Sunday, December 31, 2006

Music: Current count 12719 [12695] rated (+24), 851 [868] unrated (-17). Should be done with the year-end wrap-up by now, but I'm not. Moving slow, uncertainly, indecisively. To some extent I'm perplexed that the consensus picks are bands I've never cared much for (Red Hot Chili Peppers) or have been warned against (TV on the Radio). But I also haven't made my mind up on Clipse -- widely regarded as the rap album of the year -- and Ludacris. Last year I made a serious late effort to bag a few things I wanted to hear, but I haven't budged a bit this month -- still no Love Is All, to pick one example.

• Crunk Hits (2002-04 [2005], TVT): The crude beats here are topped only by the cruder groans, creating a cartoon crassness that doesn't offend so much as celebrate its niche far outside polite society -- definitive statement: "if you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck"; but when it comes to real crunk, the girlz rool -- not so much Ciara's "Goodies" as Jacki-O's "Nookie" and Khia's authoritative "Lick It." A-
• Crunk Hits Vol. 2 (2004-05 [2006], TVT): Less crunk, more hits -- not necessarily on the charts, which would be too respectable anyway, but the hooks pack some punch, and after a dozen tracks that shake your booty, along comes one called "Gasolina" that really rips the roof off the sucker; I've never heard a first-rate album by any of these artistes, but mixed up in small doses they can be potent. A-
• Lady Sovereign: Public Warning (2006, Def Jam): Lyrically it's interesting how much this is a throwback to the self-referential boast raps of the '80s, as if she has to somehow recapitulate the history of hip-hop. Beatwise, of course, it is situated somewhere in this century's Brit garage. Three or four songs are impressive enough to count as a development from the EP, but they're in the minority this time. The rest is good enough to have kept me undecided for too long. B+(***)
• Ted Lewis & His Band: Is Everybody Happy? (1925-38 [1999], ASV/Living Era): Sang, danced, acted in films and on stage, is credited with 9 top-ten hits among the 25 songs here, but is mostly forgotten today. His bands typically included George Brunies and Muggsy Spanier, and there are other notables who appear here: Frank Teschemacher, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Sophie Tucker, Fats Waller. Lewis wasn't extraordinary at anything he did: the clarinet you notice late on is Goodman, and Waller's three vocals steal the show. Lewis, whose birth name was Theodore Leopold Friedman, took his vocal cues from Jolson and toned them down quite a bit. His "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (a #2 hit in 1930) is so wan you really feel for him, and his big hit in 1932, "In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town," is as down as the Great Depression it signifies. B+(***)
• Ismaël Lo: Jammu Africa (1997, Triloka): Trying to figure out his latest album, and noticed this one on the unrated shelves. It's similar, but less consistent: the upbeat grooveful, the slow stuff slick. B+
• Tom Waits: Orphans (2006, Anti-, 3CD): Half spare parts from soundtracks, tributes, etc., half new songs that don't care if they're only half-baked, sorted into three bins that loosely define Waits -- a guy who started out fascinated by the picaresque and perverse, then found in Beefheart and Brecht a workable aesthetic that he only made rougher and cruder. Sprawling, spaldash sets -- the Clash's Sandinista, Laurie Anderson's United States Live, and the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs are three good examples -- defy familiarity through sheer numbers and diversity, compensating for their rough edges with endless discovery. I doubt that any of these discs would stand high on its own, but together they refine and reveal each other. A-

Jazz Prospecting (CG #12, Part 7)

Not sure what happened this past week, other than that I've hurt my back in a way never encountered before, and I'm trying to close this week, and for that matter year, out under a lot of pain. So forgive me if I write little more just now. I did manage to send in a Pazz & Jop poll, but haven't made much progress on notes. Recycled Goods has missed its deadline already. More on all that later. Most of the new jazz coming in has 2007 street dates, so I figure they can wait.

Circus (2006, ICP): All pieces are improvs attributed to all five members, who could just as well be listed as the artists of record, had the packaging steered that way. The four instrumentalists are ICP veterans: Ab Baars (tenor sax, clarinet, flute), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Misha Mengelberg (piano), Han Bennink (drums). The fifth is vocalist Alessandra Patrucco. I suppose the attraction of voice in this sort of framework is flexibility and dramatic detail, but I've never found it all that attractive -- Patrucco, dramatizing in a manner I associate unfondly with opera, less than most. Honsinger and Mengelberg also add to the vocal content. The instruments are more interesting. [B]

David Kweksilber + Guus Janssen (2003-06 [2006], Geestgronden): Clarinet and piano duets, recorded over -- or more likely picked from -- a series of sessions, mostly live, but one at Janssen's home. Like all such encounters, especially among the avant-leaning, this seems small -- thin sound, moderately paced, tentative, exploratory. Unlike most, the miniaturism maintains its interest. And it does pick up a bit of groove at the end with a barely recognizable "Honeysuckle Rose" -- a treat. B+(***)

Gato Libre: Nomad (2006, No Man's Land): The ten pieces here have titles like "In Barcelona, in June" and "In Krakow, in November." All of the places are in Europe, and they represent a continent's worth of folk themes elevated to chamber jazz. That they were recorded in one day in a Tokyo studio matters little -- this could be an Enrico Rava album, but it isn't. The trumpeter, leader, composer is Natsuki Tamura. He's always been a straighter shooter than his better half, pianist Satoko Fujii. Here she does him a favor and sticks to accordion, filling in that prototypical European folk sound without ever showing him up. The other key ingredient here is Kazuhiko Tsumura's guitar, especially on the Spanish-flavored tunes, which he has down pat. But Tamura is the real treat here. He's been working his colors into Fujii's more chaotic canvases all along, but here he paints his own masterpiece. A-

Francisco Mela: Melao (2005 [2006], AYVA): Cuban drummer, moved to Boston around when he turned 30, wound up teaching at Berklee. This is his first album, recorded in New York, released in Barcelona, and the main problem I find with it is an embarrassment of riches. For instance, he has to pick and choose between three willing saxophonists: Anat Cohen, George Garzone, and Joe Lovano. Ditto with two lesser known but excellent guitarists: Lionel Loueke and Nir Felder. And he has to find space for keyb man Leo Genovese. He composed all but the Ornette Coleman piece. All this makes it hard to focus on the drums, which don't strike me as particularly Cuban. The Voice Jazz Critics poll picked this as the debut record of the year. Thus far I have mixed reactions, but it is the sort of thing that can make a big impression, especially when Garzone or Lovano get cranked up. [B+(**)]

Natsuki Tamura Quartet: Exit (2003 [2004], Libra): I've had this for a couple of years, but misplaced it. Noticed it was in my unrated list, and looked around furiously for it, finding it only after giving up. The packaging is like an LP jacket, but CD-size, with a nice little soft paper inner sleeve for the disc. The music has an industrial fusion feel to it, with Satoko Fujii playing synth, Takayuki Kato guitar, and Ryojiro Furusawa drums. Some of the noises resemble vocals, but could be coming from anywhere, and don't resolve into much. In fact, only the drums are particularly recognizable as themselves. B

The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project: Simpático (2005 [2006], ArtistShare): This is latin jazz of a high order, but I have no real grip on just how high or even what order. Palmieri is a project I've made little progress on, although I've found two albums that I like quite a bit -- Palmas (1994, Nonesuch) and Ritmo Caliente (2004, Concord) -- and don't doubt that they are more. Seems like the piano is reduced here, the conga is grooving steadily, and the trumpet gets more play, but then this is really Lynch's album. He's a terrific player anywhere he wants to play. Phil Woods guests on four cuts, with at least one notable solo. Yosvany Terry showed up, but his spots got cut, leaving him with just an asterisk. Lila Downs sings two cuts, and they're not bad either. [B+(***)]

Benevento/Russo Duo: Play Pause Stop (2006, Butter Problems/Reincarnate Music): Just have an advance and a hype sheet, but this has been sitting around a while -- albeit not as long as the advance to their previous album. I dislike advances, especially when they don't grow up to be real records -- although if they're not very good that's just as well. As far as I've been able to figure out, the names are Marco Benevento and Joe Russo. Don't know what they do, but it sounds like keyboards and drums. They keep a beat, add some texture, but it all seems skeletal, undeveloped, not all that danceable, let alone jazzworthy. I don't dislike it, but they don't offer much, and when they try to muscle up toward the end, they just get messy. B-

The Benevento Russo Duo: Best Reason to Buy the Sun (2005, Ropeadope): This is the older advance. It strikes me more favorably, mostly because it builds up stronger, and there's more piano to it. Same basic rock instrumental groove. Not experimental enough to be experimental rock; not danceable enough for dance music; not improvised enough for jazz, sedate enough for new age, or hypnotic enough for surf. B

Sofia Koutsovitis: Ojalá (2005 [2006], CD Baby): Argentine singer, moved to Boston in 2001 for education, and on to New York in 2005 to work. She wrote about half of the material here, including one co-credited to Jorge Luis Borges. The covers cover the map, with stops in Cuba, Brazil, and Peru, and are shapelier than the originals -- "You Don't Know What Love Is," nearly the only one in English, is particularly nice. The Group works for her, and "Silence 2" is fractured, multiphased Latin jazz at its best. The slow ones are a bit more awkward, but overall a very attractive record. B+(***)

Martirio & Chano Domínguez: Acoplados (2004 [2006], Sunnyside): Martirio sings Spanish copla, a traditional pop song laced with flamenco and dolled up here for dramatic effect. Domínguez supports her with a tight little piano trio, but the RTVE big band and orchestra bathe the proceedings in strings and horns. It's hard to know what's traditional and what's progressive here, which limits are prodded and which are dutifully adhered to. B

Greg Davis/Steven Hess: Decisions (2003 [2005], Longbox): Davis does laptop improvs. Hess adds drums/percussion. Mostly minor electronica, noises rather than beats, although thump is an important part of the mix. I like it more so than most similar things I've heard, but I have doubts about its universal appeal. B+(*)

Jerry Leake: The Turning: Percussion Expansions (2005 [2006], Rhombus Publishing): The label looks to be unrelated to Rhombus Records, a jazz label I run into occasionally. It is run by Leake, and called Publishing because Leake's books outnumber his records by a margin of 16 to 3. Leake teaches at New England Conservatory and Tufts. His books are mostly about percussion, and his expertise centers on West Africa and North India, although his appetite for percussion instruments seems endless: he lists 42 of them in his credits, with vibraphone, balafon, metallophones, and tabla most prominent. The pieces are a mix of traditional themes (mostly African or Indian), elaborations, and jazz pieces (Bill Evans is favored). Several songs employ voice, which plays out as another form of talking drum. There's a bit of extra guitar on one track, bass on two, but the 22 tracks are mostly solo. The result is a bit scattered, like an encyclopedia -- a set of exercises and experiments, all interesting, some quite enchanting. Educational fun. B+(***)

Brian Groder: Torque (2006, Latham): An attractive, vigorous brass-reeds-bass-drums quartet, with the leader on trumpet and flugelhorn, Sam Rivers on flute and saxophones. Groder gets more play and makes more of an impression, with Rivers tending to slip into the background. B+(**)

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

Branford Marsalis: Braggtown (2006, Marsalis Music/Rounder): Since Coltrane and Shorter, damn few tenor saxophonists have managed to restrain themselves from adding soprano sax to their toolkit. Given his influences, ambitions, and essential conservatism, Marsalis was certain to follow that temptation. To his credit, he's learned to wax eloquent, but I still prefer the big horn by a wide margin, not least in his hands. On tenor he can get gruff, and when the band, a standard issue piano quartet just like Coltrane and Shorter, gets rough in turn, he sounds terrific. But that's just one part of his blend, which to his benefit is a bit stronger than usual here. B+(**)

Joe Lovano Ensemble: Streams of Expression (2005 [2006], Blue Note): Gunther Schuller is only credited with the three-piece-long "Birth of the Cool Suite," but the big band assembled there carries on for two chunks of Lovano's own "Streams of Expression" and a Tim Hagans piece "Buckeyes." As such, this resembles the widely admired (albeit not by me) Schuller-arranged Rush Hour. Lovano cut his teeth in big bands, and he's comfortable here. But I get squirmish, admiring one section for its slick intensity, getting annoyed by others, and eventually not caring which is which. B+(*)

Vittor Santos: Renewed Impressions (2005 [2006], Adventure Music): It's rare to hear Brazilian music with a lead horn of any sort, much less a trombone, but Santos's rapid-fire puffs give some much needed heft to the sly rhythms and flighty melodies. A-

Monsters

Helena Cobban makes the key point about Saddam Hussein:

The worst acts Saddam committed were to gratuitously launch those two invasions of his neighbors -- Iran in 1980, and Kuwait a decade later. For those wars not only led directly to death and destruction on the front-lines; beyond that, each of them also created a broader climate of fear and intense mistrust within which the Iraqi "security" forces committed horrendous atrocities against the country's own people . . . Against Kurds and some Shiites in the 1980s. And then in 1991, horrendously, once again against large numbers of people from both those groups.

