Blog Entries [230 - 239]

Monday, May 8, 2023

Music Week

May archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40158 [40117] rated (+41), 44 [48] unrated (-4: 16 new, 28 old).

Two side projects are relevant here. Last week, I pointed out that Rick Mitchell had interviewed me and Geoffrey Himes for his JJA Buzz podcast. The topic was About Jazz Polls. I was pretty nervous about something I've never done before, but some kind souls have assured me it came out ok (a couple better than that). I figured the least I could do was collect my preliminary notes, which are here.

In the meantime, I filled out my DownBeat Critics Poll ballot (all 49 sections), and collected my notes and ruminations here. DownBeat doesn't publish individual voter ballots, so without this cross reference you'll never know how little my single ballot counts for. I will note that I spent more time this year than I've done in a while, but still far less work than I put into the first polls I was invited for.

One consequence of the DownBeat exercise is that I went on a blues kick this week. They had nominated 33 blues albums from April 2022 through March 2023, and I had heard 7 of them (21.2%, which without checking I'd guess is slightly more than usual). I checked out another 16 of them this week, which gets to 69.6%. I found two A- records there (which is two more than I had, so it wipes out my ballot), and two B+(***). Unclear whether I'll search out more, as returns have been diminishing.

I also checked out the Shirley Scott Queen Talk album, which, figuring it belongs with her other queen-sized set, I scooped out of next week's stash to include here.

On Allen Lowe, auteur of this week's two best albums (well, except for Queen Talk), see Phil Overeem's interview, I Will Not Stop Til They Bury Me. Phil also recommended Lowe's book Letter to Esperanza, so I ordered a copy.

For what it's worth, I cobbled another Speaking of Which together over my abbreviated weekend. The week will mostly be remembered for two incidents of mass murder in Texas, only one of which involved guns, and proof that you don't need to gun to murder some one on a New York City subway. (Probably an eye-opener for Trump, who always assumed he'd need a gun when he fulfilled his destiny of shooting someone down on Fifth Avenue.)

Of course, the insult added to this week's injuries is the insistence of Abbott and Cruz in Texas that guns aren't the problem, but mental illness is, and their resolve to budget more money to fix that problem. The one thing you can be sure of is that neither will lift a finger to spend a penny more on mental health. It's not just that they're cruel bastards who don't care a whit for crazy people (even the ones who they depend on for votes). Deep down, they probably understand that more crazy people with guns just helps sell more guns to people crazy enough to buy them.

I no doubt could have written more, but took Saturday off to cook a nice dinner.

New records reviewed this week:

Alaska & Steel Tipped Dove: The Structural Dynamics of Flow (2023, Fused Arrow): Latter is Joseph Fusaro, a beats producer in New York. The former appears to be rapper Tim Baker, also of New York, connected through Atoms Family. Short album (11 tracks, 31:15), underground vibe. "You want to change the world/raise a kid that's not an asshole." B+(**) [sp]

Richard X Bennett & Matt Parker: Parker Plays X (2021 [2023], BYNK): Pianist and saxophonist, names that are hard to search, but I'm still flummoxed that I can't find either on Discogs (in my database, this is my third Bennett album, while I have three more under Parker, so these guys shouldn't be obscure -- ok, he's Matt Parker (4), but only one album listed). Bennett compositions, some designed specifically for Parker, backed by bass and drums, not avant but a bit out there. B+(***) [cd] [05-13]

Tim Berne/Hank Roberts/Aurora Nealand: Oceans And (2022 [2023], Intakt): Alto saxophonist, goes way back, here with cello and accordion/bass clarinet/voice. Chamber jazz? B [sp]

Eric Bibb: Ridin' (2023, Stony Plain): Blues singer-songwriter, cut a couple albums 1972-83, picked up the pace from 1997 on. One of his stronger albums. B+(***) [sp]

David Binney: Tomorrow's Journey (2022, Ghost Note): Alto saxophonist, early records from 1990, picked up the pace after 2001. Postbop guy, impressive chops, gets a little fancy for my taste. Group includes trumpet, trombone, two pianists (Luca Mendoza also on organ), two bassists, drums, and Kenny Wollesen (bowed vibes/percussion). B+(*) [sp]

Rory Block: Ain't Nobody Worried: Celebrating Great Women of Song (2022, Stony Plain): Country blues singer, plays guitar, first album in 1967 was a duet with Stefan Grossman. Career picked up with signing to Rounder in 1981. Since joining Stony Plain in 2008, she's released a series of tributes -- six volumes in her "Mentor Series" (from Son House to Bukka White), and three now in "Power Women of the Blues" (first was Bessie Smith). This one picks eleven scattered pop hits from the 1960s into the early 1970s ("My Guy," "I'll Take You There," "You've Got a Friend"). B+(**) [sp]

Blue Moon Marquee: Scream, Holler & Howl (2021 [2022], Ilda): Blues group, fourth album since 2014, principally A.W. Cardinal (vocals, guitar) and Jasmine Colette (vocals, bass), with a half-dozen guests including Duke Robillard. B+(*) [sp]

Joe Bonamassa: Tales of Time (2023, J&R Adventures): Blues guitarist-singer, thirty-some albums since 2000, more live than studio. This is one of the live ones. Heavy handed, not a great voice, reminds me of why arena rock sucks. B- [sp]

Theo Croker: Live in Paris (2021 [2022], Masterworks, EP): Trumpeter, from Florida, has some funk crossover angles but the best thing I've heard from him in a Miles Davis tribute. Three tracks, 18:56. B+(*) [sp]

Cydnee With a C: Confessions of a Fangirl (2023, Bread & Butter, EP): From Los Angeles, light and bubbly pop though maybe more to the lyrics. Six songs, 13:42. B+(*) [sp]

Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Spirit Gatherer: Tribute to Don Cherry (2022 [2023], Spiritmuse): Percussionist-led trio, goes way back but currently Corey Wilkes (trumpet) and Alex Harding (baritone sax), joined by featured guests here Dwight Trible (voice) and David Ornette Cherry (piano/melodica/douss'n gouni) -- the latter was Cherry's eldest son. Covers often evoking what came to be called "spiritual jazz," from Cherry, Coleman, Coltrane, Monk, and Sanders. I'd prefer fewer vocals. B+(*) [sp]

Ruthie Foster: Healing Time (2022, Blue Corn Music): Blues/folk singer-songwriter from Texas, comes from a family of gospel singers, ninth album since 1997. Strong vocals and decent sentiments. B [sp]

Ice Spice: Like . . ? (2023, 10K Projects/Capitol, EP): Bronx rapper Isis Gaston, six-song, 13:08 EP following a raft of singles, expanded to 16:01 with a second mix of "Princess Diana" (with Nicki Minaj). B+(*) [sp]

Jeremiah Johnson: Hi-Fi Drive By (2022, Ruf): From St. Louis, plays guitar, sings, probably writes, eighth album since 2003, slotted as blues these days but drop the horns and backing singers and he could've passed for rockabilly. Starts with a vintage car some ("'68 Coupe Deville"). Unfortunately, that's the high point. B [sp]

Sass Jordan: Bitches Blues (2022, Stony Plain): British-born (1962) blues/rock singer, name Sarah, moved to Montreal when she was three, tenth album since 1988. Has some depth and grit. B+(*) [sp]

Aynsley Lister: Along for the Ride (2022, Straight Talkin'): British blues singer-songwriter, from Manchester, dozen-plus albums since 1996, doesn't strike me as all that bluesy. B [sp]

London Brew: London Brew (2020 [2023], Concord, 2CD): British jazz group assembled by guitarist Martin Terefe many top London players, including Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings (saxes), Theon Cross (tuba), and Tom Skinner (drums), aiming for an update of Bitches Brew on its 50th anniversary. B+(***) [sp]

Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: America: The Rough Cut (2014-22 [2023], ESP-Disk): Saxophonist, a trade he's plied erratically (but sometimes voluminously) since 1988, while writing some of the deepest and broadest surveys of American music. His erudition gives him plenty of references for sprinkling about ("gospel formulations," "pre-blues ruminations," "Hank Williams-directed honky tonk," "Heavy Metal," "anti-tribute to Earl Hines," "hail Jelly Roll Morton," "old-time hillbilly rag," "my own statement on the fallibility of free jazz"), while adding "a personal appeal for a MacArthur." No doubt he deserves one, not least because the reward is meant not just to honor past work but to subsidize further. Nonetheless, I enjoy this record much less than I admire it. Blame that, if you will, on too much metal in the too much guitar. Ends with a stray piece from 2014 which kicks up the horns (Roswell Rudd and Ray Anderson on trombone, Randy Sandke on trumpet, Darius Jones on alto sax) without feeling one bit out of place. A- [cd]

Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: In the Dark (2022 [2023], ESP-Disk, 3CD): Lowe's been complaining a lot lately about the state of avant-jazz composition, and seems to think he's found the solution here. I don't begin to understand it technically. It just sounds like he's overcome the modernist impulse and just decided to mix it all together. To that end, he's recruited previously trad players like Ken Peplowski and Lisa Parott, as well as esteemed musicologist Lewis Porter, plus many others I've barely heard of if at all. Casual listening just washes over me, but he's bothered to break this up into 31 pieces, most with historical referents if not baggage. A- [cd]

Taj Mahal: Savoy (2023, Stony Plain): Eclectic roots bluesman Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, started in 1965 in a group with Ry Cooder called Rising Sons, reunited last year in a Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee tribute. Goes back even earlier here, reminiscing about Chick Webb in the Savoy Ballroom (some years before he was born in 1942). He sticks to top shelf songs here, risking comparison to Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Jimmy Rushing -- even on the sureshot Maria Muldaur duet, "Baby, It's Cold Outside." B+(**) [sp]

Denman Maroney/Scott Walton/Denis Fournier: O KOΣMOΣ META (2021 [2022], RogueArt): Piano-bass-drums trio, recorded in France, which may explain the credit of "piano" instead of the "hyperpiano" Maroney invented way back when -- presumably it's not something easy to schlep around, although he still gets sounds beyond the expected. B+(***) [cd]

Luiz Millan: Brazilian Match (2022 [2023], Jazz Station): Brazilian singer-songwriter, plays piano (though maybe not here; Michel Freidenson has most of the credits, as well as arranger and conductor), fifth album since 2011, many guest credits, especially for vocals. Mostly sambas, some very nice (the female voices), some a bit too lilting and/or swimmy for my taste. B+(**) [cd]

Mud Morganfield: Portrait (2022, Delmark): Father McKinley Morganfield, legendary as Muddy Waters, grew up with his mother as Larry Williams, only took up the family trade in 2008, well after his father's death. (Same for his younger brother, now known as Big Bill Morganfield, who cut his first -- and probably best -- album in 1999.) Still, Mud's vocal likeness is uncanny. He also claims eight (of 14) writing credits (one for his father, and one for John Lee Williamson, aka Sonny Boy I). A- [sp]

Van Morrison: Moving on Skiffle (2023, Exile/Virgin, 2CD): You know him, but you may have avoided as his libertarianism morphed into right-wing crankdom. You might note that he's the right age to have gotten turned on by the skiffle movement before he discovered rock and roll and invented Celtic soul. You might even recall that's recorded with skiffle icons like Lonnie Donegan. But while there's probably some intersection here, the 23 covers here are more often old country and blues standards, and few rise even to today's diminished expectations. B [sp]

John Primer: Teardrops for Magic Slim: Live at Rosa's Lounge (2022 [2023], Blues House): Blues guitarist-singer, born in Mississippi, grew up in Chicago, has recorded steadily since 1991. Live set, all covers, most familiar (two from Elmore James), down pat. B+(***) [sp]

Bruno Råberg: Solo Bass: Look Inside (2022 [2023], Orbis Music): Swedish bassist, debut 1976, about 15 albums and 25 side credits. Solo, relatively quiet and short (37:49), touches on pieces by Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and the Gershwins. B+(*) [cd] [05-19]

Angela Strehli: Ace of Blues (2022, Antone's/New West): Originally from Lubbock, moved to Austin and worked as stage manager at Antone's. There she released an album in 1987, and was part of the trio Dreams Come True in 1990. Since then she's recorded occasionally (including an album as The Blues Broads with Tracy Nelson and two others), while running a blues club in Marin County, California. Now 77, this is her first since 2005, twelve golden oldies united by guitar and voice that stands up to the originals, even when eclipsing them is impossible. A- [sp]

Joanne Shaw Taylor: Nobody's Fool (2022, Keeping the Blues Alive): British singer-songwriter, identifies as blues, plays guitar, tenth album since 2009. [sp]

Billy Valentine: Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth (2020-22 [2023], Acid Jazz/Flying Dutchman): Blues/jazz/soul singer, recorded as half of the Valentine Brothers 1977-87, made a comeback in 2017 with a collection called Brit Eyed Soul (Beatles to Clash). Relaunches Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman label here, with a set of soul covers (Mayfield to Prince), with a couple nods to the label's old catalog (Gil Scott-Heron, Leon Thomas). B+(***) [sp]

Ally Venable: Real Gone (2023, Ruf): Young blues-rock singer-songwriter from Texas, plays a mean guitar, will kick your ass. B+(*) [sp]

Joe Louis Walker: Weight of the World (2023, Forty Below): Blues singer-songwriter, has recorded quite a bit since 1986's Cold Is the Night. B [sp]

Doug Wamble: Blues in the Present Tense (2022, Halcyonic): Singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2003, this showed up on a blues list, but has a reputation as a jazz guitarist, and adds to that here, backed by Eric Revis (bass) and Jeff "Tain" Watts (drums), with Prometheus Jenkins on saxophone (which gets the band much more excited than Wamble's vocals do). B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Ray Charles: Live in Stockholm 1972 (1972 [2022], Tangerine): Credit continues in small print: "his Orchestra and The Raelettes." (Just eight songs, with intros and applause 38:37, half classic, if that's what you're looking for. B+(*) [sp]

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis With Shirley Scott: Cookin' With Jaws and the Queen: The Legendary Prestige Cookbook Albums (1958 [2023], Craft): Reissues label, main business is putting old sides onto shiny new vinyl, but they also show up on streaming sources. This boxes up four albums, all recorded in 1958 but they spaced out the releases. Jerome Richardson's flute is prominent early, present to the end. Scott's organ gains both groove and subtlety over time. The tenor saxophonist is bluesy and soulful, as fits the material. [Individual notes under Old Music] B+(**) [sp]

Shirley Scott: Queen Talk: Live at the Left Bank (1972 [2023], Reel to Real): Organ player, probably best known for her work/marriage with Stanley Turrentine, leads a very hot trio here with George Coleman (tenor sax) and Bobby Durham (drums), recorded live at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore. Trio covers three LP sides (73:13), then singer Ernie Andrews joins for the final side (24:58), and he's no less inspired. A- [sp]

Old music:

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: The Eddie "Lockjaw" Cookbook (1958, Prestige): With Shirley Scott (organ) and Jerome Richardson (flute), who take up a lot of space. B [sp]

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: The Eddie "Lockjaw" Cookbook Vol. 2 (1958 [1959], Prestige): "Featuring Shirley Scott & Jerome Richardson." But the tenor sax leads, more like it. B+(**) [sp]

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis With Shirley Scott: The Eddie "Lockjaw" Cookbook, Volume 3 (1958 [1961], Prestige): Finally beginning to appreciate Jerome Richardson's flute, in doses limited enough they dropped him from cover credit. B+(**) [sp]

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis With Shirley Scott: Smokin' (1958 [1963], Prestige): Possibly the best of the bunch, or maybe just the bluesiest. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Devin Gray: Most Definitely (Rataplan) [06-09]
  • Joëlle Léandre/Craig Taborn/Mat Maneri: hEARoes (RogueArt) [05-07]
  • Matt Mitchell: Oblong Aplomb (Out of Your Head) [04-14]

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Sunday, May 7, 2023

Speaking of Which

Got a late start, and really not feeling it this week. Seems like plenty of links, but not a lot of commentary.

Top story threads:

Trump: I got some flak for not taking the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit seriously enough last week, and wound up dropping a couple parenthetical remarks. The case will presumably be wrapped up and given to the jury early next week, so we'll see. One thing I missed was that while Trump cannot be prosecuted for rape (statute of limitations), he can be sued for assault, so this is not just a defamation case. Also, his own deposition makes him look guilty as hell. I'm particularly bothered by the "she's not my type" defense. In order for that to be a thing, he has to have a pretty large population to choose from, and do so with extreme shallowness. (Ok, maybe Trump does have a type, but think about what that says about him.)

Republicans:

More Fox fallout:

Courts:

Slow civil war: Section name derives from Jeff Sharlet's book (see below). Mostly assorted right-wing wackos taking pot shots at whoever, but it doesn't seem to be random circumstance.

Economy:

Ukraine War: Jeffrey St Clair (see below) offers a long quote from an El Pais interview with Lula da Silva, where the key point is: "This war should never have started. It started because there is no longer any capacity for dialogue among world leaders." He didn't single out the US in this regard -- the country he condemned was Russia, which "has no right to invade Ukraine" -- but by focusing on the question of how to prevent wars from starting, the US is most clearly negligent. The US has lost its capacity to act as an advocate for peace because US foreign policy has been captured by the merchants and architects of war.

World:

  • Connor Echols: [05-03] NATO foray into Asia risks driving China and Russia closer together: So, NATO's opening a "liaison office" in Tokyo -- something they've also done in Ukraine, Georgia, Kuwait, and Moldova. As I've noted many times, the prime mission of NATO over the last 10-20 years has been to promote arms sales (mostly US but also European), often by provoking threats. The war in Ukraine would seem to validate their prophecies -- and indeed has been a boon for arms sales, with more to come in Sweden and Finland. A similar US sales pitch has been racking up big sales in Taiwan, so it's not so surprising that European arms makers want a piece of the action, and NATO gives them a calling card. While China is less likely to be bullied into a war, the risks are even greater.

  • Ben Freeman: [05-01] 'Acceptable' versus 'unacceptable' foreign meddling in US affairs: "It all seems to depend on whether the offending nation is an ally or adversary." And (talk about elephants in the room) not even a word here about Israel.

  • Frank Giustra: [05-03] De-dollarization: Not a matter of it, but when. The US has been able to run trade deficits for fifty years because the world has uses for dollars beyond buying American-made goods. (One, of course, is buying American assets, including companies.) But when the US levies sanctions, it motivates others to find alternatives to the dollar, to make themselves less dependent on the US. This has been tempting for a long time, but war with Russia and efforts to intimidate China are quickening the pace.

  • Daniel Larison: [05-05] US military driving and exacerbating violence in Somalia: "Americans have been intervening there for decades. Isn't it past time to ask whether we are the problem?"

  • Blaise Malley: [05-02] In Washington, China is a four-letter word and the excuse for everything: "Lawmakers have introduced nearly 275 measures this session, while bureaucrats are busy using the CCP to justify ballooning budgets."

  • Kiyoshi Sugawa: [05-02] Should Japan defend Taiwan?: Biden says the US will defend Taiwan. It is rare, at least since WWII, for the US to enter into a war without enlisting support of its nominal allies, so this prospect is something every US ally should think long and hard about. Still, it's striking how easily the US has recruited former occupiers into its "coalition of the willing": for Iraq, not only the the UK sign up, but so did Mongolia. Japan occupied Taiwan from 1895-1945, a time that few there remember fondly.

Other stories:

William Hartung/Ben Freeman: [05-06] This is not your grandparents' military industrial complex: "Arsenals of influence, the consolidation of contractors, the blob -- all would make Eisenhower blink with unrecognition."

Ellen Ioanes: [05-06] Serbia's populist president pledges "disarmament" after mass shootings: File this under "it can't happen here." Note that Serbia is tied for the third-highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world (39.1 firearms per 100 residents; US rate is 117.5), but mass shootings are "quite rare" (vs. more than 1 per day in the US). In the two events, a 13-year-old boy killed nine people at a Belgrade-area elementary school, and a day later a 20-year-old killed eight people and wounded 14.

Umair Irfan: [05-01] Smaller, cheaper, safer: The next generation of nuclear power, explained. Still, those terms are only relative, and the old generation of nuclear power plants, which are nearing the end of their planned lifetimes, have set a pretty low bar. I can imagine a scenario where nuclear complements other non-carbon sources of energy, but first you have to solve two problems that are more political than technical: figure out what to do with the waste, and end the linkages between nuclear power and bombs, by disposing of the latter. Of course, you'll still have economic questions: how cost-effective nuclear power is compared to alternatives that are still compatible with climate goals. Even then, perhaps on some level nuclear power is still just too creepy.

Benjamin Keys: [05-07] Your homeowners' insurance bill is the canary in the climate coal mine. As climate disasters mount, their cost is going to be average out over everyone, with the result that insurance will become increasingly unaffordable. For most people, this will happen before actual disasters happen, which will make it hard to see and understand. But in the long run, I think this will fundamentally change the way government has to work.

Tyler Koteskey: [05-04] 'Mission Accomplished' was a massive fail -- but it was just the beginning.

Keren Landman: [05-05] What the ending of the WHO's Covid emergency does (and doesn't) change: "For Americans, the coming [May 11] end of the US public health emergency will have much bigger impacts."

Bruce E Levine: [05-05] Once radical critiques of psychiatry are now mainstream, so what remains taboo?.

Eric Levitz: [05-03] The Biden administration just declared the death of neoliberalism.

Nicole Narea/Li Zhou: [05-05] How New York City failed Jordan Neely: A black, unhoused person, choked to death on a New York subway, by "a white 24-year-old former Marine," who hasn't been named, much less arrested. Also:

Elizabeth Nelson: [05-02] The Ed Sheeran lawsuit is a threat to Western civilization. Really.

Jeffrey St Clair: [05-05] Roaming Charges: How White Men Fight.

Emily Stewart: [05-04] What the lottery sells -- and who pays. I know a guy who signs his emails with: "lottery (n.): a tax on stupidity." My reaction was that it's more like a tax on hopelessness, or maybe just on hope, for the set of people who realize they'll never have a chance to make qualitatively more than they have, but are willing to give up a little to gain a rare chance of change. Still, I'm not one of them. I've never bought a ticket or a scratch card of whatever form they take -- even before I got taken to task for using the "if I won the lottery" rhetorical foil (my cousin pointed out that if I did, I'd never be able to tell who my real friends are, which she insisted would be a worse problem than the supposed gain). Still, I'm glad that the state runs the racket, instead of leaving it to organized crime. Same is true for all other forms of gambling. Beware all efforts to privatize them.

Aric Toler/Robin Stein/Glenn Thrush/Riley Mellen/Ishaan Jhaveri: [05-06] War, Weapons and Conspiracy Theories: Inside Airman Teixeira's Online World: "A review of more than 9,500 messages obtained by The New York Times offers important clues about the mind-set of a young airman implicated in a vast leak of government secrets."

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Monday, May 1, 2023

Music Week

May archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40117 [40078] rated (+39), 48 [49] unrated (-1: 20 new, 28 old).

I wrote and posted two big pieces last week. One was the usual news roundup, Speaking of Which, on Sunday. Most of the links are on various demented Republicans (like "All of Ron DeSantis's Crimes Against Good Etiquette") and their nefarious schemes (like "Why Republicans Hate It When Poor People Have Food to Eat"), but I also added a section on Biden given his campaign announcement ("It's me or the abyss" is about right). The subject I wrote more about is foreign policy, where Biden leaves a lot to be desired.

One piece I cited without comment was Ethan Iverson's The End of the Music Business. I figured it might be something I'd want to circle back around to, but for now: the music business hasn't ended; it's just changing, and like most businesses that's been bad for workers. However, even if it does end, music will survive, because it meets needs that don't have to be monetized. That may be hard to grasp in a world that tries to reduce everything to money, but it could also be an example for moving past such alienation.

The other piece was my second Book Roundup in a year (last was October 22, 2022, and before that May 1, 2022. I spend a lot of time scrounging around virtual bookstores, looking for nonfiction titles of interest. I publish something when I come up with 40 blurbs, by which time I've accumulated a bunch of secondary and miscellaneous lists, which get flushed out at the same time.

I count this as important work, because it gives me a fairly good sense of what people know and think. I also find it calming. For most of my life I used to regularly retreat into bookstores, studiously examining the shelves, especially for new books -- that's probably why libraries had less allure -- which I'd pick up, look over, poke my nose into, it being just as interesting to know what I was missing as what I was reading. I didn't break that habit until Borders was shut down, and Barnes & Noble turned into a toy store/café.

