Sebastian Scotney’s Top Five Websites

 LISTENING TO UK JAZZ
The jazz scene in the UK is currently going through its most vibrant period since the 1960s. New and interesting music seems to come from every direction. But because only a small fraction of it ever registers on the radar of the mainstream media, I often get asked where to find interesting stuff to listen to on the web. I’m a fan of three sites: Alex Bonney’s http://www.earconnector.co.uk is a superb resource. Liam Noble and Paul Clarvis’s pensive album ‘Starry Starry Night’, for example, is there, and benefits from repeated listening. www.birminghamjazz.co.uk also has a wonderful podcast archive. At an earlier stage of development is Alex Hutton and Kate Winter’s  http://www.thejazzshowonline.com. They are both musicians, and have done interviews with some of the most respected figures on the scene such as Chris Biscoe and Pete Saberton. Kate is great: she gets these quiet, thoughtful people to really open up and talk.

http://www.bachtrack.com
Away from jazz, the immensely hard-working duo of David and Alison Karlin has produced an astonishing resource for the classical music world. It’s searchable, and very user-friendly. There will be a time when you will desperately want to know how many ‘Messiahs’ there are going to be between now and Christmas, or where in the world you can hear Othmar Schoeck’s ‘Notturno’, or whether Beethoven’s second symphony is getting more performances than Beethoven’s ninth. And when you do, Bachtrack has all the answers.

http://www.journalisted.com
I receive the daily update from journalisted. It aggregates the articles produced by journalists that I nominate, so I can construct my own virtual daily newspaper from writers I like. In these early days of paywall, it may just be too good a thing to last.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com
I’ve always had fun with this film reviews aggregator site. No movie ever seems to have fewer than 50 reviews, and many have more than 200. The great luminaries of film criticism are there, but also such delights as the undergraduate reviewers from the Daily Trojan, that wonderfully optimistically named (get an American friend to explain why) student newspaper of the University of Southern California. You can amass so much information about a film from this site that the effort of actually schlepping out to a cinema to watch it can start to seem superfluous.

http://www.whitakerstudio.co.uk
The Internet is a visual medium. I am simply knocked out by the talent of this young British photographer, James Whitaker.