December 2021 Notebook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Index Latest 2024 Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2023 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2022 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2021 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2020 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2019 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2018 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2017 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2016 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2015 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2014 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2013 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2012 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2011 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2010 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2009 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2008 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2007 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2006 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2005 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2004 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2003 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2002 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2001 Dec Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb |
Friday, December 31, 2021Music WeekExpanded blog post, December archive (final). Tweet: Music Week: 68 albums, 6 A-list (+1), extended the week a couple days to square off the month and year, and good riddance to all that; some more reflections back on Jazz Critics Poll and EOY lists. Music: Current count 37011 [36943] rated (+68), 126 [125] unrated (+1). Final Update: December 31: Earlier versions below. The initial post (Dec. 28) was just a placeholder, a day after the expected Music Week date. I was still very busy working on Jazz Critics Poll, but I also recalled holding past end-December Music Weeks open to make a clean break of the year. I added an update on Dec. 29 with links to Jazz Critics Poll, so scroll down to get to those. In the two days since, I've been monitoring Poll reaction (although not very obsessively or assiduously), while adding a few stragglers to the reviews below, and generally decompressing. I should do a debriefing on the poll at some point, but fear that if I start now I won't get anything out tonight. I would like to refer you to this post by Amir ElSaffar on Facebook. Also, this one by publicist Matt Merewitz, who notes his role in hooking us up with Arts Fuse. I was fully prepared to run the poll on my own, with no outside sponsorship, so Arts Fuse wasn't a make or break deal. But they were more helpful than I expected, and I've enjoyed working with them. I also have to admit that they've gotten us more eyes and clicks than would have been the case had we only had my website. I reckon it's safe here to point out that I dropped a few lines from my essay that some readers considered "sour grapes" over our previous sponsor, NPR:
The actual line I was bouncing off of was their less-than-official explanation for dropping Jazz Critics Poll:
I suspect that the real reason for dropping us was simply that they wanted to cover jazz like they cover other genres, and we represented this external data-driven appendage doing something very different, an approach they weren't using anywhere else. I can see the logic of that, and I don't doubt their right to direct their coverage. But I did find it interesting that as soon as they turned up their noses out poll, they committed a number of gaffes that would have been obvious to anyone on first glance at the data. Data analysis isn't easy. It's certainly not something that comes naturally to most people. Even in my piece, I tended to just point out isolated bits that struck me as significant, rather than digging through it all systematically. That's partly because I don't have the tools set up, and partly because we're not collecting nearly as much data as I'd like to see. I offered myself up as an example, as someone who listened to 700 new jazz albums this year -- a fairly basic figure that I don't have for any other jazz critic, although I'd guess that the range is something like 200-1000 (I've come close to the upper bound in previous years). I should note that I've made one significant change to my Jazz and Non-Jazz EOY lists: five A-list records now appear in both, so 73 + 58 = 126. The records were ones I had originally put in Non-Jazz (Anthony Joseph, Maria Muldaur, Jaubi, Theon Cross, Ruth Weiss; four of those were non-jazz artists in front of jazz bands, the fifth is a jazz artist playing electronica). I did this because I was writing