Sunday, February 27, 2005

Music: Initial count 10281 [10256] rated (+25), 900 [906] unrated (-6). Picked up the pace a bit last week, including a pile of Brazilian music. Jazz CG in, pending edit. Maybe I'll finish Recycled Goods (nominally February) this week. Also have a "smooth jazz" project, and quite a bit of that piled up. Some partial entries in the notebook below that I had meant to write more on. Been working on the website redesign (following the blog design -- the key there isn't the design per se but getting all the files to follow it), which is coming along slowly.

• Antologia de Música Electrónica Portuguesa (1972-97 [2004], Tomlab/Plancton). 15 short pieces by 15 experimenters hitherto unknown to me, some pieces happy just to coax novel sounds from their gadgets, others expand those sounds into fascinating tapestries; not being an expert I can only report that I find this pleasingly old fashioned in its celebration of the new. B+
• Ray Charles: The Early Years (1949-52 [1995], King). Early stuff, before he developed any sort of signature sound. Sounds pretty good, but not familiar, and not major. Note the blues, "Sitting on Top of the World"; note the country song, "You Always Miss the Water (When the Well Goes Dry)." On his way. B+
• The Doo Wop Box (1948-87 [1995], Rhino, 4CD). Big box, extensive booklet. More is more, at least this far. A-
• Ronny Jordan: A Brighter Day (1999 [2000], Blue Note). AMG refers to him as "one of the acid jazz movement's most prominent guitarists." Never knew what acid jazz was; he strikes me as a pleasantly funky guitarist working in the synth-dominated smooth jazz field. But it's worth noting that when he wants vibes he brings in Roy Ayers or Stefon Harris, when he wants a flute he goes to Steve Wilson, and for a guest piano spot he taps Onaje Allen Gumbs. Finally, he brings in Mos Def for a remix. With such talent you'd expect this to be, like, not bad. Wish it were that clear. C+
• The Only Doo-Wop Collection You'll Ever Need (1954-65 [2005], Shout! Factory, 2CD). The title is presumptuous and argumentative: it asserts that 37 songs exhaust your interest in the subject, and that these are the 37 songs. One can quibble about the selection, but if I had to pick 37 I'd pick two-thirds of these, and feel bad about the ones I cut. Your interest level, of course, is your own damn business, but there is an awful lot more where they came from, even if one keeps the usual limits, excluding early groups like the Ravens and 5 Royales, later groups groups like the Shirelles (girl groups), the Miracles (Motown), the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys (post-Dion), and major '50s groups like the Drifters, Clovers, and Coasters. For practical purposes, doo wop tends to be limited to one-shot singles groups. Rhino's 1989 The Best of Doo Wop Ballds and The Best of Doo Wop Uptempo set the pattern -- with two discs and 38 songs they've long been my idea of the doo wop canon. But is that enough? Rhino didn't think so when they came out with their 4-CD The Doo Wop Box, then did it again. Neither of the Rhino boxes are what I'd call essential, but they stretch the field out a bit, hit often enough to remind you that there's more worth exploring, and well documented. The music here is beyond reproach, but the box is docked a notch for arrogance. On the other hand, had they called it Doo Wop 101 it would have been docked a notch for its paltry documentation. A-
• Putumayo Presents: Acoustic Brazil (1979-2004 [2005], Putumayo World Music). Maybe a bit folkier than average, certainly a lean towards tropicalia, but the guitars that dominate mainstream Brazilian pop have always been acoustic -- often with nylon strings for a less metallic sound -- so "acoustic" means little here; a mix of some famous names and some possible comers, fine as far as it goes. B
• The Rough Guide to the Music of Brazil: Bahia ([2004], World Music Network). As far as I can tell there's nothing here before the '90s. Up the coast from Rio, south of the easternmost tip at Pernambuco, Bahia was the core of the old Brazil -- the Brazil of sugar and slavery, its people uprooted but not far removed from Africa. Compared to the sambas of the southern cities, the beat is harsher, the harmonics more obscure, as if in pursuit of a primitivism that Africa gave up long ago. The exception is Edson Gomes' sambafied reggae, my favorite track here. That suggests I'm not getting it all -- always had trouble with tropicalia, especially Tom Zé; axé is easier to latch onto. B+

Friday, February 25, 2005

Another event tonight: "Peacemaking in Palestine: An Evening With Joe Carr." Carr is a young (age 23) activist who has worked with the International Solidarity Movement and Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestinian occupied territories. He was working with ISM in Rafah when Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall were killed. More recently he has worked with CPT in the West Bank south of Hebron.

The idea of ISM is that the presence of Internationals (anyone not Israeli and not Palestinian) will inhibit Israelis from acts of violence against Palestinians. Often that works, but sometimes it doesn't. In many cases we're talking about violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, which seems to be largely tolerated by the Israeli military and judiciary. Carr detailed several cases where CPT members escorting children on their way to school had been attacked and injured severely enough to require hospitalization. How common this is across the occupied territories is hard to assess, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it exists and in some areas at least is rather common. Hebron is particularly notorious, which is one reason CPT was drawn there.

Carr had a rather polished presentation, including several points where he broke to dramatically recite poetry or play guitar and sing songs that he had written. I lost my taste for poetry and folk music agitprop long ago, so we'll skip over that part. He had a good set of maps, including good deal of detail on the Rafah and Hebron areas, the current/projected "security fence" path, and a set of four maps detailing how Palestinian land control shrank from 1946. Interestingly, he had a corresponding set of four maps of how American Indian territory shrank from 1850 on. (Of course, maps from 1650 would have shown even more.)

He had, I think, a somewhat oversimplified sense of the big picture: quick to condemn the U.S., quick to ascribe American positions to racism and/or capitalist greed, a tendency to view Israel as subordinate to U.S. whims, that sort of thing. He said very little about Israelis, although he did praise the peace movement there -- especially those who demonstrated at the wall -- and, in q&a, he said that he thought that most Israelis were very sheltered from news of the sort of violence his groups faced everyday. But the value of his talk was in the small picture: that looking up at the bulldozers, the walls, the gun towers, the settlements that devour your land, the army that protects those settlers and elevates them above the laws of any civil society.

There are a lot of things about economics that I don't understand. For instance, economists are obsessively concerned with savings, and they promote any government policy that promises to promote savings. This was just pointed out by Alan Greenspan in advocating a national sales tax, but you also run into it from economists as far away from Greenspan as Paul Krugman. (For instance, in his New York Review piece on "The Social Security Scam" Krugman defends the wisdom of building up a Trust Fund as a hedge against the impending retirement of the Baby Boomers, and goes on to recommend more of the same as a prudent hedge against expected increases in Medicare costs.)

But the first confusing thing here is the word "savings" -- what does that really mean? If I put my pennies in a piggy bank I'm saving them for future use -- at least as long as I don't get robbed, and I don't forget where I put them -- but that isn't what they're talking about. Simply taking money out of circulation doesn't do anything for the economy; if anything, delaying or foregoing consumption reduces demand, which slows growth, puts a damper on prices and profits, and ultimately puts people out of work. That may be good for the ecosystem, but that's hardly something that excites economists.

What economists really mean by savings is more like what the word "investment" means: giving your money to a business, in exchange for a promised rate of return or a future claim on profits, so that the business can spend the money on things businesses spend money for. If nothing goes wrong, you can expect your savings/investment to appreciate in value, so that you can consume more (or better yet, save/invest more) in the future. Meanwhile, all that really happens is that you transfer your spending to a business who, economists believe, will spend it more wisely. This leads us to a couple of big questions:

1. Do businesses really spend their money more wisely than individual consumers do?

2. Even where businesses do spend their money more wisely, is this the most efficient way to do so?

The first, at least, should be an empirical question: something that we can go out and measure and answer more/less definitively. (Admittedly, the word "wisely" calls for some subjective judgment; "productively" is a word that economists might prefer, or better than that, "profitably" -- turn the problem into one of counting money, but the story of Midas is just one cautionary tale about such a reduction. Moreover, "profitably" raises more questions: profitable to whom?) I can't answer this, but I can point out that many instances of household expense are not mere consumption: some save other expenses, some may appreciate in value, some make life easier or more productive or more rewarding. Greenspan talked about savings leading to "capital formation," but household spending on durable items like appliances, computers, vehicles, tools, etc., is also capital formation. On the other hand, there are many cases where business spending does not lead to capital formation, or (more basically) to the employment of productive labor. When a company builds a factory and employees workers to produce useful things, that adds meaningfully to our gross product. But when a company merely buys another company it doesn't produce anything, and may actually reduce gross product by laying people off and closing plants, while reducing value by eliminating competition.

