St. Louis jazz writers on the Web

Terry Perkins, who writes about jazz for the Post-Dispatch, All About Jazz.com and others, has just started a series of articles at the Web site JazzStandards.com called "What's New In Jazz Standards". It's "designed to explore the impact of new or recent musical compositions on the world of jazz standards," and the first topic is the practice of adding new lyrics to pre-existing instrumental compositions. In the first article, Perkins interviews vocalist Lorraine Feather, and promised next is an interview with the wonderful Jon Hendricks, who helped popularize the vocalese sound through his pioneering work with Lambert, Hendicks and Ross.

Sounds like a cool idea to me, and I'll be following along as the series develops. The rest of the site, which documents the origins and development of the most-played tunes in jazz, is definitely worth a look, too, and I've added it to the links list in the sidebar.

Perkins isn't the only St. Louisan writing about jazz on the Web, though, so let's also send some link-love to JazzReview.com, where local scribe Cheryl Hughey took over as CD reviews edtor not long ago. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Cheryl also works a publicist, formerly for Jazz at the Bistro and currently for various individual musicians, and has helped me with a couple of stories in the past.) Lots of content there from a variety of writers, some well-written and some not so much, but again, worth a look and a bookmark.

(edited immediately after posting to fix a typo)