Blog Entries [1190 - 1199]

Saturday, October 25, 2014

When I'm Sixty-Four

When I was sixteen I probably knew every lyric to every Beatles song extant, so it wasn't hard to recall at least the refrain of the jaunty little title tune on my 64th birthday. "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?" Back then I wouldn't have had a clue who "you" might be, but I never worried about food: my mother's theme song should have been Cab Calloway's "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House" -- a house I also didn't have a clue how to escape. I celebrated my 16th birthday a couple months late by dropping out of high school. I stayed home a couple days after Christmas when a cousin was visiting. I went back the next day and was so sickened I never returned.

For the next five years I basically hid out in my attic room. I skewed my hours to minimize contact with my parents and siblings, going to sleep minutes before my father got up for work, waking mid-afternoon just in time to watch Dark Shadows and Star Trek reruns. I had a tiny black-and-white TV that ran out of stations shortly after midnight, a tinny stereo with not much more than a dozen LPs, a typewriter, and a growing collection of books and periodicals -- what I spent nearly all of my $10/week allowance on. Evenings I could take the family car out, mostly downtown to bookstores and the library. I was only at ease when surrounded by books, and while my own life was locked down reading made me aware of other worlds and other possibilities.

As I was traveling last week, it occurred to me that there are two types of people in America today: those who can mentally put themselves in other people's predicaments and empathize, and those who can't (or just don't). What triggered this thought was a depression-era story about Uncle Ted: he had heard vigilante threats against a destitute family that had been stealing, so he picked them up and drove them to another county where they had kinfolk; he explained later to his family that he could imagine being so hungry that he might resort to stealing too. Whenever I heard this story, I first think of my harsh experience with thieves, but having known Ted and something of his life and history I wind up recognizing that this story is more complex and nuanced than my own narrow experience knows.

Of course, the point was reinforced many times as I watched political commercials last week. The "two types" don't precisely split along party lines. Indeed, Democrats can appeal to a majority along self-interest lines -- and do so effectively when they point out how Republicans like Tom Cotton (their Senate hopeful in Arkansas) are out to undermine and even dismantle Social Security and Medicare -- but the Republican appeals almost invariably depend on drawing lines between the voters they court and everyone else (all those people outside their identity group, most obsessively president Obama).

Of course, I didn't get to the ability to empathize with others very early. As a child I was exceptionally selfish and greedy, and as an adolescent I withdrew from my social network even before I physically isolated myself. Therefore, much of my early reading focused on my own experiences: education, psychology, religion. One most influential book on the former was Charles Weingartner/Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Their main argument was that the most valuable thing schooling could do was to encourage students to develop their own finely tuned "bullshit detectors." Needless to say, school as I had known it was strongly focused on rote learning -- including the stock moralism of the day. But there was no shortage of bullshit in the late 1960s, so detection soon became easy. I was soon reexamining every assumption I had been brought up to believe. I had an earlier interest in mainstream politics, so my move to the New Left had conventional framing (except that my ancestral reference system was rooted deeper in Populism and Republican Progressivism than in New Deal/Great Society Liberalism).

As I thought more critically, I came to realize that what gets called madness is often just social nonconformity -- something I had developed a literary and artistic taste for. As for my personal dysfunction, I was much taken with Gregory Bateson's "double-bind theory of schizophrenia": I could see how impossible it was to satisfy all the contradictory moral authorities of my youth. That insight turned my personality problem into a matter of logic, something that reason, and therefore I, could sort out.

Not that it was so simple. I had to force myself to socialize. In 1970 I got a GED and enrolled in Wichita State University. A year later I had 59 units of straight-A credit and a scholarship to transfer to Washington University (St. Louis). Two years later I got my first job, was finally able to support myself, and had had a couple of sexual relationships. A couple years later I moved to New York and soon moved in with my first wife. After she died several years later, I found another relationship, and we've been together for more than twenty-five years now.

And now I'm sixty-four -- a milestone monumental enough to inspire a pop song forty-eight years ago, but today it mostly means that I have one more year to suffer through Obamacare (and, sure, be thankful for that) before Medicare kicks in, eliminating one of the great worries of my de facto retirement. Fifteen years ago I used to joke on my "career assessment forms" that my "career goal" was retirement -- one of many times I've crossed some unstated but expected line of conformity -- but I'm more or less there now. My father retired from his factory job as soon as he could afford to, and thereby got a few good years before a stroke pinned him down. For him, as for most people fortunate enough to be able to afford it, retirement was freedom. I've enjoyed that same freedom since SCO let me go in 2000. But while my work ethic hasn't much flagged, I've become increasingly uncomfortable with my lack of accomplishment (what in engineering we call "deliverables").

My recent travels gave me some time to think about this. I spent, for instance, some time with the same cousin I played hooky to see when I was sixteen. We reminisced, but also she poked some holes in my inequality book outline, making me realize how difficult it's going to be to craft arguments that are almost too obvious to me. I believe that inequality is the core political issue of our time, but not so much to balance everyone's supply of stuff as because it profoundly corrupts our sense of justice, and losing the sense that the political order is ultimately just unravels the whole social fabric. Indeed, it may be that stuff is the wrong way to account for inequality. My working title, Share the Wealth (from Huey Long), could just as well be Share the Freedom -- assuming, as I've concluded, that it takes a certain level of wealth to be free, although it's not clear that more wealth makes one more free (although it has been shown that excess wealth doesn't make one happier).

Better developed is an outline for an essay on Israel, something I talked to several people about. The first two sections would explore the only issues of importance to understanding why Israel's leaders have acted for the better part of a century. The first concerns colonial settler demography: the only places where settlers have retained power are places where the population mix tilted decisely in favor of the settlers (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina) while everywhere settlers remained in the minority power has reverted to the majority (most relevantly in South Africa and Algeria). Israel is in between -- secure enough within its 1967 borders but far less so with the Occupied Territories.

The second issue -- perhaps the first chronologically in that it concerns the initial founding of the Zionist movement, but I think it makes more sense to treat it second -- is the dependent dialectic between Zionism and anti-semitism, how it has played out over history, and how it has been twisted around in Israeli self-consciousness. As anti-semitism has waned in the West this link can be questioned, but it is deeply held within Israel, and that has many ramifications that have to be understood. (Israel's obsession with security, for instance, has as much to do with imagined enemies as with real ones.)

The third part would review all significant "peace" proposals since the Peel Commission (or maybe the Balfour Declaration) and pick apart why they have failed -- almost invariably because Israelis have been unable (or unwilling) to reconcile their colonial project with emerging standards of international law on human rights, and lately because Israelis have been able to exploit the archaic rightward turn in US foreign policy. In the past I've written up my pet ideas about how the conflict could be resolved, and some of those ideas may return in an epilogue but my experience is that few people care for my ideas as long as they can hope for something more advantageous.

The other book-like project that came up here and there is the idea of writing a memoir: basically a huge expansion of this post, although I also see it as an occasion to write a personalized history of the era from October 1950 -- a point just before the Chinese entered and turned the tide in the Korean War -- to the present: a long history of imperial decline, with most of the rot on the moral side. (It isn't exactly irony that the US empire expanded as long as we were plausibly anti-imperialist, then declined once we started believing in our destiny. It's just hubris.)

A memoir would also let me look back at where my family came from, how they represented America, and what has happened to more than just me. I could work in some of the stories we batted around on the Arkansas leg of my trip. One of the political ads I saw last week lamented that Arkansas was 48th of 50 states in job creation, but I know good and well that's an old story: seven of my mother's cohort of eight siblings left Arkansas in the 1930s looking for work elsewhere. (Three came to Kansas.) Their stories are interesting, and while I'll never know enough to do them justice, I'd like to know more, and use that as some sort of context. As odd as I grew up, I came from remarkably average roots, and maybe there's some hope in that.

I meant this to come out on my birthday, but events didn't let it work out that way. I was touched by all the good wishes on Facebook, but it was hardly a "great day" -- don't care to go into details, but it slipped out of hand. And the resulting post is rather "stream of consciousness" as I flit from one topic to another.

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Monday, October 6, 2014

Music Week

Music: Current count 23893 [23870] rated (+23), 526 [521] unrated (+5).

Actually, the week for me ended on Friday, October 3.

New records rated this week:

  • Marcia Ball: The Tatooed Lady and the Alligator Man (2014, Alligator): sings blues, plays boogie-woogie, spins a fine yarn then goes for the filler [r]: B+(*)
  • François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: The Russian Concerts Volume 2 (2013 [2014], FMR): more if you want more, but start with superv Vol. 1 [cd]: B+(***)
  • Jack Clement: For Once and for All (2014, IRS Nashville): the late Nashville producer reclaims a few of his songs, with genteel smiling cowboy aplomb [r]: B+(***)
  • Neil Cowley Trio: Touch and Flee (2014, Naim Jazz): Brit piano trio for fans of EST and Jarrett continue to keep semipopular jazz respectable [r]: B+(*)
  • Mark Elf: Returns 2014 (2013 [2014], Jen Bay Jazz): guitarist who admires Tal Farlow backed by David Hazletine, Peter Washington, Lewis Nash dream band [cd]: B+(**)
  • Alice Gerrard: Follow the Music (2014, Tompkins Square): pioneering harmony woman of bluegrass belatedly strikes out on her own, ancient and ragged [r]: B+(***)
  • Prince: Art Official Age (2014, Warner Brothers): wondered if he was done, but give him a major label and he'll lay out some major label funk for you [r]: B+(*)
  • Prince/3rdEyeGirl: Plectrum Electrum (2014, Warner Brothers): "all-female power trio" means they know Cream's basslines but don't sing like Jack Bruce [r]: B+(*)
  • Matthew Shipp: I've Been to Many Places (2014, Thirsty Ear): yet another solo piano record, louder than ever in case you didn't get the point yet [r]: B+(*)
  • Tricky: Adrian Thaws (2014, !K7): discovers own name and recovers old tricks for a wide range of poses, must be some kind of midlife crisis [r]: B+(***)
  • Ulf Wakenius: Solo: Momento Magico (2013 [2014], ACT): solo guitar, goes for thick chords to add gravitas to an intrinsically light album [r]: B+(*)

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

  • Bambara Mystic Soul: The Raw Sound of Burkina Faso 1974-1979 (1974-79 [2011], Analog Africa): obscurities from the heart of the heart of West Africa [r]: B+(**)
  • The Evergreen Classic Jazz Band: Early Tunes 1915-1932 (1995 [2014], Delmark): Seattle trad jazz band with banjo and tuba, makes the old songs zing [cd]: A-
  • Charlie Haden/Jim Hall: Charlie Haden/Jim Hall (1990 [2014], Impulse): live in Montreal a year late for Haden's big fête, but this is more about the guitarist, drawing him out [r]: A-
  • The Rough Guide to Arabic Jazz ([2014], World Music Network, 2CD): rougher than need be, especially with the scene-stealing Cuban ringer the best cut by far [r]: B+(*)
  • The Rough Guide to Bollywood Disco (1965-93 [2014], World Music Network, 2CD): dance dance dance with a pre-disco highlight that reminds me of Chubby Checker [r]: B+(***)
  • The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara [Second Edition] (1980-2013 [2014], World Music Network, 2CD): label annoying as ever, not that they can't program a songlist [r]: B+(***)
  • Wild Jimmy Spruill: Scratchin': The Wild Jimmy Spruill Story (1956-63 [2014], GVC, 2CD): various singers sharing Spruill's guitar, a still vital r&b period compiled [cd]: A

Old records rated this week:

  • Ruby Braff: Linger Awhile (1953-55 [1999], Vanguard): early sessions led by Buck Clayton and Vic Dickenson, showing the company he keeps and progress [r]: B+(**)
  • Matthew Shipp/Guillermo E. Brown: Telephone Popcorn (2005 [2008], Nu Bop): piano-drums duo, half of David Ware's quartet, not quite finished [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Alessandro Collina/Rodolfo Cervetto/Marc Peillon/Fabrizio Bosso: Michel on Air (ITI)
  • Lajos Dudas Trio: Live at Porgy & Bess (Jazz Sick)
  • Lajos Dudas Quartet: Live at Salzburger Jazzherbst (Jazz Sick)
  • Eric Hofbauer: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 1: The Rite of Spring (Creative Nation Music)
  • Eric Hofbauer: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 2: Quintet for the End of Time (Creative Nation Music)
  • Will Holshouser/Matt Munister/Marcus Rojas: Introducing Musette Explosion (Aviary): November 1
  • Bill Watrous/Pete Christlieb/Carl Saunders: A Beautiful Friendship (Summit)

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Friday, October 3, 2014

Working Links

A quick listing of some open tabs as I'm shutting down the computer:

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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Rhapsody Streamnotes (September 2014, Part 2)

Time to wrap another batch of Streamnotes up: 21 days after the September 9 column. I've been running these approximately every three weeks this year, and the average count has been close to 90. The Old Music section focuses on Steve Lacy, after starting out with the much smaller catalogs of Julius Hemphill and Henry Threadgill. The line between Old Music and "Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries" is vague, but generally speaking the latter were released in the last couple years -- I go back as far as 2011 there.

The usual caveats about listening to music on the computer apply. It's rare that I'll settle on an A- grade in only one play -- Sun Ra and Roger Miller are two such cases, but they cover ground I'm familiar with from elsewhere. On the other hand, low-B+ and below rarely get more than one spin: I'm not especially concerned whether I get those grades right, since plus or minus a notch makes little consumer difference. More often I'm sure enough about the grade but unclear on how to write the review: it's rarely worth my while to give a record an extra spin just to write a better review, although I did that routinely back in the days when I got paid for reviews.

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 September 9. Past reviews and more information are available here (5406 records).

New Releases (More or Less)

Ryan Adams: Ryan Adams (2014, Blue Note): Instantly regretted spinning this, knowing that by the time it was over I'd neither grasp whatever intricacies may exist in the lyrics nor care. Prolific, something like 14 albums in 14 years -- surprising at this late date he'd go to the eponymous title, usually an introduction but sometimes a fresh start, in his case more a collapsing worldview, just his face (and a lot of hair) on the cover, just guitar around his voice. B

Jason Adasiewicz's Sun Rooms: From the Region (2013 [2014], Delmark): Vibraphonist, has made a big splash since starting to work with Chicago avant groups a few years back. Trio with bass (Ingebrigt Håker Flaten) and drums (Mike Reed), third album together (starting with the one called Sun Rooms, natch), and goes a long ways toward establishing the vibraphone a lead instrument. B+(***) [cd]

Afghan Whigs: Do to the Beast (2014, Sub Pop): Cincinnati group, had seven albums 1988-98, broke up, returning for this one. I've only heard one of the old albums and don't recall it at all. This strikes me as heavy, an attribute in rock I have little desire for, but very accomplished for its type, I guess. B+(**)

Aphex Twin: Syro (2014, Warp): Richard D. James, enjoyed a measure of fame in the mid-1990s for his "ambient works" -- can't say as I was impressed, nor do I recall following any of the aliases he's used since the last Aphex Twin album in 2001. This, however, is fun throughout, a trippy mix of bass lines and beats, with a little ambient coda at the end. A-

Avi Buffalo: At Best Cuckold (2014, Sub Pop): Southern California group led by Avi Zahner-Isenberg, has a falsetto lead and occasionally pines for the "In My Room" side of the Beach Boys. B+(*)

Iggy Azalea: Ignorant Art (2011 [2012], Grand Hustle, EP): Australian rapper, Amethyst Amelia Kelly, released her debut album this year (below), but on the way to checking it out, I noticed this thing -- her debut mixtape, credited as "Iggy Azalea Presents" ("Dirt in Your Pussy Ass Bitch" is someone else's sketch [T.I.?]). Runs nine tracks, 26:33, built around the video-ready single, "Pu$$y," a sharp and nasty calling card. B+(**)

Iggy Azalea: The New Classic (2014, Island): Rapper from Australia, but her mentor is T.I. and her state-of-the-world production is post-Gaga, post-Minaj even, a "pop/rap hybrid" that eschews the soft center, aiming both sharp edges at the other. "Fancy," of course, is irony, but anyone who'd describe herself as "his new bitch" is bound to be trouble. Metacritic grade: 57. A-

Daniel Blacksberg Trio: Perilous Architecture (2012 [2014], NoBusiness): Trombonist, based in Philadelphia, background ranges from klezmer to Anthony Braxton. Backed with bass and drums, keeps it interesting. B+(***) [cdr]

Frank Catalano/Jimmy Chamberlin: Love Supreme Collective (2014, Ropeadope): Tenor sax and drums, respectively, plus Percy Jones (bass), Adam Benjamin (keys on 3 of 4 cuts), and Chris Poland (guitar on the other cut). The four cuts are laid out like A Love Supreme, but run short (21:58), and rough. B+(*) [cd]

