Since less than a month lays between now and the Tenth Anniversary of the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival kicks into gear, I'd better start kicking into gear on this blog's XRIJF coverage as well. As I've done in the past, I'm going to do a series of posts over the next few weeks to set up my "itinerary" for each day of the XRIJF, going into more detail on my picks for each day and why I picked them. The posts make handy-dandy guide for each day of the (for me at least…the XRIJF's guides are pretty good, too). On my picks, I try to do a little digging in the Interwebs to get more of the skinny on the artists (in addition to that prepared for the XRIJF website) so you can decide for yourself whether you'd like to join me (figuratively, that is…) or seek your music elsewhere that night. I don't suffer from illusions that my choices are somehow "better" than yours… just perhaps different? My itinerary is at best rough sketch as I ALWAYS end up changing my mind on the fly after hearing word on the street, being too ambitious in making it from one venue to another, lines, or just deciding that I'd rather spend more time with friends who are hitting a particular artist who wasn't on my "list".
Reading the posts here on the blog is not the only place to find our material about the Festival. You can also find it on Jazz@Rochester on Twitter and Facebook, where you will find additional links and other material (dare I say bonus?). Speaking of Twitter, I've started building a Twitter List of artists who will be appearing at the 2011 XRIJF, so hope you check it out and follow that (please let me know if you know of any of the other artists who will be at XRIJF who are on Twitter). Of course, I can't be sure that they'll tweet or that it's actually them doing the tweeting…. I'll also be posting links about this year's XRIJF artists and retweeting things posted elsewhere about the festival on Twitter. For those of you who are already on Twitter, I encourage you to get into the conversation about this year's festival by using the hashtag #XRIJF. Let's start a conversation about the festival and generate some buzz beforehand, eh? Those who aren't on Twitter, I hope to have a widget prepared to highlight the "tweets" about XRIJF so you can get a taste. On Facebook, we'll share some of the same links that are going to Twitter, but hope you use it to engage each other in a conversation about the festival, the artists, etc. with each other as well.
See you soon with the first post of "picks" for Day One, June 10th! I encourage you to engage me on my picks and let me know in the comments what you think and what you've decided to do with that evening's possibilities (be nice, however…).
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