#^d 2015-12-21 #^h Music Week

Music: Current count 25987 [25944] rated (+43), 394 [381] unrated (+13).

The Tenth Annual Jazz Critics Poll, which Francis Davis started at the Village Voice, then after the Voice tanked kept going first at Rhapsody and now at NPR, appeared today. In 2009 Voice Music Editor Rob Harvilla asked me to compile and host all of the critic ballots, and I've continued doing so through all of the subsequent gyrations. Deadline for the ballots was last Sunday, and Davis forwarded them to me on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I putzed around and didn't start on them until Saturday. That wiped out my weekend and, well, today, and I still have work to do. Among other things, I figured out a system for double checking the collated ballots against Francis' tabulations. When I first got all of the data plugged in, my diff-checker spit out 480 lines of discrepancies -- roughly 120 of about 650 albums that received votes. Since then, one of the main things I've been doing has been to whittle down that discrepancy list. As I write this, I have it down to five more records that I have to check. It's fair to say that about half of those have been errors in Francis' original tabulation, and half were problems I introduced during data entry.

A second category of changes has to do with a sort of canonic representation of artist/title/label names. Francis doesn't like spurious group names attached to artist names so, say, The Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet becomes Gabriel Alegria, Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance is Steve Coleman, and Satoko Fujii Tobira is just Satoko Fujii. He also doesn't like slashes for multiple artists -- says they mean either/or -- so two artists use & and three or more use dashes, even when the album itself uses slashes (although more likely they just use space). Part of the reason is no doubt practical: when 147 meticulous critics and supposedly literate writers jot down lists, the sheer quantity of variations they come up with is mind-boggling. Still, several of these canonicalizations are arguable, and some are far from clear. At some point in the ballot collating process I get to comparing the data hacked according to his rules with a similar set of data I've been accumulating (with different rules) all year long. Unfortunately, that point is still in the future -- probably when I get around to feeding a fair amount of ballot data into my own EOY List Aggregate file (which, by the way, has significantly less jazz data now than it has in recent years, mostly because so few jazz critics have been using the JJA website to post their lists/ballots). Still, if I had some magical way to filter out the non-majority-jazz lists, my data would have reasonably well anticipated the JCP results. (Kamasi Washington and Matana Roberts would have lost most, but far from all, of their support, and Colin Stetson would have lost everything -- curiously enough Stetson's is my favorite of those three.) The main blip I see is that Jack DeJohnette ran much better in JCP, while Vijay Iyer (and JD Allen) ran a bit better in my sparser data. (I haven't weighed my own grades into my data yet, so that isn't a factor.)

There are two main pages at NPR to look at:

Much more data is available at my site, including complete totals for all five categories (new, reissue/historical, vocal, debut, Latin jazz) and complete ballots for all of the 147 participating critics. This site isn't built on a full-fledged database, but the data is internally tabled up in such a way that one need only write a little more software to organize it like, say, the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop section: one would need a script to list out all of the critics who voted for any given album, and another to fetch the ballot for any single critic -- plus a lot of extra links in each file, and some CSS to present those links. I actually wrote the second script in a couple hours last year, so critics could link to their own ballots (mine is here) without confusing the issue by picking up other critics' ballots. Unfortunately, I only think about writing things like this when I'm up to my ears facing an annual deadline, stuck with more pressing things to do.

I don't have time to comment on the results, other than to make the obvious point that I'm not much of a fan of either of the winning records (although it's been quite some time since I played either; I have them at low- and middle-B+ grades). I've liked Mahanthappa's work much more in the past, but don't get (or find interesting) his postbop take on Charlie Parker (my issue is definitely not that I find the record too bebop-y). And while I enjoyed Schneider's new album more than her previous much-hyped work, her ornate expressionism has scant appeal for me. I'm not real disappointed to see these two records doing so well: I figure they're just different strokes for different folks, especially ones grounded in classical but open to the greater vitality of postmodern jazz. (I, on the other hand, have always detested classical music, and look to jazz that builds on the rowdy subversion I first found in rock and roll.)

The next two finishers don't do much for me either. For Jack DeJohnette, the problem is (most likely) purely business. Since ECM stopped servicing me with actual product, I've had to make do with time-limited download links I often don't get to in time, and I missed the DeJohnette link -- and didn't get a second chance, despite several requests. So I simply haven't heard a record that looks great on paper and has a terrific reputation. Then there's the matter of Kamasi Washington: again I didn't get a copy -- a real practical problem for something that fills up three CDs -- again despite a further request. However, I was able to hear it on Rhapsody, and recently gave it a second complete spin. I do like him as a saxophonist, and the '70s-throwback-vibe that Davis complains about is one of my favorite jazz era-niches, but I don't get off on the electro-flavored choral goop that fills most of the first two discs. (Complicit in all of this is Steve Ellson, aka Flying Lotus, whose own work leaves me cold.)

In the end, I only had two of the top 10 albums on my A-list (with this week's bonanza 71 albums deep -- Threadgill and Lightcap were also on my ballot). Add one more for 11-20 (Ryan Truesdell), a clump of five in 21-30 (Mike Reed, Matthew Shipp, Amir ElSaffar, Liberty Ellman, Nicole Mitchell). Three for 31-40 (Irène Schweizer, MOPDtK, Barry Altschul). Two in 41-50 (Noah Preminger, Tomeka Reid). Four more for 51-60 (Erik Friedlander, James Brandon Lewis, Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble, Joe Lovano). It thins out further from there, mostly because the number of records I haven't heard grows. For instance, only six more from 61-100 (Ochion Jewell, Milford Graves, Alex von Schlippenbach, William Parker, Satoko Fujii, Michael Blake -- Steve Swell's record just came in the mail). Only seven from 101-200 (Josh Berman, Charles McPherson, Nate Wooley, Ray Anderson, Tomas Fujiwara, Rich Halley, Chico Freeman).

No doubt I'll find more good records by sniffing around the ballots -- actually, more so than by looking at the totals. While working on the ballots, I spent my time streaming items I found there, and indeed came up with two A- records this week (Ray Anderson and Tomeka Reid; the Bobby Bradford/John Carter archival release was already in my CD queue, as were voteless discs by François Carrier and and Andrew Jamieson; Daniel Rosenboom also got no votes, but was recommended in another EOY list somewhere; same for Max Richter, which I gather is classical music, but it sure fooled me).

New records rated this week:

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

Old music rated this week:

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week: