Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Cole's top-ten myths
Juan Cole has a list of top-ten myths about the Iraq war, well worth reading. Top myth: The surge is working. This mantra is being repeated on every network news broadcast. Nothing in Iraq is that simple.
P.S. - There are things of Cole's to take issue with. He's right to note that Kurdistan can no longer be regarded as truly "calm." But it remains the case that average living conditions in Kurdistan are far better than elsewhere (notwithstanding this very disturbing report on exploitation of foreign workers).
The following, in addition, is an overreach: "Kurdistan now also hosts the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas that sneak over the border and kill Turkish troops." Those guerrillas have been hiding out in Iraqi Kurdistan for a long time, and it's debatable whether Iraqi Kurdish leaders are "hosting" them.
P.S. - There are things of Cole's to take issue with. He's right to note that Kurdistan can no longer be regarded as truly "calm." But it remains the case that average living conditions in Kurdistan are far better than elsewhere (notwithstanding this very disturbing report on exploitation of foreign workers).
The following, in addition, is an overreach: "Kurdistan now also hosts the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas that sneak over the border and kill Turkish troops." Those guerrillas have been hiding out in Iraqi Kurdistan for a long time, and it's debatable whether Iraqi Kurdish leaders are "hosting" them.
Lahr on Pinter
Soon after my last comment on Harold Pinter comes John Lahr's New Yorker profile — mostly a close reading of the play "The Homecoming," though Lahr touches on Pinter's politics at the end:
...he has lent the muscle of his voice to a variety of causes, among them the Sandinistas, the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, the end of the Iraq war, and the trial of Tony Blair as a war criminal.
It's amazing how Lahr doesn't lift a finger to unpack the screaming irony. The freedom of Slobodan Milosevic. The trial of Tony Blair as a war criminal. Pinter is not opposed to war crimes as such, you see. Milosevic, the overseer of an anti-Muslim genocide, put on trial by an internationally recognized and legitimate court, should have gone free. But as for Tony Blair, no judgment is too harsh, no words too hysterical.
And somehow Pinter winds up in the moral plus-column: "...the fiasco of the current Iraq war has borne out some of Pinter's dire warnings," writes Lahr. But plenty of people opposed the war. They don't all deserve to be hailed as prophets. No, what distinguishes Pinter is something else entirely. His contempt for the west led him to propagandize for an anti-western politician who perpetrated genocide. A bit more plain English from arts critics would be a great public service.
...he has lent the muscle of his voice to a variety of causes, among them the Sandinistas, the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, the end of the Iraq war, and the trial of Tony Blair as a war criminal.
It's amazing how Lahr doesn't lift a finger to unpack the screaming irony. The freedom of Slobodan Milosevic. The trial of Tony Blair as a war criminal. Pinter is not opposed to war crimes as such, you see. Milosevic, the overseer of an anti-Muslim genocide, put on trial by an internationally recognized and legitimate court, should have gone free. But as for Tony Blair, no judgment is too harsh, no words too hysterical.
And somehow Pinter winds up in the moral plus-column: "...the fiasco of the current Iraq war has borne out some of Pinter's dire warnings," writes Lahr. But plenty of people opposed the war. They don't all deserve to be hailed as prophets. No, what distinguishes Pinter is something else entirely. His contempt for the west led him to propagandize for an anti-western politician who perpetrated genocide. A bit more plain English from arts critics would be a great public service.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Benazir Bhutto, martyr
I had some music-related and other posts stored up, but I'm putting this blog on temporary hold in mourning for Benazir Bhutto. And not only for Bhutto, but for the entire nation of Pakistan, which is erupting into chaos as I write this.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Turkey-Kurdistan-PKK
In light of continuing Turkish attacks against the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan, one could do worse than read Marko Attila Hoare's clear-eyed policy prescriptions. In short: yes, the PKK is a terrorist gang. But Turkey has created its Kurdish problem and can end it. It should grant the Kurds full, unconditional political freedom and recognize Kurdish as an official language, i.e., become a bilingual state. No, this will not spell the end of the modern Turkish republic; it will, however, render the PKK entirely impotent. The Kurds, in turn, should abandon their self-defeating drive for full independence: clearly their best long-term hope lies in remaining part of Turkey. Read it all here.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Packer on "Redacted"
I observed my Jewish Christmas by watching Brian De Palma's "Redacted" this evening. Was surprised to find it on-demand so soon. Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly with George Packer:
De Palma has announced that his intention in making “Redacted” is to end the war. “The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he said after a press screening in Venice. “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.” It seems unlikely to me that “Redacted” will have that effect, or even that De Palma is serious about wanting it to. The movie encourages you to abandon the very powers of analysis and discrimination that might lead you to write your congressman.
[...]
At the end of “Redacted,” as a kind of coda, there’s a montage of photographs of bloody and mangled bodies, many of them infants or small children. All the pictures are real, except the last, a faked image of a murdered rape victim—because, you know, what’s the difference? [...] The title of the montage is “Collateral Damage,” suggesting that these are the victims of American firepower and indifference. But there’s no way of knowing how these Iraqis came to be killed, nor does De Palma care—their only role is to shock. The eyes of each corpse have been blacked out, for legal reasons. “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people,” De Palma said in Venice. “The great irony about ‘Redacted’ is that it was redacted.” There’s nothing ironic about it at all. “Redacted” had already taken away the corpses’ dignity; the blacked-out faces are of a piece with a movie that dehumanizes everything it shows.
“Redacted” is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi’s homemade videos are war porn, “Redacted” is film-theory porn—a stylized snuff film inside a meta-critique of the media. [...]
De Palma has announced that his intention in making “Redacted” is to end the war. “The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he said after a press screening in Venice. “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.” It seems unlikely to me that “Redacted” will have that effect, or even that De Palma is serious about wanting it to. The movie encourages you to abandon the very powers of analysis and discrimination that might lead you to write your congressman.
[...]
At the end of “Redacted,” as a kind of coda, there’s a montage of photographs of bloody and mangled bodies, many of them infants or small children. All the pictures are real, except the last, a faked image of a murdered rape victim—because, you know, what’s the difference? [...] The title of the montage is “Collateral Damage,” suggesting that these are the victims of American firepower and indifference. But there’s no way of knowing how these Iraqis came to be killed, nor does De Palma care—their only role is to shock. The eyes of each corpse have been blacked out, for legal reasons. “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people,” De Palma said in Venice. “The great irony about ‘Redacted’ is that it was redacted.” There’s nothing ironic about it at all. “Redacted” had already taken away the corpses’ dignity; the blacked-out faces are of a piece with a movie that dehumanizes everything it shows.
“Redacted” is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi’s homemade videos are war porn, “Redacted” is film-theory porn—a stylized snuff film inside a meta-critique of the media. [...]
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Music after 9/11
The following book review appears in the Winter 2008 issue of Jazz Notes, the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA), edited by yours truly.
---
Music in the Post-9/11 World
Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry, eds.
Routledge, New York/London, 2007; 328 pp.; $24.95 paperback
Review by David R. Adler
In the liner notes to Up For It, written about a month before the start of the Iraq war, Keith Jarrett asked: “Why play music at all? What difference could it make?” Many involved in the arts expressed similar sentiments in the aftermath of 9/11. Lost lives, a marred Manhattan skyline, political disquiet and the prospect of ongoing war made art, and certainly the pleasure of entertainment, seem insignificant, even disrespectful. And yet the feeling gradually subsided, and the music never stopped.
