One more small point about the Jim Lehrer-Tim Geithner interview. Geithner kept referring to how we had faced "the edge of the abyss" late last year. Lehrer kept wondering what that meant. It's one of those metaphors you hear a lot, and just casually accept given any real understanding of how badly the financial system was falling down. Still, if you're as ignorant as Lehrer evidently is, that's a reasonable question. Surprisingly, it's one that Geithner didn't have an answer for. Again, maybe his talking points preparers just didn't anticipate it, but wouldn't you figure he'd be smart enough to come up with an answer -- if only one too technical for Lehrer to understand. That he didn't, wouldn't, or couldn't, suggests to me that the term should be retired.

Biggest problem I see with the abyss metaphor is that it suggests we were on the outside looking down. Actually, we went through a short period where about $13 trillion in asset evaluations simply vanished. Anyone who lost a big chunk of that nominal wealth most likely felt they weren't merely sightseeing from a precipice -- more likely they felt they were being swept into the abyss. The sense Geithner et al. want to show is that it could have been a lot worse had they not acted, but the implication that the worst is over is rather myopic. Maybe if you're a banker that's true, but unemployment and all that goes with it are still on the rise, and even when (assuming if) the numbers return to form it will be a long time (if ever) for many people to make up the losses. The abyss metaphor is overly dramatic, but it also tends to mystify and obscure what's really happening.

I watched Jim Lehrer interview Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last night, and eventually walked off in exasperation. Lehrer got the deficit bug stuck in his brain and wouldn't let go. Geithner, for his part, didn't help. He kept saying that deficits should be a long term concern, and that the Obama administration will do something about when the time comes. But he never explained why the time hasn't come clear enough to get Lehrer past his broken record point. The fact is that government deficits right now not only aren't a problem; they're a necessary part of the solution. Without government spending making up for the decline in private spending the economy would keep on collapsing until it shriveled up into a pathetic little ball, only checked by the demands of bare existence. Of course, the government could limit its deficits by raising taxes, but that would undercut the effectiveness of the deficit spending. Moreover, there is little need to worry here: when the private sector increases its spending, government deficits will contract -- partly due to increased costs, mostly due to increased taxes. If you're still concerned about paying down deficits, you could safely raise taxes then. But that's never been the point behind the people pushing the deficits meme. Their point is to strangle government, even when it is most needed.

Lehrer's concern is a sign that the meme is working, which is to say that the Republicans are going to make it more difficult than should be necessary to do what's needed to keep the economy afloat. You'd think he would at least take a clue from the fact that as long as Bush was in power the Republicans could care less about deficits -- in fact, they were pumping them to record levels for no good reason (unlike, e.g., the Great Depression, World War II, or now), just as they did under Reagan. You don't need to understand much about macroeconomics to be suspicious, but somehow Republicans never get called for hypocrisy. On the other hand, Geithner most likely does understand enough macroeconomics to give a technical response, the gist of which is that Lehrer has nothing to worry about. But by giving a political response -- that we'll slay the deficits dragon as soon as the recession dragon is good and dead -- he only fuels Lehrer's suspicions. So why doesn't he answer the question in a way that would convince Lehrer? One theory is that his head is stuck so far up the banking industry's arse that he really does think that fighting deficits is the most important thing the government should do, except, of course, when doing so exposes the whole banking industry to collapse. Another theory is that he's simply tone deaf politically, as evidenced by the fact that he never realized the only thing he got for answering the same question the same way five times in a row was the same question asked a sixth time. Most people when they're trying to persuade someone will try a new tactic when they their first shot fails to register. But then I guess that's not true of most politicians, who tend to be trained rigorously to stick to their talking points, counting each opportunity to use one as a score.

Glenn Greenwald: The "Bomb Iran" contingent's newfound concern for the Iranian People. The conditioned response of most Americans to the post-election events in Iran is to accept the line that the election was stolen and to embrace the protesters. That's partly because we've been conditioned to loathe Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic's clerical leaders, and partly because we assume that the Iranian people secretly want to to live like us and do the things we do -- forgetting for the moment that we didn't take to the streets in 2000 when our own election was stolen. Much of this conditioning comes from the nonstop propagandizing of warmongers who, borrowing a page from Bush's "axis of evil" speech, have long set their hearts on crippling Iran. But now, seeing this outpouring of quasi-American dissent, even the hawks are getting warm and fuzzy for masses of people they wanted to wipe off the map just a few moments ago:

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way -- just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least.

Of course, not all of the hawks have gone soft. Israel's hardest core supporters, like Daniel Pipes, were as much as campaigning for Ahmadinejad, and AIPAC was pushing an Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of 2009 (HR 1327) to remind the Iranian people how much we hated them. Since the election not much has changed with them. Some, like Robert Kagan, now insist that Obama to come out in support of the protesters -- advice which if followed would inevitably backfire. The US, left anyone forget it, has previously interfered in Iranian domestic politics: in 1953 the CIA hired some clerics and thugs to stage fake-communist riots to set the stage for a military coup that overturned Iran's democracy and installed the Shah as proxy until his megalomania got the best of him. The US has interfered in domestic politics all over the world, so frequently that the CIA is suspected everywhere, but there's no reason to think that the CIA has any practical ability to affect what's going on in Iran today, let alone direct it toward any sort of sensible goals -- even if we had any.

The biggest problem for American politicians is understanding that what's going on in Iran isn't about US. It looks like an internal struggle at the highest levels of power within the Islamic Republic. The stakes may be huge there and for the people of Iran, but it's not clear that it makes any real difference to us -- most likely it doesn't unless we make something of it, which would be unprecedented.

The "reformers" are as much the establishment in Iran as the "conservatives" are, but the very idea of reform is likely to let loose all sorts of change, much of which has been percolating beneath the surface for years. How far this goes may depend on how hard the system cracks, if indeed it does at all. Still, at this point it's impossible to imagine an outcome where Iran's foreign policy budges much from its recent course. It might be easier for Obama to sell a rapprochement with an Iran led by Mousavi than Ahmadinejad, but the deal is likely to be the same. Moreover, such a deal depends more on Obama than on Iran -- for proof, just look at how Clinton and Bush failed to do anything with Iran's previous round of reformers.

Matthew Yglesias: Sens. Kyl, McConnell, and Roberts Want to Preserve the Waste in Public Sector Health Care. Their method for doing this is to sponsor a bill to prohibit Medicare and Medicaid from using research on what works and doesn't work as a means of spending their tax dollars more efficiently. The big point is not only that government spending is wasteful but that the Republicans are determined to keep it that way. Otherwise they'd just have to make up shit to sandbag any efforts to provide better and more democratic health care. (Of course, they do that too.) This is reminiscent of the plank in Big Pharma's Medicare drug bill that prohibits the government from using volume purchases to reduce costs -- something which every private sector insurance company does.

Paul Krugman noticed this story too. He called his post Taking the Hypocritical Oath. He refers to a longer piece on this from The Wonk Room, which among other things points out that Kyl has raised $1,971,968 from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to sponsor his Senate career. They evidently haven't toted up the numbers for McConnell and Roberts yet, but they're likely substantial. In any case, they have been bought so many times before -- Roberts is pretty much Mr. Agribusiness on the Hill -- that they wouldn't have any qualms about getting in this line.

Matthew Yglesias: Coming to Terms With the Welfare State: The argument here is that Republican conservatives should admit what the UK Conservative Party freely concedes: that they support at least some parts of the modern welfare state and won't do anything to dismantle them. Yglesias mentions FDIC as one example, which is about as non-controversial as he can get. Doing that much would take the Grover Norquist shrink-and-drown-the-government principle off the table.

[O]ne key difference is that you almost never see anyone on the American right actively affirm belief in even a bare-bones welfare state or basic regulation. Conservative governance doesn't evince an actual desire to fully dismantle this stuff. But when conservatives get abstract, or out of power, you get a lot of stuff from Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg and some of the Cato people and so forth all about The Road to Serfdom or the totalitarian implications of the school lunch program.

Yglesias cites a book review by David Frum, who established his conservative bona fides in his "axis of evil" speech where he tried to will World War III into being, but he's been back-pedalling since then, trying to find some terra firma to launch his fantasies from. Problem is, most conservatives are happier living in an imaginary world where simple principles rule and inconvenient facts can be ignored. Conservative politicians may privately concede that there are government programs -- even welfare programs -- that they can't kill outright, but the party ideological apparatus isn't constrained by such practicalities. Moreover, the politicians don't insist that they do. Even when they recognize that a pet cause is politically hopeless, they're happy to to disguise it as something else, like casting accelerated logging as the Healthy Forests initiative. They may understand that politically they can't kill Social Security, yet they still try to palm off destructive programs by claiming that they are needed to "save" Social Security.