about the increasingly blurry line between jazz and non-jazz, and realized that those five were examples I wanted to buttress my case with. That's helped to shift the Jazz/Non-Jazz spit in the former's favor. I'm surprised I didn't find more A-list Non-Jazz this week, but new Jazz fell off as well -- and frankly, the EOY list aggregate isn't kicking up a lot of interesting candidates. I've heard everything down to 90-92 (Coral, Deafheaven, Gojira). I've looked for but haven't found jazz albums that finished {19, 35, 50, 54, 79} in the poll; the highest-rated one I haven't looked for yet is Kate McGarry at 84. While that search was frustrating, I took a fairly deep dive into the Jazz in Britain Bandamp stash, so for a while I had many more new reissues/historical than new releases. We're also seeing vinyl/digital reissues of 1960s British jazz classics from Decca. As a Penguin Guide devotee, I've heard of most of these names, so exploring their lost albums has been interesting. Should get back on schedule with a short Music Week on Monday. I haven't done the December Streamnotes indexing, so need to work on that as well. Also need to think about some New Years changes. This has been a tough year for me, and not much future bodes better. Update: December 29: The 16th Annual Jazz Critics Poll results are now public. The poll was started by Francis Davis at the Village Voice in 2006, with 30 critics polled. Davis has kept the poll going ever since, through moves to Rhapsody (2 years) then NPR (for 8 years) and The Arts Fuse this year. At the time, I was writing a Jazz Consumer Guide column for the Voice, so got an invite to vote. I got further involved a couple years later, when Voice editor Rob Harvilla asked me to host the ballots. For a number of years, Davis would collect and tabulate everything, then dump it on me after the poll closed, requiring a lot of error-checking. Eventually I developed a few programs to simplify data entry and automate formatting of the web pages. From that point, errors were reduced to a few of my typos, easily fixed. This year we were able to tabulate results as each ballot came in, and return formatted ballots to voters so they could flag mistakes way before the results were announced. This system is also nicely scalable: this year we're up to a record 156 voters. At some point I would expect adding voters would start averaging out the results, but thus far we just keep adding diversity, making the poll more useful and valuable than ever. We wrote two essays to accompany the results. Those essays were initially published at Arts Fuse, along with the top results. (At some point, I'll add them to the JCP website. Eventually, I hope to have all of the poll materials archived there.) Francis Davis did his usual fine job of summarizing the results, reflecting on the year in jazz, and expanding on his own ballot, in The 2021 Jazz Critics Poll: Only the Best. I wrote a second essay, focusing more on the mechanics of the poll, on what gets measured and what doesn't, and what the more marginal data in the poll reveals, in Behind the 2021 Jazz Critics Poll: A Tool for the Times. We also revived an early JCP tradition and published a R.I.P. 2021's Jazz Notables. I still have a bit more work to do on the website. I need to add some footnotes to the results, and to add the essays to the pulldown menus. Not sure what else. I keep thinking I should be able to generate voter lists for each album, so I may still fiddle with that. I also want to make it easier to compare results over years, but that will have to be a longer-term project. I'm still not ready to wrap up this Music Week, though it wouldn't hurt to drop another album cover. I spent a lot of time last week listening to the Ron Mathewson archival tapes, which led me to more early modernist British jazz. Initial Post: December 28: Music Week will be delayed for a day or two (or three) this week. I'm still working on an essay to go with the 16th Annual Jazz Critics Poll, and I'm having a horrible time trying to wrap it up. The Poll results and a Francis Davis essay will be published by The Arts Fuse real soon now, at which point my Jazz Critics Poll website will go live, with complete results, and complete ballots from our 156 distinguished critics. When I know more, I'll kick out a tweet, then update this page. By the way, this isn't the first time I've extended the last Music Week of the year. It just seems tidier to wrap up the year on the last day. Although circumstances have made this year a good deal more stressful than in the past. Gloomy, even. New records reviewed this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:
Old music:
Limited Sampling: Records I played parts of, but not enough to grade: -- means no interest, - not bad but not a prospect, + some chance, ++ likely prospect.
