At 110 records, the shortest Steamnotes so far this year. Also the longest time between columns -- last one wasJune 13. The main reason is that I spent three weeks driving northwest and visiting relatives, and didn't bother listening to anything new. (I packed three cases with 200 tried-and-proven CDs for the trip, but mostly just listened to them in the car. I streamed a couple new albums, like Miguel's, but didn't write up anything on them.)

See last month's column for a description of the Spin 1985-2014 list project. Most of this month's "old music" came from mopping up albums I hadn't gotten to then. I'm up to about 90% of that list -- when the list came out I had heard 73%. I thought I might give up on the remainders, but as I've been writing this I've picked off a couple more albums from the list -- System of a Down's Toxicity (not as bad as I expected), and Animal Collective's Sung Tongs (far worse). I think Lil Wayne (Tha Carter II) and 2Pac (All Eyez on Me) are up next, and those are things I probably should listen to (sooner or later).

A few other things have crept into the old music section, following various strategems: I checked out Silk Degrees to go with the new Boz Scaggs album (but that's as far as I went); I noticed I had an ungraded Uncle Tupelo album while I was working on Wilco, and went on to check out the Mermaid Avenue outtakes; someone sent me the Close Readers CDs. The older Four Tet records could have been filed as old or new: in general "new" means last 2-3 years, but I figured it made more sense to keep them together.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on June 13. Past reviews and more information are availablehere (6659 records).

Recent Releases

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Harry Allen's All-Star Brazilian Band: Flying Over Rio (2015, Arbors): Retro-swing tenor saxophonist, has shown an interest in Brazilian music before -- cf. 1997's Eu Não Quero Dançar -- but he's never made this much out of it. The All-Stars I recognize are Nilson Matta (bass) and Duduka Da Fonseca (drums), but Klaus Mueller (piano) and Guilherme Monteiro (guitar) show up my ignorance. Singer Maucha Adnet is a tougher sell when you're expecting Astrud Gilberto, but the extra grit and sass finally turned into a plus.A-

Tiffany Austin: Nothing but Soul (2015, Con Alma): Standards singer, associated with SFJAZZ, first album, definitely has a crush on Hoagy Carmichael (6 of 9 songs), offering Johnny Cash ("I Walk the Line") as a change-up, and concludes with a piece by her saxophone player, Howard Wiley.B [cd]

Kevin Bachelder/Jason Lee Bruns: Cherry Avenue (2015, Panout Music Group): Singer and drummer, respectively, mostly standards (one Bachelder original, one from saxophonist Ron Blake), including an obligatory Jobim followed up by a Beatles song, both relatively obscure,"Dear Prudence" deservedly so.B- [cd]

The Bad Plus/Joshua Redman: The Bad Plus Joshua Redman (2015, Nonesuch): Long-running (since 2000) all-star piano trio -- Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson, David King -- plus a comparably established (since 1992) tenor/soprano saxophonist that should be a fair match and complement, and that's true to a point: they do manage to wind each other up. I'm just not sure what the value of this intensity is.B+(**)

John Basile: Penny Lane (2015, StringTime Jazz): Guitarist, has more than a dozen albums since 1986, plays eleven Lennon-McCartney songs, most of which have proven deadly as jazz standards ("A Day in the Life" is something of an exception). Solo, with some midi programming for percussion; not exactly muzak, not exactly not.B [cd]

Bilal: In Another Life (2015, E1): Neo-soul singer with some hip-hop touches, fourth album since 2001 but picking up the pace.B+(**)

Terence Blanchard: Breathless (2015, Blue Note): Trumpet player from New Orleans, has dabbled a lot in soundtracks to mixed success. Organized a new quintet here, E-Collective, listed on the cover as "featuring": Charlea Altura (guitar), Fabian Almazan (piano, synths), Donald Ramsey (bass), Oscar Seaton (drums), adding vocalist PJ Morton on three cuts.B+(**)

Kenny Carr: Idle Talk (2014 [2015], self-released): Guitarist, AMG lists three previous albums. Wrote all original material and recruited Donny McCaslin, Kenny Wolleson, and Hans Glawischnig to play. The sax can really get your attention.B+(**) [cd]

Brett Carson: Quattuor Elephantis (2014 [2015], Edgetone): Leader plays electric keyboard, which meshes nicely with Scott Siler's vibes -- the primary sound here, backed by guitar and drums. The lineup suggests a groove album, but no such thing here.B [cd]

Leoanrd Cohen: Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour (2012-13 [2015], Columbia): Relatively rare songs taken from a range of soundchecks and shows -- a tactic which forgoes the satisfactionLive in London and Live in Dublin offered of recognizing long-familiar hits. On the other hand, this is almost like discovering a fresh batch of unknown songs.B+(***)

Kris Davis Infrasound: Save Your Breath (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Avant-pianist from Canada, has had an impressive run of trio and quartet albums, comes out with her largest group ever, led by four clarinetists (Joachim Badenhorst, Andrew Bishop, Ben Goldberg, Oscar Noriega), with guitar (Nate Radley), organ (Gary Versace), and drums (Jim Black) but no bass. The clarinets come in all weights, but are soft-edged and in the end blend into the drone.B+(**)

Steve Davis: Say When (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): Mainstream trombonist, leading a sextet in the old hard bop model: Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Eric Alexander (tenor sax), Harold Mabern (piano), Nat Reeves (bass), Joe Farnsworth (drums). Mostly JJ Johnson pieces (6 of 11), winding up with "When the Saints Go Marching In."B+(*)

Charlie Dennard: 5 O'Clock Charlie (2015, self-released): Organ player based in New Orleans, leads a group with Todd Duke on guitar and Doug Delote and/or Geoff Clapp on drums. Usual funk grooves but nothing wrong with that.B+(*) [cd]

Jeff Denson/Lee Konitz: Jeff Denson Trio + Lee Konitz (2015, Ridgeway): Nice to see Konitz finally elected to Downbeat's Hall of Fame, especially while he's still alive and active (albeit 88). He doesn't push any boundaries here, but his brief solos are a delight. Denson is a bassist who sings a few moldy standards ("Body and Soul,""Skylark") and makes them moldier. Trio adds Dan Zemelman on piano and Jon Arkin on drums.B+(*) [cd]

Aaron Diehl: Space Time Continuum (2015, Mack Avenue): Pianist, fourth album, mostly trio but some guests drop in, including Joe Temperley and Benny Golson on sax, plus a vocal by Carenee Wade.B+(**)

Four Tet: Pink (2011-12 [2012], Text): Kieren Hebden, laptop composer, released most of these tracks as 12-inch singles (the exceptions were "Lion" and "Peace for Earth" but they came out separately later) -- hence this is often considered a compilation, but none came out more than a year before the album, so I figure this for current work. "Peace for Earth" sounds almost like it might work.A-

Four Tet: Beautiful Rewind (2013, Text): More laptop, one piece drawing my wife's complaint that it sounds like her tablet bemoaning a low battery but here I find that less disturbing. "Aerial" is a track that got my attention both spins, so maybe the other stuff just isn't consistently at that level. Hard to tell.B+(***)

Four Tet: Morning/Evening (2015, Text): Two 20-minute tracks, the first with a nice Lata Mangeshkar sample over the bubbly. The second also harkens to something Asian or Near-Eastern, then runs through a long march-step, not as attractive.B+(*)

Nick Fraser: Too Many Continents (2015, Clean Feed): Drummer, from Canada, has a couple previous records including 2013's excellent Towns and Villages. This one is a trio with Tony Malaby (tenor and soprano sax) and Kris Davis (piano). Too abstract for anyone to work up a full head of steam, and Malaby's soprano is shrill where his tenor is invigorating, but the twists and turns are captivating, and Davis is worth the trouble.B+(***) [cd]

Chico Freeman/Heiri Känzig: The Arrival (2014 [2015], Intakt): Tenor saxophonist, made a big splash in avant circles in the late 1970s; has recorded pretty regularly since then, although in the 1980s it seemed like he got upstaged by his father, Von Freeman. Bassist Känzig was born in New York but studied in Austria and Switzerland, and currently teaches in Luzern. Duets, very laid back, spare but gorgeous. A- [cd]

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin: Ichigo Ichie (2014 [2015], Libra): Extremely prolific Japanese avant-pianist, she's put together a half-dozen orchestras as she's traveled around the world, and this is one of the best. Twelve-piece group, not quite a big band but the three saxes and three trumpets are meant to solo and spar, and the two drummers rumble.A- [cd]

Satoko Fujii Tobira: Yamiyo Ni Karasu (2014 [2015], Libra): Pianist-led quartet, with Natsuki Tamura (trumpet), Todd Nicholson (bass), and Takashi Itani (percussion). Gives you a good sense of Fujii's avant-piano, although not at breakneck fury, and adds some splashy trumpet.B+(***) [cd]

George Garzone/Jerry Bergonzi/Carl Winther/Johnny Aman/Anders Mogensen: Quintonic (2013 [2014], Stunt): Two legendary tenor saxophonists from Boston, although Garzone is better known as an educator than for his recordings -- partly because most of his recordings were credited to his sax trio, the Fringe (1978-2005), but mostly because literally everyone who studied saxophone in Boston picked up some of his mastery. The others play piano-bass-drums. Not really a joust, much more ducking around Winther's chords than blowing them away, but that's sometimes how masters work.B+(***)

Giant Sand: Heartbreak Pass (2015, New West): Howe Gelb's long-running (since 1985) band/front, which always had a sense of rough-hewn Americana nudged even more so in that direction by their new label.B+(*)

Vance Gilbert: Nearness of You (2015, Disismye Music): Folksinger, has close to a dozen albums since 1985. Takes on fourteen jazz standards here, giving them crude guitar-vocal treatments, some laughable although "I'm Beginning to See the Light" gave me a brief glimpse of something more.B [cd]

Robert Glasper: Covered: The Robert Glasper Trio Recorded Live at Capitol Studios (2014 [2015], Blue Note): Pianist from Houston, picked up by Blue Note for his second album in 2005 and hyped for his supposed hip-hop synthesis, something which never panned out (to my ears at least, although he has a Grammy meant to argue otherwise). Figure this as his "unplugged" album, just trio with Vicente Archer and Damion Reid, mostly covers (not that Bilal, Radiohead, or Kendrick Lamar quite rank as standards) although a 13:01 original sits in the center. Some talk, plus the studio has a live crowd, and uneven, but this is the first time I've enjoyed him.B+(**)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (2015, Constellation): Instrumental rock, sometimes called post-rock as if rock was just a path to speechlessness and incoherence. Actually, this sort of thing dates back to the early 1970s, to prog and/or fusion, but having arrived later they throw in bits of industrial and, uh, church music. Sometimes they seem to be onto something. Sometimes not.B-

Jerry Granelli Trio + 3: What I Hear Now (2014 [2015], Addo): Drummer, started out in piano trios (Vince Guaraldi, Denny Zeitlin), has close to 20 albums as leader since 1988, leaning some towards fusion but broad ranging -- my favorite in the spoken wordSandhills Reunion (2005) -- with this three sax, one trombone sextet venturing deep into free jazz.B+(***) [cd]

Devin Gray: RelativE ResonancE (2014 [2015], Skirl): Drummer, second album, another sax-piano-bass-drums quartet but with new collaborators: Chris Speed, Kris Davis, Chris Tordini. Speed, typically, puts a soft edge on his sax, but Davis doesn't pull any punches.B+(***) [cd]

David Hazeltine: I Remember Cedar (2013 [2014], Sharp Nine): Mainstream pianist, in a trio with David Williams and Joe Farnsworth, offers bright and lively readings of many compositions by the late Cedar Walton, a couple originals for the occasion, and a thoroughly appropriate "Over the Rainbow."B+(***)

Vincent Herring: Night and Day (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): Alto saxophonist, much recorded since 1990, in a hard bop quintet with Jeremy Pelt (trumpet), Mike LeDonne, Brandi Disterheft, and Joe Farnsworth.B+(*)

Dre Hocevar Trio: Coding of Evidentiality (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Drummer, b. 1987 in Slovenia, second album, a trio with Bram De Looze on piano and Lester St. Louis on cello, with Sam Pluta doing "electronics, signal processing" on one track. Starts with very attractive broken field piano lead, but moves the focus around, highlighting the cello drone.B+(**) [cd]

John Hollenbeck: Songs We Like a Lot (2015, Sunnyside): Drummer, his interests ranging from a big band to the often fabulous Claudia Quintet, returns with a sequel to 2013's Songs I Like a Lot, again with Theo Bleckmann and Kate McGarry singing, Uri Caine on piano, and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band's pomp and circumstance. Mostly songs I don't care about one way or the other, except for "Up Up and Away."B

Charlie Hunter Trio: Let the Bells Ring On (2015, CHT Publishing): Seven-string guitarist, has leaned toward fusion but never stuck in one place long. Trio adds trombonist Curtis Fowlkes (Jazz Passengers) and drummer Bobby Previte, and Fowlkes pretty much sets the tone: slow, abstract, profound.B+(**)

Ahmad Jamal: Live in Marciac: August 5th 2014 (2014 [2015], Jazz Village): In his 80s, still an impressive performer, a master of melody who can kick it up a notch. With Reginald Veal (bass), Helin Riley (drums, and Manolo Badrena (percussion). [Rhapsody omits 2 cuts + second-disc DVD].B+(*)

Max Johnson Trio: Something Familiar (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): Bassist-led trio with Kirk Knuffke on cornet and Ziv Ravitz on drums. Nothing very familiar here, as confounding as their previous outing as The Invisible Trio. Both records sound rather distant to me, but maybe there's more depth on the CDs, or maybe it just takes more effort to break through the inscrutability.B+(***)

Joyfultalk: Muuixx (2015, Drip Audio): "Composed, performed and recorded by Jay Crocker at the Prism Ship in Crousetown, Nova Scotia." Aside from Jesse Zubot doing the mastering, that's all the credits I have to go by, but sounds like quasi-industrial guitar, bass, percussion, some synth (presumably all overdubbed by Crocker) and, uh, violin (Zubot?).B+(**) [cd]

Ku-Umba Frank Lacy & Mingus Big Band: Mingus Sings (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): The Mingus Big Band dates back to 1993, or as Mingus Dynasty to 1982, shortly after the great bassist-composer's death, so they know the pieces/arrangements here cold -- indeed, the usual knock against them is that they're too cool and assured, where Mingus' own bands lived in constant fear of their leader's tantrums. Lacy started off as a trombonist in Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and the Henry Threadgill Sextett, but has lately moved toward singing, his specialty gut-bucket blues. Given limited choices, you get four lyrics from Joni Mitchell, two more from Elvis Costello.B

Marsa Fouty: Concerts (2015, Fou): French duo, some sort of play on the names of Fred Marty (contrebasse) and Jean-Marc Foussat (dispositif électro-acoustique) -- bass and electronics. The combo can get loud and ugly, and even the quieter patches can get under your skin. B [cd]

Michael McNeill Trio: Flight (2014 [2015], self-released): Pianist from Buffalo, blew me away with his debut (Passageways) and continues to impress, aided by Ken Filiano on bass and Phil Haynes on drums. This is considerably more, uh, nuanced, building slowly, repaying patient attention.A- [cd]

Bob Mintzer Big Band: Get Up! (2015, MCG Jazz): Tenor saxophonist, probably best known for several decades in the Yellowjackets, but has been running his big band almost as long. Not exceptional, but his past titles namecheck Trane and Basie, and that gives you the idea.B+(*) [cd]

Ashley Monroe: The Blade (2015, Warner Music): Country singer-songwriter, one-third of Pistol Annies, had an album before she started hanging out with the other thirds, then a breakthrough last year -- admittedly, it felt small, almost too easy. This one is less consistent, but takes more risks, and they often pay off.A-

Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (2015, Mercury Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, second album, knows that not all girls are built for beauty pageants, that you don't get to pick your family, and that life can still be gravy for those who mind their own biscuits. On the other hand, I'm still not sure how "love hard, live fast, die fun" works.B+(***)

Simon Nabatov/Mark Dresser: Projections (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Piano-bass duets. Nabatov was born in Russia, moved to Rome, New York, and eventually to Köln, and has more than two dozen albums since 1988 -- avant-garde with a classical grounding. Dresser, of course, is one of the great bassists of our era, and reminds you why frequently. B+(***) [cd]

Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity: Firehouse (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Norwegian drummer, has played in several bands since 2007: Puma, Bushman's Revenge, Lord Kelvin, Cortex (the latter's Live! an A- last year), as well as collaborations with Eirik Hegdal, Tore Brunborg, and Mathias Eick, but I'll score this as his first as leader: an avant-sax trio with Andre Roligheten and Petter Eldh, and everything you'd want there, blistering hot and completely cogent.A- [cd]

OZO: A Kind of Zo (2015, Shhpuma/Clean Feed): Portuguese duo, Paulo Mesquita on prepared piano, Pedro Oliveira on prepared drums. The preparations aren't that extreme, and the dynamic is simple enough: the piano sets up a rhythmic vamp, and the drums kick it to another level.A- [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Whit Dickey: Tenorhood (2014 [2015], Leo): Tenor sax-drums duets, Dickey most often associated with Matthew Shipp. Title tune plys five more dedicated to eminent tenor saxophonists: Mobley, Webster, Coltrane, Ayler, Rollins. A little schizzy around the edges, sort of a fractal effect.B+(***) [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Callas (2015, Leo, 2CD): Tenor sax-piano duos, inspired by opera diva Maria Callas (1923-77), not that there are any words here, nor vocals, just two avant-gardists trying to recapture some imagined spirit. What they come up with is real enough.A- [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Joe Morris: Counterpoint (2015, Leo): Tenor sax, viola, guitar, all joint improv, with Maneri both the dominant voice and the odd man out. Scratchy, squawky, not clear what Morris is doing but Perelman does a fine job of softening the edges and shining them up.B+(**) [cd]

Jack Perla: Enormous Changes (2013 [2015], Origin): Pianist, second album, wrote these songs with lyrics sung by Crystal Monee Hall, Jordan Carp, and Robin Coomer, backed by a band that includes cello and pedal steel but no horns. Moves into soft rock territory without the usual mawkishness.B [cd]

R5: Sometime Last Night (2015, Hollywood): Nominally an LA teen pop group with three brothers (like the Beach Boys?) and a sister (unlike the Beach Boys). Not as catchy as they need to be, but off to a nice start.B+(*)

Mason Razavi/Bennett Roth-Newell: After You (2015, First Orbit Sounds Music): Guitar-piano duets, Bay Area musicians. Razavi has a couple previous albums. Mix of originals and covers -- Clifford Brown, Joe Zawinul, "Yesterday."B+(*) [cd]

Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: The Otherworld Cycle (2014 [2015], Edgetone): Alto saxophonist, one of the more consistently interesting figures of recent years, assembles fourteen musicians for"a new music Odyssey inspired by ancient Finnish mythology and the Kalevala [a 19th century compilation of epic poetry from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore]." The vocal concept seemed like too much clutter at first, but that was forgotten least once the sinewy grooves kicked in, and the sax approached A Love Supreme's stratosphere.A- [cd]

Roots Magic: Hoodoo Blues & Roots Magic (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Group name not clear from the album cover, nor is there much in the way of liner notes, but label is clear on the point. Alberto Popolla (clarinets), Enrico DeFabritiis (alto sax), Gianfranco Tedeschi (double bass), Fabrizio Spera (drums), plus guest Luca Venitucci (organ, melodica, amplified zither). Can play free but mostly prefer blues riffs.B+(***) [cd]

Boz Scaggs: A Fool to Care (2015, 429 Records): In his 70s now, started out in blue-eyed soul occasionally descending into ordinary white pap, but as he's aged the logical progression is into blues, which he's taken at the same langourous pace he's always had. His Memphis was easily overrated, but this more unassuming effort hits the spot: a collage of covers that takes you back without tempting you to play your own oldies.A-

Skydive Trio: Sun Moee (2014 [2015], Hubro): Guitar trio, led by Norwegian Thomas T. Dahl (first record as leader), with Mats Eilertsen on bass and Olavi Louhivuori on drums. Understated grooves, the guitar spare but eloquent, only rarely building up much pressure.B+(***)

Omar Souleyman: Bahdeni Nami (2015, Monkeytown): Syria's famed wedding singer, who "transformed traditional dabke music into a hyperactive electronic stomp" [Guardian]. With his home turf turned into a battleground between ISIS and the Kurds (and the US and/or Bashar Assad), he's turned west, picking up Kieran Hebden as a producer, who in turn decided to leave well enough alone.A-

Terell Stafford: Brotherlee Love: Celebrating Lee Morgan (2014 [2015], Capri): Mainstream trumpet player, eighth album since 1995, hasn't shown a lot of devotion to Morgan over the years but takes the challenge to show off his chops. Hard bop quintet, with Tim Warfield on tenor sax, Bruce Barth on piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Dana Hall on drums, playing seven Morgan compositions,"Candy," and a new one by the leader.B+(**)

Ben Stapp & the Zozimos: Myrrha's Red Book: Act 1 (2014 [2015], Evolver): Tuba player, not very prominent here with all the voices, trumpets, clarinets, and cornet although he does produce a distinct bottom if you dig for it. The voices fit the definition of opera, with multiple characters forcing their voices around melodic curves that don't quite fit, exuding drama I don't have the ears for. Some remarkably complex music, and occasionally some shard of libretto lodges in my brain -- I suspect it's all very smart.B+(**) [cd]

Tame Impala: Currents (2015, Caroline): Australian alt/indie group led by Kevin Parker, who is credited/blamed for shifting the emphasis from guitar fuzz to cleanly melodic synths. Regarded as a big deal by critics and fans, I've never quite seen the point, although this one went down so easy I scarcely noticed.B+(*)

The Warren Vaché Quintet: Remembers Benny Carter (2014 [2015], Arbors): Cornet player, retro when he was young but now seems to have extended his time almost as long as Carter, an alto sax great twenty years before and forty years after Charlie Parker. Flanked by Houston Person on tenor, backed by Tardo Hammer, Lisa Parrott, and Leroy Williams, with Parrott singing several songs, Vaché one. B+(***)

Veruca Salt: Ghost Notes (2015, El Camino): Postpunk band from the 1990s (only second album since), quartet fronted by singer-guitarists Nina Gordon and Louise Post, named after a character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ("a spoiled child who demands every single thing she wants"). The closer "Alternica" gets a bit heavy-handed, but everything else is sharp and chipper.A-

Eyal Vilner Big Band: Almost Sunrise (2014 [2015], Gut String): Alto saxophonist, also plays flute, composed two pieces, arranged and conducted the rest, mostly from swing-schooled boppers, backstopped by Ellington. Six (of 13) cuts have vocals, mostly Charenee Wade.B+(**) [cd]

Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: Intercambio (2014-15 [2015], Patois): Bay Area trombonist, has run this group for many years now. Includes a few guest slots -- mostly flutes, which may seem like a nice contrast, but I prefer the trombone leads.B+(*) [cd]

Johannes Wallmann: The Town Musicians (2013 [2015], Fresh Sounds New Talent): Pianist, fifth album, lively postbop on the hard side; band includes Russ Johnson (trumpet), Gilad Hekselman (guitar), Sean Conly (bass), and Jeff Hirshfield (drums), plus Dayna Stephens (tenor sax) joins on two cuts. Over 75 minutes, everyone makes a strong impression.B+(***) [cd]

Wilco: Star Wars (2015, dBpm): Leads off with a guitar skronk instrumental, and even when they settle into recognizable pop they push more boundaries than they had in the last couple albums.B+(***)

Tony Wilson 6Tet: A Day's Life (2012 [2015], Drip Audio): Guitarist, based in Vancouver, has a handful of albums, three with this sextet: JP Carter (trumpet, electronics), Jesse Zubot (violin), Peggy Lee (cello), Russell Shulberg (bass), Skye Brooks (drums). One especially strong groove track ("The Train Keeps Rollin'") suggests what they can do when everyone is in sync.B+(**) [cd]

Florian Wittenburg: Aleatoric Inspiration (2009-14 [2015], NurNichtNur): German pianist, has a couple previous albums, this one piano miniatures which sometimes grab your attention, and sometimes let it go.B+(*) [cd]

Jamie XX: In Colour (2015, XL/Young Turks): Jamie Smith, electronic music producer, first noticed in a band called The XX (more commonly xx although to my typographic eyes it looks like they're using two multiplication signs). First solo album (not counting remixes from a collaboration with Gil Scott-Heron) after two group efforts. B+(***)

John Yao and His 17-Piece Instrument: Flip-Flop (2014 [2015], See Tao): Trombonist, big band arranger, his "17-piece instrument" the band, and with musicians like saxophonists John O'Gallagher and Jon Irabagon on not always of one mind.B+(***)

Omri Ziegele Billiger Bauer: So Viel Schon Hin: 15 Herbstlieder (2014 [2015], Intakt): Alto saxophonist from Switzerland, sixth album since 2002, three with this nonet (not counting singer Isa Wiss). The autumn songs in German are arch and arty (not that I can follow), Wiss splitting the difference between opera and Weill, as best she can given that the music is so slippery.B+(*) [cd]

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Alex Chilton: Ocean Club '77 (1977 [2015], Norton): At 27, the peak year for baseball players and rock martyrs, the Memphis singer-songwriter already had the AM-savvy Box Tops and the obscure-but-legendary Big Star on his résumé and was starting to sort out a solo career. Still, his live set, backed with bass and drums, mostly looks back, including "The Letter" run through the Big Star grinder.B+(**)

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session (1970 [2015], Grönland, EP): A vault discovery from the estate of German sound engineer Plank (best known for Marlene Dietrich), just three takes of "Alerado" and three takes of "Afrique" (including a vocal). First surprise is the prominence of the organ (Wild Bill Davis), although it's more pronounced in the riff-based "Alerado" than in the trickier "Afrique." Six tracks, 29:21.B+(**)

Percussions: 2011 Until 2014 (2011-14 [2015], Text): Rhapsody files this under Four Tet, but most sources say Percussions and refer back to a series of vinyl EPs collected here. I file them under Kieran Hebden, who appears to be the sole artist. Fairly minimal concept pieces -- "Bird Songs" are beats with chirps.B+(**)

Old Music

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Boredoms: Super AE (1998, Birdman): Japanese band, from Osaka, fifth album, some vocals but mostly instruments, mostly electronic ones; most tracks kicking off with strong beats, framed by some noise, nothing I particularly relate to.B+(**)

Billy Bragg & Wilco: Mermaid Avenue, Vol. III (1998-2000 [2012], Nonesuch): Leftovers from a project which released seminal albums in 1998 and 2000, where the English folk provocateur and Americana vet Jeff Tweedy worked up some music for lyrics Woody Guthrie had jotted down but hadn't found melodies for yet. None of the songs appeared before, and while most don't grab you right away, one that does is "Ain'ta Gonna Grieve."B+(**)

Billy Bragg & Wilco: Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions (1998-2000 [2012], Nonesuch, 3CD): This wraps all three volumes up in a tidy box, worthwhile if you're missing the first two as the inessential third is at least good for more quirky context.A-

C86 [Compact Digital Edition] (1986 [2014], Cherry Red): Originally a cassette released by British rock zine NME, this captured a moment in Britpop's evolution, with a heavy guitar clang, or sometimes jangle. Only four tracks from the original 22, filling out 17 with even more obscurities, so this hardly deserves the same name (which the cover provides, along with "NME 022" -- the original released number). [Docked a notch for making me do the paperwork.]B+(*)

The Close Readers: Group Hug (2010 [2011], Austin): New Zealand group, a vehicle for singer-songwriter Damien Wilkins, who won some prizes for writing fiction in the 1990s (but isn't famous enough to dislodge Dominique Wilkins' nephew from Google's search lead). Christgau picked their 2014 The Lines Are Open and after I concurred the back catalog showed up in my mail. On this debut it's clear he studied the Go-Betweens for songcraft while writing songs titled "Elton John" and "Iris DeMent." Gets a little tangled up on "Bipolar," but maybe that's a point.B+(***) [cd]

The Close Readers: New Spirit (2012, Austin): Usual sophomore album traits: songs fall off a bit but also get more ambitious, musicianship improves -- they rock more, also try more production tricks. But the basics are solid, especially the lyrics, and if they sound a lot like the Go-Betweens, I'd put that in the plus column.B+(***) [cd]

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: F# A# ∞ (1997 [1998], Kranky): Canadian post-rock group, from Montreal, took their name from a Japanese film about a biker gang named the Black Emperors. Title pronounced "F-Sharp, A-Sharp, Infinity." Album originally released as a 32:22 LP (with one of those infinite lock grooves at the end), then a year later was reorganized as a 3-track 63:27 CD.B+(**)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000, Kranky, 2CD): Second album, four pieces running 18:57 to 23:17, each a mini-suite, usually resetting toward the middle.B+(*)

Janet Jackson: Control (1986, A&M): No one I'm aware of takes her teen efforts seriously, but turning 20 for her third album, Jam & Lewis feed her some serious beats, echoing family trademarks. While she claims control, she's not quite there yet. "Nasty," for instance, is something boys do.B+(*)

Jimmy Eat World: Bleed American (2001, Grand Royal): Emo band from Arizona, fourth album, first to chart and only (of 8, 1994-2013) to go platinum. Or that's their rep: emo seems to apply to a range of sounds but depend on lyrics I rarely can follow. All I can say is that they're fairly tuneful and a little baleful.B-

Mastodon: Blood Mountain (2006, Reprise): Heavy metal band from Atlanta named after a lumbering prehistoric beast, third album. A band which gets critical support beyond metalheads, although I can't see why. There's the speed drumming and the time shifting slide into cacophony, but it's mostly just the usual deep sludge.B-

Mobb Deep: The Infamous (1995, Loud): Gangsta rap duo from Queens, second album, beats came easy, bullshit too.B+(**)

Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine (1989, TVT): First album by Trent Reznor's industrial rock group, although his notion of industrial is closer to New Order new wave, but with a harder metallic gleam and more dystopian attitude.A-

Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile (1999, Interscope, 2CD): Third album, five years after The Downward Spiral, a sprawling set, heavy, dreary, not totally without interest, but lacking something -- charm, maybe? Second disc does get better.B+(*)

Nine Inch Nails: With Teeth (2005, Nothing): Even-keeled, showing his future in soundtracks but occasionally turning some songs on.B+(**)

Nine Inch Nails: The Slip (2008, The Null Corporation): I see the genre list here includes "dark ambient" -- not something I've run across before, but a reasonable description here.B+(**)

Oasis: Definitely Maybe (1994, Epic): First album by Manchester UK group that was taken as the second coming of the Beatles in some parts. I don't hear that: just a loud backbeat and plenty of guitar up front.B+(*)

Oasis: Be Here Now (1997, Epic): Third album, makes me want to check my volume levels because they are so dedicated to pumping it up. While I find that annoying I also find it surprisingly invigorating -- enough so that I can see why they became so big, but not enough to become a fan myself.B+(*)

Orbital: In Sides (1966 [1997], FFRR, 2CD): British electronica, something like jungle 'n' bass, with industrial touches and occasional references to Satan -- the latter on the bonus disc, added in 1997, ending in a live track with something familiar.B+(**)

Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (1995, Loud): Debut album for Wu-Tang rapper Corey Woods. Not following the skits, which presumably knit the concept together, but the beats dazzle, the raps cut, and it seems to add up to some sort of worldview, probably no more strange than the ghetto itself.A-

Boz Scaggs: Silk Degrees (1976 [2007], Columbia/Legacy): Far and away his most successful album -- quintuple platinum with his two higest charting singles, "Lowdown" and "Lido Shuffle" -- but while it made a big splash it's not especially memorable, borrowing much of its energy from disco, but not quite the way you remember it.B+(***)

Snoop Doggy Dogg: Doggystyle (1993, Death Row): Calvin Broadus, later just Snoopy Dogg, was already a celebrity before dropping this G-funk debut, an upbeat rush of faux-gangsta fables built on P-Funk samples -- my favorite just repeats "tha bomb" every bar.B

Sunny Day Real Estate: Diary (1994, Sub Pop): Seattle alt/indie group, usually tagged as emo but not far removed from grunge, at least on this first album. I'm not sure "emo" is the same thing as overwrought, but at least they pound it furiously into shape.B

Teenage Fanclub: Bandwagonesque (1991, DGC): Scottish alt/indie group, has that pop twist to the guitar band sound, but not enough spit and polish to make it real.B+(*)

Uncle Tupelo: Anodyne (1993 [2003], Rhino/Sire): Seminal alt-country band from Illinois with Jay Farrar (Son Volt) and Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) -- their debut album was taken as the title for genre-defining No Depression magazine -- on their last album.B+(*)

Wilco: A.M. (1995, Sire): Debut from Jeff Tweedy's post-Uncle Tupelo group, a more-than-promising mix of vocal twang and uncommonly sharp guitar.A-

Wilco: Summer Teeth (1999, Warner Brothers): The end of their notion that true American music should be rooted in the so-called heartland, partly by moving to the California melting pot, which doesn't quite a Beach Boys album make.B+(**)

Yo La Tengo: Ride the Tiger (1986 [1996], Matador): Hoboken alt/indie group, Ira Kaplan the main writer/singer, first album, missing among the 19 LPs and EPs Christgau has reviewed (5 A-, 2 A), so the original label (Coyote) must have been awfully obscure in the day. The band had a knack for surfing over the guitar line, a lightness that makes everything crisp and clear. The CD reissue adds some murkier cuts, but that just raises the intensity.A-

Yo La Tengo: New Wave Hot Dogs (1987, Coyote): Second album, moves forward, backwards, and sideways from the first, so yeah, less consistent, a mix of punkish raves and more sedate spots.B+(**)

Yo La Tengo: President Yo La Tengo (1989, Twin/Tone): I spoke admiringly of the lightness of their debut, but two albums later it's the heaviness you hang onto, especially the guitar squelch of the 10:35 "The Evil That Men Do." [Matador reissued on CD in 1996 with New Wave Hot Dogs and "Asparagus Song" tacked onto the end; this is the version Rhapsody has, but I split it up for review.]A-

Yo La Tengo: Fakebook (1990, Bar/None): Mostly a covers album, done simply, although five songs are credited to Ira Kaplan, two of those also to drummer Georgia Hubley. Obscure song choices, not that "Griselda" (Antonia) or "Andalucia" (John Cale) are obscure to me.B+(*)

Yo La Tengo: May I Sing With Me (1992, Alias): First album for bassist James McNew, joining Ira Kaplan (mostly guitar) and Georgia Hubley (mostly drums). The greater depth allowed them to move into Sonic Youth territory, and the guitar (in particular) sometimes reminded me of avant-jazz, especially in an extended feedback freakout, but also in certain solos. As an alt/indie band they've long fit into the Velvets lineage, so the growth may just be recessive genes coming back into play.A-

Yo La Tengo: Painful (1993, Matador): Sounds like an attempt to consolidate the sonic gains of their recent albums without doing anything shocking or weird or pathbreaking -- a plus for their alt/indie audience, but less interesting for me. Or maybe they just wanted to give their new bass player more leads.B+(***)

Yo La Tengo: Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo (1988-95 [1996], Matador, 2CD): Two hours of "rarities, alternate versions, and out-takes" -- the first disc songs with vocals, the second just instrumentals, ranging from an 8-second "Drum Solo" to the 26:22 closer, "Sunsquashed." Obviously something for fans only, but it gives you a fair taste of where they've been, and their sound is distinct enough to justify the latter disc.B+(**)

Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (2000, Matador): Follow-up to I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One -- probably the group's best record: catchy songs, with an impressive flow. This one is similar, but sometimes slower and prettier. Christgau advises"play loud" but can that be right?B+(***)

Revised Grades

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

Yo La Tengo: Electr-O-Pura (1995, Matador): If Painful didn't quite mark the point where they merged their early songcraft with their hard-earned sonics, this was. [was: B+] A-

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section:

• Billy Bragg: Back to Basics (1983-85 [1987], Go! Discs): B-
• Billy Bragg & Wilco: Mermaid Avenue (1998, Elektra): A
• Billy Bragg & Wilco: Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 2 (2000, Elektra): B+
• The Close Readers: The Lines Are Open (2014, Austin): A-
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor: 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! (2012, Constellation): B+(**)
• Jimmy Eat World: Jimmy Eat World (1998, Fueled by Ramen, EP): B-
• Janet Jackson: Rhythm Nation: 1814 (1989, A&M): A-
• Janet Jackson: Janet (1993, Virgin): B+
• Janet Jackson: Design of a Decade 1986-1996 (1986-95 [1995], A&M): B+
• Janet Jackson: The Velvet Rope (1997, Virgin): A-
• Janet Jackson: All for You (2001, Virgin): B-
• Janet Jackson: 20 Y.O. (2006, Virgin): C+
• Jimmy Eat World: Jimmy Eat World (1998, Fueled by Ramen, EP): B-
• Mastodon: Crack the Skye (2009, Reprise): B
• Mastodon: The Hunter (2011, Reprise): B-
• Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral (1994, Interscope): B+
• Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero (2007, Interscope): A-
• Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV (2008, Halo Twenty Six, 2CD): A-
• Nine Inch Nails: Hesitation Marks (2013, Halo): B+(*)
• Oasis: (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995, Epic): B+
• Orbital: Snivilisation (1994, FFRR): C+
• Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. II (2009, Ice H20): B+(***)
• Boz Scaggs: Slow Dancer (1974, Columbia): B
• Boz Scaggs: Hits (1972-85 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): B
• Boz Scaggs: My Time: The Anthology (1969-1997) (1969-97 [1997], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): B-
• Boz Scaggs: Memphis (2013, 429 Records): B+(**)
• Uncle Tupelo: No Depression (1990 [2003], Columbia/Legacy): B+
• Wilco: Being There (1996, Sire/Reprise): B+
• Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002, Nonesuch): A-
• Wilco: A Ghost Is Born (2004, Nonesuch): B
• Wilco: Sky Blue Sky (2007, Nonesuch): B+(***)
• Wilco: Wilco (The Album) (2009, Nonesuch): B+(**)
• Wilco: The Whole Love (2011, Anti-): B+(**)
• Wilco: What's Your 20? Essential Tracks 1994-2014 (1994-2014 [2014], Nonesuch, 2CD): A-
• Yo La Tengo: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (1997, Matador): A-
• Yo La Tengo: Summer Sun (2003, Matador): A-
• Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (2006, Matador): A-
• Yo La Tengo: Popular Songs (2009, Matador): B+(***)
• Yo La Tengo: Fade (2013, Matador): B+(**)

Notes

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

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

I neglected these short book blurbs for close to a year --July 3, 2014 toJune 17, 2015 -- so I'm still catching up. In fact, I have so much written at this point I'll try to do another tomorrow. For today's selection, I've tried to focus on history books. (Last entry was focused on political books.)

Tariq Ali: The Extreme Centre: A Warning (paperback, 2015, Verso): British Marxist, novelist, filmmaker, part of the oldNew Left Review crowd, wrote a book in 2002 which excoriated extremists on both sides of the terrorism wars (which he dubbed the Oil Wars -- see The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity). Now he finds comparable trouble in the so-called center, focusing on the UK and Europe where the traditional parties of left and right compete to support corporations.

Edward E Baptist: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014, Basic Books): Argues against the notion that slavery was pre-capitalist or even anti-capitalist by pointing out the how especially in the cotton industry technical innovations (hence capital) were developed to make slavery more productive and profitable. But showing that slavery was compatible with capitalism doesn't lighten its burden -- if anything, the opposite. Some of this was anticipated by Walter Johnson: River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013, Belknap Press). Also related: Sven Beckert:Empire of Cotton: A Global Industry (2014, Knopf).