Sticking to their hardcore anti-government principles makes even more sense when they're out of power. When Bush was in the White House, Republicans had to be schizophrenic over government power and spending, even to the point of supporting deficits to pay for political plunder. Now they're free to be as anti-deficit as possible, at least without breaking their no-tax-increase pledges. But attitude runs deeper than that. Virtually every success the Republicans have enjoyed going back at least as far as Nixon was based on fear and loathing, which they refined to the point where it consumed them. Their ability to focus all that rage on the Democrats is what built them the base they have, and it's all the base they're going to have for a long time now. So why should they be reasonable and make Obama look good? Their only hope is to get Obama to fail, then to get a majority of Americans to blame Obama for that failure. They've pulled tougher con jobs in the past, so why not this one? It's not like they have any other options, or any other ideas. In appealing to the dumbest and meanest America has to offer, that's what they've settled into.

Matthew Yglesias: Blaming the Victim for Health Reform Difficulties: For example, what are the Republicans doing with health care reform?

What we have here is a Democratic president advocating for some tough reforms that will reduce public expenditures over the long run. Those reforms will be hard to implement. And one reason they'll be hard to implement is that, as Ezra Klein notes, conservative politicians who ought to be the core constituency for endeavors to slow the growth of Medicare costs seem more interested in drawing blood from Obama than in slowing the growth of government.

Another example, from another Yglesias post:

There is, for example, simply no way to dispute the fact that other developed countries with national health care systems also have more efficient health care systems. There's maybe a credible argument to be made that the United States couldn't realize those efficiencies, but no serious person can maintain that they don't exist. And yet here's John McCain saying "the idea that somehow the government can administer health care in a more efficient fashion than the private sector I think flies in the face of examples of other countries that have done so."

He went unchallenged on this assertion because in America "everyone knows" that government is inefficient and "everyone knows" that foreign countries are bad.

Actually, McCain's assertion can be disproved by what the US has already done in the areas where the government actually runs health care: compare Medicare vs. private insurance, or the VA vs. private for-profit providers.

Of course, McCain doesn't have to do that, because he's sticking to the anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-everything script. It's a bluff, but who's calling him on it? It's the sort of bluff that Bush ran for eight increasingly disastrous years. Even after the results came in and his popularity went down the toilet, who called him on it? That is why the Republicans think they can get away with what they're doing.

The single most important thing that Obama has to do as president is to push significant health care reform through. It's much more important than saving the banks from mass hara-kiri by fraud, saving the planet from global warming, or dialing back the ridiculous global American empire. It's more immediately necessary than turning back the tide of jingoistic stupidity that dominates the political media these days -- although doing something on health care will start to do double duty there. I recall -- not sure when but early 1990s are a good guess -- when it was scandalous that health care chewed up 12% of US GDP. That figure is up to 17% now. It's a cancer whereby a few greedy private interests are devouring the economy, filling our lives with uncertainty and fear. That this is an issue in doubt testifies to the overwhelming power of money in politics: that 17% is a huge vested interest (double the size of the military-industrial complex, roughly the size of the banks, just to give you two points for political influence comparison).

One thing I expected the Democrats to move more proactively on is to start taking the big money out of politics. They may figure that as the top dogs now this is no time to get out of the game, but the game itself is what corrupts American politics so utterly.

Thought I would start with Legacy's reissues commemorating 1959, which they identified as the greatest year in jazz. You can make that case, but also can pick any of a number of years, most (at least as far as the LP era is concerned) in that neighborhood. The Mingus album is an all-time wonder, and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall are two more A+ records from the year. Some other legendary records are: John Coltrane: Giant Steps, and Coltrane Jazz; Duke Ellington: Blues in Orbit, and Anatomy of a Murder; Bill Evans: Portrait in Jazz; Coleman Hawkins: The High and Mighty Hawk; Wynton Kelly: Kelly Blue; Shelly Manne: At the Blackhawk; Blue Mitchell: Blue Soul; Cecil Taylor: Love for Sale; and Ben Webster and Associates. Less famous but in some ways even better -- at least if you have a saxophone jones -- are: Arnett Cobb: Party Time; Eddie Davis: Very Saxy; Jackie McLean: New Soil, and Swing Swang Swingin'; Duke Ellington/Johnny Hodges: Side by Side; Lars Gullin: Stockholm Street. Of course, you could plug in other years and get similar results, at least from 1956 (Ellington at Newport and Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus) up through 1966 (Ellington's Far East Suite and Rollins' Alfie). After that it starts getting trickier, although there's still plenty to listen to.

In general, a slow week for me: hard to concentrate, which I don't expect to change until I get the kitchen done. I will be testing it out with a serious dinner this coming Friday. Maybe the deadline will focus my efforts, but that doesn't promise a good week of Jazz Prospecting.

Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um [Legacy Edition] (1959 [2009], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): Frantically label-hopping in the late 1950s, Mingus landed at Columbia for two albums: the title album here on the first disc, and the erratic follow-up, Mingus Dynasty, that fills most of the second disc. The former is an undoubted masterpiece. Mingus learned jazz from the ground up, playing trad with Kid Ory, swinging with Red Norvo, apprenticing with Duke Ellington, bopping with Bird and Max Roach, finding his own path through the avant-garde. The nine neatly trimmed songs on the original Mingus Ah Um take a postmodern tack on jazz history, with gospel welling up in "Better Get It in Your Soul," nods to "Jelly Roll" and "Bird Calls" and an "Open Letter to Duke" and a gorgeous remembrance of Lester Young called "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." But they don't imitate the past; they subsume it, catapulting it into the future as urgent testimony, which was most explicit in "Fables of Faubus," heaping scorn on the segregationist governor of Arkansas. Mingus was never more Ellingtonian, but everything was updated: his septet thinner but more rambunctious, the gentility and elegance giving way to cleverness and fury. While the first disc -- even fleshed out with the edits restored and padded with redundant alternate takes -- was as perfect as jazz records get, the second slops back and forth between aimless sections and wildly inspired ones. The new edition omits three alternate takes from the 3-CD The Complete 1959 Columbia Recordings -- no great loss -- and it frames Mingus Dynasty better by starting it off with alternate takes to "Better Get It in Your Soul" and "Jelly Roll." A [single albums: Mingus Ah Um A+; Mingus Dynasty A-]

Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain [Legacy Edition] (1959-60 [2009], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): The third of three major collaborations between Davis and Gil Evans, following Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. Spiced with Spanish themes, leading off with Joaquin Rodrigo's slow and moody "Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio)" -- 16:20 on the original album -- and fleshed out with Evans compositions. The first disc leaves the album intact, signing off after 45:36. Evans keeps his cleverness under tight wraps, producing a subtle background tapestry that never distracts you from the leader's trumpet -- the saving grace here. The second disc adds 70:10 of alternate takes and miscellaneous scraps -- more of the same, but without the flow. B [single album: B+(**)]

Dave Brubeck: Time Out [Legacy Edition] (1959-64 [2009], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD+DVD): Every song in a different time signature -- the sort of neat trick an egghead like Brubeck with the degree to back it up might do. The big surprise is how little notice you'd give to the concept, for the simple reason that the pieces seem so organic and complete. "Take Five" sounded so timeless it broke through the charts and sold over a million copies. Brubeck's popularity, like Keith Jarrett's a couple decades later, always seemed a bit excessive: not undeserved, just not fairly distributed. But you couldn't charge his group with selling out or pandering. Maybe you'd complain that Paul Desmond played the most simply gorgeous alto saxophone since Johnny Hodges, but that sounds more like a compliment. Time Out's success encouraged sequels -- the five discs collected in For All Time hold up pretty well (especially Time Further Out). A best-of might have made good filler for the second disc, but Legacy opted instead to plunder the previously unreleased live archives instead, picking from 1961, 1963, and 1964 sets at Newport. Mostly standard in the usual time -- "St. Louis Blues," "Pennies From Heaven," "You Go to My Head" -- they showcase a superb group fleet on their toes. Closes with slightly stretched versions of their two best-known Time Out classics, tying the package up neatly. As for the DVD -- 30 minutes of interview, performance footage, and an "interactive, multi-camera piano lesson" -- another day. A- [single disc: A]

Tito Puente: Dance Mania [Legacy Edition] (1956-60 [2009], RCA/Legacy, 2CD): A Puerto Rican timbalero from Spanish Harlem, Puente jumped onto the Cuban bandwagon in the mid-1950s, releasing albums like Cuban Carnival and Cubarama before this breakthrough party album. The band is huge, the blaring brass rather clunky, and the beats a bit more basic than what the real Cubans were doing -- Pérez Prado, in particular, managed to sound more pop and at the same time more radical -- but the energy is cranked up high and the vocals exude passion. This package expands the original 12-cut 37:50 album to 22 cuts to fill the first disc, then offers Dance Mania Vol. 2, again pumped up from 12 to 23 cuts. The prime slice is slightly leaner and cleaner, but it's hard to nitpick the rest: more is truly more. A- [single albums: Dance Mania A-; Vol. 2 B+(***)]