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Monday, December 27, 2021Daily LogHere's two paragraphs from my JCP essay that got consolidated into one, deletion in red, ostensibly to avoid looking like "sour grapes" over NPR's dropped support for the Poll:
List of JCP records I haven't heard: 19. William Parker, Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World 35. Jason Moran, The Sound Will Tell You (Yes) 58 (10) 50. Darius Jones, Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) (Northern Spy) 41 (7) 54. Ivo Perelman, Brass and Ivory Tales (Fundacja Sluchaj) 38.5 (5) 79. Nate Wooley, Mutual Aid Music (Pleasure of the Text) 26 (5) 99. Christopher Hoffman, Asp Nimbus (Out of Your Head) 19 (3) 120. Matt Mitchell & Kate Gentile, Snark Horse (Pi) 15 (4) 169. John Zorn, New Masada Quartet (Tzadik) 10 (2) 174. Milford Graves & Jason Moran, Live at Big Ears (Yes) 10 (1) 174. Joëlle Léandre, Beauty/Resistance (Not Two) 10 (1) 164. The Underflow, Instant Opaque Evening (Blue Chopsticks) 10 (1) Tuesday, December 21, 2021Daily LogGot a reminder about voting in El Intruso's Jazz Critics Poll. Cobbled this together quickly, giving it little thought beyond glancing at my Jazz EOY list:
Monday, December 20, 2021Music WeekExpanded blog post, December archive (in progress). Tweet: Music Week: 45 albums, 8 A-list (+2 battlefield promotions), progress on Jazz Critics Poll, latest EOY lists and aggregate, more idiosyncratic music picks, a P&J top 10, plus some moaning: looks like blues for the holidays. Music: Current count 36943 [36898] rated (+45), 125 [123] unrated (+2). I should wrap this up as quickly as possible, as I have a lot more work to get into. In particular, I need to write an essay introducing the 16th Annual Jazz Critics Poll, results of which will be published by Arts Fuse the week of December 27. All the ballots have been counted. Francis Davis and I know the winners (and losers), and are each supposed to write a little something on that. I'm pretty lost at the moment, but for me the key thing isn't critical consensus but the wide spread of data. We have a record 156 voters this year. They voted for 510 releases of new music, and 96 reissues/archival. I've been drawing inspiration from scattered ballots for a couple of weeks now: this week that includes Bugpowder, Kimbrough, and Sing a Song of Bird (this week's other jazz pick, Henry Threadgill's Poof, was one I was always going to listen to as soon as I got the chance). I've also been spending time monitoring other EOY lists, compiling my EOY aggregate list (and its poorer reissues/comps sibling). It's not as deep as in past years, but currently sources 147 lists, totalling 2826 new music albums and 254 old. For comparison, that's down from 5557 new music albums in the 2020 EOY Aggregate, with the leader dropping from 814 points (Fiona Apple) to 154 (Little Simz). I suspect that the leader drop isn't just due to fewer list inputs. There's just less consensus this year. This list-scrounging has helped me flesh out my Jazz and Non-Jazz EOY lists. The Jazz A-list is up to 67 (still down a bit from recent years, but the 26 old music is off the charts). Non-Jazz is up to 57 new, plus a measly 6 old music. I've played about twice as much jazz as non-jazz this year, but the top numbers were close to even when I first compiled this list. Jazz has pulled ahead mostly because I've been getting better intelligence via JCP. Most years the lists even out in January, after I see more trustworthy non-jazz lists. I've been monitoring, but haven't actually contributed anything to Glen Boothe's Pazz + Jop Rip-Off Poll in recent years. (I wasn't invited to Uproxx's post-P&J Critics Poll, so didn't have to formulate a list earlier.) If I get to it, this is what I'll likely post:
I was feeling pretty glum a month ago, when I decided to go ahead and compile the EOY Aggregates. I've been frustrated by lack of progress on both writing and technical projects, so figured I might as well submerge myself into something rote-mechanical, at least for the duration. When JCP came around, I was already in that mode, so the processing work came easy. (After all, I have a system: a set of programs that convert raw data into a website.) Still, at this point I'm feeling exhausted. What I'd normally have to look forward to this week is cooking up a Christmas Eve dinner. Last year, I cooked more than usual, but since we couldn't have guests, I bought a lot of containers and packed up dinners-to-go for a dozen friends, who either came by and picked them up, or arranged for delivery. I spent a lot of time last year planning how to do that. (Details should be in last year's notebook. Not on the list, but I think I also made eggplant parmesan.) Probably too late to do anything like that this year. It's looking like the emptiest holiday ever. New records reviewed this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:
Old music:
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Thursday, December 16, 2021Daily LogOn Facebook, Matt Merewitz reported: "One of my contacts in digital distribution told me that on average 1,500 new 'jazz' releases come out every week worldwide." I'd like to see some real numbers, so my first stop was Discogs. Filters 2021 and Jazz gave me 11,605 releases, but that would include multi-format redundancy. Album got me down to 7,423. Of that, 1,606 were Reissue, so let's say 5,817. Most likely there are still filing errors, which would reduce the total further, say 10%. On the other hand, seems like about 10% of the 2021 releases I've tried to find there were missing, so the net is close, perhaps up a bit, say 6,000. Looking at the top 50, I see 12 records (24%) that I've heard so far, including 4 I'd classify as historical. In the next 50, I've heard 10, and in following batches: 8, 9, 2, 3, 5, 7, 5, 2, so 63/500, 12.6%. I've heard about 680 jazz albums this year, so if I've heard one in eight, that implies the total number is about 5,440. Scanning through this sample of 500 suggests my 10% discount for filing errors (mostly duplicate entries and inclusion of non-jazz titles -- Steely Dan, Ani Di Franco, Gino Vannelli are examples) is on the low side, but unknown unknowns are typically underestimated as well. I made an attempt to count all jazz albums back around 2005, and came up with a little more than 2,000, which I estimated to be 20-30% low. The numbers I'm getting today are about double the 2005 estimate. That seems credible. (The number of jazz records I've heard has, if anything, gone down in that time period, but there are other reasons for that, and my listening time isn't scalable anyway.) I wrote a fairly long summary into a Facebook comment, which destroyed it. JazzTimes poll results (11-40): 40. Mike LeDonne: It's All Your Fault (Savant) {129} 39. Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas SoundPrints: Other Worlds (Greenleaf) {36} 38. Steve Coleman and Five Elements Live at the Village Vanguard Volume II (MDW NTR) (Pi) {31} 37. Dan McCarthy: A Place Where We Once Lived (self-released) {190} 36. John Pizzarelli: Better Days Ahead: Solo Guitar Takes on Pat Metheny (Ghostlight) {136} 35. Jihye Lee Orchestra: Daring Mind (Motéma) {58} 34. Jamire Williams: But Only After You Have Suffered (International Anthem) {108} 33. Oz Noy: Snapdragon (Abstract Logix) {--} 32. Nadje Noordhuis: Gullfoss (Little Mystery) {174} 31. Vince Mendoza: Freedom Over Everything (Modern) {--} 30. Eivind Aarset: Phantasmagoria, or A Different Kind of Journey (Jazzland) {402} 29. Various Artists: Indaba Is (Brownswood) {402} 28. Brian Lynch: Songbook Vol 1: Bus Stop Serenade (Hollistic Music Works) {118} 27. The Cookers: Look Out! (Gearbox) {43} 26. Thumbscrew: Never Is Enough (Cuneiform) {52} 25. James Francies: Purest Form (Blue Note) {249} 24. Amir ElSaffar/Rivers of Sound: The Other Shore (Outnote) {16} 23. Percy Jones/Alex Skolnick/Kenny Grohowski/Tim Motzer: PAKT (MoonJune) {--} 22. Craig Taborn: Shadow Plays (ECM) {20} 21. Gerry Gibbs Thrasher Dream Trios: Songs from My Father (Whaling City Sound) 20. Irreversible Entanglements: Open the Gates (International Anthem) {49} 19. Chick Corea Akoustic Band: LIVE (Concord Jazz) {42} 18. Sons of Kemet: Black to the Future (Impulse!) {9} 17. Cameron Graves: Seven (Artistry/Mack Avenue) {158} 16. Charles Lloyd & the Marvels: Tone Poem (Blue Note) {4} 15. Kenny Garrett: Sounds from the Ancestors (Mack Avenue) {11} 14. Veronica Swift: This Bitter Earth (Mack Avenue) {68} 13. Henry Threadgill Zooid: Poof (Pi) {6} 12. Remy Le Boeuf's Assembly of Shadows: Architecture of Storms (Soundspore) {93} 11. Dr. Lonnie Smith: Breathe (Blue Note) {50} 10. Archie Shepp & Jason Moran, Let My People Go (Archieball) 9. Pat Metheny, Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) (Modern) 8. William Parker, Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World: Volumes 1-10 (Centering) 6. Ches Smith and We All Break, Path of Seven Colors (Pyroclastic) 5. Vijay Iyer, Uneasy (ECM) 4. Johnathan Blake, Homeward Bound (Blue Note) 3. Anna Webber, Idiom (Pi) 2. Floating Points, Promises (Luaka Bop) 1. James Brandon Lewis, Jesup Wagon (Tao Forms) [Added 1-10 later, also bracket numbers below. Unexpected in top 10: Shepp, Parker.] Seems likely that the top ten will come from this list of 14 JCP top-40 finishers: [4] Johnathan Blake, Homeward Bound; Andrew Cyrille, The News; [2] Floating Points, Promises; Dave Holland, Another Land; [5] Vijay Iyer, Uneasy; Julian Lage, Squint; [1] James Brandon Lewis, Jesup Wagon; Makaya McCraven, Deciphering the Message; [9] Pat Metheny, Side-Eye NYC; William Parker, Mayan Space Station; [6] Ches Smith, Path of Seven Colors; Wadada Leo Smith, The Chicago Symphonies; [3] Anna Webber, Idiom; Miguel Zenón, Law Years. Wednesday, December 15, 2021Daily LogKathleen Geier twitter thread:
I tweeted a response:
Tuesday, December 14, 2021Daily LogJan sent me a picture of a recipe card for Aunt Bea's Meat Loaf:
Monday, December 13, 2021Music WeekExpanded blog post, December archive (in progress). Tweet: Music Week: 55 albums, 12 A-list, furiously struggling to catch up with the closing year, which is proving to have quite a bit of interesting music, even if it's hard to find; also some notes on the late Greg Tate, revered as a critic, underappreciated as a musician. Music: Current count 36898 [36843] rated (+55), 123 [119] unrated (+4). Spent most of last week transcribing Jazz Critics Poll ballots. Deadline was Sunday night, so in theory that's done, but we'll accept stragglers at least until tomorrow. We currently have 150 ballots, one more than last year's record. Of course, I can't talk about results now -- you should be able to see the critics list, but when you lick on the links the choices should remain blank, until we unleash them last week of December. Still, a lot of the records in this week's haul came from picks on those ballots. The total number of records receiving votes is 673, which is about 4.5 times the number of ballots (full ballots list 16 albums). That's the third highest number of albums, behind 2020 (683) and 2019 (674), but could edge up a bit. Second significant source for records this week was Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide. I had previously looked for Courtney Barnett and Neil Young, but only found them this week. Among other picks, good to see the Gift of Gab album I gave an A to recently, less so a Jason Isbell album that struck me as a B, in between a Parquet Courts I deemed a B+(***). That was also my initial grade for the Burnt Sugar album I revisited. I didn't get to it until after the news that Greg Tate had died, so can't meet Bob's claims to an unaffected grade, but I'm happy to have enjoyed the record more than when I rushed it before. Something else to note this week is that I signed up for one of those three-month free trials of Spotify. I've been increasingly frustrated by hangs listening to Napster, and coverage of some labels has been spotty. I've suspected that Spotify has a small but significant number of albums not on Napster (or impossible to find on Napster), so I waited until the next offer came around, and took it. I almost immediately got pissed off at it, as the browser ap defaulted to autoplay -- the whole point of streaming for me is that I know what I'm listening to, and when it ends. However, I did some research and discovered that their Linux ap (something Napster doesn't have) has a settings switch, so I downloaded that, and plunged into Limpopo Champions League (a desired album not on Napster that I had found on Spotify). So there's a few "[sp]" records on this week's list, and more to come. One especially pleasant surprise was finding an already constructed playlist for one of the Vietnam War anthologies Christgau reviewed in the latest Consumer Guide. Unfortunately, the other two volumes don't seem to exist. I don't have a lot to say about the late Greg Tate. He, like me, gained his first prominence as one of Robert Christgau's stable of freelancers at the Village Voice, but he was 7 years younger, and entered that orbit after I had checked out (so I never actually met him). We had one thing in common: we were both huge P-Funk fans before we hooked up with Bob. I remember Carola wondering whether Bob's late conversion might have been influenced by my arrival in New York, but Bob dismissed the idea, instead citing Parliament's Live album, appearing shortly before we saw them at Madison Square Garden (coincidentally, a first date with my future wife) -- we were all in a cluster of freeloaders on the floor, a white hole in the middle of a chocolate donut. Tate, of course, was more credible and more memorable in his enthusiasm. He was one of the few Voice critics I read regularly once I left New York. He had eye-opening insights had an astonishing gift for language. I'm not surprised as I read young critics cite him as their inspiration, but being 7 years older, I can't say that. All I can allow is that after he came around, it's just as well I had retired. After Tate died, I jotted down some tweets:
I can also cite a few articles, although the collection here is haphazard:
I'm a bit surprised that there's less out on his music. I've listened to (and liked) most of it, but don't have my scraps of writing readily available, nor have I seen much else. Burnt Sugar/The Arkestra Chamber has rarely been reviewed by jazz critics (Angels Over Oakanda has 4 JCP votes this year, probably his first ever), let alone others (only a partial exception is Robert Christgau -- page doesn't yet include his A review of Angels). I've been toying with the idea of jazz as "social music" lately, by which I mean music that organizes social movement, often with a political goal, but always as an assertion of cultural worth. I see this in the crossover jazz that's become popular in London recently. It seems to me that Tate was trying to do something like that here, even though hardly anyone's been paying attention. Meanwhile, I seem to have misplaced my copy of Flyboy in the Buttermilk, just when I could use something new to read. Ordered a copy of Flyboy 2, but the delivery schedule on that stretches out another week. I have the Graeber/Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in the wings, but that seems like a big chunk to chew off. I've found Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse very stimulating, although not without problems (as I cling to my stubborn faith in reason). New records reviewed this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:
Old music:
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Sunday, December 05, 2021Music WeekExpanded blog post, December archive (in progress). Tweet: Music Week: 46 albums, 9 A-list, focusing on new music again, finding gems on EOY lists (as well as a few frogs); JCP ballot picks, longer best-of lists, a note on the BBHOF, a longer remembrance of the late KS Senator, first met 69 years ago. Former Kansas politician and Republican majordomo Robert J. Dole has died at 98, after a long and eventful life that caused immeasurable damage to American society and politics. I remember him mostly for running one of the most scurrilous political campaigns in Kansas history, when he narrowly defeated Bill Roy for his second Senate term in 1972. Dole was the first Republican in Kansas to find a way to politicize abortion and exploit the bigotry and confusion around the issue. That was the first year I voted, and not a single person I voted for -- not even the Republican who was certainly the lesser evil running against Democratic Sheriff/Attorney General Vern Miller -- won. It was also the last time I voted until 1996, and I found myself with another chance to vote against Dole. That time, at least, I was more successful, not that Bill Clinton was much of a prize. They say that when one dies, if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all. I rarely follow that advice, but in Dole's case I actually can say a few nice things (even if I have trouble limiting myself). Here goes:
But that's all I have. I've never understood why people credit him with anything more. (The biggest critical lapse was by Tom Carson, who treats him as a humble folk hero in his otherwise brilliant novel, Gilligan's Wake.) He pulled Kansas hard to the right, and for a long time remained an outlier, at least compared to decent Republican senators James Pearson and Nancy Kassebaum. It was only with the rise of Sam Brownback and Todd Tiahrt in the 1990s that Dole started to look moderate, but their demagoguery on abortion starts with Dole's 1972 campaign. After his loss in 1996, he settled into the comfortable life of a Washington shill, never using what little political stature he had achieved to try to stem the Republican slide into and beyond Trumpism. He served his party, and was rewarded with wealth and fame and flattery and forbearance. Now he's being showered with flowery eulogies, a symptom of the same mental collapse as we witnessed with Colin Powell and John McCain -- rivals in the sweepstakes to see who could make the most mileage (and moolah) out of unfortunate military careers. And what did you get for all his success? Fucked. Very busy week looking at EOY lists and playing new music. Magdalena Bay topped the list at Gorilla vs Bear, and is near the top of my A- bracket, a good chance to go full A. Everything else is toward the bottom of the A- bracket, but that mostly reflects the limited time I've been able to give each release. They are all distinctive, interesting albums, very good ones. I probably left a few more short at B+(***) -- Mexstep? Navy Blue? R.A.P. Ferreira? I don't have a good ear for lyrics, and not enough patience to properly process rap albums, so I guess a lot. Amyl & the Sniffers topped Louder Than War's list (not a source I look to, but still). Little Simz and Floating Points have topped the most lists so far. I gave the former *** and the latter **, and should revisit both. Number three on my EOY Aggregate is Dry Cleaning, which I bumped to A- after an initial lower grade. Tyler, the Creator (another ***) has moved into 4th, displacing Low, which I'll never return to. Tyler is the only US hip-hop contender: Mach-Hommy is at 30, Vince 33, Lil Nas X 38, Doja Cat 71, Armand Hammer 96, J Cole 104. Jazz Critics Poll ballots are due Sunday, December 12.
