Printed discographies vs those on-line

[medjuck]

Over on another thread Chuck Nessa gave me some discographical information then told me that it was available in most discographies and politely (he said "please") told me I should buy one.

I have bought several discographies on individual artists over the years including the 2 volume Duke Ellington "New DESOR", but genreally I much prefer going to on-line sites and wish everyone would post their work. My assumption is that no-one creating a discography is doing it for the money. If they print it there are expenses involved which need to be recouped. On-line there is very little expense and you can constantly up-date your work. You can also call on others for help. I've made my own very minor contributions to Miles, Bird, Mingus and Ellington discographical web-sites.

On-line discographies can be made very easy to navigate. (I especially recommend Peter Losin's Miles and Bird discographies as excellent examples.) The New DESOR has an amazing amount of information in it but when using it I often have to refer to one volume to find the date I'm looking for and the other to get the list of soloists. (And at my age they're heavy as well as expensive.)

Meanwhile DESOR is being constantly revised on Sjef Hoesmit's DEMS website, but only the revisions can be found there. I wish the original was there too.

If someone doing research needs finacial assistance I'd be happy to contribute but in the meantime I don't really want to shell out for a hard copy which will be difficult to find and out of date by the time I receive it.

Besides my books shelves are getting full.

Anyone else have an opinion about this?

[Chuck Nessa]

I provided information for you from the cd-rom of Walter Bruyninckx work. It is a PDF file and can be updated and edited if you have the software. Rust, Jepsen, Bruyninckx, Rabin and many others (earlier and later) have invested years of work in this and need both recognition and payback.

Discography is a time intensive and exacting task. I started my record company in 1967 and started answering letters from discographers a year later. I'm not sure you have any idea of the work and expense involved in building the database now being expanded. I find complaining about the lack of free/easy info and offering some sort of "free will offering" insulting to these fine researchers.

FWIW, the DESOR information would be still in it's infancy without the earlier, exhaustive work of Massagli, Pusateri and Volonte supported by their customers.

This age of instant free information can be disturbing to some of us who paid for the data and now feel the need to be a "good guy" and provide it to others. I can't imagine how Brian Rust or Walter Bruyninckx would feel about it.

Edited September 18, 2006 by Chuck Nessa

[Chuck Nessa]

FWIW, I keep my printed discographies (and even buy more) to crosscheck the data.

[Chalupa]

Paging Mike Fitzgerald... Mr. Fitzgerald please pick up the nearest courtesy phone...

[medjuck]

. Rust, Jepsen, Bruyninckx, Rabin and many others (earlier and later) have invested years of work in this and need both recognition and payback.

Discography is a time intensive and exacting task. I started my record company in 1967 and started answering letters from discographers a year later. I'm not sure you have any idea of the work and expense involved in building the database now being expanded. I find complaining about the lack of free/easy info and offering some sort of "free will offering" insulting to these fine researchers.

FWIW, the DESOR information would be still in it's infancy without the earlier, exhaustive work of Massagli, Pusateri and Volonte supported by their customers.

This age of instant free information can be disturbing to some of us who paid for the data and now feel the need to be a "good guy" and provide it to others. I can't imagine how Brian Rust or Walter Bruyninckx would feel about it.

No disagreements here. But were those early discographies on-line their creaters would still get the props they deserve as well as some help. If they needed financial help they would probably get that too, but without the cost of printing they probably wouldn't need that much. As it stands now even a lot of hard core EKE fans probably can't afford DESOR. (I think I paid a couple of hundred bucks for it.)

Mu guess is that the next edition of DESOR will be on-line just as DEMS which used to be a subscription newsleter now is.

So your last arguement is: why should people who get interested in stuff later than you did get something free that you've had to pay for? And I can't answer that.

[Chuck Nessa]

So your last arguement is: why should people who get interested in stuff later than you did get something free that you've had to pay for? And I can't answer that.

My real argument is why should anyone get free stuff from people spending time and money to generate the "stuff". My argument has little to do with me.

My passing along this info for free is another discussion.

[Christiern]

So your last arguement is: why should people who get interested in stuff later than you did get something free that you've had to pay for? And I can't answer that.

My real argument is why should anyone get free stuff from people spending time and money to generate the "stuff". My argument has little to do with me.

My passing along this info for free is another discussion.

