Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Out of the Closet

I'm pleased to see that Billmon is ticked off at being attacked as a liberal:

This is slander. I'm not exactly sure how to describe myself politically these days, but liberal is definitely the wrong word.

I'm more of an ex-Marxist, ex-socialist, ex-revolutionary who realized long ago that Marx got his economics wrong, that socialism doesn't work and that Peter Townsend was essentially right about the new boss being the same as the old boss. [ . . . ]

Mostly what that makes me, I suppose, is politically irrelevant and -- in today's environment -- something of a borderline nihilist. [ . . . ] But what it does not make me is a liberal, except in the sense that I've grudgingly resigned myself to the fact that the pathetic old shell of the Democratic Party is the only effective barrier to one-party rule by a bunch of really dangerous authoritarian creeps.

So call me a racist, call me a hypocrite -- hell, call me a communist and a lunatic. I've been called worse before breakfast. Just don't call me a liberal. Because as some in the blogosphere have already discovered, I tend to regard that as a fighting word.

As I've repeatedly tried to explain, I've been down that same road. Liberalism started out as the ideology of progressive capitalism -- i.e., of capitalists who want to change the world to fit their view, which is presumed to be in the world's interest as well as theirs. But when push came to shove, as it did when Marxists came up with a more universal idea of progress, the liberals took their ideals home and joined the right-wing attack on the left. That they kept their high-faluting rhetoric just marked them as hypocrites, which is how those of us who were attracted to the new left first experienced them -- although several decades later we can point to an endless series of confusion and compromise that have left them bankrupt intellectually as well as morally. Nowadays they try to present themselves as noble centrists, opposed to the extremes of right and left, always ready to compromise the principles they insist they're defending -- not least of which is their eagerness to wage war for peace and human rights, which to them are little more than approved rhetoric.

But that's not a distinction the right troubles itself with. Back when liberals had some power it worked to tar them as soft on the left, not least because doing so provoked the liberals to show that they weren't. Nowadays, attacking leftists as liberals just implies that we're as pathetic as the liberals. Some may be tempted to defend liberalism, as if the bourgeois revolution -- including some genuinely progressive results -- wasn't fait accompli. Others, like Billmon and me, kneejerk the other way. Either way, it's hard to see a downside for the right, except perhaps in terms of lost intellecutal honesty -- uh, that's a joke.

I don't know who Billmon is or where he came from or what he went through, but clearly we have a lot of common ground -- and a few differences that matter little these days. I'm less "ex-" than he is today -- certainly not a borderline nihilist -- and what probably means I was less revolutionary back in the day. Also, I've never viewed Marx as anything but a bourgeois thinker, so I never took his post-revolution speculations seriously. And favoring Kant over Hegel, I reckoned his Aufhebungstheorie to be more poetry than logic. Given that grounding, I never had much trouble identifying the trouble with hucksters from Lenin through Castro, which may be why I never judged them as harshly as Orwell or Koestler: no gods died on my watch, because none were permitted.

The only idol I've seen fall was my Boy Scout faith in God and Country, which the liars and demagogues who promoted the Vietnam War managed to whack up pretty severely. That drove me to examine a lot of alternatives. Marx and his fellow travelers were among the ones who helped me make sense of the world, but they certainly weren't the only ones. A small number of tenets of Christianity and American patriotism even managed to survive. I've even kept some ideas of classical liberalism -- but then, so has the right, at least in its rhetoric. For a long while I identified with the left, much as one would favor the underdog, but I'm reluctant to do that now. It's not so much that I find the company unsavory -- at least we're not talking about the right or the self-important middle -- but the ideas often seem slightly off the point. I like to think of myself as centered -- focused squarely on the problems, not on the left-right spectrum. The latter is buried in its own baggage, but more importantly I think the problems are pressing in ways that promise a rather bleak and nasty future. The only way I see to deal with these problems is to develop a culture of reason and cooperation -- a recognition that we're all in this together, we all have a lot to lose (and those who don't need to get some quick), and that matters more than our little zero-sum games.

Given the relative invisiblity of the left these days, it's possible I'm not alone in my reprioritization. The big immediate problem is that the right just won't let it go. They insist on only learning lessons the hard way, and most are so dumb it's going to have to be real hard. Needless to say, that's not my project here. I'm content to try to reason with the world, and occasionally wag my finger and remind you all I told you so. Hopefully there's a rational recourse. But I'll concede that becoming a near-nihilist like Billmon isn't an unrealistic strategy.

Billmon has another post worth noting: "The 51% Solution," on Karl Rove's strategy to keep his winning margins as low as possible, figuring that any consensus majority would weaken and ultimately lose the hardcore base. This fits in with Gary Wills' argument about the fringe domination of both the Republican Party and the Catholic Church. (Can't find the New York Review of Books article, probably because it's been spun off as a book: Bush's Fringe Government.) The problem with cutting those margins so thin is that a little bad luck is all it takes to fall flat. I don't have enough faith in the voters to say that it's going to happen next week, but he sure is living on the edge.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Music: Current count 12506 [12485] rated (+21), 900 [920] unrated (-20). The unrated count is flat-out wrong: I simply haven't done my paperwork this week, although part of that is that I haven't received much either. Don't know exactly what's going on, but the bigger worry is that I've been stuck in the jazz rut all week. Jazz CG is done now. Recycled Goods is due, well, now also, which means it's late. Nothing to report here. Next week will be different. After that I'll finally get a breather -- much needed, I'm afraid.

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 13)

The 11th Jazz Consumer Guide is closed. The final draft has 21 graded albums (including two pick hits and one featured dud), 22 ungraded (20 honorable mentions, 2 duds). Total comes up to 2094 words, so expect 20-25% to be held back, assuming everything goes according to past practices. I have no idea whether this will in fact happen. I've had very little contact with the Village Voice since they fired Robert Christgau, my editor and mentor there. I do have Christgau's blessing to continue publishing Jazz Consumer Guides at the Voice, not that that carries any weight these days. The Voice has at least continued to publish Francis Davis, and my column complements his nicely, filling out the breadth beyond what he covers in depth.

No first impressions this week. I spent the whole week picking things off the replay shelves and writing up things I had graded but only had notes on. I got a lot of good stuff late, including a few major prospects I haven't gotten to yet. I've also found myself grading rather harshly in the stretch, to some extent as a means of coping with the glut.

I'm starting to work now on setting up the framework for the next cycle, which among everything else includes the usual purge. I probably won't do a Jazz Prospecting post next week. Instead, I'll do something of a wrap-up on this column, as well as posting any relevant news. If the Voice publishes this column, I want to push to get a more regular -- preferably every other month -- schedule. If not, I'll look elsewhere. Despite my occasional tardiness, the writing is only a small part of the work here. It would be nice to get more publishable words out of all this listening, especially given that there's no shortage of good records to write about. It would be nice to write reviews of especially interesting B+ records instead of squeezing the odd A- into the honorable mentions, as I've done in the past and once this time.

No first impressions this time, but these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further listening the first time around.

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City: Live at Iridium (2004 [2006], Pi, 2CD): Continuing on after the deaths of Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. The replacements are trumpeter Corey Wilkes and bassist Jaribu Shahid. They won't be a ghost band as long as Roscoe Mitchell is ticking. He seems more than ever the dominant player here -- the newcomers may have the chops to move in here, but they aren't shaking things up. I never had a very good feel for this group, but this strikes me as about par. B+(*)

So Percussion: Amid the Noise (2002-06 [2006], Canteloupe): Group name has a macron accent over 'o' in "So" -- don't know what that's meant to signify. Maybe it's an omen that I need to move from ISO-8859-1 to Unicode. It wouldn't be the first time I found myself stuck on the losing side of a technology divide. The group consists of three guys who play percussion and synths. An earlier record tackled Steve Reich's Drumming, which gives you some context, but the minimalism here is much less dense, and the percussion is less dependably rhythmic. Didn't sound like much at first, but it's grown on me a bit. B+(*)

Trio East: Best Bets (2005 [2006], Origin): Trumpet-bass-drums trio, not a lot of those out there, with those that do exist tending toward avant-obscurity. Clay Jenkins plays the trumpet, making him the presumed leader, so going with the group name advances him toward his own kind of obscurity. What he gets for it is an exceptionally well-balanced group effort. They did an equally good album called Stop-Start (Sons of Sound) last year, which languished on the cusp of the HM list until this one arrived to take its place. B+(**)

Nels Cline: New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill (2006, Cryptogramophone): This takes Hill's compositions and substitutes Cline's guitar for Hill's piano, giving them a steely resonance and more of a rock kick -- which pays off especially well on the closing "Compulsion." But Hill himself rarely wrote just for piano, so Cline augments his usual trio -- Devin Hoff on bass, Scott Amendola on drums -- with cornet (Bobby Bradford), clarinet (Ben Goldberg), and accordion (Andrea Parkins). Each of these have their moments when you think it's all coming together, but overall this is a mixed bag, interesting ideas that are hard to sort out. B+(**)

Pete McCann: Most Folks (2005 [2006], Omnitone): A guitarist who has a knack of showing up on good albums but not showing off, McCann delivers a lesson on what he can do ("straight-ahead jazz, post-bop, Latin, and creative improvised music") and how he can do it ("gentle nylon acoustic guitar sounds to sinewy and intricate jazz guitar runs to roots-of-grunge Jimi Hendrix-inspired hooting"). Even so, he often yields the spotlight to his band, especially saxophonist John O'Gallagher and pianist Mike Holober -- also sidemen skilled at making their leaders look good. The only nick is that the eclecticism leaves you without a thematic thread or a good sense of where he wants to go -- although that assumption may merely be our problem. B+(***)

Fred Fried: The Wisdom of the Notes (2006, Ballet Tree): He plays a nylon 7-string guitar, folowing the model of George Van Eps. Just bass and drums serves him well, delivering an elegant low key guitar album. B+(**)

Stephan Crump: Rosetta (2005 [2006], Papillon Sounds): Another low key guitar album -- even more so because the leader plays bass, and nobody plays drums. The guitar is acoustic by Liberty Ellman and/or electric by Jamie Fox. B+(*)

John Taylor: Angel of the Presence (2004 [2006], CAM Jazz): Piano trio, with Palle Danielsson and Martin France. I associate Taylor with Kenny Wheeler -- they both have played extensively with the British avant-garde, but tend toward more moderate engagements on their own, or together. This one struck me as exemplary on first listen, but shaded back a bit into the ordinary at spots. B+(***)

Lynne Arriale Trio: Live (2005 [2006], In+Out/Motema): Of all the recent piano trios I like -- Anders Aarum, Dave Burrell, Frank Hewitt, Enrico Pieranunzi, John Taylor, I'm probably leaving someone out -- this strikes me as the strongest crossover prospect. Part of this is that she picks standards that are recognizable and easy to hook into: "Iko Iko" and "Come Together" are two pop songs here, with "Bemsha Swing" and "Seven Steps to Heaven" working the jazz tradition the same way. Her originals, at least here, tend to be genre studies -- "Braziliana," "Flamenco." And she plays with them much like you expect jazz to work, tearing the songs down, rearranging them, teasing new melodies offset from the old. Or I should say they: Jay Anderson and Steve Davis have played in this trio for over a decade now, and the tightness pays off. Recorded at a jazz festival in Germany, with a matching DVD for the audio CD. I actually watched -- or mostly listened to -- the DVD for once. One thing I was struck by was how often all three played with eyes closed. B+(***)

