More Important Than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography 9780226067674

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More Important Than the Music

More Important Than the Music A History of  Jazz Discography Bruce D. Epperson

The University of Chicago Press chicago and london

b r u c e d . e p p e r s o n is an attorney and independent scholar and member of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He is the author of Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13   1  2  3  4  5

isbn -13: 978-0-226-06753-7 (cloth) isbn -13: 978-0-226-06767-4 (e-book) doi : 10.7208/chicago/9780226067674.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Epperson, Bruce D., 1957– author. More important than the music : a history of jazz discography / Bruce D. Epperson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-06753-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-06767-4 (e-book) 1. Jazz—Discography—History.  2. Sound recordings—Collectors and collecting.  I. Title. ml 406.e 67 2013 016.78165026'6—dc23 2013016636 a This paper meets the requirements of

ansi/niso z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to William Epperson (clt.), whose recording log has drawn to a close, and to Sammy Beck (tpt., pno., vcl.), for whom the promise of Session 001 yet awaits.

[Their] utter dependence upon phonograph records will have to be remembered. Cut off from the living music by time as well as space, [one] submits to a particular shift of values. The record becomes more important than the music; minor musicians who have left recorded examples of their work behind them become more important than those major musicians who, for one reason or another, have never got around to a recording studio; and the man who has met the musicians and knows his way through the maze of records becomes more important than the musician himself. e r n e s t b o r n e m a n , “The Jazz Cult,” Esquire, 1947

Contents List of Illustrations  •  xi Preface and Acknowledgments  •  xiii c h a p t e r o n e   •  1 The Sage of Edgware c h a p t e r t w o   •  19 “Those Frenchmen Got a Hellova Nerve” c h a p t e r t h r e e   •  49 “A Form of Musical Bookkeeping” c h a p t e r f o u r   •  79 “You Live in a Numerical World of Your Own” c h a p t e r f i v e   •  103 “What a Mess” c h a p t e r s i x   •  127 Specialized Discographies, Part 1 c h a p t e r s e v e n   •  159 Specialized Discographies, Part 2 c h a p t e r e i g h t   •  183 What Kind of Discographies Do We Want? Notes  •  213 Bibliography  •  247 Index  •  271

Illustrations

1.

A page from R. D. Darrell’s Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia (1936)  24

2.

A page from Hilton Schleman’s Rhythm on Record (1936)  30

3.

A page from Charles Delaunay’s Hot Discography (1940 Commodore edition)  45

4.

A page from Orin Blackstone’s Index to Jazz (ca. 1944–48)  52

5.

A page from Charles Delaunay, Walter Schaap, and George Avakian’s New Hot Discography (1947)  60

6. A page from Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy’s Jazz Directory (1949–57)  71 7.

A page from Brian Rust’s Jazz Records A–Z, 1897–1931 (second edition, 1962)  85

8.

A page from Mike Leadbitter and Neil Slaven’s Blues Records (1968)  99

9. A page from Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography (1992–2002)  123 10. A page from Edward Brooks’s The Young Louis Armstrong on Records (2002)  146 11. A page from Max Harrison, Charles Fox, and Eric Thacker’s Essential Jazz Recordings, vol. 1 (1984)  177

Preface and Acknowledgments

I freely admit to being an interloper in what novelist David Lodge once referred to as the “small, narrow world” of jazz, blues, and gospel music discographers. I’m not a musician. I don’t sit on the faculty of a music school. I have no collection of jazz records beyond the typical listener’s accumulation of CDs. Instead, my entry is as a bibliophile. For many years I have collected, studied, and compared discographies. Of all the many types of reference books, they were among the last to appear—only about seventyfive years ago—and are the least well known. No attempt was made to define any kind of discographic standards until David Hamilton, Steve Smolian, and others began writing about the subject in the ARSC Journal. In 1968 and 1969 the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark held two symposia that were jointly published in 1971. The only discography textbook, Lewis Foreman’s Systematic Discography, will soon celebrate its fortieth anniversary, still in its original text. There are many fine scholarly histories of dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and even manuals of usage such as Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and the Chicago Manual. In recent years the Oxford English Dic­ tionary has been the subject of more than one best-selling popular book, taking advantage of its long history and the colorful, sometimes just plain odd characters who have contributed to its voluminous pages over the years. Given the time, toil, and frustration that go into making reference books (the warnings stretch all the way back to Ecclesiastes), their uncertain financial prospects, and their propensity to swallow up careers and even entire lives, it’s surprising that we don’t hear more about them and the

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preface and acknowledgments

people who dedicate themselves to their production. Their outwardly staid pages are as drenched in pathos as in printer’s ink. The masterpieces, such as the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Eric Partridge’s 1937 Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, are justifiably famous and are as avidly collected as works of art. I have every confidence that the very best products of the twentieth-century discographers will soon be elevated to these same rarefied cultural and financial heights. The roots of this book date to early 2005, when the Alvin Sherman Library at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale hosted one of the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling Jazz Appreciation Month exhibitions. To help round out the Smithsonian’s prepackaged displays and give them some local flavor, the library’s staff asked if I would help prepare an exhibit of jazz discographies using some of the many European and American works I had collected over the years. To my surprise and delight, the Jazz Month shows, including the discography exhibit, attracted far more attention than I ever expected on a college campus filled with Generation Y in the first decade of the iPod era. While undertaking the research for the exhibit labels and handouts, I confirmed something I’d already suspected from my more informal collecting-related investigations: just how thinly covered was the history of discography and discographers, especially jazz discography. The best overview was an article titled “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” four pages long, written by Paul Sheatsley back in 1964. It appeared in a small specialty magazine called Record Research. Two years later Dan Morgenstern, now director of the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, published a good, but brief, article in  Down Beat  titled “Discography, the Thankless Science.” It was largely forgotten until reprinted in his 2004 anthology Living with Jazz. Other equally valuable but more narrowly focused articles subsequently appeared: one in 1984 by Jerry Atkins (since updated, it is now available online at jazzdiscography.com) and one in 1994–95 by Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, published in two parts in Notes, the music educators’ journal. And that was about it. Almost all of the first generation of discographers, including Walter C. Allen, Orin Blackstone, Charles Delaunay, George Hoefer, and Edgar Jackson, have passed on. Of the second generation, Dave Carey, Ernie Edwards, Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Albert McCarthy, and Laurie Wright have also died. Paul Sheatsley himself passed away in 1989. And after an outline and rough draft of this book were completed, Brian Rust died. That, more than anything, was a signal that the job needed to be done and to be done now—that the time was at hand where the perfect was now the implacable foe of the good.

p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s   xv

Discographers study musicians and the records they produce. I, in turn, have studied discographers and their workings. When, in the 1940s and 1950s, jazz musicians began to be quizzed (some would say pestered) by discographers wanting to know about recordings they had made years, sometimes decades, before, they predictably reacted in a wide variety of ways. Some were genuinely gratified that their art was finally being taken seriously. Most replied with that bemused good grace that seems to be such a hallmark of the professional stage performer. A handful were openly annoyed, and one or two demanded compensation. Not surprisingly, much of this spectrum was duplicated when the discographers themselves became the inquired of instead of the inquisitors. While no palms were stuck out, once in a while there were sharp words. Interestingly, they came not from the discographers themselves but from those who had made part or all of their livelihood reviewing discographies. Apparently they didn’t care to have their judgments reexamined, and they clearly didn’t like having the pecuniary aspects of jazz book criticism looked into—especially those who were both publishing their own works and reviewing competing products, typically without acknowledging the inherent conflict of interest.

A five-year project like this couldn’t have reached a successful conclusion without many supporters, enablers, and facilitators. At the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and its official publication, the ARSC Journal, I thank editor Barry Ashpole. He guided a feature article and a “Research in Progress” update smoothly through to publication in the journal, and both became part of this book. Tim Brooks, chair of ARSC’s Copyright and Fair Use Committee, has been my unofficial editor for the past three years on the Copyright and Fair Use Update column we prepare for each issue. Tim also offered valuable comments on that 2008 feature article, “Uncertain and Unverifiable: Jazz Metadiscography and the Paradox of Originality.” Tim is entitled to double thanks, and rather than insert a cross-reference among the discographers, I’ll just thank him here for the broad-ranging interview he granted in June 2011, covering everything from his long fight for better source control in discographies to his work on the Columbia Master Book Discography to his recollections of working with Brian Rust. At the University of Chicago Press, Elizabeth Branch Dyson championed the manuscript of an extremely improbable book by an utterly unknown author with absolutely no credentials through to acceptance, for what still strikes me as no good reason. Thanks, Elizabeth.

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preface and acknowledgments

Undoubtedly the greatest help came from the discographers themselves. Often it was given unknowingly, through published articles, editorials, and interviews that were sometimes decades old. I thank those who were kind enough to speak with me, either face to face or by telephone: Steve Albin, Robert Campbell, Michael Fitzgerald, Dan Morgenstern, and Allan Sutton. Barry Kernfeld, Tom Lord, Erik Raben, and a few others who asked to remain anonymous communicated by e-mail, sometimes extensively. I especially thank Howard Rye, who over the years has answered many e-mails and who offered a lengthy written critique of this book’s manuscript that resulted in many changes, often substantial ones. The comments of an anonymous University of Chicago Press reviewer regarding electronic/online discographies were similarly helpful and resulted in a thorough rewrite of parts of chapter 8. Needless to say, any errors or omissions that remain are solely my responsibility. In particular, the opinions and observations I offer on the massively controversial topic of plagiarism and data extraction are mine alone and should not be imputed to anyone else. Without the resources of the Institute of Jazz Studies at the Dana Library of Rutgers–Newark, this book simply would not have been possible. As far as I know, there’s no other place in the world to study the jazz and jazz discography journals from before 1952. A large university music library may have, say, Jazz Forum, or The Discophile, or Pickup, or Discographical Forum, but certainly not all four, and probably not more than one. The IJS has all four and dozens more. In each of my three visits to the IJS the staff was helpful, and as a bonus it was always interesting to see who, from around the world, you’d bump into in the reading room doing research. In addition to the IJS, the two libraries I frequented the most in getting this book in shape were the Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library at the University of Miami and the music and dance library at the University of Kansas. Other helpful sources have been the fine arts library at the University of Arizona–Tucson and the Ablah (main) Library at Wichita State University. As always, the Alvin Sherman Library at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale deserves kudos for its extensive electronic journal and interlibrary loan services, as well as for its surprisingly large discography collection for a school that has only recently gotten its music and arts programs off the ground after fifty years of specializing in the sciences and professions. Congratulations and good luck. As always, very special thanks to the secret reference librarian who makes it all possible.

chapter one

The Sage of Edgware

i On January 5, 2011, an owlish, slightly eccentric former bank clerk named Brian Rust died in his sleep at his retirement home in Swanage, on England’s south coast. He had a long life, reaching eighty-eight, though he always seemed to be experiencing some brush with disaster. In 1971, during the Christmas holidays, he was struck by a car while walking and spent months in traction. A few years earlier a freak accident had damaged his eyes so badly that he needed emergency surgery to save his sight.1 And while serving as a fire warden in London during World War II, he dodged a falling bomb by dashing into a nearby shop, only to have the storefront blown in on him. While entirely true, that last story was often written off as apocryphal, not because of the spectacular danger of being blown up but because he had instinctively run into a record store, because he was saved by diving behind a massive wall of unsorted records, and most of all because everyone who was there agrees that after dusting himself off, he was more upset about the lost 78s than about his own close call. You see, Rust hadn’t chosen to make a career of finance. He had taken his “boring” day job at the Bank of England only so he could afford his real passion. Brian Rust was one of the world’s foremost jazz record collectors. By the time he turned twenty, his research into the background and origins of rare and obscure recordings was so encyclopedic that he had already become known within the politically fractious, jealous, and mutually suspicious community of jazz music collectors as the “Sage of Edgware.”2 His big break came in 1945, when the British Broadcasting Corporation hired him as a music librarian. He stayed more than fifteen years, using his

 

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experience to become one of the world’s foremost experts on American and British popular music. Just as print librarians typically prepare bibliographies—descriptive, topical lists of books and articles—Rust began assembling discographies—authoritative rosters of sound recordings. The earliest ones had appeared almost twenty years before, but so far most had been prepared by record collectors or other enthusiastic amateurs, with no standardized format and of wildly varying quality. Rust was one of the earliest professional librarians to apply himself to the task of systematizing both discographic methods and output. He wrote or cowrote more than fifteen book-length discographies of jazz, musical show tunes, British and American dance band music, and the products of the Victor and Columbia record companies. His most famous works were Jazz Records, A-Z: 1897–1931 (1961); The Victor Master Book, 1925–36 (1970); The Complete Entertainment Discography (1973); and The American Dance Band Discography, 1917–1942 (1975). Most were revised, sometimes by others after Rust had retired. When he died, Jazz Records was in its sixth edition; The Entertainment Discography and American Dance Bands were in their second. He also wrote scores of magazine articles, record reviews, and article-length discographies starting in the early 1940s. He published thirty-one issues of his own magazine, Needle Time, and in the 1970s he hosted a weekly radio show, Mardi Gras. His work was limited to pre–World War II music, and it generally included only records issued as 78 rpm singles, which the major record companies stopped producing in the mid1950s in favor of microgroove 45 rpm singles and 331 ⁄3 rpm LPs.3 When Jazz Records, A-Z, his first comprehensive discography, appeared in 1961, it used a format based on each artist’s recording history that treated the recording session as the basic building block for structuring all the other data. Each recording session had its own time, place, and personnel, and each session led to the creation of one or more “master” or “matrix” discs, which in turn produced “issues,” or individual commercial records. In the world of early 78s, record label information might or might not mean anything, especially for discs pressed outside the United States. A British record company, for example, could have rented a Louis Armstrong or Red Nichols master from one of the big American firms, stamped out a run of 78s, and issued it under some fake band name to avoid royalties or union problems. The next record by the same band on the same label could well have been a pickup group of unknown local dancehall musicians recorded in a London suburb. A record collector wanting to separate the gold from the dross had to look for the right matrix number, engraved in small numbers on the run-

t h e s a g e o f e d g w a r e  

off grooves on the inside of the record. If the matrix number didn’t match anything known to be produced by a “legitimate” American jazz artist, it could safely be passed over, regardless of what the label said. A single matrix number could appear under a dozen label names and numbers. Rust’s format cut cleanly through the confusion, and he and his works became so intertwined that they merged: the session-matrix-issue structure is still known as the Rust format. A computer program first developed in 1996 to make structured session-based discographies was named BRIAN in his honor.4 But though he perfected the format, he did not invent it, and to his credit he never claimed he did. It evolved over almost thirty years, starting with record company catalogs and the secretive “little black books” that collectors in America and Europe kept to find the rare gold in the formidable piles of worthless black shellac they encountered in used record stores and junk shops from Chicago to London to Paris, and even Moscow. The first discographies were essentially commercial versions of these black books. But by the mid-1930s some collectors realized it was fruitless to endlessly list the label number of every “good” 78 when it was actually a single matrix number they sought, no matter how many label name and number combinations it had been distributed under. A Frenchman, Charles Delaunay, was the first to realize this and the first to organize his discography by matrix number, subordinating the label number to that tiny magic engraved identifier. Later others figured out that a set of sequential matrix numbers often meant a series of recordings had been cut at the same recording session and so the personnel and other vital data needed to be listed only once per session. That was more efficient than listing every musician for every record, and far more informative than just listing an aggregate roster covering a year or two. Moreover, if the recording engineer’s logs could be found, it was no longer necessary to verify by ear who had been playing. A British team started publishing the first completely session-based discography after World War II, led by record store owner Dave Carey and magazine editor Albert McCarthy. As music librarian Matthew Snyder once noted, before Carey and McCarthy embarked on their Jazz Directory in 1949, comprehensive discographies were lists of records; afterward they were compilations of recording sessions.5 Nevertheless, it was Rust who first visualized the discography’s potential as a platform for research. In 1951 he made the first of several trips to the United States in search of recording data. He was so restricted in the amount of currency he could take out of Britain in those immediate postwar days that he supported himself on his travels by trading and selling rare and

 

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collectible 78s along the way.6 After he was back home, he was able to talk his way into the archives of most of the big British record firms to find the supporting data for his new discoveries. But by the time he died the “Rust format” was starting to show its age. In an era of digital music, a tune recorded in the 1930s could have hundreds of releases: 78s, 45s, LPs, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. Rust had avoided the problem by including only the older 78s in his books. But what if you had no interest in collecting records? What if you just wanted to hear the music? Nobody bought 78s just to listen to anymore or sold affordable equipment to play them. Where did you go for availability, not history? And what about the new computer-based digital recordings, which don’t even have a tangible master? It is no longer impossible for an artist to sell a digitally altered version of a song that is unique for every unit sold. Even Malcolm Shaw, who edited the latest (2002) edition of Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z, admits that “JR [ Jazz Records] as it stands is probably due for a total reconsideration of the concept.”7 And what of the library world Rust came from? Libraries, at least by the 1980s, were among the most prodigious buyers of discographies. “Rarely is an exhibit mounted, an article written, or a project undertaken without some staff member consulting a discography,” observed Bruce Boyd Raeburn of the William R. Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. “Without the painstaking efforts of discographers, the efforts of jazz scholarship would be much less manageable.”8 But as discographer and electronic services librarian Michael Fitzgerald complains, most libraries’ involvement in the discographic process goes no further than the acquisitions desk: Discography has always been the work of amateurs. Nobody ever went to discography school, or got a degree in it, or joined a discographers’ union. There is no defined body of special skills systematically handed down from one generation to the next. It’s always been something each individual has largely had to learn on the job, if lucky through an apprenticeship of some kind. Most of them got into it because they were collectors and/or completists.9

Raeburn notes that “as reference tools they are an indispensable complement,” but not a replacement, for a library’s own cataloging tools. For these purposes librarians developed their own protocols, which went by such exotic names as MARC, AACR2, and SONIC. Music librarians needed them because the comprehensive discographies had grown too bulky, with too much descriptive information, to provide the locate-and-identify data they needed to catalog and organize their holdings. By 2010 a complete set of

t h e s a g e o f e d g w a r e  

Rust’s five most popular works would stretch to fourteen volumes and ten thousand pages. Assuming they could still be had at their original prices (most are long out of print), they would cost well over two thousand dollars. If actually purchased on the 2013 antiquarian book market, they would run to something like seven or eight thousand dollars. And this for a set of reference works that ignored everything recorded after 1942! Barry Kernfeld, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, noting that only one edition of Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z was ever issued by a commercial or scholarly publisher (in 1978), observes that with this type of large, comprehensive discography, “the academy is not involved in these endeavors in any substantial or meaningful way.” Allan Sutton, owner of Mainspring Press, who published the 2002 edition of Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z, afterward called the paper-based comprehensive discography “dead as of yesterday.” The seventh edition of Jazz Records, which Sutton plans to issue in 2015, will be released only on CD, except by special-order “print on demand,” mostly for libraries.10

ii Almost any discussion of discography is hampered because there is no formal agreement about what it is. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a “discography” is not even a thing; it is a methodology, defined as “the method and practice of describing sound recordings.” The Grove’s verb-oriented editors share their bias with their more bookish counterparts: librarians and other compilers of written works similarly define “bibliography” as “the study of books as material objects and the science of the transmission of literary documents.” Yet readers—even the most erudite of scholars and academics—would usually say that a bibliography is a topical, descriptive list of written works, not the process used to prepare them. Similarly, the vast majority of record collectors, musicologists, and musicians think of “discography” not as a method, but as the tangible outcome of that procedure: a product, a document, a thing.11 In 1966 jazz critic, editor, and Institute of Jazz Studies director Dan Morgenstern defined “discography”—the product, that is—as “a descriptive, classified catalog or listing of phonograph records, usually including dates and names of performers.” That worked well for many years, until it become apparent that in an era of magnetic recording tape and portable recording equipment, more and more significant recorded performances were being created that never made it onto a storable matrix, let alone being released as

 

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commercial recordings. Hence Snyder’s observation about a discography’s being a catalog not of records, but of recording sessions. Danish discographer Erik Raben subsequently defined discography as “a compilation of information in standardized format about recorded performances and their issue in the form of sound recordings.” This is the definition I will use throughout this book, unless some historical or context-specific situation requires another.12 “Discographers,” critic Steve Voce once wrote, “live in a different world from me. They look down their noses if I suggest that it doesn’t matter whether Zoot Sims created that wonderful version of ‘Jive at Five’ on 15 July 1960 or 16 July, or even, as he said with fine abandon, in June or August. No. It must be checked or got at.” Michael Fitzgerald claims that this thirst for detail is even more pronounced among jazz discographers, that one of the defining characteristics of jazz discography is “a history of passionate attention to facts that is not found in classical music,” and that it “deals with stuff on a level of detail that has always been unknown to any other branch of western music, and probably always will be.”13 Richard Kamens complained that “to me, discographies have always been the listings one skips past at the end of a musician’s biography,” but even he admitted that “in reality, discographies can be looked at as a musical biography—you can chart a musician’s development and get a feel for his musical history.” Or as Dan Morgenstern put it, “A good discography is much more than a laundry list of dates and data. It is a key and supplement to the history of music and can be as exciting to read as a good mystery or adventure novel.”14 But like any literature, a discography is a work of interpretation, its meaning necessarily defined and refined through the mental lens of its collator, editor, or author. In almost every case, some determination must be made about what will be included or excluded. Jos Willems, the compiler of what most critics consider the definitive Louis Armstrong discography, candidly admits that discographical research is a very atypical and unusual procedure. It claims to be objective, interested only in facts that are far above any doubt. It fosters the image of dedicated women and men laboring altruistically in the service of factual and established and worldwide understanding. The reality is that such paragons are hard to find, because the whole system is burdened against them. It is basically unscientific and sometimes only founded on belief.15

As we will see, “belief ” has often turned on a judgment that something “is not jazz,” or even “is not music.” Is this an interpretation or a form of cultural xenophobia? More recent compilers may soften this to assert

t h e s a g e o f e d g w a r e  

that they have omitted “works by an artist not usually associated with a traditional jazz label,” or “works not performed using typical jazz instruments,” or groups “not performing traditional jazz compositions,” but the same musty whiff remains. The critic Rudi Blesh once famously snapped that “discography [is] an activity more related to stamp collecting than to science . . . important only as an adjunct or tool to musical understanding.” What he really meant was “My God, how could so-and-so have let all that bebop crap into his new discography?”16 The motives, means, and methods by which discographers make their editorial decisions, and how those decisions ultimately affect their products, will be one of the primary themes winding its way through this book. Let me emphasize that we are not always addressing intentional prejudices or conscious biases here. As ethnomusicologist and blues specialist Paul Oliver has pointed out, one would think that the ultimate objective source for any discographer would be the musicians who were present at a given recording session, but in fact “interviews are only as good as the questions asked . . . the nature of the interviewer’s questions and motivations is bound to throw up replies that directly or indirectly reflect them. . . . [S]uch research, as data collection of this kind is considered to be, results in a fairly tight loop of supportive data, much conditioned by the knowledge and tastes of the interviewers themselves.”17 There is no absolute objectivity. In Jazz among the Discourses (1995), cultural critic Krin Gabbard asserted that discographers were “ideological canonizers” who extended or denied jazz legitimacy by including or excluding musicians or songs from their works. But author Mark Tucker objected that while Gabbard was right to challenge the criteria discographers used, Gabbard’s own pen had not been wielded entirely dispassionately: He brands the Belgian discographer Walter Bruyninckx a canon-builder and “exclusionist,” citing sins of omission in the eight-thousand-plus pages of his massive, regularly updated, privately published Seventy Years of Recorded Jazz, first issued in 1968. . . . [W]hile earlier figures who studied jazz certainly operated according to different ideological agendas, their methods were also shaped by practical and historical contingencies that Gabbard ignores. . . . [ J]azz writers have always been a testy bunch, quick to strike down the opinions of others and offer up their own as superior. But such behavior often amounts to shadowboxing.18

Some of the reasons behind Gabbard’s vehement antipathy, cloaked in the robes of postmodernist respectability (and entirely unstated) are, in fact,

 

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fascinating. Given the highly permeable roles of musician, critic, writer, promoter, publisher, and (more recently) academic that have always been endemic in jazz, the story is an illustrative microcosm of the bigger picture that follows in the upcoming chapters, and it is worth telling. But first a little historical background is necessary.