Max Blumenthal: The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (2015, Nation Books): The title reminds you that while Israel only took six days to defeat the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, seizing large slices from each's territory, they spent six-and-a-half times as long poking, probing, and pounding the tiny, defenseless Gaza Strip -- with no tangible gains, a repeat of three previous military operations that prooved equally fruitless. Blumenthal's recent Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013, Nation Books) revealed a profound racism (loathing) growing in Israel's dominant right-wing, so I hope this book goes beyond accounting the casualties and recording testimony of the survivors to get at the viciousness that powers these recurrent eruptions of Israeli wrath. Blumenthal's book is the first out on this latest round, but the following aren't what you'd call dated: Gideon Levy: The Punishment of Gaza (paperback, 2010, Verso); Norman Finkelstein: This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion (paperback, 2010, OR Books); Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé: Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians (paperback, 2010, Haymarket Books); or for that matter, Amira Haas: Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (paperback, 2000, Picador).

Daniel P Bolger: Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (2014, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Three-star general, had commands both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Concludes: "at the root of our failure, we never really understood our enemy." True, but "we" also didn't understand much of anything else, least of all how ill fit the US military was for occupying foreign countries. It's refreshing that Bolger admits that the operations were failures, but he doesn't seem to understand that the relentless focus on killing/capturing "enemies" created its own failures, as did the very alien-ness of the US military.

Joel K Bourne Jr: The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World (2015, WW Norton): The Green Revolution in the 1960s seemed to background Robert Malthus' population theories, but they're coming back as population grows, land remains constant, technology fails to bridge the gap, and other threats (like global warming) are increasing.

Douglas Brinkley/Luke A Nichter: The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 (2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Verbatim transcripts (784 pp of them), the precise history Nixon wanted you to hear, and some he didn't. Good to have this in book form, but I can't imagine wanting to read it. For some reason we have an avalanche of Nixon books, in addition to Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014, Simon & Schuster): Patrick J Buchanan: The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority (2014, Crown Forum); John W Dean: The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (2014, Viking); Elizabeth Drew:Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall (paperback, 2015, Overlook Press); Don Fulsom: Treason: Nixon and the 1968 Election (2015, Pelican); Irwin F Gellman: The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1951-1961 (2015, Yale University Press); Ken Hughes: Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (2014, University of Virginia Press); Jeffrey P Kimball/William Burr: Nixon's Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (2015, University Press of Kansas); Ray Locker: Nixon's Gamble: How a President's Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration (2015, Lyons Press); Michael Nelson: Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (2014, University Press of Kansas); James Robenalt: January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever (2015, Chicago Review Press); Douglas E Schoen: The Nixon Effect: How His Presidency Has Changed American Politics (2015, Encounter Books); Geoff Shepard: The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (2015, Regnery); Roger Stone: Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth About the President, Watergate, and the Pardon (2014, Skyhorse); Evan Thomas: Being Nixon: A Man Divided (2015, Random House); Tim Weiner: One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (2015, Henry Holt). Gellman's book is the second part of a multi-volume effort. Treason, by the way, refers to Nixon's back-channel efforts to undermine LBJ's peace talks, elsewhere known as the Chennault Affair. Fulsom previously wrote Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President (paperback, 2013, St. Martin's Griffin). Weiner has written good books about the CIA and FBI, so I suspect his is the most useful of the new books. I read Gary Wills:Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man back when it originally came out (1970) and that's as deep as I ever want to get into that man's mind.

Tom Burgis: The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth (2015, Public Affairs): While Africa has about 30% of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals, and 14% of the world's population, its economies have remained stagnant (e.g., only 1% of the world's manufacturing). The looting began under European colonialism, but continues today, enabled by the corruption of elites. Related: Celeste Hicks: Africa's New Oil: Power, Pipelines and Future Fortunes (paperback, 2015, Zed Books); Luke Paley: The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (paperback, 2015, Hurst).

Bryan Burrough: Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015, Penguin): Investigates various fringe radical groups in the 1970s -- the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, FALN, the Black Liberation Army -- who resorted to violence to advance their frustrated political ideals, and the federal agents who hunted them down (who themselves "broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice"). Also on the FBI's suppression of left radicals: Aaron J Leonard/Conor A Gallagher: Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists: The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 (paperback, 2015, Zero Books).

Sarah Chayes: Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (2015, WW Norton): Previously wrote The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2006), which indicted pretty much everyone for failing to secure a better future for the Afghan people after the US pushed the Taliban out in 2001. She supported that war, and wound up advising the US military, which puts her in an odd position: she identifies corruption as a major security problem for the US in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but misses the fact that the US has never been able to stand up non-corrupt governments anywhere, because American foreign policy is driven by the profit motive in the first place -- you didn't really buy into that altruistic humanitarian horseshit? But corruption delegitimizes government and leads to opposition, and often violence.

Meghnad Desai: Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One (2015, Yale University Press): Several variations on this book have appeared, and no doubt more will. Although economists are often asked for predictions, their models are more likely to seek an equilibrium that disallows crisis -- and in turn gives them little reason to research past crises. Still, one way to approach this would be to identify exceptions that did predict the crisis, then ask why no one paid much attention to them. One reviewer notes that lack of any mention of Hyman Minsky "leaves a gaping hole in an otherwise admirable book." I'll add that while failure to predict the crisis was a problem, a bigger one was inability to recognize what it all meant once it happened. Krugman, for instance, didn't predict the crash, but he knew exactly what was going on when it happened.

Don H Doyle: The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2014, Basic Books): A survey of how the war was viewed abroad, finding that monarchists hoped to see the Union (and democracy) fail, while radicals (like Karl Marx and Giuseppe Garibaldi) "called on the North to fight for liberty and equality." Both sides sent diplomats abroad to argue their cases. I don't see much about economic interests here. The best known is England, which leaned toward the Confederacy as a backward source of raw materials (mostly cotton), possibly fearing the Union as a potential competitor in manufacturing -- no doubt some English continued to oppose slavery, but that doesn't seem to have overridden economic interests. On the other hand, the Union tended to play down the issue of slavery in justifying the war effort, at least domestically. I wonder whether their case abroad differed.

Douglas R Egerton: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era (2014, Bloomsbury Press): A new history of the post-Civil War period, focusing on the striking advances of newly-emancipated black office holders and the systematic violence they were met with, and finally defeated by.

Barry Eichengreen: Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses -- and Misuses -- of History (2015, Oxford University Press): Similarities and differences between 1929 and 2008, how the memory of the former affected the response to the latter (and, I hope, how forgetting lessons from the former slowed down recovery from the latter). One thing I noticed at the time was that the initial output drop was almost exactly the same both times, but was soon limited by the much larger public sector in 2008 and much more responsive public policy (especially the frantic cycle of bank bailouts), but having averted a crash as bad as in 1929, the policy czars underestimated the damage, nor were they forced by public opinion to produce necessary reforms. Author has mostly written about currency issues; e.g., Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1918-1939 (1996), andExorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (2011).

Richard J Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory (2015, Oxford University Press): Author of a sweeping three-volume history of the Nazi movement -- The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005), andThe Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany From Conquest to Disaster (2008) -- returns for a review of how Hitler and company have been remembered. Seems to be an essay collection rather than a systematic treatment, but so much has been written about the subject that one can cover a lot of ground just reviewing whatever books come your way.

Eric Foner: Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015, WW Norton): America's foremost historian not so much of the Civil War per se -- that would be James McPherson -- as the penumbra surrounding it (aboltionism, reconstruction) adds another piece of the story, detailing how slaves escaped to freedom in the North, and how free blacks were often seized by "slave catchers" and forced into bondage. I read Foner's first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War back when it was originally published (1970).

Howard W French: China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa (2014, Knopf): Not sure how important this is, but China (or Chinese businesses) have been looking to grab a larger slice of Africa's raw resources -- evidently this involves immigration as well as investment. This is reminiscent of western governments and companies, before and after"independence" but perhaps novel as well, given how inexpensively China can move their own people into place. French previously wroteA Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (2004).

David A Grimes/Linda G Brandon: Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation (2014, Daymark): Grimes is a doctor, so this focuses on health care matters. Clearly, availability of safe legal abortion procedures was a big advance over illegal and often dangerous procedures. Not clear how far this goes into how abortion rights changed political, economic, and social issues but a book could be written there, too.

Nisid Hajari: Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition (2015, Houghton Mifflin): Another book on the bloody history of the British Empire's final "gift" to India: partition in 1947, which led a million deaths, many millions displaced, and set the stage for future wars, subterfuge, and terrorism between India and Pakistan. I've read Alex von Tunzelman's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007), which focuses more on the Mountbattens, and Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007), but there are many other books on this subject, including fictions like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. This is reportedly one of the best.

Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015, Harper): From the emergence of modern humans c. 70,000 years ago, a mix of genetics and sociology used to construct a hypothetical prehistory, regardless of the title -- "packed with heretical thinking and surprising facts" one reviewer says.

Dilip Hiro: The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan (2015, Nation Books): The partition of India in 1947 led immediately to one of the greatest carnages of the post-WWII era, remembered through a continuous conflict that errupted in two more major wars between India and Pakistan and numerous threats and crises. Hiro, b. in Pakistan, has written dozens of books on the Middle East and South and Central Asia -- his reference book The Essential Middle East: A Comrepehsive Guide (2003) is one I keep on an easy-reach shelf; his A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East (2013) would be an update -- so he's well positioned to cover this story.

Bruce Hoffman: Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (2015, Knopf): Author is some kind of "terrorism expert" -- wrote Inside Terrorism (rev ed, 2006, Columbia University Press), and, w/Fernando Reinares: The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden's Death (2014, Columbia University Press) -- so sees mandatory Palestine as a rare case study where Israeli terrorism "worked": as such, he rather narrowly focuses on the Irgun and LEHI (Stern Gang) from 1939-47, as opposed to the broader question of the militarization of the Yishuv from the death of Joseph Trumpeldor (1920) through the formation of Haganah and Palmach, the Arab Revolt (1937-39), WWII, and the final integration of Irgun and LEHI into the IDF in 1948. No doubt this has a lot of detail as far as it goes, but the broader book seems to have been an afterthought -- little more than jiggering the dates. Also note that it's easy to overrate the effectiveness of Irgun/LEHI terror, since the UK had basically decided to quit Palestine after suppressing the Arab Revolt. Also that the "soldiers" didn't remain"anonymous" for long: Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir parlayed their notoreity as terrorists into successful political careers (both became Prime Minister).

Gerald Horne: The Counterrevolution of 1776: Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014, NYU Press): Argues that by 1776 Britain was increasingly likely to abolish slavery, so one major motivation for the American Revolution was the desire of slaveholders to preserve their peculiar institution. Conversely, slave revolts in the British Caribbean were increasing, and likely to spread to the American colonies. Author previously wrote Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the US Before Emancipation (paperback, 2013, NYU Press), and Race to Revolution: The US and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow (paperback, 2014, Monthly Review Press). An earlier book with a similiar thesis is Alfred Blumrosen: Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (paperback, 2006, Sourcebooks).

Ayesha Jalal: The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics (2014, Belknap Press): A history of Pakistan from 1947 to the present, its Muslim identity, cold war alliances, and ever troublesome relations with India, Afghanistan, and ultimately the United States. Other recent books on Pakistan: Hassan Abbas: The Taliban Revival: Violence and Extremism on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier (2014, Yale University Press); Faisal Devji: Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013, Harvard University Press); C Christine Fair: Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War (2014, Oxford University Press); Laurent Gayer: Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (2014, Oxford University Press); Husain Haqqani:Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding (paperback, 2015, Public Affairs); Feroz Khan: Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (paperback, 2012, Stanford Security Studies); Aqil Shah: The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (2014, Harvard University Press); Rafia Zakaria: The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (2015, Beacon Press).

Tony Judt: When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010 (2015, Penguin): Selected essays from the late historian, including his famous essay recanting his early Zionism. The title refers to a famous quote that one's views should change in accordance with changing facts.

David Kaiser: No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War (2014, Basic Books): Covers the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor at least back to 1939, showing how Roosevelt worked to better position the US to fight a war that he considered inevitable. I doubt that this goes into the question of to what extend Roosevelt provoked the Japanese attack (let alone the old conspiracy buff argument that he knew in advance of the attack and didn't tip the military off to maximize the outrage). One Amazon reader panned this, saying "spoiled by a slap at George Bush." A comparison of the two wartime presidents, how they managed their wars, and what the accomplished (or failed) might be worth a book of its own. Related: Nigel Hamilton: The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-42 (2014, Houghton Mifflin).

Fred Kaplan: John Quincy Adams: American Visionary (2014, Harper): A substantial (672 pp.) biography of the sixth US president, his term four years in the middle of a career that started as a teenage diplomat during the revolution and ended as one of the strongest voices against slavery in the House of Representatives.

David Madland: Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn't Work Without a Strong Middle Class (paperback, 2015, University of California Press): It shouldn't be hard to make this point. The US economy grew at robust rates from 1945-70 when strong unions were able to capture a fair share of productivity gains, raising the working class to a middle class standard of living. Since then growth rates fell, unions were busted, virtually all productivity gains went to business, and a series of asset bubbles and busts combined with financialization led to a vast increase in inequality, hollowing out the middle class. I don't know whether Madland has a solution. Thomas Geoghegan does, in Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (2014, New Press).

James McPherson: The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (2015, Oxford University Press): Far and away the bloodiest conflict in American history -- the last real war fought in American soil -- and not always remembered as the triumph for justice all American wars are meant to teach. The afterwar (what us northerners call Reconstruction) certainly divided political life for another century only to be if not re-fought at least re-litigated in the 1960s. Since then the legacy has become stranger, so it would be interesting to get McPherson's take. By the way, while he has wound up writing many books on military aspects of the war, the first book I remember him for was The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (1965).

Mark Perry: The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (2014, Basic Books): This seems to focus on the relationship between MacArthur and Roosevelt (and Marshall) rather than the later period, with MacArthur's successful occupation of Japan and disastrous direction of the Korean War -- as I recall, the title comes from this latter period. Perry has written extensively about WWII-era generals.

Richard Rhodes: Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made (2015, Simon & Schuster): Rhodes has written a fine trilogy on the history of nuclear weapons (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race) and an important book on the Nazi invasions of Poland and Russia (Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust). The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) immediately preceded those stories, so directly that the US labelled Americans who volunteered to defend democratic Spain against Franco "premature anti-fascists." I don't see the point in blaming Neville Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland while ignoring the western powers' failure to stand up to Hitler in Spain. I suppose at this point the best-known book on the Spanish Civil War is Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (2006), but I'd rather read Rhodes.

Bruce Riedel: What We Won: America's Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (paperback, 2014, Brookings Institute Press): Longtime CIA analyst and Afghanistan hack dates the end of the Afghan War from the point when the Soviet Union withdrew, even though the country has experienced peace at no time since then. But in 1989 the CIA clearly concluded that "we won": one wonders how critical Riedel can be, but surely he recognizes some irony there -- not unlike, say, GW Bush's"Mission Accomplished" moment.

Eugene Rogan: The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (2015, Basic Books): After a century of losses, especially in eastern Europe, and ten years after a coup that brought a triumvirate of Young Turks to power, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Great War of 1914. Not clear how much decline this book covers, but the fall came quickly, with the Ottoman's Arab provinces partitioned between Britain and France, the Armenian population decimated, and Ataturk's nationalist movement defeating an invading Greek army and consolidating control of Turkey. This winds up being a very important piece of history, one previously covered by David Fromkin in one of the best-named books ever: A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 (1989).

Simon Schama: The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD (2014, Ecco): With a second volume (When Words Fail: 1492-Present) scheduled for November 15, with a PBS tie-in (the first season DVD, covering five episodes, is out). Schama also did a 15-hour PBS A History of Britain, accompanied by three volumes.

Nancy Sherman: Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers (2015, Oxford University Press): Philosophy professor, held a post at the Naval Academy, seems to have had a lot of contact with damaged returning soldiers. I'm suspicious that her "philosophical engagement" is meant to enable more war, but one can certainly find reasons here that argue for less. Also interested in her proposed changes for military courts, which have traditionally treated "shell shock" harshly as some form of cowardice. We seem to have given up any thought of reforming criminals, but right now soldiers are held in such empathy that we may be open to trying to save them, and there may be some lessons there. The book, however, doesn't seem to address cases like Henry Kissinger, where moral lapses are caused not by trauma but by cunning.

Emma Sky: The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (2015, Public Affairs): Author went to Iraq to work for the Occupation in 2003 and stayed at least through 2010 (she was political advisor to US General Odierno). Touted as "an intimate insider's portrait of how and why the Iraq adventure failed" -- which is to say highly biased, but even blaming others (like "the corrupt political elites who used sectarianism to mobilize support") reveals much about one's own culpability. (She's British, so has a little distance from the Americans, but prefers the Americans she worked with -- Petraeus, Odierno, Crocker -- to the ones she didn't, and ultimately puts a lot of blame on Iran for the resurgence of sectarian violence under Maliki, a relationship her insider status didn't provide her privvy to.)

Cass R Sunstein: Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (2015, Oxford University Press): Political theorist, closely associated with Obama (although that probably does both of them a disservice and makes it all a bit creepy; Robert Reich with Clinton is a similar case, although Reich at least is consistently on Clinton's left). Co-wrote a book with Richard H Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) arguing for a "libertarian paternalism" which gives people a fig-leaf of options while encouraging them to take the defaults selected for them. He follows up here with examples of how having choices can be burdensome. No doubt, but in a political and economic system so rife with corruption as ours is, it matters who sets defaults, how, and why. Sunstein's recent books seem aware of this, especially Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (paperback, 2015, Yale University Press); also:Simpler: The Future of Government (2013; paperback, 2014, Simon & Schuster); Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State (2014, University of Chicago Press); and Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (with Reid Hastie; 2014, Harvard Business Review Press).

Adam Tooze: The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014, Viking): Author of a huge WWII book, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2007), looks at the first world war or its aftermath with an eye toward the economy -- after all, economic capacity ultimately proved decisive in both wars.

Nick Turse: Tomorrow's Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (paperback, 2015, Haymarket Books): One of the few journalists covering nearly every facet of the US military in the world today, and the only one I've seen trying to keep track of the increasing wave of undeclared and unpublicized operations in Africa.

Gernot Wagner/Martin L Weitzman: Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (2015, Princeton University Press): Tries to put a price tag on global warming, factoring in various risky scenarios, some quite severe. We generally know that denialism is rooted in specific economic interests (chiefly coal and oil). But how do those interests stack up against others that have little to gain by doing nothing and potentially much to lose?

Bernard Wasserstein: On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War (2012, Simon & Schuster): An encyclopedic survey of Jewish life all across Europe up to the start of World War and the Holocaust.

As I noted yesterday, I had fallen way behind on my book blurb roundups -- almost a year missing until myJune 17 post. (By the way, I blame Amazon for much of this, since their immensely useful website is all but guaranteed to crash my browser within a half-dozen pages. Lately I've been using the Chromebook's browser for Amazon, an awkward workflow but less troublesome.) I picked out most of the top political books for the June 27 post, and added most of the top historical books yesterday. That leaves a wide scattering of other subjects -- all at least nominally non-fiction. I don't generally track music books, but there are a few of those here. Some science too -- the main thing I read back in the 1980s, although I've scarcely had time for it in the last decade-plus (although I have at least tracked most of the climate catastrophe books). Some books lead to lists of related books, where I hope the titles are self-explanatory. And there are more of the usual political and historical books -- perhaps a bit more marginal given I've already picked through them in recent posts. Sometimes I pick out a right-wing book to argue with (Brooks, Gairdner, Powers, and Voegeli fit that bill below). Sometimes I don't have much to say about a left-wing book but want to note it anyway.

Sometimes I jump the gun before deciding that a book is really interesting, and those pieces tend to get stuck in my draft file until I finally flush them out. I have enough left over for at least one more post, so I may do that tomorrow (instead of Weekend Update, the file for which is empty at the moment).

Only one book below I have the cover cached for (i.e., I've already read), although I've also bought a copy of Steele's The Open-Source Everything Manifesto.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Samuel Avery: The Pipeline and the Paradigm: Keystone XL, Tar Sands, and the Battle to Defuse the Carbon Bomb (paperback, 2013, Ruka Press): On Alberta's tar sands and why they represent such a threat to irrevesibly amplify global warming. Also available: Andrew Nikiforuk: Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (rev ed, paperback, 2010, Greystone Books); William Marsden: Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn't Seem to Care (2007; paperback, 2008, Vintage). If you want to explore the other side, there's Alastair Sweeny: Black Bonanza: Canada's Oil Sands and the Race to Secure North America's Energy Future (2010, Wiley), and Ezra Levant: Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands (2007, paperback, 2011, McClelland & Stewart) -- the latter is an anti-Arab rant, and the former plays on that prejudice while declaring everything else squeaky clean.

Robert B Baer: The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins (2014, Blue Rider Press): Ex-CIA agent, wrote about his career inSee No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (2002); also Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (2003), and The Devil We Know: Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower (2008). Not clear how critical and/or complicit he his, but this manual for assassins may try to have it both ways -- as if there are two sides to the story.

Alex Berezow/Hank Campbell: Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left (2014, Public Affairs): It should be clear by now that there is no single omnipresent Left in America, especially given how easily writers can construct strawman examples to kick about. This book picks on ones that the authors at least associate with the left, although from the list I see many (if not all) of the issues focus more on what corporations do with science and what the potential risks may be than on the science itself. Still, I do know people who might be considered left-leaning who understand very little of science and sympathisize with all sorts of nonscientific nonsense, but that's no less true of ignorant right-leaning people. What is different about the right is the number of people who seriously reject not just the policy application but the scientific principles behind climate change and evolution.

John Brockman, ed: What Should We Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night (paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial): One thing that should be clear by now is that people aren't very good at assessing risks, especially ones that are large and/or distant, but also ones that are near and/or familiar. This book promises the clarity of science, but many of the pieces are a bit fuzzy ("Tim O'Reilly forsees a coming Dark Age; Douglas Rushkoff fears humanity is losing its soul" -- those are pieces that actually intrigue me more than meteoric catastrophes or financial black holes). Brockman, by the way, has a whole cottage industry editing books along these lines. Recent ones include (all Harper Perennial paperbacks):What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything (1/2009); This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future (12/2009); Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future (1/2011); This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (2/2012); This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works (1/2013); Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction (10/2013).

David Brooks: The Road to Character (2015, Random House): Always one to jump out in front of a fad, this is a timely guide for those who want to blame social, economic, and political failures on those who have lost out, on their intrinsic character -- a lack of the sort of virtues that are assumed to lead to success. Those virtues, of course, are the usual conservative homilies. As a self-help book this might have some value, but Brooks is nothing if not a political hack, so when, say, he praises civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin for their "reticence and the logic of self-discipline" he really means to dismiss all the others who don't show enough deferrence to the conservative order.

Noam Chomsky/Andre Vltchek: On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (paperback, 2013, Pluto Press): Chomsky has a tendency to batter you with long list of facts, and one of his favorite lists is the violent, anti-democratic acts of the US and its allies around the world. Unpleasant as the beating is, if you aren't aware of those facts you're likely to fall for the usual sanctimonious explanations that conspire to keep the list growing.

Robert Christgau: Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (2015, Dey Street Books): Memoir from childhood growing up in Queens through college at Dartmouth and several newspaper jobs through his stretch as music editor at the Village Voice, ending in the early 1980s. Disclosure: he's a friend, and I make a couple brief appearances in the book, plus one in the acknowledgments. More prominent in the book is his wife, Carola Dibbell, who it should be noted has a new novel out, The Only Ones (paperback, 2015, Two Dollar Radio).

Niles Eldredge: Extinction and Evolution: What Fossils Reveal About the History of Life (2014, Firefly): Paleontologist, co-author (with Stephen Jay Gould) of the "punctuated equilibria" theory of evolution, which was suggested by the general lack of transitional finds in the fossil record. Illustrated, almost an art book. For a more technical book, see Eldredge's recent Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin of Species From the Nineteenth Century Through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond (2015, Columbia University Press). Over the years I've read a lot by Eldredge, but hadn't noticed: The Fossil Factory: A Kid's Guide to Digging Up Dinosaurs, Exploring Evolution, and Finding Fossils (with Douglas Eldredge, paperback, 2002, Roberts Reinhart); Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene (paperback, 2005, WW Norton);Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (2005, WW Norton); andConcrete Jungle: New York City and Our Last Best Hope for a Sustainable Future (with Sidney Horenstein, 2014, University of California Press).

Peter Finn/Petra Couvée: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (2014, Pantheon): The book was Boris Pasternak's famous novel, Doctor Zhivago, banned in the Soviet Union -- an opportunity the CIA seized upon by publishing it in Russian as a propaganda coup. The authors managed to get hold of CIA documents on the affair, most likely Russian sources as well.

William D Gairdner: The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree (2015, Encounter Books): Author is Canadian, previously wrote books like The Trouble With Canada and The Trouble With Democracy, and the publisher is right-wing, so I don't expect he comes up with much of an answer. I'd say that polarization reflects increasing inequality, which by definition means we have less in common, and that leads to less respect for one another. In a polarized society, people are less likely to compromise on the self-interest of others (unless they are compelled, so the power to do that is increasingly sought). While some of these traits are even-sided, others are asymmetrical. In particular, the right is much more fond of using force to achieve its ends (war, violence, guns, jail). On the other hand, the left is more likely to recognize the humanity of the right than vice versa: the left's definition of "us" is broadly inclusive, the right's is exclusive. And the goals are fundamentally different: the right seeks to preserve the wealth and privilege of the few, whereas the left prefers to share the wealth among all people. Gairdner may muddy this up a bit by sticking to "conservative" and "liberal" labels.

Atul Gawande: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014, Metropolitan Books): Surgeon, has written several eloquent books on his craft, the health care industry, and sometimes how they don't mesh very well. For instance, hospitals often spend a lot of time and effort (for a lot of money) doing fruitless procedures on people who are dying anyway, often causing more suffering than they can alleviate.

Russell Gold: The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World (2014, Simon & Schuster): It's long been known that you can boost oil production by pumping liquids into oil fields to force the oil toward the producing wells. That's been done in Saudi Arabia since the 1940s, but hasn't been cost-effective in the US until recently. Hydraulic fracturing goes a step further, opening up oil- (and gas-) saturated shales that otherwise would be too dense to produce. The US has a lot of gas-shale, and that's the base for the so-called boom. US oil production has been diminishing since its peak in 1969, and we're seeing similar limits and declines all around the world -- a phenomenon that validates the "peak oil" hypothesis. Fracking, therefore, to some observers looks like a reversal of the laws of physics rather than just the next increasingly-expensive recovery methods. My view is that the boom is temporary, and that in the US in particular, where there is so little effort aimed at conserving petroleum resources, it's something that we'll burn through pretty quickly (while depositing all that greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, trapping solar energy and cooking the planet). Other recent books (2014 unless noted): Ezra Levant: Groundswell: The Case for Fracking (Signal); Michael Levi: The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future (2013, Oxford University Press); Alex Prudhomme: Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know (paperback, 2013, Oxford University Press); George Zuckerman: The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters (2013, Portfolio); but also see: Walter M Brasch: Fracking Pennsylvania: Flirting With Disaster (paperback, Greeley & Stone); and Richard Heinberg: Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future (paperback, 2013, Post Carbon Institute).

Richard Goldstein: Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s (2015, Bloomsbury USA): A memoir by a good candidate for America's first rock critic, who started writing "Pop Eye" for the Village Voice in 1966. By the time I started reading him he was mostly writing about politics, which was fine with me.

John Michael Greer: Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America (paperback, 2014, New Society): Prime concern is economic sustainability, which he doesn't find much evidence of in the US. Has a number of doom and gloom works, aside from his interest in organic gardening.

Mohsin Hamid: Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London (2015, Riverhead): Novelist from Pakistan, has lived in those other towns (currently a UK citizen), collects essays on "life, art, politics, and 'the war on terror.'"

Simon Head: Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans (2014, Basic Books): Focuses on Computer Business Systems (CBSs) used to run large businesses, including the supply chains of Walmart and Amazon but also the financial shenanigans of Goldman Sachs. That this sort of technology is used to automate jobs and suppress wages has long been obvious. But who gets dumber as a result?

Bob Herbert: Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America (2014, Doubleday): Former New York Times opinion columnist travels around America and finds much to worry, and complain, about.

Matthew W Hughey/Gregory S Parks: The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama (2014, NYU Press): Looks at how Republicans talk about Obama and finds various ways they exploit lingering racism in America.

Kojin Karatani: The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (paperback, 2014, Duke University Press): Japanese philosopher, has written about Kant and Marx in the past (Transcritique: On Kant and Marx), revisits Marx somewhere between anthopology and globalization.

Edward D Kleinbard: We Are Better Than This: How Government Should Spend Our Money (2014, Oxford University Press): An attempt to reframe government taxation/spending debates not on traditional left-right terms but in terms of return on investments regardless of size. I think this is fundamentally right, although the devil will be in the details. There are many useful and important things that government can do more efficiently and more effectively than the private sector -- indeed, there are some that the private sector will only do if plied with exorbitant bribes. Nice to think we're smart enough we can figure this out, but there's little evidence of that.

Jon Krakauer: Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (2015, Doubleday): A small city, population nearly 70,000, home of University of Montana so about 15,000 students. Local authorities were notoriously lax investigating rape complaints, so Krakauer investigated and this is what he found out. FWIW, I've read five previous books by Krakauer (out of six).

Daniel J Levitin: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (2014, Dutton): Brain book, verging into self-help territory. Author has a couple of books on music: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Information overload is a real issue, and a reliable method for coping is something one might desire. However, as long as misinformation is profitable that will be a tall order.

Charles Lewis: 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity (2014, Public Affairs): IF Stone used to say, "all governments lie." Still, we'd be better off with fewer lies, which I suppose is the point of this. But getting to the truth is surely a more complex process. Lewis is such a stickler for the certainty of truth that his title refers to a documented count of"lies that led to the war in Iraq." Sure, there were lies, many of them, but some were big and some were small, some flowed automatically from others, most from misperceptions about how the world works and how American force functions in that world. Correcting for lies is a worthwhile step, but understanding why powers lie and being able to detect when they do even if you don't know what the truth is are more important still.

William McDonough/Michael Braungart: The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability, Designing for Abundance (paperback, 2013, North Point Press): An architect and a chemist, previously wroteCradle to Cradle: Remking the Way We Make Things (2002), an engineering ethic that not only dispenses with planned obsolence but goes much farther.

Kirsten Powers: The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech (2015, Regnery): Billed as a "lifelong liberal," worked in the Clinton administration, etc. But note the publisher, that she's a "Fox news contributor," and that her blurb authors are: Charles Krauthammer, Brit Hume, Juan Williams, Eric Metaxas, Ron Fournier, and George F Will. Or just the subtitle: no one on the left actually refers to the left as such, partly because we realize what they call the left we know to be a wide range of often conflicting views with no effective organizational unity. (We can, of course, speak of the right, with their daily talking points endlessly drummed into their marching base via Fox News, although lately even some of them seem to be going off message.) I have no idea what actual examples Powers has come up with -- maybe the old anti-PC rant that people should be able to express themselves as racists without fear of objection or challenge. It's true that occasionally someone says something racist on mainstream media and gets canned for embarrassing the network, but it's not the left that owns those media. For most of my life the right has been the far more serious threat to free speech -- most chillingly during the McCarthy period, but even now there's a concerted right-wing effort to purge universities of left-leaning professors (something David Horowitz, who uses"left" repeatedly in his book titles, is very active at). One can also mention efforts to prosecute (or "hold in contempt") journalists who reveal classified secrets -- James Risen is a prominent recent case. Since Obama's DOJ went after Risen, and Powers' people regard Obama as part of "the left," maybe that made Powers' list? I doubt it, since that's just the sort of thing the right would do given the opportunity. If you want to find out about real threats to free speech, check with the ACLU.

Diana Preston: A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare (2015, Bloomsbury Press): Historian, has written about the Boxer Rebellion, the Lusitania, and Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (2009), and with her husband has written historical fiction pseudonymously as Alex Rutherford. Her six-week window here was April to June 1915, during which the Germans introduced submarine warfare, aerial bombing (from a zeppelin), and poison gas (chlorine) -- innovations which "forever changed the nature of warfare." Her title, by the way, isn't original; see Robert Harris/Jeremy Paxman: A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (paperback, 2002, Random House). Still, the notion that less discriminate forms of killing are"higher" is perplexing.

Arundhati Roy: Capitalism: A Ghost Story (paperback, 2014, Haymarket Books): Short political broadside from the famous Indian novelist, critic, and activist. She has a bunch of these, including: Walking With the Comrades (paperback, 2011, Penguin);Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (paperback, 2009, Haymarket); An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (paperback, 2004, South End Press); Public Power in the Age of Empire (paperback, 2004, Seven Stories Press); War Talk (paperback, 2003, South End Press); Power Politics (2nd ed, paperback, 2002, South End Press); The Cost of Living (paperback, 1999, Modern Library).

Asne Seierstad: One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux): In 2011 Breivik killed eight with a bomb and shot and killed sixty-nine more at a Labour Party youth camp -- crimes he justified with a lengthy racist tract. Seierstad, from Norway, has written well-regarded journalism about Afghanistan (The Bookseller of Kabul, Iraq (One Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal, and Chechnya (Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya).

Micah L Sifry: The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) (paperback, 2014, O/R Books):"This is a book for social and political activists." The Internet promised more democracy. It didn't exactly deliver less, but it wrapped it up in so much noise it made many things harder to sort out, and harder to do. By offering us more connection, it's wound up making us more isolated. I read some of this and see the problems, but only a limited slice is available in the preview: any answers he has seem to be beyond the cut. Ain't that just typical?

Ken Silverstein: The Secret World of Oil (2014, Verso): Focuses more on the corruption of the finance and trading sides of the industry, as opposed to more mundane matters like exploration and production. Needless to say, there is a lot of corruption to report.

Vaclav Smil: Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken From Nature (2012, MIT Press): Rather technical assessment of how much of the Earth's biosphere has been captured by human beings, and how this affects the carrying capacity of the planet. Important info for that population bomb debate.

Robert David Steele: The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust (paperback, 2012, Evolver Editions): Author started out as a spy, but found that the shroud of secrecy in his business wound up distorting everything. He came up with the idea of Open Source Intelligence as a way of untangling the subversion, then picked up the lessons from Open Source Software and tried to generalize that into Open Source Everything. Needless to say, this sounds right to me -- at least until proven otherwise.

John Paul Stevens: Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (2014, Little Brown): Brief book by retired Supreme Court justice wants to tinker. The subjects: the"anti-commandeering" rule; political gerrymandering; campaign finance; sovereign immunity; the death penalty; the second amendment (gun control).

John Szwed: Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (2015, Viking): Biography of the legendary jazz singer, timed to come out 100 years after Holiday's birth. Szwed has written excellent biographies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, and Alan Lomax, as well as the essential primer, Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz (2000).

Dominic Tierney: The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (2015, Little Brown): Military theoretician, so no chance he'll advise avoiding conflicts let alone wars. But he's aware that the US hasn't won, by any definition, much of anything since WWII, and that the problem lies in the nature of the conflicts (which American thrashing only aggravates). His formula is surge-talk-leave. This assumes there's some tangible goals short of occupation, but that's probably another book/author. (I could imagine that the credible threat of US invasion might cajole some sort of power-sharing agreement -- that's sort of what happened with Bosnia/Serbia -- but that's hardly the American way.) Author previously co-wrote Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (2006) and wrote FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle That Divided America (2007) and How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010).

William Voegeli: The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion (2014, Broadside Books): A new twist on an old complaint, that liberal programs to help the less fortunate don't work (help the less fortunate) because, well -- fill in the blank. Being an asshole, Voegeli doesn't really care why they don't work, since he rejects the notion that compassion is a good reason to do anything, and he regards people who are compassionate as "unfit to govern" -- most conservatives agree, but try to palm off their mean-spiritedness as something a bit more palatable, like "tough love" (lest they look like assholes). I doubt that Voegeli is really doing his kind any favors here. It strikes me that both conservatives and liberals are more or less equally likely to empathize or be compassionate, but the kind of people conservatives care about is much more limited (to people most like themselves), whereas liberals are less picky about the people they care for. This leads Voegeli to a key misunderstanding: most programs he decries as compassionate (because they benefit people he would regard as pitiable if he wasn't such an asshole) are seen by liberals as self-help -- after all, they help people not unlike oneself.

Janine R Wedel: Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security (2014, Pegasus): Any doubt that American policy is primarily driven by the profit motive, both for the elites that control it and the corporations that bankroll them, should be dispelled here. This not only delegitimizes policies, it is more often than not dysfunctional, guaranteeing that the sponsored policies will fail. Wedel initially studied corruption in Poland. Then she came home, to see how it is really done.

Edward O Wilson: The Social Conquest of Earth (paperback, 2013, Liveright): Invented something I never trusted that he calls sociobiology, but he is one of the foremost writers on the impact of human beings on nature, and there is no doubt that humans have conquered earth, for better or worse. Or maybe this book is just about insect societies? -- another of his major topics.

Stephen Witt: How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (2015, Viking): Business writer focuses on how file sharing works and rose in prominence, undermining the recorded music industry.

James Wolcott: Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs (2013, Doubleday): Bio doesn't mention Village Voice, where I know him from, but the music reviews go back that far, and are complemented by pieces on film and TV, books, other things a literate raconteur would bump into over the last 30-40 years.

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Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Music: Current count 25234 [25190] rated (+44), 451 [453] unrated (-2).

After wrapping up last week's (month's) Rhapsody Streamnotes on Wednesday, I decided I wanted to work on the long-delayed book posts -- two appeared on Friday and Saturday, and a third will probably appear tomorrow -- so I didn't want to think much about what to listen to while I was working. And nothing could have taken less thought than picking off records from the Spin 1985-2014 list, so that's what I did. A week ago there were 31 records on the list I hadn't heard. Now there are 12 -- 9 not on Rhapsody, 3 more I haven't checked yet (Deftones, Green Day, Total 4), so I'll at least check out the latter. (Several people mentioned that the missing albums are on YouTube, a resource I've never used for music -- probably because I've hated watching music videos since they first became mandatory in the '80s. I have occasionally consulted YouTube for plumbing tips.)

As the grades below attest, the alt/indie rock albums toward the bottom of Spin's list were pretty awful -- most so bad I didn't bother trying to fill in any other albums I had missed. (I did check out Aerosmith's Greatest Hits and Animal Collective's Feels, which beat the recommended albums, and Cursive's Domestica and M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which didn't.) I did go deeper into 2Pac and Lil Wayne (having only heard the former's posthumous Better Dayz, but I've heard most of the latter's later work -- even some of the numerous mixtapes). Main insight I got into 2Pac was that by the time All Eyez on Me arrived he had become so submerged in the process all those posthumous records shouldn't have been a surprise -- after all, his presence hardly matters. Lil Wayne had little presence in his first albums -- they are really just mixtapes (before their time) -- but he emerged as a star as Tha Carter series started. Dimmed after that stint in jail, of course, but the first three Tha Carters are pretty amazing records. (Good chance Tha Carter II would wind up full-A if I spent more time with it.)

I also checked out Best of Frankie Knuckles but it just gathers up his early 12-inchers and doesn't find its stride until the second half. He might benefit from the sort of career-spanning treatment Rhino gave Larry Levan in Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story, but thus far at least I've always found Chicago House a bit dull.

As I was going through the Spin list, I noticed new albums by Lil Wayne, Mount Eerie (ex Microphones), and Swervedriver. None turned out to be special. I managed to work a few new jazz CDs into the week, but nothing made much of an impression until Amir ElSaffar. Among other things -- and there are a lot of other things -- this is the first album where he's really made a big splash with his trumpet chops.