Causa Sui: Pewt'r Sessions 3 (2014, El Paraiso): Third collaboration between the Danish "heavy psych explorers" (i.e., fusion group) and Ron "Pewt'r" Schneiderman, who evidently does similar stuff in Massachusetts. Three tracks for a vinyl-length album, expansive with a slow burn at the end. B+(**)

Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems (2014, Columbia): His "golden voice" is more gone than ever, but his tactic of using female backing vocals keeps him limping along. As for the songs, they're becoming more biblical not because he's thinking of death so much as he's pondering very old things. A-

Jack Cooper: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra (2014, Planet Arts): Jazz Orchestra means big band -- 5 reeds, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, guitar, piano, bass, drums -- and Ives for that gristmill isn't far from the postmodern big band norm -- not swing but not terribly Third Stream either. B+(*) [cd]

Bo Dollis Jr. and the Wild Magnolias: A New Kind of Funk (2013, self-released): New Orleans "Indians" -- a featured story line in HBO's Treme, their showy plumes and deep funk a phenomenon many of us were hepped to in 1976 when The Wild Tchoupitoulas appeared, or even earlier in 1974-75 when the Wild Magnolias released two albums. The latter group was led by Theodore "Bo" Dollis, and now his son, born seven years later but in the crew since he was 13, is at the helm of the family business. His funk moves are hardly pathbreaking, and his use of a bit of rap is tentative, but the basic shtick is irresistible, and the best thing here is the most trad and true, a burnburning "Liza Jane." B+(***)

Open Mike Eagle: Dark Comedy (2014, Mello Music Group): Rapper, west coast guy, very laid back, soft-edged, which oddly enough draws you in. B+(**)

Hal Galper Trio: O's Time (2014, Origin): Piano trio, with Jeff Johnson and John Bishop -- picked them up on a Live in Seattle album in 2009 and they're back for a fourth album. They're fine players, and this album has impressive moments. B+(**) [cd]

Gerry Gibbs Thrasher Dream Trio: We're Back (2014, Whaling City Sound): Drummer, son of vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, first album was called Thrasher (1995), evidently an apt nickname, his Dream Trio debuted on a 2013 album, consists of Kenny Barron and Ron Carter so I can't claim he's given to overstatement. Booklet has a picture of 13-year-old Thrasher: looks like he's been opening presents and is showing off his new LPs (two Ron Carter records). Back cover says, "Jazz Interpretations of R&B Classics," and as befits a '70s child most are from Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire -- "What's Going On" and "Pick Up the Pieces" are among the others. (Personally, I was more into George Clinton during the 1970s.) They add guest stars you notice when they're present but don't miss when they aren't: Larry Goldings (organ), Warren Wolf (vibes), Steve Wilson (alto/soprano sax). B+(**) [cd]

John Hiatt: Terms of My Surrender (2014, New West): Singer-songwriter going back to the mid-1970s, when he had a younger and weirdly slurred voice and sang about crushing ants and waterskiing to heaven; some marvelous work, but was never as good after he had a freak hit and kept cranking out albums nearly every year whether he had worthy songs or not. This is his best in ages (probably since 1983) -- the songs matter, his voice has achieved a new level of surrealism, and he's learned something from Adorno: "old people are pushy/'cause life ain't cushy." A-

Kevin Hildebrandt: Tolerance (2012 [2014], Summit): Guitarist, sings several songs, leads a trio with Radam Schwartz on organ and Alvester Garnett on drums. Four Hildebrant originals, one from Schwartz, covers include "House of the Rising Sun," "Night and Day," "Further On Up the Road," "I Fall in Love Too Easily." Swings harder than soul jazz. B+(**) [cd]

Homeboy Sandman: Hallways (2014, Stones Throw): Underground rapper from Queens, usually sells himself short but lets this one run a healthy 41:48. Beats seem a little off, but he talks his way around them, and usually pays off. A-

William Hooker & Liudas Mockunas: Live at the Vilnius Jazz Festival (2013 [2014], NoBusiness): Sax-drums duets, the drummer getting top billing because he's the best known or came the furthest or maybe it's just alphabetical. Mockunas, at home in Lithuania, plays soprano, alto, and tenor, and is consistently impressive on four long improvs. A- [cd]

Jennifer Hudson: JHUD (2014, RCA): Soul diva, lost her American Idol bid to Fantasia Barrino but snagged a role in the movie Dreamgirls and got an Oscar for it. Third album, built around big disco beats and that gospel wail soul divas are so given to. B+(*)

Tommy Igoe: The Tommy Igoe Groove Conspiracy (2014, Deep Rhythm): Drummer-led 14-piece Bay Area "supergroup" -- Aaron Lington is the only name among the regulars that rings a bell, but some "guest conspirators" are better known: Randy Brecker (trumpet, one track), Kenny Washington (vocals, two). Not really a groove album, just more of the usual big band blare. B- [cd]

Imarhan Timbuktu: Akal Warled (2014, Clermont): Desert blues group from Mali. First album here but group dates back to 1993. The rhythmic lilt is stock in trade for the genre, and the vocals never threaten to break ranks -- the very constancy of their sound over the entire album is their main charm, which is to say this makes for nice background music. B+(**) [dl]

Orlando Julius with the Heliocentrics: Jaiyede Afro (2014, Strut): Nigerian saxophonist, one of the founders of Afrobeat -- Fela Kuti started out in Julius' band -- gets rediscovered by English quasi-jazz group which previously brought some attention to Ethio-jazz master Mulatu Astatke. In this one the sax bulls right past the beat, impressive in its own right. A-

Just Passing Through: The Breithaupt Brothers Songbook Vol. II (2014, ALMA): That would be composer Don Breithaupt and lyricist Jeff Breithaupt -- evidently a big deal in Canada and aiming at Broadway. The first volume was prefaced Toronto Sings. This one evidently casts a wider net, although I hardly recognize any of the singers. And I've yet to find a reason to care about the music, which isn't to say that it's bad. B [cd]

Kalle Kalima & K-18: Buñuel de Jour (2013 [2014], TUM): Finnish guitarist, quartet adds Mikko Innanen (alto sax), Veil Kujala (quarter-tone accordion), and Teppo Hauta-aho (bass, percussion). The lead instruments tend to melt together into a thick, richly flavored stew. B+(***) [cd]

Sami Lane: You Know the Drill (2014, self-released, EP): DJ from Bournemouth, has uploaded several mixtapes to Mixcloud, this one a 29-minute continuous hip-hop flow, pretty hard-edged, lots of N-words. She (I think that's right) has no discernible reputation, just a Twitter account and 23 followers on Mixcloud, one of whom is Alex Wilson, who currently ranks this 23rd on his 2014 list, just behind Kris Davis (his only jazz pick) and ahead of Tacocat. I had heard 39 of his top 41 so I thought I'd track this down. One annoying problem with Mixcloud is that it keeps playing into her old catalog, which is more EDM. B+(**) [dl]

Gianni Lenoci/Kent Carter/Bill Elgart: Plaything (2012 [2014], NoBusiness): Piano trio. Pianist Lenoci, who credits Mal Waldron and Paul Bley as teachers and plays much like them, has at least 15 albums since 1991. A spirited improv set. B+(***) [cdr]

The Mark Lomax Trio: Isis & Osiris (2012 [2014], Inarhyme): Drummer, teaches and therefore is based in Columbus, Ohio, which keeps him and his sax trio out of the limelight. They have a previous album, The State of Black America, on my top-ten list for 2010. This one drags a bit near the start -- probably bass solos, something too soft to hear -- but when Edwin Bayard's tenor sax breaks through it's often mesmerizing. And the drummer's pretty special too. A-

Alexander McCabe/Paul Odeh: This Is Not a Pipe (2014, Wamco): Alto sax/piano duets. McCabe has impressed me in the past (cf. 2010's Quiz), and continues to in this sparer format. B+(**) [cd]

Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood: Juice (2014, Indirecto): There's more to guitarist John Scofield than the organ groove albums he did in the early 1990s although they were inspired fun; more to MMW than organ grooves too, but a nice stretch with Medeski on piano doesn't go very far. B+(*)

The Microscopic Septet: Manhattan Moonrise (2014, Cuneiform): Founded in 1980 with pianist Joel Forrester and soprano saxophonist Phillip Johnston writing their songs, they broke up in 1990 and regrouped in 2006 with Mike Hashim (a superstar in my book) taking over the tenor sax spot -- group has four saxes and no brass -- and since then they've done no wrong. I'm more struck than ever by the gentle swing that permeates so many of their songs. A- [dl]

Jason Moran: All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller (2014, Blue Note): A jazz pianist, Moran's early career was auspicious, debuting on a major label with a series of brilliant albums. In 2011, he won a MacArthur "genius" grant, and that led to a project called the Fats Waller Dance Party, and ultimately this album. He tapped Meshell Ndegeocello, Lisa E. Harris, and Charles Haynes as vocalists, and added some horn spots to his trio: Steve Lehman gets a superb sax solo, and Moran's keyboard work is often dazzling, but the vocals strike me as way off base -- so serious, so dour, even on "Ain't Misbehavin'." B+(*)

Nicholas Payton: Numbers (2013 [2014], Paytone): New Orleans trumpet player, although you'd hardly guess that from this album, where he spends most of his time noodling on a Fender Rhodes, with guitar, bass, and drums cranking out underdeveloped funk instrumentals. B-

Peripheral Vision: Sheer Tyranny of the Will (2014, self-released): Canadian postbop quartet with "co-leaders" Michael Herring (bass) and Don Scott (guitar), plus Trevor Hogg on tenor sax and Nick Fraser on drums, with Jean Martin lurking somewhere in the background (co-producer, "mixing & additional recording"). Read somewhere that their influences list is topped by Wayne Shorter and Kurt Rosenwinkel. Sounds like it. B+(*) [cd]

RED Trio & Mattias Ståhl: North and the Red Stream (2013 [2014], NoBusiness): Portuguese piano trio -- Rodrigo Pinheiro on piano, Hernani Faustino on bass, Gabriel Ferrandini on drums -- first appeared with an impressive eponymous album in 2010 (on Clean Feed). They're joined here by vibraphonist Ståhl, who does more than add tinkle but can get caught up in the grind. B+(**) [cd]

Wadada Leo Smith: The Great Lakes Suites (2012 [2014], TUM, 2CD): Trumpet great, has been working on large canvases lately -- I count four 2CD releases since 2009 plus the 4CD Ten Freedom Summers -- but this feels rather small and spotty as it spurts and sputters, just one more horn: Henry Threadgill (alto sax, flute, bass flute) plus bass (John Lindberg) and drums (Jack DeJohnette). It does, however, remind me what a marvelous drummer DeJohnette is. B+(***) [cd]

Wadada Leo Smith/Jamie Saft/Joe Morris/Balasz Pandi: Red Hill (2014, Rare Noise): We might have to start talking about Pandi as an exceptional drummer as well, and he's not the only surprise here. Saft first came to my attention playing organ for Joshua Redman, but his piano here is a million miles from there, out somewhere you'd have to triangulate off Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor to find. Morris, we should note, plays bass, not guitar. And while the trumpeter starts with dark tones, he can't just sit on that in this company. A-

Ken Thomson and Slow/Fast: Settle (2012 [2014], NCM East): Leader plays bass clarinet and alto sax, in a quintet with Russ Johnson on trumpet and Nir Felder on guitar -- front-line musicians who can handle the whiplash speed changes. B+(***) [cd]

Rosenna Vitro: Clarity: Music of Clare Fischer (2014, Random Act): Standards singer, has a dozen albums since 1982, more often than not trying to search out some new terrain for ye olde songbook -- an effort that works best when the songs have natural swing, like Catchin' Some Rays: The Music of Ray Charles (1997), as opposed to The Music of Randy Newman (2011). The subject here is Clare Fischer, a bit on the stuffy side, but pianist-arranger Mark Soskin lightens and opens him up, Sara Caswell's fiddle is a plus, and the singer can get by with the odd arch moment. B+(*) [cd]

Loudon Wainwright III: Haven't Got the Blues (Yet) (2014, 429 Records): Starts unexpectedly with a bit of rockabilly fluff, "Brand New Dance," but soon enough reverts to form, which is just fine ("I Knew Your Mother"), until he tries his hand at irony on a song that kicks back like an untethered Uzi: "I'll Be Killing You This Christmas." You know how much I hate Xmas music? This is one present I hope to never hear again. B+(*)

Lee Ann Womack: The Way I'm Livin' (2014, Sugar Hill/Welk): Country singer, doesn't write so has some trouble maintaining a persona -- she's too sweet to convince you she's the hopeless drunk of Chris Knight's "Send It on Down" but maybe she does sleep with the devil -- at least that's where she's picking her songs these days. (I normally tire quickly of Jesus songs, but you're not likely to run across any of these in church.) The move from countrypolitan MCA Nashville to a more trad label helps too. A-

Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Rashied Al Akbar/Muhammad Ali/Earl Cross/Idris Ackamoor: Ascent of the Nether Creatures (1980 [2014], NoBusiness): Cross was a trumpet player from St. Louis (1933-87), played in bands led by Charles Tyler and Rashied Ali, but this is the only album Discogs lists by him. Saxophonist Ackamoor was originally Bruce Baker, b. 1950 in Chicago, has a bit more, including a foundation in San Francisco. Don't know anything about bassist Al Akbar. Drummer Ali, b. Raymond Patterson in 1936, is Rashied Ali's brother, has a 1974 duo album with Frank Wright, and has appeared on some of David S. Ware's last albums. So, a two-horn free jazz quartet of some vintage, recorded in the Netherlands and reissued in Lithuania in limited edition (300 copies) vinyl. B+(***) [cdr]

Bambara Mystic Soul: The Raw Sound of Burkina Faso 1974-1979 (1974-79 [2011], Analog Africa): A backwater even by African standards, but wedged between Mali and Ghana, triangulated by Nigeria, Senegal, and Guinea, you get a little bit of the whole region, minus the stars. B+(**)

Aby Ngana Diop: Liital (1994 [2014], Awesome Tapes From Africa): From Senegal, six cuts, 31:59. Mostly drums and shouted voices, the lead singer not obviously female, some synth or something on a few tracks but window dressing to the drums. B+(***)

The Evergreen Classic Jazz Band: Early Tunes 1915-1932 (1995 [2014], Delmark): Trad jazz band from Seattle, eight pieces (at least at this point -- a 1990 album had six) including banjo and tuba (Tom Jacobus, the designated leader). Trombonist David Loomis sings a couple songs, and the clarinet (Craig Flory) is exceptional. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for this kind of music. A- [cd]

John Hiatt: Here to Stay: Best of 2000-2012 (2000-12 [2013], New West): Christgau sent me Hiatt's first two albums in 1975 -- ones that he ultimately graded B but which became personal favorites. It may have helped that I saw him playing solo in Indianapolis, a bit of totally unplanned serendipity. So he became a guy to keep tabs on. Two of his next five albums were pretty good, but the others weren't, and I remember John Piccarella wanting to write about him in the Voice, only to get stuck with Warming Up to the Ice Age. Yet somehow I missed his 1987-94 period on A&M, which reportedly produced some hits. He moved to Vanguard in 2000 and New West in 2003, and I've been checking him out since I got onto Rhapsody, until this year finding a regular series of low B+ albums. This "best-of" does what it should, picking out his most indelible songs from six or seven albums and packing them into the only album you need from the decade. A-

The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara [Second Edition] (1980-2013 [2014], World Music Network, 2CD): The label's second round compilations -- never specified as such so check the artwork and numbers -- tend to recycle newer pieces that have been farmed up through the label, and come with bonus discs reissuing albums that had no traction under the original artists' names. Can't tell from Rhapsody whether the booklets have improved -- in cases where I've seen them, they usually raise more questions than they answer. This Sahara extends from Mariem Hassan of Western Sahara/Morocco through the Mali-Niger heartland to Libya, Sudan, and Egypt, with Ali Hassan Kuban's Nubian music the clincher and the ringer -- much earlier if not older-sounding. B+(***)
Bonus disc: Mamane Barka: Introducing Mamane Barka (2009, World Music Network): From Niger, plays ngurumi with drums and sings, a rather limited palette but one which pleases in a steady, study way. B+(**)

Shaver: Shaver's Jewels: The Best of Shaver (1993-2001 [2013], New West): Billy Joe Shaver was a veteran with some very clever songs under his belt and some relatively uninspired albums when he teamed up with his guitar-playing son Eddy Shaver for five albums, a gig that ended when Eddy overdosed in 2000. The extra guitar brought some spunk and polish to the albums, and the compilation weeds out the weak spots. A-

