The aim here is to collect recordings of standards that are not widely available (not copyrighted commercial recordings), and present them in a convenient and accessible manner.
The goal of the site is not to cut into the income of musicians. Instead, I hope it will encourage interest in improvised music. Still, because of the concerns about income, there is a bias towards older recordings, and (especially in the newer stuff) away from things that are similar to commercially released recordings. Nothing here will replace the ‘official releases’.
So why care? There can be many reasons – here’s one: you can find on this site many pictures, some a bit grainy or ‘low-res’, of things that had never happened before and will never happen again. In a sense the same can be said for any recording, but it’s especially interesting in improvised music. Different recordings of a standard will share a basic framework or skeleton (rhythmic and harmonic resemblances), but what happens based on that groundwork can vary a great deal – from performer to performer, and also from one performance to another for a given artist.
