The music website Pandora.com seems almost too good to be true. Type in a song name or artist, and it will start playing music that is similar, in terms of musicological characteristics. For example, I typed in "Stella By Starlight", and selected "Chick Corea" and it started playing songs from the following albums:

Trio
Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz, Michal Miski

Past, Present & Futures
Chick Corea

Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Vol. 10 [LIVE]
Kenny Barron

I have already found Pandora.com a great way to discover new albums and music. Try Pandora.com by clicking here. It works great for jazz and popular music.  ¶ 7:07 PM

A few things to share:

As part of my fun music-sharing project I posted some more of my piano practices (click here to view).

I was fooling around on my digital piano, and suddenly a haunting choral theme came out. Here it is, as I improvised it, without any edits: Spooky Choral MP3 (click here to listen).

A while back I composed an energetic theme called "Spring Song". I have made available a quick recording of it on the piano (click here to listen).

The entire, nicely formatted lead sheet of Spring Song is available on my compositions page (click here).

I also came across a recording I made of myself practicing singing the ballad, "Here's that Rainy Day". I am really interested in learning how to sing better, and this was one of my first few attempts at singing and accompanying myself. (Click here to listen.)  ¶ 5:24 AM

Check out Andrew Rowan's review of the CD version of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz radio show, a musical interview with Shirley Horn (click here to read the review).

Grammy-award winning Shirley Horn is described as "the premiere singing pianist in jazz since Nat 'King' Cole" (Verve Records), and McPartland herself is a "legend among pianists, celebrated for her contributions to the world of jazz" (Scott Novotney).

Shirley Horn's web page at Verve Records (click here to view) has some interesting anecdotes, such as the following:

Horn discovered the allure of her singing when, at seventeen, she was playing in a local restaurant/night club. "One night close to Christmas, this older gentleman who would regularly come in for dinner came with a teddy bear as tall as I. Somehow I knew that was for me," she recalls. Indeed, the patron sent her a note saying "If you sing 'Melancholy Baby' the teddy bear is yours." "I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing," Horn says, "but I wanted that teddy bear."

Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz radio show (click here for website), aired locally and online through National Public Radio in the USA, provides a fascinating glimpse into the personalities and character of literally hundreds of top jazz musicians who have been featured and interviewed on her show over the years. Regarding this particular show, Andrew Rowan writes:

Here, we have both illuminating conversation and Shirley Horn’s musical essence: heartfelt ballad singing at crawling tempos, spot-on piano accompaniment, and deep-in-the-keys swing.

I recently listened to McPartland's Piano Jazz interview with Grammy-award winning Bruce Hornsby, another excellent CD. Bruce Hornsby and McPartland share an illuminating and casual conversation about their music and careers, and both perform some fantastic music. On first few tracks, Hornsby's vocals somehow tore right through my bubble of geeky happiness and infused me with a kind of grounded "working class" respect (especially on a version of King of the Hill that morphs into Twelve Tone Tune). He discusses his characteristic rhythmic-style piano accompaniment on his tune, Sneaking Up on Boo Radley, and also tells a personal story behind its creation, relating to his childhood.

McPartland's interview with John Medeski (of Medeski Martin & Wood) sounds like it might be an interesting listen. Mark LaMaire writes on Amazon.com:

The album, which is a recording of her show with John Medeski as guest, spotlights an aging jazz pianist (McPartland) interviewing a musician who has become known for his creative, highly inspired and technically unorthodox style of improvisation (Medeski). The two worlds collide during their conversations (the album switches track-by-track between conversation and live piano performance).

  ¶ 12:13 AM

My friend Boris told me about an interesting computer-music book, Computer Models of Musical Creativity, by David Cope. David Cope's web site (click here) describes his approach to creating a computer program that writes music in various styles. Cope explains:

My rationale for discovering such instructions was based, in part, on the concept of recombinancy. Recombinancy can be defined simply as a method for producing new music by recombining extant music into new logical successions. I describe this process in detail in my book Experiments in Musical Intelligence (1996). I argue there that recombinancy appears everywhere as a natural evolutionary and creative process. All the great books in the English language, for example, are constructed from recombinations of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Similarly, most of the great works of Western art music exist as recombinations of the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered scale and their octave equivalents. The secret lies not in the invention of new letters or notes but in the subtlety and elegance of their recombination.

  ¶ 12:21 PM

Willard Manus writes about Jazz in Cuba on the website All About Jazz (click here to read the article).Manus opens his article with:

Friends had told me to expect music everywhere I went in Havana: in the bars and clubs, coming out of doorways, windows and taxis, an outpouring of Latin polyrhythms that went on all day and night, like a soundtrack. What I hadn't expected to find, though, was the vast amount of jazz played by musicians of the highest calibre, both oldtimers and youngsters alike.

Read Article...  ¶ 5:46 AM

I was in a rather artsy mood and decided to create an online gallery of poems. However, these poems are the original work of a "poetry robot", which I created.

Given a few words to start the poem, the robot decides what to write by looking at what people have written on popular & highly ranked web pages according to Google.

The words that are chosen for the poems are not random. Quite to the contrary, when people use the Google search engine to find something, they have come to expect a somewhat "intelligent" response. The ranking algorithms that Google uses give relevant results (in part) because they try to extract meaning and value-judgments out of the huge body of pages that make up the Internet. Google's algorithms make use of the way pages on the Internet are linked together to determine which page ranks first for a particular result. By choosing words for a poem from top ranked pages on Google, I argue the robot is choosing words which Google's algorithm considers "culturally significant".

Anyways, enough discussion. Click here to view the poems!  ¶ 3:25 AM