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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links Social Media My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Blog Entries [1040 - 1049]Sunday, January 25, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 26163 [26129] rated (+34), 408 [402] unrated (+6). The dead CD changer crisis is over. Having suffered two dead changers from Sony in just a few years, I splurged and bought the Yamaha. Main problem is that in order to let you change all five discs without having to spin the carousel around, the new unit is a couple inches deeper than the old one. The stereo equipment is housed in a cabinet I built way back in the 1970s for components of the time. The face of the new unit sticks out from the front edge, but at least the feet fit. I suppose I could tidy it up a bit by expanding the small hole in the back for the wires, but for now it works. Sounds pretty good, too. I continue making minor additions to the EOY Aggregate file, even after Pazz & Jop -- mostly adding selective P&J and JCP ballots. Still, I'm hundreds short of logging them all, so I suppose I could be accused of cherrypicking favorites to tweak the standings. Main result of this has been that Kamasi Washington's The Epic moved ahead of Julia Holter's Have You in My Wilderness to claim 9th place, while Sleater-Kinney's No Cities to Love edged ahead of The Epic to 8th. Neither gainer is a particular favorite of mine, although I do like both more than Holter. Main reason I think I'm doing this is that I'm continuing to scour the lists for prospects, so I'm picking out ballots that look promising. However, no amount of fudging is going to displace Father John Misty or Tame Impala from the top ten. Of course, their current tie for 5th is fragile. The other reason, I suppose, is that I'm reluctant to move on with my life, even though I've been very neglectful of website work I've committed to (not to mention writing a book or two). In this regard January 31 looms as a drio dead date: I intend to freeze the 2015 list then, which would make it a good date to halt doing everything else 2015-related. This week's finds all come from scrounging around the lists, and I'll do some more of that next week. Every A- record this week came highly rated from someone but was a pleasant surprise to me. I wound up liking Bully more than similar groups like Chastity Belt and Childbirth. Crampton turned out to have one of the year's best electronica albums -- seems like I've parked a lot of those in the high B+ tier this year (Carter Tutti Void, DRKWAV, Floating Points, Jlin, JME, Kammerflimmer Kollektief, Lifted, Lnrdcroy, LoneLady, Noonday Underground, RJD2/STS, Skrillex/Diplo, Jamie XX). Even better is Plastician. Michaelangelo Matos spent 60 P&J points on his top two: one, as far as I can tell, is a podcast, something I have no clue what to do with (and rather doubt should be considered an album at all), and the other is Plastician's cut and paste dance mix. It at least is CD length, although I have no idea how to get one burned. (For one thing, I doubt the samples are cleared, but if you can figure this out, please consider sending me a copy.) The reissues lists from electronica specialist publications and stores were full of obscurities I had never heard of. I managed to dig up a handful of those, sorting Patrick Cowley and Savant above the A- cusp -- Mariah and Arthur Russell below. (The Trevor Jackson compilation is more Adrian Sherwood so I wouldn't call it obscure. It's probably possible to assemble an A- Sherwood CD, but why go to that trouble when you can have a half-dozen B+'s instead?) I also waded through three Rough Guides, something that eats at me more than it will you, because I want to have some idea when and where these songs come from, and that information is awful hard to dig up. Still, a winner there, disguised as something else (Lost in Mali). Three high HMs might have benefitted from more patience and dilligence on my part. Damily is a Malagasy guitarist/band that recycles soukous with extra grit and distortion. Michael Bates is a bassist leading what's basically a Michael Blake sax trio, roughly comparable to Blake's own Tiddy Boom (an A- in 2014). Then there's the Velvet Underground's Complete Matrix Tapes, which at 4CD got one spin and a summary judgment. Lots of wonderful music in there, but also lots of old news -- 1969: Velvet Underground Live came from these tapes -- and I got a bit tired of hearing several songs recycle four or more times. Chances are if I had the box, the booklets, etc., I might have leaned the other way. But I didn't really get the sense that additional sets added much, unlike some jazz boxes I can think of (Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel, Art Pepper at the Village Vanguard). Current plans are to publish a Rhapsody Streamnotes by the end of the month. Currently 90 entries in the draft file -- shorter than most columns but not too shabby. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Tuesday, January 20, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 26129 [26097] rated (+32), 402 [389] unrated (+13). Missed my usual Monday deadline this week. Stuff happens, most of which is getting me down. Rated count dropped back into normal range, although that may just be because I lost Sunday to cooking (Italian, for six). I played old favorites that day, winding up with Ben Webster's Soulville -- I'm tempted to bump it up a notch to A+, but the CD player (a Sony CDP-CD345) was dead this morning, so it will be some time before I play anything on the good stereo. I suppose I can still play CDs on the computer, but that's not really the same thing (and I've never done it except to test the sound system). I can still stream stuff, so there'll be more of that in the next week or so until I sort this out. The problem is in the mechanics: the motor, gears, belts, or what have you that are used to open the tray and change discs. I've gone through four or five CD changers in the lifespan of one receiver, and they seem to be getting crappier all the time. They're also not getting cheaper (actually, I mean less expensive; a free market should weed out planned obsolescence, but when have we had one of those?). Pazz & Jop came out last week. I meant to do some of my usual analysis this week, but that got wiped out with the rest of the week. The album totals are here, compiled by Glenn McDonald. I've noted the standings there in my EOY Aggregate, scoring them like a regular list (which means 1 point for everything from 21st to the end). Some notes:
The big music news of the week was David Bowie's death. I was a pretty serious fan back in the 1970s, but I have to admit that I've been surprised by the outpouring of testaments and such. (Last time that happened was with Michael Jackson, who like Bowie touched many people deeper than I realized. Here are some links I collected:
I spent a few days last week going through nearly all of the Bowie albums I had missed. I can't say that I missed much, although the song "I'm Afraid of Americans" has only become truer. Despite the jazz moves, I can't, however, see his new album, Blackstar, as some sort of final masterpiece. Which isn't to deny that it is a big improvement -- his best since Scary Monsters (1980) or maybe even Heroes (1977). (Actually, my favorite Bowie album ever is Lust for Life, under Iggy Pop's name, which also came out in 1977.) Finally, more EOY lists:
New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, January 11, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26097 [26050] rated (+47), 389 [395] unrated (-6). Most of the following list appeared in last week's Rhapsody Streamnotes, so no news there. I think I ran the program that counts the ratings on Thursday when I cloned the file and was surprised to find the ratings count at +32, normally a good week's work. Or maybe that was Friday when it was posted. The new draft file, which I set up as "January 2016 Part 2" currently has 20 records, a pretty healthy start. (Actually, I think I seeded it with three 2016 releases I had already written up -- Friday's RS had no 2016 releases.) The 2016 releases thus far are jazz items I shoved to the end of the queue to concentrate on 2015 releases. I haven't begun to look for new 2016 streamables, although I did notice a new David Bowie album on Rhapsody last night, and with the news of his death I'm spinning it now. (Marks a return of the "thin white duke" crooner, with orchestral swing and quite a bit of sax adding a jazzy air, the dramatic flair reminding me of Ziggy Stardust as much as anything else. Bowie produced a lot of lousy records following 1983's Let's Dance -- itself a very mixed bag -- and I thought his much-touted 2013 The Next Day came up short, but I can imagine someone more sentimental than I falling for this record. Will play it again for next week. Maybe I'll also get around to that 1993 album still marked 'U' in my database.) I expect good things from Intakt, but still was surprised to find my first A record of 2016, an African-born, balafon-driven jazz trio called Kalo Yele. The balafon player, Aly Keďta, comes from Côte D'Ivoire, but the other two musicians are recognizably Swiss, yet somehow managed to be born in Cameroon (once a German colony, divided between France and Britain after 1919, independent in 1960 with the British dragging their heels until 1961). Lucas Niggli is a well-known drummer I need to look into further -- I do know that he was a protégé of Lucien Favre, who's long been fascinated by African drumming. But I've never heard of clarinetist Jan Galega Brönnimann, who provides the perfect complement to the percussion. Marvelous. I also came close to A-listing Intakt's other January release, a piano trio with Aruán Ortiz, Eric Revis, and Gerald Cleaver. A lot of piano trio fall into my "nice" trough, and this one -- largely thanks to the rhythm section -- rose above that, but only a few each year really dazzle me, and this didn't quite. One piano trio that did dazzle me was released in 1953 as Introducing Paul Bley -- as much as Revis and Cleaver impressed me, note that Bley managed to get help from Charles Mingus and Art Blakey. Bley's second great album came in 1958 when he expanded to a quintet by hiring a young alto saxophonist named Ornette Coleman: I first ran across this as Live at the Hilcrest Club, but my current copy is simply The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet. And in 1961-62 he was in one of the most famous avant-garde trios in jazz history, with Jimmy Giuffre and Steve Swallow. He was also famous for having married two brilliant musicians, the composer-pianist Carla Borg (better known under his name) and the singer-songwriter Annette Peacock (don't know her maiden name, but her first husband was bassist Gary Peacock, later an important collaborator of Bley's), and he recorded several albums of their compositions. Bley continued to record through 2008, mostly solo and trio albums, some exceptional (1965's Closer and 1989's BeBopBeBopBeBopBeBop are personal favorites but I've only heard about a third of them). Anyhow, he died a week ago, and should be remembered as a giant of modern jazz. I rarely listen to multi-disc sets on Rhapsody because they are invariably too much to swallow in one stretch, and it's hard to break up the experience like I would normally if I had separate discs. However, I took a chance with a 4-CD box that Phil Overeem has been touting, Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush last night when I was working on my screed about ISIS, and it fit the bill perfectly, running on and on with deep blues and soul grooves and the occasional chintzy cover. Rush missed the heyday of Chicago blues, failed at Philadelphia International, then spent three or four decades working the chitlin circuit, a nice career for a guy who never came close to stardom. I wrote my review before the last disc finished, only to find that the last few cuts tailed off quite a bit. I thought about docking the grade then, but decided to let it slide by. Having only heard one previous album (out of at least three dozen), I'm going out on a limb saying that he probably doesn't have a single A- record in his catalog so there's something inherently unseemly about grading a 4-CD box that high, but he was so steady he grows on you, and over the course of a long career one winds up admiring that. Maybe I'll find an appropriate time to try The Complete Matrix Tapes. Last time I looked, The Cutting Edge wasn't there, at least in a recognizable product configuration. (The Dylan bootlegs, by the way, completely buried the Miles Davis bootlegs in my EOY Aggregate: Old Music, 37-15, with Ata Kak's Obaa Sima (one of those Awesome Tapes From Africa) in third place. The list is pretty idiosyncratic, largely because it's built from 20-30 lists, less than 10% of the new release albums lists I've compiled, and partly because the longer lists skew toward obscure electronica (although it looks like most are so obscure I haven't flagged them). Meanwhile, I keep adding to the EOY Aggregate (although I haven't touched it in a couple days). Current standings (with Pazz & Jop coming out later this week; my grades in brackets):
My grades here are pretty evenly distributed: 8 A-, 8 ***, 5 **, 8 *, 5 B, 3 B-, 3 ungraded. Robert Christgau, who's always a bit more in step with the critical consensus, graded eight (or nine with Adele) of these records higher than I did, moving five over the A- line: Jamie XX, Sleater-Kinney, Oneohtrix Point Never, Miguel, Jason Isbell. Other aggregate lists pretty much agree, regardless of depth or method -- I'd say they're probably more consistent this year than most. P&J will shuffle these around a bit, but I don't forsee anything major, unless Holter or Washington take a dive (Sleater-Kinney will probably pass them, maybe Vince Staples and/or Oneohtrix Point Never too. UK favorites typically fall off, but that mostly means Blur and Sleaford Mods. The closest thing to a late gainer (like Beyoncé and D'Angelo in recent years) is Adele, which could go either way. Also not a lot of lower-ranked albums with much P&J upside potential. The best outside shots I see are: Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon (46), Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (47), Jlin: Dark Energy (48), ASAP Rocky: At.Long.Last.ASAP (52), Arca: Mutant (57); Hop Along: Painted Shut (59), Chris Stapleton: Traveller (62); Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (76), Ashley Monroe: The Blade (102), James McMurtry: Complicated Game (107), Heems: Eat Pray Thug (113). Bob Dylan has also always run much higher in P&J than in aggregates, so either Shadows in the Night (81) or, more likely, The Cutting Edge bootlegs could crack the top 40. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Sunday, January 10, 2016 Weekend RoundupSome scattered links this week, mostly about that perennial favorite, war in the Middle East -- nothing on the Oregon standoff (aside from this link to Josh Marshall, who describes it as "white privilege performance art"). Also, in honor of the five 4.0 or higher earthquakes that hit just northwest of Enid, Oklahoma, here's Crowson's cartoon:
You'd think anyone worried that much about the price of gas would take an interest in the wars disrupting the world's largest oil producing region, but, well, Kansas isn't lacking for "stone-age brains" (see below). So back to the wars:
This view of Obama correlates with reading too much Chales Krauthammer, a certifiable form of dementia. The fact is that US interests have never aligned very well with Saudi interests, but the US humored the theocratic despots because they helped recycle a lot of money back to the US, and the Saudis had a way of dismissing what they didn't like (especially US support for Israel) because alignment with the US let them pursue their real interests -- pre-eminence in the Islamic world -- relatively freely. Along the way they (like Israel) learned that they could push America's buttons by opposing Iran, so they wound up blaming everything on Iran. American enmity toward Iran has been irrational (and counterproductive) ever since the 1980 Hostage Crisis. Obama wasn't ignorant in realizing that, although he was perhaps foolish in not admitting as much, and in not pursuing a more constructive relationship with Iran -- one that would defuse much of the hostility in the region, not least by undermining the rationales for Saudi (and Israeli) aggression. Pollack's next paragraph almost admits that the Saudis have a cockeyed view of everything:
Pollack then suggests that the Saudis are right and the the US is abandoning its traditional ally in favor of its enemy. Actually, Obama's real shortcoming is his failure to criticize nominal allies like Saudi Arabia when they are dead wrong (and Iraq and Egypt and Turkey and most of all, in case you're wondering where this cowardice comes from, Israel). But then his failure to criticize is symptomatic of a deeper problem, which is the lack of constructive principle behind US foreign policy -- a legacy of the cold war when America routinely favored pro-business despotism over popular democracy -- and the naive faith that a sufficient show of force solves every problem. Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Friday, January 8, 2016 Rhapsody Streamnotes (January 2016)For the last few weeks, I've been obsessing over year-end lists, aggregating hundreds of polls, not so much to see who comes out on top as to discover interesting items on the fringes. Most of what follows are items that looked interesting on various lists. There's also some late-arriving jazz, notably from Allen Lowe and Steve Swell -- although it's worth noting that four of the A- jazz records were picked up off the net (Ray Anderson, Michael Gibbs, Tomeka Reid, Daniel Rosenboom). 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 December 15. Past reviews and more information are available here (7538 records). Recent Releases
Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman: Lice (2015, Stones Throw, EP): Two rappers usually strong enough on their own, double down for a 5-track (17:34) freebie which starts with head lice and ends with "Get a Dog." Still, doesn't feel short. A- Scott Amendola: Fade to Orange (2014 [2015], Sazi): Drummer, member of Nels Cline Singers and Oranj Symphonette, has ten albums under his own name since 1999. Record consists of a 17:13 title piece with a guitar-bass-drums trio (with Nels Cline and Trevor Dunn) wrapped up in the full-blown Magik*Magik Orchestra, followed by four remixes that average 5 minutes each. I find the beats more appealing, but the original classical-fusion clash has some interest. B+(*) Ray Anderson's Organic Quartet: Being the Point (2015, Intuition): Trombonist, one of the all-time greats, though health problems have kept him out of the limelight for much of this decade. However, he comes back swinging here, aside from the title piece, which is one of those ordeals you have to live through to fully appreciate. With Steve Salerno (guitar), Gary Versace (organ), and Tommy Campbell (drums) -- the organ an especially inspired choice. A- Lotte Anker: What River Is This (2012 [2014], ILK Music): Danish saxophonist (soprano, alto, tenor), more than a dozen albums since 1997. Perilous to extrapolate from only 2 (of 10) cuts, especially with so many hard-to-parse elements: Borges lyrics, Phil Minton vocals, Ikue Mori electronics, Fred Frith guitar, clarinet and viola. B+(*) Babyface: Return of the Tender Lover (2015, Def Jam): Kenny Edmonds, emerged in the late 1980s with a softer, slicker R&B sound, something I never got into (although there were exceptions, as always), although he was always listenable. Releases thinned out from 2007 until last year's marriage opera with Toni Braxton. The Tender Lover was his first platinum hit. This reboot is more energetic, but hardly anyone has noticed. Recommended: "Standing Ovation." B+(***) Beauty Pill: Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are (2015, Butterscotch): DC group, principally Chad Clark, made EPs in 2001 and 2003, an LP in 2004, then nothing until this record. One of those neo-prog things I generally can't stand, but this has moments of charm and grace, interest even. B Blanck Mass: Dumb Flesh (2015, Sacred Bones): Solo project by Benjamin John Power, better known (if that) from Fuck Buttons. Post-rock, synths with or (mostly) without incomprehensible words, in all cases led by a drummer who drives and sometimes overruns everything. B+(***) Samuel Blaser: Spring Rain (2014-15 [2015], Whirlwind): Swiss trombonist, leads a sharply skilled quartet with Russ Lossing on piano/keyboards, Drew Gress on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. Nice to hear a trombone up front, but fine as Blaser is the instrument itself is hard pressed to keep up. B+(**) Peter Brötzmann/Steve Swell/Paal Nilssen-Love: Krakow Nights (2015, Not Two): Well, just one night, but running 74:27 it may have seemed like more. When you play with Brötzmann, you play his bleeding edge rough and tumble. Within those limits the trombonist smoothes off the edges and works in a few jabs, and the drummer works this ring as well as anyone. B+(***) [cd] Cam: Welcome to Cam Country (2015, Arista Nashville, EP): Camaron Ochs paid her dues writing songs for others, then dropped this four-song (13:19) EP on her way to a December debut album. First impression is that she does better with the ballad ("Burning House") than with the stomper ("Runaway Train"). B Cam: Untamed (2015, Arista Nashville): Debut album, the extra songs add heft and nuance, enough to make her a person of interest, even if the big time Nashville production isn't. B+(**) Cécile & Jean-Luc Cappozzo: Soul Eyes (2015, Fou): Piano and trumpet, respectively, with the latter occasionally pulling out his bugle. He has a handful of avant-leaning albums since 2004, but I hadn't run across her before. Nicely done, built on a firm foundation of Mingus and Waldron compositions. B+(**) [cd] Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Style (2015, Matador): Will Toledo is one of those DIY guys who took advantage of Bandcamp to release everything that pops into his head -- 12 albums since 2010 until he got a contract and scaled up to a band. Presumably Matador is more discriminating, but the lo-fi ethic prevails here, not without tunes but not a lot of them. B François Carrier/Steve Beresford/John Edwards/Michel Lambert: Outgoing (2014 [2015], FMR): My favorite alto saxophonist and his sidekick drummer from Montreal sojourn to the Vortex Jazz Club in London this time, pick up bassist Edwards, and pianist Beresford sits in for three (of five) cuts. Exceptional this time is the free rhythm, especially with the fractured piano. Carrier, as expected, is superb. A- [cd] Brian Charette/Will Bernard/Rudy Royston: Alphabet City (2014 [2015], Posi-Tone): Organ trio, the leader at one point looking like he might find new opportunities in the old instrument, but lately settling into old-fashioned soul jazz grooves. Probably helps that the guitarist and drummer were born to play soul jazz. B+(*) Container: LP (2015, Spectrum Spools): Alias for Ren Schofield, a techno producer from Nashville. His three longer albums all bear the title LP, although Rhapsody identifies this as an EP (seven cuts, 26:52). B+(**) Chick Corea & Béla Fleck: Two (2015, Concord, 2CD): Two musicians (piano and banjo), second album together, something like that -- although this was reportedly selected "over 55 shows from that seven-year period," Most likely a treat for fans but for me a waste of time. B Stanley Cowell: Juneteenth (2014 [2015], Vision Fugitive): Pianist, first record came out in 1969, Blues for the Viet Cong, and he has a couple dozen since. This one is solo, mostly a ten-piece suite which picks up strands from "Dixie" to "Strange Fruit," a lifelong subversive veering mainstream. B+(*) Crack Ignaz: Kirsch (2015, Melting Pot): German rapper, or maybe I mean Austrian -- info is hard to come by, but he has at least three albums. Sounds chopped and screwed, but I can make out German words here and there. B+(*) Adrian Cunningham: Ain't That Right! The Music of Neal Hefti (2014 [2015], Arbors): Australian reed player, clarinet and flute but mainly tenor sax, backed by piano-bass-drums (Dan Nimmer-Corcoran Holt-Chuck Redd), with trombone (Wycliffe Gordon) on four tracks. Hefti (1922-2008) is better known as an arranger, especially for Count Basie, than as a composer, but his tunes are indelible, and the band swings. B+(**) Dej Loaf: #AndSeeThatsTheThing (2015, Columbia, EP): Detroit rapper, Deja Trimble, has a couple of mixtapes and a "viral" single, gets a big label intro with a 6-cut, 23:01 EP. Two big name guest spots do her no favors (Big Sean, Future) -- she has promise to be more than a background singer. B Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon (2015, Interscope): As slowcore as Low, and probably lower though that's a contest I won't volunteer to referee. Certainly prettier, by which I mean both fetching and haunting, dream pop in bright sunlight. Must be a California thing. B+(***) Deradoorian: The Expanding Flower Planet (2015, Anticon): Last name, first Angel, formerly of Dirty Projectors, a widely hailed group I've never been able to stand. I didn't get that reaction here, but I also didn't get much out of the densely layered art-song, so it's almost a wash. B The Deslondes: The Deslondes (2015, New West): Country group from New Orleans, first album, pleasant demeanor, worked as the opening act for Hurray for the Riff Raff. Seems about right. B Downtown Boys: Full Communism (2015, Don Giovanni): Punk band from Rhode Island, with two saxes and a female singer (Victoria Ruiz) skewing them a bit toward ska, promising "leftist activist anthems you can pogo to," and delivering 12 in 25:46 (closing with a delirious cover of "Dancing in the Dark" -- cue Emma Goldman). A- Dr. Dre: Compton (2015, Aftermath/Interscope): Only his third album, tied into a movie based on his former group, better known now as a producer, which gives some creedence to his boast "I'm the black Eminem." Lots of guest spots, song songs sporting as many as 14 writers (some merely sampled), can't quite be terrible but I'm picking up so many plot points the record it most reminds me of is Hamilton (plus sirens and gunshots). B- Dr. Yen Lo: Days With Dr. Yen Lo (2015, Pavlov Institute): Rapper Ka and producer Preservation styled this concept album after the notorious Chinese doctor-hypnotist in The Manchurian Candidate, which also provides occasional snatches of dialog. The story strays but the music is hypnotic, with or without the monotone raps. A- Dungen: Allas Sak (2015, Mexican Summer): Swedish group, vocals in Swedish which seems intentionally chauvinistic given how common English-speaking groups are in Sweden, but they have a prog streak that transcends language, or perhaps caring about it. B Dyke Drama: Tender Resignation (2015, Salinas, EP): From Olympia WA, Sadie Switchblade project (drums, bass, guitar, vocals, tambourine), she of GLOSS and other groups, if that is indeed the right pronoun -- I suppose it doesn't matter. Six songs, 16:59. B Open Mike Eagle: A Special Episode Of (2015, Mello Music Group, EP): Based just on the cover, I would have parsed this differently, noting that the title is above the artist name, and in the lower left cover (larger than the title but smaller than the artist name) I read Split Pants at Sound Check!. Six songs, 19:22. B+(**) Kevin Eubanks Quintet: Things of That Particular Nature (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): Trumpet player, younger brother of Kevin and Robin, cut two albums 1999-2001 and two since. This six-member Quintet has the look and feel of a hard bop group, with impressive chops at tenor sax (Abraham Burton) and piano (Marc Cary), lightened with a little extra tinkle from Steve Nelson's vibraphone. B+(**) The Greg Foat Group: The Dancers at the Edge of Time (2015, Jazzman): British pianist, also plays organ; group is nominally a quintet although the credits list is longer, and not just guest spots. With electric bass and guitar, organ and glockenspiel, a full range of strings, flute and cabasa, this is almost grotesquely expansive -- the sort of thing that in the 1970s might have been taken for prog rock, except uncommonly jazzier. The digital version packs on an extra 14:49 of crashing waves, to no obvious point. B+(*) Jean-Marc Foussat & Jean-Luc Petit: . . . D'Oů Vient La Lumičre! (2015, Fou): Petit plays bass clarinet, sopranino and alto