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Music Week [560 - 569]Monday, August 24, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25368 [25326] rated (+42), 426 [426] unrated (+0). Another big, busy week. Rhapsody Streamnotes came out on Wednesday, so some of this week's loot appeared there. I've added a Comments section to the archive file. The comments in question were scraped from emails from Facebook, mostly in response to a notice I posted. I don't know whether I'll do this as a regular feature. Depends mostly on whether I get feedback that adds to the long-term value of the piece: the clincher this time was Clifford Ocheltree's discography note on Huey "Piano" Smith. Other valuable points/tips are that the A-rated Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink album, Welcome Back, is on Bandcamp (as is about one-third of Intakt's catalog, including A- from this year: Schlippenbach Trio, Marilyn Crispell/Gerry Hemingway, Chico Freeman/Heiri Känzig, Christoph Irniger Trio, and Oliver Lake/William Parker -- looks like a "label of the year"), and that Phil Overeem's "Mid-August Top 50" list -- a big help for me recently -- can be found on his blog. (I've added his blog to my "Music" list on the left.) Since then I've spread out in all directions. I complained some while back that Rhapsody got rid of their interface for browsing new releases in genres, but it turns out that they merely hid it -- no doubt, as they like to say, "to improve your experience." As I tweeted, I took a look at their new folk releases and picked out three, all rated B+(***) below: Bobby Bare Jr: Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost); Lindi Ortega: Gloryville; and Rod Picott: Fortune. I then turned to country but didn't do so well (Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell, Shelby Lynne). Another resource that offered some things to check out is Robert Christgau's new iteration of Expert Witness at Noisey. Unfortunately, the first two weeks haven't yielded anything that I've been tempted to A-list (Miguel came closest the first week, while I had dismissed Sam Smith with prejudice when the first hype appeared; Hop Along is just too idiosyncratic vocally, and I panned Go! Team when it came out, but I rather like Girlpool). Don't mean to complain, just noting a minor anomaly. I'd also like to plug We Are Nots over any of the girl-rock bands in the second column. And wonder when he'll get to Sleaford Mods? The new one is the third A- I've listed (with their singles comp just a notch lower). And the old ones are on Bandcamp, so you don't have to take my word (or wait for Bob's): Another new resources is that I finally figured out how to use MPE Player to get recent ECM releases. They only go back a few months, so they don't have this year's early releases, including several I missed (Jack DeJohnette, Julia Hulsmann, Kenny Wheeler; I did manage to hear downloads, now lost, of Tim Berne, Jakob Bro, Vijay Iyer, and Chris Potter). Awkward interface, puts a premium on getting the record right the first pass, but does seem to have a download feature if I find anything worth hearing again. (The Gary Peacock Trio, with Marc Copland and Joey Baron, comes closest so far. PS: Tried downloading Elina Duni Quartet, which seems to have worked.) The Miles Davis boxes were done in one pass. I might have given the Acrobat an A- if I had the actual box, but Rhapsody only made the first half available (as Volume 1) and doesn't offer the booklet. The selling point is that you're catching John Coltrane in transition from sideman to superstar, a moment of some historical value, but not as rewarding musically as the later recordings where he really made his mark. I haven't seen enough of Acrobat's boxes to have any real guess as to the documentation. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Legacy's documentation and packaging are first rate. And I've heard nearly all of the music there -- Rhapsody dropped a couple tracks from the first disc -- albeit only once. Of that, I'm quite certain that the second and third discs are really superb -- not that I'd pick them above the best live sets already available from the period (the various Plugged Nickel packages from 1965, Live-Evil and Dark Magus from 1970-73). The fourth disc is more marginal (more like the Fillmores). The first I'm less certain about: it has the most reissued material, mostly from Miles Davis at Newport 1958, which when it came out in 2001 I dismissed with a B. Sounded better than that this time, but not quite A-list. Again, that's just one play (with a break midway), but it's also not stuff I have to recondition my ears to grasp. The old stuff this week is background to the new. I own a copy of Love and Peace but never got around to it, so I was particularly anxious to knock that off my todo list. The two disco albums and two live jazz albums could be described as varying degrees of competent. I'm still missing a well-regarded 1992 album, Keeping Tradition, but I've heard most of Bridgewater's later work, and it doesn't come close to the Silver set. Partners I had listed under Peacock -- a 4-star Penguin Guide record -- but careful inspection reveals Paul Bley gets top billing. I suppose I should go back and look through Bley's back catalog to see what I'm missing. I currently have 20 records graded, including his dazzling 1953 Introducing Paul Bley (with Mingus and Blakey), his 1958 Quintet (with Ornette Coleman), his 1965 ESP-Disk (Closer), and one more A-. Still working on the long-promised update to Robert Christgau's website. Any day now. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 17, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25326 [25277] rated (+49), 426 [432] unrated (-6). Huge rated count. I got off to a fast start when I decided to fill in the records I hadn't previously heard by Kurt Elling and Alan Jackson, both with new records last week. I've never cared for Elling, but he has a huge reputation, including four Penguin Guide 4-stars. Main thing I found out was that his exuberance on the first two albums makes his mannerisms more palatable. After Elling, Jackson cleaned my ears out, and the albums were so short they piled up fast. Still best, I think, to approach his early work through compilations, like 1995's The Greatest Hits Collection, or 2007's more economical 16 Biggest Hits. His new one, Angels and Alcohol, was A- last week. (Elling's new Passion World came in at C: by my reckoning his worst ever, not that Night Moves or 1619 Broadway were much better.) The next thing that happened was that Phil Overeem posted a list on Facebook of his top 50 albums so far this year. I jotted them down in my notebook, and tallied up that 25 of the 34 I had heard were rated B+(***) or higher. That's close enough to my taste that I tried tracking down the rest. I managed to find 11 of the missing 16, and the first three (79rs Gang, Nots, Mdou Moctar) came in at A- (as did, later on, Dead Moon). Overeem's list also included the new Sonics album (***), which led me to their back catalog and a belated A- for their 1965 debut. Of the remaining five, I managed to find bits of Big Chief Don Pardo and Golden Comanche (New Orleans Indians) and the Reactionaries (pre-Minutemen D. Boon from 1979) -- not enough to rate but both sounded promising. That leaves three albums to keep an eye open for: Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago; Iris DeMent, The Trackless Woods; and J.D. Allen, Graffiti. I had, by the way, tracked down Coneheads (***) and The Red Line Comp (*) from earlier Overeem notices -- I would never have known about them otherwise. One thing I had trouble with was hip-hop: three albums (two from Overeem's list -- Doomtree and Vince Staples -- plus Future) wound up at B+(***). I gave them two plays each, all were pretty good, but they didn't come through quite clearly enough to grade higher. That seems to be happening a lot -- others on my 2015 list: Joey Badass, Action Bronson, Cannibal Ox, Rae Sremmurd. Or maybe that's just a normal break: A- hip-hop so far: BBNG/Ghostface Killah, Heems, Kendrick Lamar, Murs. Michael Tatum, who's resumed his A Downloader's Diary, recommended Songhoy Blues -- a close second, I think, to Moctar's soundtrack. Overeem also recommended the new Tamikrest (**), so I went back and filled in the old ones, netting Toumastin. Mamman Sani (Overeem picked his 2013 album) is also from Niger, but not in the dessert blues genre -- more like spacey electronic minimalism. It was a big help for me finding Sahel Sounds on Bandcamp -- will probably explore some more older titles later on. That didn't leave a lot of time for my current jazz queue, but I moved Irène Schweizer to the front and was dazzled: not a surprise given that her previous record with Han Bennink was an A -- one of 4 A records I credit her with (plus 5 A-). A really great pianist, and a pretty great percussionist too. The one I still recommend to start with is her 2006 2-CD compilation, Portrait. Maybe I should change its grade to A+. Biondini (*), Braden (*), Halvorson (***), Harris (**), Letizia (**), Maestro (*), Mazzarella (***), and Orozco (**) also came from the new jazz queue, but I had to grab James Brandon Lewis (A-) from Rhapsody. I did find some mail on the record, apparently with a watermarked download link I never bothered with. No telling how many records like that slip past me. My pre-crash system for dealing with download links is still broken -- Firefox refuses to connect to a mail server that has self-signed SSL certificates, even after storing the exception, so my message-passing mechanism is broken. Also, all the ECM links I had are stale now, and I find myself not caring enough to get them refreshed. Similarly, I hardly ever deal with the world music links I get from Rock Paper Scissors: true that a high percentage of important world music comes through them, but also true that that's a small slice of what they promote. I keep getting disabused of the concept that I can cover it all. There needs to be some meeting of the willing for this to work, but this week at least it seems to have worked pretty well. Robert Christgau found a new outlet for his Expert Witness -- I still think of it as The Consumer Guide -- column, at Noisey, promising a new one every Friday. Last week's covered three "love men" he likes more than I do: Miguel (***), Jason Derulo (*), and (most surprising) Sam Smith (B- last time I heard it), with Tinashe (**) and Oceaán (* -- the only one I hadn't previously checked out) in the HMs. Once again, he's catching up to make up for the downtime since Medium sacked him in early June. I've noticed, for instance, that there were 17 albums on his 2013 Dean's List that he never caught up with when he moved from MSN to Cuepoint. (My plan is to add stubs in his website database for those records -- presumably all A- or A, but not my place to say. I'm also looking through earlier lists to see if anything else should be stubbed -- thus far I've found three albums, but it's a slow slog to check everything.) By the way, I am getting closer to doing an update of Christgau's website. I've already uploaded a number of fixes since the ISP's server change ("upgrade") broke some old code, but the long delay demanded by Medium and my own procrastination kept me from doing an update to the CG database. Right now, I have everything from Medium in my local copy, and I'm working through some proofreading (my heroes there are George Allan and Lucas Fagen). Probably later this week, assuming I don't hold it up to do more stub work. (I've long thought that the artist pages should list albums that don't have proper CG reviews but do have significant mentions in lists or ACN, so that's a long-term project.) I should also mention that I got a notice today that Carola Dibbell's recent novel, The Only Ones, is now available as an audiobook, narrated by Sasha Dunbrooke. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 10, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25277 [25234] rated (+43), 432 [451] unrated (-19). I hit the bottom of the Spin 1985-2014 list early in the week. Of 300 records, I've not heard/rated 290. That leaves the following (not on Rhapsody, Christgau grades in brackets):
I've been told that most/all of these records are on YouTube, but haven't tried looking them up there. My final grade distribution is at the bottom of the file. Basically: A or A+: 29 (10.0%), A-: 80 (27.5%); B+: 114 (29.3%); B: 45 (15.5%); B- or lower: 22 (7.5%). When the list first came out I was missing 81 of them, so I've heard 71 since mid-May. I don't see a similar grade breakdown in my notebook at the time, but I did note that I had 103 records rated A- or above. That's up to 109 now, so I picked up 6 new A- records (8.4% of the adds, way down from the initial 44.9% A- (or better: i.e., 103/229). I picked up 4 new B- or below albums, which was also down from my initial rate (5.6% vs. 9.9%). The big growth came in B albums, up by 20 (28.1%) vs. 25 initially (11.3%). Records could wind up graded B for lots of reasons, but the most common is uninspired competency. Of course, you may just write this off as my relative indifference to the alt/indie rock that's Spin's bread and butter. Probably some truth to that. But it's not like I hate every alt/indie record. Lots of good ones on the list. With that project done, I wanted to focus on the books posts, and not think much about what I was listening to. This time I went into the new jazz queue and cleared out a lot of stuff I've been skipping over. No great finds there, although avant fans will enjoy Louie Belogenis' Blue Buddha project, and Stefan Keune's vinyl-only release offers quite a rush. Still, I probably enjoyed Dan Brubeck's tribute to his parents even more -- just didn't give it a second spin, mostly because it's a double but also because brother Chris has also tapped into the family well, with similarly fine results. Another high HM is the new Miguel album. I played it several times, went back to his debut, and even gave his sophomore album another shot. Tatum tells me it takes time to sink in, but that's not how I work -- and when I do give a record extra time, it's almost always because it's giving me something back. Still, I like the album much more than I do its widely admired predecessor -- don't get that one at all, even though I nudged its grade up a notch. Tatum, by the way, reviews Wildheart in his revived A Downloader's Diary (41). Biggest surprise for me there was the A grade for Young Thug's Barter 6 -- talk about someone who needs time to sink in! I gave it one spin and a B+(**) a while back. That's one I'm not in any hurry to revisit, but maybe Christgau will weigh in? Of course, our biggest grade difference was over Sleater-Kinney, but you know how that goes. Still, a great column. I should get around to archiving it sometime. Note: I cut the week off a bit short last night, so I didn't pick up today's mail (most notably, new albums by guitarists Liberty Ellman and Garrison Fewell). The Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file is up around 90 albums even though August is less than one-third over, so I should start thinking about posting it up. Also, the CDR of Howard Riley: 10.11.12 (NoBusiness) didn't have any music on it I could hear. It's one of their vinyl-only releases, probably solo piano, something of intrinsically limited interest to me, but he's a musician I've been wanting to hear more of. I did track down two of his early Columbia releases -- Angle (1969) and The Day Will Come (1970), both A- in my book -- but I've only heard one later record, a B+(*) live solo. According to my records, he has another 21 records which Penguin Guide gave 3.5 or 4 stars to, so a major figure, at least in their book. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 3, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25234 [25190] rated (+44), 451 [453] unrated (-2). After wrapping up last week's (month's) Rhapsody Streamnotes on Wednesday, I decided I wanted to work on the long-delayed book posts -- two appeared on Friday and Saturday, and a third will probably appear tomorrow -- so I didn't want to think much about what to listen to while I was working. And nothing could have taken less thought than picking off records from the Spin 1985-2014 list, so that's what I did. A week ago there were 31 records on the list I hadn't heard. Now there are 12 -- 9 not on Rhapsody, 3 more I haven't checked yet (Deftones, Green Day, Total 4), so I'll at least check out the latter. (Several people mentioned that the missing albums are on YouTube, a resource I've never used for music -- probably because I've hated watching music videos since they first became mandatory in the '80s. I have