Since posting, I've ordered two books from the list: Myth America, ed. by Kevin Kruse & Julian Zelizer; and A Climate Vocabulary for the Future, by Herg Simmens (buried in the long list of climate books under Greta Thunberg). The former complements my recent/current reading in American history. The latter seems like it might be useful for deciding how to write about the climate crisis.

A few weeks ago, Rick Mitchell asked me to participate in a podcast for the Jazz Journalists Association. The topic was to be jazz polls. Of late, I've been running the Francis Davis Jazz Poll, and in vote in a couple others (DownBeat, El Intruso). The original idea was to pair me with Frank Alkyer (DownBeat editor). After a no-show, Geoffrey Himes agreed to join in. We talked last week, and they posted the Jazz Buzz podcast today. I've never done anything like that, and had little sense of how well it went. I'll revisit it later, and try to write some more: no doubt I'll want to clarify a few points. If you have any comments, questions, or just wish to express outrage, please write me through the usual channels. (Note that there is a "Contact" button in the navigation bar.)

Last week, I also got my invite to vote in DownBeat's Critics Poll, so I'll take a look at that later in the week. I should also point out that the Jazz Journalists Association's 2023 Awards nominees have been announced, broken down to Performance & Recordings and Journalism & Media. I've never been a member of JJA, so I have no involvement there, and had to pass when their poll came up in the podcast. As I recall, they do an awards schmooze fest, which makes them more like the Grammys, minus the TV contract glitz. The nominee lists strike me as short (3-6 per category, just 4 for new albums) and pretty mainstream. I couldn't find any reference lists for who has won in the past, even in the "lifetime achievement" categories (this year's musicians are George Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd, and Wadada Leo Smith, so presumably they hadn't won before).

By the way, while poking around the JJA site, I was sad to see that Ken Franckling died on March 24. He's been a long-time contributor to our poll, and his Jazz Notes blog has always been a delight.

Records this week are almost all jazz (Brit Taylor the exception). I tried to play down my queue, but other than that my prospecting system had a lot more jazz prioritized than anything else, and with all the writing, I just went for whatever was easiest to find.

New records reviewed this week:

Michael Blake: Dance of the Mystic Bliss (2020 [2023], P&M): Saxophonist (tenor/soprano, also flute), from Montreal, based in New York, albums since 1997, with guitar (Guilherme Monteiro), percussion/marimba (Mauro Refosco and Rogerio Boccato), bass (Michael Bates), and strings (violin and cello). Not his first Latin/Brazilian turn. B+(*) [cd] [05-26]

George Coleman: Live at Smalls Jazz Club (2022 [2023], Cellar): Tenor saxophonist, best known as the younger guy Wayne Shorter replaced in the Miles Davis Quintet, although he's turned in a few masterpieces over the years -- the first (and most classic) Eastern Rebellion (1976), My Horns of Plenty (1991), and A Master Speaks (2016) -- and still retains one of the instrument's most recognizable voices. His set here includes an original blues and seven standards (starting with Davis, and including a Jobim), backed by Spike Wilner (piano), Peter Washington (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums). Few have ever made great sound easier. A- [cd] [05-19]

Day & Taxi: Live in Baden (2021 [2023], Clean Feed): Saxophonist (soprano/alto/c-melody) Christoph Gallio, with Silvan Jeger (bass) and Gerry Hemingway (drums), group with a dozen albums going back to 1997 (various lineups, Gallio the only constant). B+(***) [sp]

Rachel Eckroth: One (2022 [2023], Blackbird Sessions): Pianist, albums since 2014, sings elsewhere but this is solo piano, originals except for an Ellington and one by Joshua Redman. B+(*) [cd]

Wayne Escoffery: Like Minds (2022 [2023], Smoke Sessions): Tenor saxophonist, born in London, moved to US at 11, studied under Jackie McLean, eleventh album since 2001. Mainstream quartet with David Kikoski (piano), Ugonna Okegwo (bass), and Mark Whitfield Jr (drums), plus guest slots for Gregory Porter (vocals on 2 tracks, "Rivers of Babylon" especially awful), Tom Harrell (trumpet on 2), and Mike Moreno (guitar on 4), and Daniel Sadownick (percussion on 1). An often impressive player who could be making better albums. B- [sp]

Everything but the Girl: Fuse (2023, Buzzin' Fly/Virgin): British electropop duo, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, had a run 1984-00, went off to pursue solo careers (five albums for Thorn, four for Watt, none you'd call hits), back after 24 years with a reunion album. B+(*) [sp]

Frank Gratkowski/Simon Nabatov: Tender Mercies (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): German saxophonist (alto, plus flute, clarinet, bass clarinet) and Russia pianist (based in Germany), a duo. The piano breaks up the ugliness, but doesn't quite overcome it. B+(*) [sp]

Lauren Henderson: Conjuring (2023, Brontosaurus): Jazz singer, sometime songwriter (5 of 10 songs here), eighth album since 2011. The covers are most striking, especially "That Old Black Magic," and two takes of "It's Magic" (one in Spanish, as "Es Magia"). Band features Joel Ross on vibraphone. B+(***) [cd]

Marc Jordan: Waiting for the Sun to Rise (2023, Linus Entertainment): Has a rep, with John Capek, as a songwriter, less so for his albums, fifteen since 1978. Plays guitar, but relies mostly on strings. B+(*) [cd]

Jason Keiser: Shaw's Groove (2022 [2023], OA2): Guitarist, from San Jose, Bandcamp has a couple previous albums but Discogs hasn't noticed him yet. Woody Shaw pieces, with Erik Jekabson (trumpet), Aaron Lington (baritone sax), a second guitarist (John Stowell), bass, and drums. B+(*) [cd]

Le Boeuf Brothers: Hush (2021 [2023], Soundspore): From California, Remy Le Boeuf (sax/clarinet) and Pascal Le Boeuf (piano), fifth (or sixth) album together, as well as several on their own. Quintet with Dayna Stephens (tenor sax), Linda May Han Oh (bass), and Christian Euman (drums). Tends to be quiet, almost meditative. B+(**) [cd]

Asbjørn Lerheim/Roger Arntzen/Michiyo Yagi/Tamaya Honda: Chrome Hill Duo Meets Dojo: Live at Aketa No Mise (2020 [2023], Clean Feed): Chrome Hill is a Norwegian quartet led by Lerheim (guitar) with Arntzen (bass), with four records 2008-20. Dojo is a Japanese duo of Yagi (electric 21-string koto/electronics) and Honda (drums). B+(*) [bc]

Luis Lopes Abyss Mirrors: Echoisms (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Portuguese guitarist, has put together an impressive discography since 2007. Large group here (tentet), with a second guitarist (Flak), two saxophonists, two electronics credits, electric bass, and three strings (violin, viola, cello). B+(**) [bc]

Brandon Lopez Trio: Matanzas (2023, Relative Pitch): Avant-bassist, very active since 2017, trio with Steve Baczkowski (sax) and Gerald Cleaver (drums). Bass lays down industrial-grade noise, which the sax eventually builds on. B+(**) [sp]

Bill Mays: Autumn Serenade (2023, Sunnyside): Pianist, from Sacramento, twenty-some albums since 1976, more side credits (early on with Bud Shank). Trio with Dean Johnson (bass) and Ron Vincent (drums), playing nine autumn-themed songs (six with "autumn" in the title). Mays sings two, the second a duet with Judy Kirtley. B+(**) [sp]

Steve Millhouse: The Unwinding (2022 [2023], SteepleChase): Bassist, possibly his first album (although he has side credits back to the 1990s), plays six-string contrabass guitar here, with Rich Perry (tenor sax) and Eric Halvorson (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Move: The City (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Intense Portuguese avant-jazz trio: Felipe Zenicola (electric bass), Yedo Gibson (saxophones), and João Valinho (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Natural Information Society: Since Time Is Gravity (2021 [2023], Aguirre/Eremite): Chicago bassist Joshua Abrams, debut 2002, fifth album since 2015 with variants of this group, expanded here to eleven, including Ari Brown (tenor sax) and Hamid Drake (percussion). The key to the group has always been its ability to sustain a groove while doing interesting things with it. More horns here steers it back a bit toward a more conventional jazz sound, so that's what's interesting this time. A- [sp]

Aruán Ortiz Trio: Serranias: Sketchbook for Piano Trio (2022 [2023], Intakt): Cuban pianist, in US for twenty years now, with Brad Jones (bass) and John Betsch (drums). Starts flashy, ends pensive. B+(**) [sp]

Ed Partyka Jazz Orchestra: Hold Your Fire (2022 [2023], Neuklang): Trombonist, from Chicago, formed his big band in 2001 to support Bob Brookmeyer, fourth album since, this particular edition recorded in Zürich, mostly German musicians, including singer Julia Oschewsky (in English). B+(*) [sp]

Ivo Perelman/Elliott Sharp: Artificial Intelligence (2022 [2023], Mahakala Music): Brazilian tenor saxophonist, has tons of albums, many duos, including a particularly good one last year with guitarist Joe Morris (Elliptic Time), follows that up with another guitarist duo, this time with stray electronics, which work just as well. A- [sp]

Ivo Perelman/Dave Burrell/Bobby Kapp: Trichotomy (2021 [2023], Mahakala Music): Tenor sax trio, with piano and drums, veterans who go way back. Kapp is the least well known, but played on 1967-68 albums for Gato Barbieri, Marion Brown, and Noah Howard, and played on Burrell's most famous album in 1976. He appeared on two recent albums with Perelman, Matthew Shipp, and William Parker, so this lineup squares a circle. Two long blowouts, with details that matter. A- [sp]

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Jeff Cosgrove: Live in Carrboro (2017 [2023], Soul City Sounds): Live shot, tenor sax trio with his favorite pianist and a relatively unsung free drummer -- from the same year as the trio's Live in Baltimore appeared. B+(***) [bc]

Ivo Perelman/Ray Anderson/Joe Morris/Reggie Nicholson: Molten Gold (2022 [2023], Fundacja Sluchaj): Tenor sax, trombone, bass, and drums. Anderson turns out to be a great accompanist here. A- [dl]

John Pizzarelli: Stage & Screen (2021 [2023], Palmetto): Guitarist-turned-standards singer, many albums since 1992 (including some with his trad-minded guitarist father Bucky Pizzarelli), backed here by the impressive swing and boogie of Isaiah J. Thompson (piano) and Michael Karn (bass). Primo songs help, too. B+(***) [cd]

Eric Reed: Black, Brown, and Blue (2022 [2023], Smoke Sessions): Mainstream pianist, dedicated his 1991 debut to Art Blakey, played with Wynton Marsalis through the 1990s. Trio with Luca Alemanno (bass) and Reggie Quinerly (drums), one song each, standards from Ellington to Monk to Silver to Tyner, and two vocal spots: Calvin B. Rhone for "Lean on Me" (Bill Withers), and David Daughtry for "Pastime Paradise" (Stevie Wonder). B+(**) [sp]

Mike Richmond: Turn Out the Stars (2023, SteepleChase): Bassist, albums back to 1978, plays cello here, with Andy Laverne (piano), Jay Anderson (bass), and Anthony Pimciotti (drums), on what is mostly a set of Bill Evans songs. B+(**) [sp]

Diego Rivera: Love & Peace (2023, Posi-Tone): Tenor/soprano saxophonist, born in Ann Arbor, teaches at Michigan State, half-dozen albums since 2013. Lively quartet here with Art Hirahara (piano), Boris Kozlov (bass), and Rudy Royston (drums), all up for more than a little Latin tinge. B+(**) [sp]

Roots Magic Sextet: Long Old Road: Retold Pasts and Present Day Musings (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Italian group, fourth album, started as a quintet with Alberto Popolla (clarinet), Errico de Fabritis (alto/baritone sax), Gianfranco Tedeschi (bass), and Fabrizio Spera (drums) continuing, plus Eugenio Colombo (soprano sax/flutes) and Francesco Lo Cascio (vibes/percussion) making six. Leads with a strong groove, riffs on top of that, tries some change of pace. B+(***) [sp]

Dan Rosenboom: Polarity (2022 [2023], Orenda): Trumpet player, albums since 2005, this one a quintet with Gavin Templeton (alto/baritone sax), John Escreet (piano/keyboards), Billy Mohler (bass), and Damion Reid (drums). B+(***) [cd]

Steve Smith and Vital Information: Time Flies (2022 [2023], Wounded Bird, 2CD): Drummer-led fusion group, named for their 1983 debut album, principally Manuel Valera (keyboards) and Janek Gwizdolo (electric bass), with guest spots for George Garzone (tenor sax) and Mike Mainieri (vibes). Garzone is always an imposing soloist, especially on the bonus disc, which features him throughout. B+(**) [cd]

Bobo Stenson Trio: Sphere (2022 [2023], ECM): Swedish pianist (b. 1944). I was always a big fan of his 1973 album with Jan Garbarek, Witchi-Tai-To. This is a trio with Anders Jormin (bass) and Jon Fält (drums), with Jormin composing or arranging four (of 9) tracks, with others coming from Per Nørigärd, Sven-Erik Bäck, and Jean Sibelius (and nary a hint of my first thought, Monk). B+(*) [sp]

Brit Taylor: Kentucky Blue (2023, Cut a Shine): Country singer-songwriter from Kentucky, second album, a fresh voice from the hills, with a lot of fiddle. B+(***) [sp]

Erik Truffaz: Rollin' (2023, Blue Note): Swiss trumpet player, albums since 1997, accompanied here by Marcello Giuliani (electric & acoustic bass); don't see the credits, but also piano and drums, with a couple vocal spots. B+(**) [sp]

Alex Weitz: Rule of Thirds (2022 [2023], Outside In Music): Saxophonist (mostly tenor), has a previous self-released album, quartet here with piano (Tal Cohen), bass (Ben Tiberio), and drums (Michael Piolet), eight original compositions plus "Love for Sale." Has a sound that's prepared to soar, or perhaps just swing. B+(***) [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Les DeMerle Sound 67: Once in a Lifetime (1967 [2023], Origin): Drummer, backdates his debut a couple years to when he was 21, with a group that featured Randy Brecker (trumpet), a couple cuts with Genya Ravan singing, one more from the Mike Douglas show with Rosemary Clooney. B+(**) [cd]

Old music:

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society: Mandatory Reality (2017 [2019], Eremite, 2CD): Octet led by Joshua Abrams, who is credited not with his usual bass but with guimbri and flute (actually, everyone gets a flute credit on the last, and shortest, track). At this stage (their third album), the band is clearly into minimalism, with subtle variations on rmesmerizing rhythmic patterns, extended in four pieces to 81:39. B+(***) [sp]

Day & Taxi: Less and More (1997 [1999], Unit): Group led by soprano/alto saxophonist Christoph Gallio, second album, with Dominique Girod (bass) and Dieter Ulrich (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble: Drum Dance to the Motherland (1972 [2017], Eremite): Born Warren Cheeseboro (1946-2022), played vibraphone and marimba, still appeared on DownBeat "rising star" ballots into his 70s, after his last album (2009). This was his first, released 1973 on Dogtown, with him and drummer Dwight James also playing scratchy clarinet, backed by guitar, bass, and a second drummer with African percussion. B+(***) [sp]

Mike Lipskin: Spreadin' Rhythm Around (2002, Buskirk): Stride pianist, someone I hadn't noticed until Allen Lowe mentioned him, but I found a co-credit in my database, Stride Piano Summit (with Ralph Sutton, Jay McShann, and Sweets Edison). Perhaps better known as a producer, especially of RCA reissues. Mostly solo, with Leon Oakley (trumpet) on five tracks. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Satoko Fujii: Torrent: Piano Solo (Libra) [06-02]
  • Max Light: Henceforth (SteepleChase) [06-16]
  • Russ Lossing: Alternate Side Parking Music (Aqua Piazza) [07-07]
  • Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: America: The Rough Cut (ESP-Disk) [04-28]
  • Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: In the Dark (ESP-Disk, 3CD) [04-28]
  • Denman Maroney/Scott Walton/Denis Fournier: O Koσmoσ Meta (RogueArt '22)
  • Naya Bazz [Rez Abbasi/Josh Feinberg]: Charm (Whirlwind) [05-12]
  • Rudy Royston Flatbed Buggy: Day (Greenleaf Music) [05-05]
  • Felipe Salles Interconnections Ensemble: Home Is Here (Tapestry) [05-12]
  • Matthew Shipp/Mark Helias: The New Syntax (RogueArt '22)
  • Alan Sondheim: Galut: Ballads of Wadi-Sabi (ESP-Disk) [04-28]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 30, 2023

Speaking of Which

PS: Added the Kessler piece below (under Trump).

Started early, mostly just to grab some of the early Tucker Carlson reactions. Then I focused more on the Book Roundup. I've been pretty unhappy the last couple days, but keep finding links, and things to write about. Hoping to wrap this up as soon as possible.

Although I say some nice things about Biden in his section, pay extra attention to the world sections. Biden's foreign policy is not an absolute, unmitigated disaster, but the mitigations are minor, especially compared to the threats that of so much focus on power, and the arrogance that comes from that.

Top story threads:

Fox and fiends (mostly Tucker Carlson): As you know, Carlson was fired Monday morning, effective immediately, with Brian Kilmeade lined up as a temporary replacement. CNN followed almost instantly by firing Don Lemon. A couple days later, ABC fired FiveThirtyEight guru Nate Silver. And there was more (see Stieb).

Trump: E. Jean Carroll's defamation case against Trump is in a court room, being argued. The case is a poor proxy for a charge of rape, which happened about 25 years ago.

Kevin McCarthy, terrorist, sociopath, nincompoop: What else would you call someone who wants to destroy the economy along with the government?

  • Alex Shephard: [04-28] Kevin McCarthy Is Not Good at This: "The 'budget' passed by House Republicans is terrible for the party politically." Well, he did get his hostage note passed by the House, but in no scenario will he come out of this looking like anything but a heel. Threatening to default, like shutting down the government, has backfired every time Republicans have tried it, but somehow Republicans like McCarthy can't resist the moment in the spotlight. If they could, they could quietly cut all the spending they wanted in the coming year's appropriations process. It might seem harder, because the lobbyists will be all over his case, but it's his leverage according to the constitution. But default over spending that's already been passed is just terrorism.

  • Peter Wade: [04-30] Ted Cruz Maligns Biden, Claims He Is 'Behaving Like a Terrorist' with Debt Ceiling: Talk about the kettle calling the pot black. "The senator also called White House staffers 'little Marxists with no experience in the real world."

  • Li Zhou::

Other Republicans:

Biden: He announced that he is running for reëlection in 2024, so I figured I should give him a section, as I've been giving Trump (and sometimes DeSantis) for several months now. Surely there would be an outpouring of articles praising his accomplishments and auguring future hope? Well, not so much. One thing only I noticed is that this breathes a faint bit of hope into my theory about political eras: that each starts with a major two-term president (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan) and ends with a one-term disaster (John Adams, Buchanan, Hoover, Carter, Trump). Biden still seems like a stretch, but he wouldn't be as much of an anomaly as Reagan, whose whole era is the only one to witness a retreat of fundamental rights. But also, Biden is the only president in my lifetime who has impressed me beyond expectations. (True, I have no memory of Truman, and was at best ambivalent about Eisenhower and Kennedy. Johnson I now see did some good, but far worse was his war in Vietnam. Nixon, well, you know about Nixon.)

Ukraine War:

World at Large:

  • Michael Barnett/Nathan Brown/Marc Lynch/Shibley Telhami: [04-14] Israel's One-State Reality: It's Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution: Introduction to a new book, a collection of essays edited by the author, called The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?. Mitchell Plitnick wrote about it here: [04-21] The one-state reality goes mainstream, as did Philip Weiss: [04-26] White House officials know Israel is an apartheid state, but they can't say so. This insight isn't particularly new: it's hard to think of anyone other than Washington diplomats who've talked about "two-state solution" since 2012, which is the date of a book I read: Ariella Azoulay/Adi Ophir: The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. As for "apartheid," Jimmy Carter: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid came out in 2006. So I'm not surprised to find that prospects for separating the former West Bank into an independent Palestinian state have been demolished: that's been the plan since 1967, as was made clear by Avi Raz: The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War. What does surprise me is that nobody talks about the obvious two-state division, which breaks Gaza off as an independent state. Palestinians don't like this, presumably because they see it as a divide-and-conquer policy, aimed as finalizing the subjugation of the Palestinian West Bank. And Israelis don't like it, because it would mean recognizing that there is a legitimate Palestinian state. But it would end the current "open air prison," and allow at least some Palestinians to get on the path of becoming a normal country. That at least is a separable, solvable problem. Sure, that would leave Israel's foundational problem (call it apartheid for lack of a sufficient alternative), with little chance of solution, but why not fix what you can do now?

  • Tanya Goudsouzian: [04-28] What would it take to recognize the Taliban? While I would like to see many of the concessions the US and others are demanding, I doubt you get there in one initial step, or ever unless you offer some basic level of recognition.

  • Michael T Klare: [04-26] A US-China War Over Taiwan? "What will happen when China invades Taiwan, as so many in Washington believe is inevitable?" But why should we credit anything people in Washington think about China? What gives them such special insight? One thing we should know is that China has been very patient as well as very stubborn about territorial claims. They patiently negotiated their takeover of Hong Kong and Macau, which they could easily have occupied (as India, for instance, grabbed Goa). I don't like the elaborate fiction they have insisted on regarding "one China" and/or their claim to Taiwan (which has only been part of China for 4 years since 1895, and a very divided China at that), but the push to arm Taiwan and turn it into a satellite dependent on the US for its security seems very clearly meant as aimed at China. And it is precisely the sort of move that could provoke China to unseemly action.

  • Dan Lamothe/Joby Warrick: [04-22] Afghanistan has become a terrorism staging ground again, leak reveals. As Robert Wright points out, the headline here is misleading, in such a way as to imply "that this amounts to an indictment of President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan -- that, just as his critics had warned, turning Afghanistan over to the Taliban has turned it into a playground for anti-American terrorists." The "terrorists" in question identify as ISIS, although how closely (if at all) they are affiliated with ISIS in Syria isn't clear. The enemy of the Afghan ISIS is the Taliban, if the US had any interest in countering ISIS terrorism, they would recognize and work toward stabilizing the Taliban regime. It is, after all, the de facto government there, and there's nothing practical the US can do to alter that, so huffing off in a snit helps no one. PS: See Robert Wright: [04-29] No, Afghanistan has not become a 'staging ground for terrorists'.

  • James Park: [04-28] What the Biden-Yoon summit left out: "Nuclear saber rattling hasn't changed North Korea's behavior in the past and it likely won't now." As best I recall, it's mostly made it worse. One of the clearest lessons we should but haven't learned from Ukraine is that deterrence doesn't work: more precisely, it can be safely ignored by countries that have no interest in attacking you in the first place (which includes the Soviet Union for the entire duration of the Cold War), while it presses countries that think they can get away with it into acting more boldly (as Russia did in Ukraine). The lessons from North Korea itself should be even clearer. Ever since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and with it the security umbrella and life support Russia provided, North Korea has been desperately flailing, threatening at times and otherwise accommodating, trying to protect its security and enter into trade that could revive a moribund economy. The US and/or South Korea has sometimes started to engage, which lowered the threat level, then backed out and double crossed North Korea, which lead to increased threats. Why? This seems monumentally stupid to me, but the war gamers in Washington may figure a threatening North Korea is better for their budgets, plus it keeps Japan and South Korea in the US orbit, which matters when you're ulterior motive is to muscle China around.

Courts:

Other stories:

Chas Danner: [04-29] Texas Family Gunned Down by Neighbor in Yet Another Horrific Shooting.

David Dayen: [04-18] Big Tech Lobbyists Explain How They Took Over Washington: "An amazing research paper unearths how the tech industry invented the concept of digital trade and sold it to government officials."

Daniel Gilbert: [04-29] Moderna's billionaire CEO reaped nearly $400 million last year. He also got a raise.

Ethan Iverson: [04-10] The End of the Music Business.

Jay Caspian Kang: [04-04] The case for banning children from social media: Not a subject I particularly want to think about, at least right now, but bookmarked for future reference. I will say that throughout history, banning something is a good way to get people to do it anyway, and make them more anti-social and anti-civil in the process. Also that we tend to be overprotective of children, while at the same time making it harder for people of all ages to overcome mistakes and recover their lives. Also that the real problem with social media is commercial capture, and if you want to work on something, start there: if, for instance, you severely limited data capture, banned selling it and/or using it for advertising, and made advertising strictly opt-in, you could drive most of the bad actors off the Internet, and solve most of the problems associated with them. Just a few thoughts off the top of my head. I'm sure much more could follow. And perhaps this is just me, but I was miserable as a child, in many ways that access to the Internet (even in the benighted form of today's social media) would probably have helped.

