Some great samples and historical tidbits from Fresh Air: Before Ipanema: Stan Getz’s exquisite quintets Before he was famous for popularizing bossa nova with “The Girl from Ipanema” in the early 1960s, saxophonist Stan Getz recorded with small jazz groups all through the ’50s. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says a new reissue shows Getz was [...]

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It’s been mentioned before, for example on Digg, but iTunes 7 has a new feature that counts the number of times you’ve skipped a track, which is defined as playing the song for at least two seconds but no longer than twenty (after which it is counted as played fully). I’m curious how they chose [...]

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I meant to post this just after the show, but I didn’t. I saw Matt Pond PA play on March 7th at the Epicentre in Mira Mesa. The band sounded great, fitting a sometimes symphonic sound from a few band members into a smallish low-ceilinged venue (okay, teen center). I was impressed that their sometimes [...]

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I bought three new albums with my iTunes gift card this Christmas, and I thought I’d share how they’ve turned out so far: Takk… by Sigur Rós. I bought this because I liked their last album, the parentheses one, and because John Allison’s hilarious year end album review seemed to imply it was more of [...]

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