Jazz Online – Listen While You Work

There are a number of excellent online, or web-radio, sources of good Jazz. What better way to work, blog, email or whatever, than to have some good jazz bangin’ in your ear? get yourself a nice set of sound isolating earplugs or, even better, headphones and let the cool notes flow over you.

I have all but quit carrying around CDs of my favorite compilations, and shoving them in-and-out of the DVD drive. Why bother, when you can find all the best waiting for you in streaming broadcasts over the web? Some broadcasts feature excellent dj input, with solid background and commentary to supplement the music. Others are solid music, one track after another. It seems that you can have your internet radio any way you want it.

Everyone who reads thejazzmonger already knows I am a big fan of Kevin Kneistedt’s Groove Notes blog. His page is always worth reading and ought to be in your bookmarks. Kevin also hosts a live streaming broadcast on Jazz24. I recommend it.

Of course, the queen of all jazz broadcasters, the incomparable Marian McPartland, has been holding forth on NPR for many years. You can find her excellent show, with a collection of podcasts at Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. This incredible talent knows everybody who has ever been in the music business, every song that has ever been recorded. Her insights, stories, and love of music make every moment a delight. Down through the years, McPartland has hosted the both famous and the obscure of jazz with equal joy. And she can hit the keys and play a duet of any song, on a moment’s notice. Startling. the show is fun, and educational and not to be missed.

Jazz performer John Pizzarelli

I have written, in the past, about John Pizzarelli. I am a fan, particularly of his work keeping the Great American Songbook alive and active. I saw John and his wife, the talented Jessica Molaskey, perform live earlier this year (see original post) and was thoroughly entertained. John and Jessica produce Radio DeLuxe from their “deluxe living room.” They host guest and friends from the music business, chat, reminisce and play excellent music, introduced with the performer’s special insight.

Southern California‘s KTWV-FM radio aka 94.7 The Wave broadcasts Smooth Jazz over one of the cleanest, clearest signals on the web. you can crank this up to drown out a noisy Starbuck’s and get nothing but crystal clear notes.

My newest favorite is AccuJazz.com. This incredible site features 45 channels (at my last count. Forty-five! And they have them organized all kinds of great ways. You can go for genre (Cool, BeBop, Modern Mainstream, Fusion, Old School, New School, Latin, Avant-Garde, New Stream, you get the idea). They have channels that bracket eras (pre-1940, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s). You can go for featured instrument (trumpet, sax, guitar, piano, organ, bass, trombone, drum, vocal).  They even have a set of channels organized around regional specialties (Chicago, New Orleans, Europe, New York, Modern West Coast). Are you getting the idea that this site is a terrific resource? This is not juts an entertainment site, it is marvellously educational. Check it out and enjoy. Tell them thejazzmonger sent you!

This is far from a comprehensive sample of all the streaming jazz available on the net. These are just my current favorites. Check the most popular jazz links on Delicious.com and find your own.

To make it easy, here is a list of all the links buried within this post:

Jazz24 Live

Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz

John Pizzarelli’s Radio DeLuxe

94.7 The Wave FM

AccuJazz.com

Radio Nostalgia

Image via Wikipedia

I recently discovered a website that offers an unbelievably comprehensive catalog of Old Time Radio shows. These are available as streaming broadcasts, downloads, or on CD with multiple episodes bundled as collections in MP3 format. The Old Time Radio Catalog at http://www.otrcat.com/index.php is a huge storehouse of classics from the heydays of music, comedy and drama on the radio.

Yeah, I know that this is, ostensibly, a music blog but I am crazy about all kinds of good old stuff, and the days of lying in the floor listening to The Shadow or Fred Allen are near and dear to my old heart. This is before TV, if you you youngsters can imagine such a thing. We had a huge cabinet-style radio, about 3/4 the size of a good refrigerator. It was all tubes, had the greatest of sound and could pull in a station from 5-600 miles away if the station had enough power. When the atmosphere was right we could get WLS in Chicago; WOWO in Ft. Wayne, IN; WSM in Nashville and something out of Louisiana whose call letters I can’t remember. All this in addition to local stations within 75 miles or so of Danville, KY where I was living at the time.

We would listen to Wait Hoyt broadcast the Cincinnati Reds (or “the Redlegs” as they were still called back then). “There goes one into Burger-ville,” was Wait’s call for a home run, giving a nod to his sponsor, Burger Beer.

Gunsmoke, Dragnet and  The Lone Ranger were just a few of the radio shows that eventually migrated to TV and enjoyed great success there, too. Music, of course, was huge, along with variety shows with the likes of Edgar Bergen & Charley McCarthy, and George Burns & Gracie Allen. The Old Time Radio Catalog appears to have it all. Check out this excellent, and well-organized website.

Old Time Radio Catalog website

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