Robert Kuttner: [04-26] The Soaking at Bed Bath & Beyond: "Who bought up all that stock, as the retailer was on the route to bankruptcy?"

Joel Penney: [04-29] Right-wing media used to shun pop culture. Now it's obsessed with it. I'm not so sure about the first line, given how popular music from rock and roll in the 1950s to hip-hop in the 1980s were met with hysterical denunciations from self-appointed guardians of decency, but sure, it seems to be getting both more trivial and more frantic. Part of that may be the perception that popular culture trends have become so broad, so ubiquitous that all the right can do is rant and rail -- also feeds into their general sense of victimhood and grievance. I remember back in the 1970s it seemed like a big insight to understand how politics permeated cultural artifacts. (One famous example was How to Read Donald Duck.) But while the right managed to claw back (or cling to) political power, culture has continued its popular (if ever more varied) drift, and "high culture" is hardly even a term anymore (maybe "highbrow," but even that may be showing my age).

Still, I can't help but be amused watching right-wingers discover bits of formerly left-wing methodology, exposing hidden political memes in everyday cultural artifacts. But haven't they been doing that all along? It's just funnier now that symbols of satanism have given way to the currently more alarming curse of wokeness.

Adam Rawnsley/Jim Laporta: [04-27] The Online Racists Stealing Military Secrets: Jack Teixiera: If he's to be believed, you can't call him a whistleblower, because he wasn't trying to expose secrets that needed further scrutiny. He was just showing off to his friends, which turns out to be a part of a broader complex of pathological personal traits: the guns, the racism, etc. People have wondered why the military gave someone like him such access to top-secret material. Perhaps they should wonder about the mutual attraction between the military and people like him, or, say, Timothy McVeigh, or Michael Flynn. I'm not a big fan of a culture where the most basic principle is the necessity of following orders, but at least that's an ordering principle. Just recruiting psychotics who think they should answer to "higher powers" is crazy.

And speaking of crazy, while I didn't think much of the revelations at first, the more we get into them, the more bizarre they become. I've long suspected that secret classifications were more meant to keep the truth from ourselves than from supposed enemies. And the big secret here is that nobody in a position of power seems to know what they're doing.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-28] Roaming Charges: Nipped and Tuckered: Starts with Carlson, but has surprisingly little to add, other than his observation that: "Tucker Carlson seems to be a truly weird person. His obsessions -- filth, bizarre animal stories ('sex crazed pandas' and 'psycho raccoons'), obesity, bodily excrescences, the subliminal gender messages in candy, testicle tanning -- which he regularly inflicted on his audiences, range far beyond the usual tabloid grotesqueries and border on the pathological."

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Friday, April 28, 2023

Book Roundup

Seems like I've been working on this Book Roundup forever. The last one was October 22, 2022, preceded by one on May 1, 2022. I keep an open scratch file, sorted into things ready to go for the two sections: 40 substantial blurb-reviews, some with associated lists of related books, and a variable number of simple mentions, some with a line or two for identification. Everything I've done in the past gets copied into a monster archive file, which I consult to avoid repetition.

Someone once asked me about creating a database for book entries. I thought I responded with interest, but never heard from that person again. For what it's worth, my Next Draft file is public, but not in any of my navigation menus. I'm even giving some consideration to coming up with specialized posts on music and/or cooking, but have made little progress on that. It is always possible you'll find those subjects below.

I've been doing batches of 40 for quite a while, but as the sublists keep growing, it occurs to me that 20 would be a more reasonable chunk size, which would also help with the problem of stretching intervals. As it is, it's been a struggle to get this one out, and feel a bit bad doing so before completing a research round. (I left an incomplete one a couple months ago, then back to last fall.)

Rather unusually, nothing in the main section that I've read. I did buy a copy of Reality Blind, but read instead a previously noted book along those lines: Brian T Watson: Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time and the Future We'll Face. I am most tempted to order Kruse/Zelizer: Myth America, and Oreskes/Conway: The Big Myth. I've read previous books by Andrew Bacevich, Ha-Joon Chang, Timothy Egan, Norman G Finkelstein, Chris Hedges, China Miéville, David Quammen, Bernie Sanders, Quinn Slobodian, and Michael Walzer (long ago, his first book from 1965, The Revolution of the Saints, and at least some of his 1970 essay collection, Obligations).

I should note that while I look for items of interest, these are not recommendations (unless explicit). I write about a small number of books each time to criticize or make fun of, and I often note highly dubious books by well-known right-wing authors with little or no comment (Niall Ferguson and Victor Hanson Davis are obvious examples below). Books by political figures are usually noted and dismissed (like Ro Khanna, but I stopped to write something on Bernie Sanders).

There are also a fair number of historical tomes in the second section, especially where they are self-explanatory and not of immediate personal interest. I also tend to pass on left-wing political tomes, especially in the Marxist tradition (like David Harvey).

In the sublists, I made a partial effort to separate possibly worthwhile books from certainly bad ones, at least on climate change and Covid-19. I didn't on abortion. I'm really in no mood to consider anti-abortion views, even to ridicule them, or for that matter attempts to try to see the merits of both sides. Conversely, I didn't go far toward building up a pro-abortion list. I started intent on noting Mary Ziegler's other work, then found a couple more titles in that vein, and one political tract I can wholeheartedly endorse (Without Apology).

I held back a bunch of partly written drafts, plus a lot of barely noted books, especially where they seemed likely to be expanded and/or grouped later on (books on white supremacy and woke fit here; same for China, India, and policing). On the other hand, I grabbed up all the climate stuff I could find but hadn't mentioned earlier. It's certainly impossible to blame our political failures there on lack of information.

Andrew Bacevich: On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century (paperback, 2022, Haymarket Books): Conservative anti-militarist, head of Quincy Institute, collects a batch of essays initially written for TomDispatch from 2016-21. Donald Trump was president for most of that stretch, but without a coherent idea how to adapt American foreign policy after the broken hubris of the War on Terror, he mostly broke things, which was maddening for critics like Bacevich. Biden's solution was to revive the "obsolete past" Bacevich wants him to shed, so he's still not happy, but at least he has lots to critique.

  • Andrew Bacevich/Daniel A Sjursen, eds: Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars (2022, Metropolitan Books): Title suggests an oral history, but this is actually a collection of essays.
  • Andrew Bacevich: After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed (2021, Metropolitan Books): Paperback forthcoming [05-03].

Margaret A Burnham: By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners (2022, WW Norton): In what's been called "a paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow-era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy." Or: "if the law cannot protect a person from lynching, then isn't lynching the law?" Lynching was in fact so fundamental to the white supremacist order that the civil rights movement spent most of its energy from 1920 to 1940 in trying to secure a federal anti-lynching law. After all, if you can't live, what else can you do? By the way, the first federal anti-lynching bill passed was in 2022, signed by Joe Biden, and named for Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill had been passed by the House in 1922, but filibustered in the Senate.

Ha-Joon Chang: Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World (2023, Public Affairs): Korean economist, started studying developing economies, and came to suspect that much of what fellow economists were teaching on the subject didn't work, and more so, was wrong (see Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism). Since then, he's sought to debunk capitalist economics in a series of primers, like 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, and Economics: A User's Guide. Here he tries a different tactic, using food for examples, tossing in a few recipes. Perhaps he's familiar with Upton Sinclair's line: "I aimed for the public's heart, and hit it in the stomach."

Christopher O Clugston: Blip: Humanity's 300 Year Self-Terminating Experiment With Industrialism (paperback, 2019, Booklocker): There are lots of optimistic books about sustainable energy sources and not much worry about running out of other NNR (nonrenewable natural resources). This book, and its predecessor, offer the flipside to those books. The cover chart reminds me of one Richard Heinberg plotted on oil use and population, extended to project a downside mirroring the upward slant. I can think of reasons why the downside isn't necessary, but I can also imagine what happens when you add a couple more charts to the mix: one would track the efforts from the poorer parts of the world to achieve parity with the richer ones (by development and/or by emigration; it turns out that reducing population growth has little effect here); and the other (harder to quantify but easier to imagine) would track the increasing political stupidity in the richer countries. From those charts it would be a short step to war and revolution. Earlier:

  • Christopher O Clugston: Scarcity: Humanity's Final Chapter (paperback, 2012, Booklocker).

Christopher J Coyne/Abigail R Hall: Manufacturing Militarism: US Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (paperback, 2021, Stanford University Press): "The US government's prime enemy in the War on Terror is not a shadowy mastermind dispatching suicide bombers. It is the informed American citizen." They start by inflating threats, then frame them so that military force is the only option. Hence, we fund vast globe-spanning military networks to deal poorly with threats that pale in comparison to the wildfires, chemical spills, and other disasters that routinely occur. Coyne and Hall have been aware of this for some time. They are among the few who recognize that militarism directed abroad damages democracy and everyday life at home. Also:

  • Christopher J Coyne: After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (paperback, 2007, Stanford Economics and Finance).
  • Christopher J Coyne/Abigail R Hall: Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of US Militarism (paperback, 2014, Stanford University Press).
  • Christopher J Coyne: In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace (2022, Independent Institute).

Ron DeSantis: The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival (2023, Broadside Books): "He played baseball for Yale [while most were studying?], graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, and served in Iraq and the halls of Congress [not just Congress? he was a hall monitor?]. But in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: He didn't want to be part of the leftist elite." Nah, he wanted to be part of the far-right elite (although between Yale, Harvard, Iraq, and Congress, I doubt he met very many actual leftists. This, of course, is his campaign brief. (Amazon's "frequently bought together" offer adds Mike Pompeo's Never Give an Inch and Mike Pence's So Help Me God), so one would normally expect it to be long on homilies and short on details. Of course, his homilies are pretty dark, like "The United States has been increasingly captive to an arrogant, stale, and failed ruling class." And also: "Florida has stood as an antidote to America's failed ruling class." The table of contents not only includes chapters on "For God, for Country, and for Yale" and "Honor, Courage, and Commitment," but also "The Magic Kingdom of Woke Corporatism" and "The Liberal Elite's Praetorian Guard." And if you have any doubt that he's running, the books ends with "Make America Florida." All this in a succinct 286 pages. He's every bit as seductive as Satan. More campaign briefs (also see Mike Pompeo, separately; nothing yet for Larry Elder, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Rogers, or other phantom candidates I've heard about -- although Elder has a half-dozen books 2001-19, the last of which was a lame pitch for Trump; by the way, Trump's latest is in the second section):

  • Tom Cotton: Only the Strong: Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power (2022, Twelve): Senator (R-AR): "A behind-the-scenes look at the dangerous failures of Presidents Barack Obama & Joe Biden," insisting that "Only the strong can preserve their freedom."
  • Nikki R Haley: If You Want Something Done . . . Leadership Lessons From Bold Women (2022, St Martin's Press): Former governor (R-SC). Been working on her campaign a long time, as she previously wrote:
  • Nikki Haley: Can't Is Not an Option: My American Story (2012, Sentinel): The inspirational back story, and:
  • Nikki R Haley: With All Due Respect: Defending America With Grit and Grace (2019, St Martin's): Her claim from having been Trump's first UN Ambassador.
  • Perry Johnson: Two Cents to Save America (2023, self-published).
  • Mike Pence: So Help Me God (2022, Simon & Schuster): Former governor (R-IN), VP under Trump. 560 pp.
  • Kristi Noem: Not My First Rodeo: Lessons From the Heartland (2022, Twelve): South Dakota governor.
  • Vivek Ramaswamy: Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam (2021, Center Street): Biotech company CEO, hedge fund partner, now running for president as others try to jump on his anti-woke bandwagon.
  • Vivek Ramaswamy: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence (2022, Center Street).
  • Vivek Ramaswamy: Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For (2023, Broadside Books). [04-25].
  • Tim Scott: America, a Redemption Story: Choosing Hope, Creating Unity (2022, Thomas Nelson): Senator (R-SC).

Timothy Egan: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023, Viking): Focuses on D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the KKK in Indiana during its 1920s resurgence, a rich and charismatic demagogue with his sights on high political office. The woman in the subtitle was Madge Oberholtzer, whom he abducted and raped, and who got a tiny bit of redemption with her "deathbed testimony." Egan is a fine writer with a knack for fishing fascinating stories out of history, but this one would feel better if she had lived to see her tormenter's downfall. I previously noted two Egan books: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2005), and The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America (2009). Some others:

  • Timothy Egan: The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (1990, Knopf; paperback, 1991, Vintage).
  • Timothy Egan: Breaking Blue: How One Man's Hunt Through a Half Century of Police Cover-Ups Unlocked the Secret Behind the Nation's Oldest Continuing Murder Investigation (1992, Knopf; paperback, 2004, Sasquatch): The 1935 murder of George Conniff, unsolved until 1989.
  • Timothy Egan: Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (1998, Knopf; paperback, 1999, Vintage).
  • Timothy Egan: The Winemaker's Daughter (2004, Knopf; paperback, 2005, Vintage): A novel.
  • Timothy Egan: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; paperback, 2013, Mariner).
  • Timothy Egan: The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016; paperback, 2017, Mariner): On Thomas F Meagher.
  • Timothy Egan: A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Caterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith (2019, Viking; paperback, 2020, Penguin).

Norman G Finkelstein: I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (paperback, 2023, Sublation Media): A critique (544 pp) of "identity politics and cancel culture" and lament on "academic freedom" from a guy whose steadfast critique of Israel gets him canceled more often than any self-proclaimed right-wing "victim" can imagine. On the other hand, the experience seems to be taking a toll, making him even more cranky. I've cited most of his books, but missed these:

  • Norman G Finkelstein: The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years (paperback, 1996, University of Minnesota Press).
  • Norman G Finkelstein/Ruth Bettina Birn: A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (paperback, 1998, Holt).
  • Norman G Finkelstein: I Accuse! (paperback, 2020, OR Books): "Herewith a proof beyond reasonable doubt that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda whitewashed Israel."

Peter Frankopan: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023, Knopf): 736 pp. Big picture history as futurology, tracking climate change from the "dawn of time" -- billions of years where the release of atmospheric oxygen dwarfs any climate change we can imagine -- to the present and beyond. Along the way, the points is to see how many major world events can be tied to disturbances in the environment. I've seen other books trample this ground, perhaps less extensively, like David Keys: Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of Modern Civilization, and Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Author previously wrote:

  • Peter Frankopan: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2016; Knopf; paperback, 2017, Vintage).
  • Peter Frankopan: The New Silk Roads: The New Asia and the Remaking of the World Order (2019, Knopf; paperback, 2020, Vintage).

John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992; 25th Anniversary Edition, paperback, 2017, New Society): Libertarian NYC teacher, eventually resigned, saying he no longer wished to "hurt kids for a living." Reminds me of Paul Goodman's classic Compulsory Miseducation (1964). For that matter, also reminds me of my own experience in the public schools, where I escaped the curses of indifference and dependency by radical insubordination. Admittedly, I've known a few people who responded well to school, who found it affirmative, and who built brilliant careers and lives on its foundation. And I know that most teachers don't mean to be ogres, and I doubt that even their supervisors have such malign intent, but rather have set up a system where the assumption of superiority makes the harm Gatto rails against all but inevitable. Gatto aso wrote:

  • John Taylor Gatto: A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling (2001; paperback, 2002, Berkeley Hills Books).
  • John Taylor Gatto: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008; paperback, 2010, New Society).
  • John Taylor Gatto: The Underground History of American Education, Volume I: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (paperback, 2017, Valor Academy).

Rebecca Giblin/Cory Doctorow: Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets, and How We'll Win Them Back (2022, Beacon Press): This deals with monopoly powers in books, music, etc., but chokepoints go back a fair ways -- my first thought was how Hewlett-Packard connived to force me to buy ink service for a printer I naively bought from them (never again!), but IBM was notorious for similar practices back in the 1950s. Giblin is an Australian lawyer involved in several interesting projects, and Doctorow is a science fiction writer with similar interests. Still, I'm pretty skeptical about that "how we'll win them back" line.

Anand Giridharadas: The Persuaders: At the Front lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022, Knopf): Having written a book (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World) about how the rich use philanthropy less to assuage their guilty consciences than to head off potential change, he now turns to, well, I'm not sure. The prologue starts off with a section about Russian trolls and propaganda, but reviews suggest this is a series of portraits of activists trying to get their messages across, so how can you be persuasive in a world riddled with misdirection?

Jason D Greenblatt: In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East -- and How to Stop Joe Biden From Unmaking It (2022, Wicked Son): Author worked for the Trump administration in negotiating the Abraham Accords, a project Jared Kushner has taken much of the credit for. The AA are a series of agreements between Israel, the US, and various Arab countries, where the latter normalizing relations with Israel, and therefore are allowed to buy more sophisticated arms from the US. This is basically just a continuation of the arrangement Carter negotiated with Egypt in the 1970s, and which Jordan signed on to in the 1990s. The resulting arms shipments (including from Israel) do nothing to secure peace in the region: they contribute to an arms race with Iran, and to internal conflicts like in Yemen. And the whole deal bypasses the more fundamental injustice Israel imposes within its own illegally-expanded borders on Palestinians, even on those nominally considered citizens of Israel. (On paper, there is also a "Peace to Prosperity" component for the Palestinians, but Israel has never shown any interest in it, and Trump's team are not the sort to get pushy.) The praise for Trump and the threat to Biden just proves that Greenblatt understands his fundamentally partisan role. In point of fact, Biden has no desire or need to roll back any of the Abraham Accords. The only "threat" he offers is that he might resurrect the JCPOA with Iran, which would end the potential threat Iran might poise to Israel, but would deprive Israeli leaders of an enemy they need to justify their militarism. Also:

  • David Friedman: Sledgehammer: How Breaking With the past Brought Peace to the Middle East (2022, Broadside Books): Trump's ambassador to Israel, who more than anyone personified the abject surrender of American interests to Israel, weighs in.

Nicholas Guyatt: The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison (2022, Basic Books): British historian, books have covered a wide range of topics, this would seem to be a relatively obscure story: Britain's Dartmoor Prison, which held some 5,000 American sailors during and after the War of 1812 (where "they had been left to rot by their government"), and many were massacred in 1815. But it has contemporary resonance, as race, power, and dehumanization are still very much with us. Guyatt previously wrote:

  • Nicholas Guyatt: The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (paperback, 1998, Zed Books).
  • Nicholas Guyatt: Another American Century: The United States and the World Since 9/11 (paperback, 2003, Zed Books).
  • Nicholas Guyatt: Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (paperback, 2007, Cambridge University Press).
  • Nicholas Guyatt: Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World (paperback, 2007, Harper Perennial).
  • Nicholas Guyatt: Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (2016, Basic Books).

Stephen J Hadley, ed: Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W Bush Passed to Barack Obama (2023, Brookings Institution Press): Big (774 pp) collection of transition papers prepared by the outgoing Bush administration for Obama, compiled by Bush's second-term National Security Advisor, with a foreword by Bush and introductions by Hadley and Condoleezza Rice (who held the NSA post before Hadley, before she became Secretary of State). Lots of disappointments in Obama's early administration, but the extent to which he maintained continuity with Bush foreign policy was among the most shameful (and stupid).

Pekka Hämäläinen: Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest of North America (2022, Liveright). Attempts to recast the history of North America from the vantage point of its indigenous inhabitants. Still, only two chapters set the pre-1492 stage, reflecting the lack of written records for the 11-12 thousand years between their arrival from Asia and Alaska and the invaders from Europe. After that, there's a lot of history to report, though it's hitherto usually been told from the standpoint of the conquerors.

  • Pekka Hämäläinen: The Comanche Empire (2008; paperback, 2009, Yale University Press).
  • Pekka Hämäläinen: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019; paperback, 2020, Yale University Press).

Johann Hari: Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention -- and How to Think Deeply Again (2022, Crown): Superficially, this seems to fit into the tradition of anti-media screeds like Amusing Ourselves to Death, although the self-help bit wedged into the title adds a bit of the marketing the book would be better off railing against. How much self help is even possible? The table of contents enumerates twelve causes for this loss of focus, leaving scant room for solutions. How deeply do we want (or need) to think, anyway? I see blurb praise from Naomi Klein, Hillary Clinton, and Arianna Harrington, which makes me think that maybe focus is less the problem than the lack of principles and responsibility from the public figures we need to keep check on.

  • Johann Hari: Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope (2018; paperback, 2019, Bloomsbury).

Mehdi Hasan: Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking (2023, Henry Holt): British-American journalist, started with Al Jazeera English, has moved in more respectable circles recently, and yes, he's a very erudite and penetrating interviewer. Still, seems a bit odd to frame this as a self-help book for pundits who care more about winning arguments than finding the best answers. Still, like Machiavelli's Prince, you can probably flip this around and see it as an exposé of people who win arguments with cheap tricks. Some time back, I read a book that purported to have every known sales close technique. then noted that if you don't want to buy, just list the techniques just used on you, and the salesperson will be defeated.

Chris Hedges: The Greatest Evil Is War (2022, Seven Stories Press): A former divinity student who once got his kicks as a war correspondent, seeking action everywhere from Central America to the Balkans through the Middle East and into Africa, he now offers "a blistering condemnation of war in all forms and for all reasons." I would say "about time," but it looks like he's collected these writings from a couple decades of columns. Still, those of us who consistently oppose war from the start rarely need to rewrite much.

Wes Jackson/Robert Jensen: An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (paperback, 2022, University of Notre Dame Press): Short (184 pp), Jackson is an important agriculture reformer in Kansas (a folk hero, really), and Jensen is a journalism professor whose concern for the planet led him to write a book about Jackson. Title plays on Al Gore's 2006 book and film An Inconvenient Truth, but Gore's title fit together into something profound, whereas this title has a whiff of irony and desperation: sure, the situation is graver now, but apocalypse is still a bit hyperbolic, and being nonchalant about it doesn't help. Hard to tell whether this goes beyond rote alarmism. A look back at their many previous books suggests increasing pessimism.

  • Wes Jackson: Man and the Environment (paperback, 1971, Wm C Brown).
  • Wes Jackson: New Roots for Agriculture paperback, 1980, University of Nebraska Press): Introduction by Wendell Berry.
  • Wes Jackson: Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth (paperback, 1987, North Point Press).
  • Wes Jackson: Becoming Native to This Place (paperback, 1996, Counterpoint): 136 pp.
  • Wes Jackson: Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson (paperback, 2011, Counterpoint): Introduction by Wendell Berry.
  • Wes C Jackson: The Woman at the Well: How One Encounter Changed a City (paperback, 2013, Third Ralph): 60 pp.
  • Robert Jensen: All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (paperback, 2009, Soft Skull).
  • Robert Jensen: We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out (paperback, 2013, CreateSpace).
  • Robert Jensen: Plain Radical: Living, Loving and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (paperback, 2015, Soft Skull).
  • Robert Jensen: The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (paperback, 2005, City Lights).
  • Robert Jensen: Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialog (paperback, 2013, City Lights).
  • Robert Jensen: The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (paperback, 2017, Spinifex Press).
  • Robert Jensen: The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability (2021, University Press of Kansas).

Michael Kazin: What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (2022, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Broad strokes history of the Democratic Party's many struggles to win elections, starting with Jackson (or actually, his smarter alter ego Martin van Buren), and extending to the present. The title is a curious one, given that mostly Democrats didn't manage to win, often (1860, 1896, 1972) because the Party bigwigs preferred losing to Republicans over losing to other Democrats. (The Republicans returned the favor in 1912, giving us the mixed blessings of Woodrow Wilson.) Kazin favors the left wing of the Democratic Party, and has written several books about it:

  • Michael Kazin: Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (1987; paperback, 1988, University of Illinois Press).
  • Michael Kazin: The Populist Persuasion: An American History (1995, Basic Books; rev ed, paperback, 2017, Cornell University Press).
  • Martin Isserman/Michael Kazin: America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (1999, Oxford University Press; 5th ed, paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press).
  • Michael Kazin: A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2006, Knopf; paperback, 2007, Anchor).
  • Michael Kazin: American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011, Knopf; paperback, 2012, Vintage Books).
  • Michael Kazin: War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (2017; paperback, 2018, Simon & Schuster).

Kevin M Kruse/Julian E Zelizer, eds: Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (2023, Basic Books): Looks like an interesting collection of revisionist essays on controversial topics in American history, like "Founding Myths" and "Vanishing Indians" up to more contemporary topics like "White Backlash," "Police Violence," and "Voter Fraud." As they point out, "Many of the lies and legends in this collection . . . stem from deliberate campaign of disinformation from the political Right." While some of these myths have deep roots in historiography, others were largely invented by the Right in recent years, in their conscious attempt to recast American history in a self-justifying light. Refuting those myths doesn't automatically place you on the Left, but the Left has rarely hid injustices in the past, because the Left exists to correct them.

