Cleveland’s public radio broadcasting outfit, Ideastream, has just launched a 24-hour jazz channel called JazzNEO. It can be accessed as the second HD radio channel at 90.3 FM in the Cleveland area, on the Ideastream smartphone app for both Apple and Android phones, and from the Ideastream website. JazzNEO also is available through smart speakers. While it is aimed at Cleveland listeners, JazzNEO is a good source of jazz listening for anyone around the world.
Related to the above: While many people will find it convenient to listen to JazzNEO using a smartphone app and a Bluetooth speaker, the jazz broadcast and the 90.3 FM broadcast of classical music also can be accessed using an HD radio. There is something to be said, it seems to me, for being able to simply switch on a radio, rather than having to turn on two devices and make sure they are connected. (Although it hasn’t caught on in a major way, HD radio allows an FM radio station to broadcast more than one channel of programming. Many cars are equipped with an HD radio).
Cleveland is not the only city where it can be handy to have an HD radio to listen to both classical music and jazz. Pittsburgh, for example, has an HD-2 jazz channel at one of its radio stations. This sort of thing seems to be relatively common — my hometown, Tulsa, has a station that broadcasts both classical music and jazz.
I am a radio nut and I own two HD radios at home. Before JazzNEO launched a few weeks ago, I contacted one of the station’s jazz music DJs, Dan Polletta, and offered to write an article explaining HD radio for anyone else who might want the convenience of using an HD radio at home. The folks at Ideastream accepted my offer, and you can read my guide to HD radio at the Ideastream website.
While I listen to a lot of jazz, I also love classical music, as you can tell if you follow this newsletter, and I recently learned about a free service that may interest many classical music fans.
Most public libraries in the U.S. offer a streaming and ebook service, Hoopla Digital, which provides movies and TV show videos, music streams for albums from a variety of music genres, and ebooks and audiobooks.
While Hoopla has long offered many classical music recordings, it has just begun offering Medici, billed as the “world’s largest catalog of classical music videos.” To access Medici via Hoopla, look at the BingePass area of the website, or the Hoopla smartphone app.
Medici’s video offerings include concerts, ballets, operas, documentaries and jazz performances. Related to the usual topic of this Substack, I was able to use Medici to watch a documentary on Russian classical music, “Silenced: Composers in Revolutionary Russia,” which discussed many of the repressed composers I am interested in, such as Alexander Mosolov.
Interesting post.