiness was kind enough to burn on CDR for me. None are great but three would be enjoyed by anyone with an ear for free jazz.

The new Saul Williams comes recommended by Robert Christgau, and that led me to check out some of his back catalog. Can't say as I got much out of any of them, not that they aren't interesting. Maybe it's that I've always had trouble fishing lyrics out of their matrix. Maybe I'm confused by that context. Christgau also provides directions on the proper way to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack. My own approach was to stream the whole thing through once, while referring to the synopsis section of the Wikipedia article on the musical. I was thereby able to follow the plot and check it against my own recollection of the history. But unlike Christgau, I didn't make any extra effort to habituate myself to the music, which struck me as hackneyed and wordy -- a common trait of musical drama. My grade reflected that I was duly impressed, not least with the scholarship, but not much interested in hearing it again: B+(**).

The Catheters came up thanks to a Phil Overeem facebook post. He compared their first album to the Stooges, and as usual he's right -- although I guess I'm less impressed by the accomplishment. Their second album caught Christgau's attention, and we wound up with the same grade.

Never did this before, but here's a link for a Beans on Toast song/video.

Good chance I'll post Rhapsody Streamnotes sometime this week. Currently have 104 albums in the draft file. In any case, it has to come out before the end of the month, which is next Monday. Also working on a books post. Haven't done one of them in quite some time. I've even read a couple of the books I'll be reporting on.

New records rated this week:

• Africans With Mainframes: Commission Number 3 (2015, Bio Rhythm, EP): [boomkat]: B+(*)
• Ancient Methods: Turn Ice Realities Into Fire Dreams (2015, Hands, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Beans on Toast: The Grand Scheme of Things (2015, Xtra Mile): [r]: A-
• Thomas Borgmann Trio: One for Cisco (2015 [2016], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Jean-Luc Cappozzo/Didier Lasserre: Ceremony's a Name for the Rich Horn (2014 [2016], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B-
• Avishai Cohen: Into the Silence (2015 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Diet Cig: Over Easy (2015, Father/Daughter, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• DMX Krew: There Is No Enduring Self (2015, Breakin): [r]: B+(***)
• Dog Party: Vol. 4 (2015, Asian Man): [r]: B+(**)
• Harris Eisenstadt: Old Growth Forest (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Abba Gargando: Abba Gargando (Sahel Sounds): [bc]: B+(***)
• Nigel Hall: Ladies & Gentlemen . . . Nigel Hall (2015, Feel Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Ross Hammond and Sameer Gupta: Upward (2015 [2016], Prescott): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Dre Hocevar: Collective Effervescence (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Lame Drivers: Chosen Era (2015, Jigsaw): [bc]: B+(*)
• Marilyn Lerner/Ken Filiano/Lou Grassi: Live at Edgefest (2013 [2016], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• No Fun: How I Spent My Bummer Vacation (2014 [2015], Concrete Jungle): [r]: B+(***)
• Novelist x Mumdance: 1 Sec EP (2015, XL, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Physical Therapy: Hit the Breaks (2015, Liberation Technologies, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Rhythm Future Quartet: Travels (2015 [2016], Magic Fiddle Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Pete Rock: PeteStrumentals 2 (2015, Mello Music Group): [r]: B+(**)
• Vladimir Tarasov/Eugenius Kanevicius/Ludas Mockunas: Intuitus (2014 [2016], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Ursula 1000: Voyeur (2015, Insect Queen): [r]: A-
• Saul Williams: Martyr Loser King (2016, Fader): [r]: B+(***)

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

• Joëlle Léandre: No Comment (1994-95 [2016], Fou): [cd]: B
• Nouakchott Wedding Songs (2015, Sahel Sounds): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

• The Catheters: Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days (2002, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(***)
• The Catheters: Howling . . . It Grows and Grows!!! (2004, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(**)
• Saul Williams: Saul Williams (2004, Fader): [r]: B+(*)
• Saul Williams: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! (2007 [2008], Fader): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Socrates Garcia Latin Jazz Orchestra: Back Home (Summit): March 4
• Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra: All My Yesterdays (1966, Resonance, 2CD)
• Angelika Niescier/Florian Weber: NYC Five (Intakt): advance
• Richard Poole/Marilyn Crispell/Gary Peacock: In Motion (Intakt): advance
• Omri Ziegele Noisy Minority: Wrong Is Right (Intakt): advance

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Music: Current count 26267 [26231] rated (+36), 422 [421] unrated (+1).

Started to write a Weekend Roundup yesterday, but I lost a big chunk of time when we went out for shopping and sushi, and another when we watched The Good Wife and Downton Abbey. In the meantime I wrote an ill-tempered rant I wasn't very happy with about the late Antonin Scalia, and a short item on the Republican debate. Scalia was one of the most despicable figures in American politics in my lifetime. In his early years he was remarkably adept at twisting the constitution and the law to support his own political prejudices -- economist Martin Feldstein was one of the few I can think of to have debased his craft so thoroughly -- but in his later years he gave up on cleverness and turned into an ill-tempered crank and demagogue. He wasn't the first modern conservative appointed to the court -- Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist are obvious cases -- but he was a movement conservative, not content to rule he went out to campaign. One reason Republicans are so apoplectic about the prospect of Obama naming a replacement is that Scalia had made himself one of the political idols of their movement. To them, he had become sacrosanct, turning every snarky dissent into gospel.

I did manage to get out one tweet on Scalia:

My only question re Scalia is how will we ever again know what the Founding Fathers originally thought without him to reveal the truth?

Scalia called his legal philosophy "originalism" but what it amounted to was little more than an egomaniacal fraud as Scalia was invariably able to find his own political agenda among the "original intents" of the Founding Fathers. Three obvious problems with this: one is the utter impossibility of anyone growing up in modern America fully understanding the mindset of anyone from the 18th century; the second is that those founders were a remarkably diverse and divisive lot, so there's really no single "original intent" to divine; and third, the common recognition that the genius of the US constitution lies in its flexibility, how it has been adapted over time. Yet Scalia has often been humored (and in some quarters revered) for this nonsense. What he tried to accomplish was to imbue the Constitution with something like the doctrine of papal infallibility, then proclaim himself pope. The arrogance of it all is breathtaking.

Anyhow, that's more or less what I meant to write. I also had some links, including two to more moderate pieces by Michael O'Donnell: Alone on His Own Ice Floe, a 2014 book review of Bruce Allen Murphy: Scalia: A Court of One, and the post-mortem It will Be Easy to Replace Antonin Scalia. The latter doesn't refer to the political process, which with the Republican-controlled Senate will be arduous and often embarrassing, but to the impact and stature of the former Justice, who conceded both many years ago (especially in Bush v. Gore, a ruling he explained should never be taken as a precedent elsewhere). My original draft is squirreled away in my notebook, along with various other aborted drafts and more personal notes (plus a lot of what I wound up posting -- it's basically my backup store).

I won't go into the other stuff here, other than to mention that when the Kansas Supreme Court ruled last week that the government of Kansas -- which is to say Governor Brownback and the neanderthal state legislature -- had violated the state constitution by failing to adequately and fairly fund public education. Brownback's response? He wants to personally appoint a new Kansas Supreme Court. This isn't the first time the Court has ruled as much: last time the legislature came up with their "block grant" scheme and basically dared the school boards to sue them again. When Scalia died, Brownback issued a moving tribute to his hero. Clearly, one thing Brownback learned from Scalia is that an oath of office swearing to "uphold the constitution" isn't enough to keep a Republican from picking and choosing which parts they want to uphold.

Also listened to a few records this past week. The number of A-list jazz records for 2016 increased from two to five, and it's worth noting that trombone great Roswell Rudd has two of those five. Also that one was originally recorded in 2001 but unreleased until now.

The other three A- records this week are alt/indie rock. Shopping showed up on Robert Christgau's Expert Witness last week (he swear the earlier Consumer Complaints, *** below, is every bit as good, but my more limited exposure prefers Why Choose). Radical Dads came from Jason Gross's EOY list (at Ye Wei Blog), as did a bunch of HMs listed below: Jason James, Souljazz Orchestra, White Reaper; Czarface, Haiku Salut, PINS, Worriers; The Alchemist/Oh No, Inventions, Seinabo Sey. It's not the best A-list Gross has ever come up with -- most years I discover 4-6 A- records there (like Radical Dads' Rapid Reality, an A- in 2013).

The third A- is American Man by the Yawpers, a record that no one I know has gotten onto yet: its only appearance in an EOY list was 19th among Hipersonica's international albums over in Spain -- I checked it out because I've often liked albums on the label, Bloodshot. Perhaps a bit long on American mythos, but struck me as a non-southern Drive-By Truckers with a dash of non-Jersey Bruce Springsteen. But what do I know? Feels weird to me to be the one finding alt/indie and post-punk albums. Definitely not my calling.

New records rated this week:

• The Alchemist and Oh No: Welcome to Los Santos (2015, Mass Appeal): [r]: B+(*)
• Adam Baldych & Helge Lien Trio: Bridges (2015, ACT): [r]: B+(***)
• Colleen: Captain of None (2015, Thrill Jockey): [r]: B+(**)
• Czarface: Every Hero Needs a Villain (2015, Brick): [r]: B+(**)
• Ari Erev: Flow (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Father: Who's Gonna Get F***** First? (2015, Awful): [bc]: B+(**)
• Fred Frith/Darren Johnston: Everybody Is Somebody Is Nobody (2013-14 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Charles Gayle/William Parker/Hamid Drake: Live at Jazzwerkstatt Peitz (2014 [2015], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(***)
• Haiku Salut: Etch and Etch Deep (2015, How Does It Feel to Be Loved): [r]: B+(**)
• Heroes Are Gang Leaders: Highest Engines Near/Near Higher Engineers (2015 [2016], Flat Langton's Arkeyes): [cd]: B+(***)
• Inventions: Maze of Woods (2015, Temporary Residence): [r]: B+(*)
• Jason James: Jason James (2015, New West): [r]: B+(***)
• Buddy Miller & Friends: Cayamo: Sessions at Sea (2016, New West): [r]: B+(*)
• Marius Neset: Pinball (2014 [2015], ACT): [r]: B+(*)
• PINS: Wild Nights (2015, Bella Union): [r]: B+(**)
• Pixel: Golden Years (2015, Cuneiform): [dl]: B
• Radical Dads: Universal Coolers (2015, Old Flame): [r]: A-
• Jemal Ramirez: Pomponio (2015 [2016], First Orbit Sounds Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Renku: Live in Greenwich Village (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Roswell Rudd/Jamie Saft/Trevor Dunn/Balasz Pandi: Strength & Power (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): [cdr]: A-
• Samo Salamon Bassless Trio: Unity (2014 [2016], Samo): [cd]: A-
• Travis Scott: Rodeo (2015, Grand Hustle/Epic): [r]: B
• Seinabo Sey: Pretend (2015, Virgin): [r]: B+(*)
• Shopping: Consumer Complaints (2014 [2015], FatCat): [r]: B+(***)
• Shopping: Why Choose (2015, FatCat): [r]: A-
• Shopping: Urge Surfing (2015, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Shopping: Gizzard Shingles (2015, self-released): [bc]: B
• Dr. Lonnie Smith: Evolution (2016, Blue Note): [r]: B
• The Souljazz Orchestra: Resistance (2015, Strut): [r]: B+(***)
• Bruce Torff: Down the Line (2014-15 [2016], Summit): [cd]: B
• Carlos Vega: Bird's Ticket (2015 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dan Weiss: Sixteen: Drummers Suite (2014 [2016], Pi): [cd]: B
• White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again (2015, Polyvinyl): [r]: B+(***)
• Worriers: Imaginary Life (2015, Don Giovanni): [r]: B+(**)
• The Yawpers: American Man (2015, Bloodshot): [r]: A-
• Yelawolf: Love Story (2015, Shady): [r]: B+(**)

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

• The Great American Music Ensemble: It's All in the Game (2001 [2016], Jazzed Media): [r]: A-
• Soft Machine: Switzerland 1974 (1974 [2015], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

• PINS: Girls Like Us (2013, Bella Union): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Anthony Braxton: Excerpts From Three New Recordings: Trillium J (The Non-Unconfessionables)/Quintet (Tristano) 2014/3 Compositions (REMHM) 2011: sampler, albums: April 1
• Rich Brown: Abeng (self-released)
• Moppa Elliott: Still Up in the Air (Hot Cup)
• Hanami: The Only Way to Float Free (Ears & Eyes): advance, April 22
• Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra: All My Yesterdays (1966, Resonance, 2CD): February 19
• Julian Lage: Arclight (Mack Avenue): March 11
• Dave Miller: Old Door Phantoms (Ears & Eyes): April 1
• Danny Mixon: Pass It On (2015, self-released)
• Nonch Harpin': Native Sons (self-released): April 1
• Alberto Pinton Noi Siamo: Resiliency (Moserobie)
• Twin Talk (Ears & Eyes): April 29

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, February 12, 2016

I didn't really want to let myself get sucked into another post-election commentary like last week's Post-Iowa, but enough links have popped up to be worth a brief post.

On the Democratic side, it's worth noting that Bernie Sanders thus far is running ahead of Barack Obama in 2008 against Hillary Clinton: sure, Obama won Iowa handily where Sanders only tied, but Clinton beat Obama soundly in New Hampshire, and this year lost that same state by even more. Geography tilts Iowa toward Obama and New Hampshire toward Sanders -- a little bad luck for Clinton there, but doesn't Clinton also have the advantage of having done all this before? In both states Sanders gained 20-30 points over the last six months. That's momentum.

Both states are atypical in various ways, and despite all the effort candidates put into winning them, their idiosyncrasies make them poor guides for subsequent primaries, where campaigning is necessarily less personal. The main thing Iowa and New Hampshire seem to do is to winnow down the field. The sixteen Republicans we started with are now down to six: Trump, Kasich, Cruz, Bush, Rubio, and Carson. Not sure if Gilmore still thinks he's running: he got 133 votes, or 0.052%, a figure that trailed three no-longer-running candidates (Paul, Huckabee, Santorum) but at least topped ex-candidates Pataki, Graham, and Jindal; see results here; all 30 names listed were on the Republican ballot, but the list doesn't break out the 1750 write-ins.)

Gilmore (and for that matter Santorum) were also beat by Andy Martin, who Wikipedia describes as "an American perennial candidate who has pursued numerous litigations" and "the primary source of false rumors that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election." Just behind Gilmore (and ahead of Pataki) was Richard Witz, a retired school custodian from Spencer, Massachusetts. The low vote getters on the ballot were Matt Drozd, Robert L. Mann, and Peter Messina, with five votes each (Messina is the only one of those three with as much as a website).

Chris Christie (6th place, 7%) and Carly Fiorina (7th place, 4%) dropped out after New Hampshire. With most of next month's primaries taking place in the South, they didn't really have anything to look forward to. Further down, Ben Carson (8th place, 2%) and Jim Gilmore (13th place, 0%) seem to still be running (as opposed to "in the running").

[PS: On Friday, after I had written the above, Gilmore gave up the ghost. NBC noted that the Republican field had narrowed to six, then gave a rundown that only mentioned five of them. Ben Carson seems to be turning into the invisible man.]

Here are some links to chew on:

• Nate Silver: Republicans Need to Treat Donald Trump as the Front-Runner: Looks for comparisons in past Iowa-New Hampshire results for patterns and finds everything from Pat Buchanan to Mitt Romney (who in 2012 did 0.2 better in Iowa and 4.2 better in New Hampshire, but really pretty close, at least without adjusting for the competitive fields). The sidebar also (at the moment) shows Trump with a 55% chance of winning South Carolina (which you may recall Romney lost to Newt Gingrich; he has Rubio at 22% and Cruz at 15% but only in the fishy-sounding "polls plus" column). Then Silver abandons the stats and starts dreaming:

  If you could somehow combine Rubio's likability and appeal to conservatives, Kasich's policy smarts and post-New Hampshire momentum, and Bush's war chest and organization, you'd have a pretty good candidate on your hands. But instead, these candidates are likely to spend the next several weeks sniping at one another. The circular firing squad mentality was already apparent in New Hampshire, where fewer advertising dollars were directed against Trump despite his having led all but one poll of the state since July.

