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Monday, March 23, 2015

Music: Current count 24735 [24701] rated (+34), 409 [420] unrated (-11).

Eighteen records below come from Rhapsody. I played Kendrick Lamar and Modest Mouse three times: one clicked, the other did not. I see that Christgau has given Modest Mouse six A- grades plus a relatively long ungraded review (not in his Dean's List so presumably B+ or less). I have them with four A- records (including the one Christgau missed), so I'm less of a fan but not unable to tune into their shade of alt. This one just strikes me as real patchy.

Also played Vijay Iyer three times, also on the computer because ECM -- once the best-bankrolled label in jazz -- has lately gotten cheap. I'm often hard pressed to explain why I like some piano trios and less so others (unless there's a lot of crashing involved, often the case with Irène Schweizer or Satoko Fujii), but I usually know (as I did with Iyer's two previous albums with this trio) but this time I didn't. I'm a bit bothered that in recent lists both Jason Gubbels and Chris Monsen -- two critics who usually line up very closely with me -- picked Break Stuff as among the best jazz albums so far this year, and I'm always aware that listening on the computer is far from ideal. But I feel like I gave Iyer a fair shot, and besides I have a bigger disagreement with Gubbels and Monsen: Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls, number 3 and 1 respectively, a record I dislike far more than the B+(*) I gave it suggests. Iyer and Mahanthappa have huge reputations I mostly agree with (in my database, Iyer has 10 A- grades and Mahanthappa has 5, plus each has one full A). Otherwise I scoured the lists for records I hadn't heard (6/16 from Gubbels, 2/6 Monsen). Checked out DRKWAV and Makaya McCraven from Gubbels list, and have them at B+(***).

More surprising for me is that only one of the eleven jazz albums on my 2015 A-list is on either list: Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (my #1, #2 on Gubbels). The others:

2. Schlippenbach Trio: Features (Intakt)
3. Joe Fiedler Trio: I'm In (Multiphonics Music)
4. Charles McPherson: The Journey (Capri)
5. John O'Gallagher Trio: The Honeycomb (Fresh Sound New Talent) *
6. Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (TUM, 2CD)
7. Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (TUM)
8. Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (Blue Note/ArtistShare)
9. Jim Snidero: Main Street (Savant)
10. Katie Thiroux: Introducing Katie Thiroux (BassKat)
11. Oliver Lake/William Parker: To Roy (Intakt)

I expect most of them will get there eventually. One curious thing about this list is that all of my A-list jazz has come actual CDs (some in curious advance packaging), and none from Rhapsody or downloads. (All four of my non-jazz A-list records are from Rhapsody.) I've rated 19 jazz records this year based on a computer source: 6 ***, 7 **, 4 *, 1 B, 2 B-. The grade breakdown for physical jazz CDs: 11 A-, 22 ***, 29 **, 21 *, 12 B, 3 B- -- similar curve aside from the shutout at the top. One might conclude I'm susceptible to bribes. Maybe I just tend to appreciate the effort. Or maybe there's a selection effect, where people send me things I'm more likely to like (and skip things I'm more likely to dis). Or maybe it's just the speakers and the audio quality.

Robert Christgau's 2014 Dean's List has finally appeared at BN Review. He came up with 63 records, for some reason omitting Steve Reich's Radio Rewrite (rated A- on Jan. 30, same date as two other list items) and Angola Soundtrack 2 (A- on Mar. 13, same date as Aby Ngana Diop). Only one record on the list hasn't been reviewed in Expert Witness: Sunny Sweeney's Provoked. He offers some excuses for the shorter-than-usual list -- he's come up with close to 90 in recent full-employment years, and slacked off toward 60 during a previous CG hiatus -- then concludes: "Maybe the field is thinning out, or maybe the downtick is a blip." My own experience was that I came up with an all-time record 170+ A-list albums released in 2014, so I can only conlcude that the music is there if you have the time and tenacity to dig it out. The industry's bottom line may suck, but there's no evidence that lack of incentive is keeping musicians from making good music. And with streaming, more music is probably accessible to more people than ever before.

On the other hand, I can't say anything hopeful about incentives for writing about music.

Another deadline snuck up on me, so no Twitter reviews this week.

New records rated this week:

• Oren Ambarchi: Quixotism (2014, Editions Mego): [r]: B+(**)
• Antoine Berjeaut: Wasteland (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(*)
• Dewa Budjana: Hasta Karma (2014 [2015], Moonjune): [cd]: B+(*)
• Clem Snide: Girls Come First (2015, Zaphwee): [r]: B+(**)
• Dahi Divine: The Element (2013 [2015], Right Direction): [cd]: B+(**)
• Stephan Crump/Mary Halvorson: Secret Keeper (2013 [2015], Intakt): [cdr]: B+(**)
• DRKWAV: The Purge (2015, Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(***)
• John Fedchock Quartet: Live: Fluidity (2013 [2015], Summit): [cd]: B+(***)
• Janice Friedman Trio: Live at Kitano (2011 [2015], CAP): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gang of Four: What Happens Next (2015, Metropolis): [r]: B+(*)
• Maxfield Gast: Ogo Pogo (2014 [2015], Militia Hill): [cd]: B+(**)
• Colleen Green: I Want to Grow Up (2015, Hardly Art): [r]: B
• Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
• Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope): [r]: A-
• Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm: Spark (2014 [2015], Water Street Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• The Mavericks: Mono (2015, Valory): [r]: B+(**)
• Makaya McCraven: In the Moment (2014 [2015], International Anthem): [bc]: B+(***)
• Modest Mouse: Strangers to Ourselves (2015, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Raoul: The Spanish Donkey (2014 [2015], Rare Noise): [cdr]: B
• Sachal: Slow Motion Miracles (2014 [2015], Okeh): [cdr]: B
• Benny Sharoni: Slant Signature (2014 [2015], Papaya): [cd]: B+(**)
• Alex Sipiagin: Balance 38-58 (2014 [2015], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
• Bjørn Solli: Aglow: The Lyngør Project Vol. 1 (2013 [2015], Lyngør): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jacky Terrasson: Take That (2014 [2015], Impulse): [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Turre: Spiritman (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Unhinged Sextet: Clarity (2014 [2015], OA2): [cd]: B

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

• David Borden: Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments (1981 [2015], Spectrum Spools): [r]: B+(***)
• James Clay: The Kid From Dallas: Tenorman (1956-57 [2015], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
• Connie Converse: How Sad, How Lovely (1954 [2015], Squirrel Thing): [r]: B+(**)
• Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness (1989-98 [2015], Strut): [r]: B+(**)

Old records rated this week:

• Milford Graves: Percussion Ensemble With Sunny Morgan (1965 [2003], ESP-Disk): [r]: B+(*)
• Randy Weston: Blues to Africa (1974, Arista/Freedom): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Isaac Darche: Team & Variations (Challenge): April 14
• Kansas: Miracles Out of Nowhere (Epic/Legacy, DVD+CD)
• Kaze: Uminari (Circum-Libra): May 5
• Jason Miles/Ingrid Jensen: Kind of New (Whaling City Sound)

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Sunday, March 22, 2015

The top story of last week's news cycle was Israel's elections for a new parliament (Knesset). Many people hoped that the voters would finally dispose of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the last minutes "Bibi" swung hard to the racist right and wound up with a six-seat plurality, mostly at the expense of small parties nominally to the right of Likud. That still leaves Netanyahu only half way to forming a new Knesset majority coalition, but few observers see that as a problem, although it probably means further concessions to the "religious" parties -- Shas, United Torah, etc. Best place to start reading about this is Richard Silverstein: Israeli Election Post-Mortem: Rearranging the Deck Chairs:

In shreying about the Arab masses running to polling places and foreign governments funneling shovels-full of cash to topple him, he appealed to the worst devils of Israel's nature, to turn Lincoln's quotation on his head.

The results cannot but worsen the growing rancidness of the Likud vision of contemporary Israel in the noses of many Israelis, Diaspora Jews and the world at large. There is a growing sense that Israel cannot get itself out of the mess it's in.

Some other links on Israel:

• Robert Fantina: Netanyahu's victory - what is the cost? Netanyahu, of course, figures there should be none, as he's already walked back many of the inflammatory things he said to rally Israel's right to his election cause. If there were any doubts that he is a liar, someone who will say whatever it takes under any circumstances, that should have been dispelled, especially if you add the Boehner speech to what he said before and after election. There is no doubt that more and more people are noticing this -- especially previous supporters of Israel who are becoming embarrassed at what their fantasy has turned into. But the campaign not only haunts Netanyahu, the election taints the voters. By re-electing Netanyahu, Israel's voters have shown that they're unwilling to do anything to change course. Therefore, only other nations can help Israel change course. We've nudged closer to that realization, but the US in particular probably isn't there yet. Still, every new event will be seen through the prism of this election.
• Allison Deger: Meet the Knesset members from the Joint List: as I look at these pictures, I'm reminded of Bill Clinton's promise to appoint a cabinet "that looks like America looks."
• Richard Silverstein: Israel's Election: Bibi and Blood in the Water: Starts with Netanyahu's pre-election press conference statement, then adds, "Bibi is runnin' scared." Post-election we know that his hysteria worked, saving Likud from finishing second to "Just Not Bibi." Not sure this is helpful, but Annie Robbins: An American translation of Netanyahu's racist get out the vote speech translates Netanyahu's screed into an American political context (replacing "Arab" with "black," "right wing" and "Likud" with "Republican," "Labor" with "Democrats," "Israel" with "United States"). That may help you understand just how far Israeli political culture has sunk, and why certain Americans are so gung ho about getting the US to emulate Israel more, but you'll miss some nuances: e.g., Democrats in the US welcome the support of blacks and aren't ashamed to appoint a couple to cabinet posts and such, Israel's Labor Party (aka The Zionist Camp) wouldn't dare do anything like that. Indeed, their fondness of "the two-state solution" is more often presented as a way to separate Jewish Israelis from Arabs.
• Josh Marshall: Bibi: Wait, the Arabs Love Me!: Netanyahu starts to explain away his recent racist comments, including extracts from an interview for American ears (with Andrea Mitchell).
• Jonathan Alter: Bibi's Ugly Win Will Harm Israel: "Netanyahu came back from the dead by doing something politicians almost never do -- predicting his own defeat. He told base voters that he would lose if they didn't abandon far-right-winger Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayeudi Party and flock back to Likud. Instead of trying to hide his desperation, he flaunted (or contrived) it, to great political effect, winning by several seats more than expected." Something not often talked about is how often right-wingers have to appeal to liberal values to cover up their own inadequacies. Thus someone like Netanyahu has to talk about his desire for peace and security, or even something as specific (and easily disproven) as his commitment to providing infrastructure for Arab Citizens of Israel, even while making such laudable goals impossible. That they get away with it is because their platitudes are so universal they are rarely questioned. Even rank hypocrisy is often excused as mere incompetence. GW Bush, for instance, is famous for his failed wars, his imploded economy, his gross incompetence after Hurricane Katrina -- an embarrassing string of bad luck, as no one would dare suggest that his results were intended. But really, those results were entirely predictable given his worldview. Likewise, Netanyahu's repeated failures to make any progress whatsoever toward peace and justice have been deliberate, and in a sense heroic.
• Alex Kane: J Street's fall from relevance: "In a postelection statement [Jeremy] Ben-Ami said J Street would continue to stand 'for an end to occupation, for a two-state solution and for an Israel that is committed to its core democratic principles and Jewish values.' It's a nice sentiment but one that is out of touch with the facts on the ground, as Netanyahu's final days of campaigning revealed."
• David Shulman: Israel: The Stark Truth: "Mindful of Netanyahu's long record of facile mendacity, commentators on the left have tended to characterize these statements as more dubious 'rhetoric'; already, under intense pressure from the United States, he has waffled on the question of Palestinian statehood in comments directed at a foreign, English-speaking audience. But I think that, for once, he was actually speaking the truth in that last pre-election weekend -- a popular truth among his traditional supporters."
• Anshel Pfeffer: Netanyahu stoked primal fears in Israel: "Netanyahu, in his own tiny bubble of privilege and sycophancy, was on the verge of losing the election. But he emerged in time to stoke the primal fears of his electorate of their fate. It was a destructive tactic that took advantage of racism and ignorance and jeopardised Israel's diplomatic position within the international community. It won the election but has divided Israel like never before."
• Ryan Rodrick Beller: To evangelicals, Zionism an increasingly tough sell: When the British invaded Palestine and set up their "home for the Jewish people" there, about 10% of the native population were Christians -- communities dating from the Crusades or even earlier. To the Zionist Yishuv, however, those Christians were just Arabs, same as the Muslims. It's always been curious how completely American evangelicals sided with the Zionists against their own co-religionists. The standard explanation had to do with seeing Israel's ingathering of Jews as a precondition for the Apocalypse. That always struck me as sick and demented, and anti-semitic seeing as how the Jews are destroyed in the end while the true believers ascend to heaven. But this story suggests that a big part of the explanation is sheer ignorance, changed when evangelicals learn of how Palestinian Christians are treated by Israel.
• Juan Cole: Obama with Drama: Translating his cojmments on Israel's Netanyahu from the Vulcan: And not exactly into ordinary English, more like Cole calls "Bones-speak": "Netanyahu's attitude toward Palestinian-Israelis makes 1960s Southern governors like George Wallace and Orval Faubus look like effing Nelson Mandelas in comparison. He's creating a Jim Crow atmosphere."
• Philip Weiss: Who can save Israel now?: "Yaniv was almost in tears. When will the liberal Zionists help Yaniv and call for real outside pressure? Last night Peter Beinart, the leading liberal Zionist, tweeted a comment by Rep. Adam Schiff on CNN that from now on the US must not veto Palestinian statehood resolutions in the Security Council. Beinart is rising to the occasion, making his way toward BDS."
• Jeff Halper: Netanyahu's victory marks the end of the two-state solution: "No one can be happy when racism and oppression win the day. In a wider perspective, however, the election may represent a positive game-changer. Not that anything has really changed, but finally the fig-leaf that allowed even liberal Israeli apologists to argue that the two-state solution is still possible has been removed. [ . . . ] Since Israel itself eliminated the two-state solution deliberately, consciously and systematically over the course of a half-century, and since it created with its own hands the single de facto state we have today, the way forward is clear. We must accept the ultimate "fact on the ground," the single state imposed by Israel over the entire country, but not in its apartheid/prison form. Israel has left us with only one way out: to transform that state into a democratic state of equal rights for all of its citizens."

Weiss also quotes the Zionist Camp activist Yaniv as saying "We need a Mandela." The problem is more like Israel can't even come up with a De Clerk. (Arguably Yitzhak Rabin auditioned for the part, but he couldn't deliver, partly because he didn't face the demographics and worldwide ostracism white South Africa faced, and partly because he got killed before he could rise to the situation -- if indeed he could.) Still, nobody remembers De Clerk as a great man, partly because his hands were plenty dirty before he relinquished power, partly because Mandela took the glory when he showed such grace and dignity in assuming power.

Still, Israel's situation isn't exactly analogous to De Clerk's. It's not that the Apartheid metaphor isn't applicable. If anything, Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is more rigorous, terrifying, and dehumanizing than anything South Africa did. And it's only a matter of time until most of the world sees Israel's Occupation as a gross affront to human rights, peace, and justice, and takes action to isolate and ostracize Israel. But the demographics will never be equivalent: whites in South Africa amounted to no more than 15% of the population, whereas Jews are a majority within Greater Israel, and that majority could be grown by lopping off territory with large concentrations of Palestinians (most easily, Gaza). Sure, free return of Palestinian refugees from 1947-49 might tip the scales, but realistically that's not going to happen.

This demographic position gives Israel's leaders options, but time and again they've chosen to maintain the status quo, at the cost of continued strife and insecurity. They've done this partly because they've psyched themselves into both into believing they'll always live in peril -- that the world will never accept them as peaceable neighbors -- and into thinking they will always win. (This mentality was amply illustrated in Tom Segev's 1967, which showed how terrified Israeli civilians were of impending war and how utterly confident Israel's generals were of their victory.)

History also gives Israel's leaders options. The Zionist movement is now 135 years old, more than a century has passed since Britain's Balfour Declaration opened up Jewish immigration, and the state of Israel has existed for 67 years, under its current borders for 48 years (aside from returning Sinai to Egypt in a deal that established that Israel could coexist with a neighboring Arab state). Fifty years ago one could imagine Israel meeting the fate of Algeria, but no one believes that now. By 2001, all Arab states were willing to recognize Israel in exchange for a deal which would create a Palestinian state from the territory Israel seized in 1967. The PLO had already agreed to that, and Hamas has since come to that position. Only Israeli greed and intransigence has prevented a peace deal from happening. Well, that and the gullibility of American political leaders, who for one reason of another have been spineless when they needed to stand up to Israel.

Netanyahu's great value to Israel has always been his ability to manipulate US opinion -- something he's been known to brag about, unseemly as that may be -- but lately he bound his fate to the Republican Party. In doing so he has started to alienate Democratic supporters of Israel, but more than that he has opened up a mental association between Israeli and Republican policies -- militarism, racism, harsh justice, targeted assassinations, an omnipotent security state, increasing economic inequality, and much more.

I'll try to write more later about what should be done, but for now I just want to leave you with a warning. Unless something is done to correct the trends we're seeing in Israel, the situation there will continue to grow more desperate and unjust, and unless the US can break its tail-wags-dog subservience to Israel we will wind up in the same dystopia.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Roughly speaking, the same record count this time as the last two, but it took me a little over four weeks this time vs. three before, so maybe I'm slowing down. But part of that is that this is the first column that's mostly 2015 releases (88/113, or 78%), and 2015 itself seems to be starting a bit slow. I suspect this is because we don't yet have the benefit of year-end lists, plus the number of critics that I regularly consult is way down this year. I currently have 14 new A-list records this year, and they break down: 10 jazz, 2 hip-hop, 1 dance pop, 1 quasi-country. Most years split about 50% jazz, 50% non-jazz. The imbalance this year probably because I have my own resources for jazz (all 10 so far are records sent to me; I've also checked out 13 jazz albums on Rhapsody or via downloads, but nothing very impressive yet; I listened to all 4 of the non-jazz A- albums on Rhapsody).

