Site news: Calendar and sidebar updates, and more old school link-pimping

Though it's been a rather more protracted process than I would have liked, the latest update to the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar is finally done. Any band, musician or venue schedule information that's been sent in up to this moment should now be on the calendar. However, if you submitted something earlier and it's not there now, please send it again via email to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. Things do occasionally slip through the cracks, and if I've omitted your information, it was most likely due to an inadvertent oversight rather than any musical or value judgment on my part.

There have also been a few routine maintenance updates to the sidebar. I've added some new links, including pointers to the Houston (TX) Jazz Update Center, St. Louis area natives and drummers Marcus Baylor and Terreon Gully, pianist Ray Kennedy, local Brazilian band Samba Bom, and the jazz blog Avant Front, which, as the name implies, focuses mostly on avant-garde and experimental music.

I've also pruned a couple of links that had gone dormant, and updated some others. One of the links just updated was to Jazz@Rochester, a site that serves Rochester, NY in much the same way StLJN covers St. Louis. Writer/editor Gregory Bell was nice enough to spotlight and link to StLJN in a recent post, and so it seems only fair to return the favor here and get the link to their site corrected.

And as long as we're on the subject, if you run across any dead links on the StLJN sidebar, please email and let me know. While I do my best to keep the information current, I don't necessarily visit every link on a regular basis. Thus, I may be unaware if something has gone 404 or moved to a new address, and so readers' help in this regard is most welcome.

Finally, StLJN also recently got some link love from the in-house blog at Ask.com, which linked to our roundup of jazz-related "Best of 2006" lists as part of a year-end meta-post on lists of best-of lists. Many thanks to blogger Ken Grobe of Ask.com for the mention.