But honestly, without Iraq being in a climate of war at those times, I am sure that Saddam and the toadies from his mukhabarat would not have felt such a strong impetus to commit those atrocities. The root monstrosity was the monstrosity of starting those wars.

One lesson of history is that once war starts everyone does things that they would never do otherwise. The difference under war between monsters and bureaucrats turns out to be relatively minor. It's not even the case that the difference is that the monsters relish war, as the bureaucrats are equally capable of rationalizing it. Given what war brings, maybe the standard for determing who is and is not a monster should simply be who is willing and able to go to war. Saddam passes that test, but only so long as he ruled Iraq. Bush also passes that test, but again only while he had the power to act on his monstrous impulses. Separating such monsters from power turns them back into annoying but relatively harmless ordinary assholes.

It bears repeating that what empowers these monsters is our naive belief that war has some redeeming value. This may have had ancient roots, as Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Blood Rites, but the instinct has long become dysfunctional. Karen Armstrong argues that the Axial age religions were founded in response to "an unprecedented crescendo of violence." [interview in Salon: "In every single case, the catalyst for religious change had been a revulsion against violence.] Mark Kurlansky's Non-Violence outlines the long history of the rejection of war, going back to the Axial age religions, but the rationalization of war continues unabated to our day.

At present, the vogue for war is so great that many of us are tempted to reject the characterization of monsters -- even someone like Saddam Hussein -- on the well-founded suspicion that the any agreement would just empower our own monstrous tendencies. So it is crucial that we understand that war is the real monstrosity, enveloping all who participate in it. And that the solution isn't to slay monsters -- it's to starve them, by denying them the arms, the hate, the propaganda, the notion that they can succeed through force.

Further down, Cobban quotes Riverbend on US intentions in Iraq:

My only conclusion is that the Americans want to withdraw from Iraq, but would like to leave behind a full-fledged civil war because it wouldn't look good if they withdraw and things actually begin to improve, would it?

Actually, I doubt that the Americans can conceive of Iraq getting better without them. That's one of the staple delusions that the Bush gang exploits in hanging on there. But it's worthwhile to try to look at things from other people's perspectives. It certainly looks like the only intention the Americans had in Iraq was to destroy, to beat the country back into a primitive, desperate squalor which will take them decades, if ever, to recover from. In any case, such an endstate costs the US very little, especially given that Bush sees terrorism as a political asset.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Killing an Arab

The execution of Saddam Hussein brings closure to a America's confused and rather pathetic handling of Iraq's warlord since they captured him in late 2003. It is perhaps the only closure Bush and Maliki are capable of on the weekend when US soldier deaths in Iraq are expected to pass the 3000 mark. (The count was 2996 when Saddam was hung.) But it's not just an opportune piece of PR timing. It's one more example of how trapped Bush and his crowd are in their conflation of justice and revenge. Executing political figures like Saddam Hussein provide scant satisfaction for either impulse. Their crimes far exceed any price they can pay with personal life, and their deaths offer little to the healing process. Indeed, because revenge is so inadequate, the main thing it does is set the precedent for further revenge.

The US had two relatively good options with Saddam Hussein. They could have taken the low road and killed him right away, perhaps by stuffing him back in that spider hole with a grenade. Or they could have taken the high road and packed him off to the Hague to spend the rest of his miserable life in court facing evidence of his crimes. The former would have settled matters fast enough that no one would have given it a second thought. The latter would have set a higher standard for justice than the US occupation could provide on its own, let alone through the fiction of an independent-but-subservient Iraqi government. But the latter was something Bush could not afford, lest he find himself invited to the Hague as well. The former may just have been bad luck -- the residue of bad planning and hapless performance -- but that, too, follows Bush around.

Instead, the US tried to split the difference: to convene a court no one could possibly mistake as fair and to prosecute Saddam Hussein for some of his lesser crimes, reinforcing the suspicion that the US was party to, or at least no less guilty of, the major crimes. The worst crime of all was starting the war with Iran, which dragged on eight years, costing both sides more than a million lives. But prosecuting Saddam for attacking Iran would show Iran as the victim and raise questions as to what extent the US and its regional allies supported him in starting and prolonging the war. And for that matter, it would raise the question of whether Bush is responsible for the same sort of crime in invading Iraq.

After Iran, there are numerous other things Saddam could have been prosecuted for. As it turns out, what he was prosecuted for was a relatively narrow incident against the ruling Dawa party, making the trial look more than anything else like an instance of revenge politics. This might not matter if Iraq were stable and the Iraqi government recognized as legitimate and equitable, but that is far from the case. As it is, the trial and execution only adds to the sum of sectarian revenge that is tearing Iraq apart. The real challenge with Saddam would have been to try to use him to start to heal the chasm.

I can't say that would be possible, but it's certainly beyond the grasp of someone like Bush, who believes that force clarifies all situations. As governor of Texas, Bush never had a second thought about an execution, and he wound up signing off on more death warrants than Saddam was prosecuted for. (Albeit, not more deaths than Saddam was responsible for. Bush only moved into that league when he became Commander in Chief.) Of course, we don't yet know just how this came about, but there is little doubt that Bush craved a death sentence, and that the show trial was staged for just that purpose. As usual, the trappings of legitimacy were intended to impress only the Americans -- Iraqis have seen things like this before. And so it gives Bush a talking point: that he brought Saddam Hussein "to justice" -- i.e., that he salvaged at least something from his war goals.

It makes for a very shallow victory. That he has consigned Saddam Hussein to history is probably for the best, especially given that he had no better use for him. A smart move at this point would be for Iraq to abolish the death penalty, but that won't happen -- and not just because it would be uncomfortable for Bush. Following WWII, an American general warned politicians seeking to keep Germany crippled that they can have revenge or peace, but not both. Iraq, like Bush, seems hellbent on revenge, and this execution is just one more example. At this rate, peace will be a long time coming.

The one irony in the timing of his execution is that the other big story this week is Gerald Ford, who is being remembered for his "courageous" contribution to "healing the nation" by pardoning Richard Nixon. I put the quotes are there because, as I've written already, there are problems with that interpretation, but it gives us a reference myth for evaluating this execution. (I'll resist the temptation to argue that Nixon was a war criminal comparable or worse than Saddam -- I'd say worse, but settle for the same.) I'm not a fan of capital punishment, but I wouldn't have minded seeing Nixon swing. In fact, one of the reasons I turned against capital punishment was my disappointment that Nixon never got his just desserts. But it also helped get me past my desire for revenge, and that moved me, if not our country, onto a much more peaceable path.

I don't doubt that Saddam Hussein deserved to die, or far worse if you could figure out what that might be. But it's a matter of mere faith to say that the world's better off with him dead -- it's going to be real hard to prove that it's much better. Once he was removed from power and locked behind bars, he ceased to be a danger to anyone -- much as Nixon ceased to be a public menace once he resigned in disgrace. People die in circumstances that are beyond anyone's control, but executions are always optional: Bush and his Iraqi cronies chose to kill Saddam Hussein. In doing so, they've taken a guy who was powerless and turned him into a martyr. We'll see whether that comes back to haunt them, but in the meantime it just feeds the revenge cycle. Iraq needs peace, not revenge. So does America.

One thing that killing Saddam Hussein accomplishes is to keep quite whatever relationship he had with the CIA and the US over the years. Juan Cole has a useful review of what is known about this.

As a special bonus, here's the way Boots Riley explains it in "Head (Of State)," from the Coup's Pick a Bigger Weapon:

In a land not very far away from here
George W. Bush was drinking beer
His daddy was head of the C.I.A.
Now listen up close to what I say
The C.I.A. worked for Standard Oil
And other companies to whom they're loyal
In a whole nother land
By the name of Iran
The people got wise and took a stand
Told the oil companies that ain't shit funny
This is our oil
Our land
Our money
C.I.A. go tmad and sent false info
To Iraq to help start the iran/iraq wo
Pronounced war if I have to be proper
The C.I.A. are the cops that's why I hate the coppers
Saddam Hussein was their man out there
They told him to rule by keeping people scared
Sayin' any opposition to him, he must crush it
He gassed the kurds
They gave him the budget
Said you gotta kick ass to protect our cash
Step out of line and feel our wrath
You know the time without lookin' at the little hand
Time came for them to cut out the middle man
Children maimed with no legs and shit
Cuz of bombs over- you know the Outkast hit
And they really want you to hate him dead
When just the other day they made him head
War aint about one land against the next
It's po people dyin' so the rich cash checks

The refrain goes: "Bush and Hussein together in bed/Giving H-E-A-D: head/Y'all muthafuckas heard what we said/Billions made and millions dead."

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Jazz Label Checkup

I'm looking at the Jazz Times "Year in Review" list of "Top 50 CDs" and one thing that strikes me is how concentrated the set of labels are. There's no information on how they selected the list. But it does seem peculiar that 42% (21 of 50) come from just four labels: Blue Note (8), ECM (6), Nonesuch (4), Cryptogramophone (3). Six more labels landed two records each -- Concord, Palmetto, Pi, Sunnyside, Telarc/Heads Up, Verve -- bringing us to 66% for the top ten labels. Four more records were by major artists now on their own labels: Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Dave Holland, Dave Douglas. That leaves 13 records for the hundreds of other labels releasing jazz these days.

The second thing to note is that only one of all those labels is based in Europe, and that's ECM, distributed in the US by Universal. For that matter, only two artists (4%) come from Europe (Tomasz Stanko and Nik Bartsch, both on ECM). For that matter, I only recognize one Canadian (Jane Bunnett), no one from south of the US border (Eddie Palmieri's a New Yorker and Brian Lynch is from Milwaukee), let alone anyone from Africa or Asia (Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa are a generation removed from India). Only two albums can be classified as Latin jazz (Lynch/Palmieri and Bunnett). The list isn't exactly anti-avant -- for instance, the pianists include Muhal Richard Abrams, Dave Burrell, Myra Melford, Matthew Shipp, and Vijay Iyer, even if I'm uncertain about Andrew Hill, Randy Weston, and Jason Moran these days. But it does seem to be rather narrowly sourced and insular.

For a comparison, I took the list of 52 A- or better new (well, some vault items) jazz (well, some related world) albums I published a few days ago, and found 38 separate labels. Of those, the most places any label scored was three (Atavistic, ECM, Fresh Sound); eight more labels scored twice (Arbors, Clean Feed, Cuneiform, Justin Time, Libra, Pi, Smalls, Sunnyside). Only 3 of those 11 labels placed 2+ times with Jazz Times: ECM, Pi, Sunnyside. I had 11 European labels, plus one from Japan (Libra) and one from Canada (Stony Plain). I figure that even in my case Europe is underrepresented because I get nothing from so many important labels -- some that pop into mind are Criss Cross, Steeplechase, Leo, Emanem, Hep, FMP, Hat, Dreyfus, Label Bleu, and all the Italian labels.