These are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on February 13. Past reviews and more information are available here (6157 records).

Recent Releases

Nancy Ajram: Nancy 8 (2014, In2musica): Lebanese pop star, cut her first album in 1998 at 15 and this seems to be her 9th, her previous album (Nancy 7 or 7 or N. 7 -- same variations show up here) having sold some eight million units (more than half in Egypt, where it went 9x Platinum). I feel like I should hedge on such an obvious SFFR, but even the synth-strings resound, the ballads seem real, and the fast ones hardly need translation -- probably on a par with Shakira. A-

Béatrice Alunni/Marc Peillon: Dance With Me (2014 [2015], ITI): Alunni plays piano and wrote seven (of ten) pieces. Peillon plays bass and wrote the other three. I can't really imagine anyone dancing to this, although the liner illustrations show ballet moves, so I guess that says something about my [lack of] imagination. Pretty, though. B+(*) [cd]

Aphex Twin: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments, Pt. 2 (2015, Warp, EP): Thirteen tracks, 27:52 long, sort of an afterthought to last year's Syro, which makes it much more interesting than the ambience Richard James had peddled for a couple decades. B+(**)

Gene Argel: Luminescent (2014 [2015], Origin): Pianist, based in Maui since 1982; Discogs credits him with a 1980 LP but this seems to be the first since. Quartet, Jay Thomas plays alto and tenor sax and trumpet, adding bright colors to the luxurious flow, with Chuck Deardorf bass and Mark Ivester drums. B+(**) [cd]

Atomic: Lucidity (2014 [2015], Jazzland): Norwegian jazz group with more than a dozen albums since 2000, with a hard bop quintet lineup that leans more toward avant -- horns (Magnus Broo on trumpet and Fredrik Ljungkvist on tenor sax and clarinet) bristling, piano (Håvard Wiik) complex and slightly ornate, the rhythm section (Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass) usually a powerhouse although they lose something here with a change at drums (Hans Hulboekmo replaces Paal Nilssen-Love). B+(***) [cd]

Ab Baars Trio: Slate Blue (2014 [2015], Wig): Dutch tenor saxophonist (also plays clarinet and shakuhachi here), in a trio with Wilbert De Joode (bass) and Martin Van Duynhoven (drums) -- Baars' primary group dating back to 1990. A little mellow as these things go, a mood that suits this group. B+(***) [cd]

Ab Baars Trio & NY Guests: Invisible Blow (2012 [2015], Wig): Fine print notes that this was recorded in Amsterdam, which helps explain why the New Yorkers seem less than optimal: Fay Victor (voice) and Vincent Chancey (french horn). Much of the album is poorly articulated -- more like "Inaudible Blow" -- although Victor can make an impression when she's so inclined. B [cd]

BadBadNotGood & Ghostface Killah: Sour Soul (2015, Lex): Cover isn't clear, but most sources credit the Canadian jazz trio (keyboards, bass guitar, drums) first, ahead of the much more famous rapper. I'll note that three (of twelve) cuts are short instrumentals. I've never been much impressed by BBNG but their tight, noir-ish flow makes this short (32:55) album work -- not that they would hold up half as well without the rhymes. A-

Belle and Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015, Matador): Scottish group, name comes from a children's book, seems most pop when Stuart Murdoch's vocals give way to Sarah Martin's, which doesn't happen often enough here. B+(*)

Daniel Bennett Group: The Mystery at Clown Castle (2014 [2015], Manhattan Daylight): Saxophonist, has done interesting work in the past but this veers toward too much: too much circus, too much shouting, too much flute. Does have a sense of humor, and enjoys a good beat. B+(*) [cd]

Phil Bowler: Phil Bowler & Pocket Jungle (2013 [2014], Zoho Music): Bassist, cut an album in 1984 and now has two, although he has 40+ side credits going back to 1977 including Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jackie McLean, various Marsalises, and the World Bass Violin Quartet. He tried to put this project together 20 years ago, with sax-guitar-drums that went to Grupo Los Santos, and finally got them back for a mild-mannered Afro-Cuban tryst. B+(*)

Andy Brown: Soloist (2014 [2015], Delmark): Guitarist, from Chicago; I first noticed his rather minimalist backing for singer Petra Van Nuis (Far Away Places) and his two-guitar quartet I filed under Howard Alden (Heavy Artillary -- noticing now that I misspelled that title in my database, unless you want to argue that they misspelled it on the cover). This, of course, is solo, that same understated approach left with nothing else to prop it up. Fans of George Van Eps will be more impressed than fans of Joe Pass. B+(*) [cd]

Maureen Budway: Sweet Candor (2014 [2015], MCG Jazz): Jazz singer, died at 51 in January a couple weeks before this first album came out; taught at Duquesne, married to pianist David Budway, who plays here. First thing I really noticed was the "Americana Suite" midway, noticing that "The White Cliffs of Dover" took the prize for patriotic schmaltz, and approving of the segue into "Hard Times Come Again No More" (if not "Say It With Fireworks/Song of Freedom"). The other high point is a "Gershwin Medley" all Americans can be proud of. B+(**) [cd]

Mike Campbell: Close Enough for Love (2014 [2015], ITI): Standards singer, mostly (two originals here), has at least eight albums going back to 1985, his standards here including Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, also Kenny Loggins and Paul Williams. B+(*) [cd]

Harley Card: Hedgerow (2012 [2015], self-released): Toronto-based guitarist, second album although he's also appeared in Hobson's Choice, a group I've heard of. This group includes David French on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Matt Newton on piano/Fender Rhodes, plus either of two bass-drum pairs. Postbop, greased by the guitar. B [cd]

Ernesto Cervini: Turboprop (2014 [2015], Anzic): Drummer, from Toronto, leads a vibrant sextet with two saxes (Tara Davidson and Joel Frahm), trombone, piano, bass, and drums. Cervini wrote four pieces, picked up one from Frahm, with covers like Charlie Parker's "Red Cross" and Keith Jarrett's "The Windup" -- the latter a particularly spirited closer. B+(**) [cd]

Chamber 3: Grassroots (2013 [2015], OA2): Trio, with Christian Eckert on guitar, Steffen Weber on sax, and Matt Jorgensen on drums, although they've sensibly added a fourth wheel, bassist Phil Sparks. All three write, Eckert foremost, and the one cover makes a fair case for adding "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to the jazz repertoire. Not much what you think of as "chamber jazz" (other than tight). B+(*) [cd]

Anat Cohen: Luminosa (2014 [2015], Anzic): One of the top clarinet players in jazz, also plays bass clarinet and tenor sax here -- underrated in that more competitive category. Backed here by piano trio (Jason Lindner, Joe Martin, Daniel Freedman -- with guests periodically kicking the record into a Brazilian orientation: percussionist Gilmar Gomes, guitarist Roberto Lubambo, most importantly two cuts with Choro Aventuroso (accordion, 7-string guitar, pandeiro) that kick this into a higher orbit. B+(***) [cd]

Lainie Cooke: The Music Is the Magic (2014 [2015], Onyx Music): Standards singer, has a couple previous albums; this one, produced by Ralph Peterson, leans more toward jazz than cabaret. Myron Walden adds some sax appeal. B [cd]

Dena DeRose: Travelin' Light: Live in Antwerp, Belgium (2010 [2012], MaxJazz): Rhapsody only has 4 (of 13) tracks, so I (and you) should hedge but they're probably representative. She plays piano and sings standards here (and scats a bit) -- solo, live, some patter and applause, but mostly she holds your focus. B+(*)

Laura Dickinson: One for My Baby: To Frank Sinatra With Love (2013 [2014], Blujazz): Singer, first album under her own name but she has sung in a bunch of Disney animated films. Her selection from the "Sinatra songbook" is much more conventional than, say, Dylan's, as is the big band + strings -- conventional as in tried and proven -- while her voice is distinctive enough. B+(**) [cd]

Dahi Divine: The Element (2013 [2015], Right Direction): Tenor saxophonist from Philadelphia, first album, blows over West African rhythms while pianist Brett Williams smoothing the rough edges. B+(**) [cd]

Justin Townes Earle: Absent Fathers (2015, Vagrant): Quickie sequel to last fall's Single Mothers, more melancholia over broken relationships and busted families. B+(*)

Steve Earle & the Dukes: Terraplane (2015, New West): Reportedly this represents some kind of turn to the blues, but the songs are all originals, and these days down-and-out is just ordinary life. So why not ordinary songs to go with it? Not his best idea, nor does hiding behind the band help much. B+(**)

Silke Eberhard/Dave Burrell: Darlingtonia (2010 [2012], Jazzwerkstatt): Alto saxophonist, from Germany, has a handful of albums since 2002 including a couple by his Dolphy-tribute group Potsa Lotsa. Duet with pianist Dave Burrell, always a treat. B+(***)

Silke Eberhard/Ulrich Gumpert: Peanuts & Vanities (2011 [2012], Jazzwerkstart): Another alto sax-piano duo, but Gumpert doesn't make near the impression of Dave Burrell. Six pieces called "Peanuts" followed by six more called "Vanities," but the former are juxtaposed with two fragments of "Salt Peanuts" and the latter is followed by "The Peanut Vendor." The patterns are interesting enough, just not very exciting. B+(**)

Paul Elwood: Nice Folks (2011 [2015], Innova): Banjo player, graduate of Wichita State University and SUNY Buffalo, teaches in Colorado. Has a previous album called Stanley Kubrick's Mountain Home, which AMG files under classical. This starts out like a folk singalong, then takes off in various directions, including free jazz and deep worldly groove. Calls his band the Invisible Ensemble. Only one I've heard of is percussionist Famoudou Don Moye. B+(***) [cd]

George Ezra: Wanted on Voyage (2014, Columbia): Brit singer-songwriter; cites Dylan, Guthrie, and Leadbelly as inspirations; first album, topped UK charts and peaked at 19 in US. Strikes me as a little heavy-handed for folk-rock. Reviews use the word "spooky"; I'm tempted to add "creepy." B-

Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (2015, Sub Pop): Singer-songwriter Josh Tillman, second album, kind of a big deal in alt/indie circles, had sort of a folkie rep early on but now that he can afford more drums and synths he's over that. But his newfound big production frames a voice I don't find appealing, and when I notice a lyric -- one I jotted down is "let's put a baby in the oven/wouldn't I make the ideal husband?" -- that's usually not a good thing. B

Lupe Fiasco: Tetsuo & Youth (2015, Atlantic): Hip-hop record, his first three were superb (and yes, I include the much-panned Lasers in that list), stretches here are equally brilliant although sometimes the rhymes seem not just forced but downright gymnastic, and elsewhere I have no fucking idea what's going on. B+(*)

Free Nelson Mandoomjazz: Awakening of a Capital (2014 [2015], RareNoise): Sax trio from Scotland, second album -- the first bore the aggrandizing title The Shape of Doomjazz to Come/Saxophone Giganticus and was as audacious as the joke. Sequel seems more modest, with Colin Stewart's fuzzy electric bass riffs more prominent because Rebecca Sneddon's snarling alto sax is less so -- or maybe just less snarling? B+(***) [cdr]

Janice Friedman Trio: Live at Kitano (2011 [2015], CAP): Pianist-singer, has a handful of albums going back to 1993, wrote three (of ten) pieces here and shares a fourth with Frederic Chopin, backed by Ed Howard on bass and Victor Lewis on drums. Has a nice touch and doesn't wear out the voice. B+(*)

Gang of Four: What Happens Next (2015, Metropolis): Leeds post-punk group, released a brilliant debut in 1979, two more very good albums in 1981-82, then bowed out in 1984 after the misnamed Hard, only to revive periodically (in 1991-95, 2005, 2011, now). But where the 2005 reunion brought the original quartet back, now only guitarist Andy Gill remains. First song ("Where the Nightingale Sings") comes up with new ways to tuck noise into the crevices between the beats, suggesting they may still be capable of an A-list album, but they have trouble sustaining that level, and sometimes even lose their sound. B+(*)

Maxfield Gast: Ogo Pogo (2014 [2015], Militia Hill): Saxophonist from Philadelphia. I file him under "jazz-pop" which is ever more off-base, but he likes synth-beats and EWI -- were it not for the saxes I'd move him to "techno." This is mostly electronica with commentary, including digressions on the differences between "serious" and "funny" music. Of course, the world isn't that simple, nor, fortunately, is Gast's music. B+(**) [cd]

Otzir Godot: In- (2014 [2015], Epatto): Finnish drummer, Jouni Koponen, has at least two previous records. This one is solo, the metallic drums most captivating, the more ambient washes of sound less so. B+(**) [cd]

Gramatik: The Age of Reason (2014, Lowtemp): Denis Jasarevic, from Slovenia, has 7 or 8 albums, 3 or 4 EPs since 2008, probably more by the time you read this, produces them cheap -- most likely splices them together on a laptop -- and gives them away, an SFFR if I ever bother, but pleased so far: electronics, of course, but embedded with chunks of hip-hop and rock, nothing obvious (or even particularly identifiable like you find with Girl Talk). B+(**)

Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (2013 [2015], TUM): Graves is an avant-jazz drummer, first appearing on a number of ESP-Disk records 1963-66 (including his own Percussion Ensemble), then rarely from 1969 (Sonny Sharrock's Black Woman) to about 2000, when he started appearing (mostly on Tzadik; 1992's Real Deal, a duo with David Murray, was a rare exception). Laswell is a bassist and producer, more into fusion than free but something of a gadfly around the fringes of respectability. So not a huge surprise that the two would record together, but it is that a bass-drums duo would come up with anything so vibrantly textured. A- [cd]

The H2 Big Band: It Could Happen (2013 [2015], Origin): Big band led by Al Hood (trumpet) and Dave Hanson (piano), with Hanson arranging. Recorded near Los Angeles, credits vary a lot with horns thinning out and/or strings added on some cuts. Four cuts feature singer René Marie, who is very effective. B+(**) [cd]

Ross Hammond: Flight (2014 [2015], Prescott): Jazz guitarist, ninth album since 2003, plays this one solo, using 6-string, 12-string, and acoustic slide for a whiff of blues. Originals, several trad. pieces, "You Are My Sunshine" (which might as well be trad.): "recorded on locations throughout California" -- if not roots, at least digging in. B+(**) [cdr]

Mark Helias Open Loose: The Signal Maker (2014 [2015], Intakt): I screwed up here, originally filing this under Tony Malaby, the saxophonist whose name shows up first left-to-right mid-cover, followed by bassist Helias and drummer Tom Rainey. But when I noticed that Helias wrote all the pieces (with group help on three), I looked a little closer and found the big (but not very distinct) type. Sax trio, smolders ambitiously but never quite ignites. B+(***) [cd]

Eddie Henderson: Collective Portrait (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): Trumpet player, grew up on Miles Davis and never strayed far from his model, even now at 74. Classic hard bop quintet, loud and clear paired with alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, with George Cables rolling the blues riffs on piano. B+(**)

Scott Hesse Trio: The Stillness of Motion (2014 [2015], Origin): Guitarist, based in Chicago after ten years in New York, trio includes Clark Sommers on bass and Makaya McCraven on drums. B+(*)

The Ted Howe Jazz Orchestra: Pinnacle (2013 [2015], Hot Stove): Pianist-composer, although Geoff Haydon takes over the piano slot for most of the album. Slightly less than a conventional big band -- three reeds, three trumpets, two trombones, but includes guitar -- not that the loss is palpable. Cover says "featuring John Patitucci" because the bassist is the only player you're likely to have heard of. B [cd]

I Never Meta Guitar Three (2011-13 [2015], Clean Feed): Back cover adds: "Solo Guitars for the 21st Century." Third such volume Elliot Sharp has produced, eighteen solo pieces by various avant-jazz guitarists -- all electric, no devotees of Reinhardt or Montgomery or for that matter McLaughlin, a few I've heard of and many more I haven't. Scattered, but John King's opener grabs your attention. B+(**) [cd]

Ibeyi: Ibeyi (2015, XL): Twin sisters, Cuban-born, French-raised, Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Diaz, draw on Afro-Cuban roots -- album opens with a "chant to Eleggua" -- but is moderated through trip-hop and the like so much it rarely registers. B

Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (2010-12 [2015], TUM, 2CD): Finnish saxophonist, alto and baritone, plus a few odd instruments here and there (Indian clarinet, Uilleann chanter, nose flute, whistles, percussion). Should be better known, and after this will be. Two discs: the first with William Parker on bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums, pretty much everything an avant-saxophonist could dream of; the second a little leaner, just a duo with Cyrille. A- [cd]

Kitten: Kitten (2014, Elektra): Pop-rock band from LA, lead singer Chloe Chaidez, first album after a couple EPs. Some songs strike me as overly pumped up, although others have a raw edginess that could develop into something. B+(**)

The Susan Krebs Chamber Band: Simple Gifts (2014 [2015], GreenGig Music): Jazz singer, fifth album; none of the songs are originals but they're not really standards either -- title song is Shaker traditional. Band credits: piano (co-producer Rich Eames), woodwinds (Rob Lockhart), percussion, violin/viola -- the latter adds a crucial weepy effect. B+(***) [cd]

Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Always With Us (2010-12 [2014], self-released): South African iscathimiya (Zulu a cappella) group founded in 1974 by Joseph Shabalala with thirty-some albums -- so many and so similar (at least for us non-Zulu speakers) one hardly notices new ones. Still, this one is different: Shabala's late wife Nellie had organized her own female choir and this memorial merges the two group's voices. A-

Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015, Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope): Los Angeles (or should I say Compton?) rapper spins another long (75:17) album, the uneasy path of another good kid in the mad city. Pumped up early on with rejuvenated P-Funk, fades out at the end with what seems like an interview. More here than I'll ever manage to sort out. A-

Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): Bassist, called his second album Bigmouth in 2003 and kept the name. Two tenor saxes (Tony Malaby and Chris Cheek), Craig Taborn on keyboards (mostly Wurlitzer, in case you need a refresher in why he wins those polls), and Gerald Cleaver on drums. Lightcap's originals tend to be strongly pulsed. The one cover is "All Tomorrow's Parties" -- simply magnificent. A- [cd]

