This site is located in two places: WNUR and Bsharp.org.
Musicians on the net can post images of charts of their original tunes to this area (see below for submission guidelines). MIDI files (preferably with General MIDI patch changes), notation software files and the like are also welcome.
Most of these composers are regular readers of the Usenet group rec.music.bluenote. You are encouraged to play their tunes and post comments to r.m.b. That's one of the purposes of this link!
If you would like to play a tune in public, however, you should ask the composer first to see if that is o.k. All the composers here can be directly contacted via email. You and the composer may have very different interpretations of the same chart!
You probably got here via the WNUR Jazz Web. If not, you should check it out immediately!
The Original Jazz Charts link is maintained by Sam Hokin. There are three ways you can place your original charts here:
If you scan your charts, please do it in "line-art" mode (1-bit) at 300 dpi, so that the resulting GIF is reasonably small (around 100 kB), yet has enough detail for full-size printing (around 2500x3500 pixels). If you can't convert the scan to GIF format, Sam probably can. Postscript and PDF versions of charts are also welcome.
If you'd like Sam to scan your charts, make sure they are clear, readable, high contrast copies so he doesn't have to touch up the images.
In addition, you are asked to write a short biography of yourself. What instruments do you play? Who are your biggest influences? Do you play out, and, if so, where and with what group? What's your e-mail address?
Songs with lyrics can have the lyrics written on the chart or listed separately as a text link.
If you're interested in posting your own tunes, contact Sam.
Only a couple dozen brave composers have sent me their charts, while there have been thousands of unique host accesses. That means there's a lot of musicians out there that are holding back! Don't be shy -- SEND ME YOUR CHARTS!
WARNING! Your browser's built-in viewer may choke on these huge images, or simply display a tiny fraction on screen. Unless your browser uses a viewer that can handle a 2550x3300 GIF image in a convenient way, you should save the images to a file on your computer and use a better viewer or print them out. (Netscape users should do this, since Netscape's built-in viewer doesn't resize the image for viewing, and I recommend it for other browsers as well.) The main purpose of Original Jazz Charts is to provide high-resolution charts that you can print out and set on your music stand.