Jazz

Swing and All That Jazz

This page has multiple goals:

• be a central drop point linking to other pages and ressources helpfull to Jazz oriented moderators, and also to voters
• expose and discuss ideas and concepts specifically ressorting to Jazz, that don't yet have an independent page, or don't deserve one
• list currently active Jazz moderators, ongoing and future tidying tasks, and who is to be considered a reference for some specific artists/areas

Ressources

Wiki:

• The Jazz compositions list aims at listing commonly encountered jazz compositions that suffered many different variants, or present a spelling difficulty. It should be considered authoritative on what variant to choose, and pointed at from moderations notes to justify track title change.
• The Jazz labels compendium wants to centralize as many information as possible about jazz labels and usefull links to quickly find countries of origin, catalog numbers, period of activity, thus aims at being usefull to moderators who do a lot of release documention work.
• Jazz bands brain-storming is an informal discussion forum wishing to help in sorting out the BigMess of Jazz artists we are currently in

External:

• The Jazz Discography Project is a decent, open, well documented discographic ressource. There you may find both artists discographies and some historical labels catalog. Be aware, though, that it lacks a few things (recent editions, recent catalog numbers, recently discovered recordings), that it shouldn't be considered an authority on track titles, and that it's not completely trivial to use if you are not accustomed to such ressources.

Please don't link to specific artists discographies pages here - add them in MB instead using an AdvancedRelationships. :p

Known active jazz moderators

Please add/delete your name if you wish, and complete your informations (this may disappear or complement the future Moderator/Interest pages). Don't forget to subscribe to this page also, so you can be mailed for updates ;) .

Moderator name	Automoderator?	Will answer questions / help request by mail?	Knows... / is...	Lackin' on...
Yllona Richardson	Yes	?	All / All :p ?	Nothing :p ?
mo	Yes	?	Ellington? NHOP and north-european bands? / Polyvalent and very experienced?	Nothing :p ?
dmppanda	Yes	Yes	Monk, Mingus (and related musicians), Dolphy, O. Coleman, C. Taylor, most hard-bop and free-jazz stuff 1950-1980, labels	new stuff, not optimal with vocal jazz, big-bands, cool jazz, white jazz, pre-1940 jazz

Do you think you know enough?

• English capitalization rules?
• Extra title information style?
• The annotation FAQ?

What is Jazz after all?

We don't refer to Jazz as a genre, but rather as a specific way music can be done, thus as a specific discographic approach we need to use for it. This has the side effect of letting us escape the "genre" prison (eg: consider some Tzadik productions as Jazz), and possibly let some "Jazz music" fall out of scope of this approach.

Indeed, we don't mind at all genres frontiers and definitions. We do mind heuristic and methodology.

"Jazz" has the following characteristics:

• strongly rely on the use of acoustic instruments
• records are rarely the object of strong post-production, remixing, overdubbing, and tend to be made by choosing simply the best take
• essentially recorded in studio as it is when played live
• "bands" and "groups" concepts are most of the time replaced by the idea of "formation"
• the biggest amount of material comes from the 45-70 period
• the material have frequently been reissued numerous times, in various forms, eventually with very different release names / release artist name
• the ratio of new compositions / existing compositions per release is significantly lower than with other music
• artist intent on tracks titling is almost inexistent

Classical music shares some of these characteristics, to some extent.

Thus:

• we value precise venue information, including recording dates, locations, engineer and producer names
• more generally, we value all session information, especially musicians names and instruments
• we think release history is absolutely crucial
• we think titles should be harmonized accross release
• we tend to value more discographic exactitude and research, over the traditionnal "the release cover says it all"
• some of us are just crazy-nuts :p

Laundry list

The following are known ongoing tidying efforts, declared intention to, or implicit:

• dmppanda: Django Reinhardt, Charles Mingus, VA compilations, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy
• mo: Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman
• Yllona Richardson: all new cats, Marsalis possee

Why trusting cd covers too much is bad

TODO.

Why the concept of group is essentially inadequate to represent formations

TODO.

Why using formation names as release artist is a bad idea

TODO.