Madonna: Rebel Heart (2015, Interscope): Much more anticipated in my world than the new Sleater-Kinney -- I suppose more successful too, but that's all relative: after five plays I've gotten to where I like nearly every song here, but none enough to program it onto a choice singles tape (let alone slip it into The Immaculate Collection). It's all clear, sharp, danceable, even pushes a few envelopes, but risks becoming routine too. Not sure what it means that I like the bonus tracks (at least "Veni Vidi Vici" and "S.E.X.") more than the common ones. B+(***)

Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm: Spark (2014 [2015], Water Street Music): Singer and guitarist, respectively, the former's voice light and whispy, the latter adding a gentle strum that fits the mood perfectly. One Sturm original, the covers include Carole King, James Taylor, and Elvis Costello ("Watching the Detectives"), as well as more standard fare -- including a Jobim a bit too slow. B+(**) [cd]

Nilson Matta: East Side Rio Drive (2014 [2015], World Blue): Brazilian bassist, based in New York, pretty much the go-to guy there for that sort of thing. The underlying groove is little changed since the 1960s, but he gets a wide range of looks by shuffling guests -- front cover list features Cyro Baptista (percussion), Romero Lubambo (guitar), Edsel Gomez (piano), Craig Handy (tenor sax/bass clarinet/flute), Anne Drummond (more flute), Vince Cherico (drums). Also a singer or two, with one song stripped down all the way to acoustic bass. B+(*) [cd]

Chad McCullough & Bram Weijters: Abstract Quantities (2014 [2015], Origin): Trumpet and piano/keyboards, respectively, backed by Piet Verbist on bass and John Bishop on drums, continuing the Seattle/Netherlands balance of the leaders. Postbop, so skilled I played it twice and had nary a complaint, not that I noticed much of anything. B+(*) [cd]

James McMurtry: Complicated Game (2013-14 [2015], Complicated Game): Son of a famous novelist, slowly establishing himself as a serious storyteller in his own right. Nothing here has the instant political cred or (more importantly) musical punch of "We Can't Make It Here" (from Childish Things) or "Cheney's Toy" (from Just Us Kids) but he's smart enough not to blame his hard luck songs on Obama. Several sneak up on you, especially the one about fishing out of season. A-

Chris McNulty: Eternal (2013 [2015], Palmetto): Jazz singer, originally from Australia but based in New York, seventh album since 1990; one original, standards that tend to be treacherously modernist ("A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," "What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life," "Nature Boy," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"). Steve Newcomb's Chamber Ensemble negotiates the twists and turns. B+(*) [cd]

J.D. McPherson: Let the Good Times Roll (2015, New Rounder): Singer-songwriter from Oklahoma, dresses his country impulses up as rockabilly. B+(**)

Myra Melford: Snowy Egret (2013 [2015], Enja/Yellowbird): On my short list for best jazz pianists since her debut in 1990, but this quintet shortchanges her piano for her compositions, centered more on Liberty Ellman's guitar and Stomu Takeishi's bass guitar. Ellman has many fine moments, Ron Miles helps out on cornet, and Tyshawn Shorey is a superb drummer. B+(***) [cd]

Billy Mintz: The 2 Bass Band . . . Live (2014 [2015], Thirteenth Note): Drummer, has appeared on nearly 50 albums since 1977 -- most frequently with Vinny Golia -- but this looks to be his first as leader (notable also that he wrote all the compositions). Group is a tentet with (as advertised) two basses (Cameron Brown and Masa Kamaguchi), four brass (Dave Scott and Ron Horton on trumpet, Brian Drye and Samuel Blaser on trombone), and three reeds (John O'Gallagher, Kenny Berger, Adam Kolker), mostly established names, not quite avant but leaning that way. B+(**)

Modest Mouse: Strangers to Ourselves (2015, Columbia): One of those alt/indie groups from the 1990s which often enough seemed so formally sharp I graded their albums up before I forgot them. After their longest hiatus -- only an EP since 2007 -- they're back, sounding more like Pavement than ever, so upfront about it I have more than my usual reservations. B+(**)

Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Hannover (2014 [2015], Jazzwerkstatt): After five superb studio albums (plus a live shot and whatever you call Blue), they have enough material they can build their live concerts from medleys -- the opener here runs over 30 minutes -- a technique pop stars use to acknowledge hits they don't want to dwell on, although here the intent is less clear. B+(***)

Tisziji Muñoz & Marilyn Crispell: The Paradox of Independence (2014 [2015], MRI): Brooklyn-born guitarist, started in a doo-wop group, worked with Pharoah Sanders in the 1970s, and started recording prolifically around 2000. Recorded live at the Falcon in Marlboro, NY; backed by a bassist and two drummers (one Rakalam Bob Moses), so not limited like a duo. I find Muñoz rather erratic, but the pianist is typically brilliant. B+(**)

Tatsuya Nakatani/Kris Tiner/Jeremy Drake: Ritual Inscription (2012, Epigraph, LP): Percussion, trumpet/flugelhorn, electric guitar, avant jazz from Bakersfield. Not sure whether they sent me the vinyl or a CDR, but the record was in my system as ungraded and when I looked it up I found it on Bandcamp, so that's convenient. Two tracks, one 18:35, the other 13:07, the ground fractured and forever shifting. B+(**) [bc]

Kyle Nasser: Restive Soul (2013 [2015], AISA): Tenor saxophonist (also soprano), first album, all original pieces, backed by guitar-piano-bass-drums, an increasingly standard postbop lineup -- guitar (Jeff Miles) can solo but mostly adds to the harmonic complexity. Plenty of that here. B+(*) [cd]

Hailey Niswanger: PDX Soul (2013-14 [2015], Calmit Productions): Young, blonde tenor saxophonist from Portland, second album, goes full r&b in a couple live sets with a lot of help, including three singers on four songs -- the bluesier the better. While I can't quite describe what she does as honking, she does let it rip. B+(***) [cd]

Not Twice: Flight Plans (2012 [2014], Epigraph, EP): Avant-trumpet player Kris Tiner plus two musicians credited with keyboards and electronics: Jordan Aguirre and Andrew Koeth. The later produce a quasi-ambient background that doesn't offer much traction for the trumpet. Very limited cassette, but short enough (26:46) to be treated as an EP. B [bc]

John O'Gallagher Trio: The Honeycomb (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): Alto saxophonist, a guy who often stands out in a crowd, up close here leading a trio with Johannes Weidenmueller on bass and Mark Ferber on drums. A- [cdr]

Open Field + Burton Greene: Flower Stalk (2012 [2015], Cipsela): Greene's an avant-pianist, recorded a couple ESP albums in the mid-1960s, has regained a limited measure of fame since 2000. He adds notable bite to the Portuguese string trio -- João Carnões on viola, Marcelo dos Reis on guitar, and José Miguel Pereira on double bass. Viola has some bite, too, and guitar and piano are sometimes prepared. B+(***) [cd]

Ahmet Özhan: Gülmira (2014, Esen Muzik): Turkish singer, b. 1950 (or earlier), seems to be slotted under Turkish classical music rather than pop or folk, although we'd file it under World; also has a film career, but I'm not finding a lot of info. The music comes with a lot of beat as well as that classic oriental sway. And no doubt he's an authoritative singer. B+(***)

Lisa Parrott: Round Tripper (2014 [2015], Serious Niceness): Alto and baritone saxophonist from Australia, sister is bassist Nicki Parrott, discography lists three albums as "co-leader" but I think this is the first under her own name. Quintet, with Nadja Noordhuis on trumpet/flugelhorn, Carl Dewhurst on guitar, Chris Lightcap on bass, and Matt Wilson on drums. Mainstream, but the baritone gives it a little extra heft. B+(**) [cd]

Renaud Penant Trio: Want to Be Happy (2014 [2015], ITI Music): Drummer-led piano trio, with Steve Ash on piano and Chris Haney on bass. All standards, divided between jazz themes ("Quasimodo," "Bean and the Boys," Bud Powell, Cedar Walton) and songbook ("Love for Sale," "Autumn in New York," a Jobim, the title tune). B+(**) [cd]

Gretchen Peters: Blackbirds (2015, Scarlet Letter): Country singer-songwriter, close to a dozen albums since 1996 after establishing herself as a Nashville songwriter. Some of this clicks and some doesn't, and it's probably not cost-effective to sort it out further. Reprises the title song at the end, and that much pays off. B+(*)

John Petrucelli Quintet: The Way (2014 [2015], self-released, 2CD): Tenor saxophonist, from New Jersey but based in Pittsburgh, first album but stretched it out. Quintet includes both piano and guitar as well as bass and drums -- no one I've heard of aside from Victor Lewis (guest on three cuts). Originals plus "I Hear a Rhapsody," "Early Autumn," a Monk. Sax bears many influences, starting with Coltrane. B+(*) [cd]

Kate Pierson: Guitars and Microphones (2015, Lazy Meadow Music): B-52s singer goes solo, brings some of the old sound with her but feels a bit narrower -- I guess Fred Schneider added the zingers even though he wasn't the one you wanted to hear. B+(**)

Roberta Piket: Emanation (Solo: Volume 2) (2014 [2015], Thirteenth Note): Pianist with close to a dozen albums since 1997, this one solo, something I almost never get excited about. Two or three originals, standards including "Con Alma" and "Ba Lue Bolivar Ba Lues" and pieces by McPartland and Hancock, winding up with "Fantasy on a Theme by Chopin." B+(*) [cd]

Lucas Pino: No Net Nonet (2013 [2015], Origin): Tenor saxophonist, originally from Phoenix, studied in New York, first album, a nine-piece group that plays smaller but with all the harmonic spots neatly tucked in -- three saxes, trumpet (Max Jodrell takes advantage of the solo space), trombone, guitar, piano, bass, drums. B+(**) [cd]

A Place to Bury Strangers: Transfixiation (2015, Dead Oceans): Sort of a heavy metal shoegaze group -- the latter aspect keeps them focused within a narrow rhythmic range, but rather than adding soft, fuzzy noise they go for the hard stuff. Their formula blows me away for a few minutes, then eventually turns wearing. Your mileage may vary. B+(***)

Potsa Lotsa Plus: Plays Love Suite by Eric Dolphy (2014 [2015], Jazzwerkstatt): Group name comes from a Dolphy composition -- was also the title of Willem Breuker's Dolphy tribute. The core quartet here (Silke Eberhard on alto sax, Patrick Braun on tenor sax, Nikolaus Neuser on trumpet, Gerhard Gschloßl on trombone) previously recorded The Complete Works of Eric Dolphy. I gather "Love Suite" was left out of the earlier album because Dolphy died before he could record it. The "Plus" adds clarinet, tuba, and live electronics. B+(**)

Chris Potter Underground Orchestra: Imaginary Cities (2013 [2015], ECM): The tenor saxophonist's underground thinking first emerged in his quartet's 2006 album. Here he expands the concept to eleven pieces, mostly by piling on stringed instruments -- guitar, bass guitar, a full string quartet -- plus Steve Nelson's vibes and marimba. His orchestral arrangements still don't amount to much, but he remains a tremendous tenor sax soloist. B+(**) [dl]

Prism Quartet: Heritage/Evolution, Volume 1 (2014 [2015], Innova, 2CD): A saxophone quartet -- Timothy McAllister, Taimur Sullivan, Matthew Levy, Zachary Shemon -- been around since 1990 (at least), but their catalog picked up in 2002 and accelerated around 2007, and this is something of a breakout project, as they've invited six better known saxophonists to compose pieces and join in: Steve Lehman, Dave Liebman, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Greg Osby, Tim Ries, and Miguel Zenón. B+(**)

Reggie Quinerly: Invictus (2014 [2015], Redefinition Music): Drummer, originally from Houston, second album, composed everything here but "My Blue Heaven." Warren Wolf's vibes seem to lead here, with Yotam Silberstein's guitar and Christian Sands' piano adding to the frothy lightness. B+(*) [cd]

Nate Radley: Morphoses (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): Guitarist, a mild-mannered mainstream jazz guy, backed by bass (Matt Pavolka) and drums (Ted Poor) with saxophonist Loren Stillman adding some bright splotches of color. B+(*)

John Raymond: Foreign Territory (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): Not his first album but an advance, showcasing his trumpet in front of a very solid rhythm section -- Dan Tepfer (piano), Joe Martin (bass), Billy Hart (drums). Well within contemporary postbop bounds, but pretty sharp for that. B+(**) [cdr]

Dawn Richard: Blackheart (2015, Our Dawn): Aka Dawn Angeliqué, ex-singer in Danity Kane and Diddy-Dirty Money, previous album was Goldenheart. Some interesting beat production here, but I find it cluttered and cranky. B

Denia Ridley & the Marc Devine Trio: Afterglow (2014 [2015], ITI Music): Standards singer, backed by Devine's piano trio, a common formula, but she has a winning voice with just a touch of Holiday, and the songs are dependable friends, front-loaded with Gershwin and Porter, ending with "At Last" and "I Cried for You." B+(***)

Schlippenbach Trio: Features (2013 [2015], Intakt): Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, saxophonist Evan Parker (just tenor this time), and drummer Paul Lovens. I have no idea how many records they've recorded together, but the trio goes back at least to 1972 when they recorded Pakistani Pomade (FMP, reissued by Atavistic in 2003), a "crown" record in the first edition of the Morton-Cook Penguin Guide to Jazz (and since its reissue). I should recheck that record (and whatever else I can find -- Discogs lists twelve Trio albums, and this is my fourth), but this must be one of the most fully realized. A- [cd]

Benny Sharoni: Slant Signature (2014 [2015], Papaya): Tenor saxophonist, born in Israel, parents from Chile and Yemen (to which he attributes his head start in Latin and African rhythms), moved to US in 1986. Second album, mainstream postbop with a Latin lilt, Jim Rotondi on trumpet, both piano and guitar. B+(**) [cd]

Songsmith Collective: Songsmith Collective (2014 [2015], Blujazz): A group of Western Michigan University's jazz students, writing arrangements for various poems (Yeats, Frost, Hughes, WMU professor Traci Brimhall) for nonet plus two singers, under the direction of Dr. Andrew Rathbun -- not a player here but an estimable saxophonist in his own right. Two vocalists, sounds like art-song to me but I take that as testimony to the extent jazz is displacing classical music in academia -- so one cheer, even though it's not really my thing. B [cd]

Spin Marvel: Infolding (2014 [2015], RareNoise): British group somewhere in the experimental rock/jazztronica orbit -- Martin France (drums), Tim Harries (bass), Terje Evensen (electronics), Emre Ramazanoglu (production and further drums) -- released an eponymous album in 2006 (different drummer), back here with Nils Petter Molvaer guesting on trumpet. Darker and harder than Molvaer's own records -- something else in the post-Miles underworld. B+(***) [cdr]

Pops Staples: Don't Lose This (1999 [2015], dBpm): The patriarch of gospel group the Staples Singers, Pops died in 2000 leaving this set of incomplete demos, lately fleshed out by daughter Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy. More blues than gospel, a lovely memento. B+(**)

Story City: Time and Materials (2012, self-released): Jazz-rock (why not call it fusion?) group from Minnesota -- sax, guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, percussion, more percussion -- more strain in the sax and tension in the rhythm than seems safe for pop jazz, but not interesting enough to slot anywhere else. B [cd]

John Stowell/Michael Zilber Quartet: Live Beauty (2012 [2015], Origin): Stowell plays guitar. He cut a couple well regarded albums in New York 1977-78, then moved to Portland and mostly vanished until Origin picked him up in 1998. Zilber is a saxophonist, just credited with "saxes" but pictured with a tenor and something that looks like a curved soprano. The unnamed others are John Shifflett (bass) and Jason Lewis (drums), and they each contribute a song (Zilber wrote three, and they cover "My Funny Valentine" and John Scofield's "Wabash III." Still, the sax makes a strong impression, and whenever I notice the guitar Stowell is doing something interesting. B+(***) [cd]

Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (2015, RCA): Tempted to say this runs the gamut from "Dumb" to "Stupid Girl," but there's more to it than that. Admittedly, nothing all that useful: living the showbiz life, what Tom T. Hall once referred to as "putting on a front," and occasional romantic angst. B+(***)

Tanya Tagaq: Animism (2014 [2015], Six Shooter): Full name Tanya Tagaq Gillis, from Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island in what used to be Canada's Northwest Territories, the eastern part now known as Nunavut. Tagaq developed her own version of Inuit throat-singing, which she deploys along with more conventional vocals framed by far from conventional music produced by jazz violinist Jesse Zubot, with percussionist Jean Martin in the band. Last song is called "Fracking," an attempt to express what the Earth feels when oilmen set explosives underground to fracture rock and break loose hydrocarbons. B+(***)

Katie Thiroux: Introducing Katie Thiroux (2014 [2015], BassKat): Bassist-singer's first album, composed three originals but relies on standards, especially for lyrics. Jeff Hamilton produced, using Graham Dechter's guitar instead of piano, adding Roger Neumann's tenor sax for color and mood, both offering standout solos as well as complementing the bass -- mixed up, it provides both signature and flow. A- [cd]

Tradisyon Ka: Gwo Ka: Music of Guadeloupe, West Indies (2014, Soul Jazz): A French colony in the Lesser Antilles since 1674, briefly independent in the 1790s when the slaveholders defied orders from the French Republic to free the slaves, regained by France in 1814 and currently an Overseas Department. (Slavery was finally abolished in 1848.) Gwo Ka is their traditional drum-and-chant music, and this group sticks to basics, with little variation even though six different singers are featured. B+(**)

Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (2014 [2015], Blue Note/ArtistShare): Second album by Gil Evans' ghost band, following 2012's Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans -- some more new discoveries here, but it seems more accurate to think of this as Gil Evans' Greatest Hits . . . Live! Arrangements are properly credited to Evans, dated as far back as 1947. The band has lots of star power, intricately shadowing one another while one or another breaks out in precisely framed solos. Wendy Gilles sings three tunes, including "Everything Happens to Me." A- [cd]

Tuxedo: Tuxedo (2015, Stones Throw): Retro-disco group formed by Mayer Hawthorne (aka DJ Haircut) and Jake One. Seems like a logical progression from Hawthorne's 1960s Motown shtick, gaining traction with each play. A-

