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Droste effect. 

If you rip all your albums to a hard drive (and have a fairly extensive collection) it's a snap to do this with any reasonably good music player application, such as itunes.  I often check out all the versions I have of a song.  Not all album metadata contains all the participants but it often does, so I can often search and find sideman appearances too.  The difficulty for most with a large collection is if you haven't been ripping everything to hard drive all along, it could take a long time and a lot of labor to rip them all now! Many years back I wrote to allmusic asking them to expose an interface which would allow you create queries connected by 'and' and 'or'  to allow search for two musicians on the same album, etc.  They never replied and the site has gone downhill so badly I no longer use it.  

Is there any knowledge about why Alfred Lion rarely recorded vocalists? I only know the 45's by Bill Henderson and the two albums by Dodo Greene and Sheila Jordan. There even was a new numers series started for the latter. So what?    

A number of times I’ve pulled up a few favorites — mostly semi-standards, or “almost standards” (primarily written in the 1960’s & 70’s) — to try and find as many different versions of those tunes. Like who the heck has recorded anything of the better known tunes by Charles Tolliver, or Joe Henderson beyond “Recorda Me” and such. So not ‘standards’ per se — but the best-known tunes by some of the post 1963 greats. Or I’ll look up every single tune from a favorite slightly-lesser-known album — like from Speak Like A Child or The Prisoner — to see which (if any) have been covered. Shame that has to be done song-title-by-song-title — and that there’s not an easier way (on the streaming platforms directly) to, say, give me every song written by Andrew Hill that doesn’t have him as the recording artist. Fortunately you can sorta get to some of that thru Discogs — but it’s very tedious, and relies on composer-credits having been entered (which isn’t done nearly enough). And then you gotta go digging for an online version to stream (if you even can), or maybe it’ll be on YouTube — but then maybe in an entire album or album-side upload (and not just the one track as its own video). A major pain in the ass, but still light years more to be found online than 10 or especially 20 years ago.