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Sunday, November 19, 2017

Weekend Roundup

I've often heard that "politics is the art of the possible" -- the quote is most often attributed to Otto von Bismarck, who continued: "the attainable -- the art of the next best." Bismarck is best known now as the architect of the modern welfare state, something he achieved with autocratic Prussian efficiency, his generally satisfactory answer to the threat of proletarian revolution. But the earlier generations he was better known as the founder of German militarism, a bequest which less pragmatic followers parlayed into two disastrous world wars. Then, as now, the "possible" was always limited by preconceptions -- in Bismarck's case, allegiance to the Prussian nobility, which kept his innovations free of concessions to equality and democracy.

After immersing myself into the arcana of mainstream politics in the 1960s -- I used to trek to the library to read Congressional Quarterly's Weekly Reports, I subscribed to the Congressional Record, and I drew up electoral maps much like Kevin Phillips -- I pivoted and dove into the literature of the politically impossible, reading about utopian notions from Thomas More to Ignatius Donnelly to Paul Goodman (whose Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals is a title I still fancy recapitulating). But I never really lost my bearings in reality. In college I worked on the philosophy journal Telos, which taught one to always look toward ends (or goals) no matter the immediate terrain, and I studied neo-Kantians with a knack for making logic work to bridge the chasm. Later I turned into an engineer, and eventually had the epiphany that we could rationally think our way through complex political and economic problems to not necessarily ideal but much more viable solutions.

From the start I was aware of the standard and many other objections to "social engineering." No time to go into them now, but my background in engineering taught me that I have to work within the bounds of the possible, subject to the hard limits of physics and the slightly messier lessons I had learned from my major in sociology. Without really losing my early ideals -- my telos is equality, because that's the only social arrangement that is mutually agreeable, the only one that precludes scheming, strife, and needless harm -- I came to focus on little steps that nudge us in the right direction, and to reject ideas that couldn't possibly work. Thinking about this has made me a much more moderate person, without leading me to centrism or the notion that compromise is everything.

A good example of a political agenda that cannot be implemented -- indeed, one that offers nothing constructive -- was provided a while back by Alan Keys, a Republican presidential candidate whose entire world view revolved around teenagers having sex and how society needs to stop them. Maybe his analysis has some valid points, and maybe there are some paternalistic nudges that can trim back some of the statistical effects (like the rate of teen pregnancy), but nothing -- certainly no tolerable level of coercion -- can keep teenagers from being interested in sex. Of course, Keys was an outlier, even among Republican evangelicals. Only slightly more moderate is Roy Moore, who's evidently willing to carve out an exception for teens willing to have sex with himself. You might chalk that up to hypocrisy, which is common among all Americans, but is especially rife among conservatives (who regard it as a privilege of the virtuous rich) and evangelicals (who expect personal salvation for the fervor with which they damn all of you). But Moore's own agenda for making his peculiar take on Christianity the law of the land is every bit as dangerous and hopeless as Keys' obsession with teen sex.

The most chilling thing I've read in the last week was a column by Cal Thomas, Faith in Politics, where he urges conservative evangelicals to put aside their frivolous defenses of Roy Moore and go back to such fundamentals as Martin Luther's 95 Theses, where "Luther believed governments were ordained by God to restrain sinners and little else." The striking thing about this phrasing is how cleverly it forges an alliance with the libertarian right, who you'd expect to be extremely wary of God-ordained governmental restraint. But sin has always been viewed through the eyes of tyrants and their pet clergy, a "holy alliance" that has been the source of so much suffering and injustice throughout world history.

News recently has been dominated by a seemingly endless series of reports of sexual misconduct, harassment and/or assault, on all sides of the political spectrum (at least from Roy Moore to Al Franken), plus a number of entertainers and industry executives. Conservatives and liberals react to these stories differently -- aside from partisan considerations (which certainly play a part when a Senate seat is at stake), conservatives are hypocritically worked up about illicit sex, while liberals are more concerned with respecting the rights of women. Yet both sides (unless the complaint hits particularly close to home) seem to be demanding harsh punishment (see, e.g., Mark Joseph Stern: Al Franken Should Resign Immediately Michelle Goldberg and Nate Silver agree, mostly because they want to prove that Democrats are harsher and less hypocritical on sexual misconduct; indeed, instant banishment seems to have been the norm among entertainers, which Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, and Jeffrey Tambor having projects canceled, as well as more delayed firings of Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and Harvie Weinstein). This drive to punish, which has long been a feature of America's notion of justice, can wind up making things worse (and not just because it could trigger a backlash, as Isaac Chotiner and Rebecca Traister discuss).

I'm sure many women have many things to object to here -- the Weinstein testimonies seem especially damning, and I suspect the hushed up Ailes and O'Reilly legacies are comparable -- but I'm finding some aspects of the whole brouhaha troubling. Sex is a messy subject, often fraught and embarrassing to negotiate, subject to wildly exaggerated hopes and fears, but inevitably a part of human nature -- I keep flashing back on Brecht's chorus: "what keeps mankind alive? bestial acts." On the other hand, we might be better off looking at power disparities (inequality), which are clearly evident in all of these cases, perhaps even more so in entertainment than in politics. I can't help but think that in a more equitable society, one that valued mutual respect and eased up a bit on arbitrary punishment, would be bothered less by these problems.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest stories in politics this week: The House passed a major tax bill ("but the House bill, as written, doesn't conform to Senate rules and clearly can't pass"); Senate Republicans drafted a tax bill ("that does conform to Senate rules at the expense of creating an even starker set of financial tradeoffs"); Bob Menendez isn't guilty (I would have said something more like "dodged conviction via mistrial"); Things are looking worse for Roy Moore. Other Yglesias posts last week:

    • Senate Republicans' tax plan raises taxes on families earning less than $75,000. The chart, clearly demonstrating how regressive the plan is, is for 2027, without showing how one gets there. To satisfy the Senate's "budget reconciliation" rules many of the tax cuts have to expire in less than ten years, so this is the end state the bill aims for, probably with the expectation that some further cuts will be renewed before they run out (as happened with the Bush cuts). So on the one hand, this exaggerates the "worst case" scenario, it also clarifies the intent behind the whole scam.

    • Watch CEOs admit they won't actually invest more if tax reform passes: Gary Cohn feigns surprise that so few CEOs raised their hands.

      The reason few hands are raised is there's little reason to believe that the kind of broad corporate income tax cut Republicans are pushing for will induce much new investment. . . . The biggest immediate winners, in fact, would be big, established companies that are already highly profitable. Apple, for example, would get a huge tax cut even though the company's gargantuan cash balance is all the proof in the world that the its investments are limited by Tim Cook's beliefs about what Apple can usefully take on, not by a limited supply of cash or a lack of profitability.

    • Bill Clinton should have resigned: "What he did to Monica Lewinsky was wrong, and he should have paid the price." I've sympathized with versions of this argument -- Gary Wills has written much on how Clinton should have resigned, and I'm on record as having said that Had I been in the Senate I would have voted to convict him (less because I agreed with the actual charges than because I felt he should "pay the price" for other things he did that were wrong -- at the time I was most upset about Clinton's bombing of Iraq, something his Republican inquisitors applauded, prefiguring the 2003 Bush invasion). However, I was under the impression that whatever he did with Lewinsky was mutually consented to and should have remained private. Indeed, before Clinton (or more specifically, before the Scaife-funded investigation into Clinton) politicians' private affairs had hardly ever become objects of public concern. (I suppose Grover Cleveland, America's only bachelor president, is the exception.) Given that all US presidents have been male, you can argue that this public nonchalance is part of a longstanding patriarchal culture, but there's no reason to think that the right-wingers who went after Clinton were in any way interested in advancing feminism. Perhaps Clinton himself could have turned his resignation into a feminist talking point: Yglesias insists, "Had Clinton resigned in disgrace under pressure from his own party, that would have sent a strong, and useful, chilling signal to powerful men throughout the country." Still, I doubt that's the lesson the Republicans would have drawn. Rather, it would have shown to them that they had the power to drive a popular, charismatic president from office in disgrace using pretty flimsy evidence. While there's no reason to doubt he did it for purely selfish reasons, at the time many people were delighted that Clinton stood firm and didn't buckle under right-wing media shaming (e.g., that was the origin of the left-Democratic Move On organization). As for long-term impact, Yglesias seems to argue that had Clinton resigned, we wouldn't have found ourselves on the moral slope that led to Trump's election.

    • The tax reform debate is stuck in the 1970s: "The '70s were a crazy time," but he could be clearer about what the Republican tax cut scheme was really about, and vaguer about the Democrat response -- worry about the deficit came more after the damage was done (until they Democrats were easily tarred as advocates of "tax-and-spend"). And even though he's right that the situations are so different now that allowing companies and rich investors to keep more after-tax income is even less likely to spur job growth now, the fact is it didn't really work even when it made more sense. Here's an inadvertently amusing line: "The politics of the 1970s, after all, would have been totally different if inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and labor force growth were all low while corporate profits were high." I'd hypothesize that if corporate profits were artificially raised through political means (which is pretty much what's happened starting with the Reagan tax cuts in 1981) all those other factors would have been reduced. Increasing corporate profits even more just adds to the burden the rich already impose on us all.

  • Sean Illing: "The fish rots from the head": a historian on the unique corruption of Trump's White House: An interview with Robert Dallek, who "estimates that historical examples of corruption, like that of the Warren G. Harding administration, don't hold a candle to how Trump and his people have conducted themselves in the White House." One thing I noticed here is how small famous scandals were in comparison to things that are happening every day under Trump: e.g., Teapot Dome ("in which Harding's secretary of the interior leased Navy petroleum reserves in Wyoming and California to private oil companies at incredibly low rates without a competitive bidding process"). Isn't that exactly what Zinke is trying to do with Alaska's oil reserves? Wasn't that Zinke's rationale behind reducing several National Monuments? And how does that stack up against the monetary value of various deregulation orders (especially those by the EPA and FCC)? To get a handle on corruption today, you have to look beyond first-order matters like Trump family business and direct payoffs to the windfalls industries claim from administration largess and beyond to corporate predation that will inevitably occur as it sinks in that the Trump administration is no longer enforcing regulations and laws that previously protected the public. Even short of changing laws to encourage further predation (as Bush did with his tax cuts and "tort reform"), the Trump administration is not just profiting from but breeding corruption. Curiously, Dallek doesn't even mention the closest relatives: the Reagan administration, with its embrace of "greed is good" leading to dozens of major scandals, and the second Bush, which imploded so utterly we wound up with the deepest recession since the 1930s.

  • Cristina Cabrera: Trump Puts on Hold Controversial Rollback of Elephant Trophy Ban: In the "could be worse" department:

    The U.S Fish & Wildlife Service announced on November 16 that it was rolling back an Obama-era ban preventing the import of hunted elephants in Zimbabwe. A similar ban had also been lifted for hunted elephants in Zambia.

    The decision was met with overwhelming backlash, with both liberals and conservatives slamming the move as needlessly cruel and inhumane. The notorious photos of the President's sons posing with a dead leopard and a dismembered tail of a elephant from their hunting expeditions didn't help.

    According to the Service, it can allow such imports "only when the killing of the animal will enhance the survival of the species." African elephants are protected as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, and critics questioned the Interior Department's defense that allowing hunters to kill more of them would enhance their survival.

    To be fair to the Trump administration, "allowing hunters to kill more of them would enhance their survival" is also the common logic that binds together most key Republican initiatives, like their "repeal and replace Obamacare" and "tax cuts and jobs" acts. It's also basically why they made Betsy De Vos Secretary of Education. For more, see Tara Isabella Burton: Trump stalls controversial decision on big game hunting.

  • Alvin Chang: This simple chart debunks the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton sold uranium to Russia: The latest "lock her up" chorus, cheerleadered by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). I can't make any sense of his chart, but the simplified one is easy enough to follow (although it could use a dateline). Still, a couple of troubling points. One is why Russian state-owned Rosatom would buy a Canadian uranium country with operations in the US. Presumably it's just business, and Uranium One still sells (as well as produces) uranium in the US market. The other point is that the Clinton Foundation never has and never will cleanse itself of the stench of operating as an influence peddler with ties into the US government -- although it helps that Hillary is no longer Secretary of State or otherwise government-employed, and it will help more as Clinton's numerous political cronies move away from the family and its foundation.

  • Adam Federman: The Plot to Loot America's Wilderness: Meet Jim Cason, who "seems to be running the show" under Ryan Zinke at the Department of Interior, where he's actively cultivating what promises to be a hundred Teapot Dome scandals.

  • Brent D Griffiths: Trump on UCLA basketball players: 'I should have left them in jail': If run in The New Yorker, this article would have been filed under "Annals of Pettiness."

  • Gregory Hellman: House declares US military role in Yemen's civil war unauthorized: Vote was 366-30, declaring that intervention in Yemen is not authorized under previous "authorization of force" resolutions, including the sweeping "war on terror" resolution from 2001. The US has conducted drone attacks in Yemen well before the Saudi intervention in a civil war that grew out of Arab Spring demonstrations (although the Houthi revolt dates back even further). The US has supported the Saudi intervention verbally, with arms shipments, and with target intelligence, contributing to a major humanitarian disaster. Unfortunately, the new resolution seems to have little teeth.

  • Cameron Joseph: Norm Coleman: I'd Have Beaten Franken in '08 if Groping Photo Had Come Out: Probably. The final tally had Franken ahead by 312 votes, so Coleman isn't insisting on much of a swing. On the other hand, I don't live in Minnesota, so I don't have any real feel for how the actual 2008 campaign played out. Coleman won his seat in 2002 after Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash and was replaced by a shockingly tone-deaf Walter Mondale -- inactive in politics since 1984. Coleman's win was a fluke, and he was never very popular, but Franken had a very tough job unseating him in 2008 -- I suspect his real problem was Upton Sinclair Complex (the famous novelist ran for governor of California in 1934 and lost, in no small part because opponents could pick strange quotes from his novels and present them out of context). Franken's comedy career must have presented Coleman's handlers with a treasure trove of bad jokes and faux pas, so many that the "groping picture" might even have gotten lost in the noise. For his part, Franken bent over backwards to present himself as serious and sober, and six years later was reelected easily, by 10.4 points, an improvement suggesting many of the voters' doubts have been answered. I've never been much of a fan, either of his comedy or of how he cozied up to the military to gain a mainstream political perch. Still, I've reluctantly grown to admire his dedication and earnestness as a politician, a vocation that has lately become ever more precarious for honest folk. So I was shocked when the photo/story revealed, not so much by the content as by how eagerly the media gobbled it up. In particular, TPM, which I usually look at first when I get up for a quick summary of the latest political flaps, filed eight straight stories on Franken in their prioritized central column, to the exclusion of not just Roy Moore (who had the next three stories) but also of the House passing the Republican tax scam bill.

