Audio Archives
The Internet Archive's Audio Archives provides free downloads of over 10,000 concerts -- from John Cage and David Tudor (San Francisco, 1965, in the "Other Minds" section) to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (Cockysville, Maryland, 2002, in the Live Music Archive). Why, you could listen to recorded live performances online for the rest of your life.

The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
Thousands of wax-cylinder recordings from the late 1800s through the 1920s, available for ready listening and free download. A treasure trove of music — classical, pop, folk — and spoken-word material, most of it public domain. Turn on the "streaming cylinder radio" and then click on any other item for that between-channels/Charles Ives experience.

The Calendar for New Music
Cage? Stockhausen? Young? Zorn? Fluxus? Kronos Quartet? Downtown Ensemble? You'll want to familiarize yourself with The Calendar for New Music, which bills itself as "New York City's source for information on concerts of contemporary music in all its forms: Avant Garde, Classical, Electronic, Computer, Experimental Jazz and ???" Presented by the SoundArt Foundation, it also includes information on new CDs and other material of interest even to those from outside the tri-state area. And, if you're a maker of new music, it offers the option of a "Conflict Catcher" designed "to help prevent avoidable audience splitting, where you can post your next season's concert schedule and/or go to check other group's schedules."

Ornette Coleman/Harmolodic Group
If you want our working definition of Grandfather of Further Out, that would be Ornette Coleman -- or "Uncle O," as our Executive Director calls him. For the most up-to-date information about the current state of the blues and the harmolodic truth, visit Ornette Coleman/Harmolodic Group. And remember: Tomorrow is the question.

Bob Dylan/bobdylan.com
Bob Dylan's raspy voice epitomizes the singer-songwriter who, from the 1930s on, found a home and an audience in cafés around the world. He doesn't play those venues anymore, but he got his start in them, and Dylan's probably the only Nobel Prize nominee about whom you can say that. Here's the best Dylan site of all, with all kinds of info, all his song lyrics, various downloads. It's positively 4th Street.

Ani DiFranco/Righteous Babe
Want to know what the conservatives really fear, whether it's the radical right in the U.S. or the Taliban wherever they're hiding now? It's smart, confident, mouthy women. Among the great benefits of second-wave feminism we count the flood of fine female singer-songwriters it unleashed, from whom we can begun to learn some of the answers to Freud's patronizing question, "What do women want?" Ani DiFranco -- who's toured with Dylan -- is as good an example as you'll find, she has her own record label (Righteous Babe), plus a website where you can hear a whole lot of what she's done so far, and if all goes well she's got another half-century's worth of music to make.

Radio Station WBGO-FM
Source of the nationally syndicated program "Portraits in Blue" and other great jazz and blues programs, 17 years old and going strong, Newark's own "Jazz 88": Radio Station WBGO-FM, direct from Newark, New Jersey. With streaming audio and everything.

Leningrad Cowboys
Several of our good friends and contributors to this site are from Finland, so we slip in a plug for things Finnish whenever possible. You'll surely enjoy meeting the Leningrad Cowboys, the self-styled "world's greatest rock 'n' roll band" -- direct from Helsinki. Check out the hairdos and shoes. This site has videos, sound clips, cartoons, and lots more.

Viola Jokes
You probably didn't know that violists are the Poles and/or blondes of the classical-music world: the butt of an unending stream of Viola Jokes, some of which are quite funny in themselves and all of which form a cumulative portrait of humankind's perennial need to find someone to pee on (the actual origin of the word peon).

Chiaroscuro
Savvy producer Hank O'Neal's Chiaroscuro label produces some of the very finest CDs of mainstream jazz -- swing through bop and cool -- by the cream of the senior figures in those modes, often joined by younger players. For their catalogue (Lee Konitz, Teddy Wilson, Ruby Braff, Jay McShann, Gerry Mulligan, dozens more) and sample tracks, trip on in.