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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links Social Media My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Music Week [400 - 409]Monday, October 1, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30390 [30365] rated (+25), 280 [273] unrated (+7). Week got wiped out several different ways. Helped a friend fix a huge Russian dinner on Friday. Shopped for that on Wednesday, having to hit up nine (or was it eleven?) stores along the way, then spent from Thursday afternoon to something like 4AM doing prep for another 6-7 hours of cooking on Friday. Wound up with way too much food, but much of it was magnificent. Only the dessert disappointed, an attempt at Prague cake which I now understand doesn't resemble the real thing at all. Then Saturday I developed a fever with no other symptoms, and I basically shut down over the weekend -- so no Weekend Roundup, even following one of the more outrageous weeks of the Trump era. (Not like there won't be plenty more as bad or worse.) I started reading Jill Lepore's massive (or schematic, depending on your point of view) These Truths: A History of the United States. She starts by quoting the preamble to the US Constitution, and I realized it to offer not a practical description of the federal government but a vision statement of what that government should aspire to. The same, of course, could be said of the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, which Lepore also mentions. What I then realized is that the standard for all three "separate and equal" branches of government should be their efforts to achieve these founding aspirations. We were fortunate, at least for the first half of my life, to have a Supreme Court that took those aspirations seriously, especially in its assertion of civil rights even while the other branches dragged their heels. Since Nixon, the right-wing has made a determined effort to overturn those rulings and to strip us of our rights, not least by stacking the courts with people who oppose the aspirations the nation was founded on. With the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, we got a good view of just what kind of person would gladly do such things. Regardless of whether Kavanaugh has committed sexual assault and/or perjury, he's made it abundantly clear that he's unfit for the Supreme Court, or for that matter for the judgeship he currently holds. Maybe I'll write more on that later in the week. My most immediate task is to get September's Streamnotes organized and posted. Thinking about the dinner, then not thinking at all, I totally missed the end of the month. I can backdate what I have, making it look like I did it on time and before doing this. The latter, at least, is mostly true. I'm not sure what comes next. I can always return to compiling my last two books from the notebooks (non-review music notes, non-jazz reviews; I'm currently stalled in May, 2013). I could take a look at Pitchfork's The 2000 Best Albums of the 1980s -- the music decade I paid the least attention to at the time. Another possible source of unheard records is Will Friedland's latest book, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums. I picked up the book at the library, and while there is zero chance that I'll read it through, the actual album list isn't prohibitively long (probably 40-50 albums, half already heard). On the other hand, the new jazz queue has grown a bit (26 albums at the moment), so I should pay some attention to that. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 24, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30365 [30328] rated (+37), 273 [277] unrated (-4). Seemed likely to me that the rated count would fall this week, but I kept plugging at it, mostly picking records from Napster's Featured list, and they added up, even offering a couple surprises. Actually, early on I wrapped up the last of the Nate Chinen picks I could find, winding up with only 5 (of 129) records unrated (Ben Allison, Tim Berne, Wynton Marsalis, Hedvig Mollestad, Mike Moreno). I also checked out one of the late Big Jay McNeely's compilations -- picked the one with dates in the title, although I checked them against his singles discography to be sure. Don't recall why I didn't go further, but it wasn't easy figuring out when various things were recorded. The Featured list did get me to new vault tapes from Stella Chiweshe, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerard, and Prince -- none extraordinary. I also noticed a Bikini Kill album -- one that I had already heard, but I took another look for two that I had missed that Christgau had A-listed, and found them (after having missed them previously). I actually wound up liking their early demo tape (Revolution Girl Style Now) even more. Also new on Napster is Posi-Tone, a mainstream jazz label run by Marc Free. I got their records for a while, but largely stopped paying them any heed when service went to download-only. Streaming is enough easier to get me interested again, and the Art Hirahara album is a big step forward -- I would say a big surprise, but I never doubted Donny McCaslin could play this well. (I've just never heard it on any of his own records.) Best of the B+(***) records is probably Dafnis Prieto's album. I'm feeling a little guilty about not giving it another spin, but just not that up for Latin big band. (Could say the same thing for Eddie Palmieri's Full Circle, which could be one of his best.) Didn't pay much attention to the new jazz queue this past week -- partly due to a clutter/misfiling lapse, and partly because I've been playing Ben Webster's Soulville nearly every morning. Guess it's time to nudge that grade up to A+. Rough week for me, both physically and mentally. Had to work on the old car to get it to start, and decided I also needed to wash it. Also wound up washing the not-quite-so-old car -- jobs that were easy a decade ago but grueling these days. Another task I finally tackled last week was installing new insulation on the coolant pipes on a mini-split air conditioner. Back in July when the main AC went out, we noticed that the insulation on the mini had worn out and split, causing it to ice up and reducing its effectiveness. Back then a friend helped me tear out the old and install new, but I couldn't find the right size material, and made a mess out of it, with the oversized material not