saxophones, a mix of eardrum-piercing and softer tones. Foussat is credited with "dispositif électro-acoustique," which is to say he brings the noise. I found it more often annoying than interesting, but not without the latter. B [cd] Nils Frahm: Solo (2015, Erased Tapes): German pianist, works on the avant edge of electronica, prolific enough that AMG credits him with fourteen albums since 2009. Mostly quiet piano improv -- maybe he wrote it all out but my comparison framework is jazz, and its organization (if not its dynamics) holds its own there. B+(**) Future: 56 Nights (2015, Freebandz, EP): More prominent on the cover is DJ Esco's name, but not clear what he did, and virtually every source assigns it to rapper Future. Basic, bare even, runs 28:46 (10 cuts), hip-hop largesse, or marking time? B+(*) Michael Gibbs/The NDR Bigband: In My View (2013-15 [2015], Cuneiform): British composer-arranger, b. 1937 in what was then Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe); studied at Berklee, played trombone in Barry Guy's LJCO, has done a lot of soundtracks and obscure big band records. He started working with NDR in the 1990s and they've become his pickup band of choice. B+(***) [dl] Michael Gibbs & the NDR Bigband: Play a Bill Frisell Set List (2013 [2015], Cuneiform): Gibbs met Frisell at Berklee, taught him, and took him on tour, so this loops back on one of both artists' longest associations. The Bigband has a regular guitarist, Stephan Diez, but Frisell sits in, gets to sign his work, and the massedhorns certainly love him. Only about half Frisell compositions. I wouldn't have recommended the Beatles tune, but it's never sounded grander. A- [dl] Patty Griffin: Servant of Love (2015, PGM): Singer/songwriter, ninth album, usually filed under folk but most of this is blues, and by far the strongest part. B+(**) Halsey: Badlands (2015, Astralwerks): Ashley Frangipane, b. 1994 in New Jersey, finds herself growing up on meaner streets than Springsteen imagined forty years ago, unable to afford college until she hustled some internet buzz into a contract and a hit record. Electropop, I wouldn't call it dark but it's far from frothy and I don't hear words well enough to dismiss the reputed anger and dismay. Actually, seems about right, given how the world is headed. A- Hamilton [Original Broadway Cast Recording] (2015, Atlantic, 2CD): Lin-Manuel Miranda's "hip-hop musical" tracing the the biography of Alexander Hamilton -- Ron Chernow is credited for recounting facts in the public record, and the many who know next to nothing of the story may learn a thing or two, but the style is something else completely -- though no more far-fetched than, say, Antonin Scalia's "originalism." As a hatchet job on history, it's all rather amusing. As music it's rather didactic, clear enough to follow the story's nuances, as if they matter. B+(**) Have Moicy 2: The Hoodoo Bash (2015, Red Newt): In 1976 Rounder Records advertised their "dream come true: the Rounders on Rounder": they were referring back to the Holy Modal Rounders, a primitivist and rather bent folk group with Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber (originally) that recorded a pair of 1964 classics, then got corrupted by the Fugs and others such that by 1976 they had become Unholy. They were the scratchy heart and soul of Have Moicy!, an album as dear to me as The Velvet Underground or Pet Sounds or A Love Supreme, but it wasn't just the irrascible Stampfel that made the album work. It was headlined by Michael Hurley, who never again wrote such sly and funny songs, and Jeffrey Fredericks & the Clamtones added cornball filler. But most of all, both sides were capped by Antonia songs, one prophesying: "When we have kids, we will tell them the story/'Bout the night we got the spirit at the Hoodoo Bash." Now, Hurley's a recluse and Fredericks is dead, leaving Stampfel, with grandkids and protégés (but evidently no Antonia), to regale us with the glories of his youth -- except, of course, he can't quite pull it off. So instead of a three-headliner supergroup, we get an unsigned ("various artists") mish-mash, where the inspirational lyric comes from Robin Remailly: "the songs are idiotic/and that's the point/just to lighten up the freakin' joint." Often enough they do. A- Ted Hearne: The Source (2015, New Amsterdam): A post-classical pastiche, libretto assembled by Mark Doten from text fragments from (or relating to) Chelsea Manning's Wikileaks with Hearne writing the music for strings, electric guitar & bass, keybs and drums -- musically not far removed from Laurie Anderson. Politically, I'd say that Obama and his administration are responsible for grave injustice against many "leakers," but their treatment of Manning has been especially atrocious. So give this a star for focusing on the injustice, but not something I'd play for pleasure. B+(*) Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott: Wisdom, Laughter and Lines (2015, Virgin EMI): Heaton was the auteur behind the Beautiful South, which I would rank above Pavement, Nirvana, and everyone else has the great rock group of the 1990s -- no less when Abbott moved up front. Their second post-group album together, parts sound as fabulous as I expected, but the production is a little cluttered, and it starts longer on volume than ideas. Enough so I could probably learn to love it, but would prefer to play their older albums -- even last year's. B+(***) John Hébert: Rambling Confessionss (2011 [2015], Sunnyside): One of the top bassists of his generation, leads a piano trio (Andy Milne, Billy Drummond) plus singer (Jen Shyu). Starts with a striking "September Song" -- stretched out to remind me of Sheila Jordan -- before delving into the bassist's compositions, written wtih Carmen McRae in mind. I find Shyu much more appealing here than on her own record, but the only other track that grabs me is "Alfie." B+(*) Amy Helm: Didn't It Rain (2015, E1): Levon's little girl, debut album although she spent most of the last decade fronting the roots-rock band Ollabelle. Impressive voice -- reminds me most of Dusty Springfield, with faint echoes of her father and worth noting that her mother was also a singer (Libby Titus, had a couple albums under that name, perhaps more famously moved on to Mac Rebennack and wound up marrying Donald Fagen). B+(**) Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Buhl: We Are Not the First (2015, RVNG Intl): Chicago DJ Jamal Moss uses the former name (among others). As far as I can tell, the latter is the band (the initials stand for Journey Into The Unexpected) and the rest sort of resembles Ensemble. The musicians have more or less jazz cred -- saxophonist Marshall Allen has the most, and drummer Greg Fox (Liturgy, Zs) could sub anywhere he wants. Even without Allen, it's hard to hear this and not wonder what Sun Ra would sound like today if he'd really been born on Saturn. A- Hieroglyphic Being: The Acid Documents (2013 [2015], Soul Jazz): Considered a reissue but only if you could a run of 100 CDRs available through one record store as a release. Even this is "a one-off edition of 1000 copies on coloured double vinyl," but I doubt that the CD and digital variants are so constrained. The music is fairly minimal, pretty much all beats until a little synth noodle at the end. Not as interesting as his jazz record, but still pretty irresistible. A- Wayne Horvitz: Some Places Are Forever Afternoon (2015, Songlines): Pianist, proficient with electronics as well, an adventurous postbop composer whose efforts are, for me at least, hit-and-miss. Subtitle "11 Places for Richard Hugo" -- a poet (1923-82), evidently based in the northwest, like Horvitz and his small chamber orchestra: Ron Miles (cornet), Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon), Peggy Lee (cello), and Tim Young (guitar), bass and drums. Stately, and often quite gorgeous. B+(***) Jenny Hval: Apocalypse, Girl (2015, Sacred Bones): Singer-songwriter from Norway, started out singing in a goth metal band, recorded two albums as Rockettothesky, and now three under her given name. Arty, less a cross between Laurie Anderson and Björk than a triangulation from both reference points into the unknown. I'm tempted to be repulsed, but actually I'm not. B+(*) I Love Makonnen: I Love Makonnen 2 (2015, OVO Sound, EP): Makonnen Sheran, from Los Angeles and/or Atlanta, has more than a dozen mixtapes since 2011, five titled Drink More Water, and two EPs (this one 7 cuts, 29:21). B+(*) The Internet: Ego Death (2015, Odd Future/Columbia): LA-based R&B group founded by Matt Martians and Syd Tha Kyd [Syd Bennett], spun off from the Odd Future hip-hop collective, still reflected in the group's slack beats. Vocals are slack too, even when they turn to gospel. B+(**) Andrew Jamieson: Heard the Voice (2015, Edgetone): Pianist, AMG lists three previous albums. Solo here, despite the front cover claim, "piano/in dialogue with/African American spirituals/and church music." The call and response is in his head, but inspiration and expression flows through his fingers and keys. Doesn't sound churchy, and, well, I wouldn't know spiritual, but I'm moved. A- [cd] Jlin: Dark Energy (2015, Planet Mu): Jerrilynn Patton, from Gary IN, first album, close enough to Chicago her staggered beats and bashes are considered footwork. Reviewers tend to dwell on the "darkness" but I don't get that at all -- I'm more impressed by her ability to stagger the beat while maintaining it. B+(***) Henry Kaiser & Ray Russell: The Celestial Squid (2014 [2015], Cuneiform): Two guitarists of the fusion persuasion but not really in anyone else's bag, and while I've read that Kaiser "admirse and has been influenced by" Russell, the latter is only five years older. Band includes four saxes (Steve Adams, Joshua Allen, Phillip Greenlief, Aram Shelton), both electric and acoustic bass, First cut gets the speed and noise just right, so it's disappointing when later cuts wobble a bit. B+(***) [dl] Kanaku y El Tigre: Quema Quema Quema (2015, Strut/Tigers Milk): Indie folk duo from Peru. B+(*) Toby Keith: 35 MPH Town (2015, Show Dog Nashville): A big Nashville star since his first album (1993) went platinum, and he became one of worst yahoos in the business. But maybe we should cut him some slack: he hasn't gone platinum since 2006, nor struck gold with four of his last five. He makes a coarse effort at going inclusive with his "Drunk Americans" anthem, and ordinary American Bobby Pinson co-wrote 7 of the other 9 songs. But couldn't Pinson have written better songs? Or could Keith not tell the difference? B Kelela: Hallucinogen (2015, Warp/Cherry Coffee, EP): Last name Mizanekristos, born in DC of Ethiopian heritage, based in LA, the sort of R&B singer most likely to show up buried in trip hop beats, an aesthetic she carries over into her own writing. Six songs, 23:48. B+(*) Becky Kilgore/Nicki Parrott: Two Songbirds of a Feather (2015, Arbors): Standards singers-plus: the former plays guitar and has mostly recorded as Rebecca Kilgore with a couple dozen albums since 1993; the latter plays bass, contributed an occasional vocal and proved adept, lately turning into a headliner. With the singers playing, all it takes to flesh out band is Mike Renzi on piano and Chuck Redd on drums, plus Harry Allen takes a stellar turn on tenor sax. B+(***) Kneebody + Daedelus: Kneedelus (2015, Brainfeeder): Kneebody is a LA-based jazz band -- Shane Endsley (trumpet), Ben Wendel (tenor sax), Adam Benjamin (keyboards), bass, and drums -- with nine records since 2002, the best known has Theo Bleckman singing Charles Ives songs, but others are nothing like that. Daedelus is beat producer Alfred Weisberg-Roberts, aka Alfred Darlington, with a large pile of work, also since 2002. Also involved somehow is Steve Ellson, aka Flying Lotus, whose label brokered this not-quite-future of jazztronica. B+(***) Kode9: Nothing (2015, Hyperdub): Steve Goodman, from Glasgow, moved from DJ to producer, I have him down for programming rather than electronics but other than a cold analytical feel I can't tell you why. Just feels like a bag of tricks that sometimes add up. B+(**) Julian Lage: World's Fair (2014 [2015], Modern Lore): Guitarist, tabbed as a prodigy by age eight and subject to great expectations ever since. Takes this one on solo acoustic. Nice for what little it is. B+(*) Jeffrey Lewis: Jeffrey Lewis & the Jrams (2014, self-released): This seems to have passed by unnoticed, but the band tracks are as vital as those on Lewis's more recent, much heralded Manhattan, and the other stuff is the sort Lewis has been doing before he developed chops as a musician -- it would take time I don't have to sort all that out. B+(***) [bc] Lifted: 1 (2015, PAN): Leftfield electronica, main driver seems to be producer Matthew Papich, but Max D is credited with most of the percussion (synthetic, at least; probably short for Maxmillion Dunbar, i.e. Andrew Field-Pickering, whose 2013 album House of Woo impressed me) and several other people (if that's what Motion Graphix and Jordan GCZ are) make the credit list. B+(***) Lightning Bolt: Fantasy Empire (2015, Thrill Jockey): Noise rock group going back to 1999, principally Brian Chippendale (drums) and Brian Gibson (bass). I checked out a couple earlier albums and found them unappealing. This one is similarly intense, but more serviceable, at least as long as the beat stays on track. Some vocals but nothing you'd call singing, and not much of that. B+(**) Liturgy: The Ark Work (2015, Thrill Jockey): Started out as a black metal band but has evolved into something artier, with a few surprise appearances on EOY lists, and a drummer who impressed me much on that Hieroglyphic Being album. Alas, he hardly gets a fair shake here, with synth horns massed for the intro "Fanfare" and rarely far from the action elsewhere. The result is hideous, like Steve Reich's "Four Organs" -- played by a black metal band. C- Lnrdcroy: Much Less Normal (2014 [2015], Firecracker): Leonard Campbell, can't say as I know anything more. He put this out on cassette in 2014, so some listmakers treat it as a reissue, but it's scored two top-five finishes among lists I've counted. A little wobbly out the gate, but once the beats kick in it's pretty mesmerizing. B+(***) Amy London/Darmon Meader/Dylan Pramuk/Holli Ross: Royal Bopsters Project (2015, Motéma): Vocal group, dedicated to vocalese -- the art of making up lyrics to fit the contours of bebop horn solos. Not sure where the idea of making them royalty came from -- as far as I can tell, all are Americans (none far removed from New York) and should know better. Note cameos from the elders -- Jon Hendricks (94), Bob Dorough (92), Sheila Jordan (87), Annie Ross (85), and the late Mark Murphy (was 83 when he died in October). Jordan's the best, but then I always say that. B Lionel Loueke: Gaia (2015, Blue Note): Jazz guitarist from Benin, eschews big label moves in favor of a return to his trio of some time back, with Massimo Biolcati (bass) and Ferenc Nemeth (drums). B+(**) Low: Ones and Sixes (2015, Sub Pop): Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker founded this Duluth group, running through several bass players as they've released 18 albums since 1994. Alternately dubbed slowcore, sadcore, and dream pop because they're slow, sad, and sometimes dreamy, a combination which always read better than it sounded -- I'm tempted to add "dull" but they'd turn that into dullcore. Still, this one has some presence, maybe even an aesthetic. B Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora (2015, Constant Sorrow): My first acquaintance with saxophonist Lowe was c. 1992, when I sent him money for his first two albums (At the Moment of Impact and New Tango '92), which Francis Davis had praised in his early Jazz Consumer Guide columns. Lowe's first acquaintance with me was after I took over the JCG franchise: he went back and read everything I had written on music, firing off a flurry of emails in the process. I like to think of myself as someone who tries to devour and systematize everything, but compared to him I'm downright lazy. At the time, I thought of him mostly as a critic and historian. His book, American Pop: From Minstrel to Mojo tells you everything you really need to know about American music in the first half of the 20th century, and he collated an 11-CD anthology to illustrate the point. He followed with That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History (1895-1950), and turned that into four 9-CD sets. Then there's the one I haven't gotten to: Really the Blues? A Horizontal Chronicle of the Vertical Blues, 1893-1959 (with another 36 CDs on the side). (And now I see there's another book I hadn't been aware of: God Didn't Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950-1970, but as yet no CDs.) However, since 2009 he's returned to his music with the same burst of systemic energy he put into his books: highly recommended, his 3-CD Blues and the Empirical Truth (2011), and the 4-CD Mulatto Radio: Field Recordings (2014). Those were easy for me to grade because the sprawl just kept building on itself, obliterating any temptation to nitpick. This time he decided to make my job more difficult by releasing his four CDs (plus one more attributed to Matthew Shipp) separately. Had he boxed them all up, I could say that he's somehow managed to top even himself. But since he didn't, let's nitpick: Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Where a Cigarette Is Smoked by Ten Men (2015, Constant Sorrow): Lowe plays alto and tenor sax here, but often gives way to clarinetist Zoe Christiansen, especially on three "Blue for Pee Wee" (as in Russell) pieces. Those pieces tie an album that otherwise seems to have more affinity for Jimmy Giuffre's modernist abstractions back to their common roots. A- [cd] Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: We Will Gather When We Gather (2015, Constant Sorrow): An octet, although that seems less a matter of harmonic design than who showed up: three saxes, with Lowe on alto openin up a spot for Ras Moshe Burnett on tenor, and Hamiet Bluiett -- little heard in recent years -- heroic on baritone, more than making up for no trombone; Matt Lavelle's trumpet the only brass; guitar instead of piano, with Ava Mendoza determined to rock against the rhythm section's blues-based swing. Four titles referring to blues and gospel are interweaved, but this strikes me more as a spirit-channeling part record, a more moving "hoodoo bash" than Peter Stampfel's record. A- Allen Lowe/Matthew Shipp/Kevin Ray/Jake Millett: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Ballad for Albert (2015, Constant Sorrow): The simplest of the series, starts with a piano solo of the title cut, and ends with a piano-alto sax duet of the same. In between Ray (bass) and Millett (electronics and turntable) add some depth but little detail. So you basically get signature snippets of Lowe and/or Shipp, falling apart instead of growing together. B+(***) [cd] Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Man With Guitar: Where's Robert Johnson? (2013 [2015], Constant Sorrow): Cover goes on to describe this as "A Soundtrack," but I know not what for. Also note that the credits include no guitar or voice, but there are occasional samples (actually, sounds more like banjo), presumably picked up from the sound track the music was composed for. Matters little, since this is basically an alto sax showcase, and the fact that I can't distinguish the 7 tracks Gary Bartz takes over from Lowe's 9 tracks without looking at the conter is a high compliment. Band also includes piano (Lewis Porter), trombone, and tuba, along with various electronics sources (including DJ Logic). A- [cd] Old Man Luedecke: Domestic Eccentric (2015, True North): Singer/songwriter from Nova Scotia, plays banjo so it's tempting to file this under bluegrass, although folk is probably more accurate. B+(***) ĄMayday!: Future/Vintage (2015, Strange Music): Miami hip-hop crew, had a record with Murs last year that I liked a lot (ĄMursday!) and produce the same underground vibe here without a domineering front man. A- Meek Mill: Dreams Worth More Than Money (2015, Atlantic/MMG): Lord, I get tired of the N-shit, but sometimes I can hear through that and find decent aspirations. B+(*) Mika: No Place in Heaven (2015, Casablanca): Michael Penniman, Jr., British pop singer born in Beirut. Last two albums hit my pleasure spots consistently; this one less so but I'm occasionally reminded how exciting he can be. B+(**) Milo: So the Flies Don't Come (2015, Ruby Yacht): Rapper, Rory Ferreira, from Wisconsin, second album plus the usual lesser efforts. Underground vibe, music takes over toward the end. B+(**) Mřster!: When You Cut Into the Present (2015, Hubro): Norwegian group, third album, name comes from saxophonist Kjetil Mřster, I'm tempted to call this "prog jazz" given that fusion stagnated back in the 1970s and this ain't that -- denser, heavier, maybe faster, with guitar-bass-drums (Hans Magnus Ryan, Nikolai Haengste Eilertsen, Kenneth Kapstad) and everyone contributing extra percussion. B+(***) The Necks: Vertigo (2015, Northern Spy): Piano trio from Australia -- Chris Abrahams (piano), Lloyd Swanton (bass), Tony Buck (drums), but I don't have credits and doubt that's all -- has eighteen records and a cult reputation since 1989; I heard of them several years ago but this is the record I've heard: a single 43:56 piece, has an industrial/ambient feel, lots of drone not normally expected from a piano trio. B+(*) Neon Indian: Vega Intl. Night School (2015, Mom + Pop Music): Electropop group from Texas, principally Alan Palomo. Second album. A bit like the Pet Shop Boys, only less brainy, and with synths a bit soggier. B+(*) Noertker's Moxie: Simultaneous Windows (2015, Edgetone): Third installment in bassist Bill Noertker's "Blue Rider Suite," pieces based on (mostly Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky, at least here). Noertker shuffles another dozen musicians in and out, mostly reeds (including oboe and flute), trumpet on two tracks, piano on three, four drummers. B+(**) [cd] Noonday Underground: Body Parts for Modern Art (2015, Stubbie): This seems to be the work of Simon Dine, who also does work as Adventures in Stereo and with Paul Weller, although early on you mainly notice vocalist Daisy Marley. Divided into three long parts, the first would make a pretty good alt/indie disc, while the second is rather captivating instrumental trip-hop, and the third is more (maybe too much). B+(***) Larry Novak: Invitation (2014 [2015], Delmark): Pianist, b. 1933 in Chicago, cut a record in 1964, worked with Peggy Lee and Pearl Bailey, taught at DePaul, finally cut another record last year. Trio with Eric Hochberg and Rusty Jones, standards counting the first two from Bill Evans. B+(***) [cd] Nozinja: Nozinja Lodge (2015, Warp): Alias for Richard Hlungwani, a South African producer/performer who was most prominent on Honest Jon's 2010 compilation, Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa. Pitches this toward the worldwide electronic dance market, but the drums and vocal harmonies come out of Zulu traditions, as potent as ever. A- The Nu Band: The Cosmological Constant (2014 [2015], Not Two): Previously I filed this group's albums under Roy Campbell's name, but now that the band has survived the trumpeter's death I had to move the quartet under its own entry. The replacement is Thomas Heberer (cornet); the survivors are Mark Whitecage (alto sax/clarinet), Joe Fonda (bass), and Lou Grassi (drums). All contribute songs, but not a lot of energy -- or maybe someone just turned the knobs down. B+(**) Evan Parker/Peter Jacquemyn: Marsyas Suite (2012 [2015], El Negocito): Duets, soprano/tenor sax and bass/voice, free improv pieces recorded live in Brugge. As usual, Parker has different approaches to the two saxes, the bassist handling both, and good for some solo rumble. B+(***) John Patitucci Electric Guitar Quartet: Brooklyn (2015, Three Faces): Bassist, plays electric here, along with two guitarists (Adam Rogers and Steve Cardenas) and drummer Brian Blade, all compatible mainstreamers with a lot of Wes Montgomery in their hip pockets. Still, despite nods to Mali and gospel they don't do much with it. B Bucky Pizzarelli: Renaissance: A Journey From Classical to Jazz (2015, Arbors): A guitar duo -- something he's excelled at in the past -- with Ed Laub, backed by Dick Lieb's orchestra -- strings, woodwinds, flute, French horn -- on a program that starts with Tedesco. Gets more interesting (and a lot more charming) as they ditch the orchestra and move on to "Stardust" and "Satin Doll" but early on they dug a pretty deep hole. B Pusha T: King Push -- Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude (2015, Def Jam): Terrence Thornton, formerly of Clipse, talks gangsta, but as Christgau pointed out, "that's just talk." Lot of talk here, too, but his beats make a point, and so do his boasts. B+(***) Raury: All We Need (2015, Columbia): First name artist, last name is Tullis, first album, age 19 but strikes me as more mature than most adults. Sings more than he raps, and gets decent music to work to. B+(*) Dave Rawlings Machine: Nashville Obsolete (2015, Acony): Nashville-based singer-songwriter, played with Gillian Welch, noted for his flatpicking, come off more folk than country or bluegrass, not sure that his "Machine" even qualifies as a band, making it an odd moniker. B+(*) Tomeka Reid: Tomeka Reid Quartet (2015, Thirsty Ear): Cellist, originally from DC but moved to Chicago for her Master's, studying at DePaul and falling into the AACM orbit. She's appeared on some notable records, and has lined up Mary Halvorson (guitar), Jason Roebke (bass), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums) for her Mike Reed-produced debut. An especially good outing for the guitarist, but when furror builds it powered by the cello. A- Max Richter: From Sleep (2015, Deutsche Grammophon): German-born British "post-minimalist" composer, put together an 8-hour cycle called Sleep. This is a one-hour extract, a sampler if you like, short enough that it's not guaranteed to put you to sleep, although it will certainly calm and soothe. A- Rival Consoles: Howl (2015, Erased Tapes): British electronica producer, (IDM, experimental techno), third album, beats play with a slight guitar sound. B+(**) RJD2/STS: STS X RJD2 (2015, RJ's Electrical Connections): STS is shortened from Sugar Tongue Slim, an MC out of Atlanta, here hooked up with prolific beatmaker Jon Krohn. B+(***) Randy Rogers & Wade Bowen: Hold My Beer, Vol. 1 (2015, Lil' Buddy Toons): Texas boys, associated with something called red dirt music although that name derived from the bright clay around Stillwater, Oklahoma. I don't know whether Texas has similar soil, but if you take neotrad and dial it back several generations and park it in a honky tonk, you'll come close. Both did their time in Nashville, and are glad to be out, just not always sure what to do with their newfound freedom. B+(***) Daniel Rosenboom: Astral Transference & Seven Dreams (2014 [2015], Orenda, 2CD): Trumpet player, credits Wadada Leo Smith as his "first trumpet teacher" and dedicates the seven-movement "Dreams" to him, although the 31:31 "Astral Transference" would also be fit tribute. The long piece is an octet with two saxes, piano, guitar, cello, bass, and drums, and is glorious. The band cuts back to five for the less expansive "Dreams." Probably could have fit on one CD (80:12), but sensibly split. A- Royal Headache: High (2015, What's Your Rupture): Australian post-punk group, second album, straight, rigid even -- a telling sign, I suspect, is that they think you're garbage. B+(*) Todd Rundgren/Emil Nikolaisen/Hans-Peter Lindstrřm: Runddans (2015, Smalltown Supersound): Synths, something Rundgren has been into for decades but he's pigeonholed as a pop song guy -- even though a quick check of my database shows I haven't listen to any of his albums since Hermit of Mink Hollow (1978). Starts splashy, but gets bogged down in a swamp of vocals. B- Alejandro Sanz: Sirope (2015, Universal): A huge star in his native Spain since his second (1991) album went 9xPlatinum, he broke the Mexican and US Latin markets in 1997, this making his sixth straight top-ten album there. An impressive performer, but has never broken out of his language market, not even here. B+(*) Schnellertollermeier: X (2013 [2015], Cuneiform): Swiss power trio, one part each Andi Schnellmann (bass), Manuel Troller (guitar), and David Meier (drums). Debut album; strong, regular drive, which can be tedious or liberating. B+(**) John Scofield: Past Present (2015, Impulse!): Guitarist, sounds much like he did in his heyday before dozens of other guitarists tried to sound like him. What's perked him up is most likely a terrific quartet, with Larry Grenadier on bass, Bill Stewart on drums, and Joe Lovano superb on tenor sax. B+(***) Christian Scott: Stretch Music (2015, Ropeadope): Trumpet player from New Orleans, added "aTunde Adjuah" to his name on his 2012 album and some sources append them here. Some sources also add "(Introducing Elena Pinderhughes)" -- a flute player who isn't all that prominent here. The horns (including alto sax and trombone) do stretch out over the roiling rhythm section (with guitar, piano/Fender Rhodes, bass, and "Pan-African drums." B+(*) Matthew Shipp: Matthew Shipp Plays the Music of Allen Lowe: I Alone: The Everlasting Beauty of Monotony (2015, Constant Sorrow): Front cover runs on: "Or: The Future, He Thought, Was Never When He Expected It to Be," then follows with a list of musicians, not including the alto saxophonist, who appears with band on half of the tracks. The other half are solo piano -- more what I expected from the title. I have no feel for Lowe as a composer, other than the assumption that given his vast research he is adept at picking out lines here and there and turning them around. (At one point I recognized "Lullaby of Birdland" only to hear the next line head somewhere else.) But I have heard a lot of solo Shipp, and his work here is quite refreshing. The group pieces are even more fun, with guitarists Michael Gregory Jackson and Ryan Blotnick standing out, and Lowe's alto delightful. A- [cd] Troye Sivan: Blue Neighbourhood (2015, Capitol): South Africa-born, Australian singer/songwriter/actor/YouTube personality barely out of his teens. Mid-tempo pop, keeps to an even keel but catchy enough. I found myself admiring the drums. B+(*) Sophie: Product (2013-15 [2015], Numbers, EP): Samuel Long, London-based electronica producer, first album is a singles compilation that I had to pick and order to play on Rhapsody, eight songs, 25:17. Some are striking with their synth curtains and helium vocals, but together they can clash or get stuck. B+(**) Skylar Spence: Prom King (2015, Carpark): Aka Ryan DeRoberts, b. 1993 on Long Island, originally planned to perform as Saint Pepsi but the lawyers nixed that. Disco, in much the same sense as Mayer Hawthorne plays Motown, which these days is good enough for me. A- Dexter Story: Wondem (2015, Soundway): Singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, picked up an interest in Ethiopian which runs through these pieces, especially several instrumentals. B+(*) Susanne Sundfřr: Ten Love Songs (2015, Sonnet Sound): Norwegian singer-songwriter, works in English, a star at home but this is her first album to get much notice elsewhere. Synth-based backdrops, can't quite call them pop although they can be when she cuts down on the drama. B+(*) Steve Swell: Kanreki: Reflection & Renewal (2011-14 [2015], Not Two, 2CD): "Kanreki" is a Japanese celebration of one's 60th birthday, something the avant-trombonist celebrated in 2014, similar to a Festschrift in academia. For this one, Swell has compiled seven pieces from as many places with as many groups -- actually six groups, as one piece is solo. A long set with Guillermo Gregorio and Fred Lonberg-Holm stands out, while the whole adds up to a fine portrait. B+(***) [cd] Steve Swell: Steve Swell's Kende Dreams: Hommage ŕ Bartók (2014 [2015], Silkheart): The trombonist's liner notes clearly say the album title is Kende Dreams, but that apostrophe on the cover has misdirected pretty much everyone. A kende is an ancient Hungarian religious figure, one eclipsed by the warriors so prominent since Atilla the Hun. Supposedly Béla Bartók drew on this history as well as the complex rhythms of east-central Europe, but no Bartók is played here (unless pianist Connie Crothers slipped some in). Rather, you get a quintet with two horns -- the leader's trombone and Rob Brown's alto sax -- complementing each other, and all the support anyone could hope for from William Parker and Chad Taylor. A- [cd] Steve Swell: The Loneliness of the Long Distasnce Improviser (2015, Swell): Solo trombone. Not sure if this is the first in the two dozen or so albums Swell has led since 1996, but there aren't many -- the instrument is slow and its range is limited, and torturing it for unusual sounds rarely works. Helps here that he keeps his pieces short, often built on vamps, and mixes them up. But then he's an exceptional trombonist. B+(***) [cd] They Might Be Giants: Glean (2015, Idlewild): I was completely dazzled by their 1986 debut, but soon lost interest despite numerous instances where they were cute and/or clever. This is another, their 19th album, and this time they rock a little harder too. B+(*) The Thing: Shake (2015, Thing): Norwegian avant-power trio, although Bandcamp page says Austin, where bassist Ingebrigt Hĺker Flaten has been hanging out -- he's evidently their web guy. The volume, however, is mostly due to Mats Gustafsson (baritone/tenor sax) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), and they're as rough and explosive as ever, just not always -- the softer stretches hold this together. Possibly their best since their 2000 eponymous debut, although how good is hard to tell. B+(***) Samba Touré: Gandadiko (2015, Glitterbeat): Guitarist from Mali, first record was a tribute to Ali Farka Touré and he carries on from there. No flash or punch, but he calmly grows on you. B+(***) Dale Watson: Call Me Insane (2015, Red House): Nashville has neo-trad, but this Texan has no neo in him at all, aside from a penchant for writing new songs that sound like long lost old songs. He leads off with a pretty fair Merle Haggard likeness, then follows with one George Jones should have done ("Bug Ya for Love" -- a better tribute than the more obvious "Jonesin' for Jones"). On the other hand, the only one I can imagine him palming the title tune off on is Marty Robbins, who'd add a giddy smile, one of the few things not in Watson's toolkit. B+(**) Kenny Werner: The Melody (2014 [2015], Pirouet): Pianist, close to forty albums since 1977, leads a trio with Johannes Weidenmueller (bass) and Ari Hoenig (drums), exploring his favorite subject. B+(**) Barrence Whitfield & the Savages: Under the Savage Sky (2015, Bloodshot): Retro rocker ever since the 1980s. B+(*) Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool (2015, Dirty Hit/RCA): British group, from London, with Ellie Rowsell the main singer, with their first album. The sort of group/album I could imagine people caring about without doing so myself. B+(*) Nate Wooley/Ken Vandermark: East by Northwest (2013 [2015], Audiographic): Duo, trumpet and clarinet/tenor/baritone sax. Starts with a piece by John Carter, so figure they're mindful of the Carter-Bradford Quartet, just without the extra guys who fill out the sound and move it around. Mindful of that, too. B+(**) [bc] Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries
Bobby Bradford & John Carter Quintet: No U Turn: Live in Pasadena 1975 (1975 [2015], Dark Tree): Back cover lists Carter first, as indeed most of this now-legendary group's albums did, but spine breaks the tie in favor of Bradford (credited with cornet but photographed on the cover with flugelhorn). Previously unreleased. Takes some time to get going. A- [cd] Billie Holiday: Banned From New York City: Live 1948-1957 (1948-57 [2015], Uptown, 2CD): A totally marvelous singer, but I'm not sure how badly we need every little bootleg scrap. Mostly she does songs you know much as she always did them, although the 1948 sets with Red Norvo that fill up most of the first disc will be of interest to vibes fans. The second disc picks up a tour of France and various TV shots. B+(***) Kenny Knight: Crossroads (1980 [2015], Paradise of Bachelors): Georgia-born, Denver-raised, played in bands from his teens and off and on until he cut this his one-and-only album, a country-rock troubadour, pleasantly light with more substance than you realize at first. B+(***) Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83 (1955-83 [2015], Soul Jazz): Rastafarianism emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s in response to Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement, offering a glorious picture of the Conquering Lion in lieu of a cheap ticket to a foreign country, but the music came later, and this tries to capture it at the roots with little regard to the stars. The main figure here is Count Ossie, whose primitivist nyahbinghi recalled African drums and promised mystic revelation, and most of the rest stick to the program -- the two obvious exceptions are ska star Laurel Aitken and Calypsonian Lord Labby, who made the cut with clear anthems of Haile Selassie and Ethiopia. But I doubt clarity was ever the point. A- Ed Sanders: Yiddish-Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side (2006 [2015], Okraina, EP): I knew him first as a poet -- pretty sure some of his work appeared in my brother's 9th grade poetry notebook, the one that got him expelled -- but by that time he was also dabbling in song in a group called the Fugs (not "mythical," as the website proclaims, but we'll settle for "infamous"). He went on to cut a couple solo albums -- not very good, sad to say -- then this came out on cassette in 1991. This version was recorded later and is finally available on 10-inch vinyl. Not much music here, but appreciate the history lesson. B+(*) [bc] Ty Segall: Ty-Rex (2011-13 [2015], Goner, EP): Garage punk artist, released a 12-inch T Rex covers album in 2011, followed that up with a 7-inch Ty-Rex II in 2013, the nine cuts (31:17) collected here. An appropriate icon, and it doesn't hurt to scuff them up a little. B+(*) Sherwood at the Controls, Volume 1: 1979-1984 (1979-84 [2015], On-U Sound): British new wave/dance producer Adrian Sherwood, mostly obscure English groups with so much in common he could have passed as the auteur -- reggae rhythms with somewhat industrialized dub effects, the precursor of dubstep. B+(**) Sonny Simmons: Reincarnation (1991 [2015], Arhoolie): Alto saxophonist, emerged in the mid-1960s moving with the avant-garde, had trouble finding recording dates between 1970 and 1990 but has worked extensively since then. I don't see where this live set was previously released. It features Barbara Donald ("with" credit on the cover) on trumpet, plus piano-bass-drums, healthy workouts on three originals plus "Body and Soul" and "Over the Rainbow." B+(**) Idrissa Soumaoro: Djitoumou (2010, Lusafrica): Singer-guitarist from Mali, b. 1949, had some success in the 1970s, joined Les Ambassadeurs, worked with Amadou & Mariam. This popped up on a 2015 EOY list, but all sources show it earlier. Moreover, while they suggest that it was new then, one song has a guest spot for Ali Farka Touré, who died in 2006, so I don't have any real idea when it was recorded. B+(***) The Staple Singers: Freedom Highway Complete: Recorded Live at Chicago's New Nazareth Church (1965 [2015], Epic/Legacy): Only three titles in common with the Freedom Highway comp of the group's 1965-67 Epic sides that Legacy issued in 1991 -- still my first recommendation -- and the times differ (by 0:06, 0:25, and 1:09 on the title track). On the other hand, this adds 31:17 to the edited 1965 LP, mostly restoring the church experience. Not my idea of a plus, unless the spirit moves you. B+(*) Sun Ra and His Arkestra: To Those of Earth . . . and Other Worlds (1956-83 [2015], Strut, 2CD): British DJ Gilles Peterson selected and possibly mixed this selection from Ra's "immense 125 LP back catalog -- the label's second trawl through the trove after Marshall Allen's In the Orbit of Ra. Dates are approximate: I couldn't find half of the sources in discographies, and at least several tracks are previously unreleased. Like Allen, Peterson leans heavily on vocal pieces, which often come off as weird, amateurish, or both. I guess no one wants to remember him as a big band impressario like Benny Goodman, although he was that, too -- hard to contain, or to sum up. B+(***) Dale Watson: Truckin' Sessions, Vol. 3 (2014 [2015], Red River): At some point Watson decided Red Simpson and Dave Dudley hadn't recorded enough trucking songs, so he wrote a bunch more. The first volume appeared in 1998, a second in 2009, and in 2014 Red River added this to the first two for a 3-CD set, waiting a year to make this third volume available separately. B+(***) Old Music