Clearly, there are useful things that companies can do that households don't do, such as building factories. The question that I'm raising is how much savings/investment actually goes into making such useful things possible and how much doesn't? I don't know the answer there, but I'd be real surprised if it worked out to be more than 20%. (My first guess was more like 10%, but I hedged because a lot of business expenses are hard to classify. But note that it is very rare when buying stock actually increases the working capital of a company -- in most cases you are just buying from other speculators.) A big part of the reason private investment is so inefficient is that each investor and business only seek to maximize their own gains, and many opportunities to do so are at the expense of other investors and businesses -- or, an even bigger problem, at the expense of labor. From a big picture point of view this doesn't seem to be very efficient -- especially compared to public sector investment. The public sector manages to spend virtually 100% of its funds. The only question there is how wise/productive/profitable its spending is.

In the U.S. at least, government spending has a reputation for being grossly unwise/unproductive/etc. Whether that reputation is deserved is something we can argue about. Certainly there are plenty of instances where the charge is true, but there are also exceptions -- the management of health insurance is one such case. Governments also spend heavily in areas where there is no viable private sector business strategy, such as building roads, maintaining waterways, providing disaster relief. But there is reason to think that regardless of how efficient or not public investment has been historically, it could be made much more effective if guided by better principles. In particular, one of the major problems with public spending at present is the extraordinary level of corruption throughout the U.S. political system.

I'm not advocating a wholesale shift from private sector to public sector business finance, but it seems obvious that there are areas where such a shift would be beneficial. (I also think that we should look into reforming policies that tend to make private sector investment ineffective -- a big topic I can't go into here.) But the current political drift is moving the other direction, toward more and more privatization. This sounds like another pet theory of economists I don't understand, but in one critical respect it fits in perfectly: just as savings is a scheme to transfer money to business, so is privatization. It shouldn't be hard to figure out what all these businesses, sucking up private savings and public expenses, have in common: they are the province of the rich.

One begins to suspect that economists are just apologists for the rich. The political program of the rich is get all the money, and they pursue this program with methodical desperation because they compete not with the poor but with their fellow rich. Most economists, especially the ones you're likely to run into on TV or in the press, happily rationalize this program, often spouting utter nonsense as scientific truth. (An astounding example of this is the assertion that it didn't matter who took control of Russia's businesses, just as long as they were privately owned. Most soon fell into the hands of Russian mafiosi, who proceeded to destroy over a third of Russia's GDP.) At least that's my best theory to account for most of what I don't undersatnd about economics.

When I started this piece, I meant to comment on Paul Krugman's piece on Social Security. By the time I wrote it Alan Greenspan had taken over the news, arguing for slashing Social Security benefits and proposing a national sales tax while decrying the budget deficits that he help create in supporting Bush's tax cuts.

Three more points I want to make about Krugman's piece (which otherwise is level-headed and reasonable):

1. Regardless of its merits (or, I think, lack of) the Social Security trust fund dating back to the 1980s set a very unfortunate political precedent, which was to reinforce the public's idea that Social Security is some sort of trust fund as opposed to a pay-as-you-go welfare commitment. The idea that Social Security could go bankrupt, which is the stick driving the Bush program, depends on the notion that it is funded in advance. (The carrot is the equally fallacious idea that private accounts would generate more benefits.) Without this principle of advance funding: (a) there is nothing to invest (i.e., to feed the rich), and (b) the idea that sometime in the distant future America's voters will decide to stop supporting the welfare of the old and infirm is mere speculation. So I believe that this was a political mistake even if it made economic sense.

2. Krugman has two levels of defense for the trust fund. One is the idea that we should save for the future, which I think is sound policy for individuals -- that at least is the way my mother raised me -- but dubious for the nation as a whole. But the other idea is that we should prepare for forseeable future liabilities by getting our affairs in better order today: in particular, by paying off as much government debt as possible in order to make it easier to face up to future burdens. I don't have a problem with that.

3. Krugman argues that the increase in medical expenses is due to the continuous addition of new medical services, and that this will continue for the forseeable future, thereby increasing the share of GDP that goes to health care and adding to the burden of health insurance programs like Medicare. That's true as far as it goes, but within this macro picture there are systemic distortions of cost and quality of service (mostly denial), and those problems are critical. The only thing Krugman proposes is another trust fund. Much more needs to be done, not the least of which is transparent public funding of medical research replacing the current system of private monopolies.

Greenspan's proposal for a national sales tax is nothing more than an attempt to shift the tax burden away from profits (aka the rich) and onto everyone else. He justified this, of course, by claiming that it would encourage savings and capital formation. It isn't clear to me why he thinks we don't have enough capital, but the more fundamental issue there is whether the rich have enough money, which of course they don't -- they never do. The rationale behind this scheme is that if consumption becomes more expensive (as it does when taxed) people will have more incentive to save instead of consume. That assumes that their consumption is optional, that it can be refactored as savings, and that the difference is significant enough to lead people to change their behavior. But it should be obvious, even to a sheltered banker like Greenspan, that much of what most people spend their money on isn't really optional -- it goes for things like food, shelter, utilities, transportation, communication, basic necessities, most of which instantly become more expensive, if anything leaving less money for savings. Secondly, even among the middle classes, who could afford to save more if they lived more spartanly, there is little eagerness to do so. On the contrary, most of them are deep in debt, and a higher tax burden isn't likely to get them to rethink their lifestyles. That leaves the only beneficiary of this bit of wishful thinking to be, duh, the rich.

Actually, I think that there is a case that could be made for a national sales tax (probably in the form of a VAT, although I would do it differently than in Europe). But that would be as one part of a tax strategy that would be more progressive elsewhere, especially in taxing estates. But that's another story, and it's safe to say that that's not what Greenspan has in mind.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

The second of the two lectures intended to supplement the Emily Jacir exhibit at WSU was held tonight. The lecture was given by Issam Nassar, a history professor at Bradley University. The talk was called "Palestine at the Crossroads: From al-Nakba to the Aftermath of the Peace Process." The lecture was attended by a crowd which overflowed the allotted 80 seats.

Nassar recounted a pretty straightforward conflict history from 1948 to the present. Two significant parts of the lecture help to provide essential background for Jacir's artwork (which he did not address directly). The first was by emphasizing the pivotal role of 1948 in forming Palestinian identity -- al-Nakba, the loss of land, community, home. The second was the evolution of legal status for Palestinians by locality, especially after 1967 and again after Oslo, which is reflected in the travel restrictions that are the basis for Jacir's exhibit. (This restriction of Palestinian rights contrasts starkly with Israel's extension of citizenship rights to foreign Jews under the Law of Return.)

The q of the q&a was pointedly partisan. One question pointedly invited Nassar to identify Sharon as the person responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres; he declined to answer. Another pointed to the Arab armies massed as Israel's borders in 1947 and 1967, the terrorism and suicide bombing of later years, then asserted that Israel has only tried to defend itself and that there would be peace if only the anti-Israel violence would stop. Nassar responded by discussing the wall, which is being built less for Israeli security than to pin the Palestinians down into smaller cages. Another question had to do with Palestinian textbooks not showing maps that recognized Israel, and Palestinian schoolchildren being taught to seek martyrdom. Nassar explained that he had studied the textbooks issue and that much of the problem is that Israel has preserved the pre-1967 Jordanian texts -- part of this is tied to international law. He also said that he had never seen or heard of any instance of Palestinian authorities training children for martyrdom, and that he couldn't imagine why Palestinian parents, or any other parents, would want anything other than future health and well-being for their children.

A more open-ended question asked about the Camp David accords and Barak's allegedly generous offer. Nassar explained this reasonably well, and pointed out the progress made in subsequent talks at Taba, then he sharply criticized the incoming Bush administration for lack of interest in continuing the talks. This I thought was noteworthy because nobody really talks about it. We tend to assume that the Peace Process was doomed before Bush took over, but one could make the case that Bush's inaction was in fact a signal to Israel to go ahead and elect Sharon. The Bush/Sharon elections not only put an end to all negotiation in the Peace Process, they led to an enormous increase in the level of violence: in the first three years under Sharon more Palestinians and more Israelis were killed than in the whole period since 1967. One thing Nassar did not point out is the unofficial negotiations that followed, leading to the Geneva Accords. Nobody talks about Geneva these days, but the fact is that there is a comprehensive peace agreement signed by key members of Barak's and Arafat's negotiating teams waiting for the powers in Jerusalem and Washington to take an interest. Which says as much as one needs to know about Sharon and Bush -- not that we don't know so much more.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

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

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

The Boeing plant in Wichita KS, where my father worked for over 35 years, and my brother worked for 23 years before his layoff last year (he's back now), has been sold to a Canadian company called Onex. This illustrates various things, including the return of the U.S. trade deficit in exchange for another chunk of property here. For the short term Boeing will buy parts from Onex, which will allow the plant to continue operating as before. But Boeing expects those parts to cost less than when it owned the plant, and in any case can be expected to shop around for even cheaper parts. Onex, in turn, will have to run the plant more efficiently than Boeing did -- not a tough goal, according to my brother, but one that will pressure workers on all fronts, most likely including pay and benefits. The possible upside is that Onex can search out other customers, but the overall prospects for U.S. manufacturing aren't good.

