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Monday, September 7, 2015

Music: Current count 25453 [25408] rated (+45), 426 [429] unrated (-3).

Spent nearly the whole week listening to old jazz from Werner Uehlinger's Hatology label (or hatOLOGY, as he prefers), knocking off another 29 albums this week. As expected, the quality (at least as reflected in my grades) is dropping a bit: 6 A- records this week, so 20.6%, down from 28.5% (6/21) last week and 36.1% (26/72) from the previous database. Three of those six were from Anthony Braxton, so that won't happen again, and one of the others featured Ellery Eskelin -- I'm only aware of one more record by him that I haven't heard, something called Arcanum Moderne. Still, the next few weeks -- I have a list of 55 more Hatology albums I haven't heard yet, and I'm only up to about 2006 in Discogs' listings -- are bound to reveal some surprises.

As the rated count shows, I've been working very fast. Two Braxton albums fell just short, mostly because at the time I didn't feel like giving either a second spin (the one with Max Roach was most deserving of further attention). I pulled the earlier Urs Leimgruber albums off my unplayed shelf. The first (Statement of an Antirider) was by far the best solo sax album I've heard in the last two weeks, out of way too many. I played it twice, wrote it up as an A-, then dialed it back a notch. I took a couple flings on related non-Hat albums (Ran Blake, Anthony Ortega) but they didn't turn up much.

Not much new jazz this week, but I did manage to check out three new albums with saxophonist Jon Irabagon. I was surprised to note that I had only given one of his own albums an A- in the past -- 2010's Foxy -- because he must have more than a dozen side credits rated that or higher (mostly MOPDTK, but most recently Barry Altschul & 3Dom Factor: Tales of the Unforeseen). I took a look at his website calendar for July-August and he was working virtually every day, with almost as many different groups. He may be spreading himself thin, but he sure gets around.

I expected better things from the Dave Douglas (with Irabagon) and Irabagon (with Tom Harrell) and gave them plenty of line. Nice things on both, but neither managed to break out of the postbop mold. Still, I came up with one superb album for the week, from guitarist Liberty Ellman. He writes good parts for all three of his horns, and I love Jose Davila's thumping tuba, but the solo that always grabs my attention is by alto saxophonist Steve Lehman. Ellman gets a lot of side credits for mixing, including the last several albums by Lehman and almost everything else on the label they share, Pi. This is the third A-list album of four releases on Pi, the highest batting average of any label (pretty much year after year, by the way, so don't let the small sample size fool you). The others are Henry Threadgill's In for a Penny, In for a Pound and Amir ElSaffar's Crisis are the others; I have Steve Coleman's Synovial Joints way down at B+(***), and a fifth release, Jen Shyu's Sounds and Cries of the World just arrived and in the queue.

Probably have enough for a Rhapsody Streamnotes column, but I feel like I'm in the middle of all this Hat stuff. (I do: 128 records; but just 48 new, only 5 A-.) Also, I don't know how useful this file is (even to myself), but I fixed some typos in Music Tracking 2015 so now at least it's viewable. I also added everything in AMG's weekly "featured releases" up through last Friday, although I haven't gone through the other "review sources" in at least three months.

Having an absolutely miserable day today -- perhaps a cold on top of the worst allergies I can remember since moving west. Comes on the second straight 100-degree day here, although only the seventh such day this year. (It may be a record hot year for the world world, but not for Kansas.)

Happy Labor Day: a good day to remember that working people, and not profits or property, built everything you hold dear in America.

New records rated this week:

• Dave Douglas Quintet: Brazen Heart (2015, Greenleaf Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ellery Eskelin: Solo Live at Snugs (2013 [2015], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Liberty Ellman: Radiate (2014 [2015], Pi): [cd]: A-
• Jon Irabagon: Behind the Sky (2014 [2015], Irabbagast): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jon Irabagon: Inaction Is an Action (2015, Irabbagast): [cd]: B
• Dave McDonnell Group: The Time Inside a Year (2014 [2015], Delmark): [cd]: B+(*)

Old records rated this week:

• Albert Ayler: Lörrach, Paris 1966 (1966 [2002], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Billy Bang & Dennis Charles: Bangception, Willisau 1982 (1982 [1998], Hatology): [r]; B+(**)
• Burkhard Beins, Martin Pfleiderer & Peter Niklas Wilson: Yarbles (1996 [1997], Hatology): [r]: B+(*)
• Ran Blake: Plays Solo Piano (1965 [2013], ESP-Disk): [r]: B
• Ran Blake: Painted Rhythms: The Compleat Ran Blake Volume II (1985 [1988], GM): [r]; B
• Ran Blake & Anthony Braxton: A Memory of Vienna (1988 [2009], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Ran Blake: Something to Live For (1998 [1999], Hatology): [r]: B+(*)
• Ran Blake: Horace Is Blue: A Silver Noir (1999 [2000], Hatology): [r]: B+(*)
• Anthony Braxton: Quintet (Basel) 1977 (1977 [2001], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Anthony Braxton: Performance (Quartet) 1979 (1979 [2007], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Anthony Braxton: Open Aspects (Duo) 1982 (1982 [1993], Hat Art): [r]: B+(**)
• Anthony Braxton: Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989 (1989 [2008], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Anthony Braxton: Wesleyan (12 Alto Solos) 1992 (1992 [1995], Hat Art): [r]: B+(*)
• Anthony Braxton: Quartet (Santa Cruz) 1993 (1993 [1997], Hat Art, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Daniele D'Agaro/Ernest Glerum/Han Bennink: Strandjutters (2002 [2003], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Daniele D'Agaro/Jeb Bishop/Kent Kessler/Robert Barry: Chicago Overtones (2004 [2005], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Dunmall/John Adams/Mark Sanders: Ghostly Thoughts (1996 [1997], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Ellery Eskelin With Andrea Parkins and Jim Black: One Great Night . . . Live (2007 [2009], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Guillermo Gregorio: Ellipsis (1997, Hatology): [r]; B+(**)
• Guillermo Gregorio Trio: Red Cube(d) (1998 [1999], Hatology): [r]; B+(*)
• Richard Grossman Trio: Even Your Ears (1990-92 [1998], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Richard Grossman Trio: Where the Sky Ended (1989-92 [2000], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeanne Lee/Ran Blake: The Newest Sound Around (1961 [1962], RCA Victor): [r]: B+(**)
• Urs Leimgruber: Statement of an Antirider (1988 [1989], Hat Art): [cd]: B+(***)
• Urs Leimgruber/Adelhard Roidinger/Fritz Hauser: Lines (1990 [1994], Hat Art): B+(*)
• David Liebman: Colors (2002 [2003], Hatology): [r]: B-
• Dave Liebman: The Distance Runner (2004 [2005], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• David Liebman/Ellery Eskelin/Tony Marino/Jim Black: Renewal (2007 [2008], Hatology): [r]; A-
• David Liebman/Ellery Eskelin/Tony Marino/Jim Black: Non Sequiturs (2011, Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6: The Pond (2007 [2008], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6: Dulcet Crush (2008 [2010], Hatology): [r]: B+(*)
• Anthony Ortega: Earth Dance (1955-56 [2004], Fresh Sound): [r]: B
• Anthony Ortega: New Dance (1966-67 [2003], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Anthony Ortega: Afternoon in Paris (1966-2005 [2007], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach/Anthony Braxton: One in Two -- Two in One (1979 [2004], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Matthew Shipp Trio: Prism (1993 [2000], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Matthew Shipp String Trio: By the Law of Music (1996 [2002], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Laurie Antonioli & Richie Beirach: Varuna (Origin): September 18
• Randy Brecker: Randy Pop: Live (Piloo): September 18
• Willem Breuker Kollektief: Angoulême 18 Mai 1980 (Fou, 2CD)
• Nicole Mitchell/Tomeka Reid/Mike Reed: Artifacts (482 Music): October 30
• Jen Shyu & Jade Tongue: Sounds and Cries of the World (Pi): September 18
• Rotem Sivan Trio: A New Dance (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

This week's scattered links:

• Billmon: Once the best political blogger in the country, he gave that up only to return as an excessively prolific tweeter, often spewing out cryptic numbered series of 140-charactertudes that could be collected and polished up into respectable blog posts. Consider this transcribed (and slightly edited) example:

  If GOP was hoping party's enraged wingnuts would calm down, tug forelocks and vote for approved establishment candidates, today's dual Senate defeats on Iran deal, Planned Parenthood will be about as helpful as a couple of snorts of pure crystal meth. Endless frustration of GOP's BS promises of sweeping victories -- "We'll END Obamacare! We'll STOP the baby killers!" -- that can't be kept is a big part of what's whipped the lumpen GOP into such a frenzy of hate and rage. But instead of becoming more skeptical of BS promises of "final victory," lumpen GOP is becoming even more passionate about demanding it. And so a fraud like Trump or a laid back fanatic like Carson can still be seen as the saviors who will make good on the BS promises.

  This reminds me that the most persistent character trait of Republicans ever since Reagan has been their sense of being entitled to lord it over America -- a sense so deeply felt that they are gobsmacked by every shred of evidence to the contrary. And I'm talking less about the elites, who actually do exercise considerable power whenever they can buy or rent it, than the rank and file, the chumps who loyally vote Republican, who think they alone are the country and that everyone who disagrees with them is alien scum. Only exaggerated egos can sustain their sense of entitlement despite perceptions of victimhood. They get that way through flattery, by constantly being reminded by politicians and pundits that they are the true Americans, the source of the nation's greatness and, if only they can regain power, redemption.

  Billmon's also been bothering to post poll results, like:

  Trump favorables:
  All adults: 37/59
  Whites: 48/49
  Hispanics: 15/82
  Blacks: 15/81
  ABC/Post poll
  Ain't Ronny Reagan's America any more, Donald

  "70% of 18-29-year-olds see Trump unfavorably, +12 points since July." His base is white equivalent of Last of the Mohicans

  More evidence that America is slipping away from the self-anointed chosen people.

• Ed Kilgore: The Ultimate Jerking Knee of Anti-Obamaism: Obama used his executive powers to order the federal government to change the designated name of a large heap of rock in the middle of Alaska from Mt. McKinley to Denali. I was surprised because I thought the deal had been done in 1980 when Denali National Park and Reserve was established, but evidently some dolt at the US Board on Geographic Names didn't get (or honor) the memo. Indeed, the official name in Alaska has long been Denali, as Julia O'Malley explains here. Still, Republicans -- especially those trotting around the country campaigning for president -- blew a gasket. Kilgore sees this as one more example of knee-jerk anti-Obamaism:

  Yet here we have Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee -- so far -- attacking the move and promising (Trump) or demanding (Huck) that it be stopped. There is zero plausible rationale other than hostility to Obama and all his infernal works. If it spreads, that will be incontestable.

  When I first heard about this, I found Ohio politicians like Bob Portman complaining, making me think they should find a mountain in Ohio to name after McKinley (and, while they're at it, a slightly smaller one for Harding)? But I can think of at least two other reasons for their agita. One is that having totally sandbagged Obama's legislative agenda, they've long been primed to cry foul any and every time he uses the routine executive powers of an office that he was popularly elected to twice -- even on something this innocuous. But the other is that Republicans have become obsessed with naming things after themselves, so this seems like backsliding. Their campaign kicked into high gear when they formed a full-time lobby to get things named after Ronald Reagan, figuring that if they could plaster his name everywhere he might achieve exalted Washington-Lincoln status. We've seen fruits of this campaign locally with the VA Hospital named for Robert Dole and the airport named for Eisenhower. (Koch Arena, of course, wasn't a political decision; its naming was bought the old-fashioned way.)

• Ed Kilgore: Defending the God-Given Liberty of County Clerks to Ignore Duties They Don't Like: Evidently there's a county clerk in Kentucky who's gotten attention by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples -- something recently established as "the law of the land." She regards her refusal to be a matter of religious conscience, but doesn't feel strongly enough to resign her position, which would be the principled thing to do. Rather, she feels entitled to keep her job and use it to discriminate against people she doesn't like, to prevent them from one of their legal rights. She has no legal basis to stand on, although there are a few politicians -- including a "Tea Party dude" named Matt Bevin who's running for governor in Kentucky -- who would like to invent a legal right for at least some people to impose their bigotry on others according to some definition of religious conscience. They key word in that last line is "some" because there are way too many weird tenets in way too many religions to generalize any such "right" -- it doesn't take much imagination to see that the result would be chaos. On the other hand, respect for religious conscience isn't a bad principle. But the way to honor it isn't to turn it into a way to obstruct and frustrate justice. It's to allow the conscientious objector to step back and be replaced by someone amenable to the situation. For the clerk, that means resign and find some new job that doesn't present her with such moral qualms. For a pharmacist, say, who objects to filling prescriptions for birth control, that may even mean finding a new profession. (No business can afford to keep extra staff on hand to compensate for the "religious convictions" of staff that refuse to do their job.) Still, none of these recent examples compel people to do things against their principles like the military draft did, and which military enlistment contracts still do. I strongly believe that any soldier should be able to resign at any moment when faced with an understanding that one's task may be illegal, unethical, and/or immoral. However, even given how much I hate war, I wouldn't go so far as to insist that conscientious objectors be retained in military posts so they can undermine the operation. Rather, I'd hope that enough people would object to bring the whole operation into question.

  Admittedly, resigning a position, possibly even changing a career path, involves an economic cost. If politicians wish to support more people exercising conscientious objection, they could help cushion those costs -- e.g., by providing unemployment compensation for anyone who resigns on principle. But that's not what Bevin, et al., want. All they want is to undermine civil rights by allowing self-righteous cranks to muck up the system. That's why this clerk is their poster child.

• Norman Pollack: The Trump Phenomenon: This Is Getting Serious: News coverage of US presidential campaigns has been abysmal for a long time, and seems to get worse as a function of how long the campaigns last and how much money is spent on them. One problem this year is having to slog through so much rubbish about Donald Trump's "populism" -- the word they're looking for is "popularity," itself a highly circumscribed property when the only people you're sampling are those who show up for Republican campaign events. I figured the writer most likely to debunk this nonsense is the one who introduced me to the history of the People's Party -- checking back, the book I recall was The Populist Mind (1967), which he edited; he also wrote The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought (1962); The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare (1987), and The Humane Economy: Populism, Capitalism, and Democracy (1990). And he makes a clear distinction between populism and the gruff Trump is peddling. The latter is what he calls "neo-fascism," something he doesn't see Trump pushing so much as pandering:

  Yet Trump is less important than the American people, who, thirsting for strong leadership, pathetic in their wallowing in contrived fear, brought on by decades of gut redbaiting and subliminally-wrought and manipulative anticommunism, place him on a political-ideological pedestal tokening authoritarian submissiveness. America, not Trump himself, is the primary explanation for his standing.

  The political culture is one of uncritical acceptance of war, business, militarism (in truth neo-fascism corrected for eroding Constitutional principles still in place), a long-term historical process in the shaping of a hierarchical capitalist structure, value system, and class relationships. Old Glory is self-immolating, its fabric torn asunder by unreasoning fear (an inflexible societal framework, in essence, counterrevolutionary in scope and substance, because opposed to social change in recognition that property, class, privilege might be questioned if critical judgment were encouraged and allowed to operate freely), and by frustration over obstacles to US unilateral global hegemony. This is not something new, fear being a weapon in the elites' arsenal, permanent, yet trotted out, intensified, when they sense a mass awakening and/or restiveness usually associated with war and its aftermath.

  This neo-fascist impulse is summed up in the mass craving for a strong leader -- the word that expresses it perfectly is Führerprinzip (this is one of those cases where a German word is clearer than anything I could say in English). They can only hope Trump is the Führer of their dreams -- clearly most other Republican candidates aren't, being mere puppets of their billionaire sponsors (most obviously, I'd say, Walker and Rubio). It's safe to say that Trump will ultimately disappoint, if not as Hitler did then at some lower level of catastrophe and/or corruption. Given Trump's track record I'd bet on the latter. Few figures in our time have more consistently pursued fame as a means to fortune. Give him "the most powerful office in the world" and you can be sure he won't rule as the humble servant of the people who voted for him. He will only have his own self-interest to guide him.

  I've never seen anyone mention this, but the obvious model for Trump as a politician is Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul who became prime minister of Italy three times between 1994 and 2011. Forbes pegs Berlusconi's net worth at $7.7 billion, almost double the $4 billion Trump is supposedly worth, although Berlusconi was certainly worth less before he became prime minister. As it happens, there is a new book out: Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall From Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga, where we find that along with his great fortune and political triumphs, he also "became bogged down by his hubris, egotism, sexual obsessions, as well as his flagrant disregard for the law."

  His followers say America wants and needs a Great Leader, but the more I look at Trump, the more he looks like a cheap knock off of Silvio Berlusconi.

  Still, otherwise intelligent reporters keep buying at least part of the Trump = populism meme (like Pollack, they're usually people who don't have a very high opinion of most white Americans. E.g., Matt Taibbi: The Republicans Are Now Officially the Party of White Paranoia. Taibbi follows up a quick rundown of how oligarchy works followed by a dubious example of Trump breaking rank:

  They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything.

  They get everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a single concession to a Republican voter.

  All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. [ . . . ]

  Trump has pulled all of those previously irrelevant voters completely out of pocket. In a development that has to horrify the donors who run the GOP, the candidate Trump espouses some truly populist policy beliefs, including stern warnings about the dire consequences companies will face under a Trump presidency if they ship American jobs to Mexico and China.

  All that energy the party devoted for decades telling middle American voters that protectionism was invented by Satan and Karl Marx during a poker game in Brussels in the mid-1840s, that just disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  And all that money the Republican kingmakers funneled into Fox and Clear Channel over the years, making sure that their voters stayed focused on ACORN and immigrant-transmitted measles and the New Black Panthers (has anyone ever actually seen a New Black Panther? Ever?) instead of, say, the complete disappearance of the manufacturing sector or the mass theft of their retirement income, all of that's now backing up on them.

  What fakes people out, I think, is that the more ideologically rigorous Republican moneymen (starting with the Kochs) are so wary of Trump, not so much because they think he's not on their side as because he's not (yet) in their pocket. That'll change soon enough when they realize his shtick is just shtick.

  For another piece that takes Trump populism seriously, see David Atkins: Why Donald Trump Will Defeat the Koch Brothers for the Soul of the GOP:

  In order to understand how Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican field despite openly promoting tax hikes on wealthy hedge fund managers, hinting support for universal healthcare and other wildly iconoclastic positions hostile to decades of Republican dogma, it's important to note the that the Republican Party was teetering on the edge of a dramatic change no matter whether Trump had entered the race or not. [ . . . ]

  As for Wall Street? Most Republican voters can't stand them. The majority of the Republican base sees the financial sector as crony capitalist, corrupt liberal New Yorkers who got a bailout. Most GOP voters won't shed a tear if Trump raises taxes on the hedge fund crowd.

  Donald Trump reassures these voters that the "wrong kind of people" won't be getting any freebies on his watch. That's all they really care about -- so if Trump supports universal healthcare it's simply not that big a deal.

  And this ultimately is what the real GOP realignment is going to look like: less racially diverse corporatism, and more socialism for white people. It stands to reason. Blue-collar white GOP voters aren't about to forget decades of fear-based propaganda, and their economic position remains precarious enough that they still need the welfare state help.

  The first point to remember is that no politician can, and many don't even want to, deliver on all campaign promises. Second, it's especially far fetched to think that Trump will, not least because there's scant evidence he really believes in any of this -- especially the "socialism for white people" planks Atkins touts. If/when he gets elected, he'll have to work with a Republican party that has been leaning the other way hard for years -- especially on taxes and benefits, but also on things like trade and capital flows. He could try to push some things through with Democratic support, but that runs the risk of losing not the base so much as the media machine that has kept the GOP so united of late. If I had to guess, I'd expect him to demagogue anti-immigrant positions -- that, after all, is his trademark issue -- but he'll accommodate all the usual interest groups, notably the banks, oil, and the military, and I doubt he'll do anything to undermine the predatory nature of the health care industry (though he'll preserve some form of rebranded, "fixed" Obamacare). But he won't do anything to slow down much less reverse the increasing inequality that is undoing the white middle class. He may get a short term blip because a lot of voters are gullible, but he can't build a realignment on delivering nothing but hot air.

  Trump's slogan is to Make America Great Again, but he can't deliver on that because nothing he knows how to do will work. He is popular now because his jingoism resonates with a certain type of mainstream Republican, but you shouldn't confuse popularity with populism. The latter is a set of principled beliefs. The former is fleeting, most of all for frauds and crooks, and every experience we've had suggests that's all he is.

  PS: It will be interesting to see whether Trump support manages to break off some of the odder chinks in the conservative worldview. The most likely candidates are schemes like the flat tax and the various privatization schemes for Social Security/Medicare -- programs that are very popular among the GOP base but under attack from the libertarian-oriented (i.e., Koch-financed) think tanks. Right now the groups that seem to be most upset by Trump are Koch fronts: having entered this election cycle planning on spending $900 million to finally take control of the whole nation, they've suddenly found themselves on the defensive, in a fight over the mindset of the Republican Party. And they're liable to find that a lot of their pet issues are deeply unpopular even among the party faithful: for instance, their rabid anti-wind push couldn't even pass the neanderthal Kansas legislature, and the exemption that businessmen get from state income tax was only saved by Brownback's unwillingness to compromise on the point.

  There's probably a formal model for this somewhere, but just thinking off the top of my head, let me try to sketch one out. In any political party, there are some stances that are widely held by the masses, and multiple others that are held by the elites. The elites control the media, the think tanks, and in normal times the discussion -- a mix of their own concerns plus a little red meat to keep the masses riled up. Until Trump came along, the race was between a bunch of whores sucking up to the party's top money men, the cream of the elites. Any of those guys would have been acceptable to the masses, but none of them really satisfied their craving for a strong charismatic leader, a Führer. Trump changed all that, mostly by appealing directly to the masses (bypassing the elites) by seizing on a mass hot-button issue, immigration. (The elites are generally pro-immigration, correctly seeing it as good for business and bad for labor, although they often bite their tongue so as not to stir up the shit storm Trump raised.)