Glory M Liu: Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (2022, Princeton University Press). Scottish author of economics ur-text The Wealth of Nations in the pivotal American year of 1776, a coincidence that some Americans have taken as manifest destiny. This focuses on American readings of Smith's book, especially how they've been weaponized for private gain. For instance: "the so-called Chicago School's distillation of Smith's ideas into a popular and powerful myth: that rational self-interest is the only valid premise for the analysis of human behavior, and that only the invisible hand of the market, not the heavy hand of government, could guarantee personal and political freedom." That "invisible hand" has often been taken as the magic that converts personal greed into public good: not the only time a joke has been taken as gospel.

Andrew Morton: The Queen: Her Life (2022, Grand Central): The British monarchy has been dead weight since . . . well, as an American, I'd start with George III . . . but few monarchs have retreated into their useless world more gracefully than Elizabeth II. Morton is a hack who does "celebrity biographies" (Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Madonna) when he's not riding piggyback on the tabloid monarchy, but he scored one career-defining coup in getting Princess Diana to spill her guts into the book he subtitled "Her True Story -- In Her Own Words." My best guess is that this book has been lurking in his cabinet, waiting the Queen's inevitable death for an element of timeliness (it's not as if he didn't have other wares to flog). Still, this one's handy enough to hang a few more slices of useless but sometimes titillating royal gossip (the length perhaps owing to my lack of interest in the subject):

  • Andrew Morton: Diana: Her True Story -- in Her Own Words (1992; 25th anniversary edition, "featuring exclusive new material": paperback, 2017, Simon & Schuster).
  • Andrew Morton: 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis, and the Biggest Cover-Up in History (2015; paperback, 2016, Grand Central).
  • Andrew Morton: Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy (2018, paperback, Grand Central).
  • Andrew Morton: Meghan and the Unmasking of the Monarchy: A Hollywood Princess (2018; paperback, 2021, Grand Central).
  • Andrew Morton: Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters (2021, Grand Central).
  • Christopher Andersen: Brothers and Wives: Inside the Private Lives of William, Kate, Harry, and Meghan (2021, Gallery Books).
  • Tina Brown: The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor -- the Truth and the Turmoil (paperback, 2023, Crown): 608 pp. Brown previously wrote:
  • Tina Brown: The Diana Chronicles (2007, Doubleday; paperback, 2008, Knopf).
  • Tom Bower: Revenge: Meghan, Harry, and the War Between the Windsors (2022, Atria Books).
  • Lady Colin Campbell: Meghan and Harry: The Real Story (2020, Pegasus Books).
  • Dylan Howard: Royals at War: The Untold Story of Harry and Meghan's Shocking Split with the House of Windsor (2020, Skyhorse).
  • Robert Lacey: Battle of Brothers: William and Harry -- The Inside Story of a Family in Tumult (2020, Harper).
  • Valentine Low: Courtiers: Intrigue, Ambition, and the Power Players Behind the House of Windsor (2023, St Martin's Press).
  • Katie Nicholl: The New Royals: Queen Elizabeth's Legacy and the Future of the Crown (2022, Hachette Books).
  • James Patterson: Diana, William, and Harry: The Heartbreaking Story of a Princess and Mother (2022, Little Brown).
  • Omid Scobie/Carolyn Durand: Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family (2020, Dey Street Books).
  • Prince Harry: Spare (2023, Random House): Makes a solid case that Prince William is an asshole. Makes a very weak case that he isn't.

Eric Metaxas: Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life (2021, Salem Books): Autobiography. Everything I read about him spells "huckster," albeit a rather clever and successful one, with his syndicated radio show, his bestsellers, and his constant stroking of common religious conceits in America, while trying to reclaim moral and intellectual high ground (against slavery, against Nazism, for American liberty, for science; miracles never cease).

  • Eric Metaxas: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask) (paperback, 2005, WaterBrook).
  • Eric Metaxas: Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (2007; paperback, 2008, Harper Collins).
  • Eric Metaxas: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2010; paperback, 2020, Thomas Nelson): Big bestseller, puts the Nazis in their place.
  • Eric Metaxas: If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty (2016, Viking; paperback, 2017, Penguin).
  • Eric Metaxas: Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (2014, Viking; paperback, 2015, Penguin).
  • Eric Metaxas: Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017, Viking; paperback, 2018, Penguin).
  • Eric Metaxas: Is Atheism Dead? (2021, Salem Books). No, it's just minding its own business.
  • Eric Metaxas: Letter to the American Church (2022, Salem Books).

China Miéville: A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (paperback, 2022, Haymarket Books): British writer, started writing speculative fiction (novels, stories, comic books), branched out into criticism (Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, 2009) and history (October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, 2017). Here he re-reads 1848's The Communist Manifesto, both in light of the history it inspired and the history we wound up with today, and he finds it surprisingly resonant.

Gretchen Morgenson/Joshua Rosner: These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs -- and Wrecks -- America (2023, Simon & Schuster): Longtime financial reporters, wrote a book in 2011 on how greed wrecked the economy (Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon), zeroes in on the worst of the worst here: the private equity companies that buy companies and bleed them dry, making off with billions while employees lose their jobs, customers lose options, and we wind up having to pick up the pieces. (You may recall that Mitt Romney's Bain Capital was one such firm.)

Naomi Oreskes/Erik M Conway: The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023, Bloomsbury): Possibly an important book. Authors wrote about how companies spin PR to protect toxic products -- Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010). The difference here is that they're pushing political ideas: they want us to hate government because they fear government -- the face they paint on democracy -- might defend public interests against private greed. So they play up corruption (mostly their own clandestine interference) and bureaucratic inefficiency as intrinsic flaws. Meanwhile, they try to paint a pretty picture of a "free market," which is actually something the entire MBA program is training to subvert. Part of the reason they've gotten away with this is that the idea of free markets is so promising. But to work, you have to have ample competition, perfect information, transparency, and integrity -- conditions that would be impossible even if tried, which is something no actual business wants.

Mike Pompeo: Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love (2023, Broadside Books): Another campaign brief, this one from "the only four-year national security member of President Trump's Cabinet, he worked to impose crushing pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran, avert a nuclear crisis with North Korea, deliver unmatched support for Israel, and bring peace to the Middle East." Note that none of those things actually worked, as he left the world in worse shape than when he joined Trump. But also note that there are issues where he wants to distance himself from Trump, as when he explains "why Trump thought his Secretary of State was too tough on China," and why Trump needed to be tougher. The first blurb reads: "Mike is a real-life Tom Clancy American hero." Perhaps running for president isn't just an ego thing with him. Maybe he just wants to start World War III. He's already abandoned his presidential campaign, so expect to find this cheap.

David Quammen: Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus (2022, Simon & Schuster): Natural science writer, his book on evolution (The Song of the Dodo is a classic), but he's also ventured into diseases, with books on AIDS and Ebola, as well as (most presciently) Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, so him tackling the Covid-19 pandemic is all but inevitable. I expected by now that we'd be seeing more serious books on Covid, but a quick check through Amazon reveals only a few plausible titles, along with a bunch of more/less paranoid hysteria:

  • Stephen Bezruchka: Inequality Kills Us All: Covid-19's Health Lessons for the World (paperback, 2022, Routledge).
  • The Covid Crisis Group: Lessons From the Covid War: An Investigative Report (paperback, 2023, Public Affairs).
  • Erik J Dahl: The Covid-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough (paperback, Georgetown University Press).
  • Anya Kamenetz: The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now (2022, Public Affairs).
  • Katherine Sorrels/Lora Arduser/et al, eds: Ohio Under Covid: Lessons From America's Heartland in Crisis (paperback, 2023, University of Michigan Press).
  • Alexander Zaitchik: Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine From Aspirin to Covid-19 Vaccines (paperback, 2023, Counterpoint): Title comes from Jonas Salk, who refused to patent his polio vaccine.
  • Slavoj Zizek: Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost (paperback, 2021, Polity).

Let's also throw in a sample of the more extreme political screeds -- not all on the right, and some merely looking suspicious.

  • Paul Elias Alexander/Kent Heckenlively: Presidential Takedown: How Anthony Fauci, the CDC, NIH, and the WHO Conspired to Overthrow President Trump (2022, Skyhorse): So, millions of people got sick and died to make Trump look bad?
  • Vernon Coleman: Covid-19: The Greatest Hoax in History (paperback, 2022, Korsgaard).
  • Steve Deace/Daniel Horowitz: Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting Covid Fascism With a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens AGain (2023, Post Hill Press).
  • Toby Green/Thomas Fazi: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor -- A Critique From the Left (paperback, 2023, Hurst): Critical of lockdowns and vaccines, so not my preferred left analysis.
  • Justin Hart: Gone Viral: How Covid Drove the World Insane (2022, Regnery). Title could have come from the left, but publisher argues otherwise.
  • Aaron Kheriaty: The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022, Regnery).
  • Pierre Kory: The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine That Save Millions and Could Have Ended the Covid Pandemic (2023, Skyhorse) [06-06]
  • John Leake/Peter A McCullough: The Courage to Face Covid-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex (paperback, 2022, Counterplay).
  • Marc Morano: The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown (2022, Regnery).
  • Steve Templeton: Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe (paperback, 2023, Brownstone). The most sensible-sounding of this bunch, but clearly wrong in many cases: sure, there may be places where fear of germs can be carried to excess, but hospitals are an obvious exception.
  • Naomi Wolf: The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human (2022, All Seasons Press).

I'm not sure which of the above lists the "lab leak" stories belong in:

  • Alina Chan/Matt Ridley: Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (2021; paperback, 2022, Harper Perennial).
  • Andrew G Huff: The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (2022, Skyhorse).
  • Robert F Kennedy Jr: The Wuham Cover-Up: How US Health Officials Conspired With the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of Covid-19 (2023, Skyhorse). [06-20]
  • Sharri Markson: What Really Happened in Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths (paperback, 2022, Harper Collins).
  • Alison Young: Pandora's Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk (2023, Center Street).

Bernie Sanders: It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (2023, Crown): Not a typical political brief, and not just because it's unlikely he'll run for president in 2024 (although he does write about his run in 2020) -- more like because he has serious things to say. Sanders is not to my left on issues, but he sometimes strikes me as unnecessary taking risks with rhetoric, as when his 2016 stump speech wound up with a call for "political revolution." Even with the qualification, that struck me as risky, and not sufficiently clear. I've long been taking pains to stress that reforms would be just fine. Similarly, I'm inclined to accept that capitalism has some virtues, as long as it's sufficiently regulated, of course. But Sanders may be striking the right note here: after all, if you can't get angry enough, what chance do you have of putting those regulations (and other compensations) in place? Besides, there is no word more accurate: Ryan Cooper's How Are You Going to Pay for That? has lots of good ideas, but trying to dodge "capitalism" by complaining about "propertarianism" isn't one of them.

Jeff Sharlet: The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War (2023, WW Norton): Author has written previous books on the intersection of right-wing politics and religion -- The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism as the Heart of American Power (2008), and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy (2010) -- and this follows his subjects into the post-Trump apocalypse, where "political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals." This idea of a "slow civil war" strikes me as apt, reminding me of how slow neutrons can sustain nuclear reactions to generate heat and radioactivity short of blowing everything up. When we think of civil war, we automatically think of 1861, when each state started with its own organized militia. But civil wars usually start small and grow as the injuries compound.

Quinn Slobodian: Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023, Metropolitan Books): This is about the increase in the number of special zones, which are countries or enclaves which allow business to operate with little or no democratic accountability. Businesses can avoid taxes and other regulations by shopping for favored zones, and the more they have to choose from, the more leverage they have. The book opens with the long-established Hong Kong, but there are many more, some as local as the "innovation zones" being promoted by your local and state governments. Slobodian previously wrote Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which seems like old hat compared to this.

Jeremi Suri: Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy (2022, Public Affairs). "Worries about a new civil war in America are misplaced because the Civil War never fully ended. Its lingering embers have burst into flames at various times, including during our own." Much of this story has been told in Heather Cox Richardson's How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, but the neo-Confederate wins from Jim Crow into the 1950s haven't stood unchallenged either, as we see in the still ongoing struggle to remove Confederate monuments, or the appearance of Confederate flags in the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions (2023, Penguin Press): At 15, she emerged as an iconic leader in the campaign to take climate change seriously. She has a couple previous books -- No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019), and Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (2020) -- but one of the advantages of being a leader is you don't have to do it all yourself. She assembled, or at least put her name on (the word on the frontispiece is "created"), this mini-encyclopedia (464 pp) from the work of over 100 experts, with her own section intros. Also lots of pictures and graphs. More recent books on climate change (also see Wes Jackson, above; of course, I've published many such lists before):

  • Susan Bauer-Wu: A Future We Can Love: How We Can Reverse the Climate Crisis With the Power of Our Hearts & Minds (2023, Shambhala): "Inspired by the conversations between his holiness the Dalai Lama & Greta Thunberg." [06-13]
  • Michael D Bess: Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them (2022, Cambridge University Press): Also writes about nuclear war, pandemics, and AI.
  • Zahra Biabani: Climate Optimism: Celebrating Systemic Change Around the World (paperback, 2023, Mango).
  • Jake Bittle: The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (2023, Simon & Schuster): As climate changes, people are going to adjust by moving, and not just to/within the US, per focus here.
  • Holly Jean Buck: Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough (paperback, 2021, Verso).
  • Brian Buma: The Atlas of a Changing Climate: Our Evolving Planet Visualized With More Than 100 Maps, Charts, and Infographics (2021, Timber Press).
  • Simon Clark: Firmament: The Hidden Science of Weather, Climate Change and the Air That Surrounds Us (2022, Hodder & Stoughton).
  • Stan Cox: The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic (paperback, 2021, City Lights).
  • Elizabeth Cripps: What Climate Justice Means: And Why We Should Care (paperback, 2022, Bloomsbury).
  • Steven Earle: A Brief History of Earth's Climate: Everyone's Guide to the Science of Climate Change (paperback, 2021, New Society).
  • Peter Fiekowsky/Carole Douglis: Clilmate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (paperback, 2022, Rivertowns Books): Focus on carbon removal.
  • Chris Funk: Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Catastrophes (2021, Cambridge University Press).
  • Joshua S Goldstein/Staffan A Qvist: A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Clilmate Change and the Rest Can Follow (2019, Public Affairs): Nuclear power advocates; "solved" is big a stretch, if true at all.
  • Matthew T Huber: Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (paperback, 2022, Verso).
  • Mark Z Jacobson: No Miracles Needed: How Today's Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air (new edition, paperback, 2023, Cambridge University Press).
  • Mark Z Jacobson: 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything (paperback, 2020, Cambridge University Press).
  • Vitezslav Kremlik: A Guide to the Climate Apocalypse (paperback, 2021, Identity).
  • Joanna I Lewis: Cooperating for the Climate: Learning From International Partnerships in China's Clean Energy Sector (paperback, 2023, The MIT Press).
  • Bill McGuire: Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide (paperback, 2022, Icon Books).
  • Paul McKendrick: Scrubbing the Sky: Inside the Race to Cool the Planet (2023, Figure 1).
  • Sam Moore/Alex Roberts: The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (paperback, 2022, Polity).
  • Frederica Perera: Children's Health and the Peril of Climate Change (2022, Oxford University Press).
  • Robert S Pindyck: Climate Future: Averting and Adapting to Climate Change (2022, Oxford University Press): Economist, puts perhaps too much emphasis on uncertainty.
  • David Pogue: How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos (paperback, 2021, Simnon & Schuster): Tech writer, has written many volumes in The Missing Manual series, assumes disaster is imminent and has compiled a lengthy (624 pp), systematic survival guide.
  • Assaad Razzouk: Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit: What They Don't Tell You About the Climate Crisis (paperback, 2022, Atlantic Books).
  • Heidi Roop: The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions for Everyone (paperback, 2023, Sasquatch Books).
  • Herb Simmens: A Climate Vocabulary of the Future (2017; 2nd ed, paperback, 2023, Wheatmark): Kim Stanley Robinson applauds this.
  • Rebecca Solnit/Thelma Young Lutunatabua, eds: Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility (paperback, 2023, Haymarket Books).
  • Eli Tziperman: Global Warming Science: A Quantitative Introduction to Climate Change and Its Consequences (paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press).
  • Rob Verchick: The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (2023, Columbia University Press).
  • Katie Worth: Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America (paperback, 2021, Columbia Global Reports).

I suppose we can mention a few recent examples of right-wing denialism and/or escapism:

  • Jerome R Corsi: The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in the Age of Disinformation (paperback, 2022, Post Hill Press).
  • Alex Epstein: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014; revised ed, 2021, Portfolio).
  • Alex Epstein: Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas -- Not Less (2022, Portfolio): Founder of Center for Industrial Progress, which means he doesn't depend on book royalties for his living.
  • C Paul Smith: The Climate Change Hoax Argument: The History and Science That Expose a Major International Deception (paperback, 2021, independent).
  • Robert Zubrin: The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future (paperback, 2023, Polaris): Longtime nuclear power advocate. I'm not a priori opposed, but first solve the waste problem, and end the threat of nuclear weapons. And the argument that entrepreneurs won't make the same (or worse?) mistakes as bureaucrats is risible.

Marian L Tupy/Gale E Pooley: Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (2022, Cato Institute): Basically, they define abundance as the product of population times freedom, where the latter is plain laissez-faire capitalism. Given the latter, population is the variable, and the more the merrier. Never mind the naysayers, with their cant about finite resources, as our planet (or whatever planet these two think they live on) is "infinitely bountiful." This is, of course, extremely stupid, and as I scan down the list of raving blurbs, I can cross most of the names from the list of people to take seriously (names I recognize: George Gilder, Paul Romer, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Jason Furman, George Will, Matt Ridley, Lawrence Summers, Michael Schellenberger). A customer caught the spirit and quoted Ronald Reagan: "There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams." That's a nice line, but the actual political system it ushered in not only slowed growth but made sure it was ever more inequally shared. And while I wouldn't say that abundance is an unimaginable goal, I will say that it only matters if it is widely distributed, which cannot happen under the political regime the Cato authors serve.

Michael Walzer: The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On "Liberal" as an Adjective (2023, Yale University Press): Billed as "one of the most prominent political philosophers of our era," his epic efforts to rationalize "just wars" have marked him as practically useless and more than a little evil. This slim (172 pp) volume examines the word "liberal" as attached to eight nouns: Democrats, Socialists, Nationalists and Internationalists, Communitarians, Feminists, Professors and Intellectuals, and Jews, then asks "Who Is and Who Isn't?" That few people today identify as liberals is due to two things: the failure of liberals from the 1960s and beyond to deliver FDR's freedom from want and from fear (largely due to their embrace of capitalist neo-colonialism, most notably in Vietnam); and the hatchet job the right did on liberals as a source of disorder (basically, they were given a lose-lose choice, and managed to do both). Still, Walzer is right that the word does survive somewhat honorably as an adjective, as his cases show, but only when it adds something to the noun it refines (e.g., liberal socialists seek equality and social solidarity, but also respect and tolerance for individuals -- not always a strong point on the historical left).

DJ White/NH Hagens: The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century: Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament (paperback, 2019, independent): This is sort of a "whole earth catalog" with nothing for sale, just a mess of concepts about how the world works, and facts about how it's all going to hell. Some sections: "A Probabilistic View of the Future"; "Human Cognitive Biases" (filed under "Delusional R Us"); "Receding Horizons and Peak Everything"; "Fifth Years of Buffer for a Million Years of Slime" (under "Our Faustian Ocean"); "Resetting Your Hedonic Ratchet." Hard to tell if this is crazy, or perhaps not crazy enough. Some more or less related books:

  • NJ Hagens/DJ White: Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures: Volume 1 (paperback, 2021, independent): This one seems more straightforwardly organized. No Volume 2, as far as I can tell.

Andrea Wulf: Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (2022, Knopf): Asks the question: "when did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today?" Finds answers in 1970s Germany (Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, various Schlegels, Alexander von Humboldt), contrasting them to the more mundane revolutionaries of France. She's explored this terrain extensively before. Reminds me that in order to dominate nature, you first have to name it. Previously wrote:

  • Andrea Wulf: The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession (2009, Knopf; paperback, 2010, Vintage Books).
  • Andrea Wulf: Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2011, Knopf; paperback, 2012, Vintage Books).
  • Andrea Wulf: Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (2012, Knopf; paperback, 2013, Vintage Books).
  • Andrea Wulf: The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World (2015, Knopf; paperback, 2016, Vintage Books).

Mary Ziegler: Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (2022, Yale University Press): I've long felt that the Republican establishment embrace of anti-abortion extremism was purely cynical: they wanted to break Catholics away from the Democratic Party, and saw abortion as a cheap and easy wedge issue -- one that, as it turned out, also resonated with fundamentalist protestants, who became an important political constituency in the 1980s, especially in the white South and northern suburbs (where racist "law and order" posturing was an even more powerful wedge). Ziegler ties the issue to campaign finance regulation, arguing that the anti-abortion faction came to dominate the Republican Party due to their financial prowess. I'm not so sure there ever was a monolithic Republican establishment (Mark Hanna may have come closest), but this seems to be conflating two things: the ideological purity the anti-abortion movement has successfully demanded; and the division of party power among its now unlimited elite donors and a base that is almost totally shaped by Fox and its splinter media competitors. Other books by Ziegler (including a later one, plus some recent ones on abortion):

  • Mary Ziegler: Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (paperback, 2020, Cambridge University Press).
  • Mary Ziegler: Roe: The History of a National Obsession (2023, Yale University Press).
  • Becca Andrews: No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right (2022, Public Affairs).
  • Jenny Brown: WIthout Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now (paperback, 2019, Verso).
  • David S Cohen/Carole E Joffe: Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America (2020, University of California Press): And much worse now.
  • Leslie J Reagan: When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (1997; paperback, 2022, University of California Press).

Additional books, barely or at least briefly noted. I reserve the right to return to them later (but probably won't). Some of these are just meant to be dismissive, while others just seem self-explanatory.

Sarah Adams/Dave Benton: Benghazi: Know Thy Enemy (2022, Askari Global): Written by two former CIA officers.

Martín Arboleda: Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (paperback, 2020, Verso).

Nona Willis Aronowitz: Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution (2022, Plume).

Lucas Bessire: Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (2021; paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press): The vanishing Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies a stretch of plains from the Texas panhandle to the Dakotas.

Katherine Blunt: California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric -- and What It Means for America's Power Grid (2022, Portfolio).

Michael Booth: Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family's Journey Through the Belly of Japan (2016, Picador).

HW Brands: Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution (2021, Doubleday).

HW Brands: The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America (2022, Doubleday).

Douglas Brinkley: Silent Spring Revolution: John F Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening (2022, Harper).

Frank Costigliola: Kennan: A Life Between Worlds (2023, Princeton University): Major (648 pp) biography of George F Kennan, founder and critic of the Cold War.

Neta C Crawford: The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions (2022, The MIT Press).

Matthew Dallek: Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (2023, Basic Books).

Tom Dunkel: White Knights in the Black Orchestra: The Extraordinary Story of the Germans Who Resisted Hitler (2022, Hachette).

Noah Feldman: The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2021, Farrar Straus and Giroux; paperback, 2022, Picador).

Niall Ferguson: Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021, Penguin Press).

Orlando Figes: The Story of Russia (2022, Metropolitan Books): British historian with many books on Russia, with this one covering the most ground in the fewest pages (368 pp).

Richard M Fried: A Genius for Confusion: Joseph R McCarthy and the Politics of Deceit (2022, Rowman & Littlefield).

Beverly Gage: G-Man: J Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022, Viking).

David Graeber: Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): "Graeber's final posthumous book."

Victor Davis Hanson: The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America (2021, Basic Books).

Malcolm Harris: Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023, Little Brown): 720 pp.

David Harvey: A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse (paperback, 2023, Verso).

Jon Hilsenrath: Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (2022, Harper Business).

Cedric G Johnson: After Black Lives Matter (2023, Verso).

Robert D Kaplan: The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power (2023, Yale University Press).

Harvye J Kaye: The British Marxist Historians (1984; paperback, 2022, Zero Books): Foreword by Eric Hobsbawm, with a new preface by the author.

Ro Khanna: Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us (paperback, 2023, Simon & Schuster): US Representative (D-CA). Hardcover published as Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us (2022, Simon & Schuster).