    A couple more links on Franken:

    In addition to Yglesias above, I'm running into more reconsiderations of Bill Clinton, basically showing that the atmosphere has changed between the 1990s and now, making Clinton look all the worse. For example:

  • Fred Kaplan: Trigger Warning: "A congressional hearing underlines the dangers posed by an unstable president with unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons."

  • Azmat Khan/Anand Gopal: The Uncounted: Long and gruesome article on the air war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, who and what got hit, paying some attention to the mistakes that are never expected but somehow always occur whenever the US goes to war.

    Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike -- 103 in all -- in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014. . . .

    We found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history. Our reporting, moreover, revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all. While some of the civilian deaths we documented were a result of proximity to a legitimate ISIS target, many others appear to be the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants. In this system, Iraqis are considered guilty until proved innocent. Those who survive the strikes, people like Basim Razzo, remain marked as possible ISIS sympathizers, with no discernible path to clear their names.

  • Mike Konczal: Republicans are weaponizing the tax code: Key fact here: "Corporations are flush with cash from large profits and aggressively low interest rates, yet they aren't investing." This belies any pretense that cutting corporate tax rates. Without any real growth prospects, the cuts not only favor the rich, the other changes are meant to penalize everyone else, moving into the realm of class war ("capital is eating the economy").

    The crucial thing to realize is that this tax reform effort reflects more than the normal conservative allergic reaction to progressive taxation -- going far beyond undoing the modest progressive grains achieved by Presidents Obama and Clinton. Three major changes stand out: These taxes are far more focused on owners than on workers, even by Republican standards. They take advantage of the ambiguity of what counts as income, weaponizing that vagueness to help their friends and hurt their enemies.

    And after years of pushing for a safety net that works through the tax code, in order to keep more social democratic reforms at bay, Republicans now reveal their willingness to demolish even those modest protections. Their actions make clear that a welfare state based on tax credits and refunds, rather than universal commitments, is all too vulnerable.

    More links on taxes:

  • Josh Marshall: There's a Digital Media Crush. But No One Will Say It: The key sentence here is "The move to video is driven entirely by advertiser demand." The reasoning behind this is left unexplained, but obviously it's because advertising embedded in videos is more intrusive than static space advertising. Part of this is that it's harder for users to block as well as ignore, for the same reason radio and television advertising are more intrusive than print advertising. They're also dumber, because they don't have to offer something useful like information to catch your attention. If past experience is any guide, it also leads to a dumbing down of content, which eventually will make the content close to worthless. This is all bad news for media companies hoping to make bucks off the Internet, and more so for writers trying to scratch out a living from those companies. But more than anything else, it calls into question the public value of an information system based on advertising. From the very beginning, media dependent on advertising have been corrupted by it, and that's only gotten worse as advertisers have gained leverage and targeting data. Concentration of media business only makes this worse, but even if we could reverse the latter -- breaking up effective monopolies and monopsonies and restoring "net neutrality" rules -- we should be questioning the very idea of public information systems built on advertising.

  • Dylan Matthews: Senate Republicans are making it easier to push through Trump's judge picks: Technically, this is about "blue slips," which is one of those undemocratic rules which allow individual Senators to flout their power, but few things in the Republican agenda are more precious to them (or their donors) than packing the courts with verified movement conservatives.

  • Andrew Prokop/Jen Kirby: The Republican Party's Roy Moore catastrophe, explained. A couple impressions here. For one, their listing of Moore's "extremist views" seem pretty run-of-the-mill -- things that some 15-20% of Americans might if not agree with him at least find untroubling. I suspect this understates his extremism, especially on issues of religious freedom, where he has staked out his turf as a Christian nationalist. Second, I've been under the impression that his sexual misdeeds were in the range of harassment (compounded by the youth of his victims, as young as 14), but at least one of the complaints reads like attempted assault -- the girl in question was 16, and when Moore broke off the attack, he allegedly said to the girl: "You are a child. I am the Dictrict Attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you." I reckon it as progress that such charges are highly credible now. As for the effect these revelations may have on the election, note: "A recent poll even showed that 29 percent of the state's voters say the allegations make them more likely to vote for Moore."

    Also on Moore:

  • Corey Robin: Trump's Fantasy Capitalism: "How the president undermines Republicans' traditional economic arguments." Robin, by the way, has a new edition of his The Reactionary Mind book out, the subtitle Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump as opposed to the original Sarah Palin. For reviews, see John Holbro and Paul Rosenberg.

  • Grant Schulte/James Nord: Oil Leak Will Not Factor Into Decision to Expand Keystone Pipeline: Of course, because right after a 250,000 gallon oil leak time is no time to talk about how approving a pipeline could lead to more oil leaks. Also, note how the authors had to walk back one of their more outrageous claims:

    This version of the story corrects that there have been 17 leaks the same size or larger than the Keystone spill instead of 17 larger than this spill. One of the spills was the same size.

  • Matt Taibbi: RIP Edward Herman, Who Co-Wrote a Book That's Now More Important Than Ever: The book, co-authored by Noam Chomsky, is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, originally published in 1988.

    The really sad part about the Herman/Chomsky thesis was that it didn't rely upon coercion or violence. Newspapers and TV channels portrayed the world in this America-centric way not because they were forced to. Mostly, they were just intellectually lazy and disinterested in the stated mission of their business, i.e., telling the truth.

    In fact, media outlets were simply vehicles for conveying ads, and a consistent and un-troubling view of the political universe was a prerequisite for selling cars, candy bars, detergent, etc. Upset people don't buy stuff. This is why Sunday afternoon broadcasts featured golf tournaments and not police beatings or reports from cancer wards near Superfund sites.

    The news business was about making money, and making money back then for big media was easy. So why make a fuss?

    It occurs to me that the big money isn't so easy any more, which helps explain the air of desperation that hangs over cable and internet news outlets these days -- their need to provoke fear and stoke fights, building up an air of loyalty. One even suspects that Fox gravitated to right-wing politics less because of its sponsorship than due to a psychological profile of a sizable audience that could be captured. As Taibbi concludes, "It's a shame [Herman] never wrote a sequel. Now more than ever, we could use another Manufacturing Consent."

    By the way, while Herman and Chomsky identified "anti-communism" as their "fifth filter," that should be generalized to denigrating anyone on the US list of bad countries or movements -- especially the routine characterization of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela as non-democracies, even though all three have elections that are arguably fairer and freer than America's 2016 election. One consequence of this is that American media has lost all credibility in many of these nations. For example, see Oleg Kashin: When Russians stopped believing in the Western media.

  • Zephyr Teachout: The Menendez trial revealed everything that's gone wrong with US bribery law: The corruption case against Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) ended in a hung jury mistrial, even short of the appeals process which has severely weakened most anti-corruption laws.

    I'm with the jury: Even after closely following the trial, I have no strong view on Menendez's guilt or innocence, given the laws they have to work with. I do have a view, however, that the Supreme Court has been playing a shell game with corruption laws. It has stripped anti-corruption legislation of its power in two areas: campaign finance laws and anti-bribery laws. The public is left with little recourse against a growing threat of corruption. Whatever happens with this particular case, this is no way to do corruption law. . . .

    It is fitting that the trial ended with a hung jury. The Court has struck down so many laws that would have made this case easier. If laws prohibiting Super PACs were still in place, we'd have no $600,000 donation. But in the very case enabling Super PACs, Citizens United, the Court suggested that bribery laws would be powerful tools to combat corruption threats -- and then went ahead and weakened those laws. . . .

    Was it friendship? Was it corrupt? Or was it our fault for creating a system that encourages "friendships" that blur the line?

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, November 13, 2017

Music Week

Music: Current count 28874 [28842] rated (+32), 391 [396] unrated (-5).

Tis the season when most critics (and especially their publishers) start thinking about year-end lists. I expect that before the month is out I'll take my first pass at constructing this year's version of last year's Jazz and Non-Jazz lists. To that end, I started taking a belated look at AOTY's Highest Rated Albums of 2017 list, and picked out a few things to check out (most successfully, St. Vincent's 8th-rated Masseduction). I sought out several albums from Robert Christgau's recent Expert Witness albums (Pere Ubu's 20 Years in a Montant Missile Silo the only thing I've really liked there recently). I also made a point of looking up everything I had missed on Alfred Soto's Best albums of 2017 -- third quarter edition. Rather surprised I didn't find more there.

The present Year 2017 file lists 834 albums (28 of those pending grades). That's down from 1075 for 2016 by freeze time (January 28, 2017). Figuring I have 11 weeks left, and I've averaged 18.1 new releases per week over the first 46 weeks, that extrapolates to 1033 records: down a bit from last year, but not much. Down more from previous years, of course, but I won't bother dredging those numbers up.

I finally got a bit of work done on compiling the Jazz Guide(s): 21st Century up to 1267 pages (64% through the Jazz '00s database file, up to Ferenc Nemeth); 20th Century edged up to 750 pages as I found a couple stragglers. 21st Century should wind up 1450-1500 pages, hopefully by the end of the year. (So much for my earlier August-September estimates!) Thinking a bit about what should happen next. The drafts are collected using LibreOffice. Obviously, I can export them as PDF, and distribute them as I did the JCG-only version. I don't know the first thing about exporting to ebook formats, but I see there is a Writer2ePub extension, and also a "cross-platform free and open-source e-book reader and word processor" called Calibre. Both of those look promising.

It occurs to me that the collected writing would be more useful reorganized as a website. LibreOffice can export as HTML, but I'd need some way to explode the file into many webpages. It's possible that there is an extension somewhere to support that, but thus far is looks like a job for custom programming. That's something I'll need to look into and think about -- not that I haven't thought about pouring my database and reviews into a website for a long time now. It's just that I've always had trouble coming up with an album-based database schema to hang everything on. In recent years I've been gravitating more toward an artist-based schema, even though it doesn't normalize as nicely. That's probably the level I'd try to explode an HTML export of the Jazz Guides. One idea is to dispense with the database and just use Mediawiki, organizing the reviews by artist. In that case one could simply cut and paste from the book to the website. That would still be a lot of work.

More troubling for me is the amount of editing that the reviews require. The relatively easy part is stripping out the redundancy that occurs when discrete reviews are stacked up under an artist name. I expect to move dates, instruments, band associations, and other such attributes to a brief artist intro, cutting them out of the album reviews. In many cases that leaves virtually nothing but the credits and grade. It would be nice to flesh them out a bit, but that now appears to be a job for another lifetime, or for someone else. At this point, I'd be happy to let my framework stand as a starting point for someone else to build on, or maybe a whole community. Unclear whether anyone is interested.

One thing I neglected to mention last week was Downbeat's 82nd Annual Readers Poll (October 2017 issue). Biggest surprise for me was the late Allan Holdsworth (1946-2017) finishing second on the HOF ballot. I had him filed under rock (1970s) and hadn't rated (or heard) any of his albums. Wikipedia says he "was cited as an influence by a host of rock, metal and jazz guitarists" but the following list of twelve only includes one name I recognize as jazz (Kurt Rosenwinkel). I suppose I should do some research, possibly starting with Gordon Beck's Sunbird (1979; Beck's 1967 Experiments With Pops, with 3rd place finisher John McLaughlin, is a favorite) and two Tony Williams albums not yet in my database.

McLaughlin would have been a perfectly respectable choice. I've heard at least two dozen of his albums, with Extrapolation (1969) and Mahavishnu Orchestra's The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) early masterpieces. Fourth- and fifth-place finishers Les Paul and George Benson would have been disgraceful picks, although I can point to at least one superb record each is on.

The HOF winner, Wynton Marsalis, is a ho-hum choice: a solid hard bop trumpeter, probably better than Kenny Dorham or maybe even Woody Shaw but less exciting than Lee Morgan and not as versatile as Freddie Hubbard. He also became a huge celebrity, built an empire at Lincoln Center, and wrote some of the most ponderous compositions of the era. I've always liked him best when he was least serious. I credit him with three A- records: his soundtrack Tune In Tomorrow (1990); his Jelly Roll Morton tribute, Mr. Jelly Lord (1999); and his Play the Blues meetup with Eric Clapton (2011). Dorham and Shaw, by the way, have two A- records each, in shorter careers.

Elsewhere, the winners were on the stodgy side of mainstream -- the relatively hip picks were Chris Potter (tenor sax), Anat Cohen (clarinet), and I can never fault Jack DeJohnette (drums). Two flat out bad picks: Snarky Puppy (group), and Trombone Shorty (trombone). (Well, Gregory Porter too, but consider his competition.) I don't have time to go deeper down the lists, but for example, Marsalis won trumpet, and I'd have to drop to 13th to find someone I would have voted for ahead of him (in fact did: Wadada Leo Smith; Dave Douglas came in 15th; 4th-place Terence Blanchard gave me pause).

Only other down-ballot pick I'll mention is Geri Allen, who came in 3rd at piano. Would have been a pleasant surprise, but she died to get there, and still got beat by Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, who haven't produced exceptional albums since the early 1970s (OK, I did rather like Corea's 2014 Trilogy).

