Monday, June 30, 2008

Snack Notes

Made an impromptu bean salad today, just something to snack on. Didn't make measurements, but approximately:

• 1 can (15.8 oz) great northern beans, drained
• 2 tbs. red onion, diced fine
• 1/2 tbs. sun-dried tomato, diced fine
• 1 tbs. roasted red pepper, hacked up
• 1/4 tsp. sumac
• 1/4 tsp. aleppo pepper
• 3/4 tsp. extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/4 tsp. sherry vinegar

I thought it came out fabulous -- even better after refrigerated awhile. I vaguely recall throwing something else together last week that I really liked, but can't remember what it was now. So I thought I'd at least write this down.

One I do remember from last week was making the classic family fried chicken dinner. We just dust the chicken in flour, then pan fry it, with the lid on loose until it's time to turn the chicken -- cooks deeper and keeps the chicken moist. Used a little oil and some spare bacon fat. Poured most of the fat off, stirred in flour and milk for gravy, salt and pepper. Green beans on the side: snap and boil 15 minutes, drain and keep aside; chop up some bacon (3-4 slices), fry that, drain excess fat, chop up half a onion, cook with bacon until slightly brown; return beans and toss to heat through. Diced and pan-browned some red potatoes I had laying around -- don't like the more traditional mashed potatoes. Also made scratch biscuits, which doubled for strawberry shortcake. Haven't fried chicken in years, but it came out perfect.

Last night I cleaned out a container of leftover rogan josh, about two weeks old, mostly gravy with a couple small bits of lamb. Heated it up. Took a frozen paratha (store-bought), grilled it, cut it into inch-square pieces, and served the hot rogan josh over it. Delicious. Better, in fact, than the dish originally was.

Recycled Goods (54): June 2008

Recycled Goods is still in semi-retirement. I'm not going very far out of my way, but when I stumble across something that fits, I jot it down and post it end of each month. Back when I was working on it the columns ran 40-60 records per month. In April when I resumed this I had 10; this month it's up to 17, mostly redundant jazz.

Permanent link.

Music Week

Music: Current count 14560 [14526] rated (+34), 791 [814] unrated (-23). Did a lot of jazz prospecting this week. Worked on book posts for the blog. Read a bit. Not much else to report. Sore throat and cough persists. No real idea what that means. Laura in Detroit. This has been something of a grind.

• Madonna: Hard Candy (2008, Warner Brothers): Reportedly a return to her hard dance niche. She remains adept at shopping for the latest beats, but she comes up a bit short on message. Even when she was wrong she used to spend some time and thought on message. B+(**)

Jazz Prospecting (CG #17, Part 10)

I feel like I paid my dues this week. Didn't get to everything I wanted to, but took a big chunk out of the incoming pile. There's still a bunch left, but I have more than I need to fill out a Jazz CG column. The new William Parker record gives me one pick hit. I could take either the Ron Brown or the Roy Campbell for a second Vision Festival (AUM Fidelity) pick hit and actually come up with a nice title for once: "Festival Visions." Or I could go with the Vandermark 5 and celebrate the two most fruitful players of the now-closing decade. The duds front is less clear, but I haven't been going out of my way to chase them down.

The main thing that keeps me from closing out this column is that I've been trying to get the book reports squared away. I posted a dozen in the last week, and will probably post another dozen this coming week. Takes a lot of time. While I do manage to skip back and forth, that's easier to do with these crude notes than with trying to write real Jazz CG capsules. So I figure I'm two weeks away from finishing. Should start getting into the replays this coming week, then nail down what I can the following. Unless something tragic happens.

The Amazing World of Arthur Brown: The Voice of Love (2007 [2008], Zoho Roots): One of the few causes celębres I flat out missed in the 1960s -- AMG's "similar artists" list includes Jimi Hendrix, HP Lovecraft, Syd Barrett, and Carl Palmer; I had sort of been under the impression he was the English Dr. John, but maybe I'm confusing him with Jethro Dull. Anyway, he's hardly Amazing any more -- sort of a blues rocker with a little folkie twang in the guitar. One hoedown song had enough mustard on it I thought I might not be able to dismiss him out of hand. But then the next song came on. B

The Malchicks: To Kill a Mockingbird (2007 [2008], Zoho Roots): English blues-rock group, duo actually, with vocalist Scarlett Wrench and George Perez on guitars, banjo, bass, with some extra studio help -- drums, anyway, plus Phil May (Pretty Things) and Arthur Brown add some backup vocals. Songs are as stout as "Boom Boom," "House of the Rising Sun," "I Got My Mojo Working," "Baby, Please Don't Go." The female voice provides a slight twist on a genre firmly rooted in Eric Bourdon's testes. Finishes with a Leonard Cohen song, proving that history ambled on past the 1960s. B+(**)

The Pretty Things: Balboa Island (2007, Zoho Roots): British invasion reject from the 1960s, had a reputation as too hard, too low down, too dirty for Hullabaloo and Shindig, which was probably true but less than a crowning achievement. Went prog around 1970 with a Who-ish rock opera, no more successfully than their first phase. Staged another unsuccessful comeback in the late 1970s, aided by pub rock, punk rock, and Led Zeppelin, none of which helped. They're still around, still sounding pretty much like they always did, which with 40 years of perspective now looks a lot like the Aynsley Dunbar Retalliation, the real roots band for these inveterate punters. On the other hand, this is about as strong and a good deal more solid than any album they've turned in. They've never been much good at timing. B+(*)

Bobby Broom: The Way I Play: Live in Chicago (2007 [2008], Origin): Chicago guitarist, b. 1961, sixth album since 1995 (the first of two on Criss Cross), plus more records with Deep Blue Organ Trio. Trio, with Dennis Carroll on bass, Kobie Watkins on drums. Front cover photo is tightly cropped around guitar, and that sums up the album. Plays within Wes Montgomery's framework, but more tightly wound. Set is a mix of standards and bop tunes, most of the former well known from the latter, but none played to type. He meant this as a showcase, and that's what he got. B+(*)

Bridge Quartet: Day (2007 [2008], Origin): First album by group: Alan Jones (drums), Tom Wakeling (bass), Darrell Grant (piano), Phil Dwyer (tenor sax). Jones (from Portland, OR), seems to be the leader, but the group is built to showcase Dwyer (from British Columbia) -- "Bridge" is a Sonny Rollins reference, and Dwyer's likely to be happy with all the Rollins comparisons he can gather. Grant is by far the better known player; he has a relatively small role here, expertly done. Mainstream, but brash, loud, wide open, a mother lode of tenor sax. B+(**)

Doug Miller: Regeneration (2005-06 [2008], Origin): Bassist, originally from Bloomington, IN; studied under John Clayton, a connection to Ray Brown; moved to Indianapolis, then to New York, then to Seattle in 1987. First album under his own name, although he co-founded a big band called Big Neighborhood which has a couple of records, and has 25-30 side-credits since 1990. Miller wrote all of these pieces, which seems to be the point here. I find it hard to judge new mainstream jazz compositions -- they're so tightly bound within convention they hardly ever sound new. The odd thing here is how they vary the lead instrument -- sometimes trumpet or flugelhorn, tenor or soprano sax, or even flute, all wielded by the same Jay Thomas. Dave Peterson also does double duty on guitar and keyboard, with Phil Parisot's drums limited to four cuts. I suppose that's one way to make the bass the focal center, but it's still not clear enough for me. Still, some interesting stuff here. B

Hiromi's Sonicbloom: Beyond Standard (2008, Telarc): Japanese pianist, full name Hiromi Uehara, b. 1979, came to Berklee 1999, has five US albums since 2003, all on Telarc, where she's angling for a big audience with some fancy fusion footwork. It's been hit and miss so far, but she gets some mileage out of these standards, most impressively an uproarious take on "Caravan." The band includes Dave Fiuczynski on guitar, Tony Grey on bass, Martin Valihora on drums. Some things lost me along the way, but at best the guitar can be spectacular. Ends with the fastest "I Got Rhythm" I've ever heard. [B+(**)]

Tony Grey: Chasing Shadows (2008, Abstract Logix): English bassist, also plays keyboards, b. 1975 Newcastle, graduated from Berklee in 2001, something of a protégé of John McLaughlin, plays with Hiromi's Sonicbloom. Fusion album, long groove pieces variously decorated -- Dan Brantigan trumpet, Elliot Mason bass trumpet/trombone, Bob Reynolds soprano/tenor sax, Gregoire Maret harmonica, Lionel Loueke guitar -- none setting a dominant tone, although Maret is the most distinctive. Hiromi plays pianon on one cut, but most of the keyboard work goes to Oli Rockberger. B+(*)

Saxophone Summit: Seraphic Light: Dedicated to Michael Brecker (2007 [2008], Telarc): The last such summit was so dominated by Michael Brecker that I filed it under his name, although the reason could just as well have been that I hated the record, had never cared for Brecker's records, and therefore figured they belonged together. The other pillars were Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman: the former an unimpeachable giant of the era, the latter a fine tenor saxophonist who spends most of his time these days annoying people with his soprano sax. But Brecker's gone now, so I filed this one under Liebman, figuring he'd be the squeak wheel. In any case, the dedication to Brecker here is pro forma. His shoes were easily filled by Ravi Coltrane, especially given that the songbook focuses on his old man. Booklet has no credits beyond the horns, but a group photo hints that the piano is Phil Markowitz, bass Cecil McBee, and drums Billy Hart. Randy Brecker adds his trumpet to the finale. Not much to say about this exercise. It never gets embarrassing like its predecessor, even when the flutes arrive (Coltrane is a saving grace here, with one soprano cut, the rest on tenor). While mostly competent, there are occasional strong moments, including a strong finish on three John Coltrane space elegies, which even Liebman takes on tenor. B

Andy Middleton: The European Quartet Live (2005 [2007], Q-rious Music): OK, this is weird: next up after Saxophone Summit, I pick a CD almost at random -- well, I discarded two singers first -- and get a saxophonist whose website starts off with praise from Joe Lovano, Michael Brecker, and David Liebman (also John Abercrombie). Biography is patchy. Plays tenor sax, maybe a little soprano. Based in New York City, maybe also in Austria (although the record label is in Germany). Has an American Quartet as well as this European Quartet, but the latter includes drummer Alan Jones, who hails from Portland. Has two previous albums on Intuition (2000-02), one earlier one from 1995; played in a group called the Fensters back in 1991. Figure him for postbop: he's not very far out of the mainstream, but he has an arresting sound and some fancy moves. Pianist Tino Derado helps out. Will give it another shot. [B+(***)]

Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. III: The Croydon Concert, May 14, 1981 (1981 [2008], Widow's Taste, 2CD): A hot set with a group -- Milcho Leviev on piano, Bob Magnuson on bass, Carl Burnett on drums -- Pepper toured often but recorded rarely with. He calls them his favorite group, and they repay the compliment -- there seems to be no end to wondrous tapes from his last years. A-

Sheila Cooper: Tales of Love and Longing (2006 [2007], Panorama): Singer/alto saxophonist, originally from Canada, now based in New York, working in a cozy little duo with Austrian pianist Fritz Pauer. Third album. My "pre-release copy" only identifies Panorama as the label, but it looks like this has been picked up and reissued (or will be -- don't have date) by Candid. Songs, including one original, tend to be slow and torchy, her voice capable and assured but not all that remarkable. I do, however, love the sound of her saxophone in these tight settings. B+(*)

Michael Dessen Trio: Between Shadow and Space (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Nice new packaging for this batch of Clean Feed releases: a thin cardboard fold-out sleeve with a clear plastic liner for the disc. Dessen plays trombone and computer. Studied at Eastman School of Music, University of Massachusetts, UC San Diego; teaches at UC, Irvine. Has several academic papers, including two on Yusef Lateef. Second album, not counting four with group Cosmologic. Trio includes Christopher Tordini on bass, Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. Free trombone over a dense and intriguing brew of bass, percussion, and whatever. B+(**)

