Jazz & Blues Legends Play On in Virtual Reality

As an amateur jazzman, this one's near and dear. It's also a nod toward our holo-decky future (bless you Joss Whedon for the power of "y"!) -- a UC Berkeley project to recreate exalted Oakland, California musical hotspots like Slim Jenkins Place, Esther's Orbit Room, and John Singer's and Harvey's Rex Club. The game angle? Compose a piece of music, then try to get it financed by Seventh Street "mayor" Charles "Raincoat" Jones and distributed by the Sleeping Car Porters labor union.

Background: Middle century last, Oakland, California's Seventh Street was a jazz and blues gold mine, a stomping ground for national acts like Billie Holiday and B.B. King as well as sound-shaping "Oakland blues" locals like Lowell Fulson and Sugar Pie DeSanto. Never heard of Oakland blues? Let's just say some music historians mention it in the same breath as celebrated sounds like New Orleans jazz and Chicago or Kansas City blues.

Today, Seventh Street is mostly empty with a handful of shops. The street gets few visitors and the squeal and thump of 1940s and 50s jazz and blues venues has been replaced by the drone and rumble of semis and cars as they hustle toward the freeway on-ramp.

Enter UC Berkeley and a student-driven project to "recreate" an eight-block stretch of Seventh Street, replete with the clubs, music, and some of the key persons of the area's heyday. When it's finished, online visitors will be able to check out famous nightspots like Slim Jenkins' Place and Esther's Orbit Room and actually listen to digital recordings of the music played in the clubs. And the "get your composition signed and produced" mini-game mentioned earlier could be just the beginning.

Why not something along the lines of Second Life meets wraparound video conferencing? Imagine signing up to play a set at Esther's Orbit Room from anywhere in the world. Performance time, you and your band gear up in a studio room with wall-size screens and a few unobtrusive cameras. People around the planet sign in to Esther's online, where they can see your band perform in realtime (and you, them, on the screens in your performance room). Imagine technology that furthers interactivity by transposing you and your band three-dimensionally, feeding your images realtime and avoiding the ugly, artificially animated avatars standing in for bands like U2, Duran Duran, and Suzanne Vega in Second Life.

Clubs like Seventh Street's salad days may be past, but with projects like UC Berkeley's, we're coming up fast on a whole new world of anywhere, anytime, any-era-you-like meets massively collaborative entertainment.

Play it again, Lowell Fulson, Saunders King, and Sugar Pie DeSanto.

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