hopkins

Rosemary Clooney.

Hipsters beware, the next big thing is the wax cylinder: https://londonjazzcollector.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/ultimate-audio-revolution/ (Happy April fool's day!)

I have always wondered how Tom Lord build his discography, and who contributes nowadays (additions, corrections...).

An interesting bit of trivia, about that Guarnieri session (quoted from Tom Lord): "The performances on this album were captured on a Stahnke Reproducing Piano, a normal piano fitted with a computerized recording/playback system. When a pianist plays on this piano, the movements of all the parts of the piano action -- keys, hammers, pedals, etc.-- are measured and stored digitally on tape. When this tape is played back, the piano itself plays a performance identical to the original. Johnny Guarnieri was not present when the performances were recorded onto the audio tapes which were used for the mastering of both LP and CD. This technology was used here for the first time under the supervision of its inventor, Wayne Stahnke." More information in this NYT article: Technology; Ivories That Tickle Themselves https://nyti.ms/29jiabo Pretty cool...

https://archive.org/details/cd_wardell-gray_wardell-gray 9 minute Blue Lou on repeat last night!

Back to Guarnieri! Here is a very nice track from the "Echoes of Ellington" album: https://storage.googleapis.com/cloudplayer/samples/Johnny Guarnieri - Mississippi Moan.wav And the original, recorded in 1929: https://storage.googleapis.com/cloudplayer/samples/Ellington - Mississippi Moan.wav

I regurlarly play random track from this Ellington box set https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/7759958-Duke-Ellington-Anniversary-13-Volumes-Box-Set The box set contains 13 CDs. It was compiled by Claude Carriere. Covers the 1920s-1940s While I have all the material on other compilations (Mosaic etc), I like to listen to this set as it avoids the lesser interesting tracks or alternates included in most other collections (i would not do without them but those tracks don’t require repeated listening ).

Kudos for such a professional attitude. Nowadays, with streaming, these types of problems are amplified. I read that it is estimated around 25 % of royalty payments are misdirected due to missing or erroneous data!

I actually have the Delmark version, but I put the link to the only version I found on the Internet Archive, for the liner notes. I should have mentioned the Delmark version.

I regularly listen to "I Remember Bessie". Wonderful late Hodes https://archive.org/details/lp_i-remember-bessie_art-hodes

Yes, I listened to some of that album as well but prefer the solo album I mentioned.

I have been listening to Guarnieri's Echoes of Ellington album this week: https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/8976873-Johnny-Guarnieri-Echoes-Of-Ellington His playing is exciting, and I find it really interesting how he is able to recreate the "mood" of Ellington’s composition.

The discogs database is publicly available but it is HUGE, difficult to use, and as we both pointed out, of low quality for jazz discography. The system you describe is close to what I had in mind. I have given a lot of thought to all this for quite some time (years), and investigated a lot of different solutions out there (discogs being one, but also musicbrainz, and others mentioned above). There are many challenges to all this, but breaking down a complex problem into distinct smaller "components" we can make things more maneagble. I will take some time tonight to elaborate on all this and explain what I have in mind. Here you go: https://discogs-data-dumps.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index.html I'll answer some of this in detail as well.

https://jazzdiscography.com/brian-discography-software/

Discogs has a vast number of releases (albums), but the quality of the data (dates, credits) is poor. It is a platform designed for selling/buying albums, not really for collectors and even less so for discographers.

The effort involved in managing a database with detailed credits by session is very high. I do not regret having spend time building this detailed data for my own albums, but it would have been so much simpler to do if there were a single repository for session information available. The technology to implement this at very little cost is available, but I guess the incentive for discographers to "unite" and work together is not...

https://archive.org/details/lp_a-meeting-of-the-times_roland-kirk-al-hibbler

Amazing ressource for Dave McKenna fans (count me in). Thanks for sharing this. I was unaware he had played with Teddy Wilson! https://www.davemckennapiano.com/dave-mckenna-teddy-wilson Many other sets to discover...

https://archive.org/details/cd_the-great-divide_von-freeman

Scans of these two LPs are available on the Internet Archive and contain interesting liner notes by Mark Gardner: https://archive.org/details/lp_central-avenue-breakdown-volume-1-origi_teddy-edwards-vivian-garry-dodo-marmaro https://archive.org/details/lp_central-avenue-breakdown-volume-2_teddy-edwards-barney-kessel-slim-gailla

Here is an ”artist” page presenting annotated albums: https://paulstephane.github.io/2023/03/11/Clifford-Brown.html I’m not sure this is of any interest to others (aside for my own, to keep track of some references). I’ll see whether I continue with some additional examples. The purpose is not to have full discographies. There are some YouTube links in the album pages, but i’m not sure how persistent these will be.

Removed

Columbia's J-Disc was also an interesting initiative: https://www.jazzstudiesonline.org/content/j-disc-online-jazz-discography I contacted them a few years ago but never got an answer back. The link to their online discography is now dead...

BRIAN is the best discography tool available, IMO. In an ideal world, BRIAN discographies would be available in an online shared database, and my application would link to it to collect discographical information associated to my albums. I had in fact briefly discussed this with them, but got deeply involved in my project and never followed through (ashamed to say). Jazz enthusiasts, collectors, researchers, are terribly handicapped, in my opinion, by the lack of a common, curated, repository for session information. There are multiple sources. Tom Lord's discography is unreliable, paying, and there is no curating process to my knowledge. So I plowed ahead with my own solution, but would be more than happy to participate in discussions of other options...

Yes, that was one of my main objectives. All the credits entered for each session are parsed and indexed. In the example above - Side by Side - searching for Ben Webster will list the album, but searching for Ben Webster and Duke Ellington won’t because they are not playing together on either session of the album. One thing i did not do was to identify 'leader' roles. The leader is generally identified as text in the session ’header’, but i cannot specifically search for albums where a given artist is a leader. I do have the album artist tag from the music files, but that does noy always include the leader, and there could be multiple sessions with multiple leaders on any given album. The concept of ’leadership’ is not always clear and significant - often,as you know, leadership is only assigned for contractual reasons. But it is sometimes useful...