Typefighter: The End of Everything (2014, Huge Witch): DC-based garage-pop band, which is to say punk basics plus accessible hooks. B+(**)

Gebhard Ullmann/Johannes Fink/Jan Leipnitz/Gebhard Gschlößl: Gulf of Berlin (2012 [2014], Jazzwerkstatt): Free quartet, respectively: bass clarinet/soprano/tenor sax, cello/double bass, drums, trombone/sousaphone -- the low reeds and brass making this an alternate, less flashy but no less substantial Basement Research. B+(***)

Wormburner: Pleasant Living in Planned Communities (2014, Dive): At first blush, the most attractive postpunk band I've heard in a long time, much credit to Hank Henry's vocals, clear and distinctive at once. Then it occurred to me that the archetype was really the Hold Steady -- still an impressive trick, though I'm not as sympathetic to battered soldiers as to wayward girls. A-

Jack Wright/Ben Wright/Kris Tiner: For Instance (2014, Epigraph): Jack Wright is a free jazz saxophonist (alto and soprano here), been around a long time, only haphazardly recorded (AMG likes a 1999 set on CIMP with Fred Lonborg-Holm on cello). Ben Wright is his son, playing bass. This was recorded when the duo wandered into trumpeter Tiner's lair in Bakersfield, with four rather tentative LP-length (32:50) improvs. B+(*) [bc]

Carlos "Zíngaro": Live at Mosteiro de Santa Clara a Velha (2012 [2015], Cipsela): Spanish violinist (surname, I think, is Alves), started in avant-classical but is increasingly recognized as a superb jazz musician. This is solo, with the usual limits that implies, but still remarkable. B+(**) [cd]

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Ata Kak: Obaa Sima (1994 [2015], Awesome Tapes From Africa): Ghanian musician Yaw Atta-Owusu recorded this in Toronto, then released it in a cassette-only run of 50 copies. Brian Shimkovitz picked up one of those copies in 2002 and liked it enough to feature it in his first Awesome Tapes From Africa blog post in 2006, which in turn led to his label, and finally this reissue. Seven tracks, 35:06, vocals tend toward rap, beats run on -- struck me as overly simplistic at first but grew on me. A-

Anthony Braxton: Trio and Duet (1974 [2014], Delmark/Sackville): Early work recorded in Toronto, originally released on Sackville in Canada. The Trio cut is one of Braxton's diagrammatic titles, running 19:08, with (not yet Wadada) Leo Smith on various trumpets and percussion and Richard Teitelbaum on Moog and percussion -- one of those tuneless abstractions that eventually become engaging. The other side of the LP was a standards duo with bassist Dave Holland -- "The Song Is You," "Embraceable You," "You Go to My Head" (all remarkable readings), with two more added for the reissue ("I Remember You" adds to the theme; "On Green Dolphin Street" doesn't). A- [cd]

Connie Converse: How Sad, How Lovely (1954 [2015], Squirrel Thing): In Greenwich Village of the mid-1950s, she worked odd jobs and wrote songs, recording these in Gene Deitch's kitchen, just her voice and guitar, effectively folk music but not that easy to pigeonhole. She gave up on music by 1961, and depressed in 1974 wrote several farewell letters and vanished without a trace. This finally appeared in 2009. Robert Forster is a fan. B+(**)

Coleman Hawkins/Clark Terry: Back in Bean's Bag (1962 [2014], Essential Jazz Classics): More mainstream swing than bop, the tenor saxophonist sounds typically grand, with the trumpet player chipping in, coming more into his own on the bonus tracks that double the reissue's length -- where the album finally won me over. Tommy Flanagan plays piano, another treat. A-

Next Stop . . . Soweto, Vol. 2: Soul, Funk and Organ Grooves From the Townships 1969-1976 (1969-76 [2010], Strut): First volume focused on mbaqanga, the signature pop music that made South Africa's townships famous, although it tried to stay on the steamier side, as if obscurity is a virtue. This favors chintzy funk grooves, obscure because they're derivative and unexceptional, not that they don't broaden your world. B+(*)

Next Stop . . . Soweto: Vol. 3: Giants, Ministers and Makers: Jazz in South Africa 1963-1978 (1963-78 [2010], Strut, 2CD): Many African bands retained "Jazz" names without coming close to western jazz, but a number of South Africans adopted modern forms (without ever losing their love of South African textures and rhythms), usually going into exile -- Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana are two such here, mixed in with the more native bands. Wide ranging, quite enjoyable, but mostly as an odd sampler. B+(**)

No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds of the North-West Grunge Era 1986-97 (1986-97 [2014], Soul Jazz, 2CD): I've often said that the early-1990s dominance of grunge and gangsta was what finally drove me to become a serious jazz fan (and to fill in all that early country-blues-r&b I missed growing up in the 1960s), so I didn't hold much hope for exploring the roots of something I never cared for in the first place, but here it is: 28 tracks by 23 bands which had at least one member who played on a bill with Nirvana. I did have some hope for Vampire Lezbos' "Stop Killing the Seals" until he rest of the lyric turned out to be "because they're my friends." Picks up a bit toward the end (Treehouse, Attica), well after I jotted down this Inspirational lyric: "I'm so bored/I'm so bored/I'm so-o bo-o-ored." The main lesson of grunge is that the laziest way to create something new is to forget all that happened before. B

The Rough Guide to African Rare Groove: Volume 1 ([2015], World Music Network): Pan-African: sax jive from South Africa, others from Mozambique, Ethiopia, Senegal, Nigeria; not many clues as to from when, but 1980s and 1990s are mostly suspect. Not top drawer stuff -- more like "spare groove." B+(**)

The Rough Guide to the Best African Music You've Never Heard ([2014], World Music Network): Like programming the continent for random play, you get bits from Senegal, Morocco, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Mali, and probably other spots -- Lesotho if you count the "bonus disc," a reissue of a 2012 album by Sotho Sounds. Shouldn't be hard to pick out music "you've never heard" but a third of these groups have separate albums on the label's Riverboat subsidiary, and I have heard at least three of those (four counting Sotho Sounds) -- not that I remember them. B+(**)

Lennie Tristano: Chicago April 1951 (1951 [2014], Uptown, 2CD): Previously unreleased live tracks, picked from a week at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Chicago. Sextet, with Lee Konitz on alto sax, Warne Marsh on tenor sax, and Willie Dennis on trombone. The pianist developed his own unique conception of bebop, one that sounds radically explorative even sixty-some years later. A-

Old Music

Moppa Elliott: Moppa Elliott's Mostly Other People Do the Killing (2004 [2005], Hot Cup): First album -- I didn't get on board until Shamokin!!! came out in 2007, by which time the bassist-composer had taken his name off the masthead. The quartet's lineup has remained the same for more than a decade -- Peter Evans (trumpet), Jon Irabagon (saxes), Kevin Shea (drums). Elliott's originals only hint at where they're going, but the "Moanin'" cover at the end is magnificent. B+(***)

Chico Hamilton and Euphoria: Arroyo (1990 [1993], Soul Note): West coast drummer from the "cool jazz" generation, named this group after their 1989 album, built around guitar (Cary DeNigris) and electric bass (Reggie Washington), with Eric Person (alto/soprano sax) weaving in and out. B+(**)

Chico Hamilton and Euphoria: My Panamanian Friend (1992 [1994], Soul Note): A tribute to Eric Dolphy who wrote seven tunes here, all but the brief opening and closing passages. Kenny Davis takes over at bass (acoustic this time, I think), with Cary DeNegris' guitar still the focal point while saxophonist Eric Person wastes away on flute (though he does eventually get some prime sax time). B+(**)

James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards: Live in Aught-Three (2004, Compadre): Christgau likes how this sums up his early songbook (six albums from 1989 to 2002) -- having only heard one, I appreciate the economy of this option, probably also the sonic unity and the fact that he doesn't try to jerk these story songs into rave-ups. May take a little longer to get into them, but he's the sort of writer you'd rather let sink in. A-

Tangerine Dream: Phaedra (1974, Virgin): Edgar Froese's pioneering Krautrock group, fifth album, regarded by many as their peak. The title cut has a just enough rhythmic tension to maintain interest through its 17:39 length. The three pieces on the backside are more synth-ambient. B+(**)

Buddy Tate Quartet & Quintet: Tate a Tete: At La Fontaine, Copenhagen (1975 [1999], Storyville): The Texas tenor live in Denmark, his quartet one of those local pick-up bands although pianist Tete Montoilu is justly famous enough he gets "featuring" credit on the cover -- the bassist is Bo Stief, drummer Svend-Erik Nørregaard, and for a couple tracks the group grows to five with Finn Ziegler on violin. Tate sings "Buddy's Blues," and plays as only he can. B+(**)

Dinah Washington: Dinah Jams (1954 [1997], Verve): Taped in a studio with a live audience to conjure up the air of an after-hours jam session, with a rotating cast of star musicians -- the trumpeters are Clifford Brown, Clark Terry, and Maynard Ferguson -- and well-known songs, which Washington, ever the pro, nails. A-

Dinah Washington: Sings Fats Waller (1957 [2010], Fresh Sound): Adds nine cuts, mostly from The Queen, to the 1957 LP. Ernie Wilkins' big band runs hot and heavy, and Eddie Chamblee's vocal duets aren't up to snuff, but Washington's superb, and "Black and Blue" is a tour de force. B+(**)

Dinah Washington: Sings Bessie Smith (1957-58 [2010], Fresh Sound): Washington is the more polished singer, but she savors the gritty blues, and Eddie Chamblee's band drives the point home by emphasizing the trombone (Quentin Jackson or Julius Priester). B+(***)

Notes

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

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

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Monday, March 16, 2015

Music: Current count 24701 [24687] rated (+14), 420 [420] unrated (+0).

Oklahoma trip chewed up three days, so doesn't completely explain this week's shortfall. While I felt rather depressed before and melancholy (and tired) after, could be that the rest of the drop came from giving Madonna and Myra Melford at least five spins each before my lack of an A- response sealed their fates. Neither album reduces my estimation of the artist, but when I want to hear them I'll go elsewhere. I wound up landing on B+(***) a lot this week: six times out of fourteen records. Tanya Tagaq has by far the most uncertain grade, with some upside if I cared to work at it more than I'm willing, but also some downside. Most likely to be overrated are Atomic and Hailey Niswanger, although they gave me more pleasure than Melford or Madonna.

The one A- is Ryan Truesdell's second Gil Evans Project album. It also took about five spins. I didn't go back to recheck its predecessor, 2012's Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans. At the time I was duly impressed giving it B+(***), but many other jazz critics were wowed and it wound up fourth in the Jazz Critics Poll. Possibly deserves a revisit, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the more proven arrangements and the live sparkle still give the new album the edge.

Not much mail either. And despite adding quite a bit of bulk to the Music Tracking file, I'm not finding much of interest to look up on Rhapsody, and often not finding what I look for. I do have some downloads from Cuneiform and ECM but haven't been in a hurry to get to them. Haven't been in much of a hurry to do anything.

Should have a Rhapsody Streamnotes out in a day or two. While I was belatedly hacking out the tweets collected below, Matos wrote:

Much as I sometimes miss "keeping up," I am so happy not to drum up instapinions anymore unless I want to. Bcz it's that or nothing unless you've got leverage or tenure or w/e. Otherwise it's chump work. There are exceptions, but that's what they are. I wasted years on it. "What did you spend your thirties doing?" "A debased version of something I did in my twenties."

Sure rained on my parade. Been one of those days.

New records rated this week:

• Atomic: Lucidity (2014 [2015], Jazzland): Norwegian quintet loses all-star status with drummer change, not that Broo and Ljungkvist don't step up [cd]: B+(***)
• Phil Bowler: Phil Bowler & Pocket Jungle (2013 [2014], Zoho Music): bassist-led group goes for mild-mannered Afro-Cuban tryst with Grupo Los Santos stalwarts [r]: B+(*)
• Madonna: Rebel Heart (2015, Interscope): the good songs level out long before you reach 19, although the "deluxe" ones almost earn their keep [r]: B+(***)
• Myra Melford: Snowy Egret (2013 [2015], Enja/Yellowbird): pianist's compositions turn on electric guitar/bass (Liberty Ellman/Stomu Takeishi), with cornet [cd]: B+(***)
• Billy Mintz: The 2 Bass Band . . . Live (2014 [2015], Thirteenth Note): drummer-led tentet, many stars, not quite avant but skew their postbop that way [cd]: B+(**)
• Tisziji Muñoz & Marilyn Crispell: The Paradox of Independence (2014 [2015], MRI): guitarist and pianist clash and contrast, backed by bass-drums [r]: B+(**)
• Hailey Niswanger: PDX Soul (2013-14 [2015], Calmit Productions): tenor saxophonist goes full r&b, often with organ, but seems to still be auditioning singers [cd]: B+(***)
• Open Field + Burton Greene: Flower Stalk (2012 [2015], Cipsela): Portuguese string trio (guitar-viola-bass) with some bite risk prepared piano thrash [cd]: B+(***)
• Gretchen Peters: Blackbirds (2015, Scarlet Letter): country singer-songwriter, some clicks, some doesn't, probably not cost-effective to sort out [r]: B+(*)
• Roberta Piket: Emanation (Solo: Volume 2) (2014 [2015], Thirteenth Note): solo piano, checks off McPartland, Hancock, and Chopin as well as Gillespie, Monk [cd]: B+(*)
• Dawn Richard: Blackheart (2015, Our Dawn): neo-soul singer, some interesting beat production but strikes me as cluttered and cranky [r]: B
• Pops Staples: Don't Lose This (1999 [2015], dBpm): demo vocals from 1999, dressed up comfortably by daughter Mavis and producer Jeff Tweedy [r]: B+(**)
• Tanya Tagaq: Animism (2014 [2015], Six Shooter): less interesting for aboriginal throat singing than for the attempt to give voice to geologic strata [r]: B+(***)
• Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (2014 [2015], Blue Note/ArtistShare): Gil Evans' archivist produces a greatest hits live thing with star power and just enough vocals [cd]: A-

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

• The Rough Guide to the Best African Music You've Never Heard (World Music Network): a short-lived proposition, until you've heard it and know better [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Tom Collier: Alone in the Studio (Origin): March 17
• Joe Fiedler Trio: I'm In (Multiphonics Music): April 7
• Michael Oien: And Now (Fresh Sound New Talent): advance, June
• Sarah Partridge: I Never Thought I'd Be Here (Origin): March 17
• Unhinged Sextet: Clarity (OA2): March 17
• The Michael Waldrop Big Band: Time Within Itself (Origin): March 17

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Sunday, March 15, 2015

It's been a slow week for me, as I spent much of it in Oklahoma, visiting relatives and attending the funeral of my cousin Harold Stiner. Harold was just shy of his 90th birthday, and is survived by his wife, Louise, whom he married in 1948 and lived with until death did they part. Their life together was a sweet story, but I wouldn't go so far as to dub it the American Dream -- they never made the sort of money American Dreamers feel entitled to, but they never really wanted either, and left behind two children, four grand-kids, and eleven great-grands, so it certainly counts as a human success story. The one part of the funeral I was somewhat troubled by was the "military honors" -- the flag-draped coffin, two soldiers standing at attention, one playing "taps," the ritual folding and presentation of the flag. It's not that Harold hadn't earned the honor. Like most Americans his age, he got sucked up into the US military in the closing stretch of WWII and wound up in the army that occupied Japan, where he served as a guard in the courts that tried Japanese war criminals. He talked about that experience often, but never talked about actual combat -- and he was a mere 20 on VJ day. My own father (only two years older) was also in the army at that time, but he never invested any identity in being a veteran, and died in 2000, before the War on Terror turned into a bizarre Cult of the Troops. I wondered whether Harold's identity was conditioned by that newer Cult, and felt like the stink of America's recent wars (Vietnam most certainly included) hasn't come to taint Harold's more honorable service.

Just a thought, but war does imbue this week's select links:

• Nancy LeTourneau: Feith Demonstrates Republican Ignorance on Foreign Policy: Lots of things one can say about the 47 Republican Senators who signed Tom Cotton's letter vowing to sabotage any agreement Obama manages to sign with Iran, although critics have tended to latch onto the notion that the letter violates the Logan Act (itself very probably unconstitutional, something that hasn't been ruled on because no one has tried to enforce it) and the challenge the letter represents to the president's prerogative to conduct foreign policy. It would be better to focus on how totally counterproductive the letter was: how it shows that the US cannot become a trusted party in negotiations because a substantial factional power only believes that disputes can only be solved through war.

  One of the unintended consequences of the Tom Cotton letter fiasco is that the media focus has turned away from the actual negotiations with Iran to the various excuses Republican leaders are coming up with to explain why they signed it.

  But there are a couple of exceptions. I have to give Joshua Muravchik some credit. At least he dispensed with all the right wing cover about how we need a "better deal" and got right down to it with War With Iran is Probably Our Best Option. But what he's really recommending are surgical strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. He has to admit that won't stop Iran from continuing to build new ones, so we'll have to commit to a kind "whack-a-mole" ongoing war. And then he has to admit that we'll have to do that without IAEA inspectors, so the whole argument devolves into one big mess.

  Then there's Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that published an op-ed on the negotiations by none other than Doug Feith, who purports to have found the "fatal flaw in Obama's dealings with Iran." [ . . . ]

  Feith's point is that President Obama is taking a "cooperative" approach to the negotiations when he should be taking a "coercive" approach. [ . . . ]

  This one reminds me a lot of the Republican insistence that we can't talk about a "pathway to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants until we "secure the border." The result of that insistence is that the border is never secure enough -- just as Iran never stops being enough of a threat to pursue an agreement. It is meant to leave regime change (most likely via military intervention) as the only option on the table.

  I can only shake my head at the ignorance of people who don't remember that it was regime change in Iran that got us here in the first place.

