Recent Reading

Music Database

Artist Search:

Browse

Website Search

Google:

Blog Entries [960 - 969]

Sunday, November 6, 2016

I was sorely tempted to write nothing more about the election until it's all over. I doubt I'll write much below, but when I start out I never know. Part of this is just plain disgust at how the last couple weeks have played out. Part is that I've been sick, and that hasn't helped my mood one bit. A big part of the disgust is simply that Hillary Clinton seems to have blown a huge lead: FiveThirtyEight gave her an 88.1% chance of victory on October 17, 81.5% as late as October 28. Today that's down to 64.5%. In terms of states that posits her as losing six states she was previously leading in: Arizona (her odds there are now down to only 25.8%), Iowa (27.1%), Ohio (32.9%), Florida (47.4%), Nevada (48.0%), and North Carolina (48.4%). That's still based on a 2.8% popular vote margin. Some polls are closer than that, with at least one showing Trump ahead. TPM had a narrower spread yesterday (2.4%) but a larger one today (3.9%, despite Clinton dropping to 45.9% of the vote).

Throughout most of the election, the median state (as far as the electoral college is concerned) has been New Hampshire: if Clinton wins New Hampshire and every other state she's been polling better in, she gets 272 electoral votes and wins the election. She's still given a 61.2% chance in New Hampshire. Trump could win the election by capturing New Hampshire, unless he loses a larger state he holds a slim lead in (Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida are all very close, and early voting looks especially good for Clinton in Nevada). On the other hand, Trump could lose New Hampshire and still win if he pulls an upset in Colorado (where he's currently givens a 26.9% chance) or Pennsylvania (25.9%).

At this stage, the presidential race has been reduced to these nine "battleground" states. Kansas (97.5% R) isn't one of them. In fact, I don't think I've seen a single street sign for either Trump or Clinton. I did see two Trump advertisements last week, and thought they hit an effective note: it is, after all, easy to tag Clinton as the candidate of the status quo, without suggesting how attractive more status quo would be compared to Trumpian change. I haven't seen any Clinton ads, but am haunted by at least one of her soundbytes, where she warns us of the danger of entrusting "America's nuclear codes" to someone as "thin-skinned and impulsive" as Trump. That's probably as carefully phrased as could be, but it mostly reminded me that she is decidedly hawkish, someone who believes strongly in flaunting America's military power, and someone who views the presidency as almost a secondary role to being Commander-in-Chief. Isn't it odd that the numerous "checks and balances" that limit what a president can do aren't sufficient to keep a mad person from blowing up the world? I've said all along that the surest way Clinton could lose would be to remind us of her appetite for war, and she's found an inadvertent way of doing that. I figure that must be part of her blown lead, even though the emails and her linkage to Anthony Weiner (perhaps the most universally reviled man in America right now) have gotten more attention.

By the way, as I was preparing this, FBI Director Comey says agency won't recommend charges over Clinton email, admitting, in his usual backhanded way, that his previous letter about re-opening the Clinton email investigation -- the event that precipitated Clinton's polling losses -- had come to nothing. Too bad we can't inspect the internal FBI emails discussing why he exposed this baseless innuendo in the first place. The FBI has a terrible legacy of politically-minded "investigations" but they've rarely set their sights on someone as mainstream as Hillary Clinton. Once again they've embarrassed themselves.

More I could write about here, but let's wind up this intro with Seth Meyers' "closer look" at the Major Clinton and Trump scandals:

That's a problem for a lot of Americans: They just don't love the two choices. Do you pick someone who's under federal investigation for using a private email server?

Or do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn't a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about committing sexual assault, was accused by 12 women of committing sexual assault, said some of those women weren't attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased because his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes, stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation, has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent's looks, insulted an opponent's wife's looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy?

How do you choose?

Problem here is that Meyers is still reducing the election to a choice between two celebrity personalities, as opposed to the real differences between the parties and interests they represent. Not that there are no real issues buried in the Trump litany, nor that some of the personal traits (like his seething contempt for women and non-whites, and for that matter workers) don't portend policy dangers, but one thing this campaign has spared (or cheated) us was an opportunity to debate and vote on two radically different political visions. Imagine how much different this election might be if the choice was Bernie Sanders vs. Ted Cruz? One might learn something there, and emerge from the election with a mandate and a direction. But with Clinton vs. Trump we're stuck with muddled results -- both candidates are widely viewed as crooked, greedy, deceitful, treacherous, untrustworthy, pompous, arrogant, and full of ungrounded bluster -- their few differences attributable to irreconcilable identity allegiances. And even if Clinton wins, her margin isn't going to be nearly large enough to win Congress as well and to force a rethinking of those divisions. Republicans running for Congress have pledged to block her every appointment, to stalemate government and disable her administration from day one. Trump has already convinced most of his supporters that the only way he can lose is if the system is rigged against them.

It's fair to say that America is more divided now than at any election since 1860, which precipitated the Civil War. In terms of ideas and policies, those divisions have been growing since the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, with conservatives demanding ever more complete domination of government and business, making the state a tool of the rich while eliminating any countervailing support government might provide for working people. Of course, conservatives rarely argue their agenda coherently -- they prefer to describe clear-cutting as their "healthy forests" initiative -- because they're aware that they'd lose. What Trump adds here is an unprecedented degree of paranoia, and a demagogic style that insists on degrading and dehumanizing his opponent and all of her supporters, and that's what's made him so vile and dangerous.

Some scattered (election) links this week:

• Nate Silver: Election Update: The Campaign Is Almost Over, and Here's Where We Stand

• Spencer Ackerman: 'The FBI is Trumpland': anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaks, sources say:

  This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

  The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is "the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," and that "the reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

  The agent called the bureau "Trumplandia," with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party's national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.

• David Atkins: Trump Would Be a Radical Policy Disaster:

  This dyspeptic election is finally coming to an end in just a few days amid ugliness the likes of which has not been seen in modern American history. This nastiness has focused on the personal and the irrelevant, from the ridiculous non-scandal of Clinton's emails to the revolting but ultimately superficial fact that Donald Trump apparently carried on an affair for years that we're only just learning about.

  Follow the article if you want the affair link. Read everything else. Still, he missed the policy proposal that bothers me most: one that would make it easier for rich guys like Trump to sue anyone and everyone who said anything negative about them.

• Jonathan Blitzer: A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That's Familiar With Trump:

  [Ruth] Ben-Ghiat has been broadening her studies ever since the primaries, and is now considering a book-length examination of strongmen, from Mussolini to Trump, with stops in Franco's Spain, Erdogan's Turkey, and Qaddafi's Libya. In the speech of Mussolini, Putin, Trump, and also Berlusconi, Ben-Ghiat notes a pattern: they are at once transparent about their intentions and masters of innuendo. "Trump trails off. He uses ellipses and coded language. He lets his listeners fill in what they want." When Trump seemed to suggest that gun owners should deal with Hillary Clinton themselves, or when he talked about needing to "watch" certain communities out to steal the vote on Election Day, his statements were more powerful for their ambiguity. "It's all about letting listeners convince and mislead themselves," she said.

• Amy Davidson: Bernie Sanders's Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton: Seems like the Obamas and Joe Biden get all the media notice, but did you know?

  The truth is that Bernie Sanders is very, very angry -- at Donald Trump. He is angry enough to have spent weeks traveling on behalf of Hillary Clinton, speaking for her in union halls and arenas, to students and activists. When he talks, he is entirely Bernie -- "We are going to fight for that democracy; we are not going to become an oligarchy" -- and he hints strongly that he has done some negotiating with her before getting on the stage, and will continue to do so after, as he hopes, she is elected. When praising her positions, he often says "Secretary Clinton has told me" or "Secretary Clinton has promised," as though he knows that it might not work, with the sort of swing audiences he is dispatched to persuade (students, working-class voters), simply to declare that taking these stands is in her nature. But he knows what he wants: for her to win. [ . . . ]

  "There are many, many differences between Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump," Sanders told the crowd. "But there is one that is very, very profound. Are you ready for a very radical thought right now? I don't want anyone to faint! I think we have some paramedics here" -- "paramedics here" is, it turns out, an excellent phrase for demonstrating a Brooklyn accent -- "but I do want to make this announcement. Are you ready for it?" The crowd indicated that it was. "All right. Madam Secretary, you correct me if I'm wrong here; I don't want to misspeak for you -- Secretary Clinton believes in science!" [ . . . ]

  A few hours later, Sanders was off on his own to Iowa. Trump is ahead in that state, in the latest average of polls, by about two and a half points. Sanders had three events scheduled for Friday -- Cedar Falls, Iowa City, Davenport. On Saturday, there would be more.

• Kerry Eleveld: Latino electorate both on track for historic turnout and routinely undercounted in polls: One tidbit: in 2010, polls showed Republican Sharon Angle leading Harry Reid by 3-5 points, but Reid wound up winning 50.3-44.5%, largely due to a huge 90-10 Latino vote split.

• Ron Fournier: Hillary Has No One to Blame but Herself: Concerns itself with trivial pursuits like that email server. For insight into the deeper Clinton problem, see: Matt Stoller: How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul. Or Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? -- although I don't recommend reading the latter until Wednesday (either way).

• Charles Franklin: Party Loyalty and Defection, Trump v Clinton: Chart tracking polls so both parties with identically high (86.8%) support for their candidates, after Republicans had trailed all year. Defection rates similarly low, although Democrats (6.8%) more so than Republicans (5.2%), the margin growing lately. Billmon's conclusion: "The November non-surprise. The zombies came home."

• Neil Irwin: A New Movement in Liberal Economics That Could Shape Hillary Clinton's Agenda: The concept is "labor market monopsony," which has to do with how monopoly businesses are not only able to charge rents (fix prices), they're able to use their power to depress labor markets (wages). Ways to ameliorate this problem include higher (and more comprehensive) minimum wages and stronger antitrust action (something Democrats have not been good at, while Republicans have abandoned any pretense of enforcement).

• Ann Jones: Nasty Women:

  In his own telling, he, not the women he's demeaned or assaulted, is the abused one and he's taking it for us, for America. It's quite a self-portrait when you think about it and should make us appreciate all the more those women who stepped before the cameras, reported his sexual assaults, and left themselves open to further abuse from Trump and his supporters. They have done something rare and brave. [ . . . ]

  On the dark side, you never know what a sore loser and his loyal, bullying, misogynist followers might do. Say, for example, followers of the type who show up outside Hillary rallies with banners reading "Trump that Bitch!"

• Paul Krugman: Conservative Intellectuals: Follow the Money:

  We're supposed to think back nostalgically to the era when serious conservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol tried to understand the world, rather than treating everything as a political exercise in which ideas were just there to help their team win.

  But it was never like that. Don't take my word for it; take the word of Irving Kristol himself, in his book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Kristol explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: "I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities." This justified a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or financial problems," because "political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

  In short, never mind whether it's right, as long as it's politically useful. When David [Brooks] complains that "conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else," he's describing something that happened well before Reagan.

• Paul Lewis/Tom Silverstone: Trump rally protester: I was beaten for a 'Republicans against Trump' sign

• Martin Longman: Chris Christie Convicted By Proxy in Federal Court: Would be a bigger story if Trump had picked Christie as his running mate, but still . . . for anyone who wants to talk about locking people up, we can start with "two of Chris Christie's 'loyal lieutenants' who were taken down by Section 666 of Title 18 of the United States Code," who now "each theoretically face 20 years in prison (although nothing close to that will be imposed)."

• Caitlin MacNeal: With the End in Sight, Trump Goes All In on Criminalizing Hillary Clinton

• John Nichols: Republicans Won't Stop Talking About Impeaching Clinton: Specifically, Sen. Ron Johnson, likely to be defeated in his reelection bid in Wisconsin. But that's only one example.

• Amir Oren: Comey's Revenge: The Real Reason the FBI Intervened in the Campaign:

  The large spoke [Comey] put into the Hillary Clinton's wheels of victory won't be enough to stop her but could well reduce her coattails enough to keep the Democrats from regaining control of Congress, leaving Washington paralyzed by the warring branches of government. His motive was a personal grudge that Comey has held against Bill Clinton for a decade and a half, along with fresh residue from the investigation he closed this summer against Hillary.

  Oren dates that grudge from Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich and Pinchas Green, financiers who "fled the country as they were about to be indicted for tax evasion and doing business with Iran during the hostage crisis," but who found advocates in Israel's government. But Oren also points out that Comey is a Republican, a deputy attorney general under Bush, but he supported Obama's nomination of Eric Holder as attorney general, and was himself nominated by Obama to be FBI director.

  Also: Yochi Dreazen: The anti-Clinton insurgency at the FBI, explained.

• Daniel Politi: Key to Trump's More Disciplined Campaign? He No Longer Controls His Twitter Account:

  Although Trump may be keeping some of his thoughts away from the public spotlight, the Times also paints a scary picture of a candidate who is obsessed with getting revenge from those he feels have wronged him. "Offline, Mr. Trump still privately muses about all of the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day, including a threat to fund a 'super PAC' with vengeance as its core mission," notes the Times.

  The Times piece: Inside Donald Trump's Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance.

• John Quiggin: Trump voters are (mostly) Romney voters: Who in turn were mostly Bush voters:

  Trump is getting overwhelming support from self-described Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, and almost none from Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. The same was true for Romney four years ago, and for Bush before him. [ . . . ]

  This makes nonsense of much of the discussion of Trump voters as the dispossessed, protesting against globalisation, predatory capitalism and the destruction of American manufacturing. Conversely, it turns out that the discussion of Romney's "dog whistle" appeals to racism was misconceived. Replacing the dog whistle with a bullhorn has turned out to be no problem for the great majority of those who voted for Romney. [ . . . ]

  Corey [Robin] here at CT and elsewhere has probably been the most consistent exponent of the view that Trump is a traditional Republican, in the line of Goldwater and Reagan. I broadly agree, though I'd put more stress on new developments over the past 20 years or so. Trump's complete disregard for truth, norms of decency and so on, is an extrapolation of a process that's been going on for quite a while, at the popular level with Fox News, birtherism and so on and in the Republican intellectual apparatus with climate denial, zombie economics and attacks on "political correctness."

  The links are to pieces in Jacobin by Corey Robin. They're both worthwhile, but an even better title is Robin's The Conservative Movement Has No Decency. This piece, of course, is mostly about Joseph Welch's 1954 rebuke of Joe McCarthy, but ties in to Trump's denunciation of Khizr Khan after his speech at the Democratic Convention. Still, Trump's outburst wasn't isolated or even uniquely his own. Robin offers many other examples without ever mentioning the abuse conservatives have heaped on Hillary Clinton -- a subject for whole books, likely to sprawl into multiple volumes if she wins.

  Robin titled his latest thoughts on the election Viva Las Vegas! In it he includes a Brecht quote from 1942:

   . . . to present Hitler as particularly incompetent, as an aberration, a perversion, humbug, a pecuilar pathological case, while setting up other bourgeois politicians as models, models of something he has failed to attain, seems to me no way to combat Hitler.

• Joe Romm: Trump just proposed ending all federal clean energy development

• Alexis Sottile: The Trump Effect: How Hateful Rhetoric Is Affecting America's Children: Solar, wind, efficiency, batteries, clean cars, and climate science, too.

• Matt Taibbi: The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump:

  The best argument for a Clinton presidency is that she's virtually guaranteed to be a capable steward of the status quo, at a time of relative stability and safety. There are criticisms to make of Hillary Clinton, but the grid isn't going to collapse while she's in office, something no one can say with even mild confidence about Donald Trump.

  But nearly two-thirds of the population was unhappy with the direction of the country entering the general-election season, and nothing has been more associated with the political inside than the Clinton name. [ . . . ]

  The "scandal" of the Wiki papers, if you can call it that, is that it captured how at ease Clinton was talking to bankers and industrialists about the options for the organization of a global society. Even in transcript form, it's hard not to realize that the people in these rooms are all stakeholders in this vast historical transformation.

  Left out of the discussion over the years have been people like Trump's voters, who coincidentally took the first hit along the way in the form of lowered middle-class wages and benefits. They were also never told that things they cared about, like their national identity as Americans, were to have diluted meaning in the more borderless future.

  This is why the "basket of deplorables" comment rankled so badly. It's not like it was anywhere near as demeaning or vicious as any of 10,000 Trump insults. But it spoke to a factual disconnnect.

• Matthew Yglesias: The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign

• Matthew Yglesias: Melania's illegal immigration problem reminds us what Trump's campaign has always been about: OK, now we have proof that she entered the country to work illegally. American nativists should be up in arms: isn't a big part of their spiel how we shouldn't offer amnesty to people who don't follow the rules? Yet if they're so devoted to deep American roots, why are they backing a guy who has only one native-born American ancestor? Unless it matters what kind of immigrants we're talking about?

  Indeed, going back to when the Nixon administration sued Trump for discriminating against black and Latino tenants, Trump's long record of racism isn't really disputable.

  So there's really nothing so surprising about the Melania story. Trump doesn't like immigrants who change the American cultural and ethnic mix in a way he finds threatening and neither do his fans. Europeans like Melania (or before her, Ivana) are fine. I get it, David Duke gets it, the frog meme people get it, everyone gets it.

  But it does raise the question of why mainstream press coverage has spent so much time pretending not to get it. Why have we been treated to so many lectures about the "populist appeal" of a man running on regressive tax cuts and financial deregulation and the "economic anxiety" of his fans?

PS: Just shook up by a 5.3 earthquake centered 3 miles west of Cushing, Oklahoma. Fairly sharp for about 15 second here, unsettled for another 20-30 seconds, but I doubt we suffered any damage. On the other hand, Cushing bills itself as the "pipeline capital" of America, so they have a lot of dangerously fragile infrastructure real close to the epicenter. Happened at 7:44:25 local time.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Music: Current count 27287 [27272] rated (+15), 423 [418] unrated (+5).

Another light week. Spent Friday evening through Sunday working on an overly ambitious birthday dinner. I doubt I'll ever try that again -- at least at such scale. Wound up scratching five dishes from the menu -- a couple I'll finish up tonight to keep from wasting the ingredients, a couple more can wait indefinitely. Theme was Greek, with three main dishes, baked and fresh veggies, pita bread, dips, stuffed grape leaves, and various hot mezze, with walnut cake for dessert. The bread was disappointing, the dips mixed, the grape leaves tasty but mostly ignored, the mezze reduced to meatballs and sweetbreads (especially good). The main dishes -- fish, shrimp, rabbit, and briami were all spectacular. Cake was fine too.

Biggest problem was logistical, as I was unable to get the food out in proper order, and we ran out of table space -- we probably would have been better off setting it up as a buffet, but we don't really have room for that either. Smaller dinners for six or so still seem workable, and the main dishes were pretty simple preparations -- long bakes or slow braises. Thanks to Elias Vlanton, Greek was the first non-American cuisine I fell in love with, but aside from Garithes Yiouvetsi I've rarely cooked it, having moved on and made Turkish cuisine my specialty. So it was nice to get back to basics recently.

I posted October's Streamnotes on Saturday, just before I started cooking, so there's virtually nothing new listed below. I posted a notice on Facebook, and was surprised to find that nearly all of the commentary concerned my ACN background grades on Bruce Springsteen. I often use Streamnotes as a tool for going back and checking out records I had missed, but since I didn't bother with previously rated records I figured that at least listing them would provide some useful context. German avant-pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach was a case in point this past month, as I reviewed his latest plus six older ones, then listed 18 others (including Globe Unity and a couple of joint projects with wife Aki Takase).

I started doing Springsteen after watching his appearance on Stephen Colbert plugging his memoir and a tie-in CD of odds and sods. Next I moved on to Live 1975-85, his famed 5-LP/3-CD live archive, then figured I might as well mop up the rest. Can't say as I discovered anything -- certainly nothing I wish I had bought earlier. As is well documented (e.g., here and here and here) I developed an intense dislike for Springsteen c. his Time cover -- partly my rather instinctive leanings toward antihype, partly revulsion over the hyperbolic dramaturgy of Born to Run (e.g., "Jungleland") and Darkness at the Edge of Town, and partly because I had become partisan in my fondness for the era's British pub rock movement (e.g., see the numerous references to Ducks Deluxe, op. cit.).