occasionally consulted YouTube for plumbing tips.) As the grades below attest, the alt/indie rock albums toward the bottom of Spin's list were pretty awful -- most so bad I didn't bother trying to fill in any other albums I had missed. (I did check out Aerosmith's Greatest Hits and Animal Collective's Feels, which beat the recommended albums, and Cursive's Domestica and M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which didn't.) I did go deeper into 2Pac and Lil Wayne (having only heard the former's posthumous Better Dayz, but I've heard most of the latter's later work -- even some of the numerous mixtapes). Main insight I got into 2Pac was that by the time All Eyez on Me arrived he had become so submerged in the process all those posthumous records shouldn't have been a surprise -- after all, his presence hardly matters. Lil Wayne had little presence in his first albums -- they are really just mixtapes (before their time) -- but he emerged as a star as Tha Carter series started. Dimmed after that stint in jail, of course, but the first three Tha Carters are pretty amazing records. (Good chance Tha Carter II would wind up full-A if I spent more time with it.) I also checked out Best of Frankie Knuckles but it just gathers up his early 12-inchers and doesn't find its stride until the second half. He might benefit from the sort of career-spanning treatment Rhino gave Larry Levan in Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story, but thus far at least I've always found Chicago House a bit dull. As I was going through the Spin list, I noticed new albums by Lil Wayne, Mount Eerie (ex Microphones), and Swervedriver. None turned out to be special. I managed to work a few new jazz CDs into the week, but nothing made much of an impression until Amir ElSaffar. Among other things -- and there are a lot of other things -- this is the first album where he's really made a big splash with his trumpet chops. I don't make anything resembling a systematic effort to track books on music, but I do note some that strike my personal fancy. But in case some readers glaze over when presented with long lists of politics-economics-history, I thought I'd note the music (more or less) books from this spate of book posts (including a sneak peek at tomorrow's):
I've read Christgau's memoir, and have bought Matos' book -- something I want to learn more about, from someone I have immense respect for. The other one I find tempting is Aidi's Rebel Music, which among other things is likely to cognitively baffle most westerners with their preconceptions about Islamic fundamentalism. (I did read Mark LeVine's Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, but I'm less fond of metal than hip-hop.) But the fact is that I have other reading priorities, and have long been coasting on the music knowledge-base I accumulated last century. So most of the music books I have bought over the last decade -- Szwed's Sun Ra biography and George Lewis' A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music are two important books that come to mind -- remain unread. Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo is the exception (and should be yours). New records rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 27, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25190 [25154] rated (+36), 453 [457] unrated (-4). Bumper crop of A-list records this week: if I kept this up I'd have 400 for the year, which would blow my credibility all to bits. (Actually, I have 58 new and 7 old so far this year, so that's, if anything, below last year's pace.) First two records I graded last week were A- (both jazz but very different: Harry Allen and OZO), then nothing much happened until Saturday when I hit a streak of three (Ashley Monroe, Chico Freeman, Omar Souleyman). In between I went to check out the new Four Tet and found a couple I hadn't heard before, including Pink -- on Christgau's 2013 Dean's List but never reviewed in Expert Witness. Also surprised that I gave Satoko Fujii's Berlin big band the edge over the Tobira quartet -- I usually prefer the small groups, not least because her piano is more prominent. Veruca Salt was a tip from Michael Tatum (a solid A-, he said). I originally had it a notch lower, but a recheck (actually, a couple) convinced me. Among the high B+, Johannes Wallmann most tempted me -- terrific solos by Russ Johnson and Gilad Hekselman, and the piano never quits. I must admit that I ran out of patience with Wilco, but there could be more there. One thing that changed the week around was that I got my crashed "media" computer back up and running. I put a new hard disk drive in ($50 buys one terrabyte these days) and did a fresh install of Xubuntu 14.04.2 (Desktop). I haven't mounted the old disk yet, so I haven't recovered the missing data (mostly downloads), but it was a treat to listen to Rhapsody through decent speakers. (I had been using the Chromebook's built-in speakers, since the Bose Mini-Link had proven unusable.) Veruca Salt especially benefitted. For "old music" I'm still picking at the Spin 1985-2014 list, but losing interest as I'm going along. The unheard records are down to 31, so about 10%. That number will drop a bit in future weeks, but I don't know how much or how fast. I was more interested in finding those missing Four Tet albums. (Kieran Hebden, by the way, is producer on the Omar Souleyman album.) Expect a Rhapsody Streamnotes before the end of the month. It's been more than a month, but I lost those three weeks on the road, so the draft is only average-sized at present (105 records). But that should be big enough for any month. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 20, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25154 [25120] rated (+34), 457 [462] unrated (-5). Came back from my trip exhausted, and if anything grew wearier over the course of the week. Unpacking has been slow, and while I managed to catalog all the waiting CDs last week I still have a pile of snail mail to read (or otherwise dispose of). I did at least start to get back into a music routine, at least until disaster struck. I've been using a recycled Linux machine for streaming music, downloading PR links, playing DVDs, and occasionally checking up on Facebook. I've kept this machine rigorously up to date, so when I got back there were a huge number of software updates ready. I started to install them while I was streaming something, and a few minutes later the machine crashed with a kernel panic. It seemed to reboot, but a few minutes later froze up, with I/O errors on the console. Repeated attempts merely shortened the time to freeze. At the very least the software installation has been left in an inconsistent state. Also possible that the disk drive is malfunctioning. I had another (not-so-good) computer setup for streaming, so the main effect of losing the machine was that I lost all of the download music I had received over the last six months -- mostly from ECM and Cuneiform, since I don't bother with most other links that come my way. They're always a pain, and I had been slow at dealing with them anyway, so I was well behind reporting on them. Also, ECM's links are time-limited, and I think Cuneiform's are locked against multiple downloads. And going forward, my methodology for downloading them is broken, so that's something else to bother with. In the long run I'll probably be able to recover the lost data by mounting the disk on a working machine, but that's also in principle true of the previous "media machine" that crashed in 2014 and is still sitting on the sidelines. (It ran Windows Vista, and was similarly corrupted by a software update. My understanding is that I can fix the corruption if I can find the original installation discs, but thus far I haven't found them. If/when I give up on that search I can still try to mount the discs on a Linux system and scrounge around for useful data, but that hasn't been much of a priority.) Meanwhile, the new streaming setup is the one I used on the road: a Toshiba Chromebook and Bose MiniLink Bluetooth speakers. The latter, even when they're working properly, are much inferior to the Klipsch computer speakers on the "media machine," which are in turn much inferior to the B&O speakers on my now aged stereo system. (The speakers and the Yamaha receiver are close to 30 years old.) But it turns out that the Bose speakers rarely work right: the bluetooth connection often fails, and the auxiliary connection -- a direct wire with stereo jacks from the computer to the speakers -- has a really weird effect that I'll explain below. (It's quite possible that both of these problems are the fault of the Toshiba, which among other things has very little in the way of diagnostic tools.) The upshot is that I've had to fall back on the Toshiba's built-in speaker, lame and tinny as you'd expect. That possibly puts the streamed records at a disadvantage, even more than usual. Factor that in if you like, but looking at the grade list below I suspect I've already done so. The weird effect? When I streamed Frank Lacy's Mingus Sings I was surprised to find that the record had virtually no vocals -- maybe some vocal rumbling submerged in the background. I was mostly streaming jazz and hadn't noticed much amiss, but when I switched to Boz Scaggs' A Fool to Care again the vocals were buried, leaving a lushly attractive guitar groove album. OK, I thought. The Leonard Cohen showed evidence of background vocals but no Cohen, and that, too, had some appeal. I didn't pull the plug until I got to Kacey Musgraves and thought her doing an instrumental album was just too bizarre. And when I pulled the plug, her voice popped right up -- on the Toshiba's built-in speaker. Evidently there is such a thing as a "vocal eliminator" filter, which is used to create karaoke versions from standard stereo. How such a thing got into the Bose and/or the Toshiba beats me. (The bluetooth path to the Bose speakers didn't filter out the vocals, so it was only the wired connection. The Toshiba manual describes the jack as "headphone/microphone" but when I plug the Bose in it is recognized as a headphone, and I can't find any more audio controls. Just spent an hour researching and testing this and I know nothing more than I did.) After discovering this glitch, I went back and relistened to about ten albums. Oddly enough, I wound up grading the Lacy and Hollenbeck albums down. The others didn't move much, although the vocals are certainly a plus for Scaggs, Cohen, and Musgraves. The filter had also knocked Joshua Redman's sax out of the Bad Plus album, but that was neither much of a loss or gain. Could be that I've misheard more of the [r] albums below, so take them with more than the usual grain of salt. (I think the list that I didn't recheck was: Blanchard, Davis, Diehl, Garzone, Glasper, Hazeltine, Herring, Hunter, Jamal, Johnson, Skydive Trio; most were probably heard accurately enough. I didn't notice a problem with the old [r] records -- Bragg, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco -- so the problem must have occurred after I heard several of the above jazz records. I did recheck Silk Degrees, which improved