This new essay collection, Music in the Post-9/11 World, meticulously reconstructs a period of time that can now seem like a blur. The foreword, by ethnomusicologist Gage Averill, sets out the mission: to explore “how music is implicated in conflict, justice, intercultural understanding, and peace” — or, more broadly, “to assess the richness of sound and music in the emotional life of humankind.” The contributors represent a range of academic disciplines: ethnomusicology, music theory, folklore, communications, American studies. None of the essays deal specifically with jazz, although one jazz journalist, the JJA’s Larry Blumenfeld, weighs in with “Exploding Myths in Morocco and Senegal: Sufis Making Music After 9/11,” an insightful account of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music and the musical-political activity of Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who has done much to combat anti-Muslim stereotypes in the West.
Blumenfeld’s essay is found in part two of the book, which focuses on the climate outside the United States. Elsewhere in this section, co-editor Jonathan Ritter examines commemorative 9/11 songs in the pumpin style indigenous to Peru’s Fajardo region; John Holmes McDowell offers close readings of corridos, or Mexican ballads, relating to 9/11; James R. Grippo investigates the sha‘bi music of urban working-class Egypt; and Veronica Doubleday gives a fascinating report on the state of musical culture in Afghanistan. On the musicological level, every one of these essays is illuminating. On the political level, two of them have major weaknesses, typifying an uncritical indulgence of “the Other” often found on the academic left.
Part one, dealing with the music and mass media landscape in the U.S., includes James Deaville’s innovative analysis of TV news music — an inscrutable world of “stingers,” “bumpers” and “promo beds,” starkly reminding us that “music is unsurpassed in its ability to tap into the personal narratives of individual viewers” and promote government-sanctioned viewpoints. We also find Martin Scherzinger’s especially nuanced “Double Voices of Musical Censorship after 9/11”; Reebee Garofalo’s synoptic “Pop Goes to War, 2001-2004”; Kip Pegley and Susan Fast’s analysis of the 9/11 memorial concert “America: A Tribute to Heroes”; reflections on the politics of Bruce Springsteen and Darryl Worley, by Bryan Garman and Peter J. Schmelz, respectively; and thoughts on “Classical Music and Remembrance after 9/11” by Peter Tregear. What emerges is a picture of music in its various and overlapping social functions: salve for a wounded community, vehicle of inclusion and exclusion, protest against national policy, or belligerent defense of that policy.
Somehow, each of these essays has to contend with the aggressively unenlightened reign of George W. Bush, and there is much well-deserved criticism of pro-war country music jingoists such as Worley, Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood. But elsewhere, the forgiving treatment of Egyptian sha‘bi singer Sha‘ban ‘Abd al-Rahim and Mexican corridista Andrés Contreras makes for a striking contrast, and seems to indicate a broader political bias.
Grippo, in his discussion of al-Rahim, is willing to censure “Israel’s apartheid-like domination over the Palestinian people.” But when it comes to al-Rahim’s video-clip depicting a cartoon George W. Bush scrawling a large Star of David over a world map, or his lyric “O People, O Mankind, it wasn’t but a tower/and certainly its owners are the ones that made it fall,” Grippo is studiously neutral. “Controversial” and “brazen” is as far as he’ll go. Al-Rahim is a self-professed ignoramus on world affairs, but Grippo, in the end, lauds him as part of “a long line of sha‘bi singers who have used their craft to enlarge sociopolitical criticism….” The idea that anti-Semitism and 9/11 conspiracy theories are in fact stultifying sociopolitical criticism in countries like Egypt doesn’t enter the discussion.
Similarly, McDowell can’t summon an unkind word about corrido singer Andrés Contreras, who praises Osama bin Laden as “a valiant man” and regards the 9/11 attacks as just. To be fair, McDowell seeks to establish that Contreras’s “El Corrido de Osama bin Laden” fits comfortably within the corrido tradition, in which respect for the cunning Mexican outlaw trumps other moral considerations. But the Contreras song is one of five 9/11 corridos explored in McDowell’s essay. Three of them are, in McDowell’s estimation, “conformist,” in that they endorse “the official story” of 9/11. McDowell repeats the phrase “the official story” five times in his final two paragraphs. He defines it as “a world of black and white, of terrorists and victims — the Twin Towers are portrayed as beautiful (though fragile), the victims are innocents, the attackers cowardly, and the quest for vengeance is a natural and legitimate response by the injured party.”
Oddly, McDowell seems to prefer not only the inverted black-and-white Contreras narrative, with its “damned gringos” and heroic bin Laden, but also the “neutral” stance toward bin Laden expressed by another corridista, Rigoberto Cárdenas Chávez: “I am not God to judge you/but you must have your reasons.” While McDowell never praises the pro-bin Laden sentiments outright — like Grippo, he affects scholarly objectivity in describing them — he is enthused about the “counterhegemonic potential” of the corrido genre, its ability to “challenge the official story and propose a different understanding of our collective history.” Why a “counterhegemonic” understanding like Contreras’s is superior to the putative conformism of “the official story,” McDowell does not say. It’s supposed to be self-evident. In an intellectual environment where the easy appeal of the counterhegemonic is itself hegemonic, this makes perfect sense.
Larry Blumenfeld, in his essay on Sufism, rightly calls for “intelligent, open, and complex discussion of the issues at hand,” and there is much of it to be found in Music and the Post-9/11 World. However, the Grippo and McDowell entries raise questions about some of the tacit assumptions guiding the project. Gage Averill, in the foreword, throws the problem into relief with a refreshingly candid passage about his Vietnam-era “dalliance with the violent wing of the antiwar movement.” For a time, Averill “allowed [himself] to justify violence in the pursuit of political aims,” a habit of mind that struck him as “frighteningly current” during the 9/11 crisis:
The perpetrators of 9/11 and their sympathizers justified the violence because it ‘brought the war home’ to America, and they have argued that no one living in America is innocent — arguments that were familiar to me. I had once been complicit in a way of thinking that excused or rationalized the loss of innocent lives in the exercise of terror for political ends…. As I coped with my grief and shock following 9/11, I also had to deal with an unsettling sense of complicity and guilt, a failure of my humanism.
Introspection of this sort isn’t terribly common on the anti-imperialist left, and it doesn’t surface again in the book. Averill reminds us that critical thinking involves more than a dissection of “the comfortable capitalist matrix of U.S. hegemony,” in the words of co-editor J. Martin Daughtry. At some point the critique must turn inward, toward the comfortable matrix of the left’s own design.
---
Music in the Post-9/11 World
Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry, eds.
Routledge, New York/London, 2007; 328 pp.; $24.95 paperback
Review by David R. Adler
In the liner notes to Up For It, written about a month before the start of the Iraq war, Keith Jarrett asked: “Why play music at all? What difference could it make?” Many involved in the arts expressed similar sentiments in the aftermath of 9/11. Lost lives, a marred Manhattan skyline, political disquiet and the prospect of ongoing war made art, and certainly the pleasure of entertainment, seem insignificant, even disrespectful. And yet the feeling gradually subsided, and the music never stopped.
This new essay collection, Music in the Post-9/11 World, meticulously reconstructs a period of time that can now seem like a blur. The foreword, by ethnomusicologist Gage Averill, sets out the mission: to explore “how music is implicated in conflict, justice, intercultural understanding, and peace” — or, more broadly, “to assess the richness of sound and music in the emotional life of humankind.” The contributors represent a range of academic disciplines: ethnomusicology, music theory, folklore, communications, American studies. None of the essays deal specifically with jazz, although one jazz journalist, the JJA’s Larry Blumenfeld, weighs in with “Exploding Myths in Morocco and Senegal: Sufis Making Music After 9/11,” an insightful account of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music and the musical-political activity of Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who has done much to combat anti-Muslim stereotypes in the West.