Sun Ra & His Arkestra: In the Orbit of Ra (1957-78 [2014], Strut, 2CD): Cover starts out "Marshall Allen Presents" -- indeed who better to pick out a centennary selection of Herman Blount's Arkestra? -- but I'm dropping Allen's name so as not to confuse this with the ghost band he still leads. These are, after all, vintage recordings -- at least I've been able to match them up to the date range above, allowing a few seconds variation for the remastering. Vocals on close to half of the tracks -- more than I wanted but they do establish a theme, one that's out of this world. A-

The Buddy Tate Quartet: Texas Tenor (1978 [2014], Sackville/Delmark): From Sherman, Texas; played in territory bands until 1939 when he joined Count Basie, replacing the late Herschel Evans. My favorite album of his is Buck and Buddy Swing the Blues -- "Buck" of course is Basie bandmate, trumpeter Buck Clayton, and the title is exactly right. This set was originally released as The Buddy Tate Quartet as if the group was somehow more than something he picked up touring. They scarcely deserve the compliment, but every time the sax blows Tate is nothing short of resplendent. A- [cd]

Old Music

Ruby Braff: Linger Awhile (1953-55 [1999], Vanguard): Assembled from three early sessions -- wish I could find the session details, but one cut comes from a 10-inch LP called Buck Clayton Meets Ruby Braff, and the others were possibly led by trombonist Vic Dickenson -- front cover has three photos: Dickenson, Clayton, and Braff, and the credits include Edmond Hall, Buddy Tate, Nat Pierce, and Sir Charles Thompson. Varies, but most of it swings, and the ballads are lovely. B+(**)

Columbia Country Classics, Vol. 5: A New Tradition (1967-87 [1991], Columbia): The last of five various artist volumes, released with similar artwork along with many notable single-artist compilations (see ACN?). Sony's catalog is so deep that the first two volumes -- Vol. 1: The Golden Age (1935-53) and Vol. 2: Honky Tonk Heroes (1946-61) -- are nearly as definitive as the first two volumes of Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection. The next two volumes -- Vol. 3: Americana (1954-84) and Vol. 4: The Nashville Sound (1953-73) -- are far from definitive, as is this grab bag of label stalwarts (Johnny Cash, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, latecoming Merle Haggard, an out-of-his-depth Bob Dylan) and a younger generation intent on retaining the tradition (Asleep at the Wheel, Ricky Van Shelton, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash). B+(**)

Julius Hemphill: Raw Materials and Residuals (1977 [1993], Black Saint): Sax trio, the leader playing alto and soprano, with Abdul Wadud (cello) and Don Moye (percussion). Begins with a boppish thrill ride. Ends with a tune that sticks in your head. [4/5 tracks] A-

Julius Hemphill/Warren Smith: Chile New York (1980 [1998], Black Saint): Improv duets, Hemphill playing alto/tenor sax and flute, Smith percussion. B+(**)

The Julius Hemphill Sextet: At Dr. King's Table (1997, New World): Hemphill died in 1995 after a prolonged debilitating illness that left him unable to play from the early 1990s. But he continued to write and organize sax choirs -- he was the main driving force behind the World Saxophone Quartet. His last album was Five Chord Stud (1993), a sax quintet including a young James Carter. But he left some unrecorded music, including this set, posthumously recorded under his name by a sax/clarinet/flute sextet: Marty Ehrlich, Sam Furnace, Andy Laster, Gene Ghee, Andrew White, and Alex Harding. Some marvelous blending of harmonies here, but as is often the case with sax choirs (even WSQ) I find myself yearning for some contrasting tone, or maybe just a drum. B+(***)

The Julius Hemphill Sextet: The Hard Blues: Live in Lisbon (2003 [2004], Clean Feed): The late saxophone choirmaster's ghost band carries on with Andrew Stewart replacing Gene Ghee -- carrying on: Marty Ehrlich, Sam Furnace, Andy Laster, Andrew White, Alex Harding. Same plus and minus ledger, although they can get a bit rowdier live, and that's a good thing. B+(***)

Orlando Julius: Super Afro Soul (1966-72 [2007], Vampi Soul, 2CD): Nigerian saxophone player, formed a group called the Modern Aces in 1965, a missing link between highlife and Afrobeat -- Fela Kuti started out in Orlando's band. This starts with a Modern Aces album, then adds a somewhat later second disc by Orlando Julius & His Afro Sounders -- one difference is that the three-minute songs of the former give way to 6-8 minute pieces, the extra length adding to the flow. B+(**)

Steve Lacy: Early Years 1954-1956 (1954-56 [2004], Fresh Sound, 2CD): A collection of five albums where Lacy is a sideman -- nominal leaders are: Dick Sutton (Jazz Idiom, Progressive Dixieland), Tom Stewart (Sextette/Quintette), Whitey Mitchell (Sextette), and Joe Puma (Modern Jazz Festival) -- and they illustrate the oft-made point that Lacy started in trad jazz influenced by Sidney Bechet before making the jump all the way to the avant-garde. Obviously, the story isn't that simple, as this is more transitional if never terribly boppish. B+(**)

Steve Lacy: Soprano Sax (1957 [1991], Prestige/OJC): First album by the man who defined soprano sax over a 47-year career, up to his death in 2004. The quartet includes Wynton Kelly on piano -- not the sort of pianist Lacy would work with later but a real treat here -- as well as Buell Neidlinger (bass) and Dennis Charles (drums). A couple standards, two Ellington tunes, one Monk -- a delightful if somewhat conventional set. Gotta start somewhere. A-

Steve Lacy: The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy (1960 [1985], Candid): Smart moves toward Lacy's unique style, working over tunes by Thelonious Monk (3), Cecil Taylor (2), and Charlie Parker (1). Mostly trio with John Ore (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums), plus Charles Davis (baritone sax) on one cut. A-

Steve Lacy with Don Cherry: Evidence (1961 [1990], New Jazz/OJC): Quartet with bass and drums (Billy Higgins), playing four Monk tunes and two Ellingtons (at least on the original album; Rhapsody adds six "bonus cuts" with Wynton Kelly, but I can't find any physical release with them, so I dropped them on second spin. B+(***)

Steve Lacy: Scratching the Seventies/Dreams (1969-77 [1997], Saravah, 3CD): Lacy first visited Europe in 1965 and moved to Paris in 1970. After his early albums with Prestige and Candid, he had trouble finding labels in the 1960s, but once he landed in France he recorded tons of albums for small European labels, including five for this French label, now rolled up into a 3-CD box. I decided it would be best to treat the albums one-by-one, so they follow. Overall: B+(*)

Steve Lacy Gang: Roba (1969 [1972], Saravah): Recorded in Rome with a mostly local band -- Enrico Rava (trumpet), Italo Toni (trombone), Claudio Volonte (clarinet), Irene Aebi (cello), Carlo Colnaghi (drums) -- in one 42:23 improv, split into two parts for the LP. Open-ended but not all that coherent. B

Steve Lacy: Lapis (1971 [1972], Saravah): Solo album, soprano sax with Lacy also overdubbing some percussion. B+(**)

Steve Lacy Sextet: Scraps (1974, Saravah): With Steve Potts (tenor/alto/soprano sax), Michael Smith (piano), Irene Aebi (cello), Kent Carter (bass/cello), Kenny Tyler (percussion, flute), this is sort of the prototype for a lot of Lacy's most difficult work, an odd mix of space and cacophony, initially hard to listen to but it starts to make sense after a while. Aebi also sings a bit, but I won't dock her (yet). B+(*)

Steve Lacy: Dreams (1975, Saravah): With Steve Potts (alto/soprano sax), Derek Bailey (guitar), Irene Aebi (cello), Jean-Jacques Avenel (bass), Kent Carter (bass), Kenneth Tyler (drums), plus guitar by Boulou Ferré and Jack Treese on two (of 5) cuts. Similar to the Sextet, but Potts is more competitive, the double bassists get more traction, and the guitars? Well, I'm not sure what good they did. B+(*)

Steve Lacy: The Owl (1977, Saravah): With Steve Potts (alto/soprano sax), Takashi Kako (keybs), Irene Aebi (violin, cello, voice), Jean-Jacques Avenel (autoharp, kora, sheng), Kent Carter (bass), Olivie Johnson (drums). Aebi sang a bit in previous albums, but takes center stage here. She has a deep voice, trained for operatic cadences, and I usually find her ruinous, but isn't so bad here -- perhaps because the music with its ad hoc Japanese effects is so deliriously insane, I find her kind of amusing. B+(*)

Steve Lacy: Axieme (1975 [1993], RED): Solo soprano saxophone, originally released on two LPs then combined on a single CD. [Rhapsody only has "Parts 3 & 4" for 25:09, so is 21:40 short of the full release.] B+(*)

Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo/Kent Carter: In Concert (1976 [2006], Ictus): Discogs agrees with Rhapsody on the title, but the best Lacy discography calls this Live (probably the title of the 1977 LP release). This version, with two extra tracks, was part of a 12CD anniversary box Ictus released in 2006. Soprano sax trio, the extra depth of Carter's bass helps round the sound out. B+(***)

Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo: Clangs (1977 [2006], Ictus): Duo, mostly soprano sax and drums, but Lacy is also credited with "bird calls, pocket synthesizer, crackle box" and Centazzo employs whistles and a wide range of percussion. The result is the sort of rickety contraption imagined in the title. B+(**)

Steve Lacy Quintet: Troubles (1979, Black Saint): With Steve Potts (alto/soprano sax), Irene Aebi (violin, cello, vocals), Kent Carter (bass, cello), and Oliver Johnson (drums): Starts with a group vocal that turns into a very slippery slice. Aebi returns with a vocal called "Blues" -- another very tricky tune. In between is a short one called "The Whammies!" -- later taken as the name of a marvelous Lacy tribute group. B+(***)

Steve Lacy: The Flame (1982, Soul Note): A trio with Lacy on soprano sax, Bobby Few on piano, and Dennis Charles on drums. Still going through a phase where he flails a lot, bits of genius but lots of collateral damage. B+(*)

Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo: Tao (1976-84 [2006], Ictus): Duets, soprano sax with percussion, a set of numbered pieces that appear on many Lacy albums of the period. The last four come from an earlier live performance and they fumble a bit at the start, but the later recordings are superb, constant invention highlighted by the percussion. B+(***)

Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron: Live in Berlin (1984 [2007], Jazzwerkstatt): The pianist played on Lacy's second album, Reflections, and they've appeared together many time since, especially on duos like this one -- the first recorded one is from 1971, the last 2002; Sempre Amore (1986), with its all-Ellington/Strayhorn program, is a personal favorite. This is a mixed bag, denser than most, somewhat fanciful. B+(**)

Steve Lacy Trio: The Window (1987 [1988], Soul Note): With Jean-Jacques Avenel (bass) and Oliver Johnson (drums), all Lacy originals (one piece co-credited to Mary Frazee), six tunes, 7:00-9:14 each. A fine example of Lacy's style, dazzling actually, with none of the things that occasionally make his other albums irritating. A-

Steve Lacy: More Monk (1989 [1991], Soul Note): Sequel, like Lacy's 1987 Only Monk all Monk tunes, done solo on soprano sax. Plays them fairly straight, which makes me wonder, why? B+(*)

Steve Lacy Double Sextet: Clangs (1992 [1993], Hat Art): Twelve musicians (counting two vocalists, Irene Aebi and Nicholas Isherwood), but the only instrument doubled is piano (Bobby Few joins Eric Watson), the second-stringers adding trumpet, trombone, vibes, and percussion to Lacy's long-running Sextet with Steve Potts (alto and soprano sax). One revelation is that Lacy's penchant for starchy vocals isn't purely a matter of indulging his wife. But also, once you get past the vocals, he does a marvelous job of integrating the lush instrumentals. B+(**) [cd]

Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron: "Let's Call This . . . Esteem" (1993, Slam): Another duo album, four Monks, Ellington, Strayhorn, two originals each. Typical of what they do, how they interact, which is to say masterful but somewhat estranged. B+(**)

Steve Lacy Trio: The Rent (1997 [1999], Cavity Search, 2CD): Basic Lacy, a trio with longtime collaborators Jean-Jacques Avenel (bass) and John Betsch (drums), recorded live at Old Church in Portland, OR before an enthusiastic crowd. B+(***)

Steve Lacy Trio: The Holy La (1998 [2002], Freelance): Same trio, with Jean-Jacques Avenel (bass, kalimba) and John Betsch (drums), cut in a studio in France -- the group have finally learned to stretch out and relax, with the kalimba section sounding especially lovely. Two vocals by Irene Aebi, arch and starchy as usual, but somehow I'm getting to where I can stand her. [Sunnyside reissued this in 2003; the Rhapsody version is missing a track, but Sunnyside's own website indicates that the reissue is complete.] B+(***)

Steve Lacy: The Beat Suite (2001 [2003], Sunnyside): The soprano saxophonist expanded his trio -- Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass, John Betsch on drums -- to include George Lewis on trombone, notable sonic heft, and wife/collaborator Irene Aebi for the vocals on ten texts lifted from Beat writers (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, Lew Welch, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Anne Waldman/Andrew Schelling, Kenneth Rexroth). The problem, of course, is Aebi, who would sound stilted singing Irving Berlin, much less texts written with no concern for music, then scored with Lacy's angular whimsy. B

Steve Lacy: November (2003 [2010], Intakt): Solo session from a festival in Switzerland, a little more than six months before he died. One vocal is way off base, but the soprano sax is unique, as ever. B+(**)

Ron McClure Quintet: Descendants (1980 [1990], Ken): Bassist, played with Blood Sweat & Tears in the 1960s, has a couple dozen albums since 1979, mostly on Steeplechase, this the only one I've heard. Features Tom Harrell (flugelhorn), with both piano (Mark Gray) and guitar (John Scofield). No real sense of how you would niche this other than postbop with prominent bass solos. B+(**) [cd]

Medeski Martin and Wood: Last Chance to Dance Trance (Perhaps): Best Of (1991-1996) (1991-96 [1999], Gramavision): Organ-bass-drums trio, relatively popular jazz-groove merchants in the 1990s, with this collection sampling their second through fifth albums. Keyboard player John Medeski and drummer Billy Martin have since mounted serious solo careers -- forget about Chris Wood's Wood Brothers -- while keeping the group going (their first album I A-listed was 2012's Free Magic). Best example here: the medley "Bemsha Swing/Lively Up Yourself." B+(***) [cd]

Brad Mehldau: The Art of the Trio: Volume One (1996 [1997], Warner Brothers): With Larry Grenadier on bass and Jorge Rossy on drums, the first of five Art of the Trio volumes -- a claim that rises as a challenge, and execution that plays off. Penguin Guide picked this one for their "Core Collection." I find it a smidgen on the soft side, and I'm always suspicious when jazzers take on the Beatles -- "Blackbird" is especially suspect, but they do a remarkable job. B+(***)

Brad Mehldau: Art of the Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard (1999, Warner Brothers): The Village Vanguard, that is, site of The Art of the Trio Volume Two. More snap than the first one, but not clear that makes it better. A superb pianist but I can't tell you why, partly because no single thing stands out. B+(***)

The Brad Mehldau Trio: Progression: Art of the Trio, Volume 5 (2000 [2001], Warner Brothers, 2CD): Had this on long on the shelf, so after I played it and found it remarkable in the usual ways I've never been able to articulate, I checked Rhapsody for the Art of the Trio volumes I had missed -- turns out that Vol. 1 and Vol. 4 are the top-rated ones in Penguin Guide, while this is the bottom-rated one. Beats me why. Still a remarkable piano trio -- Larry Grenadier on bass, Jorge Rossy on drums -- stretching out on a mix of originals and standards, always precise, thoughtful, compelling, and, well, long. B+(***) [cd]

Brad Mehldau: Anything Goes (2002 [2004], Warner Brothers): Same piano trio run through ten standards, starting with a tentative "Get Happy," including Monk, Porter, Paul Simon, Radiohead, "Smile," "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." B+(***)

Roger Miller: The Best of Roger Miller, Volume One: Country Tunesmith (1957-67 [1991], Mercury): Anyone with a hankering for Miller's mid-1960s novelty tunes -- from "King of the Road" to "England Swings" to "You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd" and maybe "My Uncle Used to Love Me but She Died" -- should go straight to the 12-cut 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection (1964-66 [1999], MCA), or the broader 20-cut All Time Greatest Hits (1964-85 [2003], Mercury/Chronicles), or the deeper 21-cut The Best of Roger Miller, Volume Two: King of the Road (1957-72 [1992], Mercury) that came out on the heels of this set. Before he was a star, Miller was a struggling Nashville songwriter, making his living feeding wry and sentimental tunes to Ray Price ("Invitation to the Blues"), George Jones (cowrote "Tall Tall Trees"), and others while his own recordings languished. Even the 3-CD 1995 box set, King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller, which I've long regarded as canonical, only snares 8 of these 21 tracks while adding 8 pre-1964 songs and more from the overlap period. But if you're set with (or don't care for) the hits, or just a sucker for the homelier side of honky-tonk, this opens up the most unsung period of one of country music's heroes. A-

Henry Threadgill Sextett: You Know the Number (1986 [1987], Jive/Novus): Alto/tenor saxophonist, formerly of Air, actually runs a septet here with Rasul Siddik (trumpet), Frank Lacy (Trombone), Diedre Murray (cello), Fred Hopkins (bass), and two percussionists. Avant but very upbeat, boisterous even. A-

Henry Threadgill Sextett: Easily Slip Into Another World (1987 [1988], Jive/Novus): This picks up where the previous one left off, adding up to some of the group's most inspired interplay. However, they also run into some tough spots, which may (or may not) include Asha Puthli's vocal. B+(***)

Henry Threadgill: Song Out of My Trees (1993 [1994], Black Saint): Five pieces with various lineups -- three guitarists in various combinations, two cuts with Ted Daniel on trumpet, one with Myra Melford on piano, two with Amina Claudine Myers (one harpsichord, one organ), one with Mossa Bildren grieving (backed by accordion, two cellos, and that harpsichord) while Threadgill plays his most visceral sax. An odd one. B+(**)

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Monday, September 29, 2014

Music Week

Music: Current count 23870 [23843] rated (+27), 521 [523] unrated (-2).