The word discography first appeared in print in an editorial written by Compton Mackenzie, owner and editor of the Gramophone, in its January 1930 issue. After discussing various subjects, he wrote: I have often thought I should like to start a museum to house one specimen of every kind of disc record ever published. I wonder how many there would be? I wish some devoted reader would set himself the task of making out a list. I am sure that I am voicing the opinion of our readers when I say how much I should like such an article. “A discography of Gramophone Records up to Date,” the article should be called. Now, who will volunteer for this noble but arduous task? 19

The first use of the word within an actual discography also seems to have been in the Gramophone, in April 1931. Appearing under the title “Abridged Operas,” a letter from a reader, one H. o. M. Cameron, asked: “Dear Sir; Can any reader add to the following ‘discography’ (beastly word, is there a better one?) of potted operas?” His query was followed by a list of seven abridged operas then available on record.20 Judging by the quotation marks and Mr. Cameron’s obvious distaste, the word was not yet in wide circulation. On the other hand, in January 1931 R. D. Darrell, editor of Phonograph Monthly Review, published an article on Geraldine Farrar that included a full-page list of recordings captioned “Farrar Discography.” In addition to compositions, performers, and record labels, the Farrar listing also provided label numbers and recording dates. “As best I can remember now, it was the author, not [me], who supplied the caption,” recalled Darrell in 1984. But he did use the word discography in a headline he added to an article (“A Hayden Discography”) that appeared in the March 1932 issue of PMR.21 An item appearing two years later in P. G. Hurst’s Collector’s Corner column in the Gramophone implies that it was subject to increasing international use: The New York Public Library has also communicated with me with a view to some form of co-operation in compiling a “discography” which is intended to cover all recorded music. I do not know the details of the scheme, but it is fur-

t h e s a g e o f e d g w a r e   ther recognition of the academic interest of the subject. Perhaps we shall have something similar in England one day; who knows?22

It appears from the context and from Hurst’s use of quotation marks that “discography” was the exact word used by his unnamed New York correspondent. Another two years later Charles Delaunay, editor of the Paris magazine Jazz Hot, prepared a list of Bix Beiderbecke records for its March 1935 issue under the title “Discographie de Bix et Trumbauer.”23 “The most nagging puzzle about the making of my Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia,” mused R. D. Darrell a half-century after it first appeared early in 1936, “is why neither I nor, apparently, anyone else at the time described it as a discography.” For decades, everyone assumed it was simply because the word didn’t exist yet. But in fact, it not only had been kicking around for a good five or six years already, it actually appears in Darrell’s Encyclopedia, just once, in the preface, where he explains that the book carries the arrangement by composers that is familiar in classical music catalogs and magazine articles a step further to the “presentation of each composer’s discography work by work.”24 A reviewer, Edward Betts of the Era, even mistakenly wrote that “not content with being a pioneer, R. D. Darrell has coined a new word to describe his work.” Ironically, Darrell never could answer his own question about why he didn’t call it a discography. Similarly, when the British music magazine Melody Maker published Hilton Schleman’s Rhythm on Record (which some consider the first book-length discography dedicated to jazz) in April 1936, plumping for it that same month in a gushing review/advertisement, it similarly eschewed the terminology, referring to the work only as a “reference book.” Three months later, Delaunay released his own fulllength work, the famous Hot Discography, and from then on the word was in wide circulation.25 Mackenzie’s priority in using the term was forgotten over time, perhaps even by him, and for decades thereafter credit usually fell to Delaunay, as he himself (no doubt honestly) believed was the case. But in 1991 a sharpeyed reader, Jim Hayes, spotted it in Mackenzie’s column and reported it to Jazz Journal International, which published the information in its letters column. But even that discovery was all but forgotten until Hayes’s letter was reported in a note appended to a story by Horace Meunier Harris in the IAJRC Journal in 2000. “It’s doubtful that any individual can be credited with inventing so obvious a parallel-adaptation of bibliography,” noted Darrell in 1984, admitting that he had spent almost fifty years with the

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“extremely vague impression that I first saw it as discographie in some French record journal” in late 1929 or early 1930 before doing any investigation into the matter.26

One term that will not appear in this book is “metadiscography,” a currently popular synonym for comprehensive or general discography, and this brings us back to Krin Gabbard and the issue of discographic canon building. In 2004 Matthew Snyder reported that he believed Gabbard had originally used “metadiscography” in a 1992 review of Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography in Cadence magazine. This giant series, published between 1992 and 2002, eventually ran to thirty-five volumes, including indexes and supplements.27 In that review Gabbard implied that he had used the term before, but it couldn’t be found, and so most researchers concluded that he had been mistaken or the word had fallen victim to some lastminute edit. But it had appeared previously, in Gabbard’s May 1989 review of a book by W. E. Timner titled Ellingtonia. Timner’s book was not a general or comprehensive discography; it is typically categorized as a singleartist specialized discography. But as Gabbard himself explained in his 1989 review, even that classification is not quite accurate: Strictly speaking, Ellingtonia is not a discography—the word does not even appear in the book. “Metadiscography” might be a more accurate if unwieldy word for what Timner has done because his book is mostly for collectors who have acquired other discographical sources along with the records. . . . Entries for studio sessions include matrix numbers, but only the first issue of each record is given, and there are no catalog numbers.28

Gabbard uses “metadiscography” to mean a reference work that is not a discography but builds on discographies to undertake some task that is not duplicative. The term is analogous to one then emerging in health research, “meta-analysis”: a systematic examination not of a subject or problem, but of the studies examining that problem. Meta-analyses are used to determine if the underlying studies are tending toward or away from a consensus, or if a discernible line of thought is developing.29 The comparison is apt: Ellingtonia was primarily a catalog of unreleased material, so it didn’t list the issue numbers for commercial records, only their labels. Timner used discographies not to extract their data, but simply to determine if a given master had ever been issued. If it was, he noted the issuing label and moved on. Ellingtonia was a metadiscography in the sense that it reviewed discographies to check what wasn’t in them.

t h e s a g e o f e d g w a r e  11

Jazz among the Discourses was one of two companion books of essays that Krin Gabbard edited. In the introduction to the earlier of the two works, Representing Jazz, he used this descriptive prefix “meta” in the same narrow, technically precise manner: [These essays] have undertaken the metacritical work of reading jazz histories within their own moments. . . . [W]ithout [traditional] jazz history our knowledge would depend on the platitudes in the daily press as well as on trite movies and television dramas, lurid novels, sensationalizing photographs, and genre paintings. But over time, don’t these artifacts begin to constitute a history of their own? Are there no reasons for looking at this other history?30

Again, meta refers to a set of studies that examine not jazz, but the cultural and societal responses to jazz: critiques of criticism. But in his August 1992 review of The Jazz Discography, Gabbard applied “metadiscography” in two quite different ways. He first noted that “Lord is off to an extremely promising start in his bid to replace all previous metadiscographies, including those of Brian Rust, Walter Bruyninckx, and Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, as well as Erik Raben’s work in progress.” Now, “metadiscography” appears to be simply a synonym for “general discography” or “comprehensive discography”; this is the meaning Snyder attributed to it in his 2004 thesis, and that is how it has been used most commonly since, including by me in the title of a 2008 article I wrote for the ARSC Journal.31 But Gabbard is an experienced semiotician, and he was undoubtedly aware that in this context a more appropriate prefix would have been either mega (large-scale discography) or omni (comprehensive discography), not meta.32 This linguistic quibble, so uncharacteristic of him, accomplished only one thing: it drew a semiotic equivalence between the four named works and Lord’s new discography. He then proceeded to forge yet another alternative definition for “metadiscography,” one that turned his 1989 use on its head: I have used the term “metadiscography” for those massive works that attempt to cover all jazz records within a large stretch of time. As used most commonly in English words, “meta” means “after” and “beyond” as in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a treatise that came after the Physics in his collected works and that went beyond purely earthbound science. Thus, a metadiscography comes after label and artist discos and seeks to go beyond their scope.33

Gabbard’s central concept of “goes beyond” (as in “a metadiscography ‘goes beyond’ a discography”) has shifted from “incorporating all earlier information in order to perform a different, second-level analysis of it,” to

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the more straightforward idea of just aggregating everything, then adding to it. But in doing so, “after” becomes superfluous to “beyond,” because you cannot aggregate data until it already exists somewhere else. That is, unless he means that it is the legitimate purpose of a metadiscography to take from “label and artist discos” as its source, or to extend the argument to its logical end, that it is the legitimate purpose of specialized discographies to provide their data to the subsequent metadiscography. Cadence sponsored Lord’s Jazz Discography, and Gabbard had advance knowledge of its mid-1992 release: “Bob Rusch, the editor with whom I worked most closely at Cadence, called me after he sent me the volume by Raben for review,” recalled Gabbard.34 (This was volume 3 of Erik Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80, the massive update of Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s eleven-volume work. Raben’s series took almost two decades to research and was ultimately not finished.)35 He told me that Tom Lord, who had been compiling indexes to the material published by Cadence for several years, was working on a massive discography project. More importantly, he told me that Lord’s discography would cover everything released between 1898 and 1992, while Raben’s books only covered the years 1942–1980. And Lord’s volumes were supposed to be cheaper than Raben’s. If you go back to that June 1992 issue of Cadence, you will see that I have nothing but good things to say about what Raben actually accomplished.36

Gabbard didn’t say whether he knew that Lord and Rusch had been business partners since 1981, or whether Rusch had told him that Lord’s discography was being coproduced by Cadence. However, his claim that he had “nothing but good things to say,” strains credulity, since he summed up his review of Raben’s book by cautioning that “I must urge potential buyers of Raben’s work to investigate first the forthcoming discography of Tom Lord. . . . [I]f [Lord] can achieve the same level of comprehensiveness as Raben, he will have completely replaced Bruyninckx, Rust and all other discographies in five years.”37 Bold statements for a book Gabbard says he had heard about only through a phone conversation. Things began to unravel in early 1994 when Jan Lohmann, a specialty Miles Davis discographer, told Down Beat magazine that “Tom Lord has actually borrowed 99.9 percent of my listings . . . and that without any credit at all.” Later Han Enderman, an editor at the discographic journal Names & Numbers, used a close textual comparison of Walter Bruyninckx’s Swing Journal series of paperback discographies (distributed in America by Cadence between 1986 and 1991) and The Jazz Discography to conclude that “Lord’s

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work started as a straight copy. . . . Lord took the last issued general discography, Bruyninckx’s paperback series, and ordered a typist to copy the complete work . . . someone without general discographic knowledge.”38 Lord himself has never denied this (for example, in his defense in the case of Lohmann’s Miles Davis discography: “Although I did use his work extensively, I also added a substantial number of CDs and made several corrections”), but it has never been established what role Cadence played in preparing or producing the series, and the two parted ways in 1999. Nevertheless, in a 1995 article Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye observed that “in publishing Lord’s project the crew at Cadence have not applied their standards to themselves, but indeed have lightened up, concurrently publishing extremely enthusiastic, self-serving reviews of Lord’s project while quietly sweeping improprieties under the rug.”39 Raben never said much about the Lord discography, simply going about his work until the death of his sponsor/publisher and a lack of resources brought his project to an untimely end, but Walter Bruyninckx has been an unremitting critic of Tom Lord, publishing some very embarrassing examples that suggest the hard-copy version of The Jazz Discography (1992–2002) was little more than a quick and dirty compilation of others’ works, assembled by having semiskilled clerks keypunch data assembly-line fashion into inexpensive database software.40 So did Gabbard take the opportunity in his Jazz among the Discourses essay to retaliate against the man who had become Lord’s most durable antagonist? Gabbard later claimed, “My point is not that Bruyninckx has committed ‘sins of omission’ . . . [but that] discographers like Bruyninckx and the rest have not thought as deeply as they should about why they believe one music is jazz and another is non-jazz.” But not everyone would agree. As one contributor to the discographic journal Names & Numbers wrote, “I thought for many years that ‘Walter Bruyninckx’ is a synonym for ignorance. Just look at all his Rock n’ Roll and Rockabilly entries.” And can it be considered “deep thought” on the part of Tom Lord to include blues music in the first volume of The Jazz Discography, only to discontinue coverage of the genre in subsequent books on discovering that Bruyninckx had abandoned his plans for a blues subset in his Swing Journal paperback series?41 In the end, I have concluded that the etymology of “metadiscography” is so clouded, and the word has become so value-laden, that it would be unwise to use it in this book except in a purely historical context. I shall instead confine myself to the older terms general discography and comprehensive discography.

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Finally, although this book uses the general term discography broadly, it will not include everything under the sun. Excluded will be listening guides (also known as buyers’ guides)—those works that describe, critique, and sometimes recommend commercially available records intended for listening enjoyment. Nor will it include collectors’ guides, which essentially serve the same purpose for those seeking records that are highly desirable for their rarity or cost. Both will be discussed in their own sections. The difference between a discography and a collectors’ guide is not always clear, especially before 1960; the early comprehensive discographies evolved out of collectors’ guides and were intended to serve many of their functions. Guides that recommend a price or a range of prices are generally newer, and many arose out of the expansive market for used or out-of-print LPs that started during the rock and roll era.

iii Broader issues of plagiarism, fairness, and the legalities of copyright infringement will be addressed in greater depth later, but for now I beg forbearance while I clarify a few more words before embarking on the main story. Discographers of the 78 rpm era used “matrix” and “master” interchangeably to denote the unique identification number assigned to the original, first-generation recording of a song taken at the studio by the engineering staff. That recording would then be transferred onto a permanent medium (such as an aluminum master disc) that was in turn used to prepare the plates or “stampers” used to press 78 rpm discs. Records could be, and very often were, produced and sold by different record labels in a number of countries under various catalog or label numbers. Sometimes, for various reasons, a record company would label a record with mistaken or deliberately false information about the song or its performers. However, because the master number was inscribed onto the permanent disc, it appeared right in the shellac of the record, and two identical records emanating from the same master could be verified, even if they bore different labels. This changed after the long-playing microgroove album was introduced in the mid-1950s. An LP could contain a single twenty-minute song per side, or up to half a dozen of the old three-minute tunes from the 78 era. Assuming the latter, each song would have its own master number, but now there was only one matrix number, that issued by the record company for the entire side of the album. Hence the definitions of “master” and “matrix” started to diverge in the 1950s for older, 78-era songs. Each of these

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tunes would have its “master,” produced back when the song was originally recorded, but now there was more than one “matrix”: the old one for the single tune in 78 rpm format, and the new one for the 331 ⁄3 rpm LP reissue. This book will follow the older convention established by 78 collectors. Unless specifically identified otherwise, a “matrix” and a “master” are unique numbers assigned to a single recording of a song at the time it was affixed to a tangible medium, be it wax, aluminum, electronic tape, or a computer hard drive. One tune, one master or matrix. This master or matrix is then used to produce “issues,” which are objects ready for transfer, sale, and consumption in the form of single records, LPs, tapes, or CDs. (Computer downloads that are transferred independent of any physical object warrant special consideration, and I will deal with them at the appropriate time.) While each side of an LP does have its own master disc, an LP side will be considered an “issue” of the songs it contains. Generally that “issue” will be the catalog number of the entire LP, not each of its sides, because most discographers never did list the matrix numbers of the LP sides, but only its single label number. “Issues” are identified by two interchangeable terms—“catalog numbers” and “label numbers”—that will be used even if the record company never issues a catalog or, as with cassette tapes, there is no “label.”42

Although chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated to the history of the various genres of specialized discographies—bio-discographies, label discographies, topical works, listening guides, and so on—most of this book focuses on what Jerry Atkins once called the “Magnificent Obsession”: the pursuit of the all-encompassing general discography or comprehensive discography. For twenty years, from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II, these were still relatively small, cheap, and often paperback. But as popular music moved into the LP and electronic tape era of the 1950s, the pace at which newly recorded jazz numbers and reissues of old 78-era tunes increased exponentially. In 1964 Paul Sheatsley documented the history of comprehensive discographies to that point, in what is still one of the best-written articles on the topic: “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography.” Its second half was a despairing chronicle of broken dreams and shattered plans, as project after project floundered in an engulfing sea of shellac. “The stubborn refusal of the idea of a general discography to die—in spite of the sad examples [so far],” explained Sheatsley, “testifies to need for this type of

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volume. Specialized or single-artist discographies are useful but they do not meet the demand for a general all-purpose listing.”43 To avoid drowning, comprehensive discographers adopted a number of survival strategies. Speaking broadly, all involved setting some coherent boundary on what to include or omit. In this way they hoped to make their discographies comprehensive but not infinite. Sometimes they succeeded. More often they didn’t. I have gathered the approaches they used into six rough categories. The criteria for deciding what should be “in” or “out” could include deleting some artists entirely; selecting some songs by an artist but omitting others as of “insufficient jazz interest”; restricting the date of recording sessions to those held before, say, World War II; or including only 78 rpm issues, or maybe all 78s and the first LP issue if there was no 78, or all the 78s and the most recent LP, or 78s and the highest-quality collectors’ CD reissue. The very idea of limiting a “comprehensive” discography is, of course, an oxymoron, and it was always controversial. When a comprehensive discography is limited, is it really comprehensive, or is it just a very large specialized discography? (For example, many discographers, especially in Europe, no longer consider Brian Rust’s works to be comprehensive discographies.)44 How can a compiler not inject personal aesthetic, social, or political judgments into the selection process under the guise of making such “neutral” editing decisions? (“How could you let in that bebop crap?”) Should the criteria be explicitly subjective? Strictly objective? Restricted, say, by the period when the original recording was waxed or the date when the commercial issue was released? Should it be done by committee? For these reasons, and to avoid having to break in later with a long or digressive explanation, I have chosen to define, here at the outset, my typology of the editing approaches that comprehensive discographers used over the years to limit the size and scope of their works. Rather than attempting to memorize them or understand their full complexities at this preliminary stage, I suggest that readers merely scan them, so that when they encounter a term like cycle formatting or annualization they will know where to look for a more detailed explanation. 1. Absolute inclusion. A few recent discographies, such as Walter Bruy­ ninckx’s 85 Years of Recorded Jazz and Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography Online, profess to include everything that is, was, or could possibly be jazz. It is conceivable that with the virtually unlimited capacity to store and disseminate data that the Internet affords, someone may yet achieve this ideal. But there will always be the long-standing aesthetic debate over what

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should or should not be considered jazz, as well as limits to what economists call the “marginal costs” of knowing absolutely everything about what has been recorded anytime, anywhere, by anyone. In the past, before the era of cheap computing, such information problems could be overwhelming, leading discographers to practice . . . 2. Selective genre exclusion. Some discographers cut down their enormous task by excluding performers or songs they considered irrelevant or unworthy. Unlike the explicitly narrow criteria inherent in specialized artist, topic, or label discographies, the compilers of general discographies justified their pruning by using vague stylistic or aesthetic grounds that often devolved into thinly disguised ideological judgments. The best example was Charles Delaunay’s early Hot Discography, which, under an arrangement Delaunay called “affinities of style,” emphasized the “jazz primitivism” theory popularized before World War II by his friend Hugues Panassié. 3. Temporal cutoffs. As the pace of new musical releases increased exponentially in the 1950s, the most obvious way of circumventing information overload was to establish a cutoff date for either the source performances or new commercial products. Brian Rust, for example, initially set a terminal date for recording sessions at 1931, later extended to 1942. In addition, he listed only 78 rpm records, essentially creating a second cutoff at about 1955, since very few 78s were pressed after that date. 4. Annualization. Annualization was a modification of the temporal cutoff system in which the compiler set a terminal date, published a base reference source, then issued annual supplements and errata to keep the base current. That nobody was able to make this system work for discographies for longer than a year or two is a testament to the difficulty of marketing both an expensive base product and a long string of annual supplements. But it did work for some consumer record guides such as the biennial Penguin Guide to Jazz, where LPs and CDs went out of print almost (but not quite) as fast as they were introduced, so everything could be contained in a single volume that grew fatter and fatter as succeeding editions were issued every couple of years. 5. Cycle formatting. Cycle formatting was a more complex derivative of the annualization idea. The compiler, issuing volumes at regular intervals, worked his way through the alphabet of artists, maintaining currency for new sessions and records; then, when the alphabet was complete, he started a new cycle. For example, assume our compiler wants to publish a postwar discography in five parts, arranged alphabetically by artist, with one volume coming out every two years starting in 2010. Volume 1 (A-E) covers

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1945–2010; volume 2 (F-J ) includes 1945–2012, and so on, with the final volume 5 (S-Z) coming out in 2018. For 2020, he can either issue a supplement to update A-E from 2000 to 2020 or simply start over on a second edition with volume 1 covering 1945–2020. This rather complicated concept wouldn’t be worth discussing except that it proved surprisingly widespread. Whether the strategy was inherently successful is far more problematic. 6. Loose-leafing. A completely different way to tackle the problem was to issue the base reference as loose sheets or in ring binders, then issue replacement sheets, as is done in many legal and accounting reference books. This was cheap and easy, but because customers found the loose pages fragile and the books hard to update correctly, it was also the hardest to sell. We will also encounter large general discographies sold as unpunched loose sheets, letting customers arrange for binding.

chapter two

“Those Frenchmen Got a Hellova Nerve”: 1926–44

i It is hard to say which of the lists of recorded music appearing in music magazines throughout the 1920s should rightly be considered the first discography. The technological diversity of early recorded music, including Edison cylinders, vertical-cut (“hill-and-dale”) records, horizontal-groove discs, and even aeolian piano rolls, was such that by 1910 the typical record shop had to stock over three thousand title and format combinations to remain competitive. The expiration of many basic phonograph patents soon after World War I allowed numerous small firms to break into a market previously dominated by Edison, Victor, and Columbia. By 1919 some 166 labels, with names like Gennett, Okeh, Vocalion, Paramount, and PathéFrères, had introduced lower-priced popular music recordings of marches, minstrel songs, and patriotic tunes from the recent conflict.1 While many, if not most, of these firms printed catalogs, they were usually highly ephemeral leaflets and broadsides. Relatively little of this information made its way into the music periodicals of the day, where it could have provided a far more durable source for later discographers. The situation improved enormously in 1923 with the introduction of the Gramophone in England, founded by the peripatetic Compton Mackenzie. He graduated from Oxford in 1902 and studied law, but he abandoned the bar amid a welter of literary and cultural interests: stage actor, playwright, poet, novelist, magazine publisher, spy, owner of Mediterranean islands, university rector. His first best seller was the scandalous 1913 novel Sinister Street. After serving as an intelligence officer in Greece during the Great War, he made his home on the island of Jethou while keeping a London residence at the Savile Club.2

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“[In June 1922] I had some talks in the Savile billiards room with Robin Legge, the musical critic of the Daily Telegraph,” Mackenzie later recounted. “He and Percy Scholes were the only music critics who had as yet recognized that such an instrument as the gramophone existed, and occasionally noticed some new record.” Legge, who had just taken a game of snooker off Mackenzie, looked up and said, “why don’t you write me an article about the gramophone? Let me have it as soon as possible.” Mackenzie claimed “that suggestion from Robin Legge after he had just potted the brown [ball] made it one of the most decisive moments in my life, when I said lightly that I would.” 3 The Daily Telegraph article generated a wide response, and Mackenzie “began to wonder if it might not be a good idea to bring out a monthly magazine.” Scholes agreed to include an entry discussing it in the upcoming version of the Oxford Companion to Music he was editing. Alfred Clark, managing director of the Gramophone Company, asked Mackenzie to stop by. He promised to help all he could, and added, “We’ll let you call it by that title.” “I did not understand,” Mackenzie recalled answering, completely puzzled. “It’s a copyrighted title, you know.” Back in London, Mackenzie “was amused by the general reaction at the Savile that I was going to start a magazine about gramophones: ‘What an extraordinary chap you are! Who do you think is going to buy a paper about gramophones? I believe our maids have one in the kitchen, but I don’t think they’re likely to buy this paper of yours.” “Don’t worry,” said Robin Legge. “You’ll pull it off.” And so he did. By January 1923 all three of the major record companies had committed to full-page ads, so Mackenzie ordered six thousand copies of the first issue from the printer. It hit the newsstands in mid-April, “three weeks later than we hoped.”4 The Gramophone remained almost exclusively a classical music magazine until it introduced a new monthly column, “Dance and Popular Rhythmic Records,” by Edgar Jackson. Born Edgar Louis Cohen in 1895, Jackson received his education at Cambridge and, like Mackenzie, served as an officer in World War I. After a middling show business career (including, at one point, a dog act) he was hired as the editor of a new magazine, Melody Maker. He left there in late 1929, and after a brief career managing the bandleader Jack Hylton, started at the Gramophone in June 1930.5 From the start, the Gramophone had accompanied its articles about com-

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posers, orchestras, and performers with lists of illustrative recordings. One of these sidebars is listed as the earliest entry in Michael Gray’s comprehensive bibliography of classical music discographies: a list of recordings by the Irish tenor John McCormack, prepared by Mackenzie himself to accompany an article he wrote for the October 1924 issue. Mackenzie had been introduced to McCormack in Dublin the summer before, when Mackenzie was serving as a judge for the Aonach Tailteann Literary Competition. McCormack introduced himself by commenting, “I suppose you think I sing nothing but rubbish.” Mackenzie replied that, to the contrary, he wanted to prepare an annotated list for the Gramophone “commenting on every one of the records he had made,” which Mackenzie then spent the next four months compiling.6 Mackenzie’s interest was not entirely musical. This was the height of the “troubles”: the period of violence and political instability following Ireland’s dissent to Great Britain’s participation in World War I and its deeply unpopular conscription of workingmen with dependents. McCormack had become a United States citizen, and Mackenzie was a fervent Scottish nationalist. The October 1924 article with discography was run just before a series of McCormack concerts in Britain, starting at London’s Queen’s Hall. McCormack was sure he would be booed off the stage, and he was so concerned for his family’s safety that he asked Mackenzie to sit with them. The recital was a smashing success. For the first time, but certainly not for the last, a discography had been prepared and disseminated to serve an overtly political function.7 Mackenzie thus appears to have the double honor of being the first to use “discography” in print (in his January 1930 editorial) and, with the John McCormack list, the first to actually compile one for publication. But to be fair, almost every early Gramophone issue has at least one sidebar listing the available recordings referred to in an adjacent article, and any one of these could legitimately have some claim to being the “first” discography. The first person to compile a freestanding discographic article, more than an appendix or a sidebar to another story, appears to have been R. D. Darrell, who prepared a list titled “Dvorak’s Recorded Works” for the May 1929 issue of the American magazine Phonograph Monthly Review, or PMR.8 Born in 1903, Robert Donaldson Darrell began reviewing classical recordings for the weekly general interest magazine Saturday Review while still a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. He and Axel Johnson founded PMR in Boston in October 1926. It was the first American music magazine intended for a general audience and was America’s closest

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counterpart­ to the Gramophone. Although Darrell was no great fan of popular music, he and Johnson did include some show music, dance tunes, and lighter fare.9 PMR folded in spring 1932, so Darrell spent the next few months freelancing. During this period he became extraordinarily impressed with the music of Duke Ellington, whose compositions, he believed, at times approached those of the European modernists in depth and quality. His laudatory essay on Ellington, “Black Beauty,” appeared in the short-lived Philadelphia journal disques and became a classic both in the canon of Ellingtonia and in the history of early jazz criticism. Darrell originally intended to write a book about Ellington that would combine a biography with a musical analysis and discography. He approached the bandleader in March 1932, but Ellington was not interested, so Darrell scaled back the project, with the disques article being one of the results. It appeared in June 1932 and included a lengthy discography of Ellington works from 1927 up to that time. That appendix was probably the first authoritative jazz discography to be published in any language. Darrell moved to New York in September 1932 to manage Music Lovers’ Guide, a monthly magazine owned by the New York Band Instrument Company. He stayed a year and a half, then left to work for the Gramophone Shop, New York’s largest record emporium.10 Darrell later gave credit to William Tyler of the Gramophone Shop as the “unsung hero and prime mover” of the Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia. Darrell himself considered the Encyclopedia “a major achievement” and a “jackpot that never again could possibly be matched.” Tyler and his business partner, Joe Brogan, founded the shop in 1928 and soon built it into New York’s leading record store. Its main rival was a mail-order operation based in Philadelphia, run by H. Royer Smith. Tyler acknowledged that a catalog-based strategy had an inherent appeal with a sizable portion of his potential customer base. To counter this he had, in 1929 and 1930, issued two paperbacks under the title Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia. These were mostly compilations of information on classical recordings culled from catalogs and company circulars, edited under contract to Richard Gilbert, manager of G. Schirmer’s record and phonograph department. By 1934 Tyler wanted to expand the Encyclopedia into a more ambitious hardback version. That would require a dedicated fulltime editor, so in May he hired Darrell for the task.11 Darrell started out with the files of correspondence and review columns from PMR, a series of expanded lists that had appeared in Music Lovers’ Guide (“what we’d now call specialized subject discographies,” he later explained), all “augmented by the review files of the PMR, MLG, Gramophone, and French and Philadelphian Disques (with a large and small ‘d’ respectively).” These,

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pasted onto four-by-six cards, became his database. Darrell later marveled over the resources he and his fellow pioneer discographers didn’t have: “No American Schwann, British Gramophone or German Bielefelder comprehensive catalogs! No Einstein revision of Koechel’s Mozart. No Schmieder Bach or Deutsch Schubert. No Hoboken or Robbins Landon Haydn. No Burghauser Dvorak, Kirkpatrick Scarlatti, Pincherle or Ryom Vivaldi.” The publisher Alfred A. Knopf told Tyler that he would gladly pay fifty dollars for a copy of the thing for his personal library, provided it was done well, but wouldn’t dream of taking on the project as a publisher.12 The first edition of the new Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music was released in late 1935. In it Darrell developed a clean, clear layout that was a great improvement over anything used in record company catalogs. “Even the most cursory examination of a batch of record company catalogs meets with an immediate problem in the babel of languages in which they are printed,” Darrell wrote in the Encyclopedia’s introduction. “The greatest deficiency of all catalogs is their failure to provide consistent, systematic identifications of the musical works set on their discs; all of them seem to have been based on the quicksand foundation of the information printed on the labels.” Darrell’s new layout established the template for today’s “stacked” discographic format, one of its three basic forms. It continues to be the preferred method for arranging classical discographies. He was surprised and disappointed that his formatting and layout work, in which he had invested a great deal of time, effort, and planning, was more or less taken for granted, while his use of brief introductory essays (which, in retrospect, he considered “a kind of afterthought”) was lauded as a great conceptual advance.13 He included an entry for Ellington, claiming that “while recorded jazz, dance and popular music” fell outside the scope of the Encyclopedia, he “would be stupid indeed to arbitrarily rule out a considerable number of works of this type which soar far above the levels set by the ordinary machine-products of Tin Pan Alley.” However, even as the Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia hit the shelves in early 1936, Darrell admitted that he was “already well on my way to finding not much if anything really new and truly exciting in jazz.” He soon became a self-admitted “early drop-out,” and from then on he wrote “little or nothing on jazz.” The Gramophone Shop produced two revisions of the Encyclopedia in 1942 and 1948, each under a new editor; jazz artists in general and Duke Ellington in particular did not appear in either.14 Darrell himself continued as a reviewer and writer for High Fidelity magazine through the early 1960s and wrote two other books, Shirmer’s Guide

f i g u r e 1 . A page From R. D. Darrell’s Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (1936).