New records rated this week:

  • 2 Chainz: Pretty Girls Like Trap Music (2017, Def Jam): [r]: B+(*)
  • Nicole Atkins: Goodnight Rhonda Lee (2017, Single Lock): [r]: B
  • Big Thief: Capacity (2017, Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(**)
  • Corey Christiansen: Dusk (2015 [2017], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Anat Cohen Tentet: Happy Song (2016 [2017], Anzic): [r]: B+(***)
  • Richie Cole: Latin Lover (2017, RCP): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Miley Cyrus: Younger Now (2017, RCA): [r]: B+(*)
  • ExpEAR & Drew Gress: Vesper (2015 [2017], Kopasetic): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Lee Gamble: Mnestic Pressure (2017, Hyperdub): [r]: B+(*)
  • Howe Gelb: Future Standards (2016 [2017], Fire): [r]: B+(*)
  • Tee Grizzley: My Moment (2017, 300/Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
  • Kelela: Take Me Apart (2017, Warp): [r]: B+(**)
  • The Billy Lester Trio: Italy 2016 (2016 [2017], Ultra Sound): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Delfeayo Marsalis: Kalamazoo (2015 [2017], Troubadour Jass): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Roy McGrath: Remembranzas (2017, JL Music): [cd]: B
  • Lisa Mezzacappa: Glorious Ravage (2017, New World): [cd]: B+(*)
  • The National: Sleep Well Beast (2017, 4AD): [r]: B+(***)
  • Diana Panton: Solstice/Equinox (2017, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Pere Ubu: 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo (2017, Cherry Red): [r]: A-
  • Pink: Beautiful Trauma (2017, RCA): [r]: B+(**)
  • Lee Ranaldo: Electric Trim (2017, Mute): [r]: B+(*)
  • Rostam: Half-Light (2017, Nonesuch): [r]: B+(**)
  • Romeo Santos: Golden (2017, Sony Latin): [r]: B+(*)
  • Sheer Mag: Need to Feel Your Love (2017, Static Shock): [r]: B+(**)
  • Idit Shner: 9 Short Stories (2017, OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
  • St. Vincent: Masseduction (2017, Loma Vista): [r]: A-
  • Gabriele Tranchina: Of Sailing Ships and the Stars in Your Eyes (2017, Rainchant Eclectic): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Mark Wingfield/Markus Reuter/Asaf Sirkis: Lighthouse (2016 [2017], Moonjune): [cd]: B
  • Lee Ann Womack: The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone (2017, ATO): [r]: B+(**)
  • Charlie Worsham: Beginning of Things (2017, Warner Bros. Nashville): [r]: B

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

  • Motörhead: Under Cover (1992-2014 [2017], Silver Lining Music): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last two weeks (sorry I forgot to post last week):

  • Barry Altschul's 3Dom Factor: Live in Krakow (Not Two)
  • Carn Davidson 9: Murphy (self-released)
  • François Carrier/Michel Lambert: Out of Silence (FMR)
  • Ori Dagan: Nathaniel: A Tribute to Nat King Cole (Scat Cat)
  • David's Angels: Traces (Kopasetic)
  • Die Enttäuschung: Lavaman (Intakt)
  • Brad Garton/Dave Soldier: The Brainwave Music Project (Mulatta): January 5
  • Jari Haapalainen Trio: Fusion Nation (Moserobie)
  • Alexander Hawkins-Elaine Mitchener Quartet: Uproot (Intakt)
  • Nick MacLean Quartet: Rites of Ascension (Browntasaurus)
  • Negative Press Project: Eternal Life: Jeff Buckley Songs and Sounds (Ridgeway)
  • Jen Shyu: Song of Silver Geese (Pi)
  • The United States Air Force Band Airmen of Note: Veterans of Jazz (self-released)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Matt Taibbi is a dedicated, insightful journalist and a terrific writer, but ever since the 2016 campaign started he's repeatedly gotten tripped up by having to meet advance deadlines for Rolling Stone that have left many of his pieces dated on arrival. His latest is especially unfortunate: A Year After Trump's Election, Nothing Has Changed. The factoid he chose to build his article around was a recent poll arguing that 12 months later, Trump would probably still win the 2016 election. The assumption is that Trump is still running against Hillary Clinton. Trump, of course, has been in the news every day since the election, and is already raising money for 2020 and making rally appearances in active campaigning mode. Aside from her self-serving, self-rationalizing book tour Clinton has largely dropped out of site, conceding she's not running again, and not scoring any points attacking Trump -- not that Trump's stopped attacking her, most recently accusing her of being the real "Russia colluder." Still, the poll in question shows Trump and Clinton in a dead 40-40 tie -- i.e., both candidates are doing worse than they did one year ago, but in the interest of sensationalism, the author gives Trump the tiebreaker ("Given that Trump overperformed in key, blue-leaning swing states, that means he'd probably have won again.")

As it happens, Taibbi's article was written before and appeared after the 2017 elections where Democrats swept two gubernatorial races (in VA and NJ), and picked up fairly dramatic gains in down-ballot elections all over the country. For details, start with FiveThirtyEight's What Went Down on Election Night 2017. Nate Silver explains further:

Democrats had a really good night on Tuesday, easily claiming the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, flipping control of the Washington state Senate and possibly also the Virginia House of Delegates, passing a ballot measure in Maine that will expand Medicaid in the state, winning a variety of mayoral elections around the country, and gaining control of key county executive seats in suburban New York.

They also got pretty much exactly the results you'd expect when opposing a Republican president with a 38 percent approval rating.

That's not to downplay Democrats' accomplishments. Democrats' results were consistent enough, and their margins were large enough, that Tuesday's elections had a wave-like feel. That includes how they performed in Virginia, where Ralph Northam won by considerably more than polls projected. When almost all the toss-up races go a certain way, and when the party winning those toss-up races also accomplishes certain things that were thought to be extreme long shots (such as possibly winning the Virginia House of Delegates), it's almost certainly a reflection of the national environment.

Silver also notes:

  • President Trump's approval rating is only 37.6 percent.
  • Democrats lead by approximately 10 points on the generic Congressional ballot.
  • Republican incumbents are retiring at a rapid pace; there were two retirements (from New Jersey Rep. Frank LoBiondo and Texas Rep. Ted Poe) on Tuesday alone.
  • Democrats are recruiting astonishing numbers of candidates for Congress.
  • Democrats have performed well overall in special elections to the U.S. Congress, relative to the partisanship of those districts; they've also performed well in special elections to state legislatures.
  • The opposition party almost always gains ground at midterm elections. This is one of the most durable empirical rules of American politics.

The thing I find most striking about these election results is the unity Democrats showed. Mainstream Democrats still bitch about lefties who defected to Ralph Nader in 2000, but as someone who remembers how mainstream Democrats sandbagged McGovern in 1972 (and who's read about how Bryan was repeatedly voted down after 1896), I've long been more concerned about how "centrists" might break if anyone on the left wins the Democratic Party nomination. Yet last week saw a remarkably diverse group of Democrats triumphant. The lesson I take away from the results is that most voters have come to realize is that the problem isn't just Trump and some of his ilk but the whole Republican Party, and that the only hope people have is to unite behind the Democrats, regardless of whether they zig left or zag right. Especially after last week's flap over Donna Brazile's book Hacks, that's good news.

It's also news that belies Taibbi's main thesis: not so much that nothing has changed in the year since Trump's shocking election win as the charge that we're still responding as stupidly to Trump as we did during the campaign. On the former, the administration's worker bees have torn up thousands of pages of regulations meant to protect us from predatory business, major law enforcement organizations have been reoriented to persecute immigrants while ignoring civil rights and antitrust, and the judiciary is being stock with fresh right-wingers. The full brunt of those changes may not have sunk in -- they certainly haven't hit all their intended victims yet -- but even if you fail to appreciate the threats these changes have a way of becoming tangible very suddenly. And given how Republican health care proposals polled down around 20%, you may need to rethink your assumptions about how dumb and gullible the American people are.

Republican proposals on "tax reform" are polling little better than their effort to wreck health care. This polling is helping to stall the agenda, but Republicans in Congress are so ideological, and so beholden to their sponsors, that most are willing to buck and polls and follow their orders. What we've needed all year has been for elections to show Republicans that their choices have consequences, and hopefully that's started to happen now.

But whereas the first half of Taibbi's article can be blamed on bad timing, the second half winds up being even more annoying:

Despising Trump and his followers is easy. What's hard is imagining how we put Humpty Dumpty together again. This country is broken. It is devastated by hate and distrust. What is needed is a massive effort at national reconciliation. It will have to be inspired, delicate and ingenious to work. Someone needs to come up with a positive vision for the entire country, one that is more about love and community than blame.

That will probably mean abandoning the impulse to continually litigate the question of who is worse, Republicans or Democrats. . . . The people running the Democratic Party are opportunists and hacks, and for as long as the despicable and easily hated Trump is president, that is what these dopes will focus on, not realizing that most of the country is crying out for something different.

Well, I'm as eager as the next guy for a high-minded conversation about common problems and reasonable solutions, but that's not what politics is about these days (and probably never was). But let's face it, the immediate problem is that one side's totally unprincipled and totally unreasonable, and the only way past that is to beat that side down so severely no one ever dares utter "trickle down" again. They need to get beat down as bad as the Nazis in WWII -- so bad the stink of collaboration much less membership takes generations to wash off. Then maybe we can pick up the pieces.

As for the "hacks and opportunists," sure they are, but they're approachable in ways the Republicans simply aren't. I've seen good people, hard-working activists, come into Wichita for years and urge us to go talk to our Congressman, as if the person in that office (remember, we're talking about Todd Tiahrt, Mike Pompeo, and Ron Estes) was merely misinformed but fundamentally reasonable. I've met plenty of hacks and opportunists who are at least approachable, but not these guys. They've sold their souls, and they're never coming back.

By the way, Thomas Frank's article on the Trump Day anniversary runs into pretty much the same problem: We're still aghast at Donald Trump -- but what good has that done? Well, the American political system doesn't give you a lot of latitude to repair a botched election -- everyone in office has fixed terms, the option of signing recall petitions is very limited (and doesn't apply to Trump), impeachment is virtually impossible without massive Republican defections -- so sometimes being constantly aghast is all one can do. And while the last three US presidents had their share of intractably obsessive opponents, they pale to the numbers of people constantly on Trump's case. Frank wants to minimize our effect, not least because he wants us to consider bigger, wider, deeper, older faults that Trump makes worse but isn't uniquely responsible for.

Trump's sins are continuous with the last 50 years of our history. His bigotry and racist dog-whistling? Conservatives have been doing that since forever. His vain obsession with ratings, his strutting braggadocio? Welcome to the land of Hollywood and pro wrestling.

His tweeting? The technology is new, but the urge to evade the mainstream media is not. His outreach to working-class voters? His hatred of the press? He lifts those straight from his hero Richard Nixon. His combination of populist style with enrich-the-rich policies? Republicans have been following that recipe since the days of Ronald Reagan. His "wrecking crew" approach to government, which made the cover of Time magazine last week? I myself made the same observation, under the same title, about the administration of George W Bush.

The trends Trump personifies are going to destroy this country one of these days. They've already done a hell of a job on the middle class.

But declaring it all so ghastly isn't going to halt these trends or remove the reprobate from the White House. Waving a piece of paper covered with mean words in Trump's face won't make him retreat to his tower in New York. To make him do that you must understand where he comes from, how he operates, why his supporters like him, and how we might coax a few of them away.

The parade of the aghast will have none of that. Strategy is not the goal; a horror-high is. And so its practitioners routinely rail against Trump's supporters along with Trump himself, imagining themselves beleaguered by a country they no longer understand nor particularly like.

As an engineer, I've long related to the idea that you have to understand something to change it -- at least to change it in a deliberate and viable way -- but politics doesn't seem to work that way. For nearly all of my life, the most powerful political motivator has been disgust. And while that may seem like a recent bad trend, I pretty clearly remember characters like Dick Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace. So it really doesn't bother me when people are simply aghast at Trump without understanding the fine points. Sure, at some point we need to get a better idea of what to do, but all the present situation demands is resistance, and as people line up to defend and demean Trump, those connections Frank wants us to learn are getting made.

My tweet for the day:

Wasn't #VeteransDay originally Armistice Day (a celebration of peace at the end of an unprecedentedly horrific war)? I guess when the US went to a permanent war footing, they had to rename it.

Some scattered links this week:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Music Week

Music: Current count 28842 [28813] rated (+29), 396 [405] unrated (-9).

After many short weeks, back to semi-normal last week, a swing that would have been even more pronounced had I not gotten distracted over the weekend: cooked a fairly large dinner on Saturday, had guests and a birthday party to attend on Sunday. Monday, too, has largely been chewed up by technical problems, so I'm getting a late start on this post, and not including Monday's unpacking.

The short and scattered nature of yesterday's Weekend Roundup was one consequence of my weekend distractions. One thing I did there was to cite Donna Brazile's controversial Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC, as well as a rejoinder by Josh Marshall, before moving on to my own concerns. Shortly after I posted, I noticed Charles Pierce's own anti-Brazile rant: The Democratic Party Is Finding a Way to F*ck This Up, which starts off with this hideous preface:

I will go to my grave convinced that the 2016 Democratic primary process was the single most depressing political event I ever witnessed. . . . But the Democratic nominating circus was an endless slog that veered between a coronation and a smug, self-righteous quasi-insurgency that quickly developed a paranoid streak a mile wide. This set a perfect stage for the nearly omnipresent Russian ratfcking. The ratfckers didn't have to create divisions to exploit, they already were there.

I mean, sure, it was more depressing than 2008, when Hillary Clinton was denied the Democratic Party nomination and therefore was unable to blow the general election. But even though I was delighted with Obama's primary successes in 2008, Bernie Sanders' campaign was unprecedented, and his near-success even more thrilling. The Republican primaries had more faces, and some stylistic variation, but there ultimately wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the candidates. But there were real, significant differences between Sanders and Clinton, and they were things that mattered -- so how could one not get swept up in the opportunity?

I don't know, but I have a hypothesis, based on a few people I know who I think of as having more/less lefty (but pro-Hillary) politics and extrapolating to more establishment-oriented liberals. It involves two factors: one is a cynical belief that substantial progressive change is not possible; the other is blind faith in liberal meritocracy, which has anointed the long line of Democratic Party leaders from aristocrats like the Roosevelts and Kennedys to accommodating strivers like the Clintons and Obama. That cynicism lets such people dismiss Bernie with whatever epithet they fancy (for Pierce, "smug, self-righteous") even though there is no evidence for their assertions, while always giving Hillary the benefit of any doubts, even though her own track record is full of compromises and betrayals. Such people are very hurt, probably more by Hillary's loss than by Trump's victory, because the former calls into question their belief in American exceptionalism, whereas the latter mostly hurts other people.