My brother was in town Sunday so I spent the day cooking old-fashioned "soul food" -- fried chicken and pan gravy, baked potatoes and cornbread, baked beans and creamed corn and greens with bacon -- with a flourless chocolate cake for dessert. Couldn't concentrate on processing records, so I wound up playing Coleman Hawkins, Lefty Frizzell, and Johnny Cash from the travel case. Couldn't come up with a Weekend Update either. Suffice it to say that the insane wars of the previous week are still with us, as are the usual stories of police brutality, corruption, inequality, bad economics, the subversion of democracy by the usual claque of billionaires, and that old standby -- global warming. Safe to say there'll be more of them next week (if there is a next week) and next month and next year as well.

Wasting Sunday kept the rated count under 30, but it was actually a remarkably good week quality-wise. I broke queue protocol and took the Buddy Tate reissue with me in the car even before I catalogued it, and it's kept me in a good mood all week -- not anyway near his most consistent record, but so glorious every time the sax appears. Roger Miller came up in some email correspondence -- I thought I had this particular album, so when I saw it unrated and on Rhapsody I dived right into it.

Four very different Sept. 23 releases wound up at A-: Aphex Twin, Leonard Cohen, Wadada Leo Smith, and Lee Ann Womack. I gave each at least three plays, hoping it's possible to be both first and right. Chris Monsen seems to prefer Smith's The Great Lakes Suites, which both overwhelmed me with its length and underwhelmed me with its music -- Red Hill has an air of danger and excitement I find lacking in the larger work, but Suites put a lot of talent on display, including Henry Threadgill and Jack DeJohnette. Microscopic Septet is another Monsen recommendation, languishing in my mailbox for months. Orlando Julius appeared on a Phil Overeem list (also Bo Dollis and a bunch of other records I haven't gotten to yet; worth noting that Overeem has John Coltrane's Offering: Live at Temple University on top of his "old stuff" list -- I wasn't all that impressed by it, but I often react negatively to Coltrane's last phase). Another EW person mentioned the Sun Ra. Only gave it one play, but it was a delight, and I think I tracked down all the dates (except for one of three previously unreleased cuts).

Given the extra overhead of managing the "faux blog" I may not have a Music Week (let alone a Weekend Update) post next week -- it may in fact be several weeks before I catch up. We're planning a trip east in October. Laura is flying to Boston and back from Newark, so that's tightly scheduled. I'll be driving, so that's real loosey-goosey -- I'm thinking Buffalo on the way out, and DC (and maybe Nashville) on the way back. There will be a few days on Cape Cod, but the main stretch will be six days at a friend's big country house in the NJ Appalachians. I'm hoping we can entice friends from NYC and environs to come out to visit. (One enticement is that I plan on cooking.)

I've lined up some new technology for the trip. I picked up a cheap Chromebook to replace the old Linux laptop, so I can try working in the cloud. That won't really allow me to do much in terms of programming, but maybe I'll focus more on writing. Also picked up a Bose MiniLink Bluetooth speaker, which works nicely with the Chromebook. I'll still have travel cases of CDs for the car, but may leave the boombox home and play Rhapsody when I'm stationary.

Should leave by the end of the week. Don't know when I'll get back. Best way to track whatever I post will be Twitter. Meanwhile, this week expect a Rhapsody Streamnotes (most likely tomorrow -- if not I'll have to rename files). Maybe a Mid-Week Roundup or a Book Report before I leave. If you want to get in touch during the trip, holler at me, and we'll see what makes sense. (I'm not looking to hook up with strangers, but know so many people along the way it's impossible to personally contact everyone I might want to see.)

New records rated this week:

  • Aphex Twin: Syro (2014, Warp): after more than a dozen year break, loses the ambient drag, speeds up the beats and kicks up the bass [r]: A-
  • Avi Buffalo: At Best Cuckold (2014, Sub Pop): falsetto lead, occasionally pines for the "In My Room" side of the Beach Boys [r]: B+(*)
  • Daniel Blacksberg Trio: Perilous Architecture (2012 [2014], NoBusiness): avant-trombone trio, varied enough, inventive even, your interest never flags [cdr]: B+(***)
  • Frank Catalano/Jimmy Chamberlin: Love Supreme Collective (2014, Ropeadope): sometimes flattery isn't imitation at all, just something else [cd]: B+(*)
  • Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems (2014, Columbia): his "golden voice" more gone than ever, his songs more biblical -- his way of feeling ancient [r]: A-
  • Jack Cooper: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra (2014, Planet Arts): big band Charles Ives, postmodern but third stream only in that it could use some swing [cd]: B+(*)
  • Bo Dollis Jr. and the Wild Magnolias: A New Kind of Funk (2013, self-released): a little hip-hop isn't a funk breakthrough, but the tradition is in good hands [r]: B+(***)
  • Open Mike Eagle: Dark Comedy (2014, Mello Music Group): west coast rapper, very laid back, soft-edged, draws you in [r]: B+(**)
  • Jennifer Hudson: JHUD (2014, RCA): bids to be taken seriously as a soul diva in a hip-hop world, which means . . . branding [r]: B+(*)
  • Orlando Julius with the Heliocentrics: Jaiyede Afro (2014, Strut): London collective hooks up with another aged African legend, compounding respective strengths [r]: A-
  • Just Passing Through: The Breithaupt Brothers Songbook Vol. II (2014, ALMA): aspiring Broadway songsters, big in Canada, OK but who cares? [cd]: B
  • Gianni Lenoci/Kent Carter/Bill Elgart: Plaything (2012 [2014], NoBusiness): piano trio -- you don't know him (who knows Italians not on ECM?) but he's been around, turns heads [cdr]: B+(***)
  • Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood: Juice (2014, Indirecto): neither want to be remembered for organ grooves yet that's why they're drawn together [r]: B+(*)
  • The Microscopic Septet: Manhattan Moonrise (2014, Cuneiform): [dl]: sax quartet + piano trio, Forrester and Johnston write 'em, the band swings 'em A-
  • Wadada Leo Smith/Jamie Saft/Joe Morris/Balasz Pandi: Red Hill (2014, Rare Noise): what makes this better than Great Lakes Suites is a quartet that gets out of hand and pushes him [r]: A-
  • Rosenna Vitro: Clarity: Music of Clare Fischer (2014, Random Act): standards singer looking for new turf -- Clare Fischer is a bit stuffy, but she makes something of that [cd]: B+(*)
  • Lee Ann Womack: The Way I'm Livin' (2014, Sugar Hill/Welk): imagine that Nanci Griffith had a dark side, one that drinks and sleeps with the devil [r]: A-

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

  • Rashied Al Akbar/Muhammad Ali/Earl Cross/Idris Ackamoor: Ascent of the Nether Creatures (1980 [2014], NoBusiness): avant quartet with three Muslim names you never heard of, now saved for history [cdr]: B+(***)
  • Aby Ngana Diop: Liital (1994 [2014], Awesome Tapes From Africa): from Senegal, some synth window dressing but overwhelmingly drums and shouted voices, tough as nails [r]: B+(***)
  • Sun Ra & His Arkestra: In the Orbit of Ra (1957-78 [2014], Strut, 2CD): Marshall Allen picks for Ra's centenary, more vocals than I'd pick, but you know [r]: A-
  • The Buddy Tate Quartet: Texas Tenor (1978 [2014], Sackville/Delmark): the new title has been used before, but with this guy the same old sax is timeless [cd]: A-

Old records rated this week:

  • Columbia Country Classics, Vol. 5: A New Tradition (1967-87 [1991], Columbia): first two are essential history; rest label onanism, this leaning neotrad [r]: B+(**)
  • Orlando Julius: Super Afro Soul (1966-72 [2007], Vampi Soul, 2CD): Nigerian saxophonist, earliest tracks suggest the Afrobeat that the later ones deliver [r]: B+(**)
  • Roger Miller: The Best of Roger Miller, Volume One: Country Tunesmith (1957-67 [1991], Mercury): old comp delves even deeper into pre-Doo-Wacka-Doo than the marvelous box [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Tara Davidson: Duets (Addo): October 7
  • Mark Elf: Returns 2014 (Jen Bay Jazz)
  • The Evergreen Classic Jazz Band: Early Tunes 1915-1932 (1995, Delmark)
  • Milt Hinton/Ralph Sutton/Gus Johnson/Jim Galloway: The Sackville All Star Christmas Record (1986, Sackville/Delmark)
  • The Mike Longo Trio: Celebrates Oscar Peterson: Live (CAP): October 7
  • Miho Nobuzane: Simple Words: Jazz Loves Brazil (self-released): October 21
  • The Buddy Tate Quartet: Texas Tenor (1978, Sackville/Delmark)
  • Ezra Weiss: Before You Know It: Live in Portland (Roark)
  • Dann Zinn: Shangri La (self-released): October 1

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Music Week

Music: Current count 23843 [23814] rated (+29), 523 [528] unrated (-5).

A sub-30 week. For a while I thought it was going to be even lower. On the other hand, more A- records than usual. Much of the credit for the latter goes to Robert Christgau: the return of his Consumer Guide (or as he now prefers Expert Witness) alerted me to Homeboy Sandman and Shaver, and prodded me to check out John Hiatt's latest -- I knew it was out there, but given his last half-dozen albums I wasn't in a big hurry to file another low B+. As it was, I followed up with Hiatt's best-of, which combs those low B+ albums for a much better collection. Christgau also wrote about Iggy Azalea in his new Billboard column. I knew the name and thought her appearance on the Ariana Grande album was its high point, but hadn't put together how much I might like her.

Blog status is still uncertain. I noticed I've been getting a lot of spam comments (I hardly know any other kind), which is an indication that the database is accessible. I also heard from a reader depending on the RSS feed, wondering whether I was all right. The "faux blog" doesn't generate any RSS, so that notification avenue had been blocked. (Pretty good solution: follow me on Twitter.) So I went back and added all the missing posts to the "real blog," and have kept them in sync for the last week. That's a pain, but not understanding what happened, and having no confidence that it won't happen again, for now I lack a better solution.

Shopping advice request: I'm going to be traveling a lot soon, and I'd like to buy a small Bluetooth speaker bar, like a Bose MiniLink (strikes me as pricey) or Jambox Mini (clearly not as good). Anyone have some advice/experience? I think it should allow for a wired stereo connection (so I can plug in that IPod I foolishly bought a couple years ago), but it will mostly be used with a new Chromebook, which should make it possible to listen to Rhapsody on the road (if not in the car).

New records rated this week:

  • Afghan Whigs: Do to the Beast (2014, Sub Pop): too heavy for me, but otherwise impressive, suggests growth over their long hiatus [r]: B+(**)
  • Iggy Azalea: Ignorant Art (2011 [2012], Grand Hustle, EP): debut EP mixtape, goes straight for the snatch not trusting you yokels to respond to anything subtle [r]: B+(**)
  • Iggy Azalea: The New Classic (2014, Island): Australian rapper sneaks up on America via the Dirty South -- she's got a mouth and is gonna use it [r]: A-
  • Kevin Hildebrandt: Tolerance (2012 [2014], Summit): guitarist-led organ trio with Radam Schwartz, swings hard especially on the covers, sings some too [cd]: B+(**)
  • Hal Galper Trio: O's Time (2014, Origin): veteran pianist, lot more crunch and risk than those Mehldaus but also more things that don't work [cd]: B+(**)
  • Gerry Gibbs Thrasher Dream Trio: We're Back (2014, Whaling City Sound): Ron Carter and Kenny Barron make dreams come true, on '70s soul skewed to Wonder [cd]: B+(**)
  • John Hiatt: Terms of My Surrender (2014, New West): evidently included turning in his most consistent song album since Riding With the King [r]: A-
  • Homeboy Sandman: Hallways (2014, Stones Throw): alt-rapper, beats seem a bit off but he talks his way around them, makes sense, small pleasures [r]: A-
  • William Hooker & Liudas Mockunas: Live at the Vilnius Jazz Festival (2013 [2014], NoBusiness): drums-sax duo, free improvs sound like comsummate skill [cd]: A-
  • Imarhan Timbuktu: Alak Warled (2014, Clermont): average Saharan desert blues band, vocals never break ranks with the charming rhythmic lilt [dl]: B+(**)
  • Sami Lane: You Know the Drill (2014, Mixcloud, EP): Bournemouth DJ uploads a 29-minute hip-hop flow, hard stuff, for her 23 followers on Mixcloud [dl]: B+(**)
  • Alexander McCabe/Paul Odeh: This Is Not a Pipe (2014, Wamco): alto sax/piano duets, the latter steadying, but the sax is what you want to hear [cd]: B+(**)
  • Jason Moran: All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller (2014, Blue Note): a dance tribute to Fats Waller, impressive pianistics and a surprise sax solo, but singers are way off [r]: B+(*)
  • Nicholas Payton: Numbers (2013 [2014], Paytone): New Orleans trumpet legend laid down some cushy riddim tracks, decided they didn't need trumpet dubs [r]: B-
  • Peripheral Vision: Sheer Tyranny of the Will (2014, self-released): Canadian postbop quartet, cites Shorter and Rosenwinkel as influences, gets there [cd]: B+(*)
  • RED Trio & Mattias Ståhl: North and the Red Stream (2013 [2014], NoBusiness): Rodrigo Pinheiro's avant-piano trio plus vibes, not just for tinkle [cd]: B+(**)

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

  • John Hiatt: Here to Stay: Best of 2000-2012 (2000-12 [2013], New West): label/era best-of usefully reduces handful of inconsistent albums into one real solid one [r]: A-
  • Shaver: Shaver\'s Jewels: The Best of Shaver (1993-2001 [2013, New West): no doubt Eddy Shaver added something to his old man's songs -- guitar, also production smarts [r]: A-

Old records rated this week:

  • Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo/Kent Carter: In Concert (1976 [2006], Ictus): a trio, his most stable format, bass steadying the soprano warble [r]: B+(***)
  • Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo: Tao (1976-84 [2006], Ictus): duets, soprano sax and percussion on a cycle of pieces, constant invention with light touch [r]: B+(***)
  • Steve Lacy Trio: The Window (1987 [1988], Soul Note): an even better trio, original tunes, dazzling style and touch, none of the usual irritants [r]: A-
  • Steve Lacy Double Sextet: Clangs (1992 [1993], Hat Art): only piano and voice are doubled, and as usual voice is the problem, not just Aebi this time [cd]: B+(**)
  • Ron McClure Quintet: Descendants (1980 [1990], Ken): BS&T bassist, has had long, little noticed solo career, offers tasty bits of Scofield and Harrell [cd]: B+(**)
  • Medeski Martin and Wood: Last Chance to Dance Trance (Perhaps): Best Of (1991-1996) (1991-96 [1999], Gramavision): label best-of on their way up; the Monk-Marley segue is swell [cd]: B+(***)
  • Brad Mehldau: The Art of the Trio: Volume One (1996 [1997], Warner Brothers): piano with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy, makes big title claim, neither nails/blows it [r]: B+(***)
  • Brad Mehldau: Art of the Trio: Volume 4: Back at the Vanguard (1999, Warner Brothers): like Vol. 2, back at Village Vanguard, a bit faster and sharper, not necessarily better [r]: B+(***)
  • Brad Mehldau: Progression: Art of the Trio, Volume 5 (2000 [2001], Warner Brothers, 2CD): I've rationalized the titles, but actually they're not quite the same, same for the music [cd]: B+(***)
  • Brad Mehldau: Anything Goes (2002 [2004], Warner Brothers): continuing through the trio albums, always comes close, never quite blows me away [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: The Russian Concerts Volume 2 (FMR): October 14
  • Frank Catalano/Jimmy Chamberlin/Percy Jones/Chris Poland/Adam Benjamin: Love Supreme Collective (Ropeadope): September 30
  • The Tommy Igoe Rhythm Conspiracy (Deep Rhythm): September 23
  • Darrell Katz and the JCA Orchestra: Why Do You Ride? (Leo)
  • Lefteris Kordis: "Oh Raven, If You Only Had Brains . . .": Songs for Aesop's Fables (2010, Inner Circle Music)
  • Rafael Rosa: Portrait (self-released)
  • Spoke: (R)anthems (River)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Weekend Update

This week's scattered links:

  • David Atkins: Unsettling science:

    Steve Koonin has an obfuscatory piece in the Wall Street Journal today claiming that the science of climate change isn't settled. But it's not the usual radically ignorant posturing. As with much of the evolution of the conservative "debate" over climate, it represents another move in the shifting ground of conservative chicanery intended to paralyze action to solve the problem.

