I've noticed in looking back over them that my band of the day picks have leaned heavily towards rock, which might lead one to believe this is all I care about. Not true! I love jazz, my favorite being that period of 60's and 70's postbop, when Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Miles Davis and many others were doing such groundbreaking and special work. I really don't know much about the scholarship of this kind of music or why I like it so much. I just know from empirical trial-and-error, when I play a wide variety of jazz available in the stacks, this is what gets me going. I mentioned a few days ago that I consider Love Supreme to be the single most perfect and uplifting work I have ever heard. Back when I was doing the Friday jazz shift I one day played, more or less at random, Don Cherry's "Actions" from the New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra album. Wow! It really knocked me out, and some guy called up the station and we had a 15 minute conversation about it.

Today's band of the day is a musician whose work I'm familiar with from WREK - professor, composer and saxophonist Steve Coleman. He has an amazing amount of his MP3s available on his download page. There are samples from his in print albums, and his out of print albums and the unavailable in the US ones are up in their entirety. He says on the page that soon he'll be posting an essay answering the question "As a working musician, why would you make your work available for download?" I'll be very interested in what he has to say.