Five Birthday Candles: A Bird is the Worm anniversary

So, apparently my site has reached a certain age when it no longer remembers its own birthday.

Back on December 9th, Bird is the Worm had officially reached its five year anniversary.

(Note to self:  Yes, that’s correct. Five years.)

This post will be the 1,427th post on this site since it first opened up shop.  And that doesn’t include all of the columns I wrote for eMusic’s 17 Dots (blog), their spin-off Wondering Sound, my new gig at Bandcamp and my seriously sporadic write-ups at Music is Good (dot org).  That’s a lot of music, and all of it has been fun as hell to listen to and share the word.  Here’s one such album…

Bird is the Worm looks different than it did when the year began.  I’m thrilled with some of the changes, disappointed with some of the things that got lost in the move but looking at opportunities to improve upon them, and thinking about maybe changing something else up again.  But after a lot of downtime from the change in domain and theme, I’m happy just to be back to where the site is featuring regular recommendations again.

Also new is my regular contributions to The Bandcamp Daily.  It’s nice to have a writing gig again, but I’m especially gratified that it’s with Bandcamp… a retailer that I was on board with early as a music fan.  It’s been very cool seeing how many jazz artists and labels have gravitated to it as a retail platform.  Back in the day, it was a wasteland for modern jazz.  Now, it’s all I can do to keep up.

The radio appearances on Kevin Coultas’s WXOX-fm show The Mingle continue to be fun.  It’s also wonderful to discover how much of the music he features is also recommended on my site.  It used to be that it was easy for me to cobble together a playlist of music for a guest appearance on his show… but now it takes serious effort to find albums that he hasn’t already featured.  This, too, I chalk up as a good thing.

The year 2017 may open up some possibilities for me to help musicians find gigs in Kentucky, especially here in my new hometown of Frankfort.  If you think you might be touring through the South/Mid-South in 2017, you should shoot me an email and we can chat.  Some of these plans are very much in the conceptual stage, but they will be moving forward one way or the other.  So, get in touch.

Speaking of live shows, it was pretty cool to cover the Chicago Jazz Festival this year.  Here in Frankfort, KY, I do my own thing and keep to myself and have a certain isolation from all of the music and musicians I write about.  It was nice to finally meet some of the musicians and personnel that work so hard in getting the music out there.  I also got to meet some of this website’s visitors, which was no less cool.  Covering the festival was a lot of work, but all of it fun, and I’ll be looking to do more of it in 2017.  I’m already tentatively planning on finally hitting the Iowa Jazz Festival, and hopefully the Chicago Jazz Fest will be in the cards next year, too.

I have some other plans for the new year, but five years of doing this has finally got me wise to keeping those close to my vest until I can actually proceed on getting them done.  A perusal of my previous anniversary posts could substitute for a very long, unaccomplished to-do list.  But there’s reason to be hopeful for the new year, and I look forward to rolling them out.

But the current year is not quite over.  The Best of 2016 reveal begins next Saturday, December 24th.  We’ll be running down the top thirty albums of 2016, four a day, until announcing #2 and #1 on the 31st.  I’ll talk more about that list on January 1st, when I typically unleash a rambling still-drunk-from-New-Years-Eve post upon my unfortunate site visitors.  As it was before, it was not easy selecting just thirty, and picking the top three was no less painful.  Any one of my top three could have been given the top slot, and I’ll probably continue to second-guess myself for as long as I’m running this site.

Thanks to all of you who stop by Bird is the Worm.  I appreciate all of your kind words and comments.  I appreciate those of you who I never hear from, too.  It’s my sincere hope all of you keep finding favorite new albums.  And an equally sincere thank you to all of the musicians who make life better with your creativity.  It wouldn’t be the same without you.

Cheers.