I don't make anything resembling a systematic effort to track books on music, but I do note some that strike my personal fancy. But in case some readers glaze over when presented with long lists of politics-economics-history, I thought I'd note the music (more or less) books from this spate of book posts (including a sneak peek at tomorrow's):

• Hisham D Aidi: Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (paperback, 2014, Vintage)
• Robert Christgau: Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (2015, Dey Street Books): memoir
• Richard Goldstein: Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s (2015, Bloomsbury): another memoir
• Michaelangelo Matos: The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (2015, Dey Street Books)
• John Szwed: Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (2015, Viking): biography
• Eric Weisbard: Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (paperback, 2014, University of Chicago Press)
• Stephen Witt: How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (2015, Viking)
• James Wolcott: Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs (2013, Doubleday): essay collection (probably not much music)

I've read Christgau's memoir, and have bought Matos' book -- something I want to learn more about, from someone I have immense respect for. The other one I find tempting is Aidi's Rebel Music, which among other things is likely to cognitively baffle most westerners with their preconceptions about Islamic fundamentalism. (I did read Mark LeVine's Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, but I'm less fond of metal than hip-hop.) But the fact is that I have other reading priorities, and have long been coasting on the music knowledge-base I accumulated last century. So most of the music books I have bought over the last decade -- Szwed's Sun Ra biography and George Lewis' A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music are two important books that come to mind -- remain unread. Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo is the exception (and should be yours).

New records rated this week:

• Linda Dachtyl: A Late One (2015, Summit): [cd]: B+(**)
• Amir ElSaffar: Crisis (2015, Pi): [cd]: A-
• Nick Fraser: Too Many Continents (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Daniel Levin Quartet: Friction (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B
• Lil Wayne: The Free Weezy Album (2015, Young Money/Republic): [dl]: B+(*)
• Bob Mintzer Big Band: Get Up! (2015, MCG Jazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Mount Eerie: Sauna (2015, PW Elverum & Sun): [r]: B-
• Jason Roebke: Every Sunday (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Roots Magic: Hoodoo Blues & Roots Magic (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• Swervedriver: I Wasn't Born to Lose You (2015, Cobraside): [r]: B
• Tame Impala: Currents (2015, Caroline): [r]: B+(*)
• Bill Warfield and the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra: Mercy Mercy Mercy (2015, Blujazz): [cd]: B+(*)

Old records rated this week:

• 2Pac: 2Pacalypse (1991, Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• 2Pac: Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z... (1993, Interscope): [r]: B
• 2Pac: Me Against the World (1995, Interscope): [r]: B-
• 2Pac: All Eyez on Me (1996, Death Row, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Aerosmith: Aerosmith's Greatest Hits (1972-79 [1980], Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Aerosmith: Pump (1989, Geffen): [r]: B-
• Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes (1991, Atlantic): [r]: B
• Animal Collective: Sung Tongs (2004, Fat Cat): [r], C+
• Animal Collective: Feels (2005, Fat Cat): [r], B+(*)
• Birdman & Lil Wayne: Like Father, Like Son (2006, Cash Money/Universal): [r]: B+(***)
• Neko Case: Blacklisted (2000, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(*)
• The Close Readers: Group Hug (2010 [2011], Austin): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Close Readers: New Spirit (2012, Austin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Cursive: Domestica (2000, Saddle Creek): [r]: B
• Cursive: The Ugly Organ (2003, Saddle Creek): [r]: B-
• Killers: Hot Fuss (2004, Island/Universal): [r]: B
• Frankie Knuckles: Best of Frankie Knuckles (1986-87 [1998], Mirakkle): [r]: B+(**)
• Frankie Knuckles: Beyond the Mix (1991, Virgin): [r]: B+(**)
• Lil Wayne: Tha Block Is Hot (1999, Cash Money/Universal): [r]: B+(**)
• Lil Wayne: 500 Degreez (2002, Cash Money/Universal): [r]: B+(***)
• Lil Wayne: Tha Carter (2004, Cash Money/Universal): [r]: A-
• Lil Wayne: Tha Carter II (2005, Cash Money/Universal): [r]: A-
• Lil Wayne: The Leak (2007, Cash Money, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (2003, Gooom Disques): [r]: B-
• M83: Saturdays = Youth (2008, Mute): [r]: B
• Maxwell: Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite (1996, Columbia): [r]: B
• The Microphones: The Glow, Pt. 2 (2002, K): [r]: B+(**)
• My Chemical Romance: Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (2004, Reprise): [r]: B-
• Ride: Nowhere (1990, Sire): [r]: B+(***)
• Slint: Spiderland (1991, Touch & Go): [r]: B
• Swervedriver: Mezcal Head (1993, A&M): [r]: B+(**)
• System of a Down: Toxicity (2001, American): [r]: B+(*)
• The Unicorns: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003, Alien8): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet: 10 (Zoho): August 7
• Don Braden: Luminosity (Creative Perspective Music): September 15
• John Fedchock New York Big Band: Like It Is (MAMA): August 7
• Daniel Fortin: Brinks (Fresh Sound New Talent)
• Gaetano Letizia/Mike Clark/Wilbur Krebs: Froggy & the Toads (self-released): September 4
• Shai Maestro Trio: Untold Stories (Motema): August 28

I started doing these book blurb "roundups" inApril 2007. This is the 57th such column, so I've averaged about 7 per year. I don't recall when I introduced the 40-book limit, but that should add up to a little more than 2000 books over 8 years. (The actual cumulativefile has 3319 paragraphs in it, of which a couple hundred are probably redundant blurbs -- most often written for paperback reprints.) This last week I've been trying to catch up with the last 12 months -- a break in my postings, although I had taken notes and written a few entries during that time. That yielded a column on June 17 and two more last week, with this the third. Forty books here leave me with a little more than twenty in the draft file. I'm going to try to round them up to a fourth installment later this week. The main thing that's slowing me down is that I have at least eight notebooks with lists of books I jotted down at various bookstores, and I'm slowly going through them, trying to decipher my atrocious handwriting, and look things up. Some of the books are worth adding, but many more are dated -- in fact, I'm finding a lot from around 2010 (along with notes on Borders coupons; frankly, I haven't been to many bookstores since Borders was shut down). More on that later.

Meanwhile, here's another forty books from the last year or two. My interest in collecting these is to get a sense of the public debate on important political/social/economic issues and their history (although sometimes my interests are a bit wider than that). With very few exceptions, these are not books I've read, or even actually looked at. The information is mostly gathered by browsing through Amazon or (rarely) other websites, so it depends on published summaries, blurbs, occasionally reader comments, and sometimes by looking at the partial preview scans.

Ali Abunimah: The Battle for Justice in Palestine (paperback, 2014, Haymarket Books): Palestinian blogger, previously wrote One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, tries to remain hopeful.

Hisham D Aidi: Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (paperback, 2014, Vintage): Explores musical subcultures among Muslim youth around the world, primarily hip-hop but also rock, reggae, and more traditional forms like Gnawa. Also seems to know the history where bits of traditional Muslim music worked into blues, jazz, and other genres we don't associate with the Muslim world. I see no mention of metal here, but it's worth noting Mark LeVine: Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (paperback, 2008, Three Rivers Press).

George A Akerlof/Robert J Shiller: Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (2015, Princeton University Press): Two Nobel Prize economists who built their careers by exploring cases where markets fail, co-authors of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (2009). Proper functioning of markets depends on perfect information, but that rarely exists. That leaves a lot of opportunity for profit through fraud, and that's what this is about.

David Bromwich: Moral Imagination: Essays (2014, Princeton University Press): A dozen essays, three in Part Two on Abraham Lincoln. The ones I'd be most interested in reading:"The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789" and "Comments on Perpetual War" with its sections on Cheney, Snowden, and "What 9/11 Makes Us Forget." I read an essay of his on American Exceptionalism that doesn't seem to be here, unless it's the better-titled "The American Psychosis" (or "The Self-Deceptions of Empire").

Paul Buhle/David Berger: Bohemians: A Graphic History (paperback, 2014, Verso): Buhle was editor of Radical America way back when. A historian, he had an interest in comics long before graphic novels became commonplace. This explores the counterculture before the word was coined. Buhle also collaborated on: w/Nicole Schulman: Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (paperback, 2005, Verso); w/Sharon Rudahl: Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (paperback, 2007, New Press); w/Howard Zinn/Mike Konopacki: A People's History of American Empire (paperback, 2008, Metropolitan Books); w/Denis Kitchen: The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (2009, Abrams); w/Harvey Pekar: Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History (paperback, 2009, Hill & Wang); w/Harvey Pekar: The Beats: A Graphic History (2009; paperback, 2010, Hill & Wang); and he's written two "For Beginners" books -- which, by the way, is a good place to start on anything they cover:FDR and the New Deal for Beginners (paperback, 2010, For Beginners); Lincoln for Beginners (paperback, 2015, For Beginners).

Ha-Joon Chang: Economics: The User's Guide (2014, Bloomsbury Press): A basic economics primer from a Korean economist who's been known to cast a critical eye on capitalism and its myths of development strategy; cf. his Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002), Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007) and23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (2011).

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me (2015, Spiegel & Grau): Short (176 pp) book, a memoir as a letter to a teenage son, life lessons and all that, an Afro-American essayist being compared to James Baldwin but from a different (but not that different) era. Previously wrote The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2009).

Paul Collier: Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World (2013; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press): A more general book on what we narrow-mindedly call immigration, Collier is the author of several books on things that generate migration, including: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (paperback, 2007, Oxford University Press);Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (2009, Harper; paperback, 2010, Harper Perennial); and The Plundered Planet: Why We Must -- and How We Can -- Manage Nature for Global Prosperity (2010; paperback, 2011, Oxford University Press). Book's original subtitle (in UK): Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century.

Tom Engelhardt: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (paperback, 2014, Haymarket Books): Another collections of columns from the author's TomDispatch website, on various aspects of the US security state and its shaky pretensions to empire.

Rory Fanning: Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America (paperback, 2014, Haymarket Books): A former Army Ranger, a member of the same unit that killed Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, leaves the military and tries to find the America he once thought he was serving. Turns out his service was not in vain -- it was just suspended for a few years due to his wrong turn into the Army.

Robert A Ferguson: Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (2014, Harvard University Press): America's criminal justice system is broken, in large part because those who run it seem unable to grasp the notion that punishment should be limited, both for practical reasons (like declining effectiveness) and because it systematizes brutality.

Martin Ford: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015, Basic Books): Written by "a Silicon Valley entrepreneur," argues that with recent and expected advances in automation and artificial intelligence the future will offer ever fewer "good jobs" (or for that matter jobs of any sort). The result will be unprecedented unemployment -- made worse, I'm sure, by the conservative mantra that forces people into ever poorer jobs. By the way, that's also pretty much the point of James K Galbraith: The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014, Simon & Schuster).

Brandon L Garrett: Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Corporations (2014, Belknap Press): Although we've lately seen some large fines, none of the people who wrecked the economy in 2008 (except Bernie Madoff, I guess) have been so much as threatened with jail terms -- surprising given the magnitude of fraud in some of the cases.

Jonathan Marc Gribetz: Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (2014, Princeton University Press): Explores how Jews and Arabs interacted in the early days of Zionist settlement, especially under Ottoman rule before the British tilted the tables in favor of Zionism. Gribetz argues that at least within this period the two peoples didn't see themselves in nationalist terms, but were separated on other bases (like religion and race). It occurs to me that the Ottomans provided just that framework, one which changed dramatically when the English took over (when Zionists adopted British colonial attitudes and tactics, while both sides realized that nationalism would provide a path to independence).

Tim Harford: The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run -- or Ruin -- an Economy (2014, Riverhead): Author of a series of book that try to explain economics with everyday examples, attempts to make the leap from micro to macro here. Not sure whether he's up to it, especially given the summaries I've read. I've read one of his book, and don't remember a thing about it.

Andrew Hartman: A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015, University of Chicago Press): The phrase "culture war" is brandied about so often that you probably know what Hartman is writing about -- a laundry list of hot-button issues ("abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, feminism, and homosexuality") that the (mostly religious) right got worked up about since whenever, their hysteria more effective once they aligned with the right-wing Reagan juggernaut. But to call this a "war" posits a skirmish where both sides attack the other: in fact, the attacks almost all come from the right, and what they're attacking is most often an extension of basic civil and human rights contrary to the most cherished prejudices of the right. Note that the list above doesn't include theocracy, which is what most of the huff is really about.

Dale Jamieson: Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future (2014, Oxford University Press): Author, a philosopher, seems to accept the basic science of climate change -- indeed, "in his view, catastrophic ecological damage is a foregone conclusion" -- but has more trouble with why so many people have trouble coming to grips with the issue. One thing he focuses on is lack of agency: the sense that what little we can do as individuals doesn't matter. Not clear that he digs behind this sense of powerlessness to look at the economic interests that benefit -- at least within the narrow confines of their accounting systems -- from filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Related: George Marshall: Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014, Bloomsbury Press).

Mark LeVine/Mathias Mossberg, eds: One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States (paperback, 2014, University of California Press): A collection of essays that attempt to work out how two states, defined not by territory but by their respective citizenship cohorts, might work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don't see the term, but this looks like a refinement of the bi-national notion that pops up periodically when prospects for two-states or one-state look especially grim, but never seems more than an idea. This is, indeed,"thinking outside the box" (a chapter title).

John R MacArthur: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America: Or, Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible (paperback, 2012, Melville House): Written after Obama had nearly finished his first term but before his reelection, it's clear that the author didn't consider his first term progressive -- well, neither did I. Also early enough to include a blurb by George McGovern, who knows a few things about what can happen to a smart and fundamentally decent human being when he dares run for president. And while running is bad enough, one recalls how both Clinton and Obama abandoned issues they ran on almost the instant they entered the White House. MacArthur's previous books include The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy (2000).

Michaelangelo Matos: The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (2015, Dey Street Books): The one critic I try to follow regularly for his insights into techno or electronica or EDM or whatever you call it -- I still remain blissfully ignorant of the distinctions between the dozen or so subgenres my favorite Detroit-area record store uses. So I grabbed this as soon as it came out, and some day hope to get around to it.

Jane McAlevey: Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (paperback, 2014, Verso): Trying to revive the American labor movement, from the front lines, by a (relatively) successful labor organizer.

Robert W McChesney: Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy (2014, Monthly Review Press): Professor of communications, media critic, has a pile of books, mostly on how media in America is perverted by corporate control, and the ill effect that has on democracy.

David Ohana/David Maisel: The Origins of Israeli Mythology: Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders (paperback, 2014, Cambridge University Press): Attempts to explain Zionism through the symbolic opposition and entanglement of two story lines: one that roots the Israelis unshakably deep in the history of the land, the other that recognizes their conquest from outside but proclaims it divine.

Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty: Summary, Key Ideas and Facts (paperback, 2014, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform): Short (112 pp.) summary of Piketty's bestselling book: the most important book to have appeared recently on increasing inequality, the central political problem of our time.

Thomas Piketty: The Economics of Inequality (2015, Belknap Press): A short (160 pp) general text on inequality, older than last year's monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century -- most likely a translation (and possibly update) of 2004's L'économie des inégalités.

Katha Pollitt: Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (2014, Picador): One of the few books I've seen recently that seeks to regain the moral high ground on the issue of reproductive rights, of which access to safe abortions is essential. A longtime feminist flag-waving columnist, her essays were previously collected as Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time (paperback, 2006, Random House).

Jake Rosenfeld: What Unions No Longer Do (2014, Harvard University Press): A history of the decline of labor unions in America, and what we as a nation lose by no longer having unions to advocate for American workers sharing a more equitable stake in the economy. Several more recent books on the decline (and/or hoped for revitalization) of unions: Stanley Aronowitz: The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker's Movement (2014, Verso Books); Steve Early: Save Our Unions: Dispatches From a Movement in Distress (paperback, 2013, Monthly Review Press); Raymond L Hogler: The End of American Labor Unions: The Right-to-Work Movement and the Erosion of Collective Bargaining (2015, Praeger). Thomas Geoghegan, in Only One Thing Can Save Us Now: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (2014, New Press), argues for treating the right to join a union (which is enshrined by law under the Wagner Act but virtually unenforceable) as a civil right, under civil rights law.

Peter Schweizer: Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets (2013, Houghton Mifflin): Would seem like an equal-opportunity politician-hater -- previous book was Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison but he's also written tomes flattering conservatives (Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals) and slamming government (Architects of Ruin: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation). The fact is that the entire political system is open to corruption, and insiders of both parties are protective of it: indeed, they're pretty much selected for their ability to raise money. Still, there are differences: on the one side there is the party that acknowledges that there is such a thing as the public interest and occasionally considers the desires of people without money, and on the other side there is the celebrates the naked pursuit of self-interest and does everything it can to allow businesses and property owners to rip your off. Obama promised much during his campaign, and one thing promised he did absolutely nothing on was to work to limit the influence of money on politics. Whether he was sincere or not is almost beside the point: as you can see by the alignment of the majority in the Citizens United case, the leading promoters of corruption in politics today are conservatives, in large part because they realize their is to anti-popular that the only way they can win is to bury the issues in expensive propaganda. Still, the likely error here is thinking that politicians are shaking down business (extortion) rather than business corrupting the politicians. To test what's really happening you should weigh the relative economic slices. One thing you'll find is that politicians work pretty cheap.

Richard Seymour: Against Austerity: How We Can Fix the Crisis They Made (paperback, 2014, Pluto Press): Prescribing austerity to cure a recession is much like the mediaeval practice of bleeding patients, and backed by about as much science and logic. British writer, sees austerity as class struggle, as an attack on the working class, as if the recession didn't do damage enough.

Pat Shipman: The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction (2015, Belknap Press): Co-author of The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind (1993, with Erik Trinkaus), also wrote The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human (2011). The former book did much to give us a sense of how modern neanderthals were, so the question of their extinction continued to puzzle, advancing speculation (or whatever) here.

Les Standiford: Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles (2015, Ecco): The story of the Los Angeles Water Company and construction of a 233-mile aqueduct to move water from the Sierra Nevada to the desert valley that became Los Angeles -- a story vaguely familiar if you've seen the movie Chinatown, or read Marc Reisner'sCadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986, revised 1993).

Wolfgang Streeck: Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (paperback, 2014, Verso): Lectures providing a brief history and critique of neoliberalism since the 1970s, focusing on how the business doctrine interacts with (undermines) democracy.

Richard H Thaler: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (2015, WW Norton): One of the first economists to look at irrational behavior in economics (as opposed to the usual math-simplifying assumption of rational actors), became better known when he teamed with political theorist Cass Sunstein for Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Presumably more analysis here, and less of the wonkery they call "libertarian paternalism."

Laurence Tribe/Joshua Matz: Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution (2014, Henry Holt): On the very divided Supreme Court, which seems to tip one way or the other on uncertain whims, sometimes as extreme as the Citizens United ruling which practically turns elections into auctions.

George R Tyler: What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . and What Other Countries Got Right (2013, BenBella Books): Author has a background in international non-profits, particularly regarding pharmaceuticals, so he not only understands the nuts and bolts of increasing inequality, he knows how more robust safety nets outside the US have cushioned the blow.

Kenneth P Vogel: Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp -- on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich, Hijacking American Politics (2014, Public Affairs): Sort of a "who's who" of the big money players in American politics, some notorious like Sheldon Adelson and the Kochs, others more discreet. American politics has always been highly corruptible, all the more so as the nation's wealth is increasingly captured to a tiny elite.

David Weil: The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done About It (2014, Harvard University Press): The reason is worker's loss of power/leverage. Weil specifically focuses on outsourcing but that's only one piece, and indeed the threat of outsourcing is often effective at cutting the knees from under workers. Loss of worker power lets companies do other dastardly things, but even if they are less malign, the loss of interest lets all sorts of rot set in. Weil sees better regulations as helping without denying companies "the beneficial aspects of this innovative business strategy." Another approach would be unions.

Tim Weiner: One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (2015, Henry Holt): Author of two sprawling histories,Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) and Enemies: A History of the FBI (2012). As more of Nixon's tapes are opened up more precision is added to the history, not that the general lines weren't adequately revealed at the time. I mentioned this in a long list of recent Nixon books under the entry for Douglas Brinkley/Luke A Nichter: The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972, but felt it was worth singling out. For one thing, this is likely to be the most damning of the non-fringe books, and no one deserves a more jaundiced critical eye than Nixon.

Eric Weisbard: Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (paperback, 2014, University of Chicago Press): As I recall, pop/rock seemed like a single mass culture in the early 1970s, but even then radio stations were coming up with various genre/formats to attract desired advertising niches, and by the '80s it was all over: one could listen to pop/rock all the time and never come across a top-ten single (excepting Madonna). In retrospect, other genres had split off well before the 1970s, and each makes for its own peculiar view into its own slice of the culture. This book looks back on the main ones, with the last chapter's post-millennial fragmentation the only one I have no sense of.

Darrell M West: Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (paperback, 2014, Brookings Institution Press): Billionaires are different from mere millionaires. Many of the latter have the sort of economic security that ensures they can survive misfortunes and will never go wanting, but they are still need to do the accounting to keep their fortunes in shape. Billionaires are not just secure. They are so secure they have money they can't think of any conceivable use for other than to remake the world in their own image. US politics has become little more than a plaything for billionaires, much like polo ponies in olden days but far more dangerous.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Downbeat sent me a couple pieces of mail asking me to vote in their Readers Poll, but without clear instructions. Google shows the SurveyMonkey URI to behere. (By all means, follow it and vote. I think the deadline is August 12. FYI, Tim Niland also posted his ballot here.) I voted in their Critics Poll back inApril. That's a more complex ballot -- main difference is that we were asked to identify Rising Stars in each category -- and I tried to think of that task as a critic. For the Readers Poll, I figure I just have to be a fan. I also figure there are more people voting, and it probably won't do any good to write names in. I also intend to go fast: to look nothing up, to write no comments. The only thing slow I'm doing is to keep the following list. The first one listed is the one I voted for. Others are possible choices I picked out in scanning the list (in alphabetical, not rank, order). "NOB" means not on ballot: I'm not trying to suggest names for the ballot, but sometimes a name occurs to me that I might have voted for but wasn't on the ballot. Since the ballots typically have 30-60 names, such omissions are especially egregious. The alternates fade out past percussion -- it was getting late, and I don't think much about categories like Composer or Arranger (or Blues Album).

• Hall of Fame: George Russell + Han Bennink, Anthony Braxton, Don Byas, Don Cherry, Jimmy Giuffre, Abdullah Ibrahim, Illinois Jacquet, Sam Rivers, Tomasz Stanko, Cedar Walton. [NOB: Mal Waldron.]
• Jazz Artist: Anthony Braxton + Dave Douglas, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Ken Vandermark.
• Jazz Group: Rova + Claudia Quintet, Microscopic Septet. [NOB: Mostly Other People Do the Killing.]
• Big Band: ICP Orchestra + Steven Bernstein Millennial Territory Orchestra, Either/Orchestra.
• Jazz Album (Released June 1, 2014 to May 31, 2015): Steve Lehman Octet, Mise En Abime (Pi)
• Historical Jazz Album (Released June 1, 2014 to May 31, 2015): Sun Ra, In the Orbit of Ra (Strut)
• Trumpet: Wadada Leo Smith + Steven Bernstein, Dave Douglas, Tomasz Stanko, Kenny Wheeler.
• Trombone: Roswell Rudd + Ray Anderson, Joe Fiedler, Steve Swell.
• Soprano Saxophone: Evan Parker + Sam Newsome.
• Alto Saxophone: François Carrier + Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Oliver Lake, Steve Lehman, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Henry Threadgill, Miguel Zenón.
• Tenor Saxophone: David Murray + Harry Allen, James Carter, Jon Irabagon, Joe Lovano, Tony Malaby, Joe McPhee, Evan Parker, Ivo Perelman, Houston Person, Ken Vandermark.
• Baritone Saxophone: Ken Vandermark + Mats Gustafsson.
• Clarinet: Michael Moore + Buddy DeFranco, Marty Ehrlich, Ben Goldberg, Perry Robinson, Louis Sclavis.
• Flute: Henry Threadgill
• Piano: Satoko Fujii + Kenny Barron, Uri Caine, Marilyn Crispell, Abdullah Ibrahim, Vijay Iyer, Keith Jarrett, Myra Melford, Misha Mengelberg, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Matthew Shipp, Craig Taborn.
• Keyboard: Craig Taborn
• Organ: John Medeski
• Guitar: Marc Ribot + Nels Cline, Bill Frisell, Mary Halvorson.
• Bass: William Parker + Arild Andersen, Mark Dresser, Charlie Haden, John Hébert, Peter Washington, Reggie Workman.
• Electric Bass: Steve Swallow
• Violin: Jenny Scheinman + Jason Kao Hwang.
• Drums: Andrew Cyrille + Joey Baron, Han Bennink, Jim Black, Gerald Cleaver, Jack DeJohnette, Hamid Drake, Gerry Hemingway, Lewis Nash, Tyshawn Sorey, Matt Wilson.
• Vibraphone: Warren Smith + Joe Locke.
• Percussion: Kahil El'Zabar + Han Bennink, Hamid Drake, Adam Rudolph.
• Miscellaneous Instrument: Bob Stewart (tuba)
• Male Vocalist: Freddy Cole
• Female Vocalist: Sheila Jordan
• Composer: John Zorn
• Arranger: Steven Bernstein
• Record Label: Clean Feed
• Blues Artist or Group: Taj Mahal
• Blues Album (Released June 1, 2014 to May 31, 2015): Boz Scaggs, A Fool to Care (429 Records)
• Beyond Artist or Group: The Roots
• Beyond Album (Released June 1, 2014-May 31, 2015): Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom and Pop)

Full album ballot breakdowns follow the fold.

Downbeat published their Critics Poll results in their August issue. Good year for the Indian-Americans with Vijay Iyer winning Jazz Artist and Jazz Group and Rudresh Mahanthappa on top of the album chart. (Iyer finished 4th at piano, behind Kenny Barron, Jason Moran, and Fred Hersch, but ahead of guys named Corea, Hancock, and Jarrett. Mahanthappa won at alto sax, ahead of Kenny Garrett and two Colemans.) I'm not a fan of Bird Calls, and voted for neither of them, but they've done a lot of outstanding work, some together and most separately.

Lee Konitz finally won the Hall of Fame vote. He's been in the top 3-4 spots as long as I can recall, but people keep dying and getting a sympathy (or consciousness) bounce ahead of him. I've voted for him every year so far I could. My runner up pick, the late George Russell, is down in 18th, so I despair of him ever getting in. The Veterans Committee added Muddy Waters, which gives you an idea of how poorly populated their blues wing is -- even having recently added Robert Johnson (VC-2013), Dinah Washington (VC-2014), and B.B. King (R-2014). (Among those still missing: Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Minnie. T-Bone Walker got some VC votes but fell short, as did Eubie Blake and Herbie Nichols.)

The win I least fathom is Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), big margin over Dave Douglas and Wadada Leo Smith. There used to be a big edge in this poll for artists on major labels, especially Blue Note. You see hints of this elsewhere: Joe Lovano and Charles Lloyd finished 1-2 in tenor sax, but that doesn't raise any eyebrows. Nor does Jason Moran at 2nd in piano (1st was Kenny Barron, on Impulse, a duo album with number 2 bassist Dave Holland). On the other hand, Robert Glasper won keyboard (ok, a weak/wobbly category), Gregory Porter topped male vocalist (with José James 4th), and Brian Blade knocked off Jack DeJohnette in drums. Blue Note did lose top label to ECM (with Iyer, Lloyd until recently, Jarrett, DeJohnette, and a lot of Europeans that American critics never vote for). Given that Blue Note and ECM only send me links, I may not be as appreciative as other critics, but I also suspect there's more to it than the publicist schmoozing. Downbeat's critics do like to stay in a comfortable mainstream: for evidence, let me point to a couple former-Verve artists who have won many polls and still do well: Kenny Garrett (2 in alto saxophone), and Christian McBride (1 in bass).

Downbeat's Rising Star divisions are always problematical in that there's no hard/fast rules for who is eligible vs. who has risen (or established that they haven't). For instance, Khan Jamal came in 3rd as Rising Star in vibraphone: he's older than I am, cut his first album in 1972 (Sounds of Liberation, a terrific album Porter reissued in 2010), and hasn't had a record out since 2009 (on SteepleChase, a Danish label no one gets). I recall being impressed by him on a couple of Matthew Shipp's Blue Series records, but I've never heard any of his own records (Wikipedia lists 18). As I recall, Sam Most was listed as a Rising Star into his 80s, even though he literally invented bebop flute in the 1950s (i.e., before Herbie Mann, or any other jazz musician you've ever heard of playing flute).

Of course, those are categories where you're always scrambling for names. The major categories are more meaningful: Kirk Knuffke won trumpet (Peter Evans 3rd, Taylor Ho Bynum 5th, Amir ElSaffar 7th); Ryan Keberle trombone (Joe Fiedler 5th, Jacob Garchik 6th); Steve Lehman alto sax (Darius Jones 2nd, Matana Roberts 4th, Mike DiRubbo 9th, Dave Rempis 12th); Chris Speed clarinet (Oscar Noriega 2nd); David Virelles piano (Kris Davis 2nd); Tyshawn Sorey drums (Paal Nilssen-Love 10th). Lehman, by the way, also won artist, and his album, Mise En Abime, came in 2nd. On the other hand Concord topped two major categories with artists who haven't impressed me yet: Ben Williams (bass, beating Eric Revis) and Melissa Aldana (tenor sax, ahead of Marcus Strickland). As I've said, it's tough to fill out these ballots.

On the other hand, a few people won whose names have yet to register in my memory (assuming I've run across them at all: Erica von Kleist (flute), Giovanni Hidalgo (percussion), Allan Harris (male vocalist). That happens, especially in the minor categories. I might have added Michael Blum (guitar) to that list, but he sent me his first album (a low B+) with a personal cover letter asking me to vote for him. He's not the only one who ever did that, but somehow he won a 96-69 landslide -- with 5 points max he managed to get at least 20 out of 141 critics to vote for him. (That he bought a full-page ad to congratulate himself couldn't possibly have had any influence?)

The thing is, consider his competition: the top ten guitarists he beat were Lage Lund (5 albums + 2 as OWL Trio), Jakob Bro (10 albums, his latest on ECM), Joel Harrison (16 albums), Liberty Ellman (4 albums, important side credits), Jonathan Kreisberg (10 albums), Paul Bollenback (8 albums), Gilad Hekselman (4 albums), Matthew Stevens (3 albums, Christian Scott), Adam Rogers (8 albums, Chris Potter), Jeff Parker (5 albums, nearly every Chicago avant group since 1994 that needed a guitarist); the next nine include Will Bernard, Brandon Seabrook, Raoul Björkenheim, and Nguyên Lê -- I voted for Björkenheim and two guys who didn't place in the top 20: Samo Salamon and Anders Nilsson, and I noted as candidates: Scott DuBois, Nir Felder, Gordon Grdina, Ross Hammond, Eric Hofbauer, Luis Lopes, Jon Lundbom, Pete McCann, Terrence McManus, Michael Musillami, Miles Okazaki, Mark O'Leary, Kevin O'Neil, Jacob Young, and a bunch of older guys who weren't on either ballot (like Marc Ducret, Dom Minasi, Brad Shepik, Ulf Wakenius, and a dozen more).

Blum, by the way, has a second album out, which I like about as much as the first. I'd say he's roughly on a level with Andy Brown and Joe Cohn -- has some traits of each, and since he sings some on the second album, maybe he aspires to someone like John Pizzarelli (although he's nowhere near the singer). Those are all guys who make albums I rather like, so I don't mean to be insulting, but none of those names made it to the previous paragraph.

Once again, I skipped Weekend Roundup for more book blurbs. I doubt that's much of a loss, given how last week's news was so dominated by the first Fox Republican Presidential Debate Orgy -- really, if you have nothing more enlightening to talk about than Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and/or Chris Christie (swap any of a dozen other names into this list if you so desire), you should cancel your news show and slot in a nice golf match or bowling or something. Otherwise you run the risk that the Republicans' insane attacks on the Iran deal might leak through to weak-minded Democrats -- Sen. Chuck Schumer is the latest to disgrace himself (OK, here's a link).

Aside from the Republicans, who'll still be around next week, and certainly won't be any smarter or less disgraceful then, the most common news story this past week was the shooting atrocity, practically an everyday occurrence. (A foreign exchange student was killed just outside his dorm here in Wichita this week.) Those, unlike the Republicans, are terminal events, but no doubt there will be another fresh batch of them next week to.

Meanwhile, back to the books. This is the fourth installment in a little more than a week, and will probably be the last for a while. I just have a handful more entries in my draft file, and a couple of them are for books that aren't scheduled for publication until September-October. My catchup project has involved going through close to a dozen notebooks where I jotted down book names when I was in bookstores or libraries over the last few years. I'm not quite done with that, but have managed to fill up four posts -- 160 books. Some of the notebooks are rather old, mostly yielding books published in 2008-09 (between the lists I've found several Borders discount coupon numbers), but the main one I haven't gotten to was filled out in New Jersey last fall. I'll keep working on that, and maybe it'll yield a fifth post, or maybe it'll just get me started for a post this fall. We'll see.

Stanley Aronowitz: The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker's Movement (2014, Verso Books): Unions have taken a beating, especially in the private sector, over the last 30-40 years, dropping from representing more than 30% of American workers to less than 10%. The "death" part is an old story, so what about the "life" part? Or the "new" bit? I read Thomas Geoghegan's Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (2014, New Press), which has some specific ideas on things that can be done to breathe new life into the labor movement, but I don't see what Aronowitz has up his sleeve. I do recall his early book, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1974), and know that he's been working this issue for most of his life, both as scholar and activist.

Shlomo Avineri: Herzl's Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State (2014, Blue Bridge): Herzl wasn't the first Zionist, but he headed the World Zionist Organization until his early death (1904) and wrote two books (The Jewish State and The Old New Land, the latter a novel) articulating his vision for what became Israel in 1948. He was notable during his life for appealing to imperial powers to adopt the Zionists as a colonization project, and he painted a much more starry-eyed picture than what actually transpired. But then don't all imperialists start out starry-eyed?

Zygmunt Bauman: Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? (paperback, 2013, Polity): Short (100 pp) essay by a philosophy prof, evidently picks apart various arguments ("finding them one by one to be false, deceitful and misleading") to arrive at "no." I'm not inclined to disagree, especially on the so-called "trickle down" theories (unless that trickling is aided by redistributive tax policies). I don't know whether Bauman considers the argument that the extravagances and idiosyncrasies of the rich may on occasion create something of lasting cultural value -- e.g., the Taj Mahal -- that would never have been created in a more egalitarian society. On the other hand, such arts only attain popular value when they have been opened to the public. (The policy which would promote this would be a confiscatory estate tax, which would encourage the rich to build monuments to their memory while also ensuring public access in due course. It would also limit that aristocracy problem.)

James Bradley: The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (2015, Little Brown): Americans have been fascinated by China from first encounters, and as Bradley shows contributed to the opium wars, used the "open door policy" to carve out fortunes, developed a fateful alliance with the Kuomintang that continued into exile on Taiwan, fought nasty wars against the"red menace," and invested lavishly when China opened up to foreign capital. All that while, one might argue that those Americans understood nothing, not so much because the Chinese world was impenetrable as because Americans were so blunt and dull. Thomas has written a number of books about the US in East Asia, notablyThe Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (2009, Little Brown). This seems to be where he tries to sum it all up.

HW Brands: Reagan: The Life (2015, Doubleday): A bid for a comprehensive single-volume biography (816 pp) of the mediocre actor, corporate shill, and demagogic (albeit absent-minded) politician who spent eight years as one of America's most corrupt presidents. Brands is a capable historian who's knocked off biographies on Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and both Roosevelts -- I read his A Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008) and recommend it, especially if you don't know much about the man or the era -- as well as some broad-brush books like American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (2010). On the other hand, I already know too much about Reagan, and I'm not likely to enjoy (or benefit from) any author who is not as repulsed by the man and his movement as I already am. I did, after all, live through this travesty. (And I've read Sean Wilentz: The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008 [2008], so it's not like I haven't tried.)

Richard Davenport-Hines: Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes (2015, Basic Books): A new biography of the great liberal economist, a figure whose relevance has only grown since the 2008 "Great Recession" happened -- although it seems like most political leaders and central bankers have yet to acknowledge the point. Also relatively new (and brief: 136pp): Peter Temin/David Vines: Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy (2014, MIT Press).

Alain de Botton: The News: A User's Manual (2014, Pantheon): British philosopher/social critic, originally from Switzerland -- has also written novels and appeared on television -- asks the question: what is our constant preoccupation with news doing to our minds? He picks apart various common story lines -- disasters, celebrity gossip, political scandals -- and tries to put their impacts into the context of everyday life. Previous books include: How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997); The Architecture of Happiness (2006); Relgion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (2012); How to Think More About Sex (2012).

DW Gibson: Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Economy (paperback, 2012, Penguin Books): A collection of interviews, some 480 pp, about just that -- reviewers compare this to Studs Terkel's Working, and to James Agee, high praise indeed. My own view of getting fired is that it's increasingly often like getting shot down by a random sniper -- you have little sense of it coming, it seems to single you out in a way that leaves you very isolated (and often feeling somewhat guilty), and in an instant you lose something you may never be able to put back together again. (In some ways that describes me after I was fired by SCO, although I had more of a safety net than most folks do.) Sure, there are differences: getting fired in America today is not a random act -- some people, including old guys like me, are statistically more likely to get hit -- nor is it an isolated act -- public policies that promote (or simply permit) mergers, union busting, outsourcing or offshoring of jobs, or other forms of corporate predation often result in mass firings.

DW Gibson: The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century (2015, Overlook Press): More interviews, but where the author's previous Not Working traveled around the country to focus on how getting sacked affects a wide range of people, here he focuses on one city (New York City, of course) and a phenomenon that affects people in various ways (although higher rent is one common denominator).

Benjamin Ginsberg: The Worth of War (2014, Prometheus): Most recently wrote The Value of Violence (2013, Prometheus), so this is a sequel as well as a doubling down. His arguments are much like those who delight in the "creative destruction" of capitalism, except with more blood and guts. Still, in both cases, what makes the argument sanitary is that the violence/war he praises is comfortably in the past ("few today would trade our current situation for the alternative had our forefathers not resorted to the violence of the American Revolution and the Civil War"). Maybe he has something more in mind -- he does see that the modern state is rife with implicit violence ("the police, prisons, and the power of the bureaucratic state to coerce and manipulate"), and he's right that we are less free of violence than we'd like to think, but by rationalizing war instead of rejecting it, he's not doing us any favors. He's written many other books, mostly anti-government tracts like The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power (1986), but also:How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism (2013, Rowman & Littlefield). I have no idea how he makes the leap from his subtitle to his title, but it's kind of like noting a few worthwhile technical advancements that were developed during a war and concluding that war is a good thing.

Steven K Green: Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (2015, Oxford University Press): Author has written several books on church-state relations --The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (2010, Oxford University Press); The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Church-State Doctrine (2012, Oxford University Press) -- and returns here to dissect the oft-repeated claim that the founders intended a Christian republic.

Raymond J Haberski Jr: God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (2012, Rutgers University Press): Americans have long been conceited about their uniqueness in the world, and this gradually cohered into the notion of a civil religion -- something which got a huge boost during the Cold War era, as the American brand alternately stood for freedom and capitalism. All nations claim to fight for God, but few have bound them together so unquestionably as the US has done.

Gary A Haugen/Victor Boutros: The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence (2014; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press). The authors are primarily talking about "common violence like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, and police abuse" but more organized forms of violence are even more effective at depressing a population and locking them in poverty. One thinks, for instance, of the total inability of the US occupying forces to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq when faced with even relatively sporadic insurgent violence. Nor does the violence have to be "eruptive" -- the enforcement of economic sanctions depresses economies and pushes people into poverty (e.g., Gaza, or 1991-2003 Iraq, although the latter got worse). The authors argue that ending "common violence" requires effective criminal justice systems. Although you can find worse examples around the world, that doesn't let the US off lightly.