Vision Volume 3 (2003 [2005], Arts for Art): Excerpts from the 2003 Vision Festival, which William Parker and Patricia Nicholson organize each year. I've had this on the shelf a long time, figuring that this was one case where I wanted to take a look at the DVD before signing off on the CD, but never finding the time or inclination to do so. Finally took a look at it today. It's poorly shot and badly edited, with lots of double exposure shots. The sound is sometimes out of sync, and there is a formatting problem that keeps it from returning to the menu after playing a section. On the other hand, the dance pieces by Nicholson and Maria Mitchell (accompanied by Kali Z. Fasteau) lose out otherwise, and seeing helps explain Joseph Jarman's two-horn act. Otherwise, a mixed bag: the experiments at best suggest directions to follow further, and the variety ends them as quickly as it moves past ones that are less interesting. B+(**)

Kali Z. Fasteau/Kidd Jordan: People of the Ninth: New Orleans and the Hurricane 2005 (2005 [2006], Flying Note): Presumably Jordan makes his living trad jazz back home in New Orleans, but driven away by the flood, he's become the Crescent City's unofficial ambassador to New York's jazz underground. A good record with familiar faces William Parker and Hamid Drake resulted -- the Kidd was on his best behavior and the tag team was typically brilliant. Here Jordan helps to steady Kali Z's inveterate eclecticism, providing a consistent sonic center for her piano, cello, and soprano sax. Drummer Michael T.A. Thompson's name didn't fit the spine, but he referees here, and switches to balafon for a duet with Kali's nai flute -- the most attractive cut here. B+(**)

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood: Out Louder (2006, Indirecto): MMW did a credible job of updating '60s soul jazz organ combos to the techno era, but after a decade-plus they wandered off into spinoffs and solo projects, letting their main ride coast. Scofield's done his share of coasting as well, adding bright splashes of guitar to other folks' albums while his own grow empty and listless. So this seems like an ideal pairing, a useful jolt for all concerned. And to some extent it is, but I wonder about their Beatles cover, "Julia" -- is it an off note, or a necessary change of pace that just comes too late? B+(*)

Billy Stein Trio: Hybrids (2005 [2006], Barking Hoop): He's a guitarist no one would have ever heard of had Kevin Norton not urged him into the studio. He played with Norton and Sam Furnace back in the '70s, but with endless refinement this is his debut. He works in subtle harmonic shadings rather than the melodic lines that dominate the craft, so this tends to vanish in its subtleties. But he gets exceptionally sympathetic support from drummer Rashid Bakr and bassist Reuben Radding -- the latter a near-perfect match. B+(***)

Frank Hewitt: Fresh From the Cooler (1996 [2006], Smalls): Hewitt was a bebop pianist who almost slipped through 66 years of life without leaving a trace. But he built a cult during an eight year residency at Smalls jazz club, inspiring a label to no small degree dedicated to his legacy. This makes four posthumous albums, with more on the shelf -- at least one more from this date, a trio with Ari Roland and Jimmy Lovelace. The songs are jazz standards, but there's nothing overly familiar about them -- even "Cherokee" and "Monk's Mood" skirt the melodies for hidden nuances. A-

Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar): Nothing for ten years, then he repeats a scam he pulled twenty years ago with Opening the Caravan of Dreams: launching a new label with a live album named for the label, or vice versa. Seems cheap, but when sounding like no one else has been your shtick for fifty years, absence makes his returns sound even fresher, and live heightens the suspense of his inventions. Actually, he's changed little over the years, still pouring out the same sour, shrill, piercing notes. What's new here is his use of two bassists, which keeps the contrast between Greg Cohen plucking and Tony Falanga bowing in the same register. It also doubles the chaos, which is what Ornette thrives on. A

Florian Weber/Jeff Denson/Ziv Ravitz: Minsarah (2006, Enja/Justin Time): A piano trio, a bit more conventional than E.S.T., but similar in touch, feel, dynamics. Minsarah is probably meant as a group name -- i.e., it will probably recur on subsequent records. Bassist Denson and drummer Ravitz write, only slightly outnumbered by the pianist's compositions. B+(**)

Bang on a Can/Don Byron: A Ballad for Many (2004-06 [2006], Cantaloupe): Effectively, this is Bang on a Can plays Byron, with the clarinettist supervising but only making only a brief cameo. There is still some clarinet, by Evan Ziporyn, but piano and strings are more dominant, and they give the compositions a chunky, clunky feel. "Eugene" was written for a silent Ernie Kovacs piece. "The Red-Tailed Angels" was a soundtrack for a documentary on the Tuskegee Airmen. Both lose their utilitarianism in this chamber music setting. On the other hand, the band sharpens up the angles, giving this an edge that would be obtrustive for a soundtrack. Still, it sounds euroclassical to me, a sort of third stream backwash, where conservatory-trained jazz musicians return to the roost. B

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Nagoya: Maru (2006, Bakamo): Probably the pick of the four Fujii big bands, even though she only conducts, leaving the orchestra without her explosive piano. But the arrangements gain along the way. The mountains of brass move nimbly, the soloists squawk amiably, and guitarist Yasuhiro Usul gets some well-used space. Much good humor, almost corny in spots. In many ways this is more remarkable than the Junk Box record, which I picked over it -- not least because it was easier to grasp and I settled on it first. If Basie's big band was atomic, this one's thermonuclear. B+(***)

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe: Kobe Yee!! (2006, Crab Apple): Comparably loud to the Nagoya outfit, especially with Fujii playing piano here, and similar in other respects, but not as consistently interesting or as humorous. I wonder whether the horn blares in the second cut cry out "Batman!" in Japan like they do here -- at least for reviews of a certain age. B+(*)

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo: Live!! (2006, Libra): I hate to admit this -- it runs counter to my sense of how the world should work, and especially to how I want to do my job -- but the DVD saved the bacon here. It helps to be able to map sounds to the fifteen faces squeezed onto a small-looking stage. The sheer amount of paper on the stands in front of all the musicians and their concentration in following it all speaks volumes about how all this noise is assembled. It also let me note some uncredited flute-like instruments Kunihiro Izumi used for a solo, and seeing often helps clarify bass and drums. But one shouldn't get carried away: the music itself is often on a cusp between interesting and annoying. While focus helps tilt it over the top, I can't get all that excited about music that makes me work so hard. But I did find the DVD take of "Bennie's Waltz" exhilarating, and most of the time I had my head turned the other way. B+(*)

Territory Band-5: New Horse for the White House (2005 [2006], Okka Disk, 3CD): The third disc is a live concert at Donaueschingen of the first two discs' music. Given a little more budget, the logical thing would have been to provide it as a DVD, which might be as useful as the Fujii Tokyo one. I imagine the group more spread out and less tightly scripted, but with 12 musicians there tends to be a lot going on. Somehow I missed out on Territory Band-4, but the series as a whole has struck me out more often than not. This one strikes me as relatively solid, and offers some hope that the electronics will eventually pan out. Plenty of hot spots, just hard to follow, and there's a lot of it. B+(*)

Crooks in Suits

Stephen Labaton, in a front page Oct. 29 New York Times article ("Businesses Seek New Protection From Litigation") writes:

Frustrated with a recent round of laws and regulations that have been used to sue big companies and auditing firms, corporate America -- with the encouragement of the Bush administration -- is preparing to fight back.

Now that corruption cases like Enron and WorldCom are falling out of the news, two influential industry groups with close ties to administration officials are hoping to swing the regulatory pendulum in the opposite direction. The groups are drafting proposals to provide broad new protections to corporations and accounting firms from criminal cases brought by federal and state prosecutors as well as a stronger shield against civil lawsuits from investors.

Although the details are still being worked out, the groups' proposals aim to limit the liability of accounting firms for the work they do on behalf of clients, to force prosecutors to target individual wrongdoers rather than entir ecompanies, and to scale back shareholder lawsuits.

The groups also hope to reduce what they see as some burdens imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act landmark post-Enron legislation adopted in 2002. The law, which placed significant new auditing and governance requirements on companies, gave broad discretion for interpretion to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

To alleviate concerns that the new Congress may not adopt the proposals -- regardless of which party holds power in the legislative branch next year -- many are being tailored so that they could be adopted through rulemaking by the S.E.C. and enforcement policy changes at the Justice Department.

The first thing that struck me here is how prevalent the defense impulse is among the rich and powerful. No sooner had the Busheviks seized power than they started barricading themselves against the long reach of international law. Back in early 2001 the prospect of having their sorry asses hauled forth to the Hague had much the same hypothetical air, but five years later one thing we can say for sure is that exemption from ICC review hasn't made us less likely to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity. The threat of prosecution may not be the ideal way to encourage good behavior, but replacing it with indemnity -- all other factors remaining equal -- is damn sure likely to have the opposite effect.

My second thought was how typical this approach seems in an era where appearance is valued way above reality -- mostly because it's so much easier to fake appearance. What Enron and WorldCom did was actually something almost universal in the corporate world: they attempted to construct a façade that appeared even more successful than they actually were. Everyone does that, and it works as long as nobody looks too close at what's being covered up. So the idea here is to make it harder to look, to reduce the motivations for looking, and to reduce the risks if anyone still bothers. Only in a world where appearances are everything would anyone even suggest such a thing. But that's increasingly the world corporate titans and politicians live in, along with their market researchers, PR flacks, lobbyists and lawyers.

My third thought concerns victims. Corporate fraud is not a victimless crime. The best you can say is that in most cases all the victims lose is money, but it's hard to argue that money is a matter of little importance to them. They are, after all, the investors who provide the capital that capitalism depends on. Laws against corporate fraud and malfeasance aren't generally intended to harrass corporate management, except insofar as they ensure that management is responsible to the investors. So this is not a question of the rich screwing the poor -- investors include more of the middle class than used to be the case, but as a class they are anything but poor. No doubt the Busheviks like this because they have the same relationship to the voters as the corporate managers have to the investors, including a relish for whatever they can get away with. But take away the control that protect investors and eventually you'll hollow out the whole system. Much like Bush's abuse of trust has hollowed out America's democracy.

None of this means that the regulatory expense of trying to keep publically traded corporations honest and forthright isn't a burden on business. But if it is so, it may be because we got off on the wrong foot by requiring that corporations hire the auditors who certify their accounts. The obvious alternative is for the government to hire the auditors, which would establish that they work for the public, not for the corporation. Such a case would eliminate the temptation on both sides to fudge the books -- accounting firms lose the incentive, and corporations lose the opportunity. The audits could then be further reviewed, with practices standardized in an open and transparent process, which would greatly improve the quality of information provided to investors. Better information should, in turn, lead to more productive investments, which ought to be a plus for the entire economy.

For many years this wasn't much of a problem, mostly because accounting firms were isolated from other business relationships and regarded their integrity as important. I recall reading a study back in the early 1980s that ranked professions according to integrity vs. corruption: accountants had by far the highest rating, and lawyers by far the lowest. This changed primarily because of deregulation of financial services combined with lax antitrust enforcement that allowed for industry consolidation. Those things happened because the lobbyists pushing them weighed in far more strongly than common sense that might have given us pause -- and because the politicians of all stripes learned to follow the money.

These new proposals are so contrary to what we know about the behavior of corporate management that they should be laughed all the way back to K Street. But the system is so totally corrupt that you can't be sure that anything ridiculous won't find a way to slip through the cracks. Still, there's more wrong here than mere corruption. Much as we've lost grip on the notion that there is a public interest distinct from some weighted sum of private interests, we've lost our to distinguish between systems and actors. Capitalism depends on accurate investment and price information and competitive markets, but corporations often gain their advantages by subverting just those things. The SEC exists to protect capitalism from corporations, but we've gotten more and more confused on this point, in large part because we assume that the corporations are capitalism. Similarly, we assume that the actors in top management are the corporations.

