Music service ... or disservice?

I subscribe to several music services, including Napster and eMusic, for accessing music for my listening enjoyment, for work and for teaching. All of these sites offer their helpful "picks" or recommendations, but there's a huge difference between the recommendations made by the sites.
Compare Napster's top picks to eMusic's:
Napster:
Lyla by Avishai Cohen
The Architect of Modern Bossa Nova (Antonio Carlos Jobim)
The Best of Dizzy Gillespie
Ultimate Big Band Collection: Glenn Miller
Body and Soul, by Louis Armstrong

eMusic:
Pathways, by the Dave Holland Octet
Kind of Blue, by you know who
Lush Life, by John Coltrane
Half the Perfect Word, by Madeleine Peyroux

This a list of really great and important work done half-a-century ago ... and three new releases. Making Kind of Blue
one of your picks on these sights is analagous to "phoning it in": you've obviously not heard anything new so you're falling back for the obvious.

In fairness, both sites are pushing Esperanza Spalding on the eve of her new release, which is great. Scroll down a little bit to find my opinions of Ms. Spalding.

But as wonderful as she is, she is but one of hundreds of hugely talented people recording and touring today. Most of whom are getting the short end of the stick because record companies -- and their apparent proxies, the music services -- are beholden to their back catalogs of classic recordings.

If jazz is in trouble, it's because these companies have decided the marketplace only has the capacity to grow by one or two new names each year (this year's additions are Michael Buble and Spalding). There's more money to be mined in what was recorded 50 years ago, so why bother?

It's got to be extremely difficult for musicians to get their names known and to build any kind of music sales -- it's not right to make them compete with Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

Time to move on?

I'm about to betray my generation, but I have to say I'm growing tired of the music of my youth. This is something that many of my fellow baby boomers apparently haven't felt ... yet.

While I still dearly love listening to -- and regularly do -- the music I grew up with, from the Beatles to George Benson, and Deep Purple to Return to Forever, I am forever hunting down new music to enjoy.

In recent years, I've found some recordings that I think will hold up over the years, just the way "Sgt. Pepper's" or "Kind of Blue" has, and I've mentioned them in other posts.

But I find the inability of many people to hear and fully enjoy such new music to be completely mystifying -- how can you find satisfaction in a steady diet of 50 or 60 year old music?

Dare I say it? Those recordings and musicians were great, but were not perfect. And you can be assured the last thing Miles Davis would have wanted is for his fans to stop hearing new music.

Thanks to sources like Napster, emusic and CD Baby, it's possible to consume a huge amount of new music, releases from musicians you've never heard of, from all around the globe.

Many are uninteresting or dully conceived; many are dazzling and brilliant. Are they as ground-breaking as "Giant Steps" was? No ... but how often can you listen to that and still feel it's originality?

I don't know if Ray Barretto's "Time is, time was" will be a classic, but I know I love to hear it as much as I love hearing Weather Report's "Black Market."

I don't know if critics and listeners will treasure Stefon Harris and Blackout's "Urbanus" as much as they treasure Charles Mingus' "Ah um," but I know it gives me the same pleasure as the first times I heard Mingus.

Some musicians attain greatness through ideas that flash like brilliant meteors; others are great through the brilliance of solid and steady performance. It's not always easy to tell which is which, when all we see is the brilliance, but you'll never know if you've closed your eyes.

Need proof? Check out the documentary "Jazz in the Present Tense," by directors Lars Larson, Peter J. Vogt and Michael Rivoira. It's not available widely yet, but here's a review by AllAboutJazz.com editor John Kelman that details the film's highlights.

A time machine discovered ...

I grew up listening to and loving jazz, but it was a mostly long-distance affair.
Jazz lovers in Montana can enjoy thier music, but don't have many opportunities to catch the big name acts of the day. I was able to catch some who are among my favorites -- such as Emily Remler -- but never saw giants like Miles Davis.
But today, co-worker Vic Monaco hipped me to the neatest Web site I've seen in years: Wolfgang's Vault. Holding the archives of decades of live performances on the King Biscuit Flower Hour and other sources, the site has hundreds -- if not thousands -- of live performances in free streaming downloads.
Leaning heavily towards rock and popular music, the site does hold surprises for jazzbos: rememebr Brian Auger's Oblivion Express? Enjoy a Nov. 25, 1975, performance at Winterland.
Didn't catch Weather Report live? Take your choice of the band's Sept. 2, 1973, show at the Lenox Music Inn; the Nov. 29, 1973, show at Cornell University; or a March 2, 1979, gig at the Karl Marx Theater.
For Miles fans, you can choose from seven shows -- but check this out: you can listen to and compare the early show and the late show from two dates in March 1970 at the Fillmore East!
There are also interviews, including a 38-minute George Benson interview from 1979.
Sound quality is ... well, it was the '70s ... certainly professionally made recordings and not boot-legged tapes off somebody's portable tape recorder.
It's almost like being able to go back in time and be there.

Who's setting the mood?

One of the most salient features of the best music is its ability to stike a mood, to capture a sound that reflects its time. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" encapsulates the late 1950s cool and sets such a definitive mood, just as John Coltrane's Impulse! releases hit the mark for the 60s. Can you hear George Benson's "Breezin'" without being transported to the late 1970s?
While there's a lot of terrific music recorded today, one has to wonder if anyone is really, really nailing the sounds that will become associated with this decade in such a way.
That's the first step towards becoming a classic ...
While I don't know if they've hit the right mood yet, several new releases have powerful moods that strike me as being potential classics -- though only time will tell.
Stefon Harris and Blackout's outstanding "Urbanus" has such an amazing range of sounds that I think it may be among the most memorable for a long time. Blackout's phenomenal rhythm section -- Ben Williams and Terreon Gully -- keep a groove going that is subtle but brilliant. If you can get your ears off the melodies and solos, you'll find a rich tapestry in the background.
But that's a big "if" -- Harris has combined and balanced a potent mix of the familiar and not-familiar. Several tracks lay a Vocoder-synthesized melody over the rhythm section, with Harris and others soloing, an effect that was entrancing. Sounding at once unhuman yet warm, it's a delicious treat -- especially on Stevie Wonder's "They Won't Go."
Madeleine Peyreaux's new "Bare Bones" captures a unique mood. It's a mystical brew made with blues-based stock, with all sorts of funky flavors added. The opening track -- "Instead" -- opens with a spot-on imitation of George Harrison's slinky guitar playing (that is, the sounds he favored later, not while with the Beatles). then adds Peyreaux's melancholy and smoky voice.
It's a powerful dose which may not suit everyone, but much of it was entrancing.
Check them out and let me know what you think -- what captures your ears, or sets a mood for you?