fitting into the raceway. I had to go shopping for new insulation tubes and possibly a new raceway. I eventually found some 3/8-inch split tubes with tape closure, so bought them. I tore the old mess out, installed the new insulation, and eventually was able to tuck it all inside the old raceway (with a few extra cuts). Took 4-5 hours, plus another trip to the hardware store, but finally got it done. Another day I was worn out at the end of. Also doesn't totally fix the cooling problem, but does make it a bit better. By the time I got it done, the heat spell had broken, so I may be able to put off getting it serviced until next year. Mental stress is harder to explain. Did a couple of things on the server, but still way short of the necessary tasks. Did a minor update, including a new XgauSez, on the Robert Christgau website, but still haven't straightened out the links and filled in the missing stubs for Carola Dibbell. One of the XgauSez questions was about jazz albums of the 1950s/1960s, and Christgau referred to my website for suggestions. Best link I could offer him was this one, but it really doesn't answer the question. So after fretting several days, I started working on a better answer page, but that's turned out to be a lot more work than I've been able to do. I did a preliminary sort for the 1950s and 1960s, but only based on the one database file linked above. Took a lot of time to get next to nothing. Also spent some time collecting music notes and non-jazz album reviews from the Notebook. Picked up about a year over the course of a week, bringing me up to February 2013. Close to 1000 pages in each volume (actually, 1015 + 1308). At least those projects are straightforward, things I can keep plodding at, and in fairly short order get done. What bothers me more are the things I can't get started. I still have people I want to call about my sister's death back in March, and others I called them but haven't since. I've been hoping to visit family in Oklahoma and Arkansas since, well, it's been more than two years since I've gotten out of town. I've been meaning to reorganize my cookbooks, and clean out and update my spice racks -- bought new bottles for that more than a year ago. I'm bothered that I haven't even looked at the stack of library books I have due Wednesday (including Chris Hedges' America: The Farewell Tour and David Cay Johnston's It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America; probably nothing in those I don't already know, but I'm certainly could learn something from Ajax Hacks: Tips & Tools for Creating Responsive Web Sites -- well, pub date was 2006, so may be kind of obsolete.) Probably going to wind up sending them all back, only one (mostly) read. Nor do I anticipate this week becoming suddenly productive. Actually, just the opposite. A Russian friend wanted me to help do some down-home cooking, so I'll be whipping up an assortment of zakuski, side dishes, and a dessert for Friday night dinner. Will probably do something horrible to my back, but otherwise should be fun . . . at last. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 17, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30328 [30295] rated (+33), 277 [271] unrated (+6). Had a rough week, including a moment when all of the stress I had been accumulating seemed to implode, then emanate outward in a scream and a shudder. One thing that did break was my progress through the new jazz queue. I ran into an album that under the circumstances was unbearable. I imagine I'll go back to it later this week and give it a fair shake, but that wasn't going to happen last week. Instead, I slipped two CDs into the changes, choice encounters between saxophonist and pianist -- Lester Young and Oscar Peterson for starters, then Ben Webster with Art Tatum -- and that's remained my wake-up ritual ever since: long enough for breakfast, reading what's left of the local newspaper, and a little work on the jigsaw puzzle. Later in the day I'd pull up some jazz on Napster, or if I needed to get away from the computer, some r&b from the travel cases. Somehow managed to fix a nice dinner for the people who were kind enough to tear down and pack my late sister's big art project -- currently in a truck on the road to Vancouver, WA. Greek shrimp, green beans, salad, rice, and an applesauce cake, as I recall. Wound up with mostly old jazz this week, in most cases starting with albums Nate Chinen picked as the "129 Essential [Jazz] Albums of the Twenty-First Century." I copied them down, checked my database, and figured out I hadn't heard nearly a sixth of them (21, so 16.2%). I've since knocked that down to five that don't seem to be on Napster. In some cases my curiosity led me to related albums, picking up two extra albums by Danilo Pérez and John Scofield, one by Cassandra Wilson, but none of those cases filled in all of the holes in my listening. The one exception was Trio 3 (Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille) -- not coincidentally the only of the 16 records to get an A- -- and they got me to take another look at the great Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer. I've made a couple of previous dives through her catalog, especially the piano-drum duos (I especially recommend the ones with Han Bennink and Pierre Favre), so much of what was left was solo -- something I rarely follow well let alone get into, but she's really special. Also gave me an excuse to dig deeper into her label, Intakt -- something I've long wanted to do. One thing I did manage to do (in an unsatisfying, hacked up way) last week was set up WordPress for Notes on Everyday Life. I had previously built websites for this domain in 2004 based on Drupal and in 2014 based on WordPress, but both were eventually wiped out in server catastrophes. Neither was a major loss, in that the writing also existed in my notebook. So I was pleased that I found the "Intro" I wrote in 2014, but I got confused by the default widget setup so it's still not usable. I have a half-assed idea to fill it up with fragments from old notebooks, hoping that the category and tag system will bind those bits into more coherent wholes. Given that I've already gone through and collected the political writings, it should be relatively straightforward to start picking things out. I have two more WordPress blogs to set up, including one for music writings. Would like some advice and direction on the latter, and ultimately some help. I've continued to collect music writings and non-jazz reviews into book form. I'm up to 2012 now, with close to 2000 pages in two books, so there's quite a bit of content that could be used as a starting point. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 10, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30295 [30261] rated (+34), 271 [278] unrated (-7). Pretty average week, maybe skewed a bit more than usual toward jazz, as I continued adding jazz albums to my Music Tracking file (up to 2062 records now, 913 of them jazz). As the week started, I was still playing catch up with the late Randy Weston. After that, new adds to the tracking file steered me to various jazz artists -- Gordon Grdina, Tord Gustavsen, Scott Hamilton, Uwe Oberg. Also made a dent in my incoming queue. Only three non-jazz albums this week -- two from Christgau (who also noted Kali Uchis' Isolation as an HM, but I have it at A-). I'm not expecting to get much work done this coming week. My late sister's big art project will be dismantled toward the end of the week, and either packed up and hauled somewhere (still, as far as I know, undetermined) or tossed into the trash. Some relatives are likely to show up for this, but I don't have any details. (I'm feeling really out of the loop here.) This summer has been an awful slog for me. Don't know whether I'll be relieved or shattered when the week is over. Meanwhile, I've dropped the ball on my server project, and for that matter on long-delayed maintenance work on Robert Christgau's website. Probably won't make much progress there until this week's dust settles, but I've started to think about the tasks again, after blanking out a week ago. Still reading books on Russia, although nothing new is quite as enlightening at David Satter's 2003 book, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. Satter's more recent The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep reprises his sensational charge that the FSB was responsible for the 1999 terror bombings of apartments in Moscow (pictured) and elsewhere, providing the perfect provocation for Putin to demolish Chechen independence and consolidate his grip on Russian political power. Of course, this sounds much like so many 9/11 conspiracy theories, especially with its cui bono rationales, but it's hard to imagine how else an unknown insider like Putin could have overcome the morass Boris Yeltsin's presidency had left Russia in. I'm midway through the book, just reading about the massacres in the Moscow theater and the Beslan school. Satter suggests these terrorist attacks may also have been guided by the FSB as provocations -- by this point support for the Chechen War was again flagging, so they laid the ground for another round of Russian escalation -- but thee's less evidence and rationale behind those charges. Later chapters should move on to the Ukraine crisis in 2014, but they are bound to be brief. Masha Gessen, in The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, follows several (mostly) elite families from Glasnost on -- some semi-famous, most liberal dissenters but also neo-fascist ideologist Alexander Dugin (you might think of him as Putin's Steve Bannon). I think the key thing here is that while she doesn't excuse Yeltsin and Putin, she sees the return to totalitarianism as a mass preference rather than as something the leaders inflicted on the people. Reading the book, it occurred to me that the main reason for this was that 70 years of Communist rule had left people so cynical about the left critique of capitalism that it's since been impossible to form a significant democratic socialist opposition to the self-dealing oligarchy that took over with Yeltsin. The least satisfactory book is Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, although I did find useful how he tracked Gessen's history from a slightly broader perspective. Snyder is a historian who has specialized in the war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to control Eastern Europe (his big book is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin), but he's never rasped the difference between fascism and communism, so he readily falls for the Cold War ploy of treating both as totalitarianism, making it easy to see Putin as the unification of both evils. He even finds a forgotten philosopher, Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) as the key ideologist behind Putinism. (Gessen, on the other hand, starts with psychological studies of Homo sovieticus, ties them to the "authoritarian personality" studies of Adorno and Arendt, and charts how those traits have persisted under Putin.) Snyder likes to call the Ilyin-Putin idea "the politics of eternity" -- sounds a bit like thousand-year Reich extrapolated to infinity, but smells more like bullshit. Gessen, by the way, has a piece I should have mentioned yesterday, The Undoing of Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin's Friendship, and How It Changed Both of Their Countries. Clinton's decision to bomb what was left of Yugoslavia over Kosovo offended Yeltsin, both by harming an important relationship for Russia and by making Russia look weak and helpless when faced with American hostility. It also re-established NATO as a counter-Russian threat, and set a precedent for the US to unilaterally start wars elsewhere (e.g., Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003). It also changed Russia:
One thing that should be clear by now is that Clinton and other independent western actors like George Soros actively intervened in Russian politics in the 1990s, in support of Yeltsin, they never cared the least for the welfare of Russia, or even for making their supposed friendly politicians look good. Clinton just assumed that Russia would never be a problem again, no matter how much popular enmity he caused. Bush and Obama took much the same tack with Putin, who actually did a pretty decent job of humoring them as long as that proved possible, but in the end, sure, he pushed back. My evolving view of Putin is that he is a smart, canny politician, careful to maintain his popularity as well as his hand on the levers of power in Russia. But, unlike Snyder, I don't see him as a person of strong ideological conviction. It's true that he embraces various conservative/nationalist positions, but most likely because that's where his natural political base is. He exercises a discomforting degree of control over the media and all forms of political discourse, and he has done some unsavory things with his power, but he also seems to have some sense of limits, unlike many dictators we can recall. In short, he seems like someone the US can work with, and that would be better for all concerned than the recent spiral of escalating offenses. Still, one should be clear about the ways of power, in Russia, in the United States, everywhere. Change what you can, and don't get suckered into projects that can only make matters worse (e.g., ones involving real or even just mock war). Recommended music links:
New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, September 3, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30261 [30216] rated (+45), 278 [275] unrated (+3). Posted Streamnotes on Thursday, figuring it was foolish to think I could find any more A-list records on the last day of August. But part of that problem was that I was looking for August-released pop, and none of the obvious picks -- Ariana Grande, Mitski, Nicki Minaj, Blood Orange, even that Methodist Hospital album Christgau recommended -- did the trick. After posting, I switched to new jazz, and came up with three A- avant-jazz albums in short order (Schnell, Rempis-Piet-Daisy, Hegge). Actually, what steered me toward the Clean Feeds was Chris Monsen's 2018 favorites, which lists Mia Dyberg at 18 and Chris Pitsiokis at 29 (also Hegge at 34), but not Schnell (or Carlos Bica). Monsen also lists two more Clean Feeds: The Heat Death's The Glenn Miller Sessions and Jon Rune Strøm Quintet's Fragments, which I had previously reviewed at B+(**). I have one other A- Clean Feed this year: Angles 3's Parede, and six more at B+(***):
I haven't done the research, but there's a good chance that my Clean Feed grades have slipped a bit (and are otherwise more slapdash) since they stopped sending me physical CDs. (Certainly I'm slower in getting to them.) The Rempis album turned up in my effort to flesh out the jazz listings in my Music Tracking file. Strikes me as the best thing he's done all year (I have four more albums of his in my Year 2018 file.) I spent a fair amount of work last week trying to identify more 2018 jazz releases, adding 363 new entries to the file (was 1498 albums, now 1885, 806 of them jazz). The original purpose of this list is to build a list of things that might be interesting to hear, but it also provides a framework for aggregating EOY lists, including the Jazz Critics Poll. I got most of them by looking at the 2018 jazz album list under Discogs: 5,727 records (vs. 12,849 for 2017, 13,394 for 2018). Obviously, I didn't add everything. I just picked out artists that I more/less recognized, things on well-regarded labels, and a few others that looked interesting. For instance, of the 50 albums on the first page, I list 11 (*5 added this week): Chris Burn*, Verneri Pohjola*, Globe Unity, Henri Texier*, Skadedyr, YoshimiO, Kamaal Williams, Sylvie Courvoisier, Jerry Granelli*, Dinosaur*, Terence Blanchard. Many records appeared multiple times (e.g., separate listings for CD, LP, and Downloads), so we're looking at more like 1,500 distinct titles. picked up some reissues, but skipped even well known ones where they didn't seem to offer anything new. After that, I took a look at Free Jazz Collective's reviews, and also All About Jazz's reviews, although I didn't get very far back there before I started running into uncertain dates. (Maybe this link will work better.) Under "old music," I noticed a new vinyl reissue of Roland Kirk's Domino, and felt like streaming it, then one thing led to another. Still a few later albums I haven't heard, but I don't have a lot of hope for them. Then I noticed a Zoot Sims record in a search (I was actually looking for Tom Abbs' new Hawthorne), and felt like hearing him. Finally, Randy Weston died (92, elected to Downbeat's Hall of Fame just last year). Here's an obituary by Giovanni Russonello; another by Harrison Smith. My grade list is here, with Carnival (1974) and Khepara (1998) my personal picks (plus three more A- records). Noteworthy links I missed in yesterday's Weekend Roundup:
Recommended music links:
Also, I'll be posting another batch of Robert Christgau's Xgau Sez Q&A sometime Tuesday. You can always get the latest first at that link. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 27, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30216 [30165] rated (+51), 275 [310] unrated (-35). Running on a new server. I ordered the replacement from Hosting & Designs non Tuesday. Everything is kind of a blur now, but I think it was late Friday afternoon when I was finally able to log in and start configuring accounts and rebuilding websites. Unfortunately, we had a miscommunication on setting up the nameservers, so I didn't get DNS running properly until Saturday evening. I now recall that I made the same stupid error when we set up the initial server eight years ago. By Saturday night I had rebuilt four websites I had active copies of: hullworks.net, tomhull.com, carolcooper.org, and caroladibbell.com (the latter lost some pages that had been managed by WordPress). I'm still digesting a lot of server details -- I'm getting a lot more status email than I ever did before. The first message, even before I got my login directions, was a notice that hackers tried to login and have been blocked. I expected the Russians would chomp at the bit, but the first blocked address was from China, the second from the US, then half a dozen other countries (Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Colombia, France, Thailand) before Russia showed up. I've been saving those notices, and have 30-40 blocked IPs so far. Nothing very troubling so far, but I can't say as I understand it all. One thing that happened last time was that some of my website software broke because the security setup blocked some of the PHP functions I was using. So far that does not appear to have happened. Still, the server has moved from PHP 5 to PHP 7, and that transition broke a lot of things when I changed my local server several months back. I'd appreciate it if you'd be on the outlook for breakage and let me know so I can get it fixed. This particular server change does not affect robertchristgau.com, but I'm still mid-stream in dealing with similar issues there. I still have four more websites to set up, but three