Olatunji: Drums of Passion [Legacy Edition] (1959-66 [2009], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): One of the first albums of African music to appear in the US, no doubt because Babatunde Olatunji, a Yoruba from southwest Nigeria, got a scholarship to study at Morehouse College in Georgia, then moved on to New York, where he set up his percussion ensemble as a side project while studying public administration. With its dense percussion and crude, chantlike vocals, this seems geared to contemporary stereotypes of Africa, but it doesn't pander: it stands tall and forthright. The album became a huge bestseller. The band expanded, with some notable jazz names joining in on the bonus tracks: Clark Terry, Yusef Lateef, Jerome Richardson, Bud Johnson, Ray Barretto. Second disc features the long-out-of-print More Drums of Passion. Cut 7 years later, it seems less of a novelty, especially with the irresistible groove of "Mbira." A- [single albums: Drums of Passion B+(***); More A-]

Kenny Burrell: Prime Kenny Burrell: Live at the Downtown Room (1976-2006 [2009], High Note): Six cuts as advertised, from a prime period between when Burrell recorded his two Ellington Is Forever volumes, but everyday fare, in an intimate quartet with the equally decorus Richard Wyands on piano. No Ellington there, but the seventh cut is a much later solo guitar take on "Single Petal of a Rose," which hardly seems out of place. B+(**)

Michael Occhipinti: The Sicilian Jazz Project (2008 [2009], True North): Guitarist, has one of those web bios that offer no info before his professional debut in 1994, but presumably from Toronto, Canada -- at least his older brother, bassist Roberto Occhipinti, is. (Plus he has JUNO nominations, including one for an album of Bruce Cockburn songs.) Father may have been Sicilian. (Note postcard dated 1952, Palermo), but his musical interest goes back to 1954 field recordings by Alan Lomax. The weak spot here, as usual, is the vocals: Dominc Mancuso and Maryem Tollar, appropriately authentic as far as I know, sounds rather like flamenco, or a Sardinian I ran into once. Seven of nine cuts are powered with Louis Simao's accordion, Ernie Tollar on sax or flute, and (six cuts) Kevin Turcotte on trumpet. Two cuts substitute a string quartet, and the opener has everything, even an extra oud. B+(**)

Jerry Bergonzi: Simply Put (2008 [2009], Savant): Tenor saxophonist, a mainstream blower from Boston who doesn't go in for fancy titles or concepts. He's happy working in front of piano-bass-drums, and you'll be happy too, because the point is to hear the sax. Bruce Barth (piano) joints Dave Santoro (bass) and Andrea Michelutti (drums), repeaters from last year's Tenor Talk, which I thought might have been his best yet. (25-plus albums since 1982; I've only heard a few recent ones, and some older side-spots, where he's always made a big impression.) No signs of decline here. He's on a roll. A-

Andrew Rathbun: Where We Are Now (2007 [2009], SteepleChase): Saxophonist, plays tenor and soprano, has been rather prolific since 2000, recording for Fresh Sound New Talent and more recently SteepleChase -- third album there. (By the way, this is the first SteepleChase album I've received since starting Jazz Consumer Guide. They're an important Danish label, since the late 1970s a safe harbor for American expatriates starting with Dexter Gordon and Duke Jordan, with a small minority of European artists -- Piere Dørge, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Tete Montoliu are three who come to mind. Mostly mainstream postbop; deep catalog; a lot of things on my scrounging list.) Previous record (haven't heard it) was called Affairs of State, with songs themed on the Bush administration: "We Have Nothing but Tears," "Around the Same Circles, Again and Again," "5th Anniversary" (of 9/11), "Fiasco," "Folly (of the Future Fallen)." This one is a quintet: Nate Radley (guitar), George Colligan (piano), Johannes Weidenmuller (bass), Billy Hart (drums). Rathbun's tenor sax is a bit light and sly, slipping easily around the complex rhythm. Radley has some nice solo spots, and Colligan is superb. B+(***)

Jürgen Friedrich: Pollock (2007 [2009], Pirouet): German pianist; looks pretty young judging from photo; AMG credits him with 8 records since 2000. This is a piano trio with bassist John Hebert and drummer Tony Moreno. One cover: "'Round Midnight"; two group credits, one by Friedrich and Moreno, two by Hebert, four by Friedrich. They all evince a delicate inside flow, quiet and meditative. B+(**)

Nicolas Thys: Virgo (2008 [2009], Pirouet): Bassist, b. 1968, from the Netherlands, graduated from Hilversum Conservatory. First album, after ten or so side credits since 1998. Quintet, with Chris Cheek (tenor sax), Jon Cowherd (piano), Ryan Scott (guitar), and Dan Rieser (drums). Wrote all of the pieces. They have a light, propulsive feel, helped along by the guitar, with the sax fitting closely to the melodies and the piano straying a bit. B+(***)

François Carrier/Michel Lambert: Nada (2008 [2009], Creative Sources): Canadian saxophonist, plays alto and soprano, and his long-time drummer sidekick, in a duet setting, running through 20 short exercises in 56:53. I've become a big ban, and have two of their records -- the trio Within on Leo and the 6-CD Digital Box on Ayler -- lined up for the next Jazz CG. This isn't quite as compelling, but doesn't disappoint as a catalog of ideas -- just roughly sketched out ones. B+(***)

Bobby Broom: Plays for Monk (2009, Origin): Guitarist, b. 1961. Seventh album since 1995, a trio with Dennis Carroll on bass and Kobie Watkins on drums. Eight Monk tunes, plus "Lulu's Back in Town" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Nice and clean, even with Monk being Monk. B+(*)

Andy Milne/Benoît Delbecq: Where Is Pannonica? (2008 [2009], Songlines): Piano duets. I've run across both pianists before, generally finding their work exacting and impressive but much to my taste -- Delbecq's 2005 album, Phonetics, is the exception there, juiced up with Congo drums, sax and viola. This one is toned down, abstract even. The second piano often functions more like a bass, just more minimally. B

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

Some corrections and further notes on recent prospecting:

Paul Meyers: World on a String (2009, Miles High): As the publicist patiently explained to me, the reason I couldn't find anything on this guitarist was that I had the name misspelled: Meyers, not Myers. Embarrassing mistake, especially since I made something of it. Went to his website -- even though Flash-only is a pain, I resolved not to complain, although all I got from his bio was lives in New York and digs Brazilian music, which could have been surmised from recruiting Helio Alves. Has a few past records, including his own website typo on the record "featuring Frank Weiss" -- album cover and photo are unmistakably Frank Wess.

Unpacking: Found in the mail this week:

• Ralph Bowen: Dedicated (Posi-Tone)
• Kevin Deitz: Skylines (Origin)
• Dave Glenn: National Pastime (Origin)
• Inner Circle: State of Da World (Shanachie): advance
• Mimi Jones: A New Day (Hot Tone Music)
• Chad McCullough: Dark Wood, Dark Water (Origin)
• Enrico Pieranunzi: Plays Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas and Improvisations (CAM Jazz)
• Oumou Sangare: Seya (World Circuit/Nonesuch)
• Martial Solal: Live at the Village Vanguard: I Can't Give You Anything but Love (CAM Jazz)

Two letters in The Wichita Eagle this morning. One, from Scott E. Blades, insists "George Tiller was no different from his killer." The chances that Blades knows anything about Tiller beyond what he's sucked up from the papers and talk radio are nil. The other letter is from a physician, Gayle Stephens, who knew Tiller and has something to say worth repeating:

The best part of my life was lived in Kansas, especially Wichita, and I still think of myself as a Kansan. I knew George Tiller well and his father, Jack, even better.

As a physician, I feel profound disappointment that a family physician can be assassinated in Wichita and local physicians can be silent and largely absent from public discourse. If a firefighter or police officer were murdered in the line of duty, their colleagues would rise in anger and protest, call for justice, and attend a public funeral in uniform. They would vow to seek justice and pledge support for the victim's family.

Tiller was a legitimate family physician who practiced medicine as well as performing abortions. He was not a butcher, profiteer, opportunist or fraud. His murder diminishes us all, and nobody is safer or better off because he is dead.

Kansas has a rich history of family doctors, and history will be kinder to Tiller than to the forces that destroyed him or those who stood by silently. His friends, colleagues and beneficiaries cannot allow his memory to be characterized by those who despised him and what he stood for. They must report a fuller public narrative of his life.

Tiller could have used more testimonies like this while he was alive, but modesty, respect for his privacy, and a general reluctance to grapple with assholes are reasons why they weren't much in evidence. Plus most people, starting with his accusers, weren't inclined to look, or consider. In some ways, that is typical of the abortion conflict. The anti-choice side seeks to impose absolute rules on everyone regardless of context; for the pro-choice side context is everything. Absolute certainty regardless of context or consequences is impossible to argue with, as it doesn't allow any grounds for compromise. We should be smart enough to reject any such irrational propositions, but the persistence of the anti-choice movement shows that we aren't.

Vincent Rossmeier: Scarborough: Krugman foments "left-wing hate": I'm not sure who Joe Scarborough is or where he's coming from, but his reaction to Paul Krugman's "The Big Hate" column (cited in the previous post) is knee-jerk juvenilia: you know, the sort of retort that seeks to answer a charge by simply repeating it, only louder. I don't even know what "left-wing hate" could mean these days. After all, for several decades now liberals were routinely lambasted for caring too much (especially for the poor), for being soft on crime and too chickenshit to stand up and fight the nation's wars, for wanting to offer therapy when punishment is called for, for being icky blobs of peace, love, and understanding -- and now, all of a sudden, those same people have turned into virulent haters. Why? Well, just because a couple of gun-toting psychopaths took their deep beliefs in right-wing causes a bit too far and went out and killed people, and now the formerly wishy-washy left has the gall to suggest that the right-wing pundits and politicos who championed those same causes, and who themselves have consistently supported all sorts of wars and repression, bear some responsibility for their followers.