  My sense of the Republican masses is: people who basically feel economically secure (unless they own small business); are cynical about government but less so about business; regard wealth and self-sufficiency as signs of virtue, and poverty as a personal failing; regard hierarchies as normal, and tend to defer to strong male figures; strongly identify with like groups, especially the nation. You can probably tune this further. The GOP has been very effective at cultivating single-issue voters, like gun nuts (I added "self-sufficiency" thinking of them), anti-abortion zealots (male-dominated hierarchies has a lot to do with this), and the military (ditto). I could add something about people who aspire to be rich and vote their dreams, but such people mostly fall into hierarchies, and that's sort of a self-serving cliché -- besides, most of the mass base know they'll never get rich (many are already on Social Security), they're just satisfied with their lot. Obviously, most are white and native-born over at least a couple generations -- but there are exceptions, including such over-compensating strivers as Rubio, Cruz, Jindal, Santorum (and I suppose I should add Carson). I didn't include religion in part because I'm not convinced that Republicans have any edge there (let alone monopoly), although they may be more clannish, dogmatic, and bigoted about their religion.

  I also didn't include prejudice or stupidity in this list, mostly because I think they are effects of the way Republican elites manipulate their mass base rather than defining factors of membership. The unavoidable fact is that the mass base is incredibly misinformed about just about everything -- something easy to blame on the right-wing media and their knack for spinning facts and spicing them up with "dog whistle" nuance, something the mass base doesn't just buy into but gobbles up with disturbing relish. Still, this ignorance is a weak spot for the mass base, one that's likely to fracture whenever contrary facts break through -- which happens regularly as Republican programs inevitably blow up.

• Iran Deal links:

  • Celestine Bohlen: Europe Doesn't Share US Concerns on Iran Deal:

    Given the sound, fury and millions of dollars swirling around the debate in Washington over the Iranian nuclear deal, the silence in Europe is striking. It's particularly noticeable in Britain, France and Germany, which were among the seven countries that signed the deal on July 14.

    Here in France, which took the toughest stance during the last years of negotiation, the matter is settled, according to Camille Grand, director of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris and an expert on nuclear nonproliferation.

    "In Europe, you don't have a constituency against the deal," he said. "In France, I can't think of a single politician or member of the expert community who has spoken against it, including some of us who were critical during the negotiations."

    Mr. Grand said the final agreement was better than he had expected. "I was surprised by the depth and the quality of the deal," he said. "The hawks are satisfied, and the doves don't have an argument."

  • Grace Cason/Jim Lobe: Committee for the Liberation of Iraq Members on Iran Deal: As you've probably noticed by now, most of the people who brought you the Iraq War are opposed to Obama's Iran Deal. This article provides an exhaustive rundown:

    Virtually all of the political appointees who held foreign-policy posts under George W. Bush -- from Elliott Abrams to Dov Zakheim, not to mention such leading lights as Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric Edelman, and "Scooter" Libby -- have all assailed the agreement as a sell-out and/or appeasement with varying degrees of vehemence, if not vituperation.

    The piece especially covers the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), which was set up in November 2002 to sell the war -- "a classic letterhead organization (LHO), a collection of individuals with widely varying degrees of knowledge about Iraq gathered together by the Bush White House, PNAC, and Chalabi." Of that group, Chalabi seems to be the only one to favor the deal. Many others are quoted, the most flamboyant being Bernard Lewis, who said that "for Iran's leadership, mutually assured destruction is 'not a deterrent, it's an inducement.'" They did find four CLI members who supported the deal, and several others, ranging from James P. Hoffa to Donald Rumsfeld, who have yet to weigh in.

  • Fred Kaplan: How the Iran Deal Will Pass -- and Why It Should: This runs through a lot of opposition arguments and knocks them down. Then ponders the politics, which is subject to a different form of reasoning:

    The biggest source of uncertainty, among some vote counters, is that the whole exercise is a bit theatrical. Because Obama has said he would veto a rejection, all the Republicans and a few Democrats feel that they have leave to succumb to political pressures. They can vote "no," and satisfy their party whips or constituents, without shouldering any responsibility for their actions.

    The irony and danger of this is that, the safer Obama's margins seem, the more Democrats might defect, believing that the deal will pass without their support. But if enough Democrats act on that calculation, the outcome could shift -- maybe enough to override a veto, even though none of the swing voters has that intention.

    This can happen in a political system, such as ours today, that encourages legislators to take their jobs less than seriously.

  • Paul R Pillar: The Iran Issue and the Exploitation of Ignorance: Most of this is on public polling, which confirms here, as it has on many other occasions, that most Americans are ignorant and/or stupid. He then moves on to cases where opponents have sought to exploit this ignorance by spinning minor details into supposed problems -- the "24 day" issue is an example -- but he also points out that supporters can use the issue as an opportunity for educating the public (e.g., Congressman Jerrold Nadler Statement on the P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

  • Stephen M Walt: The Myth of a Better Deal:

    The most obvious example of magical thinking in contemporary policy discourse, of course, is the myth of a "better deal" with Iran. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, opponents of the JCPOA keep insisting additional sanctions, more threats to use force, another round of Stuxnet, or if necessary, dropping a few bombs, would have convinced Iran to run up the white flag and give the United States everything it ever demanded for the past 15 years. The latest example of such dubious reasoning is the New York Times's David Brooks, who thinks an agreement where Iran makes most of the concessions is a Vietnam-style defeat for the United States and imagines that tougher US negotiators (or maybe war) would have produced a clear and decisive victory.

    Never mind that while the United States ramped up sanctions, Iran went from zero centrifuges to 19,000. Never mind that there was no international support for harsher sanctions and that unilateral US sanctions wouldn't increase the pressure in any meaningful way. Never mind that attacking Iran with military force would not end its nuclear program and only increase Iran's interest in having an actual weapon. Never mind that the deal blocks every path to a bomb for at least a decade. And never mind that the myth of a "better deal" ignores Diplomacy 101: To get any sort of lasting agreement, it has to provide something for all of the parties.

    The next paragraph has another good line but I wanted to stop on the "Diplomacy 101" point. Deals shouldn't turn into contests of power, in part because they're never really zero-sum games. When both sides are equal in power, their deals can be expected to find mutual benefits that exceed either party's losses. But when power is inequal, when one side has to make concessions to the other, it becomes essential that the more powerful side limit those concessions to what will be viewed as just. Failure to do so breeds resentment, both against the unjust treaty and the powerlessness it demonstrates. The classic example, of course, was Versailles, where the reparations Germany was forced to pay fueled a revolt that led to an even deadlier war. I'd worry more that the deal was stacked too much against Iran than that the US negotiators could have held out for something more punitive. The US did not enter these negotiations with a much of a reputation for justice, at least in Iranian eyes, and reneging on the deal (as the Republicans propose) will only sully America's reputation further.

    Needless to say, no nation has a worse reputation for turning negotiations into contests of power than Israel (the main reason the power-crazed neocons so love and envy it).

  • Gareth Porter: Barak's tales of Israel's near war with Iran conceal with real story: A tale of frantic sabre-rattling, designed more for show than as a real military action (kind of like Nixon's "Madman" feint).

    The latest episode in the seemingly endless story of Israel's threat of war followed the broadcast in Israel of interviews by Barak for a new biography. The New York Times' Jodi Rudoren reported that, in those interviews, Barak "revealed new details to his biographers about how close Israel came to striking Iran." Barak "said that he and Mr Netanyahu were ready to attack Iran each year," but claimed that something always went wrong. Barak referred to three distinct episodes from 2010 through 2012 in which the he and Netanyahu were supposedly manoeuvering to bring about an air attack on Iran's nuclear programme.

    The bulk of the article show how Obama used Israel's threats to gain UN agreement on harsher sanctions against Iran.

  • Trita Parsi/Reza Marashi: Obama's Real Achievement With the Iran Deal:

    In his speech at American University on August 5, Obama made clear that the Iran nuclear deal is a product of him leading America away from the damaging over-militarization of America's foreign and national security policies following the September 11th attacks. "When I ran for President eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn't just have to end that war -- we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place," Obama said. "It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy."

    But a single foreign-policy achievement, however historic and momentous, a mindset does not change. Particularly if the debate surrounding the deal remains deeply rooted in the old, militaristic mindset. Herein lies the Obama administration's own shortcomings in the debate. While the president made clear his aim to shift America's security mindset, most of the arguments employed to convince lawmakers to support to deal are rooted in the mindset that led America into Iraq, not in the mindset that enabled the diplomatic victory with Iran.

    The Iraq war mindset is one where strength above all else produces security. An attitude that, in the words of Obama, "equates security with a perpetual war footing." This mindset, in turn, produces a fear of not projecting strength; of looking weak. As the president pointed out in his speech, "Those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak -- even appeasers of a malevolent adversary."

    This desire to look strong, borne out of this mindset, continues to define the debate over the Iran deal. It has led some supporters of the deal to highlight the military justifications behind their support, even though this defeats the larger purpose of the deal itself: To shift the paradigm from militarism to diplomacy.

    But Obama's line about wanting to change the way we think about war had turned into a joke long ago by the man himself. Whatever doubts he may have had before, they evaporated pretty quickly once his minions started calling him "commander in chief," as he started racking up his own personal body count -- as I recall, the first person he directly, personally ordered assassinated was a Somali pirate, and the list has grown much longer since then. Obama didn't change the way we think about war; war changed the way we think about Obama (not, of course, that the Republicans can be accused of thinking here).

    Even Obama's great diplomatic breakthrough has all the marks of a military campaign, deftly executed to line up a broad front of allies whose combined leverage was so great that Iran saw no alternative but to surrender its Ayatollahs' dreams of nuclear apocalypse. Admittedly, Obama did (at least for the moment) effect a change within American military strategy, preferring a clean surrender signed by Iran's leaders, who remain in place to enforce it, to the usual American military clusterfuck -- you know, invade a country, kill people indiscriminately, destroy the infrastructure to commit mass mayhem, buy off the most corruptible elements and turn them into the face of occupation, then spend eternity putting down guerrilla insurrections. Nonetheless, Obama reserved the latter option in case the deal doesn't work out. You'd think his opponents would at least take heart in that. But then you'd also think that anyone who grasped the alleged problem would recognize that an agreement with positive incentives for compliance will be much more effective than disagreement with random punishments and unpredictable reprisals, which is all that Netanyahu, Lieberman (take your pick), and their ilk have to offer.

    As the debate over the Iran deal concludes and the next policy crisis comes to the fore, both Obama's friends and foes would be wise to take his advice: "Resist the conventional wisdom and the drumbeat of war. Worry less about being labeled weak; worry more about getting it right."

    Indeed, if the Iran nuclear deal solely prevents an Iranian bomb but fails to shift the security paradigm in America towards peace building through diplomacy rather than the militarism of perpetual warfare, then truly a historic opportunity will have been lost.

    Changing the way we think about war will take some leadership who's already changed the way they think, but when it happens we'll look back on this debate and wonder how both sides could have been so drunk on force.

  • Noam Chomsky: On the Iran Deal: I might say he's a little long-winded, but he makes so many solid points the piece comes off as a breath of fresh air. For instance:

    Turning to the next obvious question, what in fact is the Iranian threat? Why, for example, are Israel and Saudi Arabia trembling in fear over that country? Whatever the threat is, it can hardly be military. Years ago, US intelligence informed Congress that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region and that its strategic doctrines are defensive -- designed, that is, to deter aggression. The US intelligence community has also reported that it has no evidence Iran is pursuing an actual nuclear weapons program and that "Iran's nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy."

    The authoritative SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the US, as usual, way in the lead in military expenditures. China comes in second with about one-third of US expenditures. Far below are Russia and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western European state. Iran is scarcely mentioned. Full details are provided in an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which finds "a conclusive case that the Arab Gulf states have . . . an overwhelming advantage of Iran in both military spending and access to modern arms."

    Iran's military spending, for instance, is a fraction of Saudi Arabia's and far below even the spending of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Altogether, the Gulf Cooperation Council states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE -- outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance that goes back decades.

    Next up is the "existential threat" that Iran is said to present to nuclear-armed Israel. And of course Chomsky brings up the 1953 coup, American arms sales to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, etc. I suspect he goes a little too far in belittling Iran's efforts to recruit allies around the Middle East -- their interventionism pales in comparison to what the US and even Saudi Arabia has done, but that doesn't make it constructive. Also, their human rights record, including religious intolerance (particularly against the Baha'i) leaves a lot to be desired -- although, again, maybe not in comparison to our great ally, Saudi Arabia.

• Also noted:

  • Jason Diltz: Four US Troops Among Six Injured in Sinai IED Blasts: I can't say I was aware of any US troops anywhere in Egypt, but here you go, in harm's way. Evidently they are part of an observer group demanded by Israel to monitor Egyptian forces in Sinai, but Egyptian forces there are mostly fighting other Egyptians, some allegedly affiliated with ISIS. Rather than admitting that their presence has become a complicating factor, doing neither Egypt nor Israel any good, the sensible thing would be to move those troops out, lest they become an excuse for sending more in. But it seems like that's just what the military wants to do: to send more firepower in and escalate the conflict.

  • Jason Diltz: 45 UAE Troops, 10 Saudis, and 5 Bahrainis Killed in Yemen War: Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen has mostly involved killing Yemenis from the air, but as you can see here the Saudis and their Gulf allies actually have "boots on the ground," as 60 deaths in a two-day span clearly shows. Not clear whether the US is actively or merely passively supporting the Saudi effort, but as the Saudis' main arms supplier this is effectively yet another American proxy war effort.

  • DR Tucker: Everything in Moderation: Part II: Starts with a quote from a Rachel Maddow monologue back in 2010, but relevant to much of the above:

    At the top of the show today, we talked about the myth of bipartisanship, the futility of Democrats, including the president, wasting time trying to persuade Republicans to go along with them on policies that are good for the country. [ . . . ]

    None of this is a secret, which is the most important thing to understand about it. Republicans right now do not care about policy. By which I mean, they will not vote for things that even they admit are good policies . . .

    And they are unembarrassed about this fact. They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more what's-best-for-the-country patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive.

    It wastes a lot of time. It won't work. And ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing than you do for trying.

  The bulk of the piece has to do with climate change, but it could just as well be the Iran Deal or pretty much anything else. Republicans can't imagine a better outcome to the "manufactured crisis" than the one Obama handed them, but they've negotiated a deal which lets them sputter on about the deal, secure that nothing they do will undermine the deal, and confident that no one will remember their pig-headedness come next election.

  This feeling Republicans have that nothing can stick to them was hugely reinforced when they took control of Congress in 2010, only four years after Iraq and Katrina wiped them out in 2006, only two years after they caused the largest recession since the 1930s. This sense that no matter what they do they'll never have to pay for it is about the only thing that explains their intransigence on global warming and health care.

  By the way, Tucker is also saying very laudatory things about Barack Obama's Arctic Blast speech. I haven't read or seen the speech, so will take his word (with the usual grain of salt). However, I have been saying all along that even if Obama can't legislate solutions he should be using his pulpit to speak about problems, so this seems to be a step in the right direction. I just wish his convictions on war/peace and economic equality were more laudable.

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Monday, August 31, 2015

Music: Current count 25408 [25368] rated (+40), 429 [426] unrated (+3).

Christgau makes a big point about never writing about an album until he is sure what he thinks about it, including a firm grade. I've never been so certain about anything, or at least about music, so I've always regarded my grades as provisional approximations. That doesn't mean that I don't take due diligence. I very rarely grade an album A- on one play, although I also rarely give a second play to a B+(*) to give it a chance to rise of fall a notch, or a B- to see how bad it really is. Still, it seems like the line between B+(***) and A- is unusually cloudy this week. The Barry Altschul album and a couple of the old Hat discs are pretty solid, but all the rest of the A- records are borderline. Some of the B+(***) come close, too -- in particular, it's tempting to bump up everything Ellery Eskelin does, while on the other hand, I rarely get excited enough by Paul Bley and/or Jimmy Giuffre.

I finished digging through the ECM records on MPE. They only go back to March (or maybe later, as the label's German and US release dates aren't always the same), so there are still some 2015 ECM releases I missed -- notably everyone's favorite, Jack De Johnette's Made in Chicago. Despite the "[dl]" notation below, everything I rated was based on streaming, and the user interface requires me to login again every time I finish an album, so there's a built-in bias against second plays. The only ECM record I downloaded was Elina Duni's, and I haven't tried burning a copy yet, but it struck me as something I'd be willing to do a little work to hear again. (She's an Albanian folk singer, but works with a first-rate Swiss jazz group, Colin Vallon's piano trio.) Falling just short of that are two other B+(***) albums by Gary Peacock and Stefano Battaglia -- good records, but not as exceptional.

Jerry Bergonzi's new record is probably the most borderline of all. I must have played it six, maybe as many as eight, times, and every time I was ready to file it as a high B+ I'd hear something special -- always from the tenor saxophonist. The problem is he get diluted with a second horn -- no knock on Phil Grenadier, whose trumpet sparkles throughout, but I prefer Bergonzi's trios and quartets, albums like Tenor Talk and Simply Put.

After Christgau declared Stuff Like That There Yo La Tengo's "loveliest album ever," I almost reflexively considered it an A-, but then I looked up Fakebook in my database and was reminded that I had only given it a B+(*) -- the best thing about their covers album was that it showed that they owned some of the same esoteric records I did. Aside from the Hank Williams, this new batch of covers is even more esoteric, sometimes a plus, sometimes not. And while it is lovely -- it reminded me of one of those later, hitless Everly Brothers albums -- much of the middle wasn't especially distinguished. But it ends on a song so good I started having second thoughts. Just didn't follow up on them.

Going into the week, it wasn't clear what I would do down in the old music section, but last week I had followed the new Gary Peacock album with an older Paul Bley duet, Partners -- a 4-star from the Penguin Guide list, and that got me to looking at what else Rhapsody had from Bley that I hadn't heard before. That's when I discovered that Rhapsody had added a sizable chunk of the Hatology (aka Hat Hut and Hat Art and Hat Now) catalogue. Hat was one of a handful of European labels that rescued avant-jazz in the late 1970s -- the only more important label, at least for American avant-gardists, was Black Saint/Soul Note (in Italy), with DIW (Japan) coming a bit later, and Leo (UK) and FMP (Germany) focusing more on European artists.

Checking back through my database, I had previously rated 72 Hat albums, and had another 109 in the "shopping" list. To give you a taste, all of the following are rated A- or higher ([A] so marked):

• Ray Anderson/Han Bennink/Christy Doran: Cheer Up (1995, Hat Art)
• Anthony Braxton: Dortmund (Quartet) 1976 (1976, Hat Art)
• Anthony Braxton: Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989 (1989, Hat Art)
• Anthony Braxton: Willisau (Quartet) 1991 (1991, Hat Art, 4CD)
• Anthony Braxton: Charlie Parker Project 1993 (1993, Hat Art, 2CD)
• Dave Burrell: Windward Passages (1979 [1994], Hat Art)
• Clusone Trio: Soft Lights and Sweet Music (1993, Hat Art)
• Dave Douglas: Constellations (1995, Hat Art)
• Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black: One Great Day (1996 [1997], Hatology)
• Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black: 12 (+1) Imaginary Views (2001 [2002], Hatology)
• Ellery Eskelin: Ten (2004, Hatology)
• Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd: School Days (1963 [1994], Hat Art)
• Steve Lacy: Morning Joy: Live at Sunset Paris (1986, Hat Art) [A]
• Jon Lloyd: Four and Five (1998, Hatology)
• Joe McPhee: Oleo and A Future Retrospective (1982 [1992], Hat Art)
• Joe McPhee: Linear B (1990 [1991], Hat Art)
• Manuel Mengis: Into the Barn (2004 [2005], Hatology)
• David Murray: 3D Family (1978 [2006], Hatology)
• Matthew Shipp: The Multiplication Table (1998, Hatology)
• Matthew Shipp: Expansion, Power, Release (1999 [2001], Hatology)
• Horace Tapscott: The Dark Tree: 1 (1989, Hat Art) [A]
• Horace Tapscott: The Dark Tree: 2 (1989, Hat Art)
• Cecil Taylor: One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye (1978 [1980], Hat Art, 2CD)
• Vienna Art Orchestra: From No Time to Rag Time (1982 [1983], Hat Art) [A]
• Vienna Art Orchestra: The Minimalism of Erik Satie (1983-84, Hat Art)
• John Zorn: News for Lulu (1987, Hat Art)

So that's 26 A/A- records, before I added six this week (plus one more after the cutoff, so next week). Possible I'm loosening up the curve: I'd expect the percentage of A-/A records to decline over time, having cherry-picked the best prospects early on. Indeed, it has: the legacy share is 36.1% (26/72), whereas this week's haul is down to 28.5% (6/21). I expect it will drop further as I keep tapping into this resource. By the way, I've run across a couple cases where cuts are missing. If that seems minor, I may just hedge, but Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy: Live at Dreher Paris 1981 was reduced from 4CD to three cuts (all takes of "Round Midnight"), so there's nothing a critic can do about that.

Also, I haven't found much here that predates the launch of the Hatology (or as they prefer to style it, "hatOLOGY") label. There are several weird things about Hat's business model. One is that they tout their releases as "limited editions" -- usually that means a run of 3000 units -- so their most popular titles tend to run out of print, while they periodically binge and put the rest on deeply discounted sales (I've picked up a lot of titles for $5 or less over the years). Currently Hatology is used both for new releases and reissues of out-of-print titles.