Russia is their perfect villain, a way of blaming their failure not on other Americans but on some external evil. Still, I recently read David Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, and I don't recall a single Russian operative in the entire book. The "ratfuckers" -- the people conspiring to engineer districts and electorates to their partisan advantage -- are Republicans, and they've been very effective at it. I don't doubt that Russia helped them out here and there, but the game plan was hatched in Republican circles, and they were the ones who mostly carried it out. Blaming Russia may make some Democrats feel better about themselves, but it mostly means they're continuing to turn a blind eye to their real enemies. And in their failure to recognize real enemies, they've not only been ineffective at defending against them -- they've lost credibility among the very people who suffer Republican rule the worst.

Pierce goes on to attack "SPW" ("Senator Professor Warren"), and to set up scapegoating the left if the Democrat Ralph Northam loses the Virginia gubernatorial race. He's right that the Democrats have various problems achieving unity, even in the face of the most obviously horrid Republicans in history, but it beats me how he thinks he's contributing to solidarity by trashing Bernie.

Since I posted, I've run across two more pieces on the Brazile Affair: Glenn Greenwald: Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False -- three attacking Brazile, two of those repeated by Pierce -- and Matt Taibbi: Why Donna Brazile's Story Matters -- But Not for the Reason You Might Think. The lesson Taibbi draws from the story is how the Clinton camp distrusted democracy -- they sought to rig the primaries not because they couldn't win otherwise, but because they didn't think they should have to submit to the voters.

New records rated this week:

  • Thomas Anderson: My Songs Are the House I Live In (2017, Out There): [r]: A-
  • Big Thief: Masterpiece (2016, Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(*)
  • Robt Sarazin Blake: Recitative (2017, Same Room, 2CD): [r]: A-
  • Mihály Borbély Quartet: Be by Me Tonight/Gyere Hozzám Estére (2016, BMC): [r]: B+(**)
  • Peter Brötzmann/Steve Swell/Paal Nilssen-Love: Live in Tel Aviv (2016 [2017], Not Two): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Ernesto Cervini's Turboprop: Rev (2013-16 [2017], Anzic): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Cowboys and Frenchmen: Bluer Than You Think (2017, Outside In Music): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Marc Devine Trio: Inspiration (2017, ITI): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Jeff Dingler: In Transit (2017, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Matthieu Donarier/Santiago Quintans: Sun Dome (2017, Clean Feed): [r]: B-
  • Sinne Eeg: Dreams (2017, ArtistShare): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Satoko Fujii Quartet: Live at Jazz Room Cortez (2016 [2017], Cortez Sound): [cd]: B
  • Dre Hocevar: Surface of Inscription (2016 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B-
  • Adam Hopkins: Party Pack Ice (2015 [2017], pfMENTUM, EP): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Jon Langford: Jon Langford's Four Lost Souls (2017, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(***)
  • Large Unit: Fluku (2016 [2017], PNL): [bc]: A-
  • Paal Nilssen-Love/Frode Gjerstad: Nearby Faraway (2016 [2017], PNL): [bc]: B+(***)
  • The Paranoid Style: Underworld USA (2017, Bar/None, EP): [r]: B+(***)
  • Adam Rudolph: Morphic Resonances (2017, M.O.D. Technologies): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Samo Salamon/Szilárd Mezei/Achille Succi: Planets of Kei: Free Sessions Vol. 1 (2016 [2017], Not Two): [cd]: B+(***)
  • A. Savage: Thawing Dawn (2017, Dull Tools): [r]: B+(*)
  • Slow Is Possible: Moonwatchers (2016 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
  • Trio S: Somewhere Glimmer (2017, Zitherine): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Deanna Witkowski: Makes the Heart to Sing: Jazz Hymns (2017, Tilapia): [cd]: B
  • Mark Zaleski Band: Days, Months, Years (2016 [2017], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

  • Mihály Borbély Quartet: Hungarian Jazz Rhapsody (2014, BMC): [r]: B+(***)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Again, a very late start, so this is very catch-as-catch-can.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that drove politics this week: I moved Yglesias' weekly summaries up top a couple weeks ago as I've found lately that he's become a pretty good chronicler of the Trump travesty, which especially as I've started to tune out myself makes for a useful intro to whatever happened recently. This week's stories: We finally saw the GOP's tax bill; Mueller revealed indictments -- and a guilty plea; Jeff Sessions is back in the spotlight: specifically, for Russia stuff, going back to his false testimony during his confirmation hearings; and, Jerome Powell will be the next Federal Reserve chair. Other Yglesias pieces:

    • Republicans should admit to themselves they mostly don't want big change: "It's a cranky old person party, not a policy visionary party."

    • The Republican tax plan, in one chart:

      Big-picture summary is that over the first 10 years, the bill has:

      • $1 trillion net tax cut for business owners
      • $172 billion tax cut for people who inherit multi-million dollar estates
      • $300 billion net tax cut for individuals.

    • Republicans changed their minds and now want to cut the mortgage deduction.

    • Jerome Powell, President Trump's reported choice to head the Federal Reserve, explained: "Good news for people who like lax bank regulation."

    • Republicans promised a tax reform bill by today. Here's why they don't have one: November 1. "Nobody knew taxes were so complicated."

    • Booker calls on antitrust regulators to start paying attention to workers. Key word to add to your vocabulary is "monopsony":

      Antitrust law normally comes up in the context of monopoly power, the prospect that a company will control such a large share of output that it can raise prices or reduce quality. But it also applies to situations of monopsony power, in which market concentration offers undue leverage over workers or upstream suppliers. Antitrust regulators have consistently recognized the importance of the monopsony issue when it comes to cartels between separate companies -- suing a number of big Silicon Valley companies that had reached an illegal "no poaching" agreement to depress engineers' wages -- but has not in recent years appeared to recognize such concerns when conducting merger review. . . .

      Booker's letter starts with a premise that's now become common in progressive circles: that the American economy is becoming broadly more concentrated across a range of sectors. . . . At the same time, corporate profits as a share of the overall economy are at an unusually high level, the stock market is booming, and wage growth has been incredibly restrained even as the economy has recovered from the depths of the Great Recession.

    • Congressional Republicans are helping Trump with a big cover-up: Several things here, including:

      George W. Bush put his personal wealth in a blind trust. Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm. Barack Obama held all his assets in simple diversified index funds. There is a way in which a modern president with a modicum of integrity conducts himself, and Trump has refused to do it.

      Rather than liquidate his assets and put the proceeds in a trust, Trump has simply turned over day-to-day management of the family business to his two older sons -- sons who continue to serve as surrogates and part of his political operation, even while his oldest daughter and her husband serve as top White House aides. Ivanka Trump is reeling in Chinese trademarks while Eric and Donald Jr. do real estate deals in India. Trump is billing the Secret Service six figures for the privilege of renting golf carts at his golf courses. People with interests before the government can -- and do -- pay direct cash bribes to the president by joining his Mar-a-Lago club or holding events at his hotel in Washington, DC. . . .

      There's an interesting lesson in the fact that Paul Manafort is being brought down by criminal money laundering and tax evasion charges that are at best tangentially related to his work for Trump's campaign -- there's a lot of white-collar crime happening in America that people are getting away with. . . .

      Manafort's criminal misconduct only came to light because he happened to have stumbled into massive political scandal that put his conduct under the microscope in a way that most rich criminals avoid.

      By the same token, over the years Trump has been repeatedly fined for breaking federal money laundering rules, been paid millions in hush money to settle civil fraud claims, been caught breaking New Jersey casino law, been caught violating the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, been caught violating federal securities law, been caught violating New York nonprofit law, and -- of course -- been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault.

      Yet throughout this storied history of lawbreaking, Trump has never faced a major criminal charge. He gets caught, he pays a civil penalty, and he keeps on being a rich guy who enjoys rich-guy impunity -- just like Manafort.

    • Paul Ryan won't let indictments stop him from cutting taxes on the rich.

    • Trump's response to indictments: "why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????"

    • The question that matters now: what will Republicans do when Trump fires Mueller? "Probably nothing."

  • Tom Engelhardt: Doing Bin Laden's Bidding: I read (or maybe misread) a turn of phrase today that describes America's "War on Terror" aptly: "flailing forward." I always thought freedom meant you can choose what to do, and therefore free people can refuse to do stupid things just because they get taunted. Maybe Bin Laden didn't appreciate how much destruction the US would wreak when he challenged the insecure egos of American power, but he was certainly baiting the giant to blunder into "the graveyard of empires" -- as Afghanistan was known even before 2001.

    Looking back, 16 years later, it's extraordinary how September 11, 2001, would set the pattern for everything that followed. Each further goading act, from Afghanistan to Libya, San Bernardino to Orlando, Iraq to Niger, each further humiliation would trigger yet more of the same behavior in Washington. After all, so many people and institutions -- above all, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security state -- came to have a vested interest in Osama bin Laden's version of our world. . . .

    After all, Osama bin Laden managed to involve the United States in 16 years of fruitless wars, most now "generational" conflicts with no end in sight, which would only encourage the creation and spread of terror groups, the disintegration of order across significant parts of the planet, and the displacement of whole populations in staggering numbers. At the same time, he helped turn twenty-first-century Washington into a war machine of the first order that ate the rest of the government for lunch. He gave the national security state the means -- the excuse, if you will -- to rise to a kind of power, prominence, and funding that might otherwise have been inconceivable. In the process -- undoubtedly fulfilling his wildest dreams -- he helped speed up the decline of the very country that, since the Cold War ended, had been plugging itself as the greatest ever.

    That, of course, is old news. The new news here concerns Niger, where four US special forces soldiers were recently killed despite hardly anyone in America realizing they were there. What's happened since is a recapitulation of the Afghanistan-Iraq-Libya disaster:

    And suddenly U.S. Africa Command was highlighting its desire for more money from Congress; the military was moving to arm its Reaper drones in Niger with Hellfire missiles for future counterterrorism operations; and Secretary of Defense Mattis was assuring senators privately that the military would "expand" its "counterterrorism focus" in Africa. The military began to prepare to deploy Hellfire Missile-armed Reaper drones to Niger. "The war is morphing," Graham insisted. "You're going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you're going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you're going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field."

    Rumors were soon floating around that, as the Washington Post reported, the administration might "loosen restrictions on the U.S. military's ability to use lethal force in Niger" (as it already had done in the Trump era in places like Syria and Yemen). And so it expectably went, as events in Niger proceeded from utter obscurity to the near-apocalyptic, while -- despite the strangeness of the Trumpian moment -- the responses came in exactly as anyone reviewing the last 16 years might have imagined they would.

    All of this will predictably make things in central Africa worse, not better, leading to . . . well, more than a decade and a half after 9/11, you know just as well as I do where it's leading. And there are remarkably few brakes on the situation, especially with three generals of our losing wars ruling the roost in Washington and Donald Trump now lashed to the mast of his chief of staff.

    Our resident expert on US Africa Command is Nick Turse, but while this was happening, he was distracted by A Red Scare in the Gray Zone.

  • Juliette Garside: Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth. Also: Jon Swaine/Ed Pilkington: The wealthy men in Trump's inner circle with links to tax havens.

  • William Greider: What Killed the Democratic Party? Cites a recent report: Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis. This appeared before publication of Donna Brazile: Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC, which details the remarkable extent the Clinton campaign controlled the DNC all through the primary season. Brazile's revelations are further monetized in her book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. Josh Marshall attempts to mount a counterattack in Donna Brazile Needs to Back Up Her Self-Serving Claims, insisting that "There's zero advantage to re-litigating the toxic 2016 primaries." Personally, I felt that Hillary Clinton had earned the right to tell her side of the story in What Happened, so I see no further harm in Brazile's Hacks. (I suppose I might draw a line if Debby Wasserman-Schultz manages to find a publisher.) Still, the one thing that keeps bugging me about all of the 2016 Democratic autopsies -- especially the Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign -- is the nagging question: where did all of the money Clinton raised go? And why didn't she use more of it to build up the party she supposedly was the leader of?

  • Mike Konczal: Trump Is Creating a Grifter Economy.

  • German Lopez/Karen Turner: Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting: what we know: "At least 26 people were killed . . . The shooter is also dead following a brief chase." Also: Texas church shooting: suspect named as at least 26 confirmed dead -- as it happened.

  • Noam Maggor: Amazon wants goodies and tax breaks to move its HQ to your city. Say no thanks. I want to underscore that the practice of giving tax breaks and incentives to companies that promise jobs is actually far worse than a zero-sum "race to the bottom." For evidence specific to Amazon, look no further than the perks they received to open a distribution center in Coffeyville, KS. Then try to find it. They've already closed it, moving on to greener pastures.

  • Mike McIntire/Sasha Chavkin/Martha M Hamilton: Commerce Secretary's Offshore Ties to Putin 'Cronies'. Also, Jesse Drucker: Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire's Twitter and Facebook Investments.

  • Simon Tisdall: Trump's Asia tour will expose his craving for the approval of despots: Not just despots. I got stuck watching Japan's Prime Minister blowing smoke up Trump's ass in their first press appearance. Trump's vanity clearly hasn't escaped the notice of world leaders.

  • Alex Ward: Bowe Bergdahl isn't going to prison. But he is getting a "dishonorable discharge" -- you know, like the shooter in Texas got. Among those who thought the sentence too lenient:

    Donald Trump made it a campaign issue in 2016, calling Bergdahl a "traitor," even suggesting that he should be executed. About an hour after the ruling by a military judge, Trump tweeted his thoughts: "The decision on Sergeant Bergdahl is a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military."

    Of course, Bergdahl isn't the only soldier Trump has disparaged for "getting captured."

  • Sarah Wildman: Saudi Arabia announces arrest of billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Without specifically commenting on Prince Alwaleed, Trump evidently approves: Mark Landler: Trump Tells Saudi King That He Supports Modernization Drive. Also by Wildman: Mueller has enough evidence to charge Michael Flynn.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Streamnotes (October 2017)

Shortest monthly roll-up of Streamnotes this year, by quite a large margin (75 vs. 111 in May; high was 156 in January). Probably the shortest in several years. I've made my excuses in past Music Week posts, so won't rehash them here.

I will note that the jazz share of the following is relatively high, even by my standards. Until the EOY lists start appearing, I'm don't seem to be noticing much non-jazz. However, the lists should start appearing in late November. Over the last few years, I've threatened to stop compiling them, but at the moment I'm actually looking forward to the diversion. Also to sorting out my own Jazz and Non-Jazz EOY lists -- I'll probably make my first stab at that shortly after the first lists appear.