One commenter wrote "a universe where BTR is a B+ is a chilly place indeed." Actually, my original Born to Run grade was B-. I certainly didn't feel chilly at the time. Lots of other things I loved at the time, and it's always been relative. I've mellowed considerably since then, acknowledging the title cut as magnificent (despite some terrible lyrics, like "And strap your hands 'cross my engines") although "Jungleland" still sucks. The album that started to turn me around was The River, where he cut out most of the crap and started to hone his sound down to something classically rock but still distinctive. Took me a while, but he eventually turned into someone I liked (took him a while too) -- e.g., I don't get the problem some commenters have with The Seeger Sessions.

Still, I'm not here to argue that you shouldn't like something you actually do. If you have your own considered views, God bless you. I figure I'm mostly useful because I write about so much stuff you've never heard of, or never taken seriously. (Black Bombaim is a good case in point, or 75 Dollar Bill -- although Jason Gubbels and Robert Christgau got to the latter way before I did.) And when I do touch on something familiar, maybe that will help you correlate, as well as providing my own sanity check. Wouldn't want to miss anything important, especially if it's a widespread pick (like Springsteen, unlike Schlippenbach).

More useful was Dan Weiss' complaint that I underrated Rae Sremmurd. One of those acts I always seem to come out low on. A comment that's more likely to trigger re-evaluation is Michael Tatum's on American Honey: "Genres that aren't supposed to mix, artists I don't care for, even songs I never liked . . . no one listens to all this stuff at the same time. But somehow it works." I could blame Spotify (Napster only has like seven cuts), but I heard all that and still couldn't decide whether it justified what's basically a mixtape.

New issue of Downbeat came in the mail today, featuring their 81st Annual Readers Poll results. I've rarely felt further isolated from the jazz fans represented by the magazine (looks like about 15000 voted). The HOF winner was the late Phil Woods, a worthy candidate who narrowly edged out Wynton Marsalis -- not a personal favorite, but over 35 years now he's probably produced as many A- albums as Woods, maybe more. Woods also won for alto saxophone, where he was trailed by (get this): Kenny Garrett, David Sanborn, and Grace Kelly. Marsalis won trumpet, followed by a guy I'd never heard of, Roger Ingram (he's mostly played in big bands, going back to Louie Bellson and Woody Herman).

Most disappointing for me was the album standings -- not so much that Maria Schneider won (most critics adore her) as that she was followed by Grace Kelly, Gregory Porter, Arturo Sandoval, and many others. I count two A-, two B+(***), and various lower grades. What the hell, let's list them:

1. Maria Schneider Orchestra: The Thompson Fields (ArtistShare) [**]
2. Grace Kelly: Trying to Figure It Out (Pazz) [*]
3. Gregory Porter: Take Me to the Alley (Blue Note) [B-]
4. Arturo Sandoval: Live at Yoshi's (ALFI) [*]
5. Jack DeJohnette/Ravi Coltrane/Matthew Garrison: In Movement (ECM) [A-]
6. Christian McBride Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard (Mack Avenue) [**]
7. Tony Bennett & Bill Charlap: The Silver Lining (Columbia) [*]
8. Pat Metheny: The Unity Sessions (Nonesuch) [B]
9. Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra: Live in Cuba (Blue Engine) [**]
10. Esperanza Spalding: Emily's D + Evolution (Concord) [B]
11. Charles Lloyd & the Marvels: I Long to See You (Blue Note) [**]
12. Chick Corea & Béla Fleck: Two (Concord) [B]
13. Cécile McLorin Salvant: For One to Love (Mack Avenue) [*]
14. Sonny Rollins: Holding the Stage: Road Shows Vol. 4 (Okeh) [A-]
15. Snarky Puppy: Culcha Vulcha (Universal) [C+]
16. Bill Charlap: Notes From New York (Impulse!) [*]
17. John Scofield: Past Present (Impulse!) [***]
18. Snarky Puppy: Family Dinner Volume Two (Decca) [B-]
19. Kenny Barron: Book of Intuition (Impulse!) [**]
20. Arturo O'Farrill & the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra: Cuba: The Conversation Continues (Motéma) [***]

I haven't assembled my 2016 lists yet (working list here), but compare my Best Jazz Albums of 2015, which intersects the earlier (and larger) half of this list, and considers a lot more.

Hard to overstate how disgusted I am right now with the FBI over Hillary Clinton's emails -- easily the most boring subject in American politics for over a year now. (And while I don't doubt that Anthony Weiner is a creep, why the hell are they investigating him?) Before this broke I was actually thinking that both candidates had been treated unfairly. After all, the real primordial scum of American politics is Ted Cruz, but to go after him you'd have to talk about issues, and that's the real fear and dread of all sorts of media in America.

I minor exception to this is the Wichita Eagle, which has published detailed position charts on various candidates. Trump's isn't as awful as you'd expect, and Clinton's isn't as good as you'd hope, but that race at least is pretty clear cut. But I was saddened by how awful the Democratic congressional candidates are this time -- Patrick Wiesner for Senate and Dan Giroux for House. Given the Republican incumbents, I'll probably wind up voting or both (although I know a few people who prefer independent Miranda Allen over Giroux), but neither has much of a chance.

I'll be voting for Clinton too, although I fear my prediction that she'll be dogged by one stupid scandal after another for her entire term will turn out prescient. Very doubtful my wife will vote for her. Since the email thing broke open again, she's been hashtagging "itoldyouso" and heaping special scorn on those who claimed "she's been vetted" back in the primaries. Turns out none of the candidates were very well vetted, because the vanity and hubris presidential candidates all but require are endless generators of petty scandal.

New records rated this week:

• Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker (2016, Columbia): [r]: A-
• The Core Trio: Live Featuring Matthew Shipp (2014 [2016], Evil Rabbit): [cd]: B+(**)
• Andrew Cyrille Quartet: The Declaration of Musical Independence (2014 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
• Fond of Tigers: Uninhabit (2016, Offsesson/Drip Audio): [cd]: C+
• Mike LeDonne & the Groover Quartet: That Feelin' (2016, Savant): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jacam Manricks: Chamber Jazz (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: A-
• Grégoire Maret: Wanted (2016, Sunnyside): [r]: B-
• John Prine: For Better or Worse (2016, Oh Boy): [r]: A-
• Sleaford Mods: TCR (2016, Rough Trade, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• Kate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos (2016, Lex): [r]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

• Evan Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton/Schlippenbach Trio: 2X3=5 (1999 [2001], Leo): [r]: B+(***)
• Schlippenbach Trio: Bauhaus Dessau (2009 [2010], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach: Payan (1972 [2014], Enja): [r]: B+(*)
• Alex von Schlippenbach/Paul Dunmall/Paul Rogers/Tony Bianco: Vesuvius (2004 [2005], Slam): [r]: B+(**)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach: Piano Solo: Twelve Tone Tales, Vol. 1 (2005 [2006], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach: Piano Solo: Twelve Tone Tales, Vol. 2 (2005 [2006], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Sophie Agnel/Daunik Lazro: Marguerite d'Or Pâle (Fou)
• Walter Kemp 3oh!: Dark Continent (Blujazz)
• Jasmine Lovell-Smith's Towering Poppies: Yellow Red Blue (Paint Box): November 4
• Thierry Maillard Trio: Ethnic Sounds (Blujazz)
• Moutin Factory Quintet: Deep (Blujazz)
• Snaggle: The Long Slog (Browntasaurus): November 4
• Terell Stafford: Forgive and Forget (Herb Harris Music)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Slightly more than a month's worth of records here, as I ran into a couple bad weeks then found myself running out of month. Still a fairly substantial outing: 114 records (93 new, 3 recent comps, 18 oldies I'm just now catching up to -- mostly Bruce Springsteen and Alexander von Schlippenbach, both searches triggered by recent albums).

New records are mostly jazz, although I made an effort early in the month to check out many of the year's better regarded pop albums -- my main source Album of the Year's Highest Rated Albums of 2016 list. I'm still missing three of the top five (Nick Cave, Beyoncé, and Frank Ocean), one more down to ten (Dillinger Escape Plan), and three more down to twenty-five (DD Dumbo, Nails, The Hotelier) -- mostly not on Napster (although I now see that Nick Cave finally appeared).

Rated count for 2016 releases is currently 744 albums. I'm not sure how that compares year-to-date with 2015 but it's probably down by about 20%: by freeze date my 2015 list had hit 1112 albums, so if you scale that back to ten months you get 926, and 744 is 80.34% of that. Of course, in every year critics pick up their coverage rate toward the end when the annual best-of lists start to appear. Seems likely I'll wind up down closer to 10% than the current 20%.

A list this year is currently 97 long, down considerably from 150 last year (at freeze date, now up to 164). Same calculations show that current A-list is down 22.4% this year. I've actually wondered whether I'm getting faster and looser with grades this year. These numbers actually look rather normal, but that doesn't mean I haven't: I'd have to do some research to prove it, but I suspect that it's normal for A-grades to pile up late in the year. It's also normal for jazz to spurt ahead of non-jazz (currently 54-43, as I recall less than last year's split at this time, although the two columns wound up evenly balanced).

One reason for my doubts is that some of this month's picks are records that I don't regard as especially strong for the artist, but I've let them pass through anyway (Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Handsome Family, maybe even Revolutionary Snake Ensemble). On the other hand, I didn't quite bite on several jazz albums that have gotten a lot of critical play (Mary Halvorson, Wadada Leo Smith; perhaps halso Darcy James Argue and Andrew Cyrille). On the other hand, my favorites this time lean toward mainstream and/or groove (although I guess Black Bombaim and Damana don't fit either niche -- so much for predictable).

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 based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on September 22. Past reviews and more information are available here (8746 records).

Recent Releases

75 Dollar Bill: Wooden Bag (2015, Other Music): A duo, with Rick Brown banging on things and playing a little alto sax, and Che Chen playing guitar and more alto sax. Mostly roiling drone and percussion, and little differentiation among seven songs, but the noise is distinct and captivating, so there. B+(***) [bc]

75 Dollar Bill: Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (2013-15 [2016], Thin Wrist): Principally a duo, with Rick Brown playing less than a full set of drums (but "plywood crate") and Che Chen more than one guitar, with a few others adding to the discordant harmonies. Four pieces, 39:20, the vaguely Saharan grooves and harmonies minimally differentiated. A- [bc]

Stefan Aeby Trio: To the Light (2015 [2016], Intakt): Swiss pianist, third trio album, also appears on good records by label mates Christoph Irniger and Sarah Buecchli. With André Pousaz on bass and Michi Stulz on drums. B+(**) [cd]

Joey Alexander: Countdown (2016, Motéma): Pianist, from Bali in Indonesia (full name Josiah Alexander Sila), was 11 when he cut his debut and 13 for this sophomore effort. Mostly trio with Larry Grenadier or Dan Chmielinski on bass and Ulysses Owens Jr. on drums. He's gotten the red carpet treatment so far -- even won a Grammy. And he is a surprisingly adept interpreter, as well as a fairly decent writer of genre exercises, but among mainstream jazz pianists these days, who isn't? B+(*)

JD Allen: Americana: Musings on Jazz and Blues (2016, Savant): Tenor saxophonist, leads a trio with Gregg August on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. Sticks to basics here, doesn't strain or strive, but makes it all -- mostly original pieces, only one cover dating back to the '30s -- feel natural, unforced. A- [cd]

Amber Arcades: Fading Lines (2016, Heavenly): Alias for Dutch singer Annelotte de Graaf, with a background in law working for UN war crimes tribunals. No idea how I should alphabetize names like this. Bright, tuneful pop, framed more by guitar than keyboard. B+(*)

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Real Enemies (2016, New Amsterdam): Big band, rhythm section (including guitar) often plugged in, third album, Argue composes and conducts but doesn't play. His conspiracy themes are highlighted in spoken pieces, including a lecture on "paranoid style," and he backs it all up with stark, dramatic swells. B+(**) [bc]

Jay Azzolina/Dino Govoni/Adam Nussbaum/Dave Zinno: Chance Meeting (2016, Whaling City Sound): Listed alphabetically, all four contributing songs, as listed: guitar (best known, if not best remembered, for Spyro Gyra), tenor sax, drums, and bass. Most impressed by Govoni -- unfamiliar with him, but he teaches at Berklee, and his page there asserts the obvious: "A good saxophonist, first and foremost, has to have a tremendous sound." He does. B+(**) [cd]

Andrzej Bauer/Adam Baldych/Cezary Duchnowski/Cezary Konrad: Trans-Fuzja (2012 [2016], ForTune): Polish string jazz trio (cello, violin, bass/electronics) plus drums. Despite the instrumentation, not close to the "chamber jazz" notion. B+(**) [bc]

Beekman: Vol. 02 (2015 [2016], Ropeadope): Tenor sax quartet based in Brooklyn, pianist Yago Vazqauez (also Rhodes) listed first although all write with saxophonist Kyle Nasser most prolific -- 4/9 songs, vs. 3 for Vazquez, 2 for Pablo Menares (bass), 1 by Rodrigo Recabarren (drums). Boppish, flows fast and hard. B+(***) [cd]

Black Bombaim/Peter Brötzmann: Black Bombaim & Peter Brötzmann (2016, Clean Feed): Portuguese "stoner/psychedelic rock" group, a power trio with guitar-bass-drums but no singer, so they're into densely textured noise. That suits the saxophonist. He does what he's been doing for nearly fifty years, but the framing makes this more accessible without compromising his rawness. A- [cd]

Bon Iver: 22, a Million (2016, Jagjaguwar): Justin Vernon, third album, not so much a singer-songwriter as a fairly huge cult artist, his popularity and critical favor a puzzle to me -- not that I'm immune to his appeal, I just find it hard to see how such arcane chicanery and fey disposition could gain a mass following. Perhaps that says something about the ever-evolving nature of anomie. B+(*)

Danny Brown: Atrocity Exhibition (2016, Warp): Rapper from Detroit, apprenticed in the drug trade but has righted his career, now on his fourth album. Voice humorous similar to Young Thug, gives him a bit of lift even when the thug life doesn't deserve it. First hook goes "tell me something I don't know." Not the last, either. A-

John Butcher & Ståle Liavik Solberg: So Beautiful, It Starts to Rain (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): Sax and drums duets, the former playing soprano and tenor. Three pieces, 35:19, choppy and rather abstract. B+(**) [cd]

George Cables: The George Cables Songbook (2016, HighNote): Pianist, has a long list of records since 1975, many well regarded ones on SteepleChase I haven't heard so I tend to remember him best for his stellar work with Art Pepper. Something of a career recap here, with a superb trio (Essiet Essiet and Victor Lewis) augmented by sax (Craig Handy) on five tracks, percussion (Victor Kroom) on four, and vocals (Sarah Elizabeth Charles) on six. B+(***) [cd]

Lou Caimano/Eric Olsen: Dyad Plays Jazz Arias (2015 [2016], self-released): Alto sax and piano, respectively, adding Randy Brecker (flugelhorn) or Ted Nash (tenor sax) on most pieces -- written, as advertised, by Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, Massenet, Delibes, and Barber. But without their usual strings and voices they never trigger my usual classical gag reflex. They just seem a little overblown. B [cd]

Neko Case/KD Lang/Laura Veirs: Case/Lang/Veirs (2016, Anti-): Trio of established singer-songwriters, in alphabetical order but also from most to least famous. Reviewers like to compare this to the Parton-Ronstadt-Harris "Trio" but those were much bigger stars with instantly recognizable voices. These three are much more anonymous, yet it's remarkable how evenly they blend together. B+(**)

Nels Cline: Lovers (2013 [2016], Blue Note, 2CD): Guitarist, pays the rent by slumming in Wilco, but that evidently hasn't dulled his ambition for solo projects. Indeed, this project is gargantuan both in length and in its credits, yet none of that is evident in the orchestral music, an mix of placid and ominous, neither all that well defined. B-

Clipping: Splendor & Misery (2016, Sub Pop): Experimental hip-hop group from Los Angeles, best known member Daveed Diggs (from Hamilton), offer a concept about about a future slave (Cargo 2331) being shipped through outer space. Progress ends in very spare and mechanical beats and blips, its own cold and unforgiving dystopia. B+(*)

Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker (2016, Columbia): Slow, grim, gravelly, the octogenarian poet backs himself into a dark corner, and then a funny thing happens: the more you strain for clues (and you do) the sweeter his serenade. A-

Cymbals Eat Guitars: Pretty Years (2016, Sinderlyn): New York band, took their name from a Lou Reed quote "describing the sound of the Velvet Underground," not that they're that disciplined. Instead, we get a better-than-average rock band with solid songs and some flash, not that I find that especially interesting. B

Andrew Cyrille Quartet: The Declaration of Musical Independence (2014 [2016], ECM): Drummer, from Brooklyn, an important figure on the avant-garde since he joined Cecil Taylor's group in 1964. With more than dozen albums under his own name, his ECM debut is a subversive little quartet, with guitarist Bill Frisell shirking the spotlight more often than not. Equally inscrutable are Richard Teitelbaum (synth/piano) and Ben Street (bass). B+(***) [dl]

Damana (Dag Magnus Narvesen Octet): Cornua Copiae (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): Drummer-led Norwegian octet, with three saxes (alto, tenor, baritone/bass), trumpet, trombone, piano, bass: tremendous power from a horns section, but also texture, layering, and detail, propelled by a rhythm section with a hint of swing. Looks like a debut record, likely my ballot pick. A- [cd]

Dogbrain: Blue Dog (2016, Dogbrain Music, EP): Jay Ward, a countryish songwriter who sings through his stutter because the music flows so readily, has one album and three EPs. Six cuts, 18:39. B+(***)

Dreezy: No Hard Feelings (2016, Interscope): Chicago rapper-singer, has a couple of EPs, pretty good single here in "Body" (feat. Jeremih). B+(*)

Drive-By Truckers: American Band (2016, ATO): First thing you notice is how easily Patterson Hood's southern drawl flows over the contour of the melodies. Then words kick in, starting with a remarkable song about race and shooting deaths which works in a not unrelated bit of domestic violence. A-

Earprint: Earprint (2016, Endectomorph Music): Boston quartet: Tree Palmedo (trumpet), Kevin Sun (tenor sax, clarinet), Simón Willson (bass), Dor Herskovits (drums). Slippery postbop, bouncing off walls, occasionally surprising you. B+(**) [cd]

Orrin Evans: #Knowingishalfthebattle (2016, Smoke Sessions): Postbop pianist from Philadelphia sets up a high-revving group with two guitarists (Kurt Rosenwinkel and Kevin Eubanks), plus bass (Luques Curtis) and drums (Mark Whitfield Jr.), with guest spots for sax (Caleb Wheeler Curtis) and voice (M'Balia Singley) -- the latter's take of "Kooks" trips itself up, but her "That's All" is fine. B+(**)

Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense: Moving Still (2016, Pi): Trumpet player, previous album (Moment and the Message) was terrific, has notable side credits with Steve Coleman, Steve Lehman, Mary Halvorson, and Tomas Fujiwara. Quintet with both guitar (Miles Okazaki) and piano (Matt Mitchell), tends to float above their postbop. B+(**) [cd]

Five in Orbit: Tribulus Terrestris (2015 [2016], Fresh Sound New Talent): Franco-Catalan quintet, where Ramon Fossati (trombone), Olivier Brandily (alto sax/flute), and Laurent Bronner (piano) write the pieces (aside from a Lincoln-Roach cover), plus Nicolas Rageau (bass) and Luc Isenmann (drums). Fossati seems most drawn to Mingus, kicking the band into a higher orbit. B+(**)

Fond of Tigers: Uninhabit (2016, Offsesson/Drip Audio): Instrumental rock band from Vancouver, seven-piece, includes a couple of the city's notable jazzbos -- JP Carter on trumpet and Jesse Zubot on violin -- but guitarist Stephen Lyons (also credited with vocals, percussion and electronics) is most likely responsible, for the music if not necessarily the bloat. C+

