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The week on disc (24)
In case you missed the last one… George Colligan, Runaway (Sunnyside) Danilo Pérez, Across the Crystal Sea (EmArcy) Roy Hargrove Quintet, Earfood (EmArcy/Groovin’ High) Rebecca Martin, The Growing Season (Sunnyside) Uri Caine Ensemble, The Othello Syndrome (Winter & Winter) Wolfert Brederode Quartet, Currents (ECM)
King Crimson at 40
One of the most short-sighted things I’ve ever done was a big vinyl purge, years ago, necessitated by moving but costing me some great mid-’70s Judas Priest, every Rush album and too much else to think about. It says something, however, that I kept all 12 of my King Crimson records. The band and I are both 40 this year.
Dismissing Georgia
Andrew Sullivan joins the smugness bandwagon on Georgia, calling the besieged country “uppity” and issuing this shameful bit of relativism: Maybe we should start complaining when as many Georgians have perished as Iraqis – and when Putin throws thousands of innocent Georgians into torture chambers. Thank god there are readers taking him to task on this: That’s a ghastly thing
Russia the aggressor
Yglesias’s take on the Russia-Georgia shooting war, which seems to lay large amounts of blame on Georgia, strikes me as fatuous. He begins with an oddly strained parallel: Perhaps a closer analogy in the present-day context would be to Cuba, like Georgia a former favorite vacation destination for the great power’s elite, a country we’ve been horribly mistreating for decades
Return to Forever PS
The show in Philly was … wow, loud. It all comes down to Chick Corea. His playing was phenomenal, across all keyboards. The harmonic subtlety of that music is thanks largely to him. There were a couple too many moments of simultaneous bass-and-guitar shredding — good for getting peoples’ fists in the air but not very deep. Yet there were also times
The week on disc (23)
In case you missed the last one… Noah Preminger, Dry Bridge Road (Nowt) Gaetano Partipilo, The Right Place (EmArcy/Universal) Larry Willis, The Offering (HighNote) Arrive, Live at Elastic (Singlespeed) Brad Mehldau Trio, Live (Nonesuch) Bill O’Connell, Triple Play (Savant)
Readers respond
In the September ’08 Jazz Times, there are two letters in response to my column on jazz and politics (pdf here). Both focus on my unsurprising and by now barely controversial endorsement of Barack Obama. The first letter is a classic: Regarding David R. Adler’s recent Solo guest column: Although most jazz devotees may reside on the left, there are