    Koonin doesn't dispute that the climate is changing and that the world is getting hotter. He doesn't dispute that humans are causing the change through greenhouse gas emissions. He doesn't even dispute that these changes are dangerous. His position is that because we don't fully understand all of the complex reverberating effects of climate change, we can't make good climate policy yet. [ . . . ]

    Of all the cynical arguments against action on climate change, Koonin's ranks among the most disturbing because it's so obviously calculated by a very smart person to make a radically irresponsible conclusion just to protect a few entrenched economic elites.

    By the way, a People's Climate March took place in New York City today:

    A comment I noticed on Twitter, from Robert Loerzel:

    GOP lawmakers say there's no definitive scientific proof that there's a Climate Change march today.

  • Carikai Chengu: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS: I've alluded to this many times of late -- it's hard to think of Al Qaeda without thinking of William Casey, even more so with Henry Kissinger hawking a new book -- but this bears repeating, especially since this includes a few wrinkles I didn't even recall:

    The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

    The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

    The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, "by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism -- in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation."

    During the 1970's the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

    Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980's. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of "the database" in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

    The article gets a little cloudier as it approaches ISIS. As far as I know -- and I haven't read Patrick Cockburn's new book on ISIS, The Jihadis Return, but I've read much of his reporting -- nobody's assembled a good accounting of the CIA in Syria. We do know, for instance, that ISIS arms are overwhelmingly American, but we do not know to what extent those arms were provided by the US by Syrian rebels, looted from Iraq, or provided by Saudi Arabia or Qatar -- nations which are nominally allied with the US but are free to use militant jihadis to implement their programs. Chengu does regard ISIS as an offshoot from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, but that runs somewhat counter to the fact that another Syrian group, Al Nusra, claims the Al Qaeda brand. The problem with secret organizations like the CIA operating in Syria is that there's never any accountability, and therefore never any reason for discipline or restraint. I think that's reason enough to abolish the CIA (at least he "operations" end of the racket): they can never plausibly deny anything, no matter how outrageous, because their entire existence is based on secrecy and lies. The US will never be able to be taken at its word as long as the CIA exists.

    Also see Andrew Levine: Fear of a Caliphate, long and rather rambling, but this much is surely true (bold added):

    Talk of caliphates serves the IS's purpose, much as beheadings on You Tube do. And talk is cheap, and become cheaper. Since 9/11, the cost of getting America to do itself in has plummeted.

    And so, the IS, wins: Obama's America is off to war again.

    Worry about that; not about what the IS says it wants to establish in the region or the world.

    The potential for harm resulting from the United States and other Western powers fighting against the IS is greater by many orders of magnitude than any harm that the IS can do in the areas it controls.

    As I've written before, what brought the World Trade Center towers down wasn't Al Qaeda; it was gravity. As long as the US responds to provocation with the same unthinking, unreflective automation as the laws of physics, we'll never be able to command our fate.

  • Juan Cole: Shiite Militias of Iraq Reject US Return, Threaten to Attack US Forces: More proof that US intervention against ISIS will be a colossal failure even the Americans manage to kill every Arab who leaves his house dressed in black. Nor are the threats only coming from Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army: the Badr Brigades and foreign minister Ibrahim al-Jafari are upset that the US snubbed Iran in putting together their "coalition of the killing." The Iraqi Army (effectively another Shiite militia) is beginning to chafe about depending on US air support. And Prime Minister al-Abadi is unlikely to have any wiggle room to make concessions to Sunni tribes with the Shiite militias staging their own revolt. Rather than destroying ISIS, the only thing the US mission is likely to accomplish is the secession of Kurdistan from Iraq. Cole adds:

    It is difficult to tell how serious these militia leaders' pronouncements are, since they might be attempting to save face with their followers even as they benefit from the US air cover. On the other hand, Asa'ib Ahl al-Haqq actually did in the past kidnap US troops, and the Mahdi Army fought them tooth and nail in spring of 2004, inflicting high casualties on them. Since President Obama's air campaign requires Special Ops forces like Navy Seals or Green Berets to be on the ground with the Iraqi Army, they should apparently watch their backs. The people they are trying to help against ISIL don't seem to appreciate their being there. And many of them seem to prefer Iran's help.

    Speaking of which, Kerry seems to have softened the anti-Iran stand (see Changing US-Iran Relations: Kerry: Iran has a Role in Defeating ISIL Militants, although I don't think we've heard the last from AIPAC on this). The fact remains that the US is opposed to Assad in Syria, but eager to fight against Assad's worst enemy, even if it winds up aligning with Assad's allies to do so.

  • Matthew Kalman: Hoping War-Weary Tourists Will Return to Israel: While Israel has generally been able to escalate its war on Gaza without incurring any real costs or hardships for its first-class citizenry, wars still make tourists nervous, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Israel's tourist business has declined of late. (I think it was during the 2006 war on Lebanon when we worried that some of my wife's relatives were going to Israel; upon checking, we were relieved to find out they had gone to Auschwitz instead.)

    This year should have been a record year for Israeli tourism. In 2013, Israel attracted 3.6 million foreign visitors. Numbers from January to June showed a 15 percent increase. Then the war began in July, and the number of visitors slumped. In July and August, the number of tourists fell to 400,000, down from 578,000 in the same period last year, a 31 percent decline. Ninety percent of cruise ship visitors canceled.

    United States flights to Israel were banned for 24 hours after a rocket landed near Ben-Gurion airport. There was little damage and few casualties, but those who came found themselves running for shelter as air-raid sirens wailed in Tel Aviv.

    The Israel Hotels Association said that occupancy rates, usually 80 percent in July, fell below 40 percent. Top hotels offered deep discounts. The new Ritz-Carlton in Herzliya slashed its room rate to $400 from $575. In Jerusalem, Hilton's new Waldorf-Astoria offered a 10 percent discount online and a 20 percent discount for inquiries by phone.

    Dan Hotels, which owns the King David in Jerusalem, warned shareholders in August that third-quarter revenue was liable to fall by 30 percent because of war-related cancellations.

    Wasn't the King David the hotel the Stern Gang blew up in 1948? Kalman doesn't mention the most famous tourist during the war: a Palestinian-American teenager visiting Jerusalem, where his cousin was immolated by Israeli settlers, after which he was beat and arrested by Israeli police, and was only allowed to leave the country after Israel's normally servile allies in the US embassy intervened. The article details various ideas Israelis have to revive the tourism industry, but they don't include forgoing future wars, opening up Gaza, or inviting Palestinian refugees to "come home" for a visit.

    Meanwhile, see: Alice Rothchild: Gaza and the American awakening:

    The seven week war on Gaza is theoretically over though Israeli forces continue limited incursions into the beleaguered and bombed out strip of coastal land and over 11,000 wounded and 100,000 homeless pick through the rubble of their lives, mourn their dead children, and survive hungry on the generosity of overstretched international aid. The headlines are all Abbas and airstrikes in Syria and Netanyahu declaring without a shred of credible evidence that ISIS is Hamas and Hamas is ISIS. Even more invisible are the ongoing land grabs, continued Jewish settlement growth, and arrests and killings of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. [ . . . ]

    Although the media has largely turned its gaze elsewhere, the war in Gaza has forced more of these kinds of contradictions to become painfully obvious to liberal Jews in the US. While the Israeli government talks about "pinpoint strikes" and "unprovoked attacks from Hamas" it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the massive destruction of the Gazan infrastructure, hospitals, schools, government buildings, UN facilities, homes. With more than 60 Israelis dead and a Jewish population fearful of the ever increasing reach of the primitive Qassam rockets, it is time to ask if three devastating attacks on Gaza in six years and a policy of periodically "mowing the lawn" is a long-term strategy that leads to an end to Palestinian resistance and a secure Israel.

  • Jay Caspian Kang: ISIS's Call of Duty:

    The similarities between ISIS recruitment films and first-person-shooter games are likely intentional. Back in June, an ISIS fighter told the BBC that his new life was "better than that game Call of Duty." [ . . . ]

    The use of video games as a recruiting tool is not new. The United States Army has, for the past decade, offered "America's Army," an online multiplayer shooter; it is among the most downloaded war games of all time and has been credited with helping boost enlistment. In 2009, according to the New York Times, Army recruiters hoping to attract enlistees from urban areas set up stations in a Philadelphia mall where kids could play video games and, if they so chose, talk to someone about what life in the armed forces would be like. [ . . . ]

    Aside from the recruitment films tailored to evoke video games, they also have released a series called Mujatweets, which stresses the brotherhood of ISIS fighters and shows them handing out candy to children.

  • Paul Krugman: Wild Words, Brain Worms, and Civility:

    First, picturesque language, used right, serves an important purpose. "Words ought to be a little wild," wrote John Maynard Keynes, "for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." You could say, "I'm dubious about the case for expansionary austerity, which rests on questionable empirical evidence and zzzzzzzz . . ."; or you could accuse austerians of believing in the Confidence Fairy. Which do you think is more effective at challenging a really bad economic doctrine?

    Beyond that, civility is a gesture of respect -- and sure enough, the loudest demands for civility come from those who have done nothing to earn that respect. Noah felt (and was) justified in ridiculing the Austrians because they don't argue in good faith; faced with a devastating failure of their prediction about inflation, they didn't concede that they were wrong and try to explain why. Instead, they denied reality or tried to redefine the meaning of inflation.

    And if you look at the uncivil remarks by people like, well, me, you'll find that they are similarly aimed at people arguing in bad faith. I talk now and then about zombie and cockroach ideas. Zombies are ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but keep shambling along -- e.g. the claim that all of Europe's troubled debtors were fiscally irresponsible before the crisis; cockroaches are ideas that you thought we'd gotten rid of, but keep on coming back, like the claim that Keynes would never have called for fiscal stimulus in the face of current debt levels (Britain in the 1930s had much higher debt to GDP than it does now). Well, what I'm doing is going after bad-faith economics -- economics that keeps trotting out claims that have already been discredited. [ . . . ]

    And of course, people who engage in that kind of bad faith screech loudly about civility when they're caught at it.

    I never think of myself as a rock critic more than when I'm writing about politics. Rock critics are always sensitive to ambient noise, and looking for some choice words to break through the din.

    Also see Krugman's Return of the Bums on Welfare, about "John Boehner's resurrection of the notion that we're suffering weak job growth because people are living the good life on government benefits, and don't want to work." Conclusion:

    So basically the right is railing against the bums on welfare not only when there aren't any bums, but when there isn't any welfare.

  • Amanda Marcotte: Creationism is just the start: How right-wing Christians are warping America's schools: This, of course, is nothing new -- I recall reading Paul Goodman's book Compulsory Mis-Education back in the 1960s, when it first occurred to me that the ideological purpose of school was to brainwash the masses. Still, the broad consensus of received wisdom in the 1950s at least gave lip-service to science and smarts, and painted US history as progressive -- we were taught that the US fought for independence and free trade, that the North faught against slavery, and that the reunited US frowned on imperialism and put an end to fascism (although we still had to read Animal Farm on the evils of Godless Communism). Now, however:

    The attempts to indoctrinate children into the belief that America is basically a Christian theocracy are bad enough, but that's not the only conservative agenda item the books are trying to trick students into buying. The books also try to subtly discredit the civil rights movement by implying that segregation wasn't so bad, with one book arguing that white and black schools had "similar buildings, buses, and teachers," which the researchers argue "severely understates the tremendous and widespread disadvantages of African-American schools."

    Researchers also found that the books were playing the role of propagandist for unregulated capitalism. One textbook argues that taxes have gone up since 1927, but society "does not appear to be much more civilized today than it was" back then. It's an assertion that ignores the much reduced poverty and sickness, improved education, and even things like the federal highway system, all to make an ideological point. Another book argues that any government regulation whatsoever somehow means that capitalism ceases to be capitalism, a stance that would mean capitalism has never really existed in all of history.

    That these books are stuffed full of lies and propaganda is not a surprise. From the get-go, the State Board of Education made it clear it was far more interested in pushing a right-wing ideology on students than actually providing an education. In July, the Texas Freedom Network reviewed the 140 people selected to be on the panels reviewing textbooks. Being an actual expert in politics or history practically guaranteed you couldn't get a slot, as "more than a dozen" Texas academics with expertise who applied got denied, while conservative "political activists and individuals without social studies degrees or teaching experience got places on the panels." Only three of the 140 members of the panel are even current faculty members at Texas universities, but a pastor who used to own a car dealership somehow got a spot.

  • Heather Digby Parton: Wingnuts' crippling Ebola fury: Why they're enraged about fighting a disease: Superficially most of these wingnuts appear to be griping about ISIS rather than Ebola, but I suppose that's because they prefer threats they can misunderstand to ones they cannot grasp, or maybe they just prefer enemies they can kill to diseases that could kill them. For example, Allen West:

    The world need to step up against Islamo-fascism but I suppose fighting Ebola is easier for a faux Commander-in-Chief than to fight a real enemy of America. Nice optics there Barack, good try to change the subject, and make yourself seem like a leader fighting a really bad flu bug -- all the while you dismiss the cockroaches who behead Americans.

    Then there are the right-wingers who fear illegal child refugees will sneak Ebola into the country. Unless, of course, we head them off by setting up an ambush on the Syria-Iraq border.

  • Paul Rosenberg: We really must remember the epic failures of George W. Bush: Frank Bruni asks, "Whenever Barack Obama seems in danger of falling, do we have to hear that George W. Bush made the cliff?" Well, yes, not that there was no cliff before Bush, but it got much steeper and less study under Bush's eight years of malign neglect and extreme right-wing activism.

    But the real problem here was not that Obama supporters attacked Bush. It was that Obama himself did not. [ . . . ]

    While it's true that we can't undo Bush's mistakes, that hardly means it's foolish to keep them in mind. It would be foolish to forget them, after the terrible price we've paid -- and at the same time when the architects of that disaster are urging another mission in the Middle East to "destroy" ISIS.

    And yet, as with domestic policy, Obama's most significant mistake has been his reluctance to break sharply with previous Republican policy, call out their failures, and hold them responsible. War crimes have not even been investigated, much less punished -- only those who sought to expose them have been prosecuted. Yet, holding our own accountable for their misdeeds would work wonders for regaining trust throughout the world.

    I don't see how you can blame Obama's supporters. He did promise change when he ran in 2008, and I'm pretty sure most of us took that as meaning change from G.W. Bush, who gave us seven years of stupid, pointless wars; two huge tax giveaways to the already rich; runaway deficits; a bad recession early, a fake recovery, and an even worse recession late, which he turned into a trillions of dollars of gifts to the big banks; perversion of the criminal justice system and the right-wing politicization of civil service; major failure in federal disaster relief; complete inattention to festering problems like health care and climate change; utter disregard for international law. Obama, the Democrats, the press, everyone should have routinely repeated that list, not so much to heap scorn upon the Republicans (although they certainly deserve to be shamed) as to warn ourselves against repeating such disastrous policies.

    Indeed, most of Obama's problems since taking office result not from the few changes Obama did manage -- Obamacare, for instance, is a success by any measure, at least against the previous system if not against the single-payer system we would have preferred -- but from the many ways he continued and conserved Bush policies.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The Kissinger Disorder

Every year dozens of books are published about a topic that only a handful of Americans care about: specifically, those with cushy "think tank" jobs, plus a few military officers and State department bureaucrats who aspire to those jobs. Most assume that the US has a rightful role running the World Order, with some fretting that China or some other nation is going to butt in and offering sage advice on how the US can secure its rightful role. Against these stalwart hegemonists, now and then someone will argue that a "multipolar" isn't such a calamity, but they are in the minority, and are still so obsessed with dominance they needn't fear about losing their status as Very Serious Thinkers.