Meanwhile, the year-in-progress list is here. Current grade breakdown (new releases): 107 A- (64 jazz, 43 non-jazz), 121 B+(***), 186 B+(**), 180 B+(*), 78 B, 23 B-, 5 C+, 2 C; (reissues/compilations): 1 A, 8 A- (2 jazz, 7 non-jazz), 12 B+(***), 14 B+(**), 6 B+(*), 3 B, 1 B-, 1 C+. The A-list usually winds up being pretty evenly split between jazz and non-jazz, but always starts with jazz way ahead (about the current ratio). That adds up to 627 records rated in 10 months, so that projects to 815 over 13 months (January is usually devoted to late-breaking (or merely late-noticed) albums from the previous year. Adding a month for January also makes it easy to compare progress this year to last year, as I can compare a straightforward projection to the actual frozen 2016 list as of January 28, 2016. That file listed 1074 records, so by this first crude approximation I'm down about 24% compared to 2016. I'm not surprised that my rate has slowed in 2017, but this is the first time I've tried making a projection, and the drop is a bit more than I expected.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Napster (formerly Rhapsody; other sources are noted in brackets). They are snap judgments, usually based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on September 30. Past reviews and more information are available here (10248 records).

Recent Releases

Rez Abbasi: Unfiltered Universe (2016 [2017], Whirlwind): Guitarist, from Pakistan, group expands on a group saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa organized (with Abbasi and percussionist Dan Weiss, the Indo-Pak Coalition -- adding Vijay Iyer on piano, plus cello and bass. Main difference is that Abbasi wrote the pieces here, and his postbop stumbles awkwardly in spots. On the other hand, Mahanthappa is terrific throughout. B+(**) [cd]

Tony Allen: The Source (2017, Blue Note): Nigerian drummer, met Fela Kuti in 1964 and anchored his band for the next 15 years. Has recorded a couple dozen albums since going on his own in 1979, but this is the first (following an EP) for a jazz label, and this is very straightforward jazz album, a nonet plus a couple spot guests, occasionally working in a bit of African rhythm but not very often. B+(*)

Banda Magda: Tigre (2017, GroundUP Music): New York-based band built around Greek singer-songwriter Magda Giannikou (also plays accordion and piano). Third group album. Hard to peg, with its Balkan beats and occasional orchestral swirl. B+(*)

Peter Bernstein: Signs LIVE! (2015 [2017], Smoke Sessions, 2CD): Guitarist, strikes me as one of the better examples of the long-dominant Wes Montgomery school, stretches out at great length in this quartet -- although equally featured is pianist Brad Mehldau. Two Monk pieces, the rest originals. With Christian McBride (bass) and Gregory Hutchinson (drums). B+(**)

Blue Note All-Stars: Our Point of View (2017, Blue Note, 2CD): Third time Blue Note has tried this, with its 1996 Blue Note All Stars (no hyphen), 2009 Blue Note 7, and now this one: note, first of all, that none of the three albums share any musicians or producers. Lineup this time: Ambrose Akinmusire, Marcus Strickland, Lionel Loueke, Robert Glasper, Derrick Hodge, Kendrick Scott, plus two legends return for a shot at "Masqualero" (Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock). Aside from a Loueke showcase not far removed from the hard bop the label was built on, so plus ça change, plus c'est le męme chose. B+(**)

Borderlands Trio [Stephan Crump/Kris Davis/Eric McPherson]: Asteroidea (2015 [2017], Intakt): Bass-piano-drums trio, the bassist getting a solo intro to kick things off, elsewhere the pianist playing soft rhythmic figures behind the bass. Fascinating there, even more so when Davis jumps out front, bringing the drums into play. A- [cd]

Bobby Bradford/Hafez Modirzadeh: Live at the Magic Triangle (2016 [2017], NoBusiness): Cornet-tenor sax quartet, Ken Filiano on bass and Royal Hartigan on drums, each contributing a song (or two for Bradford). Loose and free, but doesn't have the spark of Bradford's legendary quartet with John Carter. B+(**) [cdr]

Dee Dee Bridgewater: Memphis . . . Yes, I'm Ready (2017, Okeh): Started as an r&b singer, not making much of a mark with her early Atlantic and Elektra albums (1976-80), well before she moved into jazz (first Verve album in 1993). So this is a throwback to her r&b days, except with better songs -- Memphis-associated, including a couple of Elvis hits. The horn arrangements are stock, the vocal tone a bit darker, so it actually helps when he turns the gospel afterburner on, on "Precious Lord" (of course), even more so on "Try a Little Tenderness." B+(*)

Kyle Bruckmann's Degradient: Dear Everyone (2017, Not Two, 2CD): Plays oboe, English horn, electronics, with a dozen-plus albums since 2001. First with this group, backed by Aram Shelton (alto sax, clarinet, bass clarinet), electric bass and percussion, with a text by Matt Shears rendered by 99 readers. The spoken word is scattered about, accenting rather than breaking up the dense music. B+(**)

Cortex: Avant-Garde Party Music (2017, Clean Feed): Norwegian two-horn quartet -- Thomas Johanson (trumpet), Kristoffer Alberts (saxes), Ola Hřyer (bass), Gard Nilssen (drums) -- first studio album after two terrific live ones. One figures they haven't outgrown their taste for high-energy rock even though their chops and instruments have opened up avant-jazz options. B+(***)

Cowboys and Frenchmen: Bluer Than You Think (2017, Outside In Music): Co-led by alto saxophonists Owen Broder and Ethan Helm, who split writing chores 3-4 -- one additional track by Chris Misch-Bloxdorf, who is not in the quintet (piano, bass, drums), and produced by Ryan Truesdell, who prefers delirious unity to conflict. B+(*) [cd]

Corey Dennison Band: Night After Night (2017, Delmark): Bluesman, plays guitar and sings, born white in Chattanooga, "immediately felt a strong connection to Soul music," moved to Chicago and fit right in. First half is perfectly respectable Chicago blues, second nudges its way into respectful soul, losing a step but relishing it. B+(***) [cd]

Mark Dresser: Modicana (2016-17 [2017], NoBusiness): Bassist, major avant-garde figure including a long stretch in Anthony Braxton's legendary quartet, 35+ records as leader (or 40+ if you could Arcado String Trio), many more side credits. Goes solo here, always a tough sell, but keeps it interesting. B+(**) [cdr]

Open Mike Eagle: Brick Body Kids Still Daydream (2017, Mello Music Group): Underground rapper, real name Mike Eagle, one half of Run the Jewels but has kept a solo career going steady since 2010. B+(**)

Harris Eisenstadt/Mivos Quartet: Whatever Will Happen That Will Also Be (2015 [2017], NoBusiness): Actually, just the Canadian percussionist's composition -- four movements of the title piece -- performed by a conventional string quartet: two violins (Josh Modney and Olivia De Prato), viola (Victor Lowrie), and cello (Mariel Roberts). Interesting music, but I'm not much of a fan of the form/sound. B+(*) [cdr]

Ellery Eskelin: Trio Willisau Live (2015 [2016], Hatology): Tenor saxophonist, with Gary Versace (organ) and Gerry Hemingway (drums). Some remarkable sax and cliché-free organ. A-

Bob Ferrel: Bob Ferrel's Jazztopian Dream (2016 [2017], Bob Ferrel Music): Trombonist, side credits include Southside Johnny & the Jukes (1983-86) and Michael Treni Big Band (2011-13), has the run of a fairly large band here, featuring vocalist Dwight West on four tracks, including a "Yardbird Suite" I find inadvertently funny, and one from Ferrell Sanders that notes "whales out in the sea need freedom." More swing than bop, and lots of trombone. B+(*) [cd]

Four Tet: New Energy (2017, Text): Kieran Hebden has done most of his laptronica work under this alias since 1999, more than a dozen albums, most quite enjoyable. Seems like there's more guitar than usual here, but otherwise little stands out. B+(**)

Ghost Train Orchestra: Book of Rhapsodies Vol II (2012-17 [2017], Accurate): Trumpet player Brian Carpenter's Brooklyn-based large band, fourth album, two modern arrangements of hot 1920s jazz, the Rhapsodies sets featuring chamber jazz from the 1930s. This one takes an odd turn by adding two choirs, one of adults, one of children. Looks like the latter was dubbed over older recordings, and I can't say as I approve (although the music is lovely). B+(*) [cd]

Yedo Gibson/Hernâni Faustino/Vasco Trilla: Chain (2016 [2017], NoBusiness): Baritone/soprano saxophonist from Brazil, first album as leader, recorded in Lisbon where he picked up the bassist (best known for RED Trio) and drummer (actually Spanish -- has appeared on ten or so avant albums since 2015). Free jazz tension and strife, spending a fair amount of time grumbling in the basement. B+(**) [cd]

Gordon Grdina Quartet: Inroads (2017, Songlines): Guitarist, also plays oud, based in Vancouver, has put together an impressive string of records since 2006. No bassist here, so he tends to melt into that role here, especially as his stars -- Oscar Noriega (alto sax/clarinets) and Russ Lossing (piano/Rhodes) -- bull their way to the front. With Satoshi Takeishi on drums. B+(***) [cd]

Ross Hammond + Jon Bafus: Masonic Lawn (2016 [2017], Prescott): Guitar-drums duo, Hammond also credited with resonator, 12-string resonator, and lap steel. Draws inspiration from Americana, but I hear more Chuck Berry than Bill Frisell. B+(***)

Hans Hassler: Wie Die Zeit Hinter Mir Her (2015 [2017], Intakt): Swiss accordion player, in his 70s, third album since 2008 for the label. Starts routine, but picks up speed and interest. B+(*) [cd]

Dylan Hicks: Ad Out (2017, Soft Launch): Singer-songwriter, based in Minneapolis, albums go back to 1996, also has a novel. Christgau praised this but described him as "logocentric" -- presumably why I didn't readily warm to him, although second time around I did notice occasional turns of phrase. B+(**)

Steve Hobbs: Tribute to Bobby (2016 [2018], Challenge): Plays marimba and vibraphone, has a record from 1993, couple more since. Speaks here of his quartet with Bill McConnell, Peter Washington (also on the 1993 record), and John Riley, but there's also a saxophonist in play, a good one, Adam Kolker. "Bobby" is presumably Hutcherson, though the only non-originals are by Dylan and Rodgers & Hart. Three guest vocals almost spoil the groove. B+(*) [cd]

Dylan Jack Quartet: Diagrams (2017, Creative Nation Music): Drummer, has a previous duo album with bassist Tony Leva, expanding that here by adding Tod Brunel on clarinets/soprano sax and Eric Hofbauer on guitar -- the part I noticed first. All originals by Jack, stretched out nicely with increasingly strong clarinet. B+(***) [cd]

Ahmad Jamal: Marseille (2016 [2017], Jazz Village): Pianist, first albums came out in early 1950s, still has his fine touch at 86. Quartet with James Cammack (bass), Herlin Riley (drums), and Manolo Badrena (percussion), with three takes of the title song, one instrumental, the others with vocals (Abd Al Malik and Mina Agossi). B+(**)

Danny Janklow: Elevation (2015 [2017], Outside In Music): Alto saxophonist, also plays alto flute, first album, has some side credits with John Beasley and José James. Personnel split here at piano and bass, with Jonathan Pinson on drums and Nick Mancini on vibes for 6/10 cuts. Bright, upbeat postbop, ending in a Michael Mayo vocal. B [cd]

Piere Kwenders: Makanda at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time (2017, Bonsound): Alias for José Louis Modabi, born in Kinshasa, based in Canada. Has a sort of hybridized sound that strays far from the Congo without landing anywhere obvious -- perhaps some future lullaby chant. B+(*)

Andrew Lamb/Warren Smith/Arkadijus Gotesmanas: The Sea of Modicum (2016 [2017], NoBusiness): Tenor saxophonist from North Carolina, free and rough, has a fairly short discography back at least to 1995, including a duo with percussionist Smith as The Dogon Duo. Gotesmanas is a second percussionist, not that either make much of an impression here -- Lamb strikes me as rather subdued as well. B+(*) [cdr]

Lost Bayou Ramblers: Kalenda (2017, Rice Pump): Cajun group, formed in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1999 by brothers Louis and Andre Michot, with ten albums. Starts out with a stomp, the percussion noisier than expected, the accordion louder, the vocals shriller, all of which stands out in a genre where things tend to blend together. A-

Rob Luft: Riser (2017, Edition): Guitarist, from London, 23, first album, quintet with Joe Wright on tenor sax, Joe Webb on organ/piano/harmonium, plus bass and drums -- the Hammond a little cheesy, but sometimes the sax rises up. B

Roberto Magris Sextet: Live in Miami @ the WDNA Jazz Gallery (2016 [2017], JMood): Italian pianist, has gone out of his way to send me records so I've heard more than Discogs lists. Vigorous postbop with plenty of Latin tinge, as much in the horns -- Brian Lynch on trumpet and Jonathan Gomez on tenor sax -- as in Murph Aucamp's congas. B+(***) [cd]

Rudresh Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition: Agrima (2017, self-released): The alto saxophonist represents India (he was actually born in Italy, but his parents had previously become US citizens, so his Indian heritage is something he's picked up over the years). Guitarist Rez Abbasi was born in Pakistan, but has been an American nearly as long. The third member is drummer Dan Weiss, from Tenafly, NJ, who also plays tabla, offering the most authentic Indo-Pak spicing, although the aromas whiff in and out, and Mahanthappa's sax is as fluid as ever. A- [cdr]

Alma Micic: That Old Feeling (2017, Whaling City Sound): Serbian-born vocalist, sang with the Radio Belgrade Big Band before moving to New York. Fourth album, six delectable standards plus one original ("Ne Zaboravi Me") and a Russian/Romany folk song. Backed by guitarist Rale Micic plus bass and drums. B+(**) [cd]

Matt Mitchell: A Pouting Grimace (2017, Pi): Pianist, also plays "Prophet 6" (a 6-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer) and electronics. Has a couple previous albums, and has distinguished himself with side credits. Runs the gamut here from solo electronics pieces to a 12-piece orchestra conducted by Tyshawn Sorey. B+(**) [cd]