a lot.) I should probably add a note on the two A- records this week. I've given Rent Romus and Michael McNeill A- grades in the past, and gave these two records more than the usual fair chance -- McNeill probably wound up with eight or more plays. Both have corresponded with me -- McNeill even weirded me out when he said he'd check out Vijay Iyer on my recommendation. Could it be that I'm softening up and playing favorites? I'll stick with them: in fact, the clincher for McNeill was that I want to hear the album again. By the way, Devin Gray, Max Johnson, and Skydive Trio were recommended by Chris Monsen on his Fave Jazz of 2015 mid-year list: 3 of the 9 records I hadn't heard, all good ones. Of the other B+(***) albums, the one I'd definitely spin again if I had the CD is Warren Vaché's. Scaggs and Cohen were hinted at in Christgau's parting missive (as well as the Nelson-Haggard album I like, and "giant sand/springsteen/bishop" -- I'd guess the latter is Elvin's Can't Even Do Wrong Right, which is as right as he's gotten in a long time, but I have no idea about the others). I may get around to Rhapsody Streamnotes near the end of the week. Certainly by the end of the month. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 13, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25120 [25116] rated (+4), 462 [439] unrated (+23). Got back from my west coast drive just before midnight Saturday. In retrospect I should have packed a boombox. I did bring along 200 old CDs which we played in the car, but most of most days went music-less. I did make a token effort to stream the new Miguel on Rhapsody, but couldn't tell much (other than that I didn't get into it -- saw him do an amusing skit on Jimmy Kimmel). So the "newly rated" above and below was just what I picked up Saturday (and early today, relatively speaking). Surprised I found an A-list item in that short time. I did manage to get the mail unpacked, below. Even after rechecking everything, there is a minor discrepancy in the numbers: rated count is only +4 but I listed 5 newly rated records below; unrated count is +23, which matches 28 newly catalogued items minus 5 newly rated. It's hard to keep all of my interlocking lists in sync. One thing I wanted to do during the trip was to rethink what I should be doing. It helped to talk through my various book proposals, particularly with my sister, and they all seem to make sense. Harder to tell about my music website RFC: thus far, I've received no serious comments and very little interest, despite the usual boost such project ideas get when Robert Christgau's consumer guide loses its patron (see Expert Witness at Cuepoint/Medium. Recommended music links:
Normally, the unheard items on lists by these particular critics would be priorities for my own listening. Indeed, many of the unheard items on the Soto and Weiss lists are June-July releases. Unfortunately, the machine I use for streaming has been flaky today and just crashed (for the second time). Could be a major setback for me. Mid-year best-of lists are becoming increasingly common. I checked out one from Rolling Stone, and found pretty much what I expected: more not-so-good records, and more stuff I didn't know about or hadn't bothered with. The breakdown: 4 A- (Kendrick Lamar, Courtney Barnett, D'Angelo [they're a bit slow], Mbongwana Star); 7 *** (Madonna, Jack Ü, Jamie XX, Rae Sremmurd, Sufjan Stevens, Joey Badass, Jazmine Sullivan); 4 ** (Pops Staples, Blur, Kamasi Washington, Rhiannon Giddens); 4 * (Sleater-Kinney, Alabama Shakes, Earl Sweatshirt, Death Grips); 2 B (Drake, Father John Misty); 1 C (Bob Dylan); 22 unheard (Björk, Mark Ronson, Mumford & Sons, Kacey Musgraves, Florence, Muse, Kid Rock, Marilyn Manson, Leonard Cohen, Faith No More, Zac Brown, Sonics, Chris Stapleton, Future Brown, Fifth Harmony, Refused, Metz, Leon Bridges, Steven Wilson, Bosse-de-Nege, Downtown Boys, Hop Along). New records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail when I got back:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, June 22, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25116 [25116] rated (+0), 439 [439] unrated (+0). About three days of work here -- less than half a week. On the fourth day I was totally distracted, and on the fifth day I took off for the upper northwest. Although I spent a good deal of time swapping discs out of and into my travel cases, virtually nothing that I'll be taking with me is new work. Rather, I'll have three weeks to listen to things I really liked at some point but haven't had time to play recently. I don't expect to post much over the next three weeks. I should be reachable via email, at least by the end of the day. Hopefully, I'll get some reading done, and find some time to think about what I want to write about in the future. New records rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, June 15, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25103 [25069] rated (+34), 429 [432] unrated (-3). Most of this week's report was scooped by last week's Rhapsody Streamnotes. Since then I've kept going down the Spin list, picking up Raekwon, Yo La Tengo (hey), and moving into Oasis (ugh). On the new jazz front, I've played all three new Ivo Perelman records, but only rated one (the most marginal; the others need another play or two). I almost have a full basket of unrated new jazz. Not much mail this week. (So little I added Monday's mail to Unpacking but it's not yet factored into the current count above.) Sorry to say I didn't get any time last week to work on the book blurbs. Two days were taken up with