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The Big Question
How are you celebrating Jazz Appreciation Month or International Jazz Day?
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 ...
read moreIf you could make one suggestion on how to improve Jazz Near You, what would it be?
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 ...
read moreWhich jazz musicians produce consistently good music on records or in concert?
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 ...
read moreIf Coltrane emerged today, would he receive recognition and appreciation?
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 ...
read moreIn search of good jazz radio. What's your favorite station?
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 ...
read moreWhat is your preferred music listening format?
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 ...
read moreSome of the freshest and most innovative music in the current day is coming from the jazz world. Why isn't this better known?
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 ...
read moreHow Are We Doing?
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 ...
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