Steve Inskeep: Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab (2015, Penguin Books): In case you ever got queasy about Stalin moving whole nations to the barren margins of Russia, beware that he got the idea from an American, Andrew Jackson, who ordered the Cherokee (and other tribes) uprooted and moved from North Carolina to Oklahoma (then designated"Indian Territory"). The story, retold here with uncommon focus on the Cherokee chief, is commonly known as the "Trail of Tears." Ready why. The author, by the way, was last seen writing about Pakistan: Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi (2011, Penguin Books).

Alyssa Katz: The Influence Machine: The US Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life (2015, Spiegel & Grau): I don't know how common this is, but in Wichita at least the Chamber of Commerce is extremely Republican and very active in pushing state politics to the extreme right. Evidently this is more widespread:"Through its propaganda, lobbying, and campaign cash, the Chamber has created a right-wing monster that even it struggles to control, a conservative movement that is destabilizing American democracy as never before."

Walter Kempowski: Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich (2015, WW Norton): History from a thousand scraps of paper -- diaries and letters from ordinary civilians, soldiers and prisoners of both sides, here and there some bigwig, a contemporary picture of the Reich in ruins. Kempowski (1929-2007) assembled ten volumes of diaries like this, as well as writing a number of novels, but this is his first book translated into English.

David M Kotz: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (2015, Harvard University Press): Economist, "one of the few academic economists to predict it [the great recession in 2008]," rehashes the neoliberal economic policies that led to the crash. Not clear, though, what the "fall" is, sine no matter how hard they got tripped up, the politicians haven't been forced to rethink the standard approaches.

Jonathan Kozol: Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America (2012, Crown): Bernard Goldberg wrote a book a while back listing "101 people screwing up America." Most were good people, but you could sort of see where their political stances ticked off Goldberg (Noam Chomsky, for instance, even though he's almost always right). However, the one thing I couldn't forgive, or even see anything but pure moral rot in, was his picking on Jonathan Kozol, a teacher who's never done anything more than expose how poor children are treated shabbily in our public schools. The only book of his that I've read was his first, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (1967), but he's written a dozen others, notably: Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (1988); Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991); and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005). Here he revists people he knew as children and growing up, over some twenty-five years, a mix of success stories and all-too-common failure.

Mark Kurlansky/Talia Kurlansky: International Night: A Father and Daughter Cook Their Way Around the World (2014, Bloomsbury USA): The elder author has written a number of popular history books with built around food -- Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997), which led him to The Basque History of the World (1999); Salt: A World History (2002); The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (2006); and Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man (2012). The idea here is to spin the globe, land on a country, and fix dinner appropriate to that country. They wrote up a year's worth of meals, including the recipes. The sort of book I might be able to write, although his randomizing approach ventures further than I have. He also wrote two other books I've read (and recommend): 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (2004), and Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2006).

James Mahaffey: Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima (2014; paperback, 2015, Pegasus): A survey of an important problem, although the author previously wrote a book proselytizing a brilliant future for the nuclear power industry -- Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power (2009, Pegasus) -- and sometimes he seems a little glib here: e.g., Chapter 3: A Bit of Trouble in the Great White North; Chapter 6: In Nuclear Research Even the Goof-ups are Fascinating; Chapter 8: The Military Almost Never Lost a Nuclear Weapon. Fukushima Daiichi is at least called a tragedy, although you wonder whether he felt that for Japan or for the industry.

Joshua Muravchik: Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel (2014, Encounter Books): Author notes that as late as 1967 Americans and Europeans overwhelmingly favored Israel in its conflict with the Arabs, but the tide of public opinion in the west has markedly turned against Israel. I doubt the author attributes this shift to the "facts on the ground" Israel has so assiduously constructed -- the occupation, the settlements, the failure to resolve the world's largest and most persistent refugee crisis, the denial of basic civil rights to Palestinians, Israel's periodic bombing of neighboring countries, the growing power of an increasingly racist right-wing. Rather, he looks at the public relations battle, how Israeli Hasbara has been countered in various forums (especially among the democratic left, which he accuses of a new "leftist orthodoxy in which class struggle was supplanted by noble struggles of people of color").

Michael B Oren: Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (2015, Random House): Author of what is probably the standard military history of the 1967 war (at least from the Israeli side, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East; I can't think of anything remotely comparable from the Arab sides) and a long history of US adventures in the Middle East (Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present), Oren is also a political activist of Israel's right-wing, serving as Israeli ambassador to the US 2009-13. So this is a memoir of his advocacy, which primarily involved beating the war drums against his fantasy view of Iran while avoiding doing anything constructive about the real conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Adding to the surrealism is that Oren was born in the US, citizenship which he only renounced in 2009 -- a background which helps him promote the myth that the two nations should really act as one, with Israel calling the shots.

Timothy H Parsons: The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (2010; paperback, 2012, Oxford University Press): His examples: Roman Britain, Muslim Spain, Spanish Peru, Napoleonic Italy, British India and Kenya, Vichy France. I imagine you could add your own examples, especially as the dynamics reappear in case after case -- although his cases vary in many respects, such as time (four centuries down to six years), integration of local elites, the religion of the rulers and the degree of conversion, the empires are inevitably driven by exploitation and instinct for survival to make themselves unwelcome. One can also argue that the world's tolerance for empires is declining, even cases which cloak their control as ingeniously as the US does.

Henry M Paulson: Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower (2015, Twelve): Head of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary to GW Bush, some insider, close enough much of the book can be done as memoir. There are whole shelves of books on China's economic rise and the threat that implies to American economic supremacy (as if the latter is even a real thing in this age of multinational corporations and unrestricted capital flows).

Richard Reeves: Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II (2015, Henry Holt): Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into WWII, the government began rounding up Japanese-Americans and trucked them off to spend the war in concentration camps -- a story which in the muddled mind of Wesley Clark became a template for a new wave of camps for troubled Muslim youths, but which most Americans with any awareness recall as one of the more shameful episodes in American history. Racism against East Asians has largely faded in recent years, but was rampant well past WWII, and it was at the root of this.

Richard Rhodes: Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (2010; paperback, 2011, Vintage): No idea how I missed this, having read all three of Rhodes' previous books on the subject: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986); Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995); and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007). This volume attempts to tie up various loose ends, and spends a lot of time on Iraq, less on securing the former Soviet Union's arsenal, the dismantling of South Africa's bombs, North Korea, and the NPT -- less so on the French and Chinese projects that produced bombs in the 1960s, on Israel-India-Pakistan (the latter developed a bomb by 1990, the former two in the 1970s), the Iran controversy, and various other countries that worked on bombs but abandoned them (he mentions Taiwan and South Korea, both pressured by the US). Probably enough material left over for a fifth book. Doesn't look like he's going to find closure any time soon, although it's likely that Iran will soon be as dormant as Iraq seems now.

James S Robbins: This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive (2010; paperback, 2012, Encounter Books): Put this on a shelf with Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999) as a piece of Monday-morning quarterbacking, an attempt to argue that the United States needn't have lost in Vietnam -- that in fact the troops were winning the war but the American people and their leaders let them down. Part of this view is the notion that the Tet Offensive in 2008, when Vietnamese forces penetrated to the center of most Vietnamese cities, spent so many resources that by the time the offensive was beaten back the Vietnamese were near defeat. But at the time, it didn't look that way: what the Tet Offensive showed, graphically, was that the propaganda coming out of Washington, justifying the war and touting future victory, was plain horseshit. Same for these revisionist ploys: they depend on the same sort of magical thinking that makes all American war planning seen invincible. How rational people can continue to believe this after the actual track record both in Vietnam and later in Afghanistan and Iraq is unfathomable, but the DOD and CIA have plenty of jobs for people who persist in this fantasy. One clue why is the reason I couldn't bring myself to write "NVA" or "VC" above -- I wrote "Vietnamese," because America's enemies there were the Vietnamese people, and the US couldn't claim victory there without killing nearly all of them. The cold fact is that had the Army not thrown in the towel and quit in 1973, had each administration after the other hung tough and kept the killing going, however many Vietnamese are left would still be fighting America today. The revisionists are offering a formula not for peace but for perpetual war, and that war is wrong not just because it can never be won -- it's wrong because it was never right in the first place.

Jan Jarboe Russell: The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II (2015, Scribner): In addition to the mass internment of Japanese-Americans, FDR set up a concentration camp in Texas where the US kept whole families of German and Italian natives (many US citizens), on the theory that they could be traded both Americans trapped behind enemy lines by the outbreak of war -- something called "quiet passage."

Shlomo Sand: How I Stopped Being a Jew (2014, Verso): Short essay (112 pp), from a relentless critic of Israel's system of identity classifications (Jew, etc.), hard-and-fast rules he's argued against in several previous books: The Invention of the Jewish People (2009, Verso); The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (2012, Verso).

David Satter: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway (paperback, 2013, Yale University Press): Explores current Russian attitudes to the Soviet Union, including the fact that many Russians "actually mourn the passing of the Soviet regime." Satter previously wrote two of the more important books on recent Russian history: Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (1996) and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003). For a different angle on this, see: Peter Pomerantsev: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014, Public Affairs).

Eric Schlosser: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013; paperback, 2014, Penguin Press): Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, no nation has used nuclear weapons in war. One might chalk that up to the idea, much touted by the very scientists who invented the thing in the first place, that nuclear weapons have made war unthinkable, although you'd also have to concede that it was not for lack of "thinking about the unthinkable" by the world's Dr. Strangeloves (Herman Kahn even wrote a book with that title). It's also the case that no one has accidentally set a nuclear bomb off, the prospect that Schlosser writes about. The"Damascus accident" occurred in 1980 in a Titan missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas (a few miles north of Little Rock): a dropped tool punctured a fuel tank, which caused the missile to explode, but the nuclear warhead on top of the missile didn't detonate (although the explosion did spray radioactive materials hither and yon). Needless to say, this wasn't the only such accident. Schlosser covers a wide range of them, the engineering problems they presented, and the politics on all sides.

Frederick AO Schwarz Jr: Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (2015, New Press): Former chief counsel to the Church Committee on Intelligence -- you know, back in the 1970s, the last time Congress seriously tried to figure out what the CIA had been up to. Much of what we know about the CIA was aptly summed up by Tim Weiner: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007). They've been able to get away with such incompetence and criminality only inasmuch as they've been able to keep what they've done secret. Indeed, secrecy hides rot and degeneracy everywhere it occurs in government.

David K Shipler: Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword (2015, Knopf): Journalist, wrote a basic book,The Working Poor: Invisible in America (2004), has lately turned his attention to threats to fundamental American liberties --The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties (2011), and Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (2012). I'd expect this to be the balanced book on freedom of speech issues that Kirsten Powers'The Silencing isn't. I wonder how far this goes into the recent vogue for extending corporate powers under the guise of free speech -- e.g., the "right" to engage in unlimited campaign graft.

Jason Stanley: How Propaganda Works (2015, Princeton University Press): I read a book on sales closes once and it included some helpful advice on how to keep from being sold something you don't want: recognize the close. Like a good close, propaganda needs to sneak up on you to be effective, so if this book does reveal the secrets, it will help you see through them, and take back control over your own mind. Although anyone can construct propaganda for any position, in real life propaganda is very unbalanced. Part of this is that it's expensive, something the rich can afford while the poor cannot. Also, propaganda is needed for positions that cannot be argued by appealing to logic, facts, and the general welfare, and those are overwhelmingly concentrated on the right. For example, one of the better ones was Bush's proposal to allow timber companies to shred public lands: they called this the Health Forests Initiative. Likewise, Stanley's examples are mostly from the right. Stanley previously wrote Know How (paperback, 2013, Oxford University Press).

Bettina Strangneth: Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (2014, Knopf): Author picks through"more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann's own recently discovered written notes -- as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires" to construct a portrait of the Nazi war criminal in exile, and concludes that his self-effacing act on trial in Jerusalem in 1961, which led Hannah Arendt to coin the term "balanity of evil" -- was just an act.

Bert Randolph Sugar: The Baseball Maniac's Almanac: The Absolutely, Positively, and Without Question Greatest Book of Facts, Figures, and Astonishing Lists Ever Compiled (3rd edition, paperback, 2010, Skyhorse): Caught my eye because I used to belong to a club called Baseball Maniacs, but pretty sure none of us got any royalties. Basically a trivia book, chock full of statistical lists, some pretty obvious but most involving multiple selection criteria; e.g. "3000 Hits, 500 Home Runs, and a .300 Batting Average, Career": just Hank Aaron and Willie Mays; "Players with 2500 Career Hits, Never Having a 200-Hit Season": 29 players topped by Carl Yastrzemski, Eddie Murray, Dave Winfield, and Cap Anson (who never played a 100-game season until he was 32 and only topped 140 once), and including great hitters who walked a lot, like Rickey Henderson, Mel Ott, Barry Bonds, and Ted Williams. The old players I recognize, like George Gore (a teammate of Anson's with a lifetime .301 BA), still the player born in Maine with the most base hits. Instantly obsolete, of course, the kind of book that's unlikely to be updated in the future -- it would be easy to replace it with a free website. Sugar has several list books like this, but his real interest is boxing.

Elana Maryles Sztokman: The War on Women in Israel: A Story of Religious Radicalism and the Women Fighting for Freedom (2014, Sourcebooks): Jewish feminist, has written two other books on Israel's politically established Orthodox Judaism -- The Men's Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World (2011, Brandeis); Educating in the Divine Image: Gender Issues in Orthodox Jewish Day Schools (2013, Brandeis) -- and their increasing insistence on segregating and bullying women over what they consider immodest dress. She should probably write her next book on Orthodox homophobia -- an Orthodox recently stabbed six people in a Jerusalem Gay Pride parade. Also on the evolution of Israeli Orthodoxy: Marc B Shapiro: Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites It History (2015, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization).

David Vine: Base Nation: How American Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (2015, Metropolitan Books): Even skipping the better known war zones, there are hundreds of bases, costing on the order of $100 billion per year. Their presence is one reason the US shares blame for the regimes they reside in, and one reason the US is repeatedly dragged into the world's wars -- even ones we're not directly responsible for. Closing those bases is an essential step to extricating the US from war abroad, with all the damage that causes both there and here.

Nikolaus Wachsmann: KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Attempts to provide a complete history of Nazi Germany's concentration camps -- KL for Konzentrationslager -- from the beginning in March 1933 when the target was ostensibly "social deviants -- an ever-expanding definition that came to include everyone who suffered the Fuhrer's ire. Big job, big book (880 pp). Other books continue to come out, most showing that no matter how definitive the big book looks, there's always more misery to uncover: Sarah Helm: Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (2015, Nan A Talese); Elissa Malländer: Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 (2015, Michigan State University Press); Dan Stone: The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (2015, Yale University Press); Kim Wünschmann: Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (2015, Harvard University Press).

Michael Walzer: The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (2015, Yale University Press):"Many of the successful campaigns for national liberation in the years following World War II were initially based on democratic and secular ideals. Once established, however, the newly independent nations had to deal with entirely unexpected religious fierceness." Examples are: India, Israel, Algeria. Walzer's skill at rationalizing "just wars" is always suspect, but he raises a fair question. I wonder whether he recognizes the role of the US (and other post-colonial powers) in promoting religious reactionaries to undermine socialism? Or that the violence needed to liberate those nations was itself fertile ground for religious reaction?

Especially on the old lists, there were a lot of books that I didn't feel like writing up, mostly because they're no longer timely (or recent), but some just because I didn't have much to say about. So I figured I'd just list them here. In a couple cases I've added a very short explanation, but mostly I'll let the titles/subtitles speak for themselves. I also saved a few of the more recent ones, so this is likely to become a regular feature (given that books worth noting the existence of but not worth spending much time on are likely to be published in the future; in fact, in a couple cases I threw away blurbs that didn't say anything to file the books here).

• Spencer Abraham: Lights Out!: Ten Myths About (and Real Solutions to) America's Energy Crisis (2010; paperback, 2011, St Martin's Griffin)
• Patrick Allitt: A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (2014; paperback, 2015, Penguin Books)
• Theresa Amato: Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny (2009, New Press)
• Thomas G Andrews: Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (paperback, 2010, Harvard University Press)
• Kate Ascher: The Works: Anatomy of a City (paperback, 2007, Penguin): how things work in a modern city.
• Dan Barber: The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (2013, Penguin Press)
• Ugo Bardi: Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet (paperback, 2014, Chelsea Green)
• Harper Barnes: Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (2008, Walker Books): East St. Louis, IL.
• Sheldon D Beebe/Mary H Kaldor: The Ultimate Weapon Is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace (2010, Public Affairs)
• Scott Berkun: The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work (2013, Jossey-Bass)
• Richard Bessel: Germany 1945: From War to Peace (2009, Harper; paperback, 2010, Harper Perennial)
• Richard X Bove: Guardians of Prosperity: Why America Needs Big Banks (2013, Portfolio)
• Michael Brooks: 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time (paperback, 2009, Vintage Books)
• Robert Bryce: Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (paperback, 2011, Public Affairs)
• Tom Buk-Swienty: The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America (2008, WW Norton)
• Michael Burleigh: Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II (2011, Harper Collins)
• Charles W Calomiris/Stephen H Haber: Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (2014; paperback, 2015, Princeton University Press)
• Daniel Carlat: Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry -- A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis (2010, Free Press)
• Erwin Chemerinsky: The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014, Viking)
• CJ Chivers: The Gun (2010; paperback, 2011, Simon& Schuster): on the AK-47.
• John Weir Close: A Giant Cow-Tipping by Savages: The Boom, Bust, and Boom Culture of M&A (2013, St Martin's Press)
• Robert Coles: Lives We Carry With Us: Profiles of Moral Courage (2010, New Press)
• Paul Collier: The Plundered Planet: Why We Must -- and How We Can -- Manage Nature for Global Prosperity (2010; paperback, 2011, Oxford University Press)
• Bob Coen/Eric Nadler: Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail (2009, Counterpoint)
• Deborah Dwork/Robert Jan Van Pelt: Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946 (2009; paperback, 2012, WW Norton)
• Alice Echols: Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (2010; paperback, 2011, WW Norton)
• Dan Fagin: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (2013, Bantom Books)
• James Fallows: China Airborne: The Test of China's Future (2012, Pantheon; paperback, 2013, Vintage Books)
• John V Fleming: The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (2009, WW Norton)
• Richard Florida: The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live (2010; paperback, 2011, Harper Business)
• James R Flynn: Where Have All the Liberals Gone? Race, Class, and Ideals in America (2008, Cambridge University Press)
• Todd Gitlin/Liel Leibovitz: The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (2010, Simon& Schuster)
• Ian Goldin/Mike Mariathasan: The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It (2014, Princeton University Press)
• Temple Grandin: Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (paperback, 2010, Mariner Books)
• Richard S Grossman: Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them (2013, Oxford University Press)
• Randall Hansen: Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany (2009; paperback, 2010, NAL)
• John Hofmeister: Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk From an Energy Insider (2010; paperback, 2011, St Martin's Griffin)
• David Isby: Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires: A New History of the Borderland (2010; paperback, 2011, Pegasus)
• Brian Kahn: Real Common Sense (2011, Seven Stories Press)
• Sandor Ellix Katz: The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes From Around the World (2012, Chelsea Green)
• L Douglas Keeney: 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (2011; paperback, 2012, St Martin's Griffin)
• Eli Kintisch: Hack the Planet: Science's Best Hope -- or Worst Nightmare -- for Averting Climate Catastrophe (2010, Wiley)
• Nicholas D Kristof/Sheryl WuDunn: Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (2009, Knopf; paperback, 2010, Vintage Books)
• Matt Latimer: Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor (2009, Crown; paperback, 2010, Broadway): Bush/Rumsfeld speechwriter
• Martin Lindstrom: Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (2008; paperback, 2010, Crown Business)
• Christopher Lloyd: What on Earth Happened? The Complete Story of the Planet, Life, and People From the Big Bang to the Present Day (2008, Bloomsbury USA)
• Kenan Malik: From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath (2010, Melville House)
• Paula Mallea: The War on Drugs: A Failed Experiment (paperback, 2014, Dundum)
• John Marriott/Mika Minio Paluello: The Oil Road: Journeys From the Caspian Sea to the City of London (2012; paperback, 2013, Verso)
• John McPhee: Silk Parachute (2010; paperback, 2011, Farrar Straus and Giroux): essay collection.
• Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011; paperback, 2013, Verso)
• Ingrid Monson: Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (paperback, 2010, Oxford University Press)
• Wolfgang Munchau: The Meltdown Years: The Unfolding of the Global Economic Crisis (2009, McGraw-Hill)
• Craig Nelson: The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era (2014, Scribner)
• David Niose: Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans (2012; paperback, 2013, St Martin's Griffin)
• Scott Reynolds Nelson: A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters (2012, Knopf; paperback, 2013, Vintage Books)
• Eli Pariser: The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (2011; paperback, 2012, Penguin Books)
• Claire L Parkinson: Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix (2010; paperback, 2012, Rowan & Littlefield)
• David Pilling: Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (2014; paperback, 2015, Penguin Books)
• Ian Plimer: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science (paperback, 2009, Taylor)
• Christopher Potter: You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe (2009, Harper; paperback, 2010, Harper Perennial)
• Eswar S Prasad: The Dollar Trap: How the US Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance (2014, University of Princeton Press)
• Nathan Rabin: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture (2009; paperback, 2010, Scribner)
• Ray Raphael: Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (2009; paperback, 2010, New Press)
• Scott Ritter: Dangerous Ground: America's Failed Arms Control Policy, From FDR to Obama (2010, Nation Books)
• Eugene Robinson: Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010, Doubleday; paperback, 2011, Anchor)
• Nick Rosen: Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America (paperback, 2010, Penguin Books)
• Jay W Richards: Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and Activists Who Are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives and Our Fortunes (2013, McGraw-Hill)
• Thaddeus Russell: A Renegade History of the United States (paperback, 2011, Free Press)
• Larry Samuel: Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture (2009, AMACOM)
• Carmine Sarracino/Kevin M Scott: The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go From Here (2008, Beacon Press)
• Richard C Sauer: Selling America Short: The SEC and Market Contrarians in the Age of Absurdity (2010, Wiley)
• Peter D Schiff: How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes (2010, Wiley)
• Peter J Schifferle: America's School for War: Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education,a nd Victory in World War II (2010, University Press of Kansas)
• Brigid Schulte: Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (2014, Sarah Crichton; paperback, 2015, Picador)
• Dominic Tierney: How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010; paperback, 2012, University of Nebraska Press)
• Anya Von Bremzen: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food & Longing (2013; paperback, 2014, Crown)
• Peter Ward: The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps (2010; paperback, 2012, Basic Books)
• Charles Wohlforth: The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth (2010, Thomas Dunne; paperback, 2011, Picador)

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Music: Current count 25277 [25234] rated (+43), 432 [451] unrated (-19).

I hit the bottom of theSpin 1985-2014 list early in the week. Of 300 records, I've not heard/rated 290. That leaves the following (not on Rhapsody, Christgau grades in brackets):

34. Metallica: Master of Puppets (1986, Elektra)
80. Bikini Kill: The Singles (1998, Kill Rock Stars) [A-]
100. Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand (1994, Scat) [B-]
105. Dr. Dre: The Chronic (1992, Death Row) [C+]
121. Kate Bush: Hounds of Love (1985, EMI America) [B]
176. Primal Scream: Screamadelica (1991, Sire) [N]
211. Aaliyah: One in a Million (1996, Blackground) [S]
255. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime (2007, Kompakt)
285. The Books: Thought for Food (2002, Tomlab)
296. Kompakt: Total 4 (2002, Kompakt)

I've been told that most/all of these records are on YouTube, but haven't tried looking them up there. My final grade distribution is at the bottom of the file. Basically: A or A+: 29 (10.0%), A-: 80 (27.5%); B+: 114 (29.3%); B: 45 (15.5%); B- or lower: 22 (7.5%). When the list first came out I was missing 81 of them, so I've heard 71 since mid-May. I don't see a similar grade breakdown in my notebook at the time, but I did note that I had 103 records rated A- or above. That's up to 109 now, so I picked up 6 new A- records (8.4% of the adds, way down from the initial 44.9% A- (or better: i.e., 103/229). I picked up 4 new B- or below albums, which was also down from my initial rate (5.6% vs. 9.9%). The big growth came in B albums, up by 20 (28.1%) vs. 25 initially (11.3%). Records could wind up graded B for lots of reasons, but the most common is uninspired competency. Of course, you may just write this off as my relative indifference to the alt/indie rock that's Spin's bread and butter. Probably some truth to that. But it's not like I hate every alt/indie record. Lots of good ones on the list.

With that project done, I wanted to focus on the books posts, and not think much about what I was listening to. This time I went into the new jazz queue and cleared out a lot of stuff I've been skipping over. No great finds there, although avant fans will enjoy Louie Belogenis' Blue Buddha project, and Stefan Keune's vinyl-only release offers quite a rush. Still, I probably enjoyed Dan Brubeck's tribute to his parents even more -- just didn't give it a second spin, mostly because it's a double but also because brother Chris has also tapped into the family well, with similarly fine results.

Another high HM is the new Miguel album. I played it several times, went back to his debut, and even gave his sophomore album another shot. Tatum tells me it takes time to sink in, but that's not how I work -- and when I do give a record extra time, it's almost always because it's giving me something back. Still, I like the album much more than I do its widely admired predecessor -- don't get that one at all, even though I nudged its grade up a notch. Tatum, by the way, reviews Wildheart in his revived A Downloader's Diary (41). Biggest surprise for me there was the A grade for Young Thug's Barter 6 -- talk about someone who needs time to sink in! I gave it one spin and a B+(**) a while back. That's one I'm not in any hurry to revisit, but maybe Christgau will weigh in? Of course, our biggest grade difference was over Sleater-Kinney, but you know how that goes. Still, a great column. I should get around to archiving it sometime.

Note: I cut the week off a bit short last night, so I didn't pick up today's mail (most notably, new albums by guitarists Liberty Ellman and Garrison Fewell). The Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file is up around 90 albums even though August is less than one-third over, so I should start thinking about posting it up.

Also, the CDR of Howard Riley: 10.11.12 (NoBusiness) didn't have any music on it I could hear. It's one of their vinyl-only releases, probably solo piano, something of intrinsically limited interest to me, but he's a musician I've been wanting to hear more of. I did track down two of his early Columbia releases -- Angle (1969) and The Day Will Come (1970), both A- in my book -- but I've only heard one later record, a B+(*) live solo. According to my records, he has another 21 records which Penguin Guide gave 3.5 or 4 stars to, so a major figure, at least in their book.

New records rated this week:

• Alessio Alberghini/Garrison Fewell: Inverso (2014 [2015], Floating Forest): [cd]: B+(**)
• Baltazanis: End of Seas (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Bastet: Eye of Ra (2015, self-released): [cd]: B
• Louie Belogenis: Blue Buddha (2015, Tzadik): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Karl Berger/Kirk Knuffke: Moon (2013-14 [2015], NoBusiness, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• Michael Blum/Jim Stinnett: Commitment (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• The Dan Brubeck Quartet: Celebrating the Music and Lyrics of Dave & Iola Brubeck (2013 [2015], Blue Forest, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Casa: Futuro (2012 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B
• Kasey Chambers: Bittersweet (2015, Sugar Hill): [r]: B
• The Coneheads: L.P. 1 (2015, Erste Theke Tonträger, EP): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Convergence Quartet: Owl Jacket (2013 [2015], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Easton Corbin: About to Get Real (2015, Mercury Nashville): [r]: B
• Benjamin Duboc/Jean-Luc Petit: Double-Basse: This Is Not Art (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Kurt Elling: Passion World (2015, Concord): [r]: C
• Field Music: Music for Drifters (2015, Memphis Industries): [r]: B+(**)
• Nick Finzer: The Chase (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Laszlo Gardony: Life in Real Time (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(***)
• Albert "Tootie" Heath/Ethan Iverson/Ben Street: Philadelphia Beat (2014 [2015], Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Hubweber/Frank Paul Schubert/Alexander von Schlippenbach/Clayton Thomas/Willi Kellers: Intricacies (2014 [2015], NoBusiness, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Alan Jackson: Angels and Alcohol (2015, Capitol Nashville): [r]: A-
• Stefan Keune/Dominic Lash/Steve Noble: Fractions (2013 [2015], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Lama + Joachim Badenhorst: The Elephant's Journey (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Frantz Loriot/Manuel Perovic Notebook Large Ensemble: Urban Furrow (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Miguel: Wildheart (2015, RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Larry Newcomb Quartet: Live Intentionally! (2015, Essential Messenger): [cd]: B+(*)
• Matt Panayides: Conduits (2014 [2015], Pacific Coast Jazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Evan Parker/Joe Morris/Nate Wooley: Ninth Square (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Simon Phillips: Protocol III (2015, Phantom): [cd]: B
• Robert Sabin: Humanity Part II (2014 [2015], Ranula Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Brianna Thomas: You Must Believe in Love (2015, Sound on Purpose): [cd]: B+(*)
• Helen Tzatzimakis: Soulfully (2014 [2015], Cobalt Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Brad Allen Williams: Lamar (2012-13 [2015], Sojourn): [cd]: B+(*)
• Mark Winkler: Jazz and Other Four Letter Words (2015, Cafe Pacific): [cd]: B+(***)

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

• Charlie Haden/Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Tokyo Adagio (2005 [2015], Impulse): [r]: B+(*)
• Daniel Smith: Jazz Suite for Bassoon (1995-97 [2015], Summit): [cd]: B

Old records rated this week:

• The Deftones: White Pony (2000, Maverick): [r]: B+(*)
• Green Day: Kerplunk (1992, Lookout): [r]: B+(*)
• Green Day: Nimrod (1997, Reprise): [r]: B+(**)
• Green Day: Warning (2000, Reprise): [r]: A-
• Green Day: American Idiot (2004, Reprise): [r]: B+(*)
• Miguel: All I Want Is You (2010, Jive): [r]: B+(**)

Grade changes:

• Miguel: Kaleidoscope Dream (2012, RCA): [r]; [was: B] B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Beegie Adair/Don Aliquo: Too Marvelous for Words (Adair Music Group): September 4
• Luciano Biondini: Senza Fine (Intakt)
• João Camões/Jean-Marc Foussat/Claude Parle: Bien Mental (Fou)
• Robin Eubanks Mass Line Big Band: More Than Meets the Ear (ArtistShare): advance, November 20
• Phil Haynes: Sanctuary (1999, Corner Store Jazz): September 29
• Miho Hazama: Time River (Sunnyside): advance, October 2
• Roberto Magris: Enigmatix (JMood)
• Richard Nelson/Aardvark Jazz Orchestra: Deep River (self-released)
• Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (Intakt)

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Music: Current count 25691 [25653] rated (+38), 439 [447] unrated (-8).

A busy week, in all regards except unpacking. Rated count is back up after last week's dip. I got a jump there by looking at everything I hadn't previously heard on Alfred Soto's "third quarter report" (ASAP Rocky, Speedy Ortiz, Florence + the Machine, Brandon Flowers, Angel Haze, Destroyer, Robert Forster, Janet Jackson). Some good records there, but nothing I especially loved. Still, the exercise did send me back to Forster's best-of (didn't get to Grant McLennan's companion comp, something I should remedy; at least with McLennan I'm more familiar with the source albums, a couple of which I've A-listed -- Watershed and Horsebreaker Star).

Most importantly, Michael Tatum published a new A Downloader's Diary last week. (My archive copy ishere.) Not a lot there I hadn't heard already -- Deerhunter, Forster, and Destroyer are in my list this week but I got them earlier, without the benefit of Tatum's advice. (I came up with slightly lower grades for Deerhunter, Forster, and Jill Scott -- any of which could be chalked up to lack of patience with records a bit outside of my wheelhouse.) Aside from ratings quibbles, I should point out that the Heems and even more so the Kendrick Lamar reviews rank among the year's best music writing.

I did get two A-list records from Robert Christgau's Expert Witness this week: Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog and Jeffrey Lewis' Manhattan. I gave them two spins each -- not enough to rise beyond A-, although Lewis was getting better, and I can certainly see the appeal of Anderson's stories (I'm just not as swept away by the music as I was by Strange Angels, or even Home of the Brave). I'll probably break down and order copies of both, but actually the new record that impressed me the most this week was Lyrics Born's Real People (also two spins). Evidently it came out in May but the first I heard of it was when it showed up on one of Mosi Reeves' Rhapsody lists. Tom Shimura is as much a cult-favorite among Christgauvians as Anderson or Lewis, so I'm surprised no one flagged it. (Or did I just slip up and not notice?)

Very rare that I actually buy records any more: after Yesterdays closed there are no decent record stores in Wichita, and the impulse buys I would occasionally pick up at Best Buy petered out as their inventory continued to shrink. I do continue to buy books, though not often music books. (I did feel a desire to own, but haven't yet read, Michaelangelo Matos'The Underground Is Massive.) I was tempted last week by the two Allen Lowe books I don't own: Really the Blues? A Horizontal Chronicle of the Vertical Blues, 1893-1959 (the companion to his massive 36-CD trawl through blues history) and, especially, God Didn't Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950-1970, but I got weak knees in Paypal hell (maybe later).

However, the book I did order, and want to offer a preëmptive plug for, is Tim Niland's Music and More: Selected Blog Posts 2003-2015. I've been reading Niland'sMusic and More blog for many years now, not so much to find new music (since we seem to be on the exact same mailing lists) as to check my sanity. Blogs are pretty much designed to be disposable but his is the opposite: if compiled into an indexed, searchableChristgau-like website it would be viewed as an essential reference resource. His 822-page book is the next best thing. Bargain-priced, too.

Two more A-listed new jazz albums this week (plus one old one). You may recall that I also liked Nat Birchall's Live in Larissa last year. Maybe the Coltrane-isms are too obvious, but it's not like we'd turn out noses up at a new vault discovery. The fact is I'd take either Birchall album over The Offering (the 1966 tape that swept the polls last year). I've never gotten anything by Birchall in the mail, so reviewing him is strictly a Rhapsody bonus (with the usual caveats: in this case I have no idea who else played on the album, although they're pretty damn good).

Matthew Shipp's trio took a lot more time to suss out -- I must have given it five (maybe six) spins. Without doing any A/B, I think it's his best trio since he moved back away from the jazztronica of last decade, maybe because I hear more of the knockabout rhythmizing of the Ware Quartet and his later albums with Ivo Perelman.

I should probably mention that there will be a memorial "to celebrate the remarkable life of Elizabeth Marcia Fink," who died on September 22. I've seen a very nice invitation, but can't find any public posting of it, so here are the details: the memorial will be on Saturday, November 7, 2015, from 3:00-6:00 pm, at Union Theological Seminary, 3041 Broadway at 121st Street, New York, NY 10027. The invitation asks for RSVP. We're not up for another trip to New York at the moment, but we do miss Liz -- in fact, remark on it every single day.

New records rated this week:

• Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (2015, Nonesuch): [r]: A-
• Dennis Angel: On Track (2014 [2015], Timeless Grooves): [r]: B-
• ASAP Rocky: At.Long.Last.ASAP (2015, Polo Grounds/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Nat Birchall: Invocations (2015, Jazzman): [r]: A-
• Sarah Buechi: Flying Letters (2013 [2014], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)
• Sarah Buechi: Shadow Garden (2015, Intakt): [cd]: B+(***)
• João Camões/Rodrigo Pinheiro/Miguel Mira: Earnear (2015, Tour de Bras): [cd]: B+(**)
• João Camões/Jean-Marc Foussat/Claude Parle: Bien Mental (2015, Fou): [cd]: B+(***)
• Romain Collin: Press Enter (2013 [2015], ACT): [cd]: B+(**)
• Caroline Davis Quartet: Doors: Chicago Storylines (2013 [2015], Ears & Eyes): [cd]: B+(***)
• Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (2015, 4AD): [r]: B+(***)
• Destroyer: Poison Season (2015, Merge): [r]: B+(*)
• Marcelo Dos Reis/Luis Vicente/Théo Ceccaldi/Valentin Ceccaldi: Chamber 4 (2013 [2015], FMR): [cd]: B+(**)
• Empress Of: Me (2015, Terrible/XL): [r]: B+(*)
• Florence + the Machine: How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015, Island/Republic): [r]: B
• Brandon Flowers: The Desired Effect (2015, Virgin EMI): [r]: B+(**)
• Robert Forster: Songs to Play (2015, Tapete): [r]: B+(**)
• Angel Haze: Back to the Woods (2015, self-released): [r]: B+(***)
• Holly Herndon: Platform (2015, 4AD): [r]: B+(**)
• Keigo Hirakawa: And Then There Were Three (2014 [2015], self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Sam Hunt: Between the Pines: Acoustic Mixtape (2015, MCA Nashville): [r]: B
• Janet Jackson: Unbreakable (2015, Rhythm Nation): [r]: B+(*)
• Hiatus Kaiyote: Choose Your Weapon (2015, Flying Buddha): [r]: B-
• Emma Larsson: Sing to the Sky (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B
• Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts: Manhattan (2015, Rough Trade): [r]: A-
• Lyrics Born: Real People (2015, Mobile Home): [r]: A-
• Michael Sarian & the Chabones: The Escape Suite (2014-15 [2015], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Maria Schneider Orchestra: The Thompson Fields (2014 [2015], ArtistShare): [cd]: B+(**)
• Matthew Shipp Trio: The Conduct of Jazz (2015, Thirsty Ear): [cd]: A-
• Slobber Pup: Pole Axe (2015, Rare Noise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Speedy Ortiz: Foil Deer (2015, Carpark): [r]: B+(*)
• The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful (2015, Fortuna Pop): [r]: B+(**)
• Total Babes: Heydays (2015, Wichita): [r]: B+(*)
• Webb Wilder: Mississippi Moderne (2015, Landslide): [r]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

• Robert Forster: Intermission: The Best of the Solo Recordings 1990-1997 (1990-97 [2007], Beggars Banquet): [r]: A-
• Marty Grosz and His Sugar Daddies: On Revival Day: Live at the Atlanta Jazz Party! (1995, Jazzology): [r]: B+(**)
• Marty Grosz & His Hot Puppies: Rhythm Is Our Business (2000-01 [2003], Sackville): [r]: B+(***)
• John Law Quartet: Exploded on Impact (1992 [1993], Slam): [r]: B+(***)
• John Law: Extremely Quartet (1996 [1997], Hat Art): [r]: A-
• John Law Quartet: Abacus (2000 [2001], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Aaron Irwin Quartet: A Room Forever (self-released): November 24
• Ernie Krivda: Requiem for a Jazz Lady (Capri): November 17

Nothing from Crowson this week: he wasted his editorial space with a celebration of the World Series victors. I enjoyed the Kansas City Royals' wins, too -- even watched a couple innings of Game 2, where I didn't recognize a single name but had no problem understanding the many nuances of the game. At least that much doesn't change much, or fade away.

The main topic this week is the mental and moral rot that calls itself conservatism, also known as the Republican Party. Scattered links:

• Anne Kim: The GOP's Flat Tax Folly: It seems like every Republican presidential candidate has his own special tax jiggering plan, although they all have common features, namely letting the rich pay less (so they can save more) and increasing the federal deficit (hoping to trim that back a bit by cutting spending, although not on "defense" or on privatization schemes or on putting more people in jail). And those who lack the staff or imagination to come up with signature schemes fall back on the so-called "flat tax" scam (even more euphamistically called "the fair tax" -- as spelled out in Neal Boortz's The Fair Tax Book): Kim's list of flat-taxers includes Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson, who likens the tax to a tithe. One thing flat-taxers always claim is that a single rate would greatly simplify the income tax code, but today's "complicated" rate chart is maybe two pages of the code. Reducing that to one line in an age where everything is computerized is nothing. All the rest of the complexity addresses the many questions of what is (or is not) income, at least for taxability purposes. For individuals who don't have many itemizable deductions that's already been simplified, but for businesses that's where all the complexity comes in. The loopholes for any given business may vary, but the bottom line is that businesses (including self-employed individuals) get to deduct many expenses that the rest of us cannot. The flat-taxers may think they're going to cut through a lot of special cases, but it's often hard to separate perks out from necessary expenses, to take one example. Another complicating factor is that we often implement policy through tax incentives. For instance, the tax code favors property owners over renters, married people over single, and families with dependent children over those without (although not nearly as much as the actual increased cost of maintaining those children). The tax code has long favored private health insurance (effectively subsidizing it), and since ACA added penalties for those who are uninsured (who are, after all, not only hurting themselves but becoming public liabilities). And this list could go on and on, from things that seem eminently reasonable to others that are truly perverse (like the oil depletion allowance).

