TorstaiJazz - ThursdayJazz

Tänään on sitten jälleen vuorossa jazz, mutta muutakin hauskaa on tarjolla. Päivä on ollut minulle erittäin antoisa paitsi musiikin suhteen (kontrabassonsoittoakin tuli harjoiteltua), myös esiin tulleiden uusien omenasovellusten vuoksi; julkaisunsa ovat saaneet musiikkiin liittyvä Discovr Music ja näkövammaisten avuksi tarkoitettu suomalaisen Ilkka Pirttimaan toteuttama BlindSquare.

It Don't Mean A Thing

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

  Tämä 1943 filmimateriaali heittää Duke Ellingtonin orkesterin swingaikakauteen kappaleella "It Don't Mean A Thing" (Ei se mittään), yhdessä laulaja-viulisti ja trumpetisti Ray Nancen ja pasunisti "Tricky" Sam Nantonin kanssa. Kappaleen otsikko on peräisin sanonnasta, jota Ellington Bandin entinen trumpetisti Bubber Miley usein käytti.

Tästä kappaleesta tuli nopeasti Jazz standardi, ja on luultavasti ensimmäinen kappale, josta käytetään ilmaisua "swing". 

Duke Ellington Orchestra, toisin kuin monet ikätoverinsa pystyi siirtymään 1920-luvun Hot Jazzista 1930-luvun Swing-musiikkiin melko helposti.

This 1943 film footage captures the Duke Ellington Orchestra performing the swing era anthem "It Don't Mean A Thing" with the singing of violinist and trumpeter Ray Nance, and trombonist 'Tricky' Sam Nanton. The songs title was a derived from a saying often used by the Ellington Band's former trumpet player Bubber Miley.

This song would quickly become a Jazz standard and is probably the first song to use the phrase "swing" in it's title.

The Duke Ellington Orchestra, unlike many of their contemporaries, was able to make the transition from Hot Jazz of the 1920's to the Swing music of the 1930's fairly easily. 

http://www.30sjazz.com/videos/duke-ellington/it-dont-mean-a-thing-.html

  For more Duke Ellington videos, click here

 Discovr Music
Hieno sovellus, josta kaikki musiikin harrastajat ja ammattilaiset hyötyvät.Ilmaiseksi tänään torstaina ladattavissa oleva Discovr auttaa löytämään uutta ja mielenkiintoista musiikkia. Sovellukseen syötetään pitämäsi artistin nimi ja Discovr suosittelee musiikkia, josta todennäköisesti nautit myös. Kappaleita voi ennakkokuunnella, ja tarjolla on myös videoita, elämäkertatietoja ja arvioita. Discovr on julkaistu iPhonelle ja iPadille. Löydät sen Macmaan Softaoppaasta.

Evolver Review

We’re surrounded by more music than ever these days. It’s easy to get lost.

Luckily, maps exist — most recently, Discovr for iPad ($3), which displays the relationships between millions of artists in a sort of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” sort of way. Start with any band or artist, and wend your way through the world of music. We’ve seen web apps that do more or less the same thing (LivePlasma in particular springs to mind).

But with Discovr, released by Jammbox on Thursday, much of the magic happens after you double-tap an artist. This brings up a comprehensive dashboard of sorts where you can hear their songs, see their videos, read their bio, find out what the blogs are saying about them, take in their official reviews, and visit them on MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes and Amazon:

Discovr’s interface is slick and easy to grasp, though it carries a heavy payload of information. You can scroll through each section separately, swiping YouTube videos horizontally and each of the individual text sections below vertically. (Disclosure: Discovr is powered by 7Digital, YouTube, and The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm.)

Of course, an app like this wouldn’t be worth much without the ability to listen to music, because one can only take so much dancing about architecture in a single sitting. Discovr comes through in that regard by embedding YouTube videos — a solution that is better than it might sound.

YouTube is by far the most comprehensive free source of music on the planet — a fact not lost on listeners. Neilsen released a study this week finding that YouTube accounts for approximately three times as much music listening as the “legal” downloads purchased from iTunes and other music stores). And because the YouTube videos play in little windows within Discovr’s artist page, your iPad won’t have to load the videos separately in its own YouTube app, which would have been a major drag.

The Discovr app combines many things that are freely available into a supremely digestible package, which lives up to its name by introducing the user to all sorts of bands they should know, but don’t.

On one hand, $3 might be considered a lot to pay for that. On the other, we’re hard pressed to think of another music discovery tool that makes learning about and listening to bands ranging from the obscure to well-known this easy — and fun.

The world of music is simply too large and bewildering to tackle without a map, and this is a good one.

Update: New details emerged after an email conversation with Jammbox’s David McKinney. Future versions of the app will include a music module powered by 7Digital, augmenting the music in the YouTube videos, and the ability to scan your iTunes library in order to automatically populate the Favorites bar with your most-frequently-played artists.

evolver.fm review by Eliot Van Buskirk

Toinen tämän päivän löytöni on suomalaisen koodinikkarin työstämä iPod/iPhone -sovellus näkövammaisille, joka on nimeltään BlindSquare.
Kotimainen BlindSquare on sovellus, joka auttaa näkövammaisia uusien teknologioiden avulla. Käyttöön tarvitaan iPhone tai iPad, joiden GPS:ää ja kompassia sovellus käyttää paikantamiseen. Se hakee lähistön paikkoja FourSquare-palvelusta ja kertoo niistä suosituimmat halutun matkan etäisyydeltä: Mikä on suosituin kahvila 200 metrin säteellä? Missä on posti? Missä on lähin kirjasto?
BlindSquare avustaa haluttuun kohteeseen kertoen etäisyyden ja suunnan. Ravistamalla laitetta kuulee oman sijainnin, kuten osoitteen ja lähimmän risteyksen. Omia paikkoja voi merkitä ja jakaa niitä FourSquare-kavereiden kanssa. BlindSquare puhuu suomea, englantia ja ruotsia. Lisää ohjelmasta Macmaan Softaoppaassa.

Foursquare’s venue data is being used to power all sorts of apps. Some are useful, some not so useful. One developer has found a way to put it to work in one of the most useful ways possible: helping blind people understand the places around them. And judging by their reactions to the beta, it’s a home run.

BlindSquare is an iOS app that combines foursquare venue data, Open Street Maps and text to speech from Acapela in order to help blind people find what’s around them. As they walk around their cities, it speaks the names of places and cross streets that are nearby to help them get their bearings, including distance and direction information for each one.