by Patrick Jarenwattananon

We had a lot of stuff to do yesterday. So sue me.

—A Summer Jazz Festival Will Return To New York: Because jazz festival impresario George Wein and co. lobbied some health care executives.

... the company is looking to brand itself among hospital clinicians, and found through market research that they care deeply about jazz.

"The research indicated that second to travel, music and the arts were the number two areas of interest for practitioners in health care," said David Schlotterbeck, the chief executive of CareFusion. "At the same time, there has been a demonstrated link between music and healing, and jazz has been used as a metaphor for generating a harmony that is necessary in a group of practitioners."

A full story is up at the New York Times ArtsBeat blog. Incidentally, NPR Music, WBGO and WGBH will now be going to the George Wein's CareFusion Jazz Festival 55 this August — aka the Newport Jazz Festival — for a series of live Webcasts (and online archives).

—RIAA Numbers On Jazz Sales: I surmise that I'm late to this news, but this chart from the RIAA (opens PDF file) is not good news. The entire record industry is suffering, sure, but if the market share for jazz has really dropped to 1.1% of all record sales in a year when Herbie Hancock won a Grammy for a jazz album ... well, I'd rather not think about what that means. H/T to the big hater Brilliant Corners — I honestly mean that as a compliment — for pointing this out. He proposes that declining numbers for jazz are a byproduct of the Ken Burns Jazz hoopla dying off. I'd imagine that the aging audience and the sheer ease of illegal downloading also have something to do with it, though. Plus, it's unclear whether the steady migration of jazz away from the RIAA roster of labels could also have something to do with the numbers. And the margin of error is over 3%. Right.

—A Gunther Schuller Interview: If perhaps you saw this NPR profile and were curious to know more, this NewMusicBox interview sits down with the composer, historian and man behind Third Stream at length. At 83, the high school dropout has had quite a career in music. (He says his best friend was once Frank Zappa.) Very much worth a read.

—Sheila Jordan's Farmhouse: The New York Times profiles the great jazz singer Sheila Jordan, also an octogenarian — but not for her voice. The piece is for a series exploring second homes and getaway property, and looks at Jordan's upstate New York farmhouse, which looks lovely and bucolic and related adjectives. With all this talk about economic realities of artists in the blogosphere lately, my eye went to the question of how a non-superstar jazz musician (and a single mother) managed to buy a second home. The answer: by working a day job until age 58, and then investing wisely. Sounds simple enough. Related: for a tidy little profile of Sheila the artist, try this NPR report.

—Nextbop.com: In their Montreal Jazz Fest coverage, the Montreal Gazette blog Words And Music spotlighted a new Web site attempting to bring jazz to young people. Nextbop.com, run by two 23-year-olds who believe firmly that groups like The Bad Plus can be an entry into jazz, has a blog, an artist archive, and a bunch of streaming tracks. I can't quite get a handle on how I'm supposed to experience the site, but they've certainly built the framework for something potentially really cool. As an aside, what is with these twenty-somethings and their attempts to start useful jazz Web sites? It's almost as if more of us young people could actually be interested in jazz, but nobody has ever tried to speak to us about it in a meaningful way on the Web before now. How strange!

—The Outpost, Albuquerque, N.M.: I've never been, but it seems like a really cool venue. It's a 150-seat room, but run as a nonprofit rather than a club, with an emphasis on community jazz education classes. And the founder, Tom Guralnick, is always somehow luring actually innovative national acts to a town not known for jazz in the desert Southwest. On the eve of the New Mexico Jazz Festival, Willard Jenkins interviews Guralnick for Jazz.com. Related: this NPR story about the very same place.

—More NPR Music Jazz Links: Lots of internal links today. Have some more.

This week's Take Five has some great listening (Mulatu Astatke!): Jazz Out Of Africa
A studio session with a saxophone hero in JD Allen (from WBGO): JD Allen Lets It 'Shine'
Listening to the new Kurt Elling disc (NPR's Song Of The Day): Kurt Elling: Doing Justice To John Coltrane