Fight the Big Bull: Dying Will Be Easy (2006 [2008], Clean Feed): Richmond, VA big band (well, nonet), led by guitarist Matt White, who writes the songs but tends to get drowned out by the six horns, especially the dual trombones. Rough and tumble, not quite free, but loud and noisy. On a lark, I checked out a couple of YouTube videos, which are badly shot and even more roughly played, although the recognizable line to "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is amusing. Album with Ken Vandermark is reportedly in the works. B+(*)

Luis Lopes: Humanization 4Tet (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Don't know much about Lopes -- a couple of google matches appear to be false positives. This one plays guitar, is probably Portuguese, wrote all the pieces on his first album. The other players are slightly more well known: Aaron Gonzalez (double bass) and Stefan Gonzalez (drums) are sons of trumpeter Dennis Gonzalez. Rodrigo Amado is a Portuguese tenor saxophonist who's put together a number of solid albums, both under his own name and with Lisbon Improvisation Players (which has been known to include Gonzalez pčre). Amado's full-voiced honking dominates here, but a section where the guitar leads takes on much the same melodic shape, so I figure the guitarist is always pushing this music along even when he's not conspicuous. Another clue is that this is probably Amado's strongest outing yet, mostly because he rarely gets a chance to let up. B+(***)

Kirk Knuffke Quartet: Bigwig (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Trumpet player, originally from Denver, now in New York. First album, with Brian Drye doubling the brass on trombone, Reuben Radding on bass, Jeff Davis on drums. Fairly free. I like the brass dynamics. B+(*)

Carlos "Zingaro"/Dominique Regef/Wilbert DeJoode String Trio: Spectrum (2004 [2008], Clean Feed): A bit from the liner notes (Rui Eduardo Paes): "Violins were forbidden in the 'Machine Gun' years, when 'classical instruments' were seen as symbols of a closed, authoritarian, and hierarchic music system. Even today, there's suspicion. European musicians in the new 'free' music came out of both the classical and jazz traditions but, influenced by the turbulent political climate, rejected their origins." Maybe that's an avant-garde thing, although my impression has long been that the line between avant-jazz and avant-classical has never been clearly drawn in Europe -- e.g., the relationship between Cornelius Cardew and AMM. While there are plenty of bad examples of small and large string groups backing jazz musicians, violin soloists in jazz are more likely to draw on folk fiddle or on the raw noisiness of the instrument -- the Velvet Underground's viola was as ear-opening as anything specifically within a jazz context. I suppose the reason this comes up with Zingaro is that he does have the Euroclassical background and tends to get slotted in avant-classical as much as jazz. Still, this is in no sense a polite piece of chamber music. DeJoode plays bass, but Regef fills the middle ranges with hurdy gurdy, providing buzzes and drones that suggest electronics. Three long pieces, complexly varied textures, with an uncomfortable bite to the sound that never really gets monotonous. Most sources skip the quotes around Zingaro, which may be a nickname or stage name -- Carlos Alves seems to be the given name, although sometimes this just appears as Carlos Zingaro Alves (with or without quotes). He has at least 16 albums since 1989; haven't heard any others, but I've run across him in side roles. This gained enough traction the second play I'm holding it back for a third. [B+(***)]

Elliott Sharp/Scott Fields: Sharfefelder (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): From Fields' notes: "This is what happens when you kid around." Two avant guitarists, both with long discographies, including some together. Chemistry can do amazing things. It can also leave you with nothing but an incoherent mess. More of the latter here. B-

Sten Sandell/Mattias Stĺhl: Grann Musik (Neighbour Music) (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Sandell plays piano, sometimes prepared. He tends to be abstract, sometimes turning out long, dramatic lines that strike me as grandstanding. Stĺhl plays vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel -- instruments that produce tones that fit neatly within the crevices of the piano. They almost fit as one, which is an accomplishemt but not necessarily a plus. B

Todd Sickafoose: Tiny Resistors (2007 [2008], Cryptogramophone): Bassist, probably more electric than acoustic but plays both; originally from San Francisco, now based in New York. Third album. Has a substantial number of side credits since 1998, including Jenny Scheinman, Tin Hat, Ani DiFranco. I figure this as a fusion album, one of those big, sweeping prog things, loud, powerful, always listenable, sometimes interesting. Alan Ferber's trombone stands out among the horns. DiFranco plays some electric ukelele. B+(*)

The Jeff Gauthier Goatette: House of Return (2008, Cryptogramophone): Violinist, b. 1954, based in Los Angeles, had a couple of records on 9 Winds before he founded Cryptogramophone in 2000. This is his third record since. Quintet, with Nels Cline on guitar, David Witham on piano, Joel Hamilton on bass, Alex Cline on drums. Sort of avant-fusion, basically prog rock tweaked into funny shapes -- similar to the Todd Sickafoose record (trading the horns for violin), or various records by the Cline brothers. B+(*)

Freddie Hubbard & the New Jazz Composers Octet: On the Real Side (2007 [2008], 4Q/Times Square): Hubbard's early 1960s, both as a leader and especially as a sideman, made up one of the great individual stretches in jazz history -- hard bop, postbop, avant-garde, he could and did do it all. But after about 1965 he started to thin out, with a couple of superb fusion albums in 1970 (Red Clay, Straight Life), even less after 1980, a rare comeback in 1991 (Bolivia), then he literally blew his lip out in 1992 and that was that. This is his first album since then, produced and carefully shepherded by David Weiss. Not clear how much Hubbard plays. He's credited with flugelhorn, with Weiss on trumpet and a lot of firepower in the group -- three saxes plus guest Craig Handy on three cuts, Steve Davis on trombone, guest Russell Malone on one cut, piano, bass, and drums. Compositions are all by Hubbard. Haven't checked to see if any are new, but they all have arranger credits -- mostly Weiss, Davis on one, bassist Dwayne Burno on two. Weiss is a crack arranger, and if you're into that sort of thing, these pieces are crisp and snappy. I find that it leaves me wondering about the leader. B

Roswell Rudd Quartet: Keep Your Heart Right (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): This reproduces the lineup and two songs from one of my all-time favorite albums, Rudd's Flexible Flyer (1974). That album included Hod O'Brien on piano, Arild Andersen on bass, and Sheila Jordan singing -- Rudd seems to have an aversion to drummers, even when he's playing African music. This time it's Lafayette Harris on piano, Bradley Jones on bass, and Sunny Kim singing -- not a fair comparison, especially pitching any singer up against the incomparable Jordan. More songs this time -- close to all the songs Rudd ever wrote lyrics to. Terrific trombone -- making me wish that was more the focus. Even here, the two repeats stand out. Maybe the others will kick in. [B+(**)]

Scott DuBois: Banshees (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): Guitarist, b. 1978, based in New York. Recorded two previous albums with Dave Liebman on Soul Note. This group consists of Kresten Osgood on drums, Thomas Morgan on bass, and Gebhard Ullman on tenor/soprano sax and bass clarinet. One thing I've noticed lately is that some saxophonists seem to get much sharper with a guitar guding them along. I've heard half-dozen or so albums by Ullman, respect his ambitions as a free player, but until now I've never really seen him hold it all together before. The Luis Lopes is another like this, but DuBois is much more out front -- his solos tend to be short but they strongly reinforce the pieces. Played this half-dozen times and it keeps gaining on me. A-

Guillermo Klein/Los Gauchos: Filtros (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): Pianist, b. 1970 in Argentina, attended Berklee 1990-94, moved on to New York. Los Gauchos is his big band, a mix of Latin players and other New York talents, including some players with substantial discographies of their own: Miguel Zenon, Chris Cheek, Bill McHenry, Ben Monder. Over a half-dozen albums, he's developed into an expansive and inventive arranger -- I'm tempted to compare him to Maria Schneider, but not being a big fan of either that may be too tongue-in-cheek. Still, the Monkish "Vaca" here is pretty irresistible, a good track to check out. Wish he wouldn't sing. B+(**)

Kris Davis: Rye Eclipse (2007 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Canadian pianist, based in New York since 2002, has three albums now with this superb quartet, each showing advance. Group includes Jeff Davis (drums; from Colorado, presumably not related), Eivind Opsvik (bass), and Tony Malaby (tenor sax). The early albums immediately appealed for Malaby's distinctive edge. The pianist is developing a similarly rugged approach -- not just offsetting block chords, but in a piece like "Wayne Oskar" she leads off with intriguing abstractions then backs off as Malaby slips in to finish off her thoughts. A-

Jon Irabagon's Outright! (2007 [2008], Innova): Alto saxophonist, has done some good work lately, appearing on a pick hit (Mostly Other People Do the Killing) and another featured disc (Jostein Gulbrandsen) from the latest Jazz Consumer Guide. This one goes for overkill, starting with cover pics of masses of arm-waving fans -- I could see him moving the people but drawing them is another matter. A lot of talent here: three-fourths of Kris Davis' quartet -- Davis on piano/organ, Eivind Opsvik on acoustic bass, Jeff Davis on drums -- plus Russ Johnson on trumpet and Irabagon. Two cuts expand the group up toward big band mass. I don't much care for the horn duet at the beginning, but there are interesting bits throughout, including a MOPDTK-style assault on "Groovin' High." B+(*)

William Parker: Double Sunrise Over Neptune (2007 [2008], AUM Fidelilty): Recorded live at Vision Festival XII, three long pieces built around repeated bass riffs that the conductor farmed out to Shayna Dulberger, and a short bridge. With sixteen musicians, favoring strings (two violins, viola, cello, bass, guitar or banjo, oud, the leader's doson'ngoni) which elaborate the themes over horns (trumpet, three saxes, whatever "double reeds" Bill Cole plays), with vocalist Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay trading off against the latter. Oh, also two drummers, Gerald Cleaver and Hamid Drake. Whereas Parker's large groups in the past, like his Little Huey Orchestra, tended to go unhinged, this all flows together marvelously. Even a bit of wildness near the end of the second piece, which seems inevitable once you unleash saxophonists Rob Brown and Sabir Mateen, holds tight. The singer runs close to the edge of the high-pitched squeak that east (or southeast) Asian opera is prone to, but never slips over. A remarkable piece of work. A

David Murray/Mal Waldron: Silence (2001 [2008], Justin Time): Duo, recorded in October 2001, a little more than a year before Waldron passed on Dec. 2, 2002. Three Waldron songs, the title cut from Murray, three more (Sammy Cahn, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington). Not sure how to rate Waldron's performance here; Murray runs rings around him, but that's just Murray -- expansive, bracing, sometimes gorgeous (especially on bass clarinet). Both artists have excelled in duos before: Waldron with Marion Brown; Murray on several occasions, my favorite being the ballad set Tea for Two with George Arvanitas on Fresh Sound -- more of an Oscar Peterson-type player. This is much more dry. [B+(***)]

Gerald Cleaver: Gerald Cleaver's Detroit (2006 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Drummer, from Detroit, based in Brooklyn (where this, despite its title, was recorded). Second album, plus 50-60 side credits. I mostly associate him with the avant-garde, since I've often run into him on records by Matthew Shipp, Roscoe Mitchell, Charles Gayle, Joe Morris, Mat Maneri, and Rob Brown. But he also shows up on more conventional postbop fare, including records by his group here: Jeremy Pelt (trumpet), JD Allen (tenor sax), Andrew Bishop (soprano/tenor sax, bass clarinet), Ben Waltzer (piano), Chris Lightcap (bass). (Actually, I don't see Pelt in his credits list.) Some flashy hornwork here, strong moments, although it's a little de trop for my taste. (Too bad he couldn't get his mentor, Detroit's patron saint Marcus Belgrave, instead of Pelt.) B+(*)

Pete Robbins: Do the Hate Laugh Shimmy (2007 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Alto saxophonist. Website describes what he does as "brooklyn prog-modern (post)jazz." B. 1978, moved to New York 2002. MySpace page lists Tim Berne and Lee Konitz at top of list of influences. Two previous albums, the one I'm familiar with on Playscape (Waits & Measures) comes closer to bearing that out. This one doesn't. The keyboards and guitar are soft and moody, and the horns (including Jesse Neuman on trumpet and Sam Sadigursky on tenor sax, clarinet, and bass clarinet) rarely rise above that. Must be that "prog-modern (post)jazz" thing he's looking for. B