One pair of grades is worth breaking down. The two Joe McPhee discs are both solo, one coming in at A-, the other B-. As near as I can figure it, McPhee's 1976 album Tenor was his answer to Anthony Braxton's 1969 For Alto, an album often held to be brilliant as well as uncompromising -- Penguin Guide awarded it one of their crowns -- but which I've always found to be plug ugly (I gave it a D based on an LP I no longer own). Tenor takes the same approach and, given the larger horn, digs even deeper. If I were to revisit For Alto (and I do have the CD somewhere) I would probably bump it up some, but I found myself anxious for Tenor & Fallen Angels to end long before it did. On the other hand, As Serious as Your Life varies the instruments -- McPhee is also a superb trumpet player (actually, pocket cornet here), and will astonish you on crashing piano, and he adds some electronics to a couple cuts so he actually has a beat to bounce off, so it winds up being a very different album.

The Tony Coe album is another Penguin Guide 4-star that I found while looking for Hat releases -- he has a couple of them, a long association with Derek Bailey and/or Tony Oxley, an avant side far removed from his roots with Humphrey Lyttelton in Britain's trad jazz movement. Could be this swing album sounded even better as a break from all the avant-jazz. At any rate, I found it delightful.

One more thing to note: with the author's permission, I've revamped the Michael Tatum archive. Hopefully in the future we'll add some more old pieces, but for now it has all of the A Downloader's Diary columns (including his latest), all properly indexed, a total of 978 albums.

New records rated this week:

• John Adams/San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas: Absolute Jest/Grand Pianola Music (2013 [2015], SFS): [r]: B+(**)
• Barry Altschul & 3Dom Factor: Tales of the Unforeseen (2014 [2015], TUM): [cd]: A-
• Stefano Battaglia Trio: In the Morning: Music of Alec Wilder (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]; B+(***)
• Jerry Bergonzi: Rigamaroll (2012 [2015], Savant): [cd]: A-
• Elina Duni Quartet: Dallëndyshe (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
• Daniel Fortin: Brinks (2015, Fresh Sound New Talent): [cd]: B+(**)
• Roberto Magris: Enigmatix (2013 [2015], JMood): [cd]: B+(**)
• Stephan Micus: Nomad Songs (2012-14 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Olavi Trio: Oh, La Vie! (2013 [2015], TUM): [cd]: B+(**)
• Enrico Rava Quartet/Gianluca Petrella: Wild Dance (2015, ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Andy Sheppard: Surrounded by Sea (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Savina Yannatou/Primavera en Salonico: Songs of Thessaloniki (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There (2015, Matador): [r]: B+(***)

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

• Manu Katché: Touchstone for Manu (2004-12 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy: Shots (1977 [2015], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe McPhee: As Serious as Your Life (1996 [2014], Hatology): [r]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Paul Bley/Jimmy Giuffre/Steve Swallow: The Life of a Trio: Sunday (1989 [1990], Owl: [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley: 12 (+6) in a Row (1990 [2008], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Tony Coe: Some Other Autumn (1971 [1983], Hep): [r]: A-
• Ellery Eskelin: Forms (1990 [2004], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black: Kulak 29 & 30 (1997 [1998], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Ellery Eskelin & Han Bennink: Dissonant Characters (1998 [1999], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black: The Secret Museum (1999 [2000], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Jimmy Giuffre 3: Emphasis, Stuttgart 1961 (1961 [1993], Hat Art): [r]: B+(***)
• Jimmy Giuffre 3: Flight, Bremen 1961 (1961 [1993], Hat Art): [r]: B+(**)
• Jimmy Giuffre/Paul Bley/Steve Swallow: Emphasis & Flight 1961 (1961 [2003], Hatology, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Mary Halvorson/Reuben Radding/Nate Wooley: Crackleknob (2006 [2009], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy: Clinkers (1977 [2000], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lacy: N.Y. Capers & Quirks (1979 [2000], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Steve Lacy: New Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden 2002 (2002 [2006], Hatology): [r]: B+(*)
• David Liebman/Ellery Eskelin/Tony Marino/Jim Black: Different but the Same (2004 [2005], Hatology): [r]; B+(*)
• Joe Maneri Quartet: Coming Down the Mountain (1993 [1997], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe Maneri Quartet: Tenderly (1993 [1999], Hatology): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee: Tenor & Fallen Angels (1976-77 [2000], Hatology): [r]: B-
• Myra Melford Trio: Alive in the House of Saints (1993, Hat Art): [r]: A-
• Myra Melford & Han Bennink: Eleven Ghosts (1994 [1996], Hatology): [r]: A-
• Misha Mengelberg: The Root of the Problem (1996 [1997], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)
• Sleaford Mods: Wank (2012, Deadly Beefburger): [bc]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Bob Albanese: Time Remembered (Mayimba): October 2
• Bob Belden's Animation: Machine Language (Rare Noise): September 25
• Marcelo dos Reis/Luis Vicente/Theo Ceccaldi/Valentin Ceccaldi: Chamber 4 (FMR)
• Michael Gallant Trio: Live Plus One (Gallant Music): October 9
• Ochion Jewell Quartet: Volk (self-released): September 29
• Bob Merrill: Cheerin' Up the Universe (Accurate): September 4
• Mike Reed's People Places & Things: A New Kind of Dance (482 Music)
• Aram Shelton/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Frank Rosaly: Resounder (Singlespeed Music)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

I want to start with the text of a short speech that Laura Tillem gave at a demonstration at the office of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Koch). It does a nice job of summarizing the basic points in favor of the Iran Deal, which Pompeo, in typically kneejerk fashion, opposes.

One thing the opponents of this deal are not doing is listen to the experts. . . . for example The Israeli experts who say "Iran capitulated," who say "every path to a bomb we know of is blocked," who say "on balance, not a bad deal," who say "we can live with it." They are not listening to the UN inspectors, who got it exactly right before the Iraq War, they say that this inspection regime is more thorough than any ever have been. Why would they say these things if they were not sure? Why would they risk their reputations?

And why are the European countries already eagerly investing in Iran because of this agreement? They sure don't seem worried that this will destabilize the Middle East, as the opponents of the deal say. If they are investing it means they expect More stability after this agreement, not less. If this deal was so bad as to let Iran bomb and terrorize everywhere, as the politicians claim, why would these business people risk their money, any more than the experts would risk their reputations? No, in fact, the deal is better for the Middle East, better for the Iranian people, and better for us, (because you know, not a war) better than any alternative by a mile. Only the politicians will not admit it, they not only can't accept the idea that the US might come to an agreement with Iran; they can't stand that the US would even meet with Iranians in person.

The opponents of this deal say the ruling mullahs are bad, but by rejecting this deal they are hurting only the reform movement there, the people who will ultimately change that system for the better, the people who elected a more reform-minded president to replace the hostile Ahmadinejad. What a smack in the face it would be to the millions of Iranian young people who are excited and hopeful about this agreement. Which also points to what is so good about this agreement: it will mean more access to and from other countries, more access to more ideas, more opportunities for students to study here, etc.

And finally, as an American Jew, it is beyond infuriating to see Netanyahu speak for "the Jews." As a Newton resident said recently, "Does the Westboro Baptist Church speak for "the Christians"? In fact, more US Jews support the agreement than oppose it.

We wish there were a brave Republican, and what better place than Kansas, where they all claim to be "independent" and "open-minded," a brave one who would step up and say Yes to peace.

Of course, this is tailored a bit for the Wichita, Kansas audience. The appeal to "open-minded" and "independent" Republicans is partly because the Republicans have such a stranglehold on elective office in Kansas, but such people have been scarce since the Great 2010 Purge. Still, but Sens. Roberts and Moran embraced Obama's normalization efforts with Cuba (as well as his TPP nonsense), and both opposed Obama's request for authorization to use force against Syria (although they didn't object when Obama didn't ask, as in Libya or later in Syria once ISIS clouded the issue). On the other hand, Pompeo, like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, never saw a war he didn't want to jump into (he's a West Point grad, has run aerospace and oil businesses, rushed to the head of the NSA fan club, and did yeoman service as one of the Republicans' Benghazi! clowns -- he's so intransigent he made Bill Kristol's dream list of "October Surprise" presidential candidates).

The case for supporting the Iran Deal is so overwhelming you have to question the sanity (and/or ethics) of anyone opposing it. Netanyahu opposes it, as far as I can discern, for three reasons: (1) because he is in principle opposed to anything that reduces the usefulness of a marketable enemy (Iran is the prime example, because Americans remain prejudiced against the people who overthrew their beloved Shah, and because Israeli leaders need foreign distractions to avoid talking about the Palestinians); (2) because the internal political dynamics of Israel favors right-wing leader who prove their toughness by never compromising with anyone (even though Israelis negotiated in private with the PLO pre-Oslo, when they refused to agree on a shape of a table for public meetings, and are reportedly negotiating in secret with Hamas now -- if/when such negotiations bear fruit, you can be sure that right-wing leaders like Netanyahu will condemn and undermine them); and (3) Netanyahu has made a personal ploy to bind his party to the Republicans in some sort of grand anti-Obama coalition, which thus far the Republicans are playing along with (among other things, this makes Netanyahu look to his homies like a big player in American politics, and encourages Americans to view Likud as the unified face of Israel). None of these reasons have to do with the effectiveness of the Deal at curbing the Iranian nuclear weapons threat, suggesting Netanyahu never took the threat seriously in the first place. (Gareth Porter wrote a whole book to that effect: Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare [2014]. Trita Parsi wrote an earlier [2007] book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, on the relationship of Iran and Israel over time, pointing out that Israel discovered an existential threat in Iran not when the Ayatollahs came to power but when a new enemy was required after Iraq was disarmed in 1991.)

Obama, on the other hand, seems to have taken the Iranian threat seriously, inasmuch as he bothered to build a coalition with Russia and China that put serious teeth into sanctions, then used that leverage to negotiate a strictly verifiable Deal that ensures that Iranian nuclear technology cannot for many years, if indeed ever, be used to build nuclear weapons. Anyone who took the Iranian threat seriously should be delighted by the Deal, and anyone who isn't -- that is, anyone who claims the previous regime of harsh sanctions, clandestine warfare, and periodic threats of Israel and/or the US bombing select targets would be more effective than inspections based on official agreements -- cannot be taken seriously.

That means Netanyahu and his AIPAC cronies, and it also means the Republicans. The latter's rejection of the Deal is little more than an effort to tarnish one of Obama's signature accomplishments, built on the casual prejudice that Obama and the Democrats are intrinsically weak on security, and the even more casual assumption that Republicans, by snarling more, are tougher. (I won't bother demolishing this, in large part because I think Obama is already way too belligerent for the nation's good.) So most Republicans see this as a game, one they've been playing without much evident downside (forgetting Bush-Cheney), so they don't expect anyone to call them on their warmongering. On the other hand, it's interesting that they agreed to a process they cannot possibly win -- Obama only needs to sustain a veto, which can be done by the Democratic minorities in either house -- so no matter how much they rant and rave the deal will go through. And if, say, Ronald Reagan's demagogic attacks on Jimmy Carter's Panama Canal Deal in 1980 are any indication, they'll never act on what they're threatening now. (Indeed, even when Reagan's VP became president and invaded Panama, he didn't make any effort to renege on ceding the Canal to Panama.)

Still, the Republicans' hot air campaign isn't harmless. Nor should it be painless for them. Every Republican who votes against the Deal should have to account for their stance in the next elections. They should be painted as warmongers: a party that so loathes the idea of diplomacy that they'd rather shoot first, and a party that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, believes that a quick show of force is the answer to all of America's problems in the world. In particular, their opposition to the Iran Deal shows the hollowness of their now common regrets over the Iraq War -- one that was started by Bush in 2003 over the same "WMD" charges, where Bush not only refused to negotiate but insisted that UN inspectors, which had not shown any evidence that Iraq had the alleged WMD, stop their work. What Obama has done is diametrically opposite to what Bush did with Iraq. It very predictably ensures that: (1) Iran will not be able to develop nuclear weapons for the duration of the deal, well beyond 10 years; (2) Iran will continue to be ruled by a stable government, and will not collapse into chaos as Iraq has done; (3) America will not earn new legions of enemies due to attacking another country. In doing this deal, it's hard to see any real cost to the US. Maybe some US defense contractors might lose some Persian Gulf business if Iran seems to be less of a threat. And oil prices may dip as Iran's oil enters the world market. But is that the platform Republicans want to run on in 2016: more arms jobs and higher gas prices? You can see the attraction for someone like Pompeo, but how many Americans actually live in the pockets of the defense and oil industries? -- as compared to, say, how many only pay the bills?

(Lest you object that letting Iranian oil out into the world market would accelerate global warming, that's attacking the problem at the wrong end, with the wrong solution. Right now the main cause of cheap oil is conservation, and the main effect is to make particularly nasty oil, such as the Alberta Tar Sands, uneconomical.)

On the other hand, the cost of a war to topple and replace Iran's regime would run into trillions of dollars (first approximation: Iraq + Afghanistan + another 50%) -- given the GOP's tax lock that adds to a national debt they already deem insupportable (although they won't say that if there's a Republican deficit -- most of the run up came under Reagan and "deficits don't matter" Cheney). The side-effects of such a war are incalculable, but one is that it will validate the argument that the only defense against American/Israeli aggression is to develop nuclear deterrence. Republicans might try to argue that harsher sanctions would suffice to contain Iran, but the only example of such they can point to is nuclear-armed North Korea, probably the most dangerously deranged state in the world today (unless you count Israel and the US -- i.e., the countries which actually do attack other countries with no thought to the consequences).

The biggest problem I see with the deal is that it shows Obama and the Democrats to be not only smart and shrewd but rigorous and tough. The latter trait allows them to sell the deal on the grounds that it will be effective at ending a threat, burying the fact that Iran has never actually threatened to develop, let alone use, nuclear weapons. It allows the Democrats to continue portraying Iran as an international scourge, when in fact the balance of wrongs between the US and Iran is tilted the other way. And by continuing to demonize Iran, we give up opportunities to align with Iran to help stabilize the Middle East. Not that Iran's interests naturally align with America's, but mutual engagement might help both countries move towards peace, stability, democracy with respect for minority rights, open trade -- the sort of things that are mutually agreeable precisely because they are universally aspired to.

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Monday, August 24, 2015

Music: Current count 25368 [25326] rated (+42), 426 [426] unrated (+0).

Another big, busy week. Rhapsody Streamnotes came out on Wednesday, so some of this week's loot appeared there. I've added a Comments section to the archive file. The comments in question were scraped from emails from Facebook, mostly in response to a notice I posted. I don't know whether I'll do this as a regular feature. Depends mostly on whether I get feedback that adds to the long-term value of the piece: the clincher this time was Clifford Ocheltree's discography note on Huey "Piano" Smith. Other valuable points/tips are that the A-rated Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink album, Welcome Back, is on Bandcamp (as is about one-third of Intakt's catalog, including A- from this year: Schlippenbach Trio, Marilyn Crispell/Gerry Hemingway, Chico Freeman/Heiri Känzig, Christoph Irniger Trio, and Oliver Lake/William Parker -- looks like a "label of the year"), and that Phil Overeem's "Mid-August Top 50" list -- a big help for me recently -- can be found on his blog. (I've added his blog to my "Music" list on the left.)

Since then I've spread out in all directions. I complained some while back that Rhapsody got rid of their interface for browsing new releases in genres, but it turns out that they merely hid it -- no doubt, as they like to say, "to improve your experience." As I tweeted, I took a look at their new folk releases and picked out three, all rated B+(***) below: Bobby Bare Jr: Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost); Lindi Ortega: Gloryville; and Rod Picott: Fortune. I then turned to country but didn't do so well (Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell, Shelby Lynne).

Another resource that offered some things to check out is Robert Christgau's new iteration of Expert Witness at Noisey. Unfortunately, the first two weeks haven't yielded anything that I've been tempted to A-list (Miguel came closest the first week, while I had dismissed Sam Smith with prejudice when the first hype appeared; Hop Along is just too idiosyncratic vocally, and I panned Go! Team when it came out, but I rather like Girlpool). Don't mean to complain, just noting a minor anomaly. I'd also like to plug We Are Nots over any of the girl-rock bands in the second column. And wonder when he'll get to Sleaford Mods? The new one is the third A- I've listed (with their singles comp just a notch lower). And the old ones are on Bandcamp, so you don't have to take my word (or wait for Bob's):

• Austerity Dogs
• Divide and Exit
• Chubbed Up: The Singles Collection

Another new resources is that I finally figured out how to use MPE Player to get recent ECM releases. They only go back a few months, so they don't have this year's early releases, including several I missed (Jack DeJohnette, Julia Hulsmann, Kenny Wheeler; I did manage to hear downloads, now lost, of Tim Berne, Jakob Bro, Vijay Iyer, and Chris Potter). Awkward interface, puts a premium on getting the record right the first pass, but does seem to have a download feature if I find anything worth hearing again. (The Gary Peacock Trio, with Marc Copland and Joey Baron, comes closest so far. PS: Tried downloading Elina Duni Quartet, which seems to have worked.)

The Miles Davis boxes were done in one pass. I might have given the Acrobat an A- if I had the actual box, but Rhapsody only made the first half available (as Volume 1) and doesn't offer the booklet. The selling point is that you're catching John Coltrane in transition from sideman to superstar, a moment of some historical value, but not as rewarding musically as the later recordings where he really made his mark. I haven't seen enough of Acrobat's boxes to have any real guess as to the documentation. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Legacy's documentation and packaging are first rate. And I've heard nearly all of the music there -- Rhapsody dropped a couple tracks from the first disc -- albeit only once. Of that, I'm quite certain that the second and third discs are really superb -- not that I'd pick them above the best live sets already available from the period (the various Plugged Nickel packages from 1965, Live-Evil and Dark Magus from 1970-73). The fourth disc is more marginal (more like the Fillmores). The first I'm less certain about: it has the most reissued material, mostly from Miles Davis at Newport 1958, which when it came out in 2001 I dismissed with a B. Sounded better than that this time, but not quite A-list. Again, that's just one play (with a break midway), but it's also not stuff I have to recondition my ears to grasp.

The old stuff this week is background to the new. I own a copy of Love and Peace but never got around to it, so I was particularly anxious to knock that off my todo list. The two disco albums and two live jazz albums could be described as varying degrees of competent. I'm still missing a well-regarded 1992 album, Keeping Tradition, but I've heard most of Bridgewater's later work, and it doesn't come close to the Silver set. Partners I had listed under Peacock -- a 4-star Penguin Guide record -- but careful inspection reveals Paul Bley gets top billing. I suppose I should go back and look through Bley's back catalog to see what I'm missing. I currently have 20 records graded, including his dazzling 1953 Introducing Paul Bley (with Mingus and Blakey), his 1958 Quintet (with Ornette Coleman), his 1965 ESP-Disk (Closer), and one more A-.

Still working on the long-promised update to Robert Christgau's website. Any day now.

New records rated this week:

• Beegie Adair/Don Aliquo: Too Marvelous for Words (2015, Adair Music Group): [cd]: A-
• JD Allen: Graffiti (2015, Savant): [cd]: A-
• Takeshi Asai: French Trio Vol. 2 (2014 [2015], De Trois Cités): [cd]: B+(**)
• Bobby Bare Jr.: Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost) [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] (2015, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(***)
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Dee Dee's Feathers (2014 [2015], Okeh): [r]: B+(**)
• Greg Cohen: Golden State (2014, Relative Pitch): [r]: B+(**)
• Darts & Arrows: Altamira (2015, Ears & Eyes): [r]: B+(*)
• Mathias Eick: Midwest (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Electric Squeezebox Orchestra: Cheap Rent (2014 [2015], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Clay Giberson: Minga Minga (2013 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Girlpool: Girlpool (2014, Wichita, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Girlpool: Before the World Was Big (2015, Wichita): [r]: B+(**)
• Giovanni Guidi Trio: This Is the Day (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell: The Traveling Kind (2015, Nonesuch): [r]: B+(*)
• Will Herrington: Solace (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Hommage à Eberhard Weber (2015, ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Hop Along: Painted Shut (2015, Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(*)
• Keith Jarrett: Creation (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Carly Rae Jepsen: E-MO-TION (2015, Interscope/Schoolboy Silent): [r]: B+(***)
• Joanna Gruesome: Peanut Butter (2015, Slumberland): [r]: B+(*)
• Anders Jormin/Lena Willemark/Karin Nakagawa: Trees of Light (2013 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Shelby Lynne: I Can't Imagine (2015, New Rounder): [r]: B
• Merzbow/Balasz Pandi/Mats Gustafsson/Thurston Moore: Cuts of Guilt/Cuts Deeper (2014 [2015], Rare Noise, 2CD): [cdr]: B+(***)
• The Montgomery Hermann Quinlan Sextet: Hear, Here (2015, Summit): [cd]: B
• Richard Nelson/Aardvark Jazz Orchestra: Deep River (2015, Heliotrope): [cd]: B+(*)
• Lindi Ortega: Faded Gloryville (2015, Last Gang): [r]: B+(***)
• Gary Peacock Trio: Now This (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
• Rod Picott: Fortune (2015, Welding Rod): [r]: B+(***)
• Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (2015, Harbinger Sound): [r]: A-
• Grant Stewart: Trio (2014 [2015], Cellar Live): [r]: B+(**)
• David Torn: Only Sky (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Juli Wood Quartet: Synnkä Metsä (Dark Forest) (2015, OA2): [cd]: B+(**)

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

• Tad Britton: Cicada (1992-93 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• The Continental Drifters: Drifted: In the Beginning & Beyond (1992-2001 [2015], Omnivore, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Miles Davis: All of You: The Last Tour 1960 (1960 [2014], Acrobat, 4CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Miles Davis: Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975 [The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4] (1955-75 [2015], Columbia/Legacy, 4CD): [r]: A-
• Keith Jarrett: Barber/Bartók (1984-85 [2015], ECM New Series): [dl]: B-
• Nu Yorica! Culture Clash in New York City: Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77 (1970-77 [2015], Soul Jazz, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Huey "Piano" Smith: Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu (1956-62 [2012], Hallmark): [cd]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Paul Bley/Gary Peacock: Partners (1989 [1991], Owl): [r]: B+(***)
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Dee Dee Bridgewater (1976, Atlantic): [r]: B
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Dee Dee Bridgewater (1980, Elektra): [r]: B-
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Live in Paris (1986 [1987], Impulse): [r]: B+(*)
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Live in Montreux (1990 [1991], Verve): [r]: B
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver (1994 [1995], Verve): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• JD Allen: Graffiti (Savant)
• Jerry Bergonzi: Rigamaroll (Savant)
• João Camões/Rodrigo Pinheiro/Miguel Mira: Earnear (Tour de Bras)
• Dave Douglas Quintet: Brazen Heart (Greenleaf Music): October 2
• Jon Irabagon: Behind the Sky (Irabbagast): September 15
• Jon Irabagon: Inaction Is an Action (Irabbagast): September 15
• Dave McDonnell Group: The Time Inside a Year (Delmark): August 21
• Fred Randolph: Song Without Singing (Creative Spirit): August 28
• The Dan Trudell Trio: Dan Trudell Plays the Piano (self-released): September 15
• Mort Weiss: Mort Weiss Is a Jazz Reality Show (SMS Jazz)

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Sunday, August 23, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• Josh Marshall: Breaking: Nuclear Stuff Really Complicated:

  But they've had an extremely difficult time making substantive arguments against the deal because according to almost all technical experts it is about as tight and comprehensive and total a surveillance regime as we've ever seen. Ever. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon under any circumstances for 10 to 20 years. Unless they choose to cheat. And if they do, the U.S. and the international community will almost certainly catch them and catch them before they're able to weaponize. But here's the problem -- that's only the opinion of people who actually know what they're talking about.