Blumenfeld’s essay is found in part two of the book, which focuses on the climate outside the United States. Elsewhere in this section, co-editor Jonathan Ritter examines commemorative 9/11 songs in the pumpin style indigenous to Peru’s Fajardo region; John Holmes McDowell offers close readings of corridos, or Mexican ballads, relating to 9/11; James R. Grippo investigates the sha‘bi music of urban working-class Egypt; and Veronica Doubleday gives a fascinating report on the state of musical culture in Afghanistan. On the musicological level, every one of these essays is illuminating. On the political level, two of them have major weaknesses, typifying an uncritical indulgence of “the Other” often found on the academic left.
Part one, dealing with the music and mass media landscape in the U.S., includes James Deaville’s innovative analysis of TV news music — an inscrutable world of “stingers,” “bumpers” and “promo beds,” starkly reminding us that “music is unsurpassed in its ability to tap into the personal narratives of individual viewers” and promote government-sanctioned viewpoints. We also find Martin Scherzinger’s especially nuanced “Double Voices of Musical Censorship after 9/11”; Reebee Garofalo’s synoptic “Pop Goes to War, 2001-2004”; Kip Pegley and Susan Fast’s analysis of the 9/11 memorial concert “America: A Tribute to Heroes”; reflections on the politics of Bruce Springsteen and Darryl Worley, by Bryan Garman and Peter J. Schmelz, respectively; and thoughts on “Classical Music and Remembrance after 9/11” by Peter Tregear. What emerges is a picture of music in its various and overlapping social functions: salve for a wounded community, vehicle of inclusion and exclusion, protest against national policy, or belligerent defense of that policy.
Somehow, each of these essays has to contend with the aggressively unenlightened reign of George W. Bush, and there is much well-deserved criticism of pro-war country music jingoists such as Worley, Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood. But elsewhere, the forgiving treatment of Egyptian sha‘bi singer Sha‘ban ‘Abd al-Rahim and Mexican corridista Andrés Contreras makes for a striking contrast, and seems to indicate a broader political bias.
Grippo, in his discussion of al-Rahim, is willing to censure “Israel’s apartheid-like domination over the Palestinian people.” But when it comes to al-Rahim’s video-clip depicting a cartoon George W. Bush scrawling a large Star of David over a world map, or his lyric “O People, O Mankind, it wasn’t but a tower/and certainly its owners are the ones that made it fall,” Grippo is studiously neutral. “Controversial” and “brazen” is as far as he’ll go. Al-Rahim is a self-professed ignoramus on world affairs, but Grippo, in the end, lauds him as part of “a long line of sha‘bi singers who have used their craft to enlarge sociopolitical criticism….” The idea that anti-Semitism and 9/11 conspiracy theories are in fact stultifying sociopolitical criticism in countries like Egypt doesn’t enter the discussion.
Similarly, McDowell can’t summon an unkind word about corrido singer Andrés Contreras, who praises Osama bin Laden as “a valiant man” and regards the 9/11 attacks as just. To be fair, McDowell seeks to establish that Contreras’s “El Corrido de Osama bin Laden” fits comfortably within the corrido tradition, in which respect for the cunning Mexican outlaw trumps other moral considerations. But the Contreras song is one of five 9/11 corridos explored in McDowell’s essay. Three of them are, in McDowell’s estimation, “conformist,” in that they endorse “the official story” of 9/11. McDowell repeats the phrase “the official story” five times in his final two paragraphs. He defines it as “a world of black and white, of terrorists and victims — the Twin Towers are portrayed as beautiful (though fragile), the victims are innocents, the attackers cowardly, and the quest for vengeance is a natural and legitimate response by the injured party.”
Oddly, McDowell seems to prefer not only the inverted black-and-white Contreras narrative, with its “damned gringos” and heroic bin Laden, but also the “neutral” stance toward bin Laden expressed by another corridista, Rigoberto Cárdenas Chávez: “I am not God to judge you/but you must have your reasons.” While McDowell never praises the pro-bin Laden sentiments outright — like Grippo, he affects scholarly objectivity in describing them — he is enthused about the “counterhegemonic potential” of the corrido genre, its ability to “challenge the official story and propose a different understanding of our collective history.” Why a “counterhegemonic” understanding like Contreras’s is superior to the putative conformism of “the official story,” McDowell does not say. It’s supposed to be self-evident. In an intellectual environment where the easy appeal of the counterhegemonic is itself hegemonic, this makes perfect sense.
Larry Blumenfeld, in his essay on Sufism, rightly calls for “intelligent, open, and complex discussion of the issues at hand,” and there is much of it to be found in Music and the Post-9/11 World. However, the Grippo and McDowell entries raise questions about some of the tacit assumptions guiding the project. Gage Averill, in the foreword, throws the problem into relief with a refreshingly candid passage about his Vietnam-era “dalliance with the violent wing of the antiwar movement.” For a time, Averill “allowed [himself] to justify violence in the pursuit of political aims,” a habit of mind that struck him as “frighteningly current” during the 9/11 crisis:
The perpetrators of 9/11 and their sympathizers justified the violence because it ‘brought the war home’ to America, and they have argued that no one living in America is innocent — arguments that were familiar to me. I had once been complicit in a way of thinking that excused or rationalized the loss of innocent lives in the exercise of terror for political ends…. As I coped with my grief and shock following 9/11, I also had to deal with an unsettling sense of complicity and guilt, a failure of my humanism.
Introspection of this sort isn’t terribly common on the anti-imperialist left, and it doesn’t surface again in the book. Averill reminds us that critical thinking involves more than a dissection of “the comfortable capitalist matrix of U.S. hegemony,” in the words of co-editor J. Martin Daughtry. At some point the critique must turn inward, toward the comfortable matrix of the left’s own design.
"The duality of man"
Violent hip-hop lyrics, we're told, don't really glorify violence — either they hold up a mirror to harsh reality or offer a fantasy escape from same. Brian McManus, my editor at Philadelphia Weekly, puts a knife in that argument, and twists it. It's hilarious.
Critical Improv Intensive
My piece about the "Improvisation, Community and Social Practice" initiative, a pioneering seven-year study funded by the Canadian government, is now online at NewMusicBox.org.
Monday, December 17, 2007
On Sonny Fortune
My review of Sonny Fortune's Saturday gig at Chris's Jazz Cafe, in today's Inquirer.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Year in Review 2007
It's a rough estimate but I've listened to some 700 CDs this year. I've attended nearly 200 live performances. Again I'll point you toward my top-ten list at the JJA website (other members' lists here), and my cumulative Six Picks for the year. But I'm taking this opportunity to add additional titles, list my top shows and throw in other things that come to mind.
Biggest regret: Not seeing Stevie Wonder at the Wachovia Center on November 8. I'm told it was nonstop greatest hits, with a killing band. From Craig D. Lindsey's writeup in Philadelphia Weekly: "After his opening remarks, [Wonder] hit the piano for 'Love's in Need of Love Today' ... With [his] caramel, cascading voice (aged but still seasoned) surfing through the notes of this still-beautiful song, I wondered to myself: Might I break down and cry this evening?"
Next biggest regret: Not hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra play Varèse's "Ameriques" earlier this month. Apparently it was the first Philly performance since Stokowski conducted the U.S. premiere here 81 years ago.