Jazz Times Top 50 CDs for 2006, indexed by label:

 8 Blue Note: Andrew Hill, Stefon Harris, Patricia Barber, Jason Moran,
     Don Byron, Cassandra Wilson, Joe Lovano, Jane Bunnett
 6 ECM: Paul Motian, Keith Jarrett, Trio Beyond, Tomasz Stanko,
     Charles Lloyd, Nik Bartsch
 4 Nonesuch: Kenny Garrett, Brad Mehldau, Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny
 3 Cryptogramophone: Nels Cline, Bennie Maupin, Myra Melford
 2 Concord: Karrin Allyson, Ben Riley
 2 Palmetto: Ted Nash, Dr Lonnie Smith
 2 Pi: Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams
 2 Sunnyside: Chris Potter, Bob Belden
 2 Telarc/Heads Up: Geri Allen, Yellowjackets
 2 Verve: Diana Krall, Roy Hargrove
 1 ArtistShare: Brian Lynch
 1 Groovin' High: Roberta Gambarini
 1 Half Note: Odean Pope
 1 High Two: Dave Burrell
 1 Hyena: Rahsaan Roland Kirk
 1 MaxJazz: Nancy King
 1 Omnitone: Lee Konitz
 1 Planet Arts: Vanguard Jazz Orchestra
 1 Random Chance: Randy Weston
 1 Savoy: Vijay Iyer
 1 Thirsty Ear: Matthew Shipp
 1 Trippin N Rhythm: Chris Standring
 1 Wingood: Gordon Goodwin

 1 Dare2: Dave Holland
 1 Doxy: Sonny Rollins
 1 Greenleaf Music: Dave Douglas
 1 Sound Grammar: Ornette Coleman

For comparison, here's my list A-list, sorted by index:

 3 Atavistic: Steve Lacy, Vandermark 5, Sound in Action Trio
*3 ECM: Nik Bartsch, Charles Lloyd, Manu Katche
*3 Fresh Sound: Bob Reynolds, Ramon Diaz, Bill Carrothers
 2 Arbors: Harry Allen, Maurice Hines
*2 Clean Feed: Adam Lane, Joe Morris
 2 Cuneiform: Soft Machine, Harry Miller
 2 Justin Time: World Saxophone Quartet, Rabih Abou-Khalil
 2 Libra: Satoko Fujii, Junk Box
 2 Pi: Odyssey the Band, Rudresh Mahanthappa
 2 Smalls: Omer Avital, Frank Hewitt
 2 Sunnyside: Steven Bernstein, Les Primitifs du Future
 1 Accurate: Club D'Elf
*1 ACT: Ulf Wakenius
 1 Akron Cracker: Carneyball Johnson
 1 AUM Fidelity: Kidd Jordan
 1 Blue Note: Ignacio Berroa
 1 CIMP: Adam Lane
 1 Concord: Scott Hamilton
 1 Cryptogramophone: Erik Friedlander
 1 Delmark: Fred Anderson
 1 Domino: Kieran Hebden/Steve Reid
 1 Doxy: Sonny Rollins
*1 Intakt: Zentralquartett
 1 Koch: Jon Faddis
*1 Leo: Francois Carrier
*1 No Man's Land: Gato Libre
 1 Nonesuch: Toumani Diabate
 1 Palmetto: Ben Allison
*1 Piranha: Maurice El Medioni/Roberto Rodriguez
 1 Playscape: Mario Pavone
*1 Rune Grammofon: Thomas Stronen
 1 Savoy: Moncef Genoud
 1 Sound Grammar: Ornette Coleman
 1 Stony Plain: Jeff Healey
 1 Thirsty Ear: David S. Ware
*1 Tumi Music: Saborit
 1 Verve: Diana Krall
*1 Winter & Winter: Paul Motian

Fordism's Last Hurrah

The natural tendency when someone dies is to try to say something nice about the person. How hard this can sometimes be is a constant theme in Kudzu, the comic strip featuring the Rev. Will B. Dunn. But really, folks, why are we being so nice to Gerald Ford? The Wichita Eagle had a gushing editorial on Ford today, flanked by a Crowson cartoon showing a map of America with a big bandaid representing Ford crossing the heartland. Walter Shapiro's Salon piece sums up the sentiment: "The man who ended our Nixon nightmare." It's hard to imagine a clearer case of the fallacy of succession: the idea that what came after caused what went before to go away. Ford followed Nixon as President in an inside deal that, to the relief of everyone, first cleared Spiro Agnew out of the way. But Ford's only contribution to healing the damage that Nixon wrought was pardoning Nixon from future prosecution, and that too was part of the deal. The pardon stopped the digging, eventually allowing Nixon to be rehabilitated -- at least to the point where Bill Clinton, who of all people should have known better, wound up eulogizing Nixon at his funeral.

Actually, the people who "ended our Nixon nightmare" were the ones who exposed it: journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, politicians like Sam Ervin, prosecutors like Archibald Cox, a few insiders with a conscience like John Dean. It was only by exposing Nixon's crimes that we could in any way deal with them. Ford's only role in this was to clean up the mess -- primarily by putting a stop to the exposure. Watergate, after all, was not the worst thing Nixon did. The worst was Vietnam -- another mess that Ford conveniently mopped up, so we could recover without learning any painful lessons.

The net effect of the Ford cover-ups was that we never learned not to abuse the political power of the presidency and we never learned that US military power is not necessarily able to force other nations to bend to our will. Those lessons came back to hit us hard in the Bush administrations, especially the second. Is it some sort of coincidence that Ford's chiefs-of-staff Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have been recurrent actors in those nightmares? I suppose it could be, but one thing Rumsfeld and Cheney must have witnessed firsthand is how power protects its own, and as such how much license they have to abuse it -- as long as they can keep it under wraps. This raises the question of whether, had Nixon really paid for his crimes, the Bushes would have been so cavalier about committing their own?

The answer is probably yes, because even if the lesser cover-up of Nixon's political machinations had been foiled, no one dared to question the the real problem: the militarization of the presidency, which resulted from America's addiction to hot and cold wars in the aftermath of WWII. Nixon was anomalous only in that he personalized war to such an extreme that he ordered crimes like Watergate. But every president from Truman on has on their own authority, with no real public debate or oversight, directed hostile acts against other nations, and in doing so they've built up as self-contained and as belligerent as the Ottoman sultans or the Mongol khans. To do that, they had to operate in secret -- the rationale and the consequence of the imperial presidency. For a long time this was justified by the ideology of anti-communism, but since the Soviet Union fell it has been self-sustaining, directed at evils that for the most part are mere reflections of itself. That, even more than Nixon, was what Ford covered up.

There's no need to blame Ford severely for this. He was, at most, a bit player, a man of no great curiosity or conviction who had some skills at getting along, presenting a straight face, and asking few questions. (It's worth noting that Ford had already proven this much on the Warren Commission.) Whether he was what the cold warriors needed at the time is hard to say. Mostly they needed time to bury Vietnam, and he was at least good for some of that. But he didn't heal anything, and in the long run he did his little bit to make things worse. One revelation that has come out since his death is that he was opposed to Bush's Iraq War. But, typically, he never went public with that when it might have made a difference. When you read about his "profile in courage" award, please gag.

These thoughts are echoed and expanded on in various letters responding to Shapiro.

Slackie Onassis wrote:

Ford didn't do the country a service by pardoning Nixon. If anything, that free pass from judgment let the GOP continue full steam on their anti-democratic course that made the G.W. Bush presidency inevitable -- Bush has out-Reaganed Reagan and out-Nixoned Nixon. The imperial Presidency's more alive than ever, and thanks to the bar-lowering of Monicagate by the GOP themselves, no President will likely ever be impeached again.

Btdenver wrote:

Ford restored civility in the short-term at the price of making administrations unaccountable, fostering the severe incivility of today. He merely tightened the lid of the pressure cooker that it may blow up later. His "decency" gave cover to the great indecency of the GOP, which we now see in full bloom.

If Nixon and his men had been brought to justice, would it have made it more difficult to lie this country into another war a generation later? To utterly disregard the law? Ford interposed himself between Nixon's men and justice and truth. We are all paying for that still.

Rrk1 wrote:

The pardon healed nothing. It left much wrong doing unexposed and unexamined, and signaled the political establishment that accountability, no matter what they did, was off the table. Moreover, the ever self-promoting Nixon spent the rest of his life resurrecting his image, and transforming himself into an elder statesman. Columnists, like Saphire [sic] in the Times, wrote endless screeds and apologias for decades about Nixon. For the Republicans the rehabilitation of Nixon was a crusade, a political holy grail pursued relentlessly, more-or-less successfully, and made infinitely easier by his pardon.

Expatjourno wrote:

The nightmare for the country was not the exposure of Nixon's crimes, it was the crimes themselves. Exposure of the many ways Nixon attempted to subvert the Constitution and the rule of law was only a nightmare for Republicans, conservatives and people who wanted to subvert the constitution and the rule of law. For Democrats, for liberals, for people who believed in the Constitution and the rule of law, for people who always saw who Nixon really was, it was vindication.

Far from being a selfless act of statesmanship, Ford's pardon of Nixon before all of the facts came to light in a court of law ensured that Nixon's crimes were not in the headlines during the 1976 campaign, which they surely would have been had the pardon not been issued. So, far from being a "clear-the-air" pardon, it was a move-along-there's-nothing-to-see-here pardon. Indeed, it was the ultimate cover-up of Nixon's crimes.

Breadbaker wrote:

Right now, the presidency is held by a man who reads the Constitution as including two phrases in big bold letters, one that says that the executive power is vested in a President of the United States, and another that says that that President is commander-in-chief. Everything else, in his constitutional view, is in footnote-size type and need not be bothered with.

What is the source of this? His principal advisers are two men who cut their teeth running the government in the Ford Administration, Ford's two chiefs-of-staff, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. These men came from the school that thought not that Nixon had gone too far, but that he hadn't gone far enough.

Ford's presidency is remembered as relatively benign in terms of foreign policy, but Miriam Adams points out:

Even less commentary about Ford's mission to Indonesia as the honored guest of dictator Suharto's State dinner. The presence of Ford and Kissinger that night and their "carte blanche" for weapons transfers there came only hours before the war against the Peoples of East Timor was initiated in which more than 200,000 civilians were slaughtered. Famous photos are still archived online showing Ford toasting his host/dictator wearing flower garlands the night before that genocide began.

One assertion in the letters is that Ford was in office a whole month before he pardoned Nixon, and only decided to do so at that point -- i.e., it was not part of the deal, as I suggest above, but a decision that he made independently. I don't have evidence that I'm right, but I find the logic of the deal so compelling that the burden of evidence should be on the other side. Maybe it wasn't formalized as a deal, but the basic need for limiting the damage, especially to the presidential institution, pushed Ford in the direction of some sort of cover-up. The pardon was a novel approach, and not necessarily a legally sound one. The time delay helped Ford establish a facade of independence, and let the bury-the-hatchet propaganda take root.

Ford was almost a definition of mediocrity, but his death comes at the same time as the death of a truly great American, James Brown. It surely is a coincidence that Ronald Reagan died at about the same time as Ray Charles -- one of the few American musicians of the 20th century even remotely on Brown's level. I got dragged into a desert island disc discussion a few years back and someone suggested a pick for me. I don't recall who now, just that my reaction was I'd rather have James Brown. If I had to pick two articles of unswerving faith, they'd be "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" and "funk is its own reward": James Brown, more than anyone else, embodied both. The "hardest working man in show business" set standards none of us can match. He not only kept it on the one, he was the one.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Village Voice Jazz Poll

Francis Davis converted his year-end column into a jazz critics poll this year. He invited 40 more/less New York-focused critics, and got 30 ballots. The big winner was Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar, followed by Andrew Hill's Time Lines and Sonny Rollins' Sonny, Please. The results get scattered after that, with seven ballots putting Nels Cline's Andrew Hill-themed New Monastery into 4th place, and five votes sufficing to place Paul Motian's Garden of Eden at 6th. The results are here, and you can navigate to the rest of the pieces from there.

One of those pieces is my own annotated ballot. This was submitted a couple of weeks ago, under mild protest that the year was still young, and I'm still trying to catch up. Normally I keep my year-end list open another year, adding things as I get the chance. You can see how this works by scanning the nearly-frozen 2005 list, where the late adds appear in green. The A-list there comes to 133 records, of which 20 were added late. This year's list, with less than a week to go before I start breaking out the green font, has 97 records, a drop I haven't analyzed yet. Looking through the pending list, I see maybe a dozen that might wind up A-, which would bring the two years reasonably close into line -- assuming I hit my deadline, a stretch. The total number of new records is up this year (741, including pending, vs. 646); the number of reissues of various sorts is down a smidgen (318, from 336), with the A-lists down quite a bit (68 vs. 115).