Nicole Mitchell and Haki Madhubuti: Liberation Narratives (2016-17 [2017], Black Earth Music): Flute player, still calls her band Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, but that name gives way on cover and spine for spoken word artist Madhubuti, whose poetry spans the gamut of black American experience. Deep, and the band keeps it percolating, with Pharez Whitted on trumpet, a violin-violin-cello-bass string section, drums plus percussion. A- [cd]

Liudas Mockunas: Hydro (2015-16 [2017], NoBusiness): Lithuanian saxophonist, solo here, credited with "clarinet, percussion, water prepared soprano, soprano and tenor saxophone," on a series of short pieces, eleven titled "Hydration Suite," one "Dehydration." B+(**) [cdr]

Paul Moran: Smokin' B3 Vol. 2: Still Smokin' (2017, Prudential): Organ player, based in London, two groups but no session dates. Four originals, covers start with "Come Together" and "One Note Samba" and wind up wondering "Where or When." B- [cd]

Van Morrison: Roll With the Punches (2017, Caroline): Original song count down to five, counting the title song he got help on, none keepers, vs. eleven covers, mostly electric blues -- double hitting on T-Bone Walker and Bo Diddley. All get his standard generic treatment, which means remarkable voice and exquisite timing but with twenty-one artist credits that doesn't necessarily salvage the picks. B

Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Paint (2017, Hot Cup): Bassist Moppa Elliott's group vehicle, named after his first (and only non-solo) album, made their mark as a pianoless quartet of "bebop terrorists," blowing up themes and styles from the '50s and '60s, but they lost trumpet player Peter Evans in 2013, replacing him with pianist Ron Stabowsky, and now saxophonist Jon Irabagon has dropped out, transforming them into a piano trio. Stabowsky plays heroically here, and Elliott's tunes are as vital as ever, that's a big change (actually I mean loss) to process. B+(***) [cd]

Ian O'Beirne's Slowbern Big Band: Dreams of Daedelus (2016 [2017], self-released): Saxophonist, credited here with "reeds" but website pictures him on alto and baritone, and he plays the latter in the Glenn Miller ghost band. Based near Philadelphia (this was recorded in Conshohocken, PA). Big band, has some nice moments. B [cd]

Johnny O'Neal: In the Moment (2017, Smoke Sessions): Pianist, also sings some, originally from Detroit, moved to Birmingham in 1974, which got him into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame but kept him out of the national spotlight. Has a handful of albums since 1982, the first with Art Blakey. Mainstream quintet with Roy Hargrove (trumpet), Grant Stewart (tenor sax), bass and drums. B+(*)

Teri Parker: In the Past (2016 [2017], self-released): Pianist, also electric, based in Toronto. Quartet includes Allison Au on alto sax, which helps elevate her deft rhythmic touch. B+(**) [cd]

Wojciech Pulcyn: Tribute to Charlie Haden (2016 [2017], ForTune): Polish bassist, has a couple dozen side credits since 1996 but this seems to be the first album under his name. Starts with two Ornette Coleman pieces (the first a bass solo), followed by six from Haden and the trad. "Oh, Shenandoah." with a vocal on an Abby Lincoln lyric. B+(**) [bc]

Tom Rainey Obbligato: Float Upstream (2017, Intakt): Drummer, leads a conventionally shaped all-star quintet: Ralph Alessi (trumpet), Ingrid Laubrock (sax), Kris Davis (piano), and Drew Gress (bass). Six standards, one joint credit. Aptly titled: seems to be all about flow, gently even-tempered even working against gravity, remarkable when it succeeds. A- [cd]

Samo Salamon/Szilárd Mezei/Achille Succi: Planets of Kei: Free Sessions Vol. 1 (2016 [2017], Not Two): Acoustic guitar, viola, bass clarinet/alto sax, the acoustic adding a prickly edge to the free string mix, contrasting to the hollow sound of the reeds. B+(***) [cd]

Marta Sánchez Quintet: Danza Imposible (2017, Fresh Sound New Talent): Pianist, born and raised in Madrid (as was the same-named Spanish pop singer, a different person), based in New York, second album, all originals. Quintet features two saxophonists: Roman Filiu (alto) and Jerome Sabbagh (tenor), plus bass and drums. Complex postbop with Spanish flair. B+(**) [cd]

Irčne Schweizer/Joey Baron: Live! (2015 [2017], Intakt): Swiss pianist, one of the greats, in a duo with a notable American drummer -- half-dozen albums as a leader, well over 100 side-credits (John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Tim Berne, John Abercrombie, Enrico Pieranunzi, Laurie Anderson, many more). She has a whole series of piano-drum duos, and most are extraordinary (especially those with Han Bennink and Pierre Favre). So I kept expecting this to take off, but it never quite does. B+(***) [cd]

Wadada Leo Smith: Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk (2014-15 [2017], TUM): Trumpet player, hard to think of a better one over the last decade, so it's hard to say that anything he does is a bad idea. Still, solo trumpet is tough, even when he works with familiar Monk tunes -- not that the five here are easy to peg, especially when mixed in with three of his own. B+(**) [cd]

Wadada Leo Smith: Najwa (2014 [2017], TUM): Group effort, Henry Kaiser making me think of Yo! Miles!, but he's only one of four guitarists, and Smith is looking to take their electric post-funk into places Miles Davis never imagined: all Smith originals, all but the title "love song" namechecking legends: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Billie Holiday. With Bill Laswell on electric bass (and mixing), Pheroan akLaff on drums, and Adam Rudolph on percussion. A- [cd]

Mike Stern: Trip (2017, Heads Up): Guitarist, played with Miles Davis late in the game and has gone on to make quite a few fusion-oriented albums, none (as far as I know) especially great. This was evidently cut after a fall that broke both of his arms, leading him to write new tunes like "Screws" and "Scotch Tape and Glue." Guest horns (Randy Brecker and Wallace Roney on trumpet, Bob Franceschini and Bill Evans on tenor sax) steer some of this toward hot bop, and he's working harder than ever on his guitar. B+(*)

Yosvany Terry/Baptiste Trotignon: Ancestral Memories (2017, Okeh): Quartet, featuring the Cuban-born alto/soprano saxophonist and the French pianist, backed by bassist Yunior Terry (brother) and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts. Terry is well versed in Afro-Cuban jazz -- a long list of side credits indicates that he's the "go to" saxophonist for such -- but such impulses are muted here, leaving a light postbop impression. B+(*)

Charles Thomas: The Colors of a Dream (2017, Sea Tea): Bassist, singing one track (the one standard, "My Foolish Heart"). Looks like this was recorded in three sessions with different bands, but I don't see any dates. At least one of the saxophonists is impressive, but I don't recognize any of them (Marcia Widget, Leon Williams, Joe Cohn). B+(*) [cd]

Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet: Ladilikan (2017, World Circuit): The trio from Mali features singer Hawa Diabaté (daughter of Kassé Mady Diabaté) plus two traditional instruments: balafon and bass n'goni lute. Kronos is a standard string quartet that stradles classical and much else, with 43 records since 1979 -- 1992's Pieces of Africa was, I think, their first with an African group, and one of their best. Much of this strikes me as rather stately (or do I mean starchy?), although there are spots where it starts to click. B+(*)

James Blood Ulmer With the Thing: Baby Talk: Live at the Molde International Jazz Festival 2015 (2015 [2017], Trost): Norwegian power trio -- Mats Gustafsson (baritone/tenor sax), Ingebrigt Hĺker Flaten (bass), Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) -- meets up with the blues/harmolodic guitarist (no vocals this time). Several previous albums matched the Thing with various guitarists, usually resulting in noisy jousts, but Ulmer just does his thing here, and the extra gravel the group hauls just deepens it. Short (4 cuts, 33:26). B+(***)

Kamasi Washington: Harmony of Difference (2017, Young Turks): Tenor saxophonist, I had noticed him with Gerald Wilson, Phil Ranelin, and in Throttle Elevator Music before his 3-CD The Epic became a crossover sensation in 2015. More relevant to his breakthrough was his studio work with Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus -- the latter produced The Epic. This one barely tops EP-length: six tracks, 31:54. Mid-to-large groups -- octets on the first half, 21 musicians (not counting the choir) on the 13:30 "Truth" closer. I've never cared for his added voices, but does blow some mean sax. B+(*)

Wooden Wand: Clipper Ship (2017, Three Lobed): Singer-songwriter James Jackson Toth, has a lot of recordings since 2004, many released as cassettes or CDRs. Fairly pleasant guitar and voice, nothing really got my attention. B

Lizz Wright: Grace (2017, Concord): Jazz singer from Georgia, started out in church, went solo with 2003's Salt. Looks toward Americana here, with Joe Henry producing and suggesting songs, which she handles with steadfast charm. B+(***)

Tal Yahalom/Almog Sharvit/Ben Silashi: Kadawa (2017, self-released): Guitar-bass-drums trio, first album, seems like a bit more with guests on 5 (of 12) tracks, Adam O'Farrill's trumpet on three of those. Everyone writes, but mostly Yahalom, whose guitar has a nice ring. B+(**) [cd]

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Mose Allison: I'm Not Talkin': The Soul Stylings of Mose Allison 1957-1971 (1957-71 [2016], BGP): Piano-playing jazz singer from Mississippi, draws on blues but never lived them, his light voice flippant and bemused, a carefree hipster from the 1950s who never fit into anyone's mainstream. There should be a compilation that sums up his uniqueness. B+(***)

American Epic: The Collection (1916-36 [2017], Third Man/Columbia/Legacy, 5CD): The flagship, a box set tied to a documentary exploring a wide range of pre-WWII American music, country-folk and blues and Latino and Hawaiian and Native American but eschewing pop and jazz -- you get Ma Rainey but no Bessie Smith, Jimmie Rodgers with a cornet not Louis Armstrong. Although the dates spread out a bit, more than 90% fall within 1926-31 -- the two earlier cuts are solo fiddle pieces, the late ones blues so classic they seem older (Leadbelly, Robert Johnson). Closer, that is, to Harry Smith's purist Anthology of American Folk Music than it is to Allen Lowe's broader and deeper 9-CD American Pop. Eleven duplicates from Smith, but I recognize more songs than that as classic, and more still I didn't know at all. Comes in a hardcover book with song-by-song annotation. A [cd]

American Epic: The Best of Blues (1927-36 [2017], Third Man/Columbia/Legacy): Seventeen (or thirteen on vinyl) cuts from the box, only one post-1931 (Robert Johnson). That works out to a little less than half of the blues on the box -- depends on whether you count the box's religious cuts, skipped here. Can't say they're the better half either -- I wouldn't have picked more than half, not that the others aren't worthy of the box. Nor do they work particularly well as an old-time folk blues sampler either (not sure what I'd suggest instead, but short of the Smithsonian's The Blues 4-CD box set, maybe Yazoo's more focused Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson). B+(***)

American Epic: The Best of Country (1927-34 [2017], Third Man/Columbia/Legacy): Same deal, sixteen cuts, only one later than 1930. Given the series' folk focus, these early cuts stay clear of the Smithsonian's canonical Classic Country Music -- only three artists in common, two (Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers) represented here with their first 1928 Bristol sessions. (The third is Uncle Dave Bacon, although comparing the lists I have to wonder how Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett missed here, and Clarence Ashley and Charlie Poole missed there.) So I find this more useful than The Best of Blues, although the integration forced on the box is better still. A-

Chévere (2017, Parma): Cuban classical music, as near as I can figure, names of seven composers on the cover -- I thought I recognized Arthur Gottschalk, only to find I had him confused with Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). Instrumentation is dominated by strings, and most come with vocals (Kat Parra is the one I recognize) -- neither of those are particularly endearing to me. "Chévere" is a Cuban slang term I've seen variously translated as cool, hot dog, and/or fantastic. B [cd]

Roscoe Mitchell: Duets With Anthony Braxton (1976 [2017], Sackville/Delmark): Exactly as advertised, two pioneering AACM saxophonists playing various unqualified reeds and flutes, often more polite than their usual mid-'70s rut. B+(**) [cd]

Professor Rhythm: Bafana Bafana (1995 [2017], Awesome Tapes From Africa): Thami Mdluli, from South Africa, started making instrumental albums (mostly synths) around 1985, a sort of township jive meets house music which may or may not be related to kwaito (introduced to the US in Earthworks' Kwaito: South African Hip Hop (2000). Actually sound more like disco to me, or perhaps I should say what "African disco" should sound like? Seroiusly upbeat, ecstatic even. A-

Sky Music: A Tribute to Terje Rypdal (2016 [2017], Rune Grammofon): The various artists include nine guitarists, the most famous (Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, David Torn, Jim O'Rourke) only appearing once, Raoul Björkenheim twice, Henry Kaiser four times, Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen five (of nine cuts), matched only by ubiquitous bassist Ingebrigt Hĺker Flaten and drummer Gard Nilssen. Some keyboards too, all fitting Norwegian guitarist Rypdal more firmly than ever into the fusion lexicon -- mostly by cranking the volume up. B+(*) [cd]

Ton-Klami [Midori Takada/Kang Tae Hwan/Masahiko Satoh]: Prophecy of Nue (1995 [2017], NoBusiness): Marimba/percussion, alto sax, and piano. Group formed 1991, had two albums 1993-95. Satoh has a substantial discography (73 items in Discogs; Hwan 11, Takada 4). Rolling percussion with drone is the theme, but the variations only start there. B+(***) [cd]

Old Music

Jack DeJohnette: Made in Chicago (2013 [2015], ECM): Names below the title: Muhal Richard Abrams (piano), Larry Gray (bass, cello), Roscoe Mitchell (sopranino/soprano/alto sax, flute, recorder), and Henry Threadgill (alto sax, bass flute), all associated with AACM. Not as consistent as I'd like, but a stellar turn on piano, with the horns shooting every which way. A- [dl]

Fats Domino: Alive and Kickin' (2000 [2006], Tipitina's): New Orleans rock and roll legend, scored 18 top-20 hits from "Ain't That a Shame" in 1955 through "Let the Four Winds Blow" in 1961, enough for a near-perfect single-CD compilation (e.g., The Fats Domino Jukebox) but his non-hits rarely distinguished themselves (so don't expect many surprises on his four-CD box). But he hasn't been a factor since then, and hadn't released anything since 1980 until these live shots washed up following Hurricane Katrina, when he was briefly reported as missing. Not sure just when these were recorded ("all were recorded by 2000"), and there are no revelations let alone classics, but he wasn't just an oldies artist -- his one remake ages gracefully, and his obscurities remind you what made him so likable. A-

Gordon Grdina's Box Cutter: New Rules for Noise (2007, Spool): Canadian guitarist, second album with this quartet: François Houle (especially strong on clarinet), Karlis Silins (bass), Kenton Loewen (drums). The guitarist brings a little noise, more groove, and keeps it interesting. B+(***)

New Lost City Ramblers: Volume II: Out Standing in Their Field (1963-73 [1993], Smithsonian/Folkways): Founded in 1958 by Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley, they played old time folk music on banjo-fiddle-guitar, introducing much of it to a new generation. For that, see The Early Years: 1958-1962, an essential album for any American folk collection. In 1963 Paley was replaced by Tracy Schwartz, offerng a convenient dividing line, with this sampler from seven albums sounding very nearly as classic. A-

Trevor Watts/Peter Knight: Reunion: Live in London (1999 [2007], Hi 4 Head): Alto/soprano saxophonist, an important figure in the British avant-garde although he's gotten much less credit than Evan Parker or John Surman (both 5 years younger) as he's appeared much less often as a leader. Knight plays violin. He's best known as a member of English folk group Steeleye Span, but he played in Watts' Moire Music Sextet in 1987 and in Watts' Original Drum Orchestra in 1989. One 56-minute improv piece, the violin a deeply resonant duo partner. B+(**) [bc]

Trevor Watts/Veryan Weston: Dialogues in Two Places (2011 [2012], Hi 4 Head, 2CD): Two musicians with a long working relationship, sax-piano duets, one disc from Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario, the other from a slightly earlier set in Toledo, Ohio. Free improvs. Soprano starts shrill, but the alto balances nicely, and the interaction is vigorous. B+(**) [bc]

Notes

Everything streamed from Napster (ex Rhapsody), except as noted in brackets following the grade:

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

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Monday, October 30, 2017

Music Week

Music: Current count 28813 [28799] rated (+14), 405 [398] unrated (+7).

