Web Watch
By Bill Piekarski -- Library Journal, 11/01/2000
CLICKING ON THE WEB... The web's multimedia capabilities offer great potential for communicating the experience, technique, and history of music. Photographic portraits of musicians can illuminate text biographies while audio excerpts play in the background. Even as the web's still-primitive video capabilities are beginning to blossom,
users can watch song snippets, music videos, or even entire concerts.
Jazz and blues, America's two indigenous musical idioms, have traditionally commanded a somewhat smaller but much more passionate contingent of devotees than other popular music genres. While Internet coverage of each genre cannot yet match such excellent print resources as Leland Rucker's Musichound Blues: The Essential Album Guide (Music Sales Ltd., 1997) and Nancy Ann Lee's immense Musichound Jazz: The Essential Album Guide (Music Sales Ltd., 1998), each of which comes with a CD of well-chosen songs, jazz and blues sites are steadily improving.
SONICNET
www.sonicnet.com
Date Visited: 10/02/00
Developer/Provider: SonicNet
SonicNet offers a rich, if sometimes obscure, multimedia approach. The start page displays a selection of musical genres, among them jazz and blues folk. Clicking on any category reveals a palette of approaches: the lead paragraph of a feature story (with photo), headlines of three or four news items, a sample list of available audio downloads, a hyperlist of 'top five searched artists,' album reviews, video, and more. Each menu item leads to more.
However, the real treasure chest for those seeking a jazz or blues education can be found on the upper right of the category pages: a box listing 'subgenres.' SonicNet groups the hundreds of primary artists profiled into four blues and ten jazz subgenres: traditional blues, contemporary blues, country blues, and urban blues; early jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, contemporary, fusion, smooth jazz, Latin jazz, and avant garde. Clicking on each of the subgenres launches a comprehensive hyperlist of representative artists (though not an introductory essay).
These lists are strikingly comprehensive, and musicians who have figured prominently in multiple styles (such as Herbie Hancock) are listed under each. Each of these hundreds of artist pages includes a knowledgeable biography (many from Muze and the All-Music Guide, the latter of which produces valuable print guides), links to artist-related news items, signed album reviews, and links to artist-related web sites where available. The Audio Clips link in the left menu of the artist page triggers a list of key albums by each artist, arranged in reverse chronological order, with RealAudio samples.
The Bottom Line: Because of the tight, consistent organization and the sheer number of artists covered, SonicNet is the best overall multimedia web introduction to both jazz and blues.
JAZZ FAMILY TREE
Date Visited: 10/02/00
Developer/Provider: Jazz Family Tree
While the interface and structure of Jazz Family Tree seem initially arcane, the site remains the premier online source of textual jazz history. The Java Jazz Tree appears in the upper left as simulated manila file folder tabs. For those clicking vertically on the tree, the file folders are not keyed to musical instruments; the tabs for various Styles link to essays, artists, and biographies.
If you click the right and left arrows-rather than scroll down through genres-the folder tabs flip: acoustic bass, electric bass, clarinet, and so on. Each folder displays subcategories, which in turn reveal lists of artists. Clicking on the individual artist name will take you to either the artist's web site, a site created by a fan, or an artist profile from the same sources as SonicNet (the All-Music Guide and Muze). Each such artist profile includes a photo, a signed biography, and a discography.
Unlike in the biographies in SonicNet, here the names of other musicians mentioned in context are in turn hyperlinked to their own profiles. Each album title is linked to an individual album description. Clicking on each song title displays a list of albums featuring that same song, whether recorded by that jazz artist or others. However, there's no easy way to navigate back to the start, and the site sometimes loads slowly and freezes.
The Bottom Line: The exhaustive discographies and linked biographies make Jazz Family Tree the strongest web source of textual information. However, it can be balky to use.
THE BLUE HIGHWAY
Date Visited: 10/03/00
Developer/Provider: Curtis Hewston
The work of a blues enthusiast, The Blue Highway's start page presents, toward the bottom of the screen, a panel of buttons, including The Blue Highway, The Blues Board, and Muddy's Cabin. The Blue Highway reveals profiles of 20 blues giants. Each profile consists of a brief summary of their career, a photograph, and an audio sample of representative works, but only in .wav format. (The RealAudio offerings are inactive.)
The RealAudio button links to RealAudio blues concerts (both live and archived) and a list of RealAudio netcast links. It also reprises what's on the Links page (the Links button is missing from the menu on some pages): exhaustive alphabetical lists of blues artists, with each name linked to either a personal web site, a record label's page, or a fan site. There are also links to record labels, blues festivals, and blues societies.
The Bluescasts button leads to a thorough, current listing of blues radio shows arranged by and within state (and netcasts, as well). Blues News leads to a list of awards and top CDs. Gutbucket holds miscellaneous items, like a RealAudio interview with guitarist/singer Luther Allison. The site also has a message board, and chat room.