From all these records, a top ten seems arbitrarily short. Davis added a few more "honorable mentions" to his list. I'll go a bit further here and give you my up-to-the-minute 2006 A-list, minus the non-jazz records (which start with Todd Snider and Public Enemy):

1. Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar)
2. Jon Faddis: Teranga (Koch)
3. World Saxophone Quartet: Political Blues (Justin Time)
4. Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra: New Magical Kingdom (Clean Feed)
5. Mario Pavone Sextet: Deez to Blues (Playscape)
6. The Harry Allen-Joe Cohn Quartet: Hey, Look Me Over (Arbors)
7. Odyssey the Band: Back in Time (Pi)
8. Adam Lane Trio: Zero Degree Music (CIMP)
9. Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra: MTO Volume 1 (Sunnyside)
10. Nik Bärtsch's Ronin: Stoa (ECM)
11. Satoko Fujii Four: When We Were There (Libra)
12. Steve Lacy Quintet: Esteem (1975, Atavistic)
13. Joe Morris Quartet: Beautiful Existence (Clean Feed)
14. The Vandermark 5: A Discontinuous Line (Atavistic)
15. Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra: Boulevard de l'Indépendence (World Circuit/Nonesuch)
16. Ben Allison: Cowboy Justice (Palmetto)
17. Zentralquartett: 11 Songs -- Aus Teutschen Landen (Intakt)
18. Gato Libre: Nomad (No Man's Land)
19. Sonny Rollins: Sonny, Please (Doxy)
20. Fred Anderson: Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge (Delmark)
21. Diana Krall: From This Moment On (Verve)
22. François Carrier: Happening (Leo, 2CD)
23. Bob Reynolds: Can't Wait for Perfect (Fresh Sound New Talent)
24. Ramón Díaz: Diàleg (Fresh Sound New Talent)
25. Maurice El Médioni Meets Roberto Rodriguez: Descarga Oriental: The New York Sessions (Piranha)
26. Sound in Action Trio: Gate (Atavistic)
27. Ignacio Berroa: Codes (Blue Note)
28. Scott Hamilton: Nocturnes & Serenades (Concord)
29. Ulf Wakenius: Notes From the Heart (ACT)
30. Soft Machine: Grides (1971, Cuneiform)
31. Charles Lloyd: Sangam (ECM)
32. Erik Friedlander: Prowl (Cryptogramophone)
33. Rabih Abou-Khalil/Joachim Kühn: Journey to the Centre of an Egg (Enja/Justin Time)
34. Manu Katché: Neighbourhood (ECM)
35. Jeff Healey & the Jazz Wizards: It's Tight Like That (Stony Plain)
36. Harry Miller's Isipingo: Which Way Now (1975, Cuneiform)
37. Omer Avital: The Ancient Art of Giving (Smalls)
38. Saborit: Que Linda Es Mi Cuba (Tumi Music)
39. Club D'Elf: Now I Understand (Accurate)
40. Rudresh Mahanthappa: Codebook (Pi)
41. Les Primitifs du Futur: World Musette (1999, Sunnyside)
42. Frank Hewitt: Fresh From the Cooler (1996, Smalls)
43. Kidd Jordan/Hamid Drake/William Parker: Palm of Soul (AUM Fidelity)
44. Maurice Hines: To Nat "King" Cole With Love (Arbors)
45. Paul Motian: On Broadway Vol. 4 (Winter & Winter)
46. Moncef Genoud: Aqua (Savoy Jazz)
47. Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid: The Exchange Session Vol. 1 (Domino)
48. Bill Carrothers: Shine Ball (Fresh Sound New Talent)
49. Carneyball Johnson (Akron Cracker)
50. The David S. Ware Quartet: BalladWare (Thirsty Ear)
51. Junk Box: Fragment (Libra)
52. Thomas Strønen: Pohlitz (Rune Grammofon)

The reissues category is harder to judge, in part because of how redundancy, utility, and historical value enter into the equation. When I did the ballot, I actually skipped over my top rated item to take Fats Waller, then skipped over some more obvious choices in favor of Irène Schweizer and Andrew Hill. The following list comes from the year-end list, merging compilations and reissues together. (First releases of vault music are generally included with the new releases, although I didn't always do it that way.)

1. Night in Tunisia: The Very Best of Dizzy Gillespie (1946-49, Bluebird/Legacy)
2. Fats Waller: If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It (1926-43, Bluebird/Legacy, 3CD)
3. Sonny Rollins: Milestone Profiles (1972-2001, Milestone)
4. God Bless the Child: The Very Best of Billie Holiday (1935-42, Columbia/Legacy)
5. Irène Schweizer: Portrait (1984-2004, Intakt)
6. Bob Wills: Legends of Country Music (1932-73, Columbia/Legacy, 4CD)
7. Pérez Prado: The Hits (1949-59, RCA/Legacy)
8. One O'Clock Jump: The Very Best of Count Basie (1936-42, Columbia/Legacy)
9. The Miles Davis Quintet: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions (1955-58, Prestige, 4CD)
10. Andrew Hill: Pax (1965, Blue Note)
11. Archie Shepp: The Impulse Story (1964-72, Impulse)
12. Serge Chaloff: Boston Blow-Up! (1955, Capitol Jazz)
13. Joe Henderson: Milestone Profiles (1967-75, Milestone)
14. John Coltrane: The Impulse Story (1961-67, Impulse)
15. Pärson Sound (1966-68, Anthology, 2CD)
16. Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: Éthiopiques 21: Ethiopia Song (1963-96, Buda Musique)
17. Sonny Rollins: The Impulse Story (1965-66, Impulse)
18. Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: The Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings (1957, Riverside, 2CD)
19. Andrew Hill: Smoke Stack (1963, Blue Note)
20. Nils Petter Molvaer: An American Compilation (Thirsty Ear)
21. Pharoah Sanders: The Impulse Story (1966-73, Impulse)
22. The House That Trane Built: The Best of Impulse Records (1961-76, Impulse)

Some of these items are borderline jazz, but that's the way the world works. In particular, I included Toumani Diabaté because the record got votes in the Voice poll. Same for Pérez Prado, which I might have included anyway -- even thought about voting for it myself. Bob Wills is another case. There's actually quite a bit of stuff that doesn't get filed as jazz that can be listened to as jazz -- especially world and electronica, but western swing works for me.

I've gone through the published ballots and collected 45 new titles and 27 reissues that I don't have/haven't heard. I need to track some of those down. The winning jazz vocal record, by Nancy Kelly, is one. The winning debut record, by Francisco Mela, would have been but I got tipped off, hustled up a copy, and am playing it now. (Seems unlikely to dislodge my vote for Bob Reynolds.)

Publicist's letter:

The Village Voice has published my year-end jazz list:

  http://villagevoice.com/music/0652,davis,75410,22.html

My list is an add-on to Francis Davis's year-end column, which this
year has been expanded into a NYC-oriented jazz critics poll:

  http://villagevoice.com/music/0652,davis,75409,22.html

A bit frustrated that I could only vote for 10 (well, 15, including
oldies, vocal and debut) albums, I dumped my whole year-end jazz
list into a blog entry:

  http://www.tomhull.com/blog/archives/447-Village-Voice-Jazz-Poll.html

New records indexed by label:
  Accurate: Club D'Elf
  ACT: Ulf Wakenius
  Akron Cracker: Carneyball Johnson
  Arbors: Harry Allen-Joe Cohn (#6), Maurice Hines
  Atavistic: Steve Lacy, Vandermark 5, Sound in Action Trio
  AUM Fidelity: Kidd Jordan
  Blue Note: Ignacio Berroa
  CIMP: Adam Lane (#8)
  Clean Feed: Adam Lane (#4), Joe Morris
  Concord: Scott Hamilton
  Cryptogramophone: Erik Friedlander
  Cuneiform: Soft Machine, Harry Miller
  Delmark: Fred Anderson
  Domino: Kieran Hebden/Steve Reid
  Doxy: Sonny Rollins
  ECM: Nik Bartsch (#10), Charles Lloyd, Manu Katche
  Fresh Sound: Bob Reynolds, Ramon Diaz, Bill Carrothers
  Justin Time: World Saxophone Quartet (#3), Rabih Abou-Khalil
  Koch: Jon Faddis (#2)
  Intakt: Zentralquartett
  Leo: Francois Carrier
  Libra: Satoko Fujii, Junk Box
  No Man's Land: Gato Libre
  Nonesuch: Toumani Diabate
  Palmetto: Ben Allison
  Pi: Odyssey the Band, Rudresh Mahanthappa
  Piranha: Maurice El Medioni/Roberto Rodriguez
  Playscape: Mario Pavone (#5)
  Rune Gramophone: Thomas Stronen
  Savoy Jazz: Moncef Genoud
  Smalls: Omer Avital, Frank Hewitt
  Sound Grammar: Ornette Coleman (#1)
  Stony Plain: Jeff Healey
  Sunnyside: Steven Bernstein (#9), Les Primitifs du Futur
  Thirsty Ear: David S. Ware
  Tumi Music: Saborit
  Verve: Diana Krall
  Winter & Winter: Paul Motian

Reissues indexed by label:
  Anthology: Parson Sound
  Blue Note (Capitol Jazz): Andrew Hill (2), Serge Chaloff
  Buda Musique: Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou
  Concord (Milestone, Prestige, Riverside): Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis,
    Joe Henderson, Thelonious Monk/John Coltrane
  Intakt: Irene Schweizer
  Legacy (Sony/BMG): Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday,
    Bob Wills, Perez Prado, Count Basie
  Thirsty Ear: Nils Petter Molvaer
  Verve (Impulse): Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins,
    Pharoah Sanders, The House That Trane Built

I've worked my way through almost 500 jazz records to come up with
these lists, four Jazz Consumer Guides, and weekly Jazz Prospecting
notes. Nonetheless, there were 72 records (45 new, 27 old) that
received votes in the poll that I haven't heard -- something to
follow up on, no doubt.

Jazz records that got votes in Francis Davis' Village Voice Jazz Poll that I never got (new records, including vocal [*] and debut [#] slots; 45 total):

• Atomic: The Bikini Tapes (Jazzland) [Szwed]
• Jonathan Batiste: Live in New York: At the Rubin Museum of Art (jonathanbatiste.com) [Fricke#]
• Lincoln Binney: Foreign Affair (XQ/AM) [Johnson]
• Bob Brookmeyer & the New Art Orchestra: Spirit Music (ArtistShare) [Hajdu, Morgenstern]
• Uri Caine: Rimmon (Tzadik) [Macnie]
• Jack DeJohnette & Bill Frisell: The Elephant Sleeps but Still Remembers (Kindred Rhythm) [Hajdu]
• Bob De Vos: Shifting Sands (Savant) [Stewart]
• Electric Masada: At the Mountains of Madness (Tzadik) [Fricke]
• Peter Evans: More Is More (Psi) [Dollar]
• Bill Frisell/Ron Carter/Paul Motian (Nonesuch) [Donohue, Kaplan, Ouellette]
• Roberta Gambarini: Easy to Love (Grovin' High/Kindred Rhythm) [Morgenstern*, Musto*, Stewart*]
• Kenny Garrett: Beyond the Wall (Nonesuch) [Milkowski, Musto, Richardson]
• David Gilmore: Unified Presence (RKM) [Musto]
• Mary Halvorson & Jessica Pavone: Prairies (Lucky Kitchen) [Dollar]
• Curtis Hasselbring: The New Mellow Edwards (Skirl) [Davis#, Henkin]
• Roy Haynes: Whereas (Dreyfus Jazz) [Morgenstern]
• Leroy Jenkins & Driftwood: The Art of Improvisation (Mutable Music) [Mandel]
• Hank Jones/Christian McBride/Jimmy Cobb: West of 5th (Chesky) [Kaplan, Musto]
• Nancy King: Live at the Jazz Standard With Fred Hersch (MaxJazz) [Adler*, Donohue, Hajdu*, Williams*]
• Lee Konitz: New Nonet (Omnitone) [Adler, Blumenfeld, Milkowski]
• Bobby Matos: Acknowledgement (Lifeforcejazz) [Szwed]
• Pat Metheny & Brad Mehldau (Nonesuch) [Moon]
• Neil Miner: The Evening Sounds (Smalls) [Stewart]
• Marisa Monte: Universo ao Meu Redor (Blue Note) [Blumenfeld*]
• Mark Murphy: Once to Every Heart (Verve) [Johnson]
• Zim Ngqawana: Vadzimu (Sheer) [Jenkins]
• Orchestre National de Jazz: Close to Heaven (Le Chant du Monde) [Jenkins]
• Evan Parker: Time Lapse (Tzadik) [Henkin, Richardson]
• Luis Perdomo: Awareness (RKM) [Macnie]
• Ted Reichman: My Ears Are Bent (Skirl) [Dollar]
• Ben Riley's Monk Legacy Septet: Memories of T (Concord) [Donohue, Musto, Ouellette, Williams]
• Ned Rothenberg/Tony Buch/Stomu Takeishi/David Tronzo: The Fell Clutch (Animul) [Henkin]
• Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Solo (Blue Note) [Blumenfeld]
• Catherine Russell: Cat (World Village) [Friedwald]
• Frank Sinatra: Vegas (Reprise) [Hajdu]
• Vanguard Jazz Orchestra: Up From the Skies -- Music of Jim McNeely (Planet Arts) [Hajdu]
• Alexander von Schlippenbach: Twelve Tone Tales Vol. 1 & 2 (Intakt) [Henkin]
• SF Jazz Collective: Live 2005: 2nd Annual Concert Tour (SF Jazz) [Jenkins]
• Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra: Port Chicago (Noir) [Morgenstern]
• Grant Stewart: Estate (Video Arts) [Stewart]
• Syntopia Quartet: Mars (Nemu) [Shoemaker#]
• Aki Takase Piano Quartet: Tarantella (Psi) [Shoemaker]
• Joe Temperley: A Portrait (Hep) [Morgenstern]
• Benny Wallace: Disorder at the Border (Enja) [Friedwald]
• Randy Weston: Zep Tepi (Random Chance) [Jenkins]