people working on the big elm tree in the backyard. (If I recall correctly, Google has an aerial view of the neighborhood where the tree dwarfs the house we live in.) Then there was the Ornette Coleman post, Rhapsody Streamnotes, and a little thing on building a music website. As you may know, Terminal Zone was a one-shot magazine Don Malcolm and I put together in 1977. A few years back I registered the terminalzone.net domain name with the idea of building a music website there. It's gone through three or four (or five or six) design iterations since then, but still isn't anything substantial. But every time Robert Christgau's blog hits the shoals of web-media indifference, I think there might be some value to dusting it off. (Cuepoint failed to post Christgau's June 5 and 12 columns. No word on whether this hiatus is permanent or just a temporary blip.) So I spent a couple days last week touching up the Terminal Zone Website RFC (request for comments, common jargon for Internet specs). I sent it around to a couple people last week but didn't get any response, so I figured I'd mention it here ("run it up the flagpole to see who salutes"). I see two pieces to the website. One is a ratings database, where some number of invited critics file and track record ratings (although in principle it could be used to track non-participating critic ratings, such as Metacritic does). A while back Chuck Eddy suggested that "you" (this was addressed to the Expert Witness Facebook Group) should put together something like the Pazz & Jop Product Report that the Village Voice ran in 1976-77. At the time, I wrote these notes, which of course resemble the new RFC -- PJPR is really just one view into the ratings database. This all requires a fairly substantial amount of programming, which I am interested in doing. In addition to supporting the website, the software could be used for other niche-oriented websites, and could be tailored as an ap for anyone who wants to keep their own personal ratings list. This could be developed as free software, or could have some value if someone wants to build a business around it (and, of course, there are various hybrid options). The other piece would be a blog which mostly consists of diary entries from critics briefly describing what they've been listening to and what they think of it. I'm thinking of something sort of midway between my Music Week and Rhapsody Streamnotes posts, occurring more or less weekly. These wouldn't be full-fledged record reviews, even in the "ultra-brief" sense of CG reviews. But they would have links to the ratings database, so one could scan the diary entries for mention of an interesting record, then click on the link to get more information on the record (including more critics' views). One of the better examples of the diary format is the pieces collected in Philip Larkin's All That Jazz: A Record Diary. My guess is that the minimal thresholds for a useful website would be close to ten diarists and 20-30 raters, and it could scale up to much more. We would need a team of editors to keep the copy flowing and clean. (I'm not looking to be one of the people involved in day-to-day content management.) We might come up with a board of "executive editors" to add some prestige and overall direction. (That's more my speed, although at least initially I'm offering to do software development, provide a server free of charge, and the domain name.) The blog part could be created almost immediately. My own database and writings can be freely plundered for initial content. Initially I don't expect to make any money on this, and assume that contributions would have to be gratis (non-exclusive license granted but all other rights retained). I'm open to other business proposals. By the way, earlier draft were oriented toward doing something more Wikipedia-ish: building a more extensive reference database. Recently I've been looking for something more manageable, easier to do, more simply useful for a certain community -- music fans like you and me who don't find timely information and guidance from the usual music media resources. Write me if you want more info, or to kick this thing around. Especially if you have editing, writing, rating, sysadmin, and/or engineering skills you'd be interested in contributing. My own time is likely to be disrupted over the next 3-4 weeks. I'm planning on taking a long car trip starting Friday (Oregon and Washington, if that makes any difference). Most places are connected, so I should have email pretty much everywhere (if not all the time). I do hope to get some writing done along the way, but I imagine things like website updates will be few and far between. And historically I've never managed to do much music rating/reviewing on the road. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, June 8, 2015 Music Week
