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 places and Jazz dates are experimental research projects trying to address the current limitations of MusicBrainz, preventing it from being a discographic tool
• Jazz collections is a working page for the ongoing tidying effort of all the messy collections
• SwingJazzBandDisambiguation is a mo project, actually an informal discussion forum wishing to sort out the BigMess of Jazz artists we are currently in
• Jazz Quotes and Jazz Words are two projects focused on general jazz information: while you might find them funny and/or interesting in themselves, they probably won't really help you editing

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.
• Michael Fitzgerald discography project contains a slew of valuable links and information. Fitzgerald is also famous for his completely unknown but remarquable Brian discographic tool.

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 across releases
• we tend to value more discographic exactitude and research, over the traditional "the release cover says it all"
• some of us are just crazy-nuts :p, including a few completists

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 wrong, Volume 1: "Why am I treated so bad?"

You might want to first try by yourself to determine from cover art the release artist of this album.

Now that you concluded you can't, you also know why: a release title and a release artist often change between successive strictly identical editions of an album. The reasons vary, but may be narrowed down to:

• a label simply decides to change the cover art, and change the font size and/or mentions about the participants, and/or add/strip a formation name
• a label may decide not to publish an album under the real artist name, but rather use the (supposedly more commercial) name of one of the sidemen
• after a catalog changes hands, a new label decides to reissue the album putting emphasis on another participant of the session which may "sell" more than the previously credited artist
• the album is unofficially reissued by a bootleg company which either doesn't know exactly what they reissue, or just give fantasist, misspelled, or completely false indications
• a reissue label decides to restore discographic truth and reissues with proper informations an album previously improperly attributed

The problem of course is that most listeners/users:

• are not discographers
• don't necessarily know the artists enough to make a decision by just hearing the album
• don't care about discographically inexact data, as long as they have the feeling their album is tagged according to what they think they bought
• might even bug you to death because they think having the cd cover suddenly entitle them to decide what is discographic truth

Which of course might lead to the situation of a caring moderator constantly merging again and again the very same albums, constantly arguing on the same things, not to mention deep user dissatisfaction.

So?

Here are a few suggestions to find a decent resolution to this category of problem:

• if a release is a bootleg, discographic truth is an absolute rule, and inexact release informations must be discarded and simply ignored (you probably won't be bugged by users with these: remember that most obscure/completely messed up bootlegs are owned by either completists who do care a lot about exactitude, or by p2p consumers who don't give a damn about the name of the stuff)
• the same rule should apply with blatantly inexact informations (even with legit labels)
• if a release exists with two different names under the same (or very similar) release artist, you may determine the most common edition, merge into it, and mention the alternate title into annotations
• if the very same album exists in two editions with very different names and release artist (both actually avalaible), you probably have no choice but let it go and not try to merge: you can't win that battle (think Coltrane Time, or the infamous Adderley and Coltrane)

Why the concept of group is essentially inadequate to represent formations

A group:

• is a named entity, and is created by one or more persons
• has an history: creation, old members departing, new members arriving, disband
• is distinct from its members, at least in the intention if not in facts
• may be assimilated to the notion of "project", from the point of vue of its participants
• has a consistency: members don't change overnight, and most time stick together for a while
• has a structure, that doesn't evolve much: functions in the group are distributed to persons
• should be considered as an artist entry or as a performance name, as it is indeed the intent of the artists to release stuff under that particular name representing the entity they created

A jazz formation (most time):

• is not a named entity, and is not created
• doesn't have an history (something not created can't...)
• is essentially a numerical indication of the number of sidemen present on a particular gig, and is essentially an extension of its leader
• may be assimilated to the notion of back-up "band", from the point of vue of its leader
• has no consistency: John Doe trio may change three times in three sessions (except John Doe of course)
• has no fixed structure: overnight, John Doe trio may be a bass/piano/drums, then a guitar/saxophone/drums
• should NOT be considered as an artist entry or as a performance name, as most time, a John Doe Sextet album is a John Doe created, composed and led album, were session musician do play and accompany John Doe.

Why trusting cd covers too much is wrong, Volume 2: Sessions are not Releases

Sessions are not releases. Jazz formations are not groups, and are not release artists.

The fantasy of label producers and/or cover designer, mentioning session formation names either as a decorative feature, either as a convenient indication to inform consumer about the type of the record (big band, small formation), either because they consumed too much booze, should not be taken into account to determine a release artist.

So you really shouldn't use formations names as release artist on single artists releases. And you shouldn't use formations names as track artist on VA releases.

Of course, there are exceptions - eg: there exist formations that presented all the charasteristics of a group. In this case of course, use the formation name as a release artist.

This is the major task, biggest problem, and main source of hatred we have to cope with in Jazz - but we must tackle it, and we must save ourselves from the artist BigMess.