  By pegging Trump as the "front runner" Silver seems to be daring the "Republican elites" to get their act together and settle on one anti-Trump miracle and be done with it. Still, you have to wonder (as Elias Isquith does), if, having downplayed Trump's changes, Silver isn't just looking to salvage his reputation. What Silver's own data shows is that Bush-Kasich-Rubio (maybe even Cruz) understand that only by getting past each other does one have a chance of taking on Trump -- the problem is that none of them come close to Silver's dream criteria. What I suspect will eventually happen is that those "elites" will in the end reconcile themselves to Trump, because in the end Trump is no threat to them. That's far more likely than the prospect of the Democratic Party apparatchiki giving in to Sanders even if Sanders sweeps the primaries as thoroughly. Part of this is, as David Frum put it, because the GOP fears its base, whereas the Democrats loathe theirs. But mostly it's because Trump is just another corrupt demagogic symptom of a system that Sanders is promising to upend.

• Paul Krugman: Hard Money Men: Ohio Governor John Kasich skipped Iowa and ran pretty close to the perfect New Hampshire campaign -- lots of town halls, one-on-ones, presenting a low-key personality with a command of issues and his own temper -- and wound up getting 16% of the vote, pretty unimpressive totals except that he topped Cruz, Bush, and Rubio for second place. Tempting, given his competition, to argue that he's a sane oasis in the Republican field, but Krugman isn't having any of it:

  [N]ote that on economic policy -- which sort of matters -- Kasich is terrible, arguably worse than the rest of the GOP field.

  It's not just his balanced-budget fetishism, which would be disastrous in an economic crisis. He's also a hard-money man.

  Ted Cruz has gotten some scrutiny, although not enough, for his goldbuggism. But Kasich, when asked why wages have stagnated, gave as his number one reason "because the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low" -- because this diverted investment into stocks, or something. No, it doesn't make any sense -- but it tells you that he is viscerally opposed to monetary as well as fiscal stimulus in the face of high unemployment.

  So no, Kasich isn't sensible. He's just off the wall in ways that differ in some ways from the GOP mainstream. If he'd been president in 2009-10, we'd have had a full replay of the Great Depression.

  For more on Kasich, see Heather Digby Parton: John Kasich is a right-wing Trojan Horse. On the other hand, Jon Huntsman received 17% of the vote in New Hampshire in 2012 (3rd place behind Romney and Ron Paul) and was never heard from again.

• Emily Douglas: Last Night, Rachel Maddow Perfectly Captured What Bernie's Win Means for the Left: Follow the link for that quote (and some video). What I find more interesting is this later bit:

  Think back to the 1992 conventions, when Pat Buchanan gave his infamous culture-wars speech, announcing a "crusade," as Maddow put it, against gay people, minorities and feminism and concluding that "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In response to that declaration of war, the Democratic Party didn't have much: "As a gay person watching that in 1992, I didn't feel like Bill Clinton had my back. I didn't feel like the Democratic Party had my back," she added. "He was talking about agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government was the problem."

  I saw a little bit of Maddow in the election coverage. She was talking about how Trump is viewed, at least in Europe, as analogous to the neo-fascist right-wing parties there. That's probably true, but Americans have little experience with native-grown fascism, so the same resonance isn't easily felt here. On the other hand, most European countries experienced native fascist movements as well as the fascist-driven World War -- so bad that surviving right-wing parties can't help but be tarred by the experience. You find, for instance, in France large numbers of people who will vote for anyone against Le Pen. The closest analogue in the US was when Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. But aside the KKK, the US has never really had fascist movements. In a sense, the hallmarks of fascism -- racism, rabid xenophobia, militarism -- have become so mainstreamed here that they don't get flagged as such.

• Martin Longman: Why Sanders Is Still Behind the Eight Ball: Points out that the way the Democratic Party selects "superdelegates" creates a huge baked-in advantage for Clinton (currently 394-42). By comparison, with the proportional split of delegates in New Hampshire, Sanders has made a net gain of 13 delegates. At that rate, it's going to take a long time and a lot of landslide victories for Sanders to catch up. Sure, Clinton had a similar advantage in 2008, but not as extreme as this year: Obama had a number of prominent Democratic supporters (Longman emphasizes Tom Daschle). Still hard to say what happens if the primaries go overwhelmingly for Sanders: those superdelegates may save Clinton, but won't make her look like the people's pick.

• Joel Beinin: More details about Bernie Sanders and Kibbutz Sha'ar ha-'Amakim: In case you're curious. I've heard reports that after New Hampshire Clinton was going to attack Sanders for being anti-Israel. Good luck with that. Chances are that most supporters of Sanders are already more disturbed by Israel's right-wing polity (not to mention the alliance of Netanyahu with the Republicans) than Sanders himself is -- so attacking him on that is more likely to shift voters against Israel/Likud than it is to harm Sanders.

• Michelle Alexander: Why Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve the Black Vote: "From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted -- and Hillary Clinton supported -- decimated black America." Then, and these are not unrelated, there's "the economy, stupid":

  An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn't have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate. [ . . . ]

  Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the reality is that the Clinton administration didn't reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. During Clinton's tenure, funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant "effectively making the construction of prisons the nation's main housing program for the urban poor."

• Josiah Lee Auspitz: For GOP, It's 270 to Win, but Also 1237 to Lose: Reviews the strange delegate allocation procedures the Republican Party adopted to help ensure the dominance of conservatives by tipping the scales toward smaller states in the west and south.

• Eric Alterman: Why There Will Be No New New Deal: Draws on the argument of Jefferson Cowie in a new book, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Cowie seems to believe that the New Deal was an unrepeatable exception because it occurred at the one point in American history when the internal divisions of America's working class -- race, ethnicity, religion -- were at low ebb (even so, he sees the exclusion of blacks from many New Deal benefits as necessary for their passage -- for details see Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White). Civil rights for blacks and increased immigration only serve to undermine the New Deal's unique focus on class and solidarity. Alterman also cites Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? and Robert J Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth to pile on inevitability. Yet he also notes:

  Beginning midway through Jimmy Carter's presidency, with the New Deal order wheezing on life support, Democrats tried to save themselves by aping right-wing arguments about government being the problem, not the solution, to the challenges that ordinary Americans faced. By tying themselves to the mast of a corrupt campaign-finance system, they have helped to make it so.

  Uh, maybe it wasn't so inevitable. Maybe it had more to do with some bad decisions certain politicians made because the Cold War had blinded them to thinking of America in class terms? Someone like, oh, Bill Clinton? Cowie points to the Great Depression and WWII as the key events that forged the sense of unity and solidarity that made the New Deal, and implies that they are irrepeatable. On the other hand, it's not that we lack for depressions and wars -- just the critical analysis to understand and overcome them.

• Gar Alperovitz: Socialism in America Is Closer Than You Think: Lest you think that socialism is un-American, Alperovitz has a number of examples of things that already exist that go beyond Sanders' own program. Not all are advertised as "socialism" -- a brand that hasn't fared all that well, not that socialists don't have an honorable legacy, often moving well ahead of more mainstream politicians.

• Josh Marshall: A Clarifying Encounter: On Thursday's Democratic debate, which Marshall thought was good for both but maybe a bit better for Clinton. He complains, "and yet there's a vague hint of Rubio-ism in Sanders" -- an objection to Sanders repeatedly hitting his campaign talking points. Having heard them all many times I can't say that's something I especially enjoy, but I suspect such repetition is needed to drive his points home -- and they are points that encapsulate broad programs, unlike Rubio's whatever. I caught about three minutes of the debate, which included Sanders citing the 1954 coup against Mossadegh as a lesson in unintended consequences -- and he wasn't just name-dropping; he explained it very succinctly -- and blasting Kissinger's guidance of American foreign policy, citing how the Kissinger's expansion of the Vietnam War destabilized Cambodia and led to three million deaths and how his opening to China has cost millions of American jobs. That's all stuff I know like the back of my hand, but it's also stuff you never hear politicians say. When Sanders promised he wouldn't be seeking Kissinger's advice, Clinton asked he would listen to on foreign policy, and Sanders ignored her. What should he say? The Democratic Party mandarins, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madelyn Albright, are every bit as compromised as Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice: indeed, you can't be certified as a "foreign policy expert" in Washington without having been systematically deluded for decades. Maybe Marshall is right and Clinton is exceptionally knowledgeable about wonky policy specifics. But Sanders knows his history, and that's where lessons are to be learned -- not least the ones that have blindsided Clinton time and again.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Music: Current count 26231 [26199] rated (+32), 421 [412] unrated (+9).

I don't have much to say this week. Most of the records below are still 2015 releases (11 are 2016, only one of those non-jazz). Since I froze the 2015 file, belatedly graded 2015 releases are appearing in green. (Note to self: this greatly increases the likelihood of a coding error making the file unviewable, so check it more often.) I have decided (for now) to continue adding to the jazz and non-jazz EOY lists, and I've added a few things to the EOY aggregate -- I'm not really looking for more lists, but occasionally stumble onto one (like this one from If Men Had Ears -- supposedly objective because numbers were crunched, but there's still selection bias, and anything that elevates Tame Impala to second place is a bit suspicious).

A fair number of the records below are alt-country. Last year I got a lot of good tips from Saving Country Music. Less so this year, but I checked most of their nominees out -- even Don Henley's not-so-bad album (much better than the James Taylor album that also appeared on Rolling Stone's EOY list). I complained last week about not being able to find Arca's Mutant on Rhapsody -- thanks to the reader who encouraged me to try again. The Eszter Balint album appeared on Christgau's EW post (also Thomas Anderson and Donnie Fritts). It's worth noting that Balint's superb album was totally missed by the 700+ EOY lists I've compiled -- the second (or third) time Christgau has picked something that far from the spotlight. (Foxymorons was the other, with Mark Rubin only appearing on the list of a well known fan.)

Old music has a couple albums from the wonderful Sheila Jordan. I noticed Better Than Anything in Downbeat, and when I found it on Rhapsody, I noticed a couple more albums I hadn't heard. I commented that she hadn't recorded anything new since turning 80 in 2008. Rummaging around a bit I found notice of an 85th birthday concert with Steve Kuhn in 2013, and her website showed events at least into 2014. No doubt she's moving into a treacherous age.

Some more EOY list links:

• Bird Is the Worm: Best of 2015
• Saving Country Music: 2015 Nominees for Album of the Year: not exactly an EOY list

New records rated this week:

• Arca: Mutant (2015, Mute): [r]: A-
• Thomas Anderson: Heaven (2016, Out There): [r]: B+(***)
• Allison Au Quartet: Forest Grove (2015 [2016], self-released): B+(*)
• Eszter Balint: Airless Midnight (2015, Red Herring): [r]: A-
• Blue Muse: Blue Muse Live (2015, Dolphinium): [cd]: B
• Brooklyn Blowhards (2015 [2016], Little (i) Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Brandi Carlile: The Firewatcher's Daughter (2015, ATO): [r]: B+(***)
• Benjamin Clementine: At Least for Now (2015, Virgin EMI): [r]: B+(**)
• Anderson East: Delilah (2015, Low Country Sound/Elektra): [r]: B+(***)
• Mike Freeman ZonaVibe: Blue Tjade (2014 [2016], VOF): [cd]: B+(**)
• Bill Frisell: When You Wish Upon a Star (2015 [2016], Okeh): [cdr]: B
• Donnie Fritts: Oh My Goodness (2015, Single Lock): [r]: B+(***)
• Michael Monroe Goodman: The Flag, the Bible, and Bill Monroe (2015, MammerJam): [r]: B+(***)
• Grandpa's Cough Medicine: 180 Proof (2015, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• William Clark Green: Ringling Road (2015, Bill Grease): [r]: B+(*)
• Anna von Hausswolff: The Miraculous (2015, Other Music): [r]: B
• Heads of State: Search for Peace (2015, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Henley: Cass County (2015, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
• Left Lane Cruiser: Dirty Spliff Blues (2015, Alive Naturalsound): [r]: B+(*)
• Urs Leimgruber/Alex Huber: Lightnings (2015 [2016], Wide Ear): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rob Mazurek/Exploding Star Orchestra: Galactic Parables: Volume 1 (2013 [2015], Cuneiform, 2CD): [dl]: B+(***)
• Mekons/Robbie Fulks: Jura (2015, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(***)
• Whitey Morgan & the 78s: Born, Raised & Live From Flint (2011 [2014], Bloodshot): [r]: B+(**)
• Whitey Morgan & the 78s: Sonic Ranch (2015, Whitey Morgan Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Matt Parker Trio: Present Time (2015 [2016], BYNK): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ken Peplowski: Enrapture (2015 [2016], Capri): [cd]: B+(***)
• Danilo Pérez/John Patitucci/Brian Blade: Children of the Light (2015, Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(**)
• Valery Ponomarev Jazz Big Band: Our Father Who Art Blakey (2014 [2016], Zoho Music): [r]: B+(***)
• J. Peter Schwalm: The Beauty of Disaster (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Shatner's Bassoon: The Self Titled Album Shansa Barsnaan (2015, Wasp Millionaire): [bc]: B+(*)
• Mike Sopko/Simon Lott: The Golden Measure (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• Turnpike Troubadours: Turnpike Troubadours (2015, Bossier City): [r]: B
• Ward Thomas: From Where We Stand (2015, WTW Music): [r]: B+(*)

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

• Sheila Jordan: Better Than Anything: Live (1991 [2015], There): [r]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• Sheila Jordan: Confirmation (1975 [2005], Test of Time): [r]: B+(***)
• Sheila Jordan: Believe in Jazz (2003 [2004], Ella Productions): [r]: A-
• Sheila Jordan & E.S.P. Trio: Straight Ahead (2004 [2005], Splasc(H)): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dave Anderson: Blue Innuendo (Label 1): April 1
• Andy Adamson Quartet: A Cry for Peace (Andros)
• Thomas Borgmann Trio: One for Cisco (NoBusiness): CDR (LP only)
• Jean-Luc Cappozzo/Didier Lasserre: Ceremony's a Name for the Rich Horn (NoBusiness): CDR (LP only)
• Chaise Lounge: Gin Fizz Fandango (Modern Songbook)
• Ari Erev: Flow (self-released)
• William Hooker: Light: The Early Years 1975-1989 (NoBusiness, 4CD)
• Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (ECM): advance, March 25
• Marilyn Lerner/Ken Filiano/Lou Grassi: Live at Edgefest (NoBusiness): CDR (LP only)
• Joëlle Léandre: No Comment (Fou)
• J Mancera: Mancera #5 (self-released): March 1
• Christian Perez: Anima Mundi (CPM): March 4
• Rhythm Future Quartet: Travels (Magic Fiddle Music): February 26
• Alfredo Rodriguez: Tocororo (Mack Avenue/Qwest): March 4
• Vladimir Tarasov/Eugenius Kanevicius/Ludas Mockunas: Intuitus (NoBusiness): CDR (LP only)
• The U.S. Army Blues: Live at Blues Alley (self-released)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

I threw this together rather quickly, but here are some links of interest this week:

• Thomas Frank: It's not just Fox News: How liberal apologists torpedoed change, helped make the Democrats safe for Wall Street:

  As the Obama administration enters its seventh year, let us examine one of the era's greatest peculiarities: That one of the most cherished rallying points of the president's supporters is the idea of the president's powerlessness.

  Today, of course, the Democrats have completely lost control of Congress and it's easy to make the case for the weakness of the White House. For example, when Frank Bruni sighed last Wednesday that presidents are merely "buoys on the tides of history," not "mighty frigates parting the waters," he scarcely made a ripple.