  Marshall follows this up with examples of stories based on ignorance and innuendo that supposedly show flaws in the inspections process, and cites the appropriate authorities on why they're false. I don't see any point in going down these various rat holes. The most comprehensive rebuttal I've seen is from Uzi Even, an Israeli physicist who's built nuclear weapons, who studied the deal and concluded: "the deal was written by nuclear experts and blocks every path I know to the bomb." The only exception I would take to Marshall's "nuclear stuff is complicated . . . so it's important to consult the people who know about nuclear stuff, people called scientists" is that the details of the inspection process only really matter if you assume that Iran actually was working on developing nuclear weapons, and that they secretly intend to continue on that path after sanctions are lifted, once Iran opens up to foreign investment and can trade freely with the rest of the world -- in short, starts to become a normal country.

  I think that Ayatollah Khamanei drew a sharp line in the sand with his fatwa declaring nuclear weapons contrary to Islam, so while Iran certainly wanted to show the world its mastery of nuclear technology, including the fuel cycle, and possibly thereby gain some deterrence against the long-present threat of foreign attack, they never had any intention of moving from capability to weaponization. Hence, it makes sense to me that Iran would agree to an inspections process that foreclosed any possibility of doing what they hadn't intended on doing in the first place -- especially in exchange for ending the sanctions, which were extremely offensive to Iran in the first place.

• Dan Simpson: The United States owns part of Europe's migrant problem: If anything, he understates American responsibility. Even though most of the political pressure for intervention in Libya came from Europe, the model (as well as the firepower) came from the US. Nor should one ignore US impacts further south in Africa, especially in countries like Somalia and Mali. (Ironically, Libya used to be able to absorb many migrants from war-torn Africa.)

  The biggest problem of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa at the moment is massive migration.

  It is a result of American direct and indirect war-making in recent years in those regions. Most Americans regard the problem as someone else's. We get away with it because people don't think the matter through.

  The United States is responsible for two aspects of the problem. The first is that we have massively disrupted the societies and economies of the countries that are producing the refugees through war. The second source of our responsibility is that our role in the overthrow of the government in Libya turned that country into a rat's nest of chaos and non-government. The result is that Libya has come to serve as the jumping-off point for the boatloads of African and other refugees jamming their way into Southern Europe and even trying to cross the English Channel.

  A quick glance at the countries of origin of the refugees make America's role clear. They are Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, nationals of countries where we have tried to determine what government should be in power, including by raining countless bombs and drone-mounted missiles down on them. In each of these countries, America has destroyed order and the economy, making life unbearable and employment unobtainable. Put another way, we have turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria into countries that people are desperate to escape, no longer able to imagine their lives there given the dangerous, lawless cauldrons the countries have become.

  But I also blame Europe for not having the smarts and guts to stand up to the American neocons' misguided and mistaken efforts to transform the world through fire. (GW Bush: "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." Quoted in Ron Suskind: The One Percent Doctrine.)

• Stephen M Walt: So Wrong for So Long: Why neoconservatives are never right: Well, some of the reasons anyway:

  Getting Iraq wrong wasn't just an unfortunate miscalculation, it happened because [the neocons'] theories of world politics were dubious and their understanding of how the world works was goofy. [ . . . ]

  For starters, neoconservatives think balance-of-power politics doesn't really work in international affairs and that states are strongly inclined to "bandwagon" instead. In other words, they think weaker states are easy to bully and never stand up to powerful adversaries. Their faulty logic follows that other states will do whatever Washington dictates provided we demonstrate how strong and tough we are. This belief led them to conclude that toppling Saddam would send a powerful message and cause other states in the Middle East to kowtow to us. If we kept up the pressure, our vast military power would quickly transform the region into a sea of docile pro-American democracies. [ . . . ]

  Today, of course, opposition to the Iran deal reflects a similar belief that forceful resolve would enable Washington to dictate whatever terms it wants. As I've written before, this idea is the myth of a "better deal." Because neocons assume states are attracted to strength and easy to intimidate, they think rejecting the deal, ratcheting up sanctions, and threatening war will cause Iran's government to finally cave in and dismantle its entire enrichment program. On the contrary, walking away from the deal will stiffen Iran's resolve, strengthen its hard-liners, increase its interest in perhaps actually acquiring a nuclear weapon someday, and cause the other members of the P5+1 to part company with the United States. [ . . . ]

  Fourth, as befits a group of armchair ideologues whose primary goal has been winning power inside the Beltway, neoconservatives are often surprisingly ignorant about the actual conditions of the countries whose politics and society they want to transform. Hardly any neoconservatives knew very much about Iraq before the United States invaded -- if they had, they might have reconsidered the whole scheme -- and their characterizations of Iran today consist of scary caricatures bearing little resemblance to Iran's complicated political and social reality. In addition to flawed theories, in short, the neoconservative worldview also depends on an inaccurate reading of the facts on the ground.

  Walt lists a couple more reasons neocons are always wrong, and misses or only glances on a few more. One is that they're extremely squeamish about dealing with people they perceive as enemies -- i.e., people who don't show the proper submissive repose to the righteousness of their power. Neocons not only can't accept the idea that the US might come to an agreement with Iran; they can't stand that the US would even meet with Iranians in person. In some ways, their insistence on only dealing with the world by projecting force derives from insecurities about personal (they would say moral) hygiene.

  Walt correctly notes that "the neoconservatives' prescriptions for US foreign policy are perennially distorted by a strong attachment to Israel," but doesn't add that the obvious motive behind that attachment is envy: they want the US to confront the whole world with the same arrogance and contempt Israel projects in its neighborhood. One can make a pretty good argument that such policies don't even benefit Israel let alone are scalable worldwide.

  Despite the terminology, there is nothing especially new about neocon-ism. The core idea first emerged following the development of nuclear bombs and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that's when the US became the world's sole superpower, a moment of omnipotence the neocons have been yearning to regain ever since (hence all the "end of history" brouhaha after the collapse of the Soviet Union). Aside from the early Bush-Cheney administration, they've rarely been able to dictate American policy, but the delusions of power their ideas spring from has been a driving force behind America's post-WWII war machine -- indeed, they've spun up an entire ideology (calcified into a secular religion) that nearly all American politicians are swamped by. This, despite the fact that every war started with the assumption that American power will prevail, and every fiasco with the notion that nothing unmanageably bad could occur.

  But even before the bomb, neocon-ism rested on a conservative doctrine that goes back millennia: the master-slave relationship, the eternal backbone of American conservatism, and of empires everywhere. Conservatism has always depended on two assumptions so deep you can only accept or reject them: one is that some people are (usually innately) superior to others and therefore should be privileged to rule; the other is that contrary to the first can (meaning should) ever change over time. But critics as far back as Hegel understood that the relationship wasn't timeless: that over time the master engenders opposition that ultimately undoes slavery. By the same measure, the projection of American power creates resistance, something no amount of belief in enduring superiority can overcome. Jonathan Schell called this "the unconquerable world."

• More Iran links:

  • David Bromwich: Playing the Long Game on Iran: Neoconservatives:

    War and the prospect of war have been the source of their undeniable importance. If the Iran nuclear deal attains legitimacy, much of their power will slip through their fingers. The imperialist idealism that drives their ventures from day to day will be cheated of the enemy it cannot live without.

  • Reese Ehrlich: Iran's Jewish community gets behind nuclear deal with the US

  • Akbar Ganji/Richard Falk: Why Congress Must Support the Nuclear Agreement With Iran

  • JJ Goldberg: The Game-Changing Iran Report That Bibi Fears

  • Sayed Hossein Mousavian: If Congress Rejects the Iran Deal, It Would Be a Historic Blunder

Also, a few links for further study:

• Eric Foner: Struggle and Progress: An wide-ranging interview with one of the most important historians working today.

• Reynard Loki: Environmentalists Blast Obama's Decision to Let Shell Drill in Arctic: I recall something about Republican presidential platforms always ticking off the same five or so bullet items, one of which was energy self-sufficiency for the US, generic blather for loosening up environmental regulations and importing a lot more Canadian crude (which in the tar sands tundra is very crude indeed), possibly with something about "clean coal" (the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). I don't expect Obama will ever get any credit for it, but during the time Obama has been president that plank has largely been realized. For one thing, by delaying the Keystone Pipeline he hasn't solved the problem with Canadian imports. Nor has he done it with coal, although you have to give wind and solar some credit there. Actually, it's mostly been North Dakota's Bakken field plus a lot of fracking -- which he hasn't raised a finger to slow down despite environmental concerns. But the one big thing Obama has done to promote the oil industry has been to open up a lot more offshore drilling -- this article reports on Shell's project to drill in the Arctic Ocean. Still, I doubt Obama's offshore license has had much effect yet: just when he was opening up the Atlantic, BP blew a major spill in the Gulf of Mexico and that gummed up the works.

• Aman Sethi: At the Mercy of the Water Mafia: On the edges of Delhi.

  In conversations, Sanghwan is annoyed by concerns about the sustainability of his small empire, about the short-term nature of his profits compared with his work's potentially devastating long-term implications. Such questions, he says, demonize the poor and water providers like him, while letting the rich and the government off the hook. He claims he would welcome efforts to lay a proper pipe network in his neighborhood, but given the government's track record, he isn't holding his breath.

• Chris Sullentrop: The Kansas Experiment: Long article by the nephew of Kansas Republican legislator Gene Sullentrop. Kinship opened a few doors, not that the lowdown on Brownback's dog or his preferred basketball strategies humanizes him, much less renders his obsessions sensible. Still, the nephew provides a fair accounting of the session's fiscal crisis. He does drop in the line about how "the state is a petri dish for movement conservatism, a window into how the national Republican Party might govern if opposition vanished." But he doesn't even mention 80% of the vile insanity that was passed by the legislature in addition to the education cuts and regressive tax increases.

• Steve Weintz: Worst Idea Ever: Dropping Nuclear Bombs During the Vietnam War: As I recall, there was occasional loose talk all during the long American War in Vietnam about using nuclear weapons. At the time the US was putting a lot of effort into reducing the size of nuclear weapons to try to come up with something that could be used for "tactical" strikes as opposed to obliterating entire cities. They even managed to deploy an Atomic Bazooka (1961-68) -- a portable launcher that could shoot a 10-20 kiloton (i.e., Hiroshima/Nagasaki-sized) bomb about three miles. Weintz reports on some recently declassified documents, which show that the possible use of "tactical nukes" in Vietnam was seriously studied, and wasn't rejected for the obvious moral and political reasons -- the Mandarins doing the studying didn't want to look "soft" -- but because they couldn't figure out a way to make them work effectively.

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Friday, August 21, 2015

Christian Appy: America's Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 Years Later: On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated the Japanese city of Hiroshima with a single bomb. Three days later they repeated that feat with Nagasaki, demonstrating that the "total war" that had been fought for the past six years (actually, longer in China) would turn much more destructive in the future. Japan surrendered a couple weeks later, pretty much on terms they had (too discreetly) proposed in the weeks before Hiroshima: clearer messages could have spared us all the ordeal of nuclear warfare (but then mutual respect and understanding might have spared us so much more). I know people who every year mark the anniversary of Hiroshima with vigils, not because they remember the 100,000+ victims there any different than the other 60 million lives the war took. They mark Hiroshima because the weapon the US introduced there still looms over us with its threat to instantly devastate life as we know it. And they mark it because our own nation -- not the only one to possess such weapons but the only one to have actually used them on an "enemy" people -- has still not demonstrated the maturity and modesty necessary to put the age of nuclear terror behind us. Two pieces of evidence here: one is that the US, despite having negotiated a deal (the NPT) where the world's nuclear powers promise to dismantle their arsenals in exchange for the rest of the world pledging to never develop such weapons, continues to build new bombs and formulate war plans assuming their use; the other is that the US has engaged in conventional and guerrilla warfare almost continuously since WWII ended, using its nuclear weapons as an umbrella for an empire of bases that girdle the world, allowing the US to poke its nose into nearly every country around the world (and shun the few -- at least the little ones -- that deny its hegemony). Or maybe the second is just the reason and effect of the first. Another way to phrase the second is that the US has repeatedly failed to support international efforts to resolve conflicts (especially its own) without resorting to war. So where many thought the advent of nuclear weapons would make further wars unthinkable, American defense mandarins not only embraced the horror -- the classic is Herman Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable -- but have resuscitated the concept of limited war and applied it repeatedly (even though they've virtually never achieved their stated goals).

I understand and appreciate anti-nuclear protesters, especially in the 1960s (which led to the Test Ban Treaty and the NPT) and in the 1980s (which led to several arms reduction treaties between the US and USSR). I also fully appreciate that Japan would have surrendered in 1945 regardless of whether the US bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Nonetheless, those bombings don't bother me more than the rest of the war. I feel that it was inevitable that the bombs would be used once developed, and the end of WWII was as appropriate as any time could be: they were the icing on the cake, as if the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo weren't enough, or the German death camps, or the Rape of Nanking, or the starvation of Bengals far from the fighting lines. They remind us, among other things, that by the end of the war the US had descended to the barbarity of its enemies -- that indeed the real enemy was war, and that it had morally crippled those it didn't kill outright. That realization gave rise to the UN as a forum for preventing future wars -- a failure nearly from the start, but at least the fear of another Hiroshima many times over, of what came to be called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), forced powers with no good will whatsoever to pull back from brinksmanship. Arguably, nuclear deterrence also thwarted a fourth India-Pakistan war in 2002, and has kept Israel safe from attack since 1973 -- no Arab nation even thinks of such a thing, even though Israel continues to strike Syria whenever it feels like it. I think it's fair to say deterrence works, but also that its driving force is fear, the effect of which is to preserve and nurture hostility or worse: our so-called "limited wars."

Appy does a good job of reviewing Truman's "decision" to bomb Hiroshima:

Truman understood, of course, that if Hiroshima was a "military base," then so was Seattle; that the vast majority of its residents were civilians; and that perhaps 100,000 of them had already been killed. Indeed, he knew that Hiroshima was chosen not for its military significance but because it was one of only a handful of Japanese cities that had not already been firebombed and largely obliterated by American air power. U.S. officials, in fact, were intent on using the first atomic bombs to create maximum terror and destruction. They also wanted to measure their new weapon's power and so selected the "virgin targets" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In July 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed Truman of his fear that, given all the firebombing of Japanese cities, there might not be a target left on which the atomic bomb could "show its strength" to the fullest. According to Stimson's diary, Truman "laughed and said he understood." [ . . . ]

By 1945, most Americans didn't care that the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not committed Japan's war crimes. American wartime culture had for years drawn on a long history of "yellow peril" racism to paint the Japanese not just as inhuman, but as subhuman. As Truman put it in his diary, it was a country full of "savages" -- "ruthless, merciless, and fanatic" people so loyal to the emperor that every man, woman, and child would fight to the bitter end. In these years, magazines routinely depicted Japanese as monkeys, apes, insects, and vermin. Given such a foe, so went the prevailing view, there were no true "civilians" and nothing short of near extermination, or at least a powerful demonstration of America's willingness to proceed down that path, could ever force their surrender. As Admiral William "Bull" Halsey said in a 1944 press conference, "The only good Jap is a Jap who's been dead six months."

Appy also writes about changing American attitudes to Hiroshima, which most recently appear to have hardened. For example, he writes about Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 bestseller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption:

The book is decidedly a page-turner, but its focus on a single American's punishing ordeal and amazing recovery inhibits almost any impulse to move beyond the platitudes of nationalistic triumphalism and self-absorption or consider (among other things) the racism that so dramatically shaped American combat in the Pacific. That, at least, is the impression you get combing through some of the astonishing 25,000 customer reviews Unbroken has received on Amazon. "My respect for WWII veterans has soared," a typical reviewer writes. "Thank you Laura Hillenbrand for loving our men at war," writes another. It is "difficult to read of the inhumanity of the treatment of the courageous men serving our country." And so on.

Unbroken devotes a page and a half to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, all of it from the vantage point of the American crew of the Enola Gay. Hillenbrand raises concerns about the crew's safety: "No one knew for sure if . . . the bomber could get far enough away to survive what was coming." She describes the impact of the shockwaves, not on the ground, but at 30,000 feet when they slammed into the Enola Gay, "pitching the men into the air."

Also see Susan Southard: Entering the Nuclear Age, Body by Body, on the bombing of Nagasaki -- adapted from her new book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. The second bomb has been much less documented than the first -- Southard seems to be aiming for a belated companion to John Hersey's first-on-the-scene reporting in Hiroshima. Lest you forget the immediate experience:

The five-ton plutonium bomb plunged toward the city at 614 miles per hour. Forty-seven seconds later, a powerful implosion forced its plutonium core to compress from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a tennis ball, generating a nearly instantaneous chain reaction of nuclear fission. With colossal force and energy, the bomb detonated a third of a mile above the Urakami Valley and its 30,000 residents and workers, a mile and a half north of the intended target. At 11:02 a.m., a superbrilliant flash lit up the sky -- visible from as far away as Omura Naval Hospital more than 10 miles over the mountains -- followed by a thunderous explosion equal to the power of 21,000 tons of TNT. The entire city convulsed.

At its burst point, the center of the explosion reached temperatures higher than at the center of the sun, and the velocity of its shock wave exceeded the speed of sound. A tenth of a millisecond later, all of the materials that had made up the bomb converted into an ionized gas, and electromagnetic waves were released into the air. The thermal heat of the bomb ignited a fireball with an internal temperature of over 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Within one second, the blazing fireball expanded from 52 feet to its maximum size of 750 feet in diameter. Within three seconds, the ground below reached an estimated 5,400 to 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Directly beneath the bomb, infrared heat rays instantly carbonized human and animal flesh and vaporized internal organs.

As the atomic cloud billowed two miles overhead and eclipsed the sun, the bomb's vertical blast pressure crushed much of the Urakami Valley. Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds; catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were simple kiloton-range devices. The fusion-powered bombs first tested in the early 1950s were as much as a thousand times more powerful. J. Robert Oppenheimer famously argued against developing fusion bombs because the real-world targets were too small. Edward Teller was able to convince the US military not only to go ahead but to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, excluding him from future influence. With hawks like Teller clearing out all possible opposition, it shouldn't be surprising that virtually every proposal of a pre-emptive nuclear strike came from the US. Until the Soviet Union developed its own bomb, many hard-core anti-communists agitated for "preventive war." When American efforts in Korea stalled and Vietnam went from bad to worse, many hawks saw nukes as a way to snatch victory from defeat. Nixon's version of this was what he called his "Madman Strategy": the idea was to convince the Soviets that he was so crazed he'd risk destroying the world to avoid losing Vietnam. By the 1980s, Andropov was so unnerved by America's "first strike" threats that the Soviets almost started a nuclear war by accident. Even recently, the US was promoting the idea of nuclear bombs as "bunker busters" to "take out" deeply buried infrastructure in Iran and North Korea. In fact, every time an American politician makes a point about "not taking options off the table," the world hears a threat to use nuclear weapons. No wonder the US is so flustered by Iran: every time we look at them, we see a mirror image of the US. (Israel, of course, has the same problem.)

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Tuesday, August 18, 2015

My trip to the northwest pushed July's compilation all the way to the end of the month, but I've been knocking down records at a furious clip this August. Still, this is only average length for this year, where I've only done one Rhapsody Streamnotes per month, usually close to the middle. I suppose I could have waited another week and come up with something ridiculous. But I hit a logical endpoint in the "old music" section and I'm looking forward to doing something different there in the future. (Not that I know what.)

The "old music" section is mostly the result of my attempt to fill in the gaps in Spin's Top 300 Albums of 1985-2014. When that list was published on May 11, I copied it down, noted my grades, and discovered that I hadn't heard 81 of those 300 records (27%). Not a big surprise. There's a generation gap between me and the younger critics who picked the list -- I know 1970s rock pretty well, but didn't review records during much of this period (1980-2003), so I had no reason to pay attention to things I wasn't likely to like. And while I like alt/indie much more than metal, say, I don't like it enough to write for Spin. (For diversity, Spin likes, and does a pretty decent job of covering, hip-hop -- 19.6% of their list -- but my tastes there are more underground, and I missed a lot of the 1990s gangsta bubble they're so fond of. Their EDM is about as spotty as mine -- making it hard to intersect -- and they only listed three country albums, one Africa comp, and no jazz.)