Rated count is the lowest of any week this year -- you probably have to go back to a travel week to find one lower, although this month has been consistently low: 18 last week, 15 the week before, 17 the week before that. Three major reasons/excuses for this week: I took a day off cooking dinner on my birthday (old family favorites, keeping it relatively simple this year); I spent three days playing pretty much nothing but a 5-CD box, American Epic: The Collection; and I hurt myself rather badly, probably strains from moving some heavy (for me, these days) equipment. I'm still feeling pretty crippled, which is why yesterday's Weekend Roundup was so late and short, and this too will be brief. Also brief will be tomorrow's October-ending Streamnotes -- brief because of the light rated weeks all month long, but I doubt I'll write much introduction either.

The equipment story: I finally replaced an old Yamaha receiver with a new Harmon-Kardon unit. The Yamaha had developed an annoying buzz, which I've suffered through for many months now. A friend came over and conclusively proved that it was the Yamaha's fault, and recommended the new unit. I'm very happy with it, but swapping it in wasn't easy. The whole setup is in a large piece of furniture I built back when I lived in New York, so close to forty years ago. It's taller than I am, much wider, deeper too, and weighted down with all of my residual LP collection (about 400 albums). It originally had three equipment shelves: one for the turntable, one for one of those wedge-shaped Nakamichi tape decks, and one on top for an integrated amplifier and tuner. The gear it was built for has expired and been replaced, with one shelf returned to albums, an old turntable resting on top of a CD changer, and now the new receiver filling half of the top.

The problem was moving it all away from the wall to get access to the wires in the back. I also had to add a power strip, since the new receiver doesn't have secondary outlets. And, of course, it all needed cleaning. I still don't have it all put back together. Meanwhile, we have another equipment crisis: local wi-fi has been increasingly flaky. I've planned on replacing it for quite some time, buying a new wi-fi router appliance but never installing it. Looks like I need to do that soon. Unfortunately, it involves getting down on the floor and moving cables. It also means reconfiguring the firewall/router, and ultimately decommissioning a very old Linux box (one I built in NJ before moving to Kansas in 1999). So, some point next week everything breaks, then we scramble to put it back together again.

I thought I might get away for a brief road trip this week, but the way things are going I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever go anywhere again. Might not be so bad if I could report progress on book projects, but all I can claim for last week are new ideas I haven't done anything about. For instance, I thought a bit about writing an essay in the form of "A Letter to the Democrats" -- partly reaction to reading Mark Lilla's short and unconvincing The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, and partly revulsion with much of what I hear from the all-too-loyal opposition party spokespeople in Washington. (Although, not that anyone cares, the Casey Yingling story here in Kansas could offer a rich lode of material.)

Meanwhile, I've made no progress even on the most pedestrian of all of my projects, the Jazz Guides. Still only 53% through the last of the monster database files.

New records rated this week:

  • Banda Magda: Tigre (2017, GroundUP Music): [r]: B+(*)
  • Peter Bernstein: Signs LIVE! (2015 [2017], Smoke Sessions, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
  • Cortex: Avant-Garde Party Music (2017, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
  • Dylan Hicks: Ad Out (2017, Soft Launch): [r]: B+(**)
  • Danny Janklow: Elevation (2015 [2017], Outside In Music): [cd]: B
  • Roberto Magris Sextet: Live in Miami @ the WDNA Jazz Gallery (2015 [2017], JMood): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Nicole Mitchell and Haki Madhubuti: Liberation Narratives (2016-17 [2017], Black Earth Music): [cd]: A-
  • Paul Moran: Smokin' B3 Vol. 2: Still Smokin' (2017, Prudential): [cd]: B-
  • Marta Sánchez Quintet: Danza Imposible (2017, Fresh Sound New Talent): [cd]: B+(**)

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

  • American Epic: The Collection (1916-36 [2017], Third Man/Columbia/Legacy, 5CD): [cd]: A
  • American Epic: The Best of Blues (1927-36 [2017], Third Man/Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B+(***)
  • American Epic: The Best of Country (1927-34 [2017], Third Man/Columbia/Legacy): [r]: A-
  • Sky Music: A Tribute to Terje Rypdal (2016 [2017], Rune Grammofon): [cd]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

  • Jack DeJohnette: Made in Chicago (2013 [2015], ECM): [dl]: A-
  • Fats Domino: Alive and Kickin' (2000 [2006], Tipitina's): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Derek Bailey & Greg Goodman: Extracting Fish-Bones From the Back of the Despoiler (1992, The Beak Doctor): vinyl, November 1
  • Rahsaan Barber: The Music in the Night (Jazz Music City): November 3
  • Michelle Coltrane: Awakening (Blujazz)
  • John Gruntfest & Greg Goodman: In This Land All the Birds Wore Hats and Spurs (1984-2008, The Beak Doctor): vinyl, November 1
  • Taylor Haskins & Green Empire: The Point (Recombination): November 7
  • Markley & Balmer: Standards & Covers (Soona Songs)
  • Delfeayo Marsalis: Kalamazoo (Troubadour Jass)
  • Frank Perowsky Jazz Orchestra: Gowanus (Jazzkey)
  • Daniel Rosenthal: Music in the Room (American Melody): November 14
  • Galen Weston: The Space Between (Blujazz)
  • Eric Wyatt: Look to the Sky (Whaling City Sound)
  • Dave Zinno Unisphere: River of January (Whaling City Sound)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Just the bare bones this week.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that mattered this week: Congressional Republicans passed a budget; More sexual harassment shoes dropped; Retiring Republicans blasted Trump; Opioid abuse is officially an emergency. Other Yglesias posts:

    • There's less than meets the eye to the Trump stock rally: "German, French, and Japanese stocks are all doing way better."

    • Lou Dobbs's Trump interview is a masterpiece of sycophancy and nonsense: "precisely because the softball format leads to such easy questions, Trump's frequent inability to answer them reveals the depths of his ignorance better than any tough grilling possibly could."

    • Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and John McCain need to start acting like senators, not pundits.

    • Trump and a key Senate Republican are fighting on Twitter.

    • The real stakes in the tax reform debate:

      Democrats have grown more critical of inequality in recent years with Barack Obama proclaiming economic inequality to be the "defining challenge of our time." Energy in the party shifted even-further-left and fueled an unexpected level of support for Bernie Sanders and an unprecedented level of skepticism about the basic fundraising model of American politics.

      Even more surprisingly, in the GOP camp Donald Trump ran hard to the right on culture war issues while also promising a more egalitarian form of economics -- promising to be a champion of working class interests.

      But in office, while Trump has continued to obsessively feed the culture war maw, he is pushing a policy agenda that would add enormous fuel to the fire of inequality -- enormous, regressive rate cuts flying under the banner of "tax reform."

      Yglesias touts a report by Kevin Hassett, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, as "crucial because it's honest," but even "honesty" doesn't help much when you're extraordinarily full of shit:

      Hassett's contention, in essence, is that the best way to benefit the American worker is to engage in a global version of this subsidy game. Instead of targeted subsidies for new investments from one particular company, he and Trump want to offer a broad subsidy to all investment profits -- old profits and new profits, real returns on productive investments and returns on monopoly rents -- in the hopes of maximally catering to investor interests. By catering to the interests of the global investor class in this way, he thinks, we can do so much to boost the growth of the American economy that almost everyone will end up better off.

      Even if "almost everyone will end up better off" by cutting the taxes that rich people pay, that doesn't mean that tax cuts are "the best way to benefit the American worker." Direct redistribution to workers would be much more efficient. So would less direct approaches such as increasing labor's leverage. But the supposition that "almost everyone will end up better off" is itself highly suspect. The only way giving the rich more money "trickles down" is when the rich spend it to increase demand (which they don't do much of, although that does account for a few jobs here in Wichita building private jets) or when the rich invest more in productive capacity. The problem here is that even at present -- before Trump's tax cuts kick in -- the rich have more money than they know how to productively invest. A big part of the problem here is that by sucking up money that working folks and the government would be spending, their hoarding reduces aggregate demand, and as such reduces the return on investments in productive capacity. This effect is so large one has to wonder whether tax cuts generate any tangible growth at all, much less growth so substantial that "almost everyone benefits."

      Yglesias goes further and notes that "Doug Holtz-Eakin, a well-regarded former Congressional Budget Office director and current think tank leader, believes that eliminating the estate tax will create lots of jobs." The piece cited was written for the American Family Business Foundation, a political front group founded to promote repeal of estate and gift taxes, and is typical of the hackwork Holtz-Eakin has made a career out of.

    • Trump's latest big interview is both funny and terrifying: Before the Lou Dobbs interview, this one with Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox Business Channel. Subheds include: "Trump doesn't know anything about any issue"; "Bartiromo keeps ineptly trying to cover for Trump"; and "Trump gets all kinds of facts wrong."

      Over the course of the interview, Trump also claims to be working on a major infrastructure bill, a major welfare reform bill, and an unspecified economic development bill of some kind.

      Under almost any other past president, that kind of thing would be considered a huge news-making get for an interviewer. But even Fox didn't tout Bartiromo's big scoops on Trump's legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, "We're doing a big infrastructure bill," means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.

  • Dean Baker: The problem of doctors' salaries.

  • Julian Borger: Trump team drawing up fresh plans to bolster US nuclear arsenal.

  • Alastair Campbell: The time has come for Theresa May to tell the nation: Brexit can't be done: Fantasy from Tony Blair's former director of communications, but the facts are sound enough, just the political will is weak. Campbell has also written: My fantasy Corbyn speech: 'I can no longer go along with a ruinous Brexit'.

  • Alexia Fernández Campbell: Nurses returning from Puerto Rico accuse the federal government of leaving people to die.

  • Danica Cotto: Puerto Rico Says It's Scrapping $300M Whitefish Contract: Not clear how a 2-year-old company from Interior Secretary's Ryan Zinke's home town managed to win a $300M no-bid contract, but the more people look into it the more suspicious it seems. For instance: Whitefish Energy contract bars government from auditing deal. For more: Ken Klippenstein: $300M Puerto Rico Recovery Contract Awarded to Tiny Utility Company Linked to Major Trump Donor; also Kate Aronoff: Disaster Capitalists Take Big Step Toward Privatizing Puerto Rico's Electric Grid.

  • Thomas Frank: What Harvey Weinstein tells us about the liberal world: I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions about political philosophy from someone like Weinstein, who more than anything else testifies that people with power tend to abuse it, regardless of their professed values. Still, this is quasi-amusing:

    Perhaps Weinstein's liberalism was a put-on all along. It certainly wasn't consistent or thorough. He strongly disapproved of Bernie Sanders, for example. And on election night in November 2008, Weinstein could be found celebrating Barack Obama's impending victory on the peculiar grounds that "stock market averages will go up around the world."

    The mogul's liberalism could also be starkly militaristic. On the release of his work of bald war propaganda, Seal Team Six, he opined to CNN as follows:

    "Colin Powell, the best military genius of our time, supports the president -- supports President Obama. And the military love him. I made this movie. I know the military. They respect this man for what he's done. He's killed more terrorists in his short watch than George Bush did in eight years. He's the true hawk."

  • Ronald A Klain: He who must be named:

    For decades, conservatives labored to make their movement more humane. Ronald Reagan put a jovial face on conservative policies -- more Dale Carnegie than Ayn Rand; George H.W. Bush promised a "kinder, gentler" tenure; George W. Bush ran on "compassionate conservatism." . . .

    That was then. Today, we are living the Politics of Mean. In the Trump presidency, with its daily acts of cruelty, punching down is a feature, not a bug. And the only thing more disquieting than a president who practices the Politics of Mean are the voters who celebrate it. . . .

    Since Trump's victory, his meanness has been infectious. We have seen it in neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and elsewhere, students chanting "build that wall" at Hispanic peers, and a rise of racial epithets and anti-Semitic graffiti on college campuses. Puerto Rico, again, provides a current example. As The Post's Jenna Johnson recently reported, countless Trump supporters -- including some in Texas, who themselves took Federal Emergency Management Agency aid after Hurricane Harvey -- back the president's proposal to limit aid to Puerto Rico and believe that fellow Americans there should "fix their own country up."

