ALEXANDRIA, VA—Electronic publisher Alexander Street today announced the launch of Jazz Music Library, a new, continuously growing, online collection that currently includes more than 18,000 audio tracks featuring more than 3,800 artists in streaming audio. Available to universities and libraries world-wide and the latest release in Alexander Street’s growing suite of Music Online products, Jazz Music Library gives library users, music faculty, and students at subscribing institutions access to what Alexander Street music editor Liz Dutton says will be “the most comprehensive online collection of recorded jazz available.”

At launch, the collection includes works licensed from dozens of record labels, including Audiophile, Concord Jazz, Contemporary Records, Fantasy, Jazzology, Milestone, Nessa Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, Prestige, and Riverside. Labels being added include Circle Records, GHB, Good Time Jazz, GRP, Impulse, Peak, Solo Art Records, Stretch Records, Verve, and dozens more.* Future releases of the collection will include the NPR radio broadcast series of Marian McPartland’s Peabody award-winning Piano Jazz as well as rarely heard live performances from the Monterey Jazz and Newport Jazz festivals, together with live recordings from famous jazz venues including the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, the Apollo, the Jazz Standard, the Black Hawk, the Five Spot, and many others. Most of these recordings are made available here for the first time.

Says Dutton, “Jazz Music Library will include virtually every important jazz musician and composer and will cover the full range of jazz history and genres, from bebop to free jazz, scat, smooth jazz, salsa, and traditional big band . . . it’s all here, from the 1920s to today.”

Although the collection is designed specifically to meet the needs of instructors and students—with playlists, teaching tools, and extensive controlled vocabularies—says Dutton, “it’s also incredibly easy to use. So public libraries will see heavy use among their jazz-loving patrons.” Jazz Music Library lets users browse by genre, instrument, recording date, artist, and album. Browsing by song title lets users compare different recordings of a particular title—all 12 versions of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” for example.

Teaching tools central to Jazz Music Library include playlists that instructors can annotate and share. Notably, Alexander Street has made it possible for playlists to include content not only from their collections but from anywhere on the Web. Says Dutton, “This lets instructors create a single playlist for all of the online content they want their students to see, not just our content.” The playlists can also be shared—either within a subscribing institution or with all subscribers—giving users access to playlists they can replicate and add to, including playlists created for use with specific textbooks or for an introductory jazz class.

Additional information about Jazz Music Library is available on the Alexander Street Press Web site at http://alexanderstreet.com/products/jazz.htm.

* Note that not all content is available in all countries. For a complete breakdown of content by geographic area, contact us at marketing@alexanderstreet.com.

© Copyright 2009 Alexander Street Press. All rights reserved.                        Last Updated: 28-Apr-2009