Rod Poole

How terrible to learn of the stabbing death of Rod Poole, the great experimental guitarist. The culprits are in custody.

A tribute from Nels Cline is here. A long clip from the Acoustic Guitar Trio record (Poole/Cline/McCauley) is here. More info on the crime here.

Electro-Music '07

My preview of this year's Electro-Music Festival (Cheltenham, PA), in today's Inquirer.

Torture, continued

A commenter going by "napoleon15" took me to task the other day for this post, one of many in which I've denounced the Bush administration's pro-torture policy. "What the US does to al-Qaida war criminals doesn't even begin to compare to what the Nazis and others have done," wrote my respondent.

Andrew Sullivan has unearthed a document describing Verschärfte Vernehmung, or "enhanced interrogation," as practiced by the Gestapo:

As you can see from the Gestapo memo ... the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.
[...]
...What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by [Bush] are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis.

Read the whole thing.

Music highlights

Leni Stern, Alu Maye (Have You Heard) — An interesting five-track EP recorded in Mali in 2006. Features remarkable playing by the late Michael Brecker, in an eclectic, African-influenced pop context. Given Brecker's death some months later, the tribute to Don Alias is almost eerie.

Randy Napoleon, Between Friends (Anzic) — About a month ago I heard the impressive vocalist Sachal Vasandani at the Tin Angel in Philly. Randy Napoleon appeared as a guest on a few numbers and sounded promising. In truth, I knew he could play when I heard him warming up. What a pleasure, then, to get a hold of this beautifully recorded CD, featuring Randy with the formidable Benny Green on piano, among others. It's a down-the-middle standards record, but done with an expert touch. The guitar sound is huge, the playing is radiant.

Jaki Byard, Sunshine of My Soul: Live at the Keystone Korner — The late Byard, documented in 1978, solo piano. An astonishing, previously unreleased find on the HighNote label.

And a few recent live highlights:

Steely Dan at the Tower Theater, PA, May 24 — I have to admit I almost wept when they played "Babylon Sisters," a defining song for me in the mid-'80s. The show was a blast. The sight of middle-aged white people dancing poorly didn't diminish it in the least. Hanging afterwards with my friends Michael and Carolyn Leonhart (trumpet and backing vocals, respectively) was a treat. So was the opening set by organist Sam Yahel, guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Francisco Mela.

Sam Rivers, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul, Miller Theatre, NY, May 25 —
I attended with my good friend Nate Chinen, whose review is here. The 83-year-old Rivers never fails to amaze. And what a thrill to hear Dave Holland in a context this abstract. Quite the New York jazz community event. I managed to greet a bunch of friends and colleagues during a quick one-night stay in town. Thanks to the folks at WKCR-FM for making it happen.

Bowerbird — I've become kind of hooked on this avant-garde concert series since I moved to Philly. They present a lively, unpredictable mix of free jazz, live electronics, contemporary classical music and who knows what else. A typical Bowerbird evening includes four relatively brief sets, in appealing, out-of-the-way venues scattered across the city. Recent highlights include the duos EKG and HZL, the Signal Quintet from Switzerland, saxophonist Jack Wright's trio with the compelling bassist Evan Lipson, solo electronics by Vertonen and Jason Talbot ... on and on. I'm particularly excited about the June 23 performance of Morton Feldman's "Patterns in a Chromatic Field."

Moore's Cuba, continued

A follow-up to my post of May 13, on Michael Moore's new film "Sicko" and his take on health care in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Anthony DePalma has an interesting piece about life expectancy rates in Cuba and the U.S. He quotes a Dr. Robert N. Butler:

“I know Americans tend to be skeptical,” [Butler] said, “but health and education are two achievements of the Cuban revolution, and they deserve some credit despite the government’s poor record on human rights.”

One of the questions always begged in these discussions: What constitutes a good education? Does it end with basic literacy? No, it requires an atmosphere of open inquiry and critical thinking, free from fear and censorship. Needless to say, these conditions are completely lacking in Cuba. In other words, everything following the word "despite" in the above quote completely undercuts what comes before it.

As for health care, DePalma cites the view of a Dr. Leonel Cordova, who defected in 1992, shortly after the Soviet collapse. Cuba has two health systems, Cordova argues:

...one is for party officials and foreigners like those Mr. Moore brought to Havana. “It is as good as this one here, with all the resources, the best doctors, the best medicines, and nobody pays a cent,” he said.

