JAZZPROFILES lives in the music 1,146 Jazz Artists fully Profiled! About JazzProfiles
Why we built a site for the jazz artists the algorithms skip.
We launched JAZZPROFILES as a complement to existing music and jazz sites such as allmusic.com and discogs.com. On ALLMUSIC biographies of lesser-known jazz artists are either extremely brief or non-existent; on Discogs the biographies, while more prevalent for a larger selection of artists, are a single paragraph. ALLMUSIC also fails to account for substantial discographies for Jazzists that aren't very well known, and the discographies on Discogs are somewhat harder to work through. While there are a few other notable Web sites that attempt to provide background information on jazz artists that are a bit less in the spotlight, the onus of the work tends to focus at best on the Top 500. But there are over 100,000 recording jazz artists worldwide – Tom Lord lists almost a quarter million, but alas all of his data is behind a paywall.
Typically, American jazz performers are well-covered elsewhere, and so the focus of JAZZPROFILES is to provide coverage for the successful but lesser-known Jazzists in what is known as ROW – Rest of the World. The initial effort is on Japanese, Israeli and Italian jazz artists and as we fill in data for many of these, we will expand the effort to additional nationalities.
For each jazz artist profiled here you will find an in-depth biography, a full discography that includes recordings not only as a leader but also as sideman as well as a wealth of collaborations. Eventually each line in the discographies will link either to that recording's Spotify page or to a YouTube clip, as well as to a buy link on Amazon or elsewhere. The buy links are the only way this site makes any money to cover ongoing operations – so if you are in the market for jazz recordings, please do click through and buy using the link on the site, we receive between 4% and 10% of the purchase price.
In our view the most important component of the site is the "Key Recordings" section. These provide the best way to get to know a new jazz artist or to reconnect with a jazzist you were already familiar with. Key Recordings encompass four or five top characteristic recordings of the jazz artist and are a gateway and testcase to check out whether you wish to continue and explore a given player's work. This section includes links to a Spotify page or YouTube recording, as well as a buy link – again, our only way to return some investment on the effort of building this site for you.
Finally, the ever-developing resources section already includes a list of the TOP 100 Jazz sites, top global festivals, and a pretty comprehensive bibliography of books about Jazz. The books section also provides revenue through affiliate agreements, so, again – if you wish to purchase anything please do so through the link on the site.
We're keen to hear from you – you can drop us a line at info@jazzprofiles.com, or head over and participate in one of our Reddit communities: r/IsraelJazz, r/CrossoverJazz or r/ItalianJazz. We're also very active on r/JapaneseJazz.
Thanks for dropping by!