are basically empty stubs, and I'm waiting on some configuration info for the fourth. So, I figured those could wait a bit, and like God, I decided to take a day of rest. Well, of doing some of my own writing. I came up with Weekend Roundup, but didn't actually get it done until late afternoon Monday. Then, of course, there's this. After which, I'll have to do my first partial update of my website. Shouldn't be a problem, but I've been running into a lot of Murphy lately. My plan to start writing short, single-topic news/politics posts got put on hold with the server crash. The planned outlet is one of the WordPress websites I haven't set up yet. Still seems like the right thing to do, especially after juggling a half-dozen topics in Weekend Roundup. I wound up rather flummoxed by the Korea piece, which ran on through 16 paragraphs, leaving me thinking: it was too long, it didn't cover everything that needed to be covered, and it didn't come to a real conclusion. I have an idea for a simpler piece: a simple op-ed, on "Trump should start by ending the Korean War now." Then save the stuff on how American mental attitudes lead us to such stupid and arrogant policies. Another piece might be on McCain. I said pretty much what I wanted to say, but it doesn't feel like I made the points in proper order. And I added a couple of points today that could have been woven into the main piece. On the other hand, I probably understated the extent to which McCain has been a media creation, and what this says both about us and the media. Those two issues overwhelmed the week, but another half-dozen items deserve deeper, more focused treatment. I also have thoughts on Masha Gessen's book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia: not so much about the political system in Russia as the overall mindset which supports Putin, and how common that mindset is even in the United States. I'm reminded of much here, ranging from the classic studies by Arendt, Adorno, and Fromm (which Gessen cites) to Chris Hedges' still-important American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2012). Much to write about there. Not much to say about the music below. The new jazz queue had shrunk to almost nothing a couple weeks ago. It's back up to 20 records now, but most of them have September-October release dates, so they didn't seem very urgent. August is relatively slow for new releases. Several weeks ago I made an effort to catch up with many of the 2018 releases that showed up on mid-year lists, so I doubted more research now would yield much. But also, a couple weeks ago I started streaming records I have long listed as U (unrated) in my database. Some were old LPs I had long ago but never jotted down a grade for. Most were used CDs I bought at closeout sales c. 2000-2004, when I was still buying a lot of CDs on spec, before I started getting all the promos I could handle. And some were promos I received but didn't find time to get to (mostly non-jazz from 2006-07; pending counts from 2005-17 are: 6, 20, 14, 6, 4, 8, 8, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2). My unrated list peaked over 900, but I've been slowly knocking it down for many years now. I took a big chunk out of it last week, dropping under 300 for the first time since I've been counting, winding up at 275. Early in the week I worked off the database rock files. Later on I just pulled all the unrateds out regardless of where they came from. I also started collecting a list of Christgau A-list records I hadn't heard (or at least graded), and occasionally tried something there. Three of this week's six A- records came from Christgau's A-list (Amy Allison's No Frills Friend, Chic's Real People, and Paul Pena). Two came from my unrated CDs (Amédé Ardoin, Art Neville). The other Amy Allison record I just picked up when I was in the neighborhood. I'll probably continue the tactic another week or so, but at this point half of what I look up isn't on Napster. On the other hand, I do presumably have physical copies of these records, somewhere, and I've started to find and play some (Art Neville was one). On the other hand, I'm likely to have a lot of distractions the next couple of weeks. The new server and the Christgau website still need a lot of work. I'm trying to wrap up one last pass through the Notebook, this time to collect all of the non-jazz reviews and most of the non-review scraps I've written on music. The former I hope to hand over to Michael Tatum, in the hopes that he can fix my mistakes, flesh out the many places where I'm too cryptic (or evasive), and fill in the numerous gaps. I doubt the latter has any value as a book, but it should make it easier to find scraps that can be used elsewhere. I'm currently in 2009, so about half of the way through. When I'm done, I will have hacked the notebook into nine volumes, ranging from 800 to 1,800 pages each -- should run close to 15,000 pages in total. It's most of what I have to show for nearly two decades of ranting and raving "on the web." August ends on Friday, so if nothing major breaks I'll post a Streamnotes by then. Currently the draft file includes a very low 32 new records, 3 recent compilations, 137 old records, and 2 grade changes, so 173 total records. That's a pretty big month -- I should check whether I've ever topped it. (Let's see: the most ever for a column was 206 on November 8, 2009, but that covered 41 days after September 28; the most on a monthly schedule was 185 for November, 2013, followed by 179 for September, 2015. The most so far this year was 165 in February, followed by 163 in July and 157 in January. Not much chance I'll top 206, but 185 is possible, and 179 is likely.) New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 20, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30165 [30119] rated (+46), 310 [325] unrated (-15). Server still down, so I'm writing this for posterity -- not for immediate consumption. Working in seclusion like this made it seem more appropriate to continue using Napster to look up albums in my database as unrated (things I have physical copies of, or had, but they're often difficult to locate in my clutter). I started this a couple weeks ago with reggae and rap, then I started with the rock lists: currently up to rock-90s, although I skipped some 2CD sets along the way, and couldn't find others. The old music list below is mostly '80s. Along the way, I started to compile