On the other hand, since I got onto Rhapsody -- 2007 was when I started taking notes -- it's been more tempting (or at least cost-effective) to check out records other people like even when I'm pretty doubtful I'll like them myself. For instance, I wound up hearing 47 of the top 50 finishers in last year's EOY Aggregate (OK, only 42 of the next 50, 38 of the third 50, and with interest really starting to wane, 20 of the fourth -- although I later caught up with U2 and Fred Hersch). So the Spin list offered a form for working backward. Along the way, I picked up other records of likely interest by artists placing a record on the list. For instance, Green Day's American Idiot made the list, but Christgau had much preferred their previous album, Warning (A- to C+), so it didn't make sense to hit one without checking out the other. On the other hand I didn't bother rechecking records I had previously rated -- in Green Day's case, Dookie (also on Spin's list) and Insomniac (not on the list). In those cases, for your convenience, I listed my previous grades at the bottom.

Of course, not every artist got the same treatment. I checked out an extra album for Aerosmith, M83 and Cursive and found that was more than enough. And I didn't feel like exploring Tori Amos or Killers at all. Of course, not everything was available on Rhapsody. I wound up with 10 records still missing (3.3%). I've heard that most of those are available on YouTube, but haven't tried chasing them down yet. (I did go to YouTube to find the Nots album, and I noticed a lot of unheard Ty Segall there -- Memphis artists. Segall's Manipulator was number 25 on last year's EOY Aggregate list.)

Since then I've added a few more "old music" artists, a side trip from listening to their new albums: Kurt Elling, Alan Jackson, the Sonics, Tamikrest. The new stuff is relatively straightforward, although I should note again that one exceptional source of leads was Phil Overeem's "Top 50 of 2015 (So Far)" list (posted on Facebook, so no link), pointing me toward 79rs Gang, Dead Moon, Mdou Moctar and Nots among the A-list, and several more high B+s. Only three records came from my jazz queue (Adair/Aliquo, ElSaffar, and the magnificent Schweizer/Bennink disc) -- I had to chase James Brandon Lewis, and for that matter, Miles Davis, down on Rhapsody. Both Davis boxes, by the way, are incomplete on Rhapsody -- the Acrobat is only half there, the Sony just missing a couple cuts. I felt I had heard enough (in one pass) to offer a fair grade, but I would much rather had heard it all. (I do, by the way, never grade something I haven't listened to all the tracks I can hear.) In both Davis reviews I take pains to explain my limits. My hedge on the Acrobat box was to pick the lower of the two most likely grades. It could be that the missing material will nudge it over the A- cusp. Also possible that doc and multiple plays might make the difference, but that's pure speculation.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on July 29. Past reviews and more information are available here (6797 records).

Recent Releases

79rs Gang: Fire on the Bayou (2015, Sinking City/Urban Unrest): Big Chief Romeo Bougere of the 9th Ward Hunters and Big Chief Jermaine Bossier of the 7th Ward Creole Hunters team up to form the Soixante Dix Neufleurs Bande, aka 79rs Gang. A throwback to the great New Orleans Indian bands of the 1970s, though the beats are sharper and tenser, the jungle denser, the struggle harder. A-

Beegie Adair/Don Aliquo: Too Marvelous for Words (2015, Adair Music Group): Piano and tenor sax quartet from Nashville, backed by Roger Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums. I hadn't run into Adair before, but AMG credits her with 48 albums since 1997 -- admittedly a rather cheesy list with lots of standards and tributes, piano music for special occasions (not just Xmas but Mother's Day), a Cocktail Jazz Party and Beautiful Ballads. She goes for standards here, especially Strayhorn with a dash of Monk. I am familiar with Aliquo, a mainstream tenor who really shines on the ballads. Perhaps too easy, but they earn their title. A- [cd]

Alessio Alberghini/Garrison Fewell: Inverso (2014 [2015], Floating Forest): Duets, Fewell plays guitar, Alberghini mostly soprano sax, sometimes baritone. Originals plus two pieces by John Tchicai. Nice, intimate, "little gem" is the phrase from the liner notes. B+(**) [cd]

Gregg Allman: Gregg Allman Live: Back to Macon, GA (2014 [2015], Rounder): Like Elvin Bishop, Allman realizes that the long-term career strategy for southern rockers is to revert to the blues, so he starts off here with Blind Willie McTell and works his way through Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James, also Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett, working in a few ravers from his old band. Saxophonist Jay Collins always hits the spot. B+(***)

Takeshi Asai: French Trio Vol. 2 (2014 [2015], De Trois Cités): Pianist, based in New York, only bio I've seen (AAJ) gives his birth date as 1864 (presumably a typo on '8') but doesn't mention where. He has a couple New York Trio records, but also likes France, and Pascal Combeau (bass) and Maxime Legrand (drums) show why. B+(**) [cd]

Baltazanis: End of Seas (2015, self-released): Guitarist, first name Costas, has previously recorded in the group Iasis. This is a postbop quintet (trumpet, keyboards, bass, drums) plus guests) which favors a steady groove. B+(*) [cd]

Bastet: Eye of Ra (2015, self-released): Cat-headed Egyptian goddess, something I know because my sister had a black cat she named Bastet. This one is a San Francisco-based quartet where guitarist Justin Rock writes the songs, backed by sax, bass, and drums -- a little more postbop than fusion, a lot more guitar than sax. B [cd]

Louie Belogenis: Blue Buddha (2015, Tzadik): Tenor saxophonist, credits go back to 1993 with groups God Is My Co-Pilot and Prima Materia, but not much under his own name -- indeed, looked like this was an eponymous group album until I found his name on the spine, and I can't be sure of that. Quartet, with Dave Douglas on trumpet, Bill Laswell on bass, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. B+(***) [cdr]

Karl Berger/Kirk Knuffke: Moon (2013-14 [2015], NoBusiness, 2CD): Duets, Knuffke on cornet, the 80-year-old German best known on vibraphone but he's also a remarkable pianist. Runs long, and not a lot of sparks, but gaps of age and continent give way to shared dreams (old and new). B+(**) [cd]

Luciano Biondini: Senza Fine (2014 [2015], Intakt): Accordion player, from Italy, AMG credits him with eight records, I've run across him on a couple of Rabih Abou-Khalil's discs. This one is solo, but his instrument is so rich harmonically the set escapes the spareness of so many solo sets. B+(*) [cd]

Michael Blum/Jim Stinnett: Commitment (2015, self-released): Guitar and bass, plus a couple others (Brad Smith on piano, Fred Haas on tenor sax, Grant Stinnett one track on bass guitar) here and there. I wasn't sure why Stinnett got cover billing, but he contributed three (of ten) songs, two more than Blum, who plays tasteful guitar and sings several standards ("Pick Yourself Up," How Deep Is the Ocean") with awkward charm. B+(*) [cd]

Don Braden: Luminosity (2010-14 [2015], Creative Perspective Music): A fine mainstream tenor saxophonist with 18 albums since 1991. Credit here refers to his Organix Quartet, with Dave Stryker (guitar), Kyle Koehler (organ), and Cecil Brooks III (drums), with Claudio Roditi and Sherman Irby listed as special guests (one track each). Sumptuous soul jazz, but too much flute. B+(*) [cd]

The Dan Brubeck Quartet: Celebrating the Music and Lyrics of Dave & Iola Brubeck (2013 [2015], Blue Forest, 2CD): Five of Dave & Iola Brubeck's six children became professional musicians, Dan playing drums. Iola was a jazz lyricist before she married Dave in 1942, and they both lived together into their nineties, so there's something especially sweet about this project, with its thick booklet and many pictures. Dan's quartet is modeled on dad's, with Steve Kaldestad on tenor sax, Tony Foster on piano, and Adam Thomas on bass -- Thomas also sings the lyrics that figure largely (although not exhaustively) here. B+(***) [cd]

Casa: Futuro (2012 [2015], Clean Feed): Avant-sax trio: Pedro Sausa on sax, Johan Berthling on bass, Gabriel Ferrandini on drums. Has some strong moments, but doesn't sustain them. B [cd]

Kasey Chambers: Bittersweet (2015, Sugar Hill): Australian singer-songwriter, emerged in 2000 with a voice that rivaled anyone in Nashville. She married Shane Nicholson in 2008 and has a couple duet albums with him, but this is her first solo since divorce. Still, not much of a breakup album, not that the title cut -- a duet with Bernard Fanning -- doesn't try. Does end on an up note with "I'm Alive." B

Greg Cohen: Golden State (2014, Relative Pitch): Bassist, has only a handful of albums under his own name but has appeared on many dozens more, equally home in trad jazz (Marty Grosz), in avant-garde (John Zorn, Ornette Coleman), and with the occasional rock star (Tom Waits, Lou Reed). This is a duo album with guitarist Bill Frisell doing his impressionist folkie thing on a set of venerable California-themed chestnuts. B+(**)

Jay Collins and the Kings County Band: Rivers Blues and Other People (2012, Sundown): Tenor saxophonist for Gregg Allman and Levon Helm, who appreciate his blues honk, Collins has an early (1994) jazz album with Kenny Barron, Joe Locke, Rufus Reid and Ben Riley I'd like to hear someday, but here he's moved into a blues format. Presumably he's the singer -- I don't see a credits list, but he's still got some jazz guys in the band (Dred Scott, anyway). B+(***)

The Coneheads: L.P. 1 (2015, Erste Theke Tonträger, EP): Title runs on: Aka 14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords Rip Off Devo For The Sake Of Extorting $$$ From Helpless Impressionable Midwestern Internet Peoplepunks L.P.. Punk band from Indiana, I don't know that they aren't 14 but they're old enough to know from Devo. Discogs lists five other albums, all self-released cassettes since 2014. This has 15 songs, two of them covers (Residents' "Lizard Lady" and Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer"), runs 21:11 with a slow fade at the end. B+(***) [bc]

The Convergence Quartet: Owl Jacket (2013 [2015], NoBusiness): Avant-jazz group -- Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Andrew Hawkins (piano), Dominic Lash (bass), Harris Eisenstadt (drums) -- has a couple good records together. Hawkins continues to impress in this group, but the cornet seems less out there. B+(**) [cdr]

Easton Corbin: About to Get Real (2015, Mercury Nashville): Country singer, more/less neo-trad, third album. One thing that strikes me, looking at Wikipedia, is that while his three albums have peaked on the country charts higher (4-2-1) sales have hit the skids (371-177-29, in thousands). I've heard sales in general have slacked off, but not that much. B

Linda Dachtyl: A Late One (2015, Chicken Coup/Summit): Organ player, third album since 2006, with Don Hales on guitar and Cary Dachtyl on drums, plus various guest slots for sax and/or brass. Two originals, most of the rest from early bop sources (Dameron, Monk, Silver) but swung pretty hard -- one tune's "A Tribute to Cozy Cole," and another has a croonerish vocal. B+(**) [cd]

Doomtree: All Hands (2015, Doomtree): Minneapolis hip-hop crew -- includes solo artists I've heard: P.O.S., Dessa, Sims, plus four more I don't know -- sixth group album. Lots going on here -- maybe too much, plus the synths can get busy and they try to slam everything down. B+(***)

Benjamin Duboc/Jean-Luc Petit: Double-Basse: This Is Not Art (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): Double-bass duets, most often one plucked, the other bowed, the latter offering deep moans as a backdrop to random rhythm. B+(*) [cd]

Kurt Elling: Passion World (2015, Concord): Jazz singer, a dozen albums since 1995, used to be an impressive dervish of fancy technique, which isn't to say better, but this is rather plodding. C

Amir ElSaffar: Crisis (2015, Pi): Trumpet player, originally from Iraq, named his 2007 album Two Rivers and calls his group Two Rivers Ensemble -- more appropriate than ever as he figures out more ways to integrate Arabic motifs into his music. The superb jazz rhythm section of Carlo DeRosa (bass) and Nasheet Waits (drums) is matched by Tareq Abboushi (buzuqi) and Zafer Tawil (oud, percussion), and ElSaffar sings three pieces. Ole Mathisen's sax complements his trumpet, which has advanced to a new plane. A- [cd]

Field Music: Music for Drifters (2015, Memphis Industries): Fifth album, this one written as a soundtrack to a 1929 documentary (John Grierson's Drifters), dispenses with vocals and plays more like a series of jazz set pieces, a bit regular but more hypnotic for that. B+(**)

Nick Finzer: The Chase (2014 [2015], Origin): Trombonist, second album, leads a sextet with Lucas Pino on sax, Alex Wintz on guitar, Glenn Zaleski on piano, plus bass and drums. All originals, postbop, nice to hear the deep leads but nobody gets dirty. B+(*) [cd]

Future: DS2 (2015, Epic): Rapper Nayvadius Cash, third album, title short for Dirty Sprite 2. B+(***)

Laszlo Gardony: Life in Real Time (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): Pianist, originally from Hungary, has a dozen albums since 1986, most trios but this time he unleashes the saxophones: Don Braden, Bill Pierce, and Stan Strickland (all tenor, with Strickland also playing bass clarinet), and they create all sorts of excitement. B+(***) [cd]

Mary Halvorson: Meltframe (2014 [2015], Firehouse 12): Guitarist, one of several impressive musicians to study under Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan, has been very prolific since 2005 -- AMG lists 20 albums, Discogs 19. This is solo, ten pieces written by other jazz musicians, Ellington and (maybe) Coleman the only standards. Shows off many of her favorite tricks, and when she gets noisy and dissonant you don't miss anyone else. B+(***) [cd]

Lafayette Harris, Jr. Trio: Bend to the Light (2011 [2015], Airmen): Mainstream pianist, seven albums since 1973, this a sparkling trio with Lonnie Plaxico and Willie Jones III (also "help" on percussion by Thomas Dyani, and uncredited scat by Jazzmeia Horn. B+(**) [cd]

Albert "Tootie" Heath/Ethan Iverson/Ben Street: Philadelphia Beat (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): Brother of Jimmy and Percy Heath, the drummer's discography goes back to 1957 (Red Garland, John Coltrane, Nina Simone) and runs on for hundreds of records since then, but before 2013 he only had two albums under his own name. Second album with this piano trio, all standards. Nice to spotlight the drummer, although Iverson offers the surprises. B+(**)

Bret Higgins: Bret Higgins' Atlas Revolt (2015, Tzadik): Bassist, from Canada, first record, leads a quintet with electric guitar (Tom Juhas), violin, keyboards, and drums. They keep a groove going, a touch of klezmer in the violin, but mostly opens up for the guitar. B+(**) [cdr]

Paul Hubweber/Frank Paul Schubert/Alexander von Schlippenbach/Clayton Thomas/Willi Kellers: Intricacies (2014 [2015], NoBusiness, 2CD): Trombone, alto/soprano sax, piano, bass, drums, respectively, mostly German. I had never heard of Hubweber before, but he seems to be a fairly major figure in the German avant-garde: Discogs credits him with 15 albums since 1998, but his Wikipedia page (in German) lists 37 albums going back to a solo, Aus meiner Sicht, in 1976. Two long improvs (49:39 and 44:40) plus a 14:34 encore. Focus on the pianist, who most likely you have heard of. B+(***) [cd]

Alan Jackson: Angels and Alcohol (2015, Capitol Nashville): Sixteen albums in, the neo-traditionalist sounds most like himself. If this seems easier than most of his albums, like he's aging comfortably, that's probably because he knows he's got a good bunch of songs. A-

Jar-e: Chicas Malas (2009, Exotic): In the new records queue for six years now -- can't even find a hype sheet. Jar-e sings (male) and plays keyboards and trombone, band includes guitar-bass-drums, some horns, and background singers (female). Third album, recorded after he moved from North Carolina to Mexico. Basically southern rock, ulta-lightweight division. B- [cd]

Stefan Keune/Dominic Lash/Steve Noble: Fractions (2013 [2015], NoBusiness): German saxophonist, sopranino and tenor here (alto elsewhere), ten or so albums since 1992, backed by bass and drums. Free improv, fast and furious, although the sopranino tends to be a bit squeaky. B+(***) [cdr]

Lama + Joachim Badenhorst: The Elephant's Journey (2015, Clean Feed): Lama is a mostly Portuguese trio led by bassist (and composer) Gonçalo Almeida, with Susana Santos Silva on trumpet and Greg Smith on drums. Here they add a clarinet -- gives them some color contrast but doesn't perk up the group much. B+(*) [cd]

Gaetano Letizia/Mike Clark/Wilbur Krebs: Froggy & the Toads (2015, self-released): Guitar-drums-bass trio, the leader originally from Naples, plays in blues and fusion groups, this trio somewhere in between, maintaining a groove while adding something more. B+(**) [cd]

Daniel Levin Quartet: Friction (2015, Clean Feed): Avant-cellist, ten albums since 2003, this a quartet with Nate Wooley (trumpet), Matt Moran (vibes), and Torbjorn Zetterburg (bass). Has a couple moments when they all get moving, but also bogs down a lot. B [cd]

James Brandon Lewis: Days of FreeMan (2015, Okeh): Tenor saxophonist, born in Buffalo, went into gospel before jazz, self-released an album in 2011 and got his second picked up by Sony when they relaunched the Okeh label. Third album, a sax trio with Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Rudy Royston, although he's mixed in some vocal bits, which may (or may not) have anything to do with the hip-hop the hype sheet says he's been studying. The horn, however, rings clear. A-

Lil Wayne: The Free Weezy Album (2015, Young Money/Republic): A good-will gesture, I suppose, dumped on the web after Wayne sued Birdman and Cash Money over the delay/non-release of Tha Carter V (although Sorry for the Wait 2 came out first). His post-jail albums have lost something -- nothing in technique so much as that swagger that elevated rather mundane ideas (mostly "fuck bitches/make money") into a transcendent joke. Obviously, he can still crank this shit out by the truckload. B+(*) [dl]

Frantz Loriot/Manuel Perovic Notebook Large Ensemble: Urban Furrow (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): The leaders composed this, with Loriot playing viola and Perovic conducting. The group itself isn't that large -- I count nine pieces, including Loriot (but not Perovic): two reed players (tenor and alto sax, but also bass clarinet and bassoon), two brass, guitar, cello, bass, drums. I don't know what to make of the bit of vocal, but the ensemble work is powerful. B+(**) [cd]

Shai Maestro Trio: Untold Stories (2014 [2015], Motema): Israeli pianist, third album, recorded in Brooklyn and France, backed by Jorge Roeder (bass) and Ziv Ravitz (drums). B+(*) [cd]

Nick Mazzarella Trio: Ultraviolet (2015, International Anthem): Alto saxophonist from Chicago, with Anton Hatwich (bass) and Frank Rosaly (drums), has several previous albums plus tenure in the Chicago Reed Quartet. B+(***)

Miguel: Wildheart (2015, RCA): Neo-soul singer from Southern California, surname Pimentel, third album, built with thick, loopy layers of chorus, occasionally punctured by an unexpected "fuck." I could see losing oneself in the swim, but I don't relish drowning, even if that's someone's idea of heaven. Does end on two exceptional pieces, both (wtf?) "feat. Lenny Kravitz" (guitar, I guess). Easy to underrate. Easy to overrate, too. B+(***)

Mdou Moctar: Afelan (2013, Sahel Sounds): Tuareg guitarist from Niger, one of those Saharan rockers although this keeps its groove on a fairly even keel. B+(*) [bc]

Mdou Moctar: Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai [Original Soundtrack Recording] (2015, Sahel Sounds): English title of the film is Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red in It, about a Tuareg musician, which is exactly what Moctar is. None of the usual soundtrack pitfalls, just lots of guitar, some chant vocals, and that Saharan beat that's as accessible as the blues. A- [bc]

Mount Eerie: Sauna (2015, PW Elverum & Sun): Lo-fi singer-songwriter Peter Elverum, started out as the Microphones in 1999, has more than a dozen albums since 2004, when he adopted this more appropriate moniker -- AMG describes his albums as "massive and mysterious." Dirges built on drone (or organ), tarted up with background voices. B-

Larry Newcomb Quartet: Live Intentionally! (2015, Essential Messenger): Guitarist, I don't see any previous albums, but Bucky Pizzarelli seems to like him. Three originals, the rest standards and jazz tunes from Charlie Parker and Carla Bley. Eric Olsen plays a lively piano, and everyone swings. B+(*) [cd]

Nots: We Are Nots (2014, Goner): "Weird punk" band from Memphis, originally guitarist Natalie Hoffmann and drummer Charlotte Watson before adding bass and keyboards. Eleven songs, only runs 26:28. Not sure I caught any of the words, but Hoffmann has a unique guitar sound ("reverb-soaked noise bursting forth like shards of aural shrapnel") and they build up an impressive sonic wall. A- [dl]

Obnox: Know America (2015, Ever/Never): Lamont Thomas, from Cleveland, fifth album under this moniker since 2011, has bounced around through various other bands (Unholy Two, Puffy Areolas, Bassholes, and the only one I've heard of, This Moment in Black History -- look for their 2006 album, It Takes a Nation of Assholes to Hold Us Back). A synthesis of surrealism and noise rock, seems promising as it wears you down. B+(*) [bc]

Oceaán: The Grip (2014, B3SCI, EP): Electronica, approximately trip-hop, from Oliver Cean (Brussels-born, Manchester-based), four songs, 15:15. B+(*)

César Orozco & Kamarata Jazz: No Limits for Tumbao (2015, Alfi): Piano/keyboard player, born in Cuba but also identifies as Venezuelan, group a quartet with bass, percussion, and drums, to which the album adds many featured guests and a few surprising turns, like Linda Briceño's vocal on "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square." Orozco argues that tumbao is as pervasive as swing was for Ellington. B+(**) [cd]

Matt Panayides: Conduits (2014 [2015], Pacific Coast Jazz): Guitarist, second album, tone and lines put him in the Montgomery mainstream of jazz guitar. Quartet: Rich Perry's tenor sax helps out but doesn't threaten to steal the show. B+(*)

