A Jazz Big Band Worth Blogging About

by Patrick Jarenwattananon
Darcy James Argue didn't move to New York to start a blog. He just needed a Web site for his new band. Then he started writing. "We're kind of a two-blogging apartment here," Argue says. "My girlfriend has a political blog that she had started, and I started to get jealous. ... And hers is much more popular than mine." Argue writes frequently about jazz and modern music, with forays into politics and pop culture. His secretsociety.typepad.com has become one of the most popular jazz blogs.

But his site also functions as an information hub for his band, Secret Society. He's posted downloadable recordings of nearly every gig that Secret Society has ever played — more than 30 sets in all. Peter Hum is an arts editor for the Ottawa Citizen, where he, too, curates a blog about jazz. Hum says he's impressed with the way Argue has put his music out there. "Isn't that the drug-dealer model, where you give away a bit of your product for free, and then the people get hooked, and they want more, and they're willing to pay for it?" Hum says. Even before he listened to the music, Hum says he first got into Darcy James Argue as a writer.

"His Web site just struck me as a really cool place to go and learn about jazz through the eyes and ears of someone who's really out there doing it in New York," Hum says.

A Big-Band Habit
Nearly four years after his band's first gig — in the basement of the former New York rock club CBGB — Argue has finally released Infernal Machines, Secret Society's first studio recording. Argue, 34, says he waited so long to make an album because he wanted to perfect the details. It's not cheap to record an 18-piece big band — or, really, to do anything with an ensemble that size. So Argue turned to his listeners (and readers) for help. He set up a fund where fans could make tax-deductible contributions, and asked his blog's readers to contribute.

"That's, like, my least favorite thing to do on the blog," Argue says. "NPR, I'm sure you can relate; no one's going to like doing the pledge drives." He says he was overwhelmed by the response, even though it only came out to a little more than 10 percent of the recording budget. He is funding the remainder through his day job, as a music copyist. The work of a music copyist can seem, well, a bit random. One recent client was Calvin Klein's CK One fragrance. "They wanted the jingle that they use in their ads — they wanted a transcription of that into music notation," Argue says. "You know, any time I get a chance to do one of those, I will, because it means I can then afford to do more Secret Society work."
Complete on: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113726352&sc=nl&cc=jn-20091018