joeleblanc

Sessionography is a better way to discover and listen to jazz. Every sideman is listed prominently. Tap their image -> see their entire discography as leader or sideman. Tap a tune -> see its entire recorded history in chronological order. Tap a label or studio(Van Gelder etc) -> see everything that's been recorded there. Filter by artist, era, and instrument to hone in on exactly what you want to listen to. Free to download and try I'm still open to any and all feedback and feature requests- so please keep those coming(you can email me through the app). As a thank you- I'm happy to provide an upgrade discount to anyone on this forum, just let me know!

Yes- I think the problems come when simply hoovering up all the data, or scraping sites that don't allow it. MusicBrainz and Discogs do explicitly allow it and I'm finding MusicBrainz is quite robust. Discogs is not quite as organized but just today I worked out a way to get 2700 more albums labeled with recording session dates(sometimes down to the day, but at least to the year). For each of these methods I'm cross referencing the approach with album sets with proven data to have a pretty high confidence that it's being categorized correctly. The most difficult part I'm finding though are the compilations and reissues. Those are often not well documented- even by Tom Lord(which honestly though makes sense he's not covering these). There are a number of heuristics though to parse these. That's most of what I'm working on right now.

Discogs is great for new releases. Discogs is also a sales platform so artists tend to list there way more reliably than MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz has a much more rigorous data structure with more data points. It's been quite good for cataloguing the classic eras. The options you listed- I've looked into them and there are licensing issues with scraping that data so it's largely a no go right now. Thanks for the suggestions - I'm all ears for suggestions, feature requests- anything at this point. There isn't really a completely perfect solution at least yet, but what we have a pretty close and the connections we are graphing in the app can lead you pretty deep, pretty fast. There is just so much on Apple Music that is simply impossible to surface via search, but with Sessionography you can drill down pretty easily and discover some really interesting tracks.

Two main sources- MusicBrainz and Discogs. In some cases we are also scraping wikipedia to fill in some missing data- but that doesn't get us too much. Sessionography isn't simply presenting this data in a nicer UI though- I've merged the databases on a hosted server with over a hundred parsing rules, correction layers and validation passes. For example on Musicbrainz- most of John Coltranes discography is dated AFTER his death. We recover true session dates from a chain of sources — session-date relationships, recording-location dates, even dates parsed out of bootleg titles ("Konserthuset, Stockholm, March 22, 1960") and album liner-note annotations. On top of that we parse out a number of signals to determine which releases are compilations(this data is frequently missing) so those can be filtered out. It's still early though and I'm working like crazy everyday to keep cleaning up the data- if you see anything off, email me through the app.

The app is fully browsable with previews even without an Apple Music sub and it will play full tracks in your iTunes library. The only thing that won't work is playing full playlists. Sessionography does have a CarPlay app- but it doesn't have the fully functionality of the app due to restrictions around car apps. You can however view personnel on any track in from the now playing screen in CarPlay.

Sessionography lets you go on crazy jazz discography deep dives. View chronological recording order timeline as leader and/or sideman Personnel listed for every album- tap to jump into their career Combine artists and see every session they have done together Explore entire record label or studio discography View entire recording history of a tune in chronological order Play every track via apple music Create smart playlists based on artist/group size/Era/instrument Install the beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/EAPvdrEu It's a simple enough idea- and I was surprised that absolutely nothing like it exists. I would love for as many people to take a look and let me know what you think! Please report any bugs or data errors as well- it's early and I'm making significant improvements daily for both the app UI and the data parsing. Thanks! -Joe