    The obvious difference between then (1980-2000) and now is sixteen years of endless war, although it's worth noting that conservatism has always prided itself on being a hard way of life, a stance which never took much prodding to tip over into meanness. Indeed, even while feigning compassion conservative political pitches always started with playing on people's prejudices -- primordially racism, as Reagan made clear when he launched his 1980 campaign over the graves of slain civil rights workers. Klain calls for a list of recent presidents and wannabes to stand up to Trump's Politics of Mean. They should, of course, but it would be even more helpful if they owned up to how their own errors got us here.

  • Julia Manchester: National Weather Service 'on the brink of failure' due to job vacancies.

  • Rupert Neate: World's witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires' wealth swells to $6tn.

    Billionaires' fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires' average return was double that achieved by the world's stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

  • John Nichols: Trump's FCC Chair Moves to Undermine Journalism and Democracy.

  • Mark Perry: Are Trump's Generals in Over Their Heads? "For many in Washington, they're the only thing standing between the president and chaos. But their growing clout is starting to worry military experts." One problem is that as more generals move into politics, the military itself (at least at the top) becomes increasingly politicized. I would add that the competency and maturity they supposedly possess are traits with little real evidence to back them up. Paul Woodward also adds:

    The problem with viewing the former and current generals in this administration as the indispensable "adult supervision" Trump requires, is that these individuals are the sole source of legitimacy for his presidency -- exactly the reason he surrounded himself with this kind of Teflon political protection.

    Instead of seeing Mattis et al as the only thing that stands between us and Armageddon, we should probably see them as the primary obstacle to the outright exposure of the fraud that has been perpetrated by Trump and the cadre of visibly corrupt cronies he has installed in most of the executive branch of government.

    Speaking of the alleged competence of generals, see Senior military officials sanctioned for more than 500 cases of serious misconduct: That just since 2013.

  • Andrew Prokop: 6 charts that explain why American politics is so broken: "The Pew Research Center's political typology report, explained." Actually, I'm not sure he charts do explain "why American politics is so broken" -- for one thing, nothing here on the influence of money, which is by far the biggest breaker. They do show several disconnects, including "Most Americans -- including a good chunk of Republicans -- want corporate taxes raised, not lowered" and "It's only a vocal minority of Americans who are anti-immigrant." Nor do most of the typology groups make much sense, although "Country-First Conservatives" are defined exclusively by their hatred for immigrants. Still, worth noting that "Solid Liberals" are more numerous than "Core Conservatives" (16-13% among the general public, 25-20% among "politically engaged."

  • Charlie Savage: Will Congress Ever Limit the Forever-Expanding 9/11 War?

  • Joseph E Stiglitz: America Has a Monopoly Problem -- and It's Huge.

  • Nick Turse: It's Not Just Niger -- U.S. Military Activity Is a "Recruiting Tool" for Terror Groups Across West Africa.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 23, 2017

Music Week

Music: Current count 28799 [28781] rated (+18), 398 [402] unrated (-4).

As predicted (feared), another short week with many distractions. Next week looks pretty similar, which means October's Streamnotes will very likely be the year's shortest -- lowest monthly count so far is 111 in May (114 in March, 115 in April, 119 in August; top count was 156 in January, followed by 153 in February, 149 in June, 144 in September). Current draft has 59 records, so that extrapolates to about 83. I'd need a week (plus a day) with 52 reviews to match my previous lowest monthly total this year.

Only three non-jazz albums below: Corey Dennison's blues album actually came in the mail; Wooden Wand was suggested by a tweet (actually an earlier album, not on Napster, so I tried the new one); Twitter also led me to the latest release by Awesome Tapes From Africa -- possibly the only label I actually follow there.

I haven't made a serious attempt to survey new non-jazz released in a couple months, so I have very little idea what to look for. Still, quite a few jazz albums in the queue, and many more I'm not serviced on. Unfortunately, I'm finding fewer than 50% of the new jazz I look for. I expect this will add up to my poorest coverage level since I started Jazz Consumer Guide in 2004.

New records rated this week:

  • Borderlands Trio [Stephan Crump/Kris Davis/Eric McPherson]: Asteroidea (2015 [2017], Intakt): [cd]: A-
  • Dee Dee Bridgewater: Memphis . . . Yes, I'm Ready (2017, Okeh): [r]: B+(**)
  • Kyle Bruckmann's Degradient: Dear Everyone (2017, Not Two, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
  • Bobby Bradford/Hafez Modirzadeh: Live at the Magic Triangle (2016 [2017], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
  • Corey Dennison Band: Night After Night (2017, Delmark): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Mark Dresser: Modicana (2016-17 [2017], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
  • Bob Ferrel: Bob Ferrel's Jazztopian Dream (2016 [2017], Bob Ferrel Music): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Ghost Train Orchestra: Book of Rhapsodies Vol II (2012-17 [2017], Accurate): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Ross Hammond + Jon Bafus: Masonic Lawn (2016 [2017], Prescott): [r]: B+(***)
  • Hans Hassler: Wie Die Zeit Hinter Mir Her (2015 [2017], Intakt): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Ahmad Jamal: Marseille (2017, Jazz Village): [r]: B+(**)
  • Rudresh Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition: Agrima (2017, self-released): [cdr]: A-
  • Alma Micic: That Old Feeling (2017, Whaling City Sound): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Mike Stern: Trip (2017, Heads Up): [r]: B+(*)
  • Wooden Wand: Clipper Ship (2017, Three Lobed): [r]: B

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

  • Professor Rhythm: Bafana Bafana (1995 [2017], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [r]: A-
  • Ton-Klami [Midori Takada/Kang Tae Hwan/Masahiko Satoh]: Prophecy of Nue (1995 [2017], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Sheryl Bentyne: Rearrangements of Shadows: The Music of Stephen Sondheim (ArtistShare)
  • The Billy Lester Trio: Italy 2016 (Ultra Sound): November 3
  • Roy McGrath: Remembranzas (JL Music): November 7
  • Kyle Motl Trio: Panjandrums (Metatrope): November 6
  • Gabriele Tranchina: Of Sailing Ships and the Stars in Your Eyes (Rainchant Eclectic)
  • Mark Wingfield/Markus Reuter/Asaf Sirkis: Lighthouse (Moonjune): November

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Weekend Roundup

I didn't get a head start on this -- in fact, started after dinner on Sunday, so it's pretty quick and dirty, with a limited set of sources. Still, it's so easy to find such appalling stories that posts like this practically write themselves.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 political stories that actually mattered this week: We got a bipartisan insurance stabilization deal: thanks to Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), but: Republican leaders don't seem to want a deal, like Paul Ryan, with Trump both waxing and waning; The administration tested some new tax arguments, like "corporate tax cuts boost wages" and "math forces tax cuts for the rich"; Nobody knows what's happening with NAFTA, hence no real story here, but Trump's folks are blowing some smoke. Other Yglesias pieces this week:

    • The raging controversy over Trump and the families of fallen soldiers, explained: well, more like summarized, as it's hard to explain how tone-deaf Trump is in human interactions as straightforward (albeit no doubt unpleasant) as issuing condolences.

      Yet Trump has managed to completely and utterly botch this relatively simple job less than a week after creating a major diplomatic crisis with Iran for no particular reason. The humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico appears to be, if anything, intensifying as citizens cope with a chronic lack of safe water. The president has willfully destabilized individual health insurance markets without any clear plan and is actively scuttling congressional efforts to stabilize the situation.

      Other serious challenges are lurking out there in the world, yet the Trump administration seemed incapable of issuing a simple condolence statement or answering a question about it without unleashing a multi-front political fiasco.

    • Trump aide says manufacturing decline increases abortions, death, and drug abuse: "He might be right." Reviews research on "China shock" -- what happens to areas hard hit by job losses due to cheaper imports. You can blame this on trade deals, but it's also indicative of the frayed safety net all across the country.

    • Republians say they can't figure out how to not cut taxes for the rich: "It's really not very hard." If, say, you wanted to lower rates on the first $100k of income, that would reduce taxes on those who make more too, but you could offset that by increasing the rate further up the income scale. Or you could do it lots of other ways. And don't bother cutting the estate tax, something no one in the middle class has to pay -- that's only a benefit for the very rich.

    • Trump says a big corporate tax cut will boost average incomes by $4,000 a year.

  • Sarah Aziza: How Long Can the Courts Keep Donald Trump's Muslim Ban at Bay? Two federal judges issued injunctions against the third iteration of Trump's travel ban last week.

  • Julia Belluz: White House officials think childhood obesity is not a problem. Have they seen the data? Their campaign to wipe out Obama's legacy (in this case, Michelle Obama's) continues apace.

  • Aida Chavez: House Republicans Warn Congress Not to "Bail Out" Puerto Rico.

  • Jason C Ditz: What Are U.S. Forces Doing in Niger Anyway?: Four US Special Forces were killed in an ambush a couple weeks ago, finally pointing a spotlight on US intervention there (much like the Benghazi fiasco).

    Turns out that for five years Niger has been a toe in the expanding American footprint in Africa, and has become a hub of U.S. military activity (about 800 soldiers are serving as advisors and training local forces there now) and, according to Nick Turse, the location of a brand new $100 million drone base. Meanwhile, the region has become a crossroads of Islamist activity, from Boko Haram in Nigeria to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb across the Sahel. And now, apparently, ISIS. . . .

    Niger is far from the exception. In March 2012, the Pentagon confirmed that U.S. troops were attacked in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, and that a CIA officer was killed. This was the first time officials confirmed that the U.S. had ground troops operating inside Yemen at all. The revelation is even more stunning when one recalls that the White House publicly ruled out sending ground troops to Yemen several times in the years leading up to this admission.

    More war news from around the world:

  • Lee Fang/Nick Surgey: Koch Brothers' Internal Strategy Memo on Selling Tax Cuts: Ignore the Deficit: After all, deficits only matter when a Democrat is president and might use deficits for expanding services and/or growing the economy -- things Republicans oppose and, especially, want to make sure no Democrat gets credit for. But when Republicans are in power, well, as Dick Cheney said, "deficits don't matter."

  • Sarah Kliff: Medicare X: the Democrats' supercharged public option plan, explained: Specifically, Sens. Bennet and Kaine, a plan that makes less sense than Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all but would involve less turmoil by adding a Medicare-based plan to the Obamacare exchanges as a public option, increasing competition for private insurance plans.

  • Paul Krugman: Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies: A propos of the Trump's "new" arguments for slashing taxes, Krugman explains:

    Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number. Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track.

    He then comes up with a list of ten (see the article for details, although you're probably familiar with most of them already):

    1. America is the most highly-taxed country in the world
    2. The estate tax is destroying farmers and truckers
    3. Taxation of pass-through entities is a burden on small business
    4. Cutting profits taxes really benefits workers
    5. Repatriating overseas profits will create jobs
    6. This is not a tax cut for the rich
    7. It's a big tax cut for the middle class
    8. It won't increase the deficit
    9. Cutting taxes will jump-start rapid growth
    10. Tax cuts will pay for themselves

    One thing that's missing in this debate is what do we need taxes for. Some people argue that taxes should be limited to a certain percentage of GDP -- often the same people who don't understand why government spends more now than it did under Coolidge or McKinley. I think it's obvious that a lot of things that we need in today's economic world are necessarily more expensive than they were in past eras (especially things that didn't really exist back then). To figure this out, one needs some kind of multifactor analysis, and I think especially one has to ask what things are most efficiently produced and distributed through public channels. I think this list is large and growing, and may include things that surprise you. If this list is as large as I think, we need to be looking not at ways to cut taxes but at ways to grow them, and how to do so fairly and efficiently. As it is, the relentless focus on cutting taxes is an attack on public spending, and ultimately on the public taxes are meant to serve.

  • Jane Mayer: The Danger of President Pence: A profile of the vice president, one which raises plenty to be alarmed about, not least because his odds of being elevated to the presidency via the 25th amendment (the one that says all it takes is a majority of the cabinet to find Trump incompetent -- perhaps something Trump should have considered before giving Pence so much say in picking nominees). For more on the 25th, see Jeannie Suk Gersen: How Anti-Trump Psychiatrists Are Mobilizing Behind the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

  • Anna North: A detained 17-year-old immigrant wants an abortion. The government went to court to stop her. Here's a case where the Trump administration isn't being run like a business -- try finding an angle where it makes sense for the government to prevent a detained emigrant from obtaining an abortion -- but more like a shady religious cult. For more cultlike behavior:

    Doe is not the only minor who's been affected by the policy, according to the ACLU. In March, according to court documents filed by the group, another minor at a shelter in Texas chose to have a medication abortion after getting a judge's permission for the procedure. After she had taken the first dose of the medication, ORR officials forced her to go to an emergency room to see if the abortion could be reversed. Ultimately, she was allowed to proceed with the abortion and take the remaining dose of the medication. In another case, the ACLU said, Lloyd traveled from Washington, DC, to meet personally with a young woman to try to convince her not to have an abortion.

  • Jon Schwartz: It Didn't Just Start Now: John Kelly Has Always Been a Hard-Right Bully: The former Marine General has had a tough week, not only failing repeatedly to keep Trump from embarrassing himself, but having his own Trumpian moment making baseless charges against Rep. Frederica Wilson. The best Trump mouthpiece Sarah Sanders came up with in Kelly's defense was It's "highly inappropriate" to question John Kelly -- because he's a general. Schwartz compresses "Kelly's worldview, as expressed in 2010" into this short list:

    1. No one outside of the military can legitimately question any of America's wars.
    2. No one who is in the military ever questions any of America's wars.
    3. America and its wars are and have always been good.
    4. America is under terrifying threat from incomprehensible lunatics.
    5. Our country is hamstrung by its sniveling "chattering class."

    I've run across many more links on Kelly and Wilson, but I'd rather point out this one: Alice Speri: Top Trump Official John Kelly Ordered ICE to Portray Immigrants as Criminals to Justify Raids.

  • Matt Shuham: Forbes: Trump Drops on 'Richest Americans' List as Net Worth Takes a Hit: Down $600 million to $3.1 billion, dropping 92 spots (from 156 to 248). No real analysis here as to why. Certainly, it's not because he's resolved his conflicts-of-interest and made it impossible to use his office to feather his own nest. And this looks extra bad with the stock market setting new record highs. On the other hand, leaving his day-to-day business decisions in the hands of Jr. and Eric may not ave been the smartest idea. And naming so many properties after himself has politicized them, which makes their value at least partly subject to his extraordinarily low popularity.

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