Reissues (27 total):

• Air: 80 Degrees Below 82 (CD-R) [Johnson]
• Jon Appleton & Don Cherry: Human Music (Water) [Szwed]
• Ornette Coleman: Love Revolution -- Complete 1968 Italian Tour (Gambit) [Hajdu]
• John Coltrane: Fearless Leader (Prestige) [Fricke, Hajdu]
• Ted Daniel: Sextet (Ujamaa Music) [Henkin]
• Eric Dolphy Quintet: Outward Bound (Prestige) [Richardson]
• Duke Ellington: The Complete 1936-1940 Variety, Vocalion and Okeh Small Group Sessions (Mosaic) [Hajdu]
• Gil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions (Blue Note) [Adler]
• Sonny Fortune: Trilogy (Sonny Fortune) [Jenkins]
• Red Garland Trio: At the Prelude (Prestige) [Mandel, Stewart]
• Dizzy Gillespie: The Complete Verve/Phillips Small Group Sessions (Mosaic) [Kaplan, Morgenstern]
• Rufus Harley: Courage: The Atlantic Recordings (Rhino Handmade) [Freeman, Fricke]
• Andrew Hill: Solo (Mosaic Select) [Fricke, Kaplan, Morgenstern]
• I Like Be I Like Bop: Odds & Svends of Early Bebop Violin & Contemporary Violin Curiosities (AB Fable) [Szwed]
• Steve Lacy & Brion Gysin: Songs (HatHut) [Macnie]
• Charles Lloyd: Of Course, of Course (Mosaic) [Seymour]
• Jackie McLean: Demon's Dance (Blue Note) [Shoemaker]
• Bheki Mseleku: The Best Of (Sheer) [Jenkins]
• Kansas City Frank Melrose: Bluesiana (Delmark) [Mandel]
• Oliver Nelson: The Argo, Verve, and Impulse Big Band Studio Sessions (Mosaic) [Friedwald, Seymour]
• King Oliver: Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings (Archeophone) [Blumenfeld]
• Evan Parker: The Topography of the Lungs (Psi) [Macnie, Shoemaker]
• Jimmy Raney: With Bob Brookmeyer (Verve) [Davis]
• Roswell Rudd: Blown Bone (Emanem) [Szwed]
• Eddie South: The Cheloni Broadcast Transcriptions (Jazz Oracle) [Morgenstern]
• Lucky Thompson: Meets Oscar Pettiford (Fresh Sound) [Williams]
• Stan Tracey: (The Return of) Captain Adventure (Steam-TentoTen) [Donohue, Shoemaker]

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

I made my annual stab at a Christmas dinner today. Menu:

• Chicken cacciatore
• Sweet potato frites
• Fried zucchini
• Green beans with parmesan
• Mark Bittman's "shrimps my way"
• Sliced tomatoes with mozzarella
• Amish door date pudding

Figured since I was deep frying, I'd double up. Once again, it proved to be the bottleneck in serving the meal, with the last batch of zucchini appearing after most of the plates were cleared. Other than that, everything was near perfect. Mike took some pictures. Maybe they'll show up on porkalicious some day.

Redeemed by History?

An excerpt from an opinion column in the Wichita Eagle today, written by Mark Updegrove, author of a book, Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House:

And yet Truman may offer President Bush hope. As Truman said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." Just a few years after leaving the White House, after retreating to his hometown of Independence, Mo., Truman's stock began to rise.

The magnitude of his times was appreciated. Truman's strength of character was acknowledged, too. . . .

If the growing appreciation Truman enjoyed is any indication, Bush has at least one thing going for him: the indisputable historical significance of the post-Sept. 11 period, offering him the greatest leadership test of his generation.

Afghanistan had been "the graveyard of empirse" before U.S.-led coalition forces crossed over the border and drove out the Taliban. But it is Bush's decision to invade and occupy Iraq on which his historical legacy hinges, particularly because he did so without direct provocation.

Bush has shown the unwavering resolve for which great leaders are often celebrated -- if they are ultimately proved to be right.

If that is the case, history may celebrate Bush, and, as distant as the hope seems now, he may be awarded a place in the presidential pantheon along with Harry S. Truman. If not, history will surely condemn him for his lack of judgment.

It's hard to believe that Updegrove is so dense that he thinks the jury's still out on Bush. But he does do us a favor in pointing out that Bush's immediate post-9/11 "leadership" is the myth that most needs to be demolished. This was the period when Bob Woodward lionized Bush at War. Even in the 2004 presidential debates, Kerry complimented Bush for his post-9/11 act. The fct is that Bush failed utterly in that critical period. He failed to recognize that 9/11 was a consequence of years of manipulative policies in the Middle East, including a peculiar daliance with Islamists, prized in Washington for their anti-Communism. He failed to understand that a massive military response would lose the political ground, eventually ejecting the US from the region. And he didn't realize that his own interests and predilections -- his corrupt use of government to pay off his political obligations, his confusion of privilege with freedom, and his adolescent relish of violence -- would undermine his every effort.

None of the results of those efforts are very controversial now: the Taliban is back in Afghanistan -- pace Updegrove, they never actually left -- as well as stronger in Pakistan; Iraq is a seething cesspool of violence; occupied Palestine and Lebanon have been levelled by Israel with unquestioning Bush support; efforts to isolate and bully Syria and Iran have only stiffened their resolve to defy the US; the US military has been broken, while running up a bill that has massively expanded the national debt; US ability to project power is diminished, and whatever moral authority the US once had has been lost. Even to the extent that these things are trends as opposed to completed facts, the trends are locked into Bush's famed "resolve" -- his delusional conviction in his own righteousness.

I'm not a big fan of Truman. In particular, I consider his pivotal decisions to engage in what we came to call the Cold War with the Soviet Union to have been a long-term mistake. It should also be noted that Truman, like Bush, went with the popular flow down the easy slope to war, where real leadership would have resisted the temptation -- although to be fair, Truman was far more reluctant to bite off more than he could chew than Bush, and never seemed to have actually relished picking a fight, like Bush clearly does. Truman had another personal trait that worked in his favor: he established his reputation as an opponent of wartime profiteering, and he is widely recognized as one of the least corrupt politicians the US has had. Bush is at the far opposite end of that spectrum.

But Truman's rehabilitation is also based on two more factors that Bush doesn't have working in his favor. The first is that Truman was president at a time when American power was ascendant worldwide, and not just because the rest of the world had gone through the horrific destruction of WWII. This made is possible for the US to do things like the Marshall Plan, which actually had a lot more -- especially positive -- effect than military actions in Germany and Korea. On the other hand, US power has been declining for several decades now, leaving Bush in a much weaker position, with fewer options, than Truman had. It's also worth noting that self-conceptions lag actual power, so Truman was more modest than he needed to be, and Bush more arrogant. One measure of the extent of decline is that Truman was able to defeat the governments of Germany and Japan and to hold the Soviet Union and China at bay, while Bush can't even handle a couple of guerrilla revolts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The other secret behind Truman's reputation triumph was how the Republicans, exercising selective memory, adopted him as an avatar of their own postwar legacy. This was mostly limited to Cold War militarism, which in Truman's day was primarily opposed by conservative isolationists like Taft. But Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers built on Truman's foundation, but tougher and more aggressive -- the latter traits conveniently masked by citing Truman as their originator. There's no chance that Bush will be similarly adopted by his nominal opponents.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Music: Current count 12695 [12671] rated (+24), 868 [860] unrated (+8). Mostly an off-week, with most of the ratings coming from deep backlog, rather than things I have more immediate reason to work on. Accordingly, the immediate tasks are backing up.

• Carl Allen & Manhattan Projects: The Dark Side of Dewey (1992 [1996], Evidence): I always assumed that Dewey was Redman, but the music didn't fit, nor the lineup. I looked more closely when I recognized "All Blues" and found out that Miles' middle name was Dewey. So this is basically a Davis tribute with Nicholas Payton enjoying himself in the hot seat, Vincent Herring playing Shorter, Mulgrew Miller doing his best Hancock, Dwayne Burno on bass, the leader on drums. B+(*)
• Eubie Blake: Memories of You (1915-73 [1990], Biograph): Mostly taken from piano rolls Blake recorded 1917-21, plus two 1915 piano rolls by others and two 1973 recordings. This is actually both brighter and slicker than Brun Campell's recordings. Rather impressive, even. B+(***)
• Ruby Braff: Very Sinatra (1982, Red Barron): With no vocals, no one is challenging Sinatra on his own turf. Rather, Braff picks songs Sinatra picked, and not just because Sinatra picked them. He relishes the swing, and if anything takes them back a closer to trad jazz. Played this twice before I looked at the personnel sheet, admiring the consistent play without especially noticing anything other than the pretty good organ. Turns out the band is: Dick Hyman, Bucky Pizzarelli, Michael Moore (the mainstream bassist, not one of the many others), and Mel Lewis, with Vic Dickenson and Sam Margolis slipping in on three cuts. A-
• Brun Campbell: Joplin's Disciple ([2001], Delmark): Born 1884, died 1953. As a teenager in 1898 Campbell heard his first ragtime and set out for Sedalia MO to take lessons from Scott Joplin. He claims to have been Joplin's only white student, and the booklet notes that he was the only Joplin student to record. No dates on these recordings, but evidently date from the 1940s. Remarkable historical document. Don't know ragtime well enough to comment on the finer points, but Campbell is such a rough gem there may be none. B+
• The Teddy Charles Tentet (1956 [1988], Atlantic): Charles played vibes, which are prominent but not critical. The group is large, and tightly arranged, impressive in its details, although I've never been all that taken by it. Aside from Charles, the composer-arrangers are all hall of famers: Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Mal Waldron, and on the bonus tracks, Bob Brookmeyer. B+(**)
• The Robert Cray Band: Live From Across the Pond (2006, Nozzle/Vanguard, 2CD): A terrific blues guitarist, a so-so singer, and a songwriter I all too frequently find myself wanting to strangle. After twenty-some years, he's entitled to throw out a live double career retrospective. But that doesn't make me like the songs any better. Well, not much better, anyway. B-
• Lonnie Donegan: Putting on the Styles (1955-66 [1992], Sequel, 3CD): The Skiffle King, as the first disc describes him. Donegan was an important figure in the prehistory of English rock -- his skiffle analogous to the pre-Beatles folk movement here, except more fun. We know him mostly for a novelty hit: "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (On the Bedpost Overnight)" near the end of the second disc. Still, this set goes too far. The third disc turns him loose on standards like "Miss Otis Regrets" and pop hits like "I Wanna Go Home" that are almost devoid of interest. B
• Eek-A-Mouse: U-Neek (1991, Island/Peace Posse): His voice was a novelty at first, but here he works within it, and it's workable. Beats for the most part are up. "No Problem" is a great song. B+
• Roy Eldridge in Paris (1950 [1995], RCA/Disques Vogue): Two sessions from 1950, with all the spare parts. Eldridge sings on several cuts, working with someone named Anita Love on two of them. Delightful stuff, always enjoy his vocals, but the trumpet is what's awesome. B+
• Feathermerchants: Last Man on Earth (2006, Innocent 12th Street): Alt-rock group with a female lead singer, Shannon Kennedy, and the usual laconic guitars. Group has several records, dating back to 1999. Pleasant sound, no clear take on how deep they might be. B
• Dusko Goykovich Big Band: Balkan Connection (1995 [1996], Enja): The big band isn't quite as sharp as it should be, but it has a good measure of elegance and suppleness. Also, the Balkan connection isn't as revealing or inspiring as you'd hope for, but that may be beside the point. The great tradition the songs are actually rooted in is bebop. B+(*)
• Coleman Hawkins: In Europe 1934/39 (1934-39 [1989], Jazz Up, 3CD): Hawkins spent five years in Europe, mostly playing with local bands, sometimes with American travelers like Benny Carter. Before he left he was the most important tenor saxophonist in big band jazz. By the time he returned he was even further advanced as a soloist. This is the basic documentation, including sidesteps and multiple takes, as well as the "Crazy Rhythm" sessions with Carter and Django Reinhardt, which you no doubt already own. I must have ten copies, but I never tire of hearing them. A-
• John Holloway: Johann Sebastian Bach: The Sonatas and Partitas (2004 [2006], ECM): The only music teacher I ever had -- an old geezer named Pankratz -- always named Bach as his all-time favorite. I aced his tests and the notebook, did my best to never actually listen to any classical music, and always felt self-conscious about my singing -- at least since Lannie Goldsten (or was her name Marva Goldberg? I think she used both) started kicking me every time I made a peep ("just lip sync!"). So this does and doesn't bring back traumatic childhood memories -- not the music because, as I said, I never actually listened to it, although the sound of violin was enough to send me scurrying. That's the only sound there is here, and I find it oddly soothing on a very gray, rainy December day, although I also find it rather indifferent -- the violinists I do like have a little swing in their kit. But I'll grade this one leniently: Laura thought it was wonderful. B+(*)
• Maria Kalaniemi: Bellow Poetry (2006, Alula): Finnish accordionist, classically trained but plays folk melodies, intimately detailed, warm and comfy, with occasional vocals -- which leaves them lacking sufficient energy to jump over the cultural barrier, or sufficient deviousness to tunnel under. B
• Erich Kunzel/Cincinnati Pops Orchestra: Christmastime Is Here (2006, Telarc): Included here only because the featured singers, at least when they can shut up the Children's Choir and the Indiana University Singing Hoosiers, have jazz credentials -- Ann Hampton Callaway, Tony DeSare, Tierney Sutton, John Pizzarelli. Reminds me of a junior high recital, only at a higher standard of competency. Hard to say how much of a plus that really is. But it is clear that the jazz singers only made the program through the label's contacts, and that they were wasted. C+
• Jamie Lidell: Multiply (2005, Warp): AMG slots him under electronica, and that's where his label generally resides. That's also where I found his record at Record Time, and they generally know what they're doing. But he sounds to me like a straight soul singer, which I suppose is some sort of accomplishment for a white DJ/producer from England. Having trouble relating to this, but it has some appeal and potential. B+(**)
• Wadada Leo Smith: The Year of the Elephant (2002, Pi): Quartet, with Anthony Davis on piano and synth, Malachi Favors on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums. Smith sounds terrific, especially out of the gate, and Davis has some good moments, but this drags a bit in the middle. B+(**)
• Tom Wurth (2006, Aspirion): Country singer, on his first album, has all the basic skills, but tries so hard, the overkill gets the best of him. He does a credible "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," but passes it off as a bonus track, because he already has 14 songs -- not originals, mind you, just non-standards. He doesn't seem to have written any of them, which is probably why he's able to slip a great song like "Bread on the Table" in with a good like like "Good Ground" and a bunch of stuff that go through the motions -- sometimes, as in "Bad Case of Missing You," at breakneck speed with fancy piano. B