  But the pundit fixation on Obama's powerlessness goes back many years. Where it has always found its strongest expression is among a satisfied stratum of centrist commentators -- people who are well pleased with the president's record and who are determined to slap down liberals who find fault in Obama's leadership. The purveyors of this fascinating species of political disgust always depict the dispute in the same way, with hard-headed men of science (i.e., themselves) facing off against dizzy idealists who cluelessly rallied to Obama's talk of hope and change back in 2008.

  Frank brings up many examples, especially the Obama administration's response to the financial collapse and recession of 2008:

  It would have been massively popular had Obama reacted to the financial crisis in a more aggressive and appropriate way. Everyone admits this, at least tacitly, even the architects of Obama's bailout policies, who like to think of themselves as having resisted the public's mindless baying for banker blood. Acting aggressively might also have deflated the rampant false consciousness of the Tea Party movement and prevented the Republican reconquista of the House in 2010.

  But Obama did the opposite. He did everything he could to "foam the runways" and never showed any real interest in taking on the big banks. Shall I recite the dolorous list one more time? The bailouts he failed to unwind or even to question. The bad regulators he didn't fire. The AIG bonuses that his team defended. The cramdown he never pushed for. The receivership of the zombie banks that never happened. The FBI agents who were never shifted over to white-collar crime. The criminal referral programs at the regulatory agencies that were never restored. The executives of bailed-out banks who were never fired. The standing outrage of too-big-to-fail institutions that was never truly addressed. The top bankers who were never prosecuted for anything on the long, sordid list of apparent frauds.

  Frank concludes that "the financial crisis worked out the way it did in large part because Obama and his team wanted it to work out that way." After all the "hopey-changey" campaign blather in 2008, it came as a shock to discover how hard Obama would work to conserve a banking industry which had frankly gone berserk: not only could Obama not imagine America without its predatory bankers, he couldn't imagine changing ownership of those banks, or even dislodging Jamie Dimon from Chase. It's not clear that anyone in the Republican party is that conservative. Rather, they are like those proverbial bulls in the china shop, blindly breaking stuff just to show off their power.

• Paul Krugman Reviews The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon: Gordon's big book (762 pp.) argues that growth is largely driven by the introduction of new technologies, but that not all technologies have the same growth potential. In particular, a set of technological breakthroughs from the late 19th century up through the 1930s drove high rates of growth up to about 1970, but more recent innovations have had much less effect, so the prospects for future growth are much dimmer. This is pretty much the thesis of James K. Galbraith's 2014 book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth, who I suspect is clearer about why this is the effect, while spending a lot less time on the case histories. For Galbraith, the key is that the earlier innovations tended to move work from the household to factories while cheaper transportation and energy made those factories much more cost-effective. On the other hand, recent innovations in computing and automation increase efficiency at the expense of jobs, and increasingly some of those labor savings are taken as leisure. One reason this matters is that our political system was built around an assumption that growth makes up for inequality -- that conflict over the distribution of wealth is moot as long as there is ample growth for all. But this isn't something that we're just discovering now: growth rates in the US started to dip around 1970, and the result over the next decade was the growth of a conservative political movement that aimed to maintain profit rates even as growth slumped. I actually think that shift was triggered by more tangible factors -- peak oil, moving from a trade surplus to deficit, the many costs of the Vietnam War (including inflation) -- but the technology shift helps explain why no amount of supply-side stimulus ever did any good: every subsequent growth spurt has turned out to be a bubble accompanied by more/less fraud. Krugman suggests some of this, but the more explicit (and challenging) suggestions are in Galbraith's book. Krugman:

  So what does this say about the future? Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of "headwinds": rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.

  It's a shocking prediction for a society whose self-image, arguably its very identity, is bound up with the expectation of constant progress. And you have to wonder about the social and political consequences of another generation of stagnation or decline in working-class incomes.

  A couple more things worth noting here. One is that the exceptionally high growth rates of recent years in China, India, and similar countries is tied to them belatedly adopting the technologies that fueled high growth in Europe and America nearly a century ago. Nothing surprising here, although one would hope they'd be smarter about it. The other is that while newer technologies produce less economic growth, they still quite often have quality of life benefits. So while wages and other economic metrics have stagnated, many people don't really feel the pinch. (And where they do, I suspect is largely due to the oppressive weight of debt.)

• Paul Krugman: Electability: Alright, so Vox asked 6 political scientists if Bernie Sanders would have a shot in a general election, and they said: no, no way. In particular:

  Fear of sudden, dramatic change could impede Sanders in a general election. But just as powerfully, Republicans could also successfully portray Sanders as out of step with the average American's political views, according to the academics interviewed for this story.

  There isn't a lot of doubt that this would have a big impact in an election. Political scientists have had a pretty good idea since the 1950s of how voters tend to make their choices: by identifying which candidate fits closest to them on an ideological spectrum.

  Who's Krugman to argue with such august personages:

  I have some views of my own, of course, but I'm not a political scientist, man -- I just read political scientists and take their work very seriously.

  After all, man, they're scientists! They must be right, even though Krugman has occasionally -- well, more like 3-4 times a week -- been moved to note that the professional practitioners of his own branch of the social sciences, economics, often have their heads wedged. But, I guess, political science must be much more objective than economics, more predictive and all that, less likely to be biased by the political biases of its researchers and analysts. Sure, makes a lot of sense. After all, I know a lot of people who went into political science, and who among them did so because they were interested in politics? Uh, every one of them. I myself majored in sociology, and spent most of my time there dissecting the myriad ways biases corrupt research. I could have done the same thing in economics or political science, but the nonsense in those social sciences was just too easy to debunk. But it's been ages since I've been so reminded how shoddy political science is as I was by the Vox article.

  As for Krugman's value-added, there really isn't any. He doesn't even explain why electability is such a concern. He just proclaims, "The stakes are too high for that, and history will not forgive you," after taunting us: "That's what Naderites said about Al Gore; how'd that work out?" So, like, it's my fault Gore couldn't make a convincing argument why Bush would be a much more terrible president than himself? Sure, in retrospect that's true. In retrospect, it's also clear that enough hints were available at the time to make that argument -- and it's not only Gore's fault that he failed to do so, you can also blame a press that was totally smitten with Bush's good ol' boy shtick.

  I don't doubt the importance of the election, at least in terms of how much damage a Republican victory might inflict. But I don't buy the idea that we all live on a simple left-right ideological continuum, let alone that we all make rational choices based on who is closest to one's individual perch. Gore's problem, for instance, wasn't that he wasn't close enough to the median voter. It was more like he didn't convince enough of his base that he would fight for them, that his election would be better off for them than Bush's. No doubt Clinton is closer to that median voter, but will she fight for you? Or will she cut a deal with whatever donor woos her most? My first close encounter with Hillary was listening to a radio interview with her while her ill-fated health care plan was still in play. She was asked how she would feel if it was rejected, and she said "sad." Right then I realized this was a person who didn't care enough even to get upset. Sanders wouldn't take that kind of rejection lying down. But the Clintons simply forgot about health care for the rest of his terms, and went on to doing "pragmatic" things the Republicans would let them pass: NAFTA, welfare "reform," the repeal of Carter-Glass.

• Robert Freeman: The new social contract: This is what's roiling the electorate & fueling the success of anti-establishment candidates Trump, Cruz and Sanders: Actually, less about those candidates -- that's just bait -- than the dissolution of the notion that rich and poor are bound together through a "social contract":

  But shared prosperity is no longer the operative social contract. Ronald Reagan began dismantling it in 1981 when he transferred vast amounts of national income and wealth to the already rich. He called it "supply side economics."

  Supposedly, the rich would plow their even greater riches back into the economy, which would magically return that wealth -- and more -- to everyone else. George H.W. Bush called it "voodoo economics." It seemed too good to be true. It was. Consider the facts.

  Since the late 1970s, labor productivity in the U.S. has risen 259 percent. If the fruits of that productivity had been distributed according to the post-World War II shared prosperity social contract the average person's income would be more than double what it is today. The actual change?

  Median income adjusted for inflation is lower today than it was in 1974. A staggering 40 percent of all Americans now make less than the 1968 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation. Median middle-class wealth is plummeting. It is now 36 percent below what it was in 2000.

  Where did all the money go? It went exactly where Reagan intended.

  Twenty-five years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners pulled in 12 percent of the nation's income. Today they get twice that, 25 percent. And it's accelerating. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent.

  This is the exact opposite of shared prosperity. It is imposed penury That is the new deal. Or more precisely, the new New Deal, the new social contract.

  Freeman is right that this is the rot and ferment that breeds support for "anti-establishment" candidates. Trump and Sanders have different answers to the problem: Trump flames foreigners, and that seems to appeal to certain voters; Sanders blames the rich, and that appeals to others. I'm less sure why Freeman lumps Cruz here. Sure, he's "anti-establishment" in the sense that he too has a scapegoat: the government. But he has the very opposite of a solution.

  I should also quote Freeman on Clinton and Sanders, since this runs against the "common sense" of Krugman's "political scientists":

  It is unlikely Hillary will pull many Republicans away from whomever the Republicans nominate. She is both an object of visceral hatred to most Republicans and the establishment candidate in a year of anti-establishmentism.

  Sanders, on the other hand, pulls well from disaffected Republicans. He has little of Hillary's baggage and polls much better against either Trump or Cruz than does Hillary. He is anti-establishment in a year of ervid anti-establishmentism, a fiery mouthpiece for the intense cross-partisan anger roiling the electorate.

  If Sanders can survive the primaries he has a much greater chance of beating any Republican challenger than does Hillary. Whether he can implement his vision of a retrofitted social contract is another matter.

• Links on the presidential campaign trail:

  • Josh Marshall: Making Sense of the Last NH Debate: And relishing how "Chris Christie simply eviscerated Rubio." I doubt if this means the end of the Rubio bubble, which exists because major players -- I suspect "the establishment" gives them more credit than they deserve -- need to front a candidate who is pliant enough to do their bidding, and the others they've entertained have proven more obviously flawed (especially Jeb Bush). For post-debate damage control, see Amanda Terkel: Marco Rubio Says He'll Keep Using the Same Obama Attack Line Over and Over Despite Being Mocked.

  • Cody Cain: Donald Trump's Iran idiocy: The interview that should have ended his candidacy once and for all: as the article notes, Trump couldn't even negotiate the sacking of Megyn Kelly at the Fox debate. The idea that with nothing more than ignorance and bluster he could have negotiated a better deal with Iran -- one that would have allowed the US to keep $150 billion in Iranian assets impounded after the revolution -- is pretty farcical.

    This was highly revealing of Trump's character. He exhibits a tendency toward paranoia, he immediately concludes that others are conspiring against him without a shred of evidence, and he perceives himself as being victimized. These are traits that are not exactly well suited for a leader of a nation.

    In another encounter, a lady from the audience expressed concern that Trump had not provided enough specificity about his policies. Trump's answer was that he prefers not to provide detailed policies because he desires to remain unpredictable.

    Seriously? A presidential candidate running on a platform of unpredictability?

  • Gary Legum: The special hell of a Ted Cruz rally: What it's like to spend an evening with the GOP's oiliest operator.

  • Conor Lynch: These guys are killing conservatism: How Trump & Cruz are accelerating the intellectual debasement of the right: Not that the big-name conservative thought leaders aren't hoping for a more pliant and innocuous standard bearer (like Marco Rubio), but Cruz and Trump get the headlines. Actually, he write another article about how those same are debasing the right -- George Will and David Brooks are good examples, yet somehow they're still considered the "reasonable" guys.

  • Rebecca Gordon: American Presidential Candidates Are Now Openly Promising to Commit War Crimes: specifically focuses on Republicans Cruz, Carson, Bush, and Trump (the piece was published on Jan. 7; I'm sure that had it appeared last week the author would have mentioned Rubio, who seems to have emerged as the neocon favorite in the race). I'll also note that Gordon focuses on torture -- she wrote Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States -- which seems to be more of a Republican psychosexual obsession. Had she taken a broader view, she might have said something about Clinton, whose "no fly zones" also advocate war crimes.

  • Daniel Denvir: Dems, stop lying to yourself about Hillary: Sure, she "gets s*** done" -- atrocious s***, that is: Pretty much reiterates a point I thought I made above.

  • Paul Campos: Hillary Clinton's self-satisfied privilege: Her Goldman Sachs problem helps explain the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: Among other things, reveals that "together the Clintons have a yet worth in excess of $100 million" -- a curious figure given that one or the other has either been on the public payroll or been preparing to run for office virtually all of their adult lives (at least the last 30 years). Just brilliant I guess -- why else would a savvy (and more than a little underhanded) business like Goldman Sachs be willing to pay you $650,000 for a single speech?

  • Martin Longman: The Tide Has Turned Against Clinton: Argues that her establishment connections and "no, we can't" campaign is losing interest:

    [W]hen they got to policy, she had the distinct disadvantage of having to argue that we can't have a health care system as good as Canada's and we can't afford to give people free tuition to college like we give them free tuition to K-12 education, and that we can't raise the minimum wage as much as her opponent would like. [ . . . ]

    The problem is that she is thereby pushed into being a naysayer who can't speak to the aspirations of the base. Her incrementalism is probably well-suited to actually occupying the White House in a time of Republican dominance in Congress and in the states. But it's a wet blanket on the campaign trail.

    What seems to be happening here is that Sanders is disrupting the time-tested Clinton-Obama campaign strategy, which is to promise great things when running for the first term, then sandbag them and yield Congress to a Republican backlash, which in turn gives them an excuse for never delivering anything, and turns their re-election campaign into a defensive struggle against the barbarians. Longman also cites a recent Quinnipiac poll which shows that Sanders has closed the gap, now trailing Clinton among Democrats 42% to 44% (previously 53%-36% in Clinton's favor). CNN also reports that "general election match-ups between the top Republian and Democratic candidates suggest Sanders and Rubio would be their party's most competitive standard-bearers," with Sanders defeating Trump by 10 points but only tied with Rubio (43% each).

  • Richard Silverstein: Interview: Bernie's Commie Mohel Speaks: A sneak preview of the anti-Sanders smear to come, modelled, no surprise, on the anti-Obama smear of eight years past.

  • Nomi Prins: The Big Money and What It Means in Election 2016: includes particulars for most candidates, especially the billionaires behind Cruz and Rubio, plus a long section on Clinton -- her electability argument depends as much on her fundraising prowess as on her centrism; however, there's a catch:

    As of October 16, 2015, she had pocketed $97.87 million from individual and PAC contributions. And she sure knows how to spend it, too. Nearly half of that sum, or $49.8 million -- more than triple the amount of any other candidate -- has already gone to campaign expenses.

    She doesn't talk much about the Kochs, who a year ago were torn between Scott Walker and Rand Paul as their favorite candidates. For more on them, see: Robert Faturechi: How dark money stays dark: The Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and the right's biggest, most destructive racket going. Also, Chris Gelardi: Capitalist puritans: The Koch brothers are pushing pure economic liberty as the only road to true prosperity -- to the detriment of all but the rich -- actually, I'm not sure that even the rich (even the Kochs) would prosper under true Kochian freedom. I expect it would in rather short order lead to the sort of dystopia you see in the Oscar-nominated Mad Max: Fury Road.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

• Andrew J Bacevich: Out of Bounds, Off-Limits, or Just Plain Ignored: Sub: "Six national security questions Hillary, Donald, Ted, Marco, et al., don't want to answer and won't even be asked." Only one has to do with the "war on terror" -- still the biggest game in town. Not sure that Bacevich has much of a handle on his question six: "Debt."

• Tom Engelhardt: "The Finest Fighting Force in the History of World": Take Afghanistan, for instance. Engelhardt cites Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living, America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which argues that the Taliban disbanded and dissolved after their first taste of American firepower, but the US couldn't leave well enough alone:

  Like their Bush administration mentors, the American military men who arrived in Afghanistan were determined to fight that global war on terror forever and a day. So, as Gopal reports, they essentially refused to let the Taliban surrender. They hounded that movement's leaders and fighters until they had little choice but to pick up their guns again and, in the phrase of the moment, "go back to work."

