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dustedmagazine · 4 years ago

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Dust Volume 6, Number 9

New Bomb Turks

Late summer in the oddest year in memory, and we are still, improbably, deluged by music. The world, it seems, will go out with a bang and a whimper and a steady four-on-the-floor, and we at Dusted expect to have headphones on when it all blows to smithereens. This month’s Dust covers the usual gamut, from milestone ambient reissues to several varieties of improvised jazz, from eerie folk to honest punk rock, from surprising debuts to unlooked for but welcome re-emergences. Two hurricanes, a hinged and unhinged convention, wildfires, confusing hybrid school plans and scorching days won’t stop us, and they shouldn’t stop you either. Some days music is the only thing that makes sense. Listen along with Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer, Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Justin Cober-Lake, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Nate Knaebel, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Forsythe and Patrick Masterson.

Aix Em Klemm — Aix Em Klemm (Kranky)

Aix Em Klemm by Aix Em Klemm

If there’s one word that probably applies to most fans of Stars of the Lid and its many peers and offshoots, it might just be “patient.” Which means the fact that Aix Em Klemm, the so-far one-off duo between SotL’s Adam Wiltzie and Labradford/Anjou’s Robert Donne, put out this stunning record just under 20 years ago and haven’t followed it up yet is probably regarded more as unfortunate than maddening. With Kranky issuing Aix Em Klemm on vinyl for the first time, though, and even saying of the duo “they still collaborate musically so new Aix Em Klemm recordings remain a possibility,” it’s a perfect time to both appreciate what they did actually give us and maybe just gently lament that there hasn’t been any follow up (yet?). From the reserved vocals that introduce “The Girl With the Flesh Colored Crayon” before it ebbs into beautifully reassuring drones, to the closing, improv-ed highlight “Sparkwood and Twentyone” (written and recorded on the day, after a year or more of trading tapes and mulling a collaboration), Aix Em Klemm stakes out its own unique place in the oeuvres of its creators and its transporting enough that a little over 40 minutes never feels like enough. Still, we can wait for more.

Ian Mathers

Lina Allemano’s Ohrenschmaus — Rats and Mice (Lumo)

Rats and Mice by Lina Allemano's Ohrenschmaus

Pop the word Ohrenschmaus into a translator program and you’ll find that it’s German for “ear candy.” The choice of language makes sense, since the name applies to Canadian trumpeter Lina Allemano’s Berlin-based trio. But the imagery breaks down, since the music that she, electric bassist Dan Peter Sundland and drummer Michael Griener play isn’t sweet and easy. Allemano’s compositions are concentrated, full of events that are involving to follow and demanding to negotiate. One might expect the group’s configuration to leave plenty of room, but between the contrasting written events and the enthusiastic elaborations that the players work upon them, this music does not feel spacious at all. Griener shifts between skin and metal surfaces, and Sundland detonates flurries of activity, but the busyness of their activity never seems gratuitous. No, it’s just the thing to amplify the eventfulness of their leader’s fluent and wide-ranging playing.

Bill Meyer

Jaye Bartell — Kokomo (Radiator Music)

Kokomo by Jaye Bartell

2016 Light Enough introduced me to Jaye Bartell’s pleasingly deep and measured vocal delivery and his elegant way with a tune, reminiscent of Leonard Cohen or M. Ward. There and on this new album, his words have the precision and droll humor of a writer sharply aware of the impact of a well-turned phrase. Kokomo takes its title from the faintly ridiculous and pathologically catchy Beach Boys song featured in the soundtrack to Cocktail. Bartell posits here that too often we live trying to bridge the gulf between our dreams and reality — and how tragi-comic this can be. Tellingly, Bartell’s music is sober and deftly played, but with a lightness to its step and a glint in its eye. (Look no further than the lovely, lilting “Sky Diver,” with its brushed drums and harpsichord.) He’s a smart, reassuring companion, someone who has gone the extra mile for his craft and doesn’t see the need to jump through hoops to catch your attention.

Tim Clarke

Kath Bloom—Bye Bye These Are the Days (Dear Life Records)

Bye Bye These Are The Days by Kath Bloom

You might know Kath Bloom from her 1980s work with Loren Mazzacane Connors or from her spectral “Come Here” featured prominently in the 1995 film “Before Sunrise.” Her high flickering soprano, fluted with vibrato, is instantly recognizable, grounded in down-to-earth folk music, but tinged with otherworldly spiritual resonance. And oddly, her voice hasn’t changed much over the years. Up to last year (before the world fell apart), she was still performing periodically in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, and now we have a new record from her, some 40 years past her Daggett Records debut. Here, her songs are gently shaped around her distinctive voice and twining dual guitars (she plays with fellow Connecticut musician Dave Shapiro of Alexander), yet not soft. They have a wiry idiosyncracy and a resistance to cliché, and the way the guitars work together is rather lovely. I like “When Your House Is Burning,” a song where the central metaphor—a burning house—is so precisely described that it may not be a metaphor at all, not a stand-in for musings on the value of connection, the fleetingness of stuff, but the thing itself. Bloom adds harmonica for the pensive “How Do You Survive,” a song about aging with grace and humor, and in her worn-in voices, the melody stretches out like spider web, transparent but nonetheless very strong.

Jennifer Kelly

Catholic Guilt — This Is What Honesty Sounds Like (Wiretap)

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Catholic Guilt really want us to get their honesty (there's no irony in the new EP's title This Is What Honesty Sounds Like). Authenticity has long been a vaunted (or derided) element of pop music, but the Melbourne-based quintet aren't posturing. They deliver straightforward rock with straightforward thinking, but that doesn't mean the music's easy. The group looks at the world with a mix of dismay and hope, as if they recognize that life is difficult but we don't have to let it kill us. The new EP leans into pop-punk, letting the upbeat approach direct the energy of the two standout tracks. “A Boutique Affair” looks at the challenges of increasing isolation as we age: “It's hard to make friends in your 20s / It's even harder to make 'em in your 30s / At this point I'm really dreading / The thought of making it to my 40s.” Vocalist Brenton Harris might wonder why we should bother growing, but he's determined to age loudly. Single “The Awful Truth” turns its pop guitars into rage as it looks at the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. By the time Harris says, “I can't wait to watch you burn,” it's clear that the truth may be awful, but at least it's honest.

Justin Cober-Lake

Cutout — Cutout (Driff)

Cutout by Jorrit Dijkstra, Jeb Bishop, Pandelis Karayorgis, Nate McBride, Luther Gray

The name Cutout implies removal, but that won’t get you very far in understanding this Boston-based jazz quintet’s music. Quite the contrary, Cutout’s performance dynamic involves judicious addition by a group of musicians who have made a long-term commitment to playing together. Alto and soprano saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra and pianist Pandelis Karayorgis have been business and creative partners for years. They are the co-operators of Driff Records, all of whose releases feature one or both musicians, and they have shared several ensembles, including the large band Bathysphere, the Steve Lacy-themed Whammies, and Cutout. Trombonist Jeb Bishop, bassist Nate McBride, and Luther Gray often show up in these groups, and their smooth execution of sharp corners and sudden turnarounds reflects their shared understanding. What distinguishes Cutout from their other bands is the way they bring material by all five members into the set. Some of this album’s six tracks are single compositions, but others are sequential suites joined by improvisations. There’s plenty of dynamite soloing at work here, but the most intriguing turns come when one of the players elegantly links a couple of his bandmates’ compositions.

Bill Meyer

Tim Daisy & Ken Vandermark — Consequent Duos: series 2a (Audiographic)

Consequent Duos: series 2a by Tim Daisy & Ken Vandermark

Ken Vandermark is a notoriously busy guy; in any ordinary year, the multi-reedist logs an extraordinary number of miles traveled, gigs played, records released and musical partners engaged. This 75-minute long recording braids together three threads of inquiry. It inaugurates the second volume of Consequent Duos, a shelf-full of improvised duos played in North America, mostly with Americans. And as with the other volumes of series 2a, it is a download-only release, part of a sequence of album-length recordings that may not be deemed to be major efforts, but that nonetheless don’t deserve to be filed away forever on some hard drive. Finally, it shares one night in Vandermark’s two decades and counting relationship with drummer Tim Daisy. It takes about ten seconds of any random selection from this concert recording, which preserves what went down one Sunday night in August 2011, to hear why these guys keep working together. The trust and empathy forged by playing literally hundreds of concerts together manifests in music that feels effortless, no matter how technically demanding it actually is. Whether it is the sound of drums being played at a galloping pace with the lightness of knitting needles while the baritone sax pops and roars eruptive masses of sound, or the bass clarinet leaping and trilling with joyous abandon while the percussion swings with dance beats that could get you arrested in certain countries, these guys know just how to make each other sound really good.

Bill Meyer

The Dillards — Old Road New Again (Pinecastle)

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The Dillards' influence on popular music outstrips their own fame (they might even be as well remembered for appearing on The Andy Griffith Show as they are for their proper recordings). The group became an important part of the development of country-rock, especially as they expanded the possible sounds of bluegrass. Nearly 60 years after their first release, they return with Old Road New Again. Only Rodney Dillard (sounding younger than his age) remains from the initial lineup, but he brings along a number of guests to fill out his act. Don Henley appears, and if “My Last Sunset” drifts into Eagles territory, that's no surprise, but Ricky Skaggs, Sam Bush, and others prove the act has plenty of flexibility left in it, whether cutting an original or reworking a classic like “Save the Last Dance.” The album winds down with “This Old Road” and a recounting of some musical history through playful allusion. Even as Dillard looks back, though, he thinks about new ways to push forward. Although the record could work just as reminiscence, the artists show more interest in what comes next.