Boeing's constant whining about how it has to reduce costs in order to compete with Airbus makes little sense when you consider that the dollar has lost something like 40% against the Euro in the last four years. Meanwhile, Boeing has lost market share, and stands to lose more as long as the 7E7 is vaporware. The latter is a problem because Boeing prematurely announced the 7E7 in order to pursue what's become its primary business: auctioning aviation jobs to local and foreign governments. The state of Kansas coughed up $500 million to secure some of the work in Wichita. The city of Tulsa OK chipped in another $350 million -- their Boeing plant has also been peddled off to Onex. China and Japan also get big chunks of work. In past years Boeing always insisted that it wouldn't make any difference if it farmed out fuselage work because the critical component of their business is the wing, but now Japan will build the wings. Meanwhile, Airbus has opened an engineering group here in Wichita to design wings, and they're looking for a manufacturing facility somewhere in the U.S. -- presumably to undercut Boeing's already undercut American-built pitch, although the cheaper labor may be a factor, too.

Boeing is keeping some of their military business here -- nobody's sure just what the facilities split is. Much of the Boeing plant here was actually built by the U.S. government during WWII, where a series of legendary bombers were built: B-17, B-29, B-47, B-52. Wichita nearly doubled in size during the 1940s when farmers like my father moved to town to build airplanes. Boeing is much smaller here now, but still by far the largest employer in town. For my father's generation it was good work. Today Boeing is a hopelessly corrupt deadbeat company that survives through inertia and political scams. (Another Boeing executive just went off to jail.) I'm tempted to say good riddance, but it's more likely to be a long, agonizing decline. Reminds me that a big part of the reason I left Wichita 27 years ago was my recognition that the local businessfolk were too dumb to stand working for.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Ad in The Nation:

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Obviously, I'm not qualified for this job, nor am I particularly anxious to move to New York, but I thought it would be interesting to write something about how I would approach it. Stand by . . .

Gary Giddins finally wrote up a year-end list. It appeared in his "Cadenza" Jazz Times column. No numbers. He broke the list out into loose categories like "big band" and "boudoir break." I've been collecting year-end lists in my notebook, but this time I thought I'd take his list and hang my own comments on it. Everyone comes to the table with slightly different experiences and orientations and agendas, so this juxtaposes two. The grades refer back to my CGs or notes, with ? indicating undecided.

• Percy Heath: A Love Song (Daddy): Lovely album, a modest but fitting statement after all these years. [A-]
• Don Byron: Ivey-Divey (Blue Note): Everybody loves this; me too, although I was a bit slow getting to it. [A-]
• Clark Terry: Porgy and Bess (Americana): I hated this at first; warmed a bit, then cooled. Giddins points out that Gil Evans and Miles Davis did this way back when. But they were inventing something which stretched the use of the studio, at least as far as jazz was concerned. This is just sentimental repetory. [B-]
• Steve Turre: The Spirits Up Above (HighNote): Haven't heard this one, but I shouldn't have missed a Kirk tribute with James Carter.
• Alice Coltrane: Translinear Light (Verve): Don't think this was organized very well or thought through, but her piano carries the record further than I would have expected. [B+]
• Marc Copland/Greg Osby: Night Call (Nagel Heyer): Don't have it. I've never heard Copland, although I've read good things about him, and I need to check him out. Osby's a better sideman than leader, which is to say that his chops are better than his concepts. Note that Vincent Herring's guest shot on Nagel Heyer was a lot better than his own album on HighNote.
• Charles Lloyd/Billy Higgins: Which Way Is East (ECM): Home recordings, intimate and crude, a wonderful set. [A-]
• Fred Anderson/Hamid Drake: Back Together Again (Thrill Jockey): Good match; best I've heard from Anderson, a guy I've had trouble with. [A-]
• Houston Person: To Etta With Love (HighNote): Don't have. Quality soul jazz guy, especially on ballads.
• Arthur Blythe: Ace (Midlantic): Didn't even know this exists. His previous albums with David Eyges are good.
• Cecil Taylor: The Owner of the River Bank (Enja/Justin Time): With the Italian Instabile Orchestra, who I don't know despite several attempts to track them down. Missed this one, too.
• Andrew Hill: The Day the World Stood Still (Stunt): Don't have. I'm not a fan of Hill's recent large band records, but he's a great pianist.
• Madeleine Peyroux: Careless Love (Rounder): I found this off-putting, although I don't doubt her appeal, and there's probably a choice cut or two. Giddins cites Abbey Lincoln as an influence, as well as the obvious Billie Holiday. I've tried hard to like Lincoln, but never made it. [B]
• Andy Bey: American Song (Savoy): Another singer I've never much liked, although I've softened a bit in the last year. [B]
• Joe Lovano: I'm All for You (Blue Note): Ballad album; the musicians are so talented they manage to keep it from capsizing, but it really doesn't work for me. I don't think he has any feel for ballads, and ballads are mostly about feeling. His new album with Motian and Frisell is comparably slow, but they're up to something else there, and it works better. [B]
• Kenny Davern: At the Mill Hill Playhouse (Arbors): Fine record, lots of fun, but didn't strike me as having enough of an edge to really stand out. [B+]
• Great Piano Trio: Someday My Prince Will Come (Eighty-Eight's/Columbia): Good piano trio, anyway, plus a sympathy vote for Elvin Jones. [B+]
• Jessica Williams: Live at Yoshi's, Volume One (MaxJazz): She's very good, but she records a lot, and they all tend to blur together. [B+]
• Mulgrew Miller: Live at Yoshi's, Volume One (MaxJazz): He's very good too, but he looks so much like McCoy Tyner he might be advised to try playing like someone else. [B]
• Keith Jarrett: The Out-of-Towners (ECM): It's been more than 20 years since he put this trio together, and great as they all are in some respects he's just punching the clock. [B+]
• Dave Burrell: Expansion (High Two): He's one piano player who never punches the clock, but the time signatures get so weird here that I just can't follow them. In many respects this is an amazing record, but it's pretty strange too. [B+]
• Geri Allen: The Life of a Song (Telarc): Sounds great, with big assists from Holland and DeJohnette. [A-]

One comment I will make on Giddins' picks is that they're less avant than in previous years, and note that the exceptions are all well into their 60s. (Taylor will be 75 this year.)

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Music: Initial count 10256 [10240] rated (+16), 906 [905] unrated (+1). Been trying to get Jazz Consumer Guide done, but seem to be word-tied on the critical pick hits and dud of the month, so I've been picking around the edges. Got no non-jazz backlog done at all this past week, and lowest newly-rated count in years.

• Brizzi do Brazil (2004, Amiata). Aldo Brizzi is an Italian, reported a modern classical composer. This is effectively a tribute album, done by Brazilian stars like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Virginia Rodrigues, Carlinhos Brown, Arnaldo Antunes, Tom Zé. The new wave rhythms are exciting, but the vocals are rooted in the classical tradition -- not operatic so much as churchy. I find this to be a very mixed bag. B
• Splish Splash: The Best of Bobby Darin Volume One (1958-71 [1991], Atco). The held back "Mack the Knife," "Beyond the Sea," "Clementine," and others to salt a second volume, although the division is stylistic as well. This one has Darin's more rockish things -- "Splish Splash," "Dream Lover," various things deriving from Ray Charles. All but the last three cuts here date from 1958-61, after which Darin moved on to Capitol. Darin was a talented singer, but these things don't cohere into much -- "Dream Lover," especially, sounds like a perfect Ricky Nelson hit, but nothing else does. This one charts better than Volume Two: 16 chart songs, 6 top ten, vs. 6 and 2 on Volume Two. But Atlantic was a great rock label, so that's the direction hey steered him towards -- not necessarily where he wanted to go. B
• Mack the Knife: The Best of Bobby Darin Volume Two (1958-61 [1991], Atco). After Darin went to Capitol he tried his hand as a swinging big band singer -- the trade of idols like Sinatra, but a declining proposition in the '60s. These are early steps in that direction, including his biggest hit ("Mack the Knife"), the signature song Kevin Spacey tapped for his biopic title ("Beyond the Sea"), and a bunch of hard-swinging standards -- "Clementine" and "Artificial Flowers" are particularly effective, and even "Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home" works. This seems to be more his thing. B+
• The Legendary Bobby Darin (1962-73 [2004], Capitol). Past his initial rock hits (some reprised live, some very briefly), he croons competently in front of anonymous big bands and covers trifling pop songs of the day. B+
• Celine Dion: The Collector's Series, Volume One (1990-99 [2000], Epic/550 Music). A Quebecois pop singer filed under rock for no discernible reason, a substantial star, but one I've hitherto managed to avoid. Don't know how this fits her "Greatest Hits" profile -- I gather that the French and Spanish songs weren't meant for Middle America, while the citation for "The Power of the Dream" is "performed at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games." The music is thick and schmaltzy, the voice faux operatic, the lyrics, well, better in Spanish. (Perhaps they'd be better still in Finnish?) Still, this isn't quite as appalling as it all sounds -- well, except for the duet with Andrea Bocelli. I'm a bit of a sucker for the French, and occasionally enjoy the grand gesture. C-
• Gerry Hemingway: Electro-Acoustic Solo Works 1984-95 ([1996], Random Acoustics). Experimentation, scratchy noise, little blips and fades and whatnot. It's OK, but don't know what for. B
• Jazz Satellites, Vol. 1: Electrification (1968-96 [1996], Virgin, 2CD). I tracked down about half the dates here, with most dating from 1968-73. Most of the rest (by names like Divine Styler, Fat, UI, Bedouin Ascent, 16-17, Slab) are likely to be remixes. So this is some sort of post-fusion beat down. It don't make much sense to me, and I'm not sure that I like it, like at all. But it's not without interest, and it was plenty hard to find. Could be better documented. B
• Magic Moments: The Best of '50s Pop (1950-59 [2004], Shout! Factory, 3CD). This was the adult music of my childhood, the grand pop synthesis that survived the decline of the big bands. I remember it mostly from television (Perry Como, Dean Martin, Nat Cole, Andy Williams) and movies (Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds); indeed, its cross-media dominance reminds you that monopoly power over culture was at its peak then, even as minority musics proliferated on the margins of the industry. I hated this music when I was growing up, although not without exception, and I still have a low opinion of the anonymous bands, the omnivorous strings, and the operatics. But there are glorious moments here, songs like "The Tennessee Waltz," "The Wayward Wind," "Que Sera Sera," "Singing the Blues." Rhino's Sentimental Journey series surveyed much of this: 18 of the 60 songs here are repeats. This ranges a bit broader, picking up some novelty songs, a little mambo influence, more stultifying orchestras, convergence from the Platters, and a couple of my own first favorite songs -- "Sixteen Tons" (Ernie Ford, not Merle Travis) and "Mack the Knife" (Bobby Darin, not Lotte Lenya). B+
• Mario Pavone: Toulon Days (1991 [1992], New World). With Thomas Chapin (alto sax), Joshua Redman (tenor sax), Steve Davis (trombone), Hotep Idris Galeta (piano), Steve Johns (drums), Marty Ehrlich (clarinet and flute, two cuts). Pavone plays bass; I regard him as an important player. This is earlier than his other albums I'm familiar with. Recently he's been reliving his experience with Chapin, so this points in that direction. B+
• Preservation Hall Jazz Band: New Orleans, Vol. II (1981 [1982], CBS). Trad jazz group from New Orleans, where they no doubt served an important tourist function. AMG rates their first as a five-star classic, then disparages this one. I haven't heard the first one, so I'm tempted to go cautious on this one. Key player is trumpeter/vocalist Percy Humphrey. The songs are old, tried and true. The rhythm a bit clunky. B
• Pure Brazil: Bossa4Two: Great Duets for Great Moments (1963-97 [2004], Universal Latino). Elis and Tom, Tom and Chico, Toquinho and Chico, Toquinho and Vinicius, Tom and Astrud, Astrud and João, Ivan and Beth, Tom and Dorival, and so forth; Jobim is at the center of most of these duos (some plus, including Stan Getz on you know what), writing as well as performing. B+
• Pure Brazil: Bossa4Two Vol 2: Great Duets for Great Moments (1977-2002 [2004], Universal Latino). Younger, more recent than Vol. 1; also less consistent. Caetano Veloso is the most frequent appearance here, but the others bear little relationship to him, so that seems to just be an accident of programming. B
• Pure Brazil: Feijoada: 14 Delicious Sambas (1963-2000 [2004], Universal Latino). Perhaps the best thing here is "Alguem Me Avisou," attributed to Maria Bethania but dominated by guests Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The beat is an idealized strolling down the beach in Rio with nothing else to do -- nothing conveys the good life as effortlessly as samba. There are variations on this -- mostly a bit faster, one a piece of solo guitar that provides a nice break from the vocals. Most of the pieces come from the '70s, but you'd need the notes to figure out which is which. The album is named for the national dish of Brazil: a rich stew of black beans and pork parts. Brazilian food is like Brazilian music: not bland, but as subtle as you can get without getting bland. A-
• Pure Brazil: The Girls From Ipanema: From Astrud to Bebel (1963-2000 [2004], Univesal Latino). Actually, the years are 1963-75 except for one song at the end by Bebel Gilberto, daughter of first song sing Astrud Gilberto. B
• Pure Brazil: The Girls From Ipanema Vol. 2: From Astrud to Bebel (1963-2003 [2004], Universal Latino). Despite the common end points most of this is more recent than Vol. 1, more obscure, more idiosyncratic, but that doesn't make it any better or worse. B
• Pure Brazil: Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars: Bossa Nova Sung in English (1965-2001 [2004], Universal Latino). The problem here isn't that singing in English loses the mystique of Brazil, or that the lyrics leave something to be desired. No, the real problem is the belief that Yanks love swill, especially wrapped in strings. Even if they have marketing data to prove it, that's no reason to buy. Nor is Sergio Mendes. C+
• Pure Brazil: Samba Social Club: The Masters Sing Their Best (1974-2002 [2004], Universal Latino). Presumably the title reference is to Buena Vista Social Club -- the concept a bunch of old guys keeping the music going. The best known of these "masters" is Martinho da Vila, b. 1938, which doesn't quite make him a geezer. Don't have ages for the others, but their discographies suggest that they are younger. The recording dates are mostly '70s, although at least a third are recent, which suggests that their folkish, purportedly pre-samba sound is mere Braziliana. Still, even if the introduction of old-sounding instruments like banjo is recent, this adds another dimension to the music. B+
• Pure Brazil: Samba Soul Groove (1969-2001 [2004], Universal Latino). What differentiates this? The soul horns are a giveaway. The guitar is a little straighter, the nylon string sound giving way to good old fashioned steel. Os Mutantes even throws in an organ riff -- they're often touted as psychedelia, but "She's My Shoo Shoo" sounds more like bubblegum to me. Jorge Ben gets more space here; Gilberto Gil gets one song, and Caetano Veloso is absent. B
• Vernon Reid: Mistaken Identity (1996, 550 Music/Epic). Pre-Yohimbe Brothers. Minus a brother. An important one. B
• The Rough Guide to Mambo (1948-2003 [2004], World Music Network). Years are uncertain: Noro Morales comes from a 1948-51 comp; Xavier Cugat from 1950-52; Cal Tjader is from 1954; Perez Prado from a 1956 album; Tito Puentes from sometime in the '50s. I don't think that anything here is earlier. Eddie Palmieri is from a 2003 album, so that's probably the latest. As usual, they rarely give dates, and often the albums they cite are compilations that don't help much. I like the endpoints (Morales, Fruko) for their simple formalism, and the track that speaks most directly to me, "I Don't Speak Spanish (But I Understand Everything When I'm Dancing)." B+
• Jimmy Smith: Organ Grinder Swing (1965, Verve). Featuring Kenny Burrell and Grady Tate. Produced by Creed Taylor. Mostly blues riffs, nice take on "Satin Doll." Nothing much wrong with it, but he did a lot of albums like this, many better. B
• Tenacious D (2001, Epic). Bad taste in heavy rock. Ineptly played. Liberally salted with bad jokes. Ineptly told. I spoze this could be satire, but don't you have to give a shit in order for satire to work? C-

Book: Max Boot: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002; paperback: Basic Books, 2003).