But for the 11 million ordinary Cubans, hospitals are often ill equipped and patients “have to bring their own food, soap, sheets — they have to bring everything.”

I'll withhold definitive judgment until I see Moore's film. But I would expect a muckraking journalist like him not to gloss over the apparent inequity that Dr. Cordova describes. "I'm not trumpeting Castro or his regime," Moore says in his defense. We'll see. If he's silent about Castro's human rights abuses while lavishing praise on the Cuban health care system, then he's complicit in said abuses.

[Update: Cuba is one of the world's 10 worst "backsliders" on freedom of the press, according to a May 2 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. If Moore has any integrity as a proponent of free media and the right to dissent, he'll want to make a note of this during the fallout over "Sicko."]

The horror continues

Nir Rosen's NY Times Magazine article last week [$], on the Iraqi refugee crisis, shed some light specifically on the plight of Palestinians living in Iraq:

Hussein was first threatened in 2005, when, he said, a letter containing a bullet and two drops of blood was sent to his house. ''If you do not leave Iraq, this will be your fate,'' the letter read. A second death threat was signed by the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia sponsored by Iran and belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
[...]
Two of Hussein's uncles were kidnapped. The kidnappers, Hussein told me, had demanded $100,000 in ransom, but Hussein's family did not have the money. The next day they received a phone call informing them that his uncles' bodies were in the morgue. Hussein's uncles had been tortured and mutilated, drills driven through their bodies -- a signature practice of Iraq's Shiite militias -- and their genitals cut off .... Hussein's family was also given a CD containing a film of the murders.

Not the work of Sunni terrorists, mind you. No, this was the Badr Brigade, intimately tied to the Iraqi government — the one we're relying on to "step up" and solve this mess.

David Torn

My review of David Torn's Saturday engagement at the Clef Club, in today's Inquirer.

No friends but the mountains, and...

I have great regard for the Kurds of northern Iraq (go here to read my Turkey-Iraq travelogue from last year). For a long time, the Kurdish authorities have been forced to grab support wherever they can get it — from Iran and Israel, for instance, in different circumstances and for different reasons. You've heard it before: politics makes for strange bedfellows.

But this piece by the investigative reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran really disturbed me. It delves into the Kurds' lobbying efforts in Washington, what Chandrasekaran calls "an influence-buying campaign." It turns out that the slick PR drive called "The Other Iraq" — which I mentioned in this post — was put together by an evangelical Christian named Bill Garaway, who has hired the consulting firm Russo Marsh & Rogers to place a series of high-profile TV ads. According to Chandrasekaran, "The firm is closely affiliated with Move America Forward, a conservative advocacy group that has organized rallies in support of continuing military operations in Iraq."

Move America Forward is Melanie Morgan's organization. I wrote about Ms. Morgan, an unhinged character with politics to the right of Rush Limbaugh's, just the other day.

It's no secret that Jalal Talabani and other Kurdish officials are dead-set against any American troop withdrawal and are largely uncritical of our miserable excuse for a president. It's objectively true that they've benefited from this war, at least in the short term. One can understand the logic of their position, given what they endured during the Saddam Hussein years. But how disheartening to read of their marriage of convenience with the looniest of the loony on the American right.

The spirit of Falwell, abroad

A story here, about the jailing and intimidation of an Indian artist over supposed "obscenity." I wrote some days ago about the Richard Gere story, and the deluded opinion that Gere needed to show more respect to "Indian culture" — as if the priorities of the ultraright Hindu faction Shiv Sena represent Indian culture as a whole.

In the present case in Gujarat state, the rightist thugs are not defending Indian culture — they are mounting an assault against it:

...one of the most striking [paradoxes] is that the puritanism of today’s Hindu radicals coexists with a long tradition of graphic sexual iconography. Hindu temple carvings often feature elaborate scenes of copulation.

That is Indian culture.

