February 19, 2000

6:16 PM

I love seeing a well established offline brand bring their image and experience to the web. Tonight, I stumbled upon Blue Note Records' site for the first time. Blue Note is famous for producing both wonderful jazz records and beautiful album artwork. The splash page shows a random artist and the graphics are reminiscent of their covers. They're even cool enough to offer live streaming music from their library, which sounds great over my cable modem (although it's done through windows media player).
posted by mathowie (5 comments total)

Definitely check out their "Blue Break Beats" series. It's a collection of songs by Blue Note artists that have been sampled by various hip hop bands, with liner notes on who sampled what and when.

My personal favorite is "Howling for Judy" by Jeremy Steig from BBB vol 3. (sampled by the Beastie Boys on "Sure Shot") Never heard a man rock a flute so hard in my life.

Donald Byrd?
Cannonball Adderly?
Lou Rawls?

Hell yeah!
posted by jennyb at 10:20 PM on February 19, 2000

I've been visiting Blue Note for some time now because the (long awaited) redesign of my gavinfriday.com site will have a jazzy/blue note feel to it. (If ever I get the time to work on it.)
Thanks for linking to that book. Don't you just love that 'One click ord...' oops, I've clicked!

posted by prolific at 12:13 AM on February 20, 2000

heh, Caroline, don't forget there's a second edition of the Blue Note covers book. I have them both and they're great. Someday soon, I'm launching a jazz community website, and the index page will look like an old Blue Note cover.
posted by mathowie at 12:26 AM on February 20, 2000

I briefly mentioned it above, but the "Blue Note Radio" streaming music is about the most perfect use of streaming music I've seen. It requires registration, so I can't link directly to it, but it not only plays a cd-quality stream, you see who the artists are, what the song title is, and what album it is from, including a shot of the record's artwork. The interface is in flash and it's both smooth in function and beautiful in its simplistic design.

If you like great jazz, give it a go.
posted by mathowie at 1:06 PM on February 20, 2000

nearly-worthless-me-too comment: they're speaking the truth. the blue note radio stream is just awesome background music for working.

in related product news, launch.com's launchcast is pretty great, too. (and no, i don't work for them, or own stock)
posted by mmanning at 1:54 PM on February 22, 2000