Friends & Neighbors: What's Wrong? (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): Another fine Norwegian freebop group, quintet with trumpet, tenor sax/clarinets, piano, bass, and drums -- no one I've heard of before. Four of the five contribute songs, with André Roligheten (reeds) marginally more prolific (and listed first in the credits). B+(***) [cd]

Future of the Left: The Peace & Truce of Future of the Left (2016, Prescriptions): Rock band from Wales, considered noise rock or post-hardcore but I'd slot them more as post-punk in a line that includes the Fall and the Three Johns. Not sure of the politics, but Falco's snarl exudes class conflict, so that's a start, and I've never found their basic grind more appealing. B+(***)

Robert Glasper Experiment: ArtScience (2016, Blue Note): Pianist, originally promised jazz with hip-hop influence and has straddled that concept inelegantly since 2005, but the vocals here push the balance toward postmodern r&b, which is where the beats derive anyway. B+(*)

GOAT: Requiem (2016, Sub Pop): Swedish group, called their first album World Music and has tried to expand on that thought ever since, but to the extent they specialize at all, they've come up with a psychedelicized form of afrobeat. They're not always that delectable, but I could listen to, say, the grind of "Goatband" much longer than 7:50, nor is that the only time they find such a compelling groove. B+(***)

Mary Halvorson Octet: Away With You (2015 [2016], Firehouse 12): Guitarist, protégé of Anthony Braxton, has previous Quintet and Septet albums, here adding Susan Alcorn (pedal steel) to the latter: Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet), Jon Irabagon (alto sax), Ingrid Laubrock (tenor sax), Jacob Garchik (trombone), John Hébert (bass), Ches Smith (drums). Slippery pieces, much to admire but hard to pin them down, especially with the guitarist most elusive of all. B+(***) [cd]

The Handsome Family: Unseen (2016, Loose Music): Brett and Rennie Sparks, she (I gather) does most of the writing with its fascination for nature and science, and he does most of the singing, like the music (mostly guitar) basic but elegant. I fear some recycling of tunes, but that's mostly because they're so memorable. A-

Billy Hart & the WDR Big Band: The Broader Picture (2016, Enja/Yellowbird): The veteran drummer composed all of these pieces, some going back to the 1970s, and took over as the WDR Big Band's drummer, but the star here is Christophe Schweizer, arranger of the pieces and director of the big band. The WDR Big Band has long been one of the most competent of Europe's institutional bands, but even they have rarely brought their guest star's music so vividly to life. B+(***) [cdr]

Luke Hendon: Silk & Steel (2016, self-released): Guitarist, touches on gypsy jazz à Django Reinhardt, backed by bass and drums (and sometimes violin) but you rarely notice more than the guitar. B+(*) [cd]

Dave Holland/Chris Potter/Lionel Loueke/Eric Harland: Aziza (2016, Dare2): Bass, tenor/soprano sax, guitar/vocals, drums -- not sure why I missed the first two names when I filed this (other than that my advance didn't come with a cover, and the spine only says Aziza). Strong rhythm record, moves right along. Potter, of course, is superb, and when he switches to soprano they just double down on the Latin tinge. Two songs each, the sort of balance you rarely find in a supergroup. A- [cdr]

Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch (2016, Sacred Bones): Avant goth diva from Norway, released a couple records as Rockettothesky before reverting to her birth name, turns out some kind of soundtrack about vampires -- maybe just a concept album, but it's as scattered as many soundtracks. C+

Ital Tek: Hollowed (2016, Planet Mu): Electronica producer Alan Myson, from Brighton UK, fifth album since 2008, has a bit of industrial klang shaded toward ambience. B+(**)

Nicolas Jaar: Sirens (2016, Other People): Nominally electronica, but it's the rock and roll bits -- bass throbs, drum rolls, even a little squelchy guitar -- that impress me, not that he doesn't occasionally fade into ambiance. B+(**)

Kate Jackson: British Road Movies (2016, Hoo Ha): British singer-songwriter, formerly frontwoman for the Long Blondes, debut solo album. Solid album, but not much sticks. B+(*)

Manu Katché: Unstatic (2016, Anteprima): French drummer, group includes Tore Brunborg (saxes), Jim Watson (keyboards), and Eileen Andrea Wang (bass), adding guests here and there, notably Nils Langren (trombone on five tracks). Relaxed, a bit light, easy on the ears. B+(*)

Michael Kiwanuka: Love & Hate (2016, Polydor): Born in London, parents from Uganda, straight up soul singer often tagged as retro, big star in England but barely gets noticed here. Second album, nothing fancy but a simple pleasure. B+(**)

Mike LeDonne & the Groover Quartet: That Feelin' (2016, Savant): Started as a mainstream pianist in the early 1990s but has increasingly made the organ his tool, goes for old-fashioned soul jazz with tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander and guitarist Peter Bernstein providing tasty leads, and dependable Joe Farnsworth on drums. Vince Herring (alto sax) joins on three cuts. B+(**) [cd]

Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine (2016, Glassnote): Former frontman (guitar, vocals) of the Walkmen, my candidate for the most dead-ass boring alt/indie band of the last decade, working with multi-instrumentalist and producer Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of a much better band, Vampire Weekend. Splits the difference, the songs sharp and catchy, but still something I don't quite trust. B

John Lindberg Raptor Trio: Western Edges (2012 [2016], Clean Feed): Bassist-led sax trio, with Pablo Calogero on baritone and Joe LaBarbera on drums. The deep sax meshes evenly with the bass, with no threats to break out into something crazy -- just steady, smart free jazz. B+(**) [cd]

John Lindberg BC3: Born in an Urban Ruin (2016, Clean Feed): Bassist, founder and mainstay of String Trio of New York. Trio with Wendell Harrison on clarinets and Kevin Norton on vibraharp and percussion, although more often it seems like bass duets with one or the other, or just bass solos. Each combo is interesting in its own right, but I don't see how they add up. B+(**) [cd]

Jacam Manricks: Chamber Jazz (2015 [2016], self-released): Saxophonist, credited here with alto, soprano, tenor, flute, alto flute, and clarinet; leading a quartet with Kevin Hays on piano and Fender Rhodes, Gianluca Renzi on acoustic bass, and Ari Hoenig on drums. Nothing I think of as "chamber jazz," although he incorporates bits from some classical composers as well as Nascimento and Miles Davis, adding to the album's sheer catchiness. A- [cd]

Grégoire Maret: Wanted (2016, Sunnyside): Born in Geneva, Switzerland; based in New York; plays chromatic harmonica, an instrument which speaks blues but gets diluted in the strings and flute producer Terri Lyne Carrington brought out, not to mention the scattered soul vocals. Could be his Grammy first time out spoiled him. B-

Jørgen Mathisen/Christian Meaas Svendsen/Andreas Wildhagen: Momentum (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): Free sax trio from Norway, Mathisen -- also on the Damana album -- playing soprano and tenor (mostly the latter), the others bass and drums. Struggles a bit, both at full roar and in more studious stretches. B+(*) [cd]

Maxwell: blackSUMMERS'night (2016, Columbia): Gerald Maxwell Rivera, neo-soul crooner, fifth album going back to 1995, but only second since 2001, the previous title differentiated from this one's only by different case. Can't say that I docked him for that, but it didn't win him the benefit of the doubt either. B

Anna Meredith: Varmints (2016, Moshi Moshi): British, background includes compositions for classical orchestra, moving into pop in 2012 with the first of two EPs, then this debut album. Favors crashing waves of synths, where words are almost an afterthought. B

Rale Micic: Night Music (2015 [2016], Whaling City Sound): Guitarist, born 1975 in Belgrade (Yugoslavia, now Serbia), moved to US in 1995 to study at Berklee, settled in New York, has at least three previous albums. This quartet blends his guitar nicely with Danny Grissett's piano. B+(*) [cd]

Minim Experiment: Dark Matter (2016, ForTune): Guitarist Kuba Wojcik wrote all five tunes, featuring piano (Kamil Piotrowicz) and backed by bass and drums, most attractive when the beat sustains the minimalism, but interesting even when it doesn't. B+(**) [bc]

Moonbow: When the Sleeping Fish Turn Red and the Skies Start to Sing in C Major I Will Follow You to the End (2016, ILK): All tracks composed by bassist Tomo Jacobson, born in Poland, based in Copenhagen, also in the group Mount Meander, and working on a film about William Parker (who contributed a liner note poem). Septet -- three saxes, guitar and piano, bass and drums, Kresten Osgood the only familiar name. Ambitious set, with its broad sweep and towering heights, moody colors. Still, hard to get a handle on it all. B+(**) [cd]

Kevin Morby: Singing Saw (2016, Dead Oceans): Singer-songwriter from Lubbock, recording his third album in Woodstock. Outstanding song is "Dorothy," which refines a riff from . . . "Heroin." B+(***)

The Mowgli's: Where'd Your Weekend Go? (2016, Photo Finish/Island): Pop group from Calabasas, California -- a ritzy suburb in the hills west of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. Bouncy upbeat, multiple singers with lots of vocal harmonies, a formula completely alien to the downer vibe that young critics seem to love. Me, I loved their previous Kids in Love, but while this has similar appeal, nothing here quite grabs me. B

Mudcrutch: 2 (2016, Reprise): Southern rock band, formed in 1970 in Gainesville, Florida, defunct by 1975 without an album but reformed in 2007 with five-sixths of the original lineup, the original lead singer having left by 1972 and been obsoleted by backup Tom Petty's post-group stardom. So basically, this is Petty in a nostalgic mood. B

Mark Murphy: Slip Away (2016, Mini Movie): Not the late jazz singer, this one's a singer-songwriter, plays guitar, also covers Dylan, McCartney, Newman, and Young. Band composed of name jazz musicians (Jon Cowherd, Chris Morrissey, Jeff Ballard, Gilad Hekselman, Dayna Stephens) with Maria Neckham joining for a duet, but no one stretches, the result barely registering as easy-listening rock. B [cd]

Naked Wolf: Ahum (2016, Clean Feed): Dutch group, has a previous album, looks like all members write with Felicity Proven (trumpet) and Mikael Szarfirowski (guitar) also singing (or rapping); the others are Luc Ex (bass), Yedo Gibson (reeds), and Gerri Jäger (drums). The vocals threaten to pull this into some weird post-rock vein, while the instrumentals drag it back into the domain of demented circus music. B+(*) [cd]

Steve Noble & Kristoffer Berre Alberts: Condest Second Yesterday (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): English drummer, has a long discography since 1987 mostly with European avant-gardists, here in a duo with a relatively new tenor saxophonist from Norway -- brings tremendous energy, although he does tend to squawk. B+(***) [cd]

Sean Noonan: Memorable Sticks (2015 [2016], ForTune): Drummer-led piano trio, with Alex Marcelo and Peter Bilenc, with Noonan adding a narration about chipping away in a salt mine, looking for treasures. Very upbeat, often emphatic, but I find the voice more distracting than not. B [bc]

Angel Olsen: My Woman (2016, Jagjaguwar): Singer-songwriter from St. Louis, sang backup for Bonnie "Prince" Billy, second (or third) album, adding to the critical acclaim for her 2014 Burn Your Fire for No Witness. First time through I didn't catch much, but a second spin caught my ear numerous times, even when she slows to a whisper. B+(***)

Parker Abbott Trio: Elevation (2016, self-released): From Canada, a different kind of piano trio, with both Teri Parker and Simeon Abbott playing various keyboards (including organ and good old acoustic piano, but mostly electrics), with Mark Segger on drums and percussion. B [cd]

Nicholas Payton: Textures (2016, Paytone): Around the turn of the century someone came up with the term "jazztronica" and a number of mainstream jazz artists started dabbling in that direction, including the New Orleans trumpet master. Nothing much happened, but Payton keeps plugging away, doing this solo on keyb and laptop. He succeeds in generating textures. Still doesn't amount to much by way of music. B-

Houston Person & Ron Carter: Chemistry (2015 [2016], HighNote): Two old guys playing sax-bass duets at a casual pace on comfortable standards. Carter has probably appeared on more records than any other jazz musician (Morton & Cook once tried counting and decided Ray Brown held that distinction, but Carter has long passed Brown). Back cover has a photo of the two with an old white man sandwiched between the more imposing black figures -- presumably that's Executive Producer Joe Fields, who signed Person to Prestige in the 1960s and kept him close ever since. This isn't their first duet album. I should probably recheck that one, but for now I'm too much in love with this one. Guess I'm getting old myself. A [cd]

John Prine: For Better, or Worse (2016, Oh Boy): In 1999 Prine eased his way back from throat cancer with a remarkable album of old country tunes, the vocal duties shared with Iris DeMent and several other women. He repeats that concept here -- probably figures that at 70 he's earned another easy one, or maybe he's noticed that he hasn't written a album's worth of originals since Bush provoked him to 2005's Fair and Square. Of course, this isn't as marvelous as the first time: the songs aren't as improbable, he's lost a step, and so many young women are chasing him that DeMent only gets two highlights. None of that bothers me. And if you're waiting for a John Prine song, just wait for the end. A-

Punkt 3: Ordnung Herrscht (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): Group named for German bassist-composer Noah Punkt, who has a previous solo album, two previous trios, and various other projects. This is a trio with saxophonist Tobias Pfister and drummer Ramon Oliveras, free jazz, sharp but not too aggressive. B+(***) [cd]

Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife 2 (2016, Eardrum/Interscope): Hip-hop duo from Mississippi, Swae Lee and Slim Jimmi, second album. Pretty ragged for pop stars, somewhat catchy, might even be funny too if I was into their B- and N-shit. B+(*)

Revolutionary Snake Ensemble: I Want That Sound! (2016, Innova): Alto saxophonist Ken Field's Boston-based answer to New Orleans' second line brass bands, actually just a sextet with two saxes, trumpet, and the trombonist doubling on tuba. Fourth album, more of their infectious funk groove. A- [cd]

Huerco S: For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) (2016, Proibito): Brian Leeds, Kansas-born, based in Brooklyn, second album, ambient electronica composed of little bits of synth, almost toy-like at first but grows into something. B+(**)

Savages: Adore Life (2016, Matador): London-based post-punk band, fronted by Jehnny Beth (Camille Berthomier), who has a bit of Patti Smith in her voice. Doom and gloom too, the sort of thing that could prove prophetic, although for now I'm on the fence. B+(***)

SBTRKT: Save Yourself (2016, self-released, EP): English "post-dubstep" group, primarily synths producer Aaron Jerome, with vocals from Sampha and The-Dream. Short LP (8 tracks, 25:55) after two longer albums. Kind of mopey, more like trip-hop, without the hop. B-

Schlippenbach Trio: Warsaw Concert (2015 [2016], Intakt): Avant pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, with Evan Parker on tenor sax, and Paul Lovens on drums -- a trio for more than forty years. Frenetic and sketchy when they started out, now old masters to don't mind kicking up their heels. B+(***) [cdr]

John Scofield: Country for Old Men (2016, Impulse!): Easy-grooving guitarist, backed by Larry Goldings (piano and organ), Steve Swallow (electric bass), and Bill Stewart (drums), playing relatively old country songs (Shania Twain's "You're Still the One" is the only one less than thirty years old, and James Taylor's "Bartender's Blues" might not count as country), all familiar and still recognizable. B+(*)

Travis Scott: Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (2016, Epic): Jaques Webster, Houston rapper, dreams of dollar signs in his stage name, recruits enough guests for his second album to point that way. But I mostly hear a beats record, and like it that way. B+(**)

Elliott Sharp Aggregat: Dialectrical (2016, Clean Feed): After many years as an avant-garde gadfly, mostly playing guitar, he's turned into a free jazz stalwart, here playing reed instruments (soprano/tenor sax, Bb/bass clarinet), in a group named for his 2012 album -- his best as far as I know. This one gives 76-year-old drummer Barry Altschul a "Feat." on the cover, and spreads the horns out with Taylor Ho Bynum on trumpet and Terry L. Greene II on trombone, plus Brad Jones on bass. Sharp indeed, though also a bit shrill. B+(***) [cd]

Alan Silva/Mette Rasmussen/Ståle Liavik Solberg: Free Electric Band (2014 [2016], ForTune): Silva, born in Bermuda, moved to New York at age 5, has been a minor figure on the avant-fringe since the early 1960s, mostly playing bass but increasingly since the 1990s keyboards. Regardless of the dilapidated upright on the cover, he plays synth here, the electric clashing with alto sax and drums. One 45:55 piece, rough around the edges, as advertised. B+(*) [bc]

Sleaford Mods: TCR (2016, Rough Trade, EP): New label, thought they'd test the water and make nice with a five track, 17:17 EP, so straightforward you can follow every word and step easily to the clipped beats. TCR stands for Total Control Racing. B+(***)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani: Sunergy (2015 [2016], RVNG Intl.): Three pieces, 23/12/18 minutes, not sure who composed but both play various synthesizers, for something like ambient but with much more swish. B+(**)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Ears (2016, Western Vinyl): More synths, more scattered at first with bits of voice and woodwind (Rob Frye's credit) or maybe just more slippery, with six shortish pieces between 3:05 and 4:57 then an 11:09 finale which builds into something, justifying its title, "Existence in the Unfurling." B+(**)

Wadada Leo Smith: America's National Parks (2016, Cuneiform, 2CD): Trumpet player, came of age in Chicago's AACM but remained obscure until around 2000 when he started to break out of expectations -- an album with Thomas Mapfumo (from Zimbabwe), an "Electric Miles" trbute band with Henry Kaiser, and recently a series of extended compositions (including The Great Lakes Suites and Ten Freedom Summers). This sprawling six-piece, written for his Golden Quintet (piano-cello-bass-drums) draws inspiration from all around the country, and strikes me as being as heavy and ponderous as its subject matter, but dotted with marvelous, often breath-taking details. B+(***) [cd]

Solange: A Seat at the Table (2016, Saint/Columbia): Last name Knowles, same as her older sister Beyoncé. Third album in thirteen years, a big production with scores of writers, producers, and guests, but the sound hardly suggests such scale, and the songs are laced with a male commentary which while interesting in its own right could just as well belong to a completely different album. B+(**)

Richard Sussman: The Evolution Suite (2015 [2016], Zoho): Pianist, also credited with electronics, more importantly as composer, arranger, etc. Played keyboards in Elephant's Memory in 1969, later spent a couple years with Blood, Sweat & Tears, while his own records started up in the 1970s. Title piece runs through five movements, with a couple "radio edits" tacked on to fill out 75 minutes. Band a quintet with trumpet (Scott Wendholt) and tenor sax (Rich Perry), expanded with a string quartet (The Sirius Quartet) and Zach Brock on electric violin. Some exciting passages, but I don't much care for the strings. B [cd]

Kate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos (2016, Lex): British rapper with a literary bent, not sure what the story is here but it must pick up toward the end when the grime beats come together and flower into melody -- or maybe that's just the music. B+(**)

Touché Amoré: Stage Four (2016, Epitaph): Post-hardcore band from Burbank, fourth album, work up a decent grind, tight enough I'm impressed and rather pleased, as if I still liked music of this sort. B+(*)

Wax Tailor: By Any Beats Necessary (2016, Le Plan): French trip-hop producer Jean-Christophe Le Saoût, fifth album since 2005, comes out as a blues rocker but eventually retreats to his more accustomed turf. Reminds me of a group called Was Not Was, another producer vehicle with no signature sound but a lot of smashing studio tricks. B+(*)

Whitney: Light Upon the Lake (Secretly Canadian): Alt-rock duo from Los Angeles, Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, who previously did business as the Smith Westerns, plus a drummer from Unknown Mortal Orchestra and a producer from Foxygen wrapping the falsetto vocals with orchestral dross. B-

YG: Still Brazy (2016, Def Jam): Rapper Keenon Jackson, from Compton, follow up to his 2014 My Krazy Life, still shocked that a guy with such crude rhymes and so little flow can bank on a major label contract. Inspirational lyric: "Fuck Donald Trump." B+(*)