True, discographers spend an inordinate amount of time on their work, but they also "get stuff from people," not to mention that the bulk of most discographies is lifted from earlier works by other discographers. Something to be considered.

While I'm at it, allow me to issue a caveat regarding the bio blurbs found in Walter Bruyninckx's discography. I don't know who writes these things, but they are terrible—so full of misinformation that they make Scott Yanow's stuff seem scholarly!

Here's a sample of this sort of thing. Mind you, it is taken from a '90s edition, so there is no excuse for not having made corrections.

BESSIE SMITH

Singer. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, April 5, 1894 and died Clarksdale, Mississippi, September 26, 1937. Bessie came from a very poor family. She started singing when still in her teens.

No, she hadn’t reached her teens when she started singing.

It was Ma Rainey touring with her Rabbit Foot Minstrels and passing through Chattanooga who heard her singing and she took Bessie with her on tour.

No, Ma Rainey was the singer with the Moses Stokes company, a show that also had Bessie’s brother, Clarence in the troupe. He arranged for Bessie to be hired as a dancer.

Bessie worked several years in honky tonks znd tent shows.

No, Bessie dis not work in honky tonks, or even tent shows. She worked in theaters in the South and along the Northeast coast, with various headliners.

It was Frank Walker who heard her in Selma, Alabama and he sent pianist Clarence Williams to bring her to New York for a recording session.

No, that Frank Walker story is one of the myths, long since shattered. Bessie was working in a Philadelphia club when Clarence Williams contacted her.

Other sources say that Bessie was already in New York in 21 where she recorded for Emerson, but no evidence is found of any such recording. The success of Bessie's first recordings was quite sensational she was a direct hit with the black population and sold over 2 million records during her first recording year.

From 24 on she was recognized as the greatest blues singer even surpassing Ma Rainey's fame as a blitz war. For her accompaniments Columbia brought the best known jazz musicians to the studio and some remarkable recordings were made up to 1930.

Ma Rainey was never a bigger star than Bessie, so there was no “blitz war.” Ma had been around longer, but “fame” did not come to her until she started recording, which was when even greater fame came to Bessie.

By that time there was a decline in the popularity of Bessie due to several events. The public looking for something new, the popularity of radio and film and Bessie's heavy drinking problems.

Public taste did undergo a change, but Bessie knew that and she began transforming her act and repertoire to fit the new era. While the advent of talking pictures did affect the vaudeville business that Bessie worked in, it had nothing to do with a decline in her career. Neither did the advent of radio (around 1925)—in fact, Bessie appeared on radio in the 1920s and did rather well. Bessie was indeed a heavy drinker, but that, too was not why her career sagged. It was the Depression, which almost wiped out the record industry and forced Columbia to drop many of its artists, including Bessie.

She could only get second roles as a singer in vaudeville tours and even had to sell cigarettes between the acts.

Bessie began touring with much smaller companies, but they were her own. She also took a job at a club in Philadelphia (her hometown at that point), but she never had to resort to selling cigarettes—that was something Hammond and Paul Oliver concocted.

In 33 John Hammond tried to bring Bessie back but without much success.

John produced four Okeh sides with Bessie in 1933, but he was not making any attempt to “bring Bessie back.”

Bessie went back to the south and lived in poverty, quite far away from the days she earned up to $ 2000 a week.

After recording for John, Bessie went back to Philadelphia, where she lived, and continued working. She never lived in poverty after leaving Chattanooga. Yes, she now made less money, but she was not poor. Her lover, Richard Morgan, was a successful bootlegger, so they did alright.

In 37 John Hammond wanted to try again and while on his way to the south, Bessie was involved in a car crash and refused admission in an hospital because of her color. By the time the ambulance had reached another hospital Bessie had bled to death.

Hammond did not want to “try again” in 1937. He hadn’t tried in the first place. The only thing he did was to fuel the greatest myth surrounding Bessie: how she allegedly died. Bessie was in a car crash, but she was never taken to a white hospital—that story was absolute fabrication, given credence by Hammond (who knew better). Bessie died in Clarksdale Mississippi’s Afro-American hospital, not on her way to it.