Justin Cober-Lake

Fire! Orchestra / Krzysztof Penderecki — Actions (Rune Grammofon)

Rune Grammofon · Fire! Orchestra - Actions (excerpt)

The Fire! Orchestra is not so much Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s big band as his big house, the place where he can bring his myriad interests together and invite them to interact. They have already taken on free jazz, krautrock and abstracted songcraft, so why not one of the earliest documents of post-third stream classical-jazz interaction? Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki originally composed Actions for Free Jazz Orchestra after hearing the Globe Unity Orchestra and handed it off to trumpeter Don Cherry to realize its first performance in 1971. Cherry’s imprint upon Gustafsson is deep; where do you think his long-running trio, The Thing, got its name? But this is no mere recreation. Some of Fire! Orchestra’s members weren’t even alive when the first version was performed, so the task is to find a way of playing the piece that makes sense now. So, they stretch things out, letting passages evolve organically. Special credit is due to the three-piece, whose contributions melt and glow.

Bill Meyer

Ganser — Just Look At That Sky (felte)

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Chicago quartet Ganser explores the bewilderment, claustrophobia and anxiety induced paranoia of the times on their latest album Just Look At That Sky. Brian Cundiff’s lockstep drumming anchors the record as Charlie Landsman whips out driving chords and intricate riffs that summon touchstones like Ian MacKaye, Thurston Moore and Rowland S Howard and push the songs to the edge of control. Spiky, equally detached and declamatory, Alicia Gaines (bass) and Nadia Garofalo (keyboards) share vocal duties working inside the kinetic rhythms to explore an interior world reactive to circumstance but seeking paths forward.

Centerpiece “Emergency Equipment and Exits” demonstrates what the band can do when they stretch out and build layers of dread; Cundiff and Gaines drop into a propulsive groove as Gaines sings of parties past and now lost to the new reality: “Swallowing negative space/Like DB Cooper falling/Until I too am nothing/And it all seemed so big.” The tempo drops, a lonely keyboard riff, the song builds as Gaines intones “It’s a long way down” and Landsman’s guitar howls into the ether. The combination of exhilaration and enervation encapsulates the power that makes Ganser stand out amongst their peers working at similar intersections of post punk and art noise.

Andrew Forell

Godcaster — Long Haired Locusts (Ramp Local)

Long Haired Locusts by Godcaster

Possibly it’s the pandemic, though the trend seems to predate early 2020, but we have not heard a lot of over-stuffed, over-instrumented, over-the-top art-prog ensemblery lately. Godcaster, from Philly, busts the one-guitarist-on-the-couch paradigm wide open in this manic, Zappa-esque adventure. First of all, there are half a dozen musicians, augmenting the usual bass/drums/guitar with outre axes like flute, trombone and a variety of synthesized keyboards. All six of them lock into wiggy, hyper funky overdrive in opening salvo “Even Your Blood is Electric.” It’s a righteous groove, a tight and feisty disco extravanganza that mutated in the lab, but that sells it short and blurs the complications. Other cuts take the temperature down, but not the oddity. “Apparition of Mother Mary in My Neighborhood” feels like an almost pop song, though conceptualized by a 12-tone composer and interpreted in odd-numbered time signatures. Long Haired Locusts is too precise and earnest to be a gag, but an anarchist sense of humor pops up, as in the single “Don’t Make Stevie Wonder Wonder,” a Curlew-ish irregular jam punctuated with jump-rope chants. All these cuts have a lot of moving parts, a sense of play and a manic attention to detail, and if you’re sick of sad folksinger live streams, Godcaster could be just what you’re looking for.

Jennifer Kelly

Haptic — Uncollected Works (2005-2010) (Haptic)

Uncollected Works (2005-2010) by Haptic

Haptic is best characterized as a Chicago combo. Even though one or another of its members has lived out of town for roughly a third of their existence, the influence that such a situation has on their work’s pace only confirms that they are a band that needs to share space to get much done. The recordings on this DL-only collection of compilation contributions and curios dates from the first third of their existence, when Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg got together on a weekly basis. Heard end to end, these tracks don’t sound much alike. But whether the project at hand is framing a few piano noises with collected sounds, stretching out a bell’s toll, or patiently exploring the potential of signal corps training jazz, it sounds like the work of a common understanding about how sound can be molded and reframed.

Bill Meyer

Boldy James — The Versace Tape (Griselda Records)

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On his third album this year, Boldy James pairs up with Jay Versace, but despite a change in producers, there is little to distinguish the three tapes. After a long hiatus Boldy churns out music to flood the market, and every new tape causes head-scratching. Was it necessary to release this? As a stone cold pro, Boldy never repeats himself. He also never says anything new. His blueprint is all business talk with designer names splashed here and there: “First come, first serve, first through the third, no dealings \ Mama, I apologize, ain't mean to hurt your feelings.” When he steers towards Mafia references in his songs he sounds a bit archaic (but he already sounded retro when he first started in early 2010s). On The Versace Tape, as always, he raps like he’s not giving us the whole picture. He’s holding back, but maybe what’s left unsaid is the best part.

Ray Garraty

Madeline Kenney — Sucker’s Lunch (Carpark)

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How big can a pop song go? This Oakland songwriter’s third full-length is boundlessly expansive without being particularly loud, the choruses swelling effortlessly, like a soap bubble blown to the size of your head. Kenney worked with Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack to produce Sucker’s Lunch and taps Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, Boy Scout’s Taylor Vick and film composer Stephen Steinbrink for vocals. “Tell You Everything” is translucently gorgeous, layers of guitars, drum, percussion and saxophone shifting in iridescent patterns that never overwhelm its sleepy vocals. “Jenny” increases the friction, with a hard beat, surging synths and shoe-gazey gloss on the guitars, but sweetness in the vocals. Kenney’s subject matter is love and its complications, but she ends the disc in “Sweet Coffee” with a lucid purity. “I’m making coffee,” she croons in a breathy voice out of dreams, “Won’t you sit with me?” Sure, let me pull up a chair.

Jennifer Kelly

Josh Kimbrough — Slither, Soar and Disappear (Tompkins Square)

Slither, Soar & Disappear by Josh Kimbrough

Writing an album in the spaces around an infant’s schedule is a delicate business, but Josh Kimbrough managed it quite well on this lovely album. His finger-picked rambles unfold like the slip-sliding time in a baby’s first year, a tumble of frantic activity interspersed with quiet, contemplative intervals. Kimbrough, a veteran of the North Carolina-based Trekky Collective, plays softly but with precision on acoustic solo pieces like “Sunbathing Water Snake” and “Giant Leopard Moth,” but his work really takes on warmth and resonance when he invites collaborators into his quiet, sunlit world. Blues-flecked “Two-thirds of a Snowman” gains an eerie glow from Andrew Marlin’s mandolin, which echoes Kimbrough’s licks in an upper register like the light hitting a shadowy corner. A sustained synth note in “Glowing Treetops” glitters like the surface of a pond—that’s Jeff Crawford of the Dead Tongues, who also play some bass—while gentle bent guitar notes zing like mosquitoes off its clear, cool liquid surface. Bobby Britt loops lush fiddle flourishes around this and other Kimbrough melodies; a rich, subtle blend of string timbres enlivens many of these tracks. The natural world also makes its appearance as well, most prominently in weather-haunted “The Shape of the Wind Is a Tree,” though the album’s light, clean tone throughout is like an open window. And yet despite multiple intermeshing elements, the album works very gently, light and soft enough not to wake a sleeping little one. “Simon’s Lullaby,” near the end, is beautifully communal, supporting Kimbrough’s clear, pensive guitar with the reassuring throb of cello, the bright promise of flute. Much of child raising is a solitary process, but Kimbrough’s meditation on it is not.

Jennifer Kelly

Kimmig-Studer-Zimmerlin And George Lewis— Kimmig-Studer-Zimmerlin And George Lewis (Ezz-thetics)

Violinist Harald Kimmig, cellist Alfed Zimmerlin and double bassist Daniel Studer have been mapping out the possibilities of extra-idiomatic improvisation since 2009. They favor juxtapositions of raw and refined timbre, and in their roiling web of activity, the quicker a gesture passes, the more impact it seems to have. The Middle European trio matches up well with American trombonist/electronicist George Lewis, who is likewise devoted to making music spontaneously and unbounded by genre prescriptions or proscriptions. There are passages where it sounds like the four musicians have transcribed muttering and stifled laughter into musical activity. This incomprehensible vocal quality proves magnetic, drawing the listener ever deeper into the fray. While some might object to “chatty” improvisation, in this company, it’s a virtue.

Bill Meyer

Matmos — The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form (Thrill Jockey)

The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form by Matmos

Given the vigor with which Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt approach all of their work, it’s surprising to find Matmos’s new album, The Consuming Flame, to be somewhat lacking in cohesion. Like many of their previous releases there is a unifying concept — in this case, they corralled musical contributions recorded at 99bpm from 99 contributors — but it feels like the creative limitations they imposed on this project weren’t quite stringent enough. Inevitably, given the wide range of contributors (including Oneohtrix Point Never, Yo La Tengo and Mouse On Mars) and Matmos’s formidable technical virtuosity, there are plenty of satisfying passages that feature inventive vocal cut-ups, ear-catching beats and playful juxtapositions, but the presentation of these ideas within three continuous hour-long collages makes it hard to sift the gold as the music flows past. Bizarrely, the album’s presentation on Spotify is more listener-friendly, with each of the three discs broken down into digestible tracks that can be easily trimmed from the bigger picture to assemble your own collage of favorites.

Tim Clarke

Meridian Brothers — Cumbia Siglo XXI (Bongo Joe)

Cumbia Siglo XXI by Meridian Brothers

Eblis Alvarez, the sole musician behind the long-running Colombian space roots experiment known as Meridian Brothers, takes inspiration from like-minded predecessors in Cumbia Siglo XX for this electro-shocked take on coastal cumbia. Eerie blasts of jet-set synthesizer, buzzing funk bass and video game bleeps and bloops haunt the clip-clopping rhythms of these mad ditties. It’s like a Star Wars space port built on the verge of primitive villages, donkey tails swatting flies while lazer beams zip by. “Cumbia de la fuente” gene-splices syncopated hand-drum beats and traditional-sounding choruses with the splintered buzz of synth bass and glittery spurts of MIDI-generated arpeggios. It’s a hot tropical celebration lit by UFO glow. “Puya del Empresario” nudges a hip swaying cumbia rhythm to the foreground, but blares a rough-edged synth riff over it. “Cumbia del Pichaman” transforms Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacherman” into a surreal technological marvel, buzzes and squeaks punctuating the offbeats like a DIY version of Zaxxon gone soft in the equatorial heat.