Yoni & Geti: Testarossa (2016, Joyful Noise): Collaboration between beatmaker Yoni Wolf (of WHY?) and rapper David Cohn (aka Serengeti). Musically this reminded me first of the Beach Boys then the Beatles in their most psychedelic modes but more so by half. The raps are standard-grade 'Geti. B+(**)

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

American Honey ([2016], UME): Soundtrack to a movie I hadn't heard of until Christgau raved about this download-only product. Evidently there are multiple versions, with a "complete" song list totalling 27 songs, but Rhapsody only has 8 so I turned to Spotify and found 23. A mixtape of hip-hop and Americana and some alt-rock. only a couple songs I recognized, although when I played Spotify the ones on Rhapsody stood out. Maybe they're the best, or maybe more familiarity will elevate more. B+(***) [sp]

Vieux Kanté: The Young Man's Harp (2005 [2016], Sterns): Blind kamalé ngoni virtuoso from Mali, died at age 31 in 2005, leaving this recording from "shortly before he died" unreleased. Schematic solo intro before a singer and percussion join in. A-

Bruce Springsteen: Chapter and Verse (1966-2012 [2016], Columbia): Compiled as a tie-in to Springsteen's Born to Run autobiography, so it starts with juvenilia: three cuts from his teenage bands, three more from the year he got signed (1972), plus one of those soppy ballads from his second album -- the first five previously unreleased -- before he gets his sound together on "Born to Run." The second half you probably know, not so much a best-of as a set of signposts to a life's work. Not a record you're likely to replay, except maybe for your grandchildren, who probably won't get it but might dig the early intensity. B+(***)

Old Music

Black Bombaim: Titans (2012, Lovers & Lollypops): "Stoner/psychedelic rock" band from Portugal, Ricardo Miranda (guitar), Vitor Rodrigues (electric bass), and Paulo Gonçalves (drums), although this second album adds others on each of four LP-side-length tracks (three over 18 minutes, one just 10:36). Most mix-ins are guitar, some keybs, a muted vocal on first tracks, and some sax sounding prophetic. B+(***)

Black Bombaim/La La La Ressonance: Black Bombaim & La La La Ressonance (2013 [2014], PAD/Lovers & Lollypops): A live mash up of two Portuguese instrumental rock bands, the former group a noise-oriented power trio, the latter a bit jazzier (and not just because they feature Paulo Araujo on alto sax). B+(**)

Black Bombaim: Far Out (2014, Lovers & Lollipops): A single LP, so just two pieces, total 34:44, the first side adding the superb saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, the second mixing in synth and electronics by Luis Fernandes. Rocksteady beat, of course, but what they build on it, unencumbered by vocals, is as complex as powerful. A-

Evan Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton/Schlippenbach Trio: 2X3=5 (1999 [2001], Leo): Two trios, the common denominator saxophonist Evan Parker, with the latter trio adding pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and drummer Paul Lovens. One 77:07 piece, the interest often drifting to the percussion, not least the piano. B+(***)

Schlippenbach Trio: Bauhaus Dessau (2009 [2010], Intakt): Living legends, seems like every few years they tape a concert and put it out, if only to remind you they're still around, still kicking up raw improv, with Evan Parker doing his circular breathing thing for a showstopper. B+(***)

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Live 1975-85 (1975-85 [1986], Columbia, 3CD): In the 1970s most big rock groups would release a live album, usually a 2LP, either as a status item or a piece of interim product. Shortly before I moved to New York, Springsteen had played a week at the Bottom Line -- possibly the last time he played in a venue that intimate -- and those who saw him there were total converts. I wasn't, but I never saw him live, and only started to like his albums with 1980's The River (his 2LP, another of the era's status rungs). Over the next decade his songbook grew and his concerts grew longer, so when he finally did release the live album his fans had been craving, it added up to five LPs, 40 songs, 3:36:13 -- something they could also squeeze into a 3CD box. Highlights abound, including two possible national anthems we can all stand for, a story about dodging the draft, a terse take on "War." But even the 1975-78 hyper-dramaturgy I so hated at the time sounds personable framed by these arenas. B+(***)

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 (1975 [2006], Columbia, 2CD): One complete concert, 2:04:52, from the tour that followed Springsteen's Born to Run breakthrough album, released as a DVD bonus to that album's 30th Anniversary Edition package, then a year later repackaged on CD. Makes me wonder whether I would have been so appalled by the studio album had I seen them live? In an age when guitar bands were the norm, the organ-piano-sax combo both invoked rock's early roots and scaled the sound up to a new level of magnificance. Still too much drama. B+(**)

Bruce Springsteen: The Promise (1977-78 [2010], Columbia, 2CD): Outtakes from the sessions that produced my least favorite Springsteen album, the pompous and ridiculously overblown Darkness at the Edge of Town, assembled as part of a 3-CD + 3-DVD "30th anniversary edition" -- extra baggage we can dispense with here. Two songs were hits for others, and a couple more are related to things that made the finished album, but most were most likely rejected because they weren't sufficiently hyperbolic -- a human scale that I found redemptive, at least when it appeared on better songs than these. B+(*)

Bruce Springsteen: In Concert/MTV Unplugged (1992 [1993], Columbia): Part of MTV's Unplugged series, but after the previously unreleased "Red Headed Woman" the irregular band plugged in and played a set primarily from his uninspired current albums, Lucky Town and Human Touch (8/12 songs). B-

Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995, Columbia): Title reference is to Steinbeck channeled through Woody Guthrie, not least musically where guitar and harmonica suffice for the subdued folk music. I can relate more to the lament for the lost foundries of "Youngstown" -- but not much else. B

Bruce Springsteen: Tracks (1972-95 [1998], Columbia, 4CD): Demos and outtakes, a couple of live tracks, a few B-sides, 66 songs in all selected from a trove of some 350 at the time. I have no idea how many turned up on later albums -- the four 1972 demos made it to 1973's Greetings From Asbury Park, and much further down I see a "Born in the USA" as a Nebraska outtake. Mixed bag, of course, but follows the arc of his career -- the third disc, where the scraps fell off his two great 1980s albums, is a lot of fun. But he slipped and slowed down a bit in the 1990s. B+(*)

Bruce Springsteen: 18 Tracks (1972-99 [1999], Columbia): A 15-cut sampler from the Tracks box set, plus three more bait cuts, no doubt figuring that's all they'd need to get fans willing to buy a 4-CD box of outtakes to buy them again. I don't think it would be hard to carve an A- record from the box, but I'd mostly go with the fast ones, and they didn't. In fact, they only picked one of the five "choice cuts" Christgau identified in the box: "Pink Cadillac." B+(**)

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Live in New York (2000 [2001], Columbia, 2CD): Recorded over two nights of a "ten-show tour-ending run at Madison Square Garden," and originally released as an HBO special (pretty sure I saw that), expanded onto two DVDs, and finally two CDs, long enough to qualify as an average Springsteen show: loud, some interesting variations, magnificent when the sax comes out on top. Due for a revival: "American Skin (41 Shots)." B+(**)

Bruce Springsteen With the Sessions Band: Live in Dublin (2006 [2007], Columbia, 2CD): Another DVD product reissued on CD, the band refers back to the 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions -- 10 of 12 songs repeated here, plus 10 more, a mix of Springsteen's folkier oldies and even older trad fare, all given the big arena treatment by a star who can command an 18-piece band and make it cohere like a revival. B+(**)

Alexander von Schlippenbach: Payan (1972 [2014], Enja): The avant-pianist's first solo album, not that I'm so sure where all the sounds in the 10:00 closer "Kinds of Weirdness" come from. But until weirdness takes over, you get chopped abstraction, finding its unique way in the world. B+(*)

Alex von Schlippenbach/Paul Dunmall/Paul Rogers/Tony Bianco: Vesuvius (2004 [2005], Slam): London studio session, the pianist playing with saxophonist Dunmall's trio, Rogers playing a 7-string ALL bass. Two long pieces (29:11, 34:47), not as volcanic as hoped for. B+(**)

Alexander von Schlippenbach: Piano Solo: Twelve Tone Tales, Vol. 1 (2005 [2006], Intakt): Twelve-tone theory is supposedly a way to break ingrained habits by spreading compositions evenly over all possible tones, but I doubt I'll ever be able to recognize that theory just by sound. Rather, I hear a sort of mid-tempo rambling, a lot of thought input but far less conveyed. [4/9 tracks: 35:50] B+(**)

Alexander von Schlippenbach: Piano Solo: Twelve Tone Tales, Vol. 2 (2005 [2006], Intakt): More from the same session, ending the string of originals with three Dolphy tunes, "All the Things You Are," and Monk's "Trinkle Tinkle." [6/13 tracks, 34:03] B+(**)

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section. Included extra Schlippenbach albums (Globe Unity, Aki Takase) but the Evan Parker record was picked for Schlippenbach, so this isn't the place to go through his discography (at least 26 rated records).

• Globe Unity 73: Live in Wuppertal (1973, FMP): A-
• The Globe Unity Orchestra & the Choir of the NDR-Broadcast: Hamburg '74 (1974 [2004], Atavistic): B
• Globe Unity Special '75: Rumbling (1975 [1991], FMP): B+(***)
• Bruce Springsteen: Greetings From Asbury Park (1973, Columbia): B
• Bruce Springsteen: The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (1973, Columbia): B
• Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run (1975, Columbia): B+
• Bruce Springsteen: Darkness at the Edge of Town (1978, Columbia): B-
• Bruce Springsteen: The River (1980, Columbia, 2CD): A-
• Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska (1982, Columbia): B+
• Bruce Springsteen: Born in the USA (1984, Columbia): A
• Bruce Springsteen: Tunnel of Love (1987, Columbia): A
• Bruce Springsteen: Human Touch (1992, Columbia): B-
• Bruce Springsteen: Lucky Town (1992, Columbia): B-
• Bruce Springsteen: Greatest Hits (1975-95 [1995], Columbia): B
• Bruce Springsteen: The Rising (2002, Columbia): B+
• Bruce Springsteen: Devils and Dust (2005, Columbia): A-
• Bruce Springsteen: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (1997-2006 [2006], Columbia): A-
• Bruce Springsteen: Magic (2007, Columbia): A-
• Bruce Springsteen: Working on a Dream (2009, Columbia): B
• Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball (2012, Columbia): A-
• Bruce Springsteen: High Hopes (2014, Columbia): B+(*)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach: The Living Music (1969 [2002], Atavistic): B+(**)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra: Globe Unity 67 & 70 (1967-70 [2001], Atavistic): B+
• Schlippenbach Trio: First Recordings (1972 [2014], Trost): B+(**)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio: Pakistani Pomade (1972 [2003], Atavistic): B+(***)
• Schlippenbach Quartet: Hunting the Snake (1975 [2000], Atavistic): B+(*)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach and Sunny Murray: Smoke (1979, FMP): B+
• Schlippenbach Trio: Elf Bagatellen (1990, FMP): B+(**)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach/Axel Dörner/Rudi Mahall/Jan Roder/Uli Jennessen: Monk's Casino: The Complete Works of Thelonious Monk (2003-04 [2005], Intakt, 3CD): A
• Schlippenbach Trio: Gold Is Where You Find It (2008, Intakt): B+(***)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach/Daniele d'Agaro: Dedalus (2008, Artesuono): B+(***)
• Alexander von Schlippenbach: Schlippenbach Plays Monk (2012, Intakt): B+(*)
• Schlippenbach Trio: Features (2014 [2015], Intakt): A-
• Aki Takase/Alex von Schlippenbach/DJ Illvibe: Lok 03 (2004 [2005], Leo): A-
• Aki Takase/Alexander von Schlippenbach: So Long, Eric! Homage to Eric Dolphy (2014, Intakt): B+(***)
• Lok 03+1 [Aki Takase/Alexander von Schlippenbach/DJ Illvibe/Paul Lovens]: Signals (2016, Trost): B+(**)

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
• [sc] available at soundcloud.com
• [sp] available at spotify.com
• [os] some other stream source
• [dl] something I was able to download from the web; may be freely available, may be a bootleg someone made available, or may be a publicist promo

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, October 28, 2016

More tidbits from my online notebook, which starting in 2005 became an archive and expansion of my blog.

On February 15, 2005, I wrote about North Korea's newly developed nuclear weapons, and the American response:

North Korea's announcement that they possess nuclear weapons was met first by some incoherent bluster by Condoleezza Rice, then by a marginally more thoughtful U.S. threat: let's see if they can eat their nukes. This is hardly America's first attempt to win hearts and minds through empty stomachs. During the Korean War the U.S. bombed dams to ravage Korean farmland. The many years of crippling economic sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on North Korea ever since then have resulted in chronic malnutrition and starvation. Now the idea is to tighten up the sanctions even more. It's not really clear how that can be done, but if it can be done one net effect will be to punish a people even more for their misfortune in leaders. Another will be to remind the world of how callous and cruel the U.S. can be.

Following WWII the U.S. established a reputation as being a gracious victor, but the stalemate at the end of the Korean War left a sour taste in the mouth of American triumphalism. Since then the U.S. has responded to each occasion where its will was rejected with the petty vindictiveness of a sore loser: Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq. After the shooting stopped in Korea the U.S. proceded to punish North Korea with every weapon short of invasion. North Korea's response was to internalize the threat, developing a defensive posture that makes invasion a very risky proposition and a deterence capability that could devastate the South Korean city of Seoul, while occasionally making aggressive, grimacing gestures. More recently, North Korea has made overtures to normalize relations, especially with South Korea -- that seems like the one way to escape America's death grip isolation. But the obstacle to normalization is the U.S., especially the factions in control of the Bush Administration -- for whom North Korea is most useful as a threatening enemy: especially as a rationale for their "missile defense" boondoggle, although one also suspects that they find North Korea's threat useful for keeping Japan in line.

On February 4, 2005, I wrote a letter in response to an editorial in the Eagle by a "Social Security reformer" named Jim Clark (you may recall that Bush tried to redeem his "mandate" by wrecking Social Security, a quest which didn't go over too well):

The big problem with the Social Security reform facts that Jim Clark wants to get straight is that they aren't facts yet: all he's done is speculate about the future. For instance, he assumes that Americans in the future won't have the moral backbone to increase taxes if necessary in order to fund the Social Security needs of the old and infirm, even though ever since the founding of Social Security they have done whatever needed to be done. Moreover, he asserts that the federal government of the future will default on its borrowing of the excess taxes that workers have paid into Social Security since the last time the politicians "fixed" it. If this is true we have much more serious things to worry about than pensions in the latter half of the 21st century. The only way Social Security can go bankrupt is if the U.S. government goes bankrupt first. Given Bush's tax cuts and exorbitant spending on war and corporate welfare, the trade imbalance and the sinking dollar -- that's the real threat we need to take seriously.

From a post on May 29, 2005, on a couple Kansas politicians:

Todd Tiahrt, whose congressional district includes Wichita, was one of twenty Republicans to vote against undoing the ethic rule changes that Tom DeLay had tried to cover his sorry ass with. Tiahrt has spoken repeatedly in defense of DeLay -- he even went so far as to reiterate DeLay's threats against "activist judges" on the same day DeLay was apologizing for them. Note the careful wording above to avoid saying that Tiahrt represents Wichita. Tiahrt represents Boeing, but because he occupies the district congressional seat, nobody represents Wichita. I maintain that he's the worst congressman in the country, but on the evidence of this vote he still has nineteen competitors.

Senator Sam Brownback has taken over the District of Columbia committee in the Senate. His first act there was to make sure that gay marriages performed in Massachusetts won't be recognized as legal in D.C. While most of what Brownback does is obnoxious, please excuse me if I take this one personally. I have a niece, born and raised here in Wichita, who went to college in Boston, met a nice girl and got married there. They've recently moved to D.C., where my niece is studying law. Most people look at political issues as something rather abstract, failing to recognize the real people impacted. This is one case where I can fill in a real person, and in that context Brownback is nothing but a priggish homewrecker.

In early May, 2005, I noted that I succumbed to my wife's entreaties and started watching television with her, specifically the Jack Bauer terrorism fantasy 24. Since then TV has become a nightly ritual. I reckon you can date my mental rot from that date.

On May 27, 2015, I noted:

The Democrats caved in on Bush's activist judges. From day one the Bush administration has sought to exempt itself from the rule of law -- first attacking convenient international targets like the World Court and treaties restricting their ability to proliferate weapons of mass destruction, then moving on to the PATRIOT ACT while trying to pack the court system with political cronies. There's a word commonly used to describe people who try so hard to evade the rule of law: criminals. However, in their demagogic slander campaign against "activist judges" -- most of whom meet any reasonable definition of conservative -- they're moving beyond mere criminality. We need a fresher word for this, but anyone who can recall history as far back as the 1920s will know what I mean by the old-fashioned term: fascists.

On May 31, 2015, I published a piece in the Village Voice on jazz labels. The notebook adds a note on business models that I promised to return to some day:

My first draft for the introduction sketched out an unconventional economic theory. I discarded it (the draft, not the theory) after my editor didn't understand it, but I hope to go back to it someday. I regard businesses as important and vital, but I'm not an ideological capitalist. I'm struck by the arbitrariness and inefficiency of most businesses, and those same traits are in play here. But a couple of things make jazz labels different from most widgetmakers: one is that there's not a lot of money in the market, so there's not a lot to be gained by being greedy; another is that success is mostly a matter of survival -- it's more important not to lose a lot than to make a lot when you can; a third is that most of the capitalists are in awe of their labor; finally, in many cases the music is its own reward. By and large, this sort of capitalism has served recorded jazz well. Other businesses might learn something from their example.

On September 1, 2005, I wrote this in a letter about Katrina and New Orleans:

I wouldn't say it was unnecessary, given that it was inevitable. Almost happened a year ago, you should recall, but the storm was smaller, later in the season, and turned north to hit the Florida panhandle instead. Could happen next year. There will probably be 3-5 more hurricanes this year, so it could even happen again this year. New Orleans wasn't designed to be a death trap, but that's mostly because it wasn't designed at all. It looked dry enough when the French set up camp there, but as the town grew it expanded into more dubious terrain, plus it finally dawned on people that the town was sinking. The levees and pumps and so forth were added to protect what they had blundered into, and the whole system is a stack of cards that at any moment could have been knocked down from many angles. John McPhee covers some of this in The Control of Nature, which is most of what I know, but not most of what there is to know. I wonder what's going to happen to all that rain in Tennessee and Kentucky when it drains down the Mississippi, but maybe that's manageable compared to the usual annual floods. One thing that will become obvious over the next few months is that flood in New Orleans is fundamentally different from flood almost everywhere else. Right now Mississippi is getting as much or more coverage, but they can start fixing things in Mississippi now. New Orleans will be under water for months, and there's no telling what will or won't be salvageable when they finally pump it dry. It will be tempting not to rebuild it at all. One thing that's already started is that everyone with an axe to grind is viewing this through their own prism. Same thing happened after 9/11: I knew people who saw that as a wake-up call to dismantle Israel's settlements or stop using foreign oil; Eric Raymond thought the answer would be to let all airplane passengers carry guns on board; dumber still, Bush invaded Iraq. No telling what all is going to come out of this. Racism, for sure. The all-idiots team on Fox news are already bitching about how federal disaster insurance lets people think they're safe building in dangerous places, and complaining about how people around the Great Lakes wind up paying for such stupidity. Global warming has something to do with this. Unchecked, badly planned development is another aspect. Long-term underinvestment in infrastructure is another, and of course bankrupting the federal government doesn't help in this regard -- and this shouldn't just include levees and roads and such, the social and educational and economic deficits are coming due, too. One thing this shows is that keeping 20% of America below the poverty line packs its own hidden costs. People have already pointed out that the helicopters and National Guard are all in Iraq -- don't you think that the liberal argument about how we have to help poor Iraq (cynical as it is) is going to wear thin pretty quick? The gasoline price stories seem to have the jump on all else, probably because they were already a story, so were easy to do. It's telling that Bush's first act was to suspend air quality standards for gasoline blends. Stock market went up yesterday, mostly people buying oil company stocks.