Jazz Prospecting (CG #12, Part 6)

Time to post the week's jazz prospecting, and what I find here is downright embarrassing: two Christmas albums. My first thought was to declare "no jazz prospecting" this week, but I figured it would look even dumber to run them after Christmas. (Of course, today's too late for shoppers, but they're not recommended all that highly.) So "Part 6" is pretty sparse, even after I plundered the notebook for three more not-really-jazz notes.

I hadn't expected to do much jazz this week, as the impending deadline is the 2006-roundup edition of Recycled Goods, and most of what I have to catch up with there is non-jazz. But I wound up spending a lot of time rummaging through the new 8th Edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. I'll write more about this in the next few weeks. Thus far I've started building up the differences chart: I figure I'm about 26% done, and don't know when I'll get around to finishing it. It's hard on the eyes, and 3-4 days of hacking at it cuts drastically into whatever else I'm trying to do. But you can take a look at what I have so far here. The Crown and Core lists should be complete.

The Village Voice should have its big year-end jazz poll out this week. More on that when it happens.

Christmas Break: Relaxing Jazz for the Holidays (1992-98 [2006], Telarc): Selected from the label's Christmases past, avoiding any hint of merriment, joy, or, heaven forbid, excitement. Nonetheless, this order is mostly filled by thoughtful solo piano (Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, George Shearing) and guitar (Jim Hall, Al Di Meola -- the latter is unexpectedly lovely on "Ave Maria"), all of whom have something to add to the melody. Better still is Jeanie Bryson cooing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" over Kenny Barron's piano. Still doesn't break my tinsel ceiling, but comes close. B

Erich Kunzel/Cincinnati Pops Orchestra: Christmastime Is Here (2006, Telarc): Included here only because the featured singers, at least when they can shut up the Children's Choir and the Indiana University Singing Hoosiers, have jazz credentials -- Ann Hampton Callaway, Tony DeSare, Tierney Sutton, John Pizzarelli. Reminds me of a junior high recital, only at a higher standard of competency. Hard to say how much of a plus that really is. But it is clear that the jazz singers only made the program through the label's contacts, and that they were wasted. C+

The Robert Cray Band: Live From Across the Pond (2006, Nozzle/Vanguard, 2CD): A terrific blues guitarist, a so-so singer, and a songwriter I all too frequently find myself wanting to strangle. After twenty-some years, he's entitled to throw out a live double career retrospective. But that doesn't make me like the songs any better. Well, not much better, anyway. B-

Maria Kalaniemi: Bellow Poetry (2006, Alula): Finnish accordionist, classically trained but plays folk melodies, intimately detailed, warm and comfy, with occasional vocals -- which leaves them lacking sufficient energy to jump over the cultural barrier, or sufficient deviousness to tunnel under. B

John Holloway: Johann Sebastian Bach: The Sonatas and Partitas (2004 [2006], ECM): The only music teacher I ever had -- an old geezer named Pankratz -- always named Bach as his all-time favorite. I aced his tests and the notebook, did my best to never actually listen to any classical music, and always felt self-conscious about my singing -- at least since Lannie Goldsten (or was her name Marva Goldberg? I think she used both) started kicking me every time I made a peep ("just lip sync!"). So this does and doesn't bring back traumatic childhood memories -- not the music because, as I said, I never actually listened to it, although the sound of violin was enough to send me scurrying. That's the only sound there is here, and I find it oddly soothing on a very gray, rainy December day, although I also find it rather indifferent -- the violinists I do like have a little swing in their kit. But I'll grade this one leniently: Laura thinks it's wonderful. B+(*)

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

Hindsight and Foresight

Billmon spent some time recently going back over his blog postings on Iraq. His conclusion:

If nothing else, though, the Whiskey Bar archives prove to my satisfaction that it was possible, even for a nonspecialist (which is all I'll ever be in the fields of foreign policy or military affairs) to see at least an outline of the disaster as it started to unfold. What was lacking in the corporate media was not the opportunity, but rather the insight, the courage and the independence to say what needed to be said -- at a time when the both the powers that be and the paying audience were unwilling to listen.

I can post a similar audit trail. In fact, I did back in March 2005, listing links to material originally posted in my notebook or previous blog:

• Psst! US to invade Iraq [2002-02-14]
• Another Day of Infamy [2003-03-18]
• It's clear already that the Iraq war is a colossal failure [2003-03-25]
• The feel good day of the war [2003-04-11]
• Facing the inevitable in Iraq [2003-08-19]
• Why immediate withdrawal from Iraq makes more sense than anything else [2003-10-01]
• The second feel good day of the Iraq war [2003-12-16]
• One year later [2004-03-21]
• Why prolong the course? [2003-04-18]
• The war on terrorism strikes out [2004-05-05]
• How to get out of Iraq (seriously) [2004-05-16]
• The siege of Najaf ends with Sistani's masses (not the U.S.) in control [2004-08-29]
• Is 1000 dead Americans in Iraq just another statistic? [2004-09-09]

Since 2005, see the War/Terror thread, which repeats these themes ad nauseum. I'm struck by this quote from May 2004, although it's probably just typical:

As for Iraq, it has turned into a major security vulnerability for the U.S., primarily because it shows the world that the U.S. is deceitful and manipulative and callous and contemptuous of the rest of the world. The only way that the U.S. can mitigate the damage (which includes coups, wars, and sanctions) that it has done to Iraq is to get out and stay out.

I don't know about the mainstream media's courage or independence, but the insight they all seem to lack is the ability to see the US as "deceitful and manipulative and callous and contemptuous of the rest of the world." Those of us who could recognize those traits had little trouble figuring out where the war was going or why. Those who didn't were easy suckers. It's important to understand that long before Iraq was attacked, the first preëmptive attack was against the "blame America first" crowd on the "looney left" -- and that clearing out the critics most sensitive to what would go wrong was the essential first step toward such a disastrous war.

Friday, December 22, 2006

The Road Map to Nowhere

After two straight posts on Israel, this should be a good time to dump out my marked quotes from Tanya Reinhart's The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (Verso). This follows on from her earlier Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. Reinhart is Professor Emeritus, Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. She is neither a journalist nor a historian, but is remarkably adept at pulling together a coherent picture of recent events from the current reporting.

Much of her story is familiar, albeit poorly reported here in the US. I didn't pull a lot out, but did find a few quotes that should be noted. The first is on the military and the politicians in Israel (pp. 6-7):

The military is the most stable -- and most dangerous -- political factor in Israel. As an Israeli analyst stated in 2001, "in the last six years, since October 1995, there were five prime ministers and six defense ministers, but only two chiefs of staff." Israeli military and political systems have always been closely intertwined, with generals moving from the army straight to the government, but the army's political status was further solidified during Sharon's premiership. It is often apparent that the real decisions are made by the military rather than the political echelon. Military seniors brief the press (they capture at least half of the news space in the Israeli media), and brief and shape the views of foreign diplomats; they go abroad on diplomatic missions, outline political plans for the government, and express their political views on any subject and occasion.

In contrast to this military stability, the Israeli political system is in a gradual process of disintegration. In a World Bank report of April 2005, Israel was found to be one of the most corrupt and least efficient in the Western world, second only to Italy in the government corruption index, and lowest in the index of political stability. Together with his sons, Sharon personally was associated with severe bribery charges that have never reached the courts. The new party that Sharon founded, Kadima, which now heads the government, is a hierarchical agglomeration of individuals with no party institutions or local branches. Its guidelines, published on 22 November 2005, enable its leader to bypass all standard democratic processes and appoint the list of the party's candidates to the parliament without voting or approval of any party body.

The Labor party has not been able to offer an alternative. In the last two Israeli elections, Labor elected dovish prime ministerial candidates: Amram Mitzna in 2003 and Amir Peretz in 2006. Both were initially received with enormous enthusiasm, but were immediately silenced by their party and campaign advisors and by self-imposed censorship, aiming to situate themselves "at the center of the political map." Soon, their programs became indistinguishable from those of Sharon. Peretz even declared that on "foreign and security" matters he will do exactly as Sharon, or later Olmert, do, differing from them only on social matters. Thus, these candidates helped convince Israeli voters that Sharon's way is the right way. In recent years, there has been no substantial left-wing opposition to the rule of Sharon and the generals, since after the elections, Labor would always join the government, providing the dovish image that the generals need for the international show.

The US-backed Road Map insisted that Palestinians first put a halt to their violence before Israel would be required to make any concessions. The Israelis could thereby forestall the Road Map by fueling violence (pp. 20-21):

Nevertheless, the Palestinian Authority and the various Palestinian organizations fulfilled their side of the bargain, declaring complete ceasefire for three months, during which they would halt all attacks in Israel and the occupied territories, as stipulated in Phase I of the Road Map. The first announcement that the Palestinian organizations had reached a ceasefire agreement came on 25 June 2003. Hamas spokesmen observed "it was noteworthy that they had accepted the three-month lull without receiving any guarantees from Israel that it would cease its military activities against them in exchange for the ceasefire."

The Israeli immediate reaction was instantaneous and decisive. Within minutes of the Palestinian announcement, "Israeli helicopters fired missiles at two cars new the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, killing two people, including a woman. The Israel Defense Forces said the helicopters fired the missiles at a Hamas cell that was about to fire mortar shells at an Israeli settlement." In Jerusalem, "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz decided . . . that Israel will ignore any agreements on a hudna, or ceasefire, reached by the Palestinian organizations, and will instead insist that the Palestinian Authority disarm militias in any area in which it assumes security responsibility . . . The Foreign Ministry . . . instructed foreign legations to prepare for a Palestinian propaganda assault that will blame Israel for violating the 'ceasefire' while ignoring the PA's [Palestinian Authority's] responsibility for continued terrorist activity by 'local' cells."

The Israelis use of assassinations (p. 29):

Some months later, on 22 March 2004, the Israeli army decided that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's time had come. At 5:20 a.m., Israeli helicopter gunships fired rockets at the car of the wheelchair-bound Yassin as he was leaving a mosque in Gaza city after morning prayer. What was inconceivable even a year earlier had become reality.