Brian Kilmeade: The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraha Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul (2022, Sentinel): "Fox & Friends" co-host, like Bill O'Reilly has a sideline of writing politically correct histories for his smug followers. Four of his previous tomes have been conveniently boxed as America's Heroes and History: A Brian Kilmeade Collection (2021).

Charles Leerhsen: Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain (2022, Simon & Schuster).

Jonathan Martin/Alexander Burns: This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future (2022, Simon & Schuster): Covers the 2020 election and the first year of the Biden presidency, still focused on the subject they'd rather be writing about: Trump.

Forrest A Nabors: From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (2017, University of Missouri).

David Pietrusza: Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR's 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal (2022, Diversion Books).

Diana Preston: The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth (2022, Atlantic Monthly Press).

Michael Pye: Europe's Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp's Golden Age (2021, Pegasus Books).

Alissa Quart: Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselvs From the American Dream (2023, Ecco). Executive director of Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit founded by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Scott Reynolds Nelson: Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World (2022, Basic Books).

Kim Stanley Robinson: The High Sierra: A Love Story (2022, Little Brown): Science fiction novelist, appears to be a combination memoir and travel guide, with some science mixed in.

Stacy Schiff: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (2022, Little Brown).

Ronald H Spector: A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955 (2022, WW Norton). Covers the same terrain as the author's In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (2007).

Margaret Sullivan: Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life (2022, St Martin's Press): Longtime journalist, eventually made journalism itself her beat as "public editor" for the New York Times and "media columnist" for the Washington Post.

Matt Taibbi/Anonymous: The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: An Almost True Account (2021, OR Books).

Nina Totenberg: Dinners With Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships (2022, Simon & Schuster): NPR legal affairs correspondent schmoozes with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Donald J Trump: Letters to Trump (2023, Winning Team): "Donald J Trump is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence while expanding his interests in real estate, sports, and entertainment." Picture book, 320 pp, 4.15 lbs, $99.00. Amazon's "frequently bought together": Our Journey Together by Donald J Trump; Melania Trump: Elegance in the White House by LD Hicks.

Marcus M Witcher: Getting Right With Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016 (2019, University Press of Kansas): Emphasizes how roundly criticized Reagan was by conservatives for never being as right-wing as they wanted.

Martin Wolf: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023, Penguin Press): Financial Times economist.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, April 24, 2023

Music Week

April archive (final).

Music: Current count 40078 [40331] rated (+47), 49 [54] unrated (-5: 21 new, 28 old).

Again, mostly new music, mostly attributable to the tracking file, which is usually the first thing I consult when I need a new record. Pace picked up considerably from Friday, when I started collecting Speaking of Which: at 5668 words, just a bit shorter than the previous week (5773 words). The difference (and much of the difference from the even longer previous weeks (of April 9 and April 2) is in the introductions, which I cut short this week.

It's a grind to pull those posts together in three days, which results in another grind as I process music in the background. I'm usually paying enough attention to form a reasonable opinion, but rarely have the time to write down much detail: hence, you get a bunch of reviews that hardly say anything. That probably says something about my priorities: I'd rather get to the next record than nail the one I just heard, and in any case I care more about making my political points than music crit ones: I feel like I have more to say, more that is original, and more that matters.

Unfortunately, few others feel that way. And frankly, I was rather gratified in a noticeable uptick of interest in last week's Music Week. That marked the week when my rated count topped 40,000, so it was as much a lifetime achievement as another weekly installment. My wife recently watched Sullivan's Travels for her film group, so for a week there I kept imagine people coming up to me and advising, "forget about the politics you can't do anything about anyway, and just write better record reviews." But here I am, still taking a half-assed stab at both.

I'm almost done with Brian T Watson's Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time, and the Future We'll Face. I'm not convinced that the forces he identifies will lead to the doom of civilization he predicts, but he got me thinking about other things he slights (war, guns, racism, civil strife, injustice, surveillance, repression) and in some cases misses completely (his book appeared just before Covid broke out). He is fairly good on climate change (without more than a few lines on how it might generate waves of emigration, resource conflicts, and war), a little both-sidesy on capitalism and politics, and way over the top on what he calls Webworld.

He understands that these "forces" interact and compound in ways that are hard to separate out -- his Webworld is largely a confluence of dangers he doesn't fully articulate in capitalism, technology, politics, and human nature. The latter is by far the trickiest to write about: even though we've been studying it for ages, it's almost impossible to generalize about in contexts that haven't yet happened.

What I do believe is that there are practical, technical solutions to virtually all problems we face, except that there is (and will continue to be) formidable political opposition to doing anything before it is much too late. So, I think it's ultimately very important to thoroughly critique those political opponents. Of course, it's also nice to have some nice music to play in the background. (I happen to be on an Ivo Perelman kick at the moment.)

Next book up is probably Kurt Andersen's 2017 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. I read Andersen's later (2020) book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America shortly after it came out, and consider it the single best book on the rise of the political right in recent America. The earlier book won't have the luxury of pointing to Trump (although it serendipitously arrived with America's most ridiculous fantasy president). I've long regarded Reagan's 1980 election as a decision to live in a fantasy world (his catchphrase was "morning in America") as the real one was becoming too grim, but when you think about it, everything from "city on a hill" to "go west, young man" to the "new frontier" was fantasy.

Maybe there's a fantasy for a political era that actually faces problems and turns them into opportunities for a better world, as opposed to the usual ones where you look away and pretend it's got nothing to do with you.

This is the last Music Week of April, so the monthly archive should be complete (see link above), but I decided to post this before I do all my usual indexing. I'll catch up later in the week. Meanwhile, the first nominal week of May has started, here.

New records reviewed this week:

Susan Alcorn/Patrick Holmes/Ryan Sawyer: From Union Pool (2022 [2023], Relative Pitch): Pedal steel guitar, clarinet, and drums, playing very free, which leaves you wondering what the guitar really sounds like. B+(*) [sp]

Ralph Alessi Quartet: It's Always Now (2021 [2023], ECM): Trumpet player, from San Francisco, a dozen albums since 1999, plus more side credits (especially with Uri Caine, Steve Coleman, and Ravi Coltrane). Quartet with Florian Weber (piano), Bänz Oester (bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Algiers: Shook (2023, Matador): Alt/indie band from Atlanta (or maybe London), fourth album. Mojo hears "stories of struggle, pain and healing are painted in edgy electro, impassioned punk-soul, cloudbursts of jazz and rattlesnake trap pulses." I don't hear much of that, but some concerned talk with grim overtones. B+(*) [sp]

Matt Barber: The Song Is You (2023, MB): Standards singer, seventh album (per hype sheet; I can't find any confirmation on sites like Discogs, although he's pretty clearly not the Canadian singer-songwriter Matthew Barber, or the British politician). One co-writing credit (with pianist Day Kelly), and covers advancing the songbook to Billy Joel. B+(*) [cd]

Kenny Barron: The Source (2022 [2023], Artwork): Pianist, approaching 80 (b. 1943), recently elected by the fans to DownBeat's Hall of Fame, offers a solo album, his first since 1982, with four original pieces, two Ellingtons, two Monks, and a standard ("I'm Confessing"). B+(***) [sp]

Belle and Sebastian: Late Developers (2023, Matador): Scottish indie pop group, since 1996. Mostly engaging. B+(***) [sp]

Boygenius: The Album (2023, Interscope): Implicit supergroup, consisting of three recently but firmly established singer-songwriters: Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus. First album, after a much-noticed EP. B [sp]

John Cale: Mercy (2023, Domino): From Wales, studied in London, moved to New York in 1963, was part of the experimental music underground until he joined the Velvet Underground for two pathbreaking albums. His subsequent solo career was all over the map, aside from a three album 1974-75 stretch when he deserved to be a major rock star. Now 81, with his first album of new songs in over a decade, a monster running 71:34 with a guest list that couldn't be guessed (7/12 songs have featuring credits). Sounded awful at first, but got interesting at some point, and might merit further study. B+(*) [sp]

Rodrigo Campos: Pagode Novo (2023, YB Music): Brazilian singer-songwriter, albums since 2009, but surprisingly little on him. Seems to fit in the MPB mainstream, with a previous album called 9 Sambas. B+(***) [sp]

Joe Chambers: Dance Kobina (2023, Blue Note): Drummer, b. 1942 (80), sixteenth album since 1974, has hundreds of side credits, playing on many major albums in the 1960s, plays vibes (5 tracks, with Michael Davidson on 3) as well as drums here. Caoilainn Power plays alto sax on three tracks, Marvin Carter alto on one and tenor on another, with piano and bass duties split, and extra percussion (Latin or African). B+(**) [sp]

Slaid Cleaves: Together Through the Dark (2023, Candy House Media): Singer-songwriter from DC, grew up in Maine, wound up in Austin, where he can pass for country but not for Nashville, more than a dozen albums since 1990. Solid. B+(***) [sp]

Das Kondensat: Andere Planeten (2020 [2023], WhyPlayJazz): German saxophone/clarinet player Gebhard Ullmann, prolific since 1985, leads a quartet with Liz Kosack (keyboards), Oliver Potratz (electric bass/electronics), and Eric Schaefer (drums/modular synthesizer) on third group album. The keyboard is an addition from two earlier trios. A- [cd]

Yelena Eckemoff: Lonely Man and His Fish (2021 [2023], L&H Production, 2CD): Russian pianist, usual classical training, came to US in 1991 and switched to jazz. Original compositions, trio with Ben Street and Eric Harland plus major help from Kirk Knuffke (cornet) and Masaru Koga (Japanese flutes). B+(***) [cd]

Michael Feinberg: Blues Variant (2022 [2023], Criss Cross): Bassist, has a half-dozen albums since 2012, postbop quartet here with Noah Preminger (tenor sax/flute), Leo Genovese (piano), and Nasheet Waits (drums). He gets a lot of sound and action from that lineup. B+(***) [sp]

Fever Ray: Radical Romantics (2023, Rabid/Mute): Swedish singer-songwriter Karin Dreijer, previously did business as The Knife (a duo with brother Olof Dreijer), third album under this alias. B+(**) [sp]

Anat Fort Trio: The Berlin Sessions (2022 [2023], Sunnyside, 2CD): Israeli pianist, debut 1999, trio with Gary Wang (bass) and Roland Schneider (drums). B+(**) [sp]

GoGo Penguin: Everything Is Going to Be OK (2023, XXIM): British piano-bass-drums trio (Chris Illingworth, Nick Blacka, Jon Scott), albums since 2012 including a run on Blue Note, with some crossover appeal. B+(**) [sp]

Mette Henriette: Drifting (2020-22 [2023], ECM): Norwegian tenor saxophonist, backed with piano (Johan Lindvall) and violoncello (Judith Hamann), takes chill a bit too far. B [sp]

Hieroglyphic Being: There Is No Acid in This House (2022, Soul Jazz): Electronica producer Jamal R. Moss, from Chicago, many albums since 2008. B+(***) [sp]

Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My (2023, Jagjaguwar): Singer-songwriter from Alabama, hard to classify, long more noted for his paintings and sculptures, only recording from 2012 on. B+(*) [sp]

Islandman Feat. Okay Temiz/Muhlis Berberoglu: Direct-to-Disc Sessions (2021 [2023], Night Dreamer): Turkish groove merchant Tolga Böyük, debut 2015, credits: drum machine, electric bass, synthesizers. Percussionist Temiz (b. 1939) has been on the fringe of the European free jazz scene since the 1970s (including albums with Johnny Dyani and Monghezi Feza). Berberoglu is younger, plays baglama and cura (plucked string instruments used in Ottoman classical music), while others play guitar (Erdem Baser) and drums (Eralp Guven). A- [sp]

Karol G: Mañana Será Bonito (2023, Universal Music Latino): Colombian singer, Carolina Giraldo Navarro, from Medellin, fourth album. B+(***) [sp]

Kate NV: Wow (2023, RVNG Intl): Russian electronica producer-singer Kate Shilonosova, sixth album since 2016. A little on the campy side this time. B [sp]

Kelela: Raven (2023, Warp): Pop singer-songwriter, last name Mizanekristos, born in DC of Ethiopian heritage. Second studio album, plus mixtapes and singles and EPs back to 2014. Soft soul, sometimes too atmospheric, but savvy as ever. B+(**) [sp]

The Long Ryders: September November (2023, Cherry Red): Country-rock band from Los Angeles, released three studio albums 1984-87, broke up, reunited in 2004 and occasionally since, releasing a new album in 2019 and now this one. B+(**) [sp]

Loscil & Lawrence English: Colours of Air (2023, Kranky): Scott Morgan, from Vancouver, ambient electronica producer (and sometime Destroyer drummer), albums since 1999, working with an Australian producer of similar experience and bearing. B+(*) [sp]

Brad Mehldau: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles (2020 [2023], Nonesuch): Pianist, plays solo, a live recitation of ten Beatles songs (including one by George Harrison), opening with "I Am the Walrus," plus "Life on Mars?" to close. B [sp]

Margo Price: Strays (2023, Loma Vista): Country singer-songwriter, fourth studio album. B+(*) [sp]

Taiko Saito: Tears of a Cloud (2022 [2023], Trouble in the East): Japanese marimba/vibraphone player, solo. B+(*) [cd] [04-28]

Kendrick Scott: Corridors (2023, Blue Note): Drummer, from Houston, half-dozen albums since 2007, 80-90 side-credits. Trio with Walter Smith III (tenor sax), and Reuben Rogers (bass). B+(**) [sp]

Slowthai: Ugly (2023, Method/Universal): British rapper-turned-singer Tyron Frampton, third album, title supposedly an acronym for "U Gotta Love Yourself" (spelled out but not expanded on in the title song). B+(***) [sp]

Wadada Leo Smith and Orange Wave Electric: Fire Illuminations (2023, Kabell): Trumpet player, has a new group in his Yo! Miles! mode, with three guitarists (Nels Cline, Brandon Ross, Lamar Smith), two bassists (Melvin Gibbs and Bill Laswell), drums (Pheeroan aKlaff), percussion (Mauro Refrosco), and electronics (Hardedge) bringing the avant electrofunk. A- [sp]

Walter Smith III: Return to Casual (2023, Blue Note): Tenor saxophonist, debut 2006 (Casually Introducing), titled a 2014 album Still Casual), so this suggests a return to his roots. Band here includes Kendrick Scott (drums) and Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet, 2 tracks) from his debut, as well as Taylor Eigsti (piano), Matt Stevens (guitar), Harish Raghavan (bass) -- listed with Scott on the cover. Smith makes a better (less casual) impression on Scott's recent Corridors. B+(*) [sp]

Something Blue: Personal Preference (2021 [2023], Posi-Tone): Effectively producer Marc Free's house hard bop band, a showcase for his label's younger musicians, with only bassist Boris Kozlov returning from the 2019 release under the same group name. Newccomers, all on the cover: Markus Howell (alto/soprano sax), Willie Morris (tenor sax), Altin Sencalar (trombone), Misha Tsiganov (trombone), and Donald Edwards (drums). B+(*) [sp]

Mark Soskin/Jay Anderson: Empathy (2022 [2023], SteepleChase): Piano and bass duets, Soskin has a couple dozen albums since 1980, more side credits, including a 1978-91 run with Sonny Rollins. Nothing terribly flashy here, but the pair live up to the title. B+(***) [sp]

Ben Wendel: All One (2020-22 [2023], Edition): Tenor saxophonist from Vancouver (also soprano and bassoon), seventh album since 2009, plus seven in the group Kneebody, and more side-credits. Tracks were laid down at home, then guests dubbed in (Cécile McLorin Salvant on "I Love You Porgy," Terence Blanchard, Bill Frisell, Elena Pinderhughes, José James on "Tenderly," and Tigran Hamasyan). B [cd]

Buster Williams: Unalome (2022 [2023], Smoke Sessions): Bassist, has led more than a dozen albums since 1975, many more side credits back to Gene Ammons in 1961, back cover calls this group the Buster Williams Something More Sextet: Jean Baylor (vocals), Bruce Williams (sax/flute), Stefon Harris (vibes), George Colligan (piano), Lenny White (drums). B [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Chet Baker: Blue Room: The 1979 Vara Studio Sessions in Holland (1979 [2023], Jazz Detective, 2CD): First release of three studio sessions recorded for Dutch radio: two quartet dates in April with Phil Markowitz on piano, plus one from November with Frans Elsen. Typically nice trumpet, with a few vocals, and long piano leads. B+(**) [cd] [04-28]

Bill Charlap: All Through the Night (1997 [2023], Criss Cross): Mainstream pianist, mother is singer Sandy Stewart, debut 1993, a later run at Blue Note (2003-10) made him one of the best known pianists around. This is the third of three Criss Cross albums, a trio with Peter Washington (bass) and Kenny Washington (drums). Standards, smartly done as usual. B+(**) [sp]

Dream Dolphin: Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works (1996-2003) (1996-2003 [2023], Music From Memory, 2CD): Japanese electronica producer Noriko, recorded 20 albums 1996-2003, trimmed down here to 18 pieces, 116 minutes. Has some beat, vocals (mostly spoken) too. B+(**) [sp]

Dick Sisto: Falling in Love (1994 [2023], SteepleChase): Vibraphonist, this looks like a reissue of his American Love Song album from 1995, mostly standards, backed by Fred Hersch (piano), Drew Gress (bass), and Tom Rainey (piano). B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

Das Kondensat: Das Kondensat (2016 [2017], WhyPlayJazz): The first of three albums (so far) by this group, at this point just a trio of Gebhard Ullmann (tenor/soprano sax, looper/sampler), Oliver Potratz (bass/effects), and Eric Schaeffer (drums/modular synth). B+(**) [sp]

Das Kondensat: 2 (2020 [2021], WhyPlayJazz): Same trio, Poltratz adding bass synthesizer, "live without overdubs." This may be the best I've heard Ullmann play, probably because the electric bass sets him up to soar while still eschewing predictable grooves. A- [sp]

Gebhard Ullmann: Kreuzberg Park East (1997 [2000], Soul Note): German saxophone/bass clarinet player, joined by Ellery Eskelin (tenor sax), Drew Gress (bass), and Phil Haynes (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Sylvie Courvoisier & Cory Smythe: The Rite of Spring/Spectre D'Un Songe (Pyroclastic) [05-19]
  • Bruno Råberg: Solo Bass: Look Inside (Orbis Music) [05-19]
  • Brandon Seabrook: Brutalovechamp (Pyroclastic) [05-26]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 23, 2023

Speaking of Which

Supposedly Obama's motto as president was "don't do stupid shit." Republicans this week, perhaps more than ever before, proved themselves to be his polar opposite.

Sad to hear of the death of Fern Van Gieson (1928-2023), a dear friend we met twenty-some years ago through the Wichita Peace Center.

Also passing this week was Australian comedian Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna Everage. I can't say as I've ever been much of a fan, but this reminds me how common, innocent, and downright silly drag has been going back longer than I can remember. Republicans want to vilify and criminalize drag. While it's always possible that their schemes are just some cynical plot hatched from Frank Luntz's polling, the deeper implication is that their fears are rooted in deep insecurities, as well as a defective sense of humor, and a general loathing not just for people who are a bit different, but also for people who are a bit too similar.

Top story threads:

Kevin McCarthy v. America: I don't have time to write more, but this reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles where the black sheriff escapes a lynching by threatening to shoot himself.

Trump: No new indictments. E. Jean Carroll's defamation case against Trump is scheduled to start on April 25, with or probably without Trump's presence. I skipped over a bunch of articles on how Trump is polling (he seems to be burying DeSantis).

  • Isaac Arnsdorf/Jeff Stein: [04-21] Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term: 'I am your justice': He goes on: "And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." "The former president is proposing deploying the military domestically, purging the federal workforce and building futuristic cities from scratch." The latter are to be called "freedom cities": "with flying cars, manufacturing hubs and opportunities for homeownership, promising a 'quantum leap in the American standard of living.'" Stephen Moore wants to build them with tax incentives and deregulation, as well as a "super police force that keeps the place safe." Some ideas do suggest Trump input, like "classical-style buildings, monuments to 'true American heroes,' and schools and streets named 'not after communists but patriots.'"

  • Sophia A McClennen: [04-22] Sick of Trump? Try laughing at him. Author wrote a book on the subject: Trump Was a Joke: How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didn't (Routledge, rather pricey at $35.96 paperback). Author previously wrote [02-01] Donald Trump is the worst kind of fool.

  • Luke Savage: [04-20] Donald Trump's NFTs Are the Perfect Symbol of American Capitalilsm in 2023.

Other Republicans: If you want an intro here, refer back to the top.

Guns: OK, this is the week I finally gave up on trying to rationalize a right to guns. Take them away. Consider "my cold dead fingers a taunt." I'm the first to admit that banning something people really want doesn't make it go away, but in this case it would certainly make it harder for a lot of very stupid people to do vicious things that are completely unjustifiable. Jeffrey St Clair (more on his piece below) offers a quick rundown:

In one 24-hour period last weekend, there were at least 15 mass shootings in the US, including 4 shot in Northridge, California, 6 in Louisville, 36 in Dadeville, Alabama, 6 in Cyrus, Minnesota, 3 in New Orleans, 6 in Paterson, NJ, 5 in Wiainai, Hawaii, 4 in Detroit, another 3 in Louisville, 4 in Phoenix, 3 in Los Angeles, 3 in Charlotte, 4 in Newark and 3 in Cincy.

This week in America . . .

  1. A teenage boy was shot for ringing the wrong doorbell.
  2. A teenage girl was shot for entering the wrong driveway.
  3. A cheerleader was shot for going up to the wrong car.
  4. A six-year old girl shot for rolling a ball into the wrong yard.

Globally, 87% of the children killed by gunfire were shot in the USA.

He also offers stats for mass shootings in US by year, rising from 272 in 2014 to 415 in 2019, then to 610-690 from 2020-22. This year's total of 164 in 108 days is actually a bit behind the recent pace (although 554 would be the 4th most ever). [PS: Others insist Frequent shootings put US mass killings on a record pace.] Further down, he also notes that "Boston cops shot two dogs this week while serving a warrant against a man for . . . driving without a license." I'm beginning to feel wistful for the threatened dystopia of a "world where only criminals have guns." For one thing, that would make it easier to identify the criminals. Some of these stories below (and by Sunday there'll no doubt be more):

The Courts:

Fox: Just before the trial opened, Dominion Voting Machines agreed to settle their defamation suit with Fox, for a whopping $787 million (they had originally sued for $1.6 billion, so about half that).

Next up, Mike Lindell: But even before he faces his own Dominion lawsuit, there's this:

Earth Day:

  • Elizabeth Kolbert: [04-22] It's Earth Day -- and the news isn't good: "New reports show that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than anticipated, and other disasters loom."

  • Kate Aronoff: [04-18] Is Jimmy Carter Where Environmentalism Went Wrong? "Carter's austerity was part of a bigger project. It didn't really have much to do with environmentalism." There is a lot to chew on here, but also more stuff the author doesn't mention, like the "Carter Doctrine" that committed the US to securing oil shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf -- the second of two major decisions in the 1970s to keep gas cheap (the other being Nixon's refusal to conserve oil after production peaked in 1969, leading to a trade deficit in 1970 that has only grown ever since).

  • Liza Featherstone: [04-20] Nixon Was the Weirdest Environmentalist: "Richard Nixon, the original culture warrior, helped establish Earth Day and poured millions of dollars into conservation, despite his own ambivalence about the environmental movement." There was a brief period 10-20 years ago when some liberal pundits thought it would be clever to rehabilitate Nixon as a closet progressive, largely on the basis of a series of bills that he signed after Democrats in Congress passed them, including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and OSHA. But the best you can say for Nixon is that he recognized that government needed to move left to even begin to deal with some pressing problems (and with the Cuyahoga River burning down bridges, the environment was the most obvious one). But Nixon rarely if ever cared about solving problems (one fine example of his indifference was making Donald Rumsfeld head of the EEOC). He just didn't want to lose any political power by taking the wrong side of an issue, and the one thing he really did care about was power.

Buzzfeed, Twitter, etc.:

Ukraine War:

  • Connor Echols: [04-21] Diplomacy Watch: US ignores calls for negotiations at its own peril: "Huge swathes of the world want the war in Ukraine to end as soon as possible. Can Washington afford to disregard them?" Brazilian president Lula da Silva "sparked a controversy" when he said the US "needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace." A US spokesman replied that "Lula's comments amounted to little more than 'Russian and Chinese propaganda.'" The Americans aren't even to the stage of pretending they' care about peace. Granted, Russia isn't at that stage either, but why should that stop the US from offering the prospect of a future where the present conflict is dead and buried? Failure to do so suggests that the real US goal isn't to defend Ukraine but to destroy Russia -- which is the belief, and fear, of most hawkish Russians. The Ukrainian position that they'll only talk after Russia fully withdraws is similarly unhelpful.