  I think it's time Americans admit that we got off on the wrong foot with Iran's Islamic Republic in 1979, and that we need a fresh start based on mutual respect. That won't be easy because we utterly lack the ability to see ourselves as others do (not that many others dare say so to our faces -- cf. "The Emperor's New Clothes" for insight). Americans always assume that our own intentions are benign, and never think that our interventions in the rest of the world aren't welcome; actually, we wouldn't even call them interventions, despite presence of US military in over 100 other countries and the CIA in the rest, the US Navy on all seven seas and satellites in space able to spy on every square inch of the world's surface. We do, however, perpetuate childish grudges against any nation that offends us, regardless of how counterproductive our shunning becomes: North Korea is the longest running example, and for its people perhaps the saddest; then there is Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, and a few others -- the neocons would love to add Russia and China to that list. The fact is that the US has done Iran much more harm than vice versa, yet we are totally unaware of any of that: the 1953 coup, equipping the Shah's police state, supporting Iraq's invasion (one of the deadliest wars since WWII), prodding the Saudis to promote anti-Shiite propaganda, crippling sanctions, cyber warfare. Iran hasn't been totally without fault either, and a little contrition on their part would be good for everyone. But the attitudes you see from Cotton, from Feith, from Muravchik and so forth show you how blind and vicious we can be. Iran, after all, has at least as much reason to worry about a nuclear-armed Israel as vice versa, and even more so about a nuclear-armed United States -- a country which within the last fifteen years has invaded and pretty much wrecked two neighboring countries (Afghanistan and Iraq). And an isolated, villified, wounded Iran is far more dangerous than an Iran that is integrated into global trade and culture. The latter might even contribute constructively to our many problems in the region.

  I could say much more about this, but for now I just want to bring up one side point. I have no real worries about Iran producing nuclear bombs -- I don't think they ever intended to build them let alone to use them, possibly because they suspect that they would be useless (as they have been for everyone else but the US against WWII Japan). But I do worry about Iran's ambitions to build nuclear power plants: to see why, recall that the worst nuclear wasteland in Japan isn't the A-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it's the drowned nuclear power plants at Fukishima. On the other hand, I don't see that the US can arbitrarily deny Iran access to nuclear power -- the NPT promises not to limit that access, and dozens of other countries (most notably India) have nuclear power plants. But if Iran is going to have nuclear power plants, we should do everything possible to ensure that they will be as safe as those plants can be, which means sharing advanced technology and making sure the plants are inspected and follow "best practices." To do that we need cooperation, not war.

• Gideon Levy: To see how racist Israel has become, look to the left: Of course the right is racist -- see Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel for abundant proof of that -- but loathing of Arabs is as much of a driving force behind the former left in Israel as for the right.

  The foreign minister [Avigdor Lieberman] said "Those who are against us . . . we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head," aiming his ax at Arab Israelis. Such a remark would end the career and guarantee lifetime ostracism of any Western statesman. [ . . . ] But such is the intellectual, cultural and moral world of Israel's foreign minister, a bully who was once convicted of physically assaulting a child. The world can't understand how Lieberman's remark was accepted with such equanimity in Israel, where some highly-regarded commentators still believe this cynical, repellent politician is a serious, reasonable statesman.

  No less repugnant was his savaging, in a televised debate, of Joint List leader Iman Odeh, whom he called a "fifth column" and told, "you're not wanted here," "go to Gaza." None of the other party heads taking part, including those of leftist and centrist slates, leader in the debate, stepped in to stop Lieberman's tirade. [ . . . ]

  The racism of the campaign season has been planted well beyond the rotten, stinking gardens of Lieberman, Naftali Bennett, Eli Yishai and Baruch Marzel. It is almost everywhere. Our cities have recently been contaminated by posters whose evil messages are nearly on a par with the slogans "Kahane was right" and "death to Arabs."

  "With BibiBennett, we'll be stuck with the Palestinians forever," threaten the posters plastered on every overpass and hoarding, on behalf of the Peace and Security Association of National Security Experts. It is impossible to know their level of expertise on matters of peace and security, but they are clearly experts in incitement. The message and its signatories are considered center-left, but it too spreads hate and racism. [ . . . ]

  Such is the state of public discourse in Israel. Yair Lapid and "the Zoabis," in reference to Haneen Zoabi, Moshe Kahlon who says he won't sit in a government coalition "with the Arabs," Isaac Herzog who will conduct coalition negotiations with all the parties with the exception of the Arab ones, Tzipi Livni and her obsession with her Jewish -- and also nationalistic and ugly -- state. Even the dear and beloved (to me) Amos Oz, who in Haaretz ("Dreams Israel should abandon -- fast," March 13) called for a "fair divorce" from the Palestinians. He has the right not to believe in the prospects for a shared life, we must call for their liberation, but to call for a divorce without asking the Palestinians what they want rings with a rejection of them. And what about Israel's Arab citizens? How are they supposed to feel when one of the most important intellectuals of Israel's peace camp says he wants a divorce? Are they to remain among us as lepers?

  I've said for quite some time now that the main rationale behind the "two-state" partition resolution is that it doesn't depend on Israelis to rise above their deep-seated racism; all it depends on is their will to cut loose some land and prerogatives they still want and a lot of people they can't stand and have constantly wronged.

  Also see Haviv Rettig Gur: Is Netanyahu about to loose the election? for its review of the prospects for post-election coalition building, especially in the face of the refusal of all Zionist parties (left, right, or center) to negotiate with the Joint (Arab) List. For more on this, see Philip Weiss: Herzog and Netanyahu are likely to share power -- because Herzog won't share it with Arab List. (I suppose there are Republicans who feel that the election of a Democrat should be invalidated if a majority of whites vote otherwise, but unlike Israel we don't have a political system that makes it easy to sort out votes like that, or a media that legitimizes such racism. In Israel Jews even have their own language.)

  More Israel links:

  Akira Eldar: Who will stop the Israeli settlers?:

  On March 13, 2005, the second Ariel Sharon government decided to dismantle all the illegal outposts that had been erected since the government came into office in March 2001, and were listed in the report prepared by attorney Talia Sasson.

  The government averred that it would thus fulfill the first stage of the Road Map set down by the Quartet, in keeping with an Israeli commitment made in May 2003. This clause, which included a total freeze on settlement construction, was not included among the 14 reservations Israel presented to the Quartet.

  The signature of then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this decision is just as worthless as the paper upon which the Wye River Memorandum, the Bar-Ilan speech and all the "two-state" speeches made before the United States Congress and the United Nations General Assembly are written.

  But it's time to remind those with short memories that Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni were also part of that government. The latter was appointed head of a special ministerial committee whose job was to convert the outpost report into action -- primarily by ensuring the dismantling of outposts built after the formation of the previous government (in which Livni also served). A significant portion of those outposts were built on private Palestinian land.

  Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics show that over the past decade, the settler population in the West Bank has grown by 112,000 (from 244,000 to 356,000).

  Figures from Peace Now show that in the same period, the illegal outposts gained 9,000 more residents -- about three times their population 10 years ago. More than half of the growth occurred during the time when Livni and Herzog bore ministerial responsibility for this gross violation of Israeli and international law.

  The Kadima/Hatnuah leader and the Labor Party and Zionist Union chairman were also both partly responsible for allowing hundreds of millions of shekels to flow to the settlements via the leaky pipe known as the "settlement division," which suddenly became the national punching bag.

  According to the outpost report (presented a decade ago), the division "mainly erected many unauthorized outposts, without approval from the authorized political officials." [ . . . ]

  Every Israeli government since 2005 has ignored the report's unequivocal recommendation to clip the wings of the division, especially its budget, which continues to fund the effort to wreck peace.

  William Greider: What About Israel's Nuclear Bomb? Israel began its work on developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s when fear that it might be overwhelmed by much more populous adversaries was more credible. By the mid-1960s, Israel's denials offered a convenient out while the US attempted to corral all other nations (including Iran) within the confines of the NPT. But one side effect of US acquiescence in this "don't ask, don't tell" treatment is that we're not allowed to factor in Israel's nuclear deterrence capabilities when evaluating possible threats from possible enemies like Iran. No nuclear-armed power has ever directly attacked another nuclear-armed power, not even at the height of conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. One can even argue that conflicts become more stable when both adversaries possess nuclear weapons: one can point not only to the Cold War but to the way India and Pakistan walked back from a likely fourth war in 2002. Israel hates the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran less because it fears Iran -- Iran, after all, has not committed direct military aggression against another country for several centuries now, whereas Israel has done so close to ten times since 1948 -- so much as because it hates the idea that any nation it attacks might fight back.

  Anne-Marie Codur: Why Iran is not and has never been Israel's #1 enemy.

• Mike Lofgren: Operation Rent Seeking: Reviewing James Risen's book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, on how the Global War on Terror turned into a racket and a cash cow for the nation's military profiteers:

  It is difficult to read Pay Any Price and not come away with the sick feeling that the Bush presidency -- which, after all, only assumed office by the grace of judicial wiring and force majeure -- was at bottom a corrupt and criminal operation in collusion with private interests to hijack the public treasury. But what does that say about Congress, which acted more often as a cheerleader than a constitutional check? And what does it tell us about the Obama administration, whose Justice Department not only failed to hold the miscreants accountable, but has preserved and expanded some of its predecessors' most objectionable policies?

  Partisans may squabble over the relative culpability of the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as that of Congress, but that debate is now almost beside the point. If Risen is correct, America's campaign against terrorism may have evolved to the point that endless war is the tacit but unalterable goal, regardless of who is formally in charge.

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Monday, March 9, 2015

Music: Current count 24687 [24592] rated (+95), 420 [499] unrated (-79).

Saturday evening I checked the rated count and found I was only +17 for the week, a pace that would leave me well short of a productive +30 week. I decided that would be a good time to make a pass through the unrated file and see if any of those albums had been rated elsewhere (checking against the year-end files and sometimes the indexes for Recycled Goods or Rhapsody Streamnotes). I've made less systematic sweeps in the past and often netted a dozen or two missing grades. This time I picked up 72 albums, turning a slack week into a monster, statistically speaking.

Wound up with 26 records below, so not much shy of a normal "good" week. Two new non-jazz A-list releases (or three if you count a reissue of a cassette that only previously had a run of 50 units) so that may finally break the 2015 drought -- although all three are close to the borderline, and McMurtry and Tuxedo nearly got written up as HMs until 4-5 plays nudged me over the line. The live McMurtry was something I've been meaning to check out, so this seemed like a good time.

My Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file is already long enough to post. Good chance I'll post it some time this week, although I won't promise. For one thing, I'll be out of town a few days: one of my cousins, Harold Stiner, passed away on Saturday, so I want to at least make an appearance at the funeral. He was 89 -- a teenager when he joined the Army and wound up stationed as a guard during war crimes trials in Japan. When he returned, he bought a small farm north of Stroud, married Louise Byrd, and they both lived there until moving to a nursing home a few months ago, more than 65 years. We went down there often when I was a child, and I spent a lot of time fishing his pond. He was an exceptionally kind, open, generous person, and will be missed and remembered fondly.

New records rated this week:

• Aphex Twin: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments, Pt. 2 (2015, Warp, EP): outtakes EP, maybe just an afterthought, from last year's "Syro" [r]: B+(**)
• Ab Baars Trio & NY Guests: Invisible Blow (2012 [2015], Wig): Dutch tenor saxophonist, group goes back to 1990, so they've grown old and mellow together [cd]: B
• Ab Baars Trio: Slate Blue (2014 [2015], Wig): Fay Victor and Vincent Chancey -- I like them enough but they're not what Baars needs [cd]: B+(***)
• Belle and Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015, Matador): while the boys make clunky music and hog the vocals [r]: B+(*)
• Anat Cohen: Luminosa (2014 [2015], Anzic): leads with her clarinet, group less than focused except when her Brazilian guests take charge [cd]: B+(***)
• Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (2015, Sub Pop): not an artist I want to get to know better, not that the fancy production never clicks [r]: B
• Ross Hammond: Flight (2014 [2015], Prescott): guitarist meant for bigger things tries his hand at folk-oriented solo pastorale [cdr]: B+(**)
• Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (2010-12 [2015], TUM, 2CD): Finnish saxophonist gets all the help he needs: William Parker and Andrew Cyrille [cd]: A-
• James McMurtry: Complicated Game (2013-14 [2015], Complicated Game): hard luck songs continue, less political because he's too smart to blame it all on Obama [r]: A-
• Kyle Nasser: Restive Soul (2013 [2015], AISA): tenor saxophonist, uses guitar-piano-bass-drums for complex postbop layering, very au courant [cd]: B+(*)
• Prism Quartet: Heritage/Evolution, Volume 1 (2014, Innova, 2CD): obscure but long-running sax quartet invite six famous saxophonists to guest, rub off [cd]: B+(**)
• Nate Radley: Morphoses (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): guitarist-led trio plus Loren Stillman's sax for extra splotches of contrasting color [r]: B+(*)
• John Raymond: Foreign Territory (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): young trumpet player backed by solid pros on piano-bass-drums, postbop but pretty sharp at that [cdr]: B+(**)
• Spin Marvel: Infolding (2014 [2015], RareNoise): Brit jazztronica group host Nils Petter Molvaer, a bright spot in their post-Miles underworld [cdr]: B+(***)
• Story City: Time and Materials (2012, self-released): jazz-rock returns, not hot enough for fusion, not soft enough for smooth, not bad but no matter [cd]: B
• Tradisyon Ka: Gwo Ka: Music of Guadeloupe, West Indies (2014, Soul Jazz): a drum-and-chant music never far removed from Africa, done by trad band with guests [r]: B+(**)
• Tuxedo: Tuxedo (2015, Stones Throw): Jake One and Mayer Hawthorne go retro-disco, which treats them as well as retro-Motown did; who knew we still need this? [r]: A-
• Typefighter: The End of Everything (2014, Hope Witch): pretty good DC-based garage-pop band -- i.e., rough as punk but hooks pop out [r]: B+(**)
• Carlos "Zíngaro": Live at Mosteiro de Santa Clara a Velha (2012 [2015], Cipsela): Spanish violinist, improvised from classical to jazz, goes solo [cd]: B+(**)

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

• Ata Kak: Obaa Sima (1994 [2015], Awesome Tapes From Africa): rapper from Ghana, belated release of Brian Shimkovitz's original inspiration for Awesome Tapes From Africa [r]: A-
• Next Stop . . . Soweto, Vol. 2: Soul, Funk and Organ Grooves From the Townships 1969-1987 (1969-76 [2010], Strut): soul, funk, organ grooves from South Africa, thin glosses on things done better elsewhere [r]: B+(*)
• Next Stop . . . Soweto, Vol. 3: Giants, Ministers and Makers: Jazz in South Africa 1963-1978 (1963-78 [2010], Strut): the iceberg beneath the more visible stars that went into exile [r]: B+(**)
• No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds of the North-West Grunge Era 1986-97 (1986-97 [2014], Soul Jazz, 2CD): 28 songs by 23 bands with one or more members who played on a bill with Nirvana [r]: B

Old records rated this week:

• Chico Hamilton and Euphoria: Arroyo (1990 [1993], Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Chico Hamilton and Euphoria: My Panamanian Friend (1992 [1994], Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
• James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards: Live in Aught-Three (2004, Compadre): first live album sums up a decade-plus of learning and writing [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Stephan Crump/Mary Halvorson: Secret Keeper (Intakt): advance, April
• Maxfield Gast: Ogo Pogo (Militia Hill)
• Bradley Williams: Investigation (21st Century Entertainment, 2CD)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• David Atkins: Missing Selma: The Final Death of GOP Minority Outreach: When I saw the movie Selma, I couldn't help but think of how much that was gained by the civil rights movement in the 1960s has been lost in the last decade due to Republican courts, state legislatures, and the failure of Congress to renew voting rights protections. (Of course, more than renewal is needed: voting rights protections need to be extended beyond the deep South to everywhere Republicans hold power.)

  Facing demographic reality after their devastating defeat in 2012, Republicans issued a report saying they needed to consider policy changes to court minority voters. That olive branch lasted a few weeks before their base and its mouthpieces on AM radio urgently reminded them that bigotry is a core Republican value and would only be dismissed at the peril of any politician that didn't toe the Tea Party line.

  Now the party finds itself shutting down Homeland Security to protest the President's mild executive order on immigration and almost ignoring the Selma anniversary entirely. The minority outreach program is not just dead: it's a public embarrassment and heaping ruin. [ . . . ]

  And they will continue to try to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible -- one of the reasons why the Selma memorial is so problematic for them. Republicans are actively trying to remove as many minority voters as possible from the eligible pool, and have no interest in being reminded of Dr. King's struggle to achieve the end of Jim Crow and true voting rights for African-Americans.

  The GOP has made it abundantly clear that things are going to get much uglier before they get better. Their base won't have it any other way.

  This is probably as good a place as ever to hook a link to Kris Kobach Floats Idea Obama Wants to Protect Black Criminals From Prosecution. Of course that's taken a bit out of context -- Kobach is obsessed with voting irregularities and has repeatedly pleaded with the Kansas state legislature to give him authority to prosecute voting infractions (seeing that county prosecutors rarely do so, preoccupied as they are with killing and stealing), and his actual examples are voting-related. Still, he was unwilling to raise any objection to a caller who repeated the whole racist canard, and by adding his own parochial examples the caller no doubt considered his paranoia confirmed.

• Conservatives Who Hate "Big Government" Are, Shockingly, Not Up in Arms About Ferguson: References Adam Serwer, who dug through the DOJ's report on police abuses in Ferguson, Missouri (those protests last year weren't only about police shooting an unarmed teenager -- that sort of thing happens all over the country -- but were rooted in a long pattern of predation).

  You're probably aware that Ferguson used the cops and courts to generate tax revenues. How extreme were the fines? From the report:

  [O]ur investigation found instances in which the court charged $302 for a single Manner of Walking violation; $427 for a single Peace Disturbance violation; $531 for High Grass and Weeds; $777 for Resisting Arrest; and $792 for Failure to Obey, and $527 for Failure to Comply, which officers appear to use interchangeably.

  Now, here's the thing: Isn't this the sort of thing right-wingers ought to be complaining about? Government charging you a three-figure fine for walking wrong, or not cutting your grass properly? Aren't some of these an awful lot like taxes? Don't right-wingers hate taxes? Don't they hate government attempts to micromanage citizens' lives? Isn't turning "high grass and weeds" into a rime punishable by large fines a sort of aesthetic political correctness? [ . . . ]

  Oh, but of course. . . .

  Available data show that, of those actually arrested by FPD only because of an outstanding municipal warrant, 96% are African American.