Ramón Díaz: Unblocking (2007 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Drummer, originally from the Canary Islands, based in Barcelona, runs a hard bop quintet that last time out (Diŕleg) I compared favorably to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Same group, a little more varied, with one "trad." piece, a slow bit, and some Fender Rhodes separating this from the 1960s. Blakey would have loved to have worked with the front line here -- saxophonist Jeppe Rasmussen, trumpeter Idafe Pérez -- and also with pianist José Alberto Medina (who has good records on his own). But he would think that the drummer should be a bit louder. B+(***)

The Alon Farber Hagiga Sextet: Optimistic View (2006 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Israeli band, led by soprano saxophonist Farber; hagiga means celebration. Has a previous FSNT album by the Hagiga Quintet: nice record, as is this one. Loose rhythm with middle eastern (and possibly Latin) touches, a second horn in Hagai Amir's alto sax; piano and guitar aiding the flow. B+(**)

Norma Winstone: Distances (2007 [2008], ECM): English vocalist, b. 1941, cut a well-regarded record in 1971 (Edge of Time), but more often worked with others: Michael Garrick; Mike Westbrook; John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler in the group Azimuth. AMG counts nine records under her name. This one, like her 2002 Chamber Music (Universal) puts her in front of Glauco Venier (piano) and Klaus Gesing (soprano sax, bass clarinet). Hard to characterize her as a singer: she has a calm, stately voice, seemingly unaffected by the vogue of jazz singers emulating horn players. Gesing is consistently a plus here, especially when he lifts up one of the many slow pieces. Cole Porter's "Every Time We Say Goodbye" is a choice cut, but maybe that's just because it's easiest to relate to. B+(**)

Gary Morgan & PanAmericana!: Felicidade (Happiness) (2007 [2008], CAP): Twenty-piece big band, plays Brazilian music, with pieces by Jobim, Pascoal, Jovino Santos Neto, and others, including five by Morgan. Morgan was born in Chile, moved to Canada very young, played saxophone, later switched to bass. Studied at Berklee in 1980, but he seems already to have immersed himself in Brazilian music. Moved on to New York, where PanAmericana is based, although he also leads another orchestra based in Toronto. He's not in the personnel list here. For that matter, few (if any) of the musicians here are Brazilian. I don't have much feel for bands like this: when they're cruising they make for pleasant but uninteresting background music, when they slow down they get clumsy. Second album for the group. B-

The Joe Ascione Quartet: Movin' Up (2007 [2008], Arbors): Drummer, b. 1961, third album as leader (first was a tribute to Buddy Rich), plus 60 or more side credits, including membership in Frank Vignola projects Travelin' Light and the Frank and Joe Show (he's Joe). Quartet includes Frank Tate on bass, John Cocuzzi on piano and vibes, and Allan Vaché on clarinet, an interesting and somewhat whimsical lineup, especially when the vibes are in play. Mostly tunes from Gershwin and Porter, with some oddities thrown in -- "The Aba Daba Honeymoon," "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah's Got Rhythm." "Norwegian Wood" usually makes me gag, but he almost gets away with it. B+(*)

Larry Ham: Just Me, Just You (2007 [2008], Arbors): Subtitle: Arbors Piano Series, Volume 17. Pianist, b. 1954, played with Lionel Hampton (1986-87) and Illinois Jacquet (1990-95); more recently appeared on several Scott Robinson records. Second album, after debuting in 2007. This one's solo. Mostlys tandards, a couple of originals, a calypso, one from Bud Powell. No complaints -- just doesn't quite break the ice. B

Chris Flory: For You (2007 [2008], Arbors): Guitarist, b. 1953, played with Benny Goodman 1978-83, with Scott Hamilton from 1978 to at least 1989. Has half-dozen albums since 1993, one of many players who started on Concord and wound up on Arbors. Quintet with Dan Block (tenor sax), Jon-Erik Kellso (trumpet), Mike LeDonne (organ), and Chuck Riggs (drums). Like many swing-oriented guitarists, he tends to drop into rhythm when someone else is playing, which is kind of a waste behind the predictable LeDonne. The album fares best when Flory gets a clean lead. The horns aren't very pushy either, but are usually a plus. B+(**)

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

For this cycle's collected Jazz Prospecting notes, look here.

Unpacking:

• Bryan Beninghove: Organ Trio (no label)
• David Berger Octet: I Had the Craziest Dream: The Music of Harry Warren (Such Sweet Thunder)
• Paul Bley: About Time (Justin Time)
• Georg Breinschmid & Friends: Wien Bleibt Krk (Zappel Music)
• Frank Catalano: Bang! (Savoy Jazz)
• Fight the Big Bull: Dying Will Be Easy (Clean Feed)
• Al Foster Quartet: Love, Peace and Jazz! (Jazz Eyes)
• Warren Hill: La Dolce Vita (Koch)
• Rebecca Martin: The Growing Season (Sunnyside)
• Jason Miles: 2 Grover With Love (Koch): advance, Aug. 19
• David Murray/Mal Waldron: Silence (Justin Time)
• Anne Phillips: Ballet Time (Conawago)

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Books

Continued posting book reports all week:

• Greg Anrig: The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing
• Jared Bernstein: Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)
• Jeremy Bernstein: Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know
• Jonathan Chait: The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics
• Ha-Joon Chang: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
• Daniel Cohen: Globalization and Its Enemies
• Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson: Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy
• Jacob S Hacker: The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream
• Stephen Holmes: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Repsonse to Terror
• Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power
• Robert Kuttner: The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity
• Geoffrey Nunberg: Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Holywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
• Kevin Phillips: Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
• Richard Rhodes: Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Monday, June 23, 2008

Browse Alert: Tankers

Salon War Room: Did lobbyists influence McCain's "straight talk" on Boeing?. The underlying question is: do senators ever do anything without the interest of some lobbyist? Not a big surprise -- not even news -- that McCain had/has connections to EADS lobbyists. Still, his efforts at derailing Boeing's original tanker lease deal qualify as being in the public interest, and his $6B estimate of how much he saved taxpayers is credible. A couple of people wound up in jail over this scam, and you can't just chalk that down to political influence. The first thing to understand about the tanker deal was that it was concocted wholly inside Boeing: it wasn't something the Air Force cared much about one way or another -- the AF would much rather go for something cutting edge, and there's no real sex appeal in tankers. The reasons are easy enough to grasp: Boeing's 767 was obsolete, due to be replaced by the 787 ("Dreamliner"), but converting it to a tanker would stretch out a little more ROI on the tooling and assembly line; the lease deal was a way of fudging the lack of any budget for tankers, and by the time you added it all up more than doubled Boeing's return (that alone is good for McCain's $6B); and the obsolescence of the old KC-135 fleet should have been an easy sell (they're based on Boeing's original 707). So Boeing's first task was to get the AF to buy into the scam, which was the source of the first round of convictions. Once the AF was on record as wanting $35B of tankers, EADS figured they had their own line of airliners that would work just as well, and somehow they managed to get the bid specs tweaked in their favor -- whether that means we'll be seeing more parties in court remains to be seen. Once the contract was awarded to Northrup Grumman (fronting for EADS), Boeing's political division -- Wichita congressman Todd Tiahrt is so obsessed with the issue Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd -- went apeshit, putting a full court press on everyone from McCain to the GAO, which signed off on Boeing's talking points last week. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the only thing that matters is political clout, so we're constantly bombarded with arguments about how many jobs the program will create and where will those jobs go? (The EADS jobs obviously go to France and the UK, but a big chunk of the mod work goes to Alabama. The Boeing jobs are promised to Kansas and Washington, but less obviously also include Japan and China.) Boeing (headquarters Chicago) can even get someone like Obama to opine that those government-paid jobs should be American jobs, without giving any thought to how inefficient a jobs program this is, let alone the more basicquestion of what we need tankers for. The core mission of the USAF tanker fleet is to make it possible to rapidly deploy US forces, especially tactical bombers, anywhere in the world. After eight years of Bush Doctrine, you'd think we'd start to have second thoughts about being the world's block bully. But rather than ask such philosophical questions, the next best thing may be to follow the money and unravel the corruption. If we're lucky they'll all wind up in jail, and we'll never get around to rebuilding a fleet we don't need and shouldn't want.

I went ahead and posted the above paragraph as a comment at Salon, where it will be quickly forgotten. None of the other comments came anywhere close to my points. I am surprised that the story gets next to no attention outside of Wichita. The jobs actually won't make much of a difference even here. Net, even if Boeing wins the contract, we may wind up losing jobs -- the old KC-135 fleet depends on Wichita stay in the air, but the new tankers could just as well be moved to some other tax haven. But it's such an extraordinary example of how corruptly politicized defense spending has become in the US. At the same time, Boeing has transformed itself from America's top export company to a den of scam artists who do nothing but exploit their political graft, willing to do anything for government bucks, no matter how badly -- check out their Mexican border fence, or their latest anti-missile technology. There are many ways you can look at what's wrong with America, and a lot of them show up here.

Music: Current count 14526 [14502] rated (+24), 814 [803] unrated (+11). Hanging in here, slogging through.

• Classic Piano Blues From Smithsonian Folkways (1944-76 [2008], Smithsonian/Folkways): The small print limits the selection to Moe Asch's folkie-ethnomusicological label, which recorded some 3000 LPs with its eyes and ears fixed on the past -- one result is that real classics like Leroy Carr are too old, and contemporaries like Otis Spann are too modern. Sampled instead are such uncommercial fogeys as Memphis Slim, Speckled Red, Roosevelt Sykes, Champion Jack Dupree, and Little Brother Montgomery, with James P. Johnson a surprise appearance. The booklet often omits recording dates -- 1944-76 covers about half of the songs, but others could be earlier or later -- but otherwise provides a lot of information, often referencing more classic versions of these same songs. B+(**)
• The Roots: Rising Down (2008, Def Jam): Skits at the beginning and end drag. A couple of plays in the car had me thinking they were doing a Public Enemy thing, not quite as hard or sharp. At home, however, the pop layer started to emerge, which drives the hard edged raps along. Not sure if this is really over the line. I haven't called a full-A record all year -- maybe I'm just too gunshy? A

Jazz Prospecting (CG #17, Part 9)

Still foundering, killing time like I'm hoping it'll just slip by without noticing me. More or less recovered from that bout of whatever a week or two ago, but still going through the motions. Started with some easy oldies. Moved on with no particular rhyme or logic. At one point started to put a Ab Baars/Ken Vandermark record on, then decided to hold off on that. Next week I promise I'll get to the Clean Feeds and Evil Rabbits and the latest batch from Satoko Fujii. Also have the collected works of Nik Bärtsch on tap -- most of the feedback I got from the last Jazz CG included praise for Holon. I had thought about holding Holon back for a pick hit, but chose instead to get the word out before it got dated. It's been at the top of my 2008-in-progress list until this week, when the Roots' Rising Down bumped it. Still need pick hits for next time. The list reminds me that Rob Brown's Crown Trunk Root Funk and Vandermark 5's Beat Reader are the obvious choices, with Scott Fields' Bitter Love Songs rising on the outside.