It's certainly true that people are more sensitive to hatred directed their own way than they are to hatred of third parties, but if Scarborough thinks Krugman hates him he's being awfully thin-skinned -- suspiciously so if he really is a conservative. After all, look at what conservatives believe: that the poor deserve their fate, that trying to help people put their lives together is a hopeless indulgence, that our way of life can only be defended with overwhelming military force, that if in applying force we inadvertently kill innocent people matters little if at all, that government should never limit the rich in their pursuit of more riches (especially over things like pollution and global warming), but they have no qualms about using the government to prohibit private indulgences that they disapprove of (like drug use or sex). As this list shows, real conservatives are pretty tough characters. You'd think they'd be able to handle some hate, because they sure can dish it out.

On the other hand, when you see their pet projects result in an event of unseemly violence, what else can they do? It's not like we've seen any conservatives back off from their anti-choice stance, least of all to show the likes of Scott Roeder that their crimes will have no effect. No, they wrap themselves up in a ball and pretend to be the real victims, accusing other people of hating them. That ruse is both dishonest and irrelevant. It's dishonest because hatred and violence are so fundamental to the right-wing mindset, as least as currently manifested in the US. It's irrelevant because no matter how disgusted people of the left (at least as currently manifested in the US) get with some right-wingers, they never carry those feelings to the point of committing violent acts -- because, well, we don't believe in violence.

Hatred is a useless emotion for anyone committed to nonviolence, but calling a leftist's disgust and opposition hate may be the only way a right-winger can relate to it. That is one of the maddening things about the right: they can't just dislike something without feeling compelled to prohibit it; they can't stand to give anyone else a break without feeling cheated; the idea that we might be better off helping each other than ripping each other off is one they can't conceive; and when things don't go their way, they turn into shameless prevaricators, denying themselves even the honesty of their misconceptions. Still, the problem isn't that they are dumb and mean. Leftists generally respect people's right to be wrong. The problem comes when they seek the power to force their dumb and mean ideas on others -- especially when they do so on no more authority than possession of a gun. Then the least we can do is point out how the whole sick ball of wax is stuck together. Too bad if that hurts their feelings.

So chill out. Try to find a copy of Bill Sheffield's "I Don't Hate Nobody" (on Journal of a Shelf). The worst thing a leftist can do, after all, is to pick up some of the bad habits of the right.

Alex Koppelman: Right: DHS extremist report was "crap." Really?: James von Brunn's shotgun assault on the Holocaust Museum reminds me of Marx's quip about history repeating itself first as tragedy then as farce. I don't mean to take this lightly: the guard who was killed wasn't a specific target for assassination like Dr. George Tiller, but he is just as dead, certainly mourned, and all the more poignant for being such an arbitrary victim -- a point we've come to accept as normal for terrorism, because we're always more comfortable talking about innocent victims who bear no responsibility for the causes the terrorists embrace. Another is that it is easier to show that random acts of terrorism don't work -- indeed, that they often backfire on their architects. Targeted killings, on the other hand, sometimes do appear to work. Killing Tiller, for instance, has closed down his clinic, depriving Wichita KS of its last local provider of abortion services, and depriving the nation of one of the last providers of late-term abortion services. It would take considerable political will to reverse those losses, something that no US political leader is likely to muster -- unlike, say, tearing up a country on the other side of the world, like Afghanistan.

The difference here is that Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, is part of an active, widespread political movement that has demonized doctors and clinic workers, that has harrassed women who have a legal right to abortion services, and that has frequently resorted to violence, including murder, to further its aims. Von Brunn, on the other hand, is way out of step from the conservative movement. I've seen him described as a "neo-Nazi" but at 89 he's old enough to be an old school Nazi, not a "neo" anything. The antisemitism that was rather common when he was young has lost its grip and fallen from favor, even on the far right, where support for Israel is nearly unanimous, and Holocaust denial is a mere accident of general ignorance.

So I don't see von Brunn's example as one that will have any effect or resonance beyond the damage he's already done. Still, he does, like Roeder, fit in the broader category of would-be vigilantes willing to martyr themselves for right-wing causes. The DHS report saw this coming, and indeed if you look at the backgrounders on von Brunn and Roeder it wouldn't have taken a lot of detective work to sniff them out. Whether sicking the FBI on them would be worthwhile isn't obvious: the FBI caused more trouble than they found on the left, and they don't appear to have done much better with the al-Qaeda threat. The more interesting question is why the right's pundits and politicos got so upset about the DHS report in the first place. I think it's because the emotional triggers that set off individuals like Roeder and von Brunn are the essential stock in trade of the right. What you hear repeated ad nauseum on their radio is fear and loathing of others, the underhanded dominance of the left, and a wail and cry meant to tease right-thinking people to action -- which given how enamored the right is with guns, with harsh and capital punishment, with torture, with war, can easily slip in to violence. One wonders how they can look at themselves in the mirror, but their reaction to the DHS report shows they refuse to.

Paul Krugman: The Big Hate: Another take on the same news. Again we see the parallels with the early Clinton years, peaking with the Timothy McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City.

Roxana Hegeman: Slain Kansas abortion provider's clinic to close; Dion Lefler: Access to abortion now farther away. It looks like the assassin who struck down Dr. George Tiller has managed to deprive Wichita, KS of its last abortion provider, as well as eliminating one of the nation's very few providers of late-term abortions. Women in Wichita (metro area population almost 600,000; 84th largest MSA in the US) will now have to drive three hours to the Kansas City area. Other Kansans who formerly had to drive hours to Wichita will have to drive even further. In 1992, Kansas had 15 abortion providers -- Wichita had four. The extended campaign of harrassment, both by ad hoc groups like Operation Rescue and lately by the state government, especially under former attorney general Phill Kline, along with a number of acts of criminal violence culminating in the shooting of Tiller, have finally taken their toll.

It will be interesting to see whether any of our political leaders will stand up this time and declare that we won't let terrorists strip us of our rights or undermine our way of life. That's really what this amounts to, but they've taken it so placidly for so long it's unlikely that anyone in power is going to develop a new spine. It seems to me that this is one case where the military could actually strike a blow against terrorism: imagine what would happen if the government were to offer free or low-cost abortion services through its network of VA hospitals, at least in areas where no private providers exist. Wichita has a VA facility, on a lot so large that it would be impossible for anti-choice mobs to form anything like the gauntlets they were able to set up at Tiller's clinic. More importantly, this would send a message that abortion is a legal right, the law of the land, backed by the full power of the military government. That might give the terrorists some pause.

PS: Of course, I realize that the VA is not part of the military, meaning the Dept. of Defense. If it were, it wouldn't be able to run the most efficient health care system in the country. It would, rather, have been subcontracted to Halliburton and run straight into the ground.

A featured comment from Paul Krugman's blog:

Why would any educated society rely on a health care system that has a stated fiduciary responsibility to extract as much money from its customers while giving them as little care as possible?

That is precisely the key to what is wrong with health care in the US. Moreover, it is why the system, if not radically reformed, will only get worse -- indeed, why it will get much worse. We have yet to reach the point where most doctors, nurses, therapists, etc., who actually deal with patients have been fully trained to put their "fiduciary responsibility" above normative standards of care, but that is an inefficiency that management is working on. We've seen the same ethos applied everywhere in business, a subtle but profound shift from companies providing useful goods and services and thereby profiting from their success to companies that only see their goods and services as instruments for returns on investment. In industry after industry, this has resulted in a hollowing out of value -- the catchphrase "lean and mean" hints ominously at the result, a purely predatory capitalism. This works everywhere, but prospects are particularly lucrative in health care, where the bottom line is, after all, your money or your life.

The solution is straightforward, in concept anyway: at every stage in the system, we need to replace profit-maximizing incentives with incentives that are tied to professional standards of quality care. In some cases this is obvious: a government-run non-profit single payer insurance system could easily replace the patchwork of private insurance rackets, saving costs and providing universal coverage with higher quality standards. As the VA shows, state-run nonprofit health care providers also work out better. (For that matter, the few private non-profit providers left have much better cost-benefit records than the profit-maximizing providers.) The technology sector, including pharmaceuticals, could be reformed by limiting or dropping patent laws -- which currently promise monopoly profits, the profit-maximizer's all-time wet dream -- and publicly subsidizing research and development. (Manufacturing of the products could still be done by private firms under non-exclusive licenses, where competition will limit profits and incentivize efficiencies.)

This should be a no-brainer, but the non-brains are pretty well ensconced. Any change produces disruptions, and potential losers are always first in line to complain. Our political system favors organized interests over public interests, which tend to be diffuse and poorly represented. For example, the Wichita Eagle ran this item on our senior Senator today:

Sen. Pat Roberts says he'll oppose any health care reform package that includes a public health insurance option to cover those who can't get private insurance at an affordable cost.

"It won't work. It hasn't worked in other countries," the Kansas Republican said Monday during a visit to Westwood.

Roberts and eight other GOP senators released a letter to the White House on Monday that says a public health insurance option would be unfair to private insurers because they couldn't compete with the government.

Only a few pesky details wrong here. Actually, it has worked elsewhere -- like, everywhere it's been tried. And the fact that private insurers can't compete with a public non-profit system pretty much proves that the private insurers don't have anything to offer customers -- indeed, that they're only out to rip them off, which becomes impossible once people have a choice. Roberts never has been much of an intellect, but the thing that I have to wonder most about is why he doesn't see that there's a problem that people "can't get private insurance at an affordable cost." Not that he's ever cared about anyone who wasn't rich. But is he really smart enough to grasp that the fear of losing insurance is one of the most powerful levers the private insurance industry has in pursuing its "fiduciary responsibility"?

A bit short this week. Hit a point mid-week when I got tired of doing this, and spent several days playing nonwork things and a little jazz without sitting down to write. Even went 3-4 hours last night with nothing on. I reckon this will pass. I'm closing in on getting the kitchen done, but everything is coming slow, with new difficulties all along the way. Built the first four of eight drawers yesterday. Three sit in their slots nice and square, but the fourth juts out an extra half-inch. The drawer itself is perfectly square, so the problem must be in the frame, where it's hardest to fix -- right now I don't even understand the problem. Spent much of last week fighting with a cabinet with three units, roughly 48h x 16w x 8d, that sit on a pair of slides and pull out. They were virtually impossible to line up parallel and to secure precisely. If I had it to do all over again, I'd design the whole thing differently, but for now I managed to get them to look decent and more/less function -- still need to take off bits of wood where two units rub against each other. Stuff like that gets me down. The only music that's been picking me up has been off the list (well, except for Rushing, below): Lily Allen: It's Not Me, It's You; Leonard Cohen: Live in London; K'naan: Troubadour; Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz!; Jonatha Brooke: The Works; Neil Young: Fork in the Road; Staff Benda Bilili: Très Très Fort.

Next Jazz Consumer Guide is scheduled for sometime August. No point trying to close this out until end-June, so I have some breathing room, for once. I could use some breaks like that.

Paul Meyers: World on a String (2009, Miles High): Guitarist. Don't know anything about him, and Google isn't helping. Presumably not Mike Myers' older brother, the former front man for a group called the Gravelberrys. Plays acoustic. Wrote 7 of 9 songs, the exceptions the Arlen-Koehler "I've Got the World on a String" that suggests the title and John Lennon's "Because." Nice sound and feel on guitar, plus he gets help from Donny McCaslin on sax and Helio Alves on piano -- both given featuring plugs on the cover -- and also Leo Traversa on electric bass and Vanderlei Pereira on drums/percussion. McCaslin also plays flute on a couple of cuts, which spoils this for me. B+(*)

3 Play +: American Waltz (2009, Ziggle Zaggle Music): Wound up filing this under pianist Josh Rosen, based on 7 of 8 compositions (the other a group effort). Rosen teaches at Berklee, and as far as I know has no previous discography. Bassist Lello Molinari, who also teaches at Berklee, is also referred to as a cofounder. Group also includes Phil Grenadier on trumpet and Marcello Pellitteri on drums, and two guests show up: Mick Goodrick on guitar and George Garzone on tenor sax. You should recognize Garzone, if not for his relatively thin but notable discography, as a legendary saxophone teacher. I think just about every jazz musician who passed through Boston in the last 30 years credits Garzone. Needless to say, he sounds terrific here. Grenadier and Goodrick do a nice job of polishing the edges, and the pianist holds down the center. Having trouble concentrating on this while trying to write something else, so will hold it back. An intriguing record. [B+(***)]

Alison Burns and Martin Taylor: 1: AM (2008 [2009], P3 Music): Burns is a singer, from Scotland, grew up in Dundee; website says she's Scottish-Canadian, but MySpace bases her in UK. Second album. Has a voice I disliked at first, but makes it work in subtle ways. Accompanied by nothing more than Taylor's guitar, which doesn't seem like a lot of support, but could hardly be more fitting. One original. Mostly standards I rarely run across. B+(***)

Henning Sieverts Symmetry: Blackbird (2007 [2009], Pirouet): From Berlin, Germany, b. 1966, plays bass and cello; label's website claims he has 10 albums under his own name (AMG only lists 3), a total of 75 credits. Wrote 11 of 13 tunes here: the exceptions a medley of the Lennon-McCartney title tune and trad's "Wenn Ich ein Vöglein Wär" and Charlie Parker's "Blues for Alice." Three songs have dedications: to Paul Klee, Arnold Schönberg, and Olivier Messiaen. Interesting group, with John Hollenbeck on drums, Achim Kaufmann on piano, Johannes Lauer on trombone, and Chris Speed on clarinet and tenor sax. A mixed bag, with the harder edged stuff (with Speed on tenor sax, cf. "Gale in Night, Nightingale") quite sharp, the soft ones (e.g., cello-clarinet) much less so. Doesn't help that I've loathed the title cut for decades. B

Pablo Held: Forest of Oblivion (2007 [2008], Pirouet): Young pianist, b. 1986, from Germany. Won lots of prizes for young jazz musicians, the first at age 10. First album, a piano trio with Robert Landfermann on bass and Jonas Burgwinkel on drums. Wrote 6 of 10 songs, not counting the group-credited "Interlude." Fairly quiet, contemplative; hard for me to gauge. B+(*)

Avram Fefer Trio: Ritual (2008 [2009], Clean Feed): Reed player -- I have him listed clarinet first based on earlier work, but credits this time are ordered alto sax, tenor sax, soprano sax, bass clarinet, which seems like the right order. B. 1965, near San Francisco, family moved around, settling in Seattle; picked up a liberal arts degree at Harvard, while studying music at Berklee and New England Conservatory. Spent some time in Paris, wound up in New York. Sixth album since 2001, a trio with Eric Revis on bass, Chad Taylor on drums. Basically, a series of freebop pieces, varied mostly by horn. Played it four straight times while fighting with my cabinet work and reading about the CIA, enjoying it while not finding much to say, and need to move on. The bass clarinet piece stands out, and Taylor is a bundle of focused energy. B+(**)

Dennis González/João Paulo Duo: Scape Grace (2007 [2009], Clean Feed): Paulo is a Portuguese pianist; full name is João Paulo Esteves da Silva. B. 1961 in Lisbon. Has three more albums on Clean Feed -- don't know what else. Duets with González playing cornet and trumpet. Seems like an informal set with each musician bringing a few songs. I'm not used to González playing without a rhythm section, so this sounds a bit disjointed. Intimate and sometimes eloquent. B+(*)

Transit: Quadrologues (2006-07 [2009], Clean Feed): Quartet, band members listed alphabetically: Jeff Arnal (percussion), Seth Misterka (alto sax), Reuben Radding (bass), Nate Wooley (trumpet). Second album on Clean Feed. Don't have credits on songs, which are presumably group improvs. In any case, they play free, the horns jousting and jamming. Has a number of impressive spots, but doesn't sustain the pace consistently. B+(*)

Lucky 7s: Pluto Junkyard (2007 [2009], Clean Feed): Septet, from Chicago, led by two trombonists, Jeff Albert and Jeb Bishop. Others are: Josh Berman (cornet), Keefe Jackson (tenor sax), Jason Adasiewicz (vibes), Matthew Golombisky (double bass), and Quin Kirchner (drums). Tough group to characterize, more freebop than avant; despite the group size there doesn't seem to be anyone at the helm with postbop arranger ambitions. I thought their previous album, Faragut, had a bit of New Orleans gumbo in it, but don't get that feel here -- maybe it's that the vibes are better integrated. The cornet adds some high contrast, but the sax seems to be here mostly for muscle, the trombones rooling. B+(***)

Herculaneum: Herculaneum III (2007 [2009], Clean Feed): A town in ancient Italy, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in CE 79. Also a septet from Chicago -- note that only six unidentified pictures, presumably members, are fit into the inside cover -- with a Flash-only website (isn't it time to gripe about that again?). MySpace has no real info either, and I don't feel like trying to track them down. No familiar names: John Beard (guitar), David McDonnell (alto sax, clarinet), Nick Broste (trombone), Patrick Newbery (trumpet, flugelhorn), Nate Lepine (flute), Greg Danek (bass), Dylan Ryan (drums, vibes). Two previous albums -- second one is called Orange Blossom; first one was eponymous, with a quintet (minus Beard and Lepine). Thick large group sound, tightly arranged, rockish drumming, not a lot of fluff (despite clarinet, flute, and vibes). B+(*)

