Listening to as many versions you can of one standard.

[Hardbopjazz]

Has anyone else gone onto one of the streaming services and selected one standard and listened to all the different recordings of that tune? Today I did this today for two, "Moon River" and "Summertime." I wanted to see how many sounded different than others. Very few stray from the original version.  

[Big Beat Steve]

No, not really ... but many years ago I compiled my own cassette chock full of all the versions of "Jumping At The Woodside" that I was able to come up with from my records. Played it over and over again without tiring of it ...
Many versions by Count Basie, of course, but amazingly different anyway through the years, and then there were Lester Young, Bob Wills, Lambert Hendricks & Ross and others ... 

By now I would have even more versions in my collection.

 

Re- "Summertime:"
Two suggestions (off the beaten tracks of the usual):

Dave Phillips & The Hot Rod Gang ("Wild Youth" LP, obviously modeled on the 1958 version by Gene Vincent )
The Slingshots ("Big Noise From Northwood" V.A. LP)

(both from the early 80s) 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Big Beat Steve

[Rooster_Ties]

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.

[Stompin at the Savoy]

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.

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Stompin at the Savoy

[Hardbopjazz]

1 hour ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

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.

 

Yes, I am doing this.