Several times this year I've written that one of the big issues of the coming decades will be how governments respond to disasters. The Indian Ocean tsunami was a distant example, but this (actually lesser) disaster will make a more immediate impression on people here. It should scare the hell out of us -- even if New Orleans is unique, much of the story translates elsewhere. Marc Reisner has a sketch of a very possible CA earthquake in A Dangerous Place, which makes for harrowing reading. To the best of my knowledge, no one sketched out what could happen in New Orleans, but that's no longer a question for the imagination.

On September 30, 2005, in the wake of Katrina, I wrote about the Republican embrace of small and/or incompetent government:

I don't know about Norquist, but the key issue for some Republican ideologues isn't the size of government so much as their wish to break the poor, and for that matter the middle class, of the habit of looking toward government to help solve their problems. Starving the government beast is one way to do this, but more effective still is to render government incompetent. Bush may have failed the straightforward task of shrinking government, but he's done a bang-up job of making it incompetent -- or at least making it useless to all but his political backers. For Bush, this is a multi-pronged attack, but the main thrusts are: 1) put political agents in charge everywhere, especially to maximize the patronage potential of the government; 2) undermine the civil service system and the unions; 3) muck up all regulatory processes; 4) start a few wars to suck up resources; 5) pile extra security responsibilities on top of all other government functions; 6) cut taxes on the rich, driving the government ever deeper in debt; 7) push as much unfunded work as possible onto state and local governments. In this framework, greater debt does double duty: it provides discretionary rationale for rejecting spending now, and it makes future spending more prohibitive. The resulting government will, for most people, become so useless that they won't mind drowning it in a bathtub. . . .

Ever since Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980, America has been in denial, and the Republicans have capitalized on that denial by feeding people fantasies. That worked because until lately it's never really been tested. First Reagan then Bush put together improbable coalitions of the rich and the foolish, and now that coalition is starting to show signs of fracture. Polls show that Bush is losing support among fringe groups like libertarians and racists. The more serious question is whether, or when, the rich will abandon him. The rich have more to lose than anyone -- do tax cuts matter so much that they're willing to countenance such thoroughgoing corruption and incompetence?

On October 17, 2005, I wrote about Bush's ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

The Miers nomination is one more instance of David Ogilvy's old adage: "first rate people hire first rate people; second rate people hire third rate people." Bush not only hires them. Once they've proven their incompetence, he gives them medals and/or promotes them.

Also:

Saw a news story tonight on how Americans are feeling all tapped out donating for disaster relief lately. The death toll in Pakistan's earthquake has passed 50,000, but as Stalin might say, that's just a statistic. Hurricane Stan killed more than a thousand in Central America, but that's just a hurricane that missed the US -- someone else's problem. (Unlike the remnants of Tropical Storm Tammy, which have caused extensive flooding along the US East Coast. And while we're at it, note that Hurricane Vince, the first V-name storm ever in the Atlantic, was also the first hurricane on record to hit Spain. The world's disaster zones are spreading.) There are so many lessons buried in this story that it's hard even to list them. One is that disasters are not just nature -- they are compounded by human developments. One aspect of that is that disasters in areas of widespread poverty take a much higher toll in lives. (On the other hand, disasters in areas of wealth ring up higher insurance claims.) Another is that private charity doesn't work very well. Even in the best of circumstances it isn't very efficient, and over time generosity wanes. But even governments are hard pressed to respond to large disasters -- especially when they shunt much of their spending off into military adventures, as the US and Pakistan have done.

From October 22, 2005, I reminded readers I had opposed going to war in Afghanistan in the first place (well, in 2001, although had I given it any thought I would have opposed it in 1979 as well), then noted:

Still, every now and then the US manages to do something really stupid over there: bombing a caravan of tribal leaders, torturing and killing a stray taxi driver, scoring a decisive firefight with the Canadians, killing a NFL star wearing their own uniform. Last week they pulled off another doozy: they burned a couple of killed Taliban fighters, hoping to taunt their comrades into coming out to be slaughtered. Even if such an act wasn't sacrilege to Muslims, you'd think they'd remember how they felt when American contractors were strung up and burned in Fallujah. Maybe if the whole thing hadn't been videotaped they could have contained the outrage, but unlike all those good old wars it's hard to hide what you're doing these days. But the bigger problem lies in the mixed messages that emanate from Bush, Rumsfeld, et al. (You'll remember the concept of mixed messages from the 2004 presidential campaign -- it was what Bush accused Kerry of propagating.) On the one hand, they tell us that we're in Afghanistan and Iraq to help people achieve their legitimate democratic aspirations with freedom and prosperity and all the good things that go with it. On the other hand, they tell us that our goal there is to kill or capture the enemy, which is everyone who opposes us, an ever-increasing population. Soldiers have a tough time reconciling these contradictions, but many of them joined up out of blanket hatred of Arabs and Muslims, and most have come to realize that shooting first is a policy that the brass almost never comes down on -- even when it gets taped and broadcast, as is the case this time.

On November 11, 2005 I wrote about Veterans Day:

But the problem with gunshy military and the trigger-happy politicos in America isn't just about us. Most of the rest of the world has learned to live perfectly well without war. The best thing that ever happened to Germany and Japan was that they lost WWII, and that they lost it bad enough they never entertained the thought again. (As you'll recall, when Germany lost WWI a bunch of hotheads like Hitler wanted another round, which is what they got.) It's beginning to look like the worst thing that ever happened to America was that we thought we won. The truth is nobody wins wars, and while you may thankfully beat some country that was worse than you at the start, in the nasty brutality of war you become ever more like your enemies. But war isn't obsolescent just because it's gone out of fashion in places like once war-happy Europe. Even the soldiers in the world's one undoubted superpower have lost their taste for war. This even happened in the Soviet Union: the nation that almost single-handedly beat back Nazi Germany was unable to quell a bunch of goatherders and poppy-growers in Afghanistan. That should have been a powerful lesson but we misread it. Just as powerful states, like the Soviets in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam and Iraq, are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice to conquer other people's lands, the people of those lands are still willing to sacrifice to drive the invaders out. These are the two sides of what Jonathan Schell has called "the unconquerable world" -- the world we live in today, the one that Bush ideologues cavalierly dismiss as "reality-based."

This would all be laughable if so many people didn't buy into the myths. The right has the most at stake: their view of human nature makes enemies inevitable, and their strategy for dealing with those enemies is to intimidate them -- one of their favorite maxims is Machiavelli's "it is better to be feared than loved," so you can see how that leads to the dream of firing lasers from space to instantly smite their foes. Insistence on military might makes them look tough and spends money that liberals might otherwise be tempted to waste on the poor. The military and their business partners appreciate the dole. The scam would end there, except that the right does indeed make enemies, and once in a while one takes a pot shot at us. That's when we finally wonder just how much defense all those billions have bought us. But when you're talking a tightly organized cell of fanatics with homemade bombs, you're talking something at a scale the military can't operate at. Imagine a gnat on a rhino. Imagine entering an Abrams tank in a Formula One race. Still not close. There are only a few things the military knows how to do. Incinerate a billion people in China? Hey, no problem. Flush Osama bin Laden out of a cave in Afghanistan? No way. A rational person would conclude that the military is useless for that task and any other thing we might reasonably want to do, and downright dangerous for all the things it can actually do. But how tough can a politician look arguing the common sense that $500 billion/year buys us nothing worthwhile? Especially when so many soldiers have sacrificed so much to keep us free. The problem with Veterans Day is that the veterans are the designated cheerleaders for this kind of nonsense.

The tragedy of Veterans Day is that many veterans do get run through the ringer. Something like 20% of the soldiers returning from Iraq bring home physical and/or mental wounds. The casualty rates for the brief and, from the American standpoint, almost bloodless Desert Storm war were even higher -- of course, the current war is likely to more than make up the difference as time passes. It's ironic that despite all the photo ops and propaganda ploys, despite the political instincts of many and perhaps most of the soldiers, the antiwar movement is far more concerned with their welfare than the people who cheered them into war. That is largely because the antiwar movement is far more concerned with everyone's welfare. But it's also a seductive concern, in that many of us are tempted to bask in the warm glow that the military and the politicos have spun around veterans. That seduction, for instance, led many Democrats to the foolish notion that a decorated veteran like John Kerry would be an unassailable candidate against Bush's own dubious service record. Kerry lost. So will the vets, unless we come to our senses and figure a way out of these rhetorical traps. Veterans are little different from anyone else, except that some have been put through circumstances that no one should have to experience. They don't need a day, and we don't do them justice by giving them one. Only an end to war corrects the course. And that can't happen as long as we glory in wars past, let alone present.

Might as well end this with my Pazz & Jop ballot, from December 27, 2005:

1. Amy Rigby: Little Fugitive (Signature Sounds) [15]
2. Kanye West: Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella) [13]
3. William Parker Quartet: Sound Unity (AUM Fidelity) [12]
4. The Perceptionists: Black Dialogue (Definitive Jux) [10]
5. Amadou & Mariam: Dimanche à Bamako (Nonesuch) [10]
6. FME: Cuts (Okka Disk) [10]
7. Rachid Taha: Tékitoi (Wrasse) [8]
8. Buck 65: This Right Here Is Buck 65 (V2) [8]
9. Blueprint: 1988 (Rhymesayers) [8]
10. Jerry Granelli: Sandhills Reunion (Songlines) [6]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Music: Current count 27272 [27263] rated (+9), 418 [412] unrated (+6).

One of those weeks that was just blown to shreds, as I came down with a stomach bug on Wednesday, spent a couple days pretty much stuck in bed, and still feel exhausted and a bit unsettled. Before getting sick several records got a lot of plays without quite convincing me they're A- material (Cables, Schlippenbach, American Honey). The only Schlippenbach Trio album I've given an A- to was 2015's Features, which I don't recall as being a close decision, so I thought I should at least go back and replay 1972's Pakistani Pomade -- perhaps a little wilder than the new one, but not nearly as vividly recorded. I've been playing more old Schlippenbach today, but nothing that can't wait until next week.

Birthday tomorrow, will be 66. Spent some time today wading through the Social Security online form, so maybe I'll start drawing some income (and slow down the savings burn). Had planned on cooking tomorrow, but the illness forced a postponement -- maybe Saturday. I usually pick out a national cuisine and try to overdo it. I thought Greek would be fun this year: first non-American food I learned to cook, thanks to my dear college friend Elias Vlanton. I visited Elias back in June and we cooked up a pretty smashing dinner, using The Jerusalem Cookbook and a few other Mediterranean recipes, so he's been on my mind. Finally worked out a tentative menu last night: a delicate balance of feasible and awesome.

Made very little progress on the jazz book(s) last week. I'm up to October 2005 in the notebook. I've reached a point where nearly all the reviews I'm finding had been copied to the Jazz Prospecting and/or Recycled Goods archives. Not sure yet if that means I can skip the rest, but good chance I can. For now I have one more Golden Oldies column to post, so that series will probably end with 2005.

I should get around to a Streamnotes post later this week. Currently have 102 records, which isn't a huge amount, but if quantity doesn't force a post, the calendar will. Might give me some extra motivation to cherry pick the largest incoming queue I've had in several years.

Sad to note the death of Tom Hayden, a founder of the new left even before he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War. As a teenager I read his book Rebellion in Newark, and of course rooted for him in the Chicago 8/7 trial. I was pleased to see him go into mainstream California politics, and can't say much about that. (Although I did roast him for endorsing Hillary over Bernie earlier this year: post here.) In 2012, he spoke to the annual meeting of the Peace and Social Justice Center here in Wichita, and did a nice job of tracing out the continuity from the New Left to today's progressive politics.

New records rated this week:

• Stefan Aeby Trio: To the Light (2015 [2016], Intakt): [cdr]: B+(**)
• John Butcher & Ståle Liavik Solberg: So Beautiful, It Starts to Rain (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• George Cables: The George Cables Songbook (2016, HighNote): [cd]: B+(***)
• Dreezy: No Hard Feelings (2016, Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Mark Murphy: Slip Away (2016, Mini Movie): [cd]: B
• Schlippenbach Trio: Warsaw Concert (2015 [2016], Intakt): [cd]: B+(***)
• Travis Scott: Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (2016, Epic): [r]: B+(**)
• Wax Tailor: By Any Beats Necessary (2016, Le Plan): [r]: B+(*)

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

• American Honey ([2016], UME): [sp]: B+(***)

Grade changes:

• Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio: Pakistani Pomade (1972 [2003], Atavistic): [r]: [was: B+] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• BassDrumBone: The Long Road (Auricle, 2CD): November 15
• Eraldo Bernocchi/Prakash Sontakke: Invisible Strings (RareNoise): advance, November 18
• Jeff Collins: The Keys to Christmas (Crossroads)
• Fifth (Jinsy): advance, November 18
• Frank Kimbrough: Solstice (Pirouet): November 25
• Ingrid Laubrock: Serpentines (Intakt): advance: November
• Jerry Leake: Crafty Hands (Rhombus Publishing)
• Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: A Day in Brooklyn: At Ibeam (Constant Sorrow)
• Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: A Day in Brooklyn [Recorded 10/18/15 at Ibeam] (Constant Sorrow)
• Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Hell With an Ocean View (Constant Sorrow)
• Tom Marko: Inner Light (Summit)
• Bobby Previte: Mass (RareNoise): advance, November 18
• Ken Schaphorst Big Band: How to Say Goodbye (JCA): December 2
• Scott Whitfield: New Jazz Standards (Volume 2) (Summit)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Continuing my slog through the online notebook, picking up in mid-2004, just in time for another presidential election -- I think this was the one that Matt Taibbi called "The Stupid Season," fully aware that what he was describing was a periodic ritual, not a one-shot fluke. On August 19, with the anti-Kerry "swift boaters" in full attack, I wrote:

It looks like the Bush campaign from here on out is going to be nothing but lies and slander and terrorism. They're trying to work their own base into a frenzy of paranoia, and they're trying to swamp the media with ruses to crowd out any serious evaluation of Bush, his record, and the real issues. Already we've seen a series of terrorism alerts where they try to spook us with little more than leaks and innuendos. We've even seen a flare-up in Iraq hard on the heels of the latest economic debacle -- is this an indication of how desperate they are to change the subject?

The election is still more than two months away. I seriously doubt that anything much is going to change between now and then, but as their policies continue to sink in their own quicksand, we can expect the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy to become ever shriller and ever more desperate. All a straight-thinking person can do from here on out is to batten down the hatches and stay the course.

Also:

One of the evening news shows has a daily segment called "Fallen Heroes" -- all someone has to do to get into that show is be a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. By that logic I've known several Vietnam War heroes: my nextdoor neighbor, drafted, marched through the jungle, where he sat down on a mine; a cousin, killed inside a tank when his own gun accidentally discharged (the official story; some people suspect he was fragged). It is said that these people made the supreme sacrifice for their country, but the plain fact is that the country wasted their lives for no good purpose. So I couldn't care less if Kerry did or didn't do anything conventionally heroic in Vietnam. The real heroes from that war were the ones who opposed it, as Kerry himself dramatized when he threw away his medals or ribbons or whatever they were.

I probably should have added something like "too bad he no longer has the courage to remind us how right he was in opposing that war, as opposed to how dumb he was in signing up for it in the first place." Maybe even: "in retrospect, he's managed to make both stances look like nothing more than opportune political stunts as he tried to gauge which way the wind was blowing." But then we're talking about a guy who voted against the Gulf War in 1990 and for the Iraq War in 2003 and came to regret both votes.

On September 3, 2004, I wrote a fairly long post on Chechen separatism and terrorism -- the occasion was an attack on a school in nearby Beslan, which killed more than 300 people.

On September 13, 2004, I found myself looking back on 9/11:

Three years after the terrible attacks of 11 September 2001 I find myself wondering whether anyone ever is so shocked by an unexpected event that they reconsider and change course. The horror that we felt that morning watching the World Trade Center burn and collapse was not just for the victims. Every bit as horrifying was the expectation of what would come: not what further attacks might come, but what the U.S. would do in reaction. To call what happened afterwards revenge would be to give it more purpose and sense than history demonstrates. All Osama bin Laden actually did on that day was to poke a giant and stir it into fitful action. He soon went into hiding and has been irrelevant ever since, but the U.S. reaction has continued to rail blindly against the world. In the three years since, the U.S. has laid waste to two countries, killing at least ten times as many people as died on that fateful day, perhaps twenty times, sacrificing another thousand Americans in the process. The U.S. burned up over $200 billion prosecuting those wars, now just hopeless sinkholes, festering pools of hate. And three years out we're nowhere near closure.

That no good would come of America's reaction was clear from the first day. The problem was no doubt made worse because the President was a deceitful cynic who saw a ready chance to cover himself with the glory of war, and because his administration was chock full of liars and crooks and ideological megalomaniacs. But the U.S. had long been cocked for this sort of reaction, much as, say, the world of 1914 plunged into World War following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. . . .

The attacks of 11 September 2001 should have been a moment for sober reflection, but it wasn't. The collapse of the Soviet Union should have been a time for healing, but it wasn't. Throughout history there have been few cases where victors have been gracious, and fewer still where nations have changed their ways without having been forced to by catastrophe. That anyone believes that Bush has a clue how to proceed from here tells us both that we're not very smart about ourselves and the world and that, disastrous as the War on Terror has been, we still haven't fallen hard enough yet. Kerry's nomination and campaign are scarcely more encouraging: he has a bad record for rushing into wars, but at least has some capacity for learning from his mistakes. Bush's supporters are blind to those mistakes, otherwise they'd recognize that he is the necessary sacrifice in order to start to set things right.

On October 29, 2004, I wrote a piece about the Boston Red Sox and their curse, on occasion of their first World Series victory since 1918. Also wrote this:

Noted the cover this week of The Economist: Ariel Sharon with an olive branch in his mouth. Evidently it's supposed to represent him as a dove, but it looks to me like he's just ate the West Bank.

On October 21, I sent a letter to virtually everyone in my address book, titled "Vote for John Kerry (It's Important)." It was the first time I ever done something like that (and it will probably be the last). You can read the letter with a postscript here. The letter concluded:

Bush has a big problem this year: reality. In less than four years Bush has taken us from relative peace and prosperity to a disastrous war and an economy which exposes the fundamental problems of a government which favors the rich at the expense of everyone else. A good part of this problem is systemic -- the decline of real wages for the workers who built America has been going on for thirty years, as the gulf between rich and poor has been broadening, concentrating power for the rich and reducing opportunity and a sense of fairness for everyone else. But much of the problem is due to the arrogance, ignorance and incompetence of the Bush administration. . . .

If Bush does somehow manage to win it will be a sad time for America. Not only would it expose us to four more years of depredations and mismanagement, it plainly broadcasts to us and the world that the citizens of the United States just don't get how far their country has decayed from the ideals of freedom, equality, opportunity, and justice that we grew up believing in. A victory for Bush would show us to be extraordinarily gullible, or downright vile.

As we now know, Bush did win that election -- a very close one, with some taint in Ohio -- but it wasn't long before the gullible came to regret their choice: only Nixon sunk faster and further after a successful re-election bid. Still, twelve years later few people seem to recall what was at stake in 2004. And even though the second Bush term merely brought the disasters seeded in his first term to fruition, it seems like most people have forgotten his party's responsibility for so many calamities.

After Kerry failed, I wrote a long postmortem, including this prediction (November 3, 2004):

The most likely [scenario] is that Bush will make such a mess of his second term that his now-blind followers will give up in disgust. But that's been given a pretty severe trial by his first term, and he's emerged stronger than ever. Historically mid-term congressional elections (the next one is in 2006) have ran against the President's party, but the Republicans managed to escape that effect in 2002, mostly by treating each race as a separate forum (mostly not on Bush). The Democrats do have the experience of massive volunteer efforts this year, which if duplicated could make an impact in 2006.

My mood darkened later that week when Bush celebrated by destroying the defiant Iraqi city of Falluja. From my November 9, 2004 post:

John Kerry campaigned using the slogan, "help is on the way." George W. Bush's first act now that he's got his mandate was to launch a major ground assault on Falluja in Iraq, following a few months of intensive aerial bombardment. This has evidently been planned quite a while, but they delayed launching it until the votes had been counted and the voters safely put back to sleep. A more revealing campaign slogan for Bush would be, "hell is on the way."