Jennifer Kelly

Nas — King’s Disease (Mass Appeal)

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Like all of Nas’s output in this century, King’s Disease, his 13th album, is pretty much unlistenable. King from the title here has two meanings. Every black man is a king (every woman is a queen) or should be. And second, it reminds that Nas is a king of rap, even though his royal days are long over. But even kings had to live on crumbs of their fame. With regard to the current moment in history, the album compels the listeners to unite and wear their blackness proud. Nas’ idea for achieving that? Just listen to his truisms and patronizing rants. On “Ultra Black” it’s “We goin' ultra black, I gotta toast to that”. On ‘Til the War is Won”, dedicated to women, it’s “May God gives strength to women who lost their sons \ I give all I have 'til the war is won.” All Nas gives to a black community is his bad music and maybe some charity. Every track here is to some degree about empowering black people, yet the only person Nas ends up empowering is himself. Every line on King’s Disease is disguised as virtue signaling, and the last thing we all need now is patronizing advices from rap millionaires.

Ray Garraty

The New Bomb Turks — Nightmare Scenario: Diamond Edition (Self-released)

Nightmare Scenario - Diamond Edition by New Bomb Turks

It would be understandable if, upon hearing the New Bomb Turks 1993 debut full-length, Destroy-Oh-Boy!, you thought to yourself, "They'll never top this." You wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but you'd be neglecting a much larger story and a key release in their catalog, 2000's Nightmare Scenario. With their debut, the Ohio quartet built a distinct machine out of familiar parts: cheap-lager-fueled thrash, butterflyin'-around rock 'n' roll swagger and barstool-philosopher lyrics. And with the possible exception of fellow buckeyes Gaunt, no other band at the time combined those attributes in quite the same way. It was as if America finally had its own Saints. The Turks would go on to make five more LPs over the next decade. Though lost in the shuffle a bit after jumping to Epitaph in 1996, the band were never going to become darlings of that label's skater boi base anyway. You certainly can't blame them for trying to reach a new audience nor should you overlook the output from that era. 2000's Nightmare Scenario, their third for Epitaph, is gritty, witty, and so full of Midwest blastitude you'd think it was year zero at Datapanik (or at least 1991). Yet to hear the album in its original mixes by Detroit studio guru Jim Diamond, newly issued for the 20th anniversary of its release, is all the more gratifying. It's stripped of that extra coat of paint found on the original, and it reveals what a decade's-worth of relentlessly plying one's trade in the punk rock free market will get you. The Turks were an absolute musical force by this point: they could still hit warp speed but could also swing with the best of them. And frontman Eric Davidson is in full possession of his vocal gifts (always a key aspect of the band's sound), nestling into the groove like a Funhouse-era Iggy or leading the charge as needed. The 20th anniversary Diamond Edition of the album is a nice reminder of just how consistently good the New Bomb Turks were and a nice splash of Pabst in the face for anyone who slept on that reality the first time around.

NOTE: Never above a little frat boy humor, the Turks were always much more about mocking those particular attitudes than ever truly embracing them. With that in mind 100 percent of the digital will be donated to Black Queer & Intersectional Collective bqic.net and Columbus Freedom Fund www.instagram.com/columbusfreedomfund www.instagram.com/columbusfreedomfund.

Nate Knaebel

Siege Column — Darkside Legions (Nuclear War Now!)

Darkside Legions by Siege Column

Some thoughts that occurred on first listening to Darkside Legions, the new LP from Siege Column: Track one, “Devil’s Knights of Hell”: “Whoa, this is pretty nuts. Exciting — raw and barely coherent, but exciting.” Track three, “Snakeskin Mask”: “Okay, I get it. All this stupidity is just too frigging stupid. Enough, already…” Track five, “Funeral Fiend”: “Holy shit! I think this may be genius-level stupid!” And so on. The record keeps on doing that, and the listener (this one, anyways) keeps on generating phrases like “genius-level stupid” in an attempt to cope with the experience. Siege Column is constituted of two shadowy figures from somewhere deep in the chemically treated wilds of New Jersey, and for sure, this is music that could only come from New Jersey. I still can’t figure out if Darkside Legions is too moronic for words, or if that projection beyond words is the mark of some sort of greatness. Meanwhile, the next song is peeling out like a 1969 Chevelle that needs some serious muffler work, trailing empty cans of cheap domestic, wads of bloody paper towel and the smell of burnt hair. Yikes. Feel like I better catch up…

Jonathan Shaw

Smokescreens — “Fork in the Road” (Slumberland)

A Strange Dream by Smokescreens

A new single from LA’s Smokescreens is notably partly because David Kilgour took a hand in it, distilling the band’s jangly sweet sound in a Clean-like way, where the guitar comes coated in liquid clarity and everything else is drenched in beautiful fuzz. Even if you’ve been liking Smokescreens for a while, “Fork in the Road,” is something special, the thump of bass glowing quietly, the guitars cavorting, a synthesizer building dense shimmery textures, the chorus softly harmonized around a koan-ish verse. (How do you go straight at the fork in the road? ) The guitar solo two minutes in is worth the trip all by itself. If the upcoming album is anything like this tune, I’m in.

Jennifer Kelly

Matt Sowell — Organize Or Die (Feeding Tube)

Organize Or Die by Matt Sowell

Too often, the words “sounds like John Fahey” denote either laziness or a sparse descriptive vocabulary on the part of the people who utter them. But it cannot be denied, Matt Sowell sounds like he’s closely studied Fahey’s records, especially the less experimental ones of his Takoma/Vanguard period. There’s a similar melding of bluesy styling, compositional elegance, and emotional evocation. But Sowell’s motives are different. Where Fahey’s music looked at the snarl of personal memory and the blacker, deeper pit of his tangled subconscious, Sowell’s looks outward. Fahey tried to subdue demons within; Sowell calls out the devils of capitalism, and honors the purity of respect untainted by dollars or oil. Of course, since his music is purely instrumental, you can project whatever you want onto it. But in times like these, we need all the resistance and resonance we can get.

Bill Meyer

Treasury of Puppies — S/t (F��rlag För Fri Musik)

Treasury of Puppies by Treasury of Puppies

The Gothenburg duo of Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson’s debut release as the Treasury of Puppies is lo-fi depressive but charming pop, recorded at the beginning of 2020. A Fairly short release, barely pushing past an EP length, it's in the vein of other Swedish underground releases of the past few years. The two trade chilly, spoken-sung vocals over a set of eight tracks, either buoyed by repeating, fuzzy guitars alongside field recordings, sauntering looped drums and hand-tampered tape sounds, or a layer of delayed static and fuzz churning under over drifting bells and slowly rotating keys.

Ian Forsythe

Trio No Mas — A Tragedy Of Fermented Undulation (Mars Williams)

A Tragedy Of Fermented Undulation by TRIO NO MAS

Chicago has saxophonic tradition, and part of that convention is the expectation that the city’s saxophonists work hard. However you look at it, Mars Williams holds up his end. He’s busy on both local and world stages. In recent years you can hear him melding Albert Ayler and Xmas carols on a couple of continents, freely improvising with the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and playing not-just-old-memories rock and roll with the Psychedelic Furs. But it would seem that he has room for another band, if the situation is right, and that’s the genesis of this trio. Williams sat in with brothers Stefan and Aaron Gonzalez when the Texan rhythm section came through Chicago and then made a couple quick passes through their neck of the woods. This live recording, which is being sold as a download as Williams figures how to make up for not going on the road with the Furs this year, brings us to the other way that Chicago saxophonists work hard. Switching between several horns, he plays them all with a mix of vein-popping force and pyrotechnic fluency. The freres Gonzalez toggle between heavy lurching and molten streaming, pulling back every now and then to create quiet spaces in which Williams can tap into yet another Chicago tradition — the evocative chatter of little toy instruments. If you can handle the unbearable lightness of the no-physical format, this music brings plenty of satisfying heaviness to the sonic realm.

Bill Meyer

Various Artists — Total 20 (Kompakt)

Total 20 by Various Artists

Since 1999, each summer Cologne’s Kompakt label has compiled recent and new tracks from their roster. For fans of the label’s distinctive musical aesthetic — a shuffling, playful, pop-facing, experimental minimalist form of techno — the Total series seems a must-have, but the series has also served as an entrée into Kompakt’s world for curious newcomers, casual listeners and cash-strapped collectors. Total 20 maintains the high standards of its predecessors. Coming in at two plus hours and 22 tracks from stalwarts Michael Mayer, Voigt und Voigt and J��rg Burger share space with newcomers like Kiwi and David Douglas. This edition works as a soundtrack for in home dance sessions, concentrated listening and background for escaping the mope and drag of enforced isolation. The music itself is uniformly of high quality, but the sequencing is key here. Moments of elegantly constructed ambient minimalism (Soela’s “White Becomes Black”), euphoric vocal house (Kiwi’s “Hello Echo”) and high concept psy-trance (ANNA & KITTEN’s “Forever Ravers”) are interwoven with the familiar midtempo Kompakt sound. While it’s a lot to digest at first and may to some ears merge into an amorphous mass, Total 20 will lift your mood, shift your body and shake off your funk. Have a taste, you may find yourself grazing if not gorging.