Wes Montgomery: Incredible Jazz Guitar (1960 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): Not really -- despite his overwhelming influence on two-thirds of the jazz guitarists who followed in his wake, at best he was a subtle craftsman with natural swing on basic blues; nowhere is that more clear than on this elegant quartet with Tommy Flanagan's piano as delectable as the guitar. A-

Sonny Rollins: Freedom Suite (1958 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): A trio with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach -- the latter credited with trumpet on a back cover typo. The 19:37 title cut seems a little subdued, tentative as if freedom is still uncertain. Same could be said for the side of standards, expanded with redundant bonus cuts, but they're just tapping into his sentimental side, and it's easy to feel sentimental about him. B+(***)

Coleman Hawkins: The Hawk Flies High (1957 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): Makes it look easy, too, lifted by warm brass from Idrees Suleiman and J.J. Johnson, soaring over a rhythm section that layers Hank Jones bebop on Jo Jones swing, swooping and diving and snatching the listener's attention with surprisingly effortless grace; only complaint is sometimes Hawk makes it look too easy. A-

Nat Adderley: Work Song (1960 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): Cannonball's little brother plays a lean, unpolished cornet, backed by a group that straddles Bobby Timmons' funk-groove piano and Wes Montgomery's slickened blues guitar. The irresistibly catchy title cut makes this a minor hard bop classic. A-

McCoy Tyner: Fly With the Wind (1976 [2008], Milestone/Keepnews Collection): A symphony of sorts, tempestuous but wildly scattered including some of those dull atmospheric spots, performed by a massive string orchestra plus harp, wind instruments limited to oboe and flutes, a rhythm section with Ron Carter and Billy Cobham frantically struggling to keep up with the pianist. B

The Peter Brötzmann Octet: The Complete Machine Gun Sessions (1968 [2007], Atavistic): Roughly speaking, this is where Europe's jazz avant-garde takes off, building a tradition rooted in brutal cacophony, disjointed rhythm, and cartoonish irreverance. The three saxophonists went on to major careers: Evan Parker, Willem Breuker, and Brötzmann. They turn these long pieces into free fire zones, blaring in unison siren wails, splitting off to scratch through the dirt and the rubble. Two bassists: Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall. Two drummers: Han Bennink and Sven-Ake Johansson. One pianist: Fred Van Hove. Each has his own mind, but the piano is especially worth tracking. Original LP ran 37:08. CD reissue added two alternate takes, and now this edition adds a third take of the title piece, done live with extra saxophonist Gerd Dudek. Still fits on one CD, but it's an awful lot to sit through. B+(**)

Gabi Lunca: Sounds From a Bygone Age, Vol. 5 (1956-78 [2008], Asphalt Tango): Even now, nobody would go so far as to claim that Ceausescu's Romania harbored a golden age of pop music, but the German label Asphalt Tango has compiled five volumes without a slip, music no one else seems to have had a clue about. (Buda Musique's Éthiopiques series has done something comparable, but is more hit and miss.) Gypsy lautari music, with accordion and violin and cimbalom, mostly consumed at weddings, only rarely recorded. Lunca was the more refined of two major female singers -- the earthier Romica Puceanu got her props back on Vol. 2. A-

Ornette Coleman: Town Hall, 1962 (1962 [2008], ESP-Disk): Three cuts with the trio -- David Izenzon on bass, Charles Moffett on percussion -- that in 1965 cut At the Golden Circle, Stockholm, both volumes highly recommended. This is less essential but unmistakable, more for folks who can never get enough. Sandwiched in the middle is a 9:17 string quartet, Coleman's first recorded glimpse of his harmolodic chamber music. It is something else again, classical music in form, but not in smell. B+(***)

Albert Ayler/Don Cherry/John Tchicai/Roswell Rudd/Gary Peacock/Sunny Murray: New York Eye and Ear Control (1964 [2008], ESP-Disk): Ayler's record, but all names are on the cover (Murray's misspelled) and all are notable: the four horns churning tumultuously, with Ayler's tenor sax reaching for the sacred, and Rudd's trombone plumbing the profane. B+(*)

Frank Lowe: Black Beings (1973 [2008], ESP-Disk): The short middle piece is solo tenor sax, thoughtful and intriguing. The two long pieces sandwiched around the solo are screamers, with Joseph Jarman on second noisemaker, wailing and shrieking spastically around Lowe's meatier riffs. I've found myself upgrading several of these reissues, not least because I've gotten better at handling the sheer noisiness of the 1960s-1970s avant-garde (the Brötzmann and Ayler reissues are two cases in point, up from B/B-). I'm a big fan of Lowe's, so I expected the same here, and indeed I find my reaction is more nuanced. Still, I don't see any reason to nudge my grade this time. There's some interesting stuff here, but I find Jarman downright oppressive. The two long tracks had been edited to fit on LP sides, and restored to original length here. The violinist, originally credited as The Wizard, is identified as Raymond Lee Cheng. Lowe started playing with Billy Bang a year later, so it's reasonable to wonder if they're the same, but they don't sound anywhere close. The bassist is young William Parker, who went on to corner the market for this type of thing, playing with Charles Gayle and David S. Ware. He's hard to follow, but seems to do the job. I've never heard of drummer Rashid Sinan, but he has some good spots. B-

James Zitro: Zitro (1967 [2008], ESP-Disk): Percussionist, worked with Sonny Simmons, got a free shot on the label that bragged "the artist alone decide" and turned out an energetic but unexceptional free jazz blast, a sextet with Alan Praskin and Bert Wilson on noisy saxes and Warren Gale riffing high on trumpet. B

Don Cherry: Life at Café Montmartre 1966: Volume Two (1966 [2008], ESP-Disk): Sloppy seconds in Copenhagen, with Gato Barbieri's tenor sax sparring with the leader's trumpet over the fractured field of Karl Berger vibes, playing such complex Cherry compositions as "Complete Communion" loose and short-handed. Doc is better this time, confirming that this set was recorded Mar. 31, 1966, and that Volume One came from Mar. 17, 1966 -- dates that line up with previous LP releases on Magnetic. Berger's vibes here are so scattered they're comic. Bo Stief plays bass, Aldo Romano drums. B

Droppin' Science: Greatest Samples From the Blue Note Lab (1966-74 [2008], Blue Note): With Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf departing, the legendary label foundered, adrift in quasi-commercial soul jazz with languid beats that I suppose have been sampled from time to time -- no details here, just another attempt to turn sows' ears into silk purses. C+

Dominique Cravic et les Primitifs du Futur: Tribal Musette (2007-08 [2008], Sunnyside): It's tempting to view this French cabaret group through the prism of their famous cover illustrator and sometime mandoline player, R. Crumb. Like the Cheap Suit Serenaders, guitarist Cravic's band is firmly planted in the past, its embrace of primtivism rooted in the romantic view of anthropology, with a little sci-fi for the future. For me it works not for its longing for other times so much as how disarmingly and charmingly French it all sounds: the accordions, marimba, clarinets, "musicale saw," "finger snapping," rhythm guitar, voices ranging from cigarette-stained poetasting to sweet chorales. Where we tend to think of world music as anything-but-ours, in France the view seems to be everything-including-ours. A-

Mary Lou Williams: A Grand Night for Swinging (1976 [2008], High Note): Got her start playing church organ on her mama's lap. Turned pro at age 6, and hit the road at 12. Cut her first records at 17 in 1927, really making her mark in the 1930s as pianist-arranger for Andy Kirk's Kansas City big band, going on to write extended works like The Zodiac Suite. Picked up bebop almost as naturally as she took to swing, and after a long hiatus reappeared in the 1970s as the hippest old lady in the business. This is just a live set caught in Buffalo, her trio mostly playing covers, a nice showoff spot for drummer Roy Haynes, the title cut reprised. It's all dazzlingly alive, spirit-lifting -- maybe all that praying paid off. Ends with a bit of interview, you won't mind hearing more than once. A-

Eric Alexander Quartet: Prime Time: In Concert (2007 [2008], High Note, CD+DVD): Straight-laced tenor saxophonist, the very model of a modern mainstream player, with a broad tone and plenty of energy. I've long admired his work, citing his Dead Center in an early Jazz CG, but he's slipped up quite a bit the last couple of years -- Temple of Olympic Zeus also made JCG, but as a dud. This one is a return to form, probably because the parameters are so straightforward, and the rhythm section -- David Hazeltine on piano, John Webber on bass, Joe Farnsworth on drums -- is perfectly suited to the task. Haven't watched the DVD, which looks to be the same session, in different order, with two extra songs and a longer version of "Nemesis." [B+(**)]

Bill O'Connell: Triple Play (2007 [2008], Savant): Pianist, b. 1953, from New York, teaches at Rutgers, specializes in Latin jazz, having broke in with Mongo Santamaria, although he probably comes out of a more conventional bop background. This is a trio with Dave Valentin on flute and Richie Flores on congas, both adding something distinctive to the idiosyncratic piano in the center. B+(*)

Sălongo (2007, DBCD): Group name "is an expression from Zaire meaning: We come together to create something beautiful out of love." Diacritical mark over 'a' varies by typographer -- a macron on cover, a tilde in website text. Group is from New York, a septet (plus guest keyboardist Uli Geissendoerfer) described as Afro-Cuban/Brasilian. The rhythm section fits that description; the saxes are hard boppers Teodross Avery (tenor) and Bruce Williams (alto, flute), with leader Eddie Allen on trumpet. Allen has a little bit of everything in his discography: Mongo Santamaria, conservatives like Houston Person and Cyrus Chestnut, AACM types like Muhal Richard Abrams and Lester Bowie, odds and ends like Bobby Previte and Rabih Abou-Khalil. Haven't heard any of the four records under Allen's name, which look to be mainstream (Anthony Wonsey is on a couple). This sets out a very likable Latin groove, with slick but not overly brassy horn work, and nice piano breaks from Hector Martignon. B+(**)

Antonio Ciacca Quintet: Rush Life (2008, Motéma): Italian pianist; b. 1969, Wuppertal, Germany; graduated G.B. Martini Conservatory of Contemporary Music in Bologna; moved to Detroit, and is currently based in New York. Fifth record since 1996. Hard bop quintet lineup, with Joe Magnarelli on trumpet and Stacy Dillard on tenor sax, both players who can command a solo. The pianist is less distinctive, but steers the group capably. B+(*)

Kenny Wheeler: Other People (2005 [2008], CAM Jazz): Plays trumpet/flugelhorn, from Canada, a significant figure in the English avant-garde from c. 1970 although never known for his fire, recorded an impressive series of mild-mannered composer-centric albums for ECM, has been quite prolific on CAM Jazz over the last 4-5 years. This, like most of his albums, pairs him with pianist John Taylor, a collaborator and kindred spirit from way back. The other musicians here are the four members of the Hugo Wolf String Quartet, none named Hugo Wolf. So this is another horn-with-strings thing, a genre that has rarely failed to disgust -- Warren Vaché's Don't Look Back was the latest one I've flagged down. This one is, well, not so bad. The strings hew closely to Wheeler's compositional concept, which often turns them into a fairly neutral backdrop. Taylor is splendid at stitching it all together, while Wheeler is often eloquent and/or poignant, if not very dynamic. B+(*)

Martial Solal Trio: Longitude (2007 [2008], CAM Jazz): French pianist, born in Algeria in 1927, has recorded regularly since the early 1950s, giving him a discography that rivals contemporaries like George Shearing, Marian McPartland, and André Previn, maybe even Dave Brubeck and Hank Jones -- I'm way behind the learning curve on him, and piano isn't a particularly strong suit, but he certainly ranks with the major jazz figures of his lifetime. Nearing his 80th birthday, he remains dazzling on this record, with François Moutin on bass, Louis Moutin on drums. [B+(***)]

Larry Vuckovich Trio: High Wall (2007 [2008], Tetrachord Music): Pianist, b. 1936 in Yugoslavia, came to San Francisco in 1951, studied with Vince Guaraldi, settled into the local jazz scene. Reminds me of the second generation of bebop pianists, with long, expansive lines, bright, bouncy undertow. Several bass/drums combinations, some with extra percussion. B+(**)

Nicholas Payton: Into the Blue (2007 [2008], Nonesuch): Very mild-mannered funk album. Kevin Hays barely registers a pulse on Fender Rhodes. Bass, drums, and percussion are barely on board for the ride. Payton's trumpet has never been so subdued. I can't imagine they're not doing it on some purpose, but can't imagine what the purpose might be. Some kind of quiet storm for ascetics? Payton croons a tune, too. It's like he's been hypnotized into thinking he's Chet Baker. Maybe that's the idea, but he's even more indirect. [B-]

