By Steve Chase

The explosion of new media has really changed how we listen to music, just as it has made us all closer participants in the genres that we like to listen to. Twenty years ago you had to work to find information about new artists or to hear the music you liked. Less popular genres like bluegrass or jazz were relegated to a few select radio stations and specialty music stores. The Web has changed all that, providing a great venue for new music and niche genres.

The Web also has expanded the offerings beyond the traditional musical notes to a richer, video-based experience. Many websites provide videos of artists that have become mainstays in our music portfolios. YouTube, a site we are all familiar with, is the obvious first stop for a huge variety of music-related videos, many I’ll bet you never knew existed. Fueling this is the prevalence of cell phones and small digital cameras that videotape—plus the video hobbyists who love to digitize old video and post it for all to see. I get regular emails from friends who have discovered old video of their favorite musician from their high-school days or new stuff that was made especially for distribution on the Web. Copyright laws be damned, YouTube has hundreds of thousands (or more) of video clips of every conceivable group playing most any genre of music you might want to hear.

I have always been a big fan of the French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. He got his big break as a jazz violinist in 1967 when he played with the Modern Jazz Quartet at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He soon was playing with Frank Zappa, the Maha-vishnu Orchestra, then finally settled in as a leader of his own band. So I did a YouTube search for Jean-Luc Ponty, and got back more than 350 videos. That list has a wide range of material, from early, rare video of Ponty with Frank Zappa, to the most recent material the violinist and his band have performed. I especially like the rocking video “Jean-Luc Ponty with Zappa: Greggary Peccary Suite, 1973,” and the seminal Ponty fusion tune “New Country.” But there’s a lot more than those two, so go to www.YouTube.com, type in your favorite group or song and expect some surprises. Chances are you’ll get a list of cool options leading to some instant video music gratification.

Marc Brodzik and his media company Woodshop Films (www.woodshopfilms.com) have a great series up on YouTube that is well worth viewing. Breakfast at Sulimay’s will brief you on the latest music and keep you laughing. Senior citizen music critics Bill, Moon, and Joe gather at Sulimay’s restaraunt for breakfast, to listen to music, and provide their honest comments. Who would have known that Young Jeezy would receive the thumbs up while the great Animal Collective would be panned as repetitious and no good. When they reviewed the latest hit, “Right Round,” from Flo Rida, Joe snoozed while Ann thought it was a great song. The next song, by band Gemini Wolf had Ann soon asking: “What the hell was that,” and “who killed the baby?”

But this time, Old Joe liked it, and chided his colleagues by quoting Pablo Picasso: “Don’t try to understand art,” he said.

Their bickering and truthful comments are hilarious. The 25-video series has been going for a few years now, and it’s truly a gas to watch, but watch out with the kids; it’s definitely PG-13. Find it by typing “Breakfast at Sulimay’s” into the YouTube search box, or access it through the Woodshop Films site. I think this series really shows the power of the Internet, which allows us all to become music critics or program producers, with nothing more than a video camera and a computer.

In the future, we’ll dig through some of the smaller, edgier music video sites. Until then—keep listening and (now), watching.