  It was a time of triumph and of Guantánamo, and it went to everyone's head. Among those in power in Washington and those running the military, who didn't believe that a set of genuine global triumphs lay in store? With such a fighting force, such awesome destructive power, how could it not? And so, in Afghanistan, the American counterterror types kept right on targeting the "terrorists" whenever their Afghan warlord allies pointed them out -- and if many of them turned out to be local enemies of those same rising warlords, who cared?

  It would be the first, but hardly the last time that, in killing significant numbers of people, the U.S. military had a hand in creating its own future enemies. In the process, the Americans managed to revive the very movement they had crushed and which, so many years later, is at the edge of seizing a dominant military position in the country. [ . . . ]

  It's probably accurate to say that in the course of one disappointment or disaster after another from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia to Iraq, Yemen to Pakistan, the U.S. military never actually lost an encounter on the battlefield. But nowhere was it truly triumphant on the battlefield either, not in a way that turned out to mean anything. Nowhere, in fact, did a military move of any sort truly pay off in the long run. Whatever was done by the FFFIHW and the CIA (with its wildly counterproductive drone assassination campaigns across the region) only seemed to create more enemies and more problems.

  Engelhardt concludes that "Washington should bluntly declare not victory, but defeat, and bring the U.S. military home. Maybe if we stopped claiming that we were the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensable nation ever and that the U.S. military was the finest fighting force in the history of the world, both we and the world might be better off and modestly more peaceful."

• Ann Jones: Social Democracy for Dummies: After having written books on American failure in Afghanistan and on how maimed US veterans have fared on their return, Jones moved to Norway, to see what life is like in an affluent country free from war. Not bad, really.

• Thomas Piketty: A New Deal for Europe: The author of possibly the most important book yet in growing inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, offers a few modest proposals for reforms in the Eurozone. Also see Piketty's earlier review of Anthony B Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done?: A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society.

• Philip Weiss: Dov Yermiya, who said, 'I renounce my belief in Zionism which has failed,' dies at 101. Yermiya fought in Israel's "War for Independence" in 1948, and only issued his renunciation in 2009, in a letter quoted here. You might also take a look at Steven Erlanger: Who Are the True Heirs of Zionism? -- which starts with a bloody admission:

  ZIONISM was never the gentlest of ideologies. The return of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there have always carried within them the displacement of those already living on the land.

  The Israeli general and politician Yigal Allon defined Zionism in 1975 as "the national liberation movement of a people exiled from its historic homeland and dispersed among the nations of the world." Some years later, and more crudely, perhaps, another general and politician, Rehavam Ze'evi, a tough right-winger, said, "Zionism is in essence the Zionism of transfer," adding, "If transfer is immoral, then all of Zionism is immoral."

  Admissions like this were rarely broadcast to the public during the early days of Israel, when David Ben-Gurion spoke of Israel becoming "a state just like any other." So the recent tendency to speak in such terms may sound like a confession but is rarely accompanied by reflection much less shame: rather, they are bragging, and preparing the grounds for another round of "ethnic cleansing."

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Thursday, February 5, 2015

Postscript added [Feb. 6].

No Weekend Roundup last Sunday, as I was trying to tie up the loose ends on a Rhapsody Streamnotes column. Since then the ridiculous spectacle of the Iowa Caucuses happened. With all the money being spent on political corruption these days, some small states have spied an economic opportunity in being the first to weigh in on who's going to be the next president, and that's settled out into the convention that New Hampshire runs the first primary -- they've made it clear that if any other state tries to usurp them, they'll just move their primary further up -- with Iowa sneaking ahead with its caucus scam. As you know, everyone who's anyone (plus some who don't seem to be anyone at all) has been campaigning for president for a full year now, so this is the first real opportunity the voters have had to thin the field. That's the main takeaway from the caucuses.

Martin O'Malley was the first one to suspend his campaign after a pitiful showing in Iowa. He was running as the Democrats' insurance policy, figuring that if the voters couldn't stand presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton he'd make himself available as the fallback candidate. So basically he was running against Bernie Sanders as the alternative to Clinton only, you know, without having any policy differences from Clinton and, well, the laws of physics prevailed: substance defeated vacuum. On the other hand, Sanders and Clinton are likely to continue all the way to the convention: the former because he's somehow managed to inspire and organize a sizable chunk of the Democratic base -- with issues, of course, but also integrity -- and the latter because, as 2008 demonstrated, she has a remarkable ability to "take a licking and keep on ticking." More on this later.

As for the Republicans, I think it's fair to say that Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum should hang it up. They won Iowa the last two times out, and they basically have no better prospects ahead. (Huckabee, as a Southern preacher, might want to hang on for South Carolina and maybe even Super Tuesday but if he was going to win he would have placed 1st in Iowa, not 9th.) As I understand it, Kasich and Christie didn't make much of an effort in Iowa -- still Kasich edged Huckabee for 8th, and Christie beat Santorum for 10th -- but see New Hampshire as their big opportunity. If they do as poorly there they'll be laughed out of the race too.

Hard to spin any upside for Jeb Bush either (6th place, 2.8%), not that he ever looked very likely. For starters, I suspect that it's hard to find any Republicans who didn't wind up hating either his brother or his father -- the latter for not being a true conservative, the former for making conservatives look so hideous (not that there aren't some conservatives so purist, or blinkered, as to hate both). But the final blow is probably the coalescence of the anti-Trump, anti-Cruz camp in favor of fellow Floridian Marco Rubio. Bush's only hope is that the romance will prove fleeting: Rubio ran so far ahead of his polls that I suspect that many of his supporters preferred less popular candidates but switched at the last minute trying to stop Trump and Cruz. I doubt you'd see that in a primary, although Rubio's 3rd place (23.1%) finish gives him a chance to carry the banner forward. Also Rubio does appear to have a hard core of supporters: he's emerged as the neocon favorite, even though pretty much every Republican candidate has pledged to start World War III.

Ted Cruz (1st place, 27.6%) seems to have captured most the Christian nationalist bloc which dominated Iowa's GOP caucuses in 2008/2012 -- I can't say as I see the appeal, but that's what people say. (Ben Carson's 4th place, 9.3% share is probably even more evangelical.) It's tempting to say that Cruz beat Trump (2nd place, 24.3%) once Republicans learned that he's the even bigger asshole, but it could just be Trump's excuse about not having a "ground game." That seems like something Trump could fix, or at least neutralize when we start getting into the real primaries. Whether he can repair his tarnished image as a winner is another story. As for who in the long run will reign as the chief asshole, I wouldn't count him out, but on the other hand it wouldn't be a stupid move to let Cruz enjoy his claim.

I have nothing much to say about Carson, Rand Paul (5th, 4.5%), or Carly Fiorina (7th, 1.9%), except that they are unique enough they can probably sustain their irrelevant campaigns longer than most. Still, it's worth noting that Paul, despite all his compromises, isn't doing nearly as well as his father did four (or even eight) years ago. I also see someone named Gilmore on the returns list, trailing even Santorum with 0%. As I understand it, he did so poorly his reported percentage wasn't even rounded down. [PS: After I wrote this, Paul and Santorum suspended their campaigns.]

Still, hard to even care about the Republican results. For starters, on any reality-based scale there's no practical difference between any of the candidates, and the distance between any of them and the worst possible Democratic candidate is so vast the election will most likely split the same regardless of who is nominated. In fact, there's probably a wider ideological split between the two Democrats than between Clinton and the Republicans, but the Democrats appear more cohesive because both camps recognize the very real danger the Republicans, and will tolerate the other rather than risk civilization and the republic. Sanders people are likely to bend your ear on how bad Clinton has been and could be, but unlike Nader people in 2000 they're not going to tell you there's no difference between Bore and Gush. That's one lesson that's been learned to our horror.

That lesson has been the signal accomplishment of Clintonism. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his real hope was to establish that the Democrats would be better for business than the Republicans had been under Reagan and Bush. The signature accomplishment of his first term was NAFTA, which was not only a giant gift to business; it split the Democratic Party, hitting the unions especially hard. He tried to follow that up with his (well, Hillary's) health care plan, which was intended as a second big giveaway to business, but got squashed when the Republicans decided to go feral on him (the one thing they couldn't allow was for Clinton to appear more pro-business than they were). That turned out to be a blessing for both: Republicans gained control of Congress, freeing Clinton from any need to satify any of his party's desired reforms, and positioning himself as the last defensive rampart against the barbarians at the gate. Clinton was re-elected in 1996 and presided over the strongest economic boom in the US since the 1960s -- partly the good luck of coinciding with a real tech boom, partly opening the economy up to ever greater levels of financial fraud.

But the key thing was how he usurped and monopolized the Democratic Party. He built a personal political machine, a network of rich donors -- he had, after all, made them a lot of money while he was president -- and he kept that going after he left office in 2001, mostly to support Hillary's ambitions. When she ran in 2008 she was both the heir to his machine and, once again, the designated defender of civilization against Republican ruin. As she is now -- the interesting sidelight is how Obama followed Clinton's pattern, spending his initial victory catering to business before provoking a Republican revolt which only he has saved us from. The pattern has become so regular it's hard to imagine a Hillary administration doing anything else: providing huge dividends to business while blaming the Republicans for kneecapping any popular reforms.

Clinton's hegemony over the Democratic Party proved so complete that no mainstream Democrat (unless you count O'Malley) dare run against her. This has less to do with a shortfall of up-and-coming politicians -- it shouldn't be hard to come up with a list of Senators and Governors as qualified as Cruz-Paul-Rubio and Bush-Christie-Jindal-Kasich-Walker -- as the fact that the Clintons had cornered the donor class, strangling the chances anyone else might have had for sponsorship. Sanders escaped their tentacles because he wasn't even a Democrat: he's been elected repeatedly to Congress as an Independent, yet it turns out he's the one able to appeal to the party's hardcore constituency. And the reason is quite simple: he hasn't sold them out like the Clintons have, time and time again.

I've long thought that the left wing, both inside and beyond the Democratic Party, was substantially larger than the paltry vote totals garnered by Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich, so I find Sanders' polling gratifying. Surprising too, as 50% in Iowa and 61% (latest poll I've seen) in New Hampshire is even more than I imagined. Part of this is Sanders' personal charisma, which is off the scale compared to Nader and Kucinich. Part of this is that conditions for working people, especially the young, have gotten objectively worse, in the last eight (or 16 or 24 or 36, take your pick) years. Part of this is that the cold war red-baiting which mad anyone even remotely tolerant of socialism anathema has lost much of its sting -- chalk this up to indiscriminate use, but also to how obnoxious those who traffic in such charges have become. But part of it is also residual disgust with the Clintons, who missed (and messed up) their opportunity to roll back the damages of the Reagan-Bush era, and whose minions at least contributed to Obama's post-Bush shortcomings (Larry Summers, for instance, not to mention Obama's Secretary of State).

Still, odds are Clinton will prevail. I know some decent leftists who are already supporting her, mostly on the theory that she's been tested and proven she's tough enough to stand up to the inevitable Republican slander campaign, and that matters because the alternative of a Trump-Cruz-Rubio-whoever becoming president is too horrible to even contemplate. Those people are mostly old enough to remember how the center and a loud slice of the Democratic Party abandoned George McGovern to re-elect the Crook (and War Criminal) Nixon in 1972. (If they know their history, they may even recall how many Democrats turned against the populist campaigns of William Jennings Bryan in 1896-1904 -- if not, they can read Karl Rove's recent book on his hero, William McKinley.) Paul Krugman cites an article on this: David Roberts: Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like. If anything, I think Roberts undersells his case (he admits "I'm not sure I have the requisite killer instinct to fully imagine how the GOP will play a Sanders campaign"). I think we'd be hearing a lot more about how Sanders' programs will kill jobs -- the same tack they took against the ACA, even though there's no evidence of it (but then there's no evidence that anything Republicans say about macroeconomics is true). What's unclear is whether those slanders will have any resonance beyond the right wing's echo chamber. Surely one effect of so many years of such outrageous and brazenly self-serving propaganda has worn thin on many people.

There's a famous David Frum quote where he argues that Republican politicians have learned to fear their base; by contrast, Democratic politicians loathe their base. The latter sentiment seems to fit the Clintons' cynical pandering to and rejection of their voters. Maybe if Sanders keeps rising in the polls, they'll learn to show their base some measure of respect. More likely it will come too late: given the quality of his opponents, it's harder for me to see how Sanders can fail to win the nomination and the election. What I worry about more is that he will have gotten too far out ahead of the party. But there is at least one precedent: Franklin Roosevelt became president before forging a grass roots New Deal coalition to support him. Roosevelt, an aristocrat who was turned into a radical by his times, only gradually realized the need, but as a life-long radical Sanders should know better. I'm still dismayed that he keeps talking about "a political revolution," but what else could that phrase mean?

Milo Miles tweeted a reply to this piece. Not feeling I could write an adequate reply in 144 characters, I thought I'd add a postscript here. Milo's tweet:

There's a good point to think about with your scenario: FDR couldn't walk. He was despised cripple. Makes reasoning different.

No less an authority than Frances Perkins, who knew and worked with FDR before he was struck with polio, felt that his crippling made him much more emphathetic with people, especially the downtrodden, than he had been when he was young and healthy. He was a Democrat, and a very rich and privileged one, by birth, which back then didn't predispose him toward any populist or progressive impulses. The only Democrat to win the presidency in the 19th century after the Civl War was Grover Cleveland, who was quite possibly the most conservative president we ever had. Woodrow Wilson did some progressive things early on, but he seemed to treat them like cough syrup, medicine to be swallowed fast and discarded as soon as possible. More influential was FDR's distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, so clearly the model for FDR's own career that some of the rhetoric had to rub off. Still, when FDR was elected president in 1932, I don't think it was obvious that he would wind up far to the left of Herbert Hoover. The voters simply wanted change, and in FDR they got a president who vowed to do something, to try all sorts of things to stem the Great Depression.

In his early days -- what turned into the legendary 100 days -- he indeed tried all sorts of things, all over the political spectrum. He was especially concerned about failing banks, falling farm prices, and deflation in general -- not exactly leftist causes -- but his empathy didn't exclude anyone (even though New Deal programs often excluded agricultural and domestic workers, i.e., blacks). And he was famously fond of balanced budgets, but he went with whatever worked, and what worked moved him far to the left. He finally acted on that in 1938, when he tried to move the Democratic Party to the left by challenging a number of reactionaries within the party, specifically its Southern wing. By and large, his "purge" of the party failed, even backfired, as conservative Democrats increasingly allied with Republicans to fight and in some cases undo New Deal reforms (most famously passing Taft-Hartley over Truman's veto in 1947). Over the longer term, the Democratic Party did evolve toward FDR's political stance -- even posting a few tangible legislative achievements under LBJ -- but in many respects they came up short.

I should make more explicit the point I was leaning to, which is that Sanders' "political revolution" (no matter how innocuously he means that) would be unprecedented in American history. Every major political challenge from the left so far has been voted down rather decisively -- the populist Bryan in 1896 (and 1900 and 1908), the Progressive parties of Roosevelt in 1912 and LaFollette in 1924, McGovern's anti-war candidacy in 1972. The only exception I could think of was FDR in 1932, but as I said, that case was relatively ambiguous, and his subsequent turns to the left were mostly checked. You might wish to nominate Obama in 2008, who was promptly pilloried by right-wing propaganda and the phony Tea Party movement -- not that he was much of a progressive, or any sort of leftist, in the first place.