a list of Christgau A-list albums I missed. Mostly this came into play only after I had an unrated album by an artist: e.g, I had two unrated Anna Domino albums, but Christgau had preferred her first, so I checked it out too; David Johansen (I had Buster Poindexter unrated, but had missed two A- records, and wound up checking out a couple more; another case where I went fairly deep was Freedy Johnston. I had one unrated Kid Creole album, and went further there just to satisfy my own curiosity. On the other hand, after Christgau's A- picks from Steve Arrington and Rick James didn't make the grade, I didn't feel compelled to look further. I figure I'll keep doing this for a while. August is always a slow month for new music -- indeed, most of the new jazz in my queue doesn't officially released until September -- so I don't feel much pressure to keep up. And with so much shit breaking all around me, focusing on the unrated list saves me from having to do a lot of research. It also, as this week shows, makes it much easier to keep the rated count up. Also, mixing in the Christgau picks where convenient makes it likely to find some A-list records of my own. (Lido and Never Home were Christgau picks, but Christgau didn't even review The Conquest of You and Whereabouts Unknown, so they came as big surprises.) Along the way, I also took the time to reconsider a couple of records that I had previously rated, but seemed like I might have underestimated way back when. David Johansen was a special case because I recalled a number of songs there with the sort of detail I often have trouble mustering for A-list albums these days. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 13, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30119 [30076] rated (+43), 325 [337] unrated (-12). Server crashed Thursday and has been down since, so I don't have anywhere to post this. Latest message says: "We are trying to get your server online today. Thank you again for your patience." Evidently it was damaged by a power surge, and it took a couple days for them to get the undamaged servers up. Second message had something about disk drives, suggesting they have some slow and tedious salvage method. Presumably the worst-case scenario is starting again from scratch on a new server -- probably faster, maybe a bit cheaper. Most of the websites are cloned or backed up elsewhere, so I don't expect much permanent loss -- although a couple have been managed to someone else, and I don't know the state of his backups. Reconfiguring all of the domains and accounts (8-10) isn't something I remember how to do, so will be a bit of a slog. Of course, this situation is somewhat worse coming a couple months after my local server crashed, costing me a lot of data loss. I've been able to rebuild my local copies of websites from the server, but differences in software revisions have caused a lot of code to break. I haven't been doing full updates since then, so things have gotten a bit precarious. (Robert Christgau's website is on its own virtual server, so is still up. I updated about 95 files recently, but still have a bunch more to work on before I can do a complete resynch.) I've been taking it easy since the disruption, trying to avoid panic and depression. So far, so good, but I imagine the cumulative weight of all this stress will take a toll. I'm sure not as confident in my mastery of this technology as I thought I was. Meanwhile, been playing music. Continued my scan through my reggae list, especially seeking out albums I previously owned and marked as U in my database. Wound up with just two U records left (both by Big Youth). Decided to play some Jon Hassell after that, starting with two albums I used to own but never got registered in the database, then picked up a couple more that Christgau had liked. Finally, moved on to U-rated rap albums, having a bit less success at finding them (still unrated: M.O.P.'s Handle Ur Bizness [EP], Twice Thou's The Bank Attack, MTV: The First 1000 Years: Hip-Hop. Moving on to the rock lists next. Maybe at some point doing this I'll knock the unrated list down to something I can print out and physically search for. Meanwhile, actually made a dent in the new jazz queue. I haven't been getting much, and most of what's been in the mail recently has September (or later) release dates, so didn't seem like a rush. Also took a look at Dan Phillips, who had sent me a download link for his latest a few months back. I downloaded it, but wound up reviewing it from Napster. Also found it and more on Bandcamp. I didn't go all completist on him, but did find one from 2017 I liked even more than the new one. (His Decaying Orbit, credited to Chicago Edge Ensemble, was also on my 2017 Jazz List.) Other main thing I've been doing has been to collect the political bits from my notebook. I created one book file for 2001-2008 (766k words, 1590 pages), another for 2009-2012 (708k words, 1768 pages), and I've just filled out a third for 2013-2016 (675k words, 1666 pages). Most likely I'll do the same thing for post-2016. At the same time, I've collected various non-music, non-political notes into a sidecar file (currently 324k words, 780 pages): autobiographical bits, notes on friends and family (many deceased), work on the house, computers, cooking, movies and television I've watched, pets, various maladies. Should be useful for the long-procrastinated memoir, but mostly it's gotten me reviewing the late stages of my life. Not sure whether I should be proud of all the work I've put into writing since Laura told me she'd rather I do that than start that home automation business, or ashamed of all the time I've wasted while not making any sort of tangible living. Probably will depend on whether she (or anyone else) can carve all this writing up into several worthwhile books. At some point I'll share these files -- assuming that at some point I get a working server, or come up with some other suitable outlet. PS: Occurs to me that I should make one more pass through the notebook to pick out the music writings that I didn't already stick in to the jazz guide books. Some good material there, especially from the Expert Comments period. Unfortunately, also a lot of lists and statistical analysis that are likely to be of little if any general interest. I wish someone else would take a crack at that, not least because such a person would start with a different vantage point. Also, I already have way too much to work with already. New records rated this week:
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Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 6, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30076 [30033] rated (+43), 337 [344] unrated (-7). I made my usual last-minute push just before publishing July Streanotes on Tuesday, and for once found some A-list records at the last minute. After that, I resumed my mop-up of old Silkheart jazz (leaving about fifteen titles that I couldn't find on Napster; they are all on Bandcamp, but only a few songs each, so can't really be reviewed), and wandered on as the spirit moved me (e.g., found a Darius Jones album I missed). Finally, I spent the latter half of the week listening to old reggae. Two things steered me toward reggae. One was the Nat Birchall Meets Al Breadwinner album, which I found a review of on Bandcamp Daily. The review started with Birchall, but went on to mention and link to a half-dozen older reggae titles, including a Skatalies album (Foundation Ska) I knew and recommend, a Count Ossie album similar to (possibly overlapping) one I have but never graded, and a Tommy McCook set I didn't know. I played a couple of those (still, especially, want to check out the Don Drummond), and they led to others. The other thing that steered me toward reggae was an Xgau Sez letter which argued that Clinton Fearon's Mi Deh Yah was one of the five greatest reggae albums ever. I doubted this. I had never even heard of Fearon (former bassist/backup singer for the Gladiators, which I only knew of through anthologies). Also, the competition starts with four A+ records -- Natty Dread (Bob Marley), Two Sevens Clash (Culture), Anthem (Black Uhuru), Making History (Linton Kwesi Johnson) -- and includes full A albums by the Abyssinians, Black Youth, Cedric Im Brooks, Burning Spear, Jimmy Cliff, Joe Higgs, Ras Michael, Pablo Moses, Niney, Augustus Pablo, Sly & Robbie, Toots & the Maytals, UB-40, and Bunny Wailer. (Dozens more with A- records, including: Ken Boothe, Dennis Brown, Junior Byles, The Chantells, Count Ossie, Desmond Dekker, Dillinger, Leonard Dillon, Clint Eastwood, Winston Hussey, Gregory Isaacs, Macka-B, Tommy McCook, Freddie McGregor, Junior Murvin, Mutabaruka, Lee Scratch Perry, Prince Far I, Ernest Ranglin, Rebel MC, Max Romeo, Skatalites, Steel Pulse, Peter Tosh, U-Roy, Willi Williams, Delroy Wilson, and Yellowman. Admittedly, this list is all 20th century, as I skipped more recent artists, but they're few and far between.) Still, I figured it was worth checking out, so did, then followed up with some Gladiators. That got me looking at my Reggae file, and I honed in on two sets of records: ones I had ungraded copies of, and a few that Christgau had A-listed but I hadn't heard. That added up to quite a few albums. Of course, it's much easier to deal with an ungraded album by streaming it than by tracking down the physical copy. I've done that a few times in the past, and should do it more often in the near future. The unrated count was up around 800 when I started tracking it in the notebook (Feb. 2003), soon jumped over 900, peaked at 1157 (July 2004), rising dramatically on record-buying binges, especially trips out of town and close out sales as Wichita's last decent record stores bit the dust. But after I started getting jazz promos in the mail, my shopping atrophied, and the unrated count slowly dropped: dipping under 1000 in Dec. 2004, 900 (Mar. 2005), 800 (July 2007), 700 (July 012), 600 (Dec. 2012), 500 (Dec. 2014), and 400 (Mar. 2015), with plenty of bumps along the way. Still, with streaming it's been easier (and often more interesting) to look up new records than to dig through my mess to find unrated physical product. (I do have some unrated shelves, but a lot of records on the unrated list are folded into other collections, if indeed I still own them. Still, would be gratifying to knock the number down to whatever the current queue float amounts to. As I am writing this, the only unrateds left in the reggae file are two Big Youth albums. New records rated this week:
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Ask a question, or send a comment. Thursday, August 30, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30033 [30010] rated (+23), 344 [345] unrated (-1). Week didn't start until Wednesday, after we got the air conditioning fixed, or probably later given how sleep-deprived I was by then. Returned to the Silkheart catalog, figuring that might be easiest, although by the end of the week, trying to move quickly through so much avant-squawk made it hard to distinguish. Generally speaking, the Sun Ra veterans came out on top, probably because they still swung some. The Ernest Dawkins record is probably the best of the B+(***), although they're all pretty good. And, of course, I strayed off-label for a few things that caught my eye. Unfortunately, Napster only had one cut from Dawkins' Jo'burg Blues, so that remains unreviewed. New music, mostly picked from Napster's lamentably short "featured" lists, didn't yield much of interest, although I started playing the digital-only reissue of a 1992 collection of A Tribe Called Quest remixes before I knew what I was getting into. Most of the songs originated on their debut album, and I was surprised how many I recalled, especially given that at the time I only gave the album a B -- sure, probably from their 1999 best-of The Anthology. Seemed pretty likely that I had underrated their debut. I was tempted to quietly nudge the grade up to B+, but wound up re-checking the album, and decided A- would be more appropriate. Biggest caveat I had was their paean to veganism, but (on principle at least) that's not something I either credit or begrudge. One background note is that I've been reading the questions sent into Robert Christgau's Xgau Sez, and one of the most common threads there is to ask about records he rated low at the time but has since come to regard more highly. I can think of a couple dozen for him, a few more for me, but realistically we only find such shifts (or errors) when there is some current reason to revisit. I'll also note that Christgau feels even less compulsion than I do to match his graded list to his current taste, partly because he's more disciplined at spending his listening time on paying projects, partly because he puts a higher value on the authority of