Evan Parker/Joe Morris/Nate Wooley: Ninth Square (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Sax-guitar-trumpet improv, live from Firehouse 12, the guitarist at his most prickly, which brings out the same when Parker switches from tenor to soprano. The trumpeter manages to get himself into all sorts of interesting avant mixes, but doesn't add much. B+(**) [cd]

Simon Phillips: Protocol III (2015, Phantom): British drummer, started out in trad jazz bands, but has run the table doing jazz, classical, and rock (Big Country, Judas Priest, Toto). This is your basic fusion quartet, with Andy Timmons (guitar), Ernest Tibbs (electric bass), and Steve Weingart (keyboards), all with long resumes (not that I didn't have to look them up). B [cd]

Howard Riley: 10.11.12 (2012 [2015], NoBusiness): No sound (someone screwed up), no grade. [cdr]

Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique: Love Is Free (2015, Konichiwa/Cherrytree/Interscope, EP): The Swedish pop-disco diva, keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt, and the late Christian Falk (1962-2014, best known as a producer). Four originals, an Arthur Russell cover, total 20:50. One terrific dance piece after another. Wish there were more. A-

Jason Roebke: Every Sunday (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Avant-bassist, from Chicago, has appeared on 40+ albums since 1997, several under his own name. This is one of those bass-guitar-drums trios where the normally louder guitar (Matthew Schneider) is held down to play around the bass. Drummer Marcus Evans does leave marks. B+(**) [cd]

Robert Sabin: Humanity Part II (2014 [2015], Ranula Music): Bassist, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Gary Peacock. Third record, originals except for the title piece by Morricone, arranged for ten pieces -- five brass, two saxes, guitar-bass-drums. B+(***) [cd]

Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (2015, Intakt): Piano-drum duo, both should be household names by now, and indeed the Dutch percussionist is one of the very few Europeans to make Downbeat Hall of Fame ballot. On the other hand, I've had to write in the name of the Swiss pianist the last few years -- this year ahead of Myra Melford and Marilyn Crispell, who are similar players only in the sense that anyone can be described as similar to Cecil Taylor; Schweizer comes as close as anyone to matching Taylor, but she can also work in some boogie woogie or pennywhistle jive, and closes here with a bit of Monk that evokes "Lullaby of Birdland." In the late 1980s Schweizer started a series of duos with top avant drummers (Louis Moholo was the first, followed by Gunter Sommer and Andrew Cyrille). The best was her 1995 meeting with Bennink (although I also have the 1990 Pierre Favre at A). This return engagement belongs alongside. A [cd]

Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (2015, Atlantic): The group members fled war-torn north Mali for Bamako, and have kept on moving, finding a welcome for their desert blues/Saharan rock in the west. Produced by a guitarist in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, this seems a bit slowed down and bulked up compared to their numerous competitors. On the other hand, that may make them a bit more accessible. A-

The Sonics: This Is the Sonics (2015, Revox): Garage rock band from Tacoma led by Gerry Roslie, had a hitless run in the late 1960s, regrouped in 1972 and 1980 and 2007, putting out some live albums but this is their first studio joint in many decades. Still hard, fast, loud, ramshackle, and Rob Lind is still on sax. Fewer obvious covers, and they can't quite write them like they steal 'em. B+(***)

Vince Staples: Summertime '06 (2015, Def Jam, 2CD): West coast rapper, came up in a group called the Cutthroat Boyz, released a much-admired EP last year (Hell Can Wait), intends to make a big splash with his studio debut (split into two discs, but total time just 59:07). B+(***)

Grant Stewart: Trio (2014 [2015], Cellar Live): Mainstream tenor saxophonist, recorded three albums 1992-99 then picked up the pace since 2005. I think of him as the kind of guy who usually has a piano on hand, but this time it's just bass (Paul Sikivie) and drums (Philip Stewart). B+(**)

Swervedriver: I Wasn't Born to Lose You (2015, Cobraside): British band, filed with shoegaze for their guitar echo, released four albums 1991-98, broke up, regrouped a decade later, but only now do they have a new album. Much like the old sound, maybe a bit heavier, as happens, a bit more obscure too. B

Tamikrest: Taksera (2015, Glitterbeat): Tuaregs from Mali, fourth record, "live" which may make it redundant as it certainly doesn't kick out the jams. B+(**)

Brianna Thomas: You Must Believe in Love (2013 [2015], Sound on Purpose): Singer-songwriter, debut album, wrote four originals to go with seven standards, lined up some guests to go with Allyn Johnson's piano trio -- trombonist Wycliffe Gordon made the biggest impression on me. Will Friedwald and Bill Clinton are fans. B+(*) [cd]

Helen Tzatzimakis: Soulfully (2014 [2015], Cobalt Music): Pianist-singer, from Greece, has at least one previous album (also a book of poetry), mistakes sadness for soul, gloom too -- quotes Brecht, "In the dark times/Will there also be singing?/Yes, there will also be singing/about the dark times." Most appealing when I can't make out the words -- not just not "Crazy," but not "Ne Me Quitte Pas" either. On the other hand, Marianne Faithfull's "So Sad" does her justice, or vice versa. B+(*) [cd]

Bill Warfield and the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra: Mercy Mercy Mercy (2015, Blujazz): Trumpet player, has led big bands since 1988 (at least). Shows funk is just another twist on swing. B+(*) [cd]

Brad Allen Williams: Lamar (2012-13 [2015], Sojourn): Guitarist, UNT grad, first album, trio with Pat Bianchi on organ and Tyshawn Sorey on drums, nice soul jazz groove, nothing that hasn't been done dozens of times. B+(*) [cd]

Mark Winkler: Jazz and Other Four Letter Words (2015, Cafe Pacific): Jazz singer, has a dozen albums since 1985, writes most of his own lyrics but draws on Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough for the song that frames the album "I'm Hip" -- he ends with his own "Stay Hip," so close it sounds like a reprise. Two songs are paeans to beatnik-era jazz (title cut, which name drops no one after the '50s, and "You Cat Plays Piano"). Two duets with Cheryl Bentyne, who is also hip. B+(***) [cd]

Wire: Wire (2015, Pink Flag): Seems a little late in the day to be releasing an eponymous album -- suggests the imagination is flagging. But what they've come up is the most generic rendering of their brand yet. Doesn't blow you away, but it's served them well over nearly 40 years. B+(***)

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

The Miles Davis Quintet: All of You: The Last Tour 1960 (1960 [2014], Acrobat, 4CD): Cover adds "featuring John Coltrane" -- the tenor saxophonist who had played in Davis' Quintet since 1955 but had finally broken out as a star in his own right with 1959's Giant Steps. The Quintet was filled out with Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Jimmy Cobb (drums). The tracks come from eight dates on a European tour, and while Davis gets the first solo, the cuts were picked to show Coltrane breaking away from the band. He's making those giant steps, but Wynton Kelly is also superb doing his usual bebop thing, and Davis gets his licks in. Rhapsody bills this as Vol. 1, only including the first two discs. It seems unlikely that the other two drop off much, but I'll hedge a bit. Caveat emptor. B+(***)

Miles Davis: Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975 [The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4] (1955-75 [2015], Columbia/Legacy, 4CD): Since I fell off Legacy's mailing list, it's been impossible to fairly evaluate their bootleg boxes. I used to ease myself into a box, playing a disc here and there until I was familiar with the terrain, and then there's the booklets with all that info and pictures and such. Those are the tangible things that make box sets worthwhile, and judging from the reviews by critics so treated this one must be a dandy. (Then, again, box sets almost never get negative reviews.) The 1955 group was a rather ad hoc mix of stars (Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, Connie Kay), but I can't say much about them given that Rhapsody dropped 3 (of 4) cuts. Davis returns with his regular group in 1958, with seven cuts that were previously released on CD in 2001: I gave that a B but was more impressed this time, especially by Coltrane's "Bye Bye Blackbird" solo. (Some also on the 1963 LP Miles & Monk at Newport, more on a French LP in 1968.) The second disc gives us two Quintet sets from 1966 and 1967: really superb material, with Wayne Shorter in especially fine form. The third disc offers three 1969 cuts by the transitional electric band (Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette), starting with "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" -- again, superb. Then we get six sizzling tracks from the 1973 8-piece band playing in Berlin, a bit sloppier but the trumpet rises to the occasion, and one cut from 1975. Fourth disc steps back to 1971, a Newport show in Switzerland with Gary Bartz on alto, Keith Jarrett on electric piano and organ, Michael Henderson on electric bass, and lots of percussion, which drags a bit in the 25:38 "Funky Tonk" but closes strong -- I can't say it's essential but it fills a slot on a shelf full of dazzling early '70s live albums. Assuming the box is up to snuff, probably: A-

Dead Moon: Live at Satyricon (1993 [2015], Voodoo Doughnut): Guitarist-singer Fred Cole drifted through close to a dozen bands from 1965 until he formed this DIY punk trio, which lasted two decades, with wife Toody on bass and Andrew Loomis on drums. They subsisted on self-released records and touring, cutting corners by limiting their album covers to black ink only. AMG lists this as Tales From the Grease Trap, Vol. 1: evidently we can expect a series of old live tapes. As someone who hasn't heard any of their previous albums -- 10 studio, 4 live, the 2-CD retrospective Echoes From the Past -- I can't really say this is their best or the one you should have, but it could be. A-

Charlie Haden/Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Tokyo Adagio (2005 [2015], Impulse): The search through the late great bassist's vault tapes continues, having yielded a thoroughly delightful duo with guitarist Jim Hall last year. This matches him with a familiar Cuban pianist -- they and Paul Motion appeared on The Montreal Tapes Volume 4. Rather placid, though. B+(*)

Phil Haynes: Sanctuary (1999 [2015], Corner Store Jazz): Drummer, has close to ten records since 1998 and more side credits going back another decade. This is solo, a limiting factor on any instrument. B+(*)

Nu Yorica! Culture Clash in New York City: Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77 (1970-77 [2015], Soul Jazz, 2CD): Updates a compilation with the same title issued in 1996, dropping 4 (of 16) tracks, adding 5. One of the first things I did when I got to New York in the 1970s was to try to dive into salsa music, but while it always sounded great on the street I never developed a knack for finding records I much liked. This does better than I did, but for every couple blistering rhythm tracks there's one that throws up something incomprehensibly prog. The luck of the experiments, I guess. B+(***)

Mammane Sani et Son Orgue: La Musique Electronique du Niger (1978 [2013], Sahel Sounds): Full name Mamman Sani Abdoulaye, originally released this album of organ groove pieces on cassette -- typos seem to be as common as copies of this (the original cassette, optimistically titled Vol. No. 1, is credited to Mamman Sani Aboullaye, while the LP reissue is as above. B+(***) [bc]

Mamman Sani: Taaritt (1985-88 [2014], Sahel Sounds): Previously unreleased groove pieces recorded in Niamey and Paris using analog synths, originally intended as a "relaxation guide," the album cover depicting a fantastic space ship hovering over the Agadez Mosque in the middle of a very barren desert. Much more beat than you get from new age, and more amusing than either minimalism or prog rock. B+(**) [bc]

Daniel Smith: Jazz Suite for Bassoon (1995-97 [2015], Summit): Bassoonist, recorded a lot of classical music since 1986 (including at least thirteen CDs of Vivaldi) before trying his hand at jazz with 2006's Bebop Bassoon -- best title is 2014's Smokin' Hot Bassoon Blues, but none are very good. This is earlier material, transitional I suppose. The 20:16 "Jazz Suite for Bassoon" was written by someone else (Steve Gray, who plays piano) and has some twisty moves but not a lot of dynamic range (nothing that would bury the bassoon). The first two-thirds of the album contains "Baroque Adaptations for Bassoon and Jazz Trio" and three "Scott Joplin Rags" -- so at least you get a regular beat. B [cd]

Huey "Piano" Smith: Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu (1956-62 [2012], Hallmark): I first heard the title tune on the Flamin' Groovies' Supersnazz and was even more delighted when I tracked down the original -- ever since every bit as essential to my New Orleans soundtrack as "West End Blues." That may not have occurred until Rhino compiled Serious Clownin': The History of Huey "Piano" Smith & the Clowns (1986). Later I picked up Music Club's now-out-of-print This Is . . . Huey "Piano" Smith (2000) and, on Christgau's tip, this shorter (14 vs. 18 cuts) and cheaper redundancy. Note, though, that you get no liner notes at all, And while more isn't necessarily better, if I had it to do again I'd check out the 24-cut The Very Best of Huey "Piano Smith & the Clowns, Volume 1 (1999, Westside; evidently reissued 2013, Traditions). A- [cd]

J.B. Smith: No More Good Time in the World for Me (1965-66 [2015], Dust-to-Digital, 2CD): Bruce Jackson's field recordings of Prisoner No. 130196 at Ramsey State Farm in Rosharon, TX. This is much extended beyond the three songs that appeared on the Takoma LP Ever Since I Have Been a Man Full Grown (1965). All vocal, on some Smith may be leading others, a couple spoken sections every bit as dramatic. B+(**)

Old Music

2Pac: 2Pacalypse Now (1991, Interscope): Lesane Parish Crooks (1971-96), aka Tupac Shakur, first album, peaked at 64 on the charts but eventually went gold as his next three albums -- all he released before he was shot and killed -- proved increasingly popular. Nothing splashy here, just solid beats and fairly conventional observations, even "Words of Wisdom." B+(*)

2Pac: Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z... (1993, Interscope): Acronym allegedly stands for "Never Ig'nant Getting Goals Accomplished" with the "Z" signifying something plural, whatever any of that might mean, but I'll take the acronym over the onomatopoeia (I guess that's the right word). The album itself is also rather opaque, which may at least save it from being something worse. B

2Pac: Me Against the World (1995, Interscope): In 1992 Shakur's gun shot and killed a 6-year-old (he reportedly drew the gun, put it down, and it accidentally fired when one of his entourage picked it up -- who says "guns don't kill people; people do"?). In April 1993 Shakur pled to an assault charge, doing a few days in jail. In October Shakur was charged with shooting two off-duty cops, but charges were dropped. In November Shakur was charged with sexual assault and sentenced to 18-54 months in jail, but was released pending appeal. In early 1994 he was found guilty of assault and served 15 days in jail. In November he was robbed and shot five times -- an event detailed in the "Intro" here. In February 1995 he began serving his sentence for sexual assault, and was in jail when his third album topped the charts. I don't see when he got out of jail, but in September 1996 he was in Las Vegas, where he assaulted a Crips gang member and later that night was shot and killed. Shouldn't it be I Against the World? Not his worst grammatical offense, nor is his grammar his worst criminal trait. B-

2Pac: All Eyez on Me (1996, Death Row, 2CD): Working off his bail debt -- Suge Knight and Jimmy Iovine ponied up $1.4 million and got a deal for Shakur's next three, this counting as two. Two things: first is that the production has taken a big step forward -- nearly every song is full of ear candy, which had never been the case before; second is that the political context has given way in favor of the supposed luxuries of the thug life, a parable of capitalism triumphant. The combination, probably hyped by his martyrdom, sold more than five million copies. Actually, third thing: the auteur himself generally disappears into the mix, a trait which must have helped him become so prolific after his death. B+(*)

Aerosmith: Aerosmith's Greatest Hits (1972-79 [1980], Columbia): A hard-rocking band from Boston, one that I've rarely bothered with or took an interest in. This is their original best-of, LP-length at 10 songs, 37:32, often preferring edited-down singles to album cuts. Two originals rise above the generic, and the two covers at the end help. B+(**)

Aerosmith: Pump (1989, Geffen): This album (and its successor, Get a Grip, is their second act, a resurgence of hard and fast, presumably what made them in the first place. B-

Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes (1991, Atlantic): Singer-songwriter, plays piano, previously led a synthpop band that released an eponymous album, Y Kant Tori Read (1988). Not clear at this point which way this falls. B

Animal Collective: Sung Tongs (2004, Fat Cat): Evidently just a duo at this point, Avey Tare and Panda Bear, the idea to present a more stripped down sound, achieved by blocking out half the group. A typical piece is "Visiting Friends," with its basic folk guitar strum and background noises, not exactly animal sounds. Actually, more typical is the incoherent shit that follows. C+

Animal Collective: Feels (2005, Fat Cat): Back at full strength, which means they can add some harmony to the guitar riffs and they can keep a groove going on the rare occasions when they can find one. And when they can't, that's why they call it "experimental" -- frequent failure is to be expected. B+(*)

Birdman & Lil Wayne: Like Father, Like Son (2006, Cash Money/Universal): Bryan Williams pops up on records here and there, originally with Big Tymers, most recently with Young Thug, but his real claim to fortune (if not fame) was in co-founding Cash Money Records. This started as a mixtape to promote his biggest star -- Wayne is 13 years his junior -- and turned into a legit album. The father frames his business as a classic gangsta operation. The son plays along, showing respect, earning his keep. B+(***)

Neko Case: Blacklisted (2002, Bloodshot): Singer, grew up in Tacoma, joined Canadian alt/indie New Pornographers in 2000 but was also pursuing a solo career, initially on country-ish but later the country influence faded -- this album is transitional, neither here nor there. B+(*)

Cursive: Domestica (2000, Saddle Creek): Alt/indie band from Omaha, third album of seven 1997-2012, a little heavy-handed for my taste. B

Cursive: The Ugly Organ (2003, Saddle Creek): Proves its case against the organ, then sinks deeper. B-

The Deftones: White Pony (2000, Maverick): Alt-metal band, guess that means they can suspend the grind for a few moments of relative peacefulness and make something musical out of it. They do, several times, and while the vocal scream could easily wear thin, their grind is succinct enough I can get into it. B+(*)

Kurt Elling: Close Your Eyes (1994 [1995], Blue Note): Jazz singer, from Chicago, made a big splash with this his first album, impressing people with his quick shifts and flashy scat. I can't say he has an especially effective voice on ballads, but it's much clearer than on the new album, twenty years later. Has a good band with pianist Laurence Hobgood, and slots a couple guests on sax (notably Von Freeman). B

Kurt Elling: The Messenger (1994-96 [1997], Blue Note): Second album, leads with an impressive enough "Nature Boy" and a not-bad "April in Paris," but soon wanders into usual thing, way too convoluted for me to follow let alone care, although I noticed myself noticing the vocalese "Tanya Jean" on both plays, the hip-talkie "It's Just a Thing" too, plus there are scattered touches, like the saxophone. Cassandra Wilson joins in on "Time of the Season" -- I wouldn't call that success but it is sorta interesting, par for the album. B+(*)

Kurt Elling: This Time It's Love (1997-98 [1998], Blue Note): Like Betty Carter -- another singer I admire more than like -- he has a tight command on the band, and when he's not singing there's almost always something interesting going on. But I doubt I'll ever care much for his voice or mannerisms, especially when he loads up on the ballad schmaltz as he does here. B

Kurt Elling: Flirting With Twilight (2001, Blue Note): Seems like the same formula mix, but the voice is more plodding and very little strikes me as interesting, even in a bad way. B-

Kurt Elling: Man in the Air (2003, Blue Note): A Penguin Guide 4-star album, like Live in Chicago and Flirting With Twilight, although I can't begin to fathom why. (Unlike his first albums, where he seemed to have something novel going.) B-

Green Day: Kerplunk (1992, Lookout): Postpunk, early (second album), keeps it clean and straightforward. B+(*)

Green Day: Nimrod (1997, Reprise): Fifth album -- Dookie was their ten-million unit breakthrough, with Insomniac selling a couple million more, but neither much impressed me at the time. This is probably no better, but they do have a way of being hard and clean and crunchy at the same time. B+(**)

Green Day: Warning (2000, Reprise): Reviews argue over "maturity" but they mean things like the ability to construct credible songs along multiple lines, to slow down as well as speed up, and to throw things into the mix I never expected from this band. Doesn't feel like a masterpiece, and I doubt I'll ever love it, but there's not a bad moment. A-

Green Day: American Idiot (2004, Reprise): I assume the title song is for Bush, although he's hardly the only American idiot they could have targeted. It's as snappy as they ever got, but other pieces are merely loud, and when they toy with the Who's rock opera concept they can get, uh, operatic. B+(*)

Alan Jackson: Here in the Real World (1989, Arista): First album, leads off with the only song Jackson didn't have a hand in writing and it's the one song that comes off a bit stilted. He's clearly studied country music, coming up with a sound that came to be called neo-traditionalism -- like real country music -- and songs that ply classic country tropes, occasionally with a modern dollop (like "I like my sushi southern fried"). First single only made it to 45, but the next 27 went top 10, only 3 falling short of top 3. Four of them are here. B+(***)

Alan Jackson: Don't Rock the Jukebox (1991, Arista): Declares his fealty to country music over rock in the title song, and doesn't make you regret it, even though he's not the sort of guy who drinks doubles or hops trains. But he namechecks George Jones (twice, even eliciting a cameo), pays tribute to Hank, and spins Ernest Tubb around. A-

Alan Jackson: A Lot About Livin' (and a Little 'Bout Love) (1992, Arista): Five more singles, one cruising on a motorcycle, another in a Mercury (suggesting he's secretly been searching through old rock & roll records). B+(**)

Alan Jackson: Everything I Love (1996, Arista): Skipping ahead to his sixth album, he's become really consistent, mostly because his sound -- that fiddle and steel guitar and honky tonk piano -- is so appealing. Still, I note that this has a record number of other people's songs, including the ones that grab your attention ("Little Bitty," from Tom T. Hall, and "Who's Cheatin' Who," by Jerry Hayes). B+(**)

Alan Jackson: High Mileage (1998, Arista): Jackson dips a toe into the political economy. Sure, his "Little Man" wasn't a worker -- just a small business proprietor buried by big business, but when he thinks it through he'll find a worker, and maybe he'll find more than nostalgia. B+(***)

Alan Jackson: Under the Influence (1999, Arista): A dozen covers. You'd expect as devout a student of country music as Jackson to dig deeper into the tradition, but 10 (of 12) songs came out 1971-81, when he was 13-23 (the other two came out in 1963 and 1967). He picks Merle Haggard and George Jones twice, but his Hank is Jr. and he winds up in "Margaritaville" -- sober as usual. B