Israel also deflected peace overtures from Syria (pp. 37-38):

In fall 2003, Syrian President Bashar Assad sent numerous signals of his willingness to renew peace negotiations with Israel. About two weeks after the Sharon-Abrams meeting, Assad made a public overture to resume the negotiations in an interview with the New York Times, in which he called for renewed talks and spoke of the "normalization" of Syrian-Israeli relations.

Sharon rejected this move outright. Israel's reaction to Assad's New York Times statement came swiftly the following day, when Foreign Mininster Sylvan Shalom issued a statement using precisely the same language that Israel used in response to Palestinian offers of a ceasefire: "Positive remarks about peace are always encouraging, but words are not enough. We want to see action. Syria must put an end to terror activities that begin on its territory, and curtail arms shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. Should Syria do this, and if it is prepared to engage in talks with Israel without preconditions, there's no doubt the government of Israel will seriously consider this option."

Israel's only overture during this period was Sharon's plan to unilaterally dismantle the Gaza settlements, a plan that Sharon cooked up with Abrams as an alternative to the Road Map (p. 59):

The intensity of the military operations inside Gaza increased substantially following Sharon's announcement of the disengagement plan in February 2004. In February and March there were several Israeli raids on Palestinian communities in the Strip (reported on 12 February, 8 March and 17-21 March). Israel then carried out two full-scale military offensives. "Operation Rainbow," in May 2004, concentrated on the vicinity fo Rafah, and left dozens of houses demolished. "Operation Days of Penitence" in October 2004 was similar -- in both scale and horrors -- to April 2002's "Operation Defensive Shield" in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. The Israeli army estimated the number of Palestinians killed at 130; about 500 others were wounded. According to UNRWA, 91 houses were fully destroyed, and 101 others damaged.

Reinhart analyzes Sharon's motives, which went beyond derailing any peace efforts to denying Palestinians the legitimacy of electing their own leadership (p. 106):

I would contend that the real motive behind Sharon's campaign against Hamas's participation in the election was that he was in fact trying to stall the whole electoral process. In Sharon's eyes, his biggest "achievement" was that from 2002 onwards he had succeededin completely destroying the Palestinian social and political infrastructure that had gradually developed over the years since the 1993 Oslo Accords. Though Palestinian society was far from democratic during these years, there was at least a functioning system of local governance, with many thriving semi-independent institutions. All this was erased in the massive military "Operation Defensive Sheild" in April 2002, which completed the process of re-establishing direct military rule in the West Bank. Now, a new process of democratization and elections was threatening to undo this major "achievement."

Reinhart argues that Sharon never really intended to disengage from Gaza, but that the US held him to the commitment, in part by sanctions against Israeli military purchases. This ended once the disengagement took place (p. 130):

With the US military sactions in the background, Sharon and the army had no choice but to obey. The army called off the operation [a planned military operation in Gaza], and three weeks later, the Gaza pullout took place promptly and smoothly. The drama of sanctions and pressure was kept fully behind the screens. In public, throughout the whole period, the Bush administration praised Sharon for his leadership and courage in implementing the disengagement plan. They trapped him in his words, and then gave him the sole credit for the pullout -- but it was US pressure that really achieved it. When the US really does exert pressure, no Israeli leader is able to defy its injunctions.

On the elections where Hamas defeated Fatah (pp. 148-150):

Much attention has been paid already in the Western media to the corruption of the PA and its lack of democracy, as a major cause of the vote shift. But the crucial aspect, that received little attention, is its failure in the Palestinian struggle against the occupation. As BADIL states this, "the Palestinian Authority has become both a prisoner and indispensable partner in endless diplomacy whose purpose is to cover up the fact that nothing is done to bring about a just and lasting peace, and it has failed to take action against those from its own ranks, who publicly undermine the national consensus and struggle for freedom from occupation." [ . . . ]

While the political branches of the Fatah-led PA may have been just passive int he Palestinian struggle for freedom, some of its security forces have been active collaborators with the Israeli occupation, most notably the Preventive Security apparatus, headed by Mohammed Dahlan in the Gaza Strip and Jibril Rajoub in the West Bank. These forces, trained by the CIA, have worked during all years of the Oslo Agreements in tight collaboration with the Israeli security forces, including collaborations in assassinations of Hamas militants. [ . . . ]

In voting for Hamas, Palestinians were opting for a party which had no history of collaboration with the occupiesr, and which they believed would not be coerced into such collaboration in the future. But from the perspective of the Israeli army Hamas's victory entails the complete loss of the network of control it has constructed in the territories sine 1993. When it accepted the US demand to allow Hamas's participation in the Palestinian election, Israel -- like the US -- assumed that although Hamas would be in some measure legitimized, this would only entail a small change in the PA, which would essentially remain controlled by the same apparatuses as before. However, if Palestinians are permitted to implement their own democratic decisions, their security services will come under the jurisdiction of the new government,a nd can no longer be manipulated by Israel; the days of Israel's appointment or training of Palestinian leaders will be over.

In opposing the Hamas victory, Israel ratched up the propaganda war against Syria and Iran, dovetailing with US concerns over its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reinhart's book was finished before Israel's attack on Lebanon, but the groundwork is clearly evident here (p. 153):

In its concerted campaign to prevent international recognition of the new Hamas administration, and to impose tough sanctions on the Palestinians, Israel has been exploiting the Islamophobic atmosphere that resurfaced in the US at the beginning of 2006. Israeli security officials flooded the West with reports on the dangers of HAmas's future ties with Iran and Syria, painting a disturbing picture of a global fundamentalist Islamic threat. The conditions were ripe for such propaganda. On 3 February, the Pentagon released its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), where it lays out its vision for what it describes as a "long war." It states that "this war requirse the U.S. military to adopt unconventional and indirct approaches. Currently, Iraq and Afghanistan are crucial battlegrounds, but the struggle extends far beyond their borders. With its allies and partners, the United States must be prepared to wage this war in many locations simultaneously and for some years to come."

The book ends with a chapter on the joint Israeli-Palestinian non-violent protest movement against the Wall. I didn't mark any quotes there, but it's noteworthy that the movement was opposed not only by Israel but by Fatah as well. As I said, the book was finished before the events that led to Israel's invasions of Gaza and Lebanon. No doubt another book is in the works.

Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost convinced me that Israel's political and military establishment has become so hooked on conflict and war that they are now primarily devoted to its perpetuation. The events covered in Reinhart's two books provide much further evidence of this -- not so much on the why, mostly how it plays out. It is worth noting that the US-backed Road Map indeed went no where -- that the plan for peace was a charade, and the plan for democracy turned out to be hollow.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

The Lifeblood of Zionism

I want to expand a bit on last night's post. The upshot is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the result of bad choices repeatedly made over the better part of a century, based on a faulty political theory: nationalism, seen as embodying a distinct group of people and manifested through a state and its armed forces. Nationalism developed like a cancer from the French Revolution through its apotheosis in Nazi Germany, and lingers on today at the root of most of the world's festering conflict sores. Its power comes from the appeal of defining us against them -- it's self-flattering and other-deprecating, and as such is quickly reinforced by encounters with other nationalisms. As such, it is so easily exploitable by demagogues that it quickly became the preferred stance of the right.

Nationalism developed in 19th century Europe for various reasons which we need not go into here. The net effect from 1800 to 1950 was to radically separate Europe into homogeneous nations with a mere handful of exceptions -- Switzerland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Russia, plus a few subnational minorities like the Basques and the Lapps. Europe's Jews, being a group that fit into no nation, suffered terribly as a result. Jews responded to the nationalist madness in four ways: some hunkered down in increasingly orthodox religion, isolating themselves, trying to ride out the storm; some moved to more open, pluralistic lands, such as the US, usually reforming their religion to become more secular; some joined anti-nationalist movements, such as the Bund, Socialism, or Communism; and some staked their own claim to nationalism, becoming Zionists. At the end of WWI the latter were a small minority, but three events worked in their favor: the British adopted Zionism as a means of establishing colonial control over Palestine; the US shut off the main outlet for Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe; and the rise to power of the Nazis, other Fascists, and the Soviets put pressure on Jews to flee -- for lack of any alternative, into the Zionists' arms.

The Ottoman-era Zionist movement was relatively benign -- the Ottomans ran a multinational state which had long been able to provide a haven for Jews fleeing from European purges. But from 1920 on the Zionists acted as a nation under the sponsorship and protection of the British Empire. The Zionist Yishuv (settlement) vied with native Palestinians, unwanted and unwelcomed in the Jewish nation, for the same land and resources. As such, the Zionist struggle was primarily demographic. Zionist success depended on promoting Jewish immigration and on marginalizing Palestinian political and economic power. In turn, Palestinian self-defense focused on limiting Jewish immigration -- tragically, given what happened to European Jews at this time. That proved to be a propaganda coup for the Zionists, conveniently skipping over how the Zionists worked to prevent Jews from moving anywhere but Palestine. The Zionist focus, after all, was on demography: Jews emigrating to American did them no good.

The Palestinian leadership missed the significance of all this, not least because their response to the Zionists was to adopt their own form of nationalism. In this they lost, badly. A better approach would have been to open up Palestine and the rest of the Arab world as a haven for European Jews, forging a bond with them in opposition to Europe's imperialists and colonialists. That couldn't happen for lots of reasons: the Arab nations were weak, mostly under European thumbs; the Zionists were opposed; the Americans were indifferent and disengaged, and deeply mired in their own racist delusions. But the main reason was that nationalism seemed to work as the one idea that unified non-Europeans into unities that could effectively resist European imperialism. The most immediate example was Turkey, and there were others -- until they overreached, the most spectacular was Japan. Later on Vietnamese nationalism successfully resisted the United States. But in the end nationalism is a formula for war, not peace. And the Zionists, unlike the European colonialists, came to stay, so for them every war was a challenge to their existence. The only way to deal with such a foe is to level the ground, to find common ground, and nationalism fails there, because all it has to offer is division.

More and more we see evidence that Palestinians are coming to see this, although it remains a struggle to see beyond decades of abuse under Israeli force. I think this is why Israel's extreme nationalists have come to look so desperate in their efforts to prolong the conflict. Israel never worried about Iran in the '80s when Khomeini actually made an effort to export his revolution, so why now? Surely it's not that the Israelis don't understand Nuclear Deterrence 101. Why do they worry about Hezbollah, which like a beehive can be avoided by not sticking your bare hand into it? Why do they worry about those Qassam firecracker attacks that amount to little more than the Gazan version of a Bronx cheer? Why do they work so hard to push Palestinian buttons? It's like they can't bear the thought of life without war. But without war, without their supremacist identity, without the persecution they forged their movement under, what becomes of Zionism? It fades away, like a bad memory. And just as well, it takes Palestinian nationalism to the grave with it.

As Laura Tillem taught me, Hitler hated the Jews because they were internationalists, rejecting the idiocy of nationalism. He failed to kill all the Jews, but to the extent that Jews took the lesson of the Holocaust as reason to embrace Zionism, he has further succeeded in destroying what he most hated about the Jews. So in essence what needs to happen is for the Israelis to rediscover their pre-Fascist cosmopolitanism, and who better to point this out than the Palestinians? Someone, after all, has to stop the cycle of violence -- a cycle that Bush has escalated both by supporting the Israeli hawks and by emulating them, bonding with them by putting us all in the same treacherous and ultimately pointless project.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Karon on Holocaust Denial

I've been reading through an interesting post by Tony Karon called "What Arab Holocaust-Deniers Should Learn from Mandela." The main point is certainly right: that Holocaust denial by erstwhile supporters does the Palestinian cause no good. The second point -- that Mandela drew constructive lessons from the Boer War that enabled him and the ANC to relate positively to the Afrikaners in resolving their conflict -- is food for thought, but the history is far messier. I've long noticed that at least in some respects Palestinian political movements have come to mirror aspects of Zionism -- most obviously in counterposing the Nakba to the Holocaust, an analogy that has never been very satisfying. The exile from Roman times is more like it, but a far stronger argument can be made from contemporary declarations of human rights, which have clearly been denied to huge numbers of Palestinians.

A minor, almost academic, question is to what extent does Holocaust denial actually factor into Palestinian, Arab, Islamic, or pro-Palestinian thinking. Iran's Ahmadinejad has been quoted (possibly misquoted) on the subject, and is sponsoring some sort of conference, which occasioned this post. My impression is that Holocaust denial is very rare among Palestinians, since it has never been something that they were held responsible for. Rather, it forms the basis for a basic disconnect: if Israel's raison d'ëtre is the Holocaust, why take it out of the Palestinians' hides? That's seductive rhetoric, but it misses the point. The problem was that at the time of Israel's founding there had been an extraordinary crime committed against European Jewry, and the Zionists were able to successfully argue that the just response to that crime was the creation of a Jewish state, which for various historical and ideological reasons meant Israel.

