Tuesday, November 22, 2005

jazz and blogs #3

History: #1 #2

Musicians:

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society
A composer, his thoughts and his big band's live mp3s. Check it out if you're interested in the Gil Evans/Bob Brookmeyer/Maria Schneider lineage.

Pianist Jessica Williams's The Zone
Excellent, hard-hitting stuff, especially when detailling the gender discrimination that makes making a living playing jazz even harder than it already is.

Yvinek
A French bassist who plays with a lot of interesting people and writes interesting confessions. A translation of a concise and interesting thought (translation mine): "Here's a musician [Enrico Pieranunzi] who's found his folklore. We Europeans have to imagine and take up that place hidden somewhere between the intimidating afro-American culture and that which resonates and reasons (résonne et raisonne) in our vallies. It's in this space between assimiliation and affirmation that our language is to be found, somewhere..."

Worlview
A West Coast trumpeter.

Podcasts and mp3s:

Robin Eubanks, DD Jackson, Portland Jazz Jams
Get them from the iTunes Music Store podcasts section. Check out Pere Soto on Portland Jazz Jams, a rather idiosyncratic guitarist.

Bending Corners
Monthly music podcasts.

Gunter likes french fries
Subtitled "jazz + mp3." So that tells you what you need to know.

From the armchair:

Night After Night
Not that Steve Smith, the Other Steve (Smith). Not just or even mainly about jazz, but so what.

Top Ten Sources for Jazz
I just discovered I'm a part of it... thanks! to whoever is responsible for that.

Batteur Online
Kind of a Bagatellen-like hybrid format led by the incomparable Férid Bannour and slanted towards drummers.

Jazzques
I've linked to this before? And so what if I have? And how many times will "so what" appear in this post? *

Samizdjazz
Jazz and politics. Both are well-thought out (no rants, thankfully). See his awesome dissection and reassembly of the latest round of rioting in France.

Spiced Tea & Letters
Dreams and jazz.

charpentiersancerre
I don't know if there'll be much more content, but what's there is kind of interesting.

Misc:

Echoes From Manhattan
Not even a blog, but so what? The series of videos explore the downtown Manhattan scene, with some usual suspects (Eskelin, Hollenbeck, Speed) and some less so. Yeah, the format is something of a pain, but it's worthwile.

* Five times.