The Bottom Line: Though the material it links to varies, The Blue Highway is the best gateway to blues on the web, including artists, concerts, and links to all manner of related sites.
WNUR-FM JAZZ WEB
Date Visited: 10/02/00
Developer/Provider: WNUR-FM
Created and maintained by Northwestern University's campus radio station, the WNUR-FM Jazz Web provides an advertising-free set of links to styles of jazz, artists, performance, jazz instruments, media, jazz art, and more.
The Jazz Styles section's front page is triggered from a hypermap of the stylistic and chronological flow of jazz derived from Joachim Berendt's renowned The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond (Lawrence Hill, 1992). Click on the flowchart's 'fusion' element, for example, and find a succinct, comprehensive overview of that jazz style, along with a list of its major figures, complete with hyperlinks to their personal (or otherwise relevant) web sites. A great concept, and nice where it works, but some links are empty, and many pages haven't been updated in years.
Still, the list of single artist hyperlinks is extensive, covering jazz artists from Muhal Richard Abrams to John Zorn, as is the list of over 100 jazz labels. The Jazz Art section offers links, not only to several excellent galleries of jazz portraiture but to jazz literature sites as well.
The Bottom Line: Despite its lack of recent updates, WNUR-FM Jazz Web offers a fast-loading introduction to the world of jazz, especially useful to beginners.
- Alternate Sites
- The Blue Flame Café
- The Individual Artist Sites
- Red Hot Jazz Archive
- The Blue Flame Café is a nicely organized and illustrated biographical encyclopedia presenting almost 100 highly regarded bluesmen and blueswomen. Most of the entries include a ten-second RealAudio sample of the artist's work. They also provide some links. Arranged alphabetically by name, The Individual Artist Sites includes 144 prominent jazz artists. Each link connects the user to several recommended web sites focused on that particular musician. While the list of artists is not as extensive as that available at Jazz Family Tree, it includes more links to streaming audio, video, and interviews. The Red Hot Jazz Archive is chock-full of excellent materials on early jazz (1895-1929), including essays and information about bands, individual musicians, and even films.
- Blues Access
- DownBeat; www.downbeat.com
- Jazz Review; www.jazzreview.com
- These online magazines could surpass their print equivalents by offering audio and video, but they fall short. Blues Access provides only selected articles from the current issue but does offer a long list of uncategorized links and an Internet radio station. DownBeat makes available digital downloads of complete songs by selected artists in MP3 format. Biographies of hundreds of prominent jazzmen and jazzwomen are available from an alphabetical list (though not via subgenre), along with a discography and a high-quality photo gallery. Jazz Review contains a large archive of reviews, mainly of contemporary jazz. Each of these sites offers both a back issue archive, with selected full-text articles.
- Electric Blues
- House of Blues; www.hob.com
- Electric Blues contains hundreds of contributed CD reviews (mostly of newer releases) and good links, but it's primarily valuable for its Blues Netcasting page (via Hot Links), which offers a shorter list of bluescentric netcasts than The Blue Highway, but includes annotations. While House of Blues is not strictly blues, the more than 200 archived full-length concerts (recorded at various Houses of Blues across the country) include contemporary blues stars such as Duke Robillard and Keb Mo. Under Editorial, there's Six Degrees of the Blues and Artist Bios for biographies. Netradio.com offers Learn About Blues and Learn About Jazz, each of which branches off into analyses of several subgenres, with well-chosen streaming-audio albums. The analyses are informative and well formatted, with a liberal sprinkling of biographical links. Users must click on the album cover (Buy Now!) to hear song samples.
- About.com Jazz 'How To' Index
- Country Blues and Blues Harp
- Harry's Blues and Lyrics Online
- Mark Sabatella's Jazz Improvisation Primer; www.outsideshore.com/primer
- Midnite Sun
- While occasionally tongue-in-cheek, the About.com Jazz 'How To' Index includes some serious and useful lists of tips, e.g., How To Transcribe a Jazz Solo and How To Determine a Song's Key. Glenn Weiser's Country Blues and Blues Harp provides illustrated biographies of 13 blues harp (harmonica) titans. Detailed transcriptions of six key blues harp classics are available as well. Harry's Blues and Lyrics Online delivers the lyrics to over 3000 blues songs-over half of which are accompanied by 30-second RealAudio samples. While offered alphabetically (see the left-side menu), they're also sorted by artist, title, and topic. The site also provides links to the tabs and chords for over 1000 blues songs. Mark Sabatella's Jazz Improvisation Primer covers all the fundamentals: scales, chords, improvising, bass lines, etc. And while several sites offer chord changes, Midnite Sun gives chord progression charts for over 300 jazz standards in PDF format.
- The Blues Foundation
- Jazz Fest; www.jazzfest.com
- The Blues Foundation is the premier source of links to the web sites of regional associations and festivals. Jazz Fest.com offers a calendar of and links to dozens of jazz festivals in the United States and abroad.
