Site news: The land of linkin'

It's been a while since the last update of the StLJN sidebar, and so there's a bunch of new stuff there for you to check out. In the "Bands and Musicians" section, trombonist/producer Lamar Harris has an updated Web address, and I've added new links to the sites of singer Kevin Bowser, violinist Nikki Glenn and saxophonist Mark Casey.

Elsewhere on the local front, I've added new links in the appropriate sections for the soon-to-open live music venue The Gramophone; improvising musician Eric Hall's label Echolocation Recordings; Tony Renner's new jazz radio program on KWUR, The Scientific Method; and Arts Zipper, the online cultural calendar from the Regional Arts Commission.

A special shoutout goes to Steve Pick, local music journalist, radio host, record-store-guy and man-about-town, who was kind enough link to StLJN last week from Lockwood & Summit, the blog for his retail home-away-from-home Euclid Records. Lockwood & Summit - the title refers to the store's location - includes posts from owner Joe Schwab (a very knowledgeable jazz fan), Steve and other Euclid Records staff blogging about some of their favorite music, as well as various bits of news and promotional stuff for the store. (The permanent link from StLJN to there will be in the "Other Sites You May Enjoy" section.)

Big thanks also to internationally known jazz journalist Howard Mandel, who stopped by here a couple of weeks ago to comment on a post, and subsequently blogrolled StLJN over at his online joint Jazz Beyond Jazz. I've added Mandel's site to the "Jazz Blogs of Note" section, and also updated the link for Jazz St. Louis' blog so it now points to the organization's current site instead of a long-dead Blogspot address.

In addition to all of the above, the sidebar section for Local/Regional Jazz Sites has been updated to include new links to sites covering Portland, OR; Toronto; Brisbane, Australia; and Manchester, England.

By way of further maintenance, I've also deleted a few dead links from the sidebar, and over the next few days will be going through the various sections one by one to remove any others that may be non-functioning, out of date, or otherwise irrelevant.

And while we're on the subject of deleted links, the recent redesign of the "blog zone" at STLtoday spelled doom for the generic blogroll that linked to StLJN from all the various blogs there. Now that the entire section has been reworked to run under WordPress (with some some presumably low-traffic blogs discontinued), each of the remaining blogs can now have its own blogroll, and so far, none of them have linked to this site. While the old link never resulted in a huge surge of traffic over here, it was fairly steady in providing at least a few visitors every day. Thus, I'm sorry to see it go, while also remaining grateful that someone over there decided to include a link to StLJN in the first place.

Finally, as always, if you've got jazz-related links, local or otherwise, that you think might be appropriate for StLJN, please send them along via email to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com and I'll take a look.