Community Blog Posts
A Word About Social Media and Other Platforms
By Michael Ricci
September 12, 2026
199 views
Thanks to everyone who participated in our recent Bluesky survey. Your responses were helpful, and they lead naturally to another question we're asking this week. Over the years, we've taken a different approach to social media than many publishers. It's not that we don't see its value. Social media works especially well when the person is the destination--a musician, writer or other personality whose followers want to hear directly from them. All About Jazz is ...
read moreGuitars In Oxford
By Martin McFie
September 11, 2026
42 views
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has a fine collection of early guitars, including one which was made by the most famous luthier ever known, Antonio Stradivari. He is renowned for violins and 'celli but he made some guitars. The Stradivarius is the tallest guitar in the showcase and has eighteen frets, although some may have been retrofitted. The museum also houses the Messiah Stradivarius violin. Inlaid on the reverse of the guitar's head is “Ant Stradivarius Cremonen 1688," ...
read moreChopin In Warsaw
By Martin McFie
September 9, 2026
95 views
Afternoon tea at Raffles in Warsaw is always a pleasure, but a visit to Poland's capital is not complete without some music by Fryderyk Chopin. Staying close to the river, next to the Fryderyk Chopin Music Academy, it is a hard climb through a park to get to the main square in the Old Town. Crossing the street, dodging cars and trams, there is an old wooden elevator staircase for the last steep part of the climb. It ...
read moreBossa Nova Discovered
By Martin McFie
September 4, 2026
110 views
In Lima, Peru, the Huaca Pucllana pyramid is made of clay and adobe, the size of cinder blocks on end. A message came from Rio de Janeiro, an invitation to fly there and spend New Year with a dear friend who had recently managed the Equestrian Events at the Brazilian Olympic Games. The mystery of how clay pyramids could coexist with the Amazon rainforest in Peru was solved by checking the annual rainfall in Lima, which is the ...
read moreThe Jazz Scroll Is Taking Shape
By Michael Ricci
September 3, 2026
283 views
Years ago, we built what is now called The Jazz Scroll as a proof of concept--a place where we could experiment with a new way to discover and experience jazz on All About Jazz. It's gone through a handful of name changes and iterations since then, but this year we committed to completing the project and transforming it into our flagship app. Our current All About Jazz app, though perfectly functional, is essentially the website presented as ...
read moreLou Marini: 80 is the new 50; Cassandra Wilson, Charlie Haden, Elias Haslanger and Percy France; A Poll & A Survey; Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition (update); and more
By Michael Ricci
September 3, 2026
69 views
This week we have a new installment from John Ephland's Reanimating Conversations Past series, resurfacing a Charlie Haden interview from 1991 (see below). We also have an early newsletter-exclusive peek at part 4 of The Mystery of Artie Shaw: “Art Goes Artie." Author Alan Bryson is back, too, with a new time-traveling alternate-reality story that brings musicians from the future face-to-face with The Beatles at a pivotal moment in their history. The Jazz Scroll Is Taking Shape ...
read moreThe Mystery of Artie Shaw; Jazz Talk on Bluesky; More Website Improvements; Miles at 100, Continued, and much more
By Michael Ricci
August 27, 2026
111 views
It seems that with each passing week we have something new to share on All About Jazz. This week, it's our new shopping cart / storefront, which makes purchasing our services easier and will make the fund drive donation process a breeze. It's not exactly headline news, but it is worth mentioning as it's a vast improvement and will soon allow us to phase out some legacy technology. New One Question Survey Our latest survey is just one ...
read moreThe Mystery of Artie Shaw... returns!
By Michael Ricci
August 20, 2026
1,719 views
Artie Shaw was an enigma. A self-taught, brilliant clarinetist blessed with movie-star good looks, he became one of the defining musicians of the Big Band era. Yet at the height of his fame, he walked away from the music business, leaving behind a legacy as fascinating as it was influential. In the early 1990s, Ted Hallock--a passionate jazz scholar and former Oregon State Senator--spent a week with Shaw, then in his early 80s, recording an extraordinary series ...
read moreIf You Build It...; New York's Hottest New Club; John Coltrane and Santana, Zela Margossian, plus Goldings, Bernstein & Stewart, and More
By Michael Ricci
August 20, 2026
129 views
Last week we featured an article about All About Jazz entitled “Thirty Years Later, the Vision Remains," and if you missed it, you can read it here. This week, yours truly is the latest subject of B.D. Lenz's column, Chats with Cats. We cover a lot of ground, and I shared some stories about AAJ's history that make for a fun read. It was also a good opportunity to reflect on our past three decades and chat about what's to ...
read moreThirty Years Later, the Vision Remains; plus Dorota Piotrowska, Art Pepper, Adele Sebastian, Jimi Hendrix; Jazz Fiction and More
By Michael Ricci
August 13, 2026
90 views
Looks like we hit it out of the park with Musician Orbit, as responses ranged from “very cool" to “f***ing incredible!" And we're just getting started with a feature that will help shape how readers discover and engage with All About Jazz. There's still more work to do, from making Musician Orbit accessible throughout the site to helping musicians establish their own orbits. We should have detailed instructions for you next week. It seems like just yesterday that ...
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