12 ms·

I would love to see something like this for jazz, which has musicians constantly moving through groups and albums as musicians and composers and writers. Like

• CE02 4y ago
  I second this! Couldn't agree more. In all honesty, some of the best parts of jazz lie in its history. For example listening to Clifford Brown might make you think "huh this is neat". But understanding his relationship to gillespie, early death, etc, puts his career in a unique and fascinating frame.
  • MavisBacon 4y ago
    +1 on Clifford Brown. I think he wrote some of the most brilliant bop melodies and his death was probably one of the more tragic that music ever saw
    • lostlogin 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Brown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Brown
    • CE02 4y ago
      What aways amazes me about Brown is how much he accomplished in so little. I play trumpet, in high school was in California All State Jazz and Classical. I'm by no means a prodigy, I merely brought that up to say I know a lot of musicians. When you ask any trumpet player to name their top 5 go-to artists if they want to sit down and listen, I'd say that 95% plus would have Brown somewhere in that list. This would be true of people ranging from myself to pro studio musicians. Heck I don't know anyone who's dedicated to the instrument that cant hum along perfectly to Jordu or Joy Spring including his solos. In only 26 years of life, he has become one of the most iconic names in hard bop, a genre containing the likes of Freddie Hubbard and Horace Silver. To think he did that in 26 years, one can only imagine what he'd have done if he made it to 60+!
• mastercheif 4y ago
  Check out https://roonlabs.com https://roonlabs.com Roon uses a database-style approach to keep track of the differences between compositions vs performances + artists vs composers. It’s peerless for Jazz. It also has many of the “Apple Music Classical” features already like breaking out movements from tracks.
  • taude 4y ago
    I've heard Roon mentioned a lot, and I have BluOs and my NAD amp support it natively. I've never really bothered to look into this. But this sounds like it's time for me to explore. Weird that it took an Apple product marketing sheet for me to "get" what Roon is like then....
• dekhn 4y ago
  I use Take Five as my reference recording. The bass in the background of the drum solo is very good for evaluating reproduction quality.
• joenot443 4y ago
  Learning Take Five on alto sax when I was 15 or so was part of what solidified my love for the instrument. Such a recognizable and timeless song; it's often my go-to suggestion for people unfamiliar with jazz.
• dashwehacct 4y ago
  This too is one of my favorite songs, but in a slightly different style: https://youtu.be/rbt78buj80Q https://youtu.be/rbt78buj80Q
  • lifefeed 4y ago
    That is really nice.
  • throw0101b 4y ago
    This is the "Take Five" variant by Val Bennett, "The Russians Are Coming", used in the show Secret Life of Machines (awesome series, now freely/legally posted on YT): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMxate9gegg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMxate9gegg * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-fvwg9zy08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-fvwg9zy08 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines
• disposition2 4y ago
  Maybe it's just rose colored glasses but I want to say Rdio had support for things like this back in the early 2010s. I know it was the best music streaming service I've ever used for music discovery. I definitely recall it supporting things like music labels (i.e. Deutsche Grammophon) and want to say it got so granular that it provided the information (performers, conductors, etc) you are looking for. Alas, Rdio is no more :(
  • rubslopes 4y ago
    No current app has come near Rdio in terms of music discovery. IIRC, you could also comment on albums, which was awesome.
  • CountHackulus 4y ago
    I really miss Rdio, it really was the best music streaming service.
  • sonofhans 4y ago
    Yes, I’ll join you in pouring one out for Rdio. I listened to, and paid for, Rdio every day for years until Spotify killed it. Rdio allowed users to fulfill simple goals — find music you know and listen to it; find new music and listen to it. The paths to those goals were simple and clear. Turns out it’s hard to make money that way. Thus why, I suppose, Spotify is a cornucopia of manipulative dark patterns.
    • iakov 4y ago
      I use spotify daily to listen to my playlists and find new music regularly. I have not noticed any dark patterns, apart from search on desktop being weird sometimes. What are they?
      • BlueDingo 4y ago
        I only know of the upgrade splash screens where Dismiss is small and/or floating off of the brightly colored splash so it doesn't contrast and is harder to see. Exactly like Amazon Music.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  I think the problem with separating jazz is that its boundaries are far more porous than classical. There's virtually never a question as to whether a piece is classical or not. (Except maybe soundtrack scores which are a weird category of their own.) But jazz tends to fuse with every other genre out there. You can find an artist at every point on the spectrum between jazz and hip-hop. Another way of looking at it is, I never want classical tracks in a non-classical playlist. But I want jazz tracks mixed with non-jazz in my shuffle all the time. And just one more point -- composers matter in classical just as much as artists, hence the need for special UX. But composers mostly aren't prominent that way in jazz. There are lots of standards but most people aren't aware of who actually wrote most of them.
  • AlbertCory 4y ago
    for some composers, they are: Gershwin, Ellington, Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter. Artists do entire albums featuring them alone. And there are some who you'd really like to see in their own sequence: Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael come to mind. But generally, you're right.
  • pwinnski 4y ago
    The composers of some very early jazz standards are literally unknown, or unverifiable!
    • sammalloy 4y ago
      Or that many "jazz standards" are based on popular music that wasn’t jazz to begin with.
      • walthamstow 4y ago
        Some of them are even Disney songs
• Tiktaalik 4y ago
  When I tried out Tidal a while ago I noticed that it handled the liner notes type stuff much better than Spotify or anyone else. Very much was able to do the sort of things you're alluding to, noticing you like a drummer on a track then clicking on them and finding out what else they've done. That sort of thing can't be done on Spotify. There's a lot more potential with that sort of stuff that no one is yet doing. I'd be delighted to see an Apple Jazz app.