The party of torture, the "tumor of tyranny"

Just the other night, eight out of 10 GOP candidates for president offered enthusiastic endorsements of torture, to lusty audience applause in South Carolina. The question posed to them, by pseudo-journalist Brit Hume, concerned a lurid hypothetical about three U.S. shopping malls being bombed. A suspect in a planned fourth attack has been captured. What would these candidates do to elicit the needed information and save American lives? In other words, the "ticking bomb" scenario, which is completely divorced from reality, yet used always and every time to justify "enhanced interrogation techniques" — i.e., torture, the erasure of the Geneva protocols, the abrogation of human rights, the tactic used by every vile dictatorship that history has known.

It's hardly my original phrase, but I will go on repeating it: the purpose of torture is torture. It is not information-gathering. It is not about crime scenarios pulled from TV scripts. And it is not hypothetical, despite what Brit Hume suggests. It is real. This administration has authorized it and encouraged it. They've tortured people whose innocence they have later acknowledged. Some have died.

In the wake of Abu Ghraib, here are questions that should be put to the candidates: Do you believe that naked human pyramids are useful to the gathering of intelligence? Do you support the continued use of torture, as authorized by the current administration? Do you recognize the authority of internationally codified humanitarian law, or do you think the U.S. should formally withdraw from the relevant agreements?

A roundup of reactions from Marty Lederman here. Andrew Sullivan's posts here and here couldn't be better. He writes:

The evil of torture is therefore not just a moral one. It is a political one. A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny. That tumor, we know from history, always always spreads, as it has spread in the US military these past shameful years. The fact that hefty proportions of US soldiers now support its use as a routine matter reveals how deep the rot has already gone. The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture's evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that "wartime" is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government. Imagine another terror attack, with Rudy Giuliani as president, and a mandate to arrest and torture at will, with no need to follow or even address the rule of law. We would no longer be a republic. We would be in a protectorate of one man.

Michael Moore's Cuba

In my recent Democratiya essay about Michael Moore, I remarked: "Oddly, Moore was not a major presence during the midterm election season...."

Well, Moore's absence is over.

The U.S. government has handed him a propaganda coup on a silver platter by threatening prosecution over an unauthorized trip to Cuba during filming of "Sicko," his new movie on health care, which will hit U.S. theaters in late June. (For the record, I oppose the U.S. embargo and call on the U.S. to drop the case against Moore.)

Not having seen Moore's film, I can only rely on advance descriptions, but his aim is familiar: he wants to contrast the lack of access to health care in the U.S. with the universal coverage to be found in Cuba.

Moore is right to point out the inadequacy of the American system. But given that he has devoted his entire career to condemning governmental abuses and angrily upholding the right to dissent, it will be interesting to see what else he mentions about Cuba in the film.

Viewers might want to know that Rolando Jimenez was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison for writing anti-Castro graffiti. Or that Oscar Sanchez, a journalist, was given four years for "social dangerousness" after reporting on poor factory conditions — exactly the sort of thing Moore used to do back in Flint, Michigan.

Yes, in Cuba, people who do what Moore does tend to get jail time. But when Moore travels there, it's not to denounce the Castro dictatorship, but to whitewash it.

It's one thing to make the case for a single-payer health care system. But when you consider the effects of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment on the health and welfare of an individual, it is perverse to laud Cuba for its social services.

Moore, as always, is catching hell from right-wingers. For this reason, he will feel vindicated. He shouldn't, because his apologetic stance toward Castro runs afoul not of conservative principles, but liberal ones.

The biggest whopper of all? Cuba's state-run daily Granma has rushed to Moore's defense: "The U.S. government's targeting of Moore 'confirms the imperial philosophy of censorship' by American officials, [the newspaper] added." This, from a regime that has outlawed free media for over 40 years.

[Salon's review of "Sicko" is here.]

Slavic Soul Party!

The NY-based Slavic Soul Party! played in Philly Wednesday night. My review, in today's Inquirer.

"Dying to Win"

I recently finished Robert A. Pape's very interesting book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House). It's refreshingly data-driven and non-ideological, if a bit out of date — the paperback edition is 2005, and news moves fast, in Iraq and elsewhere.

One of Pape's arguments is that suicide terrorists, and the militant organizations that deploy them, are not outcasts from their societies, but rather valued and respected members of those societies. They are not, in other words, shadowy figures who have rejected the values of the surrounding population. In the social context in which they operate, they are "normal."