Michael Gibbs: Tanglewood 63 (1970, Deram): Second album, like its predecessor a full big band plus strings -- I'm counting 32 musician credits, many names I recognize now but would have been pretty young then. The first pieces aren't all that striking, but "Five for England" blasts off with a Chris Spedding guitar solo that drives the piece for 12:02. B+(*) Michael Gibbs With Joachim Kühn: Europeana: Jazzphony No. 1 (1994 [1995], ACT): Recorded in NDR Studios with a full orchestra (Radio Philharmonie Hannover NDR), pianist Kühn's trio, and seven guest soloists (including Albert Mangelsdorff and Richard Galliano). B+(**) Henry Kaiser: Devil in the Drain (1987, SST): After a decade on obscure jazz labels like Metalanguage, the experimental guitarist gets a ride with the era's definitive alt-rock label, and makes an experimental but modestly intriguing solo guitar album. The one exception is the title piece, where the devil lays on a guilt trip over losing a goldfish down the drain, and gets flushed himself. B+(*) Henry Kaiser & David Lindley: A World Out of Time, Vol. 2 (1993, Shanachie): The Americans get credit but the stars here are Malagasy acts, some of whom went on to sell their own albums in the West (Rossy, Tarika Sammy, D'Gary) -- an island close to Africa geographically but not really ethnically. Nice lilt, but they sound a bit like they're trying to appeal to a quirky guitarist and an oddball popster. B+(*) Negro Religious Field Recordings: From Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee (1934-1942): Vol. 1 (1934-42 [1994], Document): Austin Coleman, Washington Brown, Roy McGhee, groups like the Union Jubilee Quartet and the Halloway High School Quartet of Murfeesboro deliver gravel and grit, hollers and exultation. The field recordings are every bit as dirty, which seems appropriate. Allen Lowe recommended this and, of course, he's right. A- Team Hegdal: Vol 1 (2009 [2010], Řra Fonogram): Norwegian free jazz quartet with two saxes -- Eirik Hegdal (sopranino, alto, baritone, clarinet) and André Roligheten (soprano, tenor, bass clarinet) -- bass (Rune Nergaard) and drums (Gard Nilssen). Sharp interplay, drags a bit in the middle, most impressive when they really crank it up. B+(***) Team Hegdal: Vol 2 (2011, Řra Fonogram): Same piano-less two-sax lineup, but with Mattias Stĺhl (vibes) and Ola Kvernberg (violin, viola, bass violin) joining the team. Strikes me as more composed, and much fancier, which works nice at times but nothing suits them so much as speed and daring. B+(***) They Might Be Giants: Long Tall Weekend (1999, Idlewild): Originally released as download-only, a marketing stratagem that seemed more alien at the time than now -- a concept that made it inaccessible at the time: even though I was more Internet-savvy than most at the time, I was stuck on the concept that purchases should be limited to objects (come to think of it, I still am). So I missed this, despite Christgau flagging it as the group's only A- record between 1992 (Apollo 18) and 2008 (Here Come the 123s). Re-reading Bob's review, I wonder whether his positing of Wichita as the polar opposite of New York as personal (it was, after all, written the year I moved back to Wichita). B+(***) Revised GradesSometimes 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: Leonard Cohen: Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour (2012-13 [2015], Columbia): Outtakes from the tours that produced Live in Dublin, the more video-friendly sequel to the magnificent Live in London -- left out for their relative obscurity, but I'm such a sucker for his "golden voice" (and not-quite-angelic choir) I'm surprised I didn't fall for this when it came out. As I recall, the problem was technological. [was: B+(***)] A- Future: DS2 (2015, Epic): I caught so little of this the first time around I wound up writing as close to a nothing review as ever. Then it did respectably on subconscious beats, which get sharper with each play. And while I don't approve of his junkiedom, I find it more admirable, not to mention poignant, than the usual gangsta mack. [was: B+(***)] A- Grimes: Art Angels (2015, 4AD): Now comfortably ensconced in my EOY Aggregate top ten (number eight after a late start and steady rise that will probably knock off Julia Holter but not Tame Impala). Christgau and Tatum reviewed this within a day or two of each other and disagreed (A vs. B-). I played this almost two months ago, the week it came out (Nov. 6), and my one spin split the difference between their grades. Another spin tells me that I hear more of what Tatum describes (K-pop morphing into anime porn) than what Christgau claims ("hyperfeminist individualism for a post-rock mindset"), but find that nudging the grade up. [was: B+(**)] A- Additional Consumer News:Previous grades on artists in the old music section.
NotesEverything streamed from Rhapsody, except as noted in brackets following the grade:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, January 4, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26050 [26017] rated (+33), 395 [396] unrated (-1). One New Year's resolution that I've been able to keep is that I stop adding records to the previous year's list, so that now that 2015 is gone, I'm officially done with 2014. The final list for 2014 is here. Since the January 31, 2015 freeze date, I added 81 records to the file, bringing the total number of records there to 1248. That was up slightly from 2013 (1222) and 2012 (1190), but still well below the record years of 2011 (1415) and 2010 (1300). The first year I topped 1000 records was 2004, when I started Jazz Consumer Guide -- 1052 that year, which has only dropped below 1000 twice since (982 in 2005, 996 in 2008). The last Voice-published JCG was in 2011, and the freebies thinned out after then, but I had started using Rhapsody in 2007, which took up the slack (and then some). In fact, the share of rated records I've sourced from Rhapsody (and a few other download sources, including links from publicists) has increased every year since 2007 (16.1%), up to 58.1% in 2014. (The series from 2008-13: 21.9% 34.0%, 42.5%, 46.8%, 47.4%, 49.5%.) It is not clear whether that trend will be sustained for 2015: my plan is to "freeze" the file no later than January 31, and to continue to add stragglers until December 31, 2016. The current 2015 file lists 1007 albums, of which 505 (50.1%) are from Rhapsody, etc. Virtually everything I add in that time will be streamed, so if I wind up with 1200 records (a little less than my 2012-14 average) I'll wind up at 58.5%. Odds of that happening are probably 50-50. Last year I added approximately 230 albums to my 2014 list after January 1 (133 in the pre-freeze January 24 Rhapsody Streamnotes, plus about one-third of the 50 more in the February 13 RS, plus 81 post-freeze albums, so another 193 wouldn't be out of ordinary. However, I suspect that I'm beginning to slow down, so I may not add that any. The number of physical albums I received (or in some cases bought -- not easy to separate the two, but the latter is certainly a tiny share for the last 5-6 years) has declined every year since 2011 (753, 623, 617, 523, 502), and significantly since 2004-07 (1017, 941, 1092, 956) -- peak JCG years, but also pre-Rhapsody, so I was also buying more CDs. It would be a lot of work (and probably not worth doing) but I could go back through the metacritic files (and I'd probably need some additional sources) and figure out my share of all (at least fairly well known) jazz releases. If I did so, I have little doubt that it would show that my share has decreased regularly since 2004-07 (with a probable peak year of 2004). I've currently heard 211 of the 426 jazz records in the 2015 EOY Aggegate List, so 49.5% -- better than I would have expected, but I have many fewer jazz lists compiled this year. (Actually, I have a larger sample list, 2015 Music Tracking: Jazz, with 1040 jazz albums listed, of which I've heard 610 -- 58.6%; that list includes everything I have heard, whereas the aggregate only lists records that have appeared on other lists.) That's just one data point -- not a trend -- and while it strikes me as respectable I still sense that I am slipping. I keep expecting my Jazz and Non-Jazz EOY lists to converge in length, but while I added four non-jazz albums this week (Days With Dr. Yen Lo, Halsey, Nozinja, and Skylar Spence -- underground rap, teen pop, Afro-electronica, and disco), Allen Lowe matched that on the jazz side (with a little help from Matthew Shipp), and Steve Swell added an extra, so now the counts are 76-63. Evening out compared to a month ago, but still there are blips. After the JCP ballots were sent off, I received 5-CD packages from both Lowe and Swell. It took a while to sort them out, but I wound up with five A- and 4 B+(***) (one of Swell's is 2-CD). Lowe's are all fairly matched, with a couple regulars and many friends circling around a common approach -- the sort of thing he previously released in single packages (the 3-CD Blues and the Empirical Truth and the 4-CD Mulatto Radio). Three of Swell's sets are the sort of avant-jazz that has little chance of appealing to non-believers -- solo trombone album, a compilation of scattered live sets (including more solo), and a trio with Peter Brötzmann -- but all are exceptionally well done, hence my grades. The fourth, Kende Dreams, is an all-star quintet where everyone excels. Good chance had I gotten it earlier it would have wound up on my ballot, but not feeling like bumping anyone so soon, I left it a notch lower in my file. Terrific album, even for someone with no interest or knowledge of Bartók (like me). Among the old music, I picked out the two Kaiser records because I had them marked as ungraded, and could skip the step of finding them by tuning into Rhapsody. The unrated account is listed weekly. These are records that I have (at least at one point had) but never got around to. New records pile onto the end of that list, but I currently only have two unrated 2015 releases -- a cassette tape I can't play and a Kansas CD I won't (at least not now) -- and most recent years have been handled with similar efficiency. So most of those records are ten or more years old, many bought up when the last decent local record stores went out of business, and some date back to the LP era (in which case I quite possibly don't have them anymore). Still, I always like to knock a few off whenever I get in the neighborhood, as I was with the new Kaiser/Russell album. Negro Religious Field Recordings appeared in an Allen Lowe Facebook post. I clicked on it, then found it on Rhapsody, and figured why not? There's probably a lot more down that rabbit hole, and maybe some day I'll go there, but for me this resonated not just from hearing Lowe's latest records but from checking out a Staples Family reissue that's nowhere near as good. Good chance I'll post a Rhapsody Streamnotes sometime this week. Draft file is currently 125 records deep, more than enough. Probably enough time left in January for a second column too, although I have a couple other ideas kicking around. EOY Aggegate list should be winding down, but I'm still have a bunch of lists I haven't transcribed yet, and a few stragglers are coming in. One thing I did do was to score the Robert Christgau [RC] and Michael Tatum [MT] grades I've been tracking: 5 for A/A+, 4 for A-, 3 for B+/***, 2 for **, 1 for *. I'm not sure I have them all yet, and will add new ones when they appear (until I stop working on the file). I might wind up doing the same thing for my own grades, but that would be a lot more work. Here are some EOY lists by critics you should know by name (and note I especially appreciate long lists, which I regard as realistic for people who listen broadly):
Also: For a list of many more lists, look here. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Sunday, January 3, 2016 Saudi KillsI've missed doing this the last couple of weeks. I've had other things to focus on, and figured I'd wind up writing pretty much the same things about the same outrages when I returned as I would have written before. So Saudi Arabia's mass execution of 47 mostly political prisoners came as a bit of a shock. Not a complete shock, mind you. Since King Abdullah's death last year, the Saudi monarchy has been increasingly aggressive about throwing its power around, most obviously in its entry and escalation of Yemen's civil war: one of the most blatant war crimes of the last decade, one that practically every day generates reports of atrocities. But Saudi Arabia has been meddling in the affairs of other countries since 1980 -- partly in response to the twin shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the siege at Mecca's Grand Mosque, both in 1979, but largely because the Reagan administration, following Kissinger's 1970s strategy of promoting regional powers as proxies for American mischief, encouraged the Saudis to help finance the Holy War in Afghanistan against the infidel Russians. The Saudis not only ponied up the money, they understood that to recruit Mujahideen they needed to promote their state-linked Salafist doctrine throughout the Islamic world. In doing so, the Saudis (and their fellow aristocrats among the former British cronies of the Persian Gulf states) built the financial and human infrastructure that promotes reactionary terror throughout the Middle East -- one that has taken on a life and logic of its own, turning on its former masters as surely as the Terror devoured the Jacobins. America's role in all of this can has resulted in one blunder after another, the root cause two beliefs we picked up from the British who got there (and got out) first. One is the conviction that all those who (however temporarily) stand with us are advancing civilization (basically a mental framework we have for admiring ourselves). The second is blind faith that any problem can be solved by force, so long as it is so swift and brutal that no one will dare repeat the offense. The first is little more than a invitation for sycophancy and corruption, one that attracts the worst possible allies, but which wears thin on anyone with integrity or principles. While the latter is so blatantly unjust that that it only breeds resentment and subversion, including those asymmetric acts of sudden violence we dub "terror" -- terminology oblivious to what real machines of war, like B-1 bombers and C-5 gunships, routinely wreak. Of course, the British only made matters worse, except for a few oil company owners, but they trained the Israelis in their methods -- in some cases personally, as with Ronald Wingate and Moshe Dayan; often by example, as with their suppression of the 1937-39 Arab Revolt; and ultimately well enough that the Israelis preserved the whole of British colonial law for selective application to the Palestinians. With such methods, the Israelis have managed to destabilize their dominance and extend their conflict for many generations. America followed in those footsteps not because the approach seemed to work as out of arrogance, figuring that the self-appointed rulers of the free world were destined to succeed. Of course, they haven't. Nearly fifteen years of active US military intervention in the region has cycled tragedy and farce in an ever more irresistible whorl -- among the casualties we find the brains of all current presidential candidates (even Rand Paul; even Bernie Sanders). Isn't one of those textbook definitions of insanity the belief that repeating the same act will produce a different result? The most immediate threat we face comes from the neocons, refreshed by a brief respite from an Iraq fiasco that they're now convinced they had won (until the lily-livered Obama sold them out), anxious to send American troops back into the fray. To accomplish this, they not only peddle flattering self-delucions, they never waste a chance to paint ISIS as the gravest threat to civilization, like, ever. And they've been so successful that hardly any "very serious" political pundit dispute the urgent need to "smash ISIS" (that seems to be the favored phrase, as if several million people living on their land are mere