With her disappeared the greatest blues singer jazz will ever have known. She was rightly called "The Empress of the Blues". She simply was gifted with an exceptional voice. It all flowed naturally and she seemed to have no vocal limits. She possessed a variety of tonal inflexions that made her voice unique. Her voice was poignant and had a unique richness no other singer ever matched. Yet her singing was of a natural simplicity, a honest and pure reflexion of her own. Like in Van Gogh's paintings you can find in each of her songs some reflexions of her own life.

Despite the poor quality of most of her recordings the powerful voice and pure beauty is all there, close your eyes and listen !

As you can see, I'm not just nitpicking, these are some serious distortions of the facts.

Edited March 15, 2011 by Christiern

[relyles]

The Lord discography is now available online for a reasonable subscription fee.

[Rooster_Ties]

FWIW, early on I feared being an annoyance to people with all my BN inquiries, and bought the 2001 Cuscuna/Ruppli BN discography, for what I vaguely remember being about $135 or so (sometime around 2003 I think).

Reminds me, what's the story on Michel Ruppli? (the co-discographer of The Blue Note Label. I'd always wondered what his connection was to BN, though looking at Amazon, it appears he's done quite a number of these label-based discographies.

[gvopedz]

FWIW, I bought the Coltrane Reference. I read this heavy, hardcover book cover-to-cover (not in one sitting). Since then, I go back to the book to look up details about once a month. My belated thanks to all the people who helped put the book together.

[Big Beat Steve]

Reminds me, what's the story on Michel Ruppli? (the co-discographer of The Blue Note Label. I'd always wondered what his connection was to BN, though looking at Amazon, it appears he's done quite a number of these label-based discographies.

What do you mean, what's the story on Michel Ruppli?

I'd not really have associated him primarily with BN anyway as I came acoss others of his discographies much earlier (labels I was/am particularly interested in). He just seems to have been digging deeply into label discographies (well before the internet era), including sections with various LP/45/78 other release series to cross-reference things beyond mere session details.

Others may have gone down the same route.

Otherwise, I agree with what Chuck Nessa and Chris A said about discographies and the work involved (and I DID notice the ones Chuck Nessa mentioned and - more tellingly so - did NOT mention among those who did the PIONEERING groundwork before the lifters came along).

I for one did not mind shelling out e.g. for a (secondhand) set of the Jepsen discographies, Leadbitter/Slaven's (original and then the updated 2-volume) Blues works as well as for specialist works in more recent times such as Harry Nicolausson's Swedish Jazz discography or Ginell/Coffey's Discography of Western Swing and Hot String Bands 1928-42.

A lot of work went into these and they were worth the price of admission in my book. Though it can add up indeed ...

Some may be available online, e.g. on hindsight I could have avoided buying the Nicolausson discography if I had become aware much earlier of the much-updated complete works accessible and donwloadable online on the Visarkiv website.

And others are an ongoing group effort as other collectors contribute to and deepen the research findings, e.g. (to get back to the Michel Ruppli label discographies) in the case of the Chess discography, for example, a lot of which (covering early Chess 78s) was developed in much greater depth on the Red Saunders Foundation website.

But IMO it is always up to the compilers to decide if they want to make this accessible to everyone and it should never, never be taken for granted. This is one area where the urge to want to (and feel entitled to) get everything free through the web ought to have its limits.

Edited March 15, 2011 by Big Beat Steve

[Christiern]

Apropos "lifting," I don't think anyone can be faulted for basing their discography upon the work of colleagues who came before them. A search for wholly original discographies would not turn up much of value, but—however scanty they are—the seeds are there to be updated and built upon. That said, I fault discographers for not acknowledging their reliance on the work of predecessors. If Lord acknowledged Jepsen, Rabin (whose work he not only copied but also stopped dead in its tracks at the start of letter "G"), et al, I didn't see it.

I have admiration for all the discographers, but my hero is Brian Rust.