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to Books on Music and Musicians and Good Listening. However, he admitted it was somehow “disheartening” that the “freak success” of the Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia could never be duplicated. Although the later books “were well received, they never even began to arouse the worldwide rave reactions of my Encyclopedia. Like many others, I learned to my sorrow that hard work is no substitute for a gimmick.” On the other hand, he later said that “while I lay no claim to be a Founding Father of the Art and Science of Discography,” he was “very proud to have been, as it were, present at the creation, and then to have had the good sense to retire on whatever discographic laurels I may have (deservedly or undeservedly) won.”15

The 1932 Ellington discography that Darrell had prepared for disques was not especially long. After all, Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra had only started recording for Brunswick-Vocalion in late 1926, and by 1932 the whole Ellington commercial catalog was only about forty sides. In 2003, discographer George Hulme uncovered a twelve-page, six-by-eightinch booklet written by Victor Carol Calver in 1934. Aside from the cover, Calver’s “handlist” (a diminutive of “handbook”) consists of just a ten-page Duke Ellington discography, organized by record company, then by release in chronological order. Matrix numbers were not provided, but American, British, and some Continental label numbers were. An excerpt was published in the early British jazz magazine Swing Music in May 1935.16 The most fascinating part of the handlist is the last page. It is given over to a notice announcing the forthcoming release of another list that Calver was preparing on the recordings of Spike Hughes. It states that each entry will contain a cross-reference to the issue and page number of Melody Maker in which the song was reviewed and its master number. Despite much searching, Hulme has not been able to find any evidence that the Spike Hughes handlist was ever produced. Although Calver later published a Louis Armstrong discography in Swing Music to complement his Ellington discography, it does not appear that he ever submitted one for Hughes.17 Nevertheless, as Hulme points out, the Calver document is clearly recognizable as a discographic monograph, and the last-page notice is clear evidence that he recognized the importance of matrix numbers. Calver was aware both that they were significant enough to warrant inclusion in a discography and that they were attractive enough to potential customers to mention in his advertisement. Most important, the reference to master numbers implies that Calver assumed that a sufficient percentage of readers would already know what he was talking about.

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Hulme’s discovery does not change the chronology of the earliest use of matrix numbers in print, by Charles Delaunay in the French jazz magazine Hot Jazz in spring 1935. However, it has long been assumed that the appreciation of their importance was passed from France to England about 1935, from the pages of Hot Jazz to the Gramophone. Thus Calver’s handlist appears to advance by as much as a full year the earliest date when it can be proved that a discographer knew about, and understood the significance of, matrix numbers, and shifts the location of that discovery from France to England.

ii In 1926, four years before Edgar Jackson started running “Dance and Popular Rhythmic Records” in the Gramophone, music publisher Lawrence Wright had hired him to edit Melody Maker, a new magazine that Wright planned to market as both a trade paper for dance bands and a vehicle for selling his firm’s sheet music. But Melody Maker soon was floundering. Record sales were shifting away from dance band music toward American small-group jazz as Columbia, Parlophone, and (especially) the private Levaphone-Oriole label began importing records by Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Luis Russell, and others.18 Jackson didn’t like much of the new music, and his reviews all too often were acerbic, nationalist, and often viciously racist—rather sad for a man who had to write under a nom de plume to hide his own Jewish ethnicity. While preferring British dance bands might seem to benefit Wright’s music publishing interests, Jackson went about it so artlessly that he frequently alienated the very bandleaders Wright was trying to sell his music to. In 1929 Wright gave up and sold Melody Maker to Oldhams Press, publishers of such staid periodicals as John Bull and Sporting Life. Oldhams let Jackson go in November and shifted Melody Maker from a trade-oriented publication to a fan magazine for consumers of the same general genre, gradually letting in coverage of small-group black jazz. Commercial dance tunes, light classical music, and hot jazz were reviewed starting in mid-1931, and in early 1932 John Hammond, a Vanderbilt heir and Yale student turned jazz record producer, began reporting on the American music scene. By the end of 1933 Melody Maker had almost completed its conversion into a popular music magazine, and in 1935 it absorbed Rhythm, formerly a technical journal for drummers and banjoists, which had become England’s choice for in-theknow jazz aficionados.19

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The British hot music scene of the early 1930s was, according to economic historian Eric Hobsbawm (who used the pen name Francis Newton for his jazz writings), markedly different from that in Europe. The Continental jazz public was “middle-class and intellectual, probably more so than in America.” As a result, European jazz “had the advantage of fitting smoothly into the ordinary pattern of avant-garde intellectualism, among the Dadaists and surrealists, the big city romantics.” British jazz fans “came from that social zone in which the sons of skilled workers, probably themselves in office jobs, met the sons of white-collar workers, shopkeepers, smallbusinessmen and the like: the lower-middle class.” For them jazz was not, as it was for Continental intellectuals, a retreat into fashionable primitivism; it was a step upward to a more sophisticated (or at least better informed) culture. The French fan listened to Armstrong between sides of Stravinsky or Prokofiev; his English counterpart interspersed Satchmo with Kern or Gershwin. Both American and European “hot clubs” spent much of their time and effort promoting live music, but “the British ones were not so interested in this.”20 What the British did take to was gathering around the gramophone listening to their favorite records, then endlessly arguing over them. They even formed clubs just to listen to records. There was also a practical reason. As Hobsbawm noted, “The sort of teenagers who were most likely to be captured by jazz in 1933 were rarely in a position to buy more than a few records, let alone build a collection.”21 The first of these “rhythm clubs” was formed in London in the late 1920s. They were sponsored by Melody Maker, which ran a News from the Rhythm Clubs column each issue. By World War II some 174 had been formed, over 20 in greater London alone.22 Ernest Borneman, who sat in on a meeting of the “No. 1 Rhythm Club” in 1936, later recalled that “to understand the function of this sort of organization,” its members’ “utter dependence upon phonograph records will have to be remembered.” This musical introversion had its downside: it was easy to become fixated on minutiae, to glorify eccentricities or errors as great profundities, or to find meaning in mere happenstance. “The record becomes more important than the music,” Borneman found.23 On the other hand, the rhythm club members had some legitimate grounds for their fixation, since they often couldn’t be sure just what they were listening to. “The record labels told you nothing,” recalled American Rudi Blesh, one of the first well-known jazz historians. “The companies’ specialty was to document as little as possible, get it on the market as soon as possible and, as soon as sales slowed to a walk, lose the masters, let them

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deteriorate, or even destroy them.”24 Particularly in Europe, the information on the record label meant little, since companies leased their stamping masters to a multitude of obscure export labels with little care about how they were used. The “Broadway Broadcasters” of the tiny Romeo, Lincoln, and Perfect labels could be the Chicago-based Goodman/Teagarden/McPartland “Austin High Gang” or, just as easily, a pickup group of Liverpool dance band musicians. Duke Ellington’s 1927 version of “Black and Tan Fantasy” ended up on a British Parlophone release under the name “Louis Armstrong and His Washboard Beaters,” while on some copies with the same label, the song was “Holy City” by a soon to be forgotten British bandleader named Stephen Adams.25 After spending a day following his roommate Norman through London’s Caledonian Market junk stalls, Borneman learned the secret of the hardcore collectors. “The little black book,” he wrote, “is basic and indispensable. . . . [N]o expedition to the junk markets or the secondhand shops should ever be undertaken without it.” At the time, he dismissed the apparently eccentric Norman and his little black book with a good-humored shrug. Not until years later, after he had returned to America, did he learn that Norman’s father had died just before he entered medical school, leaving an estate worth “about three dollars.” Norman invested everything he had in a stack of carefully selected records bought “at a penny apiece,” and “out of the proceeds of an ensuing trade which literally spanned the entire globe, he had financed his entire medical practice.” Norman, now a successful and affluent physician, “no longer trades,” Borneman noted wryly. Given the time and money involved, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to profit off his “little black book.”26 That “someone” turned out to be Hilton R. “Roy” Schleman, a publicity agent for United Artists Film Corporation and an avid record collector. His friend Stanley Dance, later a noted jazz critic and writer, recalled that “in his day he had one of the great collections because he took no notice of the critics whatsoever [and] simply bought what he liked.” Schleman was one of the first to eagerly collect Jelly Roll Morton when most thought Morton was “corny.” A professional publicist, Schleman was naturally friendly and outgoing, a dolphin cavorting among the awkward and suspicious cold fish of the record collecting community, and he freely helped the others when he could. When the American movie Last of the Mohicans made its British premiere, he had “a lot of budding discographers put out on a lake in London in canoes at a certain time,” decked out in Native American dress, providing a backdrop to some promotional soiree or another and

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presumably getting paid union wages. “He pulled all sorts of stunts like that,” Dance recalled.27 In late 1932 Schleman began searching for a reference guide to the records produced by the leading American and British jazz and dance bands and discovered, to his surprise, that there was no such thing. His own information was kept on file cards, and over the next three years he checked and updated this information, organizing it into book form. In 1935, on one of his periodic trips to Europe, John Hammond recalled stopping by to help him verify some details. In late 1935 Schleman sold the whole thing to Melody Maker, including manuscript, card files, and backup information. They planned to publish an edition of 1,500, followed by annual updates.28 In April 1936 Melody Maker began advertising it as “the completest work of reference ever attempted” and the “most amazing book ever conceived dealing with dance music.” In Paris, Jazz Hot magazine begged to differ. “This book is far from containing all the jazz records which exist,” its editors scoffed. They “were a bit annoyed” at “articles full of unbridled paeans of praise” that tried to convince readers that “not a single jazz record (both straight and hot) had been omitted.” In all fairness, Jazz Hot’s editors acknowledged that these weren’t Schleman’s claims (“He says so in his foreword,” they admitted), but they’d had more than enough of “Melody Maker and the silly flattery addressed to this book.”29 Jazz Hot did have a point. Rhythm on Record wasn’t the all-encompassing reference source Melody Maker boasted it was, and as Jazz Hot said, Schle­ man himself never claimed it was. He merely intended it as a useful guide for “the study and collecting of gramophone records.”30 It was organized alphabetically by the band or artist. Each entry opened with a brief biography and collective personnel list, followed by a list of recordings grouped by record company, then alphabetically by song title followed by label number. No attempt was made to provide a matrix or master number or to systematically identify the date, place, or personnel of each individual recording. The book’s index contained the names of individuals and bands, but not song titles. The lack of session-level information has led many discographers to relegate Rhythm on Record to protodiscography, leaving the honors of “first discography” to Delaunay’s Hot Discography, which appeared three months later. However, within the limited goals he set for himself, Schleman was largely successful, and discographers were still using his book some sixtyfive years later. Reviewing what had, after several decades, become a “largely forgotten” book, discographer Paul Sheatsley reminded his colleagues that

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f i g u r e 2 . A page from Hilton Schleman’s Rhythm on Record (1936).

it had always been Schleman’s intent to document dance music. He therefore included both recognized jazz musicians and “pop artists whom most of us would now find of utterly no interest, but it should be noted, are still of important historical value.”31 Björn Englund agrees that “Schleman’s work is nowadays largely forgotten, but he made sure that it was clearly shown who played first, second, and third trumpet and so on. It would be a great help in the future if this order is kept in all listings.” And finally, John Davis and Grey Clarke wryly note that exactly “one complete discography [has been] published on time. A ridiculed discography, maybe, but a pioneer work. It was, in fact, the first of them all—Schleman’s Rhythm on Record. All you have to do is to emulate it. Any discographer who has never published a discography will tell you how easy that will be.”32

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At the time of its release, Edgar Jackson predicted that “Mr. Schleman likely will be well repaid for his labours. . . . [H]e should reap a good financial reward, for this is a book of such value and absorbing interest to all jazz protagonists and enthusiasts that few will remain without it.” Alas, his prediction missed widely. Publishing any new book in the midst of the Great Depression was risky. Melody Maker did not sell out the print run of 1,500, nor did any of the promised annual updates ever appear. Fortunately, Schleman still had his day job at United Artists. After the project was over, he abandoned his interest in jazz and turned to collecting cigarette cards. Sheatsley may or may not have been right when he said that Rhythm on Record “never inspired the field . . . beyond providing nostalgic interest,” but Jackson was prescient when he predicted that Schleman would make “a name which will be respected for years to come.”33

iii In 1933 Charles Delaunay was a modestly successful Paris graphic artist, at this point still better known as the son of two notable artists, Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Sonia was born in Ukraine in 1885 but as a young child was sent to St. Petersburg to be raised by a wealthy uncle. She emigrated to Paris in 1905 to study art, where her talent was soon recognized, and she was invited to hold her first one-woman show in 1908. She and Robert were married in November 1910, and Charles was born a few months later. The writer Guillaume Apollinaire once remarked that the pair “start talking art as soon as they wake up.”34 Although Sonia had her first gallery show less than three years after arriving in Paris, Robert was initially the more successful of the two. “A big blond Frenchman,” was how Gertrude Stein recalled him. “Fairly able and inordinately ambitious.” Initially a Picasso-style cubist, Charles recalled that “after he went through his Cubist time, his only patience was with colors, with the relations of colors to one another. It became a religion of color to him, an obsession.” Robert’s infatuation was four decades ahead of its time and soon cost him his audience. “He painted one rather fine picture,” Stein remembered, “it had a great success. . . . [A]fter that his pictures lost all quality; they grew big and empty or small and empty.”35 The Delaunays were vacationing in Spain when World War I broke out, and they stayed so Robert would not be conscripted. But the 1917 Russian revolution cut off Sonia’s access to her family’s wealth, so to make money she turned to designing clothing and theater costumes. “My father was living

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in dreams,” said Charles, “My mother was more with her feet on the earth.” Her creations proved wildly popular, and over her long life (she died in 1980) she became better known for her dresses, coats, scarves, ceramics, furniture, playing cards, and even the design of a sports car (by Matra) than for her paintings. Her reputation has come to overshadow that of her husband, who she always believed was the better pure painter. “After my father died, she devoted ten years to making him famous,” Charles said. But especially during the 1970s, many in the French art community considered her influence on contemporary design equal to that of the Bauhaus. Charles followed in her footsteps. “My father used to say to me, ‘Oh, you’re just an old-fashioned guy.’ ”36 About 1929 Charles was hired to create the advertising artwork for some new jazz records being imported by a Paris music store. After listening to them he was hooked, but his enthusiasm was shared by few of his friends or, from 1931 to 1933, his fellow conscripts in the French army. While still in the service, he heard a radio show mention a national jazz club, but he could find out nothing more about it, even after his discharge. Finally, in a hip record store in Montparnasse, La Boîte à Musique, he discovered that a local jazz club, the “Hot Club,” was holding a series of concerts in the shop’s basement.37 There had been two so far, and a third was coming up in the first week of April. Would he like to come? The room was small (holding at most eighty fans), hot, and unbearably stuffy, but Delaunay found himself “paralyzed by emotion.” Embarking on this self-professed “new religion,” he asked whom he should talk to about becoming involved in the jazz scene, and the staff at La Boîte à Musique pointed him to the Hot Club’s secretary, Hugues Panassié. Panassié, a few months younger than Delaunay, was the son of a mining engineer who had earned a fortune in the Russian Caucasus, then retired to a château in central France. He died when Panassié was still a boy. As a teenager, Panassié was interested in rugby and popular dance, but when polio damaged his leg, he took up the saxophone. His teacher, Christian Wagner, introduced him to small-combo hot jazz. In 1929 he struck up a friendship with the Chicago clarinetist Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. The eccentric Mezzrow was Jewish, but he so deeply believed he shared the essence of the American black psyche that he considered himself black, identifying himself as “Negro” on his passport and other documents.38 Ironically, Panassié was a Bourbonist and an unabashed social elitist who was attracted to jazz primarily because he believed it represented a sharp break with the increasingly homologized, commercialized culture he thought Anglo-

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American democratic liberalism was imposing on French society. Panassié had already written two articles for Revue du Jazz when in 1930 the editor of Jazz-Tango (also known as Jazz-Tango-Dancing) asked him to become a columnist. Although European and American music magazines began writing about jazz at about the same time, the American coverage was sporadic until Darrell’s PMR started in 1926 and Metronome hired George T. Simon in late 1934. Simon, a college jazz drummer, went on to become one of the betterknown jazz critics, especially after the war. “At the time, Metronome was made up largely of press releases from instrument manufacturers and song publishers,” Simon recalled. “I saw how badly it was written and said to myself that if people actually get paid for producing this magazine, I could probably get paid too.”39 The situation in Europe was somewhat better. In 1919 Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet reviewed a concert by Will Marion Cook’s orchestra in Review Romande, praising Cook’s young clarinetist, Sidney Bechet. By 1924 the Belgian magazine Music featured regular jazz articles, and that year an American, Marion Eugénie Bauer, wrote a lengthy French-language article for La Revue Musicale. Between 1924 and 1934 some forty-two articles on jazz appeared in French journals and magazines. Dedicated periodicals appeared earlier in France than in America: Revue du Jazz and Jazz-Tango both premiered in 1929, but Down Beat didn’t start until 1934, and Metronome’s conversion to jazz and popular music under Simon wasn’t complete until about 1936.40 After three years at Jazz-Tango, Panassié was ready to move on, for several reasons. First, it was primarily a trade magazine for professional musicians in dance bands, and he realized that his jazz readership “must not have been more than two or three hundred in all of France.” Second, he wasn’t getting paid: Jazz-Tango was too poor. (It went under in 1936. That still beat Revue du Jazz, which died in 1931.) So in summer 1933 he left Paris, returned home to central France, and wrote a book, Le jazz hot, released in 1934. Two years earlier a Belgian lawyer, Robert Goffin, had published (arguably) the world’s first book on jazz, Aux frontières du jazz, but Le jazz hot was the genre’s first deeply critical and musicological work.41 Panassié theorized that jazz originated in or around New Orleans in the early twentieth century, then spread north, primarily on Mississippi River steamboats, to Chicago, where it matured, and hence to New York and elsewhere. Although too linear and oversimplified (for instance, it overlooked the New Orleans-to-Los Angeles sojourns of Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory,

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the Dodds brothers and others; denigrated the written show music of black composers W. C. Handy and Perry Bradford; and ignored western swing and southwestern jump music), this is the backbone of jazz ethnomusicology today. Reflecting Panassié’s personality, Le jazz hot was frequently combative in its arguments. This was not appreciated by everybody, including Jacques Canetti, editor at Jazz-Tango, who objected to “its strident tone” and accused Panassié of creating “arbitrary comparisons and classifications between different musicians.” Delaunay agreed: “Criticism of the new musical sounds was often nasty and vitriolic,” he admitted, comparing it to “being an early Christian in Rome.”42 Panassié struck back by starting his own journal, Jazz Hot, which originally appeared in February 1935 as one page printed on the back of a program for a Coleman Hawkins concert.43 The first numbered issue came out a month later, with a March 1935 cover date. Panassié was still living at the family estate in central France, so the day-to-day running of Jazz Hot was left in the hands of Delaunay, in Paris. In early 1934 the Hot Club’s secretary, Jacques Bureau, was conscripted into the army, so Delaunay stepped in, to the benefit of both men. Bureau had found the club becoming “a bit boring to me. It required a lot of administration. We were speaking only of business and not of music anymore.” On the other hand, administration proved Delaunay’s forte. “He had the spirit of a butterfly collector,” recalled Bureau. The Hot Club, which had never been registered with the City of Paris as a concert promoter, let alone formalized as any kind of business entity, was incorporated. Without Delaunay’s meticulousness and love of order, the Hot Club probably would not have survived. “Panassié was never a good director,” said Bureau. “He was president, but he was incapable of even writing a letter.” The same was true for Jazz Hot. “I was responsible for the magazine,” Delaunay told one interviewer, “Panassié was responsible for [writing] the articles.”44 This included an article on Bix Beiderbecke that appeared in the March 1935 issue. Accompanying it was an article-length list of Bix Beiderbecke– Frank Trumbauer recordings prepared by Delaunay and titled “Discographie de Bix et Trumbauer.” A brief sidebar announced that it was an extract from a forthcoming Delaunay work, Essais de discographie [Essays in discography], “which will appear shortly.” It claimed that “this work will consist of detailed information on everything that has been recorded by the principal ‘hot’ orchestras.”45 While the Beiderbecke-Trumbauer discography did segregate matrix and label numbers, it didn’t specify separate recording sessions, noting only

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general personnel changes. These, and its highly compressed format, made it somewhat difficult to use. For example, on February 4, 1927, Beiderbecke (clarinet) and Trumbauer (C-melody sax) played at a recording session for Okeh in New York. They, along with Bill Rank (trombone), Jimmy Dorsey (clarinet, alto sax), Paul Mertz (piano), Howdy Quicksell (banjo), and Chauncey Morehouse, recorded “Trumbology” (master W-80391-C). They added Stanley “Doc” Ryker (alto sax) and cut “Clarinet Marmalade” (W-80392-C). Finally, Miff Mole substituted for Rank, and Eddie Lang replaced Quicksell, and they recorded “Singin’ the Blues” (W-80393-8). Because of the way the personnel changes are presented, Delaunay’s discography gives readers the impression that “Singin’ the Blues” and “Clarinet Marmalade” were recorded at one session and “Trumbology” at a second date. Also, while the master number for “Trumbology” was fairly accurate (80391), as was its Okeh label number (40871), the matrix numbers for “Singin’ the Blues” (40772-A) and “Clarinet Marmalade” (40772-B) are actually their label numbers. To his credit, Delaunay had picked a particularly hard discography to start with, since Okeh’s jazz record masters switched to a 400,000 series system in 1928, while the labels retained a 40,000 series numbering, making transpositions almost inevitable.46 The Beiderbecke-Trumbauer discography article was still in several ways a significant conceptual advance over Darrell’s Encyclopedia and Schleman’s yet to be issued Rhythm on Record. It was the first to make a distinction between matrix numbers and label numbers, organizing that information in the hierarchical structure familiar today: label numbers deriving from matrix numbers in downward branching trees. One matrix number can be issued on several labels, typically (at this time) as one side of a two-sided 78 rpm record that has a single number. (Typical did not mean universal, however. Some records had one label number per side; others had one number with a hyphenated A and B for the two sides. Most had one label number per disc.) But label numbers—whether for an individual side or an entire record—cannot exist without at least one root matrix. All label numbers pressed from a given matrix number are parallel to each other, branching down from that root. Delaunay had started out much like Roy Schleman, by collecting records, and like Schleman and his colleagues, he started keeping his own little black book to help him sort through the obscure and sometimes deliberately deceptive European reissue catalogs. “When I started getting interested in jazz, in the late twenties,” Delaunay recalled, “documentation or literature on jazz didn’t exist. . . . I thought it would be suitable for my

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own sake to list these records, and I thought I should try to include some in a small booklet which I could carry in my pocket.” As was the case in England, French collectors found personnel information sketchy or non­ existent, but whereas British collectors grew convinced they could identify the anonymous musicians through close listening, Delaunay believed the only way to get reliable information was to ask the musicians who were there. He started by interviewing those who passed through Paris and then, after starting at Jazz Hot, by writing directly to the record companies. Until after World War II, however, few responded and even fewer were helpful, so in the end “nearly all of the 1936 edition of Hot Discography was obtained from interviewing U.S. artists who visited the continent and musicians we would write to in the States who would be kind enough to answer.”47 Unlike the situation twenty years later, when the number of researchers and writers—knowledgeable and otherwise—had grown exponentially, Delaunay found that most musicians didn’t mind being asked for information. “I think they were surprised when we asked them who they’d been playing with. . . . [ J]azz musicians were not aware of the music they were doing. They thought they were just doing dance music, and that was all. The fact that some people took their music as [art] was a big surprise for them.”48 Although the March 1935 Beiderbecke article claimed that Essais de discographie would appear “shortly,” it was over a year before the galley proofs were ready. The job turned out to be more daunting than Delaunay had expected. “At first, we didn’t think it would be that big because we only knew of a few hundred records,” he recalled.49 When it appeared in late summer 1936 under the title Hot Discography, it was not arranged alphabetically by artist, like Schleman’s Rhythm on Record; instead its chapters had a unique organizational structure called “affinities of style.” It roughly followed the evolutionary line of development that Panassié had laid down two years earlier in Le jazz hot. The first section was called “The Originators of Hot Style” and contained pre-1926 recordings by the major black and white groups, including King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Beiderbecke and the Wolverines, and female blues stars such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. This was followed by “The Great Soloists,” “The Prominent Orchestras,” and “Special Studio Combinations.” “It made sense at the time to get together all the musicians who belonged to the same musical family,” Delaunay later explained. Writing in the Discophile, Colin Salt agreed: “I prefer the historical method, as used right from the beginning by Charles Delaunay” to Schleman’s rigidly alphachronological approach. Delaunay admitted that “some readers might prefer, for their own convenience, a strictly alphabetical order, but that would destroy the historical aim of the