Andrew Forell

Verikyyneleet — Ilman Kuolemaa (I, Voidhanger)

Ilman Kuolemaa by VERIKYYNELEET

This new LP from Finland’s Verikyyneleet hits a bunch of the essential marks for hyper-obscure, one-man black metal: Difficult to pronounce and vaguely creepy name? Yep (translated from Finnish, Verikyyneleet means something like “tears of blood). Primitivist, kvlt-ish album art with lots of spindly, symmetrical, necromantical forms? Yep (pretty cool, too). Ghastly, croaked, semi-strangulated vocals and sweeping, epical song structures that likely attempt to represent the frozen forests of the Laplander landscape? Yep (see especially “Yhta Luonnon Kansaa,” which empties into another song called “The Great Scream in Nature”). But in spite of the degrees of familiarity struck by those various notes, there’s a compelling idiosyncrasy to Ilman Kuolemaa. And although Finnish weirdo Isla Valve — sole creator of the sounds — has been releasing music under the Verikyyneleet name since 2006, he hasn’t exactly been prolific: two demos in 2006, an EP last year, and now this LP. It’s all rather mysterious. But whatever the back story, the songs are really good. There’s a slightly smeared, off-kilter sound that adds to the strangeness. Is it 4 am and suddenly really, really quiet, wherever you are? Here’s your soundtrack. Light up some candles, turn it up loud and freak out the neighbors.

Jonathan Shaw

Young Dolph — Rich Slave (Paper Route Empire)

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It’s not a little ironic that Adolph Thornton, Jr., 35 years old and some seven records into his career (not counting the endless mixtapes floating around), has peaked both in hard numbers — Rich Slave hit #4 on the Billboard 200 — and stylistically with an album that arrives after the Memphis rapper was supposed to retire from the game. When GQ interviewed him in May, Dolph was locked in and hanging out with his kids, marinating on his next move; with Rich Slave, he’s unlocked a socially conscious side of himself that, admittedly, was always bubbling below the usual braggadocio. Alongside guest spots from Megan Thee Stallion, established sidekick Key Glock and Chicago staple G Herbo, Dolph tweaks his usual template to speak to the moment in what is his most effective full-length deployment yet. There are a trillion rappers who work this hustle, but no one’s done it better this year.

Patrick Masterson

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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years ago

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10 political podcasts to help you keep your sanity before the midterms

In a time of volatile politics and chaotic news cycles, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise, to stay informed without getting completely and totally overwhelmed.

Which is why, despite recent talk of a "podcast bubble," the medium is exactly what we need right now. Podcasts can slow down and really study a topic or event, bringing in the kind of nuance that's too often lacking in our current discourse.

SEE ALSO: 15 podcasts guaranteed to tell you a fantastic story

Sure, partisan political podcasts — from the Crooked Media/"Pod Save America" crew on the left to Ben Shapiro's show on the right — are still incredibly popular, as are news podcasts that dip into politics, like the New York Times' "The Daily."

But if you're looking to preserve your sanity while keeping up to date, try one of these 10 podcasts, which offer a more balanced analyses, and a respite from the multi-person shouting of television news. They'll keep you informed ... without subjecting you to the vicious cacophony of the burning tire fire that is the world around us.

"Can He Do That?" The Washington Post

To say that Donald Trump's presidency is unprecedented is an understatement, and we're not even halfway through his first term. The constant churn can leave us feeling burned-out and confused. Enter Allison Michaels and "Can He Do That?" which views Trump's actions through the lens of the actual limits on presidential power. Each episode features deeply researched analysis from journalists and experts, spelling out what Trump can and can't do and the consequences therein. It's a vital listen in an age of never-ending tumult.

"Ground Game," The Associated Press

Believe it or not, American politics extends beyond the White House, even though Trump dominates so many headlines. And there's an extremely important midterm election coming up ... you may have heard of it? Fortunately, the Associated Press' "Ground Game" cuts through the noise to deliver reporting from its network of journalists on congressional races from around the country and beyond. A recent episode gave detailed insight into what goes into the AP's decision to call a race.

#ICYIMI: @AP has been counting votes and calling elections since 1848 when Zachary Taylor beat Lewis Cass to become the U.S.'s 12th president. Ever wonder how we do it? On our newest episode, we're peeling back the curtain. Here: https://t.co/qlLKatoIpW or https://t.co/yvS1ptQaAx

— Ground Game (@APGroundGame) September 4, 2018

"Politics Podcast," NPR

This podcast is exactly what you expect from an NPR production: the latest news, terrific analysis, and a wide range of topics. While you won't find hot political takes here, it's anything but dry. The discussion is engaging and informative without leaving you lost in the weeds. Being this thorough and covering such a breadth of topics — from the White House down to state races — makes it invaluable for those trying to keep up in a world in which news that's more than a day old feels ancient.

"Political Gabfest," Slate

If you like your political roundtable talk a little spicy, Slate's "Political Gabfest" offers astute and lively debate that's well worth a listen. The three hosts — David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson — have been doing the show together for nearly 13 years, and that's to its advantage. Not only does the familiarity bring a richness to their rapport, but they aren't afraid to disagree and occasionally tangle about their topics. You'll find everything from nuanced discussions about criminal justice reform to tutting over the latest scandals and fallout.

"Left, Right, & Center," KCRW

Like Slate's "Political Gabfest," one of "Left, Right, & Center's" strengths comes from its unique mix of voices — Josh Barro is in the middle, hosting a rotating door of guests — and the way these hosts play off each other. They're purposefully from unique political viewpoints, enabling plenty of debate about the latest political news, issues, and controversies of the day, but always in a calm, respectful manner, never allowing the different perspectives to boil over the way we so often see online.

"Politics Podcast," FiveThirtyEight

After Trump's upset win in the 2016 presidential election, there was a lot of ire directed at Nate Silver's site for projecting Hillary Clinton as the winner. But one of the great aspects of the site's political podcast is how Silver and other staffers take these challenges head-on, explaining how the model works (including their current midterm models) and how readers should interpret them. The political discussions are also meticulous and often fun, as guests (usually FiveThirtyEight staffers like Clare Malone and Perry Bacon, Jr.) aren't afraid to antagonize each other, keeping the podcast lively as they break down current events and try to interpret the larger impact on the chaotic political world.

"More Perfect," WNYC

The judicial branch gets its due thanks to WNYC's "More Perfect" podcast, which explores the history, the figures, and the cases that have made the highest court in the land such an important and, at times, contentious bedrock of our country. With so much attention being given to the Supreme Court lately, especially in terms of its political lean and sway, this podcast is a valuable asset in filling the knowledge gaps.

"Slow Burn," Slate

Understanding history is essential to understanding our political present, not just because, as the saying goes, history repeats itself. As talk around the potential impeachment of Donald Trump simmers, it's important to look back at our embattled presidents, and "Slow Burn" does that exquisitely, digging deeper into the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon (season 1) and the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky (season 2).

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"Whistlestop," Slate

This is John Dickerson's second appearance on this list, but for very good reason. His delightful "Whistlestop" podcast has been churning out episodes of presidential history for years. (I included his book, based on the podcast, in a presidential biographies project I did for this site a few years back.) The podcast is still going, dipping into the past to give us essential context for events of the present. Recent episodes focus on the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987.

"Presidential" and "Constitutional," The Washington Post

Much like "Whistlestop," this pair of podcasts from The Washington Post delves into our political past to give us context for current politics and actually teach us a few things. Both are fascinating, breaking the history, historical interpretations, and debates around our presidents and the country's most important document into digestible bits without dumbing anything down. "Presidential" has one episode for each president, and "Constitutional" clocks in at a tidy eight episodes that look at the document's impact on our country, plus a special reading of the preamble.

With any luck, these podcasts won't just keep you up to date on political happenings without immersing you in the digital echo chamber — maybe you'll keep your sanity and learn some U.S. history along the way.

WATCH: Cheese lovers will obsess over these solar-powered products

#_category:yct:001000002 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_author:Marcus Gilmer #_uuid:36bea4c6-6e1a-379c-ad53-eed8f7c7adaa #_revsp:news.mashable