Same thing happens when we assume that the executive branch is the government, and that the president is the executive branch. This sort of association shifts power to the top, not least by weakening checks and balances everywhere else. That may seem to work if you have someone at the top who looks out for all the other interests in the system. That more or less happens some of the time -- more so in the business world where competition has a sobering effect. But we have many other examples of what happens when that sort of power is handed to scam artists -- just think of Enron under Ken Lay, and the US preidency under George W. Bush.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

F5 Record Report (#13: October 26, 2006)

I expected to be able to announce another F5 Record Report yesterday, but it hasn't appeared on the website yet. The usual link still gives you the October 19 column. In fact, the old issue cover is still up as well. I've written the editor, but haven't heard back. Nor have I dropped in on any of the usual places to check out the paper edition. Most likely just a temporary glitch, but I thought I'd be optimistic and file this notice anyway. Worse comes to worse you can still find the piece in my archives.

This week's lineup:

• Ben Allison: Cowboy Justice (Palmetto) A- [jazz]
• Beans: Only (Thirsty Ear) B+ [rap]
• Nils Petter Molvaer: An American Compilation (Thirsty Ear) A- [jazz, electronica]
• Sir Douglas Quintet: Live From Austin TX (1981, New West) A- [rock]
• Ska Bonanza: The Studio One Ska Years (1961-65, Heartbeat, 2CD) A [reggae]
• Ion Petre Stoican: Sounds From a Bygone Age, Vol. 1 (1966-77, Asphalt Tango) A- [world]
• Texas Tornados: Live From Austin TX (1990, New West) B+ [country]
• Eri Yamamoto: Cobalt Blue (Thirsty Ear) B+ [jazz]

Thirsty Ear got a cluster of interesting albums in. The late Freddy Fender deserved a notice, and Doug Sahm is worth remembering too. Ska Bonanza and Stoican are recycled favorites. Allison intersected with my Jazz CG work, which has been dominating my time.

Handed another one in yesterday. As long as I'm stuck in jazz mode the F5 columns are stuck with retreads, although some of my recycling comes from drafts of future columns. That will start to change when I get past this Jazz CG cycle -- any day now.

PS: Turns out the numbering on the website column and in some past dispatches had slipped a notch. This is the 13th column.

Letter to publicists:

This week's F5 Record Report presumably has a record of interest to
you. F5 is a weekly entertainment tabloid distributed free here in
Wichita KS. I cover 6-8 records per week, sometimes recycling from
other columns. The following URL will get you the latest column,
and the "next article" links will cycle you back in time.

  http://www.f5wichita.com/mba.php?id=55

For more info, see:

  http://tomhull.com/ocston/music.php

The index by label:

  Asphalt Tango: Ion Petre Stoican
  Heartbeat: Ska Bonanza
  New West: Sir Douglas Quintet, Texas Tornados
  Palmetto: Ben Allison
  Thirsty Ear: Beans, Nils Petter Molvaer, Eri Yamamoto

Thanks for your interest and support.

Friday, October 27, 2006

Bush's Useful Idiots

Speaking yesterday of where conservatives went wrong, I thought I'd follow that up with a note on what happened to the liberals. Part of the incentive there was a Tony Judt piece called Bush's Useful Idiots, about the liberals who lined up in support of Bush's little war in Iraq and long war against Terror -- i.e., against anyone who rubs us the wrong way, and seems like easy pickings.

Judt is right to criticize those people, but I think he's a little confused about who they are, what they're up to, and why they're increasingly irrelevant. It's a common confusion, the consequence of a marriage of convenience between liberals and labor in the 1930s, which was remarkably successful for the Democrats -- the liberals much more so than labor or the left -- up to 1968. Since then both have faded, giving ground to the Republican alliance of potentially antagonistic right-wingers and a whole lot of apathy. The notion that liberal = left has been hammered home so hard by the right that most folks accept it even though it has little historical or ideological basis.

The key idea behind liberalism is belief in progress, which follows several vectors: toward individual liberty, scientific rationality, economic growth, internationalism, and globalization. Historically, conservatism was rooted in the aristocracy, while liberalism was the ideology of bourgeois revolution, although as history moves on conservatism adjusts to incorporate whoever's on top and wants to keep it that way. The left differs from liberalism in being more committed to equality and more inclined to act collectively, whereas liberalism is about individuals -- equal opportunity may be an ideal, but redistribution isn't of much interest to them, and is often seen as counterproductive.

The liberals' self-characterization as occupying a noble middle ground between left and right comes from their self-awareness that they are different from the left. The right, on the other hand, has no need for such distinctions, since both are seen as enemies -- especially once the right has co-opted a sizable chunk of liberal foreign policy. If you look back in American history, one thing you'll notice is that liberals have often been more aggressive in their foreign policy than conservatives -- the exceptions were the slaveholding South and the recent convergence of neoconservatives, militarists, and Christian crusaders. So it shouldn't be surprising that there is a segment of liberals willing and eager to promote the Bush agenda: these are people who see the projection of American power abroad as a progressive, rationalizing, liberalizing force, oblivious to whatever death and destruction is caused along the way. Such people are useful to Bush because they help camouflage the everyday corruption with high-minded rhetoric. Such people are idiots because war undermines liberty at home, which presumably is something that they as liberals are interested in as well.

On the other hand, as Judt points out, liberalism is slipping. There are many reasons for this, but the deepest is that the mass benefit of progress is diminishing and for many turning negative. The classic metaphor is that a rising tide lifts all boats -- that growth benefits most people even without attempting to equalize it. That assumes that there is more growth than inequality can usurp, and that's basically been untrue, at least in the US since around 1970. Without more growth liberalism can't deliver the material gains it depends on for popular support. That leaves it with a threadbare ideology -- the promise of something that it can't deliver. Of course, liberalism has other problems -- a reflexive distaste for the masses and a fondness for the use of force head up the list. And of course it's unfair: all conservatives have to do is keep the present system of inequity intact -- even though recently they've been paying dividends -- whereas progressives actually have to show some headway. But that's the deal they bit off back when it seemed to work.

The alternative to liberalism is a resurgence of the left. That's tough, given that at present the left is in even worse shape, at least in terms of popular political discourse, than liberalism is. But maybe a better answer can be found in some sort of synthesis of individual liberty and collective responsibility. Given the right these days, the rest of us are stuck in the same boat, so we have the need to form a common defense. But those liberals who cling to their faith in progressive war have no part to play. To Bush they may be merely useful idiots; to us they're remarkably dangerous morons.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Where the Right Went Wrong

David Brooks' sycophantic New York Times review of Andrew Sullivan's book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back has a background quote from Sullivan: "The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility, and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy." The interesting thing is that one item on that list doesn't fit with all the rest: that strong anti-Communist foreign policy. It's not that the rest of the list isn't opposed to Communism. It's that the rest of the list concerns local issues, with a strong bias toward individuals that limits the power of government.

The problem isn't opposition to Communism, which never was a domestic threat. The problem was taking that opposition worldwide: assuming that Communism anywhere in the world threatened us and our vital interests, and assuming that we had the right, responsibility, and power to defend all, or nearly all, other people against their own domestic threat of Communism. The latter, not without justice, was seen as a continuation of the Age of Empire that fitfully self-destructed in two world wars. Before WWII the US policy of isolationism -- which meant no military engagements abroad, not no business or diplomatic relationships -- was widely respected, but after the war, we changed, establishing for the first time a massive permanent military with global reach, capable of interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries. The Communists who had fought alongside us in WWII became our first enemies, followed by leftists of all stripes, independent nationalists, eventually even devout Muslims -- anyone who feared loss of their self-determination in a global culture of aggressive US capitalism. Ironically, all those enemies just fed the fear that made it possible for the US war machine to keep itself going -- even after the Communist bloc self-destructed, ceasing to be any sort of threat.

But that only begins to assess the impact of Sullivan's beloved "strong anti-Communist foreign policy": for every war abroad, there is a corresponding war at home. From the beginning we've been told that the only way we can lose in Iraq is if we lose our unity and will at home: that dissent is the enemy as much as the resistance in Iraq, that those who warned against wasting our soldiers' lives will be the ones responsible for their dying in vain. This coercive patriotism attacks our freedom more directly than our so-called enemies ever could. It builds up the repressive state against our personal interests. It costs us wealth, wastes our productivity, returns us the greater risks of living in a more hostile world.

It's worth noting that there are conservatives who believe in everything on Sullivan's list except the foreign policy -- the Libertarian Party, Republicans like Rep. Ron Paul, scholars like Andrew Bacevich. This list started with people who don't trust even right-thinking states -- who understand that power always attacks freedom. I can't tell from the review whether Sullivan -- early on an enthusiastic Iraq warmonger -- has even started to lose his faith in war, let alone the political force of repression, but he has at least come to recognize that Bush and his war have empowered some strange bedfellows for those conservatives naive enough to buy Bush's folk-art: specifically, a religious right that supports war abroad as part of a crusade to enforce moral order at home.

One thing that remains poorly understood is that anti-Communism doesn't just mean that you don't like Communism. Anti-Communism is an ideology in its own right: a weapon of the rich against the poor, the religious against the rational, the militarist against civil society. Those are the three prongs of Republican Party dogma, and have been so effectively sold that the so-called opposition party hardly ever questions any of them. So it's not surprising that a gasbag like Sullivan fell for the Party line. The question is whether he ultimately follows his hero Orwell into opposition against the new Stalinists. It sounds like thus far all he's trying to do is to offer them a new deal -- one they'll certainly refuse.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Birthday Dinner

Today's a break from the norm. Still listening to jazz records that may or may not be pick hit prospects, but not really trying to write about them today. I'll spend most of today cooking a rather extravagant dinner. The centerpiece is a rather ugly looking duck with head and toes intact. It's been drying out for a couple of days, and will go into the oven late this afternoon -- hopefully emerging as something resembling Peking Duck. Thought it would be nice to serve an elegant but simple Shark's Fin Soup with it, but I balked at $49 for the dried fin shreds. I've never done the duck before, but I've made the soup before, using canned shark fin that cost less than $10. Got some imitation shark fin -- a strange gelatin concoction -- but I'm not sure if it's worth using. Will have a few appetizers, ribs, wings, rice, eggplant and broccoli dishes, as well as the usual pancakes -- the one part of the spread that has me worried -- and a prefab cake for dessert.

This is the 2006 version of my birthday dinner. The first one I can recall was the night Bill Buckner blew the Series, but it really didn't become a tradition until a few years later. After I left Contex, I got together regularly with a couple of friends there. We often talked about food, and when my birthday came around I offered that the present that would make me happiest would be if I could cook for them. I cooked Chinese that night -- no longer recall just what, but it was a good deal more than tonight. Then each year after that, at least as long as I was in Boston, I did the same. I tried my hand at Indian and Turkish. The year I moved to New Jersey I did Indian again. Since moving back to Wichita, I've missed a couple of years, but have done Spanish and Thai. Last year I made feijoada -- one big dish rather than a lot of little ones. This year just started with the duck -- everything else is insurance if I screw that up.

Had to break to actually cook that dinner, so this part is afterwards. Didn't do the broccoli, which proved to be too much to handle too late. Did make something I forgot to list above: a salad with pork kidneys, tree ears and cucumber in a sesame sauce. Everything came out quite well, except for the frozen coconut cake -- my mother made a fabulous one, which I can do a pretty fair approximation of, but didn't want to put in the work this time. Probably a reasonable decision, given how much wear and tear everything else was. One thing that aging does is to test your faith in progress.

So another day, another year. This makes 56. It's been a rough one. But one thing I like about the birthday dinner ritual is that it shows it's still possible to accomplish something extraordinary, even if just for a moment.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Course Correction

The Wichita Eagle has an article today -- curiously not on the website -- about the White House's latest course correction ("Bush alters rhetoric on Iraq"):

The White House on Monday officially discarded "stay the course" as US policy in Iraq.

White House press secretary Tony Snow and presidential counselor Dan Bartlett disclosed the policy change, saying the shorthand description failed to "capture the dynamism" of the flexible US approach to security setbacks on the ground and the challenges of getting Iraqi authorities to control militias and quell sectarian bloodshed.