That doesn't mean that Sanders' campaign is impossible, let alone undesirable. For one thing, historical conditions are every bit as unprecedented. The right-wing threat has never appeared more ominous. And the inadequacy of Clinton/Obama compromises has never been more obvious. In particular, they seem incapable of reversing major shifts of the last few decades: increasing inequality, severe climate change, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, persistent and often thoughtless war, the degeneration of democracy into an auction for the superrich.

Not sure that I answered one point about Milo's tweet: his line, "He was a despised cripple." Some people indeed despised Roosevelt, especially as "a traitor to his class," but my impression is that few people realized that he was so severely crippled, and I'm not aware of it ever becoming a "talking point" against him. I don't doubt that Roosevelt feared that being seen as a cripple would eat at the faith that he could lead the nation, and there's no doubt that he worked very hard to conceal his disability from the public. Hence I focused on the empathy question, which I thought more to the point.

PPS: Somehow I missed the report that Mike Huckabee ended his campaign, evidently on the night of his disastrous Iowa finish, buried in the Martin O'Malley news.

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Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Music: Current count 26199 [26163] rated (+36), 412 [408] unrated (+4).

Nearly everything here appeared in yesterday's Rhapsody Streamnotes -- the eagle-eyed will note that the exception is saxophonist Roxy Coss's minor-label debut. That one can wait for late February, by which time it will have some company. How much is hard to say: I really need to start writing more on other things. Wrapping up yesterday's music column precluded a Weekend Roundup. I'll try to start by doing a midweek edition, by which time the Iowa thing will be history (not that I expect to have anything to say on the subject).

In the last week, my jazz and non-jazz EOY files tightened up. When I first put them together, jazz had a big 52-33 lead in A-list files. End of January that had narrowed to 77-73 (with an 11-11 tie in reissues/compilations/vault music). There's a pretty strong correlation between what I think and what Michael Tatum and Robert Christgau write. If you read me, you probably read them, so are familiar with their picks. What I thought I'd do here is to pull out my list's non-jazz A/A- records that neither Christgau nor Tatum have reviewed thus far (the bracketed numbers are rank from my EOY aggregate file, as of yesterday; ** means ≥ 1000, breaking at 5 points):

1. Lyrics Born: Real People (Mobile Home) [633]
2. Gwenno: Y Dydd Olaf (Heavenly) [132]
3. New Order: Music Complete (Mute) [54]
4. Nozinja: Nozinja Lodge (Warp) [439]
5. Dr. Yen Lo: Days With Dr. Yen Lo (Pavlov Institute) [205]
6. Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Buhl: We Are Not the First (RVNG Intl) [283]
7. Mdou Moctar: Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai [Original Soundtrack Recording] (Sahel Sounds) [826]
8. ¡Mayday!: Future/Vintage (Strange Music) [993]
9. Bully: Feels Like (Startime International/Columbia) [136]
10. Tuxedo: Tuxedo (Stones Throw) [**]
11. Asleep at the Wheel: Still the King: Celebrating the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Bismeaux) [764]
12. 79rs Gang: Fire on the Bayou (Sinking City/Urban Unrest) [**]
13. Ray Wylie Hubbard: The Ruffian's Misfortune (Bordello) [**]
14. BadBadNotGood & Ghostface Killah: Sour Soul (Lex) [126]
15. The Mowgli's: Kids in Love (Republic) [**]
16. Laura Marling: Short Movie (Ribbon Music) [65]
17. Murs: Have a Nice Day (Strange Music) [**]
18. Protoje: Ancient Future (Indiggnation Collective/Overstand) [**]
19. Alaska Thunderfuck: Anus (Sidecar) [**]
20. Downtown Boys: Full Communism (Don Giovanni) [355]
21. Desaparecidos: Payola (Saddle Creek) [284]
22. John Moreland: High on Tulsa Heat (Old Omens) [288]
23. Alan Jackson: Angels and Alcohol (Capitol Nashville) [808]
24. Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique: Love Is Free (Konichiwa/Cherrytree/Interscope, EP) [**]
25. Battles: La Di Da Di (Warp) [159]
26. Steve Hauschildt: Where All Is Fled (Kranky) [333]
27. Max Richter: From Sleep (Deutsche Grammophon) [117]
28. Skylar Spence: Prom King (Carpark) [489]
29. Erykah Badu: But You Caint Use My Phone (Control Freaq) [213]
30. Archy Marshall: A New Place 2 Drown (True Panther Sounds) [384]
31. Hieroglyphic Being: The Acid Documents (Soul Jazz) [**]
32. Metric: Pagans in Vegas (Metric) [998]
33. Elysia Crampton: American Drift (Blueberry) [277]
34. Fabiano Do Nascimento: Dança Dos Tempos (Now-Again) [429]
35. Plastician: All the Right Moves (self-released) [**]

I let the software renumber these, but there's a big gap between my number 1 and 2 -- about a dozen (OK, 11) common albums, although Christgau hasn't touched Ezra Furman (A per Tatum) and sloughed off Sleaford Mods and Low Cut Connie with low HMs. But I'm not looking for disagreements -- for what it's worth, a quick check shows 26 Christgau A/A- records I rated *** (12) or worse, out of 50 (with one records unheard, so I downrate a bit more than 50%) -- just to point out some exceptional records you may not have noticed. (Looking down the list, I find a few more tips I might have flagged, especially from Jason Gubbels, Phil Overeem, and Lucas Fagen.)

PS: Added Arca: Mutant to the A-list while working on this today. Thanks to Thomas Walker for pointing out it finally surfaced on Rhapsody. It will be in next week's list, but is already in the EOY list file, reducing the jazz edge to 77-74. Various things held this normally-on-Monday post up, including continued fiddling with the EOY Aggregates: added a bunch of jazz ballots, two aggregates from Album of the Year, plus I finally scored my own grades (same as I had done for Christgau and Tatum). This resulted in some reshuffling at the top of the list: Father John Misty in 5th breaking the tie with Tame Impala, Kamasi Washington to 8th ahead of Sleater-Kinney, Julia Holter to 10th ahead of Björk, and Alabama Shakes topping Oneohtrix Point Never for 14th. Also the top jazz records got a sizable boost: Maria Schneider (30), Rudresh Mahanthappa (32), Jack DeJohnette (44), Vijay Iyer (48), Henry Threadgill (56), Steve Coleman (67), Mary Halvorson (74), Chris Lightcap (87), Matana Roberts (100), Arturo O'Farrill (112), and Cecile McLorin Salvant (117) -- most of the latter two's gains came from counting the Latin and Vocal votes on Jazz Critics Poll ballots.

I wound up counting about two-thirds of the Jazz Critics Poll ballots -- in many cases the decision to include or exclude was arbitrary. I also counted 60+ Pazz & Jop ballots, although that's only about 15% of the total (those who voted in both had their ballots merged, with rank points from JCP; I didn't do rank points in P&J because of some presentation quirks).

New records rated this week:

• Aram Bajakian: There Were Flowers Also in Hell (2014, Sanasar): [bc]: B+(**)
• Aram Bajakian: Music Inspired by the Color of Pomegranates (2015, Sanasar): [r]: B+(**)
• Nicholas Bearde: Invitation (2015 [2016], Right Groove): [cd]: B+(*)
• Big Boi + Phantogram: Big Grams (2015, Epic, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Deafheaven: New Bermuda (2015, Anti): [r]: B+(*)
• Dilly Dally: Sore (2015, Partisan): [r]: B+(**)
• DJ Paypal: Sold Out (2015, Brainfeeder): [r]: B+(**)
• Elephant9 with Reine Fiske: Silver Mountain (2015, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B+(*)
• Foals: What Went Down (2015, Warner Brothers): [r]: B
• Helena Hauff: Discreet Desires (2015, Ninja Tune/Werkdiscs): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Hauschildt: Where All Is Fled (2015, Kranky): [r]: A-
• Helen: The Original Faces (2015, Kranky): [r]: B+(*)
• Mette Henriette: Mette Henriette (2014 [2015], ECM, 2CD): [dl]: B+(*)
• Ira Hill: Tomorrow (2015, self-released): [cd]: C
• Florian Hoefner: Luminosity (2015 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jason Kao Hwang: Voice (2014 [2016], Innova): [cd]: B+(*)
• Abdullah Ibrahim: The Song Is My Story (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): [r]: B
• Kehlani: You Should Be Here (2015, self-released): [r]: B-
• Sam Lee & Friends: The Fade in Time (2015, The Nest Collective): [r]: B+(*)
• Lizzo: Big Grrrl Small World (2015, BGSW): [r]: B+(*)
• Marina and the Diamonds: Froot (2015, Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
• Archy Marshall: A New Place 2 Drown (2015, True Panther Sounds): [r]: A-
• Pete McCann: Range (2014 [2015], Whirlwind): [r]: B+(*)
• Nero: Between II Worlds (2015, Cherrytree/Interscope): [r]: B
• Dick Oatts/Mats Holmquist/New York Jazz Orchestra: A Tribute to Herbie +1 (2015 [2016], Summit): [cd]: B+(*)
• Chris Pitsiokos Trio: Gordian Twine (2015, New Atlantis): [r]: B+(***)
• Nathaniel Rateliff: Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats (2015, Stax): [r]: B+(*)
• Roswell Rudd & Heather Masse: August Love Song (2015 [2016], Red House): [cd]: A-
• Julian Shore: Which Way Now (2015 [2016], Tone Rogue): [cd]: B
• Michael Spiro/Wayne Wallace/La Orquesta Sonfonietta: Canto América (2015 [2016], Patois): [cd]: B-
• Lew Tabackin Trio: Soundscapes (2014-15 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Thundercat: The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam (2015, Brainfeeder, EP): [r]: B
• Ray Vega & Thomas Marriott: Return of the East West Trumpet Summit (2014 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Brian Wilson: No Pier Pressure (2015, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
• Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss (2015, Sargent House): [r]: B+(*)

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

• Tubby Hayes Quartet: The Syndicate: Live at the Hopbine 1968 Vol. 1 (1968 [2015], Gearbox): [r]: B+(**)
• Schlippenbach Trio: First Recordings (1972 [2015], Trost): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Harris Eisenstadt: Old Growth Forest (Clean Feed)
• Fred Frith/Darren Johnston: Everybody Is Somebody Is Nobody (Clean Feed)
• John Grant: Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (2015, Partisan): [r]: B+(*)
• Dre Hocevar: Collective Effervescence (Clean Feed)
• Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Bring Their 'A' Game (Hot Cup, EP): advance, February 5
• Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Make the Magic Happen (Hot Cup, EP): advance, February 5
• Ken Peplowski: Enrapture (Capri): February 16
• Protean Reality: Protean Reality (Clean Feed)
• Renku: Live in Greenwich Village (Clean Feed)
• Roswell Rudd/Jamie Saft/Trevor Dunn/Balasz Pandi: Strength & Power (Rare Noise): advance, February 26
• J. Peter Schwalm: The Beauty of Disaster (Rare Noise): advance, February 26
• Dan Weiss: Sixteen: Drummers Suite (Pi): February 26

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Well, I guess that's all for 2015. At least my 2015 list is frozen. Of course, my standard practice is to keep adding stragglers until Dec. 31, 2016, but they will be clearly separated out in this color. I suppose I should also stop adding discoveries to my EOY jazz and non-jazz files. By the way, they've finally come close to balancing out, with a 77-73 jazz edge for A/A- records, and an 11-11 tie in the secondary category of compilations, reissues and/or vault music.

This month what I've tried to do is to track down the most interesting-looking albums that showed up on various 2015 EOY lists -- aggregated as new music and old music. You will, for instance, find ten 2015 non-jazz releases below with A- grades -- six new music, four compilations, etc. -- that have yet to show up in Christgau or Tatum columns. (OK, plus two from Christgau that hardly anyone else has noticed yet: Lil Dicky and Lost in Mali.)

You can get a sense of how much I've checked out by comparing the blue/green ink to black in the EOY Aggregate files. As I write (and these things constantly change) the top-rated new albums I've missed so far are almost all not on Rhapsody:

13. Joanna Newsom: Divers (Drag City)
26. Adele: 25 (XL)
56. Arca: Mutant (Mute)
57. Jim O'Rourke: Simple Songs (Drag City)
71. Faith No More: Sol Invictus (Ipecac/Reclemation)
76. Iron Maiden: The Book of Souls (Parlophone)
82. Jack DeJohnette: Made in Chicago (ECM)
87. Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last (Castle Face)
92. FFS: FFS (Domino)
93. Ghost: Meliora (Loma Vista)
96. Baroness: Purple (Abraxan Hymns)
99. Prurient: Frozen Niagara Falls (Profound Lore)

OK, the first four plus DeJohnette aren't on Rhapsody. The others I haven't bothered looking up, so they're as real as Schrödinger's cat. Most are in the hard rock/crossover metal vein, so the odds I might like one are pretty slim. (On the other hand, the DeJohnette, judging both from its lineup and critical reactions is very likely an A-. Christgau gave Arca an A- and Adele **; most likely I'd come in a notch lower, but both are prospects. I've never heard anything by Newsom, and have no idea: Christgau gave her an A- for one record, a C+ for another.)

The other thing you can tell from that list is that the black ink (unheard records) gets thicker the further you go down the list: 12 of the top 100, 35 of the next 100, 51 of the third 100, 60 of the fourth 100, 71 of the fifth 100. There are more than 5100 records in the EOY Aggregate, and the share I've heard probably turns random around 1000 (the point total drops to 1 after 2500, with everything after that sorted alphabetically). After all, I play a lot of jazz, and play a lot of things I didn't pick out -- they simply came to my door -- so they're scattered well down among the also-rans.

Speaking of jazz, you'll find my first two A-listed 2016 releases below. Aside from David Bowie's Blackstar, I haven't sought out any 2016 releases, but I've played a few things from my queue (looks like 24 records below, so a little less than 20% of the total). That's about what I'd expect -- not sure what percent of jazz records I give A/A- grades to, but it's probably closer to this 8.3% than to the 4.2% one pick would have represented.

The other oddity this week is that I think this is the first "old music" section without a single A- record. But most often I've been working off best-of lists or opportunistically seeking out an old record with a sterling reputation. Most of this column's list is made up of David Bowie albums I didn't think would be worth checking out at the time, and I mostly confirmed what I expected. On the other hand, I did much better than usual with recent reissues/compilations/vault music. For this I have to credit the EOY lists -- certainly I wouldn't have gone near Patrick Cowley or Savant without their guidance. By the way, the nearest miss was The Complete Matrix Tapes -- I rarely bother with 4-CD sets, and trying to figure them out in one long sitting without reference to booklet or packaging is a hopeless task. I'll give a second spin to any single that comes that close, but couldn't afford the time here.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody (other sources are noted in brackets). They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on January 8. Past reviews and more information are available here (7665 records).

