OTHER TECH

The first thing I want to know about any alternative to commercial radio is how it handles jazz. These are hard times for anyone who wants to hear acoustic mainstream jazz on the radio. Even a large market like Detroit, where I live, doesn't have a genuine jazz station - just one of those "smooth" pretenders.

Both satellite-radio services acknowledge this situation by the titles they've chosen for their straight-ahead jazz channels - Pure Jazz on Sirius, Real Jazz on XM. And although both play a range that runs from Armstrong through Ellingtonia to the latest neoclassicist, both also have a strong hard-bop backbone. The main difference is that Sirius draws heavily on the Blue Note catalog while XM relies more on contemporary recreators of the form - which, in my opinion, gives Sirius a slight edge. It's been nice to tune in Pure Jazz early in the morning and hear some vintage Horace Silver or Lee Morgan or Art Blakey. On the other hand, if you hear "Miles Ahead" on XM, the Davis featured is more likely to be Osbert than Miles.

While both services offer a good range from near-jazz to the real deal, both seem to be in league with commercial radio in banishing the avant-garde. The most progressive thing I heard in three weeks of sampling the channels was a movement from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme suite on Sirius. Since avant-garde jazz has a nearly 50-year tradition, as well as many current practitioners, it seems reasonable to expect that a few regular programs would feature it, if not a whole channel.

When it comes to classical music, both services have a good Three Bs-and-beyond station. Sirius offers Symphony Hall, while XM has XM Classics (with the ambitious tagline "The greatest music of the last 1,000 years"). Sirius also has an all-chamber-music station called Vista, which is a nice alternative to have on those mornings when Horace Silver - or, for that matter, Gustav Mahler - seems too aggressive.

For rock, I heeded the generational call and spent some time with XM's '60s channel. But the problem there is that it was such a bifurcated decade - at some point in the mid-'60s, they changed the water, metaphorically speaking. So a typical 1962 song is very different from a '68 one, and just as often as the channel played something that still sounded pretty groovy, they'd play something corny that my older sister might be into. But it's all subjective, folks. For more unalloyed geezer kicks, I gravitated to Sirius's The Vault (tagline: "Deeper cuts from rock's legendary performers"), which is your basic Classic Rock station but with more leeway in the selections and minus - and this is important - the usual obnoxious commercials.

Overall, I was drawn to Sirius more often than XM, but when you're suddenly faced with just over 200 new channels, the initial impulse is to check out what you already know to see if they're getting it right. XM has some channels I haven't made up my mind about yet - including Special X, a catch-all channel for ostensibly unclassifiable music, and Sonic Theater, which presents dramas, book readings, and other things spoken-word. And I'm sure both services have hidden crannies I'll enjoy once I discover them. As when I first got digital cable, with its surplus of movie and music channels, checking out satellite radio has been a little overwhelming. But it's also been fun scratching the surface.

- Richard C. Walls