The announcement followed President Bush's weekend review of policy with his military commanders and follow-up meetings with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"What you have is not 'stay the course' but in fact a study in constant motion by the administration and by the Iraqi government -- and frankly also by the enemy," Snow said. "You constantly have to adjust to what the other side is doing."

Snow said Bush administration officials were abandoning the "stay-the-course" policy description because it "left the wrong impression about what was going on" and handed critics the opportunity to portray White House policies as inflexible.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry here. "Stay the course" was never more than a rhetorical weapon, underscoring Bush's constancy, purposefulness, moral clarity, blah blah blah, while tweaking the Democrats for their fickleness. It worked well enough, but it did have one flaw: it suggested that Bush knew where he was going, and that steadfastness would get him there. Well, so much for that -- another slogan mark smashed on the rocks of reality.

Still, it's unlikely that the new paradigm will square all that well either. One speechwriter's "dynamism" could just as well be described as squirming. And as any Republican could tell you, flexibility isn't something the US government is all that good at. But when you're groping for terms to describe cluelessness and chaos, it may be the best you can do. This is pseudo-news in that it doesn't seem to reflect any actual changes in US policies in Iraq. But it is portentous, or at least suggestive, that some sort of change is in the works. And that would be ominous, for as bad as they've been, flexibility in the service of desperate avoidance of defeat can lead to even worse things -- Cambodia is one example.

As it happens, after reading this piece, I went back to my current book, Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming, and found this little gem. This is in a discussion of the Dover PA school board's creationism. Goldberg is interviewing a local Baptist preacher and his wife, and they wind up defending their anti-Darwin position to pointing to the Iraq controversy -- don't know when this interview took place, but obviously it was after Bush invaded and well before now (p. 105):

But neither Shirley nor Michael Johnson had any doubt that evolution isn't true. I asked why they thought mainstream scientists were misrepresenting the research. "Once truth leaks out, its powerful," Johnson said. "So you've got to cloud, you've got to make sure there's a lot of layers of lies and cover-ups in order to keep confusion reigning and misrepresentations occurring."

Why would scientists want to be so duplicitous? Johnson answered with an analogy. "You see this principle worked out at times, like with the Iraq war." Adopting a whiny, mock-outraged voice, he said, "'There's all these people dying every day! My gosh, we've got to get out of there!'"

His voice returning to normal, he said that, in fact, "there's been the least amount of casualties in the history of warfare. This is world-war terrorism, they're shipping people in from all over the place, insurgents they're called, to go against the coalition of armies -- and there's another thing, some of the politicians will try to convince people we're going this war alone, that this is unilateral war. No. We have about thirty-three, thirty-four countries that have joined us. . . . Why do people play with figures like that?

"It's because they have something to protect," he concluded. "They don't like the idea that America is setting up democracy and becoming more powerful in the world."

As Goldberg concludes: "You can't argue with that kind of logic."

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Music: Current count 12485 [12470] rated (+15), 920 [926] unrated (-6). Working on Jazz Consumer Guide. Honest! Trying to, anyway. Not done yet, and not much to show for last week. This week looks to be bad too. Just awful. Don't know what happens after that.

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 12)

Lots of disruptions last week -- some expected, some surprises, but the bottom line was that I got nothing done on this for three days. That undid my certainty that I would get this Jazz Consumer Guide column finished this week. I did come close -- so close that I seriously considered keeping this open another day, or at least into the late hours, to see if I could finish it. Or at least to settle the last prospecting questions. But it's possible that my time is going to be mostly wrecked through Wednesday, so I figure it's best to run one more week and get it all tightened down.

One thing that did happen this past week was that I got hit with a lot of exceptionally good records. I haven't settled on my pick hits yet, but I have way too many A-list records for one column, as well as the usual surplus of honorable mentions. Should have closed down a month ago when this was more manageable. Still don't know what happens when I hand this in, but we'll open that bottle when it's ready. One more week and that's it, I swear.

The David S. Ware Quartet: BalladWare (1999 [2006], Thirsty Ear): This was recorded in summer 1999, after Ware. Don't know what the details were, why it's being released now, why it wasn't released then, but it fits in between Surrendered and the two albums Ware released on AUM Fidelity. Seven songs: three standards, four originals, including "Dao" and "Godspelized" -- album title songs from Ware's earthshaking DIW period. These are measured only by Ware's previous standards -- muffled perhaps, never pushed to extremes, but still embroiled in deep tension. Pianist Matthew Shipp is notable throughout, especially on "Godspelized." [A-]

Rudresh Mahanthappa: Codebook (2006, Pi): Whereas Mother Tongue looked to natural languages for tricks of transformation, this one moves on to ciphers and encodings, as when the group members sign their names in Morse code. Either way, the alto saxophonist's true Rosetta Stone is John Coltrane, and what lifts him above dozens of others is his association with pianist Vijay Iyer, who starkly frames his music, and who picks up the place when he lays out. Still, if that was all it took, you'd expect more from Raw Materials, a duo album from earlier this year that never quite stuck together. A-

John Taylor: Angel of the Presence (2004 [2006], CAM Jazz): English pianist. Been around since 1969, but mostly in the background, working with the likes of John Surman (contributes a quote on the back cover), Kenny Wheeler (wrote two songs), Jan Garbarek, and Norma Winstone. Always seemed like a good guy, but I never checked out his own records before. So this piano trio, with Palle Danielsson on bass and Martin France on drums, caught me by surprise. Fully engaged, relentlessly pushing both the instrument and the ideas. [A-]

Joan Hickey: Between the Lines (2006, Origin): Despite the song selection -- I can't say as I've ever wanted to hear "Black Magic Woman" or "Bridge Over Troubled Water" again -- this is an exceptionally engaging middle-of-the-road jazz album. She's a Chicago pianist, working since 1980, but as far as I can tell only has one previous album. This drops down to a trio, as on the Bud Powell closer, which she explains thus: "Everybody got to play some bebop!" But most cuts are amply filled out with Tito Carillo's trumpet and/or John Wojciechowski's sax. [B+(***)]

Mike Holober: Wish List (2004-05 [2006], Sons of Sound): A pianist I've been consistently impressed by, although I'm a little slow on the uptake here. Wolfgang Muthspiel's guitar gives this a shiny allure -- always good to hear him. I'm less sure about Tim Ries, credited with "saxophones" -- something for further study. [B+(*)]

Scotty Hard's Radical Reconstructive Surgery (2004 [2006], Thirsty Ear): AMG files him under rap, but most of the credits on Scott Harding's resume are for producer, engineer, and/or mixing. His credit here is for drum machines, samplers, optigan, and percussion. Keyboardits John Medeski and Matthew Shipp get second billing, followed by William Parker, Nasheet Waits, DJ Olive, and Mauricio Takara. Basically, this is what you get when you shuffle Shipp's jazztronica with Medeski's organ grind. [B+(**)]

One More: The Summary: Music of Thad Jones, Vol. 2 (2006, IPO): Another one, with the same all-star band as the first round: brother Hank on piano; Jimmy Owens on Thad's trumpet; John Mosca on trombone; Benny Golson, James Moody, Frank Wess, and Eddie Daniels on sax, flute and/or clarinet; Richard Davis on bass; Kenny Washington on drums. These aren't session scraps. They were recorded in a second session three months after the first, but as is often the case with volume twos, the concept has lost a bit of its edge, and the songbook may have slipped a bit. Thad was a bebopper who nonetheless thought that big bands were the natural forum for the music, so this nine-piece group is about right. After I played this, I noticed that the street date isn't until Feb. 13, 2007, so I guess I jumped the gun on this one. B+(**)

Boxhead Ensemble: Nocturnes (2006, Atavistic): Don't know much about this group, other than that the central figure is guitarist Michael Krassner. The other figure above the "with" is cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. Below the "with," as best I can make out given the badly registered pink type on the tan background, is someone on prepared piano and someone else on percussion -- both limited contributions, but plusses nonetheless. Sonic wallpaper -- tasteful, fractally intriguing, barely on the substantial side of ambient. B+(**)

Sonny Rollins: Sonny, Please (2005 [2006], Doxy): Having played out his contract at Milestone, Rollins is a free agent now, which for jazz legends these days means he's rolling out his own label. He's been selling this on his website for a while, so presumably that's where to go. Press release says it's been licensed to JVC in Japan and Universal in US and Europe, and they'll roll out their "traditional CD release" on Jan. 23, 2007, but will have a digital release on Nov. 21. The album holds no real surprises: the six piece band is more help than he needs but not good enough to compete, although there's nothing wrong with spots of Bobby Broom guitar or swashes of Clifton Anderson trombone; on the other hand, Rollins sounds fabulous, which is all you really need to know. A-

Steve Lacy Quintet: Esteem (1975 [2006], Atavistic): Following Lacy's death, his widow Irene Aebi started sorting through over 300 private recordings for a series called "The Leap: Steve Lacy Cassette Archives." This is Volume 1, and it's easy to see why it leapt to the head of the list. It is raw and deliciously noisy, old sounding, yet so far out it's more shocking now than when it came out. Steve Potts' alto sax provides a second horn. Kent Carter's bass is plug ugly, and Kenneth Tyler is credited with percussion because he's hitting things beyond his drum kit. But the revelation is Aebi herself. I can't stand her singing -- if you go through my database you may notice that Lacy's records get docked about a notch for each song she sings on -- but she sticks to cello and violin here, and you can hear why he fell in love with her. The notes say "The Uh Uh Uh" was Lacy's tribute to Jimi Hendrix. I'll have to listen again to see what that means. A-

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further listening the first time around.

Patricia Barber: Mythologies (2006, Blue Note): Most of the song titles I recognize from Greek mythology, not that I know or care much about that. "Whiteworld" has been to fit the series, and remains most striking. Other than "The Hours" at the end, which the chorus runs away with, the music is striking, and the vocals distinctive. Don't know what it means. B+(**)

Dave Holland Quintet: Critical Mass (2005 [2006], Dare2/Sunnyside): My idea of doing a bass special with Allison and Lane as pick hits and Holland bring up the rear is officially dead: this has managed to escape the dudhouse. Holland just has too much firepower and too many options in his book to completely slip up. Two cuts are choice here, excepting the closing bars of the latter -- "Lucky Seven" and "Full Circle" -- and it's Robin Eubanks on trombone who put them over the top, although he couldn't have done it without the leader's bass moving things along. You don't hear much trombone period these days, let alone a guy who can run off with the lead without even cheating like J.J. used to do. Vibraphonist Steven Nelson is another guy here who plays a strong hand from a weak suit. Drummer Nate Smith can jump in and out of time with the best of them. And Chris Potter wouldn't be so overrated if he wasn't so damn talented. What threw me off at first is shrinking, but still present -- little bits that seem off color or out of place, plus the suspicion that this is just too damn fancy. But I guess those who can like to flaunt it. B+(***)

Club D'Elf: Now I Understand (1998-2006 [2006], Accurate): Never did manage to figure out who's who and what's what, other than that bassist Mike Rivard is at the center of this amorphuous group and that damn near anyone is likely to show up as a guest. The machine beats recall Nils Petter Molvaer circa Khmer, but conventional drums also appear, probably Erik Kerr. While Rivard's bass grooves are critical, they tend to be thickened up with keyboards -- mostly John Medeski -- and turntables -- someone d/b/a Mister Rourke. Plenty of guitars, too. There's also a strain of mostly middle eastern exotica, which oudist Brahim Fribgane has something to do with. Several songs have vocals -- Jennifer Jackson's "A Toy for a Boy" is a marginal novelty, but the kiddie sample reggae romp "Just Kiddin'" is on my first ever year-end song list. There are also skits and raps, and if MF Doom isn't in the house, his doppelganger ist. If none of this sounds much like jazz, that's just too bad. It doesn't sound like world-techno-fusion either, because they fuck with it like jazzbos junk up pop songs. Besides, Mat Maneri's on the guest list. A-

