Interlude: Support the Artists

When travelling through music blogs, one of the most often heard statement is: "Support the artists". Everyone of you knows how she/he can do this, yet I have a few little recommendations here:

A) Support Plushmusic!


"Plushmusic is a new company founded by the cellist Adrian Brendel and saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, in partnership with the technology entrepreneur Stephen Jelley. It is run almost exclusively by professional musicians. Its executive producer is former Radio 3 producer Lyndon Jones. The site is produced by Matt Jolly and edited by Simon Ings."
Plushmusic has recently organized a plushmusic festival - I found a few little snippets of it on Hayden Chisholm's blog website www.softspeakers.com, for example "Peninsula". They feature classical, jazz and world music, separately as well as interwoven, on the festival and on the Plushmusic website. You can watch a lot of wonderful live videos on www.plushmusic.tv and then... support the artists by buying video or audio downloads in high quality (i.e. flac). However, all this would probably only work, if you haven't disabled your browser's flash functions ;-)
As a starting point I highly recommend the short documentary on Simon Nabatov.


B) Support D.D. Jackson!

Sometime in mid-2007 the pianist D.D. Jackson left some message on Bumkun Cha's Pathway to Unknown Worlds. I took the hint and listened to all of Jackson's 22 podcasts. He's been a very talkative man (I can't tell if he still is, because he's not posted any new podcasts for a long time) and heavily advertised his own work, but also provided interesting thoughts and insights not only on jazz, but also on the current status of the music business.
From his website you'll quite a few of free content, just like in the case of plushmusic. You can watch him play with his hands looking like putty and producing wonderful sounds, you can download some live samples.
So and how to support Mr. Jackson? He's got his albums offered for downloading at Artistshare. An album costs between 10 and 14 US dollars, depending on the bitrate you choose. The clou is: If you pay for these downloads, you'll get a lot of extra materials, not available anywhere else, for example artist interviews, videos of the recordings session, and - the most interesting feature - sheet music of some of the pieces.
Jackson's playing is very eclectic: He's well aware of the whole history of jazz piano playing and incorporates it all into his own music. I personally prefer his rather wild, free, freak-out moments - his ballad playing is often a little bit toooo sweet. Besides the newer albums offered at his artistshare side you should also try his first album Peace-Song with David Murray and Jackson showing off their wonderful interplay: They're a perfect match.


C) Support David Binney!

If you don't have the chance to see David Binney play live, there's a way to compensate: He's often recording his gigs and offering them for download from his website at moderate prices. Right now his new CD is out, which you also get directly from there.