His­tory of Jazz app for the iPad

Some­times I wish I was a music reviewer. There are a few things in life that I hold as being too “sacred” for me to write about because I’d never do it jus­tice, or I’d ulti­mately end up hat­ing some­thing that I love too much. Music is one of those things. When I’m not off try­ing to track down inter­est­ing post top­ics for this par­tic­u­lar web­site, I’m usu­ally try­ing to track down new music. Peo­ple who know me well, know what I’m talk­ing about.

It’s not very often that the two pas­sions in my life inter­sect with each other, and I actu­ally pre­fer it that way, but this His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion that I was asked to review has me all worked up.

I haven’t had this appli­ca­tion for more than 12 hours, and I can’t help myself. I really wanted to get this out as soon as pos­si­ble and share it with every­one. A cou­ple of years back I took a His­tory of Rock N’ Roll course in col­lege as my last elec­tive. The course was awe­some, but some­thing always felt like it was miss­ing. Read­ing about the music, and lis­ten­ing to record­ings on cas­sette tapes (yup, I took the course in 2009) pro­vided only half of what the course should have offered. Track­ing influ­ences from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion through­out the text was a bit of a chore. The course was excel­lent, but it could have far exceeded expec­ta­tions had the course direc­tor actu­ally taken the time to bring the cur­ricu­lum up to date with new tech­nolo­gies. This His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion is every­thing my His­tory of Rock and Roll course should have been. I’m not exaggerating—this appli­ca­tion is fantastic.

What’s Mac­gas­mic about His­tory of Jazz

Being able to start at the begin­ning, with Rag­time, and progress through time beyond Bebop, Cool Jazz, until Nu Jazz and beyond is price­less. Hav­ing a visual record at your fin­ger­tips is only half of the equa­tion though. The His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion also pro­vides you with other insights in the form of videos and arti­cles on selected top­ics. So you not only get to read about artists and styles, but you also get to see the orig­i­nal musi­cians play­ing some of their best songs. It’s not cov­ers and ren­di­tions by mod­ern musicians—the videos are actu­ally the peo­ple you’re learn­ing about, and that’s pretty huge. As an aside, the videos are all from YouTube, so you could both have some dif­fi­culty in the future, and find them on that web­site. I noticed one or two videos didn’t work, so it appears that they’re pulling the videos from YouTube directly. As long as the RIAA doesn’t go all crazy with the take down notices, you should be alright.

The fun doesn’t end there though. The His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion also has iTunes tie-ins that let you down­load albums and songs from the artists you’re lis­ten­ing to or watch­ing  video of from driectly within the appli­ca­tion. So if you’re enjoy­ing the groove the musi­cians are lay­ing down, you can buy up parts of their cat­a­log and lis­ten to it in iTunes or on your iPod.

What could use some polish

The application’s user inter­face is very modal. While it looks great and illus­trates its pur­pose quite well, I often found myself swip­ing and drag­ging sec­tions of the app where they clearly didn’t intend me to. Instead of stay­ing idle, pages would close or new sec­tions would open. It wasn’t a big deal at first, but when try­ing to fig­ure out how to expand an arti­cle for the first time, it becomes a lit­tle bit tedious hav­ing to re-open my page. That’s really the only thing I had a hard time with while using this application.

Final thoughts

As you can prob­a­bly tell from my post, I absolutely love this appli­ca­tion. I would love it if they expanded their appli­ca­tion library to include Rock N’ Roll, and Rhythm and Blues his­to­ries.  If they man­age to put out that con­tent in this par­tic­u­lar for­mat I’ll buy both imme­di­ately.  If you’re inter­ested in Jazz, or gen­uinely curi­ous about music his­tory, then this appli­ca­tion is for you.