Gene Bertoncini: Concerti (2005 [2008], Ambient): Veteran guitarist, one of the better players from a generation where swing was the highest compliment -- Bucky Pizzarelli is comparable, a little better known. However, he bit off too much of the wrong stuff this time. One problem is that the sound drowns in strings, with his guitar and David Finck's bass wrapped around a traditional string quartet. The other problem is the song selection: a medley of Chopin and Jobim, another of Rodrigo and Chick Corea, a couple of Cole Porter chestnuts, and the always dreadful "Eleanor Rigby." C+

Jessica Jones Quartet: Word (2005 [2008], New Artists): Family act -- husband Tony Jones plays tenor sax, as does his better half, who also plays piano and writes most of the songs. With bass and drums, they can be moderately edgy. But most of the record is turned over to daughter Candace Jones, who alternates between dry torch songs and reciting poetry from Arisa White and Abe Maneri. The album has an appealing home-crafted feel, but makes you wonder how far they could stretch if they tried. B+(**)

Jason Ajemian: The Art of Dying (2007 [2008], Delmark): Bassist, from Chicago, part of the Chicago Underground consortium. Has a trio called Smokeless Heat with Tim Haldeman on tenor sax and Noritaka Tanaka on drums, but for most of the album this group is expanded to include Jamie Branch on trumpet, Matt Schneider on guitar, and/or Jason Adasiewicz on marimba. Mostly short, intimate free exchanges -- 14 such cuts, only 2 over 5:00 -- followed by a 23:54 radio shot. [B+(**)]

Alison Ruble: This Is a Bird (2008, Origin): Singer, based in Chicago, first album. Voice seems to trail the band and the songs; nothing wrong with it, but she doesn't grab you, nor leave you with a strange aftertaste. Band has some strong points: Jim Gailloreto takes interesting solos on soprano sax, and John McLean is a pretty supportive guitarist. Songs by Bacharach/David and James Taylor rub me both ways; ones by Rodgers/Hammerstein do neither. B

Ed Reed: The Song Is You (2007 [2008], Blue Shorts): Age 78, second album, had a life that included four stretches in San Quentin and Folsom, the sort of places you could pick up a band in with someone like Art Pepper on alto sax. The band here is the Peck Allmond Sextet, with the leader playing trumpet, tenor sax, flute, cornet, and clarinet. The songs throw back to the 1950s -- could be the Sinatra songbook, but somewhat more biased toward Ellington. Reed fits the Sinatra model well enough -- mellower than the brash young Sinatra, smoother and more elegant than the older one. B+(**)

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

Unpacking:

• Nat Adderley: Work Song (1960, Riverside/Keepnews Collection)
• Patricia Barber: The Cole Porter Mix (Blue Note): advance, Sept. 16
• Cephas & Wiggins: Richmond Blues (Smithsonian/Folkways)
• Tim Collins: Fade (Ropeadope): October 7
• Chris Flory: For You (Arbors)
• Fulminate Trio (Generate)
• The Joel Futterman/Alvin Fielder/Ike Levin Trio: Traveling Through Now (Charles Lester Music)
• Larry Ham: Just Me, Just You (Arbors)
• Long Ago and Far Away: Kelly Harland Sings Jerome Kern (Origin)
• Coleman Hawkins: The Hawk Flies High (1957, Riverside/Keepnews Collection)
• Todd Herbert: The Tree of Life (Metropolitan): Aug. 19
• Freddie Hubbard & the New Jazz Composers Octet: On the Real Side (4Q/Times Square): June 24
• Guus Janssen: Out of Frame (Geestgronden)
• Grace Kelly/Lee Konitz: GraceFulLee (Pazz Productions)
• Katie King: Harry's Fight (OA2)
• Kopacoustic: Music From the KopaFestival 2006 Volume 1 (2006, Kopasetic)
• Kopalectric: Music From the KopaFestival 2006 Volume 2 (2006, Kopasetic)
• Tom Lellis/Toninho Horta: Tonight (Adventure Music)
• Kate McGarry: If Less Is More (Palmetto): advance, Aug. 19
• Robin McKelle: Modern Antique (Cheap Lullaby)
• Wes Montgomery: Incredible Jazz Guitar (1960, Riverside/Keepnews Collection)
• Moonbound: Confession and Release (Unsung)
• New Guitar Summit: Shivers (Stony Plain)
• William Parker: Double Sunrise Over Neptune (AUM Fidelity)
• John Patton: Soul Connection (1983, Just a Memory)
• Alvin Queen: Jammin' Uptown (1985, Just a Memory)
• Sonny Rollins: Freedom Suite (1958, Riverside/Keepnews Collection)
• Curtis Salgado: Clean Getaway (Shanachie)
• Paul Shapiro: Essen (Tzadik)
• Willie "The Lion" Smith & Don Ewell: Stride Piano Duets: Live in Toronto, 1966 (1966, Delmark)
• Cy Touff & Sandy Mosse: Tickle Toe (1981, Delmark)
• McCoy Tyner: Fly With the Wind (1976, Milestone/Keepnews Collection)
• Tuner: Totem (2005, Unsung)
• Von Garcia: I Think a Think (Sluggo's Goon Music)
• Corey Wilkes: Drop It (Delmark)

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Books

I'm working rather frantically trying to catch up with notes on the many books I've read more/less recently. The main chunk of work is to type up various quotes that I flagged. Sometimes I introduce them and/or comment on them. The more of either I do the slower the process gets, so while I'm trying to play catch up I'm inclined to do as little of that as possible. The resulting pages are less like reviews, but as much as anything else they are intended to bolster my own flagging memory, and for that they are functional.

In some cases, the book notes are based on secondhand reviews rather than on the original books. Either the book or the review seemed to be worth noting, and it helps broaden my coverage. The following one is like that. The book notes are also collected in the Books section, which despite my tardiness is growing into a substantial section of this website.

Pages posted during this burst (no need to copy them here):

• Alex Abella: Soldiers of Reason
• Chris Hedges: I Don't Believe in Atheists
• Richard Heinberg: Peak Everything
• Lisa Margonelli: Oil on the Brain
• William R Polk: Violent Politics
• Alan Weisman: The World Without Us
• Garry Wills: What Jesus Meant

Friday, June 20, 2008

Browse Alert

Just some scattered links below. The presidential campaign has entered a period of doldrums, reflected in Salon's numerous speculative articles on VP candidates: pro and con for Obama/Hillary, McCain/Lieberman, Obama/Hagel, and other such nonsense -- Camile Paglia likes Kathleen Sebelius as Obama's VP, which makes more sense than any of the above, although I'm ambivalent at best. Also read some talk about how Obama should retain Gates as Secretary of Defense -- no doubt he could do worse, as Clinton did in replacing Gates with Woolsey at CIA, but at this point we should still hope for better. Obama has made some noise about bringing Republicans into his administration, but this doesn't look like a year where he has to double cross the Democratic base to inch over the finish line.

Meanwhile, I have been having a good time looking at FiveThirtyEight -- subtitle is "Electoral Projections Done Right," and they look pretty right to me.

Big news here in Wichita is the GAO report which apparently puts Boeing back in running for the Great Tanker Scam. Goes to show that intense lobbying still works in Washington.

Tony Karon: America's great mistake was to make too much of al Qa'eda. Certainly true. As Gilles Kepel has shown, before 9/11 Al Qaeda had lost its battle for a political constituency in the Muslim world. The 9/11 attacks might have faded into a brief Warhol moment of notoriety (and most likely self-destruction, like the Luxor tourist attacks in Egypt had backfired against Zawahiri's group) had Bush not chosen to open up Afghanistan and Iraq in his war of retribution and conquest. Even so, Al Qaeda remains marginal, an irritant exaggerated into a menace by our own incomprehension, a mirroring of Bush and Bin Laden egos. Alternate version of essay here.

Andrew Leonard: Gas prices and offshore drilling. Steps through the basic logic of the offshore/arctic drilling proposal Bush and McCain pushed out today, finding the real nub of contention over the question whether we recognize or still deny that we face a finite resources crunch over oil supplies. Until we recognize the need to fundamentally change our energy economy, adding marginal capacity is little more than a stall tactic. I full well expect that sooner or later we'll wind up sucking every recoverable drop from those sources (at more or less cost to the environment). Maybe it would make sense to start planning how to do that, but not if it's just going to be burned up willy nilly, which is what would happen under the current regime.

Phillipe Sands: It Was Top Down, Stupid. A lot of pieces lately on the torture chambers and their prisons from Guantanamo to Bagram and points unspecified. Sands, a stickler for points of international law, points to the top of the order chain.

Chris Floyd: Torturegate: Truth but No Consequences. Another useful review of the torture testimony, with more on where it's going, or not. Doesn't include today's FISA vote, where House Democrats caved in (or to use their preferred technical term, "compromised").

Andrew J Bacevich: Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon. A review of two recent books on how other people screwed up the Iraq War -- Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's Special Plans guy, and Ricardo Sanchez, the first military commander of the occupation forces:

Apart from the finger-pointing and score-settling, these two accounts do agree at least implicitly on a single issue: taken as a whole, the national security apparatus is irredeemably broken. [ . . . ] From quite different vantage points, Feith and Sanchez affirm that the principal product generated by the interagency process is disharmony, dishonesty, and dysfunction.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

The Rot of Conservatism

George Packer: The Fall of Conservatism. Subtitle: "Have the Republicans run out of ideas?" Don't know if this is part of a longer project, or if it's just meant to touch on such recent books as Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan, but Packer's May 26, 2008 New Yorker article digs up some revealing dirt on the making and breaking of the new right. He starts by interviewing Pat Buchanan:

"From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority," Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives -- what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South." Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group -- men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, "burned the paint off the walls." As they left the hotel, Nixon said, "This is the future of this Party, right here in the South."

Note that Nixon's interest wasn't ideological: he was looking for a sizable block of votes he could get out in front of. Nixon's 1968 campaign was one of finnesse, attempting to scrape by a divided and disheartened Democratic Party without disclosing how much he too would become a source of division and disarray. But no sooner than Nixon won, he started working on his majority for 1972:

This strategy was put into action near the end of Nixon's first year in office, when antiwar demonstrators were becoming a disruptive presence in Washington. Buchanan recalls urging Nixon, "We've got to use the siege gun of the Presidency, and go right after these guys." On November 3, 1969, Nixon went on national television to speak about the need to avoid a shameful defeat in Vietnam. Looking benignly into the camera, he concluded, "And so tonight -- to you, the great silent majority of Americans -- I ask for your support." It was the most successful speech of his Presidency. Newscasters criticized him for being divisive and for offering no new vision on Vietnam, but tens of thousands of telegrams and letters expressing approval poured into the White House. It was Nixon's particular political genius to rouse simultaneously the contempt of the bien-pensants and the admiration of those who felt the sting of that contempt in their own lives.

This was when Nixon unleashed Spiro Agnew to practice what Kevin Phillips, the political demographer and author of The Emerging Republican Majority working for Nixon, had called "positive polarization."

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum -- "A little raw for today," he warned -- that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

Packer asserts that the "Nixon White House didn't enact all of these recommendations," but Perlstein's book provides a pretty comprehensive listing of how they tried, with a few further dirty tricks added as occasions arose. Note that the emphasis here is on undermining the opposition party than it is to achieve any political ideals.

Packer also argues that the 2006 and 2008 elections mark a turning point:

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, "both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics," the Times columnist David Brooks told me. "McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he's a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don't resonate with the sixties at all." The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing -- despite being despised by significant voices on the right -- shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces. "The fact that there was no conventional, establishment, old-style conservative candidate was not an accident," Brooks said. "Mitt Romney pretended to be one for a while, but he wasn't. Rudy Giuliani sort of pretended, but he wasn't. McCain is certainly not. It's not only a lack of political talent -- there's just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for change."