Alan Jackson: When Somebody Loves You (2000, Arista): Seems to be struggling with his writing -- song titles include "www.memory" and "Three Minute Positive Not Too Country Up-Tempo Love Song" -- but the songs he picked off the rack are pretty lame. Maybe one can make a case for "It's Alright to Be a Redneck" but you need a better song than the one Bill Kenner and Paul McLaughlin wrote. B

Alan Jackson: Like Red on a Rose (2006, Arista Nashville): Alison Krauss replaces Jackson's longtime producer Keith Stegall here. The most obvious result is that everything slows down, but also note that Jackson only penned one song, and that was a remake ("A Woman's Love"). B+(*)

Killers: Hot Fuss (2004, Island/Universal): From Las Vegas, which has shed its tawdriness to become the home of homegenized American culture. Even the group's name have become as main street as apple pie. Still, seems like a perfectly average new wave rock band. B

Frankie Knuckles: Beyond the Mix (1991, Virgin): Francis Nicholls, born in the Bronx but became "The Godfather of House Music" DJing in Chicago. This was his first album, nine fine dance tracks, plus an undanceable gospel wail, "Soon I Will Be Done." B+(**)

Frankie Knuckles: Best of Frankie Knuckles (1986-87 [1998], Mirakkle): I don't think anyone has tried to assemble a career retrospective for Knuckles like Rhino did for Larry Levan, so the "best-ofs" are side glimpses. I was only able to track down about half of these 12-inchers (5-of-12 released under Knuckles' name), and they all come from his first year or two of recording. ("It's a Cold World") B+(**)

Lil Wayne: Tha Block Is Hot (1999, Cash Money/Universal): First album from the New Orleans rapper, must have been about 17 at the time, but he had signed with Cash Money when he was nine and had been in the Hot Boys. Long (70:18), most tracks have "featuring" credits (but not big stars -- mostly his old crew: B.G., Juvenile, [Young] Turk, producer Mannie Fresh). Basically a mixtape, gone platinum. B+(**)

Lil Wayne: 500 Degreez (2002, Cash Money/Universal): Third album, another long one (70:21), Mannie Fresh again produces, but the "featuring" credits are way down as Wayne (Dwayne Michael Carter) comes into his own. B+(***)

Lil Wayne: Tha Carter (2004, Cash Money/Universal): Fourth album, a breakthrough at least in the sense that he returned to this title three more times, even though this didn't sell nearly as well as his debut. Even longer (79:07), chock full of hooks -- even one called "Hoes" is too catchy to fret over. A-

Lil Wayne: Tha Carter II (2005, Cash Money/Universal): His worldview has finally settled down to "get money/fuck bitches," although sometimes he swaps the priority. But he doesn't stop there, and in the long run -- and his records always run long -- I can't help but marvel at the beats and grooves and wordplay, sometimes even the change ups. A-

Lil Wayne: The Leak (2007, Cash Money, EP): Five tracks, 19:29, leaked outtakes from The Carter III sessions, quickly turned into product, then eventually palmed off as bait for the album's "deluxe edition." B+(**)

M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (2003, Gooom Disques): French electronic group, second album, last with co-founder Nicolas Fromageau (survived by Anthony Gonzalez). Multiple synths, have some appeal when you can sort them out but not much when they amass into huge curtains of sound. B-

M83: Saturdays = Youth (2008, Mute): I guess someone told them they'd need vocals to break pop, so they subcontracted some. B

Maxwell: Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite (1996, Columbia): First album from one of the blander neo-soul discoveries of the '90s. No doubt it flows. B

The Microphones: The Glow, Pt. 2 (2002, K): Early lo-fi project from singer-songwriter Phil Elvrum, recorded four main albums 1999-2003 plus a lot of mini-albums, EPs, singles, etc. -- Elvrum adopted the last of his album titles, Mount Eerie, as moniker from 2005 on. This one is very erratic, with many flashes of promise, some noisy and some not. Evidently, "The Glow, Pt. 1" was just a track on the previous album, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water. B+(**)

Miguel: All I Want Is You (2010, Jive): Debut album, makes his bid at a "love man" and backs it up with slinky, marginally funky rhythm. B+(**)

My Chemical Romance: Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (2004, Reprise): I guess you'd call this an emo band: a little anguished which comes off as heavy but not quite metal. Recorded four albums (2002-10), this the second their major label breakthrough. B-

Ride: Nowhere (1990, Sire): British shoegaze band, cut five albums 1990-96 but only the first two are well-regarded. This is their debut, a steady, rolling storm of guitar wrapped around songs with some pop appeal. B+(***)

Slint: Spiderland (1991, Touch & Go): Math rock band from Louisville, started out in punk then mixed up time signatures, volume levels, etc., working in spoken word vocals -- considered innovative although they also come off as tentative and unfocused, at least on this, their second and last album. B

The Sonics: Here Are the Sonics (1965, Etiquette): Garage rock band from Tacoma, first album, four original songs by singer-keyboardist Gerry Roslie ("The Witch," "Boss Hoss," "Psycho," and "Strychnine") padded with eight covers (two from Berry Gordy) done as rough and raw as they could. Retro even then. A-

The Sonics: Boom (1967, Etiquette): Second album, similar mix of originals (5) and covers (8), though neither are quite up to the first album's. B+(**)

Swervedriver: Mezcal Head (1993, A&M): British group, second of four albums from their 1991-98 heyday, a little on the heavy side of shoegaze, but the guitar pulse is strong, consistent, a bit nervous. B+(**)

System of a Down: Toxicity (2001, American): LA hardcore group's second album -- AMG considers them alt metal, overlooking the humor and politics and quirky rhythms, although I have to admit no real hardcore group would interpose a hymn about "when Angels deserve to die," or the Gypsy touches that anticipate Gogol Bordello. (One metal trait is that they tend to wear out their welcome.) B+(*)

Tamikrest: Adagh (2010, Glitterbeat): Tuareg group from northeast Mali, dodged civil war in a French school and picked up scattered western influences which they combined following the model of Tinariwen. Discovered at Festival au Désert in 2008, which led to Chris Eckman (of Dirtmusic and the Walkabouts) producing this first album. B+(**)

Tamikrest: Toumastin (2011, Glitterbeat): Christgau went through the trot sheet and approves ("tell the world that a little education can be a broadening thing"). I'll settle for the sound, which is clear in details that are rarely rushed -- there are certainly hotter Tuareg bands. A-

The Unicorns: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003, Alien8): Canadian band, from Montreal, their only studio album (not counting a limited edition live set and a couple EPs, one from a brief reunion in 2014). Lo-fi, likes flutes, not without a certain element of whimsy. B+(*)

Revised Grades

Sometimes further listening leads me to change an initial grade, usually either because I move on to a real copy, or because someone else's review or list makes me want to check it again:

Miguel: Kaleidoscope Dream (2012, RCA): Listening to the new one, I suspected that I must have underrated this widely praised second album smash, but the first few cuts -- through the title track -- were limper than anything on the first or third, and when it got better it wasn't by much. B+(*)

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section:

• 2Pac: Better Dayz (1994-96 [2002], Interscope, 2CD): B-
• Aerosmith: Rocks (1976, Columbia): B
• Aerosmith: Gems (1973-82 [1988], Columbia): B
• Aerosmith: Get a Grip (1993, Geffen): B-
• Tori Amos: Strange Little Girls (2001, Atlantic): C+
• Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam (2007, Domino): B+(*)
• Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009, Domino): B+(*)
• Animal Collective: Centipede Hz (2012, Domino): B-
• Neko Case & Her Boyfriends: Furnace Room Lullaby (2000, Bloodshot): B+
• Neko Case: Live From Austin TX (2003 [2007], New West): B-
• Neko Case: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2006, Anti-): B
• Neko Case: Middle Cyclone (2009, Anti-): B
• Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You (2013, Anti-): B+(**)
• The Deftones: Diamond Eyes (2009 [2010], Reprise): B-
• Kurt Elling: Live in Chicago (1999 [2000], Blue Note): B
• Kurt Elling: Nightmoves (2007, Concord): C+
• Kurt Elling: Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman (2009, Concord): B-
• Kurt Elling: The Gate (2010 [2011], Concord): B-
• Kurt Elling: 1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project (2012, Concord): C+
• Green Day: Dookie (1994, Reprise): B+
• Green Day: Insomniac (1995, Reprise): B
• Alan Jackson: Who I Am (1994, Arista): B+
• Alan Jackson: The Greatest Hits Collection (1989-95 [1995], Arista): A-
• Alan Jackson: Drive (2002, Arista): B+
• Alan Jackson: 16 Biggest Hits (1989-2002 [2007], Arista Nashville/Legacy): A-
• Alan Jackson: What I Do (2004, Arista Nashville): B+(***)
• Alan Jackson: Good Time (2008, Arista Nashville): A-
• Alan Jackson: 34 Number Ones (1989-2008 [2010], Arista Nashville, 2CD): B+(***)
• Alan Jackson: Freight Train (2010, Arista Nashville): B+(**)
• Alan Jackson: Thirty Miles West (2012, ACR/EMI Nashville): B+(**)
• Lil Wayne: Da Drought 3 (2007, self-released, 2CD): A-
• Lil Wayne: The Dought Is Over 2: The Carter 3 Sessions (2007, self-released): B+(***)
• Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III (2008, Cash Money/Universal/Motown): A-
• Lil Wayne: No Ceilings (2010, self-released): A-
• Lil Wayne: Rebirth (2010, Universal/Motown/Cash Money): B-
• Lil Wayne: I Am Not a Human Being (2010, Universal/Motown): B+(**)
• Lil Wayne: Tha Carter IV (2011, Motown/Cash Money): B+(*)
• Lil Wayne: I Am Not a Human Being II (2013, Cash Money/Republic): B+(**)
• Maxwell: BLACKsummers'night (2009, Columbia): B+(*)
• Ride: Going Blank Again (1992, Sire): B+
• The Sonics: Introducing the Sonics (1967, Jerden): B+(**)
• Tamikrest: Chatma (2013, Glitterbeat): A-

Notes

Everything streamed from Rhapsody, except as noted in brackets following the grade:

• [cd] based on physical cd
• [cdr] based on an advance or promo cd or cdr
• [bc] available at bandcamp.com
• [sc] available at soundcloud.com
[os] some other stream source
• [dl] something I was able to download from the web; may be freely available, may be a bootleg someone made available, or may be a publicist promo

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Monday, August 17, 2015

Music: Current count 25326 [25277] rated (+49), 426 [432] unrated (-6).

Huge rated count. I got off to a fast start when I decided to fill in the records I hadn't previously heard by Kurt Elling and Alan Jackson, both with new records last week. I've never cared for Elling, but he has a huge reputation, including four Penguin Guide 4-stars. Main thing I found out was that his exuberance on the first two albums makes his mannerisms more palatable. After Elling, Jackson cleaned my ears out, and the albums were so short they piled up fast. Still best, I think, to approach his early work through compilations, like 1995's The Greatest Hits Collection, or 2007's more economical 16 Biggest Hits. His new one, Angels and Alcohol, was A- last week. (Elling's new Passion World came in at C: by my reckoning his worst ever, not that Night Moves or 1619 Broadway were much better.)

The next thing that happened was that Phil Overeem posted a list on Facebook of his top 50 albums so far this year. I jotted them down in my notebook, and tallied up that 25 of the 34 I had heard were rated B+(***) or higher. That's close enough to my taste that I tried tracking down the rest. I managed to find 11 of the missing 16, and the first three (79rs Gang, Nots, Mdou Moctar) came in at A- (as did, later on, Dead Moon). Overeem's list also included the new Sonics album (***), which led me to their back catalog and a belated A- for their 1965 debut. Of the remaining five, I managed to find bits of Big Chief Don Pardo and Golden Comanche (New Orleans Indians) and the Reactionaries (pre-Minutemen D. Boon from 1979) -- not enough to rate but both sounded promising. That leaves three albums to keep an eye open for: Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago; Iris DeMent, The Trackless Woods; and J.D. Allen, Graffiti.

I had, by the way, tracked down Coneheads (***) and The Red Line Comp (*) from earlier Overeem notices -- I would never have known about them otherwise. One thing I had trouble with was hip-hop: three albums (two from Overeem's list -- Doomtree and Vince Staples -- plus Future) wound up at B+(***). I gave them two plays each, all were pretty good, but they didn't come through quite clearly enough to grade higher. That seems to be happening a lot -- others on my 2015 list: Joey Badass, Action Bronson, Cannibal Ox, Rae Sremmurd. Or maybe that's just a normal break: A- hip-hop so far: BBNG/Ghostface Killah, Heems, Kendrick Lamar, Murs.

Michael Tatum, who's resumed his A Downloader's Diary, recommended Songhoy Blues -- a close second, I think, to Moctar's soundtrack. Overeem also recommended the new Tamikrest (**), so I went back and filled in the old ones, netting Toumastin. Mamman Sani (Overeem picked his 2013 album) is also from Niger, but not in the dessert blues genre -- more like spacey electronic minimalism. It was a big help for me finding Sahel Sounds on Bandcamp -- will probably explore some more older titles later on.

That didn't leave a lot of time for my current jazz queue, but I moved Irène Schweizer to the front and was dazzled: not a surprise given that her previous record with Han Bennink was an A -- one of 4 A records I credit her with (plus 5 A-). A really great pianist, and a pretty great percussionist too. The one I still recommend to start with is her 2006 2-CD compilation, Portrait. Maybe I should change its grade to A+.

Biondini (*), Braden (*), Halvorson (***), Harris (**), Letizia (**), Maestro (*), Mazzarella (***), and Orozco (**) also came from the new jazz queue, but I had to grab James Brandon Lewis (A-) from Rhapsody. I did find some mail on the record, apparently with a watermarked download link I never bothered with. No telling how many records like that slip past me. My pre-crash system for dealing with download links is still broken -- Firefox refuses to connect to a mail server that has self-signed SSL certificates, even after storing the exception, so my message-passing mechanism is broken. Also, all the ECM links I had are stale now, and I find myself not caring enough to get them refreshed. Similarly, I hardly ever deal with the world music links I get from Rock Paper Scissors: true that a high percentage of important world music comes through them, but also true that that's a small slice of what they promote. I keep getting disabused of the concept that I can cover it all. There needs to be some meeting of the willing for this to work, but this week at least it seems to have worked pretty well.

Robert Christgau found a new outlet for his Expert Witness -- I still think of it as The Consumer Guide -- column, at Noisey, promising a new one every Friday. Last week's covered three "love men" he likes more than I do: Miguel (***), Jason Derulo (*), and (most surprising) Sam Smith (B- last time I heard it), with Tinashe (**) and Oceaán (* -- the only one I hadn't previously checked out) in the HMs. Once again, he's catching up to make up for the downtime since Medium sacked him in early June. I've noticed, for instance, that there were 17 albums on his 2013 Dean's List that he never caught up with when he moved from MSN to Cuepoint. (My plan is to add stubs in his website database for those records -- presumably all A- or A, but not my place to say. I'm also looking through earlier lists to see if anything else should be stubbed -- thus far I've found three albums, but it's a slow slog to check everything.)

By the way, I am getting closer to doing an update of Christgau's website. I've already uploaded a number of fixes since the ISP's server change ("upgrade") broke some old code, but the long delay demanded by Medium and my own procrastination kept me from doing an update to the CG database. Right now, I have everything from Medium in my local copy, and I'm working through some proofreading (my heroes there are George Allan and Lucas Fagen). Probably later this week, assuming I don't hold it up to do more stub work. (I've long thought that the artist pages should list albums that don't have proper CG reviews but do have significant mentions in lists or ACN, so that's a long-term project.)

I should also mention that I got a notice today that Carola Dibbell's recent novel, The Only Ones, is now available as an audiobook, narrated by Sasha Dunbrooke.

New records rated this week:

• 79rs Gang: Fire on the Bayou (2015, Sinking City/Urban Unrest): [r]: A-
• Gregg Allman: Gregg Allman Live: Back to Macon, GA (2014 [2015], Rounder, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Luciano Biondini: Senza Fine (2014 [2015], Intakt): [cd]: B+(*)
• Don Braden: Luminosity (2010-14 [2015], Creative Perspective Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jay Collins and the Kings County Band: Rivers Blues and Other People (2012, Sundown): [r]: B+(***)
• Doomtree: All Hands (2015, Doomtree): [r]: B+(***)
• Future: DS2 (2015, Epic): [r]: B+(***)
• Mary Halvorson: Meltframe (2014 [2015], Firehouse 12): [cd]: B+(***)
• Lafayette Harris, Jr. Trio: Bend to the Light (2011 [2015], Airmen): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gaetano Letizia/Mike Clark/Wilbur Krebs: Froggy & the Toads (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• James Brandon Lewis: Days of FreeMan (2015, Okeh): [r]: A-
• Shai Maestro Trio: Untold Stories (2014 [2015], Motema): [cd]: B+(*)
• Nick Mazzarella Trio: Ultraviolet (2015, International Anthem): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mdou Moctar: Afelan (2013, Sahel Sounds): [bc]: B+(*)
• Mdou Moctar: Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai [Original Soundtrack Recording] (2015, Sahel Sounds): [bc]: A-
• Nots: We Are Nots (2014, Goner): [dl]: A-
• Obnox: Know America (2015, Ever/Never): [bc]: B+(*)
• Oceaán: The Grip (2014, B3SCI, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• César Orozco & Kamarata Jazz: No Limits for Tumbao (2015, Alfi): [cd]: B+(**)
• Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (2015, Intakt): [cd]: A
• Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (2015, Atlantic): [r]: A-
• The Sonics: This Is the Sonics (2015, Revox): [r]: B+(***)
• Vince Staples: Summertime '06 (2015, Def Jam, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Tamikrest: Taksera (2015, Glitterbeat): [r]: B+(**)

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

• Dead Moon: Live at Satyricon (1993 [2015], Voodoo Doughnut): [r]: A-
• Phil Haynes: Sanctuary (1999 [2015], Corner Store Jazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Mammane Sani et Son Orgue: La Musique Electronique du Niger (1978 [2013], Sahel Sounds): [bc]: B+(***)
• Mamman Sani: Taaritt (1985-88 [2014], Sahel Sounds): [bc]: B+(**)
• J.B. Smith: No More Good Time in the World for Me (1965-66 [2015], Dust-to-Digital, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)

Old records rated this week:

• Kurt Elling: Close Your Eyes (1994 [1995], Blue Note): [r]: B
• Kurt Elling: The Messenger (1994-96 [1997], Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Kurt Elling: This Time It's Love (1997-98 [1998], Blue Note): [r]: B
• Kurt Elling: Flirting With Twilight (2001, Blue Note): [r]: B-
• Kurt Elling: Man in the Air (2003, Blue Note): [r]: B-
• Alan Jackson: Here in the Real World (1989, Arista): [r]: B+(***)
• Alan Jackson: Don't Rock the Jukebox (1991, Arista): [r]: A-
• Alan Jackson: A Lot About Livin' (and a Little 'Bout Love) (1992, Arista): [r]: B+(**)
• Alan Jackson: Everything I Love (1996, Arista): [r]: B+(**)
• Alan Jackson: High Mileage (1998, Arista): [r]: B+(***)
• Alan Jackson: Under the Influence (1999, Arista): [r]: B
• Alan Jackson: When Somebody Loves You (2000, Arista): [r]: B
• Alan Jackson: Like Red on a Rose (2006, Arista Nashville): [r]: B+(*)
• The Sonics: Here Are the Sonics (1965, Etiquette): [r]: A-
• The Sonics: Boom (1966, Etiquette): [r]: B+(**)
• Tamikrest: Adagh (2010, Glitterbeat): [r]: B+(**)
• Tamikrest: Toumastin (2011, Glitterbeat): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Barry Altschul & 3Dom Factor: Tales of the Unforeseen (TUM): September 18
• Tad Britton: Cicada (Origin): August 21
• Electric Squeezebox Orchestra: Cheap Rent (OA2): August 21
• Liberty Ellman: Radiate (Pi): August 21
• Garrison Fewell: Invisible Resonance Trio (Creative Nation Music): September 25
• Clay Giberson: Minga Minga (Origin): August 21
• Josh Maxey: Celebration of Soul (Miles High)
• Olavi Trio: Oh, La Vie! (TUM): September 18
• Juli Wood Quartet: Synnkä Metsä (Dark Forest) (OA2): August 21

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Sunday, August 16, 2015

I just saw a tweet by Ben Norton (author of an article linked to below). It consists of two lists: "places bombed by the US" and "places where ISIS is growing." The lists are identical: "Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan." The only chance the US has of breaking that identity would be for the US to bomb more non-Muslim countries.

Some scattered links this week:

• William D Cohan: How Wall Street's Bankers Stayed Out of Jail: "After the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than 1,000 bankers were jailed." However, after the much larger 2008 financial crisis? One, even though plenty of wrongdoing was uncovered:

  Since 2009, 49 financial institutions have paid various government entities and private plaintiffs nearly $190 billion in fines and settlements, according to an analysis by the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. That may seem like a big number, but the money has come from shareholders, not individual bankers. (Settlements were levied on corporations, not specific employees, and paid out as corporate expenses -- in some cases, tax-deductible ones.) In early 2014, just weeks after Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, settled out of court with the Justice Department, the bank's board of directors gave him a 74 percent raise, bringing his salary to $20 million.

  The more meaningful number is how many Wall Street executives have gone to jail for playing a part in the crisis. That number is one. (Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse, is serving a 30-month sentence for inflating the value of mortgage bonds in his trading portfolio, allowing them to appear more valuable than they really were.)