Recent Releases

Brian Andres and the Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel: This Could Be That (2015 [2016], Bacalao): Andres is a drummer, originally from Cincinnati, based in the Bay Area, home to a wide range of Latin jazz and pop outfits, few particularly distinguished. This is pretty much as advertised, although I'll note the curious choice of group identity: I don't suspect anything ominous, but cartels are intended to reduce competition, not to excel at it. B+(*) [cd]

The Arcs: Yours, Dreamily (2015, Nonesuch): Major disconnect between the review I'm reading (at AMG) and what I'm hearing here -- promised garage blues/roots rock/retro, sounds more like Flaming Lips psychedelia toned down a few notches. Led by Dan Auerbach, better known to you (if not me) for the Black Keys. Not without interest or a fey catchiness -- at least the title is true. B

Julian Argüelles: Let It Be Told (2012 [2015], Basho): British tenor saxophonist, twelth album since 1991, has played in a number of big bands the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, who return the favor here. The program: new arrangements of South African composers, mostly jazz notables like Chris McGregor, Abdullah Ibrahim, and most of all Dudu Pukwana (three pieces). Vibrant music. B+(***)

Julian Argüelles: Tetra (2014 [2015], Whirlwind): Quartet album, gives you a clearer picture of the saxophonist, ably supported by pianist Kit Downes, with Sam Lasserson on bass and James Maddren on drums. B+(***)

Aram Bajakian: There Were Flowers Also in Hell (2014, Sanasar): Guitarist, based in New York, Armenian heritage which he's made something of (while also recording Moravian folk music and doing projects for John Zorn and Frank London). Trio with Shahzad Ismaily (bass) and Jerrome Jennings (drums), but only 5/13 cuts available on Bandcamp, a sequence from the middle of the album, so varied I have no idea where he's going. B+(**) [bc]

Aram Bajakian: Music Inspired by the Color of Pomegranates (2015, Sanasar): Solo guitar, the inspiration a 1968 film directed by Sergei Parajanov on the life of 18th-century Armenian poet/musician Sayat-Nova (Vilen Gatstyan). Does have some of that ambling/ambient soundtrack vibe. B+(**)

Julien Baker: Sprained Ankle (2015, 6131 Records): Singer-songwriter from Memphis, cut this bare-bones guitar (or piano) and voice album before she turned 20. I suppose I'd be more sympathetic to the maladies and agonies of youth if I wasn't so preoccupied with old age. B+(*)

Michael Bates: Northern Spy (2015, Stereoscopic): Bassist, has put together a very solid series of albums, which this only adds to. Trio, with Michael Blake on tenor sax and Jeremy "Bean" Clemons on drums. B+(***)

Battles: La Di Da Di (2015, Warp): Third album for this trio, which sort of bridges the gap between alt-rock -- basically a guitar-bass-drums band -- and electronica (dabbling with keyboards, but mostly after the beats. This time they lost the vocals and doubled down on the beats. A-

Nicholas Bearde: Invitation (2015 [2016], Right Groove): Standards singer -- "Dindi," "Nature Boy," "Lush Life" -- with a soul voice and scattered jazz spots, Vincent Herring sax on three cuts, piano by someone named Nat Adderley Jr. B+(*) [cd]

The Bellfuries: Workingman's Bellfuries (2015, Hi-Style): Austin TX group, third album going back to 2001, AMG lists their style as rockabilly revival but these are mostly mid-tempo story songs and ballads, the vocalist an immediate turn-off but I suppose one could get used to him. B

Big Boi + Phantogram: Big Grams (2015, Epic, EP): Ex-OutKast rapper plus electronica duo (Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter), their 7-cut, 28:35 joint venture often attributed to Big Grams, and I've seen album covers without the artists' names. More guests show up -- not sure who, other than that 9th Wonder and Skrillex produce a track each, and there's a female singer (Barthel?). All slips by pretty easily. B+(*)

David Bowie: Darkstar (2016, Columbia): Released a week before his death, this cycles back to his early work -- he hasn't sounded this much like Ziggy Stardust in decades, nor has he scripted such drama -- yet it's certainly of a different order. The music is tightly wound, but swings some and relies on sax for a pervasive jazziness. Not a masterpiece, but vital to the end. B+(***)

Bully: Feels Like (2015, Startime International/Columbia): Nashville group, as straightahead as '90s grunge, not just fronted but led by Alicia Bognanno, "who earned a degree from Middle Tennessee State University in audio recording before getting an internship at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studios in Chicago." Ten short songs, two with as many as two words in the title, but doesn't feel like she's slighting us. A-

Kenny Carr: Exit Moon (2015, Zoozazz Music): Guitarist, has a handful of albums since 2005, I won't say smooth but basically a groove guy, leading a quartet with Wurlitzer, bass, and drums. Pretty listenable. I vaguely recall a rap in there somewhere. B+(*) [cd]

Carter Tutti Void: f(x) (2015, Industrial): Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti were members of Throbbing Gristle from 1976-81, the group which originally developed industrial rock, or so I gather -- they're one group I never got to. They went on to record many albums as Chris & Cosey before renaming themselves Carter Tutti in 2000, and picking up Nik Void (from Factory Floor) in 2011. Second trio album, the grind reminds me of Gramsci -- why isn't there a group called Fordismo? -- while the synths or guitars are more attractive than the clank of a machine brake, though maybe not the occasional voices. B+(***)

Mary Foster Conklin: Photographs (2014 [2016], MockTurtle Music): Standards singer, from New Jersey, based in New York, three or four albums since 1998. Nothing terribly obvious, so takes a while to sink in. With pianist John DiMartino arranging, and Houston Person on one cut. B+(**)

Elysia Crampton: American Drift (2015, Blueberry): Born in Bolivia, grew up in Southern California and Northern Mexico, based in Virginia (which inspires some historiography here), previously known as E+E. Four pieces, thick with synth layered like geological strata (another interest), topped with a smatter of voices, as peripheral as people crawling on the surface of the earth. A-

Joseph Daley/Warren Smith/Scott Robinson: The Tuba Trio Chronicles (2015 [2016], JoDa Locust Street Music): The leader has emerged as one of the top tuba/euphonium players in jazz, and this is meant as his showcase. Robinson plays just about every conceivable reed instrument, with the lower-pitched ones the best fits (bass sax, contra-alto clarinet, bass flute, and contrabass sarrusophone). Smith plays percussion, including tympani, marimba, and vibes. B+(**) [cd]

Dâm-Funk: Invite the Light (2015, Stones Throw): Damon Riddick, second album (or third with 7 Days of Funk), doesn't fake the funk but does stretch it out and water it down, as if quantity beats quality. B

Damily: Very Aomby (2015, Helico): Guitarist, bandleader from Tulear in Madagascar, eighth album sine 1994, not sure if he sings but there are multiple voices in the band. The guitar, with affinities to soukous but a tone more like Mali, drives the music, even the drums striving to keep up. B+(***)

Deafheaven: New Bermuda (2015, Anti): A metal band, the ghastly vocals couldn't possibly suggest any other genre, but their guitar noise is uncommonly tidy, no doubt a credit to their collective chops -- on Sunbather they deftly changed volume and speed, and here they stretch out, averaging about ten minutes per song. I cut them some slack and played this at low volume -- the high volume that metalheads and stereophiles insist on just strikes me as oppressive. B+(*)

Dilly Dally: Sore (2015, Partisan): Punkish Toronto band, founded by guitarist-vocalists Katie Monks and Liz Ball, expanded to quartet with bass and drums. B+(**)

DJ Paypal: Sold Out (2015, Brainfeeder): Name undisclosed; one report is that he was born in North Carolina but is based in Berlin, although others tie him to footwork (which I've heard is a Chicago phenomenon). Mostly beats and synth-tones, mixes in a few vocals I've already put out of mind. Amusing in its way. B+(**)

C Duncan: Architect (2015, Fat Cat): Singer-songwriter from Scotland, initial stands for Christopher, first album. I expected something electronic but this is more conventional, aside from the choral layering, an affectation I don't much care for. B-

Elephant9 With Reine Fiske: Silver Mountain (2015, Rune Grammofon): Norwegian fusion band ("progressive neo-psychedelic jazz-rock trio"), keyboards-bass-drums, augmented with guest guitarist Fiske, who might as well be one of the boys. B+(*)

FKA Twigs: M3LL155X (2015, Young Turks, EP): Title somewhat more obscure than her previous EP1 and EP2, five songs, 18:44, a placeholder after her LP1 finished 3rd in the 2014 EOY Aggregate. Mostly produced by Boots Asher, trip-hop that trips more than it hops, and barely does that. C+

Foals: What Went Down (2015, Warner Brothers): British band, fourth studio album (not counting the remix Tapes), indie rockers who suck up a little EDM, which helps when you're not paying attention. Highly regarded at home, gradually building up a base here. B

The Foxymorons: Fake Yoga (2015, Foxyphoton): Dallas group (duo anyway), formed in the 1990s with five albums to date but I'd never heard of them until this week, and this weren't among the first 3925 albums in my EOY Aggregate -- Christgau pick hit them, and they're plenty likable, as alt-rock goes. B+(***) [bc]

Bob Gluck/Billy Hart/Eddie Henderson/Christopher Dean Sullivan: Infinite Spirit: Revisiting Music of the Mwandishi Band (2015 [2016], FMR): Piano, drums, trumpet, bass. Mwandishi was a Swahili name Herbie Hancock adopted in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and the title of a 1970 album Hart and Henderson played on -- they were credited as Jabali and Mganga. B+(***) [cd]

John Grant: Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (2015, Partisan): Born in Michigan, grew up in Colorado, led an alt-band called the Czars which I never bothered with, then moved to New York, London, Berlin, and wound up in Iceland. Along the way his solo debut became a hot item in England, and he's still much more important there (and in Europe) than in the US. Not sure what to make of this -- he shows some surprising pop moves, electronics, samples, even a bit of hip-hop. Pastiche, maybe. B+(*)

Gutbucket: Dance (2014 [2016], Gut): Brooklyn band, formed in 1999 and have tried to established a niche for "punk jazz" -- a jazz-rock fusion based on attitude and chops, although it's hard to get really primitive when Ornette Coleman is dancing in your head. With Ken Thomson (sax), Ty Citerman (guitar), Adam Gold (drums), and bassist du jour Pat Swoboda, cut live in a burst of energy at the Stone. B+(**) [cd]

Helena Hauff: Discreet Desires (2015, Ninja Tune/Werkdiscs): DJ/electronica producer based in Hamburg, first album after a number of singles, EPs, and DJ mixes. Fairly basic beats here, mixed with a fine sense of what works, really all it takes. B+(***)

Steve Hauschildt: Where All Is Fled (2015, Kranky): From Cleveland, formerly of Emeralds, plays synths, aims for ambient and fails only in the sense that what he produces is too interesting and too catchy to just fade into the woodwork. A-

Stephen Haynes: Pomegranate (2015, New Atlantis): Cornet player, recorded a trio album called Parrhesia in 2010 with Joe Morris (guitar) and Warren Smith (percussion), and expands that group for a tribute, adding William Parker (bass) and Ben Stapp (tuba) because "Bill Dixon loved the low end, and would have dug this instrumentation." Dixon would no doubt dig the fractured abstractions too, but I get more from Morris' solos (and Smith's vibes). B+(**)

Health: Death Magic (2015, Loma Vista): Los Angeles group, started in noise rock before moving into electronica -- AMG's line is "a dissonant yet accessible brand of art-damaged pop." Here and there I hear echoes of the Pet Shop Boys, but nothing coherent. Group name usually printed all-caps, but I haven't figured out why yet. B+(*)

Helen: The Original Faces (2015, Kranky): This is Liz Harris, who also does business as Grouper, a lo-fi experimental rock outfit. And this is, well, lo-fi experimental rock, although it may be intended to be a bit catchier. B+(*)

Mette Henriette: Mette Henriette (2014 [2015], ECM, 2CD): Alto saxophonist, last name Rolvåg, from Norway, evidently her first album, a long one. First disc is all trio with piano (Johan Lindvall) and cello (Katrine Schiott), very pastoral. The second is more expansive, 13 musicians in all, in various combos, increasing the "third stream" effect, the drama as well. B+(*) [dl]

Ira Hill: Tomorrow (2015, self-released): Jazz singer from Phoenix, 19-years-old, first album, credits Cheryl Bentyne "for believing in me," also with vocals I didn't notice. Took his first two songs too fast, then tried a ballad, even worse. Reminds me how difficult "My Funny Valentine" is to do well. C [cd]

Florian Hoefner: Luminosity (2015 [2016], Origin): Pianist, from Germany, third album, quartet with tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, always a strong player, first shadowing then running away with the album. B+(***) [cd]

Hot Chip: Why Make Sense? (2015, Domino): Fifth album I've heard and I have no recollection of the others, still I'm surprised how much this seems like a blue-eyed soul throwback, except that no one has quite the vocal chops the genre expects. Not dumb, but "you make my heart feel like it's my brain" can be disorienting. B

Jason Kao Hwang: Voice (2014 [2016], Innova): Opera, with music by the violinist, words from various poets, voiced by Deanna Relyea for the first half, Thomas Buckner on the backstretch. Several pieces were commissioned and premiered in 2010-12, but it's not clear if these were recorded then or later. Relyea is so extreme she's almost a caricature of a diva -- I couldn't stand her until I had to laugh. Buckner is more spoken voice, tolerable but also rather dramatic. The music is interesting when it breaks free of the voices. The first half is backed by Taylor Ho Bynum's trio plus Piotr Michalowski (sopranino sax, bass clarinet) and Hwang; the second by Joe McPhee, William Parker, Sang Won Park (kayagung, ajam, voice), and Hwang. B+(*) [cd]

Abdullah Ibrahim: The Song Is My Story (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): Solo piano (plus two tracks of saxophone), recorded for release on his 80th birthday, reissued a few months later in the US. One of the all-time greats, but this comes off very subdued. B

Christine Jensen and Maggi Olin: Transatlantic Conversations: 11 Piece Band Live (2013 [2016], Linedown): Alto/soprano sax and piano, respectively, Olin leads 5-3 in compositions. Recorded in Stockholm, the band is often magnificent, though I can't say I enjoy vocalist Sofie Norling. B+(*) [cd]

Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: Azui Infinito (2015 [2016], Greenleaf Music): Trombonist, has called his group Catharsis for several albums now. Mike Rodriguez is a potent trumpet player, Jorge Roeder plays electric as well as acoustic bass, Eric Doob is the drummer, and Camila Meza sings. The latter threw me as first, but now seems like an integral part of the sonic mix. B+(**) [cd]

Kehlani: You Should Be Here (2015, self-released): R&B singer, surman Parrish, not old enough to drink legally but claims to have experienced a whole lifetime of hurt. Soft beats, broken cadences, has some potential but opened with two spoken pieces, followed with a song that left the taste of shit in your mouth, then one that never got beyond the N-word. B-

Aly Keïta/Jan Galega Brönnimann/Lucas Niggli: Kalo-Yele (2015 [2016], Intakt): Keïta hails from Ivory Coast, playing balafon and kalimba, the soft percussion marvelously matched to Brönnimann's bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, and soprano sax, with the drummer adding an extra charge. I suppose I knew that Niggli was also born in Africa -- in Cameroon in 1968 -- but hadn't run across Brönnimann before: turns out he too was born in Cameroon, and they've known each other since they were one year old. A [cd]

Knxwledge: Hud Dreams (2015, Stones Throw): Hip-hop producer Glen Boothe, has released 64 albums on Bandcamp since 2009, something I have little intention of trying to sort out. This is mostly instrumental, the beats submerged with a static echo. B+(*)

Sam Lee & Friends: The Fade in Time (2015, The Nest Collective): British folk singer, first album garnered a Mercury Prize nomination, second adds his "Friends" -- not sure who they are or what they do, but they probably add instrumental depth and some unfolkie sound effects. The weepers are a bit much for me, but he does have a sound. B+(*)

The Libertines: Anthems for Doomed Youth (2015, Virgin EMI): British postpunk band, impressed some people in their 2003-04 heyday but broke up and regrouped a decade later. I don't doubt that youth is doomed, but these don't strike me as anthems -- more like supporting documentation. B+(*)

Lil Dicky: Professional Rapper (2015, self-released, 2CD): David Burd, name actually on the cover which presents a professional-looking resume touting his BSBA and summa cum laude 3.93 GPA. From Cheltenham Township, a suburb of Philadelphia, first album, crowdsourced after mixtapes called So Hard and Hump Days. Two long, and not as funny as most similar artist MC Barman, but maybe one shouldn't be so picky. A-

Lions: Lions EP (2014 [2015], self-released, EP): New York-based Ethio-jazz group, led by guitarist Nadav Peled, also credited with arrangements of Ethiopian pop tunes from the '60s and '70s and new compositions -- not clear which is which. Six songs, 28:38. Sounds a bit like surf guitar plus ska keybs and horns. B+(**)

Lizzo: Big Grrrl Small World (2015, BGSW): Rapper Melissa Jefferson, born in Houston, raised in Detroit, based in Minneapolis. Second album. Lost me when she went soft, but then I decided that wasn't so bad either. B+(*)