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thepatriot911 · 7 years ago

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Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The lapdog memo by Mark Last week I had the chance to talk with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the two Harvard professors behind the book How Democracies Die. Later this week, I’m putting out a longer piece that includes my interview with both authors, as well as a review of the book, but considering the week the nation just went through, it seems appropriate to start this morning with something of a spoiler. The book is a stellar deep-dive into a series of modern democracies that ceased to be — not because their military rose up, or an opposing military rode in, but because the country devolved into autocracy. In many cases, nations went from a recognizable, constitutional democracy to a single-party autocracy along steps that came with surprising ease — and terrifying familiarity. Considering the events of the past week, it seemed only appropriate to ask them about the term that appeared in seemingly every news story for what seems to have been a year, but in reality was only a fortnight: The memo. Question: This was one of those days in which it seemed that the principles and practices of our institutions were strained, if not cracked. There was the Devin Nunes-authored memo, the apparently forced early retirement of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and the failure to recommend new sanctions against Russia. Do you think these events mark a significant acceleration? Do they take us past any sort of 'red line' in the erosion of Democracy? Levitsky: I don’t think we ever know if it’s a “red line” or not. There were a couple of important things that reinforced that this was a bad day. First, it was a very good day for our book sales, so a lot of people are showing increased concern about the future. Second, Trump is continuing with something that autocratic leaders do — go after the referees. Go after the institutions that serve as neutral arbiters,. Trump has been concerned about the FBI from the beginning and demonstrated repeatedly that he would like to bring it under control. He’s made clumsy efforts to put the agency directly under his personal control both when Comey was the director and after. When those failed, he moved to making attacks on the integrity of the FBI. The much-referenced article on surviving autocracy that Masha Gessen wrote on the day of Trump’s electoral victory warns against expecting any institution to save the nation, and points up the speed with which law enforcement apparatus were brought under control of autocrats like Putin and Erdogan. Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate that this grab for the handles of law enforcement is often the first move of the would-be autocrat. It serves as both a protective measure, ending any effective way to bring the budding dictator to heel through legal means, and provides an offensive tool that can be turned on enemies. On that point, both authors expressed concern about the memo, but from at least one perspective, the memo isn’t all bad, because it shows just how ineffective Trump has been at turning the FBI into his own personal police. Yes, he fired Comey, but he hasn’t been able to replace the FBI and DOJ leadership with hacks under his thumb. A year in, Trump is still fighting the FBI, rather than using it as a weapon to turn on others. That’s not so true everywhere … Levitsky: We were over optimistic in the book on one point. The members of the Republican Party in the House and Senate have become lapdogs. They’ve increasingly not just looked away, but acted in complicity with Trump’s abuses. Some institutions have held up well — the courts, media, public — but not Congress. More on this discussion later in the week. But now, let’s get below the line and listen to some pundits. The Trump–Nunes Memo Walter Shapiro shows that Republicans eat their own dog food — along with what comes out the other end of the dog. The Piltdown man – perhaps the most famous fraud in the history of paleontology –combined a 600-year-old skull, an orangutan’s jaw and a chimpanzee’s tooth to feign being the remains of the Missing Link between man and the apes. Now, more than a century later, the Piltdown man has come to US politics with Friday’s release of a declassified memo by Devin Nunes, the chairman of the misnamed House intelligence committee. The Nunes memo connects mismatched shards to suggest a missing link between Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and the Hillary Clinton campaign’s efforts to discredit Donald Trump. There is a big difference here. Piltdown Man, for all it’s silliness in retrospect, actually fooled a lot of people for some time after its ‘discovery.’ Nunes’ masterwork was already exposed as not just a slanted attempt to demean the FBI, but a political dud, even before it reached the eyes of the public. To Trumpian true believers, the Nunes memo proves that the FBI and the rest of the Deep State were conspiring to throw the election to Hillary. Of course, this omits the pesky detail that on 28 October 2016, the FBI director, James Comey, announced that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation based on what had been found on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Guess which late October event had more effect on wavering 2016 voters: Comey’s dramatic public statement raising fresh doubts about the Democratic nominee or a secret warrant against a peripheral Trump adviser. That would be the last minute letter that Comey wrote along with noted subject of endless right-wing hand-wringing, Peter Strzok. Max Boot, and his hat, have been added to the Washington Post editorial page, where this week he has another angle on … the memo. “When you’re attacking FBI agents because you’re under criminal investigation, you’re losing.” That was White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeting on Nov. 3, 2016. Back then, it was Democrats who were complaining about the FBI, and with ample justification: The bureau had released a letter 11 days before the election announcing that it was reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton based on emails found on former New York congressman Anthony Wiener’s laptop. Nate Silver later concluded, “Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28.” Comey’s supposed anti-Clinton bias was even (disingenuously) cited by President Trump as his rationale to fire the FBI director. That was, of course, in Trump’s second-draft firing Comey memo, the one that he forced Rod Rosenstein to write, rather than in the first-draft he-wouldn’t-stop-talking-about-Russia version put together by Trump and Monsters U alum, Stephen Miller. And then Trump went on TV two days later to say he had fired Comey over the Russian investigation anyway, leaving his PR team to pick up the mess. Republicans (and Russian trolls) had been pinning their hopes on Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to deliver the goods. But his four-page memo was such a nothingburger that he left everyone wondering: Where’s the beef? The week’s best pairing of a catch phrase that was worn out decades ago, with a coinage that was pretty much worn out the day it arrived. But that doesn’t make Boot wrong on the facts. The case against the FBI that’s being assembled by Trump and his minions is not designed to convince dispassionate observers. It’s only supposed to give the thinnest of cover to true believers — and at least 34 senators — to do what they are predisposed to do anyway, i.e., protect the president at all costs. Honestly, if I had to guess, the Nunes memo was such a disaster, I suspect it peeled away at least a couple of Senators on the bubble. Dana Milbank goes on the road to investigate the world events from the perspective of a guy who’s actual expertise is in beef cattle. Wouldn’t it be great to be Devin Nunes? Not only does the California Republican get to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but he simultaneously gets to serve President Trump by making public tidbits of classified information given to him by the White House. He is recused from the Russia investigation but still gets to use committee staff to undermine the Russia investigation. Nunes gets all the cake, can do all the eating, and gets no consequences … except the next time he jumps from an Uber it may be more a matter of rolling out the door. Now, best of all, he gets to release a memo (possibly written with White House help) to exonerate Trump in the Russia probe by using cherry-picked information implying wrongdoing by the FBI — while at the same time blocking declassification of a memo from committee Democrats providing context and exculpatory information that Nunes omitted. And the FBI, which under its Trump-appointed director says it has “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” can’t defend itself because, well, the information is classified. The idea of doc-blocking the FBI using classifications isn’t half bad. Fortunately for democracy, they left it up to Devin Nunes, making this his third godawful attempt to start a scandal on White House orders. Also, given two opportunities to deny the White House involved in writing the memo, Nunes flunked both times. Excellent choice in stooge. Richard Ben-Veniste was chief the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office, and he has a message for Christopher Wray and Rod Rosenstein. The long tradition of the House Intelligence Committee — heretofore an island of bipartisan protection of national security within an ever more partisan Congress — has become collateral damage in the quest to protect President Trump from the conclusion of the Mueller investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray urged Trump not to allow the public release of an inaccurate memo that recklessly reveals classified national security sources and methods. Now that he has allowed the memo to be made public, many will ask whether Wray and Rosenstein should resign in protest. They should not do so. America needs these principled public servants to stay at their posts. Back up there at the top, Dr. Levitsky and Dr. Ziblatt mentioned that the institution most in trouble at this point is Congress. With Trump directly pulling the strings of people like Nunes and Mark Meadows, and Paul Ryan having discovered that his interests lie in having no interest, Most democracies may fail from law-enforcement up, but it doesn’t have to go that way. Congress can fall first. After all, if you have to eat that elephant one bite at a time, it’s perfectly feasible to start at the ass. The campaign of denigration directed against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III , the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, the demands for personal loyalty from government officials whose first loyalty is to their oath of office and the Constitution are among a growing mountain of evidence that raises the question — “Why does the president fear the results of an unfettered Mueller investigation?” Because as many times as Trump says “no collusion,” that doesn’t make it true. Eugene Robinson doesn’t think the memo will amount to a speed bump, much less a road block, for Mueller’s investigation. The memo released Friday by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee purports to be an expression of shock, horror and dismay at alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process. But the document’s real purpose is to dishonestly suggest that the whole Robert Mueller investigation is politically motivated, cooked up by partisan Democrats in the FBI and the Justice Department. Anyone who reads the thing can spot the holes where parts of the story have been left out — the details that would undercut the memo’s thesis. I recognize the technique. I have it on good authority that opinion columnists have been known to cherry-pick a fact or two, though of course I have no personal experience with that sort of thing. Just like I have never been known to cherry-pick opinion columnist. Next up, someone who is not George Will, Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat, or Bret Stephens ... Joe Walsh remembers his collegue Devin Nunes … though fondly would be an overstatement. I served in Congress with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Based on my experience working with him, nothing about the way he’s behaving now as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — overseeing part of the so-called Russia-Trump investigation — is particularly shocking. The Nunes I knew was a purely partisan animal. When it comes to exercising good judgment and discharging his duties in service of the Constitution, he’s just not up to the task. … So it doesn’t surprise me to see Nunes today, acting more like the chairman of the president’s reelection campaign than chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He wants to please whomever he sees as the person or people running the show. Back then, it was House GOP leadership. Now it’s President Trump. And it’s pretty clear Nunes has decided his job is to protect Trump no matter what collateral damage results. How else do you explain his careless and dangerous rush to release his already infamous “memo”? Walsh, by the way, is not just a Republican a Trump supporter. I think there’s a federal law that says everyone has to consult a Trump supporter at least once a day, so my quota is done. Race Leonard Pitts on why even talking about race is so often so painful. What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Except it’s not really failure. It’s actually unwillingness to communicate, fear of what communication might mean. After all, if you communicate, you might understand some painful truths — and then where would you be? That’s why discussing race with a white person is often one of the most vexing things an African-American person can do. You quickly come to understand that understanding is the last thing they want. What Pitts goes on to demonstrate is how often white people feign an ability to not understand the point of what black people are telling them about race. Because admitting that what black people are saying is comprehensible … means admitting that it’s also sensible and just. At some point, you begin wondering if the words you hear in your head are coming out in English. How is it you’re both speaking the same language, but you’re doing such a miserable job of being understood? The answer isn’t that the black person in this conversation isn’t being clear, it’s that the white person has developed a very advanced form of selective deafness. It’s a frustrating, exhausting experience. If you’ve ever had it, you’ll likely be touched by a recent story out of Vermont. It seems that, with the unanimous support of the school board, the Racial Justice Alliance, a student-led anti-racism group at Montpelier High, is commemorating Black History Month by flying a flag on campus. A flag that says, “Black Lives Matter.” It’s a nice story, and a brief one. Go read it. Christine Emba on a surprise that white Americans will find in the 2020 census. Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau revealed its proposed questionnaire for the 2020 Census in advance of a March 31 deadline for its delivery to Congress for review. The updated format did not accommodate many suggestions made since 2010. It doesn’t ask about citizenship status (despite a request to do so by the Trump Justice Department) and won’t include a separate Middle Eastern and North African category in its question about race. But there are some key changes to the questions about race and ethnicity. In particular, black and white respondents will be asked to provide specific information about their origins. Rather than just marking a single race, respondents will be prodded for a bit more information: For the text box under the “White” checkbox, the census instructions helpfully state: “Print, for example, German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.” Don’t forget Normay. Economy Jill Abramson on the hand that’s really been at the wheel of the economy. The strength of the economy was the keystone of President Trump’s State of the Union speech. There was no need to exaggerate how good things are – low inflation, lower unemployment, soaring stock market. Nonetheless, as usual, he had to inflate his boastful claims with hot air. There were so many encomiums for various Americans in the president’s speech that the personal, anecdotal stories blurred into each other. But there was no word of thanks for the person most responsible for the strong economic winds keeping the Trump administration afloat. Janet Yellen, perhaps the most successful Federal Reserve chair in modern history and the first woman to hold the job, was completely unrecognized. President Trump gave her the boot, making her the first Fed leader not to be renominated for a second term. All of her predecessors were renominated by presidents of the opposite party. But not Yellen, whom President Barack Obama appointed in 2014 and whose last day on the job is 3 February. Yellen had two big strikes against here. One, she’d actually met Barack Obama, and two … Trump’s profound respect for women in business. Or lack thereof. And just as Yellen is going out the door, Trump’s stock market boom is going with her. Trump will surely find some way to make Yellen the scapegoat for any market collapse. Devin Nunes can prove it with a memo. General Trumpism Eric Posner maintains that Trump is bad … but too incompetent to be evil. David Frum’s new book, ��Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic,” is only the latest statement of the case that Trump is a danger to the Constitution. But it is critical to distinguish Trump’s bark from his bite. He has disparaged judges, called the media the enemy of the people, praised torture and compared the intelligence community to Nazis. But he has not followed up on these statements. Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt, he hasn’t tried to pack the Supreme Court (not that Trump needs to). Unlike Barack Obama, he hasn’t (yet) targeted journalists in leak investigations. Unlike George W. Bush, he hasn’t actually taken a page from the Nazis by ordering the intelligence community to use coercive interrogation. Unlike George Washington, he has never told the truth. Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, he has never ridden a horse. And unlike Eric Posner he has never taken a hugely selective reading of Trump’s actions to try and pass off a near endless list of assaults on liberty as no big deal … oh wait, never mind. Ruth Marcus has a somewhat different take. “Nixonian” is not the right word to use to describe the behavior of President Trump. In important ways, that characterization smears Richard Nixon. It is hard to believe I am writing this. But it is also hard to believe it has come to this: The president is in open warfare with his Justice Department and the FBI — asserting flatly that its “top Leadership and Investigators . . . have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago.” Do you have Posner’s email? Because he could really use a copy of this. “The sacred investigative process.” “Unthinkable just a short time ago.” Oh please. Nothing is sacred to Trump except protecting himself. And what is unthinkable — except that Trump has made it all too thinkable — is that a president would impugn the integrity of his own Justice Department. That a president, confronted with evidence that a hostile foreign power had tried to influence the election, would repeatedly reject those findings and fail to take action to shore up the nation’s defenses against a repetition. And, most unthinkable, that a president, confronted with evidence that his own top officials found probable cause to surveil a former campaign aide, Carter Page, for acting as the agent of a foreign power, would react with indignation — not at the aide but at the accusation. David Graham and the not all that slow motion disaster. In the current scandal, so often compared to Watergate, there’s a tendency to seek direct parallels. This is enhanced by the clear threat to special counsel Robert Mueller from the president, complete with reports that Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, and backed down only when McGahn threatened to resign. The current, unnamed scandal won’t work in the same way, and the search for a Saturday Night Massacre is misguided for two reasons. First, people are already being fired. And second, even when they’re not, Trump is accomplishing many of the same things that would otherwise be accomplished with firings via other means. Can we have a name this scandal contest? Personally, I would take points away from anything that ends in ”gate.” Not only is the president openly feuding with parts of the executive branch, he elides the fact that the top leadership of the FBI and Justice Department are, with McCabe and Comey’s departures, entirely appointed by his own administration. If the goal is to purge officials who Trump thinks represent some sort of threat to him, that’s already under way. But Trump also doesn’t have to purge them to achieve what he wants. He just has to create an environment that stifles things he believes represent a threat to him. If Rosenstein goes, don’t expect an immediate firing of Mueller. Look instead for budget cuts, resource restraints, and a re-write of the investigation’s limits that allows them look at a much narrower range of time and behavior.