    Echols also interviewed John Sopko in: [02-21] Afghanistan watchdog: 'You're gonna see pilferage' of Ukraine aid. No doubt. It happens everywhere else -- the Pentagon is notoriously unable to keep track of their own allocations. Opponents of US support for Ukraine have latched on this, hoping to discredit the war effort by taint of scandal (see Kelly Beaucar Vlahos: [04-20] Republican lawmakers to Biden: no more 'unrestrained aid' to Ukraine. It doesn't mean there should be no aid, but it's always important to stay vigilant against corruption (Afghanistan and Iraq being prime examples, but same thing was endemic in Vietnam).

  • Joshua Frank: [04-21] Will the West Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear Battlefield? Specifically, he's talking about the use of depleted uranium shells, which are effective for penetrating tank armor, but are also radioactive and toxic ("depleted" means they are pure U-238, after the slightly more fissile U-235 isotopes have been removed). Depleted uranium was used extensively by the US in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, where it caused cancer, both in Iraqis and in US troops.

  • Jen Kirby: [04-22] So what's the deal with Ukraine's spring offensive? While it can be said that both sides are refusing to negotiate based on the hopes that they can still improve their territorial positions with an offensive once conditions permit, Ukraine's hopes are slightly better grounded: they made net gains around Kharkiv and Kherson in the fall; they've withstood Russian efforts to capture Bakhmut (in one of those classic "destroy the village to save it" operations); they've gained tanks and other weapons for offensive operations. A year ago, Russia was on offense, and Ukraine was pinned down, focusing on defending its capital, Kyiv, while giving ground in the south, including Kherson and Mariupol. I question whether their offensive will be much more successful than Russia's, especially when it comes to areas that have been effectively part of Russia since 2014, but it's not unusual for people to have to learn their limits the hard way.

  • Branko Marcetic: [04-21] Why is Facebook censoring Sy Hersh's NordStream report?

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [04-17] Lieven inside Ukraine: some real breaks, and insights.

Other stories around the world:

Other stories:

Kenneth Chang: [04-20] SpaceX's Starship 'Learning Experience' Ends in Explosion: Elon Musk's biggest erection yet blew up a few minutes after liftoff, but somehow nearly every article has followed the company line that the disastrous failure is really just a "learning experience." It's true that there is a hip management culture in Silicon Valley that sees taking risks as something to be encouraged, and it's always important to learn from mistakes, but you usually want to keep your test cases small and discrete, and do them in ways you can easily observe. Piling several billion dollars worth of hardware up and blowing it up 24 miles into space is far from ideal, which makes the spin seem a bit desperate.

Jay Caspian Kang: [04-21] Has Black Lives Matter changed the world?: "A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement -- one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines." The book is by Cedric Johnson: After Black Lives Matter.

Rebecca Leber: [04-19] Why Asia's early heat wave is so alarming: This should probably be the biggest story of the week. With no further references in my usual sources, I looked more explicitly and found:

Will Leitch: [04-18] The Sports-Betting Ads Are Awful, and They're Not Going Away. Just because something is legal (in the sense of not being illegal), doesn't mean you should be able to advertise it everywhere (or for that matter, anywhere). One critical thing that distinugishes advertising from free speech is that it almost always appears as a sales proposition -- this is every bit as true for political as for deodorant ads -- which means that mistruths should be prosecuted as fraud. Still, the gray areas, where they dance around the truth, or say one thing while implying another (like when big pharma ads list side-effects while everyone keeps smiling), is often worse. I think this is basically true for everything, but gambling has got to be one of the worst things you could possibly advertise. It's not just that gamblers lose (while foolishly led to believe they won't), or that the people who take their money are among the most undeserving and unscrupulous of racketeers, but that the very idea that one should so disrespect one's hard-earned labor destroys the soul.

I should add a personal note: When I was a child, I noticed that most TV shows were sponsored ("brought to you by") big corporations, which splashed their names about, taking full credit for things I enjoyed, and mostly selling things I could imagine my family buying. Then I saw a list of America's biggest companies, and noticed that insurance companies were huge, but hadn't been buying TV advertising. So I wished that they would share some wealth and contribute to my entertainment . . . until they did, and I was shocked and disgusted by their sales pitch. That's when I decided some things should not be advertised. Of course, lots of services couldn't be advertised back then, like lawyers. Later, cigarette advertising was banned, and that turned out all to the good.

Back in the 1970s, I wound up doing a fair amount of work behind the scenes in advertising. I read numerous books on the subject (notably David Ogilvy). I came to respect the craft, creativity, art, and science of the industry -- the latter was built on the social sciences, which was my major in college, and something I viewed with an especially critical eye. Of course, I also came to be repulsed by the whole business. While there needs to be ways for honest businesses to make the public aware of their products and services, our current system of advertising does much more harm than good. And depending on advertisers to support essential public services like journalism (see Robinson below) does even more harm. So ban it all. But sports betting would be a particularly good place to start.

Jasmine Liu: [04-21] On the Road With the Ghost of Ashli Babbitt: "Jeff Sharlet saw close up how the far right has used grief and bitterness to grow its ranks." Interview with Sharlet, whose new book is: The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War.

Samantha Oltman/Brian Resnick/Adam Clark Estes/Bryan Walsh: [04-21] The 100-year-old mistake that's reshaping the American West: "What happens if the Colorado River keeps drying up?" Introduction to a new batch of articles.

David Quammen: [04-23] Why Dead Birds Are Falling From the Sky: Another pandemic may be just around the future (or if you're a bird, already here).

Nathan J Robinson: Also look for Buzzfeed above.

  • [04-17] We Can't Overstate the Danger of Tom Cotton's "Might Makes Right" Foreign Policy: The Arkansas Republican Senator has a new book out, called Only the Strong: Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power, arguing that "Democrats are insufficiently militaristic" (an argument Robinson derides as "laughable," citing examples from Truman to Obama). Given that US foreign policy is already massively, if not admittedly, tilted in the direction that Cotton advocates -- naked projection of power for purely selfish ends, the only thing extra he's advocating is that US power should be utterly shameless (regarding purely self-interested motives) and unapologetic (regarding collateral damages) -- a foreign policy which was only seriously attempted by Germany and Japan in WWII (although Israel seems to think in those terms, which is why American neocons are so enamored, but somewhat more limited given their lack of size). While there is something to be said for cutting out the hypocrisy about democracy and freedom -- things Cotton has no desire to preserve domestically, let alone anywhere else -- such frankness would make it even harder to command alliances, and would only increase the resolve of those inclined to resist US dictates. Cotton seems to think that the only thing that has held kept his strategy from dominating is the pathetic wobbliness of lily-livered Democrats.

  • [04-19] Homelessness Is an Entirely Solvable Problem: "Whether we let people have houses is a choice we make." Also: "Shocking, I know. The more expensive a place is, the more people struggle to afford housing, and the more they struggle to afford housing, the more likely they are to be unhoused."

  • [2022-02-11] On Experiencing Joe Rogan: This is a bit old, but probably all you need to know.

Priya Satia: [04-18] Born Imperial: The lingering ghosts of the British Empire. Review of Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-21] Roaming Charges: In the Land of Unfortunate Things: Opens with a bit about Dr. Bruce Jessen ("the CIA's torture shrink"), before moving on to the Dominion-Fox settlement, which winds up noting Rupert Murdoch's lobbying the British to nuke China rather than giving up Hong Kong, and on to other topics. "[US Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas isn't being bribed to make decisions; he's being rewarded for the fact that he'd make these decisions without being bribed. So would Alito." This is actually a common model, but is more conspicuous with Supreme Court justices, as their lifetime appointments don't allow a tasteful wait until retirement. Clinton and Obama earned their post-presidential fortunes for their service to an oligarchy they made all the richer.

Michael Tomasky: [04-23] Here's the Gutsy, Unprecedented Campaign Biden and the Democrats Need to Run: Here's the guy who thought Obama would be transformational. (Or was that Robert Kuttner? Similar thinkers who get a bit myopic when they get their hopes up.) The one thing Tomasky is right is that Democrats need to win big in 2024 in order to get a chance to deliver on whatever it is they campaign on, big or small. And while I'm reasonably comfortable that Biden can beat Trump, DeSantis, Pence, or the lower echelon of GOP apparatchiki, he's not very good at explaining why a solid majority of Americans should vote for him, and he's not what you'd call charismatic. The only thing that distinguishes him from the next 20-30 contenders is that he's acceptable to both the party rank-and-file and to the moneybags who'd sabotage the election to make sure no one too far left got in.

Still, two problems here. One is that the laundry list of bills isn't all that big or helpful. Free opioid clinics and adding dental coverage to Medicare are tiny compared to Medicare for All. New laws to limit monopolies and to encourage unions could help, but will take some time to gain traction. Why not a Worker's Bill of Rights, which would combine some of these things (minimum wage, overtime) with some other recent proposals (like parental leave and prohibiting NDAs) with some more ideas that are overdue (like rebalancing arbitration systems)? What about a Reproductive Health Act, which would guarantee the right to abortion, and also provide universal insurance for pregnancy and early infancy? And why not combine marijuana legalization/regulation with pain clinics that could finally make some headway on opioids (not that pot is a panacea here; sometimes opioids are needed, but legal ones, administered under care with counseling)? And there's still a lot more work to do on infrastructure, climate change, and disaster relief. And if you really want to wow minds, why not work for world peace, instead of dedicating US foreign policy to arms sales (like Trump did, although one can argue that Biden is even better at it)?

Still, I doubt that policy ideas, no matter how coherent and bold, are the key to winning elections. Sure, eventually you have to do something worthwhile (which is why Republican regimes never last: they get elected in a wave of good feeling, then invariably spoil it within 8-12 years), but first you need to get people (who don't understand much about policy) to trust you to do the right things, and not just sell out to private donor interests. Granted, like the campers running from a bear, the Democrat should only have to be faster than the Republican, but appearing less crooked is trickier than you'd expect, as proven by Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump on just that issue.

Brian Walsh: [04-19] Are 8 billion people too many -- or too few? Wrong question, as the writer (if not the titlist) realizes. No time for a disquisition here, but the goal should never be to see how many people you can cram into Malthusian misery, but to figure out how to reduce the misery of those who we do have, then try to sustain that.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, April 17, 2023

Music Week

April archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40031 [39968] rated (+63), 54 [58] unrated (-4: 26 new, 28 old).

Not only hit but blew right past the 40,000 rated albums mark this week. I noted the moment in a tweet on Friday (4/14). The database introduction and genre breakdown is here. Most of this framework dates back to the early 2000s, when I was scouring the album guides for prospects. Perhaps some of the genres should be divided up more, especially by time, but I keep thinking that a better solution would be a better tagged database -- a project that always seems to be slipping away into the future.

Records below are primarily non-jazz: probably the first week all year. I added a lot of stuff to my 2023 tracking file, so I've had a lot to pick from. Given how many records by reputable artists I heard, I'm surprised that so far hit the A- mark -- especially the three A records from Robert Christgau's April Consumer Guide (which I played at least three times each). Some of those I had played earlier (recently: Willie Nelson, 100 Gecs; others way back: Oranj Symphonette, Wayne Shorter. By the way, my pick of the Shorter Blue Notes is Night Dreamer, although the one I really recommend is The Classic Blue Note Recordings (2-CD, 2002). My Shorter list is here. Beyond that, his albums with Art Blakey and Miles Davis are often great, and his albums with Weather Report never are.

Seems like a lot of musicians have been dying recently, but few as notable as Ahmad Jamal (1930-2023). He almost exclusively recorded in trios, something I'm not a big fan of, but if you look at my list, you'll find A- records scattered over four decades, and also notice that I missed a lot in between.

Technically, the Christian McBride album missed my cutoff, but I decided to include it here because I thought I should have more good new releases, and because it shows you what Marcus Strickland can do when he's not recording his own albums.

Rough day today, especially with eyes and allergies. Former will probably clear up (though cataract surgery is likely in the future), and latter will probably get worse.

Wrote another monster Speaking of Which over the weekend. Kicked out a tweet this morning when I saw a particularly laughable op-ed:

I see Robert M Gates has an op-ed called "US needs to relearn how to tell its story to the world." Actually, the US needs a better story. Like, one that doesn't start with: sanction our enemies, buy our arms, and if you do, we'll excuse any human rights offenses.

The US had a better (but still imperfect) story before WWII, when an elite group of foreign policy wonks decided that America should save the world by running it, or alternatively that America should save colonialism by converting it to global capitalism, allowing natives to hold "independent" political posts subject to the tight credit controls of the World Bank and IMF.

New records reviewed this week:

100 Gecs: 10,000 Gecs (2023, Dog Show/Atlantic): St. Louis duo, Dylan Brady and Laura Les, second album, hyperpop (I'm told), turns the corner from mostly annoying to occasionally amusing. Blessedly short: 26:53. B+(*) [sp]

100 Gecs: Snake Eyes (2022, Dog Show/Atlantic, EP): Even shorter: three tracks (5:53), with Skrillex on the middle one, in case they ran short of bubblegum. B+(*) [sp]

Arooj Aftab/Vijay Iyer/Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile (2023, Verve): Pakistani singer, based in Brooklyn, several previous albums, working here with piano and bass, both also on synths, all three credited on all six songs. Not quite mesmerizing, but tries. B+(**) [sp]

Florian Arbenz/Greg Osby/Arno Krijger: Conversation #9: Targeted (2023, Hammer): Swiss drummer, released a couple albums in 2001 but has been most prolific since 2020, when he hit on his "Conversation" series as a pandemic lockdown workaround. Trio with alto sax and organ. Osby has been terrific of late -- last year's album with Tyshawn Sorey topped my list -- and the organ kicks off to a strong start. B+(***) [bc]

Florian Arbenz/Jorge Vistel/Wolfgang Puschnig/Oren Marshall/Michael Arbenz: Conversation #8: Ablaze (2022, Hammer): After a lockdown series of mostly duos and trios, the Swiss drummer convened a quintet, with group pic on the back cover. Others play trumpet, sax, tuba (!), and piano, with Vistel and Puschnig bringing a song each, and a cover of "Freedom Jazz Dance." B+(***) [bc]

Gina Birch: I Play My Bass Loud (2023, Third Man): British painter, photographer, moviemaker, played in the Raincoats and Red Krayola, released this debut solo album at 67. It has some of the off-kilter quirkiness of her groups, and some lessons of age. Bass isn't as loud as advertised. B+(***) [sp]

Bktherula: LVL5 P1 (2022, Warner, EP): Atlanta rapper Brooklyn Rodriguez, fourth album, albeit a short one (10 tracks, 20:57). B+(*) [sp]

Peter Brötzmann/Heather Leigh/Fred Lonberg-Holm: Naked Nudes [Brötz 80th at ADA 2021] (2021 [2023], Trost): Legendary German avant-saxophonist (alto/tenor), as part of his 80th birthday celebration in Wuppertal, a trio with frequent collaborators of late, on pedal steel guitar and cello/electronics. I'd hate to suggest that he's slowing down, but the background is kind of thick. B+(*) [bc]

Tom Collier: Boomer Vibes Volume 1 (2023, Summit): Born 1950, plays keyboards and drums as well as vibraphone, picks eleven songs from the 1960s (not checking, but being his age that's how I know them), offering versions that are slightly more than muzak, and slightly less than pop. B+(*) [cd]

Miley Cyrus: Endless Summer Vacation (2023, Columbia): Pop star since her teens, semi-famous father had a fluke country hit, eighth album since 2007 and still just 30. Some striking songs, but inconsistent as always. B+(**) [sp]

Jesse Davis: Live at Smalls Jazz Club (2022 [2023], Cellar): Alto saxophonist from New Orleans, established himself with seven 1991-2000 albums on Concord, but recording dates have been scarce since then. Live set here with Spike Wilner (piano), Peter Washington (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums), doing standards and hard bop favorites. B+(**) [sp]

Angel Bat Dawid: Requiem for Jazz (2019-20 [2023], International Anthem): Angel Elmore, based in Chicago, fourth album, plays clarinet but I don't see her in the credits here (beyond "composed, arranged, conducted & mixed"), divided between the ArkeStarzz (15-piece band including a string quartet), the Choruzz (4 singers), Special Cosmic Guests (including Marshall Allen, dubbed in later), Dancers, Set Design, and Visualz. I suppose I should be impressed by all the high-minded artfulness employed here, but some things still strike me as just plain pretentious. B [sp]

Michael Dease: The Other Side: The Music of Gregg Hill (2022 [2023], Origin): Trombonist, started in big bands with Illinois Jacquet in 2002, debut 2010, teaches at Michigan State. Joins here the wave of artists recording pieces by Michigan composer Hill. B+(*) [cd]

Lana Del Rey: Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023, Interscope/Polydor): Singer-songwriter Elizabeth Grant, ninth album since 2010, all but the first charting high, but only the second (Born to Die) selling multi-millions. Long (16 songs, 77:43), co-produced and often co-written by Jack Atonoff. Low-key, but possibly of more than passing interest. B+(**) [sp]

Marc Ducret: Palm Sweat: Marc Ducret Plays the Music of Tim Berne (2022 [2023], Screwgun/Out of Your Head): Guitarist, born in Denmark, debut 1986, has played on at least 20 Tim Berne albums. As there seems to be a push to get others to play Berne's compositions, he's a natural. Sparsely accompanied by various horns (trumpet, alto flute, trombone) and cello, no drums, the music is stripped down and prickly. B+(***) [cd]

Bokani Dyer: Radio Sechaba (2023, Brownswood): Pianist-singer, born in Botswana, based in South Africa, has a half-dozen albums since 2010, has one foot in jazz but this sounds more like soul music. Ends with a nice instrumental. B+(**) [cd] [05-12]

Vince Ector Organotomy Trio +: Live @ the Side Door (2020 [2023], Cabo Verde): Drummer, has a couple albums, side credits back to 1995 (Charles Earland, which eventually led to a Charles Earland Tribute Band). Leads a quartet here, with Pat Bianchi (organ), Paul Bollenback (guitar), and Justin Jones (sax, presumably the +1). B+(**) [cd]

El Michels Affair & Black Thought: Glorious Game (2023, Big Crown): New York funk/soul instrumental band led by Leon Michels, eighth album since 2005, lands a world class MC this time, working over some loops with occasional guest spots. A- [sp]

Emperor X: Suggested Improvements to Transportation Infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor (2023, Dreams of Field, EP): Singer-songwriter Chad Matheny, gave up graduate study in physics to focus on music, self-released debut 1998, eleven albums and nine EPs. Six songs, 18:14, each tied to a regional transportation authority (from WMATA to MBATA). B+(**) [bc]

Nick Finzer: Dreams Visions Illusions (2022 [2023], Outside In Music): Trombonist, based in New York, albums since 2012. Postbop sextet, with Lucas Pino (tenor sax/bass clarinet), Alex Wintz (guitar), Glenn Zaleski (piano), bass, and drums. B+(**) [cd]

Robbie Fulks: Bluegrass Vacation (2023, Compass): Alt-country singer-songwriter, debut 1996, has done collaborations with Linda Gail Lewis and the Mekons, and covers of Michael Jackson and 13 Hillbilly Giants. This one he wrote all but one song (Delmore Brothers). B+(***) [sp]

Girl Scout: Real Life Human Garbage (2023, Made, EP): Swedish group, Emma Jansson the singer, rocks some but doesn't reduce to punk or riot grrrl. Might even pass as winsome. Five songs, 15:35. B+(**) [sp]

The Hold Steady: The Price of Progress (2023, Positive Jams): Craig Finn's band since 2003, ninth studio album (plus a few solos on the side). It's getting hard to tell their (or his) albums apart, but they're infrequent enough that each comes as a revelation: the stories interest, the words command your attention, his talkie voice is clear enough, and the music just fits. A- [sp]

JPEGMafia x Danny Brown: Scaring the Hoes (2023, AWAL): Producer-rapper Barrington Hendricks, fifth album since 2016, adding rapper Daniel Sewall here, whose discography goes back to 2010. Sounds like they threw everything into a blender, but instead of pureeing that shit, they just sent it flying everywhere. B+(*) [sp]

Larry June and the Alchemist: The Great Escape (2023, Empire): San Francisco rapper Larry Hendricks, half-dozen albums since 2017, hooks up with prolific LA producer Dan Maman. B+(*) [sp]

Jason Kush: Finally Friday (2021 [2023], MCG Jazz): Tenor saxophonist, teaches at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, seems to be his first album, a quartet with piano-bass-drums. Has a big sound and likes to soar, so it helps that the rhythm section gives him steady support. B+(***) [cd]

Julian Lage: The Layers (2022 [2023], Blue Note, EP): Jazz guitarist, six more tracks (24:44) from the sessions of last year's View With a Room, with Jorge Roeder (bass), Dave King (drums), and/or Bill Frisell (guitar) -- two are duos. B+(**) [sp]

Las Vegas Boneheads: Sixty and Still Cookin' (2023, Curt Miller Music): Trombone-heavy band, traces its history back to 1962, but has only recorded since Curt Miller took over, with their debut in 2017, and this their sophomore effort. Mostly standards, closing with "I Thought About You," "Cherokee," and "Gians Steps." B [cd]

Mark Lewis: Sunlight Shines In (2019 [2023], Audio Daddio): Saxophonist (alto/tenor, also flute), (9) at Discogs, from Tacoma, debut album 1979, original pieces, backed by piano, bass, and drums, with Nolan Shaheed on trumpet. B+(**) [cd]

Brandon Lopez: Vilevilevilevilevilevilevilevile (2023, Tao Forms): Avant-bassist, side credits start around 2012, has been very prolific of late. This is solo, impressive enough within the obvious limits. B+(**) [cd]

Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra: Lightning Dreamers (2023, International Anthem): Trumpet/electronics player, albums back to 1994, juggles several groups, eighth album with this one since 2007, now an octet, with Jeff Parker (guitar), Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez (keyboards), Damon Locks (voice/electronics), Gerald Cleaver (drums), Mauricio Takara (electronics/percussion), and Nicole Mitchell (flute). B+(**) [sp]

Christian McBride's New Jawn: Prime (2021 [2023], Mack Avenue): Bassist, from Philadelphia, established himself as the premier mainstream jazz bassist with his 1994-2000 Verves. Introduced this group on his 2018 album, with Josh Evans (trumpet), Marcus Strickland (tenor sax/bass clarinet), and Nasheet Waits (drums), with all four bringing songs. This one adds covers of Larry Young, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins; each, in its way, sharpening the edges. A- [sp]

Francisco Mela Featuring Cooper-Moore and William Parker: Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 2 (2020 [2023], 577): Cuban drummer, went to Berklee in 2000, early records more obviously Latin, but has knocked out several free jazz sets recently. This has Cooper-Moore on piano and Parker on bass, for two side-long improvs, plus a couple spare bits for the digital. B+(***) [dl]

Gurf Morlix: Caveman (2022, Rootball): Singer-songwriter, from Buffalo before Texas and Los Angeles; was drummer, producer, and more to Lucinda Williams 1985-96, has a steady stream of records since 2000. When I went to look this up in my 2022 tracking file, I noticed that it was missing (meaning that I missed it and also that it hadn't appeared on the hundreds of EOY lists I tracked), but that his 2021 album was there, indicating that the same thing happened before. This is another solid collection of songs. B+(**) [sp]

Gurf Morlix: I Challenge the Beast (2023, Rootball): Nine more songs, most comfortably within the blues idiom. B+(***) [sp]

Willie Nelson: I Don't Know a Thing About Love: The Songs of Harlan Howard (2023, Legacy): Ten songs written by Howard (1927-2002), two (one of which will be recognized as such) co-credited to Buck Owens, delivered in an economical 31:11. Songs are a mixed bag. Singer, of course, is great. B+(**) [sp]

Billy Nomates: Cacti (2023, Invada): British singer-songwriter Tor Maries, got a big jump on her 2020 debut with her connection to Sleaford Mods. Little sonic evidence of that here, especially first half, but gets more interesting on the way out. B+(**) [sp]

Grant Peeples: A Murder of Songs (2023, self-released): Folksinger-songwriter, ninth album since 2008, one memorable title: Okra and Ecclesiastes. Pieced together while dodging the pandemic. Could be more pointed politically, and/or could be funnier, but any song that reminds me of John Prine (as "Elizabeth" does) helps. B+(**) [sp]

Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (2023, Perpetual Novice): Singer-songwriter, started in the group Chairlift, second album under her own name. B+(*) [sp]