This, along with Kevin Pollack's The Gathering Storm, is one of the books that bears some blame for Bush's Iraq misadventure. For his part, Pollack added a voice putatively outside the Bush administration that willingly pushed the WMD claims that were supposedly the casus belli. Boot's contribution was his argument that the Powell Doctrine unreasonably inhibited America's willingness to rush into small wars to defend American interests and promote American values and, as needed, punish transgressors. To make his case, Boot catalogued dozens of small wars going back to the shores of Tripoli, albeit skipping over the halls of Montezuma. The lesson Boot draws from his survey is that small wars, often with little planning, unclear directives, improvised campaigns, and no clue to an exit strategy, have mostly worked out for the best anyway. Or at least worked out better than the big war approach to counterinsurgency that was such a fiasco in Vietnam.

Boot's lesson for Iraq was go in light and don't worry about the consequences. As such he weighed in on the Rumsfeld-Feith side, as opposed to Gen. Shinseki and others who argued that 120,000 soldiers weren't nearly enough. I haven't followed Boot's prolific columns since the war began, but I suspect that he'd argue that the fiasco in Iraq, much like the one in Vietnam, had nothing to do with how many troops were put in play; rather, it depended on how quickly the U.S. could stabilize the situation, build ties with the people, and win their support. In such a scenario, all a big footprint does is to step on unnecessary toes. America's overwhelming firepower, utter dominance from the air, massive logistic requirements, and phobic obsession with its own soldiers' safety did nothing more than create new enemies while keeping potential allies at bay. On the other hand, just adding more of what the military was already doing would have multiplied the problems without adding much of a solution. As far as this critique goes, it makes a lot of sense. But bad as the approach taken was, that doesn't mean that there was an alternative that would have worked. One might fantasize about Special Forces with the right language skills and cultural experiences, but getting them on a scale to pacify Iraq wasn't in the cards for a six month run-up to war -- or, for that matter, ever.

One of the big problems with the political debate leading to the Iraq war, and for that matter the one in Afghanistan, was that we mostly talked about the faults of the enemies and almost never took consideration of our own limits. One of Rumsfeld's famous quips was that you go to war with the arms you got. He could have extended this line to include the army you got, the intelligence services, the political prejudices, the ethics and morals of the Commander in Chief. All of those were inappropriate, often grossly so, for the tasks at hand -- chief among which was convincing the Iraqis (and Afghans) that they would be better off with us than against us. As it were, the only real credible argument they heard not to be against us is the destruction we'd wreak otherwise -- in many cases the destruction we senselessly delivered anyway.

This gets us to the core problem with Boot's thesis. Actually, there are two of them:

1. The belief that an American foreign policy based on the pursuit of American interests aligns closely enough with the desires (long term, at least) of the people whose countries we intervene in that those people can be persuaded to support out interventions.

2. The more basic notion that war can ever be used to solve a problem without creating more, and possibly worse, problems.

As a conservative, Boot would reject the way I phrased these two points. In particular, he defends the need for punitive wars, which almost by definition show nothing but contempt for the punished. He also refers back fondly to the British tradition (although he cites American examples) of "butcher and bolt" operations, which had no purpose other than intimidation. More generally, Boot assumes that wars are a necessary thing -- that there are always people out to take away your freedom and your property, and that the only thing that deters them is vigilance and punishment. Toward the end of the book he goes through all the usual rationales, including quoting Vegetius in Latin (translation: "let him who desires peace prepare for war").

But for all his stuborn insistence, the chronology he tracks is one that shows that war, even as practiced by the enlightened rulers of the United States, has become increasingly useless and debilitating. The costs of war, both to wage and to defend, go up and up; benefits decline. The risks of global conflagration necessarily limited the scope of wars in Korea and Vietnam, precluding direct wars with Russia and China. With the goals of war so limited, and the risks to the nation similarly limited, the costs one was willing to bear declined: after the total warfare of WWII we became increasingly protective of our own soldiers through Vietnam and Iraq, fighting a war in Kosovo where our chief claim to fame was zero casualties. A similar trend was evident in the Soviet Union: after sacrificing vast numbers of soldiers and citizens in WWII the Russians became very unwilling to sacrifice themselves in Afghanistan, ensuring their defeat. Modern armies are able to project truly horrifying firepower, but do so at ever greater distances, where indiscriminate injustice becomes inevitable. The increasing incidence of suicide bombers shows an asymetry of desire to match the asymetry of power. But the most such desire can accomplish is to prolong the struggle.

It is time that we realize that war isn't a last resort. It's a fundamental failure in the political process. That we arrive there so commonly shows how little our political leaders have learned, how poor they are at spotting trouble, and how indifferent they are to the consequences of their acts. In the U.S. that may be because we haven't suffered from war like we've made others suffer. Of course, that only gets worse when you have a President and Administration that so shamelessly represents the interests of the most sheltered, privileged, and demented sector of the country. They like Max Boot because his advice reinforces their presumptions, at least to the paltry extent that they understand it. They bought his Iraq war, then went off and fought their own.

Speaking of Pollack, he has a new book out, this time on Iran (The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, 2004, Random House). I've read quite a bit on Iran, so I doubt that Pollack has much more to offer -- I suspect that, despite reports that he doesn't think it's a good idea to invade this time, he's likely to be more nonsense than anything else. (For the key story of the 1953 CIA coup, see Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror [2003, Wiley]; nothing much about the terror angle there, which was just the publisher's way of trying to hype the book.) But Reza Aslan's review in The Nation has a paragraph that suggests that my own reservations were too mild:

In truth, Pollack's book is less analysis than psychoanalysis. He begins it by casting the Unitd States and Iran as "former lovers who went through a messy divorce" and concludes with the assertion that until Iran comes to grips with its "emotional baggage" and its "unresolved pathologies," it is simply not "psychologically ready" to have a "meaningful relationship with the United States."

It's not so much that what he's saying is invalid as that it's so absurdly unreflexive -- you think Iran has "emotional baggage" and "unresolved pathologies"? Take a look at America, please! (Still, I have huge reservations about the usefulness of psychologizing interpersonal relationships, let alone relationships between countries.)

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Movie: Million Dollar Baby. I know a businessman here whose email signature reads: "Lottery (noun): A stupidity tax." I've had him explain to me how he expects to turn his business into millions of dollars, and I don't doubt that he will. He's a smart guy, but more than that he has an angle. Still, when I notice people buying lottery tickets it's more clear that they don't have the angle than that they don't have the brains. One could rephrase: "Lottery (noun): A tax on hopelessness." Or more precisely: "A tax on the hopes of the hopeless." Boxing may be the sport of the stupid, but this movie makes a case that it is the sport of dreams of the hopeless. That much sums up the boxers in this movie, a point driven home with stark economy in the two scenes where Hillary Swank faces her family. That doesn't sum up the fans, whose bloodlust frames the fight scenes. And that doesn't sum up the old guys -- the one-eyed ex-boxer Morgan Freeman, who's found a certain nirvana beyond stupidity and dreams, and a methodical but uneasy Clint Eastwood, who perhaps reaches his peace after the movie ends. Or perhaps not. Eastwood's struggle with his distrust of his religion makes for an interesting subplot -- never quite explained so it can never be judged. Along the way we get an intro to sweet science philosophy and technique, often the opposite of the initial instinct to fight. Triumph and tragedy follow, but they're hardly the point -- just the pace quickening and slowing down so the end can play out in its own time. I lost my stomach for boxing long ago -- never had the belligerent drive, and soured on the notion that something so primal could be redeemed as sport -- so none of that appealed to me. But the film has remarkably fine detail, keystone performances, economy and grace. It earns its keep. A-

Friday, February 18, 2005

Max Boot, in The Savage Wars of Peace, lapses into a bit of fantasy discussing the "lost opportunity" of the U.S. intervention in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution (p. 229):

Given how close the outnumbered and outsupplied Whites got to victory on their own, it is hardly outlandish to assume that, with a little nudge from the Allies at one of these crucial junctures, the Russian Civil War might have had a different outcome. If the Bolshevik Revolution had been strangled in its crib, there would likely have been no Stalinist terror, no great famine in Russia, no Cold War, no Communist takeovers in China or Eastern Europe -- and quite possibly no World War II, since if Russia had not had a Soviet government, it might have joined with the West to nip Nazi expansionism in the bud (no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact). Tens of millions of people might have been spared an early death. This is only speculation, but there is little doubt that the Bolshevik hold on power was precarious and that concerted foreign intervention might have made the difference. Instead, Britain and America sent just enough soldiers to allow Lenin to claim that the Bolsheviks were fighting foreign aggression -- but not enough to win. The story of the Anglo-American expedition to Russia in 1918, then, is the story of one of the great lost opportunities of history.