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logangray82 · 7 years ago

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Search Engine Land’s Community Corner: Industry veteran releases new book, our top columnists of 2017 and more

Happy new year! If, like me, you’re just getting caught up on industry news and announcements, I’ll share a couple of noteworthy items you may have missed over the past two weeks: We shared the top 10 columns published in 2017. Cheers to our talented contributors Sherry Bonelli, Joy Hawkins, Dan Sharp, Paul Shapiro, Wesley Young, Nate Dame and Aleyda Solis Christoph Cemper, CEO of LinkResearchTools, released his book “Spaghetti Code: Detangling Life and Work with Programmer Wisdom“ Our sister site, Marketing Land likewise notes the top 10 columns published there in 2017. Congrats again to our expert marketing columnists! Have some industry or community news you want to share? Drop us a note at [email protected]! Our own Barry Schwartz continues his “Honor an SEO/SEM” series at his blog, and this (and last) weeks’ honored nominees are: Aleyda Solis – nominated by Gianluca Fiorelli and known to all that are fortunate to call her friend as a tiny tornado of Search Engine Land Source

The post Search Engine Land’s Community Corner: Industry veteran releases new book, our top columnists of 2017 and more appeared first on ocston.org -- Great Info about SEO.

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magicalincorrectrobodokiquotes · 24 days ago

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"The Candyland Queen and the Candyman's Strings" Clip

“Something for Skye…and something for May…” Future!Avery cooed as the two opened the gifts, covered in heart printed wrapping paper.

“A MODEL AIRPLANE KIT!” Skye gawked. He looked over.

“It’s from us.” Roxanne motioned at her, Past!Booloo, Future!Booloo, Past!Nate, Alice and Kiruru 2.0.

May began to open her gift, in awe. “Ooooooooooh! What’s this?”

‘It’s a book about fairies. Two girls your age go underwater to save the ocean.” Past!Booloo cooed.

“Fairies?! THE OCEAN?! THEY’RE SEVEN?!” May’s eyes widened. “I’m gonna read it tonight! ALL BY MYSELF!”

Past!Booloo beamed with pride. “Is this what being a parent’s like?”

“What’s in this big box?” Skye noticed.

“Open it.” Roxanne encouraged as the two did so. Their eyes widened.

“We were in a rush to get something for the two of you…” Roxanne admitted. “So Nate got the idea…”

“A BOX!” they grinned.

“Just like my dad.” Past!Booloo giggled. “He’d always say that…on purpose, to mess with us.”

Skye and May opened the box, shrugging off the plush dolphin and plush shark inside, to use the box as a little hideout.

Past!Booloo tried to stifle a shrieky laugh.

“You two are silly.” Future!Avery mused.

“Thanks for the box!” May waved.

“And for the plushies, too…” Skye cooed as he grabbed the dolphin. “C’mon, Miss Dolphie.” “C’mon, Sharko.” May grabbed the shark.

He paused.

“MY TOOTH IS OUT!!!” Skye gasped as his tooth landed in his hand. “FINALLY!!!”

“Congrats!!! Looks like someone’s gonna get an extra special present from the tooth fairy, since it’s your birthday!” Past!Nate slyly showed Future!Booloo and Future!Avery a 20 dollar bill and a 75 dollar gift card to Build A Bear.

(pic coming soon)

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blairwaldcrf · 6 months ago

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New Chapter 5 of Set it Up (Dair au)

Chapters: 5/10

Fandom: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Dan Humphrey/Blair Waldorf

Characters: Dan Humphrey, Blair Waldorf, Nate Archibald, Serena van der Woodsen, Vanessa Abrams, Epperly Lawrence, Noah Shapiro

Additional Tags: background Serenessa, background rufly - Freeform, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Set It Up (2018) Fusion, Alcohol, background nate/raina, shapiro and epperly are only vaguely in character, milo humphrey - Freeform, past dangina/past chair, brief blair/louis, brief dan/olivia

Summary:

"Alright."

Dan leans over her desk, no introduction other than the one word, an interesting combination of exhausted and furious all at once. He wants to pretend he doesn’t notice the way she perks up with excitement, but he does manage to ignore the way she looks supremely self-congratulatory. It's difficult.

"Alright?"

"Yes," he responds. "Let's do this."

the Set it Up AU

#dair #dair fic #dan x blair #gossip girl #gg fic #gg au #*by me #writing tag

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othersportsnews-blog · 7 years ago

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A look at the UFC 1 yr right after its historic sale

New Post has been published on https://othersportsnews.com/a-look-at-the-ufc-1-yr-right-after-its-historic-sale/

A look at the UFC 1 yr right after its historic sale

Just one yr in the past today, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta pulled off the largest sale in sports activities heritage.

After shopping for the UFC for $2 million in 2001, they, together with high faculty close friend Dana White and a team from Abu Dhabi, sold their empire for $3.seventy seven billion to company WME/IMG, together with private fairness firms KKR, Silver Lake Funds and Michael Dell’s investment decision agency MSD Funds.

It was a amazing sum that was partly attained by optimistic expansion projections by UFC management, which believed that the UFC would proceed to mature at a equivalent charge as it had in the earlier, when it rose from a $50 million enterprise in 2005 to a $600 million enterprise by 2015.

That self-confidence didn’t just manifest alone on paper.

White, whose 9 percent share in the sale was worthy of $340 million, signed a deal to stay on with the UFC as president for the following five years. His income? 9 percent of the annual revenue, in accordance to sources.

The sellers, which include White, also place $325 million into the new company, while they could get $250 million again if their projections on future earnings hold.

A rough yr

Judging by optics by yourself, the initially yr less than the new possession has been as tough as 1 could visualize.

Zuffa LLC has sold UFC for nearly $4 billion to a team led by talent giant WME-IMG, with the official announcement of the sale made Monday morning.

After the current sale, many within just the UFC had the very same dilemma: “What does this signify for me?” Brett Okamoto polled a amount of fighters and administrators for their take on what is following.

one Associated

A women’s division anchored by Ronda Rousey, which pushed UFC much more into the mainstream than it had ever been, has become largely irrelevant outside the hard-core enthusiast base.

Of the thirteen major UFC cards of the new possession, at minimum nine of those situations have had fights canceled or postponed. Fighters withdrew normally at the pretty past moment, generally from diseases and accidents, from time to time as a final result of cutting body weight as well dramatically.

That isn’t going to consist of a significantly less-than-marketable Stipe Miocic as a heavyweight champ and a paper champ in mild heavyweight title holder Daniel Cormier, who had to wait around a yr for his archrival Jon Jones‘ drug suspension to conclude.