Easy enough to accept. But there's something missing, and it peeks through in a footnote on the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, on page 318. Pape cites the following passage from a 2000 report by the International Center for Ethnic Studies:

One by one their rivals and opponents among the Tamil separatist groups succumbed to the relentless violence of the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] ... [which] systematically eliminated all rival groups, culminating in the brutal massacre of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization and the killing of its leader, Sri Sabaratnam, between 1 and 3 May, 1986.

So, if the Tigers have indeed managed to become a popular force in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka, they did not come by that popular support innocently. They achieved it through brute violence.

To gauge the actual public support of a given terrorist group, one would have to factor in pure fear, no? In the vast majority of cases, these "liberation" groups turn their violence on the people they claim to be liberating. This is something you'd think would carry more weight in Pape's analysis.

Melanie Morgan is evil

Speaking of insufferable demagogues, on last night's Newshour the ultra-right radio host and activist Melanie Morgan "debated" Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org, a group of antiwar veterans heavily involved in lobbying the Democrats on troop withdrawal legislation. Soltz had facts, rationality and decency on his side. Morgan attacked him personally, interrupted, called him anti-American and an al-Qaeda stooge. (Her views on the war are clinically delusional and not worth discussing here.)

I've mentioned Melanie Morgan on this blog before. In June 2006 she called for the execution, by gas chamber, of NY Times executive editor Bill Keller. This is someone beyond the pale of civil discourse — well to the right, I'd say, of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. But she styles herself a voice of the people. And while we focus our ire on the likes of Don Imus (yes, I did it too), Morgan goes largely uncriticized.

The irony is that Morgan, had she been born an Iraqi, would have had a suitable temperament to serve in the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Then she could have executed journalists and criminalized dissent all she liked.

My aching back

I had some other things to sound off about, but while I was filing away CDs this morning, five of my shelves collapsed, one atop the other, in a chain reaction. I'd say nearly a thousand CDs, arranged alphabetically in thin plastic gatefolds, came crashing down around me. Like 52-card pickup.

I spent the rest of the day realphabetizing letters B through E of my collection (yeah, that includes Braxton, Coleman, Coltrane, Corea, Davis). I'll be ordering a new CD tower (three, actually) to replace the cheap piece of garbage that failed me. Seemed like such a bargain when I moved...

I had been thinking lately about the turn to digital music, and the possible merits of weeding my archives, ripping lots of the stuff to hard drives and being done with it. This experience has convinced me to put aside the qualms and get started.

Penn's sanctimony, Maher's frivolity

Bill Maher's HBO program this past Friday was excruciating. Garry Shandling, his brain scattered and his face full of botox, contributed nothing. Harold Ford, Jr., head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, was not there for a fight, and so yielded far too readily to the insufferable demagogue Sean Penn. Unable to get over himself for a fraction of a second, Penn rehashed Chomskyite platitudes and even got Maher to sympathize with the sentiment that "all war is terrorism."

Which was interesting, because just one week prior, Maher argued precisely the opposite while interviewing Dennis Kucinich. The congressman insisted that as president, he would never bring the U.S. into a war. "C'mon, congressman, you're going to lose me now," Maher responded. "Admit it: some people need killing."

Turkey in crisis

My friend Yigal Schleifer has a report at the Eurasianet website on Turkey's current political crisis.

Protesters clashed with police today in Taksim Square and the unrest spread to Istiklal Cadessi, where Yigal lives, and where I stayed during my visit last year. His neighborhood was unaffected, but he "got a good whiff of pepper gas" while watching events unfold down the block.

[Update: Yig points me to this interesting background story in the Financial Times. Seems the AKP and the army had already agreed on two possible presidential candidates, then the AKP did a switcheroo.]

[Update II: This post from Judeosphere details the frothing racism and antisemitism to be found among elements of the secularist forces in Turkey. In a sense, they're not secular at all, but rather inflamed with the religion of ultra-nationalism. It's wholly inaccurate to paint the crisis as secular democrats vs. religious fundamentalists.]

Six Picks: May 2007

My monthly list of recommended CDs, as published in All About Jazz-New York, May 2007:

David Binney/Edward Simon, Océanos (Criss Cross)

Aydin Esen, Light Years (Extinction)

Human Feel, Galore (Skirl)

James Falzone, The Sign and the Thing Signified (Allos)

Lionel Loueke, Virgin Forest (Obliqsound)

Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly, Last Year’s Ghost (482 Music)