So What: Local News, Notes & Links

Here's StLJN's latest wrap-up of assorted links and short news items of local interest:

* Just in time for what will be a long holiday weekend for some, the recently released film Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary is getting a St. Louis run starting today and continuing through Thursday, July 6 at the Tivoli Theatre.

* Trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran, an influential player, bandleader and educator in Chicago for more than six decades, has died at age 90. Though Cohran is best known for his work in the Chicago avant-garde scene and for playing with Sun Ra, he also had a St. Louis connection.

According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune (linked above), Cohran moved to St. Louis with his family from Oxford, MS "when he was about 10, immersing himself in the city's robust jazz scene and playing alongside trumpeter Clark Terry in the late 1940s" and lived here until he was drafted into the military in 1950.

* Multi-instrumentalist Lamar Harris has posted a recording of "Harvest For The World," as performed last week during his Isley Brothers-themed shows at Jazz at the Bistro, to his SoundCloud page

* The Gaslight Squares have made a music video of "Nicklin' & Dimin'" as part of producer/director Bill Streeter's Lo-Fi St. Louis series.

* Speaking of videos, pianists Peter Martin and Adam Maness made one this week recorded live on Facebook to talk about their Open Studio Network's new "Elements of Jazz Piano" online video course.

* Completing today's video troika, guitarist Todd Mosby has posted a video of his composition "Moon Song" on YouTube.

* Trombonist Joseph Bowie has just released a new duet album with percussionist Adam Rudolph. Good Medicine by IG-BO Duet: Joseph Bowie & Adam Rudolph is available now as a digital download from Rudolph's BandCamp page and as a CD.

STLtoday has online video of Kind of Blue tribute

STLtoday.com has a short video online today with excerpts from last night's free concert by the Legacy Jazz Quintet at the Missouri History Museum. The tribute to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue was presented by Jazz St. Louis and the History Museum as part of JSL's Whitaker Community Concerts series. You can see the video here.

How to save YouTube videos

YouTube, Daily Motion and the other online video sharing services have plenty of material to interest jazz fans and other music buffs, but, without exception, the services that we've been using for the videos here lack at least one potentially very useful feature: the ability to save a clip to your hard drive or other offline media.

One can understand why YouTube et al don't make it easy to save video clips - they're trying to attract as many eyeballs as possible to their sites, and letting users view the content offline pretty much defeats that purpose. But the Internet being what it is, one could also guess that someone else would come up with a way to make saving those clips possible, and sure enough, a number of "someones" have.

A simple solution is SaveYouTube.com, which does pretty much what the name implies. You copy the video URL you wish to download, paste it into the form on the site, and hit "download". Once the download is complete, you have to rename the file with an .flv extension.

You'll need a Flash video player to view the files in their native format; SaveYouTube.com has one you can download from their site, or you can use another player if that's more to your liking. Or, once you've got the files on your computer, you can use any one of many free video utilities to convert the file from Flash to another video format like .avi, .mpg or .mov.

There are a number of similar services, as well as manual ways to accomplish the same task, covered in this tutorial, and many other resources available out there on the Net. Apparently, YouTube and the various users/programmers who have devised these various solutions are in a bit of a ongoing cat-and-mouse game, with YouTube making changes in their code to foil downloading and saving, and the hackers responding in kind. So, if you're really interested in building up a collection of videos, it may worth the time to investigate and try several methods, or at least bookmark the ones that look most promising.

And if you've already found a video-downloading-and-saving resource that works particularly well, or have additional information on this topic, please feel free to use the comments to share your expertise.

Cross-posted to Heliocentric Worlds.