Quasi: Breaking the Balls of History (2023, Sub Pop): Portland duo of "former spouses" Sam Coomes (vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass) and Janet Weiss (vocals, drums), started in 1993, with both also engaged in other bands (most notably, Weiss in Sleater-Kinney), this their tenth album (albeit first since 2013). Just when I was ready to shitcan this, I heard some organ I liked. When it got awful again, a bass riff caught my ear. Up and down like that, but in the end, not worth the aggravation. B- [sp]

Joakim Rainer Trio: Light.Sentence (2021 [2023], Sonic Transmissions): Norwegian pianist, last name Petersen, first album after several side-credits, a trio with Alexander Piris (bass) and Rino Sivathas (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Rent Romus/Heikki Koskinen: Itkuja Suite, Invocations on Lament (2022 [2023], Edgetone): Two saxophonists: the former also credited with flute, melodica, and voice; the latter with e-trumpet and kantele. Fine print adds: "featuring Life's Blood Ensemble and Heikki Lantinen." The former is Romus's working group; the latter the vocalist who pulls this toward opera: the point of the "invocations on lament," something I could do without. B+(*) [cd]

Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12 (2023, Milan): Japanese pianist, died a couple months (age 71) after this album was released. counted as his 12th album (although some sources credit him with more than 20, plus his work in Yellow Magic Orchestra. Minimal ambiance, aiming at serenity. B [sp]

Cécile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine (2023, Nonesuch): Jazz singer, her last four albums (2015-22) topped the Jazz Critics Poll vocal category, though her MacArthur Genius Grant was a bigger milestone. Born in Miami, father Haitian, mother French, has used the latter language frequently in the past, but this album -- based on medieval French folk tales and music, with five original pieces -- is almost all in French (with some Kreyòl and a bit of English). I've been duly impressed, but never really enjoyed her records. B+(*) [sp]

Sleaford Mods: UK Grim (2023, Rough Trade): British rap-punk duo, vocalist Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn, grim since 2007, with twelve albums as consistent as the Fall. B+(***) [sp]

Peter Smith Trio: Dollar Dreams (2022 [2023], Real Magic): Pianist, from Los Angeles, has a couple previous albums. Trio with Mike Gurrola (bass) and Reggie Quinerly (drums), playing six Smith originals and four standards. B+(**) [cd]

Bruce Springsteen: Only the Strong Survive (2022, Columbia): Covers album of soul songs from the 1960s and 1970s, panned by one reviewer as "pretty much Bruce does karaoke," but done with surpassing care, with Ron Aniello's production, clusters of horns and backing vocals, and a string section (on 10/15 cuts). Not bad, but I can't imagine ever wanting to hear it again, least of all as a goof. [PS: Soon as I wrote that line, "7 Rooms of Gloom" came on, followed by "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" and "Someday We'll Be Together," which along with the earlier "I Wish It Would Rain" are some kind of camp.] B [sp]

Marcus Strickland Twi-Life: The Universe's Wildest Dream (2023, Strick Music): Saxophonist (soprano/alto/tenor, also bass clarinet), albums since 2001, played with Dave Douglas 2005-10, third album under this Afro-futurist project name (which originally dates back to his 2006 album). With Mitch Henry (keys), Kyle Miles (bass), and Charles Haynes (drums), plus guest vocals on three tracks. B+(*) [bc]

Lucas Traxel: One-Eyed Daruma (2023, We Jazz): Swiss bassist, has a couple dozen side-credits since 2012, first album under his own name, a trio with Otis Sandsjö (tenor sax) and Moritz Gaumgärtner (drums). B+(***) [sp]

The Tubs: Dead Meat (2023, Trouble in Mind): London band (not the Norwegian one), first album after an EP), a rock band with a bit of jangle pop. B+(*) [sp]

Luis Vicente 4tet: House in the Valley (2021 [2023], Clean Feed): Portuguese trumpet player, very active since 2012. Quartet with John Dikeman (tenor sax), Luke Stewart (bass), and Onno Govaert (drums), on two (or four) long pieces (67:16). The saxophonist has long struck me as a rather blunt instrument, hitting especially hard here. B+(**) [sp]

Waco Brothers: The Men That God Forgot (2023, Plenty Tuff): Mekon Jon Langford's Chicago bar band, more cowpunk when they were founded in 1995, own label now named for one of the songs on that debut. Tenth album, after a break of seven years. B+(**) [sp]

Yaeji: With a Hammer (2023, XL): Kathy Yaeji Lee, born in New York, of Korean parents, produces electronica and sings, first studio album after a couple EPs and a mixtape. B+(*) [sp]

Young Fathers: Heavy Heavy (2023, Ninja Tune): Scottish trio, one (Alloysious Massaquoi) born in Liberia but moved to Edinburgh when he was four, another (Kayus Bankole) has parents from Nigeria. Slotted hip-hop based on their two early mixtapes, but four albums later they're unclassifiable. B+(***) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Jeff Johnson: My Heart (1991 [2023], Origin): Bassist, b. 1954 in Minneapolis, long time in Seattle, debut 1986, has been a central figure in this label's sessions. Early quartet with John Gross (tenor sax), Art Resnick (piano), and Billy Mintz (drums). Skirts around the edges of postbop. B+(**) [cd]

JuJu: A Message From Mozambique (1972 [2023], Strut): Afrocentric jazz group founded in San Francisco by saxophonist Plunky Nkabinde (originally James Branch), with other African-sounding names: Ken Shabala (Kent Parker, bass/flute), Lon Moshe (Ron Martin, flute/vibes), Al-Hamel Rasul (Tony Grayson, piano), Babatunde (Michael Lea, congas/drums), and Jalango Ngoma (Dennis Stewart, timbales). A little rough, but could still get filed as spiritual jazz now, but at the time tried to fuse avant with black power community. Group evolved into Oneness of Juju. A- [sp]

Old music:

Mose Allison: The Word From Mose Allison (1964, Atlantic): Subtitle: "The Songs of Mose Allison: Words of Wisdom from the Jazz Sage." Jazz singer-pianist (1927-2016), white boy from Mississippi, invented a hipster sound that is still very distinctive. He recorded several albums for Prestige 1957-59, for Columbia (1959-61), and more for Atlantic 1962-76, then staged a comeback with Blue Note after 1987. I've only sampled him, but this LP is as consistently fine as his compilations. A- [sp]

Mose Allison: Mose Allison Sings (1957-59 [2006], Prestige): Compilation originally released in 1963 with 13 tracks, later expanded to 16. I can find all but two on albums, but Prestige often held material back to release later albums once its artists moved on. Penguin Guide recommends a 2001 reissue called Mose Allison Sings and Plays, which goes all the way to 23 tracks. Just four originals here, twelve covers, all with various bass and drums, done with his trademark light touch. B+(***) [sp]

Derek Bailey/George Lewis/John Zorn: Yankees (1982 [1983], Celluloid): Guitar, trombone, alto/soprano sax (plus clarinet and game calls). All improvised, the sort of abstract noise I rarely get into. It did have me wondering who the three baseball players on the cover were. Presumably New York Yankees, but I don't see any insignia. One song was named for Enos Slaughter (mostly a Cardinal, but finished his career with New York), but doesn't look like him. B [r]

Jeppe Zeeberg: It's the Most Basic Thing You Can Do on a Boat (2014, Barefoot): Danish pianist, half-dozen albums since 2014, this his debut, backed by bass and drums, two of each listed. Could be split into two trios, but in full fury it does sound like they're all playing. B+(***) [sp]

Jeppe Zeeberg: Riding on the Boogie Woogie of Life (2015, Barefoot): Second album, piano with alternate keyboards (synth, spinet, organ), again with the doubled-up bass and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Jeppe Zeeberg: The Four Seasons (2017, Barefoot): First large group album, his pairs of bass and drums (with Henrik Olsson also playing guitar) augmented by four horns (sax/clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and tuba). It can get to be a bit much. B+(*) [sp]

Jeppe Zeeberg: Eight Seemingly Unrelated Pieces of Piano Music (2018, Barefoot): Danish pianist, half-dozen albums since 2014, this one solo, also playing synthesizer, pipe organ, percussion, and electronics. He promises variety, and delivers: a stride piece to open, some organ ambiance, a crashing free piece ("A Regular Guy in Japan"), and another, then ends with "something jolly." He's most impressive flat out, but it helps that he doesn't stay there. A- [bc]

Jeppe Zeeberg: Universal Disappointment (2019, self-released): Various lineups, some he's not credited on, except as composer, arranger, etc. The eclecticism is getting a bit much. B [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Richard X Bennett & Matt Parker: Parker Plays X (BYNK) [05-13]
  • George Coleman: Live at Smalls Jazz Club (Cellar) [05-19]
  • Les DeMerle: Sound 67: Once in a Lifetime (1967, Origin) [04-21]
  • Lauren Henderson: Conjuring (Brontosaurus) [04-21]
  • Jeff Johnson: My Heart (1991, Origin) [04-21]
  • Jason Keiser: Shaw's Groove (OA2) [04-21]
  • John Pizzarelli: Stage & Screen (Palmetto) [04-21]
  • Alex Weitz: Rule of Thirds (Outside In Music) [04-28]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 16, 2023

Speaking of Which

While writing this, I threw out the following tweet:

Thinking about major patterns in American history: one is that progressive change often leads to reaction, which in turn inevitably falls into dysfunction and catastrophe, necessitating further progressive change.

First pass omitted "often" and "inevitably," but I had more characters to work with. I was thinking about adding a clause to the effect that the trick will be to sell progressive change so broadly and deeply that reaction won't be able to take root. Past progressive periods have had lasting impact, even once power shifted to opposing forces. Often, as in FDR's successful switch of focus to WWII or in LBJ's Vietnam War debacle, power shifted mostly due to other factors. Republicans have often been granted grace periods on the assumption that they wouldn't really do the awful things they campaigned for -- at least that they wouldn't do them to their own voters. On the other hand, reactionaries are directly responsible for their disastrous turns, because the stratified societies and repressive governments they favor are inherently destabilizing and suicidal.

This meme showed up in my Facebook feed, forwarded by a dear friend who's not known for lefty politics. Title is: "Shocking Things Liberals Believe." The list:

  • People working 40 hours a week should not live in poverty.
  • CEOs should not receive 3,000 times the pay of their workers.
  • Wall Street gangsters should go to prison when they steal.
  • No child should ever have to worry about being shot at school.
  • No one, especially veterans, should be homeless.
  • There should not be subsidies for profitable corporations.
  • Equal rights and equal pay should be the benchmark for all Americans.
  • Politicians should not dictate medical decisions for women.
  • Lobbyists should not be allowed to bribe our representatives.
  • Companies should not be permitted to trash the earth for profit.
  • Healthcare should be given to all, not be a luxury for rich people.
  • Everyone should have access to higher education.

That's certainly not an exhaustive list, but nothing there I'd nitpick much less argue against. I'm not sure I'd describe liberals thusly, but if liberals are serious about protecting their idea of individual liberty, they need to get behind an agenda that does a much better job of securing basic rights, including Roosevelt's "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear," than America does now.

Top story threads:

Trump:

Other Republicans:

  • Ryan Cooper: [04-13] Republicans' Self-Inflicted Budget Impasse: "The GOP discovers that shouting lies on television is not a good way to figure out how to tax and spend." Further down: "It turns out to be quite difficult to operate a political party made up of 75 percent crack-brained yahoo attention hounds, whose voters are 'egged on by a media apparatus that has trained its audience to demand the impossible and punish the sell-outs who can't deliver,' in the words of Alex Pareene." Pareene also wrote (back in 2017): "Donald Trump today is a cruel dolt turned into a raving madman by cable news and Breitbart.com." Yeah, but four years later he's much further gone.

  • Gabriella Ferrigne: [04-14] New docs reveal racist messages by man Abbott wants to pardon in BLM protester killing: "Daniel Perry repeatedly made racist comments and discussed plans to kill people."

  • David French: [04-13] How Tennessee Illustrates the Three Rules of MAGA: I hadn't seen this formulation before: "First, that before Trump the G.O.P. was a political doormat, helplessly walked over by Democrats time and again. Second, that we live in a state of cultural emergency where the right has lost everywhere and must turn to politics to reverse this cultural momentum. And third, that in this state of emergency, all conservatives must rally together. There can be no enemies to the right." Like so much Republican drivel, it's hard to pick which thread to unravel first. But sure, I suppose you can divide the public sphere into economics and culture. The focus on culture is convenient for many Republicans because it distracts from the main thrust of Republican policy going back to Reagan, which has been economic: to shift power and wealth from labor and customers to business, leading to a massive increase in inequality. It's easy to understand why Republicans don't want people thinking about economics, except insofar as they can fob blame off on Democrats (gas prices works for this, even though most of the executives who profit from higher prices skew hard Republican). Culture change, on the other hand, happens irrespective of politics, which feeds into both their victimization complex and their sense of desperation.

  • Gabrielle Gurley: [04-13] Tennessee Republicans Step Up Attacks on Democratic Cities: "States rights" supposedly tries to bring government closer to the people, but Republicans only want to decentralize power when the net flow is in their favor. That's led to many cases of Republican-controlled states limiting what mostly Democratic cities can do. Tennessee got a reminder of that when the state legislature expelled representatives from Memphis and Nashville, only to have them returned to office.

  • Josh Kovensky: [04-16] Texas GOP Struggles Over What Crisis to Manufacture at Border. The state legislature is pushing a bill that would declare that Texas is being invaded from Mexico, authorizing a "state-run Border Patrol Unit, empowered to deputize and train citizens, and to 'repel' and 'return' undocumented migrants seen crossing the border" (or, as critics dubbed it, a "vigilante death squads policy").

  • Eric Levitz: [04-13] Why the GOP Can't Moderate on Abortion Pill Bans: A big part of this is tactics: they decided to equate abortion with murder, which created a strong force dragging the law toward conception. And they threw in a few more axioms which, again, couldn't be compromised. And they billed themselves as the champion of the fetus, building up what is essentially a single-issue voting bloc, one they cannot afford to lose. They did pretty much the same thing with guns, so again they're incapable of compromise. Any time you adopt a moral absolute, you can only move toward that pure point. Any deviation is seen as a sign of weakness, and Republicans can't bear to show that. Their whole self-image is built up around resolute strength, no matter how stupid that gets.

  • Jason Linkins: [04-15] It's Really Quite Simple: Republicans Hate Young People. Scott Walker blames "liberal indoctrination," but it's conservatives who are legislating curricula and banning books. And banning abortion: "Everywhere you look, Republicans are finding it very difficult to actually run on the post-Roe dystopia they've engineered -- so much so that they're now trying to get people to just stop talking about it."

  • Nicole Narea: [04-11] Why these Democrats are defecting to the GOP: "Three Democratic lawmakers in Louisiana and North Carolina switched parties recently."

  • Heather Digby Parton: [04-14] Republicans, facing devastating fallout from "Dobbs effect," refuse to quit abortion bans.

  • Bill Scher: [04-14] Why DeSantis Should Take a Pass on the 2024 Presidential Election: "The idea that the Florida governor could cinch the GOP nomination by running as a competent, no-drama Donald Trump is fundamentally flawed." [For a counter argument, see: Ross Douthat: [04-15] Why DeSantis Has to Run.] I wouldn't presume to offer advice, but I do think that last week's Frank Luntz argument that Republicans want Trumpy policies without Trump's personality, which is DeSantis in a nutshell, is exactly wrong -- something which I think DeSantis realizes, which is why he keeps trying to fabricate media outrages like attacking Disney perks and trafficking refugees from Texas to Martha's Vineyard. I doubt he'll succeed, but if he has the money lined up, he might as well run. (Not that he needs to rush it, as he's already getting the sort of press few candidates other than Trump get.) If Trump beats him then loses, he'll have a case that it should have been him. If DeSantis gets the nomination, 2024 against Biden is probably his best timing.

  • Dylan Scott: [04-13] Republicans want to force doctors to mislead patients about reversing abortions: Kansas, in particular, though why anyone would go to the trouble of taking a dose of mifepristone then change their mind and try to get the effect reversed is hard to imagine. The much more likely explanation is that Republicans just want to make the lives of women seeking abortions as miserable as possible. By the way, there's more evil brewing in the KS legislature, despite the fact that voters overwhelmingly rejected their anti-abortion constitutional amendment.

  • Kyle Swenson: [04-16] Iowa to spend millions kicking families off food stamps. More states may follow.

  • Michael Wines: [04-14] If Tennessee's Legislature Looks Broken, It's Not Alone.

  • Li Zhou: [04-12] The return of two expelled Tennessee Democrats is a powerful rebuke to Republicans.

Matters of (in)justice: The long-brewing Clarence Thomas scandal got so big last week I moved it out into its own section. And, of course, other stories that could be filed here got slotted under Trump or Other Republicans. Still much to report:

Clarence Thomas:

Matters of economy:

  • Dean Baker: [04-13] Can Jerome Powell Pivot on Interest Rates, Again? Reminds us of why Baker thought Powell deserved a second term, and offers hope that as inflation abates he will "buck the conventional wisdom" and lower interest rates to keep the economy strong. I felt that Biden made a mistake -- as did Obama and Clinton in renominating the Republican Fed chairmen they inherited -- in not picking a more reliable ally, and so far I feel vindicated in my position.

  • Miles Bryan: [04-14] The real reason prices aren't coming down: "Excuseflation"; another new word here is "greedflation." Let me try: for many years now, at least since the Bork reformulation of antitrust rules in the 1980s and the mania of mergers and leveraged buyouts, markets have been becoming less competitive, which means companies could demand higher monopoly rents. But it didn't always happen, because price gouging ticks people off, and threatens a backlash. However, the pandemic produced a lot of supply-side glitches, which eventually coalesced into a plausible excuse for raising prices. When the expectation of higher prices sat in, the companies that could raise them without losing significant market share did so. To the extent this is true, the Fed isn't tackling the real causes of inflation. They're just trying to beat it with their stick.

  • Meg Jacobs: [04-13] The Forgotten Left Economics Tradition: "In the Progressive and New Deal eras, there was a markedly different response to rising prices, and a different usage of economic theory." I missed this one in last week's batch of American Prospect economics articles (under Stiglitz).

  • Robert Kuttner: [04-12] Will the Fed Wreck an Improving Economy? Fed chairman Jerome Powell says he's trying to control inflation, but sometimes he gives the impression that the statistic he's tracking to decide when to let up isn't inflation itself but unemployment. Kuttner also wrote: [04-13] A Revolution in Cost-Benefit Rules: "How Biden's new team at the Office of Management and Budget is reversing several decades of pseudo-technical right-wing mischief."

Ukraine War: As far as I can tell, the leaks don't amount to much. Granted, there are details they'd rather you not know, or not talk about, and there are things they should find embarrassing, but they don't amount to much.

  • Blaise Malley: [04-14] Diplomacy Watch: Biden administration in 'damage control' after intel leaks: "Leaders in Kyiv 'suspicious' of Washington's commitment to Ukrainian counteroffensive." Little diplomacy to report, other than that Pope Francis and Lula da Silva came out in favor, while Charles Kupchan and Richard Haass have "laid out a plan" to get to negotiations later while escalating now. It amazes me that serious people can make such arguments. The only question on negotiation is figuring out what each side really needs and what they can reasonably give up. The big points -- that Putin's invasion failed, that neither side can prevail on the battlefield, that the US and NATO will resist any further Russian expansionism, and that sanctions aren't a very effective deterrent -- should be pretty clear by now. The only real stickler is territory, and there the offer has been obvious from the start: let people in each disputed territory vote to decide on their fate. There are a lot of technical problems with this: chiefly, what are the boundaries of the territories in dispute, how refugees from those territories can vote, timing, etc. But fair-minded people can solve technical problems. Granted, neither side qualifies yet, and that's something each needs to work on. But what won't work is thinking that if only "we" (and this applies to either "we") can grab a bit more leverage, we'll be able to bend the other side to our will. Even unconditional surrender only works when the winning side tries to do the right thing (as the US mostly did after WWII, but as France/UK didn't do after WWI).

  • Chas Danner: [04-14] What Secrets Are in the Leaked Pentagon Documents -- and Who Leaked Them?

  • Robyn Dixon: [04-15] Breaking up with Russia is hard for many Western firms, despite war: "Only a small percentage of the hundreds of companies that promised to leave Russia after its invasion of Ukraine have exited." The Kyiv School of Economics "follows 3,141 foreign companies through its Leave Russia project, reports that only 211 companies have exited -- fewer than 7 percent."

  • Marc Fisher: [04-15] A new kind of leaker: Spilling state secrets to impress online buddies.

  • Anatol Lieven: [04-10] Pentagon leak reinforces what we already know: US-NATO in it to win: "But revelations about American and European boots on the ground are new, and could prove a dangerous and so far unexplained wrinkle."

  • Ashleigh Subramanian-Montgomery: [04-10] Even the Treasury Department admits sanctions don't work. As the last section puts it: "Time for a sanctions rethink."

Elsewhere around the world:

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [04-15] Quick Thoughts on AI and Intellectual Property: I haven't sorted through all of this, but I'll add a few more thoughts. A lot of what passes as creativity is really just the ability to pull disparate ideas out of the ether and reconfigure them in pleasing ways. AI may be hard pressed to come up with anything truly original, but it could swamp the market for "creative" recombination: all it needs to do is scan a lot of source material, then apply a few rules for sorting out what works and what doesn't. If you gave AI copyright standing, you could wind up with an automated trolling machine that would tie up honest work in endless litigation. If you don't, well, humans could use AI to vastly increase their production of copyrightable works, and they could become just as litigious. Either way, it's a mess, but the whole realm of "intellectual property" is a big legal mess even before you add AI to the mix. And as Baker knows, the whole system of enforcement is dead weight on the creative process.

David Dayen: [04-14] The Feinstein Affair: Senate Gerontocracy Reaches Absurd Heights: "Old senators, old rules, and old traditions all are cutting against what should be a simple task of confirming judges."

EJ Dionne Jr: [04-16] Gun absolutists don't trust democracy because they know they're losing: The NRA held another convention last week, attended virtually or physically by a phalanx of Republican presidential hopefuls (Pence, Trump, and Asa Hutchinson in person; DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott on video). "The nonsense floated in Indianapolis -- based on the idea that our national addiction to high-powered weaponry has nothing to do with America's unique mass shooting problem -- speaks to a deep ailment in our democracy." Oh, by the way:

Karen Greenberg: [04-11] The Wars to End All Wars? In his introduction, editor Tom Engelhardt reminds us that he started TomDispatch in 2002 to protest the "unnerving decision of President George W. Bush to respond to the disastrous terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by invading Afghanistan," adding "even then, it seemed to me like a distinctly mad act." What's strange is that even though most observers admit that twenty-plus years of "war on terror" have hurt America more than they've helped, we seem to be further away than ever from a world where demilitarized peace is possible. Greenberg, who first got drawn into the legal morass of Guantanamo (I read her 2009 book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days), has a 2021 book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy From the War on Terror to Donald Trump, which connects the dots between 9/11 and such Trump abuses his Muslim ban, border policing, his killing of Iranian General Soleimani, his reaction to BLM protests, and his post-election insanity.

Elahe Izadi/Jeremy Barr/Sarah Ellison: [04-16] The Dominion vs. Fox defamation case is finally going to trial. As much as I hate defamation lawsuits in general, this one is exposing grievous malfeasance and public harm in a forums that will be hard to ignore. Key line here: "But First Amendment advocates aren't convinced that a Fox loss is bad for journalism -- and think Dominion has a much stronger case than most defamation plaintiffs." Also quotes Floyd Abrams: "The journalistic sins, which have already been exposed here, are so grievous and so indefensible that a victory for Fox will be hard to explain to the public." Also:

Paul Krugman: [04-11] Inequality Ahoy! On the Meaning of the Superyacht. Krugman used yachts as a measure of inequality in his book The Conscience of a Liberal (2007), contrasting how much yachts had shrunk during the "great compression" of the 1930-60s, compared to the Gilded Age extravagances of J.P. Morgan. Well, yachts are back now, bigger and gaudier than ever, including the one Clarence Thomas has enjoyed. Also on yachts:

Eric Levitz: [04-10] Blaming 'Capitalism' Is Not an Alternative to Solving Problems. Basically, a brief for social democratic reforms as opposed to the belief that only a revolution can root out the core problem that is capitalism. I've long felt that revolutions only occur the old system is too rigid and brittle to adjust to popular pressure, and therefore shatters. Russia in 1917, for instance, was less the "weak link of capitalism" than an autocratic regime locked into a disastrous war and incapable of reforming. A second point is that violence begets violence, and the more violence continues beyond revolution, the more doomed a revolution is to recapitulate the old regime. Levitz cites a bunch of statistics to show that very few Americans are disposed toward revolution, but the more relevant point is that the American political system is flexible enough to reform, if not to a point we can recognize as social democracy, than at least enough to preclude the violent rupture of revolution. (Of course, if you allow Trump and the Republicans sufficient power, all bets are off.)