cockroaches). Their propaganda campaign has worked is largely because we seem to have this primordial fear of an Islamic State -- presumably dating to the downfall of Constantinople in 1454 if not the Battle of Tours in 732, although who knows about either? (More likely this is some sort of mirror reflection where we fear that others should do to us as we did to them; e.g., in the Crusades from 1092 and the Inquisition from 1492. Islam was almost never spread by the sword after the 8th century -- the exceptions were converts with a history of raiding, like the Turks and Mughals, and most people under the early Caliphs retained their pre-Islamic religions and legal systems without compulsion.) But while we're geing goaded into war with an "Islamic State" centered in Raqaa, we hear nothing about the more/less equally brutal Islamic State in Riyadh -- Saudi Arabia -- which represses Shi'a, bans all non-Muslims, punishes people they consider criminals with beheadings, which even practices the ancient art of crucifixion. Last week's mass executions, on top of the bombing and invasion of Yemen, should offer us a wake up call. Saudi Arabia gets a free pass from the neocons because they are rich, both selling the West oil and reinvesting their profits in Western banks. The only reason the Raqaa IS seems more brutal is that they are engaged in a life-and-death struggle, whereas the Riyadh IS is sitting high, directing most of its brutality abroad -- but not all, as we should see clearly now. I shouldn't need to say this, but I am not advocating US military intervention to right the wrongs of Saudi Arabia. I don't think the US can or should do that, but we should stop helping the Saudis commit those wrongs -- every bomb they drop in Yemen is, after all, made in America -- and we should realize our limits in Syria and Iraq (among other things, that we can't really distinguish friend from foe, that we don't really have anything to offer the people there other than death and destruction, and that we have no business doing that). Maybe you think I'm one of those awful isolationists? I have two answers to that. One is that if you have to choose between being a serial murderer and a hermit, I'd much prefer that you opt for the latter. The other is that it is possible to interact with the Middle East (or anyplace else) without becoming one or the other. You can, for instance, trade, invest, exchange students and tourists -- all you need for that is stability and security and mutual respect, which pacts, meddling, an arms race, and intervention obliterates. In fact, aside from a tempest over piracy (the Barbary Wars, 1801-05) the US pretty much did just that, all the way up through 1945: after that Israel, the Cold War, and oil greed and fear distorted things, but also the US forgot its founding principles, starting with appreciation of freedom from foreign dominance and entanglements, an aversion to maintaining a standing army, and at least a nominal belief that "all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" -- you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Ironically, the same time Americans were losing their principles the UN was adopting them as basic human rights. One could have built a foreign policy around those ideals, but Truman and Eisenhower didn't, and later presidents -- especially Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, but also fatefully the Democrats as well -- only got worse. Here are some links on the Saudi mass executions:
Ran out of time to comment on anything more, but here are some single-line links I had opened up:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Saturday, January 2, 2016 How to FishThought I'd share a recipe I evolved for two since I tried it last night, working mostly from memory and hunch, and it came out marvelous. My original idea was to write it up and mail it to a cousin, but then I thought of a couple more people who might enjoy it. And then it dawned on me that I could just as easily post it here for the masses who read this blog. The basic recipe is "Baked Fish with Capers and Olives" from Nancy Harmon Jenkins, The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, which I've transcribed and annotated here. That recipe calls for two pounds of fish to serve 6-8. I picked out three filets from a bag of frozen pacific cod, probably a bit less than 1 lb. I also had two Yukon gold potatoes on hand, so I peeled them (not necessary) and cut them up into a rough 1/2-inch dice. Put them in a bowl, added some extra virgin olive oil (about a tablespoon, a generous amount), salt and pepper. Also coarsely chopped three cloves of garlic, added to the potatoes, then spread them out in a 9x12 baking dish (effectively oiling the dish). I placed the fish in the middle of the pan, moving the potatoes to the side. Heat the oven to 400F. In the same empty bowl (no, I didn't wash), I put one 14 oz. can of diced fire-roasted tomatoes, a teaspoon of lemon juice (not fresh, but do it right if you want), 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, about two tablespoons of capers, and about one-half cup of green olives (from the Dillons olive bar: large, pitted, no stuffing; cut in half lengthwise). Stir this mixture up, then spoon it over the fish. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top. (I used "gluten free" but you can probably find something better.) Finally, drizzle a little more olive oil on top (I used about 2 teaspoons). Bake for 35-40 minutes, by which the potatoes should be done, the sauce bubbly, and the fish flaky. The recipe above also promises browned bread crumbs, but mine stay pretty white (although they do add some texture. And that's it: about 10-12 minutes of prep, plus the wait while it bakes. You could add a green salad -- I'd probably do horiatiki (Greek) [1] or panzanella (Italian) [2] or maybe fattoush (Lebanese) [3] depending on what I had on hand (or some ad hoc mix, since they're all pretty compatible). If the fish is frozen (and not very thick) you don't even need to thaw it out. Fresh tomatoes would be more work, and unless they're home grown aren't worth the trouble (use them in the salad). Use any kind of flaky white fish -- you can probably get away with farm fish like swai or tilapia but it won't be as good as cod. I suppose you could try this with salmon, but I'd rather do something else with it [4]. Bluefish should work. Catfish might -- I've never tried baking it [5]. For salt cod, try this (it's a fair amount of work, and a staple that was once cheap enough to feed to slaves but isn't anymore). Notes: [1] Horiatiki (Greek) salad: toss together romaine lettuce, cucumber (peeled, seeded, chopped), red onion (chopped), tomatoes (cut into wedges or chunks), bell pepper (any color, sliced thin), kalamata olives (pitted), feta cheese, parsley, anchovies, capers (most of these are optional, but it won't be recognized as a Greek salad without the lettuce, tomatoes, olives, and feta; the capers aren't in Jenkins' recipe). For dressing, use 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, juice of 1/2 lemon, 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano, salt and pepper to taste: shake it up, pour it on, and toss. [2] Panzanella is an Italian salad with bread -- ciabatta works well, cut the crust off and dice it; mix it with shopped tomatoes so it starts to get mushy (it should blend into the salad, not stand out like croutons -- nothing against croutons). Also use romaine lettuce, red onion, cucumber, and basil (again, more or less -- the bread and tomatoes are key). Not in the recipe, but you can add some grated parmesan. For dressing, use 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, 1/4 cup red wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon balsamic, salt and pepper. [3] Fattoush is another bread salad, from Lebanon, but here you want some crunch: traditionally use toasted pita bread, although I'd rather make croutons from French bread than use those pita crisps that show up at most local restaurants. (The best I've made was with Turkish pide bread, which is not the same thing as pita.) Use romaine lettuce, cucumber, radishes (chunked), scallions (chopped), tomatoes (chunked), parsley, mint (again, more or less). Jenkins calls for pickles ("plain brine-pickled cucumbers, not sweetened or heavily flavored with garlic or dill"), which isn't a bad idea but I'd rather add capers, and I'm surprised she didn't include olives (kalamata, pitted, coarsely chopped) and/or feta. For dressing, crush a couple garlic cloves in some kosher salt, then add 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, 1/4 cup lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons of ground sumac. [4] The easiest thing to do with salmon is to marinate it in teriyaki sauce (equal parts, e.g. 1/4 cup each, regular soy sauce, sake [Japanese rice wine], and sugar) for half an hour, then skin-side down broil it 6-10 minutes (or until it browns on top and flakes), brushing it with reserved marinade midway. If no skin, turn it over midway. I usually make rice (sometimes fried with ham and egg) and stir-fried lima beans with it, although there are lots of other options -- unfortunately, they almost all take longer to cook than the salmon. Of course, there is much more you can do with salmon. I've had several guests tell me that Barbara Tropp's Clear-Steamed Salmon with Ginger-Black Bean Vinaigrette was the most delicious meal they had ever had. The ingredient list can be daunting -- my secret is Chef Chow's Szechuan Hot Bean Paste, which as far as I can tell is no longer sold (I've bought two jars in my life, both in NJ, one when I lived there in the early 1980s, the other when I moved back in the late 1990s -- I use it sparely but I'm almost out). But the techniques are pretty straightforward: marinate the salmon, steam it (over onion and spinach), mix up a big bowl of vinaigrette in the food processor, and spoon it over the steamed fish. [5] I don't think I've ever made catfish from a recipe. I grew up on fried catfish, some of which I personally caught (well, not many). So I can do that, but nowadays what I prefer is dredge it in flour, sautee it in olive oil infused with a couple crushed cloves of garlic, and season with salt and pepper. Usually serve that with pasta. In fact, add some preserved lemon peel, chopped garlic, and capers to the oil I cooked the fish in and use it to sauce the pasta. Actually, you dump the pasta into the pan, put the fish on top, spritz it with lemon juice, and garnish with parsley. Jenkins' book has become my go-to standard for Mediterranean, although I also use Claudia Roden, Paula Wolfert, Sarah Woodward, and lately Yotam Ottolenghi -- also Penelope Casas for Spanish, Marcella Hazan for Italian, and Tess Mallos for Greek and Middle Eastern. (Whoa! Just checked those names and discovered that the latter three, all in their 70s, died in 2012-13. Roden and Wolfert are also in their 70s. Don't know about Woodward, whose short but well-illustrated Classic Mediterranean Cuisine is a perfect first book on the subject -- and my still-best sources for a dozen or more recipes I've made many times, from Paella Valenciana to Imam Bayildi). Someone once told me that if you can read a cookbook, you can make anything. I would like to think I've shown that to be true. Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, December 28, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 26017 [25987] rated (+30), 396 [394] unrated (+2). Ratings down a bit due to the holidays -- I cooked traditional family fare for my sister and nephew on Xmas Eve, then next day drove out to a nearby farm for dinner with a cousin and his wife's family -- and also due to the Pazz & Jop ballot deadline. After kicking some things around, I filed the following ballot a day early:
I'm reasonably satisfied with the albums list, although you might note that the Threadgill album is higher (6 vs. 9) on my official 2015-in-progress list than several non-jazz albums on the ballot, and four more jazz albums are on the list ahead of Heems:
I don't like the idea that Pazz & Jop should be the non-jazz (actually, rock/rap-only) forum it effectively is, but I've already touted the jazz records above in the Jazz Critics Poll, but at the moment felt like spreading the action around a bit. (Actually, I doubt that I'll be the only person voting for Schweizer/Bennink or Threadgill in Pazz & Jop, and might not have been the only one for Reed and Lightcap, although I will be surprised if any of the others clear a vote.) I've been keeping separate Jazz and Non-Jazz EOY lists for several years now, but I don't think I've ever skewed the scales before. This may just be a temporary aberration, but it also has something to do with the way I've been working, which keeps me from really falling in love with practically any of the records I've been recommending. At this point, I still only have two full-A records for 2015 (whereas Christgau has 9 plus 1 A+, not counting anything he has in reserve, and Tatum has 7 plus 3 A+, not counting Courtney Barnett [number 4 on his P&J ballot]). I did manage to play six of my ballot picks this week, but didn't move any of them up from A- to A -- most years I move 4-5 up, so I can't say if this is the records or me. (I also rechecked 4 albums I had filed in the B+ range, all records that Christgau had A-listed, and did move three up to A-, which helps even out the Jazz/Non-Jazz lists -- currently 71 to 59. The straggler was Jamie XX's In Colour, certainly a fine album but not enough so to get me to do all the associated paperwork.) I also replayed the consensus record of the year, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, but never gave it all the time it seems to demand. And while I flagged it as a very solid A- the first time I streamed it, it's never cohered enough to move on up. No chance it won't win Pazz & Jop -- it's way ahead (577-381-320-285) in my EOY List Aggregate, and no other record has any late momentum like D'Angelo's Black Messiah last year, or any identifiable demographic advantage -- so it felt like it would be a wasted vote. So I nudged Heems above it: not sure it's the better album, but it might be, and is the more interesting choice. Among other things, it makes for two Asian-American rappers on my list. (For what it's worth, Heems