Meredith d'Ambrosio: Wishing on the Moon (2004 [2006], Sunnyside): Seems like a fine example of what a jazz singer should be -- her voice fine tuned and personable, an innate musicality to everything she does, presence, nuance, the skill and control to play, the discipline not to get off on pointless tangents. All that puts her ahead of about 85% of the field without breaking a sweat. She has a dozen-plus albums, but this is the only one I've heard. I'd be surprised if it wasn't typical. B+(**)

George Lewis: Sequel (For Lester Bowie) (2004 [2006], Intakt): The most common instrument here is "laptop," followed by "electronics," with an assist from DJ Mutamassik's turntables. It's hard to listen to this sort of thing without thinking back to George Russell's electronic sonatas, in part because the random drift they share leaves one's mind plenty of time to wander. Lewis is a trombonist and I'd love to hear him play some -- it's the best part of this album, although the percussive later parts of the 33:46 title piece are marvelous. This doesn't strike me as any closer to Bowie than Homage to Charles Parker was to Bird -- in particular, it lacks the trumpeter's exuberance and folly. On the other hand, if you can give it the attention it doesn't demand, like Russell at his most abstract this offers some remarkable collages of sound. B+(***)

The Vandermark 5: A Discontinuous Line (2005 [2006], Atavistic): The initial effect of Fred Lonberg-Holm's cello replacing Jeb Bishop's trombone is to move the group from tight horn arrangements back into rough and ready free jazz. The other change is that the saxes have moved down a notch -- Dave Rempis to tenor and Ken Vandermark to baritone -- filling the bottom Bishop vacated while kicking up the dirt. The result is a slimmed down, fired up Territory Band, a wild west bar band for bruised brains. A-

Marcus Strickland: Quartets: Twi-Life (2005-06, Strick Muzik, 2CD): Minor bookkeeping change here: I've decided to treat "Quartets" at part of the title, not part of the artist designation. Makes more sense that way, even though the typography suggests otherwise. Two discs, two distinct quartets. Both have Marcus on tenor and soprano sax and his twin E.J. on drums. One has piano and acoustic bass, the other guitar and electric bass. The latter has two advantages: one is that guitarist Lage Lund makes much more of a contribution than pianist Robert Glasper; the other is that the electric bass seems to free up the sax, although Marcus is voluble and pungent on both discs. He's one of the brightest mainstream tenor men I've heard in years, and his brother is equally terrific. Grade tracks the weaker disc, which is in the ground rules, but the stronger one isn't all that far ahead. B+(***)

Junk Box: Fragment (2004 [2006], Libra): Satoko Fujii's four new big band albums, like Ken Vandermark's recent pair of two-disc Territory Band sets, are overwhelming: in such big universes, anything can happen, everything does, and fatigue sets in long before one can sort out so many marginal treats. At least with this trio you can keep the players straight. She pounds out thick piano chords, while sidekick Natsuki Tamura's surly trumpet adds tension and growl, and drummer John Hollenbeck referees. This is basic Fujii -- everything else is elaboration. A-

The Andy Biskin Quartet: Early American: The Melodies of Stephen Foster (2000 [2006], Strudelmedia): The old melodies benefit from oldish instrumentation -- despite its recent comeback, Biskin's clarinet still sounds like a refugee from the depression, especially when paired with trombone or tuba; guitarist Pete McCann resorts to banjo on occasion, and drummer John Hollenbeck takes the most diehard Foster melody on jingly bells. Still, everything here is more than a little bent. No point making a jazz record unless you take some liberties. B+(***)

Andy Biskin: Trio Tragico (2005 [2006], Strudelmdia): Biskin's clarinet is paired with Dave Ballou's trumpet, more often in unison than not, which keeps the focus on the tricky compositions. The third member is bassist Drew Gress, who adds depth without having much effect on the general drift. This lack of democracy can get tedious over the long haul, and this does run long. But it's interesting when it's working. B+(*)

Geri Allen: Timeless Portraits and Dreams (2006, Telarc, 2CD): Here she moves beyond her initial interest in Mary Lou Williams to something like the court historian of Afro-American musical culture. She pays tribute to Charlie Parker, Billy Holiday, and Louis Armstrong's better half, but the center of gravity falls on gospel, with Carmen Lundy, George Shirley, and the Atlanta Jazz Chorus providing most of the dead weight. This isn't all old or backwards, but seeking respectability traces just one thread in a struggle for freedom and equality that contributed much else to both. She has great skill and learning, considerable pride in her accomplishments. In some ways it's a mark of her success that I find this so thoroughly uninteresting. The thick frosting of sanctimoniousness doesn't help either. B-

Sathima Bea Benjamin: Song Spirit (1963-2002 [2006], Ekapa): Forty years and an extraordinary run of pianists for the South African singer, more at home in the jazz tradition -- "Lush Life" and "Careless Love" are choice cuts -- than in her Africa-themed originals, which tend to be anthemic. Anyone tempted by Madeleine Peyroux should give her a chance. B+(***)

Saturday, October 21, 2006

The Paradoxes of Occupation

Michael Schwartz had a piece at TomDispatch describing some sort of US military analysis, published in Military Review, of what went wrong in Iraq. The analysis listed nine "paradoxes" of counterinsurgency. For more details, see the piece; for here I'll just list them, and add a comment at the end.

1. The more you protect your force, the less secure you are.
2. The more force you use, the less effective you are.
3. The more successful counterinsurgency is, the less force that can be used and the more risk that must be accepted.
4. Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.
5. The best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot.
6. The host nation doing something tolerably is sometimes better than our doing it well.
7. If a tactic works this week, it will not work next week; if it works in this province, it will not work in the next.
8. Tactical success guarantees nothing.
9. Most of the important decisions are not made by generals.

Some of these are oddly phrased -- #3 might make as much sense if it started "the more successful insurgency is," while the point of #7 is not so much that workable tactics will fail in the future as that they cannot be expected to continue to work. Still, these are paradoxes only if you assume that force is somehow a decisive strategy. The situation becomes much clearer if you recognize the following:

1. The insurgency always plays offense and counterinsurgency can only play defense. The offense can win, give up, or keep fighting. The defense does not have the option of winning: the best it can do is to negotiate a compromise which entices the offense to give up.
2. The insurgency will halt or continue to fight depending on the degree of political support it receives from the local population. As such, the counterinsurgency's best option is to offer the local population a deal that satisfies enough that they see no advantage in supporting the insurgency.
3. Violence diminishes the credibility of those responsible, while reinforcing the political instincts of the victims.

The assumption here is that the utter destruction of the insurgency is either impossible or politically unacceptable. An exception might be a small group of foreign insurgents with no local support -- Zarqawi might have qualified had there been no other insurgency in Iraq, but that was never the case. Once an insurgency does become established with widespread popular support, its utter destruction approaches an act of genocide, which at present is still politically unacceptable.

Put these points together and what you find is that the US political struggle was lost once a fledgling Iraqi resistance was able to goad the US military into flagrant and reckless repression. Nir Rosen's In the Belly of the Green Bird provides an account of exactly that when a small group in Anbar province attacked US forces with the intent of becoming martyrs. The US was susceptible to such provocations for two reasons: one was that Bush's political aims in Iraq didn't allow for a political compromise acceptable to the Iraqi people; the other was that the US for many reasons was biased to respond to any attack with overwhelming force.

By resorting to force, the US showed that its interests would not be favorable to the Iraqi people. The US lost its moral standing, and lost any chance of establishing political favor. The only recourse at that time would have been to advance a more generous compromise, but instead Bush clung to his "course," calculating that more force might do the trick. That, too, failed, and further iterations have continued to fail, ever worse.

I've been reading Mark Kurlansky's remarkable book, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, so its lessons are especially fresh in my mind. One of those lessons is:

A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.

Admittedly, no one would ever argue that the US military occupation of Iraq was ever nonviolent, but many of its articulated goals were. In attempting to counter the insurgency by escalating its violence, the US turned those goals into lies, which finished them off, leaving no moral cloak, just brute force. That in and of itself might have been no worse than what Saddam Hussein had done, but the US had the further advantage of being an alien power assaulting people in their own homes. It should be easy to see why that didn't work.

Friday, October 20, 2006

F5 Record Report (#12: October 19, 2006)

The F5 posts are making me dizzy, given that I have to turn next week's in about about the same time I have last week's posting to report. One thing that strikes me as curious is the Google ad box, which reads: "Cool Jewish Music/Kabbalah Music/Jewish Blues/3rd Stream Music/Avant Garde Music." Someone's inference engine is flipping out. But then I got a note from Risa Mickenberg, the Jesus H Christ chanteuse, who looked at my columns and wrote, "From F5, Wichita looks like a very nice place." Always good to confound expectations.

This week's lineup:

• Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra: MTO Volume 1 (Sunnyside) A- [jazz]
• Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (Verve Forecast) B+ [rock]
• Night in Tunisia: The Very Best of Dizzy Gillespie (1946-49, Bluebird/Legacy) A [jazz]
• The Essential Ronnie Milsap (1973-88, RCA Nashville/Legacy, 2CD) B- [country]
• Sam Moore: Overnight Sensation (Rhino) B [r&b]
• The Essential Charley Pride (1966-84, RCA Nashville/Legacy, 2CD) A- [country]
• Sex Mob: Sexotica (Thirsty Ear) B+ [jazz]

Three Steven Bernstein records this week. Had I been faster on the uptake, I could have included Baby Loves Jazz (Verve), which is a solid B+ -- maybe better if you aren't as settled in adulthood as I've become.

Letter to publicists:

This week's F5 Record Report presumably has a record of interest to
you. F5 is a weekly entertainment tabloid distributed free here in
Wichita KS. I cover 6-8 records per week, sometimes recycling from
other columns. The following URL will get you the latest column,
and the "next article" links will cycle you back in time.

  http://www.f5wichita.com/mba.php?id=55

For more info, see:

  http://tomhull.com/ocston/music.php

The index by label:

  Sony/BMG (Legacy): Dizzy Gillespie, Ronnie Milsap, Charley Pride
  Sunnyside: Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra
  Thirsty Ear: Sex Mob
  Universal (Verve): Leonard Cohen
  WEA (Rhino): Sam Moore

 Thanks for your interest and support.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Recipe for Disaster

I saw Richard Haass -- currently of the Council on Foreign Relations ("a bipartisan think tank"), formerly of the Bush and Clinton State Departments, before that on the previous Bush's National Security Council -- interviewed on one of last night's news programs. He was saying that the current situation in Iraq was a total disaster, and that the only path left for the US was to try to extricate ourselves from the country. He said that everyone who knows anything -- it's still easy to come up with a list not covered by that qualification, but never mind -- agrees. But when he was asked why Iraq had come to this sorry state, he retreated and mumbled something about how Iraq is such a fractious, divided society. But that's true about many nations. What's unique about Iraq is the US occupation. The occupation kills people directly, and kills more people through a armed resistance that it justifies. Moreover, the violence of the occupation and resistance provides cover and opportunity for much more Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence.

I suppose Haass may have a problem admitting this because he had a small role in creating it. But he needs to recognize that by not facing up to the facts, he's helping to keep the killing going by letting us continue to think that we're something other than responsible. The truly blind may even conclude that we can still help fix things. Billmon is at least more forthright:

The point deserves frequent repetition: We did this. We caused it. We're not just callous bystanders to genocide, as in Rwanda, but the active ingredient that made it possible. We turned Iraq into a happy hunting ground for Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. If Iraq is now a failed state, it's because of our failures.