  If the economy itself were totally fair -- if all markets were optimally transparent and competitive, and if had enough leverage they could fully share in productivity gains and profits -- then a flat income tax might also be a fair tax (although it would be easier to account for and collect a business-only tax like a VAT). However, virtually everything in the private sector economy is unbalanced in ways that favor property owners and limit potential competitors. The result, as we plainly see today, is vast and increasing inequality, which at its current stage is undermining democracy and tearing at the social fabric. Indeed, this is happening despite a current tax system which is still progressive: which taxes the rich more than it taxes the poor, and which provides some redistribution from rich to poor. In this context, the flat tax does three things, all bad: it reduces the tax on the rich, increasing inequality; it increases taxes on the poor and at least half of all working Americans, in many cases pushing them into (or deeper into) poverty; and it kills the critical idea of progressivity in tax collection. If anything, we need to extend the notion of progressivity throughout the tax system. For instance, we currently have a flat tax on capital gains and dividends -- almost exclusively a favor to the rich -- but both are forms of income. If anything, as unearned income you can make a case for taxing them more progressively -- since they contribute more to inequality, and since the tax rate has no disincentive. (A higher tax rate offers more incentive to hide income through fraud, but not to gain the income in the first place. I've argued in the past that the proper framework for calculating a progressive scale for unearned income should be the lifetime, which would encourage saving by the young and/or poor.) I'd also like to see progressive taxes on corporations, which would help even the playing field between small and large companies. (At present the latter tend to use their scale advantage to crowd out competition.) Of course, it's not true that every tax should be progressive. But some taxes have to be progressive enough to counter the economic system's built-in bias toward inequality.

  As a rule of thumb, any time you hear "flat-tax" or "fair-tax" you should automatically reject its advocate. Most likely they don't know what they're talking about, but to the extent that they do they are out to trash society, the economy, and the public institutions that make them possible.

• Paul Krugman: The Conspiracy Consensus:

  So, are we supposed to be shocked over Donald Trump claiming that Janet Yellen is keeping rates low to help Obama? Folks, this is a widely held position in the Republican Party; Paul Ryan and John Taylor accused Ben Bernanke years ago of doing something dastardly by preventing the fiscal crisis they insist would and should have happened under Obama. If Trump's remarks seem startling, it's only because the press has soft-pedaled the conspiracy theorizing of seemingly respectable Republicans.

  Uh, doesn't this mean that Trump understands that low interest rates are the right thing for the economy? Sure, he's pissed that Obama gets credit for the stimulated growth, but if he were president he'd want the same low rates so he could get credit for the growth. Maybe he thinks that Yellen is such a partisan hack that if a Republican were president she's raise interest rates just to get them blamed for the downturn. On the other hand, what does that say about Republicans calling for higher interest rates? That they're willing to harm the economy as long as they think a Democrat will be blamed for it? On the other hand, when they were in power, you have Nixon saying "we are all Keynesians now" and Cheney "deficits don't matter."

• Nancy LeTourneau: The Effects of Anti-Knowledge on Democracy: Starts with a long quote from Mike Lofgren: The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge -- worth checking out on its own, among other things because the first thing you see after a quote attributed to Josh Billings ("The trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that ain't so.") is a picture of Ben Carson. Lofgren writes about Carson (evidently before last week's revelations about pyramids and arks):

  This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author's note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn't). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.

  It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes. [ . . . ]

  This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn't agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government's attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.

  Perhaps Lofgren was trying to burnish his conservative bona fides with that Soviet Union example: one closer to the mark would be the Salem witch trials.

  LeTourneau adds:

  That's why I'd suggest that the root cause of an attraction to anti-knowledge was the creation of Fox News. What Murdoch managed to do with that network was to pose the proposition that facts were merely the liberal media at work. So on one side of the "debate" you have the conservative garage logic and on the other you have liberal facts. The rest of the media -- in an attempt to prove they weren't liberal -- accepted this frame, giving credence to anti-knowledge as a legitimate position. That traps us into things like having to argue over whether the science of human's contribution to climate change is real because denialism is given credence as the opposing conservative view.

  I've seen an argument that right-wing opposition to climate science is based on the perception (or maybe just intuition) that the whole thing is just an excuse to promote government regulation; i.e., that because we reject the solution, we have to deny the problem and all the science behind it. That only works if the problems aren't real, which is to say never -- although global warming has had an unusually long run because people readily confuse the variability of everyday weather with the uniformity of climate, and because the latter is a bit too stochastic for certainty. There are many other examples of this -- taxes, stimulus spending, military intervention, defense spending, personal guns: all cases where the right-wing holds to a position based on political conviction regardless of the facts. Part of the problem here is that right-wingers have taken extreme stands, based on pure rhetoric, that have seized their brains like prime directives: like the notion that all government regulation is bad, or that government is incompetent to act. Part is that when right-wing "think tanks" have taken problems seriously and tried to come up with conservative solutions, they've sometimes been adopted by their enemy (leading one to doubt their sincerity: cap-and-trade and Obamacare are examples). As the right-wing has lost more and more arguments, it's only natural that they'd start to flail at the facts and science that undermines their ideological positions. From there it's a slippery slope. For many years, the right has complained about leftists in academia poisoning young minds, but in 2012 Rick Santorum broke new ground in arguing that people shouldn't go to college because the very institutions teach people to think like liberals. Since then the GOP's struggle against science, reason, and reality has only intensified. That leads us guys like Carson, and he's far from alone (see, e.g., the flat-tax brigade, above).

  Also see LeTourneau's"Who's to Blame for This Mess?". Most of the post is a quote from a Robert Reich post, where Reich is interviewing "a former Republican member of Congress," who starts out with "They're all nuts" then goes down the presidential lineup, starting with Carson and Trump ("they're both out of their f*cking minds") and ending with Bush and Christie ("they're sounding almost as batty as the rest"). He places blame:"Roger Ailes, David and Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh. I could go on. They've poisoned the American mind and destroyed the Republican Party").

  LeTourneau has yet another piece, The Policy Vacuum of Movement Conservatism, where she quotes Michael Lind:

  Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea of "rollback" in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment. In the 1960s, Reagan denounced Social Security and Medicare as tyrannical, but as president he did not try to repeal and replace these popular programs. When he gave up the confrontational evil-empire rhetoric of his first term toward the Soviet Union and negotiated an end to the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev in his second term, many conservatives felt betrayed . . .

  Indeed, it's fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right -- repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution -- have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.

  On the other hand, Lind omits the one project that Reagan and successors succeeded spectacularly at: tilting the economy to favor the well-to-do, especially at the expense of organized labor. One might argue -- I would emphatically disagree -- that Reagan offered a necessary correction to the liberal/egalitarian tilt of the previous five decades, but what's happened since then has tipped the nation way too far back toward the rich. And it's clear that the right, like the rich, has no concept of too much and no will to turn their rhetoric back toward center. Still, they can only keep pushing their same old nostrums, even having watched them fail so universally under Bush. Lind's generation of conservatives may have mellowed as he claims, but there have been at least two later points when the Republicans turned starkly toward the right -- in the 1990s under Gingrich continuing through the Bush administration, and after 2009 with the Tea Party doubling down in the wake of failure. Moreover, they haven't given up on the defeats Lind identified, even though they continue to look like losing propositions. Indeed, it's hard to see that they have any viable policy options, leaving them with little beyond their conviction that all they really need is the right character -- maybe a Trump or maybe a Carson. After all, they wrap themselves so ostentatiously in piety and patriotic jingoism that they feel entitled to rule, even when they lose as bad as McCain did to Obama.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

• Olga Khazan: Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair: One of the most disturbing discoveries of the last twenty years: the average life expectancy in Russia took an alarming downturn after the fall of communism. When I was growing up, one thing we could take for granted was that we were making progress on nearly all fronts, one being that we could expect to live longer lives, and our children longer still. Russia showed that politically-engendered economic despair could end and even reverse that progress. But who thought it could happen here? I first read these reports a year ago and did a quick inventory. On my mother's side of the family, I have a cohort of 20 cousins, b. 1925-43. The first of those cousins to die was in 2003 (emphysema, i.e. cigarettes). The youngest to die was 71, in 2011, and the youngest still alive has beat that. The oldest still alive is 89. But a number of their children are already gone: the first a victim of the Vietnam War, one to a car wreck, one to cancer in her 30s, several more (and my records are incomplete). Perhaps the most striking was one who died at 64, just three days after his father died at 88. I'm pretty sure all of my cousins did better economically than their parents, but despite more education that's less true for the next generation. Just some data, but it fits, and makes the stats more concrete. Khazan cites the work of two economists who blame inequality. That's right, but we need a better way to explain how that works.

  PS: Paul Krugman also has a comment on this, including this chart which shows a downward trend in deaths for all the charted wealthy countries (plus US Hispanics), compared to a slight rise among US whites:

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  The Anne Case/Angus Deaton paper both posts refer to is Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.

• Gareth Porter: The New Yorker Doesn't Factcheck What 'Everyone Knows' Is True: Examines a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins on the shooting of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had tried to make a case that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. I've long be skeptical about Hezbollah's (and Iran's) guilt here, mostly because it seems out of character, but it's become such a propaganda point for Israel and the US that most western journalists (like Filkins) take it for fact. Nisman's indictment of prominent Iranian and Hezbollah added fire to the charges, but as Porter points out there is little substance in the indictment -- the main source is the MEK, an anti-Iranian terrorist organization originally set up by Saddam Hussein but lately primarily used by Israel to disseminate disinformation about Iran's nuclear program. Nisman further charged that Argentine presidents Carlos Menem and Cristina Kirchner conspired with Iran to cover up the bombing, but again his evidence is suspicious. As is Nisman's death, apparently a suicide but still, like the bombing, unresolved.

• David Waldman: Good guy with a gun takes out a theater shooter! GunFAIL CLXIII: What's that, 168? Looks like Waldman's been collecting stories of gun mishaps for a while now, and this is about one week's worth (Oct. 11-17, 2015): 47 events. The title refers to a guy in Salina, KS who was watching a movie and fidgeting with a gun in his pant-pocket, finally shooting himself in the leg (i.e., the "theater shooter" he "took out" was himself).

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Music: Current count 25726 [25691] rated (+35), 439 [439] unrated (-0).

Fall is coming to Wichita several weeks later than usual this year, but we raked up a first bag of leaves yesterday (many more are still on the trees, but no longer green). That got me started thinking about EOY lists. My own lists-in-progress currently show59 jazz and42 non-jazz new records on the A-list (reissues/historic music: 6 + 5).

I added eight records to those lists this week. Michael Tatum reviewed the Chills in hislatest column, and also tipped me off on two of this week's three rap albums (Blackalicious and Peaceable Solutions, although I was vaguely aware of the former). The third rap record was Paris, reviewed by Robert Christgau a while back. I had put it off because it's a double, and only gave it one spin, but it's so solid it's in my shopping basket (along with Laurie Anderson, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and Sleaford Mods) as a possible P&J contender.

Four jazz records too. Jörg Fischer has been sending me CDs for a couple years and Spicy Unit finally hit the spot. The other two -- Ochs-Robinson Duo and Michael Zerang & the Blue Lights -- I had to stream. I spent a big chunk of time last week scanning through The Free Jazz Collective's blog and adding all the new 2015 releases they reviewed to my2015 release list file. I don't find their ratings to be very reliable, but they do cover a lot of avant-jazz. I probably added a hundred albums, noted a couple dozen to look up, and listened to a handful. The Zerang album is the Mars Williams-Dave Rempis joust of my dreams (and its companion is either more or less depending on your perspective). And the Larry Ochs duo is as clear a showcase for his powerful tenor sax as I can recall. The trawl also located a few links below.

The fourth jazz record was one I got in the mail and played a lot (4-5 times), wavering on the fence. Josh Berman is actually in Zerang's band, but he is better heard on his own new trio record. Probably would have been an easier call had I not played it right after Ochs and the two Zerangs and started worrying that everything was sounding A-worthy. (As I'm writing this, I'm playing random shit from the queue and not having that problem at all.)

The release list file is currently approaching 2500 entries (2389; about one-third are jazz: 813). I'll keep growing the file for a while, but eventually it will give way to an EOY List Aggregate file, like the one I did last year. EOY lists start showing up in mid-November, especially in the UK (which probably has more music magazines than the US does). The counter in the music tracking file shows 751 records either rated or in hand this year. Unlikely I'll hit 1000 this year, as I have done a couple of times in the past.

Recommended music links:

The first few links come from the Free Jazz Collective crawl.

• Free Jazz Collective: To Ornette Coleman: A retrospective of pretty much all the albums. The Free Jazz Collective also did a 50-year series on AACM: Introduction, 1965-1974, 1975-1984, 1985-1994, 1995-2004, 2005-2015.

• My trawl also neeted this interview with Tom Surgall, director of the free jazz documentaryFire Music, with his list of "important free jazz albums": his pick of John Tchicai's Afrodiasica spurred me to listen to a number of the Danish saxophonist's albums (see old music below).

• Milo Miles: First Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ballot: Goes through some rationalization about being "too good" to vote in Pazz & Jop (a status some of us have yet to achieve), then prints out a list of fifteen ballot choices for 2016 (any write-ins?). Then he asks, "which five did I vote for?" I wouldn't presume to know, but I wouldn't feel bad about voting for: Chic, The JB's, Los Lobos. After that it gets a bit dicier. Looking back, I see at least one A- grade for (C means a best-of compilation) for: Janet Jackson (2), Nine Inch Nails (3), The Smiths (1C). I wouldn't mind any of those, but they're not what I think of as all-time legends, and I bet I can find better acts the Hall passed over. I also see that Christgau has at least one A- grade for: The Cars (1C), Chaka Khan (1C), Steve Miller (1C), The Spinners (2+2C). I should probably give that Spinners comp another spin, maybe even check out the Atlantics I totally missed. The others: Cheap Trick (probably entertaining live), Chicago (maybe the worst rock band of all time, not that they started so bad), Deep Purple (nothing in my database, nothing I remember hearing, although I surely must have), N.W.A. (made a big impression on teens at the time), and Yes (very popular among my college friends, but I moved on).

PS: Sometime back I incorrectly got the group and album title swapped: should be The Spanish Donkey: Raoul (2015, Rare Noise). Group members are: Joe Morris, Jamie Saft, and Mike Pride. Grade:B.

New records rated this week:

• Josh Berman Trio: A Dance and a Hop (2015, Delmark): A-
• Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (2015, OGM): [r]: A-
• The Chills: Silver Bullets (2015, Fire): [r]: A-
• Marcelo Dos Reis/Angélica V. Salvi: Concentric Rinds (2013 [2015], Cipsela): [cd]: B+(*)
• Robin Eubanks Mass Line Big Band: More Than Meets the Ear (2015, ArtistShare): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Sergi Felipe: Whisper Songs (2011, UnderPool): [cd]: B+(*)
• Sergi Felipe/Whisper Songs: Bombú Es Libre En El Espacio (2013, UnderPool): [cd]: B+(*)
• Garrison Fewell: Invisible Resonance Trio (2013 [2015], Creative Nation Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Mike Holober: Balancing Act (2015, Palmetto): [cd]: B+(**)
• Hot Jazz Jumpers: The Very Next Thing (2015, On the Bol): [cd]: B
• Guus Janssen: Meeting Points (1989-2014 [2015], Bimhuis): [cd]: B+(***)
• Marco Mezquida Mateos: Live in Terrassa (2015, UnderPool): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Monash Art Ensemble/George Lewis: Hexis (2013 [2014], Jazzhead): [r]: B+(**)
• Àlvar Montfort/Lucas Martinez/Jordi Matas/Abel Boquera/Pep Mula: Underpool 4 (2014 [2015], UnderPool): [cd]: B+(*)
• Larry Ochs/Don Robinson Duo: The Throne (2011 [2015], Not Two): [r]: A-
• Paris: Pistol Politics (2015, Guerrilla Funk, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Peaceful Solutions: Barter 7 (2015, self-released): [bc]: A-
• Pol Pedrós/Noè Escolà/Albert Cirera/Rai Paz/Paco Weht/Ildefons Alonso: Underpool 3 (2014, UnderPool): [cd]: B+(*)
• Martin Speicher/Peter Geisselbrecht/Jörg Fischer: Spicy Unit (2014 [2015], Spore Print): [cd]: A-
• Spinifex: Veiled (2015, Trytone): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jacob Varmus Septet: Aegean: For Three Generations of Jazz Lovers (2013 [2015], Crows' Kin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Carrie Wicks: Maybe (2015, OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Patrick Williams: Home Suite Home (2015, BFM): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dave Wilson Quartet: There Was Never (2015, Zoho): [cd]: B+(*)
• Michael Zerang & the Blue Lights: Songs From the Big Book of Love (2014 [2015], Pink Palace): [bc]: A-
• Michael Zerang & the Blue Lights: Hash Eaters and Peacekeepers (2014 [2015], Pink Palace, EP): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• The Chills: Kaleidoscope World (1982-84 [1989], Homestead): [r]: B+(*)
• Marty Grosz and the Collectors Items Cats: Thanks (1993, Jazzology): [r]: B+(**)
• Marty Grosz Quartet: Just for Fun! (1996, Nagel Heyer): [r]: B+(*)
• Marty Grosz: Left to His Own Devices (2000 [2001], Jazzology): [r]: B+(*)
• Grant McLennan: In Your Bright Ray (1996 [1997], Beggars Banquet): [r]: B+(*)
• Grant McLennan: Intermission: The Best of the Solo Recordings 1990-1997 (1990-97 [2007], Beggars Banquet): [r]: A-
• John Tchicai: Cadentia Nova Danica (1968, Freedom): [r]: A-
• John Tchicai and Cadentia Nova Danica: Afrodisiaca (1969, MPS): [r]: B+(**)
• John Tchicai-Irene Schweizer-Group: Willi the Pig: Live at the Willisau Jazz Festival (1975 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: A-
• John Tchicai & Strange Brothers: Darktown Highlights (1977, Storyville): [r]: B+(***)
• John Tchicai: Put Up the Fight (1987, Storyville): [r]: B+(*)
• John Tchicai: Darktown Highlights/Put Up the Fight (1977-87 [2012], Storyville, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dan Ballou: Solo Trumpet (Clean Feed)
• Bathysphere: Bathysphere (Driff)
• Scott Clark 4tet: Bury My Heart (Clean Feed)
• Di Lontan: Power Trio (Clean Feed)
• Jorrit Dijkstra: Neither Odd nor Even (Driff)
• Jorrit Dijkstra/Pandelis Karayorgis/Nate McBride/Curt Newton: Matchbox (Driff)
• Brian Fielding: An Appropriate Response: Volume One (Broken Symmetries Music): January 1
• Daniel Levin/Mat Maneri: The Transcendent Function (Clean Feed)
• Jack Mouse & Scott Robinson with Janice Borla: Three Story Sandbox (Tall Grass): January 1
• Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Tanya Kalmanovitch: Villa Lobos Suite (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Complementary Colors (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Whit Dickey: Butterfly Whispers (Leo)
• Nate Wooley Quintet: (Dance to) the Early Music (Clean Feed)

It's been a good week for warmongering anti-Islamist bigots, what with the Kurdish "liberation" of ISIS-held Sinjar, the ISIS-blamed bombing of a Russian airliner, the drone-murder of reality TV star"Jihadi John," and ISIS-linked murderous assault in Paris on the innocent fans of a band called Eagles of Death Metal. Ann Coulter was so thrilled she tweeted that America just elected Donald Trump as its next president. Shell-shocked post-Benghazi! Democrats were quick to denounce it all as terrorism, using the precise words of the Republican thought police. Someone even proposed changing the Freedom Fries to "French Fries" in solidarity. French president François Hollande declared that the Paris attacks meant war, momentarily forgetting that he had already started the same war when France joined the anti-ISIS bombing party in Syria. He and other decried this "attack on western civilization." Gandhi could not be reached, but he's probably sticking to his line that western civilization would be a good idea.

I'll return to this subject below, but the main point to make up here is that this is above all a time to keep your cool. In fact, take a couple steps back and try to recover some of the cool we've lost ever since demonizing ISIS became so ubiquitous nobody gives it a second thought. I have no wish to defend them, but I will point out that what they're accused of is stuff that virtually all armies have done throughout history. Also that they exist because governments in Damascus and Baghdad became so violently oppressive that millions of people (who in normal times want peace and prosperity as much as everyone else does) became so desperate as to see them as the lesser evil. No doubt ISIS can be brutal to those under their thumb, but ISIS could not exist without some substantial measure of public support, and that means two things: one is that to kill off ISIS you'd have to kill an awful lot of people, revealing yourself to be an even more brutal monster; the other is that you can't end this by simply restoring the old Damascus and Baghdad powers, because they will inevitably revert to type. Yet who on the US political spectrum has a plan to do anything different?

Before this flare up I had something more important I wanted to write about: inequality. Admittedly, war is more urgent: it has a way of immediately crowding out all other problems. But the solution is also much simpler: just don't do it. All you need to know about war has been said many times, notably by people like A.J. Muste and David Dellinger. It might be argued that inequality is the root of war, or conversely that equitable societies would never have any reason to wage war. The ancient justification for war was always loot. And while we've managed to think of higher, more abstract and idealized concepts for justifying war, there's still an awful lot of looting going on. In America, we call that business.

The piece I've been thinking about is a Bloomberg editorial that appeared in the Wichita Eagle: Ramesh Ponnuru: Is income inequality a big deal? He starts:

We conservatives tend to get less worked up about economic inequality than liberals do, and I think we're right about that.

We should want most people, and especially poor people, to be able to get ahead in absolute terms. We should want to live in a society with a reasonable degree of mobility rather than one where people are born into relative economic positions they can never leave.

But so long as those conditions are met, the ratio of the incomes of the top 1 percent to the median worker should be fairly low on our list of concerns; and if those conditions aren't met, we should worry about our failure to meet them rather than their effects on inequality.

If you take "worked up" in the sense of bothered, sure, but if you mean concerned, his disclaimer is less true. The bare fact is that virtually every principle and proposal conservatives hold dear is designed to increase inequality. Cutting taxes allows the rich to keep more income and concentrate wealth, lifting them up further. Cutting food stamps and other "entitlements" pushes the poor down, also increasing inequality. Maybe desperation will nudge some people off welfare into low wage jobs, further depressing the labor market and allowing savvy businessmen to reap more profits. Of course, making it harder for workers to join unions works both ways -- lower wages, higher profits -- and conservatives are in the forefront there. They're also in favor of deregulating business -- never deny the private sector an opportunity to reap greater profits from little things like pollution or fraud. They back "free trade" agreements, designed mostly to protect patent (property) owners and let businesses expand into more profitable markets overseas, at the minor cost of outsourcing American jobs -- actually a double plus as that outsourcing depresses the labor market, meaning lower wages and higher profits. Sandbagging public education advantages those who can afford private schools. Saddling working class upstarts with college debt helps keep the children of the rich ahead. And the list goes on and on. Maybe you can come up with some conservative hot list items that don't drop straight to the bottom line (abortion? guns? drug prohibition? gambling? war? -- one could argue that all of those hurt the working class more than the rich, but I doubt that's really the point). Still, you won't find any conservative proposals to counter inequality.

From time immemorial the very purpose of conservatism has been to defend the rulers against the masses. From time to time that's required some adjustments to conservative thinking: in America at least, cons no longer defend the prerogatives of kings and titled aristocracy (not that they have any problems with the Saudis or Hashemites, or nearly any tin-pot dictator who lets their companies profit); and they've given up on slavery (and the most overt expressions of racism), but still can't stand the idea of unions, and they never have trusted democracy. For a while they liked the idea that America offered a chance for equal opportunity (without guaranteeing equal results), an idea Ponnuru is still fond of, not that he'd actually cross any of his betters by suggesting we do something about it. For one thing they'd probably point out that equal opportunity is how we wound up with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whereas the worst you'd have to put up with in a closed oligarchy is someone like Jeb Bush (or, pick your poison, Donald Trump).

Ponnuru refers to an article by George Packer: The Republican Class War, probably because the article starts off a "reformocon" conference organized by Ponnuru's wife April (high among the Republican Party's "family values" is nepotism). The reformocons have a book full of policy proposals that allegedly help the middle if not the lower class, but none of the things Packer mentions looks promising. Ponnuru cites a study on opportunity mentioned by Packer then dismisses it with another study on something else. He continues:

When he moved to macroeconomics, Packer was on even shakier ground:"Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care. At the top, it creates deep pools of wealth that have nowhere productive to go, leading to asset bubbles in capital markets bearing little or no relation to the health of the overall economy. (Critics call this the "financialization" of the economy.) These fallouts from inequality were among the causes of the Great Recession."

Saying that "inequality" has caused income stagnation is question-begging. If most Americans are experiencing stagnant incomes, that would cause difficulties regardless of how the top 1 percent is doing. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, income growth for most people coincided with rising inequality. And the theory that inequality leads to financial crises has a weak evidentiary basis.

Uh, 1907? 1929? 2008? That's a pretty strong series. Maybe some lesser recessions don't correlate so well: 1979-81 was induced by the Fed's anti-inflation hysteria, so the recovery was unusual as well. Income stagnation also started with the early 1980s recession, as did the first major tax cuts for the rich, although even larger sources of inequality that decade were trade deficits (resulting in a major sell-off of assets to foreign investors) and real estate fraud (bankrupting the S&L industry, resulting in a recession). In the 1990s the main sources of inequality were the massive bid-up of the stock market and a loosening of bank regulations, and they too led to a recession in 2001. The labor market did tigheten up enough in the late 1990s for real wages to rise a bit, but that was wiped out in the following recession, and the "Bush recovery" was the worst to date at generating new jobs, as it was fueled almost exclusively by debt and fraud.

Packer finally splits from the reformocons, and Ponnuru's reaction is basically a hand wave.

"The reformocons, for all their creativity and eloquence, don't grasp the nature of the world in which their cherished middle-class Americans actually live," Packer said. "They can't face its heartlessness."

I don't mean to sound heartless myself when I say that no sensible policy agenda is going to protect all towns and industries from the effects of global competition and technological change. But most members of the vast American middle class aren't looking for work in the steel mills or wishing they could be.

Ponnuru may not relish it, but being heartless is part of what it takes to be a conservative these days. So is being a devious little prevaricator. Let me close this section with a couple paragraphs from Packer (starting with the one on macro that Ponnuru thinks he disproved, because it's so very succinctly stated):

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care. At the top, it creates deep pools of wealth that have nowhere productive to go, leading to asset bubbles in capital markets bearing little or no relation to the health of the over-all economy. (Critics call this the "financialization" of the economy.) These fallouts from inequality were among the causes of the Great Recession.Inequality is also warping America's political system. Greatly concentrated wealth leads to outsized political power in the hands of the few -- even in a democracy with free and fair elections -- which pushes government to create rules that favor the rich. It's no accident that we're in the era of Citizens United. Such rulings give ordinary Americans the strong suspicion that the game is rigged. Democratic institutions no longer feel legitimate when they continue to produce blatantly unfair outcomes; it's one of those insights that only an élite could miss. And it's backed up by evidence as well as by common sense. Last year, two political scientists found that, in recent times, policy ideas have rarely been adopted by the U.S. government unless they're favored by corporations and the wealthy -- even when those ideas are supported by most Americans. The persistence of the highly unpopular carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers is simply the most unseemly example.

Some scattered links this week:

• Dan Sanchez: On Veterans Day, Who Should Thank Whom?:

  Randolph Bourne famously wrote, "War is the health of the State." By that he meant that foreign wars nourish domestic tyranny because they place people into a siege mentality that makes them more apt to give up their freedoms for the sake of the war effort. And indeed, the American national security state, from militarized cops to domestic spying, has metastasized under the cover of the War on Terror.

  So, no, the activity of U.S. soldiers has not secured our freedoms, but eroded them. More specifically, contrary to the common argument discussed above, the troops are not busy protecting freedom of speech for all Americans, including those who are anti-war. Rather, by contributing to foreign wars, they make it more likely that someday the country's siege mentality will get so bad that speech (especially anti-war speech) will be restricted.

  Since foreign wars are inimical to domestic freedom, it is those who strenuously oppose war who are actually fighting for freedom. If not for opponents and skeptics of war, we would have even more war than we do. And in that case, individual freedoms would have been even more infringed upon.

  I grew up visiting houses that had pictures of young men in uniform on their shelves and mantles, mostly from WWII, some from Korea. My grandfather went to Europe for the Great War: I don't recall any photos but he came back with a couple ribbons and medals. Some relatives posted a couple of those photos on Facebook, and I found them touching -- not so much that I thought they did anything worthwhile as because they were just ordinary Americans who happened to get caught up in America's last popular war. On the other hand, we had no such photos in my house, not because my father didn't get drafted into the war but because he considered the experience so pointless. That probably contributed to my skepticism about the army, but Vietnam sealed my opposition. Ever since my opposition to war has only grown. I know a handful of people who went to Iraq, and I have nothing to say to them: I can't thank them because they did nothing worthwhile, and I can't apologize to them because I did everything I reasonably could to keep them from going. So for me all Veteran's Day does is remind me of old (and in many cases now dead) men, who thankfully survived the holocaust and returned to live relatively normal lives -- no one in my family perished in that war -- something I can't say for the atrocities that came later. The only heroes from those wars are the people who opposed them.

• David Atkins: The Morning After Paris: What Do We Do Now?: A generally thoughtful piece, although sometimes he thinks himself into odd positions, especially when he tries to counter straw puppets from the left, but this bit of equivalence with the right resonates:

  Ultimately, what drives both domestic jingoist conservatism and ISIL's brand of extremism is a commitment to violent aggression beyond its own borders, a weird fetishization of guns and gun violence, a misogynistic hatred of sexual freedom for women and non-traditional relationships of all kind, and a deep commitment to conservative religious fundamentalism and patriarchal gerontocracy as the organizational structures of society.

  Earlier he wrote:

  The immediate reaction from many on the left is to simply blame the problem on blowback, insisting that if Western powers simply stopped trying to exert influence on the Middle East, terrorism would not reach Western shores. Many liberals further argue that the social problems in most middle eastern countries suffering from extremist violence are the direct result of a history of imperialism and colonialism.

  These are thornier arguments to dismiss, not only because they contain a great deal of truth, but also because unlike conservative claims that are testable and false, the blowback argument is unfalsifiable.

  He also charges liberals with "special pleading," which he tries to disprove by comparing the CIA coups in Iran and Chile, noting that the latter "has not led to decades of Chilean anti-American terrorism." He doesn't bother adding that even after Pinochet fell the US didn't impose sanctions on Chile, or shoot down Chilean air liners, or blow up Chilean oil rigs -- clear instances of American belligerence, some of which if done by anyone else would meet our definition of terrorism. Nor does he admit that there's not much if any case that Iran has actually committed any acts of anti-American terror. Anti-American sentiment? Sure, but that's not unknown in Chile either. But these are minor quibbles, and clearly the effects of colonialism, imperialism, and cronyism on the Middle East are more layered and more complex than this caricature. (Also note that"blowback" isn't always so indirect: when the US armed the Afghan mujahideen and Hekmatyar and Bin Laden later turned on the US, that wasn't "unfalsifiable.") Atkins carries his confusion forward:

  One could step back and remove all Western influence from the region, both in Syria and in Iraq. One could simply let the Shi'ites, Kurds, Syrian Assad loyalists and Syrian anti-Assad moderates (if any exist) battle it out themselves and hope that some combination of the above emerges victorious, trying not to draw any of their ire and taking in as many refugees from the war-ravaged conflict zones as possible. But it's highly unlikely that the attacks against the West would stop, it's likely that their propaganda would be increasingly successful at radicalizing young men in the West, and it's certainly true that populations across Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East would be greatly harmed by allowing ISIL to expand. Even if America and its allies immediately abandoned all conflict in the Middle East, terrorism would likely continue -- and even 30 years from now the Glenn Greenwalds of the world would still say any such attacks were just so much blowback. Those outcomes and that ideology are not acceptable at a moral or a practical level.

  Atkins' conjecture here (and it's really nothing more) -- that Islamic groups will continue to commit acts of terror in the West even if the US and its allies cease all provocations -- is unfalsifiable as well, because it's not going to be tested: US business has too much money at stake to back away, and US military power has too much ego at stake to back down. (One might imagine a political challenge to the latter, but it's hard to see where it might come from: clearly not Clinton, and even nominal critics of US war policy Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul are pretty compromised.) But one reason to doubt Atkins is that no less an authority than Bin Laden has stated that if the provocations cease, so will the attacks in the West. I'm not sure that the anonymous intellects behind ISIS have thought this through so rigorously, but Atkins seems to have bought the whole party line on their inhumanity -- "an active group of murderous, barbaric theocratic cutthroats who adore violence, desire and rape women as a matter of official policy, desecrate and destroy monuments that have stood for thousands of years, and seek to establish a regional and global caliphate with the goal of a final battle against the Great Satan" -- a definition that is far outside the bounds of any group in the history (and not just of Islam). It clearly serves the interest of Americans who want to escalate the war against ISIS to inflate such visions of evil, and I fear Atkins' repetition of these claims just helps them out.

  My own prescription for what the US should be doing is straightforward:

  1. We should eschew the use of force to settle any and all disputes in the region (or anywhere else, really, but let's focus here on the Middle East). Consequently, we should negotiate a multilateral arms embargo for the entire region (including Egypt, Israel, the Arabian peninsula, Iran, and Turkey), and we should move toward this unilaterally as long as doing so doesn't create a vacuum to be filled with other arms suppliers.
  2. We should promote and facilitate negotiations aimed at resolving all conflicts and protecting minority and individual human rights in accordance with well-established international standards (like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
  3. We should negotiate an international treaty which establishes a new human right: to exile, which allows anyone jailed or otherwise endangered anywhere to appeal to be granted asylum elsewhere.
  4. We should be willing to grant amnesty to anyone (including ISIS) that agrees to participate in peaceable democratic conflict resolution. We should recognize that disarmament is a goal of this process, not a prerequisite.
  5. We should back up these diplomatic appeals with economic aid. Conversely, any nations that persist in using violence against their own people and/or exporting violence abroad should be ostracized with economic sanctions. (The BDS campaign against Israel is a start here.)

  How hard can that be to understand? But in today's media heat, who's talking like that?

Some more related ISIS links:

• Why John Kerry and the French president are calling ISIS "Daesh": A little history on the ever-shifting arts of naming yourself and your enemies. Kerry et al. don't like Islamic State (or IS) because it suggests at least the potential of a single state representing all Muslims, something they want to nip in the bud. So they've come up with something meaningless and slightly exotic, DAESH (or Daesh) derived from the transliterated Arabic initials (like Hamas). Still, ISIS makes more sense to the rest of us, since it spatially delimits the Islamic State within Iraq and Syria (actually more accurate than the broader al-Sham they used to use, which got translated as Levant). My takeaway is to use ISIS, since I think it is very important to understand that their rump state is an artifact of the lost control of the governments in Damascus and Baghdad. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the aspiring but still pre-state groups in Libya, Yemen, etc., are all that linked with ISIS. Still, Islamic State is clearly a concept (and increasingly a brand name) that resonates with a good many people outside Syria and Iraq. That matters mostly because it means that even if the West smashes (or as Sarkozy put it "exterminates") ISIS the concept will continue to inspire terror groups indefinitely. Obama probably understood this when he talked about "containing and degrading" ISIS -- words that now test as namby-pamby (compared to defeat and exterminate).

• DR Tucker: And That's the Way It Is: Live-Blogging the CBS Democratic Debate: Bad timing, the evening after the Paris attacks. And, no big surprise, the Democrats all vow to wage war:

  In his opening statement, Sanders condemns the attacks and vows to "rid this planet of ISIS" as president, before decrying income inequality, the broken campaign finance system, and calling for a political revolution. Clinton says prayers are not enough for Paris; we need resolve to bring the world together to combat jihadist radicals. Clinton vows to fight terrorism aggressively as president. O'Malley says his heart goes out to the people of France, and says the US must work collaboratively with other nations to thwart terrorism.

  Sanders seems to prefer using Arab proxies in the war against ISIS, calling this a "war for the soul of Islam." He doesn't that if this metaphorical war is fought with real arms, armed warfare will be the only winner. Clinton insists that ISIS "cannot be contained; it must be defeated." She doesn't wonder what an American "victory" might mean for the vanquished, or whether indeed there will be any. David Atkins has a follow-up post to the one quoted above: The Right Will Win if the Left Doesn't Forcefully Confront ISIS. He applauds Hollande and Sanders for "sounding aggressively militaristic in response." The idea is that leftish politicians should deliberately act stupid and malicious in order to save electorates from electing right-wingers who would act stupid and malicious, and in the process really screw everything up. In the debate, at least, Sanders was able to scold Clinton, reminding her that her Iraq War vote was profoundly wrong. Atkins wants to squelch that dissent, and Sanders seems willing to throw his career away going along. Indeed, it's reasonable to argue that had the 2003 Iraq War not happened, ISIS would never have come around. On the other hand, it did, and we're here. Still, that doesn't make bowing to a flare-up of war fever right just because it is (for the moment) popular. Saddam Hussein was painted as every bit as evil then as ISIS is now. But it really doesn't matter how evil the enemy is if you can't do anything constructive about it, and we've proven that we can't. One more thing: while Sanders voted against Iraq, he did vote for the post-9/11 Afghanistan War -- in the heat of the moment, you might say. To my mind, that was the real strategic blunder.

• Alissa J Rubin/Anne Barnard: France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks: Hollande, having vowed to be "unforgiving with the barbarians," takes the path with the least mental effort, not to mention conscience, and goes straight after command headquarters in Raqqa. Of course, they wouldn't have been able to react so quickly except that they were already bombing Syria. The article also quotes Nicolas Sarkozy saying, "We need everybody in order to exterminate Daesh." Grammar isn't totally clear there, but the genocide word is.

• Peter Beinart: ISIS Is Not Waging a War Against Western Civilization: Mostly critiques some particularly dumb things Marco Rubio said. Beinart, who has a checkered history of first supporting and then having second thoughts about America's wars in the Middle East -- he wrote one book,The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror which can be read as why conservatives are clueless, and another The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. He concludes here that "both morally and strategically, limiting -- and ultimately eliminating -- the Islamic State's nightmarish dominion over millions of human beings justifies war," but he also argues that it's mostly geopolitics and not some clash of civilizations. One thing I will add is that even if you accept Beinart's conclusion that war against ISIS is justified, it doesn't follow that the US is the one that should be fighting that war. Given Beinart's track record, he'll figure that out . . . eventually.

  Beinart's pre-Paris piece is better: The Mindless Logic of Republican Foreign Policy: Sure, it's like shooting sitting ducks. But at least he's still skeptical on Syria:

  The experience of the last 15 years offers little reason to believe that waging a larger war in Syria will make Syria more stable or America more safe. But for most of the GOP presidential contenders, that's irrelevant. It doesn't really matter where American foreign policy leads, as long as America leads.

• Peter Van Buren: Paris: You Don't Want to Read This:

  But I do have this: stop what we have been doing for the last 14 years. It has not worked. There is nothing at all to suggest it ever will work. Whack-a-mole is a game, not a plan. Leave the Middle East alone. Stop creating more failed states. Stop throwing away our freedoms at home on falsehoods. Stop disenfranchising the Muslims who live with us. Understand the war, such as it is, is against a set of ideas -- religious, anti-western, anti-imperialist -- and you cannot bomb an idea. Putting western soldiers on the ground in the MidEast and western planes overhead fans the flames. Vengeance does not and cannot extinguish an idea.

