Enhancing the Music With CDs, Cyberspace

Jazz is beginning to make its presence felt in cyberspace. Web sites with jazz content are proliferating almost daily, and record companies are moving to release the first of what promises to be a wave of interactive CDs.

N2K, the online music entertainment and information company established by Larry Rosen and Dave Grusin (the founders of GRP Records), is positioning itself to become one of the major players in jazz on the Net. The first two releases from its N2K Encoded Music division, issued last week, are jazz items: “Gerry Mulligan, Legacy” and “Jazz Central Station Global Jazz Poll Winners, Vol. 1.”

Each album utilizes the enhanced CD format, which is wholly compatible with existing CD players. But the albums also include multimedia content that can be accessed on a computer via a CD-ROM drive. In the case of the Mulligan, the 10 audio tracks--drawn from recordings with Chet Baker, Gil Evans, Art Farmer and others--are supplemented with photographs and artwork from Mulligan’s private collection, full-motion video of a 1957 television appearance with Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday and others, and current interview footage with Wynton Marsalis and Farmer.

The Poll Winners album is a compilation showcasing selected winners of the Jazz Central Station Web site’s first global, online poll. Among the featured artists: Miles Davis, Christian McBride, Joshua Redman and Pat Metheny. The interactive portions of the disc include interviews with McBride, Redman and Chick Corea, biographies and a tour of the Jazz Central Station Web site.

Each disc also adds software that allows immediate access (via modem) to the Jazz Central Station Web site and a two-week free trial offer from Internet service provider Earthlink. Each disc sells for $16.98.

The division is headed by Phil Ramone, a much-praised veteran producer (Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand and others). His plans include the release of enhanced CD albums of pop, rock, blues and classical music, as well as jazz.

The new technology, he says, “will develop a bond between the artist, music and audience by creating an environment which encourages artists to build careers, not just recordings.”

Another new company, ie records, with guitarist Lee Ritenour as one of the principals, is also planning to move into cyberspace quickly. The first release--a collection of Antonio Carlos Jobim albums titled “A Twist of Jobim”--will not be in the stores until March. But the company is already planning to make CDs available that will interact directly with Web sites, drawing extensive visual and text material from the sites themselves (via modem) as the music plays on a computer’s CD-ROM drive.

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Jazz City: San Francisco continues to solidify its image as a major jazz center. On Feb. 3, the San Francisco Jazz Festival and San Francisco Performances will collaborate on a series of educational programs featuring Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The special day of jazz follows the Bay Area premiere of Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields” on Feb. 2.

The first event, “Jazz for Young People,” will present the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at the Masonic Auditorium before an audience of 2,000 students from the San Francisco Unified School District. Later in the day, Marsalis and his players will lead a discussion of “At the Root: The Origins of Jazz” with young people at the New Main Library, and they will participate in a one-hour master class workshop for music students with the orchestra. Students throughout the city have also been encouraged to submit entries for a project titled “Jazz Works” in the areas of art, oral history and research. Information: (415) 677-0331.

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Passings: Composer-arranger George Handy, who died last week at age 77, was one of the forgotten figures of jazz. Always working on the fringe, he nonetheless was an imaginative musician who managed--better than many who tried--to integrate classical composition techniques with the rhythm and spontaneity of jazz. He wrote several remarkable works, including “Dalvatore Sally” for the innovative Boyd Raeburn band in the ‘40s, and his riveting work “The Bloos,” recorded in 1946 for Norman Granz’s illuminating project, “The Jazz Scene,” was recently reissued on Verve.

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Concert of the Week: The West Coast premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ jazz oratorio “Blood on the Fields,” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Los Angeles Music Center on Thursday, is one of the major events of the year. Already highly praised in its New York premiere, the work features the Lincoln Center Orchestra with vocalists Jon Hendricks and Cassandra Wilson. Info: (213) 365-3500.

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Around Town: The Doug McDonald Nonet at the Jazz Bakery on Tuesday is a brisk, texturally entertaining ensemble. . . . Tania Maria’s energized rhythmic stylings will keep things cooking at Catalina Bar & Grill starting Tuesday. . . . Horace Tapscott brings his edgy but always fascinating piano work to the Club Brasserie on Thursday. . . .

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Free Music: The Kim Richmond/Clay Jenkins Ensemble performs at the L.A. County Museum of Art’s Friday night free jazz program tonight and Jan. 31 at 5:30 p.m. Info: (213) 857-6522. . . . On Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in Alhambra, Pedrini Music presents a free program of jazz featuring guitarist Jamie Rosenn, trombonist Alan Ferber, drummer Mark Ferber and bassist Todd Fickafoose. Information: (213) 283-1932

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On the Radio: Radio station KLON-FM (88.1) has embarked on a “Public Radio Jazz Challenge” with station WBGO in Newark, N.J. Both outlets have full-time jazz formats, with similar audience shares. In a spirited, good-natured effort to determine which is No. 1 in terms of listener support, the stations are competing to be the first to raise $500,000 in their winter pledge drives. The winner will proclaim themselves the country’s No. 1 jazz station for one year. . . . Would Mozart have been a jazz player if he had been born in 1956 instead of 1756? It would be nice to think so, and there’s no doubt that he possessed the free-spirited, spontaneously imaginative skills we now associate with jazz. So jazz fans would do well to check out the all-day celebration of the great composer’s music on his birthday, Feb. 27, on radio station KUSC-FM (91.5).