UPDATE 4/10/20 1:55 PM: The listening session will only happen live on Zoom due to technical issues with Facebook. Thanks!
As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and right now the COVID-19 pandemic is making lots of reinvention necessary. For example, take JazzTimes‘ Before & After listening sessions, which have been a reader favorite for years. Unfortunately, these sessions—in which one person plays music to another person in the same room and gauges that other person’s reactions—aren’t all that conducive to self-quarantine or social distancing. So how do we keep the Before & After concept going in a locked-down world? Online video conferencing, of course!
Though that answer may seem obvious to many, we faced several significant hurdles in making an online B&A work to our satisfaction, especially on the audio side. But now, after a couple weeks of experimenting, we’re confident that we’ve worked the bugs out. So confident, in fact, that we’re presenting our first live online B&A this Friday (April 10) at 2 p.m. EDT with the help of a major artist: the celebrated British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. He’ll be coming to us from London, while the session’s moderator, Ashley Kahn, will be in New Jersey. And you can catch it all, either via Zoom or on the JazzTimes Facebook page. Full details are below. Hope to see you there—and may this be the first of many!