I'm not aware of Kerry commenting on the siege of Fallujah, although I have to admit that I haven't been paying a lot of attention to him, including his concession speech. Had Kerry won the election he presumably would have something to say, as the assault on Falluja would have made his task of coming up with a somewhat positive resolution even harder than it is. But all I know about Kerry's concession speech is that it was lauded as gracious, which probably means he didn't take the opportunity to scold the electorate by pointing out that "help is not on the way." That is, of course, the difference between a politician trying to make nice and a leader who realizes how much was at stake, and now how much has been lost, in this election. Kerry may be a dedicated public servant, and he may have laudable personal principles, but he's not a guy who's going to fight for once you're down.

From November 17, 2004, as Bush was reloading his administration for a second term:

Colin Powell's resignation as Secretary of State is good riddance, even if his successor is likely to be even less principled and even more inept. My home town paper's editorial page toasted Powell today under the heading "Moderate": "His moderate, multinational, pragmatic views were routinely rejected in the Bush team's squabbles on nuclear nonproliferation, Iraq, the Middle East and other major challenges abroad." If this was Powell's strategy, the editorial writer (Randy Scholfield) would have been right to conclude that "his tenure can only be described as a failure." Yes, it's been a failure, maybe even in Powell's own limited terms. But it hasn't been a failure because Powell's moderation was rejected by hotter heads; it's been a failure because of Powell's willingness to support the hawks. And there's damn little evidence that Powell isn't one of the hawks. His disagreements have at most been tactical.

Theodore Roosevelt's used to say "speak softly and carry a big stick." Powell alone among Bush's War Cabinet seems to have taken that as a maxim. But Roosevelt's intent was to camouflage a whole administration. If only Powell speaks softly, he loses his voice. The bigger question is why did the others speak so loudly. And the evident answer is that Bush's foreign policy has first and foremost been a matter of domestic politics. Bush's bully tactics are meant to show his base that he's their strong leader; and the world be damned -- it's not like their votes count. Powell's most famous self-description was as the "bully on the block," so how much space does that leave between Bush and Powell? Damn little, at least in the realm of intentions. I don't discount that Powell has a stronger grip on reality and the limits of American power, but let's face it: for Bush that's off-message. Powell did nothing effective to bring such concerns to bear on administration policy. Maybe this too is just an act. . . . .

As the second term cabinet turns over, the most notable trend is that the new cabinet members are almost all current White House staff (e.g., Alberto Gonzalez for John Ashcroft). This bespeaks an administration that will be even more closeted and close-minded than the last one. You voted for it, America. This is just Bush's way of saying: fuck you.

On November 25, 2004 I wrote about an event where a panel of speakers held forth on "are we safer now?" (meaning safer from terrorism). I introduced that piece by noting that a school in Wichita had recently been blown up, not by terrorists but by construction incompetence (probably a gas leak). I went on to generate a long list of non-terrorist things that actually make our lives more dangerous, then added this paragraph, which goes a bit deeper:

All this might not matter much if the world were a well balanced static system, but it isn't. We live in a world where resources are shrinking while demand expands. We live in a world where expertise is becoming rarefied, putting us at the mercy of experts who may or may not have our interests at heart. We live in a world where a clever few can exploit the ignorant many, but even the clever few have to compete so ruthlessly that they lose their grip -- they've constructed a world of hair triggers that surrender control and amplify panic. We live in a world where the "movers and shakers" move and shake so fast that they've become incapable of recognizing the unexpected. We live in a world which continues to cling to the ideology that the pursuit of private advantages serves the common good, even though there are few if any cases where this is true. And we live in a nation that has promoted its misconceptions to such staggering heights that some sort of horrible crash seems inevitable.

On January 21, 2015, I wrote about natural disasters, starting with a local ice storm, then moving on to California mudslides and the big tsunami in the Indian Ocean:

What this means is that as disasters mount up government has not merely become the insurer-of-last-resort, it's increasingly becoming the only insurer of note. This should give us pause, especially as the political geniuses of the Republican party have set out on a program to systematically bankrupt government. In doing so they run the risk of leaving us in the rubble. The Bush administration's response to the tsunami crisis is a good example of how this is going to work: a tiny pittance, maybe a bit more after the media shames them, plus whatever the charitably inclined might pitch in; meanwhile the government's contribution gets delivered through the military -- the only U.S. government agency functioning beyond U.S. borders these days -- and only after they work out the payola angles.

On February 23 I wrote a good deal about Boeing's outsourcing of their plant in Wichita where my father and brother had worked for many decades. I also wrote a little note on Hillary Clinton and her presidential prospects (nearly four years ahead of the 2008 election):

Found in the Wichita Eagle "Opinion Line" (a good source of wise cracks and insane rants): "What a complete joke that Hillary Clinton is, quoting the Bible in her speeches." One reason I note this is that she has been getting a lot of flack on a local mail list I subscribe to for her murky position on abortion rights and her hawkishness on Iraq and any other potential cruise missile target you'd care to name. Juan Cole reports that she's also managed to tick off the presumptive next Prime Minister of Iraq. Clearly she's launched her campaign, but I have to wonder what her prospects are with an increasingly polarized public where both ends of the spectrum can't stand her. Maybe that would have worked to her advantage in the '90s when few cared about issues and most distrusted those who did.

I remember listening to a radio interview with her back in '93 or '94 when she was asked what her reaction would be if her health care reform was rejected, and she said that would be a shame. That might have been savvy had she been sure of winning, but when her plan went down is was just aloof. It was worse than a shame -- it was tragic, not so much what her lousy plan lost as that she blew a huge amount of political capital on something that wouldn't have solved the problem in the first place, that substituted for a serious plan, and that by failing cut the Republicans loose to do all the damage they've done since 1994. That health plan was the same sort of too clever straddle-the-middle tactic she's building her campaign on. I'm hoping that someone will take her to task in the NY Democratic primary in 2006 and knock her out.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Music: Current count 27263 [27244] rated (+19), 412 [401] unrated (+11).

Rated count back way down again -- it was 15 two weeks ago, then jumped up to fairly normal 33 last week (not counting a bookkeeping windfall which made the posted total 46; September's weekly totals were 34, 38, 25, 30). Several obvious factors: good records get more spins than not-so-good ones, and that was especially true this week; I took a fair amount of time off for yardwork and cooking; and the machine I use to listen to Rhapsody has had some problems, so I've had it down for a couple days (hopefully a new power supply will help -- finally got it installed today and so far, so good).

Up to February 2005 in my trawl through the online notebook for lost reviews. I've started to find some of the Jazz Consumer Guide surplus (before I started posting them in meta-columns in December 2005), as well as quite a few reviews of older jazz albums. I'm saving the latter in a Recorded Jazz in the 20th Century book file, currently a bit over 260 pages long (recent PDF here). I haven't updated the Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century PDF recently (you can still download the 144-page first pass here).

New records rated this week:

• Joey Alexander: Countdown (2016, Motema): [r]: B+(*)
• JD Allen: Americana (2016, Savant): [cd]: A-
• Bauer Baldych Duchnowski Konrad: Trans-Fuzja (2012 [2016], ForTune): [bc]: B+(**)
• Black Bombaim & Peter Brötzmann (2016, Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• Orrin Evans: #Knowingishalfthebattle (2016, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense: Moving Still (2016, Pi): [cd]: B+(**)
• Friends & Neighbors: What's Wrong? (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Robert Glasper Experiment: ArtScience (2016, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Luke Hendon: Silk & Steel (2016, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dave Holland/Chris Potter/Lionel Loueke/Eric Harland: Aziza (2016, Dare2): [cdr]: A-
• Manu Katché: Unstatic (2016, Anteprima): [r]: B+(*)
• John Lindberg Raptor Trio: Western Edges (2012 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Nicholas Payton: Textures (2016, Paytone): [r]: B-
• Houston Person & Ron Carter: Chemistry (2015 [2016], HighNote): [cd]: A
• Punkt 3: Ordnung Herrscht (2016, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Ears (2016, Western Vinyl): [r]: B+(**)
• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani: Sunergy (2015 [2016], RVNG Intl.): [r]: B+(**)
• Wadada Leo Smith: America's National Parks (2016, Cuneiform, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• Black Bombaim: Titans (2012, Lovers & Lollypops): [r]: B+(***)
• Black Bombaim/La La La Ressonance: Black Bombaim & La La La Ressonance (2013 [2014], PAD/Lovers & Lollypops): [r]: B+(**)
• Black Bombaim: Far Out (2014, Lovers & Lollipops): [r]: A-

Added grades for old LPs:

• The Freedom Sounds featuring Wayne Henderson: People Get Ready (1967, Atlantic): in twofer with Sonny Sharrock: Black Women ([2000], Collectables): B+

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Amendola vs. Blades: Greatest Hits (Sazi)
• Martin Bejerano: Trio Miami (Figgland): November 4
• Boi Akih: Liquid Songs (TryTone)
• Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra: Basically Baker Vol. 2: The Big Band Music of David Baker (Patois, 2CD)
• Oguz Buyukberber and Simon Nabatov: Wobbly Strata (TryTone)
• Richie Cole: Plays Ballads & Love Songs (Mark Perna Music): October 21
• The Core Trio: Live Featuring Matthew Shipp (Evil Rabbit)
• The Delegation: Evergreen (Canceled World) (ESP-Disk, 2CD)
• Earth Tongues: Ohio (Neither/Nor, 2CD)
• Brent Gallaher: Moving Forward (V&B): January 6
• Jason Hainsworth: Third Ward Stories (Origin): October 21
• Nate Lepine Quartet: Vortices (Eyes & Ears)
• Tom Marko: Inner Light (Summit)
• Matt Mayhall: Tropes (Skirl)
• John Moulder: Earthborn Tales of Soul and Spirit (Origin): October 21
• Adam Schneit Band: Light Shines In (Fresh Sound New Talent): advance
• Andrew Van Tassel: It's Where You Are (Tone Rogue): December 1
• Anna Webber's Simple Trio: Binary (Skirl): October 25
• Scott Whitfield: New Jazz Standards (Volume 2) (Summit)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Realizing I wasn't going to find much time, I started this early in the week, and added things when I noticed them without making much in the way of a systematic search. Since my last Weekend Roundup, much as happened, including a debate of the vice-president candidates (which failed to convince me that Tim Kaine was the smart choice), a second presidential debate (which further cemented Trump's decline), and major exposés of both candidates' dirty laundry (where Trump's smelled much fouler).

At the moment, FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary a 86.2% chance of winning based on a 6.5% popular vote advantage, with Arizona tilting slightly toward Hillary (51.0%), and progressively better odds in Iowa (62.1%), Ohio (64.8%), North Carolina (69.2%), Nevada (74.4%), Florida (74.5%), and New Hampshire (the state which for most of this election was the one that would secure an electoral college win for either candidate, now 83.7% for Hillary). Trump still looks to be solid elsewhere, although a third party candidate named Evan McMullin is polling well enough in Utah that he's given a chance of picking up the state's electoral votes (Trump's chances there are 92.7%, Clinton 4.6%, so that could leave McMullin with 2.7%). Trump's weakest leads are currently: Alaska (68.4%), Georgia (73.7%), Missouri (77.8%), South Dakota (81.2%), South Carolina (83.6%), Texas (86.1%), Indiana (86.2%), Kansas (87.3%), and Montana (87.4%).

I work out much of the logic under the Christgau link below, but to cut to the chase, I plan on voting for Hillary Clinton in November, and urge you to do so too. More importantly, I plan on voting for Democrats down ballot (even though the ones in Kansas running against Moran and Pompeo have less chance than Gary Johnson does), and hope for big gains for the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere -- in many ways that's even more important than the presidency. One thing I was especially struck by this past week was interviews with Moran and Pompeo where they casually referred to "the disaster of the Obama administration." Do these guys have any fucking idea what they're talking about? Or do they just mean Obama's been bad for them personally, like by cutting into their graft and perks? Sure, Obama has been disappointing, but mostly because he's been crippled by Republicans -- who clearly live in their own fantasy world these days.

Some scattered links this week:

• Russell Berman: What Bill Clinton Meant When He Called Obamacare 'Crazy': Actually, there's nothing in his specific critique that couldn't be fixed by rejiggering the subsidy tables to help people with a bit more income than the current schedules allow -- but that also rewards the insurance companies for pushing premiums up. The other approach that is commonly talked about is trying to drive premiums back down by providing a non-profit "public option" to compete with the private insurers. What was really crazy about Obamacare was thinking that you could solve the problem of a growing number of uninsured people while keeping the profits of all the parts of the industry propped up, and that problem isn't going to be countered until you find a way to blunt or eliminate those profit-seeking opportunities. And the truth is that the private insurance racket, which could easily be obsoleted by a single-payer system, is just the tip of that iceberg. We may not be as far away from coming to that realization as many pundits think -- in large part because we have the examples of so many other countries that have figured that out and made health care a public service and a universal right.

  On the other hand, just because Obamacare is crazy doesn't mean it wasn't a big improvement over the previous system. And while is hasn't succeeded in making sure everyone is insured, it reversed a longstanding trend that was stripping health insurance from millions of Americans. The Republicans never had an answer to that problem, and while they conceivably could make good on their promise to repeal Obamacare, they have no clue how to fix it. Berman talks a bit about various tinkerings that might help a bit -- the sort of things that Hillary Clinton is likely to push for. Still, I take Bill's "crazy" comment as good news: mostly, it shows he's moved beyond his own even lousier 1990s health care scheme.

• Robert Christgau: Confessions of a Hillary Supporter: 'It's Not Like We Can Breathe Easy': Returns to the Voice with a political screed, much of it rehashing Nader's role in Gore's fateful 2000 loss to Bush, as well as his still snippy attitude toward Sanders:

  I know, you can't stand [Trump] either. For you, Hillary is the hard part. . . . Hillary lacks daring as well as grace, and from Libya to Honduras, her instinct in foreign policy has always been to fetishize "democracy" in an obtusely formalistic way. But she has a long personal history of doing good for people, an unmatched grasp of policy, thousands of exploitable relationships, and a platform where Sanders taught her plenty about the expanding limits of what's progressive and what's politic.

Best part of the piece is his recounting past efforts to dive into the political weeds and call on voters. He urges you to do the same this year: "we don't just want to win -- we want to win so big across the board that Clinton will feel obliged to activate her platform and that Trump's racist, xenophobic chauvinism will seem a perilous tack even to the saner Republicans who are right now scheming to deliver the U.S. to Big Capital in 2020."

I don't want to relitigate Nader in 2000, but I find it odd that Christgau singles out Lieberman as the reason he voted for Nader over Gore. I've never been a Lieberman fan, but I don't think I gave Gore's VP pick any thought at the time. It was only later, after Sharon came to power in Israel and put an end to the Oslo Peace Process, and after 9/11 and Bush launched his Crusade (aka Global War on Terror) that Lieberman transformed into a conspicuously monstrous hawk. I don't doubt that he had long harbored that stance, just as I don't doubt that he had always been in the pocket of the insurance industry, but it's not like Gore saw those things as problems. I suspected that Gore would have tilted against peace in Israel/Palestine, and I never doubted that he would have gone to war in Afghanistan and elsewhere (including Iraq) in response to 9/11. He may have done so less crudely and less carelessly than Bush did, but those were pretty low bars. It's tempting to look back on this history and think that Gore would have avoided the many mistakes that Bush committed, but the whole DLC pitch in the 1990s (which Gore was as much a part of as Clinton) was to cut into the Republican alignment with oligarchy by showing that the Democrats could be even better for business, and they picked up a lot of conservative baggage along the way. That was Gore in 2000, and while we certainly underestimated how bad Bush would turn out, that was a pretty good reason to back Nader in 2000.

On the other hand, I now think that Nader made a major mistake running as a third party candidate in 2000 (and 2004). We would have been much better served had he ran in primaries as a Democrat. He wouldn't have come close to beating Gore, but he would have been able to mobilize a larger protest vote, and he would have drawn the discussion (and maybe the party platform) toward the left. But then we don't get to choose our options, just choose among them. What persuaded me to give up interest in third party efforts was the fact that even in 2000, even with no campaign visibility, Gore outpolled Nader in Kansas by a factor of ten: 37.2-3.4%. I realized then that the people we wanted to appeal to were stuck in the Democratic Party. Sometimes part of that appeal means you have to vote for a poor excuse for a Democrat.

The Nation recently ran a pair of articles on Stein vs. Clinton: Kshama Sawant: Don't Waste Your Vote on the Corporate Agenda -- Vote for Jill Stein and the Greens, and Joshua Holland: Your Vote for Jill Stein Is a Wasted Vote. I don't care for the thinking behind either of these articles, but only one has a clue what "waste" means and it isn't Sawant. If you want your vote to be effective, you should vote either for or against one of the two leading candidates, and it really doesn't make any difference whether you're positive or negative, just so you can tell the difference. On the other hand, sure, vote for a third party candidate if the following is the case: you can't distinguish a difference you really care about, and both leading candidates are objectionable on something you really do care about.

Sawant may well be right if the one issue you really care about is "the corporate agenda" -- assuming you can define that in terms where Trump and Clinton are interchangeable, which I'm not sure you can do. (For instance, Trump wants less regulation of corporations but Clinton sometimes wants more; Trump wants the rich to pay less in taxes but Clinton wants the rich to pay more; Clinton favors a higher minimum wage but Trump doesn't.) But personally, I don't see "the corporate agenda" (or its more conceptual proxy, "capitalism") as something to get bent out of shape about. I don't have a problem with corporations as long as they are well regulated and we have countervailing mechanisms to balance off problems like inequality. Clinton doesn't go as far in that direction as I'd like, and she's much to comfy in the company of billionaires, but Trump is a billionaire (one of the worst of the breed), and he clearly has no concern for the vast majority of Americans. I can think of several issues I am so deeply concerned about that I might base a decision on them: war is a big one, racism another, inequality all-pervasive, and environmental degradation. Trump is clearly unacceptable on all four accounts (as is the political party for which he stands). Clinton is clearly better on all of those except war, and she's probably more temperate and sensible there than Trump is. Perhaps if Stein ran a campaign specifically against war and empire I might find her candidacy more compelling, but "corporate agenda" doesn't do the trick.

Sawant's other argument is that you can only build an alternative to "the corporate agenda" by staying outside of the Democratic Party. I don't see that working for three reasons: almost all of the people who might be sympathetic are already invested as Democrats (and more all the time are being driven to the Democrats by the Republicans); your separatism demonstrates a lack of solidarity, and possibly even an antipathy to the people you're supposedly trying to help; and you're denying that reform is possible within the Democratic Party, which given the existence of primaries and such would seem to be false.

But let's throw one more argument into the mix. Voting is at best a rare and limited option, whereas there are other forms of political action that are more direct, more focused, and more viable for people who don't start with majority consensus: demonstrations, speeches, boycotts. In these cases what may matter more isn't having politicians to lead your side but having politicians willing to listen and open to persuasion, especially based on traditionally shared values. One instance that made this clear to me was when organizers who were opposed to Israeli apartheid and occupation came to Wichita and urged us to talk to our representative and senators. They pointed out how they gained a receptive audience from longtime Israel supporters like Ted Kennedy, but all we had to work with was Sam Brownback and Todd Tiahrt -- bible-thumping end-of-times Zionists who regard us less as constituents than as intractable enemies. So while it may not be possible to turn Clinton against American imperialism and militarism in principle, at least her administration will see a need to talk to us -- if she's our leader, we're her people, and that's not something I can imagine with Trump and the Republicans. (Also not something that seems likely with today's crop of third parties, which are almost anti-political and anti-social by design.)