• Chris Floyd: Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence:

  Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq -- which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead -- there would be no ISIS, no "Al Qaeda in Iraq." Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let's go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no "War on Terror" -- and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight. [ . . . ]

  I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators -- and again, again and again -- supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.

• Jason Ditz: Yazidis Burn Muslim Homes in 'Liberated' Iraqi City of Sinjar: What goes around comes around.

  ISIS carried out several bloody attacks against the Yazidis early in their takeover of the region, and labeled the homes of Sinjar's Sunni residents as such, apparently to advise their forces to leave them alone in their various crackdowns. Now, the homes labeled Sunni are a target.

  Sunnis are often the targets of violent recriminations after ISIS loses control of cities and towns, under the presumption that anyone ISIS wasn't persecuting (or at least was persecuting less publicly) must've been secretly collaborating with them.

• Patrick Cockburn: Paris Terror Attacks: No Security Can Stop ISIS -- the Bombers Will Always Get Through, and Paris Attack: ISIS Has Created a New Kind of Warfare.

• Graeme Wood: What ISIS Really Wants: This is evidently the source of the notion that ISIS is obsessed with hastening the apocalypse that Atkins cites in his pieces. I have no way of judging such views, but I am skeptical that there is a single idea and a single motivation behind a group the size of ISIS. I'll also note that there are plenty of Christians who are similarly obsessed with end times, and while we don't often talk about them, some have even had an inordinate amount of influence when it comes to the Middle East. (One I am aware of was David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister who oversaw the Balfour Declaration, which announced Britain's intention to facilitate the return of the Jews to Palestine, as foretold in the Book of Revelations. Another, who's been very vocal on the subject of late, is former GOP presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann.)

• Scott Atran: Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse: Another attempt to probe the ISIS mind, this one focusing on the psychological appeal of jihad to young Western Muslims -- the recruiting grounds for attacks like the ones in Paris. One lesson I draw from this is the importance of establishing the perception that the West treats the Muslim world fairly and justly. Another is that the rising racism and bigotry that prevents Muslims from assimilating in the West helps drive them against us.

If I stayed up a few more hours I could collect many more ISIS links, but this will have to be enough for now. I doubt that my main points will change any. And I don't mind the occasional pieces that show you how maniacal ISIS can be. None prove that the US military is the answer.

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Music: Current count 25787 [25726] rated (+61), 420 [439] unrated (-19).

Several reasons for the huge rated bump this week: one is that I procrastinated in cataloguing the incoming so the week ended Monday afternoon instead of my usual Sunday evening (which also means I've included Monday's mail in the unpacking); I knocked off almost all of the records listed below in a single play (which actually includes the week's two A- picks); about 20 of the records were streamed -- less than half, but they tend to go quick; finally, I noticed a record ungraded in the database that I was pretty sure I had heard, so I made a quick check of all the ungraded post-2000 jazz and that bumped the rated count up from 47 to 61.

I'd guess that probably close to ten records got a second play: Bathysphere, John Dikeman, Giovanni Di Domenico, Ingrid Laubrock, at least one of the Martin Küchens, Jack Mouse, Statik Selektah, both old and posthumous Sun Ra, John Carter (even though it's 2CD), Thank Your Lucky Stars. Still, the only one that came close to an A- was the Beach House, but I didn't feel like spending the extra time, especially after Depression Cherry (andBloom and Teen Dream) had left so little mark.

The Arab rap anthology (Khat Thaleth) was recommended by Bob Christgau just in time for the massive outpouring of anti-Arab vitriol that followed the terror attacks in Paris (and Beirut, but who's counting?). Even without downloading the trots, it's pretty obvious that these Arabs are not those Arabs. It comes as a unique item, although it probably isn't.

The Errol Garner reissue raises the question of redundancy, as you get two takes of the concert: one complete spread out on 2CD, the other as originally edited (plus one of those interviews that are interesting the first time around but unnecessary after that). Still, I had the old 1987 CD reissue at A-, and most of the cuts that the complete edition adds are every bit as good. Also, I'm relieved to point out that the whole 3CD package only costs $12.89 (at Amazon, although if you want vinyl the price jumps to $39.36). By the way, the original CD is still in print, down at $4.99. One downside is that the CD package is irregularly sized, so most likely it won't fit on your shelf.

I should also note that I was a little surprised to look back in my database and not find any other A- albums by Garner. In fact there are only three other entries: two B (Long Ago and Far Away and The Original Misty), one B+ (Easy to Love [The Erroll Garner Collection Vol. 1]). But Penguin Guide also only credits Garner with one 4-star album, no surprise given their predilection for solo piano: Solo Time! [The Erroll Garner Collection Vols. 4/5] (although they tabbed Concert by the Sea, with 3.5 stars, as a "core collection" album). Seems like there should be more because was such a distinctive stylist.

I had a few more things I wanted to write about this week. Let me just briefly mention one: Tim Niland's book,Music and More: Selected Blog Posts 2003-2015. My copy arrived and it looks terrific (although the perfect binding has developed a small bubble). Tons of reviews, an ongoing chronicle of twelve of the most productive years in jazz history. I do have a couple of quibbles: there is no table of contents or index, so it's going to be hard to find any particular review; for that matter, it doesn't even have page numbers, which should have been pretty easy to set up. I imagine the search function will help out here with the Kindle edition, if you're into that platform. Still, I'm very pleased to own a print copy. I'm adding the book cover to my book roll.

I also wanted to note that I've been working on my soon-to-be-obsolete Music Tracking File. I finally implemented the genre switches, and I've been scraping more sources for data: at this point I've added virtually every 2015 jazz record reviewed by Free Jazz Collective, and I've worked my way back to August in All About Jazz, resulting in alist of 1044 jazz releases this year (I've reviewed or at least own 540 of them). My coverage of other genres is much spottier, but currently adds up to2748 records. The list will eventually give way to an EOY aggregate list, but meanwhile helps me sort out what I need (or would like to) listen to.

New records rated this week:

• The 14 Jazz Orchestra: Nothing Hard Is Ever Easy (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B
• Bathysphere: Bathysphere (2015, Driff): [cd]: B+(**)
• Beach House: Depression Cherry (2015, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(*)
• Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars (2015, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(***)
• Beach Slang: The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us (2015, Polyvinyl): [r]: B
• Tony Bennett & Bill Charlap: The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern (Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Randy Bernsen: Grace Notes (2015, Jericho Jams): [cd]: B
• Bizingas: Eggs Up High (2015, NCM East): [cd]: B+(**)
• Björk: Vulnicura (2015, One Little Indian): [r]: B-
• Bobby Bradford-Frode Gjerstad Quartet: The Delaware River (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Leon Bridges: Coming Home (2015, Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Dani Comas: Epokhé (2014 [2015], UnderPool): [cd]: B+(**)
• Guy Davis: Kokomo Kidd (2015, M.C.): [r]: B+(*)
• Giovanni Di Domenico/Peter Jacquemyn/Chris Corsano: A Little Off the Top (2013 [2015], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• John Dikeman/William Parker/Hamid Drake: Live at La Resistenza (2014 [2015], El Negocito): [cd]: B+(***)
• Carlos Falanga: Gran Coral (2014 [2015], UnderPool): [cd]: B+(**)
• Amina Figarova: Blue Whisper (2015, In + Out): [cd]: B
• Clare Fischer: Out of the Blue (2015, Clavo): [cd]: B+(*)
• Tigran Hamasyan: Luys I Luso (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B-
• Aaron Irwin Quartet: A Room Forever (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Khat Thaleth [Third Line]: Initiative for the Elevation of Public Awareness (2013, Stronghold Sound): [r]: A-
• Martin Küchen/Johan Berthling/Steve Noble: Night in Europe (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Martin Küchen/Jon Rune Strøm/Tollef Østvang: Melted Snow (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Nancy Lane: Let Me Love You (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• Adam Larson: Selective Amnesia (2015, Inner Circle Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ingrid Laubrock: Ubatuba (2014 [2015], Firehouse 12): [cd]: B+(**)
• Daniel Levin/Rob Brown: Divergent Paths (2012 [2015], Cipsela): [cd]: B+(*)
• John Lindberg/Anil Eraslan: Juggling Kukla (2011 [2015], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Luis Lopes/Jean-Luc Guionnet: Live at Culturgest (2011 [2015], Clean Feed): [r]: B-
• Roy McGrath Quartet: Martha (2014 [2015], JL Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kristine Mills: Bossa Too (2015, InkWell Publishing): [cd]: B
• Jack Mouse & Scott Robinson with Janice Borla: Three Story Sandbox (2015 [2016], Tall Grass): [cd]: B+(*)
• Roots Manuva: Bleeds (2015, Big Dada): [r]: B
• Herb Silverstein: Younger Next Year (2015, self-released): [cd]: B
• Spanglish Fly: New York Boogaloo (2015, Caco World Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Chris Stapleton: Traveller (2015, Mercury Nashville): [r]: B+(*)
• Statik Selektah: Lucky 7 (2015, Showoff/Duck Down Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Ike Sturm + Evergreen: Shelter of Trees (2014 [2015], Kilde): [cd]: B-
• Sun Ra Arkestra Under the Direction of Marshall Allen: Babylon Live (2014 [2015], In+Out): [r]: B+(**)
• Survival Unit III: Game Theory (2010 [2013], Not Two): [r]: B+(**)
• Survival Unit III: Straylight (2014 [2015], Pink Palace): [bc]: B+(***)
• U.S. Girls: Half Free (2015, 4AD): [r]: B
• Manuel Valera & Groove Square: Urban Landscape (2015, Destiny): B+(**)
• Doug Webb: Triple Play (2014 [2015], Posi-Tone): [r]: B-

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

• John Carter: Echoes From Rudolph's (1976-77 [2015], NoBusiness, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• Hamid Drake/Michael Zerang: For Ed Blackwell (1995 [2015], Pink Palace): [bc]: B+(***)
• Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden: Frictions/Frictions Now (1969-71 [2015], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Erroll Garner: The Complete Concert by the Sea (1955 [2015], Columbia/Legacy, 3CD): [cd]: A-
• Sun Ra: The Magic City (1965 [2015], Enterplanetary Koncepts): [r]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

• Guy Davis: Juba Dance (2013, M.C.): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Juhani Aaltonen & Iro Haarla: Kirkastus (TUM)
• Tom Collier: Across the Bridge (Origin): November 20
• Bram De Looze: Septych (Clean Feed)
• Kaja Draksler/Susana Santos Silva: This Love (Clean Feed)
• Erik Friedlander: Oscalypso: Tribute to Oscar Pettiford (Skipstone)
• David Friesen & Glen Moore: Bactrian (Origin): November 20
• Jacob Garchik: Ye Olde (Yestereve)
• Miho Hazama: Time River (Sunnyside)
• Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Avant Age Garde I AMs of the Gal Luxury (Flat Langton's Arkeyes)
• Florian Hoefner: Luminosity (Origin): advance, January 15
• Will Holshouser/Matt Munisteri/Marcus Rojas: Introducing Musette Explosion (Aviary)
• Per Texas Johansson: De Långa Rulltrapporna I Flemingsberg (Moserobie)
• George Lewis: The George Lewis Solo Trombone Album (1976, Delmark/Sackville)
• Luis Lopes/Jean-Luc Guionnet: Live at Culturgest (Clean Feed)
• Mundell Lowe/Lloyd Wells/Jim Ferguson: Poor Butterfly (Two Helpins' of Collards)
• Tobias Meinhart: Natural Perception (Enja/Yellowbird)
• Charles Rumback: In the New Year (Ears & Eyes): December 4
• Richard Sears Trio: Skyline (2015, Fresh Sound New Talent)
• Wadada Leo Smith & John Lindberg: Celestial Weather (TUM)
• Mike Sopko/Bill Laswell/Thomas Pridgen: Sopko Laswell Pridgen (self-released)
• Svenska Kaputt: Suomi (Moserobie)
• Curt Sydnor: Materials and Their Destiny (Ears & Eyes)
• The People Having a Meeting (Black & Grey/Fast Speaking Music)
• Torbjörn Zetterberg & Den Stora Frågan: Om Liv Död (Moserobie)

A substantial list of albums this month as we're approaching the end-of-year, with an above-average 15 new A-list entries (from an above-average 117 "new" albums). Good chance there's some seasonal effect here, as we tend to accumulate more information toward the end of the year. This was prepared without the benefit of any actual EOY lists -- usually the first one out comes from Rough Trade in the UK, and, just rechecking, it has arrivedhere). As I have in the last couple years, I've split my2015 list up intojazz andnon-jazz files, not because I think they should be judged separately as because my own professional stature gives me access to a lot more jazz than non-jazz -- indeed, my share of the latter would be pathetic except for my ability to stream records on Rhapsody (and, rarely, other sources). This discrepancy is, I think, even more glaring this year than in past years. Looking at mymusic tracking list, I see that thus far I've rated 540 jazz records vs. a mere 249 non-jazz. More than anything else, that explains why I only have 42 A-listed non-jazz records, vs. 60 jazz.

I need to replay some records and shuffle my lists -- a lot of the ordering is pretty haphazard. The first serious deadline will be December 6, when ballots are due for Francis Davis' Jazz Critics Poll, sponsored again this year by NPR. I have about 40 unrated 2015 jazz records in the queue right now, so I need to focus on those. I also need to take a closer look at the music tracking list above, which currently lists over 1000 of this year's jazz releases. In past years I tried to prioritize them a bit, to come up with a search list I described as "estimated to have a 2% (or better) chance of making the A-list if/when I finally hear them." Pure guesswork, of course, but one clear example is Jack DeJohnette'sMade in Chicago (ECM).

Old music is down this month (28 records vs. 122 recent releases; it was 47 vs. 77 last month; 109 vs. 70 in September). Some back catalog was suggested by current releases -- in the case of Last Exit I was vainly looking for ESP's new Iron Path reissue -- while others were arbitrary inspirations (Marty Grosz, John Law, John Tchicai).

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on October 24. Past reviews and more information are availablehere (7250 records).

Recent Releases

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The 14 Jazz Orchestra: Nothing Hard Is Ever Easy (2015 [2016], self-released): Big band, arranged and conducted by Dan Bonsanti, only thirteen musicians listed (4 reeds, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, 4 rhythm). Featuring credit for tenor saxophonist Ed Calle (strong performance), with Will Lee, Mark Egan, and Marko Marcinko listed as special guests. All cover material, Dorsey to Pastorius with Curtis Mayfield and the Beatles from the pop world.B [cd]

Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (2015, Nonesuch): Christgau pegs this as her best ever, a comparison which bumps up against United States Live and Home of the Brave andStrange Angels, just to pick two albums I have at full A and a third at A+. Compared to them (especially the latter) this strikes me as short on music -- most is spoken word over some very minimally ambient electronics. Still, fascinating wordplay, on death and love and spying and a fox terrier, ending with a bit of the late Lou Reed, unplugged.A-

Dennis Angel: On Track (2014 [2015], Timeless Grooves): Flugelhorn player, third album. Scads of musicians on the back cover, including an utterly wasted "special guest" (Kenny Barron, on piano), but just below Angel you get Gottfried Stoger (tenor sax) and timeless groovmeister Jason Miles (keyboards, synths, strings, also producer).B- [cd]

ASAP Rocky: At.Long.Last.ASAP (2015, Polo Grounds/RCA): New York rapper Rakim Mayers, second album (not counting the much hyped mixtape), still preoccupied with the almighty $, although that too is an oversimplification.B+(**)

Bathysphere: Bathysphere (2015, Driff): Unconventional big band, 15 pieces (4 reeds, 6 brass including cornet and tuba, piano, 2 basses, drums, Andrew Neumann on analog electronics), jointly led by Jorrit Dijkstra (alto sax, lyricon, analog synth) and Pandelis Karayorgis (piano). Many avant luminaries, with the piano unusually prominent (more a solo than a rhythm instrument), and various bits for everyone else.B+(**) [cd]

Beach House: Depression Cherry (2015, Sub Pop): Baltimore duo, with Victoria Legrand's plain vocals over basic keyboards, a lo-fi group that's become comfortable in its surroundings -- probably not at the beach.B+(*)

Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars (2015, Sub Pop): Big improvement here, or so it seems to me -- these songs were cut about the same time as the better-reviewed Depression Cherry so they're practically outtakes, but the limited things this duo do have never meshed so effortlessly.B+(***)

Beach Slang: The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us (2015, Polyvinyl): Philadelphia post-punk band, churns up a lot of guitar slag and makes something resembling songs out of it, probably more impressive than it seems.B

Tony Bennett & Bill Charlap: The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern (2015, Columbia): Downbeat's readers just picked Bennett for the magazine's Hall of Fame, a choice I'm not unhappy with, though not one I'd ever make myself. A glance at my database reminds me that I've never A-listed any Bennett album (though I've only rated 15, and wouldn't be surprised if I missed one). The one I had highest hopes for was The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (1975), especially after a reviewer (in Crawdaddy, if memory serves) touted it as "the ultimate make-out album." Not really, but it did much to restore Bennett's jazz cred (his first album was called Jazz, and he worked with Basie before Sinatra did). This singer-piano pairing -- actually Charlap mostly uses his trio, and Renee Rosnes subs on a couple cuts -- will be likened to the Evans album, but Charlap is both more supportive and less distinctive, while Bennett, content to let his voice be its own reward, takes it easy even when the music dictates swing.B+(*)

Josh Berman Trio: A Dance and a Hop (2015, Delmark): Cornet player from Chicago, third album, also appears in Michael Zerang's group (below). This is a straight free-leaning trio with Jason Roebke on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums mixing it up.A- [cd]

Randy Bernsen: Grace Notes (2015, Jericho Jams): Guitarist, pop-funk-fusion guy I guess, dates back to Blood, Sweat& Tears; first own album came out in 1986, Mo' Wasabi. This features and was produced by bass guitarist Jimmy Haslip (Yellowjackets). Five originals, covers from Lennon-McCartney, Haslip-Ferrante, and Freddie Hubbard. Not bad as groove records go, mostly due to the bass support.B [cd]

Nat Birchall: Invocations (2015, Jazzman): Tenor saxophonist from Britain, has a half-dozen albums since 1999. Seems like John Coltrane is the most emulated (not to mention imitated) tenor saxophonist in the world since 1970, but no one's got the whole deal -- not just tone but flow, feel, rhythm, invention, and for that matter band -- down as pat at Birchall. If he's missing anything, it's conflict, which gives him a serenity beyond.A-

Bizingas: Eggs Up High (2015, NCM East): Second album from a group that calls itself an "art-rock, free-prog jazz quartet." I file them under trombonist Brian Drye (also credited here with synthesizer, organ, piano, and compositions), with Kirk Knuffke (cornet) a second horn, Jonathan Goldberger on guitar, and Ches Smith on drums and electronics. I wouldn't push the rock angle too hard -- they lose something when the beat straightens out.B+(**) [cd]

Björk: Vulnicura (2015, One Little Indian): Seems to be one of her best-regarded albums, although I've given up on trying to understand, let alone like, her. Sounds like another strings-drenched passion play, most engaging when the synth-beat breaks up, least when it all coagulates.B

Blackalicious: Amani, Vol. 1 (2015, OGM): Hip-hop group from the Bay Area (actually Sacramento), first album in 10 years and now projected to come out in three volumes. Like fellow traveler Lyrics Born's first in five years, their comeback leaps over and often stomps on the the state of the art, which has gone pretty slack.A-

Bobby Bradford-Frode Gjerstad Quartet: The Delaware River (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): Cornet and alto sax/clarinet, respectively, the quartet filled out by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. Same formula as Bradford's great quartet with John Carter but, unfortunately, no John Carter. B+(**) [cdr]

Leon Bridges: Coming Home (2015, Columbia): Retro soul singer, b. 1989 but aims for early Sam Cooke. Doesn't hit it, but a couple songs could be passed off as obscure period gems -- not enough to make him memorable, but most weren't.B+(*)

Sarah Buechi: Shadow Garden (2015, Intakt): Swiss singer-songwriter, writes mostly in English, has several albums including one previous one on Intakt with this same piano trio -- Stafan Aeby, André Pousaz, Lionel Friedli. The songs don't fall into any tradition I recognize, but are strangely seductive. B+(***) [cd]

Sarah Buechi: Flying Letters (2013 [2014], Intakt): Earlier record by same group, the piano trio named on the cover. Steps a little more awkwardly into the songs, sometimes close to spoken word, giving them an artier air.B+(*)

João Camões/Jean-Marc Foussat/Claude Parle: Bien Mental (2015, Fou): Viola (violon alto), electronics (dispositif électro-acoustique), and accordion, respectively. Foussat has been working along these lines for a while now, but this is the most interesting sonic mix he has come up with yet.B+(***) [cd]

João Camões/Rodrigo Pinheiro/Miguel Mira: Earnear (2015, Tour de Bras): Viola, piano, cello -- Pinheiro is leader of RED Trio, whose 2010 eponymous debut made my A-list. The strings give this a "chamber jazz" feel, although it is also more abstract.B+(**) [cd]

The Chills: Silver Bullets (2015, Fire): New Zealand group, had two great albums 1990-92, and not much since, with this their first studio album since 1996 (2013's Somewhere Beautiful was a live album). This gets the sound back, maybe even pumps it up a bit (maybe too much).A-

Romain Collin: Press Enter (2013 [2015], ACT): French pianist, attended Berklee, has a couple albums. Credits organized as a trio with Luques Curtis and Kendrick Scott, plus some extras, with Laura Metcalf's cello perhaps a constant.B+(**) [cd]

Dani Comas: Epokhé (2014 [2015], UnderPool): Guitarist, splits this into three parts of three songs each, the first solo, then duo and trio with Jordi Matas (bass) and/or David Xirgu (drums). Ambient but intriguing.B+(**) [cd]

Caroline Davis Quartet: Doors: Chicago Storylines (2013 [2015], Ears & Eyes): Alto saxophonist, has a previous album, based in New York but spent eight years in Chicago and developed an interest in history there. She interviewed thirteen Chicago jazz musicians and packed their reminiscences around her original pieces -- Mike Allemann (guitar), Matt Ferguson (bass), Jeremy Cunningham (drums). Lovely pieces, interesting raps.B+(***) [cd]

Guy Davis: Kokomo Kidd (2015, M.C.): Mild-mannered gentlemanly bluesman, son of Ossie Davis, has a dozen albums since 1995. This has some interesting yarns and curious filler, not prime material but true to form.B+(*)

Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (2015, 4AD): Kind of a prog band but they've moved mainstream and have a big following -- which they mostly deserved last time out (Monomania, although their previous album, Halcyon Digest, polled better). This is less challenging than either of those, prettier actually, some kind of plateau.B+(***)

Destroyer: Poison Season (2015, Merge): Band vehicle for Canadian singer/songwriter Dan Bejar going back ten albums to 1998, although he's also part of New Pornographers and the duo Hello, Blue Roses.B+(*)

Giovanni Di Domenico/Peter Jacquemyn/Chris Corsano: A Little Off the Top (2013 [2015], NoBusiness): Piano-bass-drums trio, free jazz, a fine example of the art. The pianist has put out a lot of material over the last few years, but this is only the second disc to come my way.B+(***) [cdr]

John Dikeman/William Parker/Hamid Drake: Live at La Resistenza (2014 [2015], El Negocito): Dikeman plays alto and tenor saxophone. He was born in Nebraska in 1983, grew up in Wyoming, tried New York, then Cairo and Budapest before settling into Amsterdam. A rather squawky free player, he has a group called Cactus Truck that I've yet to be impressed by. This is a standard free sax trio cut live in Ghent, Belgium -- the sort of thing Parker and Drake could do in their sleep, but never do.B+(***) [cd]

Marcelo Dos Reis/Luis Vicente/Théo Ceccaldi/Valentin Ceccaldi: Chamber 4 (2013 [2015], FMR): Guitar, trumpet, violin/viola, cello, two credited with voice although you can't exactly say they sing -- it's more of a background effect, part of a montage which despite the joint improv doesn't really move around that much.B+(**) [cd]

Marcelo Dos Reis/Angélica V. Salvi: Concentric Rinds (2013 [2015], Cipsela): Guitar and harp, both trying their hand at prepared instruments, at least for part of this. Makes for some surprising sounds, and they keep the pace so moderate they can't possibly throw you off.B+(*) [cd]

Kirsten Edkins: Art & Soul (2013 [2015], self-released): Saxophonist (tenor, soprano, alto), first album, produced by Bob Sheppard, with Larry Goldings on organ and piano, guitarist Larry Koonse sprucing up a couple of tracks, and dabs of trumpet and trombone here and there. Mainstream, swings hard, touches on soul jazz without getting stuck.B+(*) [cd]

Empress Of: Me (2015, Terrible/XL): Lorely Rodriguez, from Los Angeles, second album, electropop, pleasurable moments.B+(*)

Robin Eubanks Mass Line Big Band: More Than Meets the Ear (2015, ArtistShare): Trombonist, ten albums under his own name, side credits include Dave Holland's groups. Got a research grant at Oberlin and used that to assemble a conventional big band (plus organ and percussion and an extra trombone): his own credits include electric trombone (presumably what we're hearing on "Blues for Jimi Hendrix") and percussion pads.B+(*) [cdr]

Carlos Falanga: Gran Coral (2014 [2015], UnderPool): Drummer, from Spain, second album, leading a guitar-piano trio, with Marco Mezquida again making a strong impression on piano (see his solo album below) and Jordi Matas adding tasty licks on guitar.B+(**)

Sergi Felipe: Whisper Songs (2011, UnderPool): Spanish tenor saxophonist, leads a quintet with Hugo Astudillo on alto sax, Alfred Artigas on guitar, plus bass and drums. The instrumentation is designed to flow together seamlessly, and that's pretty much what it does.B+(*) [cd]

Sergi Felipe/Whisper Songs: Bombú Es Libre En El Espacio (2013, UnderPool): Intent here is probably that the title of his first album be the group name, but might as well file it under the tenor saxophonist's name. Same lineup, again the guitar moderates the horns, not that they have any ambitions to be heard.B+(*) [cd]

Garrison Fewell: Invisible Resonance Trio (2013 [2015], Creative Nation Music): I received a copy of this album, but when I got it the disc was badly cracked, unplayable. Trio with Roy Campbell, who died in 2014, on trumpet, and Luther Gray on drums. Sadly, I just noticed that the guitarist, perhaps best known for his work with the late John Tchicai, died earlier this year. A rather relaxed session, with Campbell exploring the cosmos and the others tagging along.B+(***)

Amina Figarova: Blue Whisper (2015, In + Out): Pianist, born in Azerbaijan, based in New York, has ten or so albums since 1996. Several pieces here were commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, nicely orchestrated postbop. I could do without the flutes and vocals, but she alternates between two ace tenor saxophonists: Marc Mommaas and Wayne Escoffery.B

Clare Fischer: Out of the Blue (2015, Clavo): I don't see a recording date, but pianist Fischer died in 2012 after a long career going back to the mid-1950s with close to fifty albums. This was produced and annotated by Brent Fischer, who ends his liner notes with: "I'm eagerly looking forward to showing you more new Fischer material when it appears out of the blue!" This has the range of a retrospective, including guest spots for vocalists and drummer Peter Erskine. Fischer has long struck me as peripheral to jazz, but he does have a charming way with Latin rhythms.B+(*) [cd]

Florence + the Machine: How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015, Island/Republic): Brit singer/songwriter Florence Welch plus an arena-scaled band, or possibly some mechanical approximation -- I don't much care one way or the other, nor do I follow her literary appreciation. Nor do I know the Tom Hull who is co-credited with two of her songs.B

Brandon Flowers: The Desired Effect (2015, Virgin EMI): Singer for the Killers, an alt/indie band of no particular distinction, evidently still extant although three members have produced side projects. This is an impressive piece of production craft, mostly mid-tempo with hints of grandeur, the singer wrapped in background harmonies.B+(**)

Robert Forster: Songs to Play (2015, Tapete): Second post-Go-Betweens album, a solid batch of songs although they take some time to sink in, partly because they move further from the group sound than the songs on Intermission.B+(**)

Rich Halley 4: Eleven (2014 [2015], Pine Eagle): Tenor saxophonist from Oregon, has had a terrific run of albums lately, most with this same quartet: Michael Vlatkovich (trombone), Clyde Reed (bass), and son Carson Halley (drums). When he takes charge this is another one, but I have a few minor quibbles -- unison themes, slow patches.B+(***) [cd]

Tigran Hamasyan: Luys I Luso (2014 [2015], ECM): Pianist from Armenia, returns for an album of sedate piano and choral music, featuring the Yerevan State Chamber Choir, conducted by Harutyan Topikyan.B- [dl]

Alfred 23 Harth/Jörg Fischer/Marcel Daemgen: Confucius Tarif Reduit (2014 [2015], Spore Point): I'd call this a free sax trio, but instead of bass Daemgen is credited with "electronics, synthesizer," and Harth's credit reads "reeds, pocket trumpet, voice, dojirak."B+(**) [cd]

Angel Haze: Back to the Woods (2015, self-released): Rapper Raykeea Wilson, released her "major label debut" at the end of December 2013, too late to get noticed, and has to follow that up with a mixtape, not as immediately appealing, but the world's a treacherous place, and she's tough enough to get through it.B+(***)

Carlos Henriquez: The Bronx Pyramid (2015, Blue Engine): Bassist for Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, from the Bronx, first album. He doesn't have the full band here -- just Michael Rodriguez (trumpet), Felipe Lamoglia (tenor sax), Robert Rodriguez (piano), Ali Jackson (drums), lots of percussionists, and a guest vocal from Rubén Blades. B+(**)

Holly Herndon: Platform (2015, 4AD): More electronica producer than singer, first half of the album manages to juggle an avalanche of samples. She then breaks the mood with a whispered word piece before returning to the thrash, a bit more abstractly.B+(**)

Hiatus Kaiyote: Choose Your Weapon (2015, Flying Buddha): Australian "alt r&b" group, second album. Singer Nai Palm does have some diva moves, and the rhythm is so slippery they slide right past me -- neither of those are compliments, although they leave some room for disagreement.B-

Keigo Hirakawa: And Then There Were Three (2014 [2015], self-released): Piano trio, with Eddie Brookshire (bass) and Fenton Sparks (drums), plus a vocal (Wenbi Lai) on one track. The pianist teaches at the University of Dayton, and has a couple previous albums. Originals except for two closing tracks: one from Bud Powell, the other "Precious Lord." Bright, upbeat, overwhelms you.B+(*) [cd]

Mike Holober: Balancing Act (2015, Palmetto): Pianist, mostly associated with big bands like the Westchester Jazz Orchestra, has a septet-plus-singer here ranging from highly orchestrated (including flute) to monster sax solos (Jason Rigby and Dick Oatts. The vocalist is Kate McGarry.B+(**) [cd]

Hot Jazz Jumpers: The Very Next Thing (2015, On the Bol): Sounds like an exceptionally noisy trad jazz group at first, but the trad fare ranges from "You Are My Sunshine" to "Jock-A-Mo" and sometimes slips into surrealism. Two singers (Miles Griffith and Betina Hershey), Nick Russo on guitar/banjo/resonator, David Pleasant on drums, and other part-timers. Eventually the weirdness turns annoying, especially on the"Russo Griffith Free Improv." Haven't watched the Bonus DVD.B

Sam Hunt: Between the Pines: Acoustic Mixtape (2015, MCA Nashville): Nashville singer, his 2014 debut Montevallo one of the year's most overrated discs. Nice gesture that he decided to throw out this freebie, reprising some earlier songs Hunt wrote, on the anniversary of his hit. Nice, but not much better.B

Aaron Irwin Quartet: A Room Forever (2015, self-released): Fourth album, plays clarinet here although I have him listed under alto sax. With no drums this could pass as chamber jazz, but trombone (Matthew McDonald) and bass (Thomson Kneeland) give it some heft, and Pete McCann slips his guitar into the mix, tying it together.B+(*) [cd]

Janet Jackson: Unbreakable (2015, Rhythm Nation): Seven years since her last album, Discipline, one of the few I didn't bother to check out (coming as it did after the C+ 20 Y.O.). Tempting to say this rights a slumping career, but it merely doesn't wrong it further. Above all it shows that competency can be enjoyed by anyone with the budget.B+(*)

Guus Janssen: Meeting Points (1989-2014 [2015], Bimhuis): Dutch avant pianist, has had a notable career with 1997's Zwik a particular high point. This is previously unreleased material from scattered groups, although six (of nine) tracks date from 2011 or later. Two piano-drums duos, a duo with Lee Konitz, but the most interesting are four small groups with Michael Moore (clarinet or alto sax).B+(***) [cd]

Jeff Jenkins Organization: The Arrival (2014 [2015], OA2): Organ trio, with Dave Gorbus on Godin guitar and Alwyn Robinson on drums. A soul jazz throwback, pretty impeccable as those things go.B+(*) [cd]

Khat Thaleth [Third Line]: Initiative for the Elevation of Public Awareness (2013, Stronghold Sound): Arabic rappers (from all over: Lebanon to Tunisia"), lyrics (I gather) politically focused, "a third electric and energized approach to looking at politics in the Arab world." Beats are fairly minimal although the traditional tones and modes sometimes leak through, and the mixes shift around a lot -- probably a plus, since I doubt that anyone here is much of a star.A-

Martin Küchen/Johan Berthling/Steve Noble: Night in Europe (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): Sax-bass-drums trio, the leader playing tenor, alto, and sopranino, recorded live at Glenn Miller Café in Stockholm. Küchen has mostly worked in larger groups like Angles (also Exploding Customer, All Included, and Trespass Trio), so this is a chance to hear him in a relatively informal improv bash. B+(***) [cd]

Martin Küchen/Jon Rune Strøm/Tollef Østvang: Melted Snow (2014 [2015], NoBusiness): Another Küchen sax trio, this one with locals (not that Berthling and Noble are much more famous) and short enough for a vinyl-only release. Not much reason to choose between them, unless you're some sort of vinyl junkie. B+(***) [cdr]

Nancy Lane: Let Me Love You (2015, self-released): Standards singer, first album. Mostly picks lesser-known songs, including one in French, but there's also "Cry Me a River,""All of You," and "What Is This Thing Called Love." Looks, and sounds, a bit like Diana Krall. Don't know anyone in the band, but they rotate seamlessly between piano and guitar backing, and several trumpet and sax spots are well chosen.B+(***) [cd]

Adam Larson: Selective Amnesia (2015, Inner Circle Music): Tenor saxophonist, from Illinois, based in New York, plays postbop, has a couple albums, this a quintet with guitar (Matthew Stevens), piano (Fabian Almazan), bass, and drums.B+(*) [cd]

Emma Larsson: Sing to the Sky (2014 [2015], Origin): Singer/songwriter (6 of 9 songs are originals), second album, backed by piano trio (Shedrick Mitchell, Eric Revis, Billy Drummond) and saxophonist Kenneth Whallum III.B [cd]

Ingrid Laubrock: Ubatuba (2014 [2015], Firehouse 12): Avant saxophonist from Germany, has about 15 records since 1998 and plays on a lot of other's albums, especially with Kris Davis, Mary Halvorson, and/or Tom Rainey. This group has four horns, with Tim Berne on alto sax, Laubrock moving between alto and tenor, Ben Gerstein on trombone and Dan Peck on tuba, plus Rainey on drums.B+(**) [cd]

Martin Leiton: Poetry of Sound (2014 [2015], UnderPool): Bassist, from Barcelona, has at least one previous album. This is a trio with Marcel-li Bayer (alto sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet) and Oscar Doménech (drums). Understated, crawls along at an even pace, nearly hypnotic. B+(**) [cd]

Daniel Levin/Rob Brown: Divergent Paths (2012 [2015, Cipsela): Duets, cello and alto sax, both a little abstract and dry.B+(*) [cd]

Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts: Manhattan (2015, Rough Trade): Comic book artist, folksinger too, although a dozen albums in he rocks harder, still crams a lot of words in, with more than a few in Yiddish.A-

John Lindberg/Anil Eraslan: Juggling Kukla (2011 [2015], NoBusiness): Well known American bassist, a founder of String Trio of New York with several dozen albums under his own name, duets with Turkish cellist Eraslan. Inevitably has some hard-to-hear spots, but also much of interest.B+(**) [cdr]

Luis Lopes/Jean-Luc Guionnet: Live at Culturgest (2011 [2015], Clean Feed): Guionnet is a prolific, fairly well known French alto saxophonist -- Discogs credits him with 35 albums since 1998, although that includes quite a few albums where, like this one, his name appears second or later on the credit line. I'm much more familiar with the Portuguese guitarist: he's come up with a distinctly non-fusion electric guitar style. Two long improvs here, much of it pretty ugly, although if you can stand it you might also find a tingle of excitement.B-

Lyrics Born: Real People (2015, Mobile Home): Tokyo-born rapper Tsutomu ("Tom") Shimura, came up through the Berkeley underground in the duo Latyrx and a handful of his own albums. This one rocks out on the title cut, then busts several of the hottest raps I've heard this year. Catchiest too.A [cd]

Roy McGrath Quartet: Martha (2014 [2015], JL Music): Tenor saxophonist, born in Puerto Rico, based in Chicago, seems to be his second album. Also plays in salsa/Latin jazz and funk groups, but this is a mainstream sax quartet -- can't read the red-on-green credits, but they're competent, and I'm a sucker for the sax leads.B+(**) [cd]

Marco Mezquida Mateos: Live in Terrassa (2015, UnderPool): Pianist, from Barcelona, has a couple previous albums as Marco Mezquida. This is solo. The cover shows him from high above at a grand piano, with no cover, surrounded on all sides by rapt listeners in uncomfortable chairs, and the recording feels that intimate. But what makes it work for me is the rhythmic undertow.B+(***) [cd]

Kristine Mills: Bossa Too (2015, InkWell Publishing): Singer-songwriter from Houston, fourth album, backed by Itaiguara Brandao (electric bass, acoustic guitar), piano, drums, some extra percussion. Slips a couple Jobims in with her originals. Appropriately light and frothy.B [cd]

Matt Mitchell: Vista Accumulation (2015, Pi, 2CD): Pianist, has built a reputation playing in key groups (Tim Berne, Darius Jones, Dave Douglas, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Claudia Quintet), now presents his third album as a sprawling double (96:10), a quartet with Chris Speed (tenor sax, clarinet), Chris Tordini (bass), and Dan Weiss (drums). Rather dark and brooding, sorry to say, although those who stick with it will continue to be impressed.B+(**) [cd]

The Monash Art Ensemble/George Lewis: Hexis (2013 [2014], Jazzhead): Pianist Paul Grabowsky founded the Australian Art Ensemble in 1994, and added students from the Monash University of Music to form this group. Lewis is the AACM trombonist, has a mixed discography that can stray far from his instrument. The combination is a stark, radical take on third stream.B+(**)

Àlvar Montfort/Lucas Martinez/Jordi Matas/Abel Boquera/Pep Mula: Underpool 4 (2014 [2015], UnderPool): Trumpet, tenor sax, guitar, keys & synth, drums -- another postbop configuration (seeUnderpool 3). At one point Martinez tries to drag this into the avant-garde, but the group doesn't follow.B+(*) [cd]

Jack Mouse & Scott Robinson with Janice Borla: Three Story Sandbox (2015 [2016], Tall Grass): Mouse is a drummer, playing a long list of percussion instruments here. Robinson plays an equally long list of reeds, giving us a minimal but fairly varied two-man band. Borla sings.B+(*) [cd]