Los Lobos: Gates of Gold (2015, 429/Savoy Jazz): Venerable East LA band, founded in the 1970s but really found their stride with 1984's How Will the Wolf Survive? and had a second masterpiece with 1996's Colossal Head. Mostly filler here, but they still sound good on a blues and better than that on "La Tumba Sera El Final" -- the one they didn't write. B+(**)

Marina and the Diamonds: Froot (2015, Atlantic): Pop singer-songwriter from Wales, Marina Diamandis, third album, doesn't have any chirp in her voice so not exactly a natural for bouncy teen pop, but gains traction as the album wears on. B+(*)

Archy Marshall: A New Place 2 Drown (2015, True Panther Sounds): British singer-songwriter, first appeared as Zoo Kid, then more notably as King Krule, matures into using his given name (or something close to it). Most resembles trip hop with its blunted beats and submerged colors, scant cover for vocals that seem determined to lurk rather than appear. Still, rather remarkable when you bother to pay attention, which isn't a given. A-

Jenny Maybee/Nick Phillips: Haiku (2015 [2016], self-released): Bay Area singer-songwriter-pianist, although the trumpet player also kicks in a couple of songs, and there's a bass player for good measure. First album, slow and somber. B

Pete McCann: Range (2014 [2015], Whirlwind): Guitarist, fifth album since 1999, shows up in a lot of side credits, most often adding some nice harmony and a memorable solo. This is a quintet with John O'Gallagher (alto sax), Henry Hey (piano, keyboards), Matt Clohesy (bass, electric bass), and Mark Ferber (drums). Too nice, I thought at first, then they cranked it up and I decided nice was better. B+(*)

Terrence McManus and John Hébert: Saints and Sinners (2015, Rowhouse Music): Guitar and bass, the former one of the more distinctive players to have appeared recently on the avant scene, the latter one of those bassists who always seems to show up on impressive albums. This has a sound but not much flow. B+(*) [dl]

Gabriel Mervine: People (2015 [2016], Synergy Music): Trumpet player, based in Denver, first album, fairly ordinary postbop quintet, although the change-of-pace coda take on "You Go to My Head" was lovely. B [cd]

Hudson Mohawke: Lantern (2015, Warp): Ross Birchard, Scottish beat maker, second album. Kitsch, some all right, some not so much. B

Róisin Murphy: Hairless Toys (2015, PIAS): Irish chanteuse, sang in Moloko before going solo, keeping the electronica backdrop. First pass I find the straight upbeat pieces attractive and the slower/artier/more atmospheric ones less so, but some would surely grow on me. B+(**)

Nero: Between II Worlds (2015, Cherrytree/Interscope): British dubstep group, added singer Alana Watson ("Fergie-fication") for their second album. Seems like they're bucking more for the arena than the dancefloor. B

New York Gypsy All Stars: Dromomania (2015, self-released): More melting pot from musicials with roots, maybe even birthplaces, in southeastern Europe, where gypsy is mess an ethnic group than a model of musical amalgamation -- their website even talks about "Roma-inspired zeal from swinging salsa to pulsing bhangra." B+(**)

Dick Oatts/Mats Holmquist/New York Jazz Orchestra: A Tribute to Herbie +1 (2015 [2016], Summit): I must admit that when I unwrapped this title, the first Herbie who flashed to mind was Nichols, a pianist who died in 1963 after a brief but brilliant career -- his 3-CD The Complete Blue Note Recordings is an essential for any serious jazz collection -- and has been the subject of several superb tributes. But, alas, time moves on, so now we're talking about Herbie Hancock, at 75 a venerable figure, no doubt. Holmquist arranges here and contributes one tune, but doesn't play, so the alto saxophonist is the front man (or field commandant). The big band does what big bands do: mass horns, with occasional solo spots. "Watermelon Man" stands out, but then it always does. B+(*) [cd]

Aruán Ortiz Trio: Hidden Voices (2015 [2016], Intakt): Piano trio, the pianist Cuban-born, New York-based, has several albums. Originals, standards by Monk and Coleman, extra percussion on one cut for some Latin tinge, but mostly superb straight jazz, something you'd expect with Eric Revis on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. B+(***) [cd]

Kresten Osgood, Masabumi Kikuchi, Ben Street & Thomas Morgan: Kikuchi/Street/Morgan/Osgood (2008 [2015], ILK Music): On the drummer's label may be why he gets top billing here vs. the more conventionally ordered (piano-bass-bass-drums) title. The pianist, perhaps best known for his group Tethered Moon, died last year, so this release must be something of a memorial. He cut across virtually all styles, but the two bassists seem to prod him inward, so this comes off as deeply personal. B+(***)

Laura Perlman: Precious Moments (2015 [2016], Miles High): Standards singer, presumably not the film music composer who shows up first on Google. This seems to be her first album, backed professionally by Bill Cunliffe (piano), Mark Sherman (vibes, Chris Colangelo (bass), and Joe La Barbera (drums), with Sherman producing and arranging (two arrangements by Cunliffe). B+(*) [cd]

Chris Pitsiokos Trio: Gordian Twine (2015, New Atlantis): Alto saxophonist, leads a trio with Max Johnson on bass and Kevin Shea on drums. Tags on the bandcamp page include "noise rock" and "experimental rock," but this is the sort of scratchy, scrappy free jazz that seemed so far out in the late 1960s, twenty-some years before the leader was born. B+(***)

Plastician: All the Right Moves (2015, self-released): British DJ Chris Reed, formerly Plasticman (a name he gave up when threatened with legal action by Plastikman). Has a reputation for grime and dubstep, but this is a continuous dance mix pieced together from more or less familiar samples -- "My Prerogative" and "Raspberry Beret" were two I recognized. This topped Michaelangelo Matos' P&J ballot, but I have a hard time judging: is this a real album if it only floats around the internet? Artwork says CD. And there's certainly more to it than just stitching together hits. A- [sc]

Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect (2015, Hardly Art): Detroit band, sound reminds me of Psychedelic Furs, buried a little deeper in the garage, less likely to land a hook but exceptional in their averageness. B+(**)

Nathaniel Rateliff: Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats (2015, Stax): Folkie from Missouri, signed with Concord and they seem to have told him that if he rounded up some soul horns they'd release his album on Stax. He delivered on that, throwing in some gospel and funk for good measure. If you're easily impressed, you will be. B+(*)

John Raymond: John Raymond & Real Feels (2014 [2016], Shifting Paradigm): Trumpet player (flugelhorn here), has a couple previous albums, this a trio with Gilad Hekselman (guitar) and Colin Stranahan (drums). Mostly covers, folk-traditional ("Amazing Grace," "This Land Is Your Land") plus some that will always seem too hokey ("Scarborough Fair," "Blackbird") -- but not so much here. B+(***) [cd]

Roswell Rudd & Heather Masse: August Love Song (2015 [2016], Red House): Masse is a singer from Maine, part of the folk group The Wailin' Jennys but also has a couple jazz albums. She wrote one-and-a-half songs here -- the half segues into "Old Devil Moon" -- and the trombone great wrote two songs, the rest from the standards repertoire. With Rolf Sturm on guitar and Mark Helias on bass, what I love is the trombone growl and rumble, but the others, not least the singer, do their part too. A- [cd]

Adam Rudolph/Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra: Turning Towards the Light (2015, Cuneiform): Percussionist, but just composer here, nor is this obviously related to the world musics he's studied. Founded Go: Organic Orchestra in 2003, but this all-guitar variant is new here: Rez Abbasi, Damon Banks, Marco Capelli, Nels Cline, Liberty Ellman, David Gilmore, Jerome Harris, Joel Harrison, Miles Okazaki, Marvin Sewell, Kenny Wessel (Banks and sometimes Harris on bass guitar; Harris also plays lap steel, and Wessel banjo), and no shortage of effects. Harmonically rich, a showcase of jazz guitar tricks, but everything turns back to the same color. B+(**)

Joan Shelley: Over and Even (2015, No Quarter): Chalk this up to "stupid marketing tricks": a 12-cut LP reduced to a 4-cut EP on Rhapsody (and with only 2 playable tracks on Bandcamp). Kentucky singer-songwriter plays and sings pretty folk-ish music. B+(*)

Julian Shore: Which Way Now (2015 [2016], Tone Rogue): Pianist, from Rhode Island, has a couple configurations here, half the pieces with Dayna Stephens (tenor sax), Gilad Hekselman (guitar), bass and drums, a mixed bag ranging from pedal steel to voice for the others. Lush, not sure that's a plus. B [cd]

Deborah Shulman: My Heart's in the Wind (2015 [2016], Summit): Standards singer, fifth album since 2004, backed by a fairly notable band -- Larry Koonse on guitar, Terry Trotter on piano -- but everything's done slow ballad so they don't get to show off much. B+(*)

Skyzoo & Antman Wonder: An Ode to Reasonable Doubt (2013, self-released, EP): Runs 9 tracks, 38:49, yet billed as an EP, probably because it started as a trivial idea: a remake of Jay-Z's debut album. Different songs, but Antman Wonder's orchestrations come close to the mark, a fair facsimile of a thug opera. B+(**)

Skyzoo: Music for My Friends (2015, First Generation Rich): Despite the concept, rather scattered. B+(**)

Snarky Puppy/Metropole Orkest: Sylva (2014 [2015], Impulse!): Brooklyn jazz-funk collective with at least eight albums since 2006. I should probably make a proper study of them from the beginning, as as this live meeting with the venerable Dutch orchestra -- something of a jazz powerhouse since Vince Mendoza took over (since moved on and not in the credits here) -- is the sort of thing groups do once they're established (and running out of ideas). Aside from an occasional throb of funk bass, much of the appeal here is in the intricate layering and details the Orkest adds. B+(***)

Michael Spiro/Wayne Wallace/La Orquesta Sonfonietta: Canto América (2015 [2016], Patois): Latin jazz from San Francisco, the leaders play percussion and trombone respectively, the Orquesta is huge with a changing membership, and there are extra horns and a string quartet and vocals, pretty much the kitchen sink. B- [cd]

The Stryker/Slagle Band Expanded: Routes (2015 [2016], Strikezone): Guitarist Dave Stryker and alto saxophonist Steve Slagle, have played on each other's albums since the 1980s and consolidated into one of the more enduring partnerships in jazz history. Usually a quartet, the "expanded" band includes John Clark on French horn and extras on several tracks: tenor sax, trombone/tuba, piano/keyboards (Bill O'Connell). Regardless, the altoist's solos are the high points. B+(***)

Lew Tabackin Trio: Soundscapes (2014-15 [2016], self-released): With Boris Kozlov on bass and Mark Taylor on drums, the leader appears on the cover holding a flute in his right hand and a tenor sax in his left, as if he's trying to make up his mind. Plays both, more flute than I'd preferred but he's actually quite good at it. B+(**) [cd]

Taraf de Haïdouks: Of Lovers, Gamblers and Parachute Skirts (2015, Crammed Discs): Romanian gypsy band, been around for a long time: first album appeared in 1991, shortly after the fall of Ceausescu, and some of the founders have since passed. A marvelous band, but some of the vocalists leave me annoyed -- especially the operatic male a couple cuts in. B+(**)

James Taylor: Before This World (2015, Concord): Concord is turning into an old folks home for singer-songwriters from the 1970s -- the irony is that when Carl Jefferson founded the label in 1972, he specialized in picking up jazz singers and musicians the major labels had washed out and reviving their careers (Rosemary Clooney is a prime example), but the corporate hacks who ru[i]n the company these days don't have the same taste or imagination. As for Taylor, I thought Lester Bangs said all that needed to be said way back in the early 1970s. C+

Tenement: Predatory Headlights (2015, Don Giovanni): Pop-punk band from Appleton, Wisconsin; third album, try to be dank at heart but catchy, somewhat successfully on all counts. B+(*)

Thundercat: The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam (2015, Brainfeeder, EP): Long title for 6 cuts, 16:07. Stephen Bruner has two previous albums, ties with Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, and Kamasi Washington and previously toiled in the metal band Suicidal Tendencies. Strikes me as a chameleon who refuses to be pinned down as a soul man or DJ or soundtrack artiste, but I'd bet on the latter. B

Ray Vega & Thomas Marriott: Return of the East West Trumpet Summit (2014 [2016], Origin): Trumpet players, did a record together called East-West Trumpet Summit in 2010, and this is more of the same, with George Colligan on B3 and Matt Jorgensen on drums. B+(**) [cd]

Brian Wilson: No Pier Pressure (2015, Capitol): Beach Boy auteur returns to form, not that anyone noticed, or likely cares. After a remarkably erratic and mediocre solo career -- aside from 2004's Presents Smile, his ace-in-the-hole -- he manages to dust off and polish all his pet tricks and what passes for his personality. But I can't say the guests help much. B+(*)

Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss (2015, Sargent House): Goth girl from Los Angeles, has several albums built up from guitar drone and electronics -- strikes my superficial ears as damsel-in-distress music but she's probably more in control, may even get a kick from the dark side. B+(*)

Zomba Prison Project: I Have No Everything Here (2015, Six Degrees): Ian Brennan and Marilene Delli have wandered the globe in search of unknown singers and musicians, much like the Lomaxes wandered the American South, which brought they to a dilapidated ("Dickensian") prison in Malawi. Various artists, both male and female, solo and in groups, some a cappella, some with improvised instruments, some more professional -- with echoes of south African pop. B+(**)

Zs: XE (2015, Northern Spy): Experimental noise group, has range between 2-6 members over the last decade-plus, lately a trio with saxophonist Sam Hilmer the surviving founder, Patrick Higgins on guitar, and Greg Fox on drums. Gets more interesting for me when the sax comes out. B+(**)

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Buena Vista Social Club: Lost and Found (1996-2000 [2015], World Circuit): Outtakes from the sessions that produced the legendary 1997 album which rebooted the careers of a lost generation of Cuban musicians -- Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Rubén Gonzalez, Omara Portuondo, Eliades Ochoa, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez -- plus some live shots that followed. Perhaps the booklet helps, but offhand this fits together awkwardly with nothing all that revelatory. B

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Live in San Francisco 1971 (1971 [2015], Sundazed): Early country-hippy band formed in Ann Arbor in 1967, cut their first album (Lost in the Ozone) in 1971, then followed that up a year later with a fine collection of trucking songs. Geoffrey Stokes featured them in the era's best book about the record business, Star Making Machinery. They hit a couple times with novelty songs -- "Hot Rod Lincoln," "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)," and "Seeds and Stems Again" are all here -- and they hung on forever as a live band. B+(**)

Patrick Cowley: Muscle Up (1973-81 [2015], Dark Entries): Regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic dance music, Cowley (1950-82) plays synths for Sylvester and composed tracks for gay porn films -- evidently that's the source of this compilation. Several scattered styles here, an early stretch of more ambient material that sneaks up on you, and some upbeat tracks (like "Pigfoot" and "5oz of Funk") that just jump you. A-

Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (1960s-75 [2015], Dust-to-Digital): Near the top of the list of unspeakable crimes perpetrated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was their expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, which led more or less directly to the fall of Prince Sihanouk's studiously neutral government and one of the most brutal and bloody civilian purges of the post-WWII era, killing some two million people. John Pirozzi's documentary film looks back before the debacle, finding a cosmopolitan Phnom Penh and a surprisingly vital rock and roll scene, American music filtered through France and lightly spiced with sonorities you'd expect from the Far East. A-

Tubby Hayes Quartet: The Syndicate: Live at the Hopbine 1968 Vol. 1 (1968 [2015], Gearbox): British tenor saxophonist, one of the few to develop a distinctive bop-based style, lived fast, died young (1935-73). Quartet with guitar (Louis Stewart), bass and drums. B+(**)