I'm reluctant to use the word genocide myself, partly because the word implies a deliberate plan to kill a population carried out on a wide scale by a competent authority. Rather, what we have is a civil war with at least four sides and possibly more, resulting in incidents of small-scale genocidal targeting among much broader relatively indiscriminate slaughter. The numbers add up -- the Lancet figure of 650,000 comes to 2.6% of Iraq's population. But it doesn't have to be genocide to get numbers like that: old fashioned war suffices, and is reason enough to stand for stopping it. And whatever it is, this point is key: to stop it you have to start by disengaging the force that started it in the first place. That should be relatively easy because the US has no business being there in the first place.

William Pfaff has a short piece in the Oct. 19, 2006 New York Review of Books that explains what the US did after 9/11 and why it has been so disastrous.

On and after September 11, 2001, I wrote a series of columns examining who those people were who had attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and why they were determined to battle the power and influence of the United States in the Mideast -- particularly in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden's home, and location of the Islamic holy places.

They were religious radicals and also utopians, having no chance of successin recreating in our day their (largely imaginary) vision of the Arab world during the years when the followers of the Prophet Muhammad came out of Arabia into present-day Iraq, seized Syria and Jerusalem from the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire, then conquered Egypt and Persia, and created a Mediterranean empire eventually reaching the Pyrenees and Vienna. [ . . . ]

One of my readers (in The Chicago Tribute) angrily e-mailed me in September 2001 to demand why I was going on about the historical and cultural background. "Are you trying to rationalize the murder of 6,000 innocent civilians?" he asked (the actual number of casualties was still unclear). He said he didn't care who the terrorists were or why they did what they did. He just wanted revenge. If I tried to explain who they were, I must be on their side.

This was a comprehensible, but destructive, reaction, because it was the White House reaction as well, sending the government off on the course that five years later has produced wars the United States is losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon, it may be, in Iran and even Syria.

My correspondent in Chicago did not want to know who these people were, and to judge from their actions, neither did the Bush White House. Yet the United States government knew a great deal about al-Qaeda -- which, after all, was the offshoot of a CIA initiative in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. [ . . . ]

This knowledge was apparently of no interest to the White House. Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, for their part, already knew that they wanted to seize Iraq, for reasons yet to be acknowledged. A realistic assessment of the terrorism threat [ . . . ] would have presented it as of modest and potentially containable scale, as has proven to be the case.

President Bush and Karl Rove, his propaganda packager, preferred to global cold war model -- the "long war" -- capable of being presented to the American public as a communism-like "struggle for the world," so as to mobilize Americans around George Bush, wearing his flight jacket.

In other words, Bush and his supporters eschewed understanding on the suspicion that it might have warned them against satisfying their emotional commitment to action. They were disinterested in reasons and oblivious to consequences. It turns out that repeating history is not the worst that can come from ignorance of history. They got away with this, for a short time anyway, because decisive action struck a responsive chord in the American public. I suspect that's a human trait that goes back to prehistoric times: when attacked, rally around the guy who acts decisively, like he knows what he's doing. With the proper prep, Bush is very good at acting like that. Too bad he's clueless. Too bad he's a jerk.

All that should have been obvious by noon on 9/11, but we let ourselves be prodded and bullied into a self-sustaining war frenzy. I remember watching people slog across Grand Army Plaza -- shocked, annoyed, but calm, knowing that they had seen the worst and were now safely out of its range. So why were people panicking in Paducah? We were not only prodded to war; we were bullied against reason. Increasingly you can see how poorly those instincts served us. But Billmon is right to point out that our folly has served the Iraqis even worse. He quotes Riverbend on the Lancet study, as "she curtly eviscerates the conservative Holocaust deniers":

We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons -- with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?

Remember, the buck started here.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Critical Theorists

PopMatters has posted a new interview with Robert Christgau. This does a pretty good job of positioning him: against balkanization and canonization; sympathetic to past monoculture, not that it was paradise; for popular culture, not least because it's popular but even when it's not; against "phenomenal narrowness" and "unwarranted arrogance"; for good writing, or at least good editing; painfully limited by time available yet still making the most of it. The title quoted him: "My tastes don't evolve; they broaden."

That reminds me how consistent he has been, even going back to his late '60s reviews. I look back at my early writings and barely recognize that person, but his early work stands up -- subsequent explorations into reggae, Africa, the Balkans, and later developments in punk, hip hop, etc., just supplement his core attitudes. What's evolved is his writing, which is denser, deeper, and wiser than it was. As far as the interview's impression of him as "arrogant and opinionated," I see that as coming from other traits: he is very efficient about managing his time, which leads him to jettison anything that doesn't strike him as productive -- including whole genres of music; he recognizes that emphatic writing reads better than wishy-washy, which leads him to sharpen contrasts even in a badly blurred world; and he has a high ethical standard of certainty -- his line is "I don't write about things until I know what I think of them" -- and that's what backs up his assertions.

By the way, in singling out those traits, I'm also highlighting where we differ. I frequently review things I'm unsure of, seeing each iteration as an approximation rather than a secure truth. I often go down inefficient and unproductive rat holes. And I tend to be diffident to a fault -- although Christgau has worked hard to wring that out of my writing. Other differences have more to do with background and experience, but we share some common ground, as when he explains, "because I am blessed with a very healthy appetite for music, and because I am more interested in breadth and variety than I am in having intensive aesthetic experiences."

As it turns out, I found this link from a notice in Christopher Monsen's blog, which didn't mention Christgau but offered this quote: "I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant." Christgau goes on: "I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz. I will give it up to those who say Adorno was very smart, but he based certain aspects of his theories on the assumption that the pop aesthetic was a priori bad, which it isn't." It's been about thirty years since I last read Adorno, so I'm a bit rusty here, but this seems off base. Adorno was profoundly disturbed by Nazism, which he saw not as an aberration in western culture but as some sort of apotheosis derived from the Enlightenment, the domination of nature, and the driving force of capitalism -- forces which brought us the culture industry. He was an expert in modern classical music -- a fan of Schönberg and a critic of Stravinsky -- but he didn't have much to say about jazz, other than he thought that improv was self-deluding: that any effort to spontaneously invent new music would be doomed to repeating the subconscious. He had a very low opinion of intuition. The only way he saw to overcome the forces behind fascism was cold, hard, critical thinking. The music he favored demanded just that; the rest didn't much interest him. Ironically, when he died in 1969 most of the music that might have interested him was coming from jazz quarters, by then the most unpopular of popular musics.

Back around 1975 I burned out on critical theory, and I've found it pretty much impossible to read ever since. I still have a massively marked up copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment -- and for that matter an unmarked Dialektik der Aufklarung -- that I thumbed through tonight, hardly recognizing anything. Once I reached the point where I could identify the bourgeois nature of everything, additional details and examples mattered little. That's when I started reading rock crit, which at least lived in my world, rather than merely railing against it. I'm not sure that Adorno has anything useful to say about popular music in America, but mapping him onto a highbrow/lowbrow spat that these days mostly shows our age is certainly wrong. He was from another time and place, maybe another planet. Wonder what he would have made of Sun Ra.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Strapped

I started reading Tamara Draut's Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead (Doubleday), but didn't have time to get through it before the library due date came up. No surprises here, but it's one of the major economic stories of our era -- an era that will eventually be recognized as a significant downturn on the welfare of most Americans. The pivotal date was roughly 1970, a fateful date for several reasons: it's when the US trade balance went negative, when US domestic oil production peaked and started to decline, when deficits started to grow, when growth slowed down and turned into what was called stagflation. It occurred in the long stuck course of a disastrous war in Vietnam, and was marked by a political turn to the right, which effectively channeled what gains there were to ever greater concentration among the rich. That this effect has been masked so long is an interesting story in its own right. But this is the only world that Draut's young adults have known, and it's increasingly hard for them to see how they reach, let alone exceed, the living standards of their parents.

I noted a couple of quotes in the introduction, which give the gist of the argument (pp. 4-5):

When our parents were starting out, three factors helped smooth the transition to adulthood. The first was the fact that there were jobs that provided good wages even for high school graduates. A college degree wasn't necessary to earn a decent living. But even if you wanted to go to college, it wasn't that expensive and grants were widely available. The second was a robust economy that lifted all boats, with productivity gains shared by workers and CEOs alike. The result was a massive growth of the middle class, which provided security and stability for families. Third, a range of public policies helped facilitate this economic mobility and opportunity: a strong minimum wage, grants for low-income students to go to college, a generous unemployment insurance system, major incentives for home ownership, and a solid safety net for those falling on hard times. Simply put, government had your back.

This world no longer exists. The story of what happened is well known. The nation shifted to a service- and knowledge-based economy, dramatically changing the way we lived and worked. Relationships between employers and employees became more tenuous as corporations faced global competitors and quarterly bottom-line pressures from Wall Street. Increasingly, benefits such as health care and pension plans were provided only to well-paid workers. Wages rose quickly for educated workers and declined for those with only high school diplomas, resulting in new demands for college credentials. As most families saw their incomes stagnate or decline, they increasingly needed two full-time incomes just to stay afloat, which created new demands and pressures on working parents. Getting into the middle class now required a four-year college degree, and even that was no guarantee of achieving the Americcan dream.

As Draut notes elsewhere, the "government had your back" angle wasn't exactly universal. There was both official and unofficial discrimination, especially racial, also sexual. One recent book describes post-WWII public aid as "when affirmative action was white"; it seems far from coincidental that the right was able to kill off or undermine such programs once it became impossible to deny those benefits to non-whites. The Republican ascendency was built on just that racism, augmented by post-defeat military bravado, and funded by an upper class determined not to let their yachts sink with the falling tide.

The description of how the world changed strikes me as weaker. The economy didn't shift to service jobs so much as service jobs took up the slack from the decline of manufacturing. The latter had two engines: technology and automation which shifted jobs to machines from people, and the capital flight that sought growth markets and lower wages abroad. Stronger labor unions might have mitigated both factors, ideally by converting productivity gains into shorter workweeks for more workers. But the political shift to the right cut the legs out from under the unions, displacing workers to the lower end of the service sector.

The other thing is that it hasn't become impossible or even all that much harder to join the middle class. It's more that the middle class isn't what it used to be, or that it's long been cracked up to be. The middle class was once imagined to be the core of a relatively egalitarian democracy, a sign that we share the same responsibilities and aspirations. Nowadays, middle class means you're just a slip away from falling into poverty, but miles and miles away from the true rich who set the standards you aspire to, but can never reach. The more society splits into rich and poor, the desperate the middle class become.

Draut sums up today (p. 6):

Becoming an adult today takes longer, requirse taking more risks, and is rife with more stumbling blocks than it was a generation ago. To get a sense of how much longer the traditional path to adulthood takes, we can compare the percentage of young women and young men meeting a traditional definition of adulthood in the yeras 1960 and 2000: leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. Four decades ago, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men aged 30 had completed all of these transitions. In 2000, only 46 percent of women and 31 percent of men had completed all these transitions by age 30.

From the price of a college education to the new cutthroat realities of the conomy, young adults are trying to establish themselves in a society that has grown widely unequal and less responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens. At each step in the obstacle course to adulthood -- getting an education, finding a job, starting a family, and buying a house -- our nation's public policies have failed to keep up. Young adults are left to drift alone, shouldering more of the financial burden and risk than previous generations.

One major cause of this is that Draut describes as "the new brand of capitalism" (pp. 19-20):

This new economy has increasingly become a winner-take-all system in which most of the spoils go to the top -- the CEOs, big shareholders, and top executives. While technology has allowed America's productivity to soar, unlike in past eras, since about 1980, less and less of these gains have been shared with workers. Productivity grew 74.2 percent between 1968 and 2000, but hourly wages for average workers fell 3 percent (adjusted for inflation). In fact, if wages had kept pace with rising productivity between 1968 and 2000, the average hourly wage would have been $24.56 in 2000, rather than $13.74.