Music: Current count 25069 [25024] rated (+45), 432 [422] unrated (+10). When I counted the number of newly rated records below, I found more than my count this week. I went back and rechecked the database, and found four albums listed as unrated that I should have filled in grades for. Then the count exceeded the list, so I went to the Streamnotes draft file and checked what I had written up against the Music Week lists, and found more discrepancies. I added them to the list below, and now the list is longer than the rated count increase again. Most likely that's the Pixies, who probably should have been reported last week. (At least seems to me like it's been a while.) Of course, if I had a system where I didn't have to update my records 4-5 times when I file a grade, I'd make fewer mistakes. But they'd also be harder to fix, so I guess there's that. The large quantity of old music is due to my attempt to fill in the holes in Spin's Top 300 Albums: 1985-2014 list. I'm a little more than a third of the way through the list. I'm not just doing albums on the list: if I find something else that has a substantial rep and/or looks interesting, I'll slip it in too. Still working on Built to Spill. Next up is Kate Bush (list isn't alphabetical). I'm not spending a lot of time with them, although the A- records get at least two spins, as do some near misses. I'm also not reviewing anything I've graded before, even though some of them look like I may have underrated a bit. It's impossible to keep a list as long as mine in lockstep. New records include two jazz A-listers from old favorites, albeit of very different stripes. But I have been dragging my feet on the jazz queue, which has been growing at a surprising rate. The main source of new records this week was Spin's 50 Best Albums of 2015 . . . So Far (my comp list is buried in the June 1 notebook). That led me to: American Wrestlers, Cannibal Ox, Dan Deacon, Eye, I Love Makonnen, Knocks, Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, Monster Rally & Jay Stone, Colin Stetson/Sarah Neufeld, and Young Thug -- two more A-list records there, with Cannibal Ox real close and nothing real bad. I expected Jason Derulo on that list too -- it was plugged as "Spin album of the week" on the same page, and has gotten rapturous reviews from critics I usually agree with, and I loved Talk Dirty as much as they did. I played it twice and it irritated me more than my low B+ grade reveals. The other two new A-list records were obvious things to listen to (Murs, Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard). For a while last week I was logging so many A- records I wondered if I was going soft. As you may have noticed, Medium's music venture Cuepoint hasn't added any new content since June 2, notably missing last Friday's expected appearance of Robert Christgau's Expert Witness. I don't have any inside info on what's happening, but there's evidently some sort of shakeup going on. The basic idea behind Medium is to sucker people into contributing free content, but Christgau at least has been paid from the start. It wasn't unreasonable at first to seed the free content with some commissioned pieces, but sooner or later some bean counter is going to insist on cutting expenses, and freelancers are easy to stiff. So one possibility is that Medium is tightening the screws. Another is that the "vertical" websites like Cuepoint built on Medium's platform haven't clicked. I think one problem with Cuepoint is that they've never had anyone else doing the sort of thing Christgau does -- either as a columnist with a regular schedule or as a reviewer. Everything else is feature writing, and I only recognize two writers on their current homepage, so they're not exactly trying to build a prestige roster. One result is that I've never found anything other than Christgau worth reading there. You may recall that something similar happened at the previous home of Christgau's consumer guide, MSN Music. They had a slightly better music site, probably because living off the fat of Microsoft's monopoly they had more money to throw at it. They had a few columnists, although none generated as much as 5% of Christgau's comment traffic. They hired Christgau to write some live reports, and occasionally you could find something else worth reading there, but it was never organized very well. There are other music websites that seem to be successful, but they do so by cultivating a niche audience and covering that niche at considerable depth -- I'm thinking of Pitchfork, PopMatters, All About Jazz, not that I know how much money they really make. But both MSN Music and Cuepoint seemed to have the idea that they could build a mass audience by covering music at the most superficial level. That they failed should not be a big surprise. Christgau wrote for MSN Music and for Cuepoint for the most pedestrian of reasons: because they paid him to do something he wanted to do anyway. If Cuepoint folds this could be the end of Christgau's Consumer Guide. Or he could find another web angel willing to lose money on him (though it's hard to imagine an infinite chain of them). He could even publish a few CG reviews in a non-paying outlet -- he had written a number of them during his last hiatus just because writing had become an integral part of the way he understands records, and was thinking about giving them to Odyshape (which more or less suspended operations last September). I'd be happy to publish them on his website, where at least they'd add value and interest. Or he could just hang it up -- something I think about, even after I reconciled myself to writing for free. Could be time to start thinking about a post-Christgau website. Expect a Rhapsody Streamnotes later this week. Current draft has 50 new records, 3 new compilations, and 75 old records, so that should be plenty. I'm also working on a series of book blurb posts. I came back from New Jersey last fall with many pages of notes I took in various bookstores, but technical problems have kept me from working on them. The last Book Roundup was on July 3, 2014, so nearly a year. There should be several hundred books worth mentioning in that time. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old records rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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