Results for "AAJ Staff"

Tommy Wolf + Fran Landesman

February 20, 2014

If many of today's jazz musicians and singers lack anything, it's curiosity. Talent they've got plenty of, but a deep interest in the past beyond what they already know about the music seems alien to their approach. Based on the CDs that cross my desk, the same two dozen standards are being recorded endlessly—At Last, Autumn ...

Indie Musicians on the Rewards vs. the Challenges of Building Independently

February 20, 2014

Electric Kiwi's Ross Barber recently kicked off a blog post series called #GoIndie in which he gathers insights from indie musicians. When asked about the “advantages and benefits" as well as the “challenges" of going indie, these musicians' answers covered a lot of ground but might be summed up by saying that creative freedom requires business ...

DIY Voice Acting for Musicians

February 20, 2014

By Carrington MacDuffie (@carringtonmacd), an Americana singer/songwriter who also has an extensive career in voice over. Her new album is “Only An Angel“. I came to voice acting through being a singer/songwriter. I was dealing with what they call writer’s block, when some good opportunities for making a living with spoken word presented themselves, so I ...

Documentary: Blues Evolution

February 21, 2014

Who invented the blues and when? Where did the blues come from. And how did it work its way into virtually every form of American music? These questions and others are addressed in Devil's Music, a super BBC documentary from 1979. A big thanks to Jimi Mentis in Athens for alerting. Here's the documentary in four ...

Suzanne Vega on Taking Charge of Her Own Career and Starting Her Own Label

February 21, 2014

Suzanne Vega is an industry lifer who experienced the age of major labels before the suits took over and then got dropped after they did. But she went on to start her own label to self-release her albums and remains committed to a long-term career. This week Vega released “Tales From the Realm of the Queen ...

Why Soundcloud Will Beat Other Streaming Music Services

February 21, 2014

By Dan Polaske an entrepreneur & blogger. Check out his artists interview series coming soon. Who is the current leader in the streaming service war? Not Spotify. Not Rdio. Not Deezer. Not Beats Music (just launched) The answer: YouTube! Ok so YouTube is not technically a streaming service, however more music is streamed on YouTube than ...

Jazz This Week: Christian McBride Trio, Gaslight Cabaret Festival, Joshua Abrams' Natural Information Society, and More

February 20, 2014

Has the dreadful winter of 2014 finally released its icy grip on the St. Louis area? We can only hope so, because there's a lot of interesting jazz and creative music to hear around town over the next few days. Let's go to the highlights... Tonight, bassist Christian McBride begins a four-night stand at Jazz at ...

Heinie Beau: Moviesville Jazz

February 19, 2014

He probably had the squarest name of all the Hollywood arrangers in the 1950s, but saxophonist and clarinetist Heinie Beau could write and play. He was in many of the best bands of the 1940s and became one of Hollywood's top ghost arrangers. But Beau recorded only one notable jazz album in the 1950s—Moviesville Jazz: Heinie ...

7 New CD Discoveries

February 18, 2014

This week, two rock boxes, a jazz-arranger compilation, a bluegrass beauty, one of the finest jazz albums of the year thus far, a powerful jazz pianist from Italy and a singer whose voice will remind you of Boz and Jon [portrait above by Rainer Magold] What's interesting about the Allman Brothers Band is that they've always ...

Lester Young: September 1958

February 17, 2014