This slide in workers' earnings happened as corporate profits were climbing. Domestic corporate profits have risen 64 percent since 1968, adjusting for inflation. The king of the low-wage sector -- the retail industry -- has done fantastically well. Retail profits have jumped 158 percent since 1968. [ . . . ]

Back in 1950, firing workers for trying to organize unions was rare: there was one illegal dismissal of workers for every twenty union elections. By the 1990s, the National Labor Relations Board found illegal dismissal of workers in one out of every three union elections.

I skipped over the parts about WalMart, as you might well guess. Final conclusion to the introduction (p. 26):

After all my research and conversations with young adults, one thing is crystal clear. Without bold thinking and the courage to uphold our nation's most sacred values, a while generation of young adults will come of age in an America that doesn't reward hard work, family values, or collective responsibilities. I have no doubt that the grim economic reality and choked opportunity facing young adults didn't have to happen. And it doesn't have to continue.

An optimist after all. Some day I hope to get back to the book and find out why. Draut runs an Economic Opportunity Program at a think tank named Demos, and she has some straightforward ideas on how to fix this. I'm not so optimistic, and not just because her young adults haven't run into the health care meatgrinder yet. But it's a good book, full of basic info and credible stories.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Working Techniques

I received the following letter from Luke Kaven, the proprietor of Smalls Records. The label was named for an after-hours joint of some repute in New York, which has expired and been replaced by one called Fat Cat. Kaven has a background in academic philosophy, which feeds into the letter. Thanks to his generosity, I've heard pretty much everything the label has released. It mostly follows a fairly conservative but soft strain of postbop -- given the intersection with Fresh Sound's New Talent series I'm tempted to suspect a West Coast/Cool Jazz influence. But the letter isn't really about the records so much as the fundamental issues of listening: what seems right, and why some things seem right and others don't. It also turns up questions about how I work and why I work that way. I'll comment more on that at the end.

I was glad to see your recent proto-review of Fresh From The Cooler. I was also glad for your other reviews, but I'm interested in something you said about Hewitt in the most recent piece. You allude there to an elusive 'it' that seems so lacking in other modern work. And you've struck onto something that involves why I derailed an otherwise promising academic career to make Frank Hewitt records. There is definitely a certain 'it', or a bundle of 'its'. And the experience of 'it' is like few experiences in life.

In my position, I am able (or required) to look further into music than most. What I've learned in the last few years are the things that one learns when one listens to an artist 500 times (as many times as I heard Hewitt play live), and the things that one learns when one listens to a given recording 500 or so times. Something emerges, something that I began to recognize a few years back, and undertook to study as a grad student in cognitive science. I get to sample a space that most people don't sample, and it is sometimes useful to report back on what is down that road, as what emerges is sometimes unexpected.

It had occurred to me earlier, reading some remarks that you had written about Charlie Parker (and others), that perhaps you were not experiencing the 'it' that many of us do experience listening to Bird. Though recently, I'm beginning to think that this experience is something that comes to you at times, but less at others. This is not to suggest that you're not a bright listener. You are. But the demands of your work do not afford you the opportunity to delve in beyond a certain point, and at times that may be important. Maybe you'll find my perspective to be interesting. I will try to give you a concrete way to visualize the kinds of phenomena I'm talking about so you can experiment yourself, to test whether or not what I claim is valid. If you wouldn't mind indulging me:

The cognitive basis of this experience I refer to is in our evolved ability to coordinate sensory events having a temporal regularity. Our musical experiences and some of our verbal life, as well as our ability to deal with repetitive action such as walking, employ this ability. The best way I know to point out the phenomenon I have in mind is to point to the basic rhyme. The rhyme is best known as a verbal phenomenon. It is a diachronic experience (meaning, an experience that has content from more than one point in time). It is the experience of auditory (specifically here phonetic) similarity between two events at different times, but where the relationship among the events involves a perceived temporal regularity. Every variation on "Roses are red . . ." demonstrates that phenomenon. But rarely does one think of generalizing that to events having other than a phonetic structures. Is it possible for two sounds to rhyme? And the claim is that there is nothing privileged about phonetic properties. The phenomenon can be based in other kinds of non-phonetic auditory properties. The key is that these properties have to be perceived by the listener in such a way as to be distinctly -- and at least somewhat reliably -- identifiable, or at least distinguishable from one another. So what properties are the right ones? Well, there are some that are more psychologically salient than others, and that is the starting point.

The most salient auditory property in musical terms after pitch is the pitch class. Pitch class is C, C#, D, etc., sounded in any octave. Pitches displaced by one or more octaves exactly are equivalent in terms of pitch class. This much almost any listener understands. But in creative music, another layer of properties are exploited, and these are much more difficult to apprehend, and consequently, the number of listeners who can discern these properties are correspondingly fewer. Even fewer are the number of listeners who can discern the ways in which these properties can be systematically exploited for musical effect (at least without musical training). This second layer that I refer to involves the property of 'chord-degree'. It is the distinct sound of a note, a melody note in this case, when sounded against a given chord, and as identified by the interval between that note and the root of the chord. Given an AM7 (A Major Seventh) chord, the note C# would be the Major Third. As sounded, this note will sound not just like C#, but will also have the qualitative character of a major third. (If the chord is fragmented, the quality may be ambiguous, and that is used intentionally by many.) This second layer is what I will concentrate on.

You can begin to visualize this by annotating a lead sheet and laying it out in different ways so that you can see the relationships among parts. Can you read music? Take a Charlie Parker tune, like Confirmation (32 bar AA'BA''), or Au Privave (12 bar blues) and make a copy. Now for each note, write underneath it the chord-degree indicated by the written chord. If one sees the note C# over the written chord "AM7", then one writes "M3" (for Major 3rd) underneath it. Assume that every note functions as a chord tone, because ipso facto it does, and name it accordingly. For example, the note B sounded on top of an AM7 chord would be notated as a major 9th rather than as a major 2nd, because the indicated chord does accept a 9th. If the note is the same as the root of the chord (eg, the note A over AM7), then write a "1". Once you have made the annotations, then make several copies of the resulting annotated score. Each of these copies will be used to visualize the same piece in different metric schemes (2x16, 4x8, 8x4, 3x4, 4x3, etc).

Now take one copy of the annotated score and snip it up according to one metric scheme. Let us start with a 32 bar AABA tune (such as Charlie Parker's "Confirmation" AA'BA'') and use the metric scheme 2x16. This means that you will snip the annotated score up into 2-measure long strips. Then you will lay them out in a column 2 measures wide by 16 rows down and paste them down. Once you've done this, take another copy of the annotated score and snip it up according to another metric scheme, such as 4x8. Snip the score into 4 measure strips, lay them out 4 measures across and 8 rows down, and tape them down. There may be many more metric schemes simultaneously at work in a single composition, but for now, let us work with these two.

The basic principles involves a kind of diachronic perception. The core principle is that in order to perceive regularities or irregularities in a pulse train, one must employ some kind of diachronic perception as a basis for comparative judgment of time intervals. Diachronic in this case refers to the perception of the occurrent sensory event in the present tense in a way that is 'co-conscious' with remembered sensory events. The term 'co-conscious' is a bit of jargon from analytical philosophy that usually refers to two or more elements that are simultaneously available to be enjoined into one thought. In this case, the two diachronic elements are 'coordinated' in time. To get a rough idea of what this is, imagine something a bit like a tape loop in the brain, one that in this case is two measures long. So as you are hearing measure 2 being played, you are hearing measure number 1 being re-played simultaneously. You are able to have thoughts and experiences simultaneously of the two of them at each point in time along the way.

So there are two kinds of musical streams, one the occurrent musical stream (eg, measure 2) and the second, coordinated (short-term) memories of prior music (eg, measure 1). Then there is the ability to have comparative thoughts about the two coordinated streams. This is just the same way as we perceive the common rhyme, and it helps to use the familiar rhyme in order to understand the musical rhyme. The complexity lies in this realm of thought. One may have arbitrarily complex and idiosyncratic thoughts of the two coordinated streams. Which is to say that understanding how the parts of a musical composition are coordinated can involve any kind of comparative ideas. Understanding the structure of a piece (and how its parts are coordinated) requires empirical discovery and knowledge of arbitrary complexity from the entire repertoire of thought, and thus the methodological presumption is (and ought to be) that there is always more to get.

In order to have coordinated experiences, one has to know what events are coordinated and how. But that knowledge can be arbitrarily complex. So over time, partial knowledge may give way to more complete knowledge, producing a significant shift in the qualitative character of the musical experience of a single performance over time.

We are emphasizing here one of the more salient properties of musical experiences, the chord-degree property, and it appears at least that these properties are given the most 'play' in music.

If you snipped up the tune Confirmation, there are some readily understandable moves. In the 2x16 time scheme (2 measures wide, by 16 rows), look down to the bridge, which occurs in rows 9-12 (measures 17-24). Study here, making special note of the play given to the root of each chord in the melody (all the "1"s you annotated). Do you see how the "1" is featured? It plays around the last eighth note in each two-measure segment. In measures 17-18, and 19-20 the note is featured in the last eighth note. In measures 21-22 the "1" is featured everywhere EXCEPT the last eighth note. In measures 23-24, the "1" is intentionally absent, displaced melodically to the first eighth-note of the next measure (measure 25). This pattern has a unique character that is intentionally articulated by the composer (Charlie Parker). It also has a unique rhythm (the rhythm of just the notes marked "1") that exists independently. There are numerous relations of this sort, most often more complex and less obvious. To see these relations, one has to look at the work under each time scheme. Confirmation has significant relations in the 1x32 scheme. It is a rapidly resolving tune with single-measure developments. Again, the way the tune is articulated by the composer provides cues as to his intent. By the way, it is extremely rare to find players these days who have any idea how to articulate this tune as anything other than mostly-flat eighth notes (which is to miss out on what gives it a special beauty). This example is among the simpler relations. More advanced techniques are everywhere in Parker's compositions.

Consider the blues Au Privave. The blues has a 12 bar structure which lends itself to two time schema in particular: 3x4 and 4x3. So you will snip up two copies of your annotated score : the first into 3 measure strips layed into 4 rows, and then the second into 4 measure strips layed into 3 rows. This modern jazz blues has a melodic structure that can be heard as three 4-bar phrases, and simultaneously as four 3-bar phrases. You can also see the piece simultaneously operating strongly at the level of 6-beats times 8 (snip the annotated score into 6 beat strips, and lay them into 8 rows). These simultaneous structures play into very oblique thematic variations that give the piece its continuity. (By the way, this style of composition is sometimes referred to as "continuous variations" in classical terms.)

The process of getting down to the bottom of a masterful work may take years because the process of discovery requires a certain amount of inspiration at each step of the way. Everything from music theory to metaphysics and epistemology come into play.

What characterizes the music that I favor is a combination of this kind of masterful composition with poetic force. One thing I learned from years at Smalls hearing people on a regular basis is that some people take a long time to understand, even for experienced listeners. Those soloists whose recordings inspire me even after 500 playings are rare, but I've found a few. Frank Hewitt is extremely subtle, and it takes years to discover all the layers in what he is doing. The variations are often very oblique, but are there to be heard in the end. This is one reason I feel he was so underestimated. I went through many stages with it myself. In the end, the Principle of Maximum Charity was never so well applied. I will suggest that the differences in level between his various recording dates are mostly insignificant. Four Hundred Saturdays has in fact work of staggering brilliance at least as good as We Loved You and Fresh From The Cooler. I would suggest that while one or another piece may stand out at any given time, and moods may shift, with rare exception time will eventually favor them all.

Other artists I work with who deliver surprises after 500 listenings are Chris Byars, Ned Goold, Ari Roland, Sacha Perry, John Mosca. The Ari Roland disk (Sketches From A Bassist's Album) has some tunes that I've been studying along the lines that I sketched to you above. The lead off tune on the disk, The Lion Of Yerevan, has a staggeringly complicated and imaginative theme with a darkly poetic quality. Much of the work from this bunch as Across 7 Street (Made in New York) has the same quality.