  And:

  Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows that African Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson's population.

  So I guess it doesn't matter that this is oppressive Big Government using jackbooted-thug powers to restrict citizens' FREEDOM!!!! and shovel more and more cash into the insatiable maw of the bureaucracy -- because, y'know, that stuff doesn't matter when it happens to Those People.

  No More Mr. Nice Blog also reports that This Frigid Winter Is Not Frigid in the West (see the map). And on that front, see Florida Officials Banned From Using Term 'Climate Change'. Not clear whether this also means that Floridians will be banned from calling for help when the last glaciers melt and their state vanishes under the rising ocean. (The article points out that "sea-level rise" is still a permitted term.)

  It's always tempting to shame conservatives for their hypocrisies and frequent lack of principles, much as it's tempting to point out that the movement to change the existing order to make it even more hierarchical and inequal (and usually more brutal) is more properly termed fascist. My own pet example is abortion/birth control, which used to be more closely associated with the right (albeit often tainted with racist "eugenics" concerns) than the left. More properly, conservatives should support abortion/birth control rights because: (a) it is a matter of personal freedom in an area where the state has no legitimate interest; (b) we expect parents to assume a great deal of responsibility for their children, and the assumption of such responsibility should be a matter of choice (whereas pregnancy is much more a matter of chance). If you want, you can add various secondary effects: unwanted children are more likely to become burdens on the state, to engage in crime, etc. But the Republicans sniffed out a political opportunity for opposing abortion -- mostly inroads into traditionally Democratic religious blocks (Roman Catholic and Baptist), plus the view resonated as prohibitionist and anti-sex, reaffirming their notion of the Real America as a stern patriarchy, and adding a critical faction to the GOP's coalition of hate.

  Conservatives should also be worried by unjust and discriminatory law enforcement such as we've seen in Ferguson -- after all their own property depends on a system of law that is widely viewed as basically fair and just. They also should worry about global warming, which in the long run will disproportionately affect property owners -- that they aren't is testimony to the political influence bought by the oil industry (along with the short-sightedness of other businesses). But again these worries are easily swept aside by demagogues seeking to discredit science, reason, and decency.

• Ed Kilgore: How Mike Huckabee Became the New Sarah Palin: I always thought that had Huckabee run in 2012 he would have won the Republican nomination: he was as well established as the "next guy in line" as Romney, we would have captured all of the constituency that wound up supporting Rick Santorum (I mean, who on earth really wanted Santorum?). I'm less certain he's got the inside track in 2016, but he's kept up his visibility and he's learned a few tricks from his fellow Fox head, Sarah Palin. On the other hand, it's hard to look at Huckabee's new book title -- God, Guns, Grits and Gravy -- and not wonder whether he's toppled over into self-caricature.

  While nobody has written a full-fledged manifesto for conservative cultural resentment, Mike Huckabee's new pre-campaign book is a significant step in the direction of full-spectrum cry for the vindication of Real Americans. It is telling that the politician who was widely admired outside the conservative movement during his 2008 run for being genial, modest, quick-witted, and "a conservative who's not mad about it" has now released a long litany of fury at supposed liberal-elite condescension toward and malevolent designs against the Christian middle class of the Heartland. [ . . . ]

  In a recent column recanting his earlier enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, the conservative writer Matt Lewis accused La Pasionaria of the Permafrost of "playing the victim card, engaging in identity politics, co-opting some of the cruder pop-culture references, and conflating redneck lowbrow culture with philosophical conservatism." The trouble now is that she hardly stands out.

  Speaking of Huckabee, he's been pushing this placcard on twitter, proclaiming "Netanyahu is a Churchill in a world of Chamberlains." This vastly mis-estimates all checked names. Neville Chamberlain's reputation as a pacifist is greatly exaggerated: he did, after all, lead Britain into WWII when he decided to declare war against Germany over Poland after having "appeased" Hitler in letting Germany annex a German-majority sliver of Czechoslovakia. From a practical standpoint, his war declaration did Poland no good whatsoever, so it's impossible to see how declaring war any earlier would have had any deterrence or punitive effect. (Moreover, declaring war over Poland definitely moved up Hitler's timetable for attacking France, leading to the British fiasco at Dunkirk.) Of course, by the time Chamberlain declared war, hawks like Churchill were on the rise in Britain, and Churchill took over once Britain was committed to war with Germany.

  Churchill is generally given high marks for leading Britain through WWII, but more so in America than in England, which voted him out of office as soon as the war was over. A more sober assessment is that as a military strategist he didn't make as many bad mistakes in WWII as he had in the first World War (at least nothing on the scale of Gallipoli). But he failed miserably in his attempt to keep the British Empire intact, in large part because he was so tone deaf about it. If you look at his entire career, you'll see he did nothing but promote war and imperialism, and in doing so he left his stink on nearly every disastrous conflict of the 20th century. Indeed, he got a head start in the 1890s in the Sudan, then moved on to the Boer War in South Africa. His penchant for dividing things led to the partitions of Ireland, India, and Palestine, each followed by a series of wars. He was a major architect of Britain's push into Palestine and Iraq (and, unsuccessfully, Turkey) during the first World War, and followed that up by supporting Greece against Turkey and the "whites" in the Russian Civil War. As WWII was winding down he sided in yet another Greek Civil War and attempted to reassert British control of Malaya. After WWII he is credited with the keynote speech of the Cold War, which led to virtually all of the world's post-WWII conflicts (up to 1990) aside from his post-partition wars. He also was the main instigator behind the 1953 US coup in Iran, so give him some credit for all that ensued there -- including Netanyahu's speech this week. Churchill died in 1965, but even today he is invoked by hawks in the US and UK as the patron saint of perpetual war and injustice. He should be counted as one of the great monsters of his era.

  Netanyahu, on the other hand, is a much smaller monster, if only because he runs a much smaller country. Still, even within Israeli history, he hasn't had an exceptionally violent career: certainly he ranks far behind Ariel Sharon and David Ben Gurion, nor does he have the sort of intimate sense of blood-on-his-hands as Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir or even Ehud Barak, nor the sort of military glory of Yitzhak Rabin or Moshe Dayan. I'm not even sure I'd rank him above Shimon Peres, the political figure most responsible for Israel's own atom bomb project, but he certainly moved up on the list with last year's turkey shoot in Gaza (and to a lesser extent the West Bank). But for two decades of rant about the "existential threat" posed by Iran, he's stayed out of actual war. What he is really exceptional at is avoiding peace. He was the most effective politician in Israel when it came to sabotaging the Oslo "peace process" and he has been singularly effective at wrecking Obama's peace efforts. Indeed, his entire Iran obsession makes more sense as an anti-Palestinian stall than as a real concern. What makes Netanyahu inordinately dangerous isn't so much what he can do directly as prime minister of Israel as his skill at persuading official opinion in the US: as we saw, for instance, when he helped parlay the 9/11 attacks into a Global War on Terror, or when he shilled for Bush's invasion of Iraq, or his longstanding efforts to drive the US to war against Iran. Huckabee's attempt to ride on Netanyahu's coattails should show you just how dangerous Netanyahu can be, and what a fool Huckabee is.

• Paul Krugman: Larry Kudlow and the Failure of the Chicago School: On the conservative predeliction for economic frauds:

  Jonathan Chait does insults better than almost anyone; in his recent note on Larry Kudlow, he declares that

  The interesting thing about Kudlow's continuing influence over conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art.

  And Chait doesn't even mention LK's greatest hits -- his sneers at "bubbleheads" who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high stock market is a vote of confidence for the president -- but only, apparently, if said president is Republican.

  But what's really interesting about Kudlow is the way his influence illustrates the failure of the Chicago School, as compared with the triumph of MIT.

  But, you say, Kudlow isn't a product of Chicago, or indeed of any economics PhD program. Indeed -- and that's the point.

  There are plenty of conservative economists with great professional credentials, up to and including Nobel prizes. But the right isn't interested in their input. They get rolled out on occasion, mainly as mascots. But the economists with a real following, the economists who have some role in determining who gets the presidential nomination, are people like Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Art Laffer. [ . . . ]

  Maybe the right prefers guys without credentials because they really know how things work, although I'd argue that this proposition can be refuted with two words: Larry Kudlow. More likely, it's that affinity fraud thing: Professors, even if they're conservative, just aren't the base's kind of people. I don't think it's an accident that Kudlow still dresses like Gordon Gekko after all these years.

  Also see Krugman's Slandering the 70s. Some time back I read Robert J. Samuelson's The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, which tries to argue that the stagflation of the 1970s was every bit as disastrous as the Great Depression. I figured out that Samuelson's mind was permanently wedged -- a conclusion that's been repeatedly reaffirmed ever since -- but I never quite understood why he was so agitated. Krugman's third graph suggests an answer: changes in income for the top 1% only rose by about 1% from 1973-1979, vs. 72% for 1979-1989, 55% for 1989-2000, and 13% for 2000-2007. Moreover, median income 1973-79 was up nearly 4%, so the elite 1% actually trailed the economy as a whole. Still, no one actually came out and said that the right turn from 1979 through Reagan's reign was needed because capital returns during the 1970s were insufficient. But that does seem to be the thing that motivated the rich to so brazenly exploit the corruptibility of the American political system to advance their own interests. And they succeeded spectacularly, so much so that there doesn't seem to be any countervaling power that can bring the system back toward equilibrium. On the other hand, the second surprise in the chart is the relatively anemic gains of the 1% under Bush, as the increasingly inequal economy started to drag everyone down -- an effect Bush was desperate to hide behind tax cuts, booming deficits, and the real estate bubble.

• Mike Konczal: Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? I'm not sure that Konczal's term "liberal nihilism" helps us in any way, but I am reminded that throughout history liberals, unlike labor socialists, have sucked up the notion of free markets -- one source of our political dysfunction is that even left-of-center we tend to confuse two rather different sets of political ideas. But Konczal is right that the stagnant or declining wages -- one part of the increasing inequality problem -- has little to do with the "stories" you hear urging resignation to the status quo. He explains:

  But wage growth is also a matter of how our productive enterprises are organized. Over the past thirty-five years, a "shareholder revolution" has re-engineered our companies in order to channel wealth toward the top, especially corporate executives and shareholders, rather than toward innovation, investments and workers' wages. As the economist J.W. Mason recently noted, companies used to borrow to invest before the 1980s; now they borrow to give money to stockholders. Meanwhile, innovations in corporate structures, including contingent contracts and franchise models, have shifted the risk down, toward precarious workers, even as profits rise. As a result, the basic productive building blocks of our economy are now inequality-generating machines.

  The third driver of wage stagnation is government policy. As anthropologist David Graeber puts it, "Whenever someone starts talking about the 'free market,' it's a good idea to look around for the man with the gun." Despite the endless talk of a "free market," our economy is shaped by myriad government policies -- and no matter where we look, we see government policies working against everyday workers. Whether it's letting the real value of the minimum wage decline, making it harder to unionize, or creating bankruptcy laws and intellectual-property regimes that primarily benefit capital and the 1 percent, the way the government structures markets is responsible for weakening labor and causing wages to stay stuck.

  Konczal delves deeper into the robots story here.

• Various links on or related to the Netanyahu speech:

  • Mondoweiss: Annotated text of Netanyahu's address to Congress: Closest thing I've found to instant, contextual correction of Netanyahu's numerous lies and misrepresentations. Still woefully incomplete; e.g.: "But unfortunately, for the last 36 years, Iran's attacks against the United States have been anything but mock. And the targets have been all too real." That presumably includes the occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and the ensuing hostage crisis, but what are the other attacks? It was the US that send a commando force into Iran supposedly to extract those hostages. It was the US that shot down an Iranian airliner full of civilians, and that shot up an Iranian oil platform. It was the US and Israel that engaged in the "Stuxnet" cyberterrorism. What else?
  • James Fallows: A whole series of pieces: On the Use and Misuse of History: The Netanyahu Case; The Central Question: Is It 1938?; The Mystery of the Netanyahu Disaster, and a Possible Explanation; The 'Existential' Chronicles Go On; On 'Existential' Threats (subhed: "A word that has replaced thought").
  • Gareth Porter: The Long History of Israel Gaming the 'Iranian Threat': As you probably know, Israeli spokesmen started hyping the Iranian Threat in the early 1990s, often projecting schedules for Iran building nuclear arms within five years (or less). Iran moved to the top of Israel's enemies list after Iraq was disabled in the 1991 Gulf War: it seems that Israel always has to keep an "existential threat" on the horizon, both to justify continued militarism long after peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and effective deterrence against Syria, and to trivialize and excuse its continuing unjust occupation of Palestinian territories and exile of millions of Palestinians.
  • Tony Karon/Tom Kutsch: Netanyahu's hard line on Iran: A four-point reality check: is this an existential threat? is Iran "hellbent on conquest and subjugation"? would an agreement "all but guarantees that Iran gets nuclear weapons"? would the allies "get a much better deal" by killing the current deal? Netanyahu is wrong on all four counts.
  • Max Blumenthal: Top Republicans to welcome Netanyahu, who called 9-11 attacks "very good," said anti-US terror helps Israel: by the way, I remember seeing 9/11 interviews both with Netanyahu and Shimon Peres where they were beside themselves with glee in anticipation that the attacks would force the US to become ever more like Israel.
  • Matt Taibbi: After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School: "First of all, the applause from members of the House and Senate was so over the top, it recalled the famous passage in the Gulag Archipelago about the apparatchik approach to a Stalin speech: 'Never be the first one to stop clapping.'"
  • Brank Marcetic: Netanyahu's Crime Isn't Playing Politics -- It's Warmongering
  • Uri Avnery: The Speech: Numerous impressions, the sheer nonsense of Netanyahu's speech evident in how far afield Avnery's mind wanders, from "the moral imposter" Elie Wiesel and the fake Holocaust fetish to the security of Israel's "second strike" capability which, if Iran did attack Israel, "would annihilate Iran within minutes."
  • Philip Weiss/Adam Horowitz: It was a bad week for the Israel lobby: Not just Netanyahu's folly, but Obama finally appointed Rob Malley to his top Mideast security post ("Malley has said that only international pressure will make Israel do anything about the occupation"), and it looks like Netanyahu's leading Democratic stooge on Iran, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) will be indicted for corruption.
  • Jim Newell: Netanyahu blew it: How he misunderstood Congress & inadvertently ruined his own goals
  • Josh Marshall: Can an Israeli Government End the Occupation?: Gives you some background on how Palestinian parties have been frozen out of government coalition building in Israel. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza can't vote in Israeli elections, but "Palestinian Citizens of Israel" amount to about 20% of the electorate, and have typically claimed about 10% of Israel's Knesset membership (voting turnout is typically light, and some Arabs vote for Zionist parties).
  • Bill Moyers/Michael Winship: "We are hostage to his fortune": Sheldon Adelson, Benjamin Netanyahu and America's dark money conspiracy: I've long warned that one reason Israel is so dangerous for American democracy is that neocons idolize Israel's stealthy belligerence as a model for American foreign policy, which given US size and worldwide interests would be even more disastrous. However, with Adelson trying to export America's money-politics to Israel, Israelis should also worry about the fate of their own democracy (as if right-wing efforts there to trample on non-Jewish rights weren't ominous enough). Actually, Adelson is worse than either: his serious proposal for dealing with Iran is to drop a "demonstration" nuclear bomb in their desert, then follow it up with "the next one in the middle of Tehran" if they refuse to surrender.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Andrew Bacevich: How to Create a National Insecurity State: Much here going back to Vietnam, occasioned by Christian Appy's new book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, but in the plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose spirit I want to point out this paragraph on Obama's new Defense Secretary, Ash Carter:

  So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth Pollack, Michael O'Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all. Besides all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three share the distinction of having supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today. For assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound -- we just need to try harder -- who better to consult than Pollack, O'Hanlon, and Kagan (any Kagan)?

• Subhankar Banerjee: Arctic Nightmares: Author of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, on oil exploration in the Arctic Ocean, what it entails, and where it's taking us.

• Lee Drutman: A Lobbyist Just for You: Businesses have hired lobbyists in Washington to defend and advance their interests in all matter of ways. Sometimes they seek advantages over other businesses, as in the recent squabble between retailers and banks over "cash card" fees, but mostly they seek to cheat the less organized "public interest" -- i.e., you. We could seek to limit their predation by regulating lobbying, but courts have increasingly viewed that as a restriction of free speech (the idea that corporations should enjoy individual rights weighs in here, even though "free speech" for corporations is mostly a matter of money pushing its weight around -- there's nothing free about it). So Drutman poses another approach, which is to support public interest lobbyists as an antidote to private interest lobbyists. He also proposes more transparency in lobbying, and more competent staff for Congress to sort through the pros and expose the cons of lobby propaganda. It's a useful start, but he ignores another aspect, which is all the PAC money going to elect Congress in the first place.

• Phillip Longman: Lost in Obamacare: A review of Steven Brill: America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, promising "Buried in Steven Brill's convoluted tome are important truths about how to reform our health care delivery system." That does indeed take some digging, even in the review, but here's one point:

  What Brill gets most importantly right about the political economy of health care is the role that provider cartels and monopolies increasingly play in driving up prices. He provides excellent on-the-ground reporting, for example, on how the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has emerged as a "super monopoly" dominating the health care market of all of western Pennsylvania -- first by buying up rival hospitals or luring away their most profitable doctors, and now by vertically integrating to become a dominating health insurance company as well.

  Brill similarly reports how the Yale-New Haven Hospital gobbled up its last remaining local competitor in 2012 to become a multibillion-dollar colossus. Importantly, Brill shows readers how, after the merger, an insurer could not "negotiate discounts with Yale-New Haven," because "it could not possibly sell insurance to area residents without including the only available hospital in its network and the increasing share of the area's doctors whose practices were also being bought up by the hospital."

  Obamacare essentially attempted to rebalance the health care industry on a basis of universal coverage as opposed to the previous (and worsening) basis of discriminatory insurance pricing (which had pushed most Americans out of the market, often into "safety net" programs), while leaving the rest of the profit-seeking industry unchanged. That was a real improvement, but a rather temporary one as the industry adjusts to the changes. Clearly one such adjustment is increasing consolidation and monopoly rents. I know, for instance, that the largest hospital in Wichita (Via Christi) has been buying up previously independent physician groups. At the very least, this calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement -- something Bush destroyed and Obama has been loathe to resurrect. Or single-payer. Or both.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Music: Current count 24592 [24560] rated (+32), 499 [493] unrated (+6).