Shows of the year, in chronological order:
Jacky Terrasson with Ugonna Okegwo, Leon Parker @ Iridium Jan. 17
Frank Zappa "Composer Portrait" @ Miller Theatre Feb. 2
Stefano Bollani solo piano @ Italian Academy Feb. 6
Edward Simon with John Patitucci, Brian Blade @ Iridium [date uncertain]
Kenny Werner with C. Potter, N. Payton, Hans Glawischnig, Brian Blade @ Dizzy’s Mar. 8
Andy Biskin’s Stephen Foster project @ Symphony Space Mar. 23
Joel Harrison’s Paul Motian strings project @ Cornelia Street Mar. 23
Nels Cline’s Andrew Hill project @ Jazz Standard Mar. 29
Anthony Braxton Ensemble @ Iridium Mar. 29
Buffalo Collision (Iverson, King, Maneri, Berne) @ Rose Recital Hall, Penn Apr. 24
Ari Hoenig with Joel Frahm, G. Hekselman, Orlando La Fleming @ Chris’s Apr. 28
Steely Dan @ Tower Theater May 24
Tortoise @ World Café Live July 6
Dan Blacksberg with Jon Barrios, Mike Szekely @ Tritone July 23
Exploding Star Orchestra Quintet @ International House Sept. 11
Sonny Rollins @ Carnegie Hall Sept. 18
John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet @ Philadelphia Art Alliance Oct. 12
David Binney Big Band @ Jazz Gallery Nov. 9
Pat Metheny Trio @ Grand Opera House, Wilmington Nov. 11
Tiger Okoshi @ Kimmel Center Nov. 17
Dave Douglas (w. Orrin Evans, D. McCaslin, Eric Revis, C. Penn) @ Village Vanguard Dec. 6
Rock covers of the year: Led Zeppelin’s "Thank You" by Lizz Wright (from The Orchard); Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" by Tony Scherr (from Twist in the Wind).
Most overstated case: That apprenticeship is dead in the jazz world. There's a new class of mentors hiring and grooming young musicians, and we need to recognize them: people like Tom Harrell, Tiger Okoshi and Bobby Zankel.
Most prolific musician: Satoko Fujii. There seems to be a new CD every couple of months. I really like her work, but it's impossible to digest it all.
Top solo recordings, in no particular order:
Stefano Bollani, Piano Solo (ECM)
Bireli Lagrene, To Bi or Not to Bi (Dreyfus)
Andy Milne, Dreams and False Alarms (Songlines)
Jozef van Wissem, Stations of the Cross (Incunabulum)
Paul Bley, Solo in Mondsee (ECM)
Muhal Richard Abrams, Vision Towards Essence (Pi Recordings)
Erik Friedlander, Black Ice & Propane (Skipstone)
Guillaume de Chassy, Piano Solo (BEE Jazz)
Sam Newsome, Monk Abstractions (ind. release)
Frank Kimbrough, Air (Palmetto)
Jacky Terrasson, Mirror (Blue Note)
Top duo recordings, in no particular order:
Javier Vercher & Ferenc Nemeth, Where Everything Is Music (Fresh Sound)
Carla Kihlstedt & Satoko Fujii, Minamo (Henceforth)
Marty Ehrlich & Myra Melford, Spark! (Palmetto)
Wycliffe Gordon & Eric Reed, We 2 (WJ3)
Jessica Pavone & Mary Halvorson, On and Off (Skirl)
Jason Kao Hwang & Sang Won Park, Local Lingo (Euonymous)
Lars Danielsson & Leszek Mozdzer, Pasodoble (ACT)
Andy Milne & Gregoire Maret, Scenarios (ObliqSound)
Anthony Braxton & Joe Fonda, Duets 1995 (Clean Feed)
Chick Corea & Bela Fleck, The Enchantment (Concord)
Joelle Leandre & Pascal Contet, Freeway (Clean Feed)
Guy Klucevsek & Alan Bern, Note Falls (Winter & Winter)
Bucky & John Pizzarelli, Generations (Arbors)
Ben Monder & Theo Bleckmann, At Night (Songlines)
Dino Saluzzi & Anja Lechner, Ojos Negros (ECM)
Myra Melford & Tanya Kalmanovitch, Heart Mountain (Perspicacity)
Satoko Fujii & Natsuki Tamura, In Krakow In November (Not Two)
John Lindberg & Karl Berger, Duets 1 (Between the Lines/Challenge)
Michael Marcus & Ted Daniel, Duology (Boxholder)
Taylor Ho Bynum & Tomas Fujiwara, True Events (482 Music)
Wycliffe Gordon & Jay Leonhart, This Rhythm on My Mind (Bluesback)
Wolfgang Muthspiel & Brian Blade, Friendly Travelers (Material)
Albrecht Maurer & Norbert Rodenkirchen, Hidden Fresco (NEMU)
Debuts not on my JJA list but deserving of applause:
Jamie Fox, When I Get Home (ind. release)
Robert MacGregor, Refraction of Light (Black Tri)
Logan Richardson, Cerebral Flow (Fresh Sound)
Alain Pérez, En el Aire (AYVA Music)
Richie Barshay, Homework (AYVA Music)
Alvin Fielder Trio, A Measure of Vision (Clean Feed)
Frank LoCrasto, When You’re There (MaxJazz)
Ryan Keberle, Double Quartet (Alternate Side) [liner notes by me]
Zaid Nasser, Escape from New York (Smalls)
Amir ElSaffar, Two Rivers (Pi)
Gil Coggins, Better Late Than Never (Smalls)
Normal Love (High Two)
Tim Collins, Valcour (Arabesque)
Antonio Sanchez, Migration (Cam Jazz)
Peter Evans, The Peter Evans Quartet (Firehouse 12)
Beyond jazz:
[Due to a system error in my brain, I omitted the top two titles when I voted in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop and Idolator polls]
Wilco, Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity (Kill Rock Stars)
Björk, Volta (Atlantic)
Radiohead, In Rainbows (Radiohead)
Sigur Rós, Hvarf – Heim (XL)
Balkan Beat Box, Nu Med (JDub)
Cinematic Orchestra, Ma Fleur (Ninja Tune)
Feist, The Reminder (Cherry Tree/Interscope)
The Bird and the Bee (Metro Blue)
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge Records)
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux)
Biggest regret: Not seeing Stevie Wonder at the Wachovia Center on November 8. I'm told it was nonstop greatest hits, with a killing band. From Craig D. Lindsey's writeup in Philadelphia Weekly: "After his opening remarks, [Wonder] hit the piano for 'Love's in Need of Love Today' ... With [his] caramel, cascading voice (aged but still seasoned) surfing through the notes of this still-beautiful song, I wondered to myself: Might I break down and cry this evening?"
Next biggest regret: Not hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra play Varèse's "Ameriques" earlier this month. Apparently it was the first Philly performance since Stokowski conducted the U.S. premiere here 81 years ago.
Shows of the year, in chronological order:
Jacky Terrasson with Ugonna Okegwo, Leon Parker @ Iridium Jan. 17
Frank Zappa "Composer Portrait" @ Miller Theatre Feb. 2
Stefano Bollani solo piano @ Italian Academy Feb. 6
Edward Simon with John Patitucci, Brian Blade @ Iridium [date uncertain]
Kenny Werner with C. Potter, N. Payton, Hans Glawischnig, Brian Blade @ Dizzy’s Mar. 8
Andy Biskin’s Stephen Foster project @ Symphony Space Mar. 23
Joel Harrison’s Paul Motian strings project @ Cornelia Street Mar. 23
Nels Cline’s Andrew Hill project @ Jazz Standard Mar. 29
Anthony Braxton Ensemble @ Iridium Mar. 29
Buffalo Collision (Iverson, King, Maneri, Berne) @ Rose Recital Hall, Penn Apr. 24
Ari Hoenig with Joel Frahm, G. Hekselman, Orlando La Fleming @ Chris’s Apr. 28
Steely Dan @ Tower Theater May 24
Tortoise @ World Café Live July 6
Dan Blacksberg with Jon Barrios, Mike Szekely @ Tritone July 23
Exploding Star Orchestra Quintet @ International House Sept. 11
Sonny Rollins @ Carnegie Hall Sept. 18
John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet @ Philadelphia Art Alliance Oct. 12
David Binney Big Band @ Jazz Gallery Nov. 9
Pat Metheny Trio @ Grand Opera House, Wilmington Nov. 11
Tiger Okoshi @ Kimmel Center Nov. 17
Dave Douglas (w. Orrin Evans, D. McCaslin, Eric Revis, C. Penn) @ Village Vanguard Dec. 6
Rock covers of the year: Led Zeppelin’s "Thank You" by Lizz Wright (from The Orchard); Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" by Tony Scherr (from Twist in the Wind).