It's interesting how these inferences leap about. What gives them such vitality is that they conveniently ignore underlying reality, and that they idealize the hypothetical alternate routes. The weakest of these is the idea that a non-Soviet Russia might have stopped Nazi Germany before 1939 where the West alone had failed. The idea that a non-Soviet Russia wouldn't have created Communist buffer states in Eastern Europe makes some sense, but that there would have been no Communist revolution in China doesn't follow. The ascension to power of Lenin in 1917 and of Stalin following Lenin's death is, of course, highly contingent, and those individuals imposed a highly arbitrary shape on the Soviet Union. But they didn't do it alone, and in many ways they were typical products of the Tsarist police state. There were hundreds of like-minded leaders, thousands of militants, millions of oppressed cadres, and deep tears in the politico-economic fabric of the country -- the empire, really, since Russian dominance was built on the backs of hundreds of subjugated peoples. Even had the Whites broken the Revolution, they would have had to deal with the mess that the Tsars created -- in many ways they would have had to do what the Soviets did just to pull the fractured empire back into order.

The idea that all subsequent history changes from this one contingency is a convenient way of ignoring the deeper truth that Bolshevism (Communism, Marxism) was itself the inevitable offspring of the contradictions appearing with the triumph of capitalism. Suppressing it never made the problem go away, and therefore never eliminated the potential of revolution. The one thing that did work was the reform of capitalism, which more or less happened in the U.S. and Europe. Where communists did manage to seize power was in the backwaters of imperialism, where there had been no bourgeois revolution, where liberalism was weak but radicals were worldly and desperate, where most people were still locked in feudalism, where foreign imperialists and/or local oligarchs ruled viciously. In such cases, Communists more often than not came to recapitulate their oppressors, making a poor case for their ideals.

But if we want to indulge in "what if," we should at least take a look at what happened in the most similar case: what happened to Hungary after the Whites put down Bela Kun's revolution. Like Russia, Hungary had been an absolute monarchy, with no liberal traditions, even though it sported a much more developed capitalist economy. Having defeated the Reds, Hungary turned to fascism, becoming an ally of Hitler in WWII. Given this, why would anyone expect that a triumphant White Russia would have allied with the West? On the contrary, a fascist Russia allied with Germany and Japan would have been the West's greatest nightmare.

A more interesting "what if" question is what would have happened had Kerensky abandoned the war after the March Revolution. The war had put a huge strain on Russia, leading to the fractures that eventually allowed the Bolsheviks to triumph. Had the liberals and moderate socialists worked directly on healing those wounds instead of prolonging a senselessly destructive war they might have kept the more extreme Bolsheviks at bay. This didn't happen for a number of reasons, including that Kerensky's potential allies in the West were themselves committed to the war -- in fact, as Boot points out, much of the rationale behind the Anglo-American intervention was to try to steer Russia back into the war. But this sort of speculation isn't likely to enter Boot's mind, for the simple reason that is believes that war is a force for positive change. In America's "small wars" he sees what George Bush nowadays calls "democracy on the march." That's why Boot was such a staunch advocate of another small war in Iraq.

Which makes one wonder what might have happened differently if interventionist ideologues like Max Boot had managed to keep both feet grounded in reality.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

I have a new Recycled Goods column posted today. This is the seventeenth such column I've written since Feb. 2003. The current format is to write a brief introduction, ten paragraph-sized reviews, a bunch of single-line (Briefly Noted) reviews (a record 46 this time), and some additional one-liners on notable records recently reissued where I haven't scored a copy of the reissue. My original plan was to split the coverage up roughly one quarter each between: jazz, rock, roots (blues, country, folk), and world. The breakdown this time is: jazz = 27 (47%), rock = 12 (21%), roots = 8 (14%), world = 10 (17%), plus, well, I don't know what the hell Jim Nabors is. Bottom line is that regardless of how I'd like to split it up I get more jazz reissues than anything else, so that's what I wind up reviewing. Over the 17 columns I've now covered 581 records.

The columns have been growing in length. The paragraph reviews have been getting longer and the "one-liners" often string together two or three distinct thoughts. Without getting trivial or pedantic, it seems to me that most albums can be summed up in three sentences or less, and Briefly Noted does that in almost haiku-like form. The grades are one more thought. While the form can only conjure up unpleasant memories, they save me from having to weigh adjectives and make it clear whether and how much I actually like the record. There's no other way to say so much so succinctly.

I have enough backlog written up already for my next column. I'd like to get back onto a regular monthly schedule, which was tough to do in 2004 because of various publishing glitches. Wouldn't hurt to make it a bit shorter, I suppose.

The following is a quote from a new book by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War, a long look at empire, freedom, and militarism in North America from the 17th century to Colin Powell. The subject is the Philippine rebellion that followed that "splendid little war" of 1898, better known as the Spanish-American War (p. 339):

President Roosevelt declared the insurrection at an end on July 4, 1902, but resistance continued among the Moro people, Muslims of the southern islands, until 1913. The costs were high. At least 20,000 insurgents lost their lives between 1899 and 1902, along with perhaps 180,000 of their countrymen, most of whom succumbed to starvation. The United States spent $400 million -- the equivalent of perhaps $30 billion today -- to suppress the insurgency. More than a thousand Americans were killed in combat and more than 2,800 were wounded, and roughly 3,000 men died from disease or other causes. Some 125,000 Americans intervened in the Philippines to promote civilization, democracy, and the rule of law as well as to secure the interests of the United States and its citizens. They would exercise dominion over the islands until the people they had liberated proved capable of governing themselves; that is, until a sufficient number of Filipino leaders could overcome what American deemed the ignorance and recalcitrance of a primitive race, accept American values and institutions, and rule their society in ways acceptable to the United States.

The most immediately striking thing is the similarity in the raw numbers between then and Iraq now. Of course, losses due to disease are down -- American losses, anyhow -- and starvation hasn't been noted, not that the media noted it then. The costs of waging war have gone up too, although part of the difference is that the U.S. had fewer forces in the Philippines then. Max Boot, who also wrote about the Philippines in The Savage Wars of Peace, puts the maximum U.S. troop count at any one time at 69,000. There are many other differences: Boot attributes the U.S. "success" in quelling the rebellion to the U.S. soldiers' experience at counterinsurgency campaigns -- most of the U.S. officers had experience in the Indian wars -- and to their ability to develop viable intelligence. There is little evidence of either in the occupation of Iraq. Other points are that U.S. motives, such as establishing naval bases, were relatively benign in the Philippines, and that the U.S. was inclined to be more generous to Filipinos who bow to American wishes. Over time the U.S. did manage to build a more honest and equitable political order in the Philippines than the previous Spanish occupation, but desire for independence remained, and there remains a century later quite a bit of anti-Ameican feeling there.

Still, the big difference may be to come: the cumulative effect of losing vs. winning. The more the U.S. was able to suppress the Filipino rebellion the more leeway the U.S. had to disarm it -- to secure territory and rebuild, to recruit its leaders, etc. On the other hand, the more the U.S. has to fight in Iraq the less it can do to win allegiance. The recent elections there provide a measure of how little grip U.S. hegemony has on the country. The problem is not just that the Sunni minority didn't participate, or that the crony Iyad Allawi slate lost badly. It's also a problem that the Kurdish and Shiite sectors retreated into the shells of their respective sectionalisms. Instead of propagating an open, inclusive political culture such as is idealized in the United States, Iraq has turned into an embattered and embittered set of enclaves. How far this has progressed can be measured by the turn to religion, always a shelter in a storm.

When the U.S. decided to "de-Baathify" Iraq, it cut the legs out from under the single most popular, most broadly supported secular party in the region. Of course, other secular parties, like the communists or socialists, are anathema to the U.S. as well. The religious parties became the compromise-of-choice, as indeed they have often been for the U.S. in the Middle East, and the increasing hardships of war and occupation drove many Iraqis who in peaceful times would have been secularists into the arms of the clergy. This was easy enough to predict. The question is: was this intended?

Dominion of War is largely a book about how Americans have repeatedly manipulated the rhetoric of freedom and human rights to bring about empire. For most of American history this has had a measure of truth to it, but that changed during or immediately after World War II. The promise of Americanism was largely the promise of the bourgeois revolution: free men and free markets, which produced vast wealth distributed equitably enough to raise almost everyone's standard of living. But it never quite worked that way -- the corruptions of power and fortune all too often siphoned off more than their fare share. Communism was an alternate theory of how to achieve the fairness that bourgeois revolutions lacked, and as such it was a challenge to Americanism. But rather than let the two models compete, the U.S. gave in to the dark side of its empire and waged a tenacious war (sometimes military, sometimes economic) against communism and all it stood for -- much of which Americanism had once (if imperfectly) stood for as well. This became the struggle of the powerful for their prerogatives, of capital over labor on the global stage -- the containment of the Soviet Union abroad was paralleled by the diminution of the AFL-CIO at home. Along the way the right, the party of the rich and mighty, gained ground, eventually turning into the Bush Administration -- a cabal so cynical and jaded that they would poison the environment and wreck the Social Security program which keeps so many elderly and infirm Americans out of the grips of poverty. This was all done while continuing to use the same rhetoric that Americanism had always used. And they're very good at the words these days -- so good they've stripped them of all meaning.

