Jazz Social Network Analysis

[Rabshakeh]

I've always been fascinated by how jazz jazz musicians formed networks, based around geographic location, family, friendship groups, band membership and label affiliation. There's a real thrill when you suddenly become aware of a new network of musicians that you did not know previously, and can enjoy exploring their interconnecting leader and sideman dates. One piece of advice that I always give to new jazz listeners is to pick favourite records from the obvious start jazz records and then "follow the sidemen". 

With that as an introduction, does anyone know whether anyone has ever carried out a social network analysis of jazz players?

For anyone to whom the term is new, a social network analysis is a business/marketing tool (never entirely sure what it is for) that analyses social data points and produces fun graphics that look like this example that I randomly stole from LinkedIn:

What they tend to show is core social networks surrounding key figures, which are then connected by other figures, who may be peripheral to any single core networks but perform an important social role sitting between them.

It would be interesting to see something of the sort. The data is right there on discogs. Just the thing for a bright young child study Jazz with Computer Science at university.

[Niko]

My dad was making those pictures when I was a kid in the 90s and I've always been fond of them (even though I have some doubts how much you learn from them)... have been thinking about doing some Jazz social network analysis for a long time, maybe just start with the discographies of the great hard bop labels and then see how people enter and leave the network, collaborate, bring in others, learn who was central to the networks of Prestige, Riverside and Blue Note at which points in time....it feels like something I might do in retirement (still over two decades to go...)

[Rabshakeh]

12 minutes ago, Niko said:

My dad was making those pictures when I was a kid in the 90s and I've always been fond of them (even though I have some doubts how much you learn from them)... have been thinking about doing some Jazz social network analysis for a long time, maybe just start with the discographies of the great hard bop labels and then see how people enter and leave the network, collaborate, bring in others, learn who was central to the networks of Prestige, Riverside and Blue Note at which points in time....it feels like something I might do in retirement (still over two decades to go...)

A lot of the material is on discogs. I would struggle to tell a computer from a lamp stand in technological terms, but I had a naive hope that it would be comparatively easy to harvest. Even just BN would be quite interesting*.

*Interesting = Fun to look at.

[Niko]

There was some discussion of how to extract data from Discogs here recently iirc... there's also the option of using the discographies on jazzdisco.org, maybe nicely asking them about the underlying database ... those visualization tools are relatively easy to use, for a start they just need a big matrix with zeros and ones for the connections... I don't think it's more than a week of work

[Ken Dryden]

Tom Lord’s Jazz Discography is also useful for such a project, though you have to subscribe or buy a static CD-Rom