[Chuck Nessa]

[Neal Pomea]

I got a paperback copy of Tony Russell's Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942 for $40 on a sale from Amazon, and it looks like it's cheaper now. Dick Spottswood did some great discographies of early Cajun artists, available in Ann Allen Savoy's book Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People. Everything Spottswood does is so valuable.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

is that the same Clarence Williams as who recorded Sun Ra's "Chocolate Avenue", wow what a connection

[cohens2]

I actually do discography and have done those of Lucky Thompson, Elmo Hope, Teddy Charles, Frank Strozier and others. I have just updated the discography in the Gigi Gryce biography, "Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce," that Michael Fitzgerald and I wrote and it's available online. If we republish the book, it will not include the discography. Print discographies are out of date that day they appear. Even with artists long gone, new discoveries and corrections are always being made. So to me, in the 21st century, online is the way to go. Here are a couple of web sites to check out if you haven't already:

http://www.jazzdiscography.com/

http://www.attictoys.com/

Sorry for the self-promotion but I invest an ENORMOUS amount of time and treasure on these projects and all I ask is that people look at them.

[jeffcrom]

Print discographies are out of date that day they appear.

This is true, and it's one reason that I often refer to on-line discographies.

But I've learned so much (and derived much pleasure) from thumbing through printed discographies. I've kept all my out-of-date ones, and keep adding more. (Thanks, Paul!) I just bought a fairly reasonably-priced copy of Mr. Rust's two-volume Dance Band Discography, since many of the 78s I've been acquiring aren't listed anywhere else. The amount of work that went into this is staggering. I've already learned a lot.

[brownie]

Apropos "lifting," I don't think anyone can be faulted for basing their discography upon the work of colleagues who came before them. A search for wholly original discographies would not turn up much of value, but—however scanty they are—the seeds are there to be updated and built upon. That said, I fault discographers for not acknowledging their reliance on the work of predecessors. If Lord acknowledged Jepsen, Rabin (whose work he not only copied but also stopped dead in its tracks at the start of letter "G"), et al, I didn't see it.

The Lord Discography books each carry an introduction which concludes with a list of contributors and the following paragraph:

My Apologies to anyone I mau have overlooked.

And, of course a deep bow to general discographers who have come before : Hilton Schleman, Charles Delaunay, Brian Rust, Jorgen Jepsen, Walter Bruyninckx and Erik Raben

[Christiern]

Thanks, Guy, I am glad to learn that.

[sonnymax]

My real argument is why should anyone get free stuff from people spending time and money to generate the "stuff".

The 18th Century was the "Age of Enlightenment".

Currently, we are living in the "Age of Entitlement".

[Christiern]

The Internet refueled the gimme generation's greed—big time.

[cih]

I bought Dixon Godrich & Rye's 'Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943' when I first realised that I was becoming sufficiently interested in the music to warrant the £75 - I'm not a 'researcher', just a fan - and it was the most I had ever paid for a book at the time. But I totally loved it (and still do) - such a fantastic piece of work - it seemed amazing that it even existed, and a beautiful thing really... and it seemed even more great because it was, in a way, ostensibly useless to me! Sheer luxury, I don't think I could get that from the internet.

[Fer Urbina]

About Ruppli, he's done his last label discographies (Atlantic, which I think is out already, ABC-Paramount, Blue Note, and Capitol) on CD-ROM through Names & Numbers (the Dutch discography magazine). The discographies come as searchable PDF files. The Blue Note updates the previous books, and it's been done with Cuscuna onboard.

Also, regarding sources and acknowledgements, it's very nice of Lord nodding at his predecesors, but as far as costs and time are concerned, I'd take issue at the fact that he (they?) seems to do none of the double checking work others did (especially Raben - whose care seems to have been his downfall, which is a very depressing moral to his story).

Mike Fitzgerald's discography project (www.jazzdiscography.com) seems to me the way to go: a systematic approach (thanks to Steve Albin's Brian software) for anyone to follow, which makes you follow, almost automatically, a set of standards regarding rigour, fact-checking and sources. Because it's online, it can be updated automatically, and contributions are very easy to add.

F

PS: Noal, THANKS for putting the Gryce discography on line!

Edited March 17, 2011 by Fer Urbina

[Brute]

IMO, the audience for any jazz discography is probably pretty slim outside of academians & die hard fans and while I don't agree that the info should necessarily be available for free, the discographers have to know that were they to charge for such info, they could never be fully compensated for their efforts.

[Victor Christensen]

I have only a few: The Blue Note (Cuscana & Ruppli), Chet Baker(Torbjørn Søgren), Wardell Gray(Coover Gazdar), Oscar Pettiford (Coover Gazdar), and then three Japanese of Blue Note, Prestige & Riverside, and also some I have printed out from the Net.

And last but not least one Brian Rust that covers Ellington.

Vic