Introducing the St. Louis Jazz Notes calendar

Today, I've added some new features to the site. First, and perhaps most important, is the calendar of local jazz events. Just click here and you should see a list of jazz concerts, club gigs and other events for the next seven days. From there, you can change the view to look ahead to a particular week or date, or to see a whole month at a time. (There's also a permanent link to the calendar over on the sidebar, though its appearance may be subject to change as I try to find something more visually appealing.)

The Yahoo calendar interface offers limited options, so there's not much detail beyond the name of the artist, the venue, and the starting time(s). Yahoo's calendars also make you specify a duration for each event, which for some items on this calendar will be an estimate - two hours for a concert, four hours for a club gig, unless I have specific information indicating otherwise. And of course, whenever possible you should always call ahead to confirm information, because things can change quickly, especially with club bookings.

So what events are included in the calendar? Well, there's just about everything I've blogged about on this site over the last six weeks, including the upcoming seasons at Jazz at the Bistro and the Sheldon, and some stuff that I haven't blogged about at all yet, like events sponsored by the St. Louis Jazz Club, plus whatever other concerts and club gigs I've been able to find online so far.

I hope this calendar will be a useful resource for readers, and I'll be making a good faith effort to keep it as complete and up-to-date as possible by checking Pollstar and the sites of local clubs, presenters and musicians.

However, if you are a musician, club or presenter who would like to make sure that your information is included, the best way to do that is to send email updates to me at stljazznotes at yahoo dot com. Once a month would be ideal, but really, any time is fine, and it is always better to send the information rather than assuming I may already have it.

Also new to the sidebar is a link to a page I've set up over at Bloglines.com containing RSS newsfeeds from a number of jazz-related sources. While this is partly a personal tool for me to keep up with news in the field, I thought readers might find it handy, too, and so I've opened it up for public viewing.

The last new feature is the box of links to feature articles at AllAboutJazz.com, located at the bottom of the sidebar. AAJ is one of the better jazz sites on the Web, and often features articles from St. Louis correspondent Terry Perkins, who also writes for the Post-Dispatch. The infobox looked like an easy, free way to add some more relevant material to the site, so I said "what the heck" and dropped it in there.

In the future, the AAJ box and the Bloglines page may or may not continue, depending on the outcome of upcoming experiments in importing some RSS feeds and displaying them on the sidebar. But at least for now, I think they add a bit of informational value to the site, and I hope you'll use and enjoy them.