Most overstated case: That apprenticeship is dead in the jazz world. There's a new class of mentors hiring and grooming young musicians, and we need to recognize them: people like Tom Harrell, Tiger Okoshi and Bobby Zankel.
Most prolific musician: Satoko Fujii. There seems to be a new CD every couple of months. I really like her work, but it's impossible to digest it all.
Top solo recordings, in no particular order:
Stefano Bollani, Piano Solo (ECM)
Bireli Lagrene, To Bi or Not to Bi (Dreyfus)
Andy Milne, Dreams and False Alarms (Songlines)
Jozef van Wissem, Stations of the Cross (Incunabulum)
Paul Bley, Solo in Mondsee (ECM)
Muhal Richard Abrams, Vision Towards Essence (Pi Recordings)
Erik Friedlander, Black Ice & Propane (Skipstone)
Guillaume de Chassy, Piano Solo (BEE Jazz)
Sam Newsome, Monk Abstractions (ind. release)
Frank Kimbrough, Air (Palmetto)
Jacky Terrasson, Mirror (Blue Note)
Top duo recordings, in no particular order:
Javier Vercher & Ferenc Nemeth, Where Everything Is Music (Fresh Sound)
Carla Kihlstedt & Satoko Fujii, Minamo (Henceforth)
Marty Ehrlich & Myra Melford, Spark! (Palmetto)
Wycliffe Gordon & Eric Reed, We 2 (WJ3)
Jessica Pavone & Mary Halvorson, On and Off (Skirl)
Jason Kao Hwang & Sang Won Park, Local Lingo (Euonymous)
Lars Danielsson & Leszek Mozdzer, Pasodoble (ACT)
Andy Milne & Gregoire Maret, Scenarios (ObliqSound)
Anthony Braxton & Joe Fonda, Duets 1995 (Clean Feed)
Chick Corea & Bela Fleck, The Enchantment (Concord)
Joelle Leandre & Pascal Contet, Freeway (Clean Feed)
Guy Klucevsek & Alan Bern, Note Falls (Winter & Winter)
Bucky & John Pizzarelli, Generations (Arbors)
Ben Monder & Theo Bleckmann, At Night (Songlines)
Dino Saluzzi & Anja Lechner, Ojos Negros (ECM)
Myra Melford & Tanya Kalmanovitch, Heart Mountain (Perspicacity)
Satoko Fujii & Natsuki Tamura, In Krakow In November (Not Two)
John Lindberg & Karl Berger, Duets 1 (Between the Lines/Challenge)
Michael Marcus & Ted Daniel, Duology (Boxholder)
Taylor Ho Bynum & Tomas Fujiwara, True Events (482 Music)
Wycliffe Gordon & Jay Leonhart, This Rhythm on My Mind (Bluesback)
Wolfgang Muthspiel & Brian Blade, Friendly Travelers (Material)
Albrecht Maurer & Norbert Rodenkirchen, Hidden Fresco (NEMU)
Debuts not on my JJA list but deserving of applause:
Jamie Fox, When I Get Home (ind. release)
Robert MacGregor, Refraction of Light (Black Tri)
Logan Richardson, Cerebral Flow (Fresh Sound)
Alain Pérez, En el Aire (AYVA Music)
Richie Barshay, Homework (AYVA Music)
Alvin Fielder Trio, A Measure of Vision (Clean Feed)
Frank LoCrasto, When You’re There (MaxJazz)
Ryan Keberle, Double Quartet (Alternate Side) [liner notes by me]
Zaid Nasser, Escape from New York (Smalls)
Amir ElSaffar, Two Rivers (Pi)
Gil Coggins, Better Late Than Never (Smalls)
Normal Love (High Two)
Tim Collins, Valcour (Arabesque)
Antonio Sanchez, Migration (Cam Jazz)
Peter Evans, The Peter Evans Quartet (Firehouse 12)
Beyond jazz:
[Due to a system error in my brain, I omitted the top two titles when I voted in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop and Idolator polls]
Wilco, Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity (Kill Rock Stars)
Björk, Volta (Atlantic)
Radiohead, In Rainbows (Radiohead)
Sigur Rós, Hvarf – Heim (XL)
Balkan Beat Box, Nu Med (JDub)
Cinematic Orchestra, Ma Fleur (Ninja Tune)
Feist, The Reminder (Cherry Tree/Interscope)
The Bird and the Bee (Metro Blue)
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge Records)
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux)
Thursday, December 13, 2007
On Tigran Hamasyan
My review of pianist Tigran Hamasyan at the Sunside club, in Paris, is now up at JazzTimes.com.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The Kiriakou file
The ABC News interview with former CIA interrogator John Kirikaou (transcript here and here) seems to sidestep what was reported two days ago in the NY Times: that Abu Zubaydah was giving vital information to the FBI before being tortured by the CIA. Kiriakou's view, that waterboarding is wrong but it works, also obscures the fact that it isn't just confirmed Qaeda operatives like Zubaydah who have been tortured. As Andrew Sullivan notes, "We have evidence of over a hundred deaths in interrogation, of which less than a score have been acknowledged by the Pentagon as examples of torturing-to-death. Whatever moral decision we come to with respect to the torture of Abu Zubaydah, it is essential to understand that no authorized act of torture stands alone." Kiriakou also confirms that torture was OK'd up the chain of command; he claims that waterboarding saved lives but he's hazy at best on the details. More of Sullivan's take on Kiriakou here.
Blind Boys/Dirty Dozen
My review of the Blind Boys of Alabama and Dirty Dozen Brass Band, a Sunday night double bill at the Kimmel Center, in today's Inquirer.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Greater Surbiton
Marko Attila Hoare, a Balkan specialist whose views I greatly respect, recently launched a blog called Greater Surbiton. From his bio:
I have been variously accused of being a neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism. Depending on how you define these terms, some or all of this may be accurate.
I'm honored to see that Dr. Hoare has included Lerterland on his blog roll, and I am of course reciprocating.
One recent post concerns leftist protesters getting their skulls cracked by a Marxist state government in West Bengal. Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Howard Zinn and others have written a patronizing, Orwellian open letter, not to condemn the government, but to admonish the protesters: "The balance of forces in the world is such that it would be impetuous to split the Left." (Interesting to note the absence of Arundhati Roy's signature; she usually joins these Chomsky missives without reservation.) Here is one Indian activist's angry and unsparing response to Ali and friends.
I didn't care much for David Leaf's recent documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," and one reason was the film's heavy reliance on Tariq Ali, a supporter of Hezbollah. It's not clear to me why we need Ali's help in understanding the man who sang "Give Peace a Chance."
[Update: Chomsky, Ali and co. respond with yet more Orwellianism; Hoare deconstructs.]
I have been variously accused of being a neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism. Depending on how you define these terms, some or all of this may be accurate.
I'm honored to see that Dr. Hoare has included Lerterland on his blog roll, and I am of course reciprocating.
One recent post concerns leftist protesters getting their skulls cracked by a Marxist state government in West Bengal. Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Howard Zinn and others have written a patronizing, Orwellian open letter, not to condemn the government, but to admonish the protesters: "The balance of forces in the world is such that it would be impetuous to split the Left." (Interesting to note the absence of Arundhati Roy's signature; she usually joins these Chomsky missives without reservation.) Here is one Indian activist's angry and unsparing response to Ali and friends.
I didn't care much for David Leaf's recent documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," and one reason was the film's heavy reliance on Tariq Ali, a supporter of Hezbollah. It's not clear to me why we need Ali's help in understanding the man who sang "Give Peace a Chance."
[Update: Chomsky, Ali and co. respond with yet more Orwellianism; Hoare deconstructs.]
The week on disc (9)
In case you missed the last one...
Carla Bley, The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu (Watt/ECM)
Asaf Sirkis & the Inner Noise, The Song Within (SAM)
Loren Stillman, Blind Date (Pirouet)
Dena DeRose, Live at Jazz Standard, Volume One (MaxJazz)
Tardo Hammer, Look Stop & Listen: The Music of Tadd Dameron (Sharp Nine)
Alan Pasqua, The Antisocial Club (Cryptogramophone)
Carla Bley, The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu (Watt/ECM)
Asaf Sirkis & the Inner Noise, The Song Within (SAM)
Loren Stillman, Blind Date (Pirouet)
Dena DeRose, Live at Jazz Standard, Volume One (MaxJazz)
Tardo Hammer, Look Stop & Listen: The Music of Tadd Dameron (Sharp Nine)
Alan Pasqua, The Antisocial Club (Cryptogramophone)
The JJA Top Tens
The Jazz Journalists Association presents its members' annual Top Ten CD lists, including mine. I'll be publishing more year-in-review comments on this blog in the coming days.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Erasing torture
Important detail in this NY Times piece on the CIA torture video coverup. The FBI got Abu Zubaydah to give up Khalid Shaikh Mohammed without using torture; then the CIA began torturing him and it's far from clear that they got anything. Gov't officials are cited saying:
...Zubaydah, who had been taken to a secret location in Thailand, cooperated with interviewers from the F.B.I., who used a nonconfrontational approach, until C.I.A. interrogators took over the questioning in April or May of 2002 and used more aggressive techniques [i.e., torture - DA].
After the Thailand confrontation, the F.B.I. forbade its agents from taking part in sessions in which harsh methods were used. In his early F.B.I. interviews, Abu Zubaydah, who had been severely wounded during his capture, identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks. [...]
The argument for torture to gain information that will save American lives has always been bogus, but this spells it out very plainly: non-torture, not torture, led the U.S. to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Fred Thompson answered questions about torture from Wolf Blitzer a couple of weeks ago. He said that torture goes against U.S. values and that we should definitely stick to international agreements, except when there are "extreme circumstances," in which case new policies might need to be formulated.
Thompson's campaign will not last, but his argument very definitely will. It is crafted to seem like an anti-torture argument, as pragmatic as can be, but it is in fact a pro-torture argument and a defense of Bush administration policy. Dig beneath the surface and it is pure doublespeak: The U.S. must not use torture, except when it must. The U.S. must obey int'l agreements, except when it shouldn't. Those agreements, by the way, do not allow for "extreme circumstances," because the extreme-circumstances argument is phony, a cynical excuse cooked up by people in power who lack the scruples they pretend to have.
Andrew Sullivan's latest cri de coeur is here:
The defenders of torture are always saying that it can be used "judiciously" and in extremely limited circumstances, that it can be controlled within the executive branch; that it need not metastasize into a broader policy, and need not trickle down to others. But from all the facts we now know, this executive decision to rescind the Geneva Conventions began with cases that were already beneath the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and within months spread like wildfire across every theater of combat, including every major branch of the armed services, leading to scores of deaths in interrogation, almost casual if brutal torture of (often innocent) suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq, secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, God knows what in outsourced torture in the grim redoubts of Uzbek, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian police states, and, of course, the excrescence of Abu Ghraib, which Bush had the gall to say he had nothing to do with.
...Zubaydah, who had been taken to a secret location in Thailand, cooperated with interviewers from the F.B.I., who used a nonconfrontational approach, until C.I.A. interrogators took over the questioning in April or May of 2002 and used more aggressive techniques [i.e., torture - DA].
After the Thailand confrontation, the F.B.I. forbade its agents from taking part in sessions in which harsh methods were used. In his early F.B.I. interviews, Abu Zubaydah, who had been severely wounded during his capture, identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks. [...]
The argument for torture to gain information that will save American lives has always been bogus, but this spells it out very plainly: non-torture, not torture, led the U.S. to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Fred Thompson answered questions about torture from Wolf Blitzer a couple of weeks ago. He said that torture goes against U.S. values and that we should definitely stick to international agreements, except when there are "extreme circumstances," in which case new policies might need to be formulated.
Thompson's campaign will not last, but his argument very definitely will. It is crafted to seem like an anti-torture argument, as pragmatic as can be, but it is in fact a pro-torture argument and a defense of Bush administration policy. Dig beneath the surface and it is pure doublespeak: The U.S. must not use torture, except when it must. The U.S. must obey int'l agreements, except when it shouldn't. Those agreements, by the way, do not allow for "extreme circumstances," because the extreme-circumstances argument is phony, a cynical excuse cooked up by people in power who lack the scruples they pretend to have.
Andrew Sullivan's latest cri de coeur is here:
The defenders of torture are always saying that it can be used "judiciously" and in extremely limited circumstances, that it can be controlled within the executive branch; that it need not metastasize into a broader policy, and need not trickle down to others. But from all the facts we now know, this executive decision to rescind the Geneva Conventions began with cases that were already beneath the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and within months spread like wildfire across every theater of combat, including every major branch of the armed services, leading to scores of deaths in interrogation, almost casual if brutal torture of (often innocent) suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq, secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, God knows what in outsourced torture in the grim redoubts of Uzbek, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian police states, and, of course, the excrescence of Abu Ghraib, which Bush had the gall to say he had nothing to do with.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Stockhausen: a political postscript
I listened to a fair amount of Stockhausen while writing my recent Anthony Braxton feature [pdf]. Now that he has died, I want to vent on an obscure political detail likely to be left out of most of the obits. No, not the notorious 9/11 comment.
I'm speaking of Cornelius Cardew's 1974 essay Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, largely and very deservedly forgotten, but given a weirdly forgiving treatment back in 2003 by Kyle Gann.
In plain English: Cardew was a gifted avant-garde composer mentored by Stockhausen and deeply influenced by John Cage. In the early '70s Cardew renounced his former activities, became a doctrinaire Maoist and set about stabbing his former teachers in the back. His Maoist writings on Stockhausen and Cage bear the sensibility of the rat who is eager to give up his friends and family to the secret police, then flatter himself that he's done a noble thing.
Of course, Cardew did not live in a police state, but rather in Britain, where his words were just words. The conclusion one might draw is that Cardew had oppression envy: he was missing out on the murderous Cultural Revolution in China, which he lavished with unqualified praise. So he behaved as though he were there, at his own show trial, taking part in History. He engaged in "self-criticism" and spoke of his earlier music like a devout Catholic speaks to a priest about adultery. And he propounded views on the interaction of art and society that are simply noxious.
"No art drops from the sky; all art bears the imprint of the real world," wrote Cardew — a banal insight, close to the Mao quote that Gann uses as an epigraph to his series: "There is no such thing as Art for Art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics." One can accept this without believing that the vanguard party therefore has the right to trample artistic autonomy, and all individual liberty, underfoot. But Cardew did in fact believe that. The paramount goal, for artists and everyone else, was to "establish and clear and unanimous line in the class struggle." Cardew gloated that...
...revolutionary students boycott Cage's concerts at American universities, informing those entering the concert hall of the complete irrelevance of the music to the various liberation struggles raging in the world. And if it does not support those struggles, then it is opposing them and serving the cause of exploitation and oppression. There is no middle course.
Gann, to be fair, calls Stockhausen Serves Imperialism "a savage little book," though he also calls the book "somewhat arrogant," which is like calling Nixon somewhat corrupt. Sounding not unlike a mafia boss, Cardew spelled out what he saw as required of even the world's most inimitable artists:
... I see no dilemma for [John] Cage. It may not all be plain sailing, but there's no reason why he can't shuffle his feet over to the side of the people and learn to write music which will serve their struggles.