That the solution was at the Palestinians' expense was typical of the times, a consequence of colonialist norms which Europe and America had yet to shake off. The Zionists succeeded in large part because no one else came up with an alternative solution -- and here no one else does include the Palestinians, the Arabs, the broader Muslim world. I understand that Rashid Khalidi's new book The Iron Cage delves deeper into the limits and weaknesses of Palestinian political leadership from the 1920s to the present day, so he may be a good source on the details. But the weak link in the Zionist argument was the assertion that only a Jewish state could protect Jews from further state-sponsored violence. One could, and should, have responded that a better solution would be for Jews to secure their human rights under international law recognized by all nations. If only Arab nations, including Palestine, had taken the initiative to do this -- to open their doors to immigration, especially in the '30s when the Nazis seized power and initiated their racist laws -- they would have undercut the Zionist argument and come out far ahead. That they didn't do this is unsurprising given the more general history -- the Arab nations were mostly under European thumbs at the time. But the fact of Palestinian resistance to Jewish immigration during the Nazi rise to power, the Holocaust, and its aftermath -- which for several critical years much of Europe was still a dangerous place for Jews -- is the foundation of the idea that Palestinians are intractably anti-Jewish. And that is the trump card that Zionists have played repeatedly over the last sixty years.

After all that's happened to the Palestinians, it may seem patently unfair to insist that they must first contribute to a fair and just solution to the WWII-vintage Jewish problem, but I believe that to be the case. Zionism strikes me as a bad deal for Jews, whom it consigns to live in a garrison state forever at war with the rest of the world -- the Palestinians suffer most for being the closest targets. But only if you go back and examine the history closely and honestly can you recognize the pointlessly self-perpetuating pain that Zionism has caused, on both sides of its weapons, on both sides of its iron walls. And ultimately that pain is the common ground shared by both Israeli and Palestinian. Which is, I think, where Karon's argument ultimately leads.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

F5: Work Like a Farmer, OD Like a Rock Star

I got a note from F5 publisher Josh Oxley yesterday, saying that "the production of F5 Magazine will be postponed until further notice." Translating from the Hirohito-ese, that means it's dead, but a little further context might be helpful. Up to about six months ago, F5 was run by a company called Hubris Communications and edited by a guy named Mike Marlett, who -- as best I recall -- actually started the paper before getting involved with Hubris. I don't know any of the details of the break-up, but Oxley bought the paper, and Marlett went on to start a new paper, something called Wichita City Paper. Oxley is otherwise involved in billboard advertising. He took F5 and toned it down politically and culturally -- among other things, dropping the "work like a farmer, party like a rock star" slogan. As editor Michelle Ross explained to me, they wanted to make it a family paper. Presumably this would be good for advertising.

On the other hand, Marlett took almost all of his writers with him, and seems to have raised a lot more money, so when Wichita City Paper came out a couple of months ago it looked to be a much more substantial operation. I had actually been thinking that I might like to write for F5 for several years, but never got around to broaching the subject until, rather accidentally, after the break occurred. I knew a couple of their writers -- even knew the owner of Hubris, although that wasn't necessarily a plus. (He is, after all, the guy who gave his company that awful name.) But I was thinking more about writing opinion pieces -- Marlett's turf, and actually he's not bad at it -- than music. But only when I saw that F5 had no one writing record reviews did I finally make my move. Looks like I bet on the wrong horse.

I wound up writing 21 F5 Record Report columns. Not sure if last week's edition actually came out. Certainly the column I wrote for this week won't appear in print, but you can find it here, with all the rest of the columns available through the navigation menu and the arrow glyphs. I covered 148 records. Much of the material was cribbed from other work, but even there I did quite a bit of editing, and I think the reviews came off rather polished.

Not sure where we go from here. I'll touch base with City Paper, and see if they have any interest. I've wondered about possibly syndicating these columns -- if nothing else, they could easily be broken up to provide filler. I could also take this as a sign to buckle down and get Terminal Zone back up and running.

Lineup for the final column:

• Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar) A [jazz]
• David Krakauer & SoCalled With Klezmer Madness: Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me (Label Bleu) B+ [world]
• KRS-One: Life (Antagonist) A- [rap]
• Odyssey the Band: Back in Time (Pi) A- [jazz]
• Roy Orbison: In Dreams (1963, Monument/Legacy) B+ [rock]
• Bill Sheffield: Journal on a Shelf (American Roots) A- [blues]
• Ali Farka Toure: Savane (World Circuit/Nonesuch) B+ [world]

I feel bad about the records I've asked for but didn't get around to covering here. You always feel that there's a future, even when there isn't one. Maybe I'm not such a pessimist after all. Or maybe the world is just worse than even we can imagine.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Jackin' Pop Poll

I got a rather late invite to Idolator's Jackin' Pop poll. The deadline is too short for my taste -- today, 3PM EST -- so I went with what I have, without an awful lot of confidence in it. Still have a fair amount of unresolved 2006 non-jazz, not to mention all that stuff I don't even know about yet. The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll doesn't demand their ballots until the end of the month/year, so I reserve the right to change my mind by then -- presumably for the better. In fact, I'll probably keep changing my mind well into 2007, especially as I find out about those things I don't know about.

The top ten new albums at this point:

1. Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar)
2. Todd Snider: The Devil You Know (New Door)
3. Public Enemy: Rebirth of a Nation (Guerrilla Funk)
4. The Coup: Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph)
5. Jon Faddis: Teranga (Koch)
6. Ghostface Killah: Fishscale (Def Jam)
7. The Klezmatics: Wonder Wheel: Lyrics by Woody Guthrie (JMG)
8. World Saxophone Quartet: Political Blues (Justin Time)
9. Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse (Jesus Christ Rocks)
10. Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra: New Magical Kingdom (Clean Feed)

I went with the descending points option (15-11, 9-5), which seemed good enough for a first approximation.

Top ten singles/album tracks, to this point: none, right now, anyway. I don't think much of singles or individual tracks, and have skipped the category more often than not in the Pazz & Jop poll. I did start a list this year, but don't have enough time to sort it out today.

Top five reissues, to this point:

1. Fats Waller: If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It (1926-43, Bluebird/Legacy, 3CD)
2. Irène Schweizer: Portrait (1984-2004, Intakt)
3. Wilson Pickett: The Definitive Collection (1961-71, Atlantic/Rhino, 2CD)
4. Night in Tunisia: The Very Best of Dizzy Gillespie (1946-49, Bluebird/Legacy)
5. Big Youth: Screaming Target (1973, Trojan/Sanctuary)

These aren't exactly in rank order -- Chuck Berry's The Definitive Collection tops them all -- but were selected for their interest and importance.

Top five artists of 2006:

1. Ornette Coleman
2. Todd Snider
3. Ken Vandermark
4. The Klezmatics
5. Adam Lane

I don't know exactly what they're getting at here, so I tend to stick close to the records. Vandermark didn't make my top ten, but he's got several records docked just off the list, and even the ones that don't quite measure up show inspired risk-taking. Lane also has a pair of very good trio albums with Vinny Golia just off the list. He's the least-known of the five -- I don't even know his work very well myself, but I'm impressed with everything I've heard, and have no doubt that he's going to be recognized as a major mover and shaker over the next decade. The Klezmatics also have a good second albums this year, plus Frank London's been busy on his own. Haven't gotten to More Fish yet, which might have argued for Ghostface.

The ballot also asks for comments. I don't have anything to add at this point. I'll do a Pazz & Jop ballot in a couple of weeks, and we'll see what I've learned by then. Don't know whether I'll have comments then, either, but I'll write up some sort of year-end summary for the website sometime in January. More than the ballots, my year-end focus will be on a special 2006 wrap-up edition to be published as the January column.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Music: Current count 12671 [12654] rated (+17), 860 [857] unrated (+3). What can I say? Had a bad week last week, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Don't have everything filed that came in -- not that a lot of stuff came in. Have done a rather sloppy job of collecting notes here on stuff I've written for F5 or Recycled Goods. Did get started on sorting out the 8th edition Penguin Guide diffs, which is potentially a huge time sink, but has a certain brainless appeal to it. This coming week should be better. Maybe it'll start when I get the website update done.

• Julio Iglesias: 1100 Bel Air Place (1984 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): Left to his own devices, he can be a magnificent singer, with "Two Lovers" an prime example, and even the tripey "Moonlight Lady" gaining stature; on the other hand, he was such a star at this point that he was attracting duettists -- can't complain about Stan Getz, but between Diana Ross, Willie Nelson, and the Beach Boys, something goes terribly wrong. B-

• Julio Iglesias: Tango (1996 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): A serious album, based on the old stuff, tangos with not much tang, ballads with a lot of romantic gush, or so it seems; his voice is towering, operatic, but he's managed to take a foreign legacy and make it even more foreign. C+

Jazz Prospecting (CG #12, Part 5)

Last week was pretty much a personal wipeout, although I suppose I can take credit for surviving it without fumbling anything too bad. The long-awaited 11th Jazz Consumer Guide was published with no major glitches. I got all my files updated, so now I'm ready to go after #12. I sent a year-end ballot in to Francis Davis for the Voice's jazz poll. I wrote some annotation to the ballot to be published as a sidebar to the poll results. I got an F5 column done. I made latkes, chopped liver, and salt-cured salmon for Hanukkah. I managed to blog something every day, and got a bit of jazz prospecting done, although I made damn little progress on my year-end research. I also finally cracked open the new 8th edition of the Penguin Guide and started to chart differences.

No final grades on records I held back this week. It's early in the cycle and best to keep an eye on what's new. Starting to get 2007 advances. This will probably remain slow over the next two weeks as holidays interfere with my schedule, guests come and go, and year-end Recycled Goods looms large.

Jazz Yule Love II (2006, Mack Avenue): If Christmas music really outsells jazz, as I've seen reports claiming, I guess this is one way to help pay the bills. Seems useless to me, but I've heard far worse down at the local mall. The roster includes familiar names from the label's recent releases, plus two I hadn't noticed: Oscar Brown Jr. and Bud Shank. No dates provided. Brown died in 2005, with his last album in 1998. Shank is 80 now, still active, with a good live record last year joined by Phil Woods. Here he makes the best case I've heard in years for letting it snow. B-

Bruno Hubert Trio/B3 Kings: A Cellar Live Christmas (2005 [2006], Cellar Live): Hubert plays piano. The B3 Kings have Cory Weeds on alto sax, Bill Coon on guitar, Chris Gestrin on the famous organ, and Denzal Sinclaire on drums. My impression is that the two groups alternate rather than play together, excepting that Sinclaire sings one song with each. There's some good news here. One is that they're serious enough about jazz that sometimes they deconstruct these songs until you forget what they're playing. Another is Coon's guitar, although the others, notably Hubert, strike me favorably. Still useless. B-

The Frankenstein Concort: Classical-A-Go-Go (2006, Sfz): Subtitled "invigorating musical novelties for woodwinds, piano, and percussion." Featuring Erik Lindgren, the piano player, who is best known from one of the first landmark experimental rock groups, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. Don't really know what to make of this one, which seems neither classical not go-go, but rather something that works within a closed system of humor I'm not really privy to. Includes pieces from usual suspects Erik Satie and Raymond Scott, a gloss on Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein," and originals, including one close to "Tomorrow Never Comes." Not without interesting bits, but too clever by some factor beyond my powers of calculation. B

Jacques Loussier Trio: Bach: The Brandenburgs (2006, Telarc): I have him rather stuffily filed under classical, since that's what a quick glance at discography, at least since 1987's Reflections on Bach, reads like. Bach represents about half the list, but I also note Handel, Mozart, Chopin, Satie, and Ravel. But there's nothing stuffy about this record. I don't know the classical readings, so it's hard for me to tell where the texts end and the jazz begins, but surely the walking bass wasn't in the original. B+(*)

Expolorations: Classic Picante Regrooved, Vol. 1 (2006, Concord Picante): Better than the usual back catalog remix project, probably because most of the originals are so awash in beats they hardly need remixing. Surprising because Picante had turned into something of a retirement home for salseros, so maybe we should hand it to the A-list remixers, who evidently know how to juice up the clave. B+(**)

Mort Weiss: The B3 and M3 (2003 [2006], SMS Jazz): Not sure what SMS stands for, but the website motto is "Straight Ahead," and that's clear enough. (OK, Sheet Music Shoppe, a music store Weiss owns.) Weiss played a little sax in his youth, giving it up when he turned 30, and picking up the clarinet again when he turned 65. He plays bright, bouncy swing, working here with an organ-guitar-drums trio on two Charlie Parker warhor