his grades. On the other hand, I'm almost never certain of my grades, figuring they're never more than my latest impression, worth jotting down because I figure any small bit of information is better than none. At one point, I even thought about adding a parameter to the grades: a second number which would indicate an estimate of certainty. For instance, I might add [1] to indicate a single play, [2] for two, maybe even [∞] for the Pet Shop Boys' Very -- the last record I can remember playing at least once a day for more than three months. That might help, but it's just another wild ass guess, and would be a lot of extra hassle. My big project last week was to update Robert Christgau's website to prepare for the release of his new book, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017, to be published October 26 by Duke University Press. One stipulation of the contract is that most of the previously published pieces be embargoed from the website for three months before and two years after publication date, so most of the work involved tucking those pieces away, so they'll reappear on the proper date. I did some further work sprucing up the book pages and the Xgau Sez feature, and started the task of converting old pages as I ran into them into proper validated HTML5. The latter wasn't terribly hard, but frustrating in two respects: one had to do with warnings about nesting CSS styles inside tables, which I temporarily fixed by moving the CSS but a better fix would be to get rid of the tables used for page layout; the other was that in most cases I was left with one or two warnings about a squib of non-conforming javascript code I picked up from Twitter. I decided to let that go, but at some point would like to rewrite the code myself, without the warning (and probably a lot of other shit). Sure, you'd think that a state-of-the-art outfit like Twitter could write valid code, but then I accidentally ran a simple Google search result page through the validator, and results there were shocking indeed: 36 errors, 315 warnings. Turns out that despite my best efforts some of the book pieces weren't even on the website. I did find two in a "nyet" directory that I had forgotten about, and the Chuck Berry obit over on Billboard's website. Not sure offhand what else is missing, but I couldn't find mention of "Sticking It in Their Ear: Bob Dylan" anywhere on the web. I also managed to add this year's Expert Witness posts to the monthly CG columns (although some are time-locked). They're not in the CG database yet. I still have technical problems reconciling the changed database access code and, until I figure out the UTF-8 requirement I'm reluctant to make an database changes. I'll make another push on this once the dust settles. Thus far I've gotten zero feedback on the update, so I guess that means that I didn't screw it up too bad. One more project milestone last week: I've been collecting the political posts from my notebook/blog, starting from 2001, initially under the title The Last Days of the American Empire. Sheer verbiage made me split this project into two volumes, one for the Bush era (2001-08), a second from 2009 on (or maybe just for Obama, as Trump is already getting out of hand, and has a different feel. I made it through 2008 a while back, but decided to make a second pass and stick things into a separate personal file, which I call Notes on Everyday Life: family and friends, cooking, house work, computers and blog maintenance, notes on movies and TV, some bits on music (but not the stuff already collected in the jazz guides). I had initially put some of that stuff (mostly movies) into a 2001-09 volume appendix. The 2001-08 tome wound up at 1590 pages (766k words), while Notes has 316 pages (130k words). I doubt the latter has any but personal interest, although I could refer to it if I ever get around to writing that memoir, and I'm happy to have it better organized. I'd like to think my political writings might have some more general appeal. The most straightforward thing would be to keep the chronicle organization, trim lots of fluff and redundancy, flesh out the framework with historical notes and asides, and add some post-facto commentary. One thing I'm struck by is much of Trump's agenda was introduced by Bush, in many cases implemented much more efficiently. Had Trump not been elected, we should be closing the door on the Bush years -- something Obama should have worked much more dilligently at doing -- but with Trump it's all the more urgent. I've also kicked around three other book ideas that could pick up words from this journal. One is a dictionary of terms and concepts -- I started working on such a thing a long time ago, and it will take some digging to see if I can find what I actually did. A second is a collection of slightly longer essays on various topics, especially those related to free software and related concepts. My working title here is borrowed from an old Paul Goodman book: Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals. A third possible carve out would be material on Israel-Palestine. I wrote a lot more about that than would make sense for a US-oriented political chronicle. I came up with an outline for such a book a while back, and tried pitching it to a friend to co-write. She didn't bite, but if enough good material already exists, it might be worth reconsidering. (And, of course, the second volume will add to this base. Whereas Bush-Obama-Trump make for clearly differentiated epochs, Sharon-Olmert-Netanyahu is a single piece. I've started moving on to 2009. Did a lot of work on the house in January, while Israel was smashing up Gaza, and Bush and Obama were keeping their heads down. One last note: Polish trumpet player Tomasz Stanko has just died, age 76. He played with Krzysztof Komeda in the 1960s, gravitated to free jazz. He somehow managed to straddle the Iron Curtain, playing in Western Europe in groups like Globe Unity while maintaining his ties to Poland. He recorded primarily for ECM from 1994 on, with Leosia and Litania early masterpieces -- you can find my grade list here. Poland continues to be an exceptionally strong and vibrant jazz venue, with dozens of superb musicians emerging in the last decade or two. Stanko was their pioneering giant. PS: Will try to get Streamnotes out tomorrow (last day of July). New records rated this week:
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