It's not clear to me in what sense McCain isn't a conservative, and in particular isn't in thrall to the movers and shakers of the movement. In at least one critical area -- the neoconservative plot to militarily crush any conceivable opposition -- he's out in front of the movement. (It doesn't help here that Packer has his own imperialist blind spot.) Packer quotes Newt Gingrich: "The Republian brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins) anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail."

Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich's diagnosis. "There's an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn't yet been made clear by defeat at the polls," he said. "The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it."

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Of course, that whole bit about the Republicans being the "party of ideas" was one of their most blatantly cynical ideas. Their real achievement had less to do with constructing ideas than with selling them, with cajoling or coercing the media into carrying their water, giving them credibility where none was deserved. Great Communicator Ronald Reagan was particularly effective at this:

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, in his new book, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (Harper), argues that Reagan "learned how to seize and keep control of the terms of public debate." On taxes, race, government spending, national security, crime, welfare, and "traditional values," he made mainstream what had been the positions of the right-wing fringe, and he kept Democrats on the defensive. He also brought a generation of doctrinaire conservatives into the bureaucracy and the courts, making appointments based on ideological tests that only a genuine movement leader would impose. The rightward turn of the judiciary will probably be the most lasting achievement of Reagan and his movement.

Wilentz sees Reagan as the movement's high-point. While Reagan achieved much of what he had intended, he also planted the seeds of the movement's decay:

In retrospect, the Reagan Presidency was the high-water mark of conservatism. "In some respects, the conservative movement was a victim of success," Wilentz concludes. "With the Soviet Union dissolved, inflation reduced to virtually negligible levels, and the top tax rate cut to nearly half of what it was in 1980, all of Ronald Reagan's major stated goals when he took office had been achieved, leaving perplexed and fractious conservatives to fight over where they might now lead the country." Wilentz omits one important failure. According to Buchanan, who was the White House communications director in Reagan's second term, the President once told his barber, Milton Pitts, "You know, Milt, I came here to do five things, and four out of five ain't bad." He had succeeded in lowering taxes, raising morale, increasing defense spending, and facing down the Soviet Union; but he had failed to limit the size of government, which, besides anti-Communism, was the abiding passion of Reagan's political career and of the conservative movement. He didn't come close to achieving it and didn't try very hard, recognizing early that the public would be happy to have its taxes cut as long as its programs weren't touched. And Reagan was a poor steward of the unglamorous but necessary operations of the state. Wilentz notes that he presided over a period of corruption and favoritism, encouraging hostility toward government agencies and "a general disregard for oversight safeguards as among the evils of 'big government.'" In this, and in a notorious attempt to expand executive power outside the Constitution -- the Iran-Contra affair -- Reagan's Presidency presaged that of George W. Bush.

I'm tempted to argue that Reagan offered at most the illusion of success -- that his unique sunny optimism encouraged people to look beyond numerous questionable facts. Just as important, the optimism kept the movement's primordial hate under wraps -- temporarily, with Gingrich's 1994 triumph the signal event:

Instead of governing, the Republican majority in Congress -- along with right-wing authors, journalists, talk-radio personalities, think tanks, and foundations -- surrendered to the negative strain of modern conservatism. As political strategy, this strain went back to the Nixon era, but its philosophical roots were older and deeper. It extended back to William F. Buckley, Jr.'s mission statement, in the inaugural issue of National Review, in 1955, that the new magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop"; and to Goldwater's seminal 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, in which he wrote, "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones." By the end of the century, a movement inspired by sophisticated works such as Russell Kirk's 1953 The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot churned out degenerate descendants with titles like How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Shortly after engineering President Bill Clinton's impeachment on a narrow party-line basis, Gingrich was gone.

Though conservatives were not much interested in governing, they understood the art of politics. They hadn't made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality, but they had created a political culture that was inhospitable to welfare, to an indulgent view of criminals, to high rates of taxation. They had controlled the language and moved the political parameters to the right. Back in November, 1967, Buckley wrote in an essay on Ronald Reagan, "They say that his accomplishments are few, that it is only the rhetoric that is conservative. But the rhetoric is the principal thing. It precedes all action. All thoughtful action."

Then came George W. Bush:

According to [David] Frum, who worked as a White House speechwriter during Bush's first two years, Bush couldn't have won if he'd run as a real conservative, because the country was already moving in a new direction. Bush's goals, like Nixon's, were political. Nixon had set out to expand the Republican vote; Bush wanted to keep it from contracting. At his first meeting with Frum and other speechwriters, Bush declared, "I want to change the Party" -- to soften its hard edge, and make the Party more hospitable to Hispanics. "It was all about positioning," Frum said, "not about confronting a new generation of problems." Frum wasn't happy; although he suspected that Bush might be right, he wanted him to govern along hard-line conservative principles.

The phrase that signalled Bush's approach was "compassionate conservatism," but it never amounted to a policy program. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount, Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee's new book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President (Thomas Dunne), the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: "We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us." Cheney's combative instincts and belief in an unfettered and secretive executive proved far more influential at the White House than Bush's campaign promise to be "a uniter, not a divider." Cheney behaved as if, notwithstanding the loss of the popular vote, conservative Republican domination could continue by sheer force of will. On domestic policy, the Administration made tax cuts and privatization its highest priority; and its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy.

The Administration's political operatives were moving in the same direction. The Republican strategist Matthew Dowd studied the 2000 results and concluded that the proportion of swing voters in America had declined from twenty-two to seven per cent over the previous two decades, which meant that mobilizing the Party's base would be more important in 2004 than attracting independents. The strategist Karl Rove's polarizing political tactics (which brought a new level of demographic sophistication to the old formula) buried any hope of a centrist Presidency before Bush's first term was half finished.

Ed Rollins said, "Rove knew his voters, he stuck to the message with consistency, he drove that base hard -- and there's nothing left of it. Today, if you're not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great." As long as Bush and his party kept winning elections, however slim the margins, Rove's declared ambition to create a "permanent majority" seemed like the vision of a tactical genius. But it was built on two illusions: that the conservative era would stretch on indefinitely, and that politics matters more than governing. The first illusion defied history; the second was blown up in Iraq and drowned in New Orleans.

Packer interviews various people who argue that conservatism is still the principal political belief in the country today, but that conservatives need to find a more functional way of governing with their beliefs.

"If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon," Frum writes. "Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well." He adds, "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today." Polls reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment. The all-purpose Republican solution of cutting taxes has run its course. Frum writes, "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."

David Brooks "was even more scathing than Frum."

Brooks called the conservative think tanks "sclerotic," but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown. Last year, writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus revealed a 1997 memo in which Buckley -- who had originally hired Brooks at National Review on the strength of a brilliant undergraduate parody that he had written of Buckley -- refused to anoint him as his heir because Brooks, a Jew, is not a "believing Christian." At Commentary, the neoconservative counterpart to National Review, the editorship was bequeathed by Norman Podhoretz, its longtime editor, to his son John, whose crude op-eds for the New York Post didn't measure up to Commentary's intellectual past. A conservative journalist familiar with both publications said that what mattered most at the Christian National Review was doctrinal purity, whereas at the Jewish Commentary it was blood relations: "It's a question of who can you trust, and it comes down to religious fundamentals."

Packer ends with some pap on Obama and McCain, including riffs on Obama as McGovern ("Goldwater was to Reagan as McGovern is to Obama") and McCain retracing LBJ's footsteps as the latter launched his Great Society War on Poverty.

While reading Perlstein's Nixonland, I noted a number of analogies between Obama's campaign and McGovern's -- most pointedly, the pivotal role Pennsylvania played in backing the party machine candidates. Other potential similarities have been narrowly avoided this time, like taking credentials disputes to the convention. The Democratic Party was in disarray at the time, split on two axes: over the still-raging Vietnam War, and between the old party bosses and reformers, mostly motivated by their opposition to the Vietnam War. The Iraq War divides today's Democrats, but less so, and the party bosses are long gone. But also looking back, we have 1972 as a lesson: the Party's desertion of McGovern may have seemed like a small thing at the time, but now it looms large, a turning point in the nation's history that we would have been better off not taking. The starkest example was George Meany's refusal to back McGovern: you can date the AFL-CIO's decline from that point -- if the unions weren't smart enough to realize that the escalating cold war was a form of class struggle aimed straight at their throats, you could even say they deserved what they got.

The Democrats are unlikely to be as divided this time, in large part because they've been so irrelevant they have nothing left to get defensive about. McGovern's change was directed as much against his own party as against Nixon, who seemed less a partisan threat than a peculiarly chameleonic form of slime. The Democrats still dominated Congress, most state and local governments, including almost every major city. They still thought of themselves as the establishment, and they still owned a lot of responsibility for the Vietnam War. McGovern couldn't change America until he cleaned up the mess in his own backyard, and that's where he got ambushed. Obama has had similar problems from Democrats who think that the way to win is to follow the Republican lead while feigning slightly more sanity. But those Democrats haven't had much of a winning record, especially now it's clear now how Clinton's two terms wound up playing into Bush's hand. (Not that Obama would ever define change so sharply.)

Then there's the Nixon role, which McCain doesn't seem to be up to (even if he wanted, which I wouldn't put past him). He's neither the incumbent of 1972 nor the disengaged statesman of 1968; rather, he's more like Humphrey in 1968, a lame substitute for a lamer duck, remembered somewhat fondly for integrity he has long since abandoned.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Celtics

I used to follow sports more closely than political news. Back when I lived in New York, I favored the Daily News over the Times, mostly because of better sports coverage (also comics). Over the years, my interest waned: can't say as I ever had any interest in hockey or soccer, so football was the first sport I gave up on (by 1990, most likely sooner), then I lost my taste for baseball during one of the lockouts. So basketball is about all I have left. Don't have time for watching TV, but I occasionally scan the boxes -- not like I used to with baseball, but enough that I have some sense of at least half of the NBA rosters. Watched some of the Boston-Detroit series this year, and maybe half of the Boston-Los Angeles finals, including last night's finale blowout.

I've never been a fan of either team. When I first moved to Boston back in 1984-85, I tried watching Celtics games on TV. The Celtics were supposedly a great team back then, but they only televised road games, and they sucked in the 20 or so games I actually saw. This was a team with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Danny Ainge -- the only NBA team of the era that was mostly white and still pretty good, a formula that Bostonians favored as long as they could get away with it. (The Red Sox were the last MLB team integrated, and even in the 1980s treated a player like Jim Rice coldly. Even later, the Patriots went out of their way to build losing teams around white QB Doug Flutie.) I might have been open-minded about the Celtics, but I wasn't much impressed by the games I saw, and I soon grew annoyed by the local press. Once the Detroit Pistons emerged as rivals, the press turned rabid, and I found a team I could really root for.

I was still rooting for Detroit this year, but the Celtics played so strong they became much more than just anyone-but-the-Lakers -- a team I've disdained ever since they left Minneapolis, another case of perpetual hype rubbing me the wrong way. That story goes back a long ways, probably picking up some guilt-by-association with the Dodgers (my first allegiance was to the NY Yankees) and maybe even UCLA (gimme KU, or practically anyone else). Still, I had noticed Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol in the box scores, and thought they might make for an interesting team, especially when they so easily dusted off the Spurs. They do, but there's still the matter of Kobe Bryant. He's always struck me as a whiney, self-important potentate, but this year he gets the MVP and I've even heard Barack Obama tout Bryant as the best player in the game.

Last night's game should put an end to such foolishness. I knew the game was going to be a blowout about midway through the first quarter, when the score was still close and the announcers were all agog over Bryant hitting three straight 3-pointers. By that point, Garnett had established his shot and was clearly going to be a big factor, which he hadn't really done before. But I also figured that Bryant would take his hot streak for granted, shooting everything he touches until he's back to his usual .350. (He wound up 7-22; he was .405 for the series, 53-131 -- how impressed should we be that a guy who takes 22 shots per game can score 25 points?) From the very beginning the whole Boston team outhustled and outmuscled LA. Once Boston's shots started dropping it turned into a rout.