• thewebcount 4y ago
  I want that for pop music, too! I don't understand why Apple (and other companies) don't get that there are users who want to slice and dice music in this way for every genre. When I go looking for "No-one is to blame" by Howard Jones, I want the version from "Dream Into Action" not the crappy radio remake he did with Phil Collins on the drums. When I listen to "Leave it" by Yes, I may want to make the connection that it was produced by Trevor Horn who was also 1/2 of The Art of Noise. In fact, my friends and I used to play a game we called "6 Degrees of Bruford/Wakeman". You could find connections between just about any band and either Yes or Genesis in 6 or fewer steps.
  • 1123581321 4y ago
    One impediment is the pop industry doesn't organize it that way. Classical does, so PrimePhonic/Apple didn't have to invent a new taxonomy to make a classical service. Apple and Spotify could use their market power to make labels backfill a more complex data format for pop.
    • wintermutestwin 4y ago
      ...or, they could pay actual human beings instead of just relying on the crap data that labels provide. Although I guess that in today's world, I could just say "use AI to figure it out."
      • grumpyprole 4y ago
        > Although I guess that in today's world, I could just say "use AI to figure it out." Amazon do this and it doesn't work at all well for classical music. The album reviews are full of reviews for the same piece of music but different performances, it's not always easy to tell either. I stopped buying CDs from Amazon years ago, although primarily because they'd always arrive with cracked jewel cases.
      • 1123581321 4y ago
        I don’t see how that could work without cooperation from the labels since they, the artists and producers have the authoritative data about each track and album. Even then, going back more than a number of years accurately would be challenging.
• ocimbote 4y ago
  I'm a happy user of Qobuz, which I find to have mapped quire nicely the composer/author/musician graph, at least at the API level. You might want to check it out.
• methehack 4y ago
  Check out roon + quboz and/or tidal -- that's the audiophile route. Roon is just meta-data and presentation. Quboz/Tidal hold the content. Roon's content and interface is fantastic compared to spotify and apple music. It uses third party content (wikipedia, reviews from tivo, maybe others) seemlessly. And it elevates the use of the album art. Also, it allows for album-centric approach to viewing/organizing/listening which I vastly prefer. Roon also allows deep linking. Like every album/track has a list of the people on it and you can see everything each of them has done. Same for composers/etc. Also, from each track, you can get to all the other recordings across all artists. Using this for the last month has really pointed out to me how crap apple and spotify are for discovery/learning/investigation. Technically, this route is also superior because, as I understand it, roon tells the streamer + DAC, which may be way higher quality than the DAC in any apple device, to stream directly from TIDAL or QUBOZ. This yields higher quality because you skip the apple DAC and airplay, both of which lessen quality compared to what's possible with the other route. I'm sure the apple DACs are fine for what they are, but I'm also sure they're full of compromises. You can spend like 5K on a DAC alone. I know audiophiles can really overdo it, but I have been using this combination for a month or so now and I think it's sooo much better. Music is way more like I remember it. It was confusing to me because spotify/apple music have everything and yet I found them very frustrating to use. My instinct was right -- they're crap products compared to what's possible. Your mileage may vary.
  • meindnoch 4y ago
    >Tidal MQA crap >audiophile Pick one
  • matthewmcg 4y ago
    I use this and love it too. I've been using both the Dragonfly DAC/headphone amp (works with iPhones and iPads) as well as RooPiee on several raspberry pis with HifiBerry Digi digital output devices. Installation was very simple, and these add 24bit/192khz roon endpoint capability to my home theater systems.
  • astrange 4y ago
    > which may be way higher quality than the DAC in any apple device It's worse. The DAC in any Apple device has a higher R&D budget than the entire audiophile industry. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-apple-vs-google-usb-c-headphone-adapters.5541/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... The Google dongle measures slightly worse but is still perfectly acceptable. Anyway, if your fridge is running or your subwoofer is misplaced that affects the sound more than any audiophile equipment purchase.
• ubermonkey 4y ago
  That's an interesting idea, and a stone killer idea for jazz (imagine following the links from "Kind of Blue," where I think every player has their own discography to explore), but the utility wouldn't be limited to jazz. Having prominent album personnel as links in really ANY popular music service would be great -- very often, players or producers on album A are also on album B, and that could lead to interesting discoveries for people. I mean, this thing happens already, but only if you're motivated to read liner notes. 30+ years ago I figured out the cool atmospheric sounds I loved on THE JOSHUA TREE were probably because of U2's collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. When I realized both had albums of their own (and other artists with whom they collaborated) I had multiple new paths to explore. Lanois resonated more with me than Eno, so I followed his work, which led me to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise for genre reasons or whatever. It's also fun to pull on the producer thread sometimes. Lanois's track "The Maker", from his 1989 record ACADIE, shows up as a cover on several OTHER records he produced or otherwise influenced. Emmylou Harris included it (plus another of Lanois' songs) on her 1998 live album SPYBOY, which was the direct followup to the Lanois-helmed WRECKING BALL from the year before. Willie Nelson included it on his 1998 collaboration with Lanois, TEATRO, which is an underrated and somewhat forgotten gem in his discography. It's NOT what you'd think of when someone says "country album." (Eventually, the song became part of the Dave Matthews Band's live rep, even.) Anyway, back then, you did it by reading liner notes, but digital music makes it less likely that you'll mull over the CD booklet while listening today. The good news is that the tech exists to make those paths more obvious now.
• paradox460 4y ago
  Gets even more interesting when you look at things like b sides, alternate takes, and covers. Take 10 was a variant of Take five, released under Desmond's name.