The Big Question

How do you use All About Jazz & Jazz Near You and how would you like to see them improve?

By Michael Ricci

All About Jazz--which includes Jazz Near You--is a 23-year project in the making. We improve the platform daily, grow our community, build our mailing list, and continue to balance a presentation that informs and entertains jazz fans and provides professional services to jazz professionals. Engagement and usage vary from reader to reader and member to member. We're curious to know which areas, sections, or services you value most and how you feel they can ...

Presenting Problem

By Duncan Heining

Jazz often appears to exist within its own cultural and artistic paradigm, isolated from other arts and in its own discreet musical corner. Worse still from the perspective of those who would hope to make a living from it, it often seems that more people want to play the music than listen to it or, more significantly, pay for the privilege. No one would want to suggest that jazz should try to compete with the glitz and pomp of rock ...

How are you celebrating Jazz Appreciation Month or International Jazz Day?

By Michael Ricci

Jazz Appreciation Month (April) and International Jazz Day (April 30) represent opportunities to program special events and bring together communities to draw public attention to jazz and its extraordinary heritage. Your friends at All About Jazz celebrate jazz and the musicians who make the music every day of the year. In addition to providing daily coverage and distributing jazz events across the internet, we're also organizing a house concert effort to present jazz in homes around the ...

If you could make one suggestion on how to improve Jazz Near You, what would it be?

By Michael Ricci

Jazz Near You is a free event discovery platform for concert goers and a free event distribution platform for musicians, venue owners, and presenters. Like most software, Jazz Near You continually improves: from how we aggregate event information to how we make those events available to our website readers and our mailing list and app subscribers. I've outlined our immediate plans and some recent accomplishments (below), but I'm mostly interested in your thoughts on how we ...

Which jazz musicians produce consistently good music on records or in concert?

By Michael Ricci

We all have our favorites, but I'm wondering which of your favorites rarely, if ever, disappoint you on records or in concert? For me, it seems anything Joe Locke releases or plays on, sounds great. His latest, Love is a Pendulum (Motema, 2015), already has a seat assignment on my best of 2015 list and I still occasionally dip into his older recordings like Mutual Admiration Society (Sharp Nine, 1999) and Sound Tracks (Milestone, 1997). Thanks for all ...

If Coltrane emerged today, would he receive recognition and appreciation?

By Maxim Micheliov

A while ago I had a chat with Vytautas Labutis, an influential Lithuanian saxophonist, educator and, at the time, curator of jny: Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival. He said: “The list of players with top skills is almost endless. Today we have kids who can do amazing things on their instruments, but the world is waiting for a new Coltrane." This phrase set my mind to thinking about this nearly religious aspect of contemporary jazz reality. If He arrives, how will ...

In search of good jazz radio. What's your favorite station?

By Michael Ricci

Thanks to emerging technologies, music discovery options have grown over the last decade: From streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube, to music mapping options found at Amazon, to apps, to websites like All About Jazz--they all assist us in our mission to find new music. Despite all of the music discovery possibilities, however, radio still plays an important role for many of us. Not long ago, you'd hear a new tune in your car, and if you ...

What is your preferred music listening format?

By Michael Ricci

Compact disc sales are in steady decline as most younger listeners opt for streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube. Millennials are also the driving force behind vinyl sales growth (since 2008) as 9.2 million units were sold in 2014, up 51.8% from 2013. I was a heavy vinyl collector growing up, made mixtapes, dropped cassettes and vinyl in favor of CDs in the mid 1980s, then years later reintroduced vinyl into my collection while increasing streaming through ...

Some of the freshest and most innovative music in the current day is coming from the jazz world. Why isn't this better known?

By Ted Gioia

Jazz no longer has the same degree of influence or popularity nowadays. We shouldn't be surprised to see the public's musical tastes change over the decades. New styles come and go. But I must admit that I am still shocked when I hear young listeners describe jazz as old-fashioned, or treat it like a museum piece. As someone who listens to lots of new music in all genres--I spend 2-3 hours every day listening to new releases--I feel compelled to ...

How Are We Doing?

By Michael Ricci

We made several structural improvements to All About Jazz and Jazz Near You in 2014 which opened the door to a whole host of opportunities in 2015. One in particular is the new on demand jazz event calendar feature that you can access from anywhere at either site (click the blue button lower right corner). We spent the last two decades steadily improving All About Jazz and we have lots of new features and services in store as ...

What were your favorite jazz albums in 2014?

By Michael Ricci

Why don't more jazz venues present the music more in line with how people live today, rather than how they lived 60 years ago?

By Christopher Burnett

I have pondered for more than a decade as to why most jazz venues don't present the music contemporary to the lifestyles of most people today. Some do. Progressive examples of such venues that come immediately to mind include, Shapeshifter Lab in jny: New York City and The Blue Whale in jny: Los Angeles. But, the fact is that jazz is primarily a listening experience where an audience “participates" by following the dialog that is occurring ...