will do better in P&J than it has in my EOY List Aggregate: its support is almost exclusively concentrated among Christgau's Expert Witnesses, who amount to a block of 20-30 voters. The effect should be about midway between Wussy and Withered Hand in 2014, where Wussy rose from 66 to 24, and Withered Hand from 100 to 92, but note that I'm working with final metafile tallies for 2014, which already include a lot of individual ballots from the Expert Witness poll. Currently I only have a few of them -- and haven't counted any points for Christgau, Tatum, or myself -- so Heems at 142 is probably a bit better than Withered Hand was at the same stage. I predict it will get 15-20 P&J votes and end up in the 50-70 range. Last year Wussy got 29 and Withered Hand got 8.) On the other hand, I have no confidence in my songs list. I almost didn't bother, but wanted to tout Chris Lightcap's Velvet Underground cover -- especially since I skipped over his album. It then occurred to me that I could pick songs from other albums that missed the cut -- Lamar, of course, plus Furman, Gwenno, Monroe, and especially Tuxedo (the year's most memorable single). I looked a couple friends' lists, and watched 10-15 videos (more than I've done all year), picking out songs that seemed good enough. I wound up with two non-album singles that Dan Weiss likes, and one choice cut from an album that otherwise I don't much care for (Jason Derulo's). Also the standout track from one of the few EPs I graded A-. Certainly a decent list, but one that I'm sure could have been improved had I spent a few more days checking things out, especially if I considered cuts from my top-ten albums ("Free People" would easily have made the list, and very likely "Flag Shopping"). I sort of get the appeal of "best songs" lists on two levels: I grew up in an era when we first heard music on AM radio (KLEO was my station) and bought 45s, so it seems perfectly natural to me to segue "Wild Thing," say, into "Woolly Bully." Until 1965 I didn't even have a record player that could play LPs, and I doubt that I bought twenty of them through the end of the decade. On the other hand, by the early 1970s we came to think of LP sides as integral works of art, meant to be consumed whole, and from 1970 up to about 1977 I doubt I bought a single 45 -- good chance the record that broke that streak was "God Save the Queen." I also approve, at least in principle, of the idea of programming your own playlists, something that home computers made accessible to the masses. However, I've never gotten the hang of the technology, not so much because I find it incomprehensible as because it doesn't suit the way I work. Even streaming, I rarely bother with anything but album-length chunks, because that still makes sense to me as the unit to write about -- and for today, at least, I mostly listen to write. I can imagine at some point turning back inward and starting to reduce my collection to its rare finest moments, but that's mostly to eliminate clutter. (At some point I suspect all collections decay into clutter.) Nor am I sure that constant exposure to brilliance would be such a good thing. I suspect I'd get too used to it. The other thing that bothers me about "best songs" is how much they are tied to videos. I hated MTV when it started to exercise its tyranny over popular music in the 1980s. My initial complaint was how it added an extraneous and expensive obstacle for music to reach the public. Moreover, it worked to select popular music by how photogenic the musicians were. Of course, since then music videos have been democratized (and amateurized) with the usual mixed bag of results. My research this year consisted of nothing more than watching Youtube videos, which were equally divided between nonsensical collages and Bollywood-worthy dance numbers. (Conceiving singles as studio product, I didn't bother with the third great class: live performance documents.) So inadvertently I bought into the notion that it's not a song unless it comes packaged in a video. I've also been invited to participate in El Intruso's 8th Creative Music Critics Poll. I think it's based in Argentina, and the focus is avant-jazz. About half of the 40+ critics are Americans I recognize. Instructions call for no more than three answers in each category. Most of those categories are instruments, which raises all sorts of awkward problems -- it's hard enough to rank albums, but I don't really believe in ranking people, so the names I jotted down below are just ones I thought could use some extra recognition. Also note that the instruments themselves weren't created equal: I could reel off the names of twenty tenor saxophonists (and fifteen altoists) before I could get to a third soprano or baritone. Also, while there are quite a few good acoustic bassists who also play electric, I hardly ever recognize them as such. Final point is I spent less than half an hour doing this, mostly by looking back over last year's notes file. Anyhow, this is what I sent in:
It would, I think, be more interesting if they did more of a record poll, especially if the ballots could extend beyond a top ten. Probably the first week ever where everything in the newly rated list came from streaming. I did play several records in the new jazz queue but didn't get around to writing them up. My first impression is that Allen Lowe's In the Diaspora of the Diaspora would have easily added up to an A- had he packed them into a box, but releasing them individually is making me do more work. Steve Swell's Hommage ŕ Bartok is also certainly an A-, but he begged me to write "more than your usual" and nothing slows me down like that. Also spent a lot of time adding to the EOY List Aggregate files, but have no time left to write about them. Maybe next week, or when Pazz & Jop comes out (January 13). As of this moment I have 318 lists compiled, referencing 3126 albums. Still working on it, but I have a pretty good idea how it all sorts out (Kendrick Lamar, Sufjan Stevens, Courtney Barnett, Jamie XX, Father John Misty, Tame Impala, Grimes, Julia Holter, Bjork, Sleater-Kinney, Vince Staples, Kamasi Washington, Joanna Newsom, Oneohtrix Point Never; 4-5-6 are pretty close but fairly stable; 9-12 are even closer and more volatile; 14 is gaining, but has too much ground to make up to bump 13; the rest of the top-20 are Kurt Vile, Carly Jepsen, Blur, Drake, Alabama Shakes, Viet Cong, and they're still likely to change). New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, December 21, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25987 [25944] rated (+43), 394 [381] unrated (+13). The Tenth Annual Jazz Critics Poll, which Francis Davis started at the Village Voice, then after the Voice tanked kept going first at Rhapsody and now at NPR, appeared today. In 2009 Voice Music Editor Rob Harvilla asked me to compile and host all of the critic ballots, and I've continued doing so through all of the subsequent gyrations. Deadline for the ballots was last Sunday, and Davis forwarded them to me on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I putzed around and didn't start on them until Saturday. That wiped out my weekend and, well, today, and I still have work to do. Among other things, I figured out a system for double checking the collated ballots against Francis' tabulations. When I first got all of the data plugged in, my diff-checker spit out 480 lines of discrepancies -- roughly 120 of about 650 albums that received votes. Since then, one of the main things I've been doing has been to whittle down that discrepancy list. As I write this, I have it down to five more records that I have to check. It's fair to say that about half of those have been errors in Francis' original tabulation, and half were problems I introduced during data entry. A second category of changes has to do with a sort of canonic representation of artist/title/label names. Francis doesn't like spurious group names attached to artist names so, say, The Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet becomes Gabriel Alegria, Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance is Steve Coleman, and Satoko Fujii Tobira is just Satoko Fujii. He also doesn't like slashes for multiple artists -- says they mean either/or -- so two artists use & and three or more use dashes, even when the album itself uses slashes (although more likely they just use space). Part of the reason is no doubt practical: when 147 meticulous critics and supposedly literate writers jot down lists, the sheer quantity of variations they come up with is mind-boggling. Still, several of these canonicalizations are arguable, and some are far from clear. At some point in the ballot collating process I get to comparing the data hacked according to his rules with a similar set of data I've been accumulating (with different rules) all year long. Unfortunately, that point is still in the future -- probably when I get around to feeding a fair amount of ballot data into my own EOY List Aggregate file (which, by the way, has significantly less jazz data now than it has in recent years, mostly because so few jazz critics have been using the JJA website to post their lists/ballots). Still, if I had some magical way to filter out the non-majority-jazz lists, my data would have reasonably well anticipated the JCP results. (Kamasi Washington and Matana Roberts would have lost most, but far from all, of their support, and Colin Stetson would have lost everything -- curiously enough Stetson's is my favorite of those three.) The main blip I see is that Jack DeJohnette ran much better in JCP, while Vijay Iyer (and JD Allen) ran a bit better in my sparser data. (I haven't weighed my own grades into my data yet, so that isn't a factor.) There are two main pages at NPR to look at:
Much more data is available at my site, including complete totals for all five categories (new, reissue/historical, vocal, debut, Latin jazz) and complete ballots for all of the 147 participating critics. This site isn't built on a full-fledged database, but the data is internally tabled up in such a way that one need only write a little more software to organize it like, say, the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop section: one would need a script to list out all of the critics who voted for any given album, and another to fetch the ballot for any single critic -- plus a lot of extra links in each file, and some CSS to present those links. I actually wrote the second script in a couple hours last year, so critics could link to their own ballots (mine is here) without confusing the issue by picking up other critics' ballots. Unfortunately, I only think about writing things like this when I'm up to my ears facing an annual deadline, stuck with more pressing things to do. I don't have time to comment on the results, other than to make the obvious point that I'm not much of a fan of either of the winning records (although it's been quite some time since I played either; I have them at low- and middle-B+ grades). I've liked Mahanthappa's work much more in the past, but don't get (or find interesting) his postbop take on Charlie Parker (my issue is definitely not that I find the record too bebop-y). And while I enjoyed Schneider's new album more than her previous much-hyped work, her ornate expressionism has scant appeal for me. I'm not real disappointed to see these two records doing so well: I figure they're just different strokes for different folks, especially ones grounded in classical but open to the greater vitality of postmodern jazz. (I, on the other hand, have always detested classical music, and look to jazz that builds on the rowdy subversion I first found in rock and roll.) The next two finishers don't do much for me either. For Jack DeJohnette, the problem is (most likely) purely business. Since ECM stopped servicing me with actual product, I've had to make do with time-limited download links I often don't get to in time, and I missed the DeJohnette link -- and didn't get a second chance, despite several requests. So I simply haven't heard a record that looks great on paper and has a terrific reputation. Then there's the matter of Kamasi Washington: again I didn't get a copy -- a real practical problem for something that fills up three CDs -- again despite a further request. However, I was able to hear it on Rhapsody, and recently gave it a second complete spin. I do like him as a saxophonist, and the '70s-throwback-vibe that Davis complains about is one of my favorite jazz era-niches, but I don't get off on the electro-flavored choral goop that fills most of the first two discs. (Complicit in all of this is Steve Ellson, aka Flying Lotus, whose own work leaves me cold.) In the end, I only had two of the top 10 albums on my A-list (with this week's bonanza 71 albums deep -- Threadgill and Lightcap were also on my ballot). Add one more for 11-20 (Ryan Truesdell), a clump of five in 21-30 (Mike Reed, Matthew Shipp, Amir ElSaffar, Liberty Ellman, Nicole Mitchell). Three for 31-40 (Irčne Schweizer, MOPDtK, Barry Altschul). Two in 41-50 (Noah Preminger, Tomeka Reid). Four more for 51-60 (Erik Friedlander, James Brandon Lewis, Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble, Joe Lovano). It thins out further from there, mostly because the number of records I haven't heard grows. For instance, only six more from 61-100 (Ochion Jewell, Milford Graves, Alex von Schlippenbach, William Parker, Satoko Fujii, Michael Blake -- Steve Swell's record just came in the mail). Only seven from 101-200 (Josh Berman, Charles McPherson, Nate Wooley, Ray Anderson, Tomas Fujiwara, Rich Halley, Chico Freeman). No doubt I'll find more good records by sniffing around the ballots -- actually, more so than by looking at the totals. While working on the ballots, I spent my time streaming items I found there, and indeed came up with two A- records this week (Ray Anderson and Tomeka Reid; the Bobby Bradford/John Carter archival release was already in my CD queue, as were voteless discs by François Carrier and and Andrew Jamieson; Daniel Rosenboom also got no votes, but was recommended in another EOY list somewhere; same for Max Richter, which I gather is classical music, but it sure fooled me). New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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