A century ago America still held some promise to places like the Philippines, and that was decisive in persuading people to give up their own instincts for autonomy. America today offers no such promise to the world -- at least not a credible one. Few if any Iraqis believe that the U.S. has any intention of helping them. Despite its rhetoric, the Bush Administration must know that, otherwise they wouldn't have obfuscated the elections so completely. (That the elections were held at all was to validate the occupation for Americans who do need to believe, and to give the Shiites reason not to join the revolt yet.) It remains to be seen whether the elected Iraqis will be able to peaceably free Iraq from America's grip.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

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

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

Whether North Korea actually possesses nuclear weapons or not matters little. If they do and use them they risk utter devastation. Otherwise they are just one more deterrent against an attack that is already too risky to contemplate. Common sense should recognize that regardless of what's wrong with the North Korean government war isn't an option -- indeed, war hasn't been a viable option for more than fifty years now. But the U.S. persists in thinking that starvation is an option, and that starvation doesn't run the risk of being interpreted as an act of war. No country has used nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed foe. As such, so despite their terrible risks (and the eternally ominous Murphy's Law) nuclear proliferation has actually led to a more stable world. But this depends on recognizing the dangers, and on overcoming the temptation to settle matters by war. The Bush Administration, with its pre-emptive war doctrine, has proven to be singularly dense in this regard. Convinced of its overwhelming power and righteousness, Bush identified three nations as an "axis of evil," then proceded to wage war on what was by far the weakest of the trio, while continuing to villify and threaten the other two. In Iraq, a nation with virtually no military resources and a severely divided populace, Bush has already bit off more than the U.S. military can chew. Provoking additional strife in Iran and North Korea cannot possibly work out better, yet Bush knows nothing but his blind faith in the civilizing power of punishment. And if that leads him to escalate what is already a severe and insensitive regimen of punishment on the North Korean people, it is possible that his hubris will blow up on him.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Derek Penslar, of the University of Toronto, gave a lecture at WSU tonight. This was sponsored by the Ulrich Museum at part of their nervousness over the Emily Jacir exhibit, which they've conflated to "Two Peoples, One Land: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." Penslar's lecture was called "Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism: A Historical Assessment." The lecture was given in one of the Museum exhibit halls, and the crowd exceeded the available seating. The lecture was even-handed and historically accurate, although some things that he touched on could have been developed further. He didn't betray much of a political position, although at one point he seemed to embrace the desirability of a Jewish state, at another he criticized several Mideast Area professors for letting their politics get ahead of their academic responsibiities, and finally he criticized the current U.S. administration for not taking a more active role to bring about peace.

Penslar started by outlining a recent document attributing many events from the JFK assassination to 9/11 to a Jewish conspiracy -- the idea was to illustrate the paranoid dimension that animates so much anti-semitic propaganda. He then made a distinction between what he called "classic" anti-semitism and more recent anti-zionist anti-semitism. The former he likened to a psychosomatic illness, the latter to an allergic overreaction. The difference is that the latter is actually based on something real -- the political struggle over Israel-Palestine -- whereas the former is purely in the mind of the fantasists. He then went on to show instances where various anti-zionists have confounded their arguments with conspiracies borrowed from classic anti-semitism, most notoriously "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

The key point there is that anti-zionism and anti-semitism, despite their occasional conflation, are two different things, and he pointed out numerous examples where they remain distinct. Where he was most useful was in pointing out a wide range of Arab reactions to zionism and placing them in their contingent context, especially in terms of the Arab experience of European imperialism and colonialism. He concluded with a thought experiment which asked us to imagine a world where WWI did not end in the breakup of the Ottomon Empire and the creation of the British mandate of Palestine. In such a world it is extremely unlikely that zionism would have succeeded in creating a Jewish state. And in such a world it is very unlikely that we would witness the sort of anti-semitism that tends to erupt in Arab countries today.

Penslar pointed out that incidents of anti-semitic violence have become more frequent, especially in Britain and France, over the last 5-6 years -- although he emphasized that the level is still nowhere comparable to the '30s, and he pretty much dismissed Phyllis Chesler's alarmist book. He could have added that the the last 5-6 years coincide with the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process and the violent repression of the Intifada under Barak and Sharon, but he preferred to generalize.

He could have said more about zionism and anti-zionism. He did point out that many Jews were/are opposed to zionism -- communists and many socialists as well as most orthodox Jews. He didn't bring up more recent debates like the idea of post-zionism. He started to say something about anti-semites who might embrace zionism, but the sources he cited were French and German and the point he drew from them was that anti-semites in the pre-WWII period didn't take zionism seriously -- if anything, they considered it yet another semitic trick. Not discussed were British anti-semites, probably because they were less interesting as ideologists, but to a large extent it was British anti-semites, most notably Balfour and Lloyd George, who actually sponsored the zionist project. Also important for now would be a discussion of the protestant fundamentalists who provide much of America's political support for the Israeli right.

None of this is, or should be, controversial. The real question is why does anti-semitism matter, at least as opposed to any other form of paranoid and/or politically expedient bigotry -- of which there are many other current examples, including anti-Arab bigotry, especially in Israel and America. Part of the reason is that the Holocaust is such a horrendous historical proof of how much damage bigotry can cause. Another reason is that anti-semitism is not merely a description -- it's a brand name, coined by an ideologue who feared and hated Jews at the height of an age when racism was promoted as a cover for imperialism, and marketed by demagogic politicians to disastrous ends. But the fashions that made anti-semitism such a deadly force in the past have eclipsed. Yet the idea is kept alive, partly by memory, but more forcefully as a ruse to obfuscate a real current conflict that is related only through the Jewish identity of the Israeli state. It is, in other words, a shield: something meant to deflect a critical view of Israel today -- both how the state behaves, and how its people think of themselves.

I suspect that it would have been more interesting to explore what anti-semitism has in common with other bigotries, not least because we know from other cases how one group's bigotry becomes another group's revenge. But more than that, we need to figure out how anti-semitism created zionism and why zionism seems to need anti-semitism in order to survive. Then we might be able to show how Arabs have to discard their anti-semitic tendencies in order to overcome the inequities of zionism.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Music: Initial count 10240 [10219] rated (+21), 905 [903] unrated (+2). Completely horrible week. Been down with what's mostly a cold, and just haven't felt like working. [This is embarrassing, not to finish the week with anything on this list. Did some jazz during the week, elsewhere.]

This is another purge from the Jazz Consumer Guide "done" file. This is basically a holding pen for notes/reviews of records that have been considered for JCG. However, the file has bloated to well over three hundred records. Given that I was only able to work 29 records into JCG #3, a lot of records (including some rather good ones) have no chance of making the cut. This is a quick culling, including some pretty good records, a lot of average ones, plus a few bad ones. There are few hard and fast rules about what gets covered and what doesn't, but in general:

1. I tend to skip records that have been covered by other Voice writers, especially Francis Davis.
2. I tend to avoid reissues except when I find them exceptionally interesting. I do, however, cover a lot of reissues in Recycled Goods.
3. It looks like I'll never have Honorable Mention space for about half of my new B+ records. Until now I've held onto all of these, but the space has gotten just too tight. The ones that drop off tend toward the bottom of the range, but they also include things that are very proficient but not especially interesting, and they may also include things that I rarely have much to say about (like piano trios).
4. The B records are neither good enough nor bad enough to bother including.
5. Sub-B records are possible Duds. I prefer to list Duds that are serious failures rather than just non-starters or things that I dislike for more personal reasons, so the latter are more likely to get flushed out here.
6. In general, the longer something sits around without getting included, the more likely it should be dropped.