“We had just the yr we considered we would have, centered on when persons fought,” White said. “Cormier-Jones is on a ridiculous card for 214, as well as we have Conor [McGregor] and Floyd [Mayweather].”

Conor McGregor has been the UFC’s major hard cash cow, but he has fought only 2 times in the Octagon above the earlier yr.

The undefeated Rousey, represented by new house owners WME/IMG, scored e book and movie specials and was considered of as unbeatable right after she piled up twelve straight victories, but she was vanquished by Holly Holm in surprising style at UFC 193 in November 2015.

All was not lost. 5 months right after the sale, Rousey received again in the Octagon to experience new bantamweight champ Amanda Nunes. Rousey lost in forty eight seconds.

Nunes won 2 times as champ and was scheduled to be the major event to UFC 213 on Saturday night time, but she made the decision not to compete mainly because of health and fitness complications. White informed supporters Nunes was medically cleared but effectively didn’t want to fight. The penalty? Preserving the women’s champ in its most high-profile division off future major situations.

It can be also harmless to say the UFC has been stalled in its initiatives to get new blood into the activity, inspite of all the advancement automobiles that the UFC has constructed to be certain a pipeline of talent.

“I’m used to this,” said a fired-up White. “In the early times, they would say, ‘What are you going to do when Chuck Liddell is completed? What are you going to do when Anderson Silva is completed? When GSP [Georges St-Pierre] is completed?’ I will say that there will hardly ever be yet another Ronda, but there will be new stars.”

The Conor McGregor brand name carries on to mature with his most recent endeavor in opposition to Floyd Mayweather. Michael Reaves/Getty Visuals

McGregor as a income stream

Then there is certainly McGregor, who has been the major event on four of the 7 cards in UFC heritage that have yielded much more than one million shell out-for each-check out purchases. (Rousey was the major event on two of the other 3.) McGregor avenged his loss to Nate Diaz at UFC 196 by beating Diaz at UFC 202, just 1 thirty day period right after the sale.

And there was McGregor’s overall look in UFC 205 in the organization’s initially card in New York, which broke all sorts of records for the UFC, which include a $seventeen.7 million gate, about eight instances the typical major UFC card ticket income.

But there is certainly vulnerability in McGregor, as well.

Just like when Rousey went thirteen months in concerning her earlier two fights, so as well will McGregor — if the UFC is fortunate. The advertising is hoping to get him again in the Octagon by December, but there is certainly no warranty there.

White reiterated to ESPN this week that McGregor’s contract with the UFC does not warranty he’ll fight in the activity again, and with a opportunity payday of $one hundred million or much more on the horizon for his Aug. 26 boxing match in opposition to Floyd Mayweather, the UFC income he can make pales in comparison.

“I labored for years with persons in this article, who cherished what they did, and they made a bunch of income [in the sale] and still left,” White said. “There is certainly hardly ever any warranty that when you make that a great deal income you may ever return.”

Though McGregor’s extended absence from the Octagon is a blow, the UFC is at minimum monetarily safeguarded.

Its most profitable event this yr will be the bout concerning McGregor and Mayweather, with sources indicating the UFC house owners could net much more than $forty million from what McGregor has to shell out the firm as component of his contractual obligation.

Content investors

Irrespective of the obvious struggles, there are not many problems staying voiced publicly.

As a private company, how the UFC is accomplishing monetarily is unidentified, while WME-IMG co-president Mark Shapiro did inform ESPN that the UFC “will hit the projections forecasted in our acquisition program and will possible exceed them, given the options in our attain across traces of businesses.” Shapiro’s remarks ended up confirmed by UFC main running officer Lawrence Epstein.

Those projections have hardly ever been publicly disclosed.

As component of the sale agreement, the UFC, which yielded $a hundred and seventy million in net earnings from June 2015 to June 2016, would have to generate $275 million in the adhering to yr (June 2016 to June 2017) to set off a $175 million bonus payment to the former house owners, which include the Fertittas and White. Neither Shapiro nor White would comment on regardless of whether the bonus was induced.

Though the UFC above the earlier yr has completed reasonably well in advertising tickets to situations — which include web hosting massive crowds in Cleveland, New York, Toronto and Las Vegas for UFC 203, 205, 206 and 207, respectively — details received by ESPN reveals that the reside event enterprise can make up significantly less than 14 percent of its income.

More significant is the shell out-for each-check out income, which has commonly been all over 35 percent of annual income in current years, in accordance to paperwork received by ESPN.

Though not publicly introduced by the UFC, estimates made by those who protect the activity advise that the earlier twelve fights less than the old possession (UFC 189 to 200) averaged about one hundred,000 much more purchases for each card than the initially twelve fights less than the new possession (UFC 201 to 212).

A UFC official disputes that estimate but would not offer any even more perception on shell out-for each-check out numbers or UFC Struggle Move subscriptions or offer any particular details supporting the expansion of the enterprise.

The most significant chunk of the UFC’s total income, unquestionably by the time 2019 rolls all over, will be the new U.S. media rights.

Though it truly is as well early to have an understanding of how those negotiations will go, Shapiro did reveal to ESPN that new intercontinental tv specials struck in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America came at boosts of much more than 200 percent, which is not a shock, given WME/IMG’s strength in negotiating and generating tv specials.

“We labored with the UFC for years and are assured in our investment decision,” Shapiro said. “This home, on its personal, is not like any other, and now it is staying supercharged by our global network.”

ESPN has received, having said that, projections shown in a document dispersed by MSD Funds, which shortly right after the sale sought to offer some of its danger in the investment decision, as it had constantly prepared as component of a common financing move.

Those projections instructed that total income would mature by a sturdy $354 million from 2016 to 2019, the initially yr of a new U.S. media rights deal. The UFC’s benefit by that yr, centered on multiples (a comparison of a company’s benefit to its income) arrived at in the sports activities marketplace, could be worthy of $7.8 billion, paperwork indicated.

The U.S. central banking method, the Federal Reserve, was concerned adequate with the projections for the UFC’s future that in the slide, it sent a note to Goldman Sachs, which is financing $one.8 billion in debt on the deal, in accordance to Bloomberg Information. It is not identified how, if at all, those problems ended up dealt with. Both equally the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs declined comment on the make a difference. But given Standard & Poor’s quality of B-as well as on the debt alone, it isn’t going to seem to be of dire worry.

“There are only two places for this investment decision: It will possibly be regarded as a excellent 1 or a excellent 1,” said Richard Sarnoff, controlling director of private fairness for KKR, which place $410 million into the deal.

Quantities in the MSD Funds deal document advise that, at worst, the UFC will get $280 million from the initially yr of a Television deal in 2019, up from $168 in 2018. At greatest, the deal will be worthy of $450 million in 2019.

Hitting the leading amount could possibly call for a new participant, these as Fb or Amazon, to move up and invest in component of the deal, specifically as media rights specials are staying much more closely scrutinized, mainly because of the cable tv bundling drop.

“We have the greatest entity in the planet handing those rights,” Sarnoff said. “It can be a item that has these a unique audience not only is it escalating, it truly is escalating between the young audiences that are hard to attain. There is certainly nothing at all in the marketplace to invest in, as considerably as reside rights go, above the following two years.”

The UFC’s reside event enterprise can make up significantly less than 14 percent of the UFC’s income. Rey Del Rio/Getty Visuals

The future

White has an reply for anything.

He understands the past-moment bowing out of fighters is hurting the activity. It can be why he’s not ashamed to say that the company’s new $twelve million, thirty,000-square-foot coaching middle in Las Vegas just isn’t only to serve the fighters — it also will help him help save fights. Finish with nutritionists and conditioning gurus, fighters, if they pick out, can perform with the UFC’s specialists to help them cut body weight in the most secure way possible.

To White’s credit rating, no serious party bidding for the UFC wished to take on the advertising without the need of White associated, since he’s plainly the glue that holds the pieces together. But not many outsiders envisioned him to be an even better existence than he was prior to the deal.

“When I made income in this deal, a good deal of persons considered I was going to bounce and be long gone,” White said. “I have hardly ever been busier, hardly ever been much more engaged.”

White admits that in the new deal, there is certainly much more amount crunchers all over than ever prior to, but he likes to guess on himself and could not be much more very pleased of what he has constructed. He states that in his personal unique way:

“All people who doubts us, we will shove it up their a–.”

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Enduring Voices: The Legacy of Nat Hentoff

There have been dozens of obituaries for Nat Hentoff over the past week. He was memorialized in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and anywhere else a person could hope to be, with obituaries detailing his intellectual prowess and expertise on a myriad of subjects. Despite the plethora of responses to his passing, I cannot help but wonder how he is going to be remembered, and indeed if he is going to be remembered in the long run. Hentoff was a producer, not a star, nor even the type of director who gave himself an occasional cameo. History is not much good for remembering producers, despite the fact that no shows go on without them. Hentoff wrote himself out of many of his works and used a light touch in his interviews in order to focus entirely on the people he interviewed: their stories, their lives, their voices. This is what makes those pieces so rich. It’s why his subjects trusted him. He was a good listener. One of the best, it seems.

I dwelled on the “elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies” in the Times obituary: “the legendary jazz writer and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies of the Constitution died on Saturday [at age 91] at his home in Manhattan … surrounded by his family members and listening to Billie Holiday.”

Hentoff worked at the Village Voice for fifty years, alongside a handful of agile writers populating their independent America with flair, teeth, and supple sentences. For my cohorts and me, they changed journalism.

Hentoff’s art was to highlight the art of others and he was so successful that he is in danger of being left out of the stories he stepped aside to make room for.

Any way you want to look at it he was prolific. There are many strands of Nat Hentoff, which, in both scope and depth, are hard to wrap your head around.