Some brief notes. I jiggled New Music around to get something I found aesthetically pleasing and well-suited to the year. This list (at least at the moment) matches my Jazz EOY List. I favored albums I had physical copies of, but included two I had only streamed (Braxton and Altschul). I did enforce a CD-only policy for the old music section, so my ballot is very different from the EOY list, where the top album was Charles Mingus, Mingus at Carnegie Hall [Deluxe Edition]. The Joseph album is an irregular choice for Vocal, in that I parked it on top of the Non-Jazz EOY List, but I find myself enjoying very few jazz vocalists -- the only ones to make my A-list were Sarah Buechi and Anaïs Reno -- while Joseph's is one of the year's very best albums. I went with somewhat arbitrary choices for Debut and Latin as well. I actually have a group, Body Meπa, higher on my list than Jiyane, but we tend to frown on group debuts. I like classic Latin jazz, but I'm rarely impressed enough by recent efforts to have any of it show up on my A-list, so I usually wind up picking something tangential. This year that's Zenón's not-all-that-Latinized Ornette Coleman tribute, which I prefer over his explicitly Latin El Arte del Bolero. One curious fact from counting the JCP votes is that thus far all but one of Zenón's New Album votes are for Law Years, but all of his Latin votes are for El Arte del Bolero. It's possible to change ballots up to Dec. 12. (Hopefully, that's incentive to send them in earlier.) I may wind up changing my ballot a bit, but I'm pretty happy with it now. I will certainly wind up changing my EOY files as I find new things, and sometimes as I further review initial grades. I'm finally streaming James Brandon Lewis' Code of Being as I write this. Supposedly, Henry Threadgill's Poof is in the mail. There are at least three Blue Note albums that I haven't been able to stream, as I have their other records for many years now. (I don't even know why does publicity there anymore, but I assume the reason they do so well in polls is the breadth of their PR operation -- I can't say much for their quality in recent years.) Much more could be said, but I'm pressed for time, and this is enough for now. Still haven't done the indexing on the November Streamnotes file. I thought I might note that I was pleased with the small-committee selections to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Especially Minnie Minoso, who clearly would have topped 3,000 hits had he not been excluded from the Major Leagues for the first half of his career. I'll also note that while Jim Kaat's 283 career wins were an obvious qualification, the article doesn't note how many Gold Glove awards he won (16) -- Randy Robbins throws some shade on his fielding reputation, but one thing I remember from watching him is how he always looked ready to field a ball hit back to him, unlike most pitchers, who come off their pitch off-balance and are lucky to get out of the way. Gil Hodges and Tony Oliva were slightly lesser stars I have no complaints about. I don't know the Negro League numbers, which have only recently been systematically compiled and accepted as official, like I do the old majors, so I only know Buck O'Neil by reputation (including as the inspiration for Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy cat name), and Bud Fowler less than that. The latter offers us a teachable moment, reminding us that segregation was the cardinal sin of baseball not just when O'Neil played (1937-48) but from the very beginning. New records reviewed this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:
Old music: None. Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
|