Larry Ochs/Don Robinson Duo: The Throne (2011 [2015], Not Two): Sax-drums duo, Ochs playing tenor and sopranino. The latter if piercingly ugly but strangely captivating. The tenor also pushes the limits of avant-ugly, but most often is invigorating, and the stretches where they slow down are most captivating. The drummer doesn't play off the riffs so much as roll with them.A-

Paris: Pistol Politics (2015, Guerrilla Funk, 2CD): Oscar Jackson Jr., rapper from San Francisco, dropped his first album in 1990 and has always worn politics on his sleeve. I should make a point of checking out his early albums when he had major label deals, but the first I heard was 2003's Sonic Jihad on his own label, then even better his "featuring" role on Public Enemy's Rebirth of a Nation (2006). This is his first album in six years, and he's got a lot to talk about, with a natural flow meant to make his words clear, and perfunctory beats to keep it moving.A- [cd]

Peaceful Solutions: Barter 7 (2015, self-released): Kool A.D. (originally of Das Racist) and Kassa Overall (originally a jazz drummer), aka Kool & Kass, now dba the title of their first album together. The title is presumably a play on Young Thug'sBarter 6, itself a play on the still-unreleased Tha Carter V. Obviously, "the world's greatest rapper" (these days "the real one") doesn't spend a lot of time on titles. Nor on rhymes, although he lands a few anyway, and the beats render even the groaners amusing.A- [bc]

Pol Pedrós/Noè Escolà/Albert Cirera/Rai Paz/Paco Weht/Ildefons Alonso: Underpool 3 (2014, UnderPool): Barcelona-based jazz label. I originally figured this for a sampler, but while the writing credits are scattered, it seems to be the same group on all tracks. Respective instruments are: trumpet, alto sax, tenor sax, guitar, bass, and drums. Seems like a formula for postbop, and is.B+(*) [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Complementary Colors (2015, Leo): Tenor sax and piano duo, two avant players with intertwined histories going back at least to 1996. The focus on color keeps this on the quiet side, which is not really what either player is known for.B+(***) [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Tanya Kalmanovitch: Villa Lobos Suite (2015, Leo): Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was a famed Brazilian composer, the inspiration for but not the author of this music. The credits here are shared by the trio, with the tenor sax receding behind the two violas. Interesting music, but the tone does rub me the wrong way.B+(**) [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Whit Dickey: Butterfly Whispers (2015, Leo): Avant tenor sax-piano-drums trio, one that previously cut 2012's The Clairvoyant -- one of the Brazilian saxophonist's finest albums. This struggles a bit to reach that level, but eventually cranks it up a notch from the Perelman-Shipp duo, which is what adding a good drummer should do.A- [cd]

Oscar Perez: Prepare a Place for Me (2015, Myna): Pianist, from Queens, played in church and listened to Cuban folk music, studied under Danilo Perez and Sir Roland Hanna, has a couple previous albums. Piano trio with a Latin lilt, plus alto saxophonist Bruce Williams on five (of nine) cuts: a nice addition but you don't notice his absence.B+(**) [cd]

Roots Manuva: Bleeds (2015, Big Dada): Brit rapper Rodney Smith, seems to have lost the grime/dub beats he started out with a decade-and-a-half ago.B

Michael Sarian & the Chabones: The Escape Suite (2014-15 [2015], self-released): Trumpet player, from Canada, second album, septet with two saxes, trombone, electric piano and bass -- allows a lot of texturing with little open space.B+(**) [cd]

Maria Schneider Orchestra: The Thompson Fields (2014 [2015], ArtistShare): A protégé of Gil Evans, she very quickly grew into damn near every critic's favorite composer/arranger (except, I guess, mine). Probably my bad, not that I'm in any hurry to go back. But this is so richly layered, so sumptuous, I feel like there should be some dazzling visuals to subsume this into the background -- probably a nature doc, since that seems to be her thing. B+(**) [cd]

Matthew Shipp Trio: The Conduct of Jazz (2015, Thirsty Ear): Piano trio, with Michael Bisio on bass and Newman Taylor Baker on drums. Shipp seems to have lost interest in his jazztronica phase, but he draws on that experience when he breaks out the heavy, tumbling rhythmic runs that set the pace here.A- [cd]

Herb Silverstein: Younger Next Year (2015, self-released): Otolaryngologist, actually more of an otologist, based in Sarasota, Florida, also plays piano, writes his own songs, and has close to a dozen albums. Quintet with sax and guitar, seems like the sort of music you could hear in his waiting room.B [cd]

Slobber Pup: Pole Axe (2015, Rare Noise): Avant-noise group, second album, Jamie Saft (organ, keyboards) and Balasz Pandi (drums) also in the similar Metallic Taste of Blood, joined here by Joe Morris (guitar) and most importantly saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (a newcomer to the group).B+(**) [cdr]

Spanglish Fly: New York Boogaloo (2015, Caco World Music): New York group dedicated to reviving boogaloo, a funk-novelty variant (simplification?) of salsa that broke some hits in the 1970s. Still, not purists, as indicated by a preponderance of English lyrics.B+(*)

Speedy Ortiz: Foil Deer (2015, Carpark): Guitar band from Northampton, MA, the female singer (Sadie Dupuis) offerng a bit of pop glow even while the jerky rhythm undermines it.B+(*)

Martin Speicher/Peter Geisselbrecht/Jörg Fischer: Spicy Unit (2014 [2015], Spore Print): Reeds (alto/sopranino sax, clarinet), piano, drums. Fischer has been sending his records in regularly, mostly engaging avant encounters, but this is the first one that really clicked -- mostly thanks to the pianist's own higher order percussion. Never noticed Geisselbrecht before, but he makes a huge impression here, which Speicher's coloring complements.A- [cd]

Spinifex: Veiled (2015, Trytone): Dutch quintet, has been around ten years but I'm not finding a discography -- one previous album was Hipsters Gone Ballistic (2013). Despite the presence of two horns -- Gijs Levelt on trumpet and Tobias Klein on alto sax -- the sound is dominated by guitars: Jasper Stadhouders plus Gonçalo Almeida on bass. Fusion closer to punk: if McLaughlin's goal was beyond, these guys are in your face. B+(**) [cd]

The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful (2015, Fortuna Pop): Scottish garage pop group, upbeat, like group harmony and that old rock and roll romp.B+(**)

Chris Stapleton: Traveller (2015, Mercury Nashville): Has a fledgling rep as a tunesmith but picks two drinking songs off the rack and had help on most of the rest. Mid-tempo with the weight of the world on his shoulders, much of which he put there.B+(**)

Statik Selektah: Lucky 7 (2015, Showoff/Duck Down Music): Patrick Baril, DJ/producer from Boston, parades a couple dozen rappers past you, not that they sound different enough to county.B+(**)

Ike Sturm + Evergreen: Shelter of Trees (2014 [2015], Kilde): Bassist, from Wisconsin, third album, serves as Music Director for the Jazz Ministry at Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan. Evergreen seems to refer to the whole band, including three female singers for a bit of choral effect. Loren Stillman's alto sax is a bright spot.B- [cd]

Sun Ra Arkestra Under the Direction of Marshall Allen: Babylon Live (2014 [2015], In+Out): A ghost band, but dedicated not so much to a songbook as to an attitude and some spectacle, which may be why the vocals loom larger than on Sun Ra's own albums. Overseeing the effort is the 90-year-old saxophonist, the last living link to the '50s Arkestra, maybe even the '80s one.B+(**)

Survival Unit III: Game Theory (2010 [2013], Not Two): Joe McPhee on alto sax and pocket trumpet, backed by two Chicagoans: Fred Londberg-Holm (cello, electronics) and Michael Zerang (percussion). Third of four recordings since 2006, they've survived longer than McPhee's early Survival Unit II (1971; I haven't found any evidence of a Survival Unit I, with McPhee's earliest recordings in 1968). McPhee speaks out in the final piece, breaking the mood to add a political dimension to the struggle.B+(**)

Survival Unit III: Straylight (2014 [2015], Pink Palace): Fourth group album, a live set at Krannert Art Museum in Chicago, with two 20+ minute pieces and a 6-minute closer. Two surprises: one is that Joe McPhee plays soprano instead of tenor sax, and that his pocket trumpet is listed first; the other is Fred Lonberg-Holm playing some very aggressive guitar in addition to his usual cello and electronics.B+(***) [bc]

Total Babes: Heydays (2015, Wichita): Four blokes from Ohio -- what did you expect? A punkish group that doesn't neglect the hooks or the grind ("Circling" is an example of both). But then they let up on the gas.B+(**)

U.S. Girls: Half Free (2015, 4AD): Only "Girls" band I've run across with actual females in it -- at least leader Meg Remy. Dense and rather erratic art-pop, playing it after Björk makes me see that source but that's only part of an approximation. Impresses me a bit, but I can't say as I like it. B

Manuel Valera & Groove Square: Urban Landscape (2015, Destiny): Cuban-born pianist, more than ten albums since 2004, has a New York band that expertly mixes postbop with Cuban touches: John Ellis (reeds), Nir Felder (guitar), John Benitez (bass), either E.J. Strickland or Jeff "Tain" Watts (drums), plus some guests.B+(**) [cd]

Jacob Varmus Septet: Aegean: For Three Generations of Jazz Lovers (2013 [2015], Crows' Kin): Trumpet player, fourth album, songs commissioned by Apostolos Georgopoulas, who recapitulated the history of the post-WWII jazz mainstream in his liner notes -- the model for the songs themselves. Group includes Hashem Assadullahi on alto/soprano sax, Pete McCann on guitar, two pianists (although it isn't clear they ever play together, bass, and drums. Has a nice flow and spots that stand up to its models.B+(**) [cd]

Luke Vibert: Bizarster (2015, Planet Mu): British electronica producer, has also worked as Plug and Wagon Christ and a few less common names. This has a nice snap to it and amuses me, which is about all the sense I can hope to make out of this kind of music.B+(***)

Lou Volpe: Remembering Ol' Blue Eyes (Songs of Sinatra) (2015, Jazz Guitar): Guitarist, first record looks to be 1985's Easy Jammin, and that's pretty much what you get here -- except that by combing through Sinatra's songbook he came up with a fine list of songs. Done with keyboards, bass, drums, and percussion -- no horns or vocals -- this work as elevator music but is much better.B+(**) [cd]

Doug Webb: Triple Play (2014 [2015], Posi-Tone): Tenor saxophonist, studio guy from Los Angeles who moved up front around 2009 and now has six albums for this mainstream-oriented label. A fast bebop joust with Joel Frahm also playing tenor, with Brian Charette avoiding any hint of soul jazz on organ, and Rudy Royston on drums. I've considerably softened my distaste for bebop from twenty years ago, but this threatens to bring it all back.B-

Carrie Wicks: Maybe (2015, OA2): Singer, third album, mostly co-writes originals but covers three standards here. Backed by piano trio: Bill Anshell, Jeff Johnson, Byron Vannoy. Interesting nuance to her voice -- "Ghost of a Perfect Flame" hits the spot.B+(**) [cd]

Webb Wilder: Mississippi Moderne (2015, Landslide): Roots rocker, grew up in Mississippi listening to the Brit Invasion, has bounced around between Austin and Nashville, recording close to a dozen albums since 1986. Perhaps he's getting some Grammy notice now because he's gotten to be as old as his music.B+(*)

Patrick Williams: Home Suite Home (2015, BFM): A composer-arranger, studied at Duke and Columbia, moved to Los Angeles in 1968, "wrote the scores for over 60 feature films and countless television assignments," cut a big band album in 1973 and has ten (or so) more since. This is another big band, many familiar names from the LA session world, with the title three-part suite, two vocal features (one for Patti Austin, a duet for Frank Sinatra Jr. and Tierney Sutton), and a couple titles I'm fond of: "A Hefti Dose of Basie (to the Memory of Neal Hefti)" and "That's Rich (for Buddy)."B+(*) [cd]

Dave Wilson Quartet: There Was Never (2015, Zoho): Tenor saxophonist, based in Lancaster PA, has a handful of albums, this a quartet with Bobby Avey (piano), Tony Marino (bass), and Alex Ritz (drums). Six originals plus "Cassidy" (Grateful Dead), "God Only Knows" (Beach Boys), and "Summertime" (everyone). Plays fast with a commanding tone, the sort of thing that usually blows me away but somehow this doesn't. Runs a business buying and selling brass instruments -- clearly something he loves.B+(*) [cd]

Michael Zerang & the Blue Lights: Songs From the Big Book of Love (2014 [2015], Pink Palace): Chicago drummer, played in Ken Vandermark's pre-5 Quartet and shows up on a lot of important albums. This group recalls the early V5 with two saxophonists: founder Mars Williams and his replacement Dave Rempis, plus V5 bassist Kent Kessler and cornetist Josh Berman for extra sparks. Terrific sax runs.A- [bc]

Michael Zerang & the Blue Lights: Hash Eaters and Peacekeepers (2014 [2015], Pink Palace, EP): Billed as a "companion release to Songs From the Big Book of Love, a bit long for as EPs go (six cuts, 33:51, but released on cassette and discounted). Heavier on themes, which beefs them up and slows them down a tad, but they do impress.B+(***) [bc]

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

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John Carter: Echoes From Rudolph's (1976-77 [2015], NoBusiness, 2CD): Clarinet and soprano sax, mostly trio with Stanley Carter on bass and William Jeffery on drums. The first disc offers a pretty good sample of Carter as improviser. Seems like much of the second disc is given over to bass solo, which is interesting in its own right. Maybe Carter did need Bradford?B+(**) [cd]

Hamid Drake/Michael Zerang: For Ed Blackwell (1995 [2015], Pink Palace): One 42:46 composition for two drum sets, in honor of the late drummer (1929-92), best known for playing in Ornette Coleman's legendary quartet from 1960, a lineup later resurrected as Old and New Dreams (with Dewey Redman instead of Coleman). This goes well beyond drum solos, almost to a system.B+(***) [bc]

Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden: Frictions/Frictions Now (1969-71 [2015], NoBusiness): Early free jazz quartet from the center of West Germany, no one who later became famous although each of the players has 5-10 other credits -- Michael Sell (trumpet), Dieter Scherf (alto sax, oboe, piano, exotic flutes and such), Gerhard König (guitar, flute), Wolfgang Schlick (drums). They cut two albums which sound like they could have come much later, perhaps because Americans don't appreciate how early a linkage was established between European free jazz and "third world musics" -- perhaps because Europeans were more conscious of their states' colonial legacies.B+(***) [cd]

Erroll Garner: The Complete Concert by the Sea (1955 [2015], Columbia/Legacy, 3CD): A fine pianist from Pittsburgh, fast and idiosyncratically unique, he became a popular celebrity when his 1956 Concert by the Sea album went gold. Cut live in Carmel, CA, heavily edited to 41:19 LP length, Garner led a trio with Eddie Calhoun on bass and Denzil Best on drums, the album seemed to have a magic lift. Sixty years later, the label has stretched it out, offering the unedited concert, with 11 extra tunes on two discs, plus a third disc remaster with a 14:10 post-concert interview. It's all rather redundant, but I like the raw concert at least as much as the tailored product -- indeed, I can't imagine how they could have left "Caravan" off the latter.A- [cd]

Sun Ra: The Magic City (1965 [2015], Enterplanetary Koncepts): Billed as "Full Stereo Edition," I doubt this exists in anything but digital form. Indeed, a lot of old and obscure Sun Ra has been coming out in digital-only releases -- the original LPs were very limited runs, and the CDs that Evidence releasec c. 1993 are becoming hard to find. Some of their furthest out space shit, only intermittently connecting with terrestial like myself.B+(**)

Old Music

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The Chills: Kaleidoscope World (1982-84 [1989], Homestead): Early singles compilation, well before Martin Phillips' group's 1988 debut (but compiled a year later). Pop gems in the rough, but very rough -- interesting that the catchiest track is the instrumental.B+(*)

Guy Davis: Juba Dance (2013, M.C.): Cover adds"featuring Fabrizio Poggi" -- an Italian harmonica player who inspires Brownie McGhee rhythms in Davis even when he's playing higher and sweeter than Sonny Terry.B+(**)

Robert Forster: Intermission: The Best of the Solo Recordings 1990-1997 (1990-97 [2007], Beggars Banquet): The Go-Betweens broke up in 1989 and regrouped with 2000's The Friends of Rachel Worth. In between principal songwriters Grant McLennan and Robert Forster released four albums each. The idea of compiling best-ofs came after McLennan's death in 2006, before Forster could resume his solo career. It's possible to find a package with one CD by each, but in the digital world they're separate. While McLennan's albums were more immediately appealing, this adds up to a good solid half a Go-Betweens album (maybe more). Maybe I should reconsider the source albums?A-

Erroll Garner: Body & Soul (1951-52 [1991], Columbia): Twenty songs collected from three piano trio sessions with John Simmons on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums. The times are uniformly within the range for 78s (2:21 to 3:45). Mostly standards, bright and fast, sometimes een showing his tenuous link to Art Tatum.B+(***)

Erroll Garner: The Erroll Garner Collection, Vol. 2: Dancing on the Ceiling (1961-65 [1989], Emarcy): The second slice of a five-volume compilation of previously unreleased performances by Garner's piano trio, with Eddie Calhoun and Kelly Martin.B+(**)

Marty Grosz and His Honoris Causa Jazz Band: Hooray for Bix! (1957 [1958], Good Time Jazz): An old-fashioned rhythm guitarist and sometime singer, born in Berlin in 1930 but escaped the Nazis as a toddler -- his father was famed caricaturist Georg Grosz -- and grew up as a devotee of trad jazz. First album, in fact his only one until 1983, and it's a delight. Cornetist Carl Halen gets a "featuring" notice on the front cover, although clarinetist Frank Chace is equally worthy. Songbook honors Beiderbecke, the songs as sweet as ever.A-

Marty Grosz with Destiny's Tots: Sings of Love and Other Matters (1986, Jazzology): One of several group names he's used -- the Orphan Newsboys is probably the best known -- but some of the key players (especially pianist Keith Ingham) are frequent associates. Grosz sang a bit on his debut, but this is where he learns how to make his rather ordinary voice work (good example:"Until the Real Thing Comes Along"). He also does a little stand up with his tale of how Edward Elgar discovered "The English Blues."A-

Marty Grosz: Songs I Learned at My Mother's Knee & Other Low Joints (1992 [1994], Jazzology): This comes from three sessions with as many groups, though they're all pretty much equivalent.B+(**)

Marty Grosz and the Collectors Items Cats: Thanks (1993, Jazzology): New band name but mostly the same cats -- Keith Ingham on piano, Peter Ecklund on cornet, Dan Barrett on trombone, Bobby Gordon on clarinet and Scott Robinson on reeds.B+(**)

Marty Grosz: Keep a Song in Your Soul (1994, Jazzology): Again split between two sessions/bands, but brighter from the start, often delightful.B+(***)

Marty Grosz and His Sugar Daddies: On Revival Day: Live at the Atlanta Jazz Party! (1995, Jazzology): Another fine trad jazz group, with Peter Ecklund (trumpet), Bobby Gordon (clarinet), Ingham, and others. On the other hand, this seems rather subdued, especially on the usually rousing Andy Razaf title song.B+(**)

Marty Grosz Quartet: Just for Fun! (1996, Nagel Heyer): Recorded live in Hamburg with what looks like a Brit trad jazz pickup group: Alan Elsdon (trumpet), John Barnes (clarinet), and Murray Wall (bass). Nothing special, but the record does pick up as the leader's tongue loosens up. [PS: Wall, b. 1945 in Australia, has played on at least two other Grosz albums. Elsdon and Barnes are English.]B+(*)

Marty Grosz: Left to His Own Devices (2000 [2001], Jazzology): With Randy Reinhart on cornet, Scott Robinson and Dan Block on clarinet and sax, Greg Cohen on bass, and Mike Peters on guitar. Relatively tame, perhaps because the obscurities aren't up to it.B+(*)

Marty Grosz & His Hot Puppies: Rhythm Is Our Business (2000-01 [2003], Sackville): A quintet with Randy Reinhart on trumpet and Frank Roberscheuten on clarinet (and various saxes), with the leader's trademark strum and sly vocals, more small group swing than trad, climaxing in a 10:17 medley: "Rhythm for Sale/He Ain't Got Rhythm/I Got Rhythm."B+(***)

Last Exit: Last Exit (1986, Enemy): Normally when I see an eponymous group album with the individual musician names on the cover, I list it under them, but this was such a unique group I prefer to keep their albums together. The musicians: Sonny Sharrock (guitar), Peter Brötzmann (saxes), Bill Laswell (electric bass), and Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums). Laswell's rockish beat keeps it all on an even keel. Sharrock can not only joust with the sax, he often comes out on top. A-

Last Exit: Köln (1986 [2005], Atavistic): A live set on saxophonist Brötzmann's home turf, which may help explain why he comes out swinging. Still, he doesn't dominate this like he does his own albums, probably because the guitar both competes and undercuts the sax. B+(***)

Last Exit: The Noise of Trouble: Live in Tokyo (1986, Enemy): Another live one, another continent, the added treats including a Jimmy Reed blues sung by Shannon Jackson, and a couple of gate crashers: Japanese alto saxophonist Akira Sakata, who knows his way around the avant-garders, and pianist Herbie Hancock, who doesn't.B+(**)

John Law Quartet: Exploded on Impact (1992 [1993], Slam): British avant pianist, with Alan Wilkinson (alto/baritone sax), Roberto Bellatalla (bass), and Mark Sanders (drums). Rhapsody only has two (of five) cuts (and the shorter ones at that: 19:17/55:47), so I probably shouldn't bother, or at least I should hedge a bit. A volatile combination, one that (here at least) ends much too soon.B+(***)

John Law: Extremely Quartet (1996 [1997], Hat Art): British pianist, trained to play baroque but broke free in the mid-1980s and has thirty or so albums -- well regarded in Penguin Guide but hitherto someone I've missed out on. Very strong group here -- Paul Dunmall (tenor and soprano sax), Barry Guy (bass), and Louis Moholo (drums) -- and the saxophonist manages to play with some restraint, not obliterating the fascinating piano runs.A-

John Law Quartet: Abacus (2000 [2001], Hatology): Pianist, with Jon Lloyd (alto/soprano sax), Tim Wells (bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums). The first cut delivers the off-kilter thrash you expect, but then they try to show their flexibility and resourcefulness, including some slow melodic stuff that's nice and all that but detracts from the rush they're capable of.B+(***)

Grant McLennan: In Your Bright Ray (1997, Beggars Banquet): Final album, distilled essence of his Go-Betweens sound but none of the songs really jump out, like they're supposed to.B+(*)

Grant McLennan: Intermission: The Best of the Solo Recordings 1990-1997 (1990-97 [2007], Beggars Banquet): Like Robert Forster, McLennan released four solo albums during their break from the group they'll always be remembered for, the Go-Betweens. But McLennan was the more natural songwriter, and he was the one I followed, A-listing two of these four albums. Not sure this is better, but "Lighting Fires" tops Fireboy, and two cuts I missed from In Your Bright Ray above made the grade this time.A-

John Tchicai: Cadentia Nova Danica (1968, Freedom): Danish alto saxophonist, father from Congo, first album but he had previously appeared with New York Art Quartet and on Albert Ayler'sNew York Eye and Ear, and also in 1968 he appeared on the first Instant Composers Pool album. I count nine musicians, with Karsten Vogel joining Tchicai at alto sax (and composing two of the pieces; Tchicai wrote two, and arranged a South American folk song), three percussionists (Giorgio Musoni on African drums), and Max Bryel switching between piano and baritone sax. Rough and tumble, but when it all connects pretty amazing.A-

John Tchicai and Cadentia Nova Danica: Afrodisiaca (1969, MPS): A year later Tchicai's group peaked out at 26 musicians for the 21:45 title cut, written by trumpeter Hugh Steinmetz, part of the sudden explosion of avant-orchestras in Europe (starting with Globe Unity and ICP in 1967, plus LJCO in 1970. One of those glorious messes some people remember as stone classics. Still, the musicians thin out on the back side, and with them the excitement.B+(**)

John Tchicai-Irene Schweizer-Group: Willi the Pig: Live at the Willisau Jazz Festival (1975 [2000], Atavistic): Quartet with Buschi Niebergall on bass and Makaya Nishoko on drums backing alto (or soprano) sax and piano for one long improv, originally split over two LP sides. Fine outing for Tchicai, but it's the pianist who makes it special.A-

John Tchicai & Strange Brothers: Darktown Highlights (1977, Storyville): Quartet live from Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen, with Simon Spang-Hanssen (tenor sax), Peter Danstrup (bass), and Ole Rømer (drums). Stretches out a bit more than in the earlier albums. B+(***)

John Tchicai: Put Up the Fight (1987, Storyville): Another quartet, but a very different with more of a groove focus, Brent Clausen playing vibes/guitar/synth, Peter Danstrup on bass guitar/synth, and Ole Rømer drums. The regular beat does let the sax soar, and the vibes provide some sparkle. B+(*)

John Tchicai: Darktown Highlights/Put Up the Fight (1977-87 [2012], Storyville, 2CD): Only print on the cover is "John Tchicai" but the best available discography settled on this title, one disc each for two Storyville albums, per above.B+(**)

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section.

• The Chills: Brave Worlds (1988, Homestead): B+
• The Chills: Submarine Bells (1990, Slash): A
• The Chills: Soft Bomb (1992, Slash): A
• The Chills: Somewhere Beautiful (2011-12 [2013], Fire): B+(**)
• Guy Davis: Call Down the Thunder (1996, Red House): B+
• Guy Davis: You Don't Know My Mind (1998, Red House): A-
• Guy Davis: Butt Naked Free (2000, Red House): A-
• Guy Davis: Give in Kind (2002, Red House): A-
• Guy Davis: Chocolate to the Bone (2003, Red House): B+
• Robert Forster: The Evangelist (2008, Yep Roc): A-
• Erroll Garner: Long Ago and Far Away (1950-51 [1987], Columbia): B
• Erroll Garner: The Original Misty (1954 [1988], Mercury): B
• Erroll Garner: Concert by the Sea (1955 [1987], Columbia): A-
• Erroll Garner: The Erroll Garner Collection Vol. 1: Easy to Love (1961-65 [1988], Emarcy): B+
• Marty Grosz: Swing It! (1988, Jazzology): B+
• Marty Grosz/Keith Ingham: Unsaturated Fats (1990, Stomp Off): A-
• Marty Grosz: Ring Dem Bells (1995, Nagel Heyer): B
• Marty Grosz: Marty Grosz and His Hot Combination (2005 [2006], Arbors): B+(**)
• Marty Grosz: Hot Winds, the Classic Sessions (2008 [2009], Arbors): B+(***)
• Marty Grosz: The James P. Johnson Songbook (2010 [2012], Arbors): A-
• Marty Grosz and the Fat Babies: Diga Diga Doo (2013-14 [2015], Delmark): A-
• Last Exit: Iron Path (1988, Venture): B+
• G.W. McLennan: Watershed (1991, Beggars Banquet): A-
• Grant McLennan: Fireboy (1994, Atlantic): B+
• Grant McLen

Much blather this week about the existential threat posed to the United States by the prospect of allowing 10,000 Syrian refugees to resettle here. Some demagogues like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush insisted that we only allow Syrian Christians to enter (7.8% in 1960, the last Syrian census to bother to count sectarian identity, although a 2006 estimate bumps this up to 10%). Others insisted on a vetting process to weed out terrorist infiltrators, evidently unaware that a rather onerous one already exists. Dozens of Republican governors, including our own Sam Brownback (who recently displaced Bobby Jindal as the least popular sitting governor in the US), issued executive orders to help stanch the deluge of Syrian/Arab/Muslim immigrants. Donald Trump not only opposed all immigration, but went further to entertain the idea of a federal registry of Muslims in America. He finally received some backlash for that (rather casual) statement, but it appeals to a base distinguished only by the depths of their ignorance. I'm seeing reports that "only 49% of GOP voters in Iowa think that the religion of Islam should even be legal."

Reading Wikipedia's piece on Islam in the United States would help alleviate this ignorance. You will find, for instance, that about 1% of the American population is Muslim (2.77 million). Also, Muslims are immigrating to the US at a rate of about 110,000 per year. So 10,000 extra Syrians represents less than 10% of the current immigration rate, about 0.36% of the total Muslim population (1 in 277). If everyone shut up and just let this happen, no one would ever notice anything. The problem, though, is that by making a big stink about it, you're not just barring 10,000 Syrians, you're sending a message of hate and fear to 2.77 million Americans. How does that help?

About one-fourth of the Muslims in America are African-Americans, notably political leaders (including two members of Congress) and many prominent athletes and musicians. Most others are first or second generation immigrants, but some date back to immigrants from the 1880-1910 era, and some can trace their families back to the colonial era. The piece has numerous examples, plus a section on "Religious freedom" that shows that Americans were aware of Islam when they declared freedom of religion in the US Constitution.

One minor point I wasn't aware of is that the first country to recognize the United States as an independent country was the Sultanate of Morocco. It's worth adding that the US had generally good relationships in the Arab world up through WWII. In the first world war, Woodrow Wilson had refused to join Britain and France in declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, and he later declined an Anglo-French proposal that the US occupy Turkey when they were divvying up the spoils of war. Before then, the US was primarily known for its missionary schools like the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo. (The Presbyterians who founded those schools restricted their missionary work to Christians so as not to offend Muslim authorities, but welcomed Muslims to study and respected them, allowing the Universities to develop as intellectual centers of liberal, nationalist, and anti-colonial thinking.) Arab/Muslim respect for America only eroded after the US sided with Israel's colonialist project and replaced Britain as the protector of the aristocracies that claim personal ownership of the region's oil wealth.

US good will in the Arab world was built on a reputation for fairness and mutual respect, but has since been squandered in an anachronistic, foolhardy attempt to grab the spoils of empire. In some sense, we've gone full circle. The first significant number of Muslims to appear in colonial America were brought here from Africa, and they proved to be especially difficult to manage as slaves. Islam was then and now a religion that stood for justice and fought back against injustice. It should not be surprising that today's right-wing sees imposing Christianity on Muslims as key to ending their disobedience, as that was precisely what their forebears the slaveholders had done. After all, the prime directive of conservatism is to defend hierarchy by forcing everyone into their "proper" place. Of course, that was easier to do before conservative institutions like slavery and the inquisition were discredited, but the more we live in a world where people with money think they can buy anything, the more we see even the hoariest fantasies of conservatism come back to haunt us.

Some scattered links this week:

• Richard Silverstein: Why "Reform" Islam?: This is mostly a response to a NY Times piece, Tim Arango: Experts Explain How Global Powers Can Smash ISIS. (If I may interject, my own response is that the piece shows how low the bar is to qualify as an "expert" on this subject.) Arango writes:

  Talking to a diverse group of experts, officials, religious scholars and former jihadis makes clear there is no consensus on a simple strategy to defeat the Islamic State. But there are some themes -- like . . . pushing a broader reformation of Islam -- that a range of people who follow the group say must be part of a solution.

  Some of those "experts" go further in insisting that terrorism is so intimately tied to Islam that only by "reforming" the latter can it be purged of such instincts. Silverstein replies:

  But even if we concede for argument's sake that there is some correlation, no matter how tenuous, why do we blame an entire religion? Why do we blame an entire sacred book when a tiny minority of a religion misinterpret it? Why do we say the religion is at fault rather than the human beings who betray or distort it?

  Baruch Goldstein was a mass murderer who killed 29 Palestinian Muslim worshippers at a religious shrine. He did this in the name of his twisted form of Judaism (which I prefer to call settler Judaism to distinguish it from normative Judaism). Did I hear Tim Arango or anyone else wring their hands about the correlation between Torah and mass murder? Even if I did, should I have?

  There is nothing wrong with Torah. Just because Jews misread their sacred text, must I blame the text itself?

  The problems here are so ridiculous it's hard to enumerate them. One, of course, is scale: there are over a billion Muslims in the world today, and hardly any of them present a "terrorist" threat, so why try to discredit the majority's religion? And who are we to decide to reform what they believe? Religions are changed by prophets, not by academics or politicians, and for lots of reasons it's ever getting harder to do that. Established religions like Christianity are certain non-starters, as they've already been rejected. Doubt is easier than replacement, so maybe atheism, secular humanism, or Marxism might make a dent, especially if one attempted to apply such"reform" here as well as there -- but even the Soviets weren't very effective at banishing old religions. So why even talk about such impractical nonsense?

  Well, it's mostly transference: our way of saying that they're the problem. The facts rather argue differently. At the simplest level, you can compare the frequency and size of acts of violence by Muslims that occur in Europe and the US -- what we like to call"terrorism" -- with the same measure of acts of violence by the US and Europe in the Muslim world, and you'll find that there are far more of the latter than the former. Also, if you put them on a timeline, you'll find that the latter predate the former (at least for any time after the early 8th century). Maybe the religions or the ideologies of the west are the ones that should be reformed? A more promising route might be to find a sense of justice that is acceptable to both (or all) religions, and build on that. But the key to doing so isn't dominating the other into submission. It is looking into oneself to find something that might work as common ground. Unfortunately, you don't get to be an "expert" on ISIS by understanding that.

  Also see another of Silverstein's pieces:"Remember the Stranger, for You Yourselves Were Strangers:

  This could just as well be the motto of the United States as one of the cardinal verses in the Torah. It should be stamped on Bibi Netanyahu's forehead since he violates this precept virtually every day that he maintains prison camps for African refugees, who he refuses to grant asylum or even an application process. For those who take the passage to heart, it means be humble, remember the refugee, show kindness and hospitality to the less fortunate. The Republican presidential candidates apparently don't read their Bibles. Or if they do, they're reading the wrong passages.

  The GOP is now making hay out of the Paris terror attacks. Each candidate falls all over himself to be more punitive, more intolerant than the next. 23 governors, including one Democrat, have said they will refuse to accept Syrian refugees within their states. This, despite the fact that governors have no say in immigration matters and may not expel legal refugees. That's the job of the federal government. But don't tell the governors that. It might educate them about the separate powers delegated to the states and federal government. A little something called the Constitution.

  Another historical fact worth mentioning: in 1938, 937 European Jews boarded the S.S. St. Louis en route to America where they hoped to find refuge from Hitler's encroaching hordes. They waited for months in Cuba and other sites while their supporters sought a safe haven in this country. At long last, they gave up and sailed back to Europe. Where 250 of them were swallowed in the Holocaust and exterminated along with 6-million other European Jews.

  There is a catastrophe enveloping Syria in which nearly 200,000 civilians have died. 500,000 Syrians have fled toward Europe and any other safe harbor they might find. These are not terrorists, not ISIS, though most are Muslim. There is nothing criminal in being either Syrian, a Muslim or a refugee. Despite what viewers saw on this FoxNews panel which quoted approvingly Winston Churchill's bit of colonial Islamophobia: "Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog." It would take FoxNews to dredge up 19th century British religious-cultural imperialism, spoken by the leader who epitomized empire in all its worst forms.

• Yousef Munayyer: There Is Only One Way to Destroy ISIS: This says pretty much what I said last week, except that I didn't feel the need to cast the optimal outcome as the destruction of ISIS. I think it's clear that ISIS will adapt to conditions, so I'd say that the thing to do is to change the conditions to render ISIS much less malign. Munayyer is aiming at the same result, but he's pitching it to people who assume that destroying ISIS is a necessity, but who are flexible and sensible enough to comprehend that just going into ISIS territory and killing (or as we like to call it, liberating) everyone won't do the trick (even if it is possible, which isn't at all clear). Munayyer draws the picture this way:

  I've found that the best way to think about comprehensive counter-terror strategy is the boiling-pot analogy. Imagine that you're presented with a large pot of scalding water and your task is to prevent any bubbles from reaching the surface. You could attack each bubble on its way up. You could spot a bubble at the bottom of the pot and disrupt it before it has a chance to rise. Many bubbles might be eliminated in this way, but sooner or later, bubbles are going to get to the surface, especially as the temperature rises and your counter-bubble capabilities are overwhelmed.

  The other pathway is to turn down, or off, the flame beneath the pot -- to address the conditions that help generate terrorism. When it comes to the question of ISIS in particular and broader terrorism in general, Western counter-terror strategy has focused on the bubbles and not the flame. While significant resources have been invested in intelligence and homeland security, too few have been invested in resolving the conditions that generate terrorism. In fact, too often, the West has contributed significantly to those conditions.

  Munayyer blames the US for invading Iraq, but while key leadership of ISIS came from the anti-American resistance in Iraq, the context which allowed them to claim statehood was the civil war in Syria. End that civil war and ISIS can no longer claim statehood and caliphate. That still leaves the concept, and we've seen that the concept can inspire guerrilla groups and lone wolves elsewhere, but concepts are a poor substitute for reality. Ending that civil war is no easy task, partly because every belligerent group believes they can ultimately impose their will by force -- a fantasy fueled by foreign support -- and partly because every group fears that the others will treat it unjustly. To turn the heat down, you have to phase out the foreign interests, convince each group that its cause is futile, and get each group to accept a set of strictures that will ensure fair and equal treatment for all. ISIS might well be the last group to join into a peace agreement, and it may take force to get the leaders of ISIS to see that their war is futile, but the vow to destroy them is premature: a peace which includes them is much sounder than the perpetual war you get from excluding them or the stench of martyrdom that remains even if you manage to kill them all. Moreover, as you reduce the heat, the popular support that the leaders depend on will fade away.

  After Paris, no one wants to speak about ISIS in terms other than its unconditional destruction, yet when they do so, they reveal how little they understand ISIS, and how little they know about themselves. France and Britain still like to think of their recent empires as some sort of blessing to mankind, but their actual history is full of contempt, repression, racism, and bloody violence. The former colonial master of Syria was no arbitrary target for ISIS, a point which was underscored by how quickly Hollande was able to reciprocate by bombing Raqqa. Similarly, New York and Washington were not picked for 9/11 because they would look good on TV. The US was cited for specific offenses against the Muslim world, and Bush wasted no time proving America's culpability by doing exactly what Bin Laden wanted: by sending his army in to slaughter Muslims in foreign lands, starting with Afghanistan. Bush did that because was locked into an imperial mindset, believing that America's power was so great he could force any result he wanted, and that America's virtue was so unquestioned that he never needed to give a thought to why or how. And Hollande, ostensibly a man of the left, proved the same. (Indeed, so does Bernie Sanders -- see the link below -- even though he's neither as careless nor as cocky as Bush.)

• Protester gets punched at Trump rally. Trump: "Maybe he deserved to get roughed up": Billmon has been obsessed this week with Trump-as-Fascist analogies (see hisTwitter feed), but this is one story that brings the point home. The thing that distinguished Mussolini and Hitler was not that they held conservative views but that they were so bloody minded about it: they were bullies, eager to fight, anxious to draw blood, and they started with beating up bystanders who looked at them funny. They celebrated such violence, and the more power they grabbed the more they flaunted it. Trump may not be in their league, but he's doing something more than merely condoning this "roughing up" -- he's feeding his crowd's frenzy of hate. I thought Jim Geraghty was onto something when he described Bush's supporters as "voting to kill." Trump's fans are basically the same folks, but now he's offering them something more visceral.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

• David Atkins: White Resentment of Welfare Is More Than Just About Racism Now: Builds on a NY Times piece on Kentucky, Alec MacGillis: Who Turned My Blue State Red?, noting that Republican voters are as harsh and unforgiving of the white poor as they are of blacks, etc. I can think of anecdotal evidence that confirms this, and it revolves around shame: the belief that we are each personally responsible for our success and failure. Part of the trick is to get the "failures" to blame themselves and drop out of the political process -- the only way poorer states vote red is when poor people give up on voting their own interest. And part of it is that marginally successful people think they're immune from failure thanks to their superior characters.