Known for books such as Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (with Nate Shapiro) and The Jazz Life, his big themes (section titles of The Nat Hentoff Reader, 2001) include the condition of liberty, the passion of creation, the persistence of race, and the beast of politics. His lesser-known books are as rich and illuminating as his best known. These include Peace Agitator: The Story of A.J. Muste; a spirited and heterodox biography of Cardinal O’Connor, to whom Hentoff warmly referred as “my friend the Cardinal”; and (a personal favorite) his understated, rough-cut Young Adult novel Jazz Country, billed on the dust jacket as, “the story of a white teen-ager’s struggle to make it in the black man’s world of jazz.”

My own hope is that some day there will be a well-selected collection of Hentoff’s music writing, that will stand side by side with such classics as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, a fellow writer and traveler who chronicled his own towering century.

For those less familiar with Hentoff, he may be one of the best-known Zelig figures that you’ve never heard of. Witness Hentoff taking the stand in Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial, and placing himself in the line of fire, as William F. Buckley berated the specter of Black Power on his TV program Firing Line. As Camera 2 turned to Hentoff in the latter, he matter-of-factly explained that the truth of Black Power is that it did “not exist as yet,” which is why black people and groups such as the Black Panthers were organizing under its banner. Aboard Bob Dylan’s bus for the Rolling Thunder Revue tour with Joan Baez, listening to Allen Ginsberg holding forth; on the go again on a chilly night in April 1955, backstage among the 40-plus musicians at Charlie Parker’s memorial concert at Carnegie Hall, which Hentoff co-produced and to which he contributed program copy; or in the studio with Cecil Taylor and Abbey Lincoln producing the album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.

Though I did not always share his opinions and positions, I respected, even lionized Hentoff. He had an unabashed sense of rabidity about what he was here to do, and how to keep on doing it. I was not alone. David Lewis asked the poet Amiri Baraka what Nat Hentoff’s reputation was among jazz musicians. Baraka shook his head and laughed, “I don’t know, what’s the reputation of the Bible in Church?”

From the age of 15, as a muckraker for the mimeographed Boston City Reporter, where he wrote about anti-Semitism, to articles drafted the past few months (see his June 2016 article “Trump’s Dangerous War on Press Freedom,” as timely as it is distressing), Hentoff never stopped.

Some of the Hentoff tributes over the past week focus on his political writings, others on his jazz criticism. He himself understood that his articles, books, and producing were interconnected. Both politics and American creative music are share the clear-eyed goal that the fight for freedom never ends. For writers and musicians like myself, certain of his most powerful books are emancipations.

How did Nat Hentoff become Nat Hentoff? In his memoir Boston Boy, one exchange becomes a central trope of his identity: I was twenty, sitting at the bar in a struggling Boston jazz club, alongside Duke Ellington’s longtime tenor saxophonist — the large, often volatile, Ben Webster.… Ben had just finished a set with an earnest but stolid local rhythm section, and he had lifted them, as if in a huge fist, into a groove that at least approximated swinging. “You see,” Ben said, triumphant: “If the rhythm section ain’t making it, go for yourself.”

That principle of Ben’s music and his life, which were the same, has stayed with me. If I’m to have a headstone, I’d like that to be on it.

In Jazz Country, another elder black musician explains to the young white protagonist that you don’t have to play jazz to swing, you can “swing in other ways.” And that was Nat’s own story of how he translated he values of music and the Jazz life into his own writing and worldview. It is more than an honorific gesture that he was the first nonmusician to be recognized as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.

He said one of his favorite Ellington songs was “What Am I Here For?” It always struck me as a strange choice. I like a few versions of the song, but never felt moved by it. Still, I’d give it a close listen, trying to hear what Nat heard it in. As it turned out, the song held a private meaning for him. His autobiography Boston Boy provides a clue.

At age 15, he still didn’t know what he was here for, but he began to find out when he was recruited “as apprentice journalists for a muckraking newspaper — actually a four-page mimeographed sheet — the Boston City Reporter.” He reflected, “The only payment was that for me, it put a personal pulse, a rhythm, to Duke Ellington’s song.”

Hentoff took the song and question to heart. He knew enough to know that the question has no one answer, but that, in any case, the lived life is its expression.

For Hentoff listening was as essential as food, clothing, and shelter. It was basic need, and yet listening and “being there” were starting points; you then had to “make it” in the moment. This meant allowing conversations to go in unexpected directions. More than once Hentoff quotes cornet player Bix Beiderbecke, who learned to play by ear, obsessively listening to records: “That’s one thing I like about jazz, kid. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?”

Strange as it may sound for a writer of his accomplishments, Hentoff believed that his most lasting achievement would not be one of his books, but in fact a television program that he helped produce one Sunday afternoon in 1957.

CBS asked Hentoff and Whitney Balliett to create a jazz program for the network. They selected the musicians and worked with them on the numbers to be played. The line-up included Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, Gerry Mulligan, Mal Waldren, Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, Vic Dickenson, Doc Cheatham, Danny Barker.

The show, The Sounds of Jazz, exemplified Hentoff’s light touch. The bare studio would be the stage. Against protocol, the cameramen were told “not to worry about being caught in someone else’s shot.” According to Hentoff, in his introduction to Listen to the Stories: Nat Hentoff on Jazz and Country Music (1995), permission was given for the cameramen to use their judgment on any “particularly arresting shots” and “not wait for the control room” for directions.

A seemingly minor detail, Hentoff relates that the musicians were “told to dress as they would for a rehearsal,” which meant that Holiday would not wear a dress and “most of the musicians wore their hats.” The details of the set up reveal Hentoff’s process in action. You can see the musicians sharing stories in their own private language in a small intimate setting.

The session’s moment of truth is Lester Young’s one course solo on “Fine and Mellow,” sung by Billie Holiday. Hentoff’s telling of it gives me the chills:

When The Sounds of Jazz was on the air, we in the control room were moving in time to the music until something happened that nobody had anticipated. It was an epiphany, a wordless remembrance of things past between Lester Young (“Prez” she [Holiday] had nicknamed him long ago) and Billie Holiday (“Lady Day” had been his name for her).

They had once been very close, but for reasons unknown they had grown far apart. During the week before airtime they had avoided each other. And Lester Young, sick and weak, had to be replaced [on an earlier part of the show] on the big-band numbers. All he had left was Billie’s number. I told him before the show started that he didn’t have to stand up for his solo; he could stay seated.

Billie was seated on a stool … She began to sing. In the control room we leaned forward. The song “Fine and Mellow” was one of the few blues in her repertory. She sang about trouble long in mind, with some kicks along the way. Her sound was tart, tender, knowing. And she was sinuously swinging.

It was time for Prez. He stood up and played the sparest, purest blues chorus I have ever heard. Nodding, smiling, Billie was inside the music. Her eyes met his. It was as if they were in another, familiar place, a very private place. I felt a tear, and so did [CBS producer Robert] Herridge.

As I dwell on Hentoff’s life and work I keep thinking how much poorer the history of jazz would be without him. I think about his liner notes for John Coltrane’s Giant Steps or his exceptional “Dizzy in the Sunlight” portraits of Dizzy Gillespie — more essays than I can name here. Hentoff wrote in such a way that we felt we were hearing something for ourselves when we were in fact hearing it through Nat’s scrupulous ear.

As Hentoff developed as a writer his questions became deeper about the person and deeper still about the bigger picture of one’s own life.

He was an early commentator on the cultural and racial politics of jazz, critiquing the white culture of jazz critics and even DownBeat magazine while he worked there. According to scholar Nichole Rustin he “was perhaps the most articulate white critic on the subject of race and its attendant discourses of power, agency, and class within jazz culture and on the national scene. Black musicians felt that they could trust Hentoff because of his deep knowledge about jazz history and its practitioners, and his respect for their ideas.”

If Hentoff is the voice of jazz writing, as he has been called, it is because he always allowed the voices of the musicians to take the lead. A typical Hentoff piece seems to tell you everything you need to know: a note or two from Nat, a quote or two from the musician, and then you’re off, on your own to immediately search for the music.

Here are the lead paragraphs for Hentoff’s “Every Night, I Begin Again.”

In the Ellington sense, Hank Jones is serenely beyond category. If I owned a nightclub, I’d give Jones a lifetime contract. Unlike some musicians who memorize attractive “licks,” as they used to be called, Jones is a true improviser. He is “the sound of surprise,” to use Whitney Balliett’s phrase for jazz as it ought to be.

Furthermore, Jones is a melodist, a lyrical storyteller. “In a way,” he [Jones] told me recently, “I have a singing approach to the piano. I play very long lines that connect with each other to tell a musical story. The sentences become paragraphs, and as for the colors — well, the harmonies are what the lines are built on.”

In many ways Hentoff’s significance has been acknowledged, and in others it has not been. Hentoff’s 1957 review of Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners and his startling interview “Just Call Him Thelonious,” both provided a much needed window into Monk as a person, musician, and composer at a critical moment in Monk’s life and career.

A favorite line from Hentoff’s introduction to his interview with Monk, is “When he has something to say, he says it in his music.” Indeed, Hentoff’s critical evaluation of the pianist proved decisive.

I do not wish to overstate Hentoff’s significance, or the role he played in such critical receptions, yet it would be wrong to understate them too. It’s a hedge for other writers or historians whom might just wish to rush directly to the gold of the quotes and miss the alchemist in the shadows of such brilliant corners.

In high school my best friend’s father, who was an encyclopedia of American music, told me that when he first heard Monk he thought he was playing chopsticks. Later I came to admire his honesty about how he heard Monk. We want to believe that we can see and hear the most vital art and its contours, mysteries, and wily beauty, but more often than not trusted guides are needed.

In the end, so many of the people whom Hentoff interviewed said things to him that they either couldn’t or wouldn’t say to anyone else. This is the power of listening, but these conversations grew out of real relationships and mutual trust. And so it is, his interviews, conversations, and many books, starting with Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz by the Men Who Made It, are a cultural treasure and inheritance. Hentoff never needed or wanted to be center stage, and that may have been the right-sized understanding of the role of a critic, and especially a white critic, in the jazz world. For me, Hentoff stands as one of the greatest sidemen in the history of jazz.

The post Enduring Voices: The Legacy of Nat Hentoff appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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