Jon Irabagon: I Don't Hear Nothin' but the Blues (2008 [2009], Loyal Label): Alto saxophonist, plays with Mostly Other People Do the Killing, has shown up on a couple of other good records. This one's a duo with drummer Mike Pride: comes from Portland, ME; has a couple dozen credits ranging from MDC to Anthony Braxton and Sonny Simmons, including a group called Evil Eye. Nothing there I've actually heard before, although a lot of things look to be of at least marginal interest. This is a single 47:40 improv, starting with a blues riff which is then turned over, twisted, and tortured until it screams. First time I put it on I wasn't in the mood and ripped it off. Second time I kicked back, was amused and even a bit psyched. I've seen several reviews comparing this to Coltrane/Ali. Sounds to me more like Brötzmann and one of those German drummers I can't recall. Which is good enough. B+(**)

David "Fathead" Newman: The Blessing (2008 [2009], High Note): Cut a little over a month before Newman died, at 75, Jan. 20, 2009. Soul jazz man, best known for his stint with Ray Charles, has a steady stream of 30-plus records under his own name ever since 1958 -- the biggest gap in AMG's list is 1989-1994. Had a lovely tone and a gentle disposition, but never made especially good records -- Bluesiana Triangle, with Dr. John and Art Blakey, is an exception but not really his album. Wrote the title song, and featured two from his pianist, David Leonhardt; covers tend to be slow and wispy, covering for a shortfall of wind. Peter Bernstein's guitar fills in admirably. Doesn't lose much on his flute feature this time. B

The Peter Hand Big Band: The Wizard of Jazz: A Tribute to Harold Arlen (2005 [2009], Savant): Guitarist, co-founder of Westchester Jazz Orchestra, don't know much more than that. Band number 18, about half names I recognize -- Harvie S on bass, Richard Wyands on piano; Cecil Bridgewater, Valery Ponomarev, and Jim Rotondi among the trumpets; Brad Leali, Ralph Lalama, Don Braden, and Houston Pearson in the reeds. Pearson gets a "featuring" credit -- reportedly throughout, but he carries "Stormy Weather" and "Over the Rainbow" practically by himself, making them the choice cuts. Group has a light, sprightly touch, put to good use on great songs. B+(**)

Jimmy Rushing: The Scene: Live in New York (1965 [2009], High Note): Backed by a band including Zoot Sims and Al Cohn. Evidently they appeared frequently together, with Sims and Cohn opening for a half-hour or so, then Rushing joining in. The record includes eight Rushing tunes and two instrumentals slotted fifth and ninth. Works reasonably well. No precise dates. Seems to have come from at least two sessions, given two bassists and two pianist -- one of the latter billed as "unknown." Nothing new or surprising here for anyone who knows Rushing reasonably well. His set is about as standard as you can get: "Deed I Do," "Gee Baby Ain't I Good to You," "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me," "I Want a Little Girl," "Goin' to Chicago," "I Cried for You," "Everyday I Have the Blues," and "Good Morning Blues." For that matter, Sims and Cohn break loose on "The Red Door" and "It's Noteworthy." If you don't know Rushing, well, you've got a lot to look forward to: he was the model every Kansas City blues shouter aspired to -- they were called "shouters" because they never could match Rushing's grace, charm, and swing, so tried to make up for it with gut volume. A-

Darren Johnston/Fred Frith/Larry Ochs/Devin Hoff/Ches Smith: Reasons for Moving (2005 [2007], Not Two): Respectively: trumpet, electric guitar, tenor/sopranino sax, bass, drums. Johnston comes from Ontario; wasn't familiar with him until recently, but he has an album on Clean Feed, The Edge of the Forest, that I like a lot. Ochs is one of the saxophonists from Rova. Frith has a long career on the avant fringe, including some innovative (if not exactly listenable) solo work with prepared guitar. He's really the center here, holding a lot of parts together that are predisposed to fly apart, not least by stating rhythmic parts often enough to keep them in mind. The horns are choppy and abstract, which works most of the time. B+(***)

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

Some corrections and further notes on recent prospecting:

Jerry Granelli V16: Vancouver '08 (2008 [2009], Songlines, CD+DVD): I misidentified J. Anthony Granelli is the leader's brother. He is actually Jerry Granelli's son. I'm sure I knew that at one time, but misremembered it.

Unpacking: Found in the mail this week:

• The Harry Allen-Joe Cohn Quartet: Plays Music From South Pacific (Arbors)
• Fernando Benadon: Intuitivo (Innova)
• Bobby Broom: Plays for Monk (Origin)
• David Crowell Ensemble: Spectrum (Innova)
• Mon David: Coming True (Free Ham)
• Ka'a Davis: Seed of Djuke (Live Wired Music): promo
• Michael Farley: Grain (Innova)
• Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band: I'm BeBoppin' Too (Half Note)
• Steve Kuhn: Mostly Coltrane (ECM): advance, July 7
• Jacám Manricks: Labyrinth (Manricks Music)
• M. Nahadr: EclecticIsM (Live Wired Music): promo
• Ben Neill: Night Science (Thirsty Ear): advance, September
• Olatunji: Drums of Passion & More Drums of Passion (1959, Columbia/Legacy, 2CD)
• Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: The Moment's Energy (ECM): advance, June 30
• Pizzarelli Party with the Arbors All Stars (Arbors)
• Louis Sclavis: Lost on the Way (ECM): advance, June 30
• Andy Sheppard: Movements in Colour (ECM): advance, June 30
• TriBeCaStan: Strange Cousin (Evergreene Music)
• Miroslav Vitous Group with Michel Portal: Remembering Weather Report (ECM): advance, July 7

Paul Krugman: Reagan Did It. Specifically, Reagan pushed for deregulation of the Savings and Loans institutions, leading to their looting, financial collapse, and bailout -- events unprecedented at the time, but repeated in spades very recently. Reagan was every bit as irresponsible with the federal debt: cutting taxes on the rich while increasing military spending, reversing a trend that had held since WWII of reducing federal debt as a percentage of GDP. Again, Bush doubled up on Reagan. "There's plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we're in were Reagan and his circle of advisers -- men who forgot the lessons of America's last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it." My stock line on Reagan even before the S&L disaster hit was that under him America's only boom industry was fraud. At the time, I couldn't understood why so many Americans let themselves be conned by him. Now I tend to see it as a flight from reality, which was occasioned as much as anything by the economic collapse of America in the 1970s -- the political fallout of Vietnam and Watergate, the US oil production peak, the trade balance tipping into the red, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the devaluation of the dollar, the oil shocks, the stagflation, the jacking up of interests rates to crippling levels. Reagan saw the whole country floudering, so he threw out a lifeline to the rich, and did what he could to cripple the unions and screw all those welfare queens he fantasized about. The economic recovery he got credit for was little more than a windfall for the rich, and we've been watching those reruns ever since, until they've finally collapsed.

[PS: I've seen some critiques to the effect that it was Carter who opened the door to S&L deregulation, which was true. It was also Carter who started arming jihadis in Afghanistan, even before the Soviet Union sent their troops in. Carter had a lot of other screwy ideas, but these two in particular would largely have been forgotten by now had Reagan not come around and inflated the political culture in ways that made them a lot worse than screwy.]

Paul Krugman: The Stagflation Myth: On Robert Samuelson, specifically a quote: "Johnson's economic policies, inherited from Kennedy, proved disastrous; they led to the 1970s' 'stagflation.'" Krugman explains why this is nonsense as economics, and crap as propaganda. Samuelson wrote a book recently, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, which tried to argue that the inflation of the 1970s was as dire a disaster as the depression of the 1930s -- a position that only a banker could support, although quite frankly even the bankers were better off in the 1970s than in the 1930s. Krugman offers a couple of textbook explanations, and points out that it was Milton Friedman who argued that the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment was unfounded. The latter is an interesting point given the pains so many economists took back then to lay the blame of inflation on wage increases (and the unions with the muscle to get them).

Some more links relating to Dr. George Tiller's assassination. Most reiterate themes also in my long post yesterday, missing two key points I made: the first is that the fact that there even is a divide over abortion shows how illogical and immature our politics really is; the second is that this heinous act of violence is only thinkable because we live in a society where violence is sanctioned both by popular culture and by our most exalted politicians. (I do not exempt Obama from that statement, although he comes along after others set the example.)

Let me reiterate the first point more schematically: politics is about conflicting interests; where there are no conflicting interests, there should be no political differences. The right to decide when and whether to have children is a private right, which is to say that it's no one else's business. The option of abortion is necessary to realize this right; take it away and you undermine the right. We live in a political system where (for the most part) we recognize that the only reason to limit a private right is when it conflicts with the rights of other individuals (theft and assault are classic examples) or when there is some public interest that circumscribes private rights (the integrity of the commercial system would be a good example here, although there are others, and some are contentious). The only public effect that abortions have is that they reduce the birth rate somewhat. We live in a world where public interests generally favor lower and more selective birth rates with major commitment by responsible parents to raise their children. In other words both public interest and private rights favor the right to abortion, so there should be no political debate.

The political division over abortion is outside and contrary to our basic political system. It is the case of one group of people demanding that the state take rights and freedom away from others. The arguments for doing so are not rational, backed by selective and demagogic reference to a religion that, too, the anti-abortionists wish to impose on others. Do you really want to indulge a thuggish mob who wants to do that?