The books, of course, are nonsense, predicated on unexamined ideas: that chaos and war are the natural state of the world, that order is so valuable you have to accept it from whoever can impose it, that inequality is the best we can do given man's venal nature. That is, of course, the way conservatives think about everything. Unfortunately, it is also the way liberals usually think about the foreign world, given how readily they have sucked up the prejudices of the West's imperial past. In 2003 Jonathan Schell published an antidote to that kind of thinking, a book called The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. It was published just as the neocon ideology had become fashionable and powerful enough to "create new reality" in Iraq, and predicted failure for such hubris. Ten years later the results should be clear, but still the foreign policy elite natters on, too absorbed in their own prejudiced thoughts to have noticed their failures.

Case in point: a new book called World Order by America's most venerable war criminal, Henry Kissinger. Fortunately, we don't have to actually read the book: we can skim through the New York Times' review by John Micklethwait -- editor-in-chief of The Economist, the kind of journalist who makes his living chronicling the rarefied world of conservative "think tanks." (Micklethwait's most famous book is The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, which every 4-5 pages reiterated the mantra that conservatives are America's "idea people." He also wrote A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization [2001] and God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World [2009], extolling the wonders of free capital flows and fundamentalism, respectively. His latest is The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, about how the future belongs to oligarchies that are able to usurp the powers of the state.) Rarely has reviewer and subject been so perfectly matched to bring out the worst in a book.

However, before we dive into the review, I should point out that there is an alternative approach to international relations that is wholly absent in the thinking of Kissinger and Micklethwait: the idea that order can be obtained through the consent of equal nations with a common commitment to basic, inalienable human rights and a just body of international law. In the wake of two horrific world wars, and the advent of even more destructive nuclear weapons, that idea got so far as the founding documents of the United Nations -- before that body got turned into a cartel of superpowers -- and the basic ideas have reappeared occasionally since. I could elaborate more, but for now just keep the idea in mind.

The first quarter of Micklethwait's review is sheer flattery:

If you want to understand the point of Henry Kissinger, play this mind game: Imagine that the nonagenarian had run American foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, instead of two groups that had spent much of the previous quarter-century condemning him. First came the democracy-touting neoconservatives, who saw his realpolitik as appeasement, and now liberal Democrats, who insist nation-building must begin at home -- and therefore hate foreign entanglements, let alone grand strategies.

Might a little realism have been useful in Iraq, rather than the "stuff happens" amateurism of the Bush years? Would a statesman who read Winston Churchill on Afghanistan ("except at harvest time . . . the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war") have committed America to establishing a "gender sensitive . . . and fully representative" government in Kabul? Would Kissinger have issued a red-line warning to Syria and then allowed Assad to go unpunished when he used chemical weapons? Or let a power vacuum gradually develop on Vladimir Putin's borders? Or looked on as the South China Sea became a cockpit of regional rivalries? [ . . . ]

Yes, passion, for this is a cri de coeur from a famous skeptic, a warning to future generations from an old man steeped in the past. It comes with faults: It is contorted by the author's concerns about his legacy and by a needless craving not to upset the Lilliputian leaders he still seeks to influence. It also goes over some of the same ground as previous works. But it is a book that every member of Congress should be locked in a room with -- and forced to read before taking the oath of office.

It's not as if Kissinger didn't have the ear of the Bush Administration after 9/11. He was, after all, Bush's first pick to chair the commission that would report on the 9/11 attacks. (He turned the job down for fear of having to disclose who his consulting clients were.) If he had any reservations about Bush's approach to Iraq or anything, he was remarkably circumspect about voicing them. And since when has Churchill been an expert on anything? He always said he hadn't been elected to preside over the dismantling of the British Empire, but no one did more to wreck it, which he repeatedly did by insisting on substituting his prejudices for any understanding of or empathy for the empire's subjects. On the other hand, Kissinger's own record is nearly as bad. The suggestion that he would have handled Syria and Ukraine better than Obama has -- admittedly a low bar -- overlooks how much his own policies contributed to those conflicts today.

The premise is that we live in a world of disorder: [ . . . ] Hence the need to build an order -- one able to balance the competing desires of nations, both the established Western powers that wrote the existing international "rules" (principally the United States), and the emerging ones that do not accept them, principally China, but also Russia and the Islamic world.

This will be hard because there never has been a true world order. Instead, different civilizations have come up with their own versions. The Islamic and Chinese ones were almost entirely self-­centered: [ . . . ] America's version, though more recent and more nuanced, is also somewhat self-centered -- a moral order where everything will be fine once the world comes to its senses and thinks like America (which annoyingly it never quite does). So the best starting point remains Europe's "Westphalian" balance of power.

The Westphalia treaties ended the 30 Years War in 1648 with a set of agreements between nations/states/cities to respect each other's autonomy and work with each other in prescribed ways. This later led to an ever-adjusting set of alliances to maintain a balance of power -- which mostly worked to keep the peace in Europe (and to export war to the third world) until its colossal failure in 1914. Kissinger always thinks in the past, and far enough back as to ignore recent novelties like the European Union, so balance of power is the best he can do. Unlike the neocons, he recognizes that the US isn't the sole power in the world, one suspects this has less to do with realism than with the fact that it takes multiple powers to balance.

After all, while the neocons hate Kissinger, he has never really reciprocated. The reason, I think, is that both worship power. It's just that the neocons think they have so much power they can create their own reality, and Kissinger, well, he's never been to type to point out "the Emperor's new clothes" -- he's too much of a flatterer for that, too worshipful of power.

The review goes on and on iterating Kissinger's past examples, a litany of Richelieu, Metternich, Palmerston, Talleyrand -- curiously enough, courtiers like Kissinger and not the monarchs they served. Kissinger goes on to belittle the European Union:

. . . as Kissinger notes in one of his more withering asides, unifications in Europe have only been achieved with a forceful uniter, like Piedmont in Italy or Prussia in Germany.

For Kissinger, historical change not accomplished by force hardly counts. Then he explains Putin and Russia:

Kissinger also canters eloquently through Russia. Vladimir Putin's nationalism makes more sense once you understand the historical chip on his shoulder and his country's centuries-long, remorseless expansion: Russia added an average of 100,000 square kilometers a year to its territory from 1552 to 1917.

Again, nothing like a historical factoid to explain away current behavior or policy. This one is about as facile as trying to explain the Bush occupation of Iraq as the latest wrinkle on Manifest Destiny. It may indeed be that a nation capable of the former is predisposed to the latter, but that leaves a lot of intervening history unexamined in favor of a pat answer.

Still, the book stalls a bit with Islam. Religion used to be one of Kissinger's blind spots: The word does not appear in the index of Diplomacy. Now Kissinger seems to have swung too far the other way. Islam's failure to differentiate between mosque and state suddenly explains virtually everything (though not, presumably, the success of the largest Muslim-dominated state, Indonesia). Iran is perfidy personified. By contrast, Israel is a victim, "a Westphalian state" in a sea of unreason. He does not mention its unhelpful settlement-building or examine the Jewish state's own extremists (the man who killed the peacemaking Yitzhak Rabin is a "radical Israeli student"). It all feels like a rather belated olive branch to the Israeli right and its supporters in America's Congress.

I suppose this is where you notice that Micklethwait is British: he can't quite fall for the poor, tiny, beleaguered Israel line that is political orthodoxy in the US. Kissinger has been around the block enough to know better too, but to say so would take principles, or courage, neither a Kissinger staple. Propounding ignorance about Islam, on the other hand, takes neither. It's right up his alley.

The book recovers speed with Asia. Kissinger compares Britain's effect on India to Napoleon's on Germany: In both cases multiple states that had seen themselves only as a geographic entity discovered a national one.

Another remarkable example of Kissinger's ability to look at al the complexities of history and only see power relationships, then to take the narrowest thread and explicate it through some totally unrelated event in European history. Sure, Britain united India politically -- more Bismarck than Napoleon, I'd say, until they also split it into two warring halves -- but they also destroyed India economically. (One thing I wonder is whether Kissinger would have been so successful had stayed in Europe, where his audiences and patrons might actually know much of the history he revels in.)

There is some repetition here with his last book on China, but he moves quickly through the Middle Kingdom's self-absorbed history, where foreign policy was largely a matter of collecting tribute through the emperor's Ministry of Rituals and where soldiery was little valued ("Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers"). In 1893, even as Western forces were overrunning the country, the Qing dynasty diverted military funds to restore a marble boat in the Imperial Palace.

Middle Kingdom? Another example of forcing the present into the distant past so he can avoid having to understand what's happening there. I like the line -- "Good men do not become soldiers" -- but modern China does not lack for soldiers, or for nails. While modern China must in some sense continue to reflect and resonate ancient China, the nation's remarkable economic growth of the past 20-30 years is more due to forced modernization. This is a modern (perhaps even postmodern) phenomenon -- unexplainable through ancient history, but also non-analogous to the processes that created similar results in Europe and America. In particular, China (and most of East Asia, Japan a partial exception) achieved its wealth without building on imperialism, so is unlikely to look at the world the same way Europe and America do. Needless to say, that's a thought Kissinger is incapable of.

Is modern America capable of leading the world out of this? Kissinger never answers this question directly, but the chapters on his own country read like a carefully worded warning to a treasured but blinkered friend. America comes to the task with two deep character faults. The first, bound up with its geography, is a perception that foreign policy is "an optional activity." As late as 1890, its army was only the 14th largest in the world, smaller than Bulgaria's. This is a superpower that has withdrawn ignominiously from three of the last five wars it chose to fight -- in Vietnam, Iraq (the younger Bush version), Afghanistan. The second is that the same ideals that have built a great country often made it lousy at diplomacy, especially "the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary" -- the naïveté of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and the neoconservatives' forays in the Islamic world. [ . . . ]

But the current disorder is more complex: chaos in the Middle East, the spread of nuclear weapons, the emergence of cyberspace as an unregulated military arena and the reordering of Asia. The challenge is "not simply a multipolarity of power but a world of increasingly contradictory realities," Kissinger writes. "It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will at some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and cooperation -- or even any order at all." [ . . . ]

How do America's current leaders shape up? Here the book is both irritatingly coy and implicitly devastating. There is no direct criticism of the Obama administration and even a slightly comic paragraph expressing Kissinger's deep personal admiration for George W. Bush -- in the midst of a section on the cluelessness of his foreign policy. But under the equivocation and the courtiership, the message is clear, even angry: The world is drifting, unattended, and America, an indispensable part of any new order, has yet to answer even basic questions, like "What do we seek to prevent?" and "What do we seek to achieve?"

One of my favorite rock lyrics is from the band Camper van Beethoven, and goes like this: "If you weren't living here in America/you'd probably be somewhere else." There are several problems with being self-centered. One is that you can't see yourself as others see you, and as such you have no clue when you do something wrong. Back when the US army was smaller than Bulgaria's it still did things that were wrong -- 1890, the very year Micklethwait cites, was the date of the Wounded Knee Massacre -- but those wrong things were much smaller in scope and more isolated from the rest of the world than they are today. I don't know why Kissinger/Micklethwait complained about the size of the 1890 army. Back then, the US was already the most prosperous nation in the world, without getting into the trap of managing overseas colonies (although it often treated Central America like one). Nor was the US isolated: with the possible exception of the UK, no nation traded more all around the world. What more do they want?

The notion of America as an "indispensable nation" dates from WWII, when latent industrial might turned the tables against the Axis -- although we conveniently forget that most of the actual fighting was carried out by the Soviet Union and China. Unfortunately, Americans had too good a time in that war -- a massive Keynesian stimulus, strict profit controls, and a sense of common purpose pushed a previously depressed economy into overdrive, while all of the war's destruction took place elsewhere. By the time the war was over, over half of the world's industrial capacity resided in the US, and America alone had the financial power to jumpstart the world economy. After some early gestures to build a peaceful world community, Truman got distracted and decided that the US should side with capital in the international class war, so efforts like the Marshall Plan were turned into political weapons against not just the Soviet Union but the whole working class. The "Cold War" somehow managed not to destroy the world, but the US repeatedly supported desperate attempts by colonial powers to recapture their empires, and corrupt dictators and oligarchs when independence was inevitable, while isolating nations that had the gall to turn toward communism. Ultimately, the big loser of the Cold War wasn't the Soviet Union, which gave up the game, but America's own middle class democracy.

Micklethwait, possibly echoing but at least distilling Kissinger, described the Cold War thusly:

In the Cold War, America's moral order worked: There was a clear adversary that could eventually just be outmuscled, there were compliant allies and there were set rules of engagement.

After the Soviet Union fell, America's foreign policy elites were beside themselves with triumphal glee -- proclaiming The End of History and looking forward to The Clash of Civilizations -- but their triumph was little more than a con. Had Reagan's rhetoric caused the Soviet Union to disintegrate, why did communist states the US confronted much more aggressively (like Cuba and North Korea) stay communist? If communism was a dead end, how was China able to post the world's strongest economic growth record over the last 25 years? Moreover, when you sift through the real rubble of the "Cold War" you find enormous chasms where the US took the wrong side of history and left enormous destruction in its wake: the "chaos in the Middle East" that Micklethwait bemoans is largely the result of America's Cold War embrace of Salafist jihadism -- a program, by the way, initiated in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger came up with the bright idea of propping the ultraconservative Saudi monarchy up as a US proxy in the Middle East (and soon thereafter Afghanistan). To say "America's moral order worked" is well beyond insane.

This isn't to say that the US should have no role in the world (although that would clearly be an improvement over the one the US has practiced for nearly seventy years now). Clearly there are useful and valuable things a large and rich nation can do in the world -- the $750 million Obama just proposed to fight the ebola epidemic is a nice gesture (although, as Nick Turse recently documented, the US has a terrible track record of running "humanitarian projects" in Africa). But what needs to be done is for the US to meet other countries in forums that give everyone a fair and equal shake, and for that to happen the US has to stop throwing its weight around, trying to bully everyone else into submission. More specifically, the US needs to develop a genuine commitment to peace and human rights, to equality and justice, to a sustainable stewardship of the earth. To do that, a good first step would be to stop listening to Henry Kissinger. In fact, a good step would be to extradite him to the Hague, to finally be tried as the war criminal he was (and is).

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Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Music Week

Music: Current count 23814 [23775] rated (+39), 528 [524] unrated (+4).

After posting Rhapsody Streamnotes last Tuesday, I kept diving into the old music, moving from Julius Hemphill to Henry Threadgill, then to Steve Lacy (still not done there). I was surprised to find that I liked the two early albums so much (both *** in Penguin Guide; I went back and replayed the 4-star all-Monk Explorations but left it at B+). And I was further surprised that none of the later albums rated that high -- though I am just filling in holes in a catalog I've previously heard much of. (Before this week I had 37 albums rated filed under Lacy's name; now 51; there are still 21 unheard albums in the database.) For the record, I previously had the following Lacy records rated A- or A (counting one filed under Roswell Rudd's name):

  • School Days (w/Roswell Rudd, 1963)
  • The Forest and the Zoo (1966)
  • Esteem: Live in Paris (1975)
  • Regeneration (w/Roswell Rudd and others, 1982)
  • Morning Joy: Live at Sunset Paris (1986)
  • Sempre Amore (w/Mal Waldron, 1986)
  • One More Time (w/Joëlle Léandre, 2002)
  • Early and Late (w/Roswell Rudd, 1962-2002)

A couple of those came out after his death in 2003. I suppose I should also note that Lacy has more low grades (B or below) than nearly any other jazz musician of his stature: I find a lot of his 1970s work to be very sloppy, and I have a lot of trouble any time he hands the mic to his wife, Irène Aëbi (although my horror has somewhat diminished with this latest batch of records). He also has a lot of solo albums that are intrinsically limited -- Only Monk (1985) is one of the B records, even though it seems like it should be better. Some more in the queue, and any time I find something more I'll give it a listen.

Not many new records: most of last week's haul came in today and barely got catalogued. Spent a lot of time with the two TUM records. It should be noted somewhere that they have the best documentation and packaging of any jazz label in the world. Also spent quite a bit of time with Lomax, whose 2010 album, The State of Black America, made that year's top-ten list. Saxophonist Edwin Bayard is key to both, one of the most powerful young players I've heard this decade.

I've kept the original tweet grade for Loudon Wainwright III below, but the database grade is somewhat more generous. Although I single out one extraordinarily bad song, it should be noted that nothing else on the album rises to the level of Older Than My Old Man Now (my top-ranked record of 2012). Also, my complaint about that "2nd Amendment Xmas anthem" isn't political (as I tweeted, "even if it's satirical and anti-gun"). Some brilliant ideas just don't work, nor do stupid ones, regardless of artistic license. (By the way, Matt Rice has a more judicious Wainwright review here.)

Recommended music links:

  • Robert Christgau: Expert Witness: first installment of the new Consumer Guide focuses on alt-rap records: Atmosphere, The Roots, Homeboy Sandman, Open Mike Eagle; three A-, two HMs. More coming each Friday. There's also an interview with Christgau where he pegs Black Portland as his favorite album of the year. I thought Atmosphere and The Roots might have some upward potential when I reviewed them back when, but I didn't get anything promising out of Black Portland -- although Tatum, Rice, and others did.