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work, which turns a simple enumeration of recordings into a fascinating account of the evolution of an art form.”50 Others had more doubts. “Delaunay’s selective emphasis on the major figures of early jazz history, and his grouping of records into ‘Chicago,’ ‘New York’ and other sections, added glamour to the listings and did give us a coherent if somewhat oversimplified picture of jazz development,” observed Paul Sheatsley, “but it is also true that this approach produced some notable omissions and distortions.”51 Some believed this was intentional. “His book bore the stamp of [Panassié’s] tastes and opinions,” wrote editor and writer Dan Morgenstern. “It was arranged according to a plan that served to emphasize the work of artists he considered important.” Jelly Roll Morton, for example, was not listed at all in the first edition, and Sheatsley admits that as a result he “passed up innumerable Red Hot Peppers [records] on the assumption that if they were not listed in the Hot Discography they must be ‘corn.’ ” In fact the book’s influence was so pervasive that it affected the dynamics of the used-record market. During the late 1930s, New York record store owner Sam Goody armed his scouts with copies of Hot Discography and orders to pick up everything listed in it and ignore the rest. “An analysis of auction prices would, I believe, confirm the point,” Sheatsley asserts.52 Much later, after Delaunay had broken with Panassié, he dropped the affinities of style approach in favor of a straight alphachronological approach, but he never admitted he had been motivated by a desire to provide empirical support for Panassié’s theories, commenting only that “if I had to start again, I wouldn’t make it a family arrangement.”53 Record collectors found the affinities of style approach made Hot Discography hard to use as a field guide because they couldn’t look up individual records quickly. It was also easy to overlook individual artist entries, especially when the musician was a sideman or was recording under a pseudonym. So while Hot Discography sold well, Rhythm on Record was never completely forgotten. Still, Delaunay’s book was widely regarded as a notable achievement. “When Hilton Schleman produced his Rhythm on Record, most of us believed his unbelievably ambitious work would long remain the leading reference,” wrote Edgar Jackson in the Gramophone, “but although it has been out less than a year it has already been improved upon by Charles Delaunay in his Hot Discography. [It] scores over Rhythm on Record in that it avoids the latter’s one drawback—the giving of collective personnels for batches of records.”54 American critics agreed. “Everyone looked upon Hot Discography as a great piece of work,” Metronome’s George T. Simon recalled later, adding

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that “of course, we weren’t doing the same thing” in the United States for several years. “Charles Delaunay is the undoubted father of discography as we know it today,” adds Sheatsley. “It was he who first saw and utilized the importance of master numbers.” Morgenstern believes that in addition to being an important reference book, it should be seen as a milestone of jazz criticism: “Far from being a dry and dusty collection of names, dates and numbers,” he asserts, it was “a guide to the fuller enjoyment and deeper understanding of jazz—in retrospect, a far more substantial contribution to jazz literature than the bulk of critical and historical writing from the period.”55 The 1936 edition did not attempt to divide each artist’s recording chronology into individual recording sessions, although the breakdown by matrix number did give an indication of which recordings were made at a given session, since those masters tended to have sequential numbers. Sheatsley says that “from the beginning [he] aimed toward the ideal of listing each artist’s work . . . with full personnel and recording date for each session, [although] the 1936 edition was severely limited in this respect, but successive revisions . . . came closer.”56 Keep in mind that at this point Delaunay, like Schleman, was still thinking in terms of organizing records, not recording histories. Only after World War II did it start occurring to several discographers around the world, including Delaunay in France, Orin Blackstone in America, and Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy in England, that keeping track of all the various details of a given artist’s recording chronology would ultimately require arranging them into building blocks comprising individual recording sessions. In England, Edgar Jackson continued writing his monthly column for the Gramophone, renamed Swing Music in November 1935. That same month, he also started to include complete personnel listings, composers, and arrangers with each review. Because the information was usually omitted from the record label, he had to get it from the record companies, and for American releases he recruited John Hammond and, later on, Leonard Feather, an English expatriate living in the United States.57 In September 1936 Jackson also started including matrix numbers, noting that they were “a useful guide for those interested in personnels.” He explained that the matrix number was “usually found stamped on the wax between the track and the label” and told readers they could reference it “against the reviews of records in their back numbers of The Gramophone.”58 Delaunay’s influence was already making itself felt, even before his book was in wide circulation. The first edition of Hot Discography was a small 271-page paperback with a blue cover. Although Delaunay never released sales figures, it apparently

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sold out fairly quickly, and less than two years later a second edition appeared, still as a small paperback, but now 408 pages with a bright yellow cover. It was printed in a much larger run (probably three thousand copies), and it is not uncommon to find one today, while the blue-cover version is all but unknown outside libraries and private collections. The yellow edition became the basis for the first hardback version, published by New York’s Commodore Music Shop.

iv All through the 1930s, American jazz writing was still trying to catch up to Europe in both quantity and quality. There were occasionally some good articles in highbrow general interest magazines, such as a 1922 feature in the Atlantic Monthly or a really good piece by Charles Edward Smith in Symposium in 1930, but there was no dedicated monthly in the United States at that time other than Etude, the music educators’ journal. It was wary of most popular music, and when it did try to write objectively it was often wrong. In 1925 Orchestra World started, but it was a trade magazine for dance band management, resembling the British Melody Maker between its launch in 1926 and its shift to a consumer magazine after six or seven years. Certainly there was nothing in the United States resembling the situation in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, where La Revue du Jazz, JazzTango-Dancing, Music, and Jazzwereld were all active.59 Marshall Stearns, a Yale historian who later founded the Institute for Jazz Studies, had started a “History of  Jazz Music” seminar in mid-1936, and it provided the starting place for such fledgling writers as Leonard Feather, George Avakian, and Helen Oakley. Down Beat began publication in summer 1934, switching in 1939 from monthly to biweekly. While that doubled its demand for jazz writing, it still paid the rent by pushing gossip articles and glamour photos. And paying the rent was what Down Beat was all about. John Mahar owned it, along with the print shop where it was produced. Mahar cared nothing about music, thought even less of jazz, and made no secret of the fact that Down Beat’s only reason for existence was to keep his presses busy. “Down Beat was almost a girlie magazine,” recalled George Simon. Nat Hentoff was fired for putting photographs of black musicians on the front page above the fold, where Mahar feared they would inhibit sales in the south. His successor, Gene Lees, later commented that “everyone who worked [there] had left with a seething hatred of the magazine.” Russell Sanjek, head of the performing rights organization Broadcast Music, Inc., noted wryly that “old man Mahar didn’t overpay nobody.”60

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Meanwhile, Metronome tried to steer a more staid, middlebrow course. One wag described its writing style as “debased journalese” and claimed that its sole criterion for selecting subjects was “box-office success.” In England, Albert McCarthy, himself an editor, once wrote that “no magazine has reviewed records so scandalously unfairly, and its stupid articles are calculated to arouse the hostility of any person having the slightest historical knowledge of jazz.” Simon was in the military from 1942 to 1945, afterward returning to Metronome, where he stayed until 1955. Debased journalese or not, after Simon left the magazine declined, and by 1960 its circulation was down to only six thousand. Dan Morgenstern was hired but was not given the resources needed to rebuild it, and Metronome went under in 1961. After a turn editing Jazz Magazine, he was hired to run Down Beat in 1964.61 Dissatisfied with the commercially oriented nationwide magazines, record collectors in New York City started two small journals during the 1930s, Jazz Information and HRS Rag, the latter edited for most of its short life of eleven issues by Heywood Broun. It appeared earlier, in July 1938, but Jazz Information, which followed in September 1939, was the first to be regularly published. The Rag was issued by the Hot Record Society (HRS), an organization formed in 1937 by Stephen Smith, whom Morgenstern once called “the forgotten man of jazz.” Smith was a commercial artist, mostly painting cover art for pulp magazines and dime novels, but in 1939 he opened the HRS Record Shop on New York’s Seventh Avenue. The Society was created as an alternative to the United Hot Clubs of America (UHCA), organized by Marshall Stearns and Milt Gabler as an American branch of Panassié and Delaunay’s Hot Club of France. Gabler, in turn, owned Smith’s major competitor, the Commodore Music Shop, which sponsored Jazz Information.62 Gabler’s father founded a radio store on New York’s Forty-Second Street that later became the Commodore Music Shop. “A little nine-foot store,” Gabler recalled. The Commodore Hotel was nearby, “so my father called the little shop the Commodore Radio Corporation.” Gabler began working there about 1926. “When I started at the shop, there was no jazz business. . . . [W]e sold radios and other things.” Customers started asking for records, “so I told my father, Pop, I’m getting calls for records in the store and we ought to take in records. He said, ‘well, if you’re getting calls, get the yellow pages and look up the phonograph record companies.’ ”63 It soon gained a reputation among jazz collectors as one of the betterstocked stores in the city. “I tried to keep every record that a company would put out. . . . [We] soon became known for having unusual recordings that you couldn’t find in your neighborhood.” Eventually record sales

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pushed out everything else. “It kept growing. Every week records would come out. So we changed the name . . . to the Commodore Music Shop [and] got rid of the radios, we got rid of all the sporting goods and tricks and novelties, etc.”64 When customers started asking for out-of-print material, Gabler asked Brunswick to custom press a run of three hundred copies of three old issues by the Wolverines, a 1923–24 Chicago-based band now most famous for its association with Bix Beiderbecke. Brunswick charged sixteen cents a copy. “They asked me what I wanted on the label,” Gabler recalled. “I said, just put ‘Commodore Music Shop’ and the address.” So was created the now famous “Commodore Label.” George Avakian remembered that when Commodore released its first reissues, “everybody gasped at such audacity, bought the records with joy . . . and figured that Milt was out of his mind.”65 Gabler had done about thirteen of these records when Stearns approached him with the idea of starting the United Hot Clubs. “Marshall wanted a way of putting the Hot Club idea over, so I got the idea of switching my reissue label over to the Hot Club.” That went on for a couple of years until “Avakian and John Hammond started doing reissues in 1939 [for Columbia]. . . . [We] knew that would be the end of the UHCA labels because the record companies would stop giving us masters.” So he revived the Commodore name and started making new recordings of old tunes by traditional jazz artists.66 Meanwhile, Smith at the HRS Shop had gone through the same progression of first offering reissues, then starting a small-scale recording business. At the same time, he had loaned office space to two young writers, Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, so they could edit a new book they were working on, Jazzmen: the Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It, which came out in 1939. Panassié’s book, translated into English and released in the United States in 1936 as Hot Jazz, had been highly influential over the intervening three years. Sanjek believed that one of the reasons Smith helped produce Jazzmen was “to get rid of some of that impact.” He recalled that “there was a kind of Montague-Capulet situation between the H.R.S. Shop and the Commodore. You were either on one side or the other. . . . [When] you walked down the street, you’d have to cross to the other side if you didn’t want a confrontation.”67 One major point of contention was the importance of “the Chicago school.” In his book, Panassié had argued that the blues-tinged dancehall and ragtime music that black musicians learned in New Orleans had matured into jazz only after arriving in Chicago and other points north. Critics

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alleged that Delaunay’s affinities of style organization in Hot Discography was an attempt to bolster this line of reasoning. “Charles Delaunay and Hugues Panassié stirred up a hornet’s nest,” chortled black music publisher Perry Bradford, who recalled hearing American writers complaining huffily that “those Frenchmen got a hellova nerve.”68 Gabler’s 1940 hardback republication of the yellow edition of Delaunay’s Hot Discography was allegedly an attempt to undercut Jazzmen, shore up Panassié, and rehabilitate the Chicago school theory. It’s possible. At the time Whitmark and Sons published the English translation of Panassié’s Hot Jazz, Frederic Ramsey worked for one of Whitmark’s competitors, Harcourt, Brace. Many years later, Ramsey claimed he had been approached by one of Harcourt’s editors who knew he was a jazz aficionado. The editor asked him to review a manuscript on the subject that they had just received. He read it and reported back that it was “a miserable book,” so Harcourt took a pass. Ramsey said this was what had motivated him to begin Jazzmen. That unnamed book may have been the translation of Hot Jazz.69 But it’s also improbable. The whole “Chicago school” flap was rather contrived, since it had long been recognized that there were white New Orleans transplants in Chicago before 1920 (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings), as well as a younger generation of Chicago natives ( Jimmy McPartland, Frank Teshmaker, Bud Freeman), to say nothing of other midwesterners who gravitated in and out of town (Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Hoagy Carmichael). Only a handful of New Orleans whites (mainly the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s boorish Nick LaRocca) ever tried to claim that blacks were unimportant to jazz; everyone else acknowledged their vital role, agreeing with Otis Ferguson’s assessment that “there was no New York style.” That is, New Orleans music may have traveled by riverboat to the environs of Chicago, or taken a train to Los Angeles or Memphis, or even have spent some time rambling around Texas or Kansas City, picking up a little western swing along the way, but in the end all roads led to the Big Apple, by which time it had turned into a distinctive, recognizable genre called jazz.70 It is equally likely that many of the tales about the hostility between Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop and Smith’s HRS Shop are also apocryphal. Historian John Gennari points out that buyers looking for records by Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Morton, and Spanier could find them equally stocked in both places. “In the absence of significant material distinctions between the two shops,” he notes, “it was necessary to create ideological distinctions.” Asked if he was aware of animosity between the two estab-

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lishments, Walter Schapp replied “not that I recall.” He did note some division between the beboppers and the revivalists during the 1940s, but “in the 30’s if you were a jazz fan . . . you liked just about everyone.”71 Frederic Ramsey’s coauthor, Charles Edward Smith, was hardly the model of a fire-breathing jazz ideologue. He had been writing about jazz since 1930, contributing to Esquire since 1934. During the 1930s he wrote the scripts for the first live network jazz show, Saturday Night Swing Session. When Leonard Feather asked about his home record collection, he replied that he “was not a record collector,” and that his stock was “variable and negligible.” Sanjek believed the Chicago school flap boiled down to money, mostly competition over old and rare discs: “That rivalry between the two places [was] because it was a very small market and if one guy got it all, the other guy was going to starve, as far as selling jazz records [is] concerned. . . . [T]hen Columbia came in with that big batch of reissues. . . . [T]hat kind of pulled the rug out from underneath the guys who were holding out for high prices.”72 The Columbia reissues put a halt to the HRS reissues along with the UHCA label, so Smith, like Gabler, turned to original recordings. World War II ended that, and although the Hot Record Society did wax some records after the war, Smith called it quits in fall 1946 and retired to a farm in upstate New York.73 The more likely explanation for Gabler’s desire to reprint an American edition of Hot Discography was his then unique practice of listing all the participating artists on the labels of his UHCA and Commodore reissues. On seeing himself listed as a still obscure sideman on a Commodore reissue of a 1929 recording, Benny Goodman remarked, “[I]t struck me as funny that this record has just been reissued, after ten years, with the names of the players on the label, whereas nobody gave a damn about that when the record was [first] made.” Gabler had already been importing and selling the paperback version of Hot Discography, and his decision to try an American edition was probably motivated less by any resentment over Jazzmen than by genuine enthusiasm for Delaunay’s book. “When the Discography came out, it had a lot of errors,” Gabler admitted. “But it was a fantastic work! It’s a definitive work, and the reason collecting became what it did.”74 He first got in touch with Delaunay in 1939, but they had difficulty communicating after Delaunay was remobilized, so Delaunay asked Dick Schaap, a former Columbia University student to help.75 After graduating in 1937 Schapp spent a year in France, where he ended up doing translations for Jazz Hot, which was bilingual as far as time, money, and space

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permitted. “During my first year over there Panassié was my close friend; I scarcely knew Delaunay,” Schaap recalls. He came home in 1938 but soon returned to study at the Sorbonne. During this period Panassié was in the United States, so Schaap got to know Delaunay. He helped Delaunay edit the 1938 edition of Hot Discography, and out of it grew a friendship that continued until Delaunay died in 1988.76 The upcoming conflict forced Schaap home again two months before Germany invaded Poland. Just before he left, Delaunay asked him to act as his intermediary in New York during the remaining negotiations with Milt Gabler over the publishing of the first Commodore edition. Margaret Kidder, a contributor to HRS Rag who was living in Paris, reported that “during the winter of 1939–40 jazz played on in Paris, for France was a country that did as it pleased.” That ended on the morning of May 10, 1940, when her cleaning woman told her the Germans had invaded. “ ‘Nonsense,’ [I replied,] but from that that day on I stopped hearing jazz in France,” she recalled. Schaap last heard from Delaunay in June. A week later the Germans entered Paris. Kidder breezily reported that because Delaunay’s father, Robert, owned a farm in the south of France, Charles had been released from POW detention as an “indispensable agricultural worker.” In truth, Robert Delaunay was dying of cancer and died at the farm in early 1941. Charles returned to Paris. As the citizen of a still-neutral country, Kidder was evacuated to Portugal by the Red Cross in fall 1940.77 The Commodore edition of Hot Discography came out just before Christmas 1940 and sold many times more copies than even the popular 1938 paperback. In Paris, Delaunay reopened the shuttered Hot Club. After a while the French underground started using it as a message center, certainly with Delaunay’s tacit acquiescence, and possibly by explicit arrangement. It was normal for a large and varied collection of often unconventional people to wander in and out of the three-story Montmartre building to attend listening sessions, use the rehearsal hall, visit the library, or come on business—in short, the perfect cover.78 Slowly, foreign agents and domestic provocateurs began to seep into the mix. The Hot Club’s activities—certainly its traditional, jazz-related ones—had been shielded by a young Luftwaffe lieutenant, Dr. Dietrich Schulz-Koehn. An economist by training, he had done his dissertation on the international popular music industry and was an enthusiastic jazz fan. He started Germany’s first Hot Club in 1935 and worked for Deutsch Brunswick and Telefunken records. He had visited Panassié at the family château in 1936, the same year he wrote a long Metronome article on German jazz. It needed no translation; Schulz-Koehn’s English was perfect, since he had attended

f i g u r e 3 . A page from Charles Delaunay’s Hot Discography (1940 Commodore edition).

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graduate school in England. The article brought him to the irritated attention of the Nazi Party’s appointed music critic, Fritz Stege.79 Schulz-Koehn didn’t give a damn. After the war started, he was assigned to occupied France but was still able to help friends from the now-shuttered Berlin Melodie-Klub start an underground jazz newsletter. The cover of its first edition in January 1942 featured a photo of Schulz-Koehn, in full uniform, and a later cover photo showed him standing in front of a Paris nightclub beside gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and four colonial black jazz musicians. Long after the war, Melodie-Klub members still debated whether he used such outlandish provocations to protect his musician friends or was simply oblivious to the depth of the Nazis’ cultural persecution. “He took a lot of risks,” one recalled.80 The Melodie-Klub’s newsletter was printed on paper appropriated from official stocks, probably with Schulz-Koehn’s help. Before the war, Schulz-Koehn had aided Delaunay’s discographic efforts by sending him catalog information from Deutsch Brunswick and other labels. After his assignment to France, he helped him prepare a third edition of Hot Discography, even as the French Hot Clubs grew more and more enmeshed in resistance efforts. The manuscript was sitting on Delaunay’s desk at Hot Club headquarters in October 1943 when the Gestapo moved in, capturing a handful of British agents and detaining the club’s staff. Delaunay was released a month later, but two other members of the Hot Club were formally arrested and later died in prison.81 Surprisingly, given the circumstances, the new Hot Discography was a significant reworking of the 1938 version. In deference to the occupiers, all the previous English translations were excised—even the name was changed to the francophone Hot discographie 1943. It was much longer. It is hard to tell by exactly how much, since the type size was reduced to save paper, but a good guess is about a third. As a result, the affinities of style arrangement was now so complex that it took a two-page flowchart to diagram it. On the left page are black artists: the New Orleans classicists, pouring into a box just for Louis Armstrong, from which the flow separates into the “Grand Orchestras” and “Studio Orchestras.” Off to the side are the Blues Queens— Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. The black New Orleanians, in turn, beget the white New Orleans school, while Armstrong begets the Chicagoans, and seemingly nobody and everybody at the same time begets Bix Beiderbecke. It’s all very confusing. A sixty-eight-page section on European artists appears at the end.82 The Vichy authorities permitted the publishing of nonofficial books in editions of up to five hundred copies. A 1946 Down Beat story said that

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Belgian jazz fans had provided enough paper for 2,500 copies, published in five runs, each numbered 1 through 500. Supposedly the print identifying the number of the copy was altered (one in plain type, another in italics, a third in small capitals, etc.) so that the five batches could be distinguished.83 This is unlikely. Only a few copies of the pink cover third edition survive: all appear to have the number identifier printed in the same font, and no two copies with the same number have been found. It is more likely that only five hundred copies were printed and that the paper source was the same as for the Berlin newsletter: official stocks diverted through SchulzKoehn’s influence.

Sorting out the various editions of Hot Discography has always been difficult. The 1936 Paris (blue paperback) and 1938 Paris (yellow paperback) versions are clearly the first and second editions. Right after the war, Esquire and Down Beat both referred to the 1943 Paris version (pink paperback) as the fifth edition, apparently considering the 1940 Commodore (dark blue hardback) and 1943 Commodore (olive hardback) versions as the third and fourth editions. This can be plausibly argued, since the 1940 Commodore version was a somewhat altered reprint of the 1938 Paris blue paperback, and the second Commodore version was a straight reprint of the earlier Commodore book with nine pages added at the end.84 It does make for easier bookkeeping to grant the two Commodore reprints status as unique editions, but when the American firm Criterion published an entirely reworked version in 1948 under the title New Hot Discography, some reviewers called it the sixth edition, some the fourth, and others considered it the first edition of a completely new work. In this book I use the nomenclature that Delaunay himself applied in the final version of his work, the 1951–52 Hot discographie encyclopédique. In the introduction of its first volume, he listed the 1940 (dark blue) Commodore version as the third edition, but considered the 1943 (olive) Commodore release merely a corrected second printing of the 1940 book, making the 1943 Paris pink edition the fourth, the 1948 Criterion hardback the fifth, and Hot discographie encyclopédique the sixth.85

As the war wound down, in May 1945 Schulz-Koehn was taken into custody by the Allies as a regular prisoner of war. When the Down Beat article ran in 1946 he was still being detained, despite Delaunay’s efforts. Delaunay acknowledged his help in preparing the third edition but was reticent about

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his role lest one partisan group or the other find it questionable, and the full story of his wartime activities did not come to light until Ernest Borneman wrote about it in Esquire in 1947, after he had been released.86 Meanwhile, Delaunay had started corresponding with his English and American friends within days after the liberation, talking friendly soldiers into sending and receiving letters for him using their military franking privileges. He immediately started planning a new and expanded edition of the Hot Discography. The rest of the country, however, was not yet ready to be so upbeat. “France nowadays is the scene of an unending manhunt for those who betrayed their country and collaborated with the occupying Nazis,” wrote one American correspondent in early 1946. No one seriously accused Panassié of collaboration, but as Delaunay later put it, there was a feeling around Hot Club headquarters that he had sat out the war “frozen in his provincial hole,” unconcerned—oblivious may be a better word—about the fate of either his erstwhile colleagues back in Paris or his nation. Moreover, some of Panassié’s “Negro primitivist” commentary just didn’t cut it any more, after the swill the Parisians had been forced to listen to for the past few years. Delaunay edited some of it out of a couple of Panassié’s Jazz Hot articles without even bothering to ask. Also, some of the Swedish and Swiss fans who had given Delaunay information for the 1943 Hot discographie were telling him about some interesting new music they were hearing from the Coleman Hawkins and Billy Eckstine bands and some small combos. Mostly it was on broadcasts from New York, because the American Federation of Musicians had just settled a lengthy strike against the record companies. Some thought it was the coming thing—modern jazz. Others thought it was noise. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to go to New York to find out about it firsthand.87 Yes indeed: New York sounded like a splendid idea to Charles Delaunay.

chapter three

“A Form of Musical Bookkeeping”: 1945–60

i In 1945 Orin Blackstone, an editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, started a new series of small jazz discographies titled Index to Jazz. Born Clarence Oren Blackstone, he was a native of Mount Pleasant, Texas. Like most teenagers, he had accumulated records casually, but he became a serious collector only after enrolling at the University of Texas and rooming with a musician for a year. He dropped out of college in 1927 to take a reporting job with the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. A year or so later, he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, to marry and started as a reporter with the daily paper there. He had always used the shortened byline “Oren Blackstone,” but for some reason the editor at the Shreveport Times insisted he change it to Orin, and thus it read for the next forty years.1 In 1931 he returned to the Times-Picayune as night editor, the perfect job for a jazz aficionado. “You don’t hear much jazz here until around midnight and my night job fitted in just right,” he once told a friend.2 In 1933 he started his first music magazine, Popular Music, a tabloid. It lasted for only a handful of issues, but regardless, he soon became an authority on New Orleans jazz, if not the leading one. “For years, when anyone interested in jazz arrived in New Orleans, the first thing he did was to look up Orin Blackstone,” wrote collector Ken Hulsizer, “He has done more for New Orleans music and for jazz than any other one man in the country. . . . It is probable that he has found more jazz records than any other one jazz collector—I mean found them himself.”3 Blackstone approached his collection as a researcher. He believed that one should work from a historical perspective, and that context mattered.