One more peeve. Several times the announcers remarked on Boston's one-year shift from 24 wins to the championship, as if that sort of transition was something any team could do with the right leadership, coaching, and chemistry. Actually, it was a very Boston kind of deal, which is to say it's a rich team's fancy. Garnett and Allen are both maximum earners past their prime. Any team looking to build over 2-4 years can expect them to slip, very expensively, by the time they're ready. With Pierce already on board and near his peak, those deals gave them 3/5 of an all-star team if they're lucky and no one slips too hard or fast. Boston then added veterans like PJ Brown and Sam Cassell who have no long-term future but can fill in for now. It all worked to plan: they started the year unbeatable, and rarely slipped. But they're not posed to get better next year, and they're going to pay a lot both now and for retooling. Unlike their teams from Bob Cousy through Larry Bird, this isn't going to be a dynasty. Still, they're more fun to watch than the others I can remember.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Music: Current count 14502 [14486] rated (+16), 803 [813] unrated (-10). Got sick midweek, and did virtually nothing after that. Unpacking is no where near up to date.

Jazz Prospecting (CG #17, Part 8)

Came up with a dry, scratchy throat midweek, followed a day later by a low-grade fever. Not much as I recall these things, but this time they wiped out the rest of the week, and I don't feel all that spiffy even now. Oddest for me was that I didn't feel like listening to music at all -- played a little Louis Jordan, Bo Diddley, Coasters, Al Green, Coleman Hawkins. Finally tried streaming some stuff from Rhapsody -- concur with Christgau on No Age and Tokyo Police Club, have some reservations about Santogold. Still, even when my critical facilities assent I'm still not responding with any enthusiasm. Wish I could promise I'll snap out of it soon, but looks like another long, even drearier trip to Detroit is imminent.

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: Eclipse at Dawn (1971 [2008], Cunneiform): As Ronnie Scott observes in his band intro, South Africa is a good place to be from. McGregor's exiles with their township jive melodies are joined by an equal number of English avant-gardists, the sounds repressed by apartheid amplified into the cacophonous noise of freedom. A live set from Berlin, not the clearest or the most exhilarating of performances -- the 1973 Travelling Somewhere was justly Cuneiform's first choice in bringing this remakable band back to our attention. B+(*)

Rave Tesar Trio: You Decide (2006 [2008], Tesar Music): Piano trio, with Kermit Driscoll on bass, Bill Tesar on drums. Pianist is based in New Jersey. First album, although he has side credits and production work going back to 1988, mostly prog rock -- Tirez Tirez, Annie Haslam. First impression was how bright and chirpy the piano sounds, especially when he picks up some speed and swings a little. B+(**)

Sumi Tonooka Trio: Long Ago Today (2004 [2008], ARC): Piano trio, with Rufus Reid on bass, Bob Braye on drums. Pianist was born 1956 in Philadelphia, father African-American, mother Japanese (from Washington state, interned during WWII), works using mother's name. Fifth album since 1990, or earlier -- Francis Davis wrote about her in In the Moment, describing a session with Reid and Akira Tana she recorded in 1984 but couldn't find a label for. All originals, except for one Cole Porter tune. State of the art postbop, hard for me to nail down, but I'm impressed with how the pieces build and move. B+(***)

Bryan Doherty Band: Rigamarole (2007 [2008], Origin): Bassist (electric, I think), based in Chicago, can't find any bio info, but he lists Jaco Pastorius first on his MySpace influences list. First album, sextet, with guitar (John McLean), Fender Rhodes (Marcin Fahmy), drums (Michael Raynor), percussion (Javier Saume), and tenor sax (Louis Stockwell). Basically a fusion joint, with clean lines and some grit in the sax. B+(*)

Matt Jorgensen + 451: Another Morning (2007 [2008], Origin): Seattle drummer, b. 1972. Fifth album since 2001, fairly even mix of originals, band contributions (saxophonist Mark Taylor, keyboardist Ryan Burns; nothing from bassist Phil Sparks), and covers (Joe Henderson, Lennon/McCartney, Neil Young). Burns plays Fender Rhodes, organ, and Moog -- various slices of fusion and soul jazz. Taylor mostly plays alto, with a sweet, skinny sound that I'm ambivalent about. Album sort of lies back, waiting for you to come to it. Can't say as I've given it a fair shot. B

Carmen Lundy: Come Home (2007 [2008], Afrasia): Vocalist, b. 1954, 10th album. Writes most of her songs. (Liner notes attribute several collaborations to "C Lundy" -- presumably her, but could be her well-known bassist brother Curtis Lundy, who plays here.) Has a distinctive voice, on the deep side, with a precise, studied manner reminiscent of Carmen McRae -- her take on "Nature Boy" is a good example. Strong piano help from Anthony Wonsey and Geri Allen. B+(*)

Ricardo Gallo Cuarteto: Urdimbres y Maranas (2007 [2008], Ladistrito): Colombia pianist, b. 1978 in Bogotá, attended University of North Texas from 1999, later moving to Stony Brook. Second album. The quartet is a piano trio plus extra percussion -- a Colombian group, recording in Bogotá. Combines some chamberish semiclassical stretches -- I'm reminded of Michel Camilo -- with trickier Afro-Cuban rhythmic feats, where the rest of the group makes their strongest impression. B+(*)

Lindha Kallerdahl: Gold (2006 [2008], ESP-Disk): Swedish vocalist. Album spells first name Lindah in two prominent locations, including the spine, and Google prefers Lindah, but her website and MySpace page both prefer Lindha. (I've also seen Linda several places.) Born 1972, studied in Stockholm, has mostly worked with avant-gardists: Mats Gustafsson, Fredrik Ljungkvist, Jaap Blonk, Ikue Mori. Plays some piano, but most of this is solo voice: sharp, shrill, jumps around an astounding range, sometimes with remarkable control, more often with wild abandon. I find it rather hideous, although "All of Me" made me smile, and "Body & Soul" might have had I figured it out earlier. C+

Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band: Season of Changes (2008, Verve): Drummer, from Shreveport, LA, has two previous Brian Blade Fellowship albums on Blue Note (1998-2000), which is how this advance was listed. Blade has a long and prominent side credit list since 1994 -- Brad Mehldau, Kenny Garrett, Joshua Redman, Mark Turner, Ryan Kisor, David Berkman, Wayne Shorter, Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell, Wolfgang Muthspiel (a duo I like a lot, Friendly Travelers). This has a slick postbop sound, mostly running on Jon Cowherd's keyboards -- Cowherd wrote 3 of 9 songs and co-produced -- thickly coated with Kurt Rosenwinkel guitar. Saxophonists Myron Walden and Chris Thomas show up intermittently, adding some more conventional jazz moves, even a little bite. B+(**) [advance]

Stanton Moore Trio: Emphasis on Parenthesis (2007 [2008], Telarc): Fusion drummer, has done some good stuff, notably Garage A Trois, Outre Mer (2005, with Skerik and Charlie Hunter). Trio mates Will Bernard (guitar) and Robert Walter (organ, keyboards) have also put out consistently solid work, but this time they all sort of melt down together, with ordinary grooves and little sonic range or variety. B-

George Cables: Morning Song (1980 [2008], High Note): Archive tape, recorded at Keystone Korner in San Francisco, only the year specified, but probably two separate dates. Four songs are done by a quartet, with Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Cables (piano), John Heard (bass), and Sherman Ferguson (drums). The other six cuts are solo piano. The latter are densely figured, intense. I've only heard a couple of Cables' albums, don't have much of a feel for him as a leader or soloist, don't have an opinion how well they stack up. I'm much more familiar with him as an accompanist, especially with Art Pepper, which was his main gig at the time. Pepper's albums with Cables are among his greatest. Henderson has rather limited range on trumpet, but opens up delightfully with Cables' ebullient swing. B+(*)

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

Unpacking: Got quite a bit of new material, but didn't get any of it catalogued. Try again next week.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Browse Alert

Michael Lind: Relax, Liberals. You've Already Won. Subtitle isn't very relaxing: "No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long counterrevolution is over." The text doesn't assume that McCain is making a break from the conservative movement. Rather, Lind argues that conservative political ideas are so widely viewed as bankrupt that even if McCain were elected he could do little damage with them. That's more optimism than I think is warranted. (He goes so far as to argue that a couple of McCain Supreme Court appointments still wouldn't be able to revoke Roe v Wade.) At least in my part of the country, the credulity for conservative rhetoric seems bottomless, even if many people are cautiously inching away from the thing. Some conservative shibboleths have no traction at all, but other memes are still very much with us, especially on the most critical matters of war and terrorism. And there's another thing to worry about: knee-jerk anger. We're in for a whole lot of it no matter who wins in November, and the right is built on the right to throw bloody tantrums.

Lind's status as an ex-conservative gives the article an appealing distance from the liberals he addresses. He styles himself as some kind of radical centrist -- his main specialty is foreign relations, where he tries to combine pragmatic nationalism with liberal ideals (still defending the US in Vietnam, but not in Iraq). I don't regard him as very trustworthy, although his 2004 book on GW Bush, Made in Texas, was one of the best on the subject, and his 1996 book, Up From Conservatism, looks to have been ahead of the learning curve.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Browse Alert: Peak Oil

Andrew Leonard: Oil Price Conspiracy Theorists: Rev Your Engines. More details on how speculation has driven up the price of oil (somewhat). Main thing to note here is that Asian countries like India have started to cut back on energy subsidies, which will sooner or later work to reduce demand, which will at least temporarily bring prices down (a bit). When prices drop, it will be similar to our recent experiences with asset bubbles collapsing, leading to the conclusion that the price rise was just a bad case of irrational exuberance (if not downright fraud). People who have a hard time learning will continue to have a hard time learning. The price of oil is still mostly a function of demand exceeding supply.

Euan Mearns: Why oil costs over $130 per barrel: the decline of North Sea Oil. This is a good case example on how peak oil works. The North Sea oil fields started development in the mid-1970s when Europe and the US were being rocked by price spikes from the Middle East. They are expensive offshore developments. The companies naturally wanted to get their money back as quickly as possible, so they built and pumped as fast as they could. The countries never joined OPEC, never trying to limit production. The find were big enough they had a significant negative impact on world prices in the mid-late 1980s. It's clear now that they peaked in 1999-2001 and have declined ever since. Whereas large fields were discovered in quick succession in the 1970s, new finds have been scarce and smaller ever since -- a pattern that holds true anywhere else you care to look. The UK has already returned to its previous status as a net oil importer.

It's easy to get confused trying to look at worldwide oil figures, but when you look at individual fields and regions this same pattern recurrs consistently. Matthew Simmons' Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy provides just this sort of detailed analysis for Saudi Arabia -- although the Saudi case remains a bit muddier because the government restricts so much detailed information on its oil resources. As someone points out in one of the numerous useful comments here, the big West Texas oil fields fit the North Sea case even closer, in large part because in both cases private interests were able to maximize exhaustion of the fields.

Saw a piece in the Wichita Eagle this morning with all sorts of current arguments about how to fix the high price of gasoline: open the Alaskan arctic up to drilling, drain the strategic oil reserve, regulate commodity futures markets, raise interest rates to boost the dollar, not sure what else. They all strike me as marginal, or worse. If supply can't increase, demand will have to reduce, and the most efficient way to do that is to let high prices damper our enthusiasm for the product. Obama has proposed a windfall profits tax, and that makes sense: while high prices are the right thing now, the decision who gets those profits is political, and there's plenty of reason to think the oil industry should be cut out of as much as possible. (Just take a look at where the oil barons have made their political investments.)

PS: My own pet tax scheme is to make corporate income taxes progressive, so that big companies with big profits pay more. The oil companies are the obvious cases right now, with patent-monopoly pharmaceuticals close behind -- both of those cases involve politically secured windfalls. But progressive corporate taxes would also provide a damper against excessive aggregation, and would help smaller companies compete against larger companies' scale advantages (e.g., WalMart). It might even help break up large companies into more competitive units, as well as inspire new competitive enterprises.

