I have listened to a lot of Jazz in my day; I had a radio show in college which was called "Ain't No Bebop Rehash" which was a truth in double-negative - it was, in fact, a bebop rehash. I loved the uptempo of Bebop and Swing. Later I began to dig Miles Davis's later work, what bridged jazz with all sorts of other stuff that sounds to me like Matmos today. And I spend most of my jazz hours now with people like Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Jan Johansson - the piano players.

Friend Wayne (recent photo) has continued his exploration of the genre and the artists and the state of that form in today's world. He wrote a piece on his Jazz History site Harlem.org called "itunes versus jazz preservation." Perhaps trolling online for a jazz curmudgeon, the Boston Globe found his piece and published a shorter version on their web site.

In his piece Wayne argues for a sort of extension of meta-data; that is to say, let the Jazzophiles and historians annotate the songs, so that when we play them, we can learn about them the same way a jazz lover holding an LP could have soaked in the cover art, the liner notes, the personnel lineup. Today, MP3s and digital music files are often lacking in all the context of collaboration and history. Without reading album covers I never would have found many of my favorite musicians who only came to my attention when they played piano on some fantastic song on a legendary album. Everyone has the greatest hits; let the curious see where the greatest hits can lead them.