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He had been enormously impressed by Panassié’s 1936 Hot Jazz, especially its dual conclusions that jazz was both a serious music and a music of the present, not some folk anachronism. While Blackstone felt there was nothing wrong with collecting a single artist—Armstrong, say, or Jelly Roll Morton—he believed one could never fully appreciate that musician’s work without comparing it with the music of others of the same time and place. “Broad listening, recounted his friend Gilbert Erskine, “gives a clear understanding of what happened in jazz history and why it happened.” Unlike many of his fellow collectors, therefore, Blackstone tended to be relatively nonjudgmental, listening for context and contrast if nothing else, and this was reflected in the sheer mass of his collection—by World War II, over twelve thousand records.4 But by the mid-1940s Blackstone was growing increasingly unhappy with his situation. Promoted at the newspaper, he was now working days. “I wish I could help you ferret out spots in the Quarter, but I’d probably be more of a hindrance than a help,” he wrote to a colleague in summer 1944. “I’ve completely lost touch with what’s going on in the past three years since I’ve been on the city desk. . . . I’ve been full city editor which has been sending me home exhausted.” In addition, live jazz in the city had all but died, a victim of wartime shortages, rules, restrictions, and the draft. The French Quarter had ceased to be a place for entertainment. Instead, for far too many people—often soldiers on leave—it had become just a place for drinking. “I’m not doing much,” Blackstone admitted, “I’ve just been collect­ ing records.” Even that was disappointing. “Speaking of collecting, there’s not much to it down here now. Just from force of habit I still look but never find anything. . . . After the war may be too late, but I hope not.”5 It was clearly a time for something different—maybe a lot of new things. Blackstone began assembling the Index to Jazz about 1940 as a catalog of his own collection, but later he credited Gordon Gullickson, editor of the Record Changer, as the man who “caused me to undertake the project” and “gave me the courage to continue.” This was no small matter, since Blackstone later admitted that “I finally got the first [volume] of the Index off my hands [only] after almost despairing of the job.”6 The first of the Index’s four volumes—a slim 118-page paperback—appeared about July 1945. That same month, the first installment of his Hot Copy column appeared in Record Changer. “We have been hunting a good man to supply us data on out-of-print jazz records,” explained Gullickson in an introduction, “I think we’ve got him. I think Orin Blackstone’s section of the Record Changer will be one of the best.”7

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Blackstone quit his job at the Times-Picayune (“It had gotten to the point where I just couldn’t stand it any longer”) and, with his brother Harvey, started the New Orleans Record Shop. “He hoped the store would support his family while he worked on the Index to Jazz,” recalled Erskine. “Harvey usually minded the store at the front counter while Orin worked on his 4-volume discography in the rear.”8 The shop was no afterthought, however. It was so special that Printer’s Ink, the trade magazine of the advertising business, ran an article about it. The store carried stock from some forty labels, and the records weren’t kept out of reach behind the counter or thrown into bins but faced outward on floor-to-ceiling shelves designed to show off their covers. “Self service, exactly like that in a supermarket or food store, is the selling system employed,” explained the magazine, “the system cuts operating costs and enables the New Orleans Record Shop to feature a more complete stock with less operational overhead.” “The first thing one noticed about the shop was that it was always clean,” Erskine recalled. “There was always a manifest class and dignity about the place. . . . [T]here were other well known stores, such as the Jazz Man Record Shop in Hollywood, and the Groove Record Shop in Chicago, but for total ambience there never was a place like Orin Blackstone’s New Orleans Record Shop on Baronne Street.”9 Unlike Delaunay’s Hot Discography, the Index to Jazz made no claim to critical judgment, and Blackstone freely admitted that he wasn’t going to “evaluate in any way the records listed except that they be of interest to the jazz collector.”10 Therefore he stuck to an alphabetical-by-artist structure from start to finish, unlike Delaunay’s affinities of style arrangement. The Index thus looked at first glance like a throwback to Schleman’s Rhythm on Record. Actually it was very different. The Index subdivided each artist’s output into sessions using a format almost identical to the later Carey/McCarthy or Rust books. The main exception was that instead of designating each recording down the left-hand column by a matrix number, followed by the title, followed by various issue numbers, the Index to Jazz designated each disc by its first-release label number, then title, then subsequent issue numbers. (In several instances a disc was designated “unissued,” just as an unreleased master later would be in Carey/McCarthy or Rust.) Blackstone himself wrote that the “sponsors of the Index to Jazz felt there was a need for more than one approach to the subject of recorded jazz [that is, Delaunay’s], and that an alphabetical guide was the most serious lack.”11 The first three volumes were published by the Record Changer, but Gullickson published the fourth volume personally because he sold the

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f i g u r e 4 . A page from Orin Blackstone’s Index to Jazz (1945–48).

magazine in late 1947 or early 1948. By the time the final volume was released, about three thousand sets had been printed.12 Limited to records released before 1944, the four thin paperback volumes were intended from the start to serve as a trial run for an expanded second edition. Readers were asked to supply missing information and, through their comments and suggestions, help shape the form and content of the “final” product. The Index to Jazz incorporated what Paul Sheatsley later called “a magnificent system” of cross-referencing. While Delaunay and Schleman both had “splendid” indexes, there was little or no cross-referencing in the body of the text. Take an artist like Jimmy Dorsey, who was both a prolific bandleader and a popular sideman. In Delaunay or Schleman, a reader first consulted the index, then was referred to (in Sheatsley’s words) “forty different page numbers.” That’s because Dorsey led and (especially) played for so many bands, all with different names. In Blackstone’s Index, one went directly to the alphabetical listing for Jimmy Dorsey, where one found all the records he cut as a bandleader, then a “see also” subheading followed by all the groups he recorded with and the specific label numbers of those appearances.13 There was a drawback to Blackstone’s method, however. The crossreferences were used instead of an index. This made it impossible to track a minor artist who never appeared on a label as a headliner. Take “Sam

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Sideman.” You couldn’t look Sam up in the index because there wasn’t one. And there was no individual heading for Sam in the text, because he never appeared as the marquee name on a record. Without his own entry, there was no place to put any “see also” listings to guide readers to the names of the bands Sam played in as a sideman over the years. Blackstone did give entries of their own to several of the better-known sidemen who never appeared under their own names (Sidney Arodin and Happy Caldwell were two examples), with nothing underneath except cross-references. But listing every sideman this way would have turned the body of the discography into its own index, though in a very space-intensive way. One of Blackstone’s main goals was to get a completed work out as quickly as possible so his readers would have the greatest opportunity to respond with corrections, additions, and updates. He often published these in his Record Changer column as he received them.14 But such expediency did require sacrificing many discographic details, including session dates, locations, a lot of matrix numbers, and exact personnels. “Major gaps in the work, such as missing master numbers and dates, are being filled,” he assured readers in the introduction to the third volume (M-R). “This certainly will permit a more orderly grouping of personnels and dates, and at the same time satisfy those collectors who want a numeric guide of some sort.”15 Marshall Stearns, who was then writing his magnum opus, The Story of Jazz, reviewed the first volume of the Index and wrote that “while the immediate effect of this book is to unearth important recordings that might otherwise have remained unknown, and to rescue the performances of highly talented musicians from oblivion, the long-range effect is to reveal an enormous and untouched field in American civilization, superbly documented, which is on the threshold of general recognition.”16 But Ron Davies found the Index to Jazz generally inferior to Hot Discography. “I prefer the historical method, as used right from the beginning by Charles Delaunay. . . . [The] reason for my preference is [my] conviction of the fundamental difference between a discography and a catalogue.” The latter “is liable all too easily to degenerate into a mere listing,” while a discography “should aim higher than this.” At a minimum, Davies felt a discography should comprise “all records of interest to the jazz collector which have been made generally available at any time, or unissued sides which may be available in the future, [with] personnels, recording dates, master and take numbers, and issue numbers of the records.” But even then it should be more: at its heart, a discography should strive to be a historical

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record “with the object in mind of presenting an artist’s life’s work.” Davies believed that Delaunay’s book, with its affinities of style approach, had approached this, and although it did not ultimately succeed, “it failed gloriously.”17 Stearns thought this aspiration somewhat impractical: “In view of the hit-or-miss operations of the numerous recording companies on well over two hundred labels, Index to Jazz is an incredible achievement.” Esquire’s Arnold Gingrich agreed that trying to create a complete historical record was a fine goal to shoot for, but he cautioned that “maybe it will take a couple of Guggenheim Fellowships for somebody or other to produce the perfect discography that will give, in one volume, all that there needs to be known about every record of significance.” And he predicted that “such a . . . book would run to the approximate bulk of the New York or Chicago telephone directory.”18 Blackstone’s Index may have been a “mere catalog,” but at least he got it done, and in less than four years. This would soon come to be appreciated as a milestone in itself.

ii By early 1945 Delaunay was inundated with new data and was hoping for an early 1947 date for the next edition of Hot Discography. But “there was so much material recorded by small companies I didn’t know of,” he later recalled. “I couldn’t write to all these companies . . . so I came and spent two months in New York just to get information.” He arrived in July 1946. Some of the bigger firms, such as RCA and Decca, agreed to collect information for him, while many smaller labels, including Apollo, Keynote, and Savoy, let him go through their files himself. George Avakian wangled permission from his employer, Columbia, to let them copy the recording logs stored at their Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant one weekend.19 Avakian had just returned to Columbia after serving in the army. In the late 1930s, while still a student at New York’s Horace Mann High School, he had become a habitué of Milt Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop. On arriving at Yale in 1938, he met Marshall Stearns.20 One of the cofounders of the United Hot Clubs of America, Stearns was a former Yale student who had studied music under Henry Cowell, but he opted instead for a PhD in English. (He later received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his research in music and dance.) After getting his doctorate, he returned to Yale to teach English and history. He was a prodigious collector of both jazz records and jazz literature, and his collection of twenty thousand rec­

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ords and five thousand books and bound journals would form the nucleus of the Institute for Jazz Studies. His 1956 book The Story of  Jazz became a milestone, not because it had any particularly brilliant insights, but simply because it was complete, balanced, well researched, well written, well documented, well produced, and above all, interesting. “It is a sad fact that jazz has often been its own worst enemy as far as publication is concerned.” noted editor Sheldon Meyer, “[B]ad writing, poor critical standards, factionalism—all have hurt.”21 At the time, Stearns also reviewed concerts for Tempo magazine, and one evening he asked Avakian to fill in for him. Avakian parlayed that into a successful career (while still a student) as a writer for Tempo and Down Beat, then as a producer for Decca. In 1940 John Hammond hired him to organize Columbia’s recording vaults in anticipation of a reissue series the firm was planning. “The job was a dream,” Avakian recalled. “They had nothing but masters racked up in rows and rows in the basement with no idea of what they were.” They turned out to be unreleased recordings by Armstrong’s Hot Fives, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and many other now famous jazz and blues pioneers. By 1942, when Avakian graduated and entered the army, Columbia had released ten albums of reissues and sixty to seventy singles, taking the air out of the hyperinflated market for old hot records. “Columbia came in with that big batch of reissues that George Avakian put out in ’41,” Russell Sanjek later recalled. “That kind of pulled the rug out from underneath the guys who were holding records for high prices.”22 Once again a civilian, he tried to make a living as a freelance writer, and though his jazz articles sold, he found no takers for his fiction. Hammond helped him return to Columbia, this time as an A&R (artists and repertoire) man. Initially he worked on such mundane projects as foreign-language instruction records and polka albums, but by the mid-1950s he was producing such acclaimed works as Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy and Ellington at Newport.23 Delaunay had all but given up on gleaning information from the multitude of small independent labels outside New York when Milt Gabler again stepped in to help. Gabler was now shuttling back and forth between his Commodore Record Shop and Decca, where he worked as an A&R man for thirty years. (“I made millions for Decca with what was mostly chart junk and then the sons of bitches fired me!” he later told one interviewer.)24 Gabler suggested that Delaunay go to James Caesar Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, to get permission to look through the AFM’s rec­ ording logs, which the union was then centralizing in New York.

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The logs were used to track the pay owed to union musicians and ensure that work rules were followed. Each record company had its own file, with individual sheets for each session that included its length, the songs recorded, personnel by their real names, rate of pay, and other information. “The only trouble was that there were thousands and thousands of companies, many devoted to only one kind of music: sacred, folklore, language instruction, and you had to go through so much material.” Petrillo was away in Chicago, and Delaunay remembers lying on his office floor with Walter Schaap “going madly” through the files and “furiously copying” their information. “That really was the providential gold mine,” recalled Delaunay, “and it is surprising that it was never used by other collecting discographers.” (That may be because no one else could. In 2010, discographer Björn Englund claimed that New York local AFM 802 has never allowed the logs to be viewed since.)25 Gabler also introduced Delaunay to Mike Golshen of Criterion Music Company, a trade publisher of sheet music and music books. Criterion agreed to publish the new edition of Delaunay’s discography in New York. It was released in mid-1948 under the title New Hot Discography.26 Criterion arranged for it to be professionally printed and bound in a durable textbook-style binding. Expanded to a full six-by-nine-inch format, it still came to a hefty 606 pages. The first printing sold out almost immediately, and Criterion quickly ordered a second. Recognizably a Delaunay product, it retained the affinities of style approach for musicians recorded before 1930 but abandoned it for later artists, who were grouped in straight alphabetical order in a long section of their own. “It made sense at the [earlier] time to get together all the musicians who belonged to the same musical family,” explained Delaunay. “Now it doesn’t make sense because the musicians are mixed in with each other.”27 “Mixed in with each other” was a deliberately ambiguous phrase referring to both stylistic and racial differences.28 The section on European artists in the 1943 edition was omitted in anticipation of an all-Europe supplement or a second volume. The decision to include modern music, and to generally be more inclusive and less judgmental in pigeonholing things as “jazz” or “not jazz,” was a controversial one. It paralleled Delaunay’s changing attitudes toward the jazz aesthetic emerging out of his face-to-face contact with the people, places, and circumstances of the music’s origin in America. “Jazz is a more controversial issue in France than it is, or ever has been, in the United States,” Columbia University’s David Strauss wrote from Paris. “[ J]azz appears to be endowed here with all the elements of a religion.” Many French

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critics thought that America itself was the enemy, or at least the American record industry. “Implicit here is a concept of jazz as a pure and uncorrupted art divorced from the commercial world,” he observed, a Platonic realm where “the purity of jazz depends not only on its isolation from the dollar, but from the whole apparatus of western civilization.” However, in creating this ethnography, the French purists painted themselves into conceptual corner, because this aesthetic grew ever more dependent on a presumption that jazz was a static, unchanging, noncommercial folk art “played by black men whose principal qualification for playing is their close resemblance to savages.”29 That worked fine for a wealthy, solipsistic misanthrope like Hugues Panassié, but the more worldly and pragmatic Delaunay, an artist and the son of artists, knew well from personal experience that the creative spark needed both spiritual inspiration and three square meals a day. As a result, he tended to be a little more broad-minded. The greatest enemy of prejudice is personal observation, combined with a willingness to see things as they are, not as one wants them to be. His views clearly started to shift after his New York trip. He began speaking of a newfound tolerance for both the modernists and the older white traditionalists such as Eddy Condon and Jack Teagarden. “Jazz is more than just Dixieland or just re-bop,” he told Down Beat’s Bill Gottlieb. “It’s both of them and more.” Shortly thereafter he wrote that “jazz is neither a sport, nor a collector’s piece. . . . [E]ven if one does prefer a style, it is not necessary to condemn other styles merely because they exist.”30 Panassié, predictably, was furious. “Riding the momentum of his great originality in Hot Jazz, [Panassié] inevitably became messianic,” recalled the critic and New Yorker writer Whitney Balliett. “He believed he could alter—or at least slow down—the course of jazz.”31 Panassié threw Delaunay out as the secretary general of the Hot Club of France, then tried to do the same at Jazz Hot. That, however, was an overreach. Panassié’s decision to sit out the war in relative comfort at the family château in rural France, commuting regularly to Switzerland, and his apparent indifference to what happened in Paris did not sit well with the magazine’s staff, all of whom had suffered some degree of hardship and deprivation. He lost the editorship battle, and it was Panassié himself who was purged from the magazine. Delaunay then used it as the base to start a new club, the Hot Club de Paris, that soon overwhelmed its older counterpart.32 But the same reaction to New Hot Discography also came from American traditionalists. Rudi Blesh, for example, claimed that the two broke because Delaunay found “there was no place free of Panassié’s huge shadow for

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him to go except to bebop.”33 It is therefore often difficult to determine if a reviewer is evaluating a book or making a statement about the shifting jazz politics of the time, an irony given that providing an empirical grounding to a particular ideological point of view was likely one of the main reasons behind the original Hot Discography. For example, consider Bucklin Moon, who savaged the book. “The revised edition of the Hot Discography is a mess,” he wrote. “I believe in charity, and I hate to take a swipe at what was once the collector’s bible, but alongside [Blackstone’s] Jazz Index, it doesn’t look so hot.”34 Bad politics or a bad book? Moon pointed out what everybody knew, that the 1938 edition had been “by its very nature a loosely arranged work that was sometimes unwieldy.” But, he complained, “the present volume seems to go out of its way to be confusing. . . . [ Y ]ou need a compass, a sextant and a seeing eye dog to find your way around.” Actually, you needed a flow chart—the flow chart that had been provided at the front of the 1943 Paris edition! Criterion Press had chosen to exclude it from the new book, for a very good reason. It had been divided down the middle into two big boxes. The left box was for black musicians (predictably, it was a black box, with white printing), and the right box was for white musicians. Leaving aside the question whether it was good or bad taxonomy, there simply was no way a nationwide American music publisher was going to reproduce the thing. But without some replacement road map to the book, Moon’s frustration was understandable. He, like most people, hadn’t seen the 1943 edition and thus had no idea how much the exponentially increasing output of the international record industry—even that portion falling within the narrow Panassian jazz canon—had affected the Hot Discography. The first twothirds of the new book was essentially the same as the 1943 Paris edition, except for the deletion of the chart and a muddling of the chapter headings to hide the fact that they had been race-based. (In a few cases the chapters themselves were a mash of one old “white” chapter and one old “black” chapter.) In retrospect, New Hot Discography made sense—if  you had a copy of the 1943 edition in front of you. So it seems that Moon had a legitimate point—the new book could be written off as a “mess.” But keep going. Delaunay quickly wrote to complain about Moon’s “slaughter.” Although somewhat disjointed, his reply did hit the nail on the head. Assuming Moon was right and the affinities of style approach couldn’t be made to work in a discography that large, he had failed to choose between the horns of his own dilemma. Which should be thrown overboard—

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affinities of style or comprehensiveness? This went to the heart of the “bad politics or bad book” question. Should a discography select, edit, excise, and arrange, or should it be broad, inclusive, and nonjudgmental? In other words, should it be a canon creator, as the traditionalists wanted, or should it accept whatever came down the recording highway, as the modernists and musical liberals believed? Moon’s reply: “I made no plea for a bigger and better Index to Jazz. In all sincerity, my only hope is for a better, not bigger, Hot Discography.”35 Comprehensiveness was not vital. Blesh’s reaction was less subtle. He dismissed Delaunay’s new broadminded approach with what has become the single most famous quotation in the history of discography: “Delaunay will be remembered for his prodigious labors in discography, an activity more related to stamp-collecting than to science, a form of musical book-keeping important only as an adjunct or tool to musical understanding. But discography and its unremitting labors were not enough for Charles . . . and so to bebop he goes.”36 One other prescient feature of New Hot Discography bears mentioning in some detail. Each issue (usually, but not always, a 78 rpm, two-sided single) was assigned a “discode,” a Delaunay-assigned serial number comprising a number, letter, and number. For example, discode 11S25, “Rock and Rye” by Charlie Spand, was recorded in June 1924 in Chicago and given matrix number WC3172 by Brunswick. In the discode system 11S designated Charlie Spand, the eleventh artist listed under S, and 25 indicated that “Rock and Rye” was the twenty-fifth entry under Charlie Spand.37 It was a unique and innovative system, and the authors hoped collectors would adopt the discode as a shorthand for identifying specific individual recordings. It was a concept that would be used to advantage in the later era of cheap computerization, but it failed because it was ahead of its time. In an ink-on-paper format it was locked into a rigid sequence that didn’t allow for inserting new data in a coherent manner. For example, discode 1A253 was a twelve-inch medley of Louis Armstrong tunes done by Armstrong and the Charlie Gains Orchestra in Philadelphia on December 8, 1932, matrix number 74878 (Victor). It was released in America by Victor and in England by His Master’s Voice. Discode 1A253a was a second medley of songs recorded on matrix 74877 but unreleased. Based on the matrix number, it was probably recorded just before the other medley, discode 1A253, at the same December 1932 Philadelphia live show. Delaunay’s discode 1A253b was “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” an excerpt culled from the unreleased matrix 74877 and issued on one Bluebird and one Victor 78.

f i g u r e 5 . A page from Charles Delaunay, Walter Schaap, and George Avakian’s New Hot Discography (1948).

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8-Dec-32/Philly.

Medley of Songs ( later)

Victor-74878

1–12”

1A253a

same

Medley of Songs (earlier)

Victor-74877

unissued

1A253b

same

“Sleepy Time” (from 74877)

none

2-78s

It appears likely that because the evening’s earlier medley was never released in its entirety, Delaunay’s team members were unable to properly place “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” until they came across the pressing plant data late in the preparation of the book. Because its proper chronological place was next to discode 1A253, they couldn’t give either the “Sleepy Time” excerpt or its parent medley a unique discode number but had to settle for suffixes. Thus the matrix for the unreleased medley ended up with “1A253a” and its excerpt got “1A253b,” even though the parent medley was recorded just before the other medley recorded that evening, discode 1A253. For anyone used to working with matrix numbers, this would be highly confusing, since suffixes normally refer to two parallel takes of the same song, a and b. But in the New Hot Discography, there is a plain 1A253 that should be 1A254, a 1A253a that should be 1A253 but isn’t, because that serial number had already been assigned, and a 1A253b that is completely unrelated to 1A253 but is instead a derivative of 1A253a. In the end, New Hot Discography remained a Janus-faced work, looking simultaneously in two directions: into the past, echoing the prewar Hot Discographies, which consciously sacrificed ease of reference to promote historical explication, and into the future, foreshadowing the coming postwar comprehensive discographies, which would seamlessly merge the functions of historical record and audio-publication catalog through the use of a session-based format, obsessive attention to detail, and copious ink and paper. With the use of the discode it even foreshadowed, in a clumsy and unworkable way, the computerized discographic databases of the twentyfirst century.

iii In June 1948, about the time the fourth and final volume of the Index to Jazz was completed, Orin Blackstone started his own specialty magazine for jazz collectors and discographers, Jazzfinder. No poetry, commentary, or other extraneous material for Orin Blackstone, no sir: “This is the first publication anywhere in the world to concern itself definitely and exclusively with jazz record collecting,” he wrote in the first issue. “In effect, it is an application of the format of the Index to Jazz . . . and will be a means of keeping that

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book somewhat up to date while a complete edition is being prepared. . . . [ T ]here will be no space for pure criticism or evaluation of any of the features of the current jazz scene.”38 In 1949 Blackstone changed the magazine’s name to Playback when he discovered that the original meaning of “jazz” was still alive and well in New Orleans, and that customers were mistakenly buying his magazine in the belief that it was a buyers’ guide to the city’s sex trade.39 To produce it, Blackstone acquired a Varityper, a sort of desktop publishing machine for the web press era, and job-lot typesetting was added to the multitude of tasks going on in the back room of the New Orleans Record Shop. The money was sorely needed. “For the first two years that we operated, customers were crying for records,” he wrote to a New York colleague in early 1949. “All of sudden we had them, and customers disappeared. It’s really down to a low level now.” But regardless, he and Harvey decided to gamble on starting their own record label, New Orleans, which recorded its first studio date, by Johnny Wiggs and His New Orleans Music, that May.40 Blackstone also supplemented the monthly Jazzfinder/Playback with the first of a projected series of annual yearbooks. It was in the pages of Jazzfinder 1949 that he first announced a new version of the Index to Jazz that would be “started in the late summer of 1949.” Acknowledging that he had learned a lot from the “rough draft” of 1945–48, he planned several changes. It would have a larger page size and larger type. While he again anticipated four installments, this time it would use a three-hole, loose-leaf format. This was intended to speed preparation, not to try to keep each volume current. Instead, a July 1949 cutoff date would be used for the whole series. Update pages would appear only after all four volumes were done. The earlier cross-indexing system would be retained, but full matrix numbers would be included and pseudonymous issues would be added to the cross-referencing system.41 But unlike the original, the new Index was plagued with problems from the start. In 1950 the Blackstone brothers were forced to sell a half-interest in the record shop to Richard B. “Dick” Allen, an employee. (Dick Allen should not be confused with Walter C. Allen, author of Hendersonia and coauthor of King Joe Oliver.) A year later the shop was forced to move from Baronne Street to less visible quarters on Magazine Street, and more significantly, its jazz stock was sold to another local record store, Werlein’s. (After the shop closed, Allen, a good friend of Jazzmen coeditor William Russell, would go on to become a noted jazz historian. He and Russell recorded many oral histories of New Orleans-based musicians and helped establish

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the William Ransom Hogan jazz archives at Tulane University. Allen served as curator from 1965 to 1980.)42 The first volume of Index to Jazz: Loose Leaf Edition did not appear until June 1950, and even then it lacked the last sixty-one pages. It stalled there for over a year. “Believe me, my long silence has not been of my own choosing,” Blackstone wrote to one inquirer. “Business troubles (folding of my record shop) caused me to go out and scramble for a living, with no time left to devote to the jazz project. It was only late last year [1951] that I started getting back in harness.”43 The problems continued. The next installment, shipped in fall 1951, was 24 pages long, followed six months later by another 40. However, to save costs Blackstone used third-class mail. But so many recipients of the 40-page segment reported they had never gotten the 24-page portion that he was forced to resend it to everyone using a higher postal rate. This was followed by several complaints from those who had never received the original 192 pages. “It is harassing enough to produce the book and magazine when things go smoothly, but to learn that subscribers are not receiving them, after all the work that has gone into them, is doubly difficult,” he told a friend.44 In the end, the first volume, finished in mid-1952, ran to 312 pages. The same A-E volume of the 1945–48 edition had been a mere 118 pages.45 Whether he could have gotten the project back on track will never be known. Blackstone wrote to George Hoefer in April 1952 that he was setting up the second volume on his Varityper and expected to go to print that summer, but it never appeared. Playback, which had also resumed in January 1952 after a two-year hiatus, did not make it through the year. In 1953 Blackstone moved to Slidell, Louisiana, to become editor of the Slidell-St. Tammany Times, where he stayed until his retirement in 1972. After moving to Slidell he reverted to the name Oren, and Johnny Wiggs, one of the musicians who had recorded on the New Orleans label, supposedly told Gilbert Erskine that by the 1970s he had grown very bitter. But Erskine himself never reported this, and Dick Allen later implied that Blackstone had been quite successful at the Slidell newspaper.46 “If Blackstone had been permitted but three more years of effort,” lamented Paul Sheatsley, “it is probable that his work would have become the standard reference for jazz discography up to 1950.” As it was, its demise marked the passing of an era. “Never again would it be possible for one man to pick up and capture the entire jazz catalog.”47 Bucklin Moon, writing in the Record Changer, wasn’t yet aware that Blackstone had suspended work when he compared the new Index with the first few volumes

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of Carey and McCarthy’s Jazz Directory. Although he found the Index “a little more convenient,” The Jazz Directory had a “better appearance” and was “monumentally definitive.” Concluding that “both are good and both are accurate,” he predicted that economics would be the determining factor for most consumers. “The answer is to be found in how much interested you are,” Moon wrote. “The Index . . . is going to set you back a good deal less than the full Directory.” Both efforts, however, pointed to the future. Rapidly fading was the vision of the comprehensive discography as a commercial substitute for the junkshopper’s handwritten little black book: “The old four-volume Index had some errors, and was far from complete, but it was a joy to carry with you on junkets,” he noted. “You could tuck it into the side pocket of a jacket and it was out of the way. This is not true of either of the present ventures and I think the loss is a big one.”48 The discography was growing up, both figuratively and literally, into a reference work—bulkier and a lot more expensive.

iv Carrying the official name The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music (it varied somewhat from volume to volume) David Carey, Albert McCarthy, and Ralph Venables’s discography has always been known by its cover title, The Jazz Directory. The idea originated with Carey.49 A jazz and dance band drummer, he started a musical instrument shop in Streatham in 1939 but had to close it during the war while he served in the Royal Air Force. In 1946, about the time work started in earnest on The Jazz Directory, he opened a London record store, the Swing Shop, which remained in business until 1980. Carey initially tried to go it alone on The Jazz Directory, but eventually he realized that including all the relevant subgenres of mainstream jazz, gospel, African American spirituals, early race records, swing, bop, and jive would require him to recruit colleagues with specialized knowledge. He therefore asked McCarthy and Venables to join him. The exact chronology is admittedly hard to pin down. In his introduction to volume 1 (published in mid-1949), Carey gives the impression that he worked on the project for a long time before asking the other two aboard, but an article in a jazz magazine from early 1946 already identifies the full three-man team.50 Albert McCarthy’s involvement in the jazz scene dated from the mid1930s. A man of strong political convictions, he once remarked that “each