When one develops a greater awareness of this layer of music and its aesthetic contributions, one will understand clearly what makes Charlie Parker (or Monk, or Bud Powell) distinctive, and actually worthy of his title as a true genius of modern music. His thematic improvisations display an uncanny imagination and intelligence coupled with poetic force on a level with those of established figures such as Mozart or Chopin. His work can withstand musical exegesis over many years. It is somewhat deceptive, as Parker played out of a set of a couple of hundred or so patterns. On the surface, his music sounds like a bunch of these strung together. But those patterns were used in a different way each time, in widely varying thematic roles, and with rare ingenuity. A change in gestalt is needed to experience the difference.

The first thing that needs to be said about the way I listen to music is that what I do is very superficial. I play records about 10-14 hours a day, not counting what I throw on at bedtime, but the median for the jazz records I process is two or three plays, with a quarter to a third only getting one. I've read that Gary Giddins sits squarely in front of his speakers to give undivided attention to records, which an assistant puts on so he hears each one with no preconceptions. I don't work like that. I'm almost always doing something else, with my back to the speakers and the volume well below prescribed levels. I've been doing this for many years, over which I've probably heard 15,000 different albums, but I'm unlikely to have heard more than a dozen as many as a hundred times, and none five-hundred. This gives me a lot of reference points, which help me sort out what I hear.

But other than a lot of exposure and history, I don't know much about music. I can't play a lick. I can read a little, but not well enough to work through the exercises presented here. I find Kaven's exposition fascinating more because it exposes working technique than because it elucidates art. The latter is a bit like disecting a magic trick -- strip away the mystery, spoil the fun. On the other hand, I suspect that some understanding of a musician's kit might be helpful, especially in explaining why so much music conforms so rigorously to type. And since different musicians have different kits, it helps in the sorting. But there are simpler ways to do this: a sense of type is something we carry even if we don't do much to cultivate it. After all, we focus on the colors our retinas sense, and on the tastes we have buds to detect. Similarly, we know "it" when we hear it. The problem is how to describe "it" -- would I be able to communicate this more effectively if only I had the technical skills and standard jargon? I doubt it, even though I can see how it might help me understand better -- and in general I'm not a person who lightly values better understanding. But I also believe that if one's primary interest is popular music -- the common use of music by people who aren't musicians -- that may not be all that useful a path to pursue.

I hope this isn't all about Charlie Parker. It may well be that he's never been adequately understood -- pedestals make for a peculiar point of view -- but he's been dead now for 50 years, and you'd think it's well past time to move on. As for the Smalls records Kaven recommends, the Ari Roland strikes me as a good one I never had time or patience to sort out -- it fell just short of my Honorable Mention cutoff point, which is arbitrary and unfair but that's how the numbers break. The one by Across 7 Street doesn't appeal to me at all, which has something to do with harmony that just sounds off to me. The others are somewhere in between. Of course, that's an unfair judgment. Many of the records I listen to gain do stature over multiple plays. Some actually get those plays through luck as opposed to method. That may be unfair but that, too, is how this works. If it didn't work at least somewhat well, no one would bother reading me.

Postscript (2006-10-17 14:15): Luke Kaven wrote back with a correction after this was posted: "I think the only erratum that I found was describing the 'mental tape loop' as a 2-measure loop in my example when it should be a ONE measure loop. Think of it in crude terms like Frippertronics, as in no erase head.'"

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Music: Current count 12470 [12438] rated (+32), 926 [934] unrated (-8). Trying to work on Jazz CG, honest I am. Did manage to play some stuff I grabbed at the library, and barely pushed the rated total over 30 by running late into Monday. Plan to finally nail Jazz CG this coming week. Then I be free, for a while anyway.

• Rosanne Cash: Black Cadillac (2006, Capitol): Her music is narrowcast enough that one has to listen to the lyrics to differentiate between her albums. Coming after the death of her legendary father, famous mother, and more famous stepmother, this one subdues the music even more than usual, while sharpening the words. This one gives God -- in the thorns as well as the petals -- a rough time, while admitting that church spires have the best views. A-
• Fatboy Slim: The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder (1996-2006 [2006], Astralwerks): Two new cuts with Lateef vocals; two remixes from Cornershop and Groove Armada; the rest cut up jobs that proved that on the dancefloor you can't be too upbeat or too obvious; not sure that concentration does these singles any favors, as what makes them great makes them inconsistent. A-
• Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: Swingin' for the Fences (1999 [2005], Silverline): Eigteen pieces, including some names like Arturo Sandoval, Eddie Daniels, and Eric Marienthal. First piece is a twist on Benny Goodman with Daniels taking the solo and it sounds terrific. Later on is a latin piece called "Mueva Los Huesos (Shake Your Bones)" which Sandoval has a field day with. A lot of the other stuff doesn't do much for me one way or another. This appears to have been originally released in 2001, then recently reissued on DualDisc. Haven't heard two later albums by the group. Goodwin plays alto and soprano sax, writes, arranges, has fun. B
• The Little Willies (2003-05 [2006], Milking Bull): AMG files this under rock, but based on song selection I'd be more tempted to file it under country: two Willie Nelson songs, one each from Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Tompall Glaser/Harlan Howard, Jimmy Driftwood, Bob Wills and Hank Williams -- Fred Rose shares credit on those two, but you know what I mean. On the other hand, the band wrote a song called "Lou Reed" -- about seeing the singer cow tipping. Lightweight but charming. B+(**)
• Making Singles, Drinking Doubles (1994-99 [2002], Bloodshot): Chicago's Bloodshot Records became my favorite alt-country label largely due to the efforts of English expat Jon Langford, who settled in the Windy City and juggled several bands -- Waco Brothers and Pine Valley Cosmonauts most prominently -- in addition to his native Mekons. This was Bloodshot's 100th release. It's not a best-of; it's a trivia sampler, collecting B-sides of singles that never made albums, mostly obvious covers mixed in with a few throwaways. E.g., this starts with the Wacos doing "The Harder They Come," and ends with a Langford tune "Nashville Radio" which is a thin gloss on something that escapes my beleaguered memory. B+(***)
• Sam Moore: Overnight Sensation (2006, Rhino): The survivor of '60s soul duo Sam and Dave -- Dave Prater died in 1988, but the pair split in 1970 and neither had much success, although Moore's been popping up in films, festival and at the Grammies lately, culminating in the 70-year-old's first solo album. Well, not quite. This is one of those all-star duet jobs, and the pairings are peculiar: Bruce Springsteen, Fantasia, Jon Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey, Travis Tritt, Nikka Costa, Billy Preston, Zucchero. His voice is still strong enough to unify this album, but I guess he's fated to be a duettist. B
• The Rough Guide to the Music of Israel (1995-2005 [2006], World Music Network): For better or worse, the usual catholic survey; the Ashkenazi may still rule the diaspora melting pot, but the Sephardim and Mizrachi make most of the folk/pop music, making it increasingly difficult for us outsiders to distinguish the Israelis from the Arabs they hate so much. B+(*)

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 11)

Another week of indecision and procrastination, but then sometimes "stuff happens" and this seems to have been the week. I'm maybe four paragraph reviews away from closing this Jazz CG, and have fourteen A- rated and note-written albums to choose from. Unfortunately, the two pick hits and the dud du jour are among the four needed reviews. I have candidates for the pick hits, but no real idea about the dud, in part because I've been discarding the crap as fast as I find it. Maybe I'm too picky about those things? Maybe even too nice? One thing I have to say is that there's just not enough money in jazz to elicit the mass of crap that you find in rock, country and rap. Almost everyone is competent, earnest, and has some distinct angle on some piece of the puzzle. There's stuff I don't much care for, but not much I flat out don't respect. Still, someone's gotta pay. If you have an idea who and why, I'd like to know.

Some current stats: 240 albums prospected; 99 in the pending queue (45 prospected, 54 not); 123 in the done file with a shot, however slim, of making the cut; 130 in this cycle's flush file. Barring another disaster, should finish this week. Despite all the kvetching, this is still pretty close to my original, and historical, schedule.

Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (2005 [2006], Sound Grammar): The publicity writeup has three pages of bio, as if Ornette wasn't recognizable by the second note. But it doesn't begin to answer the basic questions: why this, and why now? It's been ten years since Coleman's deal with Verve netted four quick albums, and eighteen since Virgin Beauty, his one-shot on Portrait, appeared. This one's just a live set recorded in Germany last year, with Denardo and two bassists. All but two of the songs are new, but how big a deal is that? After all, he's had a decade or two to work on them. One effect of recording as rarely as he does is that I don't get back to him as often as I should. This sounds utterly brilliant, but how does it stack up against his past? Against, say, In All Languages, Of Human Feelings, Dancing in Your Head, At the Golden Circle, The Shape of Jazz to Come? Those are reference points I should know well enough to poll them in my mind. It's going to be fun answering those questions. But in the meantime: the bassists are busy beavers, worth focusing on; doubling them up keeps the rhythm shifting without sacrificing their harmonic undertow; Coleman's typically sour and shrill alto sax is rendered all the more so by the extremely bright live sound; he's also credited with violin and trumpet, which I haven't noticed yet, although there is quite a bit of arco which I initially attributed to the basses. [A]

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood: Out Louder (2006, Indirecto): Although he's no doubt capable of interesting straight jazz guitar, as on 1996's Quiet, Scofield's best records have often been groove jobs -- 1994's Groove Elation is one that stands out. Here at least he's in the right company for that sort of thing, and he contributes. However, first pass through the beats seem a little squarish, and the "Julia" cover is an odd change of pace. [B+(*)]

Lisbon Improvisation Players: Spiritualized (2006, Clean Feed): No booklet. Not even a goddam PDF. So here's what I know: The leader is alto/baritone saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, who loves Ornette and set this group up for pure improv, often with whatever guests are in town and up for the sport. This is the second LIP album. Bassist Pedro Gonçalves was also on the first, and he makes a strong impression here. Drummer Bruno Pedroso is new, but probably part of the core group. The trumpet is Dennis González is a guest, although this isn't his first meeting with Amado. He adds a low-key lyricism, stabilizing Amado's tendencies to go over the deep end. The title cut, like everything else, is jointly accredited, but seems very much his thing -- measured, meditative, lovely but not in the conventional ways. Cellist Ulrich Mitzlaff is another guest, limited to the last two cuts. Wish I knew more. [A-]

Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet: ONJQ Live in Lisbon (2004 [2006], Clean Feed): One thing I don't know much about is Japanese noise bands -- the few I've heard have been such an automatic turnoff that I've had no interest in making marginal distinctions. Another is Kaoru Abe, a legendary Japanese alto saxophonist who died young in 1978, but I imagine that Tsugami Kenta here has some if not all of Abe's records. Yoshihide plays electric guitar, which can be a powerful noisemaker in its own right. Two more Japanese names play bass and drums, suggesting that ONJQ is normally a quartet. But the saxes are dominant here, with the margin coming from guest Mats Gustafsson. He's a slowly acquired taste, but at least I have some practice there, and his baritone is hard to mistake. Starts with a "Song for Che" that's hard to recognize. Ends with "Eureka," a Jim O'Rourke song also on their previous OJNQ Live (2002, DIW). The latter almost starts to make sense, suggesting that further study may help. But I'd rather cut them some slack on the grade and cut my losses. B

Elliott Sharp: Plays the Music of Thelonious Monk (2004 [2006], Clean Feed): Solo guitar. Don't know whether that's normal for him -- he's put out several dozen albums, but this is my first. But the cover art raises questions, with four lines, punctuation significant: "Sharp?/Monk?/Shark!/Monk!" Actually, it's pretty straightforward