Some other more or less leftish opinions:

• The Nation: Why Progressives Should Vote for Hillary Clinton
• Touré Reed: Why I Voted Nader in 2000 and Will Be Voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016
• Katha Pollitt: 12 Reasons to Vote for Hillary That Have Nothing to Do With Trump

• Fred Kaplan: How Does Obama Respond to Russia's Cyberattacks? The Obama administration has gone on record not only declaring that Russia is responsible for recent hacks apparently meant to influence US elections, but that the US will retaliate against Russia somehow. Perhaps I'm being dense, but I've never understood what constitutes cyberwarfare, let alone what the point of it is. I was hoping Kaplan, who has written a recent book on the subject, might enlighten me, but about all I've gathered from this article is that a picking a fight here is only likely to hurt everyone. As Kaplan writes:

  If the cyberconflict escalated, it would play into their strengths and our weaknesses. Again, our cyberoffensive powers are superior to theirs, as President Obama recently boasted; but our society is more vulnerable to even inferior cyberoffensives. We have bigger and better rocks to throw at other houses, but our house is made of glass that shatters more easily.

  What's implied here but rarely spelled out is that the US does everything we've accused Russia of doing, and probably does it better (or at least does it on a much more massive scale). I don't know, for instance, to what extent the US has tried to influence Russian elections, but clearly we have a long history of doing things like that, from the CIA operations in post-WWII Italy to keep the Communist Party out of power to the recent toppling of a pro-Putin government in Ukraine.

• Daniel Politi: Kansas Terrorists Wanted Anti-Muslim Attack to End in "Bloodbath":

  They called themselves the "Crusaders" and had a clear purpose: launch an attack against Muslims that would lead to a "bloodbath." With any luck that would help spark a religious war. But their plans were thwarted as three Kansas men were arrested on Friday for planning an attack on a Garden City, Kansas apartment complex filled with Somali immigrants that is also home to a mosque. They planned to carry out the attack one day after the November election. . . .

  The complaint also notes that during one conversation Stein said that "the only fucking way this country's ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back . . . we might be too late, if they do wake up . . . I think we can get it done. But it ain't going to be nothing nice about it." At one point Stein made it clear he was ready to kill babies: "When we go on operations there's no leaving anyone behind, even if it's a one-year old, I'm serious."

  Police say they found "close to a metric ton of ammunition in Allen's residence," which is what led authorities to believe the attack could be imminent. "These individuals had the desire, the means, the capability to carry out this act of domestic terrorism," an FBI official said.

  The article notes that "There has been an incredible increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment over the past few years." The article didn't note the Donald Trump campaign, nor America's seemingly endless war in Somalia. On the latter, see Mark Mazzetti/hjeffrey Gettleman/Eric Schmidt: In Somalia, U.S. Escalates a Shadow War:

  The Pentagon has acknowledged only a small fraction of these operations. But even the information released publicly shows a marked increase this year. The Pentagon has announced 13 ground raids and airstrikes thus far in 2016 -- including three operations in September -- up from five in 2015, according to data compiled by New America, a Washington think tank. The strikes have killed about 25 civilians and 200 people suspected of being militants, the group found.

  The strikes have had a mixed record. In March, an American airstrike killed more than 150 Shabab fighters at what military officials called a "graduation ceremony," one of the single deadliest American airstrikes in any country in recent years. But an airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were American allies against the Shabab.

• Derek Thompson: No, Not Gary Johnson: It's unfortunate that the Libertarian candidate isn't as articulate about foreign policy and war someone like Ron Paul. For one thing, that might spare us some gaffes like "what is a leppo?" or "when he failed to name a single world leader in a televised town hall" (actually, he was asked for the name of a foreign leader he admired, which frankly would have stumped me -- my response would have been that it's inappropriate for US politicians to render judgment on foreign politicians, as indeed it was for Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte to defame Obama). Thompson concludes that Johnson "suffers from an Aleppo mindset, a proud lack of curiosity about foreign affairs lurking behind an attractively simplistic rejection of military interventions." It never occurred to Thompson that if you reject in principle the whole idea of military interventions, you really don't need to know a lot of detail about places hawks want to intervene in, or the trumped up causes they think they're advancing. Still, it would have been better to have smarter answers handy -- it's not like candidates can assume that pundits won't ask stupid questions.

  Thankfully, Thompson moves past his dedication to preserving the American empire to grill Johnson over issues where his muddle-headedness is more glaring, such as the role of government in the economy, increasing the contrast by comparing Johnson to Sanders:

  But on policy, the two could not be more opposite. Sanders, a democratic socialist, proposed to raise taxes by historic sums and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to nationalize health insurance and make college free. Johnson's plans are the complete reverse: He has proposed to eliminate the federal income tax code, unwind 100 years of anti-poverty and health-insurance programs, and shutter the Department of Education. His plan would almost certainly raise the cost of college for many middle-class teenagers and 20somethings who rely on federal loans and grants, and his repeal of Obamacare would immediately boot tens of thousands of them off their parents' health plans.

  Beyond his jovial demeanor and admirably passionate anti-interventionist position, Johnson puts a likable face on a deeply troubling economic policy. Scrapping the Federal Reserve while cutting federal spending by 40 percent, while eliminating federal income taxes and trying to institute a new consumption tax would have a predictable effect: It would take hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy, likely triggering a recession, while shifting the burden of paying for what's left of the federal government to the poor just as unemployment started to rise, all the while shutting off any possible monetary stimulus that could provide relief to the ailing economy.

  Thompson's numbers are probably understated -- certainly the number who would lose their insurance if Obamacare is repealed would be well into the millions, and the economic collapse is probably more like trillions. But these examples do help remind us how naïve and foolish libertarian economic theory is. Still, without their crackpot notions of economic freedom libertarians would just be liberals. On the other hand, if liberals gave up the war on drugs and their defense of empire, libertarians wouldn't have a prayer of siphoning off votes, as Johnson does this year.

  For a longer critique of Johnson, see Nick Tabor: Gary Johnson's Hard-Right Record.

• Miscellaneous election links:

  • Arthur Goldhammer: What Would Alexis de Tocqueville Have Made of the 2016 US Presidential Election

  • Donald Trump's Disastrous Debate: The Atlantic's live blog on last Sunday's second debate. David A. Graham summed up:

    It was a microcosm of the campaign: Clinton is a weak candidate, with a train car's worth of luggage trailing behind her. But Trump is weaker still, and at every turn, he seems to overshadow her problems with much deeper problems of his own -- much louder gaffes, much more serious political errors. That has been a rather depressing spectacle for the nation.

  • Nate Silver: Where the Race Stands With Three Weeks to Go

  • Leslie Bennetts: Enough is enough: the 2016 election is now a referendum on male entitlement: "Donald Trump's inflated masculinity and unabashed claim over women's bodies speaks to female voters' lived experiences and, hopefully, men's need for change."

  • John Cassidy: The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton's Paid Speeches: Nicholas Thompson linked to this and tweeted (I'll spare you the shouting): "Breaking: new Clinton docs reveal she's a cautious centrist with advisers who think about policy." Cassidy quotes another comment, that the admissions also indicate "a level of self-awareness unimaginable in her opponent." For more on the speeches, see: Lee Fang et al.: Excerpts of Hillary Clinton's Paid Speeches to Goldman Sachs Finally Leaked. Also by Cassidy: The Election May Be Over, but Trump's Blowup Is Just Starting.

  • Martin Longman: George Will and David Brooks Lead the Defection: A quote from Brooks: "Politics is an effort to make human connection, but Trump seems incapable of that. He is essentially adviser-less, friendless. His campaign team is made up of cold mercenaries at best and Roger Ailes at worst."

  • Matt Taibbi: The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump:

  • Trump Suggests Vets Who Need Mental Health Services Aren't Strong

  • Nancy LeTourneau: Trump Still Thinks the Central Park Five Are Guilty

  • Dara Lind: Donald Trump shows the opposite of "political correctness" isn't free speech. It's just different repression.

  • Katherine Noble: Evangelicals' Response to Assault and the Donald Trump Audio

  • Russell Berman: Why the Supreme Court Matters More to Republicans than Trump: Or, conversely, why it matters more to you than Hillary.

  • Heather Digby Parton: Wolf in sheep's clothing: Mike Pence conceals his far-right radicalism with a sedate debate performance

  • Ezra Klein: Donald Trump's problem isn't a conspiracy. It's him.

  • Emily Crockett: Donald Trump's books reveal his obsession with women -- and himself

  • Tierney Sneed: Former Bush DOJer John Yoo: Trump 'Reminds Me a Lot of Early Mussolini': Funny thing: when someone asked who would be willing to serve as Attorney General under Trump after he vowed to jail Hillary Clinton, the first candidate I thought of was Bush's torture enabler. I guess I underestimated him. On the other hand, Twitter quickly answered my question: Rudy Giuliani (of course).

  • Tara Golshan: Donald Trump's Mormon problem, explained: One thing I didn't know is that there is a third (or fifth) party candidate in Utah named Evan McMullin who's evidently polling very well there.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Donald Trump's wild new rhetoric isn't about winning -- it's about what comes next, and Donald Trump's epic meltdown, explained

  • Ryan Lizza: Steve Bannon's Vision for the Trump Coalition After Election Day

  • Amy Chozick/Nicholas Confessore: Hacked Transcripts Reveal a Genial Hillary Clinton at Goldman Sachs Events

  • Jeff Stein: The math says Democrats have little shot at the House. Donald Trump suggests otherwise. Main thing the article suggests is that the Democrats would be in better shape if they made a systematic effort to nominate good candidates (and, yes, Kansas is one of the prime examples). But also there isn't much ticket-splitting (less than 10% in 2012), so a Clinton landslide could bring some unexpected wins.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

• Dean Baker: Apologies for Donald Trump:

  The white working class is right to feel that those in power are not acting in their interests. Of course they are not acting in the interests of the African American or Hispanic working classes either. Unfortunately, unless mainstream politicians stop doing the bidding of the wealthy, the white working class will continue to look to political figures who blame non-whites for their problems, since that will be the only answer they see.

• Robert L Borosage: Inequality Is Still the Defining Issue of Our Time: Title is clearly right, worth repeating at every opportunity. Another way to make the case is to point out that the entire purpose of conservativism is to defend and secure the privileges of the rich and make them richer.

• Patrick Cockburn: Talk of a No-fly Zone Distracts from Realistic Solutions for Aleppo

• Jonathan Cohn: The Future of America Is Being Written in This Tiny Office: Long piece on Hillary Clinton's "policy team."

  When it came to formulating her own ideas, Clinton wasn't starting from scratch, obviously. But since her last run for the White House, the Democratic Party had undergone a minor metamorphosis -- and in ways that didn't seem like a natural fit for Clinton, at least as she was perceived by most voters. The progressive wing was clearly ascendant, with groups like Occupy Wall Street and Fight For 15 harnessing populist anger at the financial system, and Black Lives Matter turning an unrelenting spotlight on racial injustice. Minority voters had come to represent a larger proportion of both the party and the population, giving Democrats an electoral-college advantage whose influence was still unclear when Obama ran for office. And there was another trend at work -- one that was less obvious, but no less important: In just a few years, the Democratic elite had quietly gone through a once-in-a-generation shift on economic thinking.

• Thomas Geoghegan: 3 Ways Hillary Clinton Can Inspire Americans Without a College Degree: Lots of good ideas here, like "co-determination" (giving workers a vote on corporate boards). Third point lumps a bunch of good things into one:

  Third, unlike Trump, Hillary can promise to use the welfare state to make us more competitive. How? Consider what would happen if we expanded Social Security. If we get more workers over age 65 to retire, instead of hanging on because they lack a decent private pension, we could employ more middle-aged and young workers now sitting at home, or promote them sooner. We need the government to assume more of the private sector's "non-wage" labor costs. There are yet other examples where the welfare state could make us more competitive: Expand Medicare to workers between ages 55 and 65, so employers can stop avoiding payment for working people who have higher skills. Or have a fair federal system of worker compensation, instead of states' using it to bid against each other. Or have the federal government offer to take over state Medicaid in those states that promise to use the savings for public education and worker training. And isn't publicly funded childcare a way of ensuring that we use human capital more efficiently instead of trapping highly educated women at home?

• Mark Mazzetti/Ben Hubbard: Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition: The new power in Saudi Arabia is 31-year-old Prince bin Salman, seen here as extravagant and reckless, especially with his war in Yemen which has lately dragged the US into missile exchanges.

• Richard Silverstein: Israel's Stern Gang Mailed Letter Bomb to White House, President Truman: In 1947, when LEHI was commanded by future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

• Cass R Sunstein: Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds: Tries to pick out books that liberals can take seriously, as opposed to, say, the partisan paranoid crap published by Regnery. The books are:

  1. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed
  2. Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation
  3. Casey Mulligan, Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform
  4. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
  5. Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes

  The Scalia book came out in 1997, when he still had a reputation as a serious (albeit flawed) thinker, as opposed to the partisan crank you remember him as. Scott and Ellickson would seem to be libertarians, perhaps even anarchists. Haidt's book is a respectful probe into how conservatives think (I bought a copy, but haven't read it.) Mulligan complains that Obamacare disincentivizes work, and as such is a drag on GDP. That makes sense but doesn't strike me as such a bad thing. Moreover, it's not like there aren't any countervaling incentives to work (though it doesn't help that so many jobs suck).

• Matthew Yglesias: This is the best book to help you understand the wild 2016 campaign: The book is Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, and it's a depressing slog if you've ever fancied the idea that rational arguments based on real interests might persuade voters to choose candidates and parties that actually advance those interests. One argument, for instance, is that party allegiance is based on some unknowably primordial force (probably identity), and that people pick up the views of their party rather than the other way around. Another is that fluctuations in voting results are due to factors beyond any party's control, ranging from economic performance to the shark attacks and football games. I'm not sure how much of this I buy, let alone care about. One of the problems with the social sciences is that every piece of insight they reveal about anonymous behavior becomes a lever for manipulation by some interest group. That's one reason why when I was majoring in sociology, I spent virtually all of my efforts trying to expose how research incorporates biases, and thereby to increase the doubt that findings could be usurped. That's also a reason why I quit sociology. Also why I have no interest in reading this particular book, or any of the other books on how voters think -- books that I'm sure both parties (if not necessarily both presidential candidates) have been diligently studying for whatever tricks they can find.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Continuing along as I dig through my old notebooks for jazz reviews. Here's my post from April 11, 2003, noting what turned out to be the high point of American triumphalism for the entire Iraq misadventure:

There was a period back in the Afghanistan war when the Northern Alliance started reeling off a quick series of victories -- not so much that they were defeating the Taliban in confrontations as that the Taliban was high-tailing it out of the cities, allowing Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar to fall in quick succession. The hawks then made haste to trumpet their victory and to dump on anyone who had doubted the US in this war. Back then, I referred to those few weeks as "the feel good days of the war." Well, we had something like that in Iraq, too, except that use of the plural now seems unwarranted. So mark it on your calendar, Wednesday, April 9, 2003, was the feel good day of the Iraq war. The collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime has proceeded apace, but there seems to be much less to feel good about. One big thing was the killing of the bigwig shia collaborators that the US started to promote, combined with the unwillingness of other shia bigwigs to collaborate. One of the problems with this is that it suggests that the US, as always, is looking for religious leaders to control the people -- which in turn threatens to roll back the one thing Saddam had going for his regime, which was that it was strongly secular. The fact is, you want to introduce something resembling liberal democracy in Iraq, you have to promote secularism. (Of course, given the contempt that Bush has for liberal democracy in the US, it's hard to believe that he really wants that.)

Bigger still is the whole looting thing, as well as mob reprisals against Baath leaders, which threaten to turn into the much predicted Iraqi-on-Iraqi warfare. The looting itself basically means that what infrastructure the US somehow managed not to destroy will be taken down by Iraqi mobs. The likelihood that those mobs are anything other than just isolated hoodlums is small, but collectively the damage that they inflict is likely to be huge. And given how unlikely it is that the US, its allies, and the rest of the world who were so blatantly disregarded in this whole affair, are to actually pay for anything resembling real reconstruction, this is just digging an ever deeper hole. While right now, given that their is still armed (if not necessarily organized) resistance to the US, it's hard to see how the US could keep order even if it wants to (which is to say the least a mixed proposition), but failure to do so is already setting the US up as responsible for the looting, and adding to the already huge responsibility that the US bears for the current and future misery of the Iraqi people. And when the US does start to enforce order, what is bound to happen? More dead Iraqis. And who's responsible for that? The US. If this had just happened out of the blue, I might be a bit sympathetic, but this is exactly what we had predicted as the inevitable given the US course of action.

So happy last Wednesday. That's very likely to be the last one for a long time now.

Also found this letter from April 15, 2003, also on the looting of Baghdad:

The more I read about how archaeologists and other scholars warned the US military about the very real risks that invasion and occupation posed to the libraries and museums of Iraq, the more clear it is why those warnings were ignored: they came from people who disapproved of the war. One of the major problems with this war was that it wasn't something, like Pearl Harbor or even 9/11, that happened and panicked the US into action; it was a program that was concocted inside the government and hard-sold to the public. And one of the most telling effects of the hard-sell is that the people who were selling it, so convinced were they that it was the right thing to do, put blinders on themselves to any argument, no matter how reasoned, not to proceed with their program. And since warnings about dire consequences were reasons not to do it, they were ignored. This is, I think, what happens when someone falls so in love with their ideas that they are unwilling to subject them to critical analysis. And when they crack the whip so hard to force their dreams on a world that turned out to be very skeptical. It is worth noting that this simplistic hard-sell approach to what are often very complex problems has become endemic in US political discourse, and that it has largely driven open, consensus-building discussions underground. It has also led to a preoccupation with winning arguments over solving problems, and the especially insidious tactic of winning arguments by "creating facts on the ground." The libraries and museums of Baghdad are the tragic results of this deterioration of political discourse, and by no means the only ones. The Bush Administration seems to have realized that the only way they could proceed with their war would be to discount or ignore its probable consequences, just as they realized that they would have to lie about why they wanted this war. And now that they've succeeded, it will take all of the arrogance and blindness they can summon to deny what they have wrought. Unless we can manage to break out of their psychology, we're bound for a lot more tragedy.

Earlier in April I pulled out a terrific quote from Gerald Colby's Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, pointing out that back in the 1950s Rockefeller advocated an accelerated arms race in an attempt to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Rockefeller certainly knew a thing or two about the advantages businessmen with deep pockets have, and this alone pretty much explains the next 35 years of the Cold War. I also posted a note comparing America's experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, where I wrote:

The biggest difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that in Vietnam we were defending a fraud, whereas now we're attacking a phantom. The latter, of course, is easier: it's much easier to demonize Saddam Hussein than it was to make Ngo Dinh Diem, trained and deployed and propped up by the CIA, look like a patriot. . . . What they do have in common is the inevitable resistance of people against foreign occupiers, and the contempt that U.S. leaders have both for dealing honestly with their own citizens and for the people of the other countries that they try to bully and, in fits of rage, to destroy.

Back in summer 2003 before it all turned to shit, someone "in the Bush administration" coined the saying, "anyone can go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran." Sen. Sam Brownback took the bait and introduced a bill to "destabilize" Iran. (Not that we didn't count him as a "real man" before -- you could tell from the way he treated women.) The Wichita Eagle explained: "Using the same philosophy that drove the war in Iraq, the Kansas senator is leading a drive for new leadership for its eastern neighbor." This prompted me to write a letter (June 23, 2003), again explaining the obvious:

Poor Senator Brownback. I hate to pick on someone so obviously suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, but his Iran Democracy Act is nothing more than a rerun of the same mistakes that we made with Iraq. When Congress voted to make regime change in Iraq national policy, they started us down the road to the still smoldering war there. That road was paved with lies and fantasies, and anyone who's taken the time to notice has been struck by the growing chasm between reality and the hawks' expectations. But obviously Brownback hasn't noticed anything: he's off stalking bigger, more dangerous game.

The basic fact is that over the last fifty years the U.S. has done nothing at all right by Iran. We say we want to promote democracy in Iran today, but in the early '50s the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government, immediately resulting in U.S. oil companies getting control of most of Iran's oil. The U.S. then installed the megalomaniacal Shah Pahlevi, sold him arms, and trained his vicious security police; the Shah eventually became so unpopular that every segment of the Iranian people revolted against him, a tumultuous revolution that was in the end dominated by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Then the U.S. and its oil sheikh allies in the Persian Gulf encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran, a horrendously bloody eight-year war leaving perhaps a million Iranian casualties. So what in this history makes Brownback think that Iran needs any more U.S. help?