Oleeb: Who Killed Dr. Tiller? Well, the hate speech exuded by the anti-abortion movement, for starters.

Michelle Goldberg: The Pro-Life Insurrection: Suggests that the Tiller murder isn't an isolated incident; rather, it is part of a growing trend of fringe activity in the anti-abortion movement.

Ann Friedman: Why Clinic Violence is Obama's Problem. One reason is that law enforcement to protect clinics has been lax lately. It's worth adding that the recent vandalism of Dr. Tiller's clinic wasn't referred to the FBI until after Tiller was killed.

Christina Page: The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing: Contrasts the amount of "pro-life" violence under Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. E.g.: "In the last year of the Bush administration there were 396 harassing calls to abortion clinics. In just the first four months of the Obama administration that number has jumped to 1401." By the way, it's worth noting that under Bush's restrictive policies, the number of abortions went up. The same numbers had dramatically declined under pro-choice President Clinton.

Jeffrey Feldman: The Politics of "Murder": My point again: "so long as the right-wing anti-abortion movement continues to fold dissent into an ever-expanding definition of "murder," then the right-wing will continue to give rise to activists who kill doctors."

M. LeBlanc: Abortion Is Murder: Why the Right Is Responsible for Domestic Terrorism. Same basic point, developed a bit more. Posted on the Bitch PhD. blog, which is worth trolling through, not least for attitude.

Matt Yglesias: A Kind of Terrorism that Works: In general, the downside of terrorism is the backlash it produces. But if you can control the backlash, as the anti-abortion movement has thus far been able to do, and focus your impact exactly where it most matters: "Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What's more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence."

Kate Harding: Where will women go now? Good question. Last I heard the number of women's health care clinics performing late-term abortions across the entire country was three. Patients come to Wichita from all over the country, for lack of any real alternatives. This goes over some of the stories. By the way, the main reason for second- and third-trimester abortions isn't procrastination or indifference. It's a serious health problem that has developed in the course of a desired pregnancy.

Michelle Goldberg: The Compassion of Dr. Tiller. Another good review of Tiller's caseload.

The Progress Report: Right-Wing Hate Rears Its Ugly Head: This is really on Sotomayor, written and bookmarked before right-wing hate got really ugly with the Tiller murder. But it's all of a piece, as unhinged and deadly as possible.

Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in his church in Wichita, KS today. He was a doctor who ran a clinic, Women's Health Care Services, that has repeatedly been targeted by Randall Terry's Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion rights activists ever since 1991. Many of those activists attempted to harrass and intimidate patients and personnel of the clinic. Some of those activists resorted to more extreme acts of violence, as in 1993 when one shot Tiller, or when someone bombed Tiller's clinic, or more recently when the clinic's room was chopped open and flooded. One activist, a demagogue named Phill Kline, was elected Attorney General of Kansas, and spent his term using his office to harrass and prosecute Tiller. This eventually resulted in a ridiculous case where Tiller was charged with multiple misdemeanors in violation of a recent Kansas law meant to complicate the lives of abortion providers. (Tiller was quickly acquitted on all charges.)

Laura was asked to write a brief statement for the director of the Wichita Peace Center to deliver at a vigil for Tiller tonight. She wrote:

The peace center mourns the loss of Dr. Tiller, a brave man who stood up for women when others lacked the courage and decency to do so. His support for women in the most dire circumstances will never be forgotten. Heroes like Dr. Tiller are few and far between and we are devastated at his loss.

I didn't really disagree with any of this, but felt that the Peace Center -- which has steadfastly refused to take any position on the abortion rights issue -- would be better served by taking a different tack. I wrote:

The Peace Center mourns the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. As people who have dedicated our lives to resolving social and political problems without resort to violence or intimidation, we condemn anyone who, for any reason or political persuasion, no matter how fervently held, would take the law into their own hands to harm, much less kill, someone who disagrees with them. As much as we are devastated by the loss of Dr. Tiller, we are fearful for a country where elected politicians calmly order and delight in the execution of their enemies. Ever since 1991 ad hoc groups, including former Attorney General Phill Kline, have sought to vilify and harrass Dr. Tiller, proclaiming him their enemy, characterizing him as a murderer. Even those not responsible for pulling the trigger should reflect tonight on their incivility and how much their hatred has contributed to this tragic crime.

This covers about one-quarter of what I actually have to say on the subject. The first thing is that I don't consider abortion rights to be an issue on which there can be any fundamental debate. One side favors reason, personal rights and freedom, the public interest, mutual respect, and civility. The other is stuck in a mire of unreason, emotion, phobia, ignorance, intemperance, and fanaticism. Most political issues represent different interests, which can therefore be compromised. This one does not. Those who oppose abortion rights aren't asserting their own rights; they are claiming rights for a hypothetical group, the unborn, which they have taken such an emotional bond to that they consider abortion to be murder. Once they've made that conceptual leap, compromise becomes unthinkable. They may offer modest-sounding legal proposals, but they will never stop until they have put an end to the murder.

Those who argue that abortion should be prohibited both oppress the most fundamental of personal rights and undermine the broader interests of society. Civilization is based on our ability to understand our environment and manage our lives. The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the most essential and far reaching a woman can make. Decisions depend on choice, and that choice depends on the option to abort an undesired pregnancy. Take that choice away and you deny women the most basic control over their lives. That's as plain and simple an attack on freedom as there is. It's especially an attack on privacy, both because the decision is a personal one and because it has little or no effect on anyone else.

Prohibiting abortion also hurts society because the decisions it spoils keep women from making responsible choices. We depend on parents to guide and provide for their children. That's a tall order, and not one that anyone should enter into lightly. Before someone has a child, we want that person to consciously agree to all that parenthood requires. That act of responsibility is only possible if it's based on a free choice, and that in turn means that there must be an alternative -- which is what the option to abort provides. In this regard, we should not only permit abortion; we should make clear that it is an option, and that deciding not to take it commits one to responsible parenthood.

The fact that there is any debate on abortion rights at all depends on not understanding or caring about these basic points. The social aspect is mostly a matter of ignorance, although it is logically odd that the same conservativism that harps most on the need for individual responsibility should seek to deny women such a basic choice. (One could make the same point about freedom, but conservatives are so hypocritical about freedom it hardly seems worth the trouble.) The personal aspect is more a matter of malice: it says women don't deserve the right to control their own lives.

But then nobody argues rationally against abortion rights. The opponents appeal to emotion, ranging from maternal instinct to fear and disgust with sex and the sense that religious faith and order are decaying, but what gives them traction is their insistence that abortion is baby killing. Once you get people to believe that all reason goes out the window. In that light Tiller is transformed from a doctor who helps his patients get control of their lives to a mass murderer. Once people believe that compromise becomes inconceivable: anything short of jail lets doctors continue the killing, and when the government is unable or unwilling to put a halt to it, some self-righteous martyr is bound to emerge from the crowd and settle things.

The inexorability of this logic is why I think the leaders of the anti-abortion juggernaut should be held responsible for the crime of murdering Tiller. It's hard to write off the repeated threats and acts of violence against Tiller as the work of random miscreants: too many people have gone down that road. This adds up not just because the movement identifies abortion as murder, but because the goal of the movement is to strip people (mostly women) of their rights, and to use force (preferably the force of the state) to do it. Moreover, anti-abortion politics usually is tightly clustered with other agendas which glorify violence, such as support for wars abroad and for capital punishment here. It may seem odd that a movement that calls itself "pro-life" is so rife with violent instincts -- and there are no doubt honest exceptions to this rule -- but the fact is true.

It's worth noting that the Republicans weren't always bound to the anti-abortion movement. Into the 1970s, abortion was often seen as a way to limit the numbers of poor people who would be welfare burdens and in many cases resort to crime. At the time, it was more likely the left who opposed, seeing abortion as a threat to their political base (especially in the third world). The rich could very easily have kept that position, recognizing that finite resources would be unable to support or appease an ever-growing multitude of poor and desperate people. Instead, they figured out a political angle: if Republicans could pick up a sizable chunk of white catholics and baptists they could climb to a majority party, and if all that cost was a plank against abortion and a few sops to racism, patriotism, and religiosity, there was a lot of money to be gained. Besides, as Thomas Frank emphasized in What's the Matter With Kansas?, it's not like they actually had to give up abortion rights, at least not for well-heeled Republicans. So the Republicans put this cluster of political beliefs together and bankrolled it, and the anti-abortion leaders went crazy with it. Now they are stuck with a base of fanatics who seek to destroy much of what we know as civilization.

Various anti-abortion groups issued the usual denunciations and denials in response to the killing of Tiller, although Randall Terry's response included, "George Tiller was a mass murderer. . . . Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God." Terry was the leader of Operation Rescue, which originally targeted Tiller's clinic. If any anti-abortion groups are sincere about their regrets, they should make amends by backing away from describing abortion as murder. That simple claim is pure hate speech. I don't favor passing laws to prohibit hate speech, but I do believe we should be vigilant when it occurs. The claim that abortion is murder implies that doctors who perform abortions are murderers, and that women to seek abortions are responsible for murder, and that politicians and citizens who support abortion rights aid and abet murder; it attempts to conflate multiple abortions into genocide. Such rhetoric inevitably encourages believers to commit violence.