• Benjamin Balthaser: Jews Without Money: Toward a Class Politics of Anti-Zionism: Starts by noting the class divide between the rich patrons of the Jewish National Fund and the middle class Jewish Voice for Peace protesters outside. I figured he would expand on this by noting how often rich Jews have supported Zionism almost as a way of shuttling their poor brethren from Russia to Israel -- Lord Balfour, after all, addressed his Declaration to Baron von Rothschild, the richest Jew of his time and the one he most wanted to ingratiate himself with. Instead, Balthaser goes off in other directions, all interesting.

• Tom Boggioni: Ex-CIA director: White House ignored months of warnings about 9/11 to avoid leaving 'paper trail' of culpability: Some of these stories are familiar, although Tenet used to be more dedicated to sucking up to Bush, whose indifference to Al-Qaeda before 9/11 was exceeded only by his demagogic opportunism after.

• Daniel Marans: How Wall Street's Short-Term Fixation Is Destroying the Economy: The business management motto at the root of short-termism is "make your quarters, and you'll make your year." Of course in the real world businesses stumble from time to time, so managers have learned to adjust, packing the quarters they blow with all the losses they've been hiding to make it easier to make new quarters, the year be damned. Marans notes that corporate reinvestment of profits averaged 48% from 1952-84 but dropped to 22% from 1985-2013. The obvious reason is that high pre-Reagan taxes favored reinvesting profits, whereas low taxes made it less painful to extract those profits and put them elsewhere -- indeed set up a dynamic of owners devouring their companies (a practice which vulture capitalists soon perfected). There are a couple more epicycles to this diagram: tying CEO compensation to the stock market helped to ween top management from the workforce and turn them into stock manipulators, opening up all sorts of opportunities for insider trading scams. This, in turn, makes the stock market more volatile, an opportunity for quick traders to trample over ordinary investors, reducing the quantum of short-term thinking from the quarter to weeks, days, minutes.

• Ben Railton: For More Than 200 Years, America Has Shunned a 'War on Islam': Looks like Railton has read the Wikipedia article I opened with, although he adds a little more on the Barbary Wars (which gave the Marines that "shores of Tripoli" stanza). Along similar lines, see John Nichols: Muslims Have Been Living in America Since Before the Revolutionary War.

• Rich Yeselson: The Decline of Labor, the Increase of Inequality: Useful, informative piece on the decline of labor unions in recent decades.

• Senator Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism in the United States: Fairly major speech by Sanders attempting to establish a "democratic socialism" brand name that is so modest and reasonable it's as American as apple pie. I haven't read this closely: if I did, I'd probably find much to second guess (and some things to outright oppose, minimally including much of the end section on ISIS). On the other hand, as I get older and more modest in my ambitions, I find myself gravitating more toward Keynes than Marx, and more to FDR's "second bill of rights" than more radical manifestos, and those are things that are central to this speech.

  By the way, I backed into this link from Mike Konczal: Thoughts on Bernie Sanders's Democratic Socialism and the Primary. Also note that one thing Konczal cites is a new book by Joseph Stiglitz: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity (he mentions hardcover and Kindle, but a paperback is also available) -- a book I intend to pick up ASAP. He also mentions Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America, which makes the case for increasing government spending up toward Scandinavian levels -- an argument I have some sympathy for, but I wouldn't neglect the smarter rules Stiglitz (and others like Dean Baker) argue for, and I can think of some times the Scandinavians haven't managed to do yet. (Kenworthy also has an outline and parts of a future book, The Good Society,here.) Konczal doesn't mention this, but there is at least one more "vision of left-liberalism": see the pro-union books of Thomas Geoghegan: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life and Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement.

• Finally, several pieces to file under "Americans Acting Like Jerks":

  • Armed protesters stalk peaceful Muslims at Texas mosque: We want to show force.
  • Bookstore named Isis becomes target of vandalism: A bookstore in Denver which has been in business for 35 years.

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Music: Current count 25829 [25787] rated (+42), 399 [420] unrated (-21).

Total was goosed early in the week by finding some more bookkeeping omissions. A more accurate rated count is probably a bit over 30 (indeed, there are 33 new ratings below, although I haven't double checked to make sure that's right either). I threw away Tuesday cooking, and lost Friday afternoon to a doctor thing. Otherwise I worked pretty hard.

I'm late posting this on Monday because I've dusted off last year's EOY List Aggregate scripts and started to accumulate data for2015. Thus far I have nine lists counted (see theLegend for a full list and links to the source lists; beware that I have only made the most cursory of corrections to the text there and will have to clean it up later). Seven of the first nine lists are from the UK, and five of those are from record stores (each, by the way, running 100 records deep: Drift, Fopp, Piccadilly, Resident Music, Rough Trade). We also have the two big glossy UK rock mags (Mojo, Uncut), and two more specialized US mags (metal-oriented Decibel and Americana-focusedAmerican Songwriter). The very early returns looks like this:

1. Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop Music) {27} [A-]
2. Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness (Domino) {27} [B]
3. Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty) {24} [***]
4. Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop) {18} [B]
5. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope) {17} [A-]
6. Tame Impala: Currents (Caroline) {15} [*]
7. Ryley Walker: Primrose Green (Dead Oceans) {15} [**]
8. Bjork: Vulnicura (One Little Indian) {13} [B-]
9. Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (Harbinger Sound) {13} [A-]
10. Kurt Vile: B'lieve I'm Goin Down (Matador) {13}
11. Low: Ones and Sixes (Sub Pop) {12}
12. Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (World Circuit) {12} [A-]
13. Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop) {12} [*]
14. New Order: Music Complete (Mute) {11} [A-]
15. Kamasi Washington: The Epic (Brainfeeder) {11} [**]
16. Jamie XX: In Colour (XL/Young Turks) {11} [***]
17. John Grant: Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (Bella Union/Partisan) {10}
18. Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass (Sony) {10} [*]
19. Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (Atlantic) {10} [A-]
20. Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free (Southeastern) {9} [*]
21. LoneLady: Hinterland (Warp) {9} [***]
22. Jim O'Rourke: Simple Songs (Drag City) {9}
23. Wilco: Star Wars (dBpm) {9} [***]
24. Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (Bella Union) {8} [A-]
25. Public Service Broadcasting: The Race for Space (Test Card) {8}
26. Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last (Castle Face) {8}
27. Algiers: Algiers (Matador) {7}
28. Beach House: Depression Cherry (Sub Pop) {7} [*]
29. Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD) {7} [***]
30. Tobias Jesso Jr: Goon (True Panther Sounds) {7} [**]
31. Joanna Newsom: Divers (Drag City) {7}
32. Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar) {7}
33. Matthew E White: Fresh Blood (Domino) {7}
34. Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color (ATO) {6} [*]
35. BadBadNotGood/Ghostface Killah: Sour Soul (Lex) {6} [A-]
36. Blur: The Magic Whip (Parlophone/Warner) {6} [**]
37. Leon Bridges: Coming Home (Columbia) {6} [*]
38. Gaz Coombes: Matador (Hot Fruit) {6} [*]
39. Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (Constellation) {6} [B-]
40. Gwenno: Y Dydd Olaf (Heavenly) {6}
41. Tess Parks & Anton Newcombe: I Declare Nothing (A) {6}
42. Max Richter: From Sleep (Deutsche Grammophon) {6}
43. Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool (Dirty Hit) {6}
44. Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (Big Dada) {6} [**]

I've fiddled with the formula a bit this year to provide extra points for higher placement (5 for 1, 4 for 2-5, 3 for 6-10, 2 for 11-20, 1 for> 20), and I figure I'll use that consistently for all top-tier lists (all so far count as such). Holter currently tops 3 lists (Mojo, Piccadilly, Uncut), Stevens 1 (Drift), Bjork 1 (Rough Trade), Public Service Broadcasting 1 (Fopp), Algiers 1 (Resident). The top records from American Songwriter (Chris Stapleton) and Decibel (Horrendous) don't appear on any other lists. Barnett ranks no higher than 3 on any list but appears on 8 of 9, 7 in the top 10, the other 12th. The probable favorite, Kendrick Lamar, also appears on 8 lists, but only twice in the top 10 (2 on Mojo, 2 on Uncut). The list with neither Barnett nor Lamar is Decibel's, which only has two albums that also appear on other lists: Deafheaven (2), Killing Joke (1).

Last year I wound up collecting data from 676 lists. I don't expect to come close to that this year, but still it's safe to say that returns are less than 1% in. Also that some identifiable skews are present -- e.g., Sleaford Mods won't finish ahead of Sleater-Kinney once the US lists take over. I've included my grades in brackets for reference. I'm rather surprised to see this top-40 (actually 44) has 8 records (18.2%) I've rated A- (and only 2 B-, and none lower) -- usually I disagree more, often finding no correlation at all between my grades and other people's lists. I currently have 30 of these 44 albums rated, so 68.2% (which includes some things today that will show up in next week's report).

Rhapsody Streamnotes came out onWednesday, so some of today's list managed to sneak into that file (like the Ivo Peelmans). I should be closing in on my 2015prospect list, filling out the last slots in my 2015jazz andnon-jazz lists, but surprisingly two of my A- records this week date from 2012-13: one is the Wreckless Eric/Amy Rigby album that eluded me in the past, but which I found now while looking for Eric's new album; the other is by a Bakersfield CA jazz group with a new record, but I noticed an older one, checked it out, and liked it better. Group name is: Invisible Astro Healing Rhythm Quartet.

New records rated this week:

• Dan Ballou: Solo Trumpet (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Peter Brötzmann/Peeter Uuskyla: Red Cloud on Silver (2014 [2015], Omlott, 2LP): [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Church: Mr. Misunderstood (2015, EMI Nashville): [r]: B+(**)
• Chvrches: Every Open Eye (2015, Glassnote): [r]: B+(**)
• Scott Clark 4tet: Bury My Heart (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Agedoke Steve Colson: Tones for Harriet Tubman/Sojourner Truth/Frederick Douglass (2015, Silver Sphinx, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jorrit Dijkstra: Neither Odd nor Even (2014-15 [2015], Driff): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jorrit Dijkstra/Pandelis Karayorgis/Nate McBride/Curt Newton: Matchbox (2014 [2015], Driff): [cd]: B+(**)
• Brian Fielding: An Appropriate Response: Volume One (2015 [2016], Broken Symmetries Music)
• Cee Lo Green: Heart Blanche (2015, Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
• Grimes: Art Angels (2015, 4AD): [r]: B+(**)
• Brian Harnetty: The Star-Faced One: From the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives (2013, Atavistic): [r]: B+(*)
• Brian Harnetty: Rawhead & Bloodybones (2015, Dust-to-Digital): [r]: B+(**)
• Invisible Astro Healing Rhythm Quartet: Invisible Astro Healing Rhythm Quartet (2012 [2013], Epigraph): [bc]: A-
• Invisible Astro Healing Rhythm Quartet: 2 (2014 [2015], Trouble in Mind): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeff Jenkins Organization: The Arrival (2014 [2015], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Martin Leiton: Poetry of Sound (2014 [2015], UnderPool): [cd]: B+(**)
• Daniel Levin/Mat Maneri: The Transcendent Function (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Nicki Parrott: Sentimental Journey (2015, Venus): [r]: B+(**)
• Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Tanya Kalmanovitch: Villa Lobos Suite (2015, Leo): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Complementary Colors (2015, Leo): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Whit Dickey: Butterfly Whispers (2015, Leo): [cd]: A-
• Powertrio: Di Lontan (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B
• Nate Wooley Quintet: (Dance to) the Early Music (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: A-

Old music rated this week:

• Tony Fruscella: Tony Fruscella (1955, Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)-
• Erroll Garner: Body & Soul (1951-52 [1991], Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
• Erroll Garner: The Erroll Garner Collection, Vol. 2: Dancing on the Ceiling (1961-65 [1989], Emarcy): [r]: B+(***)
• Last Exit: Last Exit (1986, Enemy): [r]: A-
• Last Exit: Köln (1988 [2005], Atavistic): [r]: B+(***)
• Last Exit: The Noise of Trouble: Live in Tokyo (1986, Enemy): [r]: B+(**)
• Brew Moore: The Brew Moore Quintet (1955, Fantasy): [r]: B+(**)
• Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby: Two-Way Family Favourites (2010, Southern Domestic): [r]: B
• Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby: A Working Museum (2012, Southern Domestic): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The 3.5.7 Ensemble: Amongst the Smokestacks and Steeples (Milk Factory Productions): January 1
• Jason Kao Hwang: Voice (Innova): January 29
• Danny Mixon: Pass It On (self-released)
• Sonny Sharrock: Ask the Ages (1991, MOD Technologies)

Old-timers will recall that Robert Christgau ran what he called a Turkey Shoot every Thanksgiving from 1988 to 2005. For most of that time he limited his pans of bad albums to one "dud" per month, so he tried to collect his reviews over the year. Even so, the pains of listening to so much unpleasant music built up, so when he left the Village Voice and retooled his Consumer Guide for a series of blog formats, he dispensed with the turkeys, and even the duds. I've heard it said that you have to write some negative reviews to establish credibility for your positive reviews. I even tried that for a while with my Jazz Consumer Guide, and learned two things: one is that the negatives are easier to write, and second is that people respond to them more (at least I always got more feedback on them). Still, I've always had the nagging suspicion that my distaste for a record is as much (maybe more) a reflection of my own limits as of the record's. Actually, I'm sure that's sometimes the case, but I also suspect that some records really are awful, and that it's rarely worth the time to clearly distinguish one from the other. So I mostly look for good records, and as a matter of conscientious bookkeeping note the records that for one reason or another don't make the grade.

Still, a few years ago I noticed some folks complaining about Christgau no longer writing up his Turkey Shoots, so I came up with the idea of spreading the agony around by crowdsourcing a set of turkey reviews. I published the first one of these in2012, and another in2013. One reaction that I got from the former was that some writers would have been willing to contribute but only wanted to write about their finds, so for 2013 I added a second column, theBlack Friday Special. Last year and this year I tried to talk other people into taking over this project. I failed both times, so that's your loss.

I also tried rounding up some bare overrated/unappreciated lists, and didn't get much response there either (although I'll share what I did get below). That leaves me with my own subjective impressions, plus some underdeveloped data.

Actually, I do have one piece of "objective" data: a list of "most overrated albums of 2015" posted at ILXOR (I'm adding my grades, where known, in brackets):

1. Fifth Harmony: Reflection
2. Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife [B+(***)]
3. Meek Mill: Dreams Worth More Than Money
4. Fall Out Boy: American Beauty/American Psycho
5. Meghan Trainor: Title [B+(***)]
6. Bring Me the Horizon: That's the Spirit
7. Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa [A-]
8. Matt & Kim: New Glow
9. Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love [B+(*)]
10. Big Sean: Dark Sky Paradise
11. Future: Dirty Sprite 2 [DS2] [B+(***)]
12. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee [B-]
13. Ellie Goulding: Delirium
14. James McMurtry: Complicated Game [A-]
15. Spectres: Dying
16. Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show [B+(***)]
17. Zun Zun Egui: Shackles' Gift [B+(*)]
18. Napalm Death: Apex Predator - Easy Meat
19. Bop English: Constant Bop
20. Passion Pit: Kindred
21. Arca: Mutant
22. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly [A-]
23. High on Fire: Luminiferous

There's no formal explanation of the methodology here: just one snippet of data which makes me think they're subtracting the user score from the critic score atAlbum of the Year. For instance, Fifth Harmony has a critic score of 74 (based on 5 reviews) and a user score of 54 (based on 36 ratings), so it comes out +20. Sleater-Kinney has a critic score of 90 and a user score of 78, so it is +12. James McMurtry is (85 - 75 = 10). Kendrick Lamar is (94 - 88 = 6). I only checked the top 20 critics scores (plus Fifth Harmony) and they come out pretty much in this order (7 of the top 20 made the overrated list, which by my figures would also include Bassekou Kouyaté). One obvious problem here is that high critic scores are simply more likely to lead the user scores (20 of the top 20 do, with Jamie XX closest at +1, but also with the second lowest critic score, 84). Grade distribution on both scales probably makes this effect more extreme. (Users grade on a 100 point scale, where critic grades are quantized rather arbitrarily.) Other problems relate to sample size and selection: e.g., note that while Mbongwana Star and Sleater-Kinney are both +12, the latter has approximately four times the number of data points (critics: 26/7, users: 352/76).

In any case, some of the user scores are so high that the record can't possibly be considered a turkey; e.g., Kendrick Lamar at 88, or even Sleater-Kinney at 78. In fact, I'd argue that Lamar's 94 critic score isn't out of line with a user score of 88, although Sleater-Kinney's drop from 90 to 78 does appear to harbor a problem: I'd argue that critics are very prone to overrating comeback albums (No Cities to Love came out 10 years after The Woods). No secret I'm not a fan of the band, but I'm not being petty in thinking that this particular record is rather overrated. Indeed, I think what we've seen so far in EOY lists shows that the record is underperforming relative to its initial (back in January) reviews: its top ranks so far are { 10, 11, 14, 23, 34, 35 }, although the record does occur on virtually every list I've tallied so far, making it tied for 12th overall. It should finish higher -- the early UK list bias hurts it a little while helping other records which will eventually fade -- but it's unlikely to come in 2nd (behind Lamar) as its critic scores had projected.

Still, no matter how much other people overrate it, I don't consider No Cities to Love anywhere near turkey level. Looking at theEOY Aggregate data, the following strike me as most suspicious (again, with my grades, where known, in brackets; order comes from the aggregate score, not some measure of turkey-ness):

1. Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness [B]
2. Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear [B]
3. Kurt Vile: B'lieve I'm Goin Down [B]
4. Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love [B-]
5. Björk: Vulnicura [B-]
6. Low: Ones and Sixes
7. Beach House: Depression Cherry [B]
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (Constellation) [B-]
9. Panda Bear: Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper [B]
10. Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night [C]
11. Keith Richards: Crosseyed Heart [B]
12. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee [B-]

That doesn't include every B record in the EOY List Aggregate (but it does pick the top few), nor does it include some unlisted but fairly well known records I've run across, but mostly it doesn't include a lot of things I haven't bothered chasing down. (I did include Low, which I've never graded higher than B, and 2 (of 4) times graded lower.) But those dozen records would in my mind make a fair Turkey Day repast.

Of course, crowdsourcing would have added more informed opinions, including some folks who actually get paid for listening to bad music -- and therefore pay more attention, and take more offense, at it than I do. Michael Tatum, for instance, has panned several records that I gave low B+ grades to after a cursory listen, including (first my, then his grades in brackets; I'm using his B- as a threshold here -- he listens deeper and gets more annoyed than I do, therefore grades lower):

• Blur: The Magic Whip [**, C+]
• Colleen Green: I Want to Grow Up [B, C+]
• Tobias Jesso Jr: Goon [**, C]
• Dawn Richard: Blackheart [B, C]
• Tame Impala: Currents [*, C+]
• Viet Cong: Viet Cong [**, C-]

I have very little invested in my grades of these records -- I certainly didn't play them enough to let them get annoying. I omitted Björk [C-] and Beach House [B-] from Tatum's list as I had already picked on them. He also panned some records I haven't listened to:

• Ryan Adams: Live at Carnegie Hall [D+]
• Ryan Adams: 1989 [B-]
• Lou Barlow: Brace the Wave [B-]
• Iris DeMent: The Trackless Woods [C+]
• Dr Dre: Compton [C+]
• Darren Hayman: Chants for Socialists [C+]
• Lower Dens: Escape From Evil [C+]
• Muse: Drones [C+]
• Petite Noir: La Vie Est Belle [C]
• Joss Stone: Water for Your Soul [C]
• Neil Young: The Monsanto Years [C+]

I got a couple other lists: Lucas Fagen went straight at the records that are dominating EOY lists:

• Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness
• Tame Impala: Currents
• Kurt Vile: Blieve I'm Goin Down
• Grimes: Art Angels
• Beach House: Depression Cherry

Jason Gross also picked:

• Adele: 25
• Vince Staples: Summertime '06
• Joanna Newsom: Divers

I rather enjoyed the Grimes [B+(**)] and Staples [B+(***)] albums, but again dealt with them superficially. Each appears on only a single list to date, but are certainly well known and widely regarded artists. I doubt that the Grimes will poll as well as well as her debut, but I liked it better -- more pop, which often rubs critics the wrong way. I figure Staples will do better as US lists come in -- should be one of the top 3-5 US hip-hop albums this year. I'm not convinced it's that good -- I seem to be having a lot of trouble hearing mainstream rap on Rhapsody -- although I know people who are into it.

I haven't heard Adele or Newsom, but the others were mentioned above. Tame Impala is a group I regard as too perfunctory to get worked up about, and I'm even more blasé over Kurt Vile: when I see records like those on EOY lists I wonder how much listening the listsmiths have actually done. Still, my impression is that there are a lot fewer bland-outs and a lot less mopeyness on this year's lists than several years ago. Also the wave of prog shit that seemed overwhelming back in 2009 (Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors) has returned to the margins -- sure, this year we still have Father John Misty, Panda Bear, and UMO, but at a more tolerable level.

Actually, the big thing that happened in 2015 was that a lot of long-departed groups have followed Sleater-Kinney's lead and come back from long hiatuses: my favorite thus far is New Order. I'm not up to reconstructing the list, but I don't doubt that the return of so many older musicians has helped to make this year seem more comforting to old ears like mine.

I also asked for candidates for a Black Friday Special: records that aren't widely known but should be -- at least, records that might appeal to those of you who aren't stuck in one musical rut. My correspondents wrote back:

• Lucas Fagen:
  • R Master: New Anime Nation, Vol. 10 (Anime)
  • Alaska Thunderfuck: Anus (Sidecar)
  • Wonder Girls: Reboot (JYP Entertainment)
  • Niyaz: The Fourth Light (Six Degrees)
  • RuPaul: Realness (RuCo)
  • Twenty One Pilots: Blurryface (Fueled by Ramen)
• Jason Gross:
  • Lyrics Born: Real People (Mobile Home)
  • Boytoy: Grackle (Papercup Music)
  • The Fireworks: Switch Me On (Shelflife)
• Milo Miles:
  • Breakfast in Fur: Flyaway Garden (Bar/None)
  • Tanya Tagaq: Animism (Six Shooter)
  • Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time*Redemption (TUM)
  • Kate Tempest: Everybody Down (Big Dada '14)
  • Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (Transgressive)

Tempest and Tagaq were 2014 releases, although the latter -- an electronica-charged Inuit throat singer whose record was the toast of Canada at 2014 list time but unknown elsewhere -- wrangled a US reissue in 2015, so I'd say give her another shot. I have Tempest and Lyrics Born at A, Graves/Laswell and Songhoy Blues at A-, Tagaq at high B+, and the others on my search list.

I thought about trying to construct some lists from ongoing lists-in-progress, especially fromChris Monsen and Phil Overeem, but I'll leave that to you. You'll also find many A-list obscurities in my in-progressjazz andnon-jazz files. Rather, my one last list come from Robert Christgau. The following are 2015 releases he reviewed in Expert Witness, graded A- (or better), and are things that virtually no one else has noticed (at least they're not in my EOY Aggregate file yet; my grades in brackets):

• Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (Nonesuch) [A-]
• The Bottle Rockets: South Broadway Athletic Club (Bloodshot) [B+(***)]
• John Kruth: The Drunken Wind of Life: The Poem/Songs of Tin Ujevic (Smiling Fez) [A-]
• Amy Lavere and Will Sexton: Hallelujah I'm a Dreamer (Archer) [A-]
• Jeffrey Lewis & Les Bolts: Manhattan (|Rough Trade) [A-]
• The Paranoid Style: Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall (Worldwide Battle, EP) [B+(***)]
• Paris: Pistol Politics (Guerrilla Funk) [A-]
• Mark Rubin Jew of Oklahoma: Southern Discomfort (Rubinchik)
• Slutever: Almost Famous (self-released, EP) [B+(**)]
• Tal National: Zoy Zoy (Fat Cat) [B+(***)]
• Tinariwen: Live in Paris (Anti-)
• Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experment: Surf (Free) [A-]

Less than half of those came as total surprises to me (Kruth, Paranoid Style, Paris, Rubin, Slutever -- well, I wasn't aware Anderson, LaVere, Lewis, or Tinariwen had new records but had I been I would have checked them out). I was more than vaguely aware of Trumpet, and had actually reviewed Tal National. Other 2015 A-list records according to Christgau: Sleater-Kinney, Ata Kak, Heems, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar, Rae Sremmurd, James McMurtry, Courtney Barnett, Nellie McKay, Young Fathers, Mountain Goats, Miguel, Hop Along, Go! Team, Yo La Tengo, Boz Scaggs, Leonard Cohen, Jamie XX, Shamir, Future, Jason Isbell, Mbongwana Star, Bassekou Kouyaté, Craig Finn, Lost in Mali.

Not much time to collect things today, but here are a few links on the week's newsk:

• Julie Turkewitz/Jack Healy: 3 Are Dead in Colorado Springs Shootout at Planned Parenthood Center: A gunman, identified as Robert Lewis Dear, entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, shot some people, and shot at police when they arrived on the scene. He was captured alive and unhurt after killing three people and wounding nine others. This link provides some preliminary reporting. Note especially:

  Since abortion became legal nationally, with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, many abortion clinics and staff members across the country have been subjected to harassment including death and bomb threats, and hundreds of acts of violence including arson, bombings and assaults and eight murders, according to figures compiled by the Naral Pro-Choice America Foundation.

  Planned Parenthood's Colorado Springs center was one of many locations around the country that became the site of large anti-abortion protests over the summer after abortion opponents released surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing using fetal organs for research. On Aug. 22, the day of nationwide protests to defund Planned Parenthood, more than 300 people protested outside the clinic here, according to local news reports.

  The campaign not just to stigmatize Planned Parenthood but to put it out of business was led this summer by all 16 Republican presidential candidates, while most Republicans in Congress (especially in the House) were so agitated over the issue that they wanted to shut down the federal government if Congress and the President didn't bow to their extortion. Such politicians are casually given the benefit of the doubt when they try to distance themselves from vigilante-terrorists who take their words so seriously they translate them into criminal acts. But in fact most of those politicians do support extra-legal murder and mayhem when the US practices it abroad (e.g., from drones). And one hardly need add that virtually every one of them is equally committed to making sure that vigilante-terrorists here in America have unfettered access to all the guns they can handle. So why excuse them from complicity in murders that are known to have a chilling, and sometimes devastating, effect on the constitutional rights of American women to private health care? (Indeed, see this report: GOP Presidential Candidates Sharing Stage With Pastor Who Hailed Murder of Abortion Provider. The article specifically mentions Cruz, Huckabee, and Jindal. Cruz subsequently received the endorsement of Troy Newman, the leader of Operation Rescue, a group which has been closely aligned with anti-abortion criminals.)

  A few more links on the shooting:

  • Several pieces from No More Mr Niceblog: Colorado Planned Parenthood Siege: Obama's Fault, Naturally, According to Fox: the complaint here is that Obama has tried to cut back on the distribution of military surplus hardware to police departments, just when it's more needed than ever to fight domestic terrorists --"this is war," exclaimed one Fox head, demonstrating complete ignorance about what "war" means. In Afghanistan, for instance, war means calling in a AC-130 gunship like the one that destroyed the MSF hospital in Kunduz. Fortunately, that sort of collateral murder isn't normal in domestic police operations. Then there is When GOP Presidential Candidates Finally Address the Colorado Shooting, They'll Sound a Lot Like Adam Kinzinger. Kinzinger is a Republican congressman who was quick to issue his disclaimer: "And if he's targeting Planned Parenthood -- and again, we don't know -- if he is, he has taken a legitimate disagreement with the practice and turned it into an evil response, which is to go in and shoot people." In other words, Republicans will use this as an opportunity to renew their attacks on Planned Parenthood, just in their "less evil" way. Then there's Republicans Hate What They Hate Much More Than They Love What They Love, I See What Fox News Did There, and There Was an Ever-Thinning Line Between the GOP and the Lunatic Fringe, and Ted Cruz Just Erased It.
  • Josh Marshall: Malign Hesitation.
  • Zoë Carpenter: The Colorado Shooting Comes Amid an 'Alarming' Escalation of Anti-Abortion Violence.

• DR Tucker: Emma's World: Part III: The first two parts were an attempt to put a human face on one of the casualties of the Paris ISIS attack: specifically, a tourist from Tasmania named Emma Parkinson. This one quotes from a piece written on the occasion of an earlier gun massacre, about a still earlier gun massacre: Will Oremus: After a 1996 Mass Shooting, Australia Enacted Strict Gun Laws. It Hasn't Had a Similar Massacre Since. You may recall that the intermediary massacre, the slaughter of elementary school children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, was followed by a loosening of gun regulation, and a few dozen only marginally less shocking mass shootings. Following the 1996 Australian shooting, over 90% of all Australians agreed on the need for much stricter gun control. As I recall, polling showed that after Newtown a majority of Americans also desired stricter gun control, but opinion was far less united, and various institutional factors allowed the gun industry to prevail. A lot of factors differ between Australia and America here. One might, for instance, point to the cultural import of the old west in America, or to the fact that the US since WWII has fought far more wars than anyone else, and that the US government spends more money on arms than the rest of the world does. Still, two factors stand out: one is that Americans care very little about the welfare of their fellow Americans; the other is that Americans have very little understanding of the actual effects of mass gun proliferation. In particular, they don't realize that Australia provides a very relevant case study of the effects of strict gun regulation. Oremus writes:

  What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post's Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here's the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn't been a single one in Australia since.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

• Phyllis Bennis: After the Paris Attacks, a Call for Justice -- Not Vengeance. Recapitulates a similar statement made after 9/11, predicting no good would come of responding to the attacks with a"war of vengeance." Indeed. Also cites the common French response to 9/11: "nous sommes tous Américains" -- showing then as now that the French can't shake their self-gratifying identity as colonial masters, even long after their empire went bankrupt.

• Lauren Fox: Why the Paris Attacks Unleashed a New Level of Anti-Muslim Vitriol in the US: Certainly did, but I'm not sure the author here got the reasons right. For one thing, the US has been fighting several wars against Muslims for 14 years -- and arguably a good deal longer, with 1990 and 1979 key moments of escalation, on top of America's increasing support of Israel, especially coming out of the 1967 and 1973 wars. For another, while the Bush administration was fairly conscientious about positing a battle between "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims," Obama has largely dropped that ball, partly as a result of disengaging from major theatres like Iraq, and partly because the picture itself has become increasingly murky. Also, I think, because the wars have been so unsatisfying that we've lost the commitment that most imperial powers feel to the natives who aligned with them, and are increasingly in trouble because of that -- although this point may just be swamped by the rising tide of nativism stirred up by demagogues like Trump, and the general meanness of the American electorate.

• Rebecca Gordon: Corruption USA: Doesn't review so much as jump off from Sarah Chayes' book about corruption in Afghanistan, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. Raises the question of whether the US is similarly beleaguered by corruption. Spends a lot of time on Ferguson, Missouri, which while pretty clear (and graphic) is small potatoes -- compared to, say, oil and finance.

• John B Judis: The Paradoxical Politics of Inequality.

• Nomi Prins: The American Hunger Games: "Six top Republican Candidates Take Economic Policy Into the Wilderness." Looks at the proposed economic policies of Bush, Carson, Cruz, Fiorina, Rubio, and Trump.

• Abba Solomon: Golem and Big Brother: A review of Jeff Halper's new book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (Pluto Press). Halper founded the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and wrote an essay called"The Matrix of Domination" which was one of the first expositions to show how Israel's many mechanisms for controlling Palestinians work together. The new book shows how Israeli businesses are taking technology developed for controlling Palestinians and marketing it to the rest of the world. If you don't yet think that the conflict over Israel-Palestine concerns you, this book should prove eye-opening.

• Philip Weiss: Trump's claim of 9/11 celebration in New Jersey is based on arrest of 5 'laughing' Israelis: A story to file away for a possible footnote, if that's what it is. I do clearly recall Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres smiling on 9/11 and bragging about how good the terror attacks was for Israel -- a faux pas that John Major also made, one that combines "now you know what it feels like" with "with our vast experience in these things we can help you." It should have occurred to people then that the US was being attacked because it had usurped Britain's colonial role in the Middle East and had doubled down on its alliance with Israel against any reasonable alternative. I also recall that Israel almost instantly released stock video that purported to show Palestinians celebrating and burning American flags -- an image that did its intended damage before anyone could soberly think about it.

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Music: Current count 25871 [25829] rated (+42), 388 [399] unrated (-11).

We've had a very pleasant autumn here in Wichita, but the weatherfolk forecast a turn toward miserable for Thanksgiving through the weekend. Objectively I doubt it ever got that bad, at least here. A cold front went stationary along a diagonal which probably extended from Amarillo to Chicago, but which cut across Kansas just north of Wichita. Along this front, wave after wave of rain/sleet/snow-storms slid northeast. In northwest Kansas this was the fourth blizzard of November, although in Wichita we never saw more than an isolated flurry. North and west of Wichita, the rain froze into a thick coat of ice on everything, and there were reports of power outtages in Hutchinson. In Wichita all I noticed was rain, which froze overnight, making driving and walking treacherous. Our solution for that was to stay hunkered down in a warm house. I like to cook when it's miserable out, so made cacciatore on Friday, and braised some pork ribs with garlic-ginger-scallions and fermented black beans on Sunday.

On Thanksgiving we did go out, to a hotel buffet with some friends. Although I've rarely cooked on Thanksgiving, that was the first time we ever took that option. The meal was fairly good as I skipped past the usual fare and found other things more to my taste -- a very moist baked salmon, a nice succotash, some salads, a slice of ham. But the desserts were mediocre: I sampled the pecan pie and carrot cake, and watched others leave half-picked-over slices of cheesecake. I thought I could have done better on each of those, and for that matter on the bread pudding which no one even bothered to taste. Wasn't overfilling, and we weren't stuck with any leftovers, so those are pluses.

Should warm up a bit over the next few days, not that there is anything here to melt, but we should be able to get out and around. Experienced another earthquake last night, just before I went to bed. It measured 4.7, located just over the Oklahoma border northwest of Enid. Heard the house groan, then watched various things sway back and forth for 20-30 seconds. I thought I felt a couple of smaller quakes after I went to bed, but I don't seen them in the USGS log: there was a 3.0 near Edmond 2 hours later, and since then a 3.1 and a 2.7 west of Perry and a 3.2 east of Cherokee, all in Oklahoma and unlikely to be felt here. That's quite a bit of seismic activity for one day. Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington had one quake each in that period (2.6, 3.4, and 3.0 respectively). Puerto Rico had two. California none, although they had a 2.6 at Gilroy the day before. Earthquakes in Kansas and Oklahoma were unheard of as recently as five year ago. They are clearly caused by injection wells, which are drilled in declining oil fields to dispose of the large amount of water that is being pumped up along with the last drops of oil. I think the largest earthquake to date in Oklahoma was a 5.7 -- big enough to do some actual damage (where last night's earthquake was merely creepy).

Pushed quite a few records through the mill last week. Eleven came from my new jazz queue, but those were the most promising 2015 releases there. I also picked up two Mali groups and Craig Finn from Christgau's Expert Witness, and tried out a few Black Friday Special nominees from correspondents. Most other records popped up in EOY lists: John Moreland was in the top ten at American Songwriter; Flako topped the list at Bleep; Gwenno and Ryley Walker were on several lists (and Kurt Vile and Unknown Mortal Orchestra were on way too many lists).

Still too early to say much about EOY lists, but here's the top 20 in myEOY Aggregate File:

1. Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty) {56}
2. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope) {55}
3. Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness (Domino) {50}
4. Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop Music) {46}
5. Tame Impala: Currents (Caroline) {37}
6. Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop) {35}
7. Jamie XX: In Colour (XL/Young Turks) {34}
8. Kamasi Washington: The Epic (Brainfeeder) {31}
9. Bjork: Vulnicura (One Little Indian) {25}
10. Joanna Newsom: Divers (Drag City) {24}
11. Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (Harbinger Sound) {23}
12. Kurt Vile: B'lieve I'm Goin Down (Matador) {23}
13. Ryley Walker: Primrose Green (Dead Oceans) {22}
14. Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar) {21}
15. Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop) {20}
16. New Order: Music Complete (Mute) {17}
17. Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color (ATO) {16}
18. Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass (Sony) {16}
19. Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD) {15}
20. Jim O'Rourke: Simple Songs (Drag City) {15}

Stevens is up from 3rd last week, and Lamar is up from 5th. I still expect Lamar to pull away. I've factored in a couple long lists from user-rating sites (Rate Your Music, Sputnik Music), although I don't think they have had much impact. No jazz lists yet: the British magJazzwise has published a list of 20 albums (I think) but all I have seen is the top three, and I decided that's not enough to count. Some lists come out in sections. I should be patient, but in one case I've already counted [21-40], while waiting for the top 20.

Would have more, and more comments, but it's gotten late.

New records rated this week:

• Juhani Aaltonen & Iro Haarla: Kirkastus (2013 [2015], TUM): [cd]: B+(***)
• Algiers: Algiers (2015, Matador): [r]: B
• Justin Bieber: Purpose (2015, Def Jam): [r]: B
• Big K.R.I.T.: It's Better This Way (2015, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Boytoy: Grackle (2015, Papercup Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Geof Bradfield Quintet: Our Roots (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gaz Coombes: Matador (2015, Hot Fruit): [r]: B+(*)
• Bram De Looze: Septych (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kristin Diable: Create Your Own Mythology (2015, Speakeasy): [r]: B
• Kaja Draksler/Susana Santos Silva: This Love (2015, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Craig Finn: Faith in the Future (2015, Partisan): [r]: A-
• The Fireworks: Switch Me On (2015, Shelflife): [r]: B+(**)
• Flako: Natureboy (2015, Five Easy Pieces): [r]: B+(**)
• Floating Points: Elaenia (2015, Luaka Bop): [r]: B+(***)
• Food: This Is Not a Miracle (2013 [2015], ECM): [dl]: A-
• David Friesen & Glen Moore: Bactrian (2015, Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jacob Garchik: Ye Olde (2014 [2015], Yestereve): [cd]: B+(**)
• Georgia: Georgia (2015, Domino): [r]: B+(**)
• Gwenno: Y Dydd Olaf (2014 [2015], Heavenly): [r]: A-
• Per Texas Johansson: De Långa Rulltrapporna I Flemingsberg (2014 [2015], Moserobie): [cd]: B+(**)
• John Moreland: High on Tulsa Heat (2015, Old Omens): [r]: A-
• Niyaz: Fourth Light (2015, Six Degrees): [r]: B+(***)
• Tess Parks and Anton Newcombe: I Declare Nothing (2015, 'a' Records): [r]: B+(**)
• RMaster: New Anime Nation, Vol. 10 (2015, Anime): [r]: B+(*)
• Wadada Leo Smith & John Lindberg: Celestial Weather (2012 [2015], TUM): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mike Sopko/Bill Laswell/Thomas Pridgen: Sopko Laswell Pridgen (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Svenska Kaputt: Suomi (2015, Moserobie): [cd]: A-
• Terakaft: Alone (Ténéré) (2015, Out Here): [r]: B+(***)
• Richard Thompson: Acoustic Classics (2014, Beeswing): [r]: B+(***)
• Richard Thompson: Still (2015, Fantasy): [r]: B+(***)
• Tinariwen: Live in Paris (2015, Anti-): [r]: A-
• Torres: Sprinter (2015, Partisan): [r]: B+(*)
• Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (2015, Jagjaguwar): [r]: B-
• Kurt Vile: B'lieve I'm Goin Down . . . (2015, Matador): [r]: B
• Ryley Walker: All Kinds of You (2014, Tompkins Square): [r]: B+(*)
• Ryley Walker: Primrose Green (2015, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(**)
• White Out With Nels Cline: Accidental Sky (2015, Northern Spy): [r]: B+(**)
• Wreckless Eric: America (2015, Fire): [r]: B+(***)
• Wussy: Public Domain, Volume 1 (2015, Shake It, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• Torbjörn Zetterberg & Den Stora Frågan: Om Liv Död (2015, Moserobie): [cd]: B+(**)