On April 28th 2009, Jazz Music Library was updated with 1,955 albums.  This brings the database to 18,922 tracks including artists from the past to musicians performing and recording today. This comprehensive collection of online jazz music includes thousands of artists, ensembles, albums, and genres and can be accessed through Music Online.

The online collection can be browsed by album titles, recording date, song titles, and more. Registered users can also create playlists containing whole videos, tracks, segments, etc.  Playlists can be used as lists of personal favorites, class viewing/listening assignments, or as a teaching resource for in-class use.

The celebration of Christmas and the birth of the Christ child begins more than a week before December 25th in Mexico with Las Posadas.  Mexican friends and families gather together on each of the nine nights before Christmas and act out the journey Mary and Joseph made to Bethlehem.  They walk together from house to house, singing songs and asking for a place to rest, but the travelers are turned away from each door as Mary and Joseph were.  At the end of each evening’s journey, a festival is held with dancing and delicious food as well as a pinata for the children.

 Smithsonian Global Sound, one of the streaming music databases at Oesterle Library includes a selection of carols that are sung during the Las Posadas.  More information about the holiday may be found by searching Academic Search Premier.

Want to hear a Bollywood movie tune, a Delta blues song from the twenties, a Beethoven symphony, a classic American protest song, or the harmonies of an a capella singing group from Ghana? With the addition of five new music databases from Alexander Street Press, Oesterle Library now offers more than 50,000 tracks of music from around the world in streaming audio.

The five new databases–African American Song; American Song; Classical Music Library; Contemporary World Music; and Smithsonian Global Sound–each include thousands of recordings of great music, ranging from medieval to modern. The databases include the original recordings of American legends like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, as well as folk and popular songs recorded for famous labels like Folkways. Classical compositions are often represented by several different high-quality recordings of performances by first-rate musicians and conductors. Serious students of music, music history, and ethnomusicology will find the rich and expansive content of these databases to be indispensable. And everyone else is sure to find music they’ll enjoy listening to here–whether it be Tejano, Afropop, Celtic, gospel, ragtime, raga, reggae, jazz, or Baroque.

All of the recordings in the Alexander Street Press databases are available to current NCC students, faculty, and staff in streaming audio. Each database also includes liner notes, CD cover art, and information about the featured artists, composers, albums, recordings, and musical styles. All can be accessed via the “Choose a Database” pulldown menu on the library homepage; on the Articles page; or on the Research by Subject page for Music.

The databases:

African American Song includes more than 16,000 African-American songs; genres include blues, jazz, gospel, ragtime, and more.

American Song includes more than 14,000 American songs; genres include folk, rock, jazz, zydeco, bluegrass, and more.

Classical Music Library includes more than 50,000 classical music recordings of all styles and time periods, as well as substantial reference material on the history of Western music.

Contemporary World Music includes more than 9,000 songs from contemporary artists from around the globe; genres include reggae, Tejano, Afropop, Bollywood, flamenco and more.

Smithsonian Global Sound includes tens of thousands of folk, traditional, classical, and popular music recordings. Here you’ll find the entire published catalog of the Smithsonian Folkways label–the single most important collection of recordings of classic American folk music, and also the best source for field recordings of traditional music from around the globe.