New records rated this week:

  • Ryan Adams: Ryan Adams (2014, Blue Note): singer-songwriter narrowly framed, both on cover and with guitar, as if we should pay more attention, but should we? [r]: B
  • Jason Adasiewicz's Sun Rooms: From the Region (2013 [2014], Delmark): vibes-bass-drums trio with Flaten & Reed, doing much to let the leader roam/soar [cd]: B+(***)
  • Kalle Kalima & K-18: Buñuel de Jour (2013 [2014], TUM): guitarist, quartet adds bass, accordion, and alto sax, all melting together, thick & juicy [cd]: B+(***)
  • The Mark Lomax Trio: Isis & Osiris (2012 [2014], Inarhyme): drags early, but Edwin Bayard's sax is often mesmerizing, drummer pretty good too [cd]: A-
  • Wadada Leo Smith: The Great Lakes Suites (2012 [2014], TUM, 2CD): another 2CD monster but spare, with Henry Threadgill jousting, Lindberg & DeJohnette [cd]: B+(***)
  • Loudon Wainwright III: Haven't Got the Blues (Yet) (2014, 429): pretty good album, as usual, except for that 2nd Amendment Xmas anthem [r]: D-

Old records rated this week:

  • John Wolf Brennan/Alex Cline/Daniele Patumi/Tscho Theissing/John Voirol: Shooting Stars and Traffic Lights (1993-97 [2006], Leo): [r]: B+(**)
  • Julius Hemphill: Raw Materials and Residuals (1977 [1993], Black Saint): early sax trio with cello and percussion, explosive postbop, seductive melodies [r]: A-
  • Julius Hemphill/Warren Smith: Chile New York (1980 [1998], Black Saint): sax-percussion duets, kind of sketchy as improv can sometimes be [r]: B+(**)
  • The Julius Hemphill Sextet: At Dr. King's Table (1997, New World): ghost band, six-piece sax choir laying out some of his most storied harmonies [r]: B+(***)
  • The Julius Hemphill Sextet: The Hard Blues: Live in LisbonB+(***)
  • Jay Clayton & John Lindberg: As Tears Go By (1987 [2014], Jazzwerkstatt): half tortured voals, half String Trio of New York, some pretty great Marty Ehrlich [r]: B+(*)
  • Steve Lacy: Soprano Sax (1957 [1991], Prestige/OJC): first album, shows his horn off on Monk & Ellington, with very engaging Wynton Kelly on piano [r]: A-
  • Steve Lacy: The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy (1960 [1985], Candid): mostly trio as Lacy lays out his unique soprano sax style, covering Monk, Parker, and Taylor [r]: A-
  • Steve Lacy with Don Cherry: Evidence (1961 [1990], New Jazz/OJC): two-horn quartet with bass/drums, indecisive squabbles over the usual fare (Ellington, Monk) [r]: B+(***)
  • Steve Lacy: Scratching the Seventies/Dreams (1969-77 [1997], Saravah, 3CD): box rolls up 5 albums as Lacy gets weird, often several ways at once [r]: B+(*)
  • Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo: Clangs (1977 [2006], Ictus): soprano sax and percussion duets, a rickety contraption with whistles, bird calls, clanging [r]: B+(**)
  • Steve Lacy Quintet: Troubles (1979, Black Saint): tricky, slippery tunes with Steve Potts on second sax, Irene Aebi on violin or cello (or voice) [r]: B+(***)
  • Steve Lacy: The Flame (1982, Soul Note): trio with Bobby Few (piano) and Dennis Charles (drums), bits of genius and bouts of flailing [r]: B+(*)
  • Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron: Live in Berlin (1984 [2007], Jazzwerkstatt): typical mix for frequent duet partners, can get dense, also somewhat fanciful [r]: B+(**)
  • Steve Lacy: More Monk (1989 [1991], Soul Note): solo soprano sax, all Monk tunes, played fairly straight but stripped to bare bones [r]: B+(*)
  • Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron: "Let's Call This . . . Esteem" (1993, Slam): duo, one of many they've done but too often they play past one another [r]: B+(**)
  • Steve Lacy Trio: The Rent (1997 [1999], Cavity Search, 2CD): trio, with Jean-Jacques Avenel and John Betsch, live before enthusiastic crowd, stretches into 2CD [r]: B+(***)
  • Steve Lacy Trio: The Holy La (1998 [2002], Freelance): same trio, cut in studio in France, lovely kalimba stretch, two Aebi vocals (not too bad) [r]: B+(***)
  • Steve Lacy: The Beat Suite (2001 [2003], Sunnyside): fine texts from famous beat poets, slippery and kinky music as only Lacy can, starchy vocals [r]: B
  • Steve Lacy: November (2003 [2010], Intakt): solo soprano sax, probably his last, a nice summation of his art; one vocals shows he can't sing either [r]: B+(**)
  • John Lindberg: Trilogy of Works for Eleven Instrumentalists (1984 [1985], Black Saint): belabored title and scores but somehow comes together impressively [r]: B+(***)
  • John Lindberg: Quartet Afterstorm (1994, Black Saint): bassist-led, but trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and pianist Eric Watson star in taut ensemble [r]: A-
  • John Lindberg Ensemble: A Tree Frog Tonality (2000, Between the Lines): quartet with Wadada Leo Smith and Larry Ochs bursting out, Andrew Cyrille superb [r]: B+(***)
  • Pago Libre: Stepping Out (2004 [2005], Leo): pianist John Wolf Brennan's avant-chamber group, violin dominating alphorn/flugelhorn, no drums [r]: B+(***)
  • Henry Threadgill Sextett: You Know the Number (1986 [1987], Jive/Novus): three horns, cello, bass, two percussionists, a boisterous avant-garde circus [r]: A-
  • Henry Threadgill Sextett: Easily Slip Into Another World (1987 [1988], Jive/Novus): picks up where predecessor left off, more or less inspired, vocal ok [r]: B+(***)
  • Henry Threadgill: Song Out of My Trees (1993 [1994], Black Saint): five pieces all over the map, like a grieving vocal over accordion/harpsichord/cellos [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Rashied Al Akbar/Muhammad Ali/Earl Cross/Idris Ackamoor: Ascent of the Nether Creatures (NoBusiness): CDR [LP only]
  • Daniel Blacksburg Trio: Perilous Architecture (NoBusiness): CDR [LP only]
  • Gianni Lenoci/Kent Carter/Bill Elgart: Plaything (NoBusiness): CDR [LP only]
  • Jack Cooper: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra (Planet Arts)
  • William Hooker & Liudas Mockunas: Live at the Vilnius Jazz Festival (NoBusiness)
  • Peripheral Vision: Sheer Tyranny of the Will (self-released)
  • RED Trio & Mattias Ståhl: North and the Red Stream (NoBusiness)
  • Ken Thomson and Slow/Fast: Settle (2014, NCM East)
  • Rosenna Vitro: Clarity: Music of Clare Fischer (Random Act): September 30

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Weekend Update: ISIS Edition

On September 10, getting a jump on the unlucky 13th anniversary of Al-Qaida's planes attacks, President Obama laid out his plans for the fourth US invasion and assault on Iraq:

Barack Obama became the fourth consecutive American president to deliver a prime time speech to the nation about Iraq on Wednesday, vowing to wage "a steady, relentless effort" to wipe out ISIS, the Sunni militant group in Iraq and Syria which recently beheaded two American journalists.

"Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy," Obama said.

The president was quick to emphasize that this won't be a war like Iraq or Afghanistan, instead likening it to U.S. engagement in Yemen and Somalia. He said it "will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil," and will instead involve "using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground" to attack ISIS (also called ISIL).

"If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region -- including to the United States," Obama said. He stressed that the strategy will be conducted with global allies, saying the four elements of his plan are air strikes, support for rebel forces on the ground, counter-terrorism and intelligence and humanitarian assistance to civilians.

[Some quick notes: the second invasion of Iraq was under Clinton, when US forces drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of the Kurdish enclave; that was done without a military engagement, although Clinton also conducted a sporadic air war against Iraq over much of his two terms, a practice Bush continued upon taking office in 2001. US troops first entered Somalia in 1992, so how is that working? The first person Obama ordered killed was a Somali pirate in 2009. The US killed a leader of Al-Shabab there as recently as Sept. 2. The US started using drones over Yemen to assassinate alleged terrorists in 2002, so that, too, is at best a slowly evolving "success" story.]

As usual, Obama managed to offend everyone with his position -- the hawks for not acting sooner and more recklessly; the rest of us for throwing us back into another pointless, hopeless war. For a guy who claims his first principle of foreign policy is "don't do stupid shit," Obama just blew it. As near as I can tell, he did this for three reasons:

  1. When US troops finally left Iraq, due to the Iraqi government's refusal to sign a "status of forces agreement" that would give US troops immunity to commit crimes against Iraqis (as they had been doing since 2003), Obama chose to celebrate the occasion as a great American success story, and as such he became party to a war that he had campaigned against. So when the success story unraveled and Iraq sank back into a civil war that the US had started by turning Shiite death squads against Sunnis, Obama felt obligated to repair the damage, even where Bush and 160,000 US troops had failed. (Obama made a similar gaffe when he touted a false recovery from the Bush recession, leading people to think he was responsible for the whole crash.) The net effect is that Obama is willing to destroy his own reputation in order to salvage Bush's. That sure isn't the "change" millions of people voted for Obama to bring about.

  2. Obama is a pushover, and he let himself get snowed here. A lot of people have been pushing for war against ISIS lately, and they've painted the group as unspeakably evil, pulling out every cliché and playing on every prejudice that has ever been used to sell Americans on a war in the Middle East. Granted, most of the people who've been agitating for war against ISIS were already trying to push the US into war in Syria against ISIS' primary enemy, the Assad regime. Many of them belong to the "real men go to Tehran" faction that wanted to extend the 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria. But all the publicity of ISIS' beheadings and massacres has gripped people initially inclined against escalating a war, even, some would say, the Pope (but see this for a more nuanced reading). For someone like Obama, who periodically feels the need to prove he's no pacifist, the chance to vanquish a foe as abhorent as ISIS was irresistible.

  3. Finally, Obama has outsmarted himself, thinking his peculiar combination of aggression (bombing, special forces) and restraint (no regular combat troops) will work magic while avoiding the risks, the abuse and blowback that inevitably follows American troops all around the world. The fact remains that no matter how light or heavy you go in, bombing will inevitably kill the wrong people, intelligence will inevitably be incomplete or faulty, and the proxy forces that the plan so relies on will have their own agendas, ones that will become more rigid with the commitment of American support.

Perhaps the worst thing about Obama's speech and the policies he previously put into place is the open-ended commitment he's made to the very same Iraqi political leaders whose misbehavior made ISIS appear to many Iraqis (Sunnis, anyway) to be the lesser evil. Now they know that when they fuck up again the Americans will have to stick with them, because the US can never afford to lose face. (On the other hand, maybe they should review the story of Ngo Dinh Diem.) But nearly every aspect of the speech/plan is flawed. ISIS came into existence in the crucible of Syria's civil war, and some group like it will inevitably reappear as long as the civil war goes on, so it will prove impossible to stop ISIS without also ending Syria's civil war. Chances of that are thin as Obama has sided with the rebels against Assad, not realizing that the most prominent rebel group is ISIS, and that the US-favored "moderates" are firmly aligned with ISIS. The situation in Iraq is no simpler, with the US fighting in favor of the central government against ISIS but also siding with Kurdish separatists against the central government. The desire to work through proxies adds complexity, but perhaps not quite the mess of a full-blown invasion and its inevitably messy occupation. Plus you have the problem of managing domestic expectations. Obama came out with a clever limited intervention plan in the much simpler context of Libya and, well, look at how that blew up. Obama put a lot of emphasis on the counterinsurgency doctrine Gen. McChrystall tried to implement in Afghanistan, and failed totally at. American soldiers are peculiarly inept at fighting Muslims, yet the are held on such high pedestals by politicians like Obama that their repeated failures are overlooked. Similarly, the diplomatic alliances the US will surely need are often unapproachable due to other conflicts -- Iran and Russia are the major cases, but the traditional wink-and-nod green light for Saudia Arabia to finance groups like ISIS also comes into play.

And one should probe deeper, although there is little chance that Obama will. Nothing is so opaque to those who believe that "America is a light unto the nations" as the actual past behavior of the US. Since the 1970s the US has financed Jihadis, and has encouraged the Saudis and others to actively proselytize their fundamentalist brand of Islam, even as it has turned back against us. Similarly, America's Cold War ideology, still very much institutionalized, keeps us from working in any meaningful way to with liberal, socialist, or any kind of progressive movements in the Middle East.

The US government is similarly ignorant about ISIS, as are the American people -- even more so as they only enter the equation as targets for propaganda, where ISIS is made to look at evil as possible while the good intentions and great deeds of the US are never subject to scrutiny. We are, after all, the leader of the free world, as such obliged to act to defend civilization, something no one else has the resources or moral character to do. And so on, blah, blah, blah. To be sure, part of the problem here is that ISIS hasn't been running the sort of media relations program that, say, the Israelis mount when they go on a five-week killing binge like they did this summer in Gaza. Rather, ISIS has contemptuously killed journalists who might have helped them get their story out. They must, after all, have stories: even the Taliban, who weren't much better at PR, could go around the room and recount the lost limbs and eyes that scarred nearly every one of their commanders. Like the Taliban, ISIS sprung from the killing fields of despotic regimes and foreign occupiers.

I'm not aware of any journalist who has gotten close enough to ISIS to present their side of the story, although Nir Rosen's In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006) and Dahr Jamail's Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007) got relatively close to earlier generations of anti-US resistance fighters in Iraq. The journalist who has written the most about ISIS is Patrick Cockburn, who wrote The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006), and who has a new book on ISIS: The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. For a sampling of his recent writings on ISIS, see:

Some quotes from Cockburn's Sept. 9 piece:

The US and its allies face a huge dilemma which is largely of their own making. Since 2011 Washington's policy, closely followed by the UK, has been to replace President Bashar al-Assad, but among his opponents Isis is now dominant. Actions by the US and its regional Sunni allies led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey, which were aimed at weakening Mr Assad, have in practice helped Isis. [ . . . ]

So far it looks as if Mr Obama will dodge the main problem facing his campaign against Isis. He will not want to carry out a U-turn in US policy by allying himself with President Assad, though the Damascus government is the main armed opposition to Isis in Syria. He will instead step up a pretense that there is a potent "moderate" armed opposition in Syria, capable of fighting both Isis and the Syrian government at once. Unfortunately, this force scarcely exists in any strength and the most important rebel movements opposed to Isis are themselves jihadis such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamic Front. Their violent sectarianism is not very different to that of Isis.

Lacking a moderate military opposition to support as an alternative to Isis and the Assad government, the US has moved to raise such a force under its own control. The Free Syrian Army (FSA), once lauded in Western capitals as the likely military victors over Mr Assad, largely collapsed at the end of 2013. The FSA military leader, General Abdul-Ilah al Bashir, who defected from the Syrian government side in 2012, said in an interview with the McClatchy news agency last week that the CIA had taken over direction of this new moderate force. He said that "the leadership of the FSA is American," adding that since last December US supplies of equipment have bypassed the FSA leadership in Turkey and been sent directly to up to 14 commanders in northern Syria and 60 smaller groups in the south of the country. Gen Bashir said that all these FSA groups reported directly to the CIA. Other FSA commanders confirmed that the US is equipping them with training and weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles.

It appears that, if the US does launch air strikes in Syria, they will be nominally in support of the FSA which is firmly under US control. The US is probably nervous of allowing weapons to be supplied to supposed moderates by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies which end up in the hands of Isis. The London-based small arms research organisation Conflict Armament Research said in a report this week that anti-tank rockets used by Isis in Syria were "identical to M79 rockets transferred by Saudi Arabia to forces operating under the Free Syrian Army umbrella in 2013."

In Syria and in Iraq Mr Obama is finding that his policy of operating through local partners, whose real aims may differ markedly from his own, is full of perils.

Some more links on Iraq, Syria, and ISIS:

  • Tony Karon: Obama promises a long and limited war on Islamic State:

    The IS thrives as a result of the alienation of Sunni citizenry by Syrian and Iraqi regimes and the breakdown of the central state in both countries. The Islamic State has taken advantage of the enduring hostility to U.S. intervention in the region -- and also of Washington's subsequent retreat and passivity. It trades off Iran's sectarian support for allied Shia militias, Gulf Arab support for equally sectarian Sunni militias and Turkish hostility to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which translates into an open border for thousands of international volunteers to cross and join the IS. The gradual collapse of the nation-state itself in Syria and Iraq has allowed the IS to break away from the transnational conspiracy strategy of its Al-Qaeda precursor to raise its black flag in a growing power vacuum that covers huge swathes of territory.