In declaring that Cardew was "[a]s brutally honest with himself as with others," Gann grants the composer a moral credence that is undeserved, to put it mildly.
Gann also opines that Cardew's book "has retained its staying power," despite its containing statements like this one:
The favourable conditions for the victory of the working class — well, they are so plentiful it is hard to know where to begin. They range from the bankruptcy of imperialist culture and economic problems of imperialism to the shining examples of socialist China and Albania and the worldwide upsurge of revolutionary theory and practice.
Not terribly prescient, shall we say. And of all the miserable Soviet satellites to single out for praise, Cardew picked Albania, one of the absolute worst.
The obvious rejoinder to Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is that Cardew Served Totalitarianism, and I'm not sure why Gann can't bring himself to say so. Cardew believed artists should be hounded and harassed into conformity. He did not explicitly say they should be killed, but he applauded regimes that executed thought criminals on a large scale, and his prose is peppered with statements like "liberation requires violence" and "life cannot flourish without death."
"Cage serves imperialism and will go under, with imperialism," wrote Cardew, and luckily for us and the culture at large, he was spectacularly wrong. Cage and Stockhausen did not go under; their influence only grew and grew. The ideology that Cardew embraced went under, but only after the deaths of millions.
Postscript to the postscript
Gann writes: "In light of Cardew's role in England's Marxist-Leninist party, it is believed that his death—a hit-and-run on December 13, 1981—was probably a political assassination." Um, it is believed that Cardew was killed by a drunk driver. It is believed by conspiracy theorists that he was assassinated. Britain has a substantial number of Marxist-Leninists operating freely to this day, and there's been no shadowy campaign to bump them off.
I'm speaking of Cornelius Cardew's 1974 essay Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, largely and very deservedly forgotten, but given a weirdly forgiving treatment back in 2003 by Kyle Gann.
In plain English: Cardew was a gifted avant-garde composer mentored by Stockhausen and deeply influenced by John Cage. In the early '70s Cardew renounced his former activities, became a doctrinaire Maoist and set about stabbing his former teachers in the back. His Maoist writings on Stockhausen and Cage bear the sensibility of the rat who is eager to give up his friends and family to the secret police, then flatter himself that he's done a noble thing.
Of course, Cardew did not live in a police state, but rather in Britain, where his words were just words. The conclusion one might draw is that Cardew had oppression envy: he was missing out on the murderous Cultural Revolution in China, which he lavished with unqualified praise. So he behaved as though he were there, at his own show trial, taking part in History. He engaged in "self-criticism" and spoke of his earlier music like a devout Catholic speaks to a priest about adultery. And he propounded views on the interaction of art and society that are simply noxious.
"No art drops from the sky; all art bears the imprint of the real world," wrote Cardew — a banal insight, close to the Mao quote that Gann uses as an epigraph to his series: "There is no such thing as Art for Art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics." One can accept this without believing that the vanguard party therefore has the right to trample artistic autonomy, and all individual liberty, underfoot. But Cardew did in fact believe that. The paramount goal, for artists and everyone else, was to "establish and clear and unanimous line in the class struggle." Cardew gloated that...
...revolutionary students boycott Cage's concerts at American universities, informing those entering the concert hall of the complete irrelevance of the music to the various liberation struggles raging in the world. And if it does not support those struggles, then it is opposing them and serving the cause of exploitation and oppression. There is no middle course.
Gann, to be fair, calls Stockhausen Serves Imperialism "a savage little book," though he also calls the book "somewhat arrogant," which is like calling Nixon somewhat corrupt. Sounding not unlike a mafia boss, Cardew spelled out what he saw as required of even the world's most inimitable artists:
... I see no dilemma for [John] Cage. It may not all be plain sailing, but there's no reason why he can't shuffle his feet over to the side of the people and learn to write music which will serve their struggles.
In declaring that Cardew was "[a]s brutally honest with himself as with others," Gann grants the composer a moral credence that is undeserved, to put it mildly.
Gann also opines that Cardew's book "has retained its staying power," despite its containing statements like this one:
The favourable conditions for the victory of the working class — well, they are so plentiful it is hard to know where to begin. They range from the bankruptcy of imperialist culture and economic problems of imperialism to the shining examples of socialist China and Albania and the worldwide upsurge of revolutionary theory and practice.
Not terribly prescient, shall we say. And of all the miserable Soviet satellites to single out for praise, Cardew picked Albania, one of the absolute worst.
The obvious rejoinder to Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is that Cardew Served Totalitarianism, and I'm not sure why Gann can't bring himself to say so. Cardew believed artists should be hounded and harassed into conformity. He did not explicitly say they should be killed, but he applauded regimes that executed thought criminals on a large scale, and his prose is peppered with statements like "liberation requires violence" and "life cannot flourish without death."
"Cage serves imperialism and will go under, with imperialism," wrote Cardew, and luckily for us and the culture at large, he was spectacularly wrong. Cage and Stockhausen did not go under; their influence only grew and grew. The ideology that Cardew embraced went under, but only after the deaths of millions.
Postscript to the postscript
Gann writes: "In light of Cardew's role in England's Marxist-Leninist party, it is believed that his death—a hit-and-run on December 13, 1981—was probably a political assassination." Um, it is believed that Cardew was killed by a drunk driver. It is believed by conspiracy theorists that he was assassinated. Britain has a substantial number of Marxist-Leninists operating freely to this day, and there's been no shadowy campaign to bump them off.
On Sex Mob
My review of Sex Mob's Dec. 4 show at Johnny Brenda's — part of an Ars Nova Workshop triple bill — in today's Inquirer.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
On the radio
I'll be a guest panelist on J. Michael Harrison's The Bridge, WRTI 90.1 FM Philadelphia, on Friday, December 7 at 10pm EST. We'll be spinning recent tracks and talking about why we like 'em. I believe you can stream the program live, info here.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Six Picks: December 2007
My monthly list of recommended CDs, as published in All About Jazz-New York, December 2007:
Harry Allen, Hits By Brits (Challenge)
Martin Bejerano, Evolution/Revolution (Reservoir)
Michael Blake Sextet, Amor de Cosmos (Songlines)
Peter Evans, The Peter Evans Quartet (Firehouse 12)
His Name Is Alive, Sweet Earth Flower: A Tribute to Marion Brown (High Two)
Henning Sieverts, Symmetry (Pirouet)
Harry Allen, Hits By Brits (Challenge)
Martin Bejerano, Evolution/Revolution (Reservoir)
Michael Blake Sextet, Amor de Cosmos (Songlines)
Peter Evans, The Peter Evans Quartet (Firehouse 12)
His Name Is Alive, Sweet Earth Flower: A Tribute to Marion Brown (High Two)
Henning Sieverts, Symmetry (Pirouet)
Sunday, December 02, 2007
A fair question
Darcy James Argue, quite unwittingly, has tied together my two previous posts in an interesting and morally serious way: He asks why Dudamel is getting heat from some for not forcefully opposing Chávez, while Gergiev (whose work I just happened to praise unreservedly) gets a free pass on his close ties to, and explicit political support for, the odious Vladimir Putin.
This I did not know, and should have known, about Gergiev, and it's very disturbing. Still, Stravinsky is Stravinsky, and I'll continue to treasure the memory of what I heard last Friday. (I am on record condemning the Putin regime's depradations, btw.)
As I wrote in DJA's comments, there's a difference here in that Sean Penn and other self-styled radicals are not flocking to Russia for photo-ops with Putin, whereas Chávez is being hailed as a hero by Penn and many other dunces on the American left. That's why I and other liberals feel compelled to speak out against the Bolivarian windbag; the charge that we're echoing the right is unfair and decontextualized.
