Video From The Village Vanguard

by Josh Jackson, WBGO

If you've been following along with our little multimedia experiment from the world's greatest jazz club, you've probably seen the live video stream we beam during the concert broadcast, no?

Consider it a typical jazz idea -- creativity thriving in a resource-starved environment. That makes what we're doing a totally MacGyver operation at this point. Basically, we strap a consumer-model camcorder onto an exposed plumbing pipe hanging from the Vanguard ceiling, point it toward the stage, and set it to NightShot. Peter Hum of the Ottawa Citizen described it lovingly as "Baghdad-bombing green." Shock and awe, baby!

We're clearly more interested in the audio (it is [ahem] "radio"). We plug David Tallacksen's lovely music mixes into the free streaming software, so at least it sounds great. It just won't win an Oscar for Best Cinematography.

So far, we've only archived one night from our Live at the Village Vanguard series: Edward Simon's Quartet featuring saxophonist Mark Turner. You can download songs from the performance here. But you can view the whole thing here:

Let us know if you'd like us to start archiving all of the shows. If we get enough folks to say YES, perhaps we can find some cash to buy server space to do this regularly. That, and a decent camcorder. Happy viewing.

12:30 PM ET | 05-22-2009 | permalink

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