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country has its own way of finding room for the talentless; in Britain the traditional escape route for many years being the church or army.” At the start of  World War II, he and his friend, saxophonist-turned-journalist Max Jones both had principled objections to participation. Jones registered as a conscientious objector and served alternative duty, but McCarthy, believing this was still acceding to warmongering, became a “trotter,” moving constantly from place to place to avoid being served with his conscription notice.51 Somehow, in the midst of all this, he and Jones were able, in summer 1942, to start a new magazine, Jazz Music. Despite including such portentoussounding articles as “Jazz and the Machine Age,” Jazz Music featured wellwritten works by the best young critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and for a decade or so it was one of the best informed of Britain’s small specialist magazines. At first, however, Jazz Music was able to run for only eight issues, until mid-1944. Wartime exigencies had put Edgar Jackson back into the editor’s chair at Melody Maker, and McCarthy and Jones made a literary hobby of skewering both. Jackson, of course, retaliated, reporting Jazz Music to the wartime rationing authorities for using unauthorized paper. For the next two years, Jazz Music was reduced to publishing booklets that appeared irregularly as paper became available. Ten were eventually issued as “Jazz Music Books.” (One of these was the original “Junkshoppers Discography,” a guide to pseudonyms and false names appearing on mostly British labels.)52 In late 1946 Jones was able to resume Jazz Music as a bimonthly. This was the golden era of the British small jazz journal. To the two big commercial stalwarts, Melody Maker (which absorbed Rhythm in 1935, discontinuing it in 1939) and the Gramophone, were added Jazz Information (1935–36), Hot News (1935), Swing Music (1935–36), Jazz Music (1942–44, 1946–60), Jazz Tempo (1943–46), Jazz Writings (irregular, mid-1940s), Discography (1943–46), Pickup (1946–47, then Jazz Journal, 1948–2010), Jazz Forum (1946–47), Jazzways (1946), Discophile (1948–50?), Jazz Illustrated (1949– 50), and many others. In addition to his involvement with the The Jazz Directory, McCarthy had left Jazz Music to start the even more esoteric Jazz Forum. It was self-consciously intellectual, featuring fiction, poetry, and the occasional Freudian analysis of song lyrics. McCarthy printed it using the most outlandish ink colors he could scrounge up: strawberry red, royal blue, flame yellow. It was frequently derided in the jazz community, but overlooked is the fact that it was officially published by a poetry society, probably to gain

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access to its quota of paper. Bryan Rust lampooned its cultural pretensions in another small magazine, Sinclair Traill’s Pickup. An excerpt from one poem ran: Piano of a million notes, chords and heaven knows what, raggin’ and stomping and stroking away, The player is dead, but his records live on, So long as there are plutocratic fatheads like us to collect them. I’m sorry, I was forgetting; it is only Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—poor filthy Old Brahms, bless his Hungarian Dances— Who are fatheads; no one else Is. (I’ve wandered off the subject, but one is apt to do that in poems of this sort; the more you do so, the greater genius You are.)53

(Leaving John Davis and Grey Clarke to later grumble: “Thus we find the really sublime moron who can write publicly that Brahms was a fathead for wasting his time composing chamber music when, by inference, he might just as easily have invented rebop.”54 Such were the times.) Ralph Venables, the third man on the Jazz Directory team, “was a fanatical propagandist” of white jazz, recalled Jim Godbolt, at the time editor of another small magazine, Jazz Illustrated. Venables “went to extraordinary lengths to substantiate his extremely biased views.” Even Dave Carey felt compelled to privately admonish one columnist: “Let me make it quite clear, here and now, that I do not share Ralph’s white-jazz tendencies.” Venables did know his Chicago school jazz, however, and he had been a contributor to McCarthy’s Jazz Music since its start in 1942. He was also coeditor, along with Max Jones’s brother Cliff, of Discography magazine.55 Unlike the tolerant McCarthy, Venables had a mean streak. When Jazz Music resumed regular publication in 1946, it absorbed Jazz Tempo and

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Discography. Max Jones explained that Discography’s editors believed this was necessary “to reduce the too large output of papers currently bidding for the support of the jazz community. . . . [We] believe that one, maybe two representative British jazzmags can gain the following here and abroad necessary to ensure survival in the open market that is to come. It is unlikely that support will continue to be given to half a dozen or more of these magazines.”56 Now, this was not an unreasonable point of view, but the way Venables chose to deal with the matter is certainly a different question. Jazzology was yet another small-circulation British magazine. Started in early 1946, it was published and edited by Charles Harvey, who was mildmannered, but rather clueless. Its October 1946 issue included an article by one Shep Landis, who recounted his participation in a Bix Beiderbeckerelated recording session sixteen years earlier. It resulted in a record released under the artist name “Fred Gardner’s Texas Troubadours,” but Beiderbecke was given no label credit. The Landis article was followed in the November and December issues of Jazzology by superficially similar material written by an author named George Lucien. In America, George Hoefer briefly reported on the Shep Landis article in his Down Beat Hot Box column.57 A month later Venables wrote to Hoefer, admitting that the Landis and Lucien articles were hoaxes he had organized with the assistance of Derrick Stewart-Baxter. “What was the plot?” Venables wrote. ”Simply to submit three articles to Harvey under the names of Shep Landis and George Lucien—these articles to be so full of glaring errors that their appearance in print would prove conclusively that, as editor of a jazz magazine, Harvey was a 100% failure, a complete ignoramus.”58 Incredibly, Venables, writing to “my dear George,” was either oblivious of or indifferent to the adverse consequences this had brought on Hoefer, who was trying to put together a reputable collectors’ column for Down Beat, a notoriously parsimonious employer who gave him few if any of the resources he badly needed to do independent research and fact checking. To make things worse, Venables admitted to Hoefer that the “Fred Gardner’s Texas Troubadours” disc referred to in the Shep Landis article did, in fact, exist. Venables had sought Hoefer’s help a year or so earlier in trying, unsuccessfully, to track down information about it in the hope that it was a previously unattributed Beiderbecke recording. In addition to destroying Jazzology’s reputation, Venables thought the information in the article would be so startling that the discographic columns of the major commercial magazines would repeat it. Then, given the egregious errors

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in the Landis article, angry record collectors and amateur discographers from both sides of the Atlantic would jump to their typewriters to submit corrections. He hoped some of this could prove useful in pinning down the source of the Gardner sides. In this way Venables could turn the collectors’ columns of the big magazines (including, of course, Hoefer’s Hot Box) into his personal “information sought” ads: “I’ve never been able to get any information on those Fred Gardners. . . . It was hoped that not only would our plot expose the much-wanted information on the Fred Gardner session, it would also expose the absolute ignorance of Charles Harvey. . . . [ T ]hese three articles would also, by their very inaccuracy, have a fair chance of stirring somebody with the necessary information into coming forward with the data. . . . Maybe by now, this latter object has already been achieved by your opportune publication of the phony story in the “Hot Box.”59

Venables had either lost all perspective or, more likely, never had any to start with. He was a contributing editor to a minor specialty publication with a circulation of perhaps 1,500. Hoefer was a featured columnist in one of the world’s largest music magazines with a distribution at least forty times larger. Venables had fed another editor deliberately false stories on the off chance that the backlash against him might provide some useful information. And Venables expected Hoefer to laugh it all off as a practical joke. Hoefer’s next Hot Box column made Jazzology out to be a champion of tolerance and Venables an ignorant clod. Dave Carey was aghast. “This would have been over and forgotten had [Hoefer’s] humorless pride not got the better of him. . . . Let us be fair! Jazzology was never especially a champion of Negro jazz—I know that Charles Harvey never actually said it was, but George has implied it, which is what counts,” he complained to Down Beat’s front office. But Venables insisted on continuing to make things worse with a follow-up letter that can only be described as a threat (“you better watch out . . . you’ve been warned,” etc., etc.).60 Venables had dug himself in so deep that he was never able to recover. After the first volume of the Jazz Directory in 1949, he dropped out of the project. By the mid1950s he had quit jazz altogether and was editing a motorcycle magazine. George Hoefer continued writing for Down Beat until 1961. Jazzology didn’t make it to the end of the year.61 It’s not clear who was responsible for determining The Jazz Directory’s format and layout, but McCarthy was the most experienced publisher of the three, and its typeface and page layout were similar to those of other

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non-jazz publications being produced at this time by his Delphic Press. The discographic format wasn’t radically different from that of the contemporaneous Blackstone and Delaunay works, but it was crisper and clearer, mostly because, once and for all, it subordinated matrix numbers to recording sessions arranged in a chronological format. The three basic units of division became the artist’s name, the recording session, and the matrix number. Each session “block” provided all the information available for that one session, including date, location, and personnel. Frequently, however, this preliminary information would be listed as “same,” indicating that the data (all personnel, for example) were identical to those for the preceding session. After this background information, the session block listed all the masters recorded at that time, whether or not they resulted in a commercially released record. If they did, the label numbers were listed; if not, this was indicated with the notation “unissued,” “rejected,” or just a dash.62 Unlike Blackstone’s recently updated Index, it mercifully did not switch back and forth between one column and two columns per page. (Blackstone switched to a two-column layout when there was a succession of artists with short entries.) The Jazz Directory looked much like the second, strictly alphabetical, section of Delaunay’s New Hot Discography, but without the discodes. England’s The Gramophone called it “the most amazing” jazz discography “ever to see the light of day,” estimating that it listed “scores” of musicians “whose existence no one this side of the Atlantic, and possibly only a few in America, will have ever heard.” It concluded that The Jazz Directory “must be the most complete directory of  jazz and similar music recordings ever attempted.” The review closed with a “fervent prayer that the compilers may live long enough to complete the undertaking.”63 They were right to be worried. Carey had written a long introduction to the first volume, then added a brief postscript explaining that the preceding material had been written several years earlier “when it was hoped that all would be smooth sailing.” Alas, that turned out not to be the case. In April 1949 the journal Discophile reported that McCarthy was on the verge of moving to the United States, where he would publish both the Directory and Jazz Forum. Two months later it followed this up with an announcement that he had canceled those plans for health reasons but would continue both projects in the United Kingdom, with the debut of the Directory “imminent.” The July date on the copyright page of the first volume of The Jazz Directory seems to corroborate this, but it appears from the earliest reviews that it didn’t actually ship until late 1949 or even early 1950.64

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At the time, Carey explained that they were “doomed from the start by technicalities and restrictions.” Many of these seem to have been related to the publisher’s unsuccessful efforts to contain costs. Even before the first volume appeared, preproduction expenses had already escalated to “several hundred pounds,” and Carey and McCarthy described the project’s finances at the launch as “very shaky.” The early 1950s were a time of severe inflation in the United Kingdom, and by the time volume 3 was released in spring 1951, paper prices had risen by a quarter. The cover price increased by 66 percent over the abbreviated life of the project, from seven and a half shillings for the first volume to twelve and a half shillings for the sixth.65 Nevertheless, the team working on The Jazz Directory continued to pursue two goals: inclusiveness and timeliness. “Our primary concern in The Directory is jazz,” Carey explained in the first volume. “We have endeavored to extend it to widest realms of application.”66 Black spirituals, gospel recordings, “race” records (primarily blues, Afro-American folk, some AfroCaribbean, and mixed music and spoken-word recordings), swing, bop, and “jive” (R&B) were included. “Hill-Billy” (southern white folk, Appalachian folk, western swing), calypso, and non-jazz vocalists performing non-jazz tunes (even if backed by jazz orchestras or musicians) were excluded. Brief notes were sometimes inserted in such cases, outlining the extent of the artist’s recorded work and explaining why some had been omitted. Critics generally gave this aspect of The Directory rave reviews, but they expressed typically valid reservations. Pete Golding admired its “vast scope, which includes artists as remotely connected with jazz as Fred Astaire and Bert Ambrose,” but others noted that this inclusiveness was sometimes achieved at the expense of depth, usually by editing out recordings the compilers determined were not within the scope of jazz, a pruning that was sometimes, in their opinion, a little too vigorous. For example, while Chick Bullock’s orchestra (an early stop for the Dorsey brothers, Artie Shaw, Bunny Berigan, and Harry James) had its own entry, all but thirty-six tunes were culled out (including many Berigans) as having “slight jazz tendencies,” whereas Blackstone had included about 250 sides.67 Others found The Directory’s policy of always selecting real personal names over pseudonyms or collective names a problem. “If you want to check an artist whose name is Smith, say, but who recorded under the name of Adam, you’ll have to wait until you have the whole set,” explained the Record Changer. “In other words, it will list Boxcoat Adam, see under Smax Smith.” That is, if you purchased volume 1, containing A, to get information on the immortal Boxcoat Adams, you would discover to your chagrin that you had to wait until the seventh or eighth volume to get what you needed,

f i g u r e 6 . A page from Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy’s Jazz Directory (1949–57).

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because that was the book containing the entry for some Smax Smith you’d never heard of, though that was Boxcoat’s real name. Paul Sheatsley pointed out a second problem with this system—its vulnerability to attribution error: “[In Blackstone] when you look up the Barrelhouse Five in the Index, there they are. When you look them up in the Directory you are referred (and incorrectly, it now seems) to Jimmy Blythe.”68 Whether it was Blythe or Clarence Williams who played on the six recordings made in the disputed “Barrelhouse Five” Chicago recording session of late 1928 or early 1929 is still argued. (Most discographers now believe that it was a Williams house band playing, with Clarence in front of the piano, and that they recorded in January 1929.) Whichever is true, Sheatsley’s point is that there is always danger in reassigning credit for a recording from a group name that is known for certain to its most significant participant when that attribution may be the result of dubious data, hearsay, or even a mere speculative aural assessment.69 Even assuming for argument’s sake that the Barrelhouse Five had been a Blythe band, is pianist Blythe that much more important than, say, trumpeter Natty Dominique, who didn’t have a separate entry in the Directory? Presumably, all such sins of omission, attribution, and categorization would have been cured in the end with the publication of an index, but the end never came, which leads to The Jazz Directory’s most glaring error—indeed, its fatal flaw: the lack of a firm cutoff date. McCarthy insisted that any comprehensive discography worthy of the name must remain current, asserting that “it is essential to document the new releases as they appear, or within a reasonable time of their release, or else on will forever be bogged down in the task of filing comparatively recent additions.”70 But Carey and McCarthy had embarked on their project during a time of radical technological change in the recording industry. Before World War II, jazz tunes led largely individual lives, each taking up one side of a three-minute 78 rpm single. Reissuing a song meant leasing a metal master or first-generation stamping plate from the owner, then hiring a pressing plant to produce a run of records from it. As late as 1953, 78s still accounted for 80 percent of the output of American record companies. Even given this technological limit, the costs of producing discs were coming down, and as a result more jazz releases (and some reissues) were sold in the decade from 1945 to 1955 than during the preceding thirty years.71 But it was the development of low-cost, high-fidelity magnetic recording tape and the microgroove long-playing (LP) album that revolutionized the industry. Tape allowed the owners of old tunes to turn a quick, easy

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profit by leasing songs to specialty reissue labels without having to risk sending the matrices off-site. All that was “leased” was a very clean firstgeneration tape copied directly from the master, along with the legal permission to reproduce it. Moreover, the LP and its capacity of twenty-three minutes per side allowed the big companies to issue new songs nine or ten at time—or re-release as many as fourteen of the old 78 tunes under their own label.72 Writer Alun Morgan called the result “the Flood.” George Hoefer, in Down Beat, wrote a eulogy to the carefree junkshopping days titled “What LPs Have Done to Wax Heads.” Most who collected for listening converted from 78s to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, and Hoefer grieved that even “the day of the collector of labels is over.” By now Riverside, Victor, and Decca had joined Columbia in offering regular LP reissue programs, with Capitol contributing only slightly less often. “Now just about all the heretofore unknown records by famous jazz artists have been listed in discographies and are well known,” Hoefer added. “The lure of the hunt is gone.”73 A few still collected 78s the way others sought old stamps, but the era when one junkshopped because that was the only way to find Jelly Roll, King Oliver, or Dodds brothers recordings was over. As George Avakian put it, “There are just too many new records, reissues, and constantly being-discovered old records to give much encouragement to the collector who once would have bid $50 for an Oliver Okeh.74 Sagging prices, and the diminishing network of dealers who dealt only in out-of-print hot records, either from dusty storefronts or through the mail, were evidence of this. Walter C. Allen noted that “the Flood” was even changing discography itself. “I have been rather snowed under by the flood of reissues” he complained. “Is it necessary that every issue . . . be documented?”75 Discography was often compared to bibliography, but, he complained, “Is it a necessary duty of the Shakespeare bibliographer to list every edition of King Lear that has ever been printed, no matter when or where?” This may not really have been the right question to ask the curator of the Folger Shakespeare Library, but Allen was on the right track. It is entirely possible that the leading Shakespeare libraries do try to catalog, and if possible, collect, every written Shakespeare text ever published. The difference is that this is not so for performances. Not even the Folger is interested in collecting a recording of each performance of every Shakespeare play performed. In fact, it collects very, very few. Performances are considered something entirely different from the texts, existing in a different world. The performance is interpretive, subordinate. The object of

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the Shakespeare scholar is to seek authenticity—words as close to what the Bard wrote as possible. But to the jazz scholar, performance is everything. The composition alone is lifeless, mere potential. Many jazz songs have no real written composition or are derived on the spur of the moment from some bland show tune. And there is a practical consideration: the Shakespeare scholar does not catalog performances because it is impossible—there are too many, too far afield.76 However, the jazz discographer of the 1950s was approaching this same situation. There were starting to be too many records, from too many places. Allen’s solution was to say “the hell with it” and focus instead on discographic research, such as defining personnels, recording dates and locations, cross-checking matrix and issue numbers, and verifying release dates on works that were the oldest, or most historically significant, or most artistically meaningful. The Shakespeare scholar would know exactly what he was talking about. The discography as a catalog, as the collector’s little black book, was dying. Who cared if 135 different 78s, 45s, and LPs had been pressed in the past twenty-five years containing Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues”? Who needed a book to list them all? Odds were you could walk into any decent record store in the United States, England, or a hundred other countries and buy some version of it off the rack. Instead, Allen believed the discography needed to evolve into a historical record—a way to freeze time. Anyone could play a version of “West End Blues,” but the “West End Blues” was three minutes and fifteen seconds of immortality that occurred in Chicago on June 28, 1928, and was etched onto a hunk of metal known as W400967B. Whatever the format, whatever the label number, wherever you found it, if the object you held in your hand in some record shop in Miami, Moscow, or Marrakech contained that number, well, you had the real thing. McCarthy admitted the problem of keeping up: “The discographer is faced with a mass of new issues at present that is in excess of any calculations he might have made five years ago.” As a result, “the sheer volume of new issues is making the task of compiling a complete work like the Jazz Directory almost impossible.” Yet he refused to give up. “While I am only too aware of the problems of giving full LP release numbers,” he explained several years later, “the illogicality of including all 78 issue number and ignoring microgroove reissues becomes more apparent every day.”77 Carey and McCarthy’s solution was to use the strategy I have termed “cycle formatting.” With each succeeding volume, the cutoff date for new data advances in parallel with the deadline for the publisher. In the case of The

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Directory, this could sometimes lead to internal discontinuities. Carey and McCarthy couldn’t fit all of G into volume 3, so the last twenty-one pages opened the fourth volume. However, those twenty-one pages had already been sent to the printer along with the rest of G, so the first part of the next volume cut off a year and a half earlier than those sections that contained H and I. Volume 4 (G-I ), issued in May 1952, was the last for three years. The next segment was released by the British trade publisher Cassell, which also simultaneously reissued volumes 2, 3, and 4. Despite assurances that “there is a reasonable chance of the remaining volumes of this work appearing at the rate of two a year,” another twenty-four months elapsed before the sixth volume (Ki-Lo) appeared, and then the series ground to a halt midway through L. (“Fred Longshaw,” McCarthy later quipped, “a name immortalized by discographers [although] he only ever made one 78.”)78 The rescue plan, which Carey, McCarthy, and Cassell published in fall 1958, called for a three-part strategy. First Cassell would issue a revised and updated volume 1. (Volumes 2, 3 and 4 had been straight reprints.) McCarthy explained why the first volume wasn’t simply reprinted: “It has been unobtainable for so long coupled with the fact that, being the initial production, it includes many errors of lay-out and abbreviations that Dave Carey and I do not wish to be perpetuated.” He added that “it will be the only revision volume to be published before the series reaches Z.”79 The second part of the plan would follow immediately. It would be a new seventh volume that would complete L (Lo-Lz) and include all of M. The third part, forthcoming in 1959, would be “an annual discography of all new recordings in the jazz field throughout the world, starting with such records as are made available in the year 1958.” Ultimately, this was the only one of the three elements of the plan that would be implemented, and even that would take another three years. In the end, high costs, inadequate sales, and the editorial team’s inability to guarantee a set production schedule were given as the official causes of death. It was, everyone sadly agreed, “an unfinished masterpiece.”80 Sheatsley believed the only way Carey and McCarthy could have escaped the labyrinth they trapped themselves in was to have established a single cutoff date and stuck to it: “In my own view, the publishers of the Directory erred in not cutting off at 1948, say, and getting out everything they had up to that date as quickly as they could. We would then have had, perhaps by 1952 or even earlier, a complete general discography covering all artists from A to Z for the first thirty years of jazz recording.”81

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v Both Charles Delaunay and Albert McCarthy made one final stab at compiling a comprehensive discography. In 1951 Delaunay, in collaboration with Kurt Mohr, released the first volume of his Hot discographie encyclopédique. Mohr was a Swiss national shuttling back and forth between Paris and Basel. In December 1945 he had published a comprehensive discography of European-pressed jazz records, Discographie du jazz.82 By 1948 he was a regular correspondent to Orin Blackstone’s Jazzfinder, where he urged Blackstone and other traditional-music discographers not to discard data on modern records, even if they weren’t interested in that music. Blackstone agreed: “We plan to do our best to get the data on records released in the last few years of the type mentioned by Mr. Mohr. . . . [It] is [still] not easy to obtain the data on new records.83 Later, in the 1960s, Mohr explained that he had been able to keep up with the Flood only because he started early and updated his files assiduously. “To start now from scratch would be almost impossible,” he noted. After his 1945 book, he confined himself mostly to topic-specific articles in the specialty journals. “I have no illusions,” he once wrote. “[I]t will never be published as a whole. It gets published bit by bit in the form of individual discographies.”84 The format of Hot discographie encyclopédique (HDE) was a complete break with any of Delaunay’s previous works and bore a strong resemblance to Carey and McCarthy’s series, so it instantly became known as the “French Jazz Directory.” Delaunay admitted that the times had changed and “such a work as this must be objective, not selective.” The main differences between The Jazz Directory and HDE were that the latter included brief artist biographies at the front of each section, à la Hilton Schleman; but to the consternation of British reviewers, HDE included only American label releases. According to modern jazz reviewer Alun Morgan, who compared them side by side, Delaunay’s coverage of contemporary artists was better.85 HDE was markedly more expensive than even the pricey Jazz Directory, and partially because of this and partially because its cycle formatting ran about two years behind The Jazz Directory, sales proved disappointing. Delaunay was forced to pull the plug on the project in 1952 after the third volume (El-He). “I was so disappointed and also so busy making a living for me and my family that I stopped collecting information,” he wrote long after, “particularly since with the long-playing record and the innumerable quantity of jazz records released all over the world it was becoming an impossible task.” Although he never again ventured into large-scale discog-

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raphy, he did prepare a well-regarded biographical discography of Django Reinhardt’s music in 1981. He also continued to edit and manage Hot Jazz magazine until 1984, operating out of a small office in the same rue Chaptal building he had first leased during World War II. He died in 1988.86 In 1960 Cassell published McCarthy’s new solo effort, Jazz Discography 1958, also known as Jazz Discography I. As I noted earlier, it was the only part of the salvage effort for The Jazz Directory ever to see the light of day. McCarthy later credited the wife of jazz writer Dom Cerulli with suggesting an annual guide. When McCarthy admitted he was “several years” behind in filing his personal jazz releases, she suggested he break the job down into one- to two-year increments. Writing in the Gramophone, Ralph Gleason noted that “the editors have only got as far as the sixth volume [of the Jazz Directory] so most people are still pretty hazy about recordings by anybody after Fred Longshaw. . . . A new series of volumes, a kind of appendix to Jazz Directory, is to keep us abreast of more recent recordings and should help the editors to know where they are, too.”87 American releases—almost all were either microgroove EPs or LPs—took up 166 pages. A summary section of microgroove reissues, which listed only the EP/LP titles and the songs they contained (about a quarter were anthologies with multiple artists), took another 22 pages. International releases filled 73 pages more. Omitted out of sheer necessity, because information was not available, were the hundreds, if not thousands, of 45 rpm singles issued by small independent jazz and blues labels. Similarly, Gleason believed the “only weak spot (and the editor gallantly pinpoints it for us himself ) is in the field of gospel and rhythm-and-blues.” Overall, Gleason praised the book, commenting that “the work has been carried out with all the skill and thoroughness one expects from a discographer of Albert McCarthy’s eminence.”88 It was priced well above even the relatively expensive last volume of the original series, and Sheatsley noted that “the sheer magnitude of the task and the cost of publication apparently insured that the 1958 issue was the first and last.” Like Delaunay, both editors of The Jazz Directory returned to their roots, Carey to his record store and McCarthy to Jazz Monthly. Carey’s Swing Shop, with its motto “Give me time and I’ll find it,” stayed in business for another thirty years. He died in Croydon in 1999.89 McCarthy continued to edit Jazz Monthly until its end in 1971, as well as the short-lived magazines Discographical Forum in 1960–61 and Mainstream in 1971.90 He wrote several very successful books, including one of the best guides to the big bands, and in association with several noted British jazz

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critics, he edited a pathbreaking selective listening guide to the best works of the first fifty years of jazz that I will discuss later. But he never again attempted to assemble an all-inclusive, comprehensive discography. In the latter half of the 1980s he withdrew from the jazz world entirely to concentrate on his first passion, radical political theory. He died in London in 1987.91 Yet over the next three decades of his busy and varied career as a jazz writer, critic, and discographer, McCarthy became a sort of elder statesman on behalf of the discographic community. Where one critic complained that discographers instinctively treated each other like two ill-tempered cats, greeting each new work as “a quite deliberate attempt to cast aspersions on each other,” McCarthy always argued that the “discography fraternity, unlike its colleagues in the critical field, usually works together in reasonable amity” and that the occasional contretemps within the field was usually confined to comprehensive discographies, mostly resulting from the tensions inherent in such works.92 He often expressed sympathy for discographers and frequently came to their defense, especially comprehensive discographers—those misbegotten souls who ventured into the precarious and uncharted waters of large-scale works armed only with courage, unflagging optimism, and wildly varying levels of skill, tact, and diplomacy. As the years passed, he more than anyone took pity on his train of spiritual followers as they staggered out of the rapids and whirlpools sadder, wiser, poorer, and humbled—or worse, simply disappeared from sight. And after his death, those waters would grow even more voracious, swallowing up discographers from around the world, discographic projects from three continents, and eventually entire multinational teams of editors. Those who survived and succeeded did so only because they sometimes had to cut corners, take shortcuts, borrow without asking, pass off questionable information as hard facts, and do other things they would, in later years, prefer not to discuss.