The history of the anti-abortion movement is rife with violent acts. As Gloria Feldt writes: "The murders were only the tip of the iceberg, among over 6000 cases of violence, vandalism, stalking, bombings, arson, invasions and other serious harassment." I would go on to include everyday harrassment and cultural innuendo that is meant to make women feel guilty about considering abortion and to make doctors and clinicians shy away from the subject. It is, for instance, virtually impossible to find a TV show or movie that doesn't sheepishly skit around the issue. There are various laws to make abortion more difficult and more shameful -- the latest one being pushed in Kansas would require that women look at ultrasound images of the fetus before an abortion can be performed. There are billboards and advertisements hectoring the subject, often pushing adoption as an alternative -- evidently there's a sizable market for babies that would otherwise have been aborted. (Combined with the anti-abortion movement's opposition to contraception, this whole aspect reeks of human trafficking.)

Of course, the everyday harrassment just sets people's nerves on end for the real acts of terrorism that have murdered doctors and clinic workers, damaged and destroyed clinics, and served as threats to scare women's health care providers away from even offering an option that is the legal right of all women everywhere in America. The effect of this terrorism isn't just to kill and maim people and destroy property. The real effect is to deny women their rights by intimidating anyone who might normally offer abortion services. The everyday harrassment of health care businesses has driven abortion services from hospitals and general purpose clinics to specialty clinics, much more convenient for the groups and the occsaional fanatic to target. The whole state of Mississippi, for instance, has no abortion services available, despite the fact that abortion is legal. Late term abortions have been so harrassed that there is no more than a handful of clinics in the entire nation willing to consider them -- Tiller's clinic is one of them, a major reason why anti-abortionist groups have attacked Tiller so vehemently (and repeatedly so violently). The assassination of George Tiller isn't personal, limited in scope to him and his clinic. It serves notice to everyone providing even remotely similar services.

There are so many important issues in politics these days that the last thing in the world I want to get into is abortion rights. On the one hand, it is, as I said above, a clearcut issue, not something where there is any fundamental grounds for disagreement. On the other hand, it isn't something that anyone feels any real attachment to. It is something that only rarely comes into play, as a last resort when contraception didn't suffice. One consequence is that you have to be able to think ahead to recognize that there is a need to make sure abortion is an available option. Opponents, however, can obsess freely on the matter. The result is that they are much louder and much more fervent and strident than those who support abortion rights can ever be. They make up in volume what they lack in numbers, making them appear more formidable than they should be in a democracy.

The problem is that democracy in America is lazy. Most people have little or no understanding of more than a tiny handful of issues that most directly affect them. Many figure nothing they can do will have any effect anyway, so they just drop out. In this framework, a well supported fringe position can fool the majority -- the decision to start the 2003 war in Iraq remains a good example, as do the various anti-missile systems which going back to Nixon have never made a lick of sense. Lots of political scams get worked out in closed meeting rooms in DC and never get a public airing at all. Abortion opponents have had some success in prying the levers of power but they haven't gotten very far, mostly because they've remained a small but vocal minority. Typical in this regard is South Dakota, where opponents have gotten measures to outlaw abortion through the state legislature only to be voted down in referendums.

Still, the abortion issue has had a chilling and debilitating effect on public discourse. It's hard to count all the ways that this has happened. You can start with the ultimate reductio ad Madison Avenue: pro-life vs. free choice. The latter at least has something to do with the issue, even if it trivializes it, while the former doesn't even make sense. (I mean, slime mold is life; is that what you're advocating? Reverse those categories and the same holds: "no choice" remains accurate albeit schematic, while "anti-life" is just as nonsensical.) But the larger problem is how the opponents approach political issues. They depend on emotion. They eschew reason. They pump up the volume. They invoke religion, and deprecate the religion of others, vilifying those they oppose. They show no respect for individual rights and they have no concept of how what they want affects public interests. They broker no compromises. They harbor absolutist and totalitarian ideals, even when they cloak them in modest proposals. Their goal is to destroy their enemies, and why not, since they are convinced that their enemies are evil. They fight this issue on all levels, using all sorts of methods -- including civil disobedience and acts of terrorism.

Every aspect of this undermines fair and rational political discourse -- not surprising given that there is no rational basis for prohibiting abortion. So they run with religion, and a major impact of the abortion issue has been the extent to which small sects of politically conservative Christians have tried to impose their religious beliefs on others. They get away with this partly because the religious are able to intimidate the indifferent in American politics -- you see this every election when presidential candidates are scrambling to establish their religious bona fides, even though a great many voters could care less. But also because Americans seem to have a reflex that is willing to criminalize anything that they find disagreeable. This seems odd in a nation that prides itself on freedom and diversity, but through much of that history freedom and diversity were rarely tested by people who seemed to yearn for a middle-of-the-road conformism. The 1960s are often best remembered for repeated shocks to accepted American norms -- the civil rights movement, sexual liberation, widespread dissent against the American empire. The right's response to those shocks has been hysterical and often vicious, a retreat from reality that invokes an imagined past to support a fantastical future. The right has been far more successful politically than it has socially, mostly because politics is seen by so many as irrelevant to their lives. Meanwhile, the social forces that produced those shocks in the 1960s have continued unabated, in many cases becoming so firmly embedded in our society and culture we never give them a second thought.

While conservatives still rant about the 1960s, the feature of the decade that remains most terrifying was the resort to violence. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King are still remembered almost canonically, but there were more, especially directed against the civil rights movement. Long before a tiny fraction of the antiwar movement splitt off to "go underground" the state had harrassed and abused dissenters, both through the courts and more haphazardly. But the key point here is that settling political scores with violence is almost exclusively the province of the right. Nor was this just the occasional crazies who responded to the hate messengers of the day. The 1960s was in fact the heyday of the CIA's assassination policy, with Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republi), and Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam) among its victims, Fidel Castro (Cuba) notoriously the one who got away, and Salvador Allende (Chile) one more in the early 1970s as Nixon struggled to keep the worst of the 1960s going.

In response to Watergate, Congress took the CIA out of the assassination business, which more or less held until Bush "took the shackles off" after 9/11. Since then politicians of both parties have been beside themselves with enthusiasm for going out and killing whoever crosses us. While assassination was off the table as national policy domestic terrorism also decreased: the main blip was in the early 1990s, when right-wing hate radio was taking off with its savage attacks on Clinton. It was then that half a dozen abortion providers were gunned down, a spree capped by the Oklahoma City bombing. That the violence lulled may be simply because the right-wing came to power in Congress in 1995 and took over the White House in 2001. Terrorism is usually a policy of weak and desperate fanatics, and from 1995 to 2009 the right was anything but weak. With the Democrats congressional victory in 2006 and Obama's election in 2008, that power equation is changing.

One thing that is clear is that the right hasn't taken defeat in stride. The hate radio jocks are as vicious as ever. Rank and file Republicans have turned into hardcore obstructionists, and their pundits are as disingenuous as ever. It isn't clear yet how many of the people who, in Jim Geraghty's memorable phrase, were "voting to kill" under Bush will decide to, now that their votes are no longer effective, take matters into their own hands, but the assassination of Tiller puts the first mark on the scorecard. It seems likely that there will be more, if only because the right's romance with violence and loathing of other people is so intense.

If so, the assassination of Dr. Tiller will be one of those historical events that punctuate our lives, like the assassinations of King and the Kennedys, and the attacks on 9/11. The chances of this killing turning into a spree would go down significantly if conservatives were sincere in stopping it. To do so they'd have to go beyond the usual denials, and beyond the disciplining of their firebrands. They'd have to admit that their goals, demands, and beliefs are negotiable. They'd have to start respecting those who disagree with them. They'd have to stop characterizing abortion as murder. And they'd have to back down from their conviction that force is a good way to settle disputes. This seems unlikely because it would mean backing down from their deepest beliefs. But as we've seen repeatedly, bad ideas beget bad policies, something that has been proven time and again as right-wing regimes from the aristocracies of the 18th century to George W. Bush have fell in ruins.

Obama could help as well by backing away from his current policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan where he seeks to slay the big Al Qaeda fish that got away from Bush while producing all sorts of collateral damage. Doing so endorses the right's conviction that we can solve our problems by going out and killing out enemies. That is a message that will, as it did in the 1960s, eat away at the very foundation of our democracy and our society, which is our ability to live in peace with people we disagree with. Take that away and the whole nation collapses into chaos.

One last thing. For years of living here in Wichita, I've been bombarded by news about Tiller, invariably repeating his role as a late-term abortionist, along with a steady set of innuendo meant to undermine the man -- one common thing is to try to shame any politician unfortunate enough to receive a contribution from him. Something new has happened since his death: people who worked with him, his friends and colleagues, and his patients have come out to give us a fuller picture of the man, especially his dedication to his patients. It's worth reflecting that this never was just a political issue. It was also a matter of personal service and professional dedication. It's clear now that Tiller warmly touched the lives of many people close to him, even as strangers who never knew or understood him stewed in their rage.