Surprised at all the mail that came in this past week, especially today. (I don't always get Monday's mail added into Unpacking, but this week I did.) In particular, I've gotten more than a few packages from publicists who seemed to give up on me years ago. I'm not sure whether I should be gratified by the recognition. I've actually been quite bummed this winter with my inability to move on to what seem to me to be more serious writing projects.

A mid-week check suggested that the ratings rate was falling off, possibly because the EOY Aggregate File seems finally to be finished. (Don't know what happened to the Dean's List I promised last week.) But bad weather kept me inside, and the growing queue encourage me to pick some items off. May also have helped that I have more than the usual number of recommendations to make this week. I started off last week checking out some records featuring the late trumpet player Clark Terry: Dinah Washington was the first of a great many singers to tap Terry; I only found one record he recorded with Coleman Hawkins, but it grew on me (as Hawk almost always does); the Buddy Tate didn't include Terry (some confusion on my part, but I followed through anyway).

I looked for the Tristano several months ago but it wasn't available. I haven't received Uptown's vault releases for a couple years now, but have tried to catch them when they showed up on Rhapsody. I usually found them disappointing -- often sound, sometimes annoying patter or just uninspired performances, but Chicago 1951 grabbed me right away. There are other good examples of the interplay between Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz, but this is the best example I've found of Tristano's innovative playing. Braxton's duets with Dave Holland are also remarkable: Braxton has often been much easier to follow on standards than through his own knotty compositions, but you rarely get to focus so intently on his bass playing. The relationship between the two musicians goes back a couple years earlier, at least to Holland's 1972 album Conference of the Birds, with one of Braxton's most virtuosic performances ever.

Three new jazz albums made the grade -- all on European labels. Chris Lightcap's album jumped to the top of my nascent 2015 list. Non-jazz 2015 A-list albums continue to lag: I could cite Ghostface Killah's disc as the first of the year, but even there top billing went to the Canadian jazz group BadBadNotGood. I was tempted by A Place to Bury Strangers, but didn't feel like a second spin would make a difference.

Also in today's mail were copies of Robert Christgau's new memoir, Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man, and Carola Dibbell's first published (but not first written) novel, The Only Ones. I read an early draft of the former, and my wife read an even earlier draft of the latter. Christgau's book was released last week, so I've been gathering links of reviews and interviews for possible use on his website. I'm not sure how many of these we will use on the website, but here is my current, unexpurgated list:

• Alex Pappademas: Maximum Bob: The Dean of American Rock Critics' Memoir Is Revealing, Rewarding, and Full of Copulating (Grantland, Feb. 19, 2015)
• Kate Tuttle: Books (The Boston Globe, Feb. 21, 2015)
• Leah Carroll: Almost Famous: The B+ Adventures of Robert Christgau (The Concourse, Feb. 23, 2015)
• Jack Dickey: How to Survive 13,000 Album Reviews (Time, Feb. 24, 2015)
• Dwight Garner: Robert Christgau Reflects on His Career as a Rock Critic (New York Times, Feb. 24, 2015)
• Dan Buyanovsky: "I'm a Good Writer" - Robert Christgau on the Life and Legacy of Robert Christgau (Noisey, Feb. 24, 2015)
• Dan Weiss: Q&A: Robert Christgau on His Memoir 'Going Into the City' and Not Loving the War on Drugs (Spin, Feb. 24, 2015)
• Mark Athitakis: Going Into the City (BN Review, Feb. 25, 2015)
• Jon Foro: Authentic Voices; New Memoirs from Kim Gordon and Robert Christgau (Omnivoracious, Feb. 25, 2015)
• Kevin J.H. Dettmar: 'Going Into the City,' rock critic Robert Christgau's back pages (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 26, 2015)
• Jon Dolan: Robert Christgau, Rock & Roll Radical (Rolling Stone, Feb. 27, 2015)
• Devin McKinney: Guts on the Page: Notes on the Absolute Unity of Robert Christgau (Critics at Large, Feb. 28, 2015)
• Arum Rath: Robert Christgau Reviews His Own Life (NPR, Mar. 1, 2015)
Margaret Eby: The Dean's List: Robert Christgau's 10,000 Opinions (Brooklyn Magazine, Mar. 2, 2015)

For more on Carola's novel, look here.

New records rated this week:

• BadBadNotGood & Ghostface Killah: Sour Soul (2015, Lex): a very noir-ish (if not exactly jazzy) soundtrack for "pimping ain't easy" raps [r]: A-
• Daniel Bennett Group: The Mystery at Clown Castle (2014 [2015], Manhattan Daylight): saxophonist, can cruise with a good beat but too much shout/circus/flute here [cd]: B+(*)
• Mike Campbell: Close Enough for Love (2014 [2015], ITI): standards singer, makes the most of Steely Dan, much less of Kenny Loggins [cd]: B+(*)
• Chamber 3: Grassroots (2013 [2015], OA2): guitar-sax-drums trio + bassist for good measure, not a chamber jazz lineup, even when coverng Nirvana [cd]: B+(*)
• Lainie Cooke: The Music Is the Magic (2014 [2015], Onyx Music): standards singer, draws more on jazz repertoire than cabaret, gets help from Myron Walden [cd]: B
• Paul Elwood: Nice Folks (2011 [2015], Innova): banjo player recapitulates career, starting with folk songs, moving on to avant and/or worldly groove [cd]: B+(***)
• Otzir Godot: In- (2014 [2015], Epatto): Finnish percussionist cuts a solo album; tunings are unique but I prefer the drumming to the ambient noise [cd]: B+(**)
• Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (2013 [2015], TUM): legendary drummer gets help from bassist who adds just enough body [cd]: A-
• Mark Helias Open Loose: The Signal Maker (2014 [2015], Intakt): puzzling over why Tony Malaby never breaks loose, I see the bassist wrote the tunes [cd]: B+(***)
• Eddie Henderson: Collective Portrait (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): trumpet-led classic hard bop quintet, Gary Bartz on alto, George Cables riffing blues [r]: B+(**)
• I Never Meta Guitar Three (2011-13 [2015], Clean Feed): Elliott Sharp's invitational for solo avant-jazz guitarists, looking to break new ground, or strings [cd]: B+(**)
• The Susan Krebs Chamber Band: Simple Gifts (2014 [2015], GreenGig Music): jazz singer backed by piano-reeds-percussion-violin/viola, a crucial weepy effect [cd]: B+(***)
• Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): two saxes (Malaby & Cheek), stellar work by Craig Taborn, especially on the VU cover [cd]: A-
• Chad McCullough & Bram Weijters: Abstract Quantities (2014 [2015], Origin): Dutch-US (Seattle) quartet, postbop so skilled I never noticed a thing [cd]: B+(*)
• Tatsuya Nakatani/Kris Tiner/Jeremy Drake: Ritual Inscription (2012, Epigraph, LP): avant-jazz from Bakersfield, ground fractured forever shifting [bc]: B+(**)
• Not Twice: Flight Plans (2014, Epigraph, EP): avant-trumpeter Kris Tiner backed with keybs/electronics, not much traction for trumpet, short too [bc]: B
• Kate Pierson: Guitars and Microphones (2015, Lazy Meadow Music): B-52s singer goes solo, sets up the classic beat but doesn't quite hit the punch lines [r]: B+(*)
• A Place to Bury Strangers: Transfixiation (2015, Dead Oceans): sort of heavy metal shoegaze, trading fuzzy noise for something harder [r]: B+(***)
• Chris Potter Underground Orchestra: Imaginary Cities (2013 [2015], ECM): still kicks ass when he solos, still struggles as a big band arranger [dl]: B+(**)
• Reggie Quinerly: Invictus (2014 [2015], Redefinition Music): drummer-led quintet, the vibes-guitar-piano adding up to frothy lightness [cd]: B+(*)
• Schlippenbach Trio: Features (2013 [2015], Intakt): with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens, together since 1972, free jazz fractured but superbly balanced [cd]: A-
• Songsmith Collective: Songsmith Collective (2014 [2015], Blujazz): Andrew Rathbun's homework assignment: take a poem, compose a score, sing it backed by jazz nonet [cd]: B
• Jack Wright/Ben Wright/Kris Tiner: For Instance (2014, Epigraph): father-son sax-bass duo, avant-wilderness wanderers, meet trumpeter with label [bc]: B+(*)

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

• Anthony Braxton: Trio and Duet (1974 [2015], Delmark/Sackville): an amusingly abstract puzzle for trio, plus you-focused standards with Dave Holland [cd]: A-
• The Rough Guide to African Rare Groove: Volume 1 ([2015], World Music Network): one suspects that what makes it rare is the not quite fully realized groove [r]: B+(**)
• Lennie Tristano: Chicago April 1951 (1951 [2014], Uptown, 2CD): with disciples Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, of course, a slightly stranger shade of bebop [r]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Coleman Hawkins/Clark Terry: Back in Bean's Bag (1962 [2014], Essential Jazz Classics): relaxed mainstream swing masters, with Tommy Flanagan; reissue adds much[r]: A-
• Buddy Tate Quartet & Quintet: Tate a Tete: At La Fontaine, Copenhagen (1975 [1999], Storyville): Texas tenor goes to Denmark, picks up local band including Tete Montoilu [r]: B+(**)
• Dinah Washington: Dinah Jams (1954 [1997], Verve): one party everyone wanted to jump into; trumpets alone: Brown, Terry, Ferguson [r]: A-
• Dinah Washington: Sings Fats Waller (1957 [2010], Fresh Sound): Eddie Chamblee's duets don't mesh, but she gets under the skin of "Black & Blue" [r]: B+(**)
• Dinah Washington: Sings Bessie Smith (1957-58 [2010], Fresh Sound): she's more polished but savors Smith's grit and sass while the trombone gets dirty [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Christian Artmann: Fields of Pannonia (self-released): April 7
• Atomic: Lucidity (Jazzland): March 17
• Dewa Budjana: Hasta Karma (Moonjune)
• Anat Cohen: Luminosa (Anzic): March 17
• Dahi Divine: The Element (Right Direction): April 7
• John Fedchock Quartet: Live: Fluidity (Summit)
• Janice Friedman Trio: Live at Kitano (CAP)
• Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (TUM)
• Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (TUM, 2CD)
• Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm: Spark (Water Street Music): April 7
• Myra Melford: Snowy Egret (Enja/Yellowbird): March 24
• Merzbow/Balasz Pandi/Mats Gustafsson/Thurston Moore: Cuts of Guilt/Cuts Deeper (Rare Noise, 2CD): advance, April 7
• Levon Mikaelian: United Shades of Artistry (self-released): April 7
• Billy Mintz: The 2 Bass Band . . . Live (Thirteenth Note): May 12
• Kyle Nasser: Restive Soul (AISA): March 24
• Hailey Niswanger: PDX Soul (Calmit Productions): April 7
• Kim Pensyl: Foreign Love Affair (Summit)
• Roberta Piket: Emanation (Solo: Volume 2) (Thirteenth Note): May 12
• Raoul: The Spanish Donkey (Rare Noise): advance, April 7
• Sachal: Slow Motion Miracles (Okeh): advance, April 7
• Benny Sharoni: Slant Signature (Papaya): March 17
• Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (Blue Note/ArtistShare): March 17
• Mark Wingfield: Proof of Light (Moonjune)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

The Kansas state legislature has past the half-way point in their scheduled session this year, and the Republicans there have already succeeded in their most evident goal: to make Kansas the laughing stock of the nation (with all due respect to the state legislatures of Texas and Missouri). Crowson's cartoon:

This primarily refers to a bill that passed the Senate (see Luke Brinker: Kansas could put teachers in prison for assigning books prosecutors don't like), but the war on public schools has gone through a number of skirmishes: first and foremost a massive funding cut -- from levels that the courts had already established were the minimum required by the state constitution. But also there have been two bills to rejigger the election of local school boards (a festering ground for people likely to sue when the state doesn't deliver its mandated funding): one is to move the election dates and make them partisan (assuming the Republican brand holds; voters have been known to accidentally elect Democrats in non-partisan elections), and another to make it illegal for any schoolteacher or relative of a schoolteacher to run for any school board (this would, for instance, disqualify 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis). There is also a bill, still pending, where the state would pay foster parents more for foster children who are privately- or home-schooled.

Some more scattered links this week:

• Dean Baker: Robert Samuelson's 'Golden Age' Mythology: I actually read Samuelson's book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement (2008), where he argues that the inflation spiral of the 1970s was every bit as damaging as the Great Depression in the 1930s -- a point my parents, who lived through both, would have found incredible. So I'm well prepared to reject anything Samuelson has to say, but note the following:

  Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 2/22/15) was inspired by a graph in the new Economic Report of the President to tell readers that the real problem for the middle class is not inequality but rather productivity growth. His point is that if we had kept up the rates of productivity growth of the Golden Age (1943-73), it would have mattered much more to middle-income families' living standards than the rise in inequality since 1980.

  This is true in the sense of "if I were six feet five inches, I would be taller than I am," but it's not clear what we should make of the point. We don't know how to have more rapid productivity growth (at least not Golden Age rates), so saying that we should want more rapid productivity growth is sort of like hoping for the Second Coming.

  Superficially, Samuelson is just grasping at straws to dismiss the obvious effects of increasing inequality. Sure, if we had much more productivity growth, the middle class might be better off, but only if it were possible for the middle class to capture a substantial share of that productivity growth -- but in recent years, no share of productivity growth has gone to increased wages. As Baker points out:

  If we can only sustain the 1.5 percent annual productivity growth of the slowdown years (1973-1995), this would still imply income gains of almost 60 percent over three decades. While it would of course be better to have Golden Age productivity growth, since we don't know how to get back such rapid growth, why not pursue the policies that we know will be effective in restoring middle class income growth?

  It is also worth noting that these equality enhancing policies are also likely to provide some boost to productivity. We know that the most important determinant of investment is growth in demand. This means that if we push the economy, rather than have the Fed slam on the brakes with higher interest rates, we will likely see more investment in new plant, equipment and software, and therefore more productivity growth.

  In addition, in a tighter labor market workers will leave low-productivity jobs for jobs with higher productivity that offer higher wages. A reason that many workers, including many with college degrees, have taken jobs in restaurants is that there are not better-paying jobs available. If the economy were stronger, better jobs would be available causing productivity to rise due to a shift in composition.

  The bulk of the article reviews Samuelson's period breakdown and shows where his effort to force history into his preconceived periods breaks down. Baker skips over the question of why 1946-64 productivity levels are no longer attainable, but James K. Galbraith wrote a whole book on the subject: The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014) -- something I'll get around to writing about sooner or later.

  By the way, see Galbraith's Reading the Greek Deal Correctly. He sees the recent agreement between Greece's new left-leaning government and the ECB not as a defeat for Greece's voters so much as a way everyone can save face by kicking the ball down the road a few weeks.

• Josh Marshall: Kerry's Clean Hit: When John Kerry pointed out how wrong Benjamin Netanyahu's predictions supporting the 2003 Iraq War were, I recalled how Kerry had voted for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002 and wrote them off as two peas in the same pod. Marshall argues that Kerry's position was more, uh, nuanced than my memory recalled:

  There's some important background on this new intrusion of the Iraq War into the current debate about Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli election. It's true that like a number of Senate Democrats, John Kerry voted for the Iraq War resolution in late 2002. That was due to a mix of belief in national unity, political cowardice and a credulous assumption that President Bush was actually on the level when he said he needed the authorization to wage war to avoid it, to get inspectors back into Iraq. It was or should have been clear that this was not true, that inspectors and Weapons of Mass Destruction were not the goal that made the threat of war necessary. They were cudgels and covers to help make the war a fait accompli.

  Many Democrats either didn't think Saddam would relent or thought that if he did, Bush would lose his casus belli. I don't exonerate them. They were helped along in these maybe misunderstandings by a health dose of cowardice and what they saw at the time as political self-preservation. As it happened, when Bush lost his rationale for war, he simply invaded anyway.

  This was mainly obvious at the time, not entirely obvious to everyone. But to suggest that Secretary Kerry 'supported' the Iraq War like President Bush or Benjamin Netanyahu is silly.

  That brings us to Netanyahu. Some believe that the Israeli government either wanted the Iraq War to happen or goaded the Americans into the attack. In fact, the Israeli security establishment was very divided on the wisdom of the US administration's policy. Indeed, Ariel Sharon pointedly warned President Bush of the dangers of what he was planning. Indeed, the best account of his discussions with President Bush suggests his warnings were highly prescient -- about the spillover of radicalism growing out of a US occupation, the zero sum empowerment of Iran and more.

  It was Netanyahu, then technically a private citizen, though he would soon enter Sharon's government in late 2002 who not only supported a US attack on Iraq but advocated for it endlessly within the US.

  Italics in the original; I added the bold. Of course, the practical effect of Kerry, Clinton, Edwards, and others in voting for Bush's Iraq War Resolution was to rubber-stamp the invasion. (As I recall Marshall at least wobbled on the war plans: in particular, I recall him praising Kenneth Pollack's influential pro-war book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.) But he is right that Netanyahu's warmongering went much further, both in words and in actually lining up his rich American donor network to lobby war support. Marshall also includes a video of Netanyahu testifying before a House committee promoting the war. Even among Israelis few politicians have that sort of chutzpah. Of course, no one's dredging this episode up because we're interested in learning from history. Netanyahu's past record of influencing Congress matters right now because he's still at it, with an invitation by House Republicans to address Congress to try to undo any progress Obama might make on negotiating a deal that would ensure that Iran not develop nuclear weapons. I haven't bothered collecting links on the various aspects of this -- either the propriety of Natanyahu's speech (widely opposed both in Israel and in the US) or on the tortuous negotiations (often hamstrung by hypothetical scenarios only Americans can imagine). (OK, if you are curious, check out: Paul R Pillar; Gareth Porter, also here; Robert Einhorn; William J Perry, et al.; Jeffrey Simpson; JJ Goldberg; Stephen M Walt (interview); Philip Weiss; Richard Silverstein.) Also, let's quote from Jeffrey Goldberg: A Partial Accounting of the Damage Netanyahu Is Doing to Israel (recalling that Goldberg has a long history of parrotting whatever Israel's current propaganda line is on Iran):

  Netanyahu is engaging in behavior that is without precedent: He is apparently so desperate to stay in office that he has let the Republicans weaponize his country in their struggle against a Democratic president they despise. Boehner seeks to do damage to Obama, and he has turned Netanyahu into an ally in this cause. It's not entirely clear here who is being played.

