The Site For Jazz, African Music and Beyond

Search Tips

The text search engine allows queries to be formed from arbitrary Boolean expressions containing the keywords AND, OR, and NOT, and grouped with parentheses. For example:

jazz guitar

finds documents containing 'jazz' or 'guitar'

jazz or guitar

same as above

jazz and guitar

finds documents containing both 'jazz' and 'guitar'

jazz not guitar

finds documents containing 'jazz' but not 'guitar'

(jazz not guitar) and african

finds documents containing 'african', plus 'jazz' but not 'guitar'

africa*

finds documents containing words starting with 'africa'

Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on "jazz -guitar" is equivalent to the jazz not guitar, and "+jazz +guitar " will return the same documents as the jazz and guitar

If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "Soukous", the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word - that is, only documents containing "Soukous" will be found. On the other hand, lowercase words like "soukous" will generate hits from "Soukous", "SOUKOUS", or "soukOUS".

To group a collection of words, use quotes. For example, the query "African Soukous" (quotes included) would not generate a hit from "African Soukous played on guitar". Without quotes, the sentence would count.