PPS: Initially posted this without the Leonard piece. Put it up front in the update because it makes more sense there.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Browse Alert: Obama

Was so stuck in my book browsing last week-plus that I wasn't able to write about anything else. Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton dithered menacingly for a few days, then made what most people seem to regard as a graceful concession and endorsement speech. (McCain, however, vowed to continue Clinton's struggle.) All three showed up to kiss the feet of AIPAC -- they were so supplicant that it'll be real hard to deny the Israel lobby's power. Not a big surprise, but Obama gave us a real quick taste of buyer's remorse -- he's since backpedalled a bit on points like the indivisibility of Jerusalem as the Jewish State's capital, a point that many Israelis no longer insist on, and that only became US policy under Bush. It's easy to hand wave some of the things politicians have to say to play the game, but eventually they have to act in the real world. It is very important, for the long-term interests of Americans as well as for those more directly involved, that the US work to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that provides all sides with full and equal rights, and that will not happen if AIPAC has anything to do with it. Obama previously talked about wanting to change the mindset that got us into war. He still has a ways to go within his own mind.

Helena Cobban: Obama and Israel. Straightforward reporting on Obama's AIPAC speech, from an Obama supporter who knows better but hopes for the best.

WarInContext: Obama Pays Homage to AIPAC. Extracts from three articles, starting with Al Jazeera's report (quotes PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat saying, "This is the worst thing to happen to us since 1967 . . . he has given ammunition to extremists across the region"). Paul Woodward comments: "Yesterday was the day the 'change' bubble burst. Obama's performance at AIPAC shows that his grasp of Middle East politics has yet to rise to the level of George Bush's!" That's a low blow given that there's never been any proof that Bush's various statements in support of a Palestinian state will ever amount to anything. The last article in the group was about McCain's AIPAC speech, which left a lot of leeway for lesser evilism.

WarInContext: "Undivided" Means Open Access. Further qualifications on Obama's AIPAC speech.

Fred Kaplan: Is Barack Obama Too Naive to Be President? Obama's gotten a lot of flack over saying he's willing to talk with Iran, both from Clinton and from McCain, and that's the source of this "too naive" charge. Kaplan defends Obama, partly because he sees it as the only way the US can recover prestige and influence wasted away under Bush.

David Warsh: Voices in the Air. On Obama's economics advisers, like Austan Goolsbee, treading lightly on whether Obama will actually take their advice. Examines one key Goolsbee paper, arguing against even the most technically limited form of the Laffer Curve (the rationale behind Reagan's "supply side" tax cuts; Bush's tax cuts were too dishonest to support a rationale, not that anyone still believed Laffer). Recommends a 1994 book as framing most of this year's key political-economic issues: Victor Fuchs, ed: Individual and Social Responsibility: Child Care, Education, Medical Care and Long Term Care. (Looks like the book is out of print.)

John Cassidy: Economics: Which Way for Obama? A book review of Richard H Thaler/Cass R Sunstein: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008, Yale University Press), associated with Obama by virtue of various Chicago connections, including adviser Austan Goolsbee. Thaler and Sunstein argue for what they call "libertarian paternalism" -- policies that manipulate people in favored directions while leaving the impression that they're making free choices. For a politician, that offers the best of several worlds, but it wouldn't take much corruption to steer the process awry. One thing Obama does get out of this approach is that it frees him from most of the other orthodoxies with all their problems.

It's getting harder for me to retain my ignorance of Obama's policy agenda. Still, one thing that contributes to this is his own studied ambiguities. Presumably, he does this not just because the campaign season is a minefield -- often an irrational, downright stupid one. It may also be because he suspects that he'll need more than answers once he wins: he'll need options. There's no evidence that he knows that about Israel/Palestine, but it does seem to be his general modus operandi. He sells hope, asking us to trust his instincts and his inclusive sense of community. It's not much to go on, but when is it ever?

Music: Current count 14486 [14455] rated (+31), 813 [836] unrated (-23). Spent the past week home in Wichita, with Laura away in Detroit. Figured I'd finally get some Jazz Prospecting done, and I did, although mostly I picked from the old stuff rather than the newer mail. Any time the rated count tops 30 I figure I've had a big week. So I'll count this one, even though it barely feels like it.

Jazz Prospecting (CG #17, Part 7)

Got about as much Jazz Prospecting done this past week as I can handle. Just didn't get much into the recent incoming. Instead, I cleaned out much of the material from my travel case and from the shelf that I had left behind. Accordingly, a lot of so-so records this time, making little progress towards finding the pick hits I need to fill out the next Jazz CG.

Bill Stewart: Incandescence (2006 [2008], Pirouet): One of the top mainstream drummers of his generation. Also claims credit for all of the compositions here, which is lays out in an unusual trio: with Kevin Hays on piano, Larry Goldings on organ and accordion. Soul jazz groups generally let the organ double as piano and bass, so you can think of Goldings holding down the bass role when Hays is in the lead, but you won't recognize him. Only on his lead cuts, like the opening "Knock on My Door," does he sound like his exuberant old self. Hays is sharp as a razor, of course. But in the end I tried to just focus on the drummer. Can't say as I got much that way, but it didn't lower my estimation of him either. B

Derrick Gardner and the Jazz Prophets: A Ride to the Other Side . . . of Infinity (2007 [2008], Owl Studios): Plays trumpet and flugelhorn, b. 1965 in Chicago. Spent 1991-96 in the Basie ghost band, but basically he's a hard bopper -- AMG's similar artists list is {Blanchard, Marsalis} and "influenced by" runs from Fats Navarro to Nat Adderley, missing no one, with Kenny Dorham at the top of the list -- I'd be tempted to lead with Blue Mitchell. His Jazz Prophets sextet includes brother Vincent Gardner on trombone, Rob Dixon on tenor sax, Anthony Wonsey on piano, Rodney Whitaker on bass, Donald Edwards and Kevin Kaiser on drums and percussion -- a hot group with a rich, classic sound. Second album. I'm impressed, but don't see where this goes beyond where it's already been. B+(**)

Torben Waldorff: Afterburn (2008, ArtistShare): Danish guitarist, attended Berklee 1984-88, seems to be based in New York now, but bio isn't very clear. Cut two records 1999-2004 for Swedish label LJ, and two since then with ArtistShare. Don't have a good sense of his guitar, but that's mostly because his band is so obtrusive -- or maybe I just mean tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin. I've never cared much for McCaslin's records, but he's always been a technically astounding player. He's all over this record. The rest of the band aren't shy, either. Cover has several pictures of Waldorff's grandmother, née Lore Woger -- dancing on the front, playing alto sax on the back. [B+(***)]

Thom Rotella 4tet: Out of the Blues (2007 [2008], Four Bar Music): Guitarist, b. 1951 in Niagara Falls, NY; went to Ithaca College, then Berklee 1970-72, and on to Los Angeles. Has 10-12 albums -- his early (1987-96) ones on DMP seem to count as smooth jazz. This is respectably postbop, with Montgomery-influenced lines, piano (Llew Matthews or Rich Eames), bass (Luther Hughes), drums (Roy McCurdy). Nice. B+(*)

Industrial Jazz Group: Leef (2008, Evander Music): Cheap cardstock wallet packaging, back cover printed white on yellow (glad I was able to lift the credits and track list elsewhere), full liner notes promised on website but not available yet. Started this while driving around Detroit, but popped it out after a few "what is this shit?" minutes. I've played and enjoyed a couple of Andrew Durkin's group's records in the past, but wasn't prepared for this sharp swerve into Zappa-land. (Actually, I flashed on Brecht/Weill cabaret first, which may have been the initial idea -- but Zappa does get a name check.) I've avoided it ever since, only putting it on when there was nothing else left to unpack from the travel case. Played it twice. First, if you bracket the vocal stuff, the musical performance is stellar. Industrial Jazz has always been a catchphrase in search of a concept -- e.g., the analogy to Industrial Rock never fit -- but Durkin has finally managed to squeeze all individuality out of the big band without sacrificing idiosyncrasy. Hard to imagine anything but a machine managing that, or exhibiting such spurious complexity just because it's possible to gear it that way. Clearest case is "Bongo Non Troppo," working off a relatively simple Latin riff, but there's more in "Howl" and "Fuck the Muck" (at least until the voices appear). The vocal stuff is more scattered -- skit and shtick, a bit of "Fuck the Muck" choir, and two legit songs (both optimistically reprised in radio edits at the end): "The Job Song" (on the Brechtian end) and "Big Ass Truck" (more Zappaesque). In Christgau's CG scheme a couple of these named pieces would be Choice Cuts. I don't do that because I'm still stuck in the old-fashioned rut of trying to swallow records whole. B+(*)

Ocote Soul Sounds and Adrian Quesada: The Alchemist Manifesto (2008, ESL Music): I gather that Ocote Soul Sounds is an alias for Martín Perna, also involved in Antibalas and, more peripherally, TV on the Radio. Perna mostly plays flutes, although his credits include baritone sax, guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion, vocals. Quesada comes from Grupo Fantasma, which I have another CD from somewhere in the queue. He plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums percussion, etc. Various guests: horns on the opener, "The Great Elixir"; bata drums, bongos, keyboards, coros. More techno than jazz, more rockish than Latin, too marginal to spend more time with. B+(*)

Empty Cage Quartet: Stratostrophic (2006 [2008], Clean Feed): California-based free jazz quartet, led by Jason Mears (alto sax, clarinet) and Kris Tiner (trumpet, flugelhorn) -- composition count slightly favors Mears -- backed by Ivan Johnson (double bass) and Paul Kikuchi (drums, percussion, electronics). Tiner claims half a dozen albums as leader, but most are in groups like this one, or at least have other name on the marquee. He also has a longer list of side credits, including Industrial Jazz Band. Mears has a namespace clash with an English metal guitarist and an Australian brass band conductor. As near as I can tell, this Jason Mears was born in Alaska, studied at Boston University and California Institute for the Arts, has side credits with Vinny Golia and Harris Eisenstadt. Also looks like same group has recorded as MTKJ. The horns have scattered moments here but don't leave a coherent impression. I suspect they're being tied down by the compositions, especially when the pieces go slow. B+(*)

Elliott Sharp: Octal Book One (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Guitarist, lots of obscure albums. AMG considers him avant-garde rather than jazz, evidence that he fits nowhere. This is solo, played on something called a "Koll 8-string electroacoustic guitarbass": has a stinging acoustic sound with occasional effects. Interesting sounds, short bursts, odd twists. Not much more. B+(*)

Benjamin Lapidus: Herencia Judía (2007 [2008], Tresero): Born 1972 in Hershey, PA; moved to New York in 1980s, got into Latin music, playing Cuban tres and Puerto Rican cuatro, eventually forming an interesting Latin band, Sonido Isleńo. This record explores traditional sephardic music as it spread surrepetitiously through the Spanish Caribbean. This has a folkie feel that seems more proper and more dated than klezmer, while the Latin accents are similarly muted. B+(**)

Perez: It's Happenin' (2007 [2008], Zoho): Name seems to be Diana Perez, although the first name is hard to come by. Born New York, moved to Los Angeles at 17, spent 10 years in Europe, wound up in New York. Third album. Despite her heritage (Cuban-Irish mother, Puerto Rican father) there's nothing Latin here, not even the obligatory Jobim or the optional "Perdido." Voice is plain, unaccented, with a depth and lustre that emerges after the fact. Songbook is a mix of standards ("Blame It on My Youth," "In the Wee Small Hours," "Detour Ahead") and vocalese (Annie Ross on "Farmers Market," Giacomo Gates on "Milestones"). Band is about as straight as they come: Jed Levy (tenor sax, flute), Ron Horton (trumpet), Steve Davis (trombone), David Hazeltine (piano), Nat Reeves (bass), Joe Farnsworth (drums). They're strong enough to lift this out of the ordinary. B+(**)

Shea Breaux Wells: A Blind Date (2007 [2008], Ultimate): Singer, from