  For decades, it has been a cardinal principle of Israeli security and foreign-policy doctrine that its leaders must cultivate bipartisan support in the United States, and therefore avoid even the appearance of favoritism. This is the official position of the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, AIPAC, as well, which is why its leaders are privately fuming about Netanyahu's end-run around the White House. Even though AIPAC's leadership leans right, the organization knows that support for Israel in America must be bipartisan in order for it to be stable. "Dermer and Netanyahu don't believe that Democrats are capable of being pro-Israel, which is crazy for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that most Jews are Democrats," one veteran AIPAC leader told me.

  In Israel, cynicism about Netanyahu's intentions is spreading. "Netanyahu, who purports to be the big expert on everything American, subordinated Israel's most crucial strategic interests to election considerations, and the repercussions will endure for some time," Chuck Freilich, a former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, wrote last week.

• Robert Wright: The Clash of Civilizations That Isn't: Reaction to Roger Cohen's polarizing rant, "Islam and the West at War," along with Graeme Wood's Atlantic piece, "What ISIS Really Wants" (links in the article if you really want them). You may recall that GW Bush (aside from a momentary slip-of-the-tongue about "crusades") was very careful to make clear that his Global War on Terror wasn't a campaign against his family friends in Saudi Arabia. (Indeed, Bush was practically the only politician in America to defend a deal that would sell US ports to Abu Dhabi: proof, if you want it, that for him at least money always trumps identity.) But most Americans have never been very disciplined or principled about distinguishing the targets of our wars from anyone else who might share superficial traits, so it isn't surprising that prolonged war with self-identified Muslims should result in more than random acts of slander and violence. In the days of purely nationalist wars (e.g., the two World Wars), this was mostly ugly and repaired easy enough once the war ended. (Indeed, the anti-Kraut hysteria of WWI was much reduced in WWII, as the embarrassment of the former provided a vaccination against repeat in the latter -- not that Japanese-Americans were spared.) But in more recent wars -- let's call them "post-colonial" -- US entry is predicated on dividing populations into groups we call allies and enemies, one we support and the other we kill, and in such wars any mental generalization undermines the mission and ultimately loses the war. (Vietnam is as good an example of the dynamic as Afghanistan or Iraq, but the downside was much more limited there: it ultimately turned into a nationalist war, with the US deciding that perpetual scorn and isolation was still some measure of victory.)

  Those post-colonial wars have, without exception that I am aware of, been fools' missions, but they would pale compared to the fevered notion that "the West" must wage war with all of Islam -- well over one billion people, including a few million already resident in "the West." Wright points out that this insanity can point to an intellectual pedigree:

  In 1996, when I reviewed Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations for Slate, I fretted that Huntington's world view could become "a self-fulfilling prophecy." This was before 9/11, and I wasn't thinking about Islam in particular. Huntington's book was about "fault lines" dividing various "civilizations," and I was just making the general point that if we think of, say, Japanese people as radically different from Americans -- as Huntington's book, I believed, encouraged us to do -- we were more likely to treat Japan in ways that deepened any Japanese-Western fault line.

  Since 9/11, I've realized that, in the case of Islam, the forces that could make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy are particularly powerful. For one thing, in this case, our actual enemies, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, themselves favor the clash-of-civilizations narrative, and do their best to encourage it. When the Atlantic tells us that ISIS is "very Islamic" and the New York Times runs the headline "Islam and the West at War," it's party time in Mosul. Order up another round of decapitations! Get Roger Cohen more freaked out! Maybe he'll keep broadcasting a key recruiting pitch of both Al Qaeda and ISIS: that the West is at war with Islam! (Wood noted, a week after his article appeared, its "popularity among ISIS supporters.")

  Wright doesn't go very deeply into the people in "the West" that buy into this "clash of civilizations" malarkey, except to note:

  I don't think it's a coincidence that commentators who dismiss attempts to understand the "root causes" of extremism tend to be emphatic in linking the extremism to Islam, and often favor a massively violent response to it.

  By the way, the wind is at their backs. Last week, CBS News reported that, for the first time, a majority of Americans polled -- fifty-seven per cent -- favored sending ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

  Haven't we seen this movie? The Iraq War, more than any other single factor, created ISIS. After the 2003 invasion, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who led an obscure group of radical Islamists, rebranded it as an Al Qaeda affiliate and used the wartime chaos of Iraq to expand it. Al-Zarqawi's movement came to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then evolved into ISIS.

  Note that more and more post-colonial rationales -- the idea that we're fighting for some (good) Afghanis/Iraqis/Muslims against other (bad) ones -- is giving way to outright nationalist/colonialist ideas (not yet with Obama and his echelons but with the people most loudly beating the war drums).

  Also worth quoting Paul Woodward on ISIS and the caliphate:

  Millions of Muslims, without being extremists of any variety, see the Islamic world as having been carved up by Western colonialism, robbed of its sovereignty, and placed under the control of compliant and corrupt rulers. Broadly speaking, what's on offer right now is a brutal ISIS caliphate vs. a fractious status quo. That seems like a lousy choice.

  As Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya demonstrated over the last half century, the project of pan-Arab secular nationalism was a spectacular failure.

  On the other hand, the Arab monarchies have the durability of a chronic disease -- their ability to survive has accomplished little more than cripple the region.

  If ISIS and the other forms of Islamic extremism are seen for what they are -- symptoms of a disease, rather than the disease itself -- then the remedy cannot be found by merely looking for ways to suppress its symptoms.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Henry Farrell: Dark Leviathan: Subhed: "The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings." As a libertarian experiment, this reminds me of some of those Murray Rothbard schemes I typeset for the Kochs back in the 1970s -- especially the naive notion that trust can be comoditized and brokered through a marketplace.

  All of these petty principalities are vulnerable to criminals trying to extract ransom, and increasingly to law enforcement, which has inveigled its way into trusted positions so that it can gather information and destroy illicit marketplaces. The libertarian hope that markets could sustain themselves through free association and choice is a chimera with a toxic sting in its tail. Without state enforcement, the secret drug markets of Tor hidden services are coming to resemble an anarchic state of nature in which self-help dominates.

• Nancy Le Tourneau: The Scott Walker Antidote: Minnesota: Compares and contrasts the results of Democratic government in Minnesota under Mark Dayton and Republican government in Wisconsin with Scott Walker. You can follow up with Ed Kilgore: Scott Walker's Koch Angle: you don't have to be as screwed up as Kansas to get screwed. For more on Walker, see A Noun, a Verb, and "Union Thugs".

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Music: Current count 24560 [24527] rated (+33), 493 [501] unrated (-8).

Wichita got hit by two snowstorms last week. Cumulative damage is about an inch on the grass, less on the concrete. I figure that if I don't pay it any attention it'll vanish by tomorrow afternoon. Cold today, though. The weather did keep me inside, and I bagged the usual bounty of records. Three of this week's four A- records came from very late-breaking, currently unpublished EOY lists: Lucas Fagen came up with a half-dozen albums I had yet to hear of -- mostly K-Pop and Middle Eastern pop or classical, with Nancy Ajram the one that clicked hardest. Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Wormburner appeared on Robert Christgau's Dean's List (or should appear when it's published at BN Review, most likely this week). Those bring my 2014 A-list to 155 records (plus 24 compilations). I think that qualifies as the longest EOY list this year -- John Mulvey stopped at 154 albums, Jason Gubbels at 150, Under the Radar at 140) -- oops, metal-friendly (but not exclusively so) Louder Than War went all the way to 200 albums, but figure that as a staff (not an individual) list. The secret to a long list is listening to a lot of records (in my case, 1206 last year) and having broad taste and a relatively open mind. I couldn't have come remotely close to that much coverage had it not been for streaming services like Rhapsody, freely streamable albums such as one finds on Bandcamp, and more or less legit downloadables (although frankly I've taken very little advantage of the latter). Still, there were hundreds of albums I searched for but couldn't find, and who knows how many worthwhile items I never knew about. As long as recorded music is treated as private monopoly instead of as a public resource we're cheating ourselves out of a higher standard of living and cultural understanding.

Robert Christgau's memoir, Going Into the City: A Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey Street Books) will be released tomorrow (Tuesday, February 24). I read an early draft of the book, so know that it starts with his childhood, goes through adolescence, college, his discovery that "a rock and roll critic is something to be" (my phrase with a hat tip to the Byrds -- I used it in my contribution to his Festschrift), his tenure editing the music section at The Village Voice, up to 1985 when he became a father. I've known him since 1975, when he invited me to write for Voice music section (and befriended me), so I know some of this firsthand, some more secondhand, and learned much more. I'll write more once I've seen the published book, but can recommend it heartily to anyone even remotely interested in thinking about popular culture in the pivotal decade of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, those of you in New York should consider two book launch events this week:

• Tuesday, Feb. 24, 7-8pm with Jody Rosen at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn [link]
• Wednesday, Feb. 25, 7-8pm with Rob Sheffield at Strand Books in Manhattan [link]

Also, several excerpts from the book have been posted:

• On Visiting CBGB in the Seventies and falling for Television's 'Marquee Moon' (Rolling Stone, Feb. 16, 2015)
• Robert Christgau Remembers the Deaths of Lennon, Marley, and Lester Bangs (Vulture, Feb. 17, 2015)
• Read an Excerpt From Robert Christgau's Memoir 'Going Into the City' (Spin, Feb. 23, 2015)

Not much on his website yet about the book, but I'm working on that.

Clark Terry died last week, age 94. My favorite tweet:

Christian McBride @mcbridesworld
Every musician in the world who ever met Clark Terry is a better musician & person because of it. He now belongs to the ages. RIP, sir.

According to Tom Lord, Terry recorded 902 sessions from February 1947 to July 2008 (114 as leader and 788 as sideman; PDF here).

Some Clark Terry records I recommend (mostly side credits although hardly ever marginal; he raised everyone's game, but the records he led were only rarely exceptional):

• Count Basie: America's #1 Band: The Columbia Years (1935-50 [2003], Columbia/Legacy, 4CD): Terry played with Basie 1948-51, so only caught the end of this.
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Ellington Uptown (1947-52 [2004], Columbia/Legacy)
• Dinah Washington: Dinah Jams (1954 [1997], Verve)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Such Sweet Thunder (1955-56 [1999], Columbia/Legacy)
• Duke Ellington: Ellington at Newport 1956 (Complete) (1956 [1999], Columbia/Legacy)
• Thelonious Monk: Brilliant Corners (1956 [2008], Riverside)
• Clark Terry Quintet: Serenade to a Bus Seat (1957 [1992], Riverside/OJC)
• Ella Fitzgerald: Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook (1956-57 [1999], Verve, 3CD)
• Clark Terry Quartet with Thelonious Monk: In Orbit (1958 [1987], Riverside OJC)
• Duke Ellington: Blues in Orbit (1958-59 [2004], Columbia/Legacy)
• Duke Ellington: Jazz Party (1959 [1991], Columbia/Legacy)
• Duke Ellington: Anatomy of a Murder (1959 [1991], Rykodisc)
• Jimmy Heath's Big Band: Really Big! (1960 [2007], Riverside)
• Budd Johnson: Budd Johnson and the Four Brass Giants (1960 [1999], Riverside OJC): with Nat Adderley, Harry Edison, and Ray Nance
• Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra: Gillespiana/Carnegie Hall Concert (1960-61 [1993], Verve)
• Tubby Hayes/Clark Terry: New York Sessions (1961 [1990], Columbia)
• Coleman Hawkins/Clark Terry: Back in Bean's Bag (1962 [2014], Essential Jazz Classics)
• Oscar Peterson: Trio + One: Clark Terry (1964 [1984], Emarcy)
• Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life (1964-65 [2000], Red Baron)
• Earl Hines: Once Upon a Time (1966 [2003], Impulse)
• Jimmy Rushing: Every Day I Have the Blues (1967 [1999], Impulse)
• Duke Ellington: . . . And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967 [1987], RCA)
• Swing Fever: Grand Masters of Jazz (1998-2001 [2013], Open Art): with Buddy DeFranco, Terry Gibbs, Jackie Ryan
• Clark Terry/Max Roach: Friendship (2002 [2003], Eighty-Eights/Columbia)
• Jon Faddis: Teranga (2005 [2006], Koch)
• Louie Bellson/Clark Terry: Louie & Clark Expedition 2 (2007 [2008], Percussion Power)

Probably a lot more where those came from. Some other musicians who show up with albums in Terry's discography (I'm just looking at leaders; Lord has counted 2504 musicians Terry played with): Cannonball Adderley, Henry "Red" Allen, Gene Ammons, Louis Armstrong (Terry picked up the horn when Armstrong couldn't play on "What a Wonderful World"), Charlie Barnet, Art Blakey, Bob Brookmeyer, Ray Brown, Ruth Brown, Ray Bryant, Kenny Burrell, Benny Carter, Ray Charles, Al Cohn, Chris Connor, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Arne Domnerus, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Roy Eldridge, Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Bud Freeman, Stan Getz, Paul Gonsalves, Benny Goodman, Wendell Gray, Johnny Griffin, Bengt Hallberg, Woody Herman, Lionel Hampton, John Hicks, Johnny Hodges, Billie Holiday, Freddie Hubbard, Milt Jackson, J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Elvin Jones, Quincy Jones, Lee Konitz, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Herbie Mann, Marian McPartland, Jay McShann, Charles Mingus, Blue Mitchell, Modern Jazz Quartet, Wes Montgomery, James Moody, Gerry Mulligan (Concert Jazz Band), Oliver Nelson, Babatunde Olatunji, Flip Phillips, Bud Powell, Dianne Reeves, Sonny Rollins, Pee Wee Russell, Lalo Schifrin, Shirley Scott, Tony Scott, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Martial Solal, Sonny Stitt, Buddy Tate, Billy Taylor, Cecil Taylor, Cal Tjader, Big Joe Turner, Stanley Turrentine, McCoy Tyner, UMO Jazz Orchestra, Sarah Vaughan, Ben Webster, Randy Weston, Ernie Wilkins, Joe Williams, Gerald Wilson, Teddy Wilson. (Incomplete, of course.)

It's too late for me to even bother trying to knock out tweet-views of this week's newly rated albums. We'll start next week with a clean slate -- and there will be reviews of all these albums in the next Rhapsody Streamnotes column, most likely in early March.

New records rated this week:

• Nancy Ajram: Nancy 8 (2014, In2musica): [r]: A-
• Béatrice Alunni/Marc Peillon: Dance With Me (2014 [2015], ITI): [cd]: B+(*)
• Andy Brown: Soloist (2014 [2015], Delmark): [cd]: B+(*)
• Harley Card: Hedgerow (2012 [2015], self-released): [cd]: B
• Ernesto Cervini: Turboprop (2014 [2015], Anzic): [cd]: B+(**)
• Dena DeRose: Travelin' Light: Live in Antwerp, Belgium (2010 [2012], MaxJazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Laura Dickinson: One for My Baby: To Frank Sinatra With Love (2013 [2014], Blujazz): [cd]: B+(**)
• Justin Townes Earle: Absent Fathers (2015, Vagrant): [r]: B+(*)
• Silke Eberhard/Dave Burrell: Darlingtonia (2010 [2012], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(***)
• Silke Eberhard/Ulrich Gumpert: Peanuts & Vanities (2011 [2012], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(**)
• Gramatik: The Age of Reason (2014, Lowtemp): [r]: B+(**)
• Scott Hesse Trio: The Stillness of Motion (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• The Ted Howe Jazz Orchestra: Pinnacle (2013 [2015], Hot Stove): [cd]: B
• Ibeyi: Ibeyi (2015, XL): [r]: B
• Kitten: Kitten (2014, Elektra): [r]: B+(**)
• Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Always With Us (2010-12 [2014], self-released): [r]: A-
• Nilson Matta: East Side Rio Drive (2014 [2015], World Blue): [cd]: B+(*)
• Chris McNulty: Eternal (2013 [2015], Palmetto): [cd]: B+(*)
• John O'Gallagher Trio: The Honeycomb (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): [cdr]: A-
• Ahmet Özhan: Gülmira (2014, Esen Musik): [r]: B+(***)
• Lisa Parrott: Round Tripper (2014 [2015], Serious Niceness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Renaud Penant Trio: Want to Be Happy (2014 [2015], ITI Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• John Petrucelli Quintet: The Way (2014 [2015], self-released, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*)
• Lucas Pino: No Net Nonet (2013 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Potsa Lotsa Plus: Plays Love Suite by Eric Dolphy (2014 [2015], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(**)
• John Stowell/Michael Zilber Quartet: Live Beauty (2012 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Gebhard Ullmann/Johannes Fink/Jan Leipnitz/Gebhard Gschlößl: Gulf of Berlin (2012 [2014], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(***)
• Wormburner: Pleasant Living in Planned Communities (2014, Dive): [r]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Moppa Elliott: Moppa Elliott's Mostly Other People Do the Killing (2004 [2005], Hot Cup): [r]: B+(***)
• Tangerine Dream: Phaedra (1974, Virgin): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ab Baars Trio: Slate Blue (Wig)
• Ab Baars Trio & NY Guests: Invisible Blow (Wig)
• Lainie Cooke: The Music Is the Magic (Onyx Music): March 17
• I Never Meta Guitar Three (Clean Feed)
• The Susan Krebs Chamber Band: Simple Gifts (GreenGig Music): March 3
• Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (Clean Feed)
• Open Field + Burton Greene: Flower Stalk (Cipsela)
• Reggie Quinerly: Invictus (Redefinition Music): March 17
• Carlos "Zingaro": Live at Mosteiro de Santa Clara a Velha (Cipsela)

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