The only people in Iran likely to benefit from a deluge of American propaganda are the ayatollahs, who are certain to use this to reinforce the case that only they can protect Iran from evil foreigners and the misguided citizens who inadvertently provide aid and comfort to the enemy. But then that's the same line used by Sharon in Israel and by Bush here: sabre-rattling is, after all, a time-tested recipe for keeping despots in power despite their incompetence. Maybe Brownback feels his own career needs a little sabre-rattling as well? (After all, while Wichita's economy has been collapsing, he's spent most of his time railing against cloning.) But if by chance he really does want to do something to undermine the ayatollahs in Iran, here's what he should do: support international programs to promote women's rights in Iran and throughout the world, including birth control and abortion. That is, after all, where the ayatollahs are most vulnerable. Too bad the same thing can be said about Brownback.

From November 12, 1963:

Quote from John McCain: "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight . . ." Come on! We lost the will to fight because we lost the fucking war. Throughout history, that's about the only thing that has ever stifled the will to fight. He goes on, ". . . because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal." Not sure what he thinks the "nature of the war" was, but the following clause suggests that we could have won if only we had used nuclear weapons. Was there anything else we didn't use in Vietnam? In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. Is McCain saying that our failure in Vietnam was that we didn't kill them all?

Vietnam was first and last a war about America's self-image as a world power. At first, it was about the US checking communist revolution and expansionism, which in the eyes of a great power was naturally attributed to the machinations of other great powers, e.g. the Soviet Union. In the end, it was about how the US might salvage, in the wake of defeat, its status as a world power, so that it might be able to check further communist revolutions and expansionism. In between, American politicians uttered a lot of hooey about freedom and helping the Vietnamese and so forth, but in cold hard fact that war was always about us.

The Iraq War, indeed the entire Global War on Terror, was about us too: specifically, America's self-conception of its superpowers. What bothered America's "leaders" about 9/11 had nothing to do with the death or destruction -- we willing suffer ten times as many gun deaths each year and far more damage in major hurricanes -- and everything to do with smacking down the impudence to test American power. After all, if we don't do so, today's loss will only be the first of many dominos to fall.

Tempted to quote the post from February 24, 2004, describing a Dick Cheney's fundraising appearance in Wichita, where he spent 30 minutes and raised $250k. The report noted that his security costs to the state of Kansas were $120k, not counting the disruptions from shutting down the airport and the main highway into town, nor his own travel costs and security detail. Sure makes it seem like public funding of elections would be more cost effective, not to mention that it would remove the aura of corruption that surrounds the entire process. Further down I reported:

U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, the village idiot of Goddard KS, managed to get an op-ed piece into the Eagle today. One line in particular dropped my jaw: "Tax relief, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, helped pull the economy out of the Clinton recession." Just try to tear that sentence apart: "tax relief" refers to Bush's tax cuts, which were proposed when the economy was booming and the rationale was to reduce the surplus. "Clinton's recession" must have been a diabolical scheme: what other politician has ever managed to create a recession that only started once his successor was ensconced in office? But have we really pulled out of that recession? One thing you can count on is that the moment Greenspan thinks that we're out of the recession woods is that he'll raise interest rates. But has that happened? Not that I've noticed.

I wish my subsequent analysis had been smarter, but I gave too much credit to the "logic" of tax cuts as stimulus and didn't yet fully realize that giving rich people more money to "invest" only increased their appetites for asset bubbles and other predatory practices. In hindsight, we now that's pretty much all that happened in the "boom years" under Bush. (OK, I suppose you could add deficit war spending and a huge run up in oil prices due to shortages caused by those wars, but the former mostly moved money abroad to be burned up, and the latter just enriched the oil barons, again mostly abroad.)

On March 21, 2004, I assessed the Iraq War a year after Bush launched it. As I noted, "Bush is still marching blithely into the unknown, and he's dragging us with him." I couldn't offer a comprehensive analysis, but did jot down a list of bullet points, including "It is clear now that the US/UK case for going to war against Iraq was founded on [little more than] arrogance and ignorance, and presented as [nothing more than] a blatant list of lies." (I'm tempted today to edit out the bracketed words.) Another point:

The US occupation of Iraq has been remarkably incompetent. Planning for the occupation was somewhere between non-existent and delusional. The initial chaos that allowed extensive looting shattered any prospect that the US might be powerful enough to conduct an orderly transformation of Iraq's political economy. For political reasons, the US also chose not to do the obvious thing, which was to keep existing Iraqi governmental agencies intact and rule through them. Abolishing the army and police forces fed the resistance, while belatedly forcing the US to reconstruct its own Iraqi army and police forces. The resistance itself soon attained a sufficient level of activity to force the US occupiers to hide behind their security barricades, disconnecting from the people they allegedly came to liberate. By failing to hold elections, the US never made an effort to establish a legitimate Iraqi political presence.

On March 12, 2004, I wrote a fair amount about the 1953 CIA coup in Iran -- the subject of Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror -- and concluded with this note on the leading Democratic candidate to challenge Bush in 2004 (although it would have been equally valid for virtually any possible Democratic nominee, especially the then-junior senator from New York):

The great worry that we have about Kerry as the next Democratic US President is that he is so wed to the past verities of US imperial foreign policy that he will -- like Clinton, Carter, Johnson, and Kennedy before him -- continue the same vicious policies, albeit just a shade less maniacally than G.W. Bush. That continuity has always happened because the rhetoric has always favored the tough guys -- the badass Republicans. (Reality is another thing: although Reagan based much of his 1980 campaign on attacking Carter for giving away the Canal Zone, when Bush finally did invade Panama he didn't make a move to reclaim the Canal Zone. Reagan's charges were merely that Carter was soft; Bush's non-action just shows us that Carter made a concession that realistically had to be made, and that no amount of obtuseness could reverse.) It seems obvious that Bush has finally proven just how bankrupt those policies are, but Kerry seems to feel that the real problem is not Bush's arrogance or ignorance, but his incompetence. After all, incompetence has long been the Achilles heel of Republican foreign policy, but if that's all you attack them for, you can never break out of their rhetorical straightjacket. It's clear that Kerry hasn't: instead of attacking the very idea of a "war on terrorism" he attacks Bush's bungling execution of it. Sure, there's lots to attack there, but if the very project is intrinsically flawed -- and it is -- no amount of competence can fix it. Only a new worldview can do that.

From April 24, 2004, following a note on Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, which identifies Bush and Ashcroft as not that far removed from the religious conceits of the book's killers:

One of my more/less constant themes has been how we've become prisoners of our rhetoric. What I've tried to do above is to sketch out the conceptual model of how this has happened. We live in a world where we as individuals are profoundly powerless, even in the cases where we are mostly free to direct our own personal lives. Such freedom usually depends on the tacit accepteance of powerlessness: people are free to mind their own business, because it doesn't make any real difference to others, least of all the elites (who are at most relatively powerful, by virtue of their ability to manipulate symbols that are broadly acquiesced to -- religion, patriotism, material wealth, ideologies like capitalism, abstract concepts like freedom and democracy, tyranny and terrorism, mere character traits like toughness, resolve, fortitude). And such freedom is for most people quite satisfying, as is the sense of belonging to a well-ordered society. But some people are unsatisfied with the status quo: they want to test the limits of their freedom, they start to question the ordering of society. Most such people were driven to want to change the world by perceived wrongs done them. But some are driven more by an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance: Ron and Dan Lafferty, believing that they were chosen by God to do his work, are simple and pathetic examples.

Where George W. Bush differs from the Laffertys is not so much in his self-conception as in his support network. Bush is a rare example of a self-possessed activist, a fanatic, raised to a position of extraordinary political power. Yet his possession of that power -- one built on the wealth of his political backers, on the cadres of the Republican party, on the institutional power of the U.S. presidency, on the symbols of American military might -- in no way changes the fact that he dwells within the limits of his personal universe. He can't see beyond those limits, which leaves him mostly at the mercy of his own mental baggage -- a world haunted by a God who metes out violence, and by a Karl Rove who vouchsafes that it is politically safe. With his support network, and with our acquiescence (or more likely out powerlessness), his mental paroxysms have can have immense impact. Never in American history has such a dangerous person been put into such a dangerous position.

At present, Donald Trump is vying for precisely this claim. And while he strikes one as a far less devout person, the entitlement he feels by virtue of his class, wealth, and celebrity (not to mention race and sex) seems to elevate him beyond any shred of self-doubt -- a common trait of mad would-be emperors throughout history.

From April 15, 2004, in response to Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip (something flacks like Dennis Ross praised as a step toward peace):

But most importantly, Sharon's plan is unilateral: it in no way depends on agreement with any Palestinians; it doesn't acknowledge the Palestinians; it doesn't provide any framework for Palestine to go about the business of rebuilding and healing. The future status of Gaza is what? It is effectively separated from Israel, separated from the West Bank, separated from the Palestinian Authority, but in no way does it become an independent entity. In its assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and many others, Israel has shown that it has no qualms about firing at will. Will this in any way change? Without recognition and agreement, without a plan and process to turn Gaza into a viable, self-sustaining territory, Gaza will continue to be a security threat to Israel, and Israel will continue to treat Gaza as a mob-infested shooting gallery. All that Israel's removal of its outposts there does is to remove the weak spots in the containment and isolation, the strangulation, of Gaza. This is an eery reminder of the myth that Israel propagated to explain the refugee flight of 1947-49: that the Arabs had told the Palestinians to leave Israeli territory so that when the Arabs marched through an anihilated the Israelis, they wouldn't be caught in the crossfire. This is hard to conceive of, but the presence of Israeli settlers in Gaza has at least been one significant inhibition against Israel attacking Gaza with genocidal weapons.

In the months that followed, Israel made great sport out of flying at supersonic speeds over Gaza, rattling houses with sonic booms -- a practice they only gave up when nearby Israeli towns complained. In the years that followed, Israel launched one major military assault after another on Gaza, as well as hundreds of more limited bombing runs and cannon fire. Meanwhile, Gaza was bottled up, its borders frequently sealed, while the economy atrophied.

Found this forgotten item on May 13, 2004, reminding us that US confusion over and participation in Syria's civil war goes back well before Arab Spring:

The news got burried under the other scandals, but Bush picked another war this week, when the U.S. announced that it was unilaterally imposing a wide range of sanctions on Syria, including freezing Syrian assets held in U.S. banks. The reason given was inadequate vigilance by Syria in terms of preventing "foreign fighters" from infiltrating Iraq. (I still bet that more than 95% of the foreign fighters in Iraq come from the U.S./U.K.) But it is a clear escalation of the rhetoric of demonization that the U.S. lays in advance of hotter wars. There are prominent neocons who make no secret about their desire to take the war to Syria, so this is a victory for them. It also aids Sharon in that it is one more excuse (as if he needed any) to ignore the requirement that Israel withdraw from Syrian lands occupied since 1967. Cooperation between Bush and Israel over Syria was demonstrated most clearly when the U.S. applauded after Israel bombed Syria last summer, in alleged retalliation for a suicide bombing that had nothing whatsoever to do with Syria. . . .

Like all acts of war, sanctions are a failure of diplomacy. As the U.S. occupation of Iraq has soured, the U.S. finds itself driven to ever more desperate acts, and those acts can only serve to isolate, embitter, and impoverish us further.

I've run across several obituaries in the notebook so far, most memorably for my cousin Bob Burns and our friend Bob Ashley. On June 6, 2004, I wrote this one about people I didn't know personally:

A great man died yesterday: Steve Lacy pioneered and exemplified the avant-garde in jazz -- in particular, the notion that the new music doesn't evolve from the leading edge so much as it transcends all of the music that came before it. He was the first postmodernist in jazz, and he explored the music (Monk above all) and developed it in novel ways over 45 years of superb records. Ronald Reagan also died yesterday: he was a sack of shit who in his "what, me worry?" way destroyed far more than Lacy built. To describe Reagan as the intellectual forefather of George W. Bush is just sarcasm; for both ideas were nothing more than excuses for wielding power not just to vanquish the weak or to favor the strong but to bask in its own glory. Ideas, of course, did flower up around Reagan, as they do around Bush -- really bad ideas.

At the time my take on the Reagan administration was that they were responsible for [making] fraud the biggest growth industry in the U.S. By the end of Reagan's second term almost every department of the U.S. government was awash in corruption scandals: despite all of the talk, the administration's most evident real program was to steal everything in sight. But ultimately the talk did matter. At the time there was much talk about a "Reagan Revolution" -- oblivious to the fact that the only right-wing revolutions in memory led to the triumph of the Fascists and Nazis, to WWII and the Holocaust. Those are big boots to goosestep in, and it's taken a while to fill them.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Music: Current count 27244 [27198] rated (+46), 401 [390] unrated (+11).

High rated count, partly inflated by finding some old grades in old notebooks that had never been registered in the database (see below). Still, most of the rated count comes from checking out a bunch of top-rated albums from this year, at least as tabulated by Album of the Year. Best album I found there was the new GOAT -- indeed, I'm not real sure Requiem isn't as good as 2014's A-listed Commune. As for the others, it's possible that more time might have put one or more of Savages, Angel Olsen, Kevin Morby, Future of the Left, or even Solange over the top.

Two A- records from Robert Christgau's Noisey column. I couldn't play the YouTube link for the Youssou N'Dour mystery album (or whatever it is -- not sure it's even a thing). Both are rather marginal finds, but distinctive in their narrow niches. I'm still undecided about Black Bombaim but will probably wind up saying the same thing about it.

Working fairly hard on the jazz book(s), although they're still in the very boring collection phase. (As I wrote that, I had a strange sense of deja vu, like I've tried to do this before.) I finished collecting reviews from Jazz Prospecting. Before moving on to Rhapsody Streamnotes, I thought I'd take a look at the old notebooks, and it's turned out that at least through 2004 there are quite a few reviews/notes there that didn't get worked into the various columns. (I hadn't broken out Jazz Prospecting Notes until JCG(7) in December 2005, so I was wondering whether I had bothered to write up anything on them later. I recall that at some point I started dumping the prospecting notes into the notebook, but those should be redundant with files I have already rummaged through.)

I'm collecting the post-2000 releases in a flat file which is currently 98625 lines long (8454 albums, although minus redundancies probably closer to 6000; 833903 words). I'm also formatting the pre-2000 album reviews/notes into book form, currently 210 pages. I'm rather surprised that the latter has grown so large, given that I picked up most of my 20th century jazz before I started writing so much. My guess has long been that the amount of work it would take to turn those writings into a fairly decent guide book would be prohibitive, but for now it certainly doesn't hurt to organize what I do have into something more accessible.

I haven't updated the 21st century book, and probably won't until I finish collecting Rhapsody Streamnotes, at which point I'll have collected virtually everything I've written on the subject. Then I figure I can go through the database and try to edit something coherent from all these widely scattered scraps. Scary what a huge job that's bound to be.

New records rated this week:

• 75 Dollar Bill: Wooden Bag (2015, Other Music): [bc]: B+(***)
• 75 Dollar Bill: Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (2013-15 [2016], Thin Wrist): [bc]: A-
• Amber Arcades: Fading Lines (2016, Heavenly): [r]: B+(*)
• Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Real Enemies (2016, New Amsterdam): [bc]: B+(**)
• Bon Iver: 22, a Million (2016, Jagjaguwar): [r]: B+(*)
• Neko Case/KD Lang/Laura Veirs: Case/Lang/Veirs (2016, Anti-): [r]: B+(**)
• Nels Cline: Lovers (2013 [2016], Blue Note, 2CD): [r]: B-
• Cymbals Eat Guitars: Pretty Years (2016, Sinderlyn): [r]: B
• Damana (Dag Magnus Narvesen Octet): Cornua Copiae (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• Future of the Left: The Peace & Truce of Future of the Left (Prescriptions): [r]: B+(***)
• GOAT: Requiem (2016, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(***)
• Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch (2016, Sacred Bones): [r]: C+
• Ital Tek: Hollowed (2016, Planet Mu): [r]: B+(**)
• Nicolas Jaar: Sirens (2016, Other People): [r]: B+(**)
• Kate Jackson: British Road Movies (2016, Hoo Ha): [r]: B+(*)
• Michael Kiwanuka: Love & Hate (2016, Polydor): [r]: B+(**)
• Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine (2016, Glassnote): [r]: B
• Jørgen Mathisen/Christian Meaas Svendsen/Andreas Wildhagen: Momentum (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Maxwell: blackSUMMERS'night (2016, Columbia): [r]: B
• Anna Meredith: Varmints (2016, Moshi Moshi): [r]: B
• Mudcrutch: 2 (2016, Reprise): [r]: B
• Kevin Morby: Singing Saw (2016, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(***)
• The Mowgli's: Where'd Your Weekend Go? (2016, Photo Finish/Island): [r]: B
• Naked Wolf: Ahum (2016, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Steve Noble & Kristoffer Berre Alberts: Condest Second Yesterday (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Sean Noonan: Memorable Sticks (2015 [2016], ForTune): [bc]: B
• Angel Olsen: My Woman (2016, Jagjaguwar): [r]: B+(***)
• Huerco S: For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) (2016, Proibito): [r]: B+(**)
• Savages: Adore Life (2016, Matador): [r]: B+(***)
• SBTRKT: Save Yourself (2016, self-released, EP): [r]: B-
• Elliott Sharp Aggregat: Dialectrical (2016, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Solange: A Seat at the Table (2016, Saint/Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Touché Amoré: Stage Four (2016, Epitaph): [r]: B+(*)
• Whitney: Light Upon the Lake (2016, Secretly Canadian): [r]: B-
• YG: Still Brazy (2016, Def Jam): [r]: B+(*)

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

• Vieux Kanté: The Young Man's Harp (2005 [2016], Sterns): [r]: A-

Added grades for remembered LPs from way back when:

• Borah Bergman: The River of Sounds (2001, Boxholder): B+
• Roy Campbell: It's Krunch Time (2001, Thirsty Ear): B
• The Cosmosamatics (2001, Boxholder): B
• The Cosmosamatics: The Cosmosamatics II (2001, Boxholder): B
• Joel Futterman/William Parker/Jimmy Williams: Authenticity (1998 [1999], Kali): B-
• Mat Maneri & Randy Peterson: Light Trigger (2000, No More): B-
• Mat Maneri: Blue Decco (2000, Thirsty Ear): B+
• Jemeel Moondoc & William Parker With Hamid Drake: New World Pygmies, Vol. 2 (2000 [2002], Eremite, 2CD): B+
• The Music Ensemble: The Music Ensemble (1974-75 [2001], Roaratorio): B
• The Nommonsemble: Life Cycle (2000 [2001], AUM Fidelity): B
• Matthew Shipp: Symbol Systems (1995, No More): B
• Alan Silva/Kidd Jordan/William Parker: Emancipation Suite #1 (1999 [2002], Boxholder): C+

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• JD Allen: Americana (Savant)
• George Cables: The George Cables Songbook (HighNote)
• Andrew Downing: Otterville (self-released): October 14
• Clare Fischer Latin Jazz Big Band: ¡Intenso! (Clavo)
• Fond of Tigers: Uninhabit (Offsesson/Drip Audio)
• Eric Hofbauer Quintet: Prehistoric Jazz - Volume 3: Three Places in New England (Creative Nation Music): November 4
• The Matthew Kaminski Quartet: Live at Churchill Grounds (Chicken Coup)
• Brian Kastan: Roll the Dice on Life (Kastan): January 1
• Mike LeDonne & the Groover Quartet: That Feelin' (Savant)
• Houston Person & Ron Carter: Chemistry (HighNote)
• Felix Peikli & Joe Doubleday: It's Showtime! (self-released): advance, October 4
• Revolutionary Snake Ensemble: I Want That Sound! (Innova): October 28
• Carol Robbins: Taylor Street (Jazzcats): January 6

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev -- next