chapter four

“You Live in a Numerical World of Your Own”: 1961–70

i In 1961 Brian Rust announced that he would soon be self-publishing his long-awaited Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931. By the time it appeared in August, it was already sold out at £4.00 ($16.95 in the United States), and a larger printing was scheduled for delivery that winter.1 Born in 1922, Rust started accumulating records before his teens, trading his train set to a cousin for a gramophone and what he later described as “a bunch of records.” By 1935, by adult standards he was already a serious collector. His parents reluctantly acquiesced to his new passion, for two reasons. It was cheap, and it was approved by the family nurse, who assured them that “it’s not possible for germs to survive on smooth surfaces.” In 1938 he went to work at the Bank of England. “I had no yearning to become a bank clerk, but I certainly wanted to get away from school at any cost,” he recalled. “I would have taken any job to earn some money and buy some records with the proceeds.”2 As a self-admitted obsessive-compulsive, he seemed a natural for a banking career, but he was also an eccentric contrarian who almost got sacked for practicing the trombone in the lunchroom. (He later played drums and washboard for the Original Barnstormers Spasm Band, which made a couple of records and did some broadcasts in the late 1950s.) He was interested in little recorded after the late 1930s, collected only 78s, and disdained anything not pressed directly from an original matrix, refusing “dubs”— second-generation discs recorded from a previously issued record.3 He made his debut as a discographer in 1942 or 1943 when Jazz Tempo, the official bulletin of the North London and Southgate Jazz Society, published his article on the Goofus Five. ( Jazz Tempo was folded into Jazz

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Music in 1946.) Rust also became a regular contributor to the Collector’s Corner column in Melody Maker. By the end of the decade he had published discographies in most of the major British jazz magazines and many of the small collectors’ journals. In 1945 he asked Valentine Britten, head of the BBC Gramophone Library, for a job. Britten hired him, and Rust worked at the library until 1960. By the time he started at the BBC, he was already being referred to as “the sage of Edgware” after his home in suburban London. (After the war he and his family moved to Hatch End, London.) In 1948 he began writing regularly for the Gramophone, eventually taking over its Collector’s Corner column in 1971, the same year he started his Sunday night radio program Mardi Gras on the commercial Capital Radio network, which ran until 1984.4 As a younger man, his enthusiasm sometimes ran away with him. One interviewer during the mid-1950s described him as having the appearance of an “excited schoolboy . . . he doesn’t say things, he breezes them. Every announcement is vital, nothing is unimportant.”5 A self-described reactionary, he complained in 1946 that “during the last four years or so, the normal British jazz enthusiast and/or collector has been inveigled, cajoled or coaxed into buying small magazines each month . . . [but] almost every issue or two makes a kind of undercurrent of opinion, which is always extremely left.”6 In an otherwise unremarkable article, Ian Lang once noted that in New Orleans, early jazz had been disparaged in the pages of the Times-Picayune and wondered if the Times of London would soon have a similar reaction to the music of London’s Eastside pubs. Rust turned this rather innocuous statement into an assertion that “jazz was the music of the masses” and countered that the true “music of the masses” had nothing to do with jazz but was pop-chart junk, and that jazz was being kept alive only through the efforts of well-educated, affluent Mayfair enthusiasts. It wasn’t an absurd argument, but Rust went about it so artlessly (“All I had to do was to use my nose, rather than my eyes, to detect the presence of the masses, downtrodden or otherwise,” was one typical line) that Jim Godbolt protested that “the humor of Brian Rust, previously limited to breaking records over a co-recitalist’s head at rhythm clubs, has found expression in a frivolous and singularly unfunny satire. . . . [S]tick to the personnels, Mr. Rust, and leave the humor to the people with wit.” (Godbolt later admitted that it must have been someone else he saw doing the notorious disc smashing.)7 Not so humorous was another incident about the same time. In the December 1946 issue of Record Changer, Ron Davies, George Avakian, and

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Charles Delaunay published an extensive discography of Clarence Williams. It was an excerpt from Delaunay’s forthcoming New Hot Discography, issued “in the hope that collectors will send in corrections and additions” in time for the final draft.8 Among a lengthy list of contributors mentioned was Brian Rust. A month later, Rust sent Pickup a vituperative article denouncing the Record Changer discography, “which presumably [was] attributable, in part, to me!” In short, Rust was unhappy that too many entries simply listed “personnel unknown,” indicating to him that no one had bothered to listen to the record, and that too much information was clearly inconsistent, contradictory, or ambiguous, such as listings that put Williams at two distant recording sessions on the same day. All these errors that I have mentioned might have been avoided. . . . [I]t seems such a pity that so much effort should have been expended on such a failure when, for the sake of a little thought, a few hours spent listening closely instead of relying on the spoken word of some unknown, excitable, and irresponsible individuals, a first class discography might have been produced.9

Ron Davies kept his cool, and a month later he marshaled what was probably the most comprehensive critique ever published of Brian Rust, his methods, and his approach to discography.10 First he reminded his readers that the Record Changer discography was a draft, assembled from three sources, and had been published for the express purpose of having its errors pointed out, a public vetting that the prickly and perfectionistic Rust could never have tolerated. “There were some real howlers in the Clarence Williams discography,” Davies admitted, “I am not, strangely, worried in the least.” Davies was greatly angered by Rust’s claim that in listing him in the acknowledgments, Davis was attributing coauthorship to him. “You knew full well that I only intended the acknowledgement as a courtesy to those who helped. . . . Could it be that, now that the war is over, you find that there are people other than yourself who can take an interest in the facts and figures of jazz records and you are beginning to feel the draught?” To Rust’s embarrassment, it appeared that he had reviewed some of the material. “Early in 1946 I sent you a long list of blues singers whose accompanist was at some time Clarence Williams. You sent it back, corrected. . . . [Y]ou declared you had no part in the compilation of the discography. Hardly the truth, Mr. Rust.” These details aside, the substantive heart of the dispute concerned the missing and contradictory data. Davies admitted that the information was incomplete, inconsistent, and sometimes impossible. But in each case it was traceable to a specific source. It came from the Columbia-Okeh files that

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Avakian had already gone through. Or from the musician interviews that Delaunay had done. Or the Schleman and Delaunay books. When these were collated, they did sometimes yield incomplete or contradictory data. But to Rust, presenting such ambiguous or irreconcilable information in public was patently unacceptable. The very purpose of the discographer was to make the critical judgments—his judgments—necessary to rectify such imperfections. But Davies countered that once the information was “corrected” in this manner, it ceased being traceable, reproducible data and became something else—expert opinion, a subjective estimate, or possibly no more than mere speculation. When asked how he dealt with the problem of “shaky memories” in interviews, Rust once replied, “If I thought there was shadow of a doubt as to what they were telling me, I would test them on one or two points. I would ask them questions to which I knew the answers, and if they gave me the right answers my faith in their veracity was usually restored.” It apparently never occurred to him that he might be the one who had the wrong answer. Moreover, as blues historian Paul Oliver warns: “Interviews are only as good as the questions asked. . . . [You have] a fairly tight loop of supportive data, much conditioned by the knowledge and tastes of the interviewers themselves. . . . [T]he nature of the interviewer’s questions and motivations [is] bound to throw up replies that directly or indirectly reflect this.”11 For Rust, the discographical bedrock was his own ear: “a few hours spent listening closely” was to be preferred to “the spoken word of some unknown, excitable, and irresponsible individuals.” But a growing body of evidence supported the opposite conclusion. “Close listening” was little more than the aural equivalent of a placebo effect. One hears into the tone, inflections, and style of an unknown record the musicians one wants to be there. Musicians didn’t always play consistently. A different studio, recording equipment, or engineer could make an amazing difference in sound. Moreover, Columbia has found that playback equipment makes far more difference than the recording equipment used to manufacture a disc. When actual 1920s masters were played on modern equipment in the late 1940s and 1950s, listeners thought the records had been faked by overdubbing instruments. In actuality the instruments had been there, but the record players of the intervening years couldn’t pick them up fully. The state of the art in consumer playback equipment took thirty years to catch up with recording technology.12 And it was on this technological basis that “close listening” advocates were making unqualified subjective judgments. The philosophical debate between those who advocated “close listening” as op-

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posed to “documentation” and “source citation” would resonate for the next fifty years. It remains unresolved today. Davies closed his reply with this admonition: If I thought that the life of jazz depended on the listing of its records I should get worried. But it does not. . . . You have reached the state of mind wherein you think that matrix numbers are the be-all-and-end-all of jazz. You are more concerned with the label than the music on the record. You live in a numerical world of your own-it’s all so ridiculous.13

Rust must have realized he’d gone too far. His only reply was a handful of corrections to his original article and a brief apology to Ron Davies.14 The snarky articles slowed, then stopped. The humor softened, became more self-effacing. He could still get angry in public on matters he felt were important to the discographic community (he would exchange sharp words with Walter Bruyninckx in the 1960s over the latter’s 50 Years of Recorded Jazz, for example), but it seems, looking through the pages of the specialty jazz magazines of the era, that he no longer relished conflict for its own sake. The boy wonder chose to step into the role of the public man he had in fact become. “Brian was a very modest, cordial man,” recalled Tim Brooks, who worked with him many years later on The Columbia Master Book Discography. “He didn’t want to be in arguments. Although the discographic community was prone to flare-ups, he would rarely get involved, even though he must have often read of some criticism or other. . . . He saw himself as the guy in the back room, taking care of accounts. . . . [H]e liked dealing with records more than people.” Malcolm Shaw, who started working with him in the 1970s, was astounded to discover that “after every edition [of Jazz Records, A-Z], Brian has had hate mail. Can you believe that, for a moment? . . . Who needs that as a part of their life?”15 Rust first visited the United States in October 1951. Because of postwar currency limits, he could take only £25 with him, so he gathered a suitcase full of sought-after 78s, which he sold as he traveled from city to city by Greyhound bus, talking to musicians and collectors. “I met up with Walter Allen and we spent quite a bit of time junkshopping,” he later recalled.16 Four years later, they coauthored a bio-discography of Joe “King” Oliver, the New Orleans–born trumpeter and bandleader who made Louis Armstrong famous when he hired him into his Chicago-based band in 1924. Jazz Records, A-Z originated from the working notes and documentation prepared during his fifteen years as a BBC music librarian. “If information

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on a particular jazz record that I’d never seen in print came to me, I’d add it to my notes, and this compilation eventually became Jazz Records,” Rust told an interviewer. In 1960 he quit the BBC to dedicate himself to the project full time. “My wife Mary . . . said, ‘Look, if you want to go out on your own, it’d be the best thing you could do. You’ve got two books to write, and they’re wanted.’ ”17 The layout was modeled roughly after Carey and McCarthy’s Jazz Directory “but with fewer ‘unknowns’ and ‘see this’ and ‘see that’ and refer to something else,” as Rust put it. It was published as a single monstrous thirteen-pound loose-leaf post binder of 858 pages, although only one supplemental page was ever issued. (“A bit of a mess,” he later admitted.)18 Rust selected a cutoff date of 1931 for recording sessions and included only 78s, effectively eliminating anything pressed after the mid-1950s, when the industry switched to RCA’s microgroove standard: twelve-inch longplaying albums, ten-inch extended plays, and seven-inch 45 singles. (Start­ ing with the second edition, Rust did include microgrooves, but only for the first release of a matrix never issued on a 78.) Without a terminal date, discographies were “inevitably out of date even before they appeared,” he explained, “as jazz records of one kind or another are continually being made and issued.”19 Using a cutoff date for the production of new music (i.e., recording sessions) also narrowed the scope of the discography by omitting the various new genres that branched off the trunk of classic, small-group, preDepression American jazz. “Those enthusiasts who buy the records of both the “traditional” and “modern” schools are not very interested in the classic performances,” he argued. “If any book tries to list the newest recordings along with the old, the adherents of both types have to pay for a book of which only half, say, is of real interest to them. Far better, then, to include in one book only those records likely to be of interest to those who buy it.”20 Rust himself never tried to hide his preference for early jazz and stage music. Discographer Richard Johnson recalls hearing one of his Mardi Gras radio shows during which he played sixteen versions of “Tiger Rag” in chronological order from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to Charlie Parker. “He faded out the Bird track early though,” Johnson recalled. “It was too far out musically for Brian, who really couldn’t cope with bebop or beyond!” But Rust defended the 1931 cutoff date in Jazz Records, mainly on pragmatic grounds. Because it was the nadir of the Great Depression, record production had slowed “to a mere trickle,” so while that date did stylistically cut across the shift from small-group jazz to big band swing, it

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f i g u r e 7 . A page from Brian Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z: 1897–1931 (1962 edition).

also minimized the number of swing-era musicians who had a sizable portfolio of songs that fell before the 1931 date. A few reviewers complained that some artist entries would still end up being “broken” (cut off in midcareer), but others conceded that “the cutoff point has to come somewhere,” and that there were “some good arguments for 1931.” In those cases where an older artist had a relatively small number of sides recorded after 1931, Rust tended to be flexible and include even the later material.21 This narrowing gave Rust free rein to do the meticulous compiling that suited his nature. Although his session-based layout was not radically different from that in The Jazz Directory, the refinements he did develop ended up making Jazz Records, A-Z so superior to anything that came before that it was eventually called the Rust format.22 Dan Morgenstern lauded it: “Published privately in 1961 after a lifetime of work . . . the scope and accuracy of Rust’s work makes it a landmark in the history of jazz discography that is not likely to be surpassed. Within the territory he has cut out for himself, only addenda and corrections remain.”23 Yet it was that qualifier, “within the territory he cut out for himself,” that distressed some. “Is it not time that a little common sense was applied to the problem of producing a comprehensive discography of jazz 78s?” asked one reader of Jazz Journal. “Rust’s first volume covers the years 1897 to 1931. Mr. Rust is working on a volume two to cover 1932 to 1942 . . . [and] he is reported to have said that he has no intention of writing a third volume, so that elusive last decade of the 78 is put off by yet another discographer!

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If discographers are to avoid duplicating each others’ work they will have to be a little less insular.”24 But for the time being this concern proved unfounded, because the discographers showed, for at least a little longer, that they could still work together. Others were concerned with the content. “His subjects for biographies and discographies show clearly that he was not color-blind,” notes discographer George Hulme. However, he defends Rust’s preferences as never stooping to “the exclusion of contributions by Creole and Black musicians.”25 Writer Will Friedwald argues that in this regard Jazz Records cannot be viewed in isolation but must be taken in context with Rust’s two other famous works, The American Dance Band Discography and The Complete Entertainment Discography. He points out that the latter two document specific musical formats—big bands, for example. But Jazz Records covers something quite different: a single style of music. “So there are bound to be big band records or vocal records that are also jazz records.” Jazz Records was mostly reserved for recordings by black bands, so “it doesn’t matter if it’s a hardcore jazz act like Ellington or Basie . . . or Noble Sissle.” All are included. However, the selection criteria for white artists were more problematic: “When it comes to white dance bands, that’s when Rust starts getting subjective, and Jazz Records becomes a work of interpretation rather than just a straightforward laying out of names and numbers,” says Friedwald.26 Rust acted selectively when incorporating white bands into Jazz Records but inclusively when placing them into The American Dance Band Discography and The Complete Entertainment Discography. So who was getting what kind of treatment depended on the publication status of all three books, not just what edition of Jazz Records was being published at that time. Howard Rye recalls that after helping prepare the 1969–70 edition, the staff at Storyville magazine (its publisher) received a steady (but not large) flow of complaints from American purchasers of Jazz Records 1892–1943 that it over-emphasized African-American contributions and failed to include various white artists who, to European ears, were merely pop artists. Such enquirers were simply referred to The Complete Entertainment Discography, but the exclusion of virtually all white soubrettes of the Marion Harris and Elsie Janis stamp may even be a justified complaint.27

Finally, keep in mind that to minimize overlaps Rust, at various points, was trying to coordinate Jazz Records with associates who were preparing their own discographies for blues, gospel, and modern jazz. Under these

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conditions it was ridiculously easy to make errors, create misunderstandings, and inadvertently step on toes. The second printing of the post-binder version shipped in early 1962. Assuring readers that “a team of strong men and a crane will not be needed to lift it,” he promised that the new edition would come out in a regular hardback format. The coverage of blues records had been a little thin in the first edition (with black gospel omitted entirely), and to keep the size of the new book manageable, Rust decided to exclude them entirely and instead sponsor a separate gospel and blues discography then under preparation by two fellow Britons, John Godrich and Robert Dixon, and scheduled to appear soon after his second edition.28 About this time, Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen of Copenhagen announced that he too was preparing a comprehensive jazz discography, but his would focus on the modern period. He asked Rust to extend the cutoff date of his new edition forward a decade to cover everything up to the start of the twoyear recording ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians in August 1942.29 In return, he would list everything between 1942 and 1961. Rust was too far along to accommodate his request, but he did agree to produce a supplement to the second edition to cover the eleven-year gap. Rust, Jepsen, and Dixon and Godrich quickly formed a sort of discographic triumvirate. As one reviewer put it, “Through the work of Brian Rust and Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen we should soon have available a comprehensive jazz discography up to 1962, with an essential supplement in the form of the Dixon-Godrich Blues Records volume.”30 If only it had proved so easy.

ii The first volume of Jepsen’s Jazz Records, 1942–196X appeared in early 1963, about the same time as the first of Rust’s two new hardbacks. (I use “196X” because the end date in the title changed several times, from 1962, to 1965, through 1967, and finally to 1969).31 Jepsen’s paperbacks were much smaller than Rust’s hardbacks, just a little larger than a standard massmarket paperback novel, and were notorious for their abysmal bindings. Probably everyone who has used one has been stunned by its propensity to suddenly explode into a handful of loose pages when opened flat on a table. Immediate rebinding by a library binder proved mandatory for institutions and serious users. Oddly enough, it began with volume 5, M-N, because Jepsen wanted it to pick up where Carey and McCarthy’s Jazz Directory left off in 1957.

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However, because The Jazz Directory had not finished the letter L when it died (ending at “Longshaw”), everything between Lo and Lz disappeared into a discographer’s black hole. When he first announced the project, Jepsen projected four volumes, but by the time of the first release, that had grown to eight: four to finish the alphabet from M to Z, and four more to complete the cycle from A back through L.32 Jepsen, a Dane, was born in 1924. He started in 1953 as a staff writer for the Stockholm-based Orkester Journalen (Orchestra Journal), which, despite its name, was the flag bearer for jazz in northern Europe after the war. Starting in the late 1950s, he published over a hundred artist discographies in Orkester Journalen and other periodicals in England, France, Belgium, and America. Later he and Alun Morgan handled much of the discographical chores for England’s Jazz Monthly. Starting in 1959, Debut Records of Denmark (not to be confused with the American label of the same name started by Charles Mingus and Max Roach) began publishing a series of his chapbook discographies, many of them extended versions of his magazine articles. They spanned the range of genres, including Adderley/Coltrane (1959), Count Basie (1959), Miles Davis (1959), Duke Ellington, (1959, 3 vols.), Louis Armstrong (1960, 3 vols.), and Stan Kenton (1960). Reviewing the Ellington set, the first available in the United States, Louis Levy commented that “this initial publication augurs well for this Danish venture,” although he noted that “typographical errors abound,” probably as a result “of the book having been printed in English in Denmark,” and pointed out a lack of adequate indexing. On the other hand, Ira Gitler, reviewing the Miles Davis work, found it “cheaply put together and [with] enough wrong information to make one uncomfortable. . . . [T]he reversed photograph on the cover does no good to anyone. . . . [L]et us hope that the [future] volumes . . . are improvements on this try.” Many of the shortcomings resulted from attempts to keep the price down (the Davis chapbook, for example, was $1.25) and foreshadowed later problems with Jazz Records, 1941–196X. Several of the early Debut Records chapbooks were later revised and reprinted by other publishers, especially Karl Emil Knudsen, who would also publish about 80 percent of Jazz Records, 1941–196X. In almost every case, the later versions were much better than the Debut Records originals.33 The one thing all the reviewers of the first volume of Jazz Records, 1941– 1962 shared was incredulity at the magnitude of the task. Pekka Gronow wrote that “if Rust’s task has been difficult, then Jepsen must have found his formidable. In the 1930’s there were three major companies issuing records

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in the United States. Between 1942 and 1962, several hundred companies issued jazz or blues.” Paul Sheatsley counted over four hundred record labels listed in just its first volume. Based on the first volume’s 379 pages, Sheatsley estimated that the entire series would eventually run to 3,000 pages (it ended up at 4,300).34 All four volumes of Blackstone’s original Jazz Index came to only 433 pages, and Carey and McCarthy’s grand total stood at 1,122, still short of the halfway mark. Survival demanded a relatively straightforward editorial policy. “This is not a complete listing of all jazz records,” cautioned Jepsen. “This is only an attempt to list all the records known to the editor and his collaborators.” Popular vocalists backed by jazz bands, gospel, and R&B groups were out. Generally, only commercial releases were included unless the records were widely known and at least somewhat available. LPs, EPs, tapes, 45s, and 78s were all listed, as were European labels and artists. Following the Blackstone tradition, if there was any doubt, it was included. “The stubborn refusal of the idea of a general discography to die—in spite of the sad examples of Blackstone, the Directory, and Delaunay’s final effort—testifies to the need for this kind of volume,” concluded one early reviewer, who nevertheless predicted that “the mass of data is now is so huge that publication expenses can no longer be met by a handful of sales.”35 The work went well at first. The fourth book did, as promised, complete the alphabet to Z, and it shipped out more or less on schedule in March 1965. But when volume 1 appeared, starting off at A, the title was now Jazz Records, 1942–1965. Having met his first objective of finishing Carey and McCarthy’s Jazz Directory, Jepsen now decided to adopt their cycle formatting strategy, keeping each volume current by moving its cutoff date forward to match its publishing deadline. Although he claimed he had been doing this all along, Jepsen was clearly becoming more ambitious. But it was equally clear that his growing ambition was starting to interfere with the program’s progress. Each book covered a smaller and smaller slice of the alphabet. volume 1 went from A to Bl, but volume 2, released in early 1967, was barely one letter long, Bl-Co. “When his first volume came out in January, 1963 [ Jepsen] thought he would be able to cover the alphabet in eight volumes,” wrote Alun Morgan. “It is now clear that the [rest] will not fit into the remaining volumes.” He predicted that Jepsen would have to start splitting his remaining tomes into subparts. This is exactly what happened, with volumes 4a, 4b, 4c, and 4d eventually coming out.36 The schedule also started to slip. The average lead time of the first four books was eight months each, with

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only one gap over ten months; the second four averaged ten months each, with two of those needing a full year or longer. “Jepsen can hardly be blamed for this,” Morgan joked. “It’s the fault of those damn jazz musicians all over the world, churning out album after album, and exceeding the discographer’s wildest nightmares.” Fellow discographer Brian Hainsworth disagreed, and far less jovially. Recalling Brian Rust’s warning that any discography failing to establish a firm cutoff “knows no boundaries of time or space,” he lamented that Rust “seems to have gone unheeded.” “How right he was,” Hainsworth continued, “and Albert McCarthy too agreed with him . . . [after] he realized the problems involved in compiling the Jazz Directory.” “Why then,” he asked, “could Jepsen not have completed Jazz Records 1942–1962, A-Z? It would then have been a relatively simple procedure to compile Jazz Records 1963, 1964 and so on as an annual discography.”37

iii John Godrich and Robert Dixon’s Blues and Gospel Records, 1902–1942 was published in spring 1964 as a 760-page hardback. In the United States it cost $13, the same as Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z.38 The first run of 500 quickly sold out and was followed by two more, in late 1964 and mid-1965, for a total of 1,100 copies. Paul Oliver first suggested that Godrich and Dixon start collecting data together in 1959, and the book began in earnest in 1961. The following year Rust agreed to transfer his blues and gospel information to them and to publish their work instead of putting the material in his second edition. Blues and Gospel Records was nevertheless a strikingly different work. Jazz Records clearly showed its roots in record collecting. Godrich and Dixon’s book was intended from the start to be a scholarly work. As the newsletter Second Line put it, “Expect no pictures, no commentary, no personal opinions. Heartily recommended for those who like research and need references.” It was a primary goal of Dixon and Godrich to list all surviving sound documents of indigenous African American cultural music, regardless of whether they were accessible to record collectors or considered valuable by them.39 Tim Brooks estimated that there were about eight hundred commercial recordings made by African American performers before 1920, starting with George Johnson’s “The Laughing Song” in 1890. Most were novelty, vaudeville, and show tunes, the primary exception being a handful of 1894 gospel music cylinders by the Kentucky Jubilee Singers (none of which ap-

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pear to have survived) and a much larger body of work by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Between 1914 and 1920, black bands such as Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Band, Borbee’s Jass Orchestra, and W. C. Handy’s Memphis Orchestra recorded songs that ranged from true small-group jazz to ragtime- and bluesinfluenced show music.40 The earliest surviving commercial recordings of black roots music were made by Okeh Records supervisor Fred Hagar (sometimes spelled Hager) and Ralph Peer, his assistant at the time, who recorded Mamie Smith in 1920. Smith was neither a blues specialist nor a southerner. She was a stage singer from Ohio, and the impetus to record her came from black songwriter Perry Bradford, who believed a female vocalist could sell records— and Bradford tunes—to both northern blacks and southern whites. Bradford shopped around a January 1920 Victor test pressing of Smith’s vocal of his “That Thing Called Love” before Hagar decided to give both Smith and the song a try. Paired with another Bradford show tune at a February recording date and released on Okeh, it sold a respectable 10,000 copies or so. But Smith’s second Okeh record, waxed that August, contained “Crazy Blues,” which became a smash hit, selling 70,000 copies in its first month. Paramount, Brunswick/Vocalion, and Columbia quickly jumped on the bandwagon, recruiting their own “blues queens” such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith, who had been belting out true southern rural blues in obscurity on the black TOBA (Theater Owners Booking Association) circuit. Decca and Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary followed in the 1930s.41 But blues and other roots music also had a second, noncommercial recording history. In 1907, almost a decade and a half before Hagar and Peer recorded Mamie Smith, a graduate student named Howard Odum recorded the folk and spiritual songs of Mississippi’s African Americans on a portable cylinder graphophone while preparing two doctoral theses that he wrote in 1909 and 1910. He took precise and copious field notes that a research assistant, Guy Johnson, used to prepare a 1926 book, The Negro and His Songs, but the cylinders themselves were either lost or destroyed sometime in the 1920s.42 (Odum’s posthumous reputation has suffered because of a 1928 book he wrote, Rainbow Round My Shoulder, a biography of a larger than life “Negro Supertramp” named John Wesley Gordon, taken from transcribed recordings. Unfortunately it was later found that Gordon, and the recordings, almost certainly never existed.)43 Also in 1907, the same year Odum was recording in Mississippi, Texas native John Lomax used a Harvard Sheldon Fellowship to record the southwestern cowboy songs he had listened to in his youth, using the same type