With all that in mind, here goes. This cuts the "done" file by about half:

• John Abercrombie: Class Trip (2003 [2004], ECM). Equally prominent is Mark Feldman's violin, which Abercrombie likes to duck under and weave around rather than put in its place. Superb rhythm section (Marc Johnson, Joey Baron), too. When this all comes together (as on "Descending Grace" and "Illinoise") one is impressed by the potential power as well as the intricate control of the whole ensemble. When it doesn't come together it tends toward atmospherics. [NB: reviewed by Francis Davis in Voice.] B+
• John Abercrombie/Jarek Smietana: Speak Easy (1999, PAO). Smietana is a Polish jazz guitarist, a leader of several groups and co-leader of the Namyslowski-Smietana Quartet (which may not mean much to you, but I consider Zbigniew Namyslowski's Winobranie to be one of the outstanding avant-garde jazz albums of the '70s). Abercrombie, of course, is a household name by now. The two guitar line-up (plus bass and drums) works like a charm here: both have sensible things to say, and they fill in nicely around each other. B+
• Claudia Acuña: Luna (2004, MaxJazz). There's always a danger when you face something different that your expectations are so off base that you'll just miss whatever's going on. So I have some doubts about my judgment on this Chilean singer's third U.S. album, but I don't find this very impressive or likable. The music has a bit of latin percussion but nothing I particularly recognize -- no salsa or son or, what the hell, mariachi or polka; it feels stiff, devoid of any of that limberness we expect in jazz, and short of groove as well. And the singer is starchy -- most of all when she tries to sing in English, but the Spanish doesn't make for much either. I'm probably missing something, but I don't think it'll make much difference. C+
• Noël Akchoté: Cabaret Modern: A Night at the Magic Mirror Tent (2003, Winter & Winter). Polyglot Eurosong, rooted in cabaret ancien, but not stuck there. Singers come and go, some in French, some in German, some in Italian, some in English. Some songs as new as Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" and Lou Reed's "All Tomorrow's Parties" sound as old as "Bella Ciao" -- a labor anthem reportedly done per the original. The crowd is never far off, nor the tinkling of their glasses nor the sounds of the workers. Still, it comes off a tad quaint, not folkie but still völkisch. B
• Ben Allison & Medicine Wheel: Buzz (2003 [2004], Palmetto). The rating is just an impression that this is a pretty good example of postmodern group composition these days, even though I'm hard pressed to identify who's doing what, let alone why. Allison plays bass and wrote four of seven tracks -- the others come from Lennon-McCartney, Andrew Hill, and one of two sax players here, Michael Blake. Allison is not strongly evident, detracting a bit from comparisons between him and Mingus. The saxes (Blake, Ted Nash) and trombone (Clark Gayton) tend to be tightly arranged, which seems likely to be Allison's doing. If this were split into a two-sided LP, the first side would be faster and more idiosyncratic, especially rhythmically, while the second side would be the chill-down one. Don't have any idea whether it was intended that way. Mysterious record. B+
• The Jimmy Amadie Trio: Live at Red Rock Studio: A Tribute to Tony Bennett (2003, TPRecordings). Personally, I don't associate any of these songs with Bennett, but what do I know? No doubt he did sing "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To," "Stella by Starlight," "The Very Thought of You," "Come Rain or Come Shine," etc., (well, maybe not "Fill the Woods With Music"), but the substitute here, "special guest" Phil Woods, is more to my taste anyway. B+
• Arild Andersen: Rarum XIX: Selected Recordings (1975-99 [2004], ECM). Jazz in Scandinavia took a fateful turn when George Russell arrived, putting aside earlier bebop influences to evolve something more avant yet distinctively nordic. The most directly influenced were Jan Garbarek (saxophones), Terje Rypdal (guitar), Arild Andersen (bass) and Jon Christensen (drums), and to a huge extent Manfred Eicher built the ECM label and the ECM sound around their work. Andersen has recorded over a dozen albums under his own name or that of his late '80s band Masqualero, which featured pianist Jon Balke and introduced trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer. The Rarum series often runs into trouble trying to mix and match pieces that don't fit well, but by focusing sharply on the bass, this one manages the shifts between quiet and dynamic, simple and complex. A-
• Noah Baerman: Patch Kit (2004, Lemel). Good, rather conventional piano trio, with famous rhythm section of Ron Carter and Ben Riley, who help out a lot. B+
• Anita Baker: My Everything (2004, Blue Note). Not a jazz record by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, the same could be said for Al Green and Van Morrison, but they at least were the greatest, most visionary, most transcendent singers of our lifetimes, and they deserve to keep doing it till they drop. Baker was an overrated torcher who gets new makeup as a soft soul queen. Not terrible, but not very interesting either. B-
• Chet Baker: Prince of Cool: The Pacific Jazz Years (1952-57 [2004], Pacific Jazz, 3CD). Lots of people adore Chet Baker, but I don't. I've always found his trumpet work anemic, even while conceding that his logic is beyond fault. He didn't play fast or high, and he rarely showed a shred of emotion -- at least any of the warm and fuzzy ones. But his vocals were even more affectless, and that's what his fans really fell for. He had been cajoled into singing as a teenager and developed a style that engaged the songs as minimally as possible. I suspect that the root of my problem with him is that I find his style embarrassing, but he managed to persevere, turning embarrassment into disinterest, which could easily be taken for vulnerability. Nobody else sang like that, and the fragility of his singing soon infected his trumpet. With the swing bands on the wane and the beboppers flaunting their virtuosity, Baker's extreme contrast epitomized something else: cool. From his emergence as a leader around 1952 to his death in 1978 his career waxed and waned but his music was remarkably consistent -- the only change being that as he accumulated the wear and tear of a rough life his indifference became even more poignant. Baker's early work for Pacific Jazz has been sliced and diced many times over -- the booklet here shows the covers of no less than 20 other albums or compilations, many redundant. This one splits him three ways: "Chet Sings," "Chet Plays," and "Chet & Friends" -- the most conspicuous friends were Art Pepper and Gerry Mulligan, with Baker's modest formality a fine complement for his voluble partners. Still, I'm not sure that "best of" is a concept that fits Baker well: his aesthetic is so convoluted and so personal that there's little if any common ground for evaluating him. So this winds up being just another slice and dice job. B+
• Chet Baker: Ensemble (1953 [2004], Pacific Jazz). The group here has Baker, three saxophones, piano, bass and drums. The saxophones are rich enough that Jack Montrose is credited with arranging. The arrangements are straightforward enough. But even this early in his career Baker's trumpet sounds a bit dull; certainly not able to pierce through the dense fog of his ensemble. But from its birth cool jazz was an arranger's art, and Montrose at least breathes some life into it here. B+
• Chet Baker: Sings and Plays (1955 [2004], Pacific Jazz). Cover adds: with Bud Shank, Russ Freeman and strings. Actually, Shank and the four cellos only covers about half the disc. The transitions between the two groups/sessions are actually fairly seamless, as the cellos add pleasantly to the background. The other notable thing here is how clear Baker sounds. "Let's Get Lost" and "I Remember You" are especially good; a few others are awkward, as usual, but this may be his most consistent vocal album. A-
• Chet Baker: Big Band (1956 [2004], Pacific Jazz). Two sessions, both in October 1956, with slightly different bands, ten or eleven members. The constants were Phil Urso, Bobby Timmons, and Jimmy Bond. The arrangements are credited to Urso, Pierre Michelot or Christian Chevallier. All pretty much standard fore for the time and place, meaning that they are light and snappy, but that's about it. The nominal leader's role is harder than usual to make out, especially given that they didn't even put his picture on the cover. B
• Chet Baker: Sextet (1954-57 [2004], Pacific Jazz). As the front cover notes, the sextet features Bud Shank, Bob Brookmeyer and Russ Freeman, which doesn't leave a helluva lot of room for the self-effacing nominal leader. Jack Montrose, Johnny Mandel, and Bill Holman each arrange a couple of tracks, turning this into a miniature big band. B
• Chet Baker: Love Songs (1953-74 [2004], Columbia/Legacy). Slim pickings: five cuts from the 1953-54 Chet Baker & Strings, which like all period jazz star + strings outings is saddled with a dreadful classics-drenched string orchestra, although occasionally the jazz musicians (including in this case, Zoot Sims, Bud Shank, and Jack Montrose) have something worthwhile to contribute. The rest comes from 1974 recordings for Creed Taylor: more anonymous big bands, even more strings. Very slight work, so far from prime it's tempting to deprecate it. C+
• Chet Baker: The Last Great Concert: My Favorite Songs, Vol. 1 & 2 (1988 [2004], Enja/Justin Time, 2CD). This concert was recorded two weeks before Baker, 59 and looking a good deal older, fell to his death (or was pushed) from a window in Paris. It was recorded with the NDR Big Band and the Radio Orchestra Hannover, although some songs were cut with smaller groups, including Herb Geller and Walter Norris. It reruns Baker's usual songbook, featuring his limp trumpet and barely cohesive vocals -- the trumpet sorely eroded with age, the voice lapsing into a bored beauty. He's one of the few major jazz figures I've never come around on, and this clearly isn't the place to start. Great only if you're already in love with him, but occasionally pretty nonetheless.