By way of his splendid JazzWax blog, Marc Myers alerts the Rifftides staff that our little slice of bandwidth gets a bit of notice. In my naiveté, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a blog rating service, but Marc points to Invesp Consulting. If you go there, you will see several segments in which Rifftides is rated at or near the top. We follow only Wynton Marsalis and Contemporary Jazz in “The Ultimate Rank,” place first in “Top Jazz Blogs By The Number Of Incoming Links,” place first in “Top Jazz Blogs By Google PR” (!), and rank high in several other categories, as does JazzWax. Every line in the Invesp
list is a link to a blog, making it easy to use the page as a point of departure for exploring.
Thanks to all Rifftides readers for being aboard as we navigate the tides, shoals and high seas of our fifth year.
Rifftides Is Rated: Who Knew?
August 14, 2009 by
The nonagenarian pianist presented de Barros with every biographer’s hope, unrestricted access to his subject’s personal papers and nearly unrestricted access to her private thoughts. He made the most of it, turning exhaustive research and hundreds of hours of interviews into a true story with the sweep of a novel. From the early discovery of McPartland’s musical gift through her wartime service, her ecstatic and stormy marriage to Jimmy McPartland, her growth as a pianist, her deep affair with Joe Morello, and the radio show that made her a national figure, she has had a fascinating life. It makes a splendid read.
Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band had three fewer musicians than most big jazz outfits. Its size permitted precision, flexibility and subtlety, yet the band had the power of sprung steel. In this concert from a half century ago, the CJB is as fresh as yesterday. Arrangements by Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn and Johnny Mandel set standards to which big band writers still aspire. Bassist Buddy Clark and drummer Mel Lewis inspired Mulligan, Brookmeyer, Conte Candoli, Gene Quill and Zoot Sims to some of the best soloing of their careers. This beautifully produced issue of the complete concert is a basic repertoire item.
Congratulations, Doug, on the high ratings.
I’m sure that many of your readers, like myself, have your homepage set as the browser’s home page and feel, when switching on the computer, that we’re ‘joining the world’ – especially those of us several thousand miles away from your world!
Okay, you keep sailing, smoothly as ever, and we’ll boat up.
Not only that, you’re also a 7 on a scale of 10 on Google’s PageRank for all websites. That is hawt, as they say. Compare JazzWax and Jazz.com both at PageRank 6.