On the other hand, while "blaming capitalism" isn't a practical political program, it does give one some clarity. Capitalism may tout free markets and free labor and maybe even freedom as an ideal, but it simply means that the profits go to the owners of capital -- a class who of necessity seek insatiably to maximize their returns, not least by manipulating the political system. Every word in that sentence is important, but "insatiable" (i.e., the felt need for infinite growth) is the crux of the problem, as it leads to two things that destabilize and destroy their world: a class system and environmental degradation. It is, of course, possible to limit those catastrophes through political reform, but doing so detracts from pure capitalism. This is why true capitalists regard anything that stands in the way of their quest for profits as socialism, a betrayal of all they believe in.

Adam Nagourney/Jeremy W Peters: [04-16] How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives: And elevated a political issue that could easily have been ignored into a defense of basic human rights. I've often wondered how many people we're talking about: "About 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children in the United States identify as transgender." That's about 0.5% of the US adult population, and 0.4% of 0-17 children (up to 1.4% of 15-17 children). That's not a lot of people to get so worked up about. But that's the point of the issue: it's a symbolic issue that a few Republicans seized on as a way to revitalize the cause of religious bigotry. And by the way, they've done more to publicize and promote acceptance of transgender people more quickly than any positive movement could.

By the way, if you'd like to meet some transgender people, take a look at: These 12 Transgender Americans Would Love You to Mind Your Own Business. This is part of a series I entered through What Happened to America? We Asked 12 People in Their 70s and 80s. The latter cohort was pretty evenly divided politically (although neither Donald Trump nor Diane Feinstein fared very well). But no Republicans in the transgender group.

Charles P Pierce: The Esquire columnist comments on a number of stories I've filed elsewhere:

Ben Schwartz: [04-14] How Woke Bob Hope Got Canceled by the Right: "The conservative comedian spoke out for gay rights and gun control, and got boycotted and ostracized by friends on the right, including Ronald Reagan." I'm a little surprised to see Hope labelled a conservative. Sure, he was of a generation when it was easy to get jingoistic about America, and I got tired of his USO shows, as he continued to associate with a military that had gone off the rails in Vietnam, but he always seemed like a decent-enough guy. And one thing was pretty unique about him, which is that nearly all of his characters were shameless cowards. He was, in this, the antithesis of John Wayne, who really was a conservative asshole.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-14] Annals of the Covert World: The Secret Life of Shampoo: "The surveillance state is both more sinister and much sillier than most of us imagine."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, April 10, 2023

Music Week

April archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 39968 [39927] rated (+41), 58 [52] unrated (+6: 30 new, 28 old).

I wrote a pretty long Speaking of Which yesterday. If you missed it, I suggest that you at least read the introduction, which starts to explain the psychotic breakdown Republicans suffered last week. There was a time when Republicans claimed to be the "law and order" party, as well as being staunch "defenders of freedom." But in following their single issue bets (e.g., on guns and abortion) to their logical ends, they've entered into territory that can only be called psychotic.

But don't get me started again here. Read the piece. And it wouldn't hurt to like, reply, and/or forward the tweet. View count is currently 127, whereas my Music Week tweets regularly top 300, probably because they do get the occasional like and retweet.

This week's haul continues recent week trends: lots of old jazz, mostly suggested by my Penguin Guide unheard 4-star list. I finished Z with John Zorn. (His Tzadik records were on Rhapsody for a while, but were taken down several years ago, and are well nigh impossible for me to come by these days.) That leaves eight various artists comps, which came from early editions of the Guide (as they stopped covering them), so they are probably impossible to find. That still leaves 615 albums unheard on the list.

Probably worth another pass, but most of them fall into big clusters: old comps of classic artists (Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson; the French Classics label has disappeared from Napster), that I largely skipped because those editions are out of print, and in most cases I've heard other editions; lots of obscure free (AMM, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor) and (mostly British) trad jazz records; boxes not deemed cost-effective; other labels that refuse to play ball with the streaming rackets (like Tzadik); and back catalog the cooperating labels haven't gotten around to (Concord is one that particularly bothers me). I did just find a Mose Allison album I had missed. Still unlikely I'l whittle the list down much more.

The Live at Dreher set led me to file separate grades for the earlier editions, especially as one appears under Mal Waldron and the other under Steve Lacy. Not really separate grades, as the four discs just delight on and on. But no point picturing the older edition covers.

Rated count could pass 40,000 next week. I'm currently 32 short, which is a fairly average week's work for me. Main thing that may distract me is that we're in the brief season between too cold and too hot, so it would be opportune to do some house/yard projects. In house it's mostly decluttering, starting with my desk.

I finished Michael Tomasky's The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity, which is one of the best recent books directly tied to current Democratic Party politics. In that same vein, I also recommend Ryan Cooper's How Are You Going to Pay for That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Questions in Politics. Both books err on the side of optimism, as they lay out sensible policies that could be implemented and that could make a big difference going forward. Next up is a much more pessimistic book, one that predicts doom of civilization between 2070 and 2100: Brian T Watson's Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time and the Future We'll Face. If I ever write my book, it will land somewhere in the middle of this triangle. I wrote a Book Roundup piece on Watson a while back:

Brian T Watson: Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time, and the Future We'll Face (paperback, 2019, Anvilside Press): I could imagine writing a book like this, which starts with a long laundry list of systemic problems (Capitalism, Technology, Webworld, Politics, Media, Education, Human Nature, The Environment, Human Population, Transportation, Miscellaneous Forces) then winds up showing how any (let alone all) of them are unlikely to be solved (that chapter is called "Possible Reforms and Their Likelihood"). I'd shuffle the deck a bit -- in the 1990s, when I started thinking along these lines, I started with resources and environment, but back then I at least had some faith in reason to see a way through technical obstacles, but that idea has taken a beating ever since. So I see no more reason to be optimistic than the author, not that I would deny that the very act of looking into the abyss implies a certain unreasoned hope. Missing here is recognition of the unknown: e.g., no mention of pandemic a mere year before Covid-19 hit. While climate was most likely mentioned under Environment or Population, it's at least as much a headline as "Webworld." Another big topic is war: both as a cause of destruction and as a likely consequence, in both its conventional and annihilationist modes. Bibliography is just a list of mostly familiar books relevant to each chapter.

After I wrote that, I ordered a copy, then managed to lose it. Last week I found it, under a pile of crap. I've just started the chapter on capitalism, and it's not as sharp as it could be if he had a better understanding of Marx and Keynes (and Michael Hudson and George Brockaway, or maybe even Naomi Klein), but he's still hitting plenty of salient points. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with under "Human Nature." Can he, for instance, explain the schizophrenia of the current Republican Party?

New records reviewed this week:

AVA Trio: Ash (2021 [2023], Tora, EP): Giuseppe Doronzo (baritone sax/mizmar), Esat Ekincioglu (bass), Pino Basile (frame drums/cupaphon), though I omitted some wrinkles (percussions, effects, voice). Two pieces, 21:26. Down and dirty soundscape. B+(*) [bc]

Daniel Bingert: Ariba (2023, Moserobie): Swedish, nominally a bassist, but defers here to Torbjörn Zetterberg and limits his playing to Moog. Second album. Band includes Per Texas Johansson (tenor sax/bass clarinet), Jonas Kulhammar (alto sax), and Charlie Malmberg (piano/baritone sax), as well as trumpet, bass, and drums. Has a loose, playful chemistry, coming into a nice, soft landing. A- [cd]

Canadian Jazz Collective: Septology: The Black Forest Session (2022 [2023], HGBS Blue): Individual names on the cover: Derrick Gardner (trumpet/flugelhorn), Lorne Lofsky (guitar), and Kirk MacDonald (tenor sax), joined here by four more, playing clarinet, piano, bass, and drums. All eight pieces are by the three named. Postbop with a nice flow. B+(*) [cd]

Kaze & Ikue Mori: Crustal Movement (2021-22 [2023], Libra): Japanese-French group, with Satoko Fujii (piano), Natsuki Tamura (trumpet), Christian Pruvost (trumpet/flugelhorn), and Peter Orins (drums), seventh album since 2010, joined here by the famous Japanese noisemaker. Another pandemic paste project, with live overdubs, billed as "a visceral, richly textured hybrid," which it certainly is. A- [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

The Birth of Bop: The Savoy 10-Inch LP Collection (1944-49 [2023], Craft, 2CD): The $99.99 edition reproduces five 10-inch LPs that Savoy released in 1952-53, but this is also available on 2CD (30 songs, 84:00), and digital. Savoy is mostly remembered for Charlie Parker's early sides (only one here, "Romance Without Finance," with vocal), and perhaps Dexter Gordon (three tracks here), so this was meant to spread the spotlight. Two times I turned away from reading the paper to see who was playing, and both were trombone player Kai Winding (remembered these days mostly for his "Jay Jay and Kai" duets). Ends with a cut by Morris Lane called "Blowin' for Kicks," that pretty effectively sums up the moment and the style. B+(***) [sp]

D.B. Shrier: D.B. Shrier Emerges (1967 [2023], Omnivore): Tenor saxophonist (1938-2017), from Philadelphia, only released this one five-track album, expanded here with five more live tracks. Opens with a Gigi Gryce bopper, then shows some range by turning in a credible ballad. Then he shows he's paid attention to Coltrane, a bit before everyone else. The extra tracks run hot, as well they should. A- [sp]

Old music:

Ralph Reichert Quartet With Randy Sandke: Reflections (2002 [2004], Nagel Heyer): German tenor saxophonist, did a PG 4-star album with Jack Walrath I haven't been able to find, has a few more items in his catalog. Quartet with piano (Buggy Braune), bass (Andreas Henze), and drums (Wolff Reichert), joined by the American trumpet player. Mostly standards, nicely done. B+(**) [sp]

The Ralph Reichert/Jerry Tilitz Quintet: Back to Back (2002 [2006], Nagel Heyer): Tilitz is a trombonist, sings some, from New York, but this was recorded in Hamburg, with Reichert on tenor sax, backed by piano-bass-drums. Tilitz wrote three (of 8) pieces, with five standards (ranging from "Crazy Rhythm" to "Lush Life" to "Alfie" -- the latter two with Tilitz vocals). B+(***) [sp]

Miroslav Vitous: Journey's End (1982 [1983], ECM): Czech bassist, moved to US in 1966 to study at Berklee, but soon was playing with Miles Davis, which led to him co-founding Weather Report in 1970, but fusion wasn't really his thing. He started recording for ECM in 1979, and eventually moved back to Europe. This was recorded in Norway, a quartet with John Surman (reeds), John Taylor (piano), and Jon Christensen (drums). Surman is remarkable here, but the way the bassist keeps the momentum building has a lot to do with that. A- [sp]

Philipp Wachsmann/Paul Lytton: Some Other Season (1997 [1999], ECM): English violinist, b. 1944 in Uganda, more than dabbles in electronics, has been tied to the European avant-garde since 1976. Duo here with the drummer, who also produces live electronics. B+(**) [sp]

Mal Waldron/Reggie Workman/Billy Higgins: Up Popped the Devil (1973 [1974], Enja): Pianist (1925-2002), emerged in the late 1950s, most famously accompanying Billie Holiday, but had a long career moving from bop to free jazz. Trio with bass and drums here. Carla Poole plays flute on one track. B+(**) [sp]

Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy: Live at Dreher Paris 1981 (1981 [2003], Hatology, 4CD): Piano and soprano sax duo, sets from four nights, most pieces run 10-13 minutes with a couple topping 17. They play six Waldron pieces, eight by Lacy, and nine by Thelonious Monk, who provides a reference hook that Lacy has often returned to throughout his career. Remarkable music, hard to pick among the discs, so the earlier 2-CD sets should do just as well. A- [sp]

Jack Walrath: Master of Suspense (1986 [1987], Blue Note): Trumpet player (b. 1946), born in Florida but grew up in Montana, joined Mingus late in the game, who remains a prominent influence -- especially in the more tumultous pieces, clashing with Carter Jefferson (tenor sax), Kenny Garrett (alto sax), and Steve Turre (trombone). Things calm down for two guest vocals, where Willie Nelson sings "I'm Sending You a Big Bouquet of Roses" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." And this closes with a ballad that could be his bid for a "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love." A- [sp]

Jack Walrath: Unsafe at Any Speed (2014 [2015], SteepleChase): I hadn't heard anything by him since 2002, but turns out he has five 2008-15 albums on SteepleChase, so I have some backfilling to do. Original pieces, texture and flow much influenced by Mingus, with Abraham Burton (tenor sax) strong as ever, backed by piano (George Burton), bass (Boris Koslov), and drums (Donald Edwards). B+(***) [sp]

Priska Walss/Gabriela Friedli: Intervista (2000-02 [2003], Intakt): Swiss trombonist, also plays alphorn, in a duo with the Swiss piano-organ player. Neither has much more discography, but they did a 1998 album as Duo Frappant. B+(***) [sp]

Cedar Walton: Roots (1997 [1999], Astor Place): Pianist (1934-2013), started appearing on albums in 1958, joined Art Blakey in 1962, always had a knack for working with horns (most importantly in Eastern Rebellion). Group here is billed as a trio (Walton, Ron Carter, and Lewis Nash) with special guests -- Joshua Redman (tenor sax), Terence Blanchard (trumpet), and Mark Whitfield (guitar), three tracks each -- but there's also an "added ensemble." B+(***) [sp]

Weather Report: The Best of Weather Report (1973-80 [2002], Columbia/Legacy): Fusion group, principally Joe Zawinul (keybs) and Wayne Shorter (tenor/soprano sax), ran from 1970-86, with various bassists (most notably Jaco Pastorius 1976-82), drummers (Peter Erskine (1978-82), and percussionists (except 1978-80). Nice account of a band I never much cared for, mostly because they kick the rhythm up. B+(**) [r]

Weather Report: Live in Tokyo (1972, Columbia, 2CD): Live double, 88:29, only released in Japan until 2014, four (of five) cuts medleys. Band at this point was Zawinul, Shorter, Miroslav Vitous (bass), Eric Gravatt (drums), and Dom Um Romão (percussion). A couple things stand out here: the bassist keeps a lot of tension in the pulse, and Shorter is playing exceptionally free. B+(**) [sp]

Eberhard Weber: The Colors of Chloë (1973 [1974], ECM): German bass/cello player, first record, did much to define ECM's sound in the 1970s, working here with flugelhorn, piano, drums, voice (Gisela Schäuble), and extra celli. B+(*) [sp]

Eberhard Weber: Yellow Fields (1975 [1976], ECM): This quartet is more substantial, with electric keyboards (Rainer Brüninghaus) and drums (Jon Christensen) more prominent, but also Charlie Mariano (soprano sax, shenai, nagaswaram) in fine form. B+(***) [sp]

Eberhard Weber: Pendulum (1993, ECM): Nominally a solo bass album, but doesn't sound like that, with some adroit fingerpicking suggesting guitar, punctuated by impossibly low notes. Actually he's not playing a standard double bass. He calls his instrument a "special bass," which curiously involves "effects" but remains "absolutely 'synthesizer-free.'" No word on overdubs, other than that the changes of effect couldn't be reproduced in real time. B+(***) [sp]

Bobby Wellins: The Satin Album (1996, Jazzizit): Scottish tenor saxophonist (1936-2016), played in Stan Tracey's quartet in the early 1960s, his own albums start in 1978. This is a ballad album, with Colin Purbrook (piano), bass (Dave Green), and drums (Clark Tracey). Nice and easy. B+(**) [sp]

Bobby Wellins Quartet: Don't Worry 'Bout Me (1996 [1997], Cadillac): Live at Vortex in London, with piano (Graham Harvey), bass (Alec Dankworth), and drums (Martin Drew). Standards plus an original to close. B+(***) [r]

Kate Westbrook: Cuff Clout (2001 [2004], Voiceprint): Née Kate Barnard (1939), married pianist-composer Mike Westbrook, sings (as does John Winfield, listed on cover as "featuring," here), wrote all the texts here, to music (originally commissioned in 1994) mostly by band members. Possible subtitle: "a neoteric music hall." Possible band name: the Skirmishers. Some remarkable music, but the vocals strike me as rather operatic, even if sometimes the reference is Weill. B+(**) [r]

Mike Westbrook Trio: Love for Sale (1985 [1990], Hat Art): British pianist (b. 1936), started producing albums in 1967. He is much admired by Penguin Guide, but my own sampling has been limited and not always enjoyable -- partly because I don't share his interest in classical composers, opera, and art song. The latter is mostly the province of his wife, Kate Westbrook, who joins here with credits that start with "design concept" and include vocals, tenor horn, bamboo and piccolo flute. So this isn't a conventional piano trio. The pianist is also credited with tuba and voice, and the third is Chris Biscoe (alto clarinet and alto/baritone/soprano sax). After an original that sounds Brechtian comes "Lush Life" and the title song (with a German lyric, so "Käufliche Liebe"), each striking in its own way. Even more so is a dense and brooding "Buddy Can You Spare a Dime," which is where the tuba is perfect. That's followed by texts from Blake and Brecht ("Seeräuber Jenny"), the originals "Sonnet" and "Crazy for Swing," the grim "Weltende," and a couple songs in French about shipwrecks. A- [r]

Mike Westbrook: Westbrook-Rossini (1986 [1988], Hat Art): Penguin Guide duplicates this title for a Zürich live performance that is just long enough to require a second CD. Neither album is clearly credited to the British pianist, but I can't think of a better way to handle it. This one, which arranges for septet (five horns, piano, and drums, with Kate Westbrook singing some) various famous opera pieces by Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), adding odd bits here and there. B+(*) [sp]

Mike Westbrook: Westbrook-Rossini, Zürich Live 1986 (1986 [1994], Hat Art, 2CD): Live rendition of the previous album, same group, runs a bit longer (83:55) resulting in the split over 2-CD. Some extra bright spots. B+(**) [r]

Mike Westbrook: Glad Day: Settings of William Blake (1997 [1999], Enja, 2CD): Lyrics by the poet (1757-1827), voiced by Phil Minton, Kate Westbrook, and the Senior Girls Choir of Blackheath Conservatoire of Music and the Arts; the leader's music played by three saxophonists, piano, bass, and drums (Kate also plays tenor horn and piccolo). B+(**) [r]

Mike Westbrook: Chanson Irresponsable (2002 [2003], Enja, 2CD): A front cover banner and the back cover credit this to The New Westbrook Orchestra, but spine and front cover slug as above, with four more names in smaller front cover type: Chris Biscoe (reeds), Matthew Sharp (voice), Kate Westbrook (voice), and Peter Whyman (reeds), with music by the leader and lyrics by his wife. Other musicians appear on trumpet, tenor sax, baritone sax, and drums, with spots of strings, bass, and French horn. B+(*) [r]

Mike Westbrook: After Abbey Road (1996-2009 [2019], Westbrook): Westbrook was commissioned to do a new presentation of the Beatles' Abbey Road for its 20th anniversary in 1989. That produced the album Off Abbey Road, but when I searched, I found this later (1996) performance -- finished off with a 2009 recording of "She Loves You." Abbey Road has long been my least-favorite Beatles album, and stretching it out ("Here Comes the Sun" runs to 15:41, "Because" to 13:26) and blowing it up hardly help. John Winfield and Kate Westbrook sing. B- [r]

Gerald Wilson: The Artist Selects (1961-69 [2005], Pacific Jazz): Big band arranger (1918-2014), moved from Mississippi to Detroit when he was 16, played trumpet for Jimmie Lunceford in 1939, led some groups in the 1940s, but recorded little until the 1960s, when Pacific Jazz released eleven of his resurgent big band albums. That's where these 16 tracks come from. B+(**) [r]

Gerald Wilson Orchestra: New York New Sound (2002 [2003], Mack Avenue): After his 1961-69 run on Pacific Sound, Wilson didn't release anything else until 1981, after which he slowly rebuilt his career into a Grammy-winning juggernaut. One thing that helped was recruiting all-star bands. On most cuts, the trumpet section here is: Jon Faddis, Eddie Henderson, Sean Jones, and Jimmy Owens, with Clark Terry sitting in on two tracks. The saxes: Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Jerry Dodgion, Jesse Davis. Piano is split between Kenny Barron and Renee Rosnes. His son, Anthony Wilson, plays guitar, joined on one track by Oscar Castro-Neves. B+(***) [r]

Steve Wilson Quartet: Four for Time (1994 [1996], Criss Cross): Alto/soprano saxophonist, b. 1961, was signed to Blue Note in the 1980s, but only appeared as a sideman. Quartet here with Bruce Barth (piano), Larry Grenadier (bass), and Leon Parker (drums), who between them wrote five (of eight) songs. Covers of "Perdido" and "Woody'N You" try to close strong. B+(***) [r]

Norma Winstone: Edge of Time (1971 [1972], Argo): English jazz singer (b. 1941), first album, following features with Michael Garrick and Mike Westbrook, eventually recognized with a MBE. Band includes many notables of the early English avant-garde, like Kenny Wheeler, Paul Rutherford, Mike Osborne, and Alan Skidmore, John Taylor. That's a lot of firepower for a singer to maneuver around. B+(***) [r]

Nils Wogram: Root 70 (2000 [2001], 2nd Floor): German trombonist (b. 1972), group name and title could be parsed variously, but Root 70 would more/less remain as his group name, at least up through an 8-CD box in 2020. Quartet with Hayden Chisholm (alto sax/bass clarinet), Matt Penman (bass), and Jochen Rückert (drums). A- [r]

Nils Wogram: Odd and Awkward (2000 [2001], Enja, 2CD): First disc is a sextet, with Chris Speed (tenor sax/clarinet), Hayden Chisholm (alto sax/clarinet), Cuong Vu (trumpet), Steffen Schorn (bass clarinet/baritone sax/alto flute/contrabass clarinet), and Jochen Rückert (drums). Second disc adds piano (Simon Nabatov) and bass (Henning Sieverts) for an octet. Music doesn't strike me as all that odd, and certainly not awkward. B+(***) [sp]

Nils Wogram's Root 70: Getting Rooted (2003, Enja): Same quartet as on the namesake album (Spotify lists this one as Root 70, but Discogs has the above title, and it's clearly not the Penguin Guide recommendation; title is also pretty clear on the cover). Same quartet, similar bounce, gets a little rough at the end. B+(**) [sp]

Bojan Z Trio: Transpacifik (2003, Label Bleu): Serbian pianist Bojan Zulfikarpasic, moved to Paris 1988, debut album a quartet in 1993. Opens on electric here, with Scott Colley (bass) and Nasheet Waits (drums), recorded in Brooklyn. B+(**) [r]

Monica Zetterlund: Swedish Sensation (1958, Columbia): Swedish jazz and pop singer (1937-2005), first album, standards in English, backed by Gunnar Svenssons Orkester (with Arne Domnerus) or (two tracks) Donald Byrd Quartet. [Penguin Guide recommends Swedish Sensation! The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1958-60, which adds eight EPs to this album, spread over 2-CD.] B+(**) [r]

Grade (or other) changes:

Steve Lacy & Mal Waldron: Live at Dreher Paris 1981, Round Midnight Vol. 1 (1981 [1996], Hat Art, 2CD): A- [sp]

Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy: Live at Dreher Paris 1981, The Peak Vol. 2 (1981 [1996], Hat Hut, 2CD): A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Mark Dresser: Times of Change (Pyroclastic) [05-05]
  • Marc Ducret: Palm Sweat: Marc Ducret Plays the Music of Tim Berne (Screwgun/Out of Your Head) [03-10]
  • Champian Fulton: Meet Me at Birdland (Champian) [04-07]
  • Jason Kush: Finally Friday (MCG Jazz) [03-03]
  • The Adam Larson Trio: With Love, From New York (Outside In Music) [04-07]
  • Luiz Millan: Brazilian Match (Jazz Station) [04-21]
  • Rent Romus/Heikki Koskinen: Itkuja Suite, Invocations on Lament (Edgetone) [04-04]
  • Emilio Solla/Antonio Lizana: El Siempre Mar (Tiger Turn) [05-19]
  • Ramana Vieira: Tudo De Mim/All of Me (self-released) [05-01]

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