  The authors quote several sources arguing that, despite all those fines paid by companies, "the evidence does not show clear misconduct by individuals." What this suggests to me is that we as a country (at least our prosecutors, who are usually pretty vigilant about such things) have radically changed our view of individual responsibility for ethical behavior: either we consider things ethical now that were deemed unethical two decades ago (especially in pursuit of corporate and/or personal profits), or we think that individuals (extending up to corporate CEOs) no longer have sufficient autonomy to be considered responsible for their own actions. I suppose there is a third possibility (or factor), which is that the political system has become so corrupt that it's become all but unthinkable to prosecute the donor class. But no matter how you slice this, it speaks volumes about the moral rot that goes hand-in-hand with a world of increasing inequality and decreasing democracy.

• Conor Friedersdorf: A Letter to Donald Trump Supporters With One Big Question:

  Dear Donald Trump Supporters:

  You're fed up. This much I understand. You're fed up with politicians who say one thing on the campaign trail, like that they're going to stop illegal immigration, and then do another in Washington; you're fed up with insiders who rig the system for their benefit at your expense; and you're fed up with coastal media elites and their insular subculture. [ . . . ]

  What I don't understand is why you think a President Trump would treat us better. If you elect the billionaire, what makes you think that he will use whatever talents that he possesses to address your grievances rather than to benefit himself? After all, he's a man who has zealously pursued his self-interest all his life. [ . . . ]

  Right now, Trump is telling you all the things you want to hear.

  There was a time when his two ex-wives and the many former business partners he has since sued felt the same way. Those relationships didn't work out very well for them.

  Why do you think that you'll fare better?

  "Trump brags about making a lot of money in Atlantic City, then ditching the place as it slid into misery," Michael Brendan Dougherty observed in The Week. "Believing Trump will bring America back is as foolish as believing he would bring Atlantic City back. Unlike Rubio and Bush, he's a free man -- and perfectly willing to walk away and say it was your fault, but that he enjoyed the ride anyway."

  Trump is a billionaire, you say, so he won't need to pander to special interests -- unlike other Republicans, he can ignore the business lobby and stop illegal immigration.

  But that makes no sense. Granted, Trump has all the money he'll ever need, yet that's been true for decades, and he's continued to expend a lot of effort to earn still more money. Like other men with significant, diversified business holdings -- some of them hotels and golf courses, no less! -- a large supply of cheap immigrant labor is in his personal financial interests. If the business elite is for illegal immigration, he is the business elite! And he'll face the exact same political incentives as every other elected Republican from George W. Bush to John McCain. [ . . . ]

  Instead you're just taking him on faith. Why? Does Trump strike you as a person who is unusually inclined to keep his word? Someone who never flip-flops? Come on.

  On the other hand, there's already a Trump Fulfills Campaign Promise article out -- clearly, the bar's so low it doesn't take much.

  Also see Stanley Aronowitz: The Real Reason Donald Trump Embarrasses the GOP:

  At the debate and numerous public appearances, Trump has matter-of-factly stated that he is an equal opportunity donor to Republican and Democratic candidates -- not for the purpose of civic duty or altruism, but in exchange for influence. He has openly deemed his gifts to politicians a business expense. He went so far as to declare, before 24 million viewers at the debate, that he uses his donations to obtain favors from legislators who are all too eager to bow to his requests. He not-so-subtly implies that politicians are bought and paid for by him and other financial moguls. And he expects a fair return for those dollars, measured in policy rewards like zoning adjustments, subsidies for building projects and long-term tax relief.

  In short, he lets the cat out of the bag about something the political system has spent more than a century to disguise.

• Fred Kaplan: Shallow Jeb: Jeb Brush tried to burnish his foreign policy cred with a 40-minute speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Kaplan describes it as "a hodgepodge of revisionist history, shallow analysis, and vague prescriptions." The main revisionist claim is the assertion that the Petraeus "surge" in Iraq was a big success which gave the US a "hard-won victory," which was in turn squandered by Obama's withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011. Every word in that claim is false, but it has already become gospel among Republican presidential aspirants. From such false premises, all sorts of insane inferences can be made.

  Later in Tuesday night's speech, Bush said that the Iraq surge can serve as a model for how "Islamic moderates can be pulled away from extremist forces" in Syria. I doubt that he was proposing to send 100,000 U.S. troops to Syria, as his brother did in Iraq -- an idea that would appeal to almost no American generals or voters. But what he was proposing isn't at all clear. [ . . . ]

  He did say, "In all of this," referring to the fight against jihadists, "the United States must engage with friends and allies, and lead again in that vital region." Which friends and allies does he mean? The Saudis try to rope us into a savage, fruitless war against the Houthi rebels, whom it portrays as Iranian proxies. The Turks lend us an air base to step up strikes against ISIS but then use the moment of goodwill as cover to attack their bigger enemy, the Kurds, who rank as the jihadists' most potent foe (and to whom Bush promised in his speech to send heavy armaments). ISIS derives much of its strength from the deep disunity of its natural foes, some of whom are our allies, some of whom aren't. "Action, coordination and American leadership," the solutions Bush calls for, are more complex than he -- and many other Republicans who have never held national office -- seems to recognize.

  He criticized Obama for drawing a "red line" against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, then failing to follow through. Many of Obama's defenders have filed the same complaint. But what would Bush do? "Under my strategy," he said, "the aim would be to draw the [Syrian] moderates together and back them up as one force . . . not just in taking the fight to the enemy but in helping them to form a stable moderate government once ISIS is defeated and Assad is gone." How would he do this? By replicating his brother's surge in Iraq. After all, he added with blithe confidence, "the strategic elements in both cases [Iraq circa 2007 and Syria today] are the same" -- thus demonstrating that he and his speechwriters have no understanding of the tangled politics in Syria or of what made the Iraqi surge work to the extent that it did.

  The most malleable concept here is "Islamic moderates" -- the proper definition seems to be "Muslims who are willing to follow the US lead," which actually says less about them than about us. Following the Surge -- which if you recall at the time escalated the violence without any tangible results -- a number Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq made a deal with the US where in exchange for money and protection from Shiite militias and the central Iraqi government they turned against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, thereby becoming "Islamic moderates." When the US left, the deal broke down, and the same tribal leaders discovered they would be better off siding with ISIS than with the Maliki government. Clearly, for them becoming "radicals" or "moderates" is mere tactics.

  I don't think I've mentioned this before, but for some insight into where Bush's money comes from, see Nomi Prins: All In: The Bush Family Goes for Number Three (With the Help of Its Bankers). You don't think he's running for president on brains or looks, now do you?

• Matt Riedl: Kris Kobach comments on how GOP has done on six key issues: Kansas' Secretary of State is probably more wired into ALEC and its push to enact right-wing legislation at the state level, so it's interesting both what he considers the critical issues and how he measures progress. The six: "guns, abortion, elections, illegal immigration, taxation and spending, and courts." He likes what Kansas has done on the first three: "constitutional carry" means criminals as well as citizens don't have to get permits or have any training to carry guns; late-term abortions have been banished in Kansas, though he doesn't mention that the trick there was extralegal: the murder of Dr. George Tiller; and Kobach himself has been empowered to prosecute his imaginary "election fraud" cases. He's had more trouble pushing his anti-immigrant laws (hint: there are business interests in the state that profit from cheap labor). On taxes, he touts the Brownback cuts that have brought disaster, but bemoans this year's regressive tax increase that was needed to keep the state solvent. As for the courts, he complains about "no accountability" and says "we need to have a court that's not activist in striking things down." The main complaint Republicans have with the Kansas Supreme Court is that the Court has ruled that the State Constitution requires adequate funding of local schools, and that messes with their tax/spending cut agenda. But then Kobach has such a peculiar notion of constitutionality that he's constantly running into trouble with the courts.

• Some Iran Deal links:

  • Abbas Milani/Michael McFaul: What the Iran-Deal Debate Is Like in Iran: Long story short, most Iranians -- especially the sort of people who westerners hope will moderate the Revolution -- support the deal, while many of those who are heavily invested in Iran's opposition to the west are opposed to the deal (much like their hawkish counterparts in the US and Israel -- indeed the rationales and tactics are almost equivalent):

    Conservative opponents of the deal tend to emphasize its near-term negative security consequences. They point out that the agreement will roll back Iran's nuclear program, which was intended to deter an American or Israeli attack, and thereby increase Iran's vulnerability. They have denounced the system for inspecting Iranian nuclear facilities as an intelligence bonanza for the CIA. And they have issued blistering attacks on the incompetence of Iran's negotiating team, claiming that negotiators caved on many key issues and were outmaneuvered by more clever and sinister American diplomats.

    And yet such antagonism appears to be about more than the agreement's clauses and annexes. The deal's hardline adversaries also seem concerned about the same longer-term consequences that the moderates embrace. For instance, IRGC leaders must worry that a lifting of sanctions will undermine their business arrangements for contraband trade. In a not-too-discreet reference to these concerns, Rouhani declared them to be "peddlers of sanctions," adding that "they are angry at the agreement" while the people of Iran pay the price for their profiteering. Over time, more exposure to the wider world of commerce is likely to diminish if not destroy the IRGC's lucrative no-bid government contracts for infrastructure and construction projects.

    Perhaps more threatening for this coalition is the loss of America as a scapegoat for all domestic problems. The conservatives need an external enemy to excuse their corrupt, inefficient, and repressive rule. Some have even suggested that the United States is trying to do to Iran what it did to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev foolishly trusted U.S. President Ronald Reagan and sought closer ties with the West. The result was the collapse of the Soviet regime.

    Obviously, some conservatives like Ayatollah Khamanei are not too worried about the deal bringing down the political system, but he probably has a broader view of the system than the Revolutionary Guards do. Conversely, Reagan's opening to Gorbachev was opposed by nearly all of Reagan's cold war advisers, who were convinced to the end that the Evil Empire's reform efforts were just a feint to get the US to lower its guard. Deal critics who keep bringing up Iranian mobs chanting "death to America" are every bit as far estranged from reality.

  • Michael R Gordon: Head of Group Opposing Iran Accord Quits Post, Saying He Backs Deal: The group, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) was founded by Gary Samore several years ago to agitate for harsh sanctions against Iran over its suspected (alleged) nuclear program. However, Samore concluded that the deal does in fact address his concerns, so he's come out in favor of it, saying, "I think President Obama's strategy succeeded. He has created economic leverage and traded it away for Iranian nuclear concessions." UANI, in turn, rejected the deal, nudged him out, and replaced him with a more politically dependable flack, Joe Lieberman (you remember: McCain's favorite "useful idiot"). Samore, by the way, is still very anti-Iran.

    He is also not convinced that Iran will continue to adhere to the accord once economic sanctions are lifted. Even so, he argues, the accord will put the United States in a stronger position to respond than a congressional rejection would.

    "We will have bought a couple of years, and if Iran cheats or reneges we will be in an even better position to double down on sanctions or, if necessary, use military force," Mr. Samore said. "If I knew for certain that in five years they would cheat or renege, I'd still take the deal."

    He'd take the deal because he seems to be one of the few people who was actually worried about Iran's "nuclear program" -- as opposed to the many who have cynically manufactured the spectre of an Iranian bomb to show off their own toughness. Had those people actually been worried, they would have been hard pressed to favor a strategy -- continued sanctions and threats of war -- that would only push Iran's efforts further underground over one that fully discloses whatever Iran is doing.

  • Richard Silverstein: Israeli Ex-Security Chiefs Endorse Iran Nuclear Deal: Thirty-six of them, although some appear more interested in the bonanza of military hardware Obama is offering Israel. The fact is that Israeli opinion at all levels is very divided on the deal, so you'd think that Americans -- especially those whose primary loyalty is to Israel -- would be equally divided. But Netanyahu has made a big deal out of rejecting the deal -- and I suspect this is for pure political reasons, as it benefits him to show his right-wing supporters that he can stand up to America and even kick her around a little -- and AIPAC is less an Israeli front than the Likud's Washington PAC.

  • Mel Levine: On Iran, a regrettable rush to judgment: A former congressman (D-CA 1983-93) and AIPAC board member comes out in favor of the Iran deal, arguing that "my friends in AIPAC and some of my friends in Israel have made a regrettable rush to judgment in immediately opposing the Iran agreement and doing so in ways likely to cause long-term harm to Israel, especially in terms of Israel's vital need for bipartisan support in the United States."

  • Daniel Levy: Israel's Iran Deal Enthusiasts: An authoritative summary of Israeli reaction to the Iran Deal, which roughly breaks down: against are the politicians and pundits, especially Netanyahu; in favor are the security and science czars (Uzi Even, a physics professor and former senior scientist at the Dimona nuclear reactor, concluded "the deal was written by nuclear experts and blocks every path I know to the bomb"). Levy goes on to explain Israel's strategly:

    Israel led the push to isolate Iran via focusing on its nuclear program and the nonproliferation imperative. That took some chutzpah, given that Israel sits on the Middle East's only nuclear weapons stockpile -- but before milk and honey, Israel has always been a land flowing with chutzpah. Israel assumed that either its own Washington lobby could indefinitely hold U.S. negotiators to an unrealistically maximalist negotiating position or that Iran would never offer a pragmatic compromise or both. For as long as the deadlock held, Iran would remain at least a permanently sanctioned pariah; regime change was the preferred alternative, successful diplomacy was never the goal.

    The bet paid off pretty well for the better part of two decades. Despite its size and lack of natural regional allies, Israel has enjoyed a degree of unchallenged regional hegemony, freedom of military action, and diplomatic cover that it is understandably reluctant to concede or even recalibrate. Israel's status has been underwritten by U.S. preeminence in the region, which offered other countries there a binary choice: Either side with the United States and, by extension, go easy on Israel or stand against it and be isolated or worse (see: Iraq).

  • Ben Norton: AIPAC spending estimated $40 million to oppose Iran Deal:

    In the first half of 2015, AIPAC spent approximately $1.7 million lobbying Congress to oppose the deal. Yet this is mere chump change compared to what it has since funneled into advertisements and lobbying.

    AIPAC created a new tax-exempt lobbying group in July called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. The sole purpose of the organization is to oppose the Iran deal -- which, in spite of the name of the group, will in fact prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons (weapons the Iranian government denies ever even seeking in the first place, and for which there is not a shred of evidence) in return for an end to Western sanctions on the country.

    Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran is spending up to $40 million to place anti-Iran deal ads in 35 states, according to the Times, up from a previous estimate of $20 million. This figure may increase even more as the 60-day period in which Congress can review the deal draws to a close.

    Part of AIPAC's lobbying effort involves flying members of Congress to Israel for some intensive Hasbara; for instance, see: AIPAC taking all but 3 freshmen Congresspeople to Israel in effort to sabotage Iran deal.

  • Gareth Porter: Don't Expect Much Change in Post-Vienna US Middle East Policy: That's basically because Obama is pushing the deal not as a diplomatic breakthrough which buries past sins and opens up a future of US-Iranian cooperation but as a narrow arrangement which reliably contains Iran's malevolent nuclear ambitions while changing nothing else. (Porter previously complained about this in Obama's Line on the Iran Nuclear Deal: A Second False Narrative. You can get a sense of Porter's take on Iran's nuclear program from his book title, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.)

    There are obviously some differences between the administration and its pro-Israel and Saudi critics regarding Iran's regional role. Otherwise Obama would not even acknowledge the possibility of discussions with Iran in the future. But it would be a mistake to ignore the degree to which Obama's weakness in the face of the lobby's arguments about the regional dimension of the agreement reflects its acceptance of the basic premises of those arguments -- just as it has accepted the lobby's premise that Iran has been trying obtain nuclear weapons.

    Obama and senior administration officials have repeated many times in the past two years the mantra that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and that its regional role is destabilizing. Key US national security institutions also continue to reinforce that hoary political line on Iran as well. The well-worn habits of mind of senior officials and institutional interest will certainly continue to impose severe limits on the administration's diplomatic flexibility with regard to both Iran and Saudi Arabia through the end of the Obama administration.

    As you should recall, Netanyahu has been harping about the Iranian threat since day one of the Obama administration. Most likely his real concern was to deflect any desire Obama might have to pressure Israel into a settlement with the Palestinians, but Obama seems to have taken Netanyahu's talk at face value. He then came up with a real solution to the hypothetical problem -- unlike Netanyahu's unilateral bombing fantasies, which would only have made matters worse -- so I suppose it makes sense that he's talking like his real solution addresses a real problem, but it also feeds the opposition's rhetoric. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that any of the deal's opponents ever thought Iran was serious about developing nuclear weapons -- otherwise, they'd embrace the real solution. (Indeed, there are a few such people.) Still, the real payoff of an Iran deal would come if the US and Iran could work together on diplomatic solutions, especially in Syria and Iraq (where both nations oppose ISIS).

• Other Middle East links:

  • Omar Ashour: Rabaa's massacre: The political impact: After Egypt's military coup removed democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi and his government, the regime cracked down violently on protesters, killing at least 600 in one 10 hour stretch in 2013. The author compares this to other notorious government "crimes against humanity."

  • Michael Young: Talks suggest the endgame is afoot in Syrian crisis: Reports on Russian efforts to negotiate some form of resolution on Syria with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the US, aimed at a compromise between the old Syrian regime (with or without Assad) and whatever qualifies as "moderate" opposition -- supposedly Jaysh Al Fatah is involved ("including the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat Al Nusra") but ISIS/ISIL is out. This occurs in the wake of a series of government defeats, weakening Assad's position. It also seems like a sane turn, unlike the US's schizo attacks both on Assad and ISIS, or Turkey's similar attacks both on ISIS and the Kurds.

  • Nancy LeTourneau: "The Obama Method" and Potential Realignment in the Middle East: The interesting news here is that Iran will hold talks with the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on Syria and Yemen. Iran supports Assad in Syria (GCC members have helped finance oppositions groups, including Salafist Jihadis) and has backed the Houthis in Yemen (Saudi Arabia is bombing the Houthis there), so this is a case where both sides should talk because the shooting has been intolerable. Such talks aren't tied to the US-Iran Deal, but the Deal makes them much more likely to happen, even to be productive.

    Also see the author's President Obama on Finding Openings. Mostly quotes from journalists Obama recently engaged, he talked about how Nixon didn't know how his overture to China might work out at the time, but he saw that as an example of the sort of "openings" he looked to create. LeTourneau adds:

    That is an incredibly wise grasp of how history works -- even for the most powerful person on the planet. It is a striking rebuke of much that we hear from would-be Republican leaders these days who presume that a President of the United States can control world events via military dominance. For those with some knowledge of history, it is especially important given that the discussion is taking place about a country where we tried that back in 1953 and paid the price for it via the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

    She also quotes the rarely lucid Tom Friedman:

    What struck me most was what I'd call an "Obama doctrine" embedded in the president's remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that "engagement," combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-a-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities -- like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Marshall Ganz: Organizing for Democratic Renewal: Essay written in 2007 (h/t Nancy LeTourneau: Balancing Private Wealth With Public Voice). Ganz starts off by quoting Sidney Verba ("Democracy is based on the promise that equality of voice can balance inequality of resources.") and Alexis de Tocqueville ("In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others." I think his key insight is:

  But only by joining with others could we come to appreciate the extent to which our fates are linked, gain an understanding of our common interests, and make claims on the political power we needed to act on those interests.

  The notion of a public interest, which in pre-Bowling Alone days was taken for granted, has taken a beating over the last 30-40 years, reducing American democracy into a raw contest between private interests. Still, the public even now gets some lip service, as one politician after another asserts that the private profits they seek will somehow be good for everyone. (My favorite example remains Bush's giveaway to the timber industry, happily named the Healthy Forests Initiative.)

• Christina Larson: The End of Hunting? Essay from 2006, arguing that "only progressive government can save a great American pastime." Good description of Kansas' open access program. (I'm not aware of the state's recent ultra-right turn endangering this program, but it has resulted in steep rises for hunting and fishing licenses. And the Republicans' lust to pre-emptively exterminate the lesser prairie chicken -- lest the species' endangered status cramps local oil interests -- is nothing short of shameful.)

• Rick Perlstein: The New Holy Grail of GOP Primaries: Piece touches on several Republican presidential candidates, their benefactors, and the idiot press. Here's just one story, featuring Ohio Governor John Kasich:

  "Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich's decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he'd said it was 'what God wanted.'" Kasich's "fiery" response: "I don't know about you, lady. But when I get to the pearly gates, I'm going to have to answer what I've done for the poor."

  Other years, before other audiences, such public piety might have sounded banal. This year, it's enough to kill a candidacy:

  "About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar."

  Which is, of course, astonishing. But even more astonishing was the lesson the Politico drew from it -- one, naturally, about personalities: "Kasich's temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP's wealth benefactors." His temper. Not their temper. Not, say, "Kasich's refusal to kowtow before the petulant whims of a couple of dozen greedy nonentities who despise the Gospel of Jesus Christ has foreclosed his access to the backroom cabals without which a Republican presidential candidacy is inconceivable."

  To see how consequential the handing over of this kind of power to nonentities like these is, consider the candidates' liabilities with another constituency once considered relevant in presidential campaigns: voters. Chris Christie's home state approval rating, alongside his opening of a nearly billion-dollar hole in New Jersey's budget, is 35 percent. While Christie has only flirted with federal law enforcement, Rick Perry has been indicted. Scott Walker's approval rating among the people who know him best (besides David Koch) is 41 percent, and only 40 percent of Wisconsinites believe the state is heading in the right direction. Bobby Jindal's latest approval rating in the Pelican State is 27 percent. Senator Lindsey Graham announced his presidency by all but promising he'd take the country to war; Jeb Bush by telling Americans they need to work more. Rick Santorum not so long ago made political history: he lost his Senate seat by 19 points, an unprecedented feat for a two-term incumbent.

• Richard Silverstein: Transforming the US into Clone of Israeli National Security State: Article lists many points where techniques and technologies Israel developed for controlling the Palestinians have been promoted and often applied by the US, both in operations abroad (e.g., targeted assassinations) and at home (often by local police departments). One of the most alarming things about Israel is how eagerly many Americans follow its model for dealing with the world.

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