Trevor Jackson Presents: Science Fiction Dancehall Classics (1981-87 [2015], On-U Sound, 2CD): Adrian Sherwood dance grooves from the 1980s, leaning on reggae and dub, adding industrial clanks, here and there a vocal but almost all are disposable. The numerous groups are more alike than you can imagine, which makes this a producer's record, or a DJ's. B+(**)

Karin Krog: Don't Just Sing: An Anthology: 1963-1999 (1963-99 [2015], Light in the Attic): Norway's (or should I say Scandinavia's) premier jazz singer of the last fifty years, sings mostly in English so that shouldn't be a problem, yet she's remained little known here. This tries to solve the problem by stretching her too thin, and I don't have liner notes to explain the range -- just a 37-year range of dates, and occasional hints about saxophonists from Dexter Gordon to Jan Garbarek to John Surman. B+(**)

Lost in Mali: Off the Beaten Track From Bamako to Timbuktu ([2015], Riverboat): Could be I should treat this compilation of "13 previously uncollected Malian artists" as new -- the odds I can track down sources for records by 13 artists I've never heard of are slim to none. Eschewing hits, you get atmosphere. I remember that in grade school I was asked to imagine an African safari. The animals were easy enough to conjure up, but I couldn't have had a clue to the people. Still an air of mystery here. A-

Mariah: Utakata No Hibi (1983 [2015], Shan-Shan): An alias Yasuaki Shimizu (b. 1954), a Japanese composer and saxophonist, used for a series of 1980-83 albums, of which this is the last. Shimizu has a long catalog of classical music (notably Bach) and soundtrack work, plus he led a group called the Saxophonettes. Dance beats, a bit of Asian flavor in the plucked strings. B+(**)

Mike Osborne: Dawn (1966-70 [2015], Cuneiform): Alto saxophonist, an important figure in the early days of the British avant-garde but he recorded little under his own name and retired due to illness in 1982. This offers some of his earliest work, opening with six tracks from a 1970 trio with South Africans Harry Miller (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums), followed by three tracks from his first group, a quartet co-led by John Surman, both superb. A- [dl]

The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Salsa (2008-13 [2015], World Music Network): I only barely have a clue what "psychedelic" means in American rock, and not the slightest idea how to distinguish psychedelic from ordinary salsa, other than that, judging from this, it's relentlessly upbeat and relatively recent. Of course, it's hard to track the dates down without the booklet (and with these guys it would still be hard with). I suspect it's just an excuse to release a new sampler without deleting the old one (which these guys are also known to do). B+(**)

The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Samba (2009-14 [2015], World Music Network): These also appear to be recent tracks by acts I scarcely recognize, although the words "Brazil" and "Psychedelic" were more than occasionally associated going back to the late-1960s (e.g., Tom Zé). So it's not surprising that this selection seems more bent from the norm than was the case for salsa. B+(***)

Bobby Rush: Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush (1964-2014 [2015], Omnivore, 4CD): Blues journeyman, arrived late (some sources list 1940 as his birthdate but more likely ones say 1933), only a couple isolated singles from the 1960s, first album 1979 (only one on Philadelphia International), then a steady stream on obscure labels until he founded his own. Toured the chitlin circuit relentlessly, and is still working at 82. I doubt if any of his albums are outstanding, but this long compilation of his life's work is rich and varied and keeps coming at you, the only missteps songs you know done better elsewhere, but even there you have to give him credit (cf. "Take Me to the River"). This can happen when a minor artist sticks to it. Does tail off a bit toward the end. A-

Arthur Russell: Corn (1982-83 [2015], Audika): Like Patrick Cowley, Russell (1951-92) was a pathmaker in electronic dance music, and died young of AIDS. He's been better anthologized -- see The World of Arthur Russell on Soul Jazz -- but lasted longer, produced more, and was more eclectic. This scatters widely, dance beats secondary to other quirks, including a reminder that his main instrument was cello. B+(**)

Savant: Artificial Dance (1981-83 [2015], RVNG Intl): This combines a 1981 EP and a 1983 album, The Neo-Realist (At Risk), the collected works of Kerry Leimer's early band, and it really was a band -- guitar-bass-drums beneath the synths and vocal samples and tape effects, giving it a metallic edge. Must have seemed like an avant curiosity at the time, partly because the pieces spin off in divers directions, but they break new ground so assuredly this sounds like accomplished innovation. A-

Schlippenbach Trio: First Recordings (1972 [2014], Trost): Not the first recordings by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach -- his Globe Unity Orchestra dates from 1967, and he recorded The Living Music under his own name in 1969 -- but this is the first trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lowens, about six months (April to November) before Pakistani Pomade (a Penguin Guide crown album), and 42 years before their latest, Features (one of the best jazz albums of 2015). One long (38:25) piece, three short ones (18:06 total). Sax strains a lot but the piano is pretty spectacular. B+(**)

Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is a Hurtin' Thing (1971-77 [2015], Luv N' Haight): Church-trained soul singer, cut some singles from 1968-77 but no hits and no albums. This doesn't quite quality as a career sampler, based as it is on five Selector singles, plus a couple discofied retreads. B+(*)

The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes (1969 [2015], Polydor, 4CD): Impossible to overstate the importance or accomplishment of this group, especially a string of four studio albums so extraordinary no one -- not the Beatles or Rolling Stones, Dylan or Redding -- has come close to matching. So it shouldn't be surprising that fans have snapped up scraps -- starting with the 1972 release of an execrable bootleg recording of Live at Max's Kansas City (dating from 1970; reissued on 2CD in 2004) and the much better 1969: The Velvet Underground Live in 1974 (2LP, reissued in two separate CD volumes in 1988). Ever since, the VU's old tape stashes have been flogged almost as mercilessly as Jimi Hendrix's, including 1985's VU, 1986's Another View, extensive extras on the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box, 2001's The Quine Tapes, and even more extras on 2CD and 3CD "deluxe editions" of the four albums. Now there's this: a 4CD expansion of the 1969: The Velvet Underground Live tapes, recorded over two nights at the Matrix in San Francisco. I gave this the one shot I can afford with streaming, and wavered back and forth at least a dozen times: some wonderful music here, some even not very familiar, but also an awful lot of redundancy. B+(***)

Old Music

David Bowie: Bowie at the Beeb: The Best of the BBC Radio Sessions 68-72 (1968-72 [2000], Virgin, 2CD): First disc goes from May 1968 to June 1971, and the early tracks are things I don't recognize and don't care to ever hear again, broken up with studio patter I don't need to hear again. Second disc advances from September 1971 to May 1972, covering the Velvets and cranking up terrific songs from Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. B+(**)

David Bowie: David Live (1974 [2005], Virgin EMI, 2CD): Like most double-LP live sets of the time, this promised lousy sound and rehashes of familiar songs done better elsewhere, profit taking and redundancy. There is that, but the added material shows a soul slant, and the sound, crowd noise, and interpretive moves aren't minuses. B

David Bowie: Stage (1978 [2005], Virgin EMI): Second live double, the reissue again expanding and reordering the original. Emphasizes newer material, especially Station to Station and the two Eno collaborations, opening with the murky ambience of "Warszawa" then filling the venue with "Heroes." He still does "Star" and "Ziggy Stardust" but that's about it. Bonus: "Alabama Song," sung to the rafters. B+(**)

David Bowie: Tonight (1984, EMI America): Aside from the live albums, this was the first Bowie album I passed on. Widely panned at the time, the two songs solely penned by Bowie ("Loving the Alien," "Blue Jean") aren't bad, although they feel like leftovers from (different) prior projects. Iggy Pop wrote (or co-wrote) five others, including two from Lust for Life given newly perverse arrangements (equally perverse is the "God Only Knows" cover). B-

David Bowie: Never Let Me Down (1987, EMI America): Tied to one of Bowie's biggest tours, this album is energetic and showy and completely forgettable -- almost like he wore out his welcome, or possibly thought he'd outgrown it. B-

David Bowie: Black Tie White Noise (1993, Virgin): Bowie floundered in the 1980s after Let's Dance (1983), finally in 1989-91 burying himself in the light metal band Tin Machine. This album represents his return to sounding like himself, although the new wave grind is more mechanical than it should be. B

David Bowie: The Buddha of Suburbia (1993 [2007], Virgin): Initially designed as a soundtrack to a BBC series based on Hanif Kureishi's book, Bowie retooled this into an album but it never lost the tag. Actually, some of the best passages here are ambient instrumental. It's the songs that don't sink in. B

David Bowie: Outside (1995, Virgin): I'm not sure even what to call this: maybe an operetta? It has a libretto, and the 19 songs voice different characters, even if they mostly sound like Bowie. Eno shares credits on most songs, and the band including Reeves Gabrels and Mike Garson get some credit. Not the sort of thing I readily follow, and at 74:36 (assuming you don't get the "extended" version; I skipped a whole second disc of outtakes) I rarely tried. B-

David Bowie: Earthling (1997, Virgin): Yet another concept album for yet another concept tour: clearly he's in a rut, but he's getting more comfortable there. He understands he needs keyboards, synths, electronics, and something of a dance beat, and he knows that if he speeds it up it won't be too bad, no matter how uninspired. He's turned into a pro, and a hack. B

David Bowie: Hours . . . (1999, Virgin): Another album that didn't sound bad but left me with nothing memorable after one (not very engaged) play, least of all a desire to write a better review. B-

David Bowie: Heathen (2002, ISO/Columbia): The notion that this is a comeback album concedes that he hasn't done anything very inspiring in the previous 10-15-20 years, but if you believe that this won't change anything. The only thing that's "back" is his voice, indeed more unmistakable here than anything since Tonight, maybe Let's Dance. B

David Bowie: Nothing Has Changed (1995-2014 [2014], Columbia/Legacy): Available in several widely-varying formats -- a 3-CD that reverses chronological order with a lot of non-album takes; a 2-CD from early-to-late, ending the first with Scary Monsters and starting the second with Let's Dance -- again, mostly single versions and radio edits; a 2-LP that hops around more (first side: "Let's Dance," "Ashes to Ashes," "Heroes," "Changes," "Life on Mars?"; second starts with "Space Oddity" and ends with "Rebel Bebel"; third includes "Fame" and a new song; fourth is mostly late but includes two songs from Let's Dance); then there's a 1-CD that mostly tracks the vinyl but there are exclusive perks for Japan, Argentina, and other special national editions. Then there's the Rhapsody edition, which is just the first disc from the 3-CD edition, working backwards from the new song, "Sue (or in a Season of Crime)," to Outside (1995). If they ever released this by itself -- a Best of 1995-2014 -- it might be useful, at least more so than any of the albums it picks from. The new piece, backed by the Maria Schneider Orchestra, is a bit overwrought but not without interest, the remixes usually help, a song I noticed before comes out sharper ("I'm Afraid of Americans" -- from 1997, but even more true today), and the Pet Shop Boys help out. The older music in the other editions can only help, although there are other places to get it. B+(*)

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas (1973 [1974], MCA): After three studio albums, the band's first official live album, from Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas (with many more to come). More country covers ("Crying Time," "Diggy Liggy Lo"), more rock and roll covers ("Good Rockin' Tonight," "Riot in Cell Block #9"), only two originals: "Too Much Fun" and the the ever-popular, even if not very good (but we've all been there) "Seeds and Stems Again Blues." B+(***)

Sue Foley: Change (2004, Ruf): Guitar-playing blues singer from Canada, cut some very good records in the 1990s but her three albums on Ruf (2004-07) slipped by unnoticed (at least by me). Live set, half originals but gains traction on the covers ("Careless Love," "Sugar in My Bowl") then seals the deal with her own "Shake That Thing." B+(***)

Stephen Haynes: Parrhesia (2010, Engine Studios): Cornet player, a protege of Bill Dixon's, in a trio with Joe Morris on guitar and Warren Smith on all things percussive. Abstract, needs some assembly from the listener, but interesting enough to command your attention. B+(**)

Peter Karp/Sue Foley: Beyond the Crossroads (2012, Blind Pig): Karp cut a couple Americana albums before hooking up with Foley for their He Said, She Said (2010). This second one moves further away from blues and into rock (or rockabilly). I don't particularly approve, but they do seem to be having a good time. B+(*)

New York Gypsy All Stars: Romantech (2011, Traditional Crossroads): First album, on a label that has released a lot of Turkish classical music. More trad than the new album, and also sharper (or at least hotter). No brass, though: the group leader is a clarinetist, Ismail Lumanovski, and he sets the tone. B+(***)

Throbbing Gristle: The First Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (1975 [2001], Thirsty Ear): The original industrial group's first release was called The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (1977), implicitly acknowledging this album -- Discogs lists a half-dozen releases from 1987, tagging them all as "unofficial." The first piece's talkie vocal offers a link back to the Velvet Underground, but the sound quality is so murky it isn't clear where the aesthetic emerges from the ineptitude. B

Tin Machine: Tin Machine (1989, EMI): Short-lived back-to-basics rock band that David Bowie submerged himself into at a time when his career was more involved in hacking out soundtracks than creating new artistic conceits -- although arguably this was one such. With Reeves Gabrels (guitar), Tony Sales (bass), and Hunt Sales (drums) -- sons of comedian Soupy Sales who played in Iggy Pop's Bowie-era band. Oddly, the more you hear Bowie here, the worse it gets. (Best cut by far is "Under the God"; someone once assembled a record called Elvis' Greatest Shit -- you could probably do the same with Bowie, for which I'd nominate "Working Class Hero.") C+

Revised Grades

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

Carly Rae Jepsen: E-MO-TION (2015, Interscope/Schoolboy/Silent): Gave this another shot after it finished 3rd in P&J, the poll's big surprise although the album had gained steadily in my EOY Aggregate, moving up to 18th. Not as flamboyant as Grimes or as clever as Lily Allen, it takes some time to adjust to her ambivalence. Clearly I filed this too soon. [was: B+(***)] A-

Lord Huron: Strange Trails (2015, Iamsound): [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section.

• David Bowie: Space Oddity (1969, Virgin): B+
• David Bowie: The Man Who Sold the World (1970, Virgin): B+
• David Bowie: Hunky Dory (1971, Virgin): A
• David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972, Virgin): A-
• David Bowie: Live Santa Monica '72 (1972 [2008], Virgin/EMI): A-
• David Bowie: Pin-Ups (173, Virgin): B
• David Bowie: Aladdin Sane (1973, Virgin): B+
• David Bowie: Aladdin Sane: 30th Anniversary Edition (1973 [2003], Capitol, 2CD): B+
• David Bowie: Diamond Dogs (1974, Virgin): B
• David Bowie: Young Americans (1975, Virgin): B
• David Bowie: Station to Station (1976, Virgin): A
• David Bowie: Low (1977, Virgin): A-
• David Bowie: Heroes (1977, Virgin): A-
• David Bowie: Lodger (1979, Virgin): B+
• David Bowie: Scary Monsters (1980, Virgin): B+
• David Bowie: Let's Dance (1983, Virgin): B
• David Bowie: Changesbowie (1969-90 [1990], Rykodisc): A
• David Bowie: The Next Day (2013, Columbia): B+(*)
• Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Lost in the Ozone: B+
• Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Hot Licks, Cold Steel and Trucker's Favorites (1972, MCA): A-
• Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Too Much Fun: The Best of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (1971-74 [1990], MCA): A
• Sue Foley: Young Girl Blues (1992, Antone's): B
• Sue Foley: Without a Warning (1993, Antone's): A
• Sue Foley: Big City Blues (1995, Antone's): A-
• Sue Foley: Walk in the Sun (1996, Discovery): B+
• Sue Foley: Ten Days in November (1998, Shanachie): A-
• Sue Foley: Love Comin' Down (2000, Shanachie): A-
• Sue Foley: Back to the Blues (2000, Antone's): B+
• Sue Foley: Where the Action Is . . . (2002, Shanachie): B+
• Peter Karp/Sue Foley: He Said, She Said (2010, Blind Pig): B+(**)

Notes:

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

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

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