None of this means that Dudamel, as an artist, is required to assume an outspoken political role in the matter. His work, like Gergiev's, should be judged on musical criteria.
I recognize this can get dodgy. Along the way, DJA cites Steve Smith's complaint that the topic of Chávez never came up during a pre-concert discussion at Carnegie. A similar thing happened last night at the Kimmel Center during an onstage chat with Jane Bunnett, a saxophone/flute specialist in Afro-Cuban jazz who has traveled extensively to Cuba to work with (and hire) Cuban musicians. Bunnett talked about how Cuba's music conservatories are losing teachers, ostensibly because once they come to the U.S., they tend to stay, as travel restrictions make it unlikely that they'll be able to visit again without major hassle. The elephant in the room, Fidel Castro, went unmentioned. Could it be that music teachers are leaving Cuba not because of meanie Uncle Sam, but because Cuba is a dictatorship? That possibility wasn't explored.
Now, like Dudamel, Bunnett is not required to have a position on Castro and her art should be judged on its merits. But what was that Trotsky quote? "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you."
This I did not know, and should have known, about Gergiev, and it's very disturbing. Still, Stravinsky is Stravinsky, and I'll continue to treasure the memory of what I heard last Friday. (I am on record condemning the Putin regime's depradations, btw.)
As I wrote in DJA's comments, there's a difference here in that Sean Penn and other self-styled radicals are not flocking to Russia for photo-ops with Putin, whereas Chávez is being hailed as a hero by Penn and many other dunces on the American left. That's why I and other liberals feel compelled to speak out against the Bolivarian windbag; the charge that we're echoing the right is unfair and decontextualized.
None of this means that Dudamel, as an artist, is required to assume an outspoken political role in the matter. His work, like Gergiev's, should be judged on musical criteria.
I recognize this can get dodgy. Along the way, DJA cites Steve Smith's complaint that the topic of Chávez never came up during a pre-concert discussion at Carnegie. A similar thing happened last night at the Kimmel Center during an onstage chat with Jane Bunnett, a saxophone/flute specialist in Afro-Cuban jazz who has traveled extensively to Cuba to work with (and hire) Cuban musicians. Bunnett talked about how Cuba's music conservatories are losing teachers, ostensibly because once they come to the U.S., they tend to stay, as travel restrictions make it unlikely that they'll be able to visit again without major hassle. The elephant in the room, Fidel Castro, went unmentioned. Could it be that music teachers are leaving Cuba not because of meanie Uncle Sam, but because Cuba is a dictatorship? That possibility wasn't explored.
Now, like Dudamel, Bunnett is not required to have a position on Castro and her art should be judged on its merits. But what was that Trotsky quote? "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you."
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Amid noise, clarity
I can't let Alex Ross's refreshing anti-Chávez comments in the The New Yorker of Dec. 3 go without praise here. Writing about Gustavo Dudamel's recent New York appearance with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Ross reflects on the celebratory atmosphere during the encores:
The players don jackets with the Venezuelan national colors and swivel around, marching-band style. Delirium inevitably ensues. I joined in, although I wondered about the wisdom of putting on such a patriotic display at a time when other Venezuelan students have been protesting Hugo Chávez's increasingly anti-democratic regime. Will Abreu's fantastic project [Venezuela's music education network, or 'el sistema'] become a propaganda tool for a dictator-in-training? History shows that when musicians trust politicians to take care of their needs they put themselves at the politicians' mercy. Stalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.
These remarks are well-timed, for tomorrow, after the referendum, we will learn whether a plurality of Venezuelans have chosen to hand their liberty and future over to a sinister clown, preferring to ignore the historical warnings that Ross sets out so succinctly.
It's almost redundant to say there's liberal bias in the field of music and art criticism. As a proud liberal, I wouldn't have it any other way. What I oppose is leftist bias. It's excellent to see Ross reject the pro-Chávez mindlessness that has taken hold of many in the entertainment world (Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover), not to mention the activist left in general. Ross has set out to deflate that sort of orthodoxy before (scroll to the end), and I hope he'll continue to do so.
See my previous posts on Chávez here, here and here. Anne Applebaum breaks down the celebrities-shilling-for-dictators phenomenon here.
To be clear: this is not to suggest that Dudamel is a shill, or undeserving of the widespread praise he has received.
The players don jackets with the Venezuelan national colors and swivel around, marching-band style. Delirium inevitably ensues. I joined in, although I wondered about the wisdom of putting on such a patriotic display at a time when other Venezuelan students have been protesting Hugo Chávez's increasingly anti-democratic regime. Will Abreu's fantastic project [Venezuela's music education network, or 'el sistema'] become a propaganda tool for a dictator-in-training? History shows that when musicians trust politicians to take care of their needs they put themselves at the politicians' mercy. Stalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.
These remarks are well-timed, for tomorrow, after the referendum, we will learn whether a plurality of Venezuelans have chosen to hand their liberty and future over to a sinister clown, preferring to ignore the historical warnings that Ross sets out so succinctly.
It's almost redundant to say there's liberal bias in the field of music and art criticism. As a proud liberal, I wouldn't have it any other way. What I oppose is leftist bias. It's excellent to see Ross reject the pro-Chávez mindlessness that has taken hold of many in the entertainment world (Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover), not to mention the activist left in general. Ross has set out to deflate that sort of orthodoxy before (scroll to the end), and I hope he'll continue to do so.
See my previous posts on Chávez here, here and here. Anne Applebaum breaks down the celebrities-shilling-for-dictators phenomenon here.
To be clear: this is not to suggest that Dudamel is a shill, or undeserving of the widespread praise he has received.
The conquering Kirov
At long last, the concert I'd been waiting for since I heard the Philadelphia Orchestra play The Rite of Spring in September. Valery Gergiev (pictured left) conducted the Kirov Orchestra last night at the Kimmel Center in Philly, in a special one-off Stravinsky program. First they played the complete Firebird, then the Rite.I'd been looking forward to the Rite especially, but it turned out to be the Firebird that made me want to leap from the balcony in joy. After 40 or so minutes of dark, schizoid sound, the orchestra pulled back to triple pianissimo (Kimmel acoustics: incredible) and then crept into that sublime final section (the one that prog-rockers Yes used to broadcast before taking the stage back in the '70s). "General rejoicing" is how it's described in Stravinsky's road map. Peals of ecstatic thunder began to ring through the hall. When Gergiev cued the final sustained chord, he stopped his frenetic movements and just stood with his left hand out, perfectly still, as that chord grew into a roar — "home stretch, we made it," he seemed to signal the orchestra. Then boom ... the devastating final downbeat.
As I've noted, Gergiev conducts without a podium; he prefers to be stage level, in the thick of it. Something else I noticed at the very start of the Firebird: the ominous opening figure is played by seven double basses, but five are bowing and two are doubling pizzicato, a detail of enormous subtlety and musical consequence.
The Rite was marvelous as well, but in a battle of the bands, I have to give it to the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eschenbach — their reading had more visceral impact. Although I should note that I was sitting very close in September; last night I was in the third tier.
Another recent musical highlight: the Bowerbird "Landmarks" series, which puts improvisers into parlor-like settings in some of Philadelphia's cozy historic buildings in the Old City district. About a month or so ago I heard Keith Rowe play live electronics at the Physick House, and this past Wednesday I heard an excellent lineup at the Powel House: first Killick, a heavily tattooed gentleman from Athens, Georgia, led a quartet and played an invented instrument called the h'arpeggione (a kind of fretted cello with sympathetic strings); then experimental banjoist Woody Sullender paired up with violinist Katt Hernandez for a thoroughly absorbing set. I'm happy to say these are the kind of evenings you can't get in New York.
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