  • Phyllis Bennis: The Speech on Diplomacy That Obama Should Have Given Last Night:

    What's missing is a real focus, a real explanation to people in this country and to people and governments in the Middle East and around the world, on just what a political solution to the ISIS crisis would really require and what kind of diplomacy will be needed to get there.

    President Obama should have spent his fifteen minutes of prime time tonight talking about diplomacy. Instead of a four-part mostly military plan, he should have outlined four key diplomatic moves.

    First, recognize what it will take to change the political dynamics of sectarianism in Iraq. [ . . . ]

    Second, instead of a Coalition of the Killing, President Obama should have announced a new broad coalition with a political and diplomatic, not military, mandate. It should aim to use diplomatic power and financial pressures, not military strikes, to undermine ISIS power. [ . . . ]

    Third, the Obama administration should, perhaps this month while Washington holds the presidency of the UN Security Council, push to restart serious international negotiations on ending the complex set of multi-faceted wars in Syria. [ . . . ]

    Finally, an arms embargo on all sides should be on the long-term agenda.

    Without political agreement, there is no solution. All you can do with military power is try to shift the power relationships between the sides -- in the hope of getting a more favorable agreement. But if all you have are military goals, they are pointless. And the value of shifting those power relationships goes down if you're willing to consider an equitable agreement. No side can legitimately ask for more.

  • Paul Woodward: Is ISIS a terminal disease?:

    President Obama might have been slow to come up with a strategy for defeating ISIS but he seems to have been much more resolute in his choice of metaphor for describing the enemy.

    After James Foley was murdered, Obama said, "there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so it does not spread." A few days later he said: "Rooting out a cancer like [ISIS] won't be easy and it won't be quick." Again, last night he said: "it will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL."

    Woodward offers three reasons why he thinks Obama like the cancer metaphor, concluding:

    Obama's political goal appears to be to secure support for an open-ended relatively low-key military operation that will be of such little concern to most Americans that it can continue for years without any real accountability.

    I'm less impressed by his "reasons" -- what struck me more from the quotes is (1) the assumption that it is his (or "our") body that has been struck by the cancer, and that therefore the US is entitled to treat it; and (2) how reducing the acts of people to the level of a disease sanitizes our process of killing those people.

  • John Cassidy: Obama's Strange Bedfellows: The Right Liked His Speech: Quotes from Rush Limbaugh, John Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Larry Kudlow applauding Obama's speech. (Podhoretz called it "the most Republican speech Barack Obama has ever given.") However, afterwards, the right started looking for high ground further to the right:

    If a vote takes place in Congress -- and, at this stage, it's unclear whether that will happen -- most G.O.P. members will likely express support for unleashing the U.S. military on the jihadis. (Opposing the President "would be a huge mistake," Kudlow warned.) The pressure from the right will be aimed at expanding Obama's war, not stopping it. More bombing; more U.S. service members involved; more everything. That will be the line.

    It's already being laid down, in fact. "Air strikes alone will not accomplish what we're trying to accomplish," House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday. "Somebody's boots have to be on the ground." Some of Boehner's foot soldiers went further -- quite a bit further. "This is a stalemate strategy," said John Fleming, a Louisiana congressman who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. "I think that we would want to see an all-out war, shock and awe. We put troops on the ground, we put all of our assets there after properly prepping the battlefield, and in a matter of a few weeks we take these guys out."

    Of course, when you're the greatest power the world has ever known, all it should take is a few weeks.

  • Andrew J Bacevich: Obama is picking his targets in Iraq and Syria while missing the point: Starts off by trying to out-think David Brooks, offering that "the core problem" of the era is "a global conflict pitting tradition against modernity." That conflict exists, of course, but Jihadists aren't militant defenders of tradition. They belong to a more specific reaction, one in response to imperialist exploitation working through the corrupt elites of many Muslim countries, not against modernity's individualistic ethos. Still, the following point is well taken:

    Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won't create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won't restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won't dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won't pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won't end the Syrian civil war. It won't bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won't persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won't end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won't resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    All the military power in the world won't solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary -- mostly because he and his advisers don't know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration's default option.

    Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.

  • Fred Hof: We Can't Destroy ISIS Without Destroying Bashar al Assad First: Hof worked for the Obama administration 2009-12 and has not rotated to a Middle East policy think tank, so I count him as untrustworthy, but his main point strikes me as true:

    The Islamic State -- just like its parent, Al Qaeda in Iraq -- cannot be killed unless the causes of state failure in Syria and Iraq are addressed and rectified. Although such a task cannot be the exclusive or even principal responsibility of the American taxpayer, the president's strategy, its implementation, and its outcome will be incomplete if it remains solely one of counter-terrorism.

    The essential problem that has permitted the Islamic State to roam freely in parts of Iraq and Syria amounting in size to New England is state failure in both places. Redressing this failure is far beyond the unilateral capacity of the United States, as occupation in Iraq and ongoing operations in Afghanistan demonstrate. Still the fact remains that until Syria and Iraq move from state failure to political legitimacy -- to systems reflecting public consensus about the rules of the political game -- the Islamic State will remain undead no matter how many of its kings, queens, bishops, rooks, and pawns are swept from the table. And yet a strategy that does not address how America and its partners can influence the endgame -- keeping the Islamic State in its grave -- is simply incomplete.

    Hof refuses to consider the possibility that in order to kill ISIS the US could change sides and support Assad, possibly under some face-saving deal that would cut the "moderate" rebels some slack, maybe promising some democratic reforms to isolate ISIS. He basically wants to run the entire US Army through Damascus ("Airstrikes will not suffice . . . A ground element is essential, as it has been in Iraq.") What he doesn't explain is how, once Assad has been swept away, the US establishes a government in Syria that is broadly accepted by the bitterly-divided Syrian people as legitimate -- one cannot, for instance, point to US efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia as providing any comfort or confidence.

  • US Pins Hope on Syrian Rebels With Loyalties All Over the Map:

    After more than three years of civil war, there are hundreds of militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad -- and one another. Among them, even the more secular forces have turned to Islamists for support and weapons over the years, and the remaining moderate rebels often fight alongside extremists like the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.

    "You are not going to find this neat, clean, secular rebel group that respects human rights and that is waiting and ready because they don't exist," said Aron Lund, a Syria analyst who edits the Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It is a very dirty war and you have to deal with what is on offer." [ . . . ]

    The Obama administration's plans to arm Syrian rebels have been troubled by false starts since April 2013, when Mr. Obama first authorized the C.I.A. to begin a secret training mission in Jordan.

    Months after the authorization, the White House still had not delivered details to Congress about the C.I.A.'s plans, and it was not until September 2013 that the first American-trained rebels returned to Syria from Jordan.

    To date, the C.I.A. mission in Jordan has trained 2,000 to 3,000 Syrian rebels, according to American and Arab officials.

    To expand the training, Mr. Obama announced a plan in June to spend up to $500 million for scores of American Special Forces troops to train up to 3,000 rebels over the next year. But the proposal languished on Capitol Hill as lawmakers complained that the plans lacked specific details. A revised plan now calls for as many as twice that number of fighters, analysts said.

    Even if Congress approves the Pentagon plan, as now appears likely after Mr. Obama's speech on Wednesday, military planners said it would be months before the fighters, to be trained at a base in Saudi Arabia, would be battle-ready.

    Fatigue from three years of war has left most of those forces exhausted and short of resources. Since pushing ISIS from parts of northern Syria early this year, Syria's rebels have few military advances to point to and in many areas have lost ground, to Mr. Assad's forces and to ISIS. But in many places they remain busy fighting Mr. Assad and are not eager to redirect their energies to ISIS -- even while many say they hate the group.

  • Rami G Khouri: Why Obama Has Picked the Worst Allies for His War on ISIS: Khouri thinks that the Arab states that Obama is trying to line up for the war against ISIS may be effective in the short-term but will only make Jihadism more prevalent in the future.

    The combination of foreign-led military power and local Arab government partners that must anchor a successful attack to vanquish the Islamic State is the precise combination of forces that originally midwifed the birth of Al-Qaeda in the 1980s and later spawned its derivative -- the Islamic State -- today. [ . . . ]

    The jails of Sunni-majority Arab regimes represent an important aspect of the mistreatment and humiliation that many prisoners experienced, especially those jailed for their political views rather than crimes. Their jail experiences ultimately convinced them to fight to topple their regimes as part of Al-Qaeda's aim to purify Islamic lands from apostate and corrupt leaderships.

    The fact that tens of thousands of Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese and other Arabs are in jail today on often questionable charges -- including many in Gulf Cooperation Council states who are jailed simply for tweeting critical remarks about their governments -- suggests that Arab autocracy continues to define and plague the region as a driver of homegrown Arab radicalism and terrorism.

  • Moon of Alabama: The Caliphate's Anti-Imperial/Imperial Dualism: Asserts: "The Caliphate is based on original Wahhabi ideas which were in their essence also anti-colonial and at first directed against the Ottoman rulers." Those anti-imperial ideas also work against the US, but the juicier target is the Saudi royal family, which made the original pact with Abd al-Wahhab and, in their general subverience to the UK and US may be seen as not holding up their end of the deal. Much of this has to do with the way the Saudis distribute dividends on their oil. A small fraction of the money goes through the state to build a social welfare network which keeps the peace by making Saudi citizens wards of the state and elevating them above migrant workers who do the real work and are kept on very short leashes. But most of the money goes to the numerous princes of the royal family, who are much like the pampered scions of rich estates all over the world: spoiled, sheltered, conceited, given to flights of grandeur and folly. American bankers love these Saudi princes -- some are serious, but most are easy marks. The princes themselves are schizo: blessed with wealth they never earned, some turn into notorious playboys, some turn pious and shameful. The latter, plus some wealthy scions of non-royal families like Osama Bin Laden and their cohort in the Persian Gulf monarchies, are the ones who finance jihadists, who hire poor, disaffected Muslims to die for God, to expiate the sins of the Saudis. Of course, when the Americans come calling, the top Saudis are quick to condemn the traitors in their ranks, but they are less eager to cut them out because deep down they are trapped in their piety. The caliphate is a deep idea dating back to Muhammad himself -- indeed, the Turks wouldn't have made a mockery of it had it not worked -- so it's no surprise that its first appearance of reality should be so dramatic.

    The new Caliphate followers are copies of the original Wahhabis who do not recognize nation states as those were dictated by the colonial "western" overlords after the end of the Ottoman empire. They do not recognize rulers that deviate, like the Saudi kings do, from the original ideas and subordinate themselves to "western" empires. It is their aim to replace them. As there are many people in Saudi Arabia educated in Wahhabi theology and not particular pleased with their current rulers the possibility of a Caliphate rush to conquer Saudi Arabia and to overthrow the Ibn Saud family is real.

    In that aspect the Caliphate is anti-colonial and anti-imperial. That is part of what attracts its followers. At the same time the Caliphate project is also imperial in that it wants to conquer more land and wants to convert more people to its flavor of faith.

    Both of these aspects make it a competitor and a danger to imperial U.S. rule-by-proxy in the Middle East. That is, I believe, why the U.S. finally decided to fight it. To lose Saudi Arabia to the Caliphate, which seems to be a real possibility, would be a devastating defeat.

    The author cites two pieces by Alastair Crooke that are worth checking out: You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia. A lot of interesting material in those two pieces. (One thing I didn't realize was that King Abdullah has made a number of reforms liberalizing Islamic law in Saudi Arabia: recognizing legal doctrines other than the Salafist, and Shiites to consult their own legal scholars. All this, of course, exacerbates the split with hardcore Wahhabists.)

    He also cites a "twitter story": Billmon on Doublethink in U.S. Foreign Policy. Punch line:

    Whether U.S. diplos still believe their liberal international bullshit isn't a particularly important question but it is interesting. I tend to think that they do: Both as classic Orwellian doublethink, a product of social conditioning, and on time-honored principle that a salesman has to believe in his/her product, no matter how fantastical. "Goes with the territory."

  • Richard Phillips/Stephan Richter: The dumbest US foreign policy question asked this century: Who "lost" Syria?

    And this begs the question: What are U.S. politicians saying when they say they want to save Syria?

    The answer to this can only be found in American hubris. Syria is not America's to save. The reality is that only Syrians can save Syria -- just as it is only Iraqis who can save Iraq and only Afghans who can save Afghanistan.

    Seeking an answer to the question "Who lost Syria?" is a foolhardy quest on the part of U.S. politicians. Rather than a serious question, it is just another manifestation of Washington's favorite political sport -- blamesmanship.

  • Davis Merritt: Americans not ready for the truth about ISIS: Former Wichita Eagle editor, usually a level-headed thinker, gets all wrapped up in the futility of wars in the Middle East:

    The religious extremism that defines the Middle East has been going on for more than a thousand years. The West has been involved for more than 900 of those years. From Pope Urban's first crusade in 1095 to President George W. Bush's ignorantly declared "crusade" amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, extremists on both sides have periodically fanned the flames.

    No American president can erase that history nor diminish its allure to radical Islamists who want to write the next chapter in our blood. Anyone who believes a few months of bombing can eradicate this latest iteration of religious intolerance is living a fantasy.

    Our 21st-century mindset doesn't tolerate lengthy wars; the half-life of our resolve is about 18 months. So the president best avoid the word "war," which implies beginning and ending points.

    Unfortunately, neither can he say the truth: This is going to be life in our world; learn to live with it.

    A year ago Americans so overwhelmingly rejected Obama's proposal to bomb Syria for using chemical weapons, recognizing that it wouldn't solve anything and wouldn't even make a dent given all the other acts of war. Indeed, it seemed probable that Congress (for once listening to the American people) would have voted authorization for bombing down. Now, supposedly an air war against ISIS enjoys popular support, with Congress gung ho not only to authorize strikes but to appropriate billions of dollars to train American proxies to fight the ground war. This turnaround depends on being able to identify ISIS as uniquely evil and dangerous, and while flashy stories of beheadings and mass killings help, I suspect the main cause is deep-seated islamophobia triggered by the prospect of resurrecting the caliphate. Last year Syria was viewed as just another internecine sectarian conflict between people we don't know or care about thousands of miles away. The caliphate, on the other hand, would be a symbol of growing Islamic power, an alarming shift in the world order, and that's what starts dredging up reassuring memories of Pope Urban -- even though most people who know the history of the Crusades regard them as an embarrassing blight on European civilization. Merritt accepts such wars because, regarding "religious extremism" as timeless, as if the fight today is about an ancient character trait, and not about anything more tangible -- like oil, or the ability of US bankers to fleece Saudi princes, or the international market for arms, or the constant jockeying of regional powers and their never-very-dependable proxy groups. Those are all things that, pace Merritt, we really shouldn't have to live with.

  • Paul Woodward: Most Americans support war against ISIS but lack confidence it will achieve its goal: A NBC News poll says that "62 percent of voters say they support Obama's decision to take action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while 22 percent oppose it." But also that "a combined 68 percent of Americans say they have 'very little' or 'just some' confidence that Obama's goals of degrading and eliminating the threat posed by ISIS will be achieved." Woodward dissects these numbers. Among other points:

    1. "Do you think President Obama presented a credible strategy for destroying ISIS?" If the answer's "no" and this is why you lack confidence in this war, then I'd take that as a fairly good indication that you are following this story reasonably closely.

    2. Of course the most obvious reason why Americans would be skeptical about the chances of success for a war against ISIS is the fact that after sinking trillions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terrorism, al Qaeda still exists.

      As has happened so many times before, Obama formulates his policies in reaction to banal, superficial, political imperatives whose primary purpose is to fend off critics.

      On Thursday he presented his strategy for destroying ISIS because only days before he got slammed for admitting he didn't have a strategy.

      After he made various comments suggesting that he only aimed to contain ISIS and was thus criticized for underestimating the threat it poses and for being too timid in his response, he answered critics by saying that his aim was to destroy ISIS.

      After it was pointed out that fighting ISIS in Iraq would accomplish little if it could continue to consolidate its strength in Syria, Obama said the fight would be taken to Syria.

      Each of his steps is reactive and political -- as though the primary task at hand was to deflect criticism.

Probably more stuff to write about, but that's enough for now. I'd be happy to return to writing about inequality, which is really the big chronic issue of our era. Or maybe that old standby, the stupidity of conservative Republicans (here's a Ted Cruz example; and here's Steve Fraser: The Return of the Titans, on the Kochs and their ilk). Or global warming even, but the last couple months have been overwhelmed by war news, and the one person who could do something sensible and constructive to defuse conflicts and resolve problems has repeatedly, almost obsessively managed to make them worse. That person is US President Barack W. Obama. Yes, he's finally sunk that low.

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