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of portable equipment. Although his 1910 book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Songs won critical acceptance, it didn’t make much money, and he returned home to work as a bond salesman in Dallas.44 In 1928 the Library of Congress founded the Archive of American Folk Song and appointed Robert Gordon to run it. Whereas previous academic researchers had ignored black music, instead focusing on such Europeanderived music as sea chanties, Gordon emphasized the genre and fieldrecorded thousands of cylinders and discs, mostly in the south. He was not a good administrator or fundraiser, however, and amid the financial shortages of the Great Depression, he was discharged in 1932.45 That same year John Lomax’s wife died, and the Depression made his bank job miserable. So he quit and with his sons, John Jr. and Alan, set off to lecture and sell his book on cowboy songs. A year later he received a contract from a commercial publisher to prepare a new book on American folk songs, and he leveraged this into a support grant from the Archive of American Folk Song to pay for him and Alan to travel through the south making field recordings. Initially they used the old equipment from John’s 1907 Texas research, but they soon took delivery of a new miniaturized Dictaphone disc-recording machine that fit in the back of a sedan and could run on car batteries. By 1936 they had contributed over seven hundred discs to the Archive, containing between two and twelve tracks each. Alan Lomax later took over Robert Gordon’s job at the Archive of American Folk Song.46 In late 1937 composer and educator Charles Seeger, who had been President Roosevelt’s music technical adviser at the Resettlement Admin­ istration, was appointed deputy director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Music Project. Up to this point the FMP had been almost exclusively a support agency for unemployed professional (i.e., orchestra) musicians. Seeger broadened its scope to include musicology and ethnomusicology, and in 1938 he organized a series of ethnic song-gathering projects. Many of these were undertaken in cooperation with a parallel folklore recording project that Benjamin Botkin was supervising at the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project.47 Sidney Robertson, one of Seeger’s field-workers, recalled his instructions as “Record everything! . . . Don’t select, don’t omit, don’t concentrate on any single style. We know so little. Record everything!” The folklorists began to break away from their previous academic obsession with rural primitivism, and for the first time urban indigenous material became worthy of consideration. Botkin explained that “the Negro street cries of Harlem are

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work songs, just as surely as the southern Negro’s songs of the cotton, cane and tobacco fields, road construction, saw mill, turpentine camps, and chain gangs. And they have social significance.”48 In 1942 Botkin moved from the WPA to take over at the Archive of American Folk Song, replacing Alan Lomax. With additional federal support, and because the WPA’s folklore group had started doing much of its fieldwork free, Lomax had been able to broaden the Archive’s scope beyond being a mere repository. He turned it into a disseminator, a vehicle for recycling folklife back into American culture, especially through popular music. In 1940 he prepared a “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” that became something of a bible for blues records collectors. “The commercial recording companies have done a broader and more interesting job of recording American folk music than the folklorists,” he complained.49 He resigned in 1941, and with two Fisk University faculty members, John Work and Lewis Jones, he launched a two-year collecting expedition in the area around Clarksdale, Mississippi. They weren’t just interested in primitive roots music: they wanted to know what the citizens of Coahoma County were playing and listening to at that time, even on the jukebox. Their material, boxes and boxes of it, sat at the Archive until 1962, when the Smithsonian issued an LP extracted from it, Negro Blues and Hollers. “There is a world of difference between the blues as collectors know them and the folk stuff waxed for the Archive,” observed Charles Edward Smith, one of the Jazzmen editors.50 As a result of the Archive’s efforts and the WPA programs, not only was noncommercial material a larger and more important proportion of the canon for blues than for jazz, much more of it was cataloged and indexed in at least a rudimentary way. As Blues and Gospel Records progressed over the next forty years, so too would the indexing of such material as film soundtracks, anthropological recordings, Library of Congress holdings, Smithsonian reissues, and private recordings. Thus all were considered for inclusion in Godrich and Dixon’s discography at one point or another. Although modest in the first edition, this material increased rapidly in the second, when a twenty-page section was added outlining this history of field research, describing the recording projects undertaken by the race labels, and explaining the Library of Congress’s Check-List of Recorded Songs in the English Language. Written by the LOC staff in 1942 from index cards prepared by WPA personnel during 1933–40, it included material gathered through July 1940.51 In addition, Godrich and Dixon had uncovered so much

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new information on the business history of recording African American roots music that to discuss it all they prepared an entire second book in narrative form, Recording the Blues.52 The 1982 third edition of the discography added material from the Library of Congress’s 1977 Supplementary Listing of Recorded Songs in the English Language, which extended the original’s coverage up to October 1940. “What is a ‘blues’ or ‘gospel’ record?” they were forced to ask. “What to include and what to leave out?” They had to admit that “the dividing line has been hard to draw, and around this line decisions have been somewhat arbitrary.” Their guiding principle was to ask themselves “What is genuinely Black? That is, performed in a style peculiar to black performances, and not derivative or a copy of any white style.”53 The decision to include all existing material without differentiating whether it was commercial or archival (and whether or not it was relevant to record collectors) proved to be the single most important metric by which Blues and Gospel Records came to be evaluated over the years. “With [this] single exception, no current general discographical project meets the real needs of its users,” wrote discographer Han Enderman.54 This is not to say that it was perfect. Paul Oliver freely admitted that while “the third edition surpassed the previous editions in many ways,” he was concerned that “the criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of [some] specific items has also shifted; the legend ‘despite appearing in the Paramount Race series, these artists are of no blues importance,’ or a similar one, continues to appear, leaving the user to take on trust this interpretation of the quality of the items concerned.”55 Blues and Gospel Records, 1902–1942 can claim one other dubious distinction: it was the first discography to be pirated wholesale. The second edition of Blues and Gospel Records had been published by Storyville magazine, owned by Laurie Wright, the proprietor of an East London record shop. It was a fairly recent addition to the British jazz publication scene, started by Wright only in 1965. In outlook it was modeled after the early years of Record Changer, Gordon Gullickson’s Virginia-based traditional-jazz journal. However, it soon evolved into what was effectively a peer-reviewed effort, with the editorial labor provided by a “Storyville Team” of rotating editors and Wright supervising and paying the bills. Among the more academically rigorous of the 1960s jazz magazines, it still retained its traditional-jazz leaning.56 Wright had published the second edition of Blues and Gospel Records in mid-1969 in a run of 2,000 copies. That print run was exhausted by the mid-1970s, and a Michigan academic reprint service offered an unauthor-

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ized and unlicensed copy of it. Apparently intended for academic libraries that could not get a copy of the sold-out second edition, it went for a hefty $50, although the Storyville version had sold for only $15. The problem became moot in October 1982 when Storyville issued the third edition in an initial printing of 1,200, followed by 500 more in 1985. Godrich had taken primary editorial responsibility for the first two editions, but after 1970 his health began to decline and his role fell to Dixon. For the 1982 edition he was assisted by Howard Rye, who would thereafter assume a larger role in managing the project. By the end of the 1980s the book’s scope exceeded the resources of all but a few publishers, and Oxford University Press signed on in 1990 for a fourth edition. A year later, John Godrich died. Preparing the new edition took another six years. When it was published in 1997, it had grown to over 1,360 pages, although only about 150 new artists were added.57 The expansion came in two forms. First, the material included was again greatly expanded. “The range of recording media included has been broadened beyond the 78-rpm record, almost to the point of bursting the work’s scope,” wrote Edward Komara. “[I]t seeks to list all surviving sound documents [and] although it is wonderful that the compilers have added cylinders, film soundtracks, and surviving radio transcriptions, perhaps the word ‘records’ in the title should be amended.”58 Second, a more inclusive attitude was adopted toward the music of artists already listed. Almost completely eliminated were the “excluded as of no pertinent blues interest” notations that had distressed Paul Oliver. Josephine Baker’s recordings on mainstream labels were now included, and others, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had only a handful of records in the earlier edition were now covered in full. Recalling Godrich and Dixon’s reflective “What is a blues or gospel record?” question from the previous edition, Komara commented that “this new edition may lead some readers to seek defining characteristics in the newly added recordings of black dance, sacred, and pre-blues music, rather than in the performances of the paradigmatic twelve-measure aab blues form.” Oxford issued an unaltered second printing in 2007.

iv The first book of Rust’s second edition—covering 1897 to 1931—appeared in spring 1963. It also sold out before arrival, and a second printing was required.59 It was a manageable 736 pages in a normal 8½-by-5½-inch format. Its page layout now looked much like that for The Jazz Directory, the big difference being that it used the same Helvetica typewriter font as the

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earlier post-binder edition, not Carey and McCarthy’s smooth offset typefaces. However, Rust had altered the arrangement of information within the session block to make it more legible when there were many records from different labels that were issued from one master. It was widely acclaimed, with one reservation—the lack of any index. This was rectified a year later when Rust published a separate sixty-twopage supplemental paperback artist index prepared by Richard Gandorge.60 Reviewing the second edition, George Hulme, editor of Matrix, noted that “there are, of course, points where other discographers disagree with the personnels given by Rust, and many have said so, forcibly, in print.” Rust was generally dismissive of these criticisms: “Hitherto, most discographical works have based their information to some extent on hearsay, sometimes on the arrogant statements of those desiring to inflate the cash value of a record.” However, he continued to insist that “the ears of reliable collectors . . . can sometimes recognize and identify an artist more readily than the musician himself.”61 Allan Sutton, who would, forty years later, publish the sixth edition of Jazz Records, A-Z believes that in making claims based upon aural evaluation (instead of either stating “unknown” or at least offering a qualification such as “possibly” or “attributed to”), Rust crossed a Rubicon of sorts not only in the development of his own work, but in the evolution of the field of discography. “Close listening is okay,” Sutton says, “but only if it is identified as such in the discography.”62 Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye caution that today’s standards should not automatically be projected backward onto Rust’s 1962–63 efforts. “The audience for the book has changed,” they note. It “was designed for record collectors,” and only later did it and its successors “become essential volumes in general and music reference collections.”63 The second volume, the one Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen had asked him to prepare to close the eleven-year gap between their two works, came out in February 1966. As promised, it covered only the period from 1931 until the start of the recording ban in 1942. Along with Jepsen’s modern series and the Godrich/Dixon blues and gospel discography, Rust believed that “the present volume completes the encyclopedia of all records known of ragtime, jazz, blues, ‘hot’ dance music and ‘swing’ music, and the modern idiom.”64 In a review, Pekka Gronow observed that “Rust’s heart obviously hasn’t been with the second volume as much as with the first one,” and Alun Morgan complained, “I am disappointed by the lowered standard of Brian Rust’s latest published work.” However, time has leavened these assessments somewhat.65

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The second volume suffered under three constraints that did not affect the first book. First, more material had to be gone through. Rust’s 1897–1931 volume covered more than thirty years of recording in 735 pages, while the supplement, applying the same exclusionary rules (no microgroove issues; almost no dubbings; few European recordings) needed 618 pages for just ten years.66 Morgan, a modernist, complained about some of Rust’s artist choices, but in the end Rust was shown to be more right than wrong. For example, the western swing groups he included, such as the Light Crust Doughboys, were later confirmed to be important stylistic contributors to southwestern style jazz bands (the Blue Devils, Count Basie, Jay McShann) and later modernists such as Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.67 The second constraint was time. Rust had spent the better part of twenty years working on the earlier book, but to keep his promises to Jepsen and the Dixon/Godrich team, he had only four years to work on the successor volume. Third, he had fewer resources to work with. Rust claimed to have handled every recording that went into the 1897–1931 volume; that was a luxury he did not have now. He had to rely to a much greater extent on his correspondents and on printed sources. Rust’s interests were broader than Gronow asserted. In 1973 he compiled a discography of British dance bands that extended through 1942, and two years later he released a massive twovolume discography of American dance bands that also extended until the American Federation of Musicians strike.68 This was the last discography that Rust self-published. He planned to produce a third edition in early 1970, but in 1969 he was injured and required eye surgery, which left him unable to continue. Wright’s Storyville operation subsequently agreed to take on Jazz Records in addition to Blues and Gospel Records. It was published in two volumes, but unlike the previous edition, the division was by alphabet, not chronology. The first volume, (A-Kar), was issued in July 1970 and the second (Kb-Z) followed in October. Malcolm Shaw, who would, ironically, be selected to edit the 2002 edition of Jazz Records, recalls helping to run off the 1970–71 version on the Gestetner Duplicator Wright used to print Storyville, then collating it in an unheated shed in Burnham, England. The print run was apparently considerably smaller than Blues and Gospel Records’ 2,000 copies, and it was sold only by mail-order from Storyville’s offices.69

v In 1968 an English trade publisher released Leadbitter and Slaven’s Blues Records, 1943–1966, a chronological follow-up to Godrich and Dixon’s

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Blues and Gospel Records, which by this time had been out of print for three years, with Storyville’s second edition still about eight months away. Mike Leadbitter began collecting jazz, blues, and gospel records in the late 1950s. In 1963 he and Simon Napier cofounded the magazine Blues Unlimited, which he continued to edit in his off-hours (he had a day job outside music) during the 1960s. It was through Blues Unlimited that he met Neil Slaven, an employee of British Decca who later helped him found his own record company, Blue Horizon. Slaven also coedited a magazine, R&B Monthly. In 1965, after Dixon and Godrich published Blues and Gospel Records, Leadbitter and Slaven agreed to try a post-1943 discography, and in 1967 Leadbitter traveled to the United States to do field research. The sheer volume of rec­ ordings they encountered led them to drop gospel records, and by the time the text was set in May 1968 it still came to over 380 pages.70 It was almost universally panned, more because of bad marketing than bad discography. The prepublication announcements, complained a reviewer for Jazz Journal, gave the impression that all known blues recordings were going to be included, and the book’s indiscreet subtitle was An Encyclopedic Discography to More Than Two Decades of Recorded Blues. Unfortunately, as it turned out, “several artists who have made good blues recordings have been omitted.” While it was always hard “to decide where to draw the line,” the reviewer complained that “in this book the line is drawn very unevenly to say the least.” The scholars were even crueler. Frank Tirro at the University of Chicago (never known for gratuitous kindness) wrote that “after a few tortuous hours advancing and retreating through the pages of this ‘reference tool,’ this reviewer began to wish that the chief editor had not terminated his formal schooling quite so quickly. . . . [T]his book is a mess.71 Others pointed out major typesetting errors, including thirty-nine lines belonging on page 345 that had been duplicated and dropped into the middle of an unrelated entry two pages earlier.72 “It was with despair that I read the put-downs of Blues Records,” Mike Leadbitter bitterly replied. “The task of covering the post-war period was, at many times, heartbreakingly difficult. One was confronted by thousands of labels and as many artists.” Much of the work had to be done in the field, and “field research is a dicey business. . . . [N]o person who has been in the heart of northern ghettoes or the deep south in search of information will ever forget the experience.” Contributors were “beaten up, robbed and nearly shot. . . . [I]t is easy to tear something to pieces while sprawled in one’s own home; it is an awful lot harder assembling it in an atmosphere of suspicion and death.”73

f i g u r e 8 . A page from Mike Leadbitter and Neil Slaven’s Blues Records, 1943–1966 (1968).

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Time and tragedy softened these feelings somewhat. “The achievement of Dixon and Godrich . . . was made ‘easier’ by the fact that by far the majority of issues up to 1943 were on major labels,” wrote Paul Oliver. “In the post–Second World War years a great many small and independent labels emerged, some of them extremely obscure. . . . [T]he complexity of the post-war recording scene is truly daunting.”74 Writing in the same academic journal where Tirro’s barbed review had appeared twenty-five years earlier, Kernfeld and Rye were able to discuss the project’s initial problems more dispassionately, and they filled readers in on its rather convoluted history. The compilers [Leadbitter and Slaven] diverged from the inclusive policies of their predecessors [Dixon and Godrich], adopting a narrow and purist definition of blues in which (unstated) value judgments evidently played a part. . . . The resulting defects were recognized early on, and even before the book was published the compilation of a complementary volume to cover [associated genres] had begun.75

The idea was to produce a three-volume series that, in Slaven’s words, would “include Rhythm & Blues artists at both the jazz and popular ends of the spectrum,” with a revised volume of “mainstream” blues in the middle. A list of artists planned for inclusion in the new series was circulated. Erik Raben, a Danish discographer who was heading up a team organizing a revised edition of Jepsen’s Jazz Records, 1943–196X (which had finished its first cycle in 1970), unfortunately used that list to decide which artists could be safely excluded from further consideration in the upcoming Jazz Records, 1943–1980. Then, in November 1974, Leadbitter unexpectedly died of tubercular meningitis. Not until 1987 did Slaven finish the first half (A-K) of the “mainstream blues,” one-third of the projected trilogy. Unspecified production problems delayed the release of the second half for another seven years. (In the book’s introduction Slaven hinted at litigation threats of some type.) The second half of “mainstream blues” was finally released in 1994, with the help of discographer Leslie Fancourt.76 Both volumes were largely ignored, for several reasons. They were quite expensive ($85 and $115, respectively); they were produced by a small, London-based press (Paul Pelletier’s Record Information Services, or RIS) but appealed mostly to an audience in the United States; other works produced in the interim had obviated much of the need for them; and there was a growing pessimism about whether a comprehensive blues discography was feasible, or even worth doing. Many felt that too much vital material was outside the sphere of commercial recordings or was scattered across so many small, obscure, and ephemeral labels that it eluded cataloging. Others

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argued that the genre was so inseparable from rhythm and blues, jazz, and even rock and roll that it could never be meaningfully contained within its own separate reference sources. As computer technology expanded discographic capacity, they believed it could be better incorporated into ultrabroad jazz/blues/R&B or popular music comprehensive discographies. The few who did review the 1987 revision generally considered it a significant improvement over its 1968 predecessor. Everyone agreed that its new subtitle A Selective Discography, was a far more realistic description than the first edition’s unfortunate Encyclopedic Discography label. Paul Oliver even noted that “though Slaven calls it a selective discography, its selectivity is inclusive rather than exclusive,” and he congratulated him for incorporating “field recordings, including some for the Library of Congress made in Senatobia as late as 1970.”77 For many years the two RIS-published volumes kept a well-hidden secret: each was seeded with fictional “squib” entries, apparently inserted by the publisher, Paul Pelletier, as an antipiracy device to catch uncritical copying. (This device was widely used by the makers of telephone books and other directories.) In volume 1, singer Spam Daggers recorded “I Don’t Belong Here” for the rather icky Creema label, while the equally improbable vocalist Finney-Mo (backed, mind you, by full rhythm and brass sections, all listed as “unknown”) waxed the only single Jelly-Jam Records ever issued. Paul Fox made a couple of sides for the Peder label, while the mysterious artist named “Him” recorded the no-nonsense “It’s a Man Down There” (no details whatever available). Volume 2 featured a vocalist named P. Ness. Several of these cropped up over the years in subsequent discographies.78 In 2007 Fancourt coedited a new edition of The Blues Discography in conjunction with discographer/publisher Bob McGrath. In 2001 McGrath had compiled a two-volume discography of rhythm and blues music from independent labels and published it through his own firm, the Vancouver-based Eyeball Productions. Between 2005 and 2007 he issued a four-volume second edition of The R&B Indies. Much of the data McGrath uncovered overlapped with the research that Fancourt was still doing on the blues side, so after R&B Indies was completed, Eyeball took on the blues project. Issued as a large paperback at less than $100, the first printing sold out in only a few months.79 Back in the late 1960s, after Leadbitter and Slaven decided they could not fit gospel records into their first edition, Leadbitter had begun serializing a postwar gospel discography being prepared by Cedric J. Hayes in his magazine Blues Unlimited. It ran for sixty-six issues before being suspended in 1970, partway through G. In 1976, after Leadbitter’s death, Blues

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Unlimited restarted a chronologically truncated version (1943–59) under the joint authorship of Hayes and Robert Laughton. It ran for about thirty issues, until Blues Unlimited ceased publication in 1987. Five years after that, in 1992, RIS issued Gospel Records, 1943–1969 in two volumes.80 Entries were limited to black musicians on American labels, although many non-gospel artists (particularly vocalists) producing gospel songs were included. A revised version was compiled by Hayes alone in 2008 and published by Bob McGrath’s Eyeball Productions.

vi Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s Jazz Records rolled to a finish in September 1970 after eleven volumes and 4,353 pages. “At long last it is finished!” he exclaimed. “What started in 1960 about making some kind of order out of my files has now in 1970 resulted in a book of over four thousand pages. It has been a busy but rather fascinating ten years.” In 1969, starting with volume 4b (the ninth book), Jepsen announced that to keep the final volumes manageable, “I have been forced to cut out more material than originally planned,” and that any blues information already contained in Leadbitter and Slaven’s Blues Records, 1943–1966 would not be listed. In November, at the first meeting of the International Discographers Association in London, he told the assembled group that he would not continue the project after the first cycle was completed. Karl Emil Knudsen, who had published the last eight volumes of Jepsen’s series, tried to organize a working team to take over Jazz Records, but it never came together, so in 1972 Erik Raben agreed to assume responsibility. Raben, like Jepsen, lived in Copenhagen. He had been contributing to Malcolm Walker’s Discographical Forum since 1969, and he started helping Jepsen with fact-checking and manuscript review at about the same time. Raben decided that the second edition had to be a large-scale cooperative project, meticulously researched and edited. As a result, the first volume of the new series did not appear until 1989, nineteen years after the last volume of Jazz Records, 1942–1969 and eight years after the legendary discographer himself had died.81 Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen spent his final years writing for the Copenhagen newspaper Berlingske Tidende, mostly doing book and television reviews. He also wrote a book on the American Revolutionary War, A Nation Comes into Existence. He died in September 1981 at age fifty-four.82

chapter five

“What a Mess”: 1968–98

i In 1968 Albert McCarthy marveled that “50 Years of Recorded Jazz seems to have upset a discographical fraternity that, unlike its colleagues in the critical field, generally works together in reasonable amity.” The controversy had started a few months earlier with a brief news item in Storyville. “Readers may have seen an announcement of a new loose leaf discography covering the first fifty years of jazz and running to 6,000–7,000 pages,” the anonymous article reported. “We were curious and took the trouble to examine a sample page.” It claimed to have found nine errors on a single page. (Entirely possible, since the sample contained the dreaded Jimmy Blythe/Barrelhouse Five sessions that had given Delaunay, Blackstone, and Carey/McCarthy so much trouble.) But worse, it said the material seemed “to be nothing more than a straight copy from existing works together with their errors.” It warned potential buyers “to examine a specimen sheet before deciding to part with their money.” Readers were probably somewhat mystified by the warning, since it neglected to provide the title, author, or release date of this awful new thing.1 “It” turned out to be 50 Years of Recorded Jazz (often shortened to 50 Years or 50 YORJ ). The brainchild of Walter Bruyninckx of Mechelen, Belgium, 50 Years had to be one of the oddest discographies ever published. It was composed of loose, one-sided, unpunched sheets of paper without binders, covers, boxes, dividers, or any other means of organization—just sheets. Lots and lots of sheets. Eight thousand, to be exact. Bruyninckx was a newspaper journalist who helped found a jazz club in Mechelen after the war, and later he contributed to Charles Delaunay’s last discographic project, the 1951–52 Hot discographie encyclopédique. While

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working for UNICEF in India in 1965, he had been badly injured in a traffic accident, and to occupy himself during his long recuperation at home he started 50 Years. He later claimed that he “did not intend to publish this discography but was persuaded by several friends who thought it would be a worthwhile job if ever completed.” Well, maybe. The March 1968 flyer openly solicited subscriptions, and it described 50 Years as if it had not yet been started or was still in the early planning stages. Moreover, the first installment of 1,500 pages didn’t ship until May or June. Several jazz magazines besides Storyville received the flyer, along with a cover letter asking them to forward any orders they received to Bruyninckx. It appears that early on he was considering some sort of commercial venture, though possibly only on a small scale.2 Storyville obviously declined his request, but others, such as Jazz Journal, told readers they would pass on any subscriptions sent to them. Even here there was some confusion: Sinclair Traill at Jazz Journal mistakenly told readers the subscription price was £6, when in fact it was £6 per installment, for a total of £28 to £30 (about $75) for the whole series. This was the marketing plan that Bruyninckx would use throughout his editions: sell subscriptions, then produce a work in five to eight installments, varying the print run up or down as the subscriber list expanded or contracted. He received about three hundred firm replies to his March flyer, so he started with a print run of five hundred.3 Steve Voce saw nothing new in the brouhaha. “Whenever a major discography is published, the first reaction is for the other discographers to start making yelping noises,” he wrote. These yelps, he explained, were indecipherable to the average person—“a sort of discographer’s avant garde music.” He provided a helpful translation: “They are actually trying to convey three things. One, that the discography is no good, . . . [two] that their own discography is to be republished imminently . . . and buyers should not rush into anything, and, three, that this latest five-thousand-page effort has been dreamed up as a quite deliberate attempt to cast aspersions on them personally.”4 Although less cynical, Sinclair Traill was likewise mystified by the resentment. “I was a little astonished that Storyville, a well-edited, most knowledgeable jazz magazine, saw fit to accept and publish the criticism clothed in pseudonymity,” he wrote. (The article had actually appeared with no byline at all.) Noting that Storyville’s main criticism had been that Bruyninckx had copied previous works, he had to agree that the mystery writer’s complaint was not entirely off base. “Maybe he is right,” Traill agreed. “But

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surely aren’t the major portions of all new discographical works copies of what has gone before?” No, replied Laurie Wright. After admitting he had been the earlier Storyville writer, he added that “Mr. Traill makes the point that discography is largely based on what has gone before. . . . [B]ut there is little point in going to print unless there is a significant amount of new information available.” While there was “a vast amount of new information which has come to light,” it was “quite obvious from the sample sheet that none of [it] would be included.” Consequently, he thought it best for readers to wait a little while, since “revised editions are either in hand or contemplated.” While “discographers do normally work together in a free exchange of information and present an unruffled front to the world,” he protested, “this work does not enjoy the backing of other discographers” and “it is when this sort of thing happens that we become annoyed.”5 Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, for one, did not have a high opinion of 50 Years: “Mr. Bruyninckx has hit upon the excellent idea of producing a discography in a loose-leaf system, but his originality seems to stop at this idea. . . . [A]bout 95 percent of the book is copied from existing works. . . . I can see from the parts ‘borrowed’ from my own books that Mr. B has even copied the printing errors!” Jepsen believed that while Bruyninckx should be congratulated for attempting to undertake the “enormous task” of compiling the data scattered among all the various genre, label, and artist discographies, this was only half the job: “The hard discographical research [of ] checking all existing jazz magazines, listening to records, writing to record companies, etc., etc., seems to be unknown to him.”6 George Hulme, writing in Matrix, also had reservations. He agreed that many of Bruyninckx’s post-1942 data appeared to have “been copied straight from Jepsen . . . without incorporating extra information, such as take numbers, which are available elsewhere.”7 He questioned its single-sided format because “the discography, even if not bound or covered in any way, will occupy three feet of shelf space” and suggested that it was “not sufficiently superior to existing discographies to warrant purchasing.” Privately he was less circumspect. “I was part of the team that prepared [ Jepsen’s discography,] and I was dismayed when Bruyninckx published what amounted to an amalgamation of Rust and Jepsen,” he later wrote. “What is the point of working to create a discography if it will simply be copied. . . . [W]ho will bother to buy it? . . . It is especially frustrating for those of us who do original research to see our work used elsewhere without any credit.”8 Voce, on the other hand, was unsympathetic to the complaints of the older discographers. “Discography is essentially an art where the results of

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one man’s labors immediately must become common property,” he wrote. “It is hardly fair to accuse people of ‘copying’ since, unless they are actually to invent their own material, it must be copied from somewhere.”9 Bruyninckx did have an unfortunate habit, quite frankly, of sticking his foot in his mouth. He had boasted in his flyer that 50 Years would be “the discography to end all discographies.” Hulme pointed out that it was doubtful anyone could succeed at that lofty goal the first time out, and he mocked Bruyninckx’s bold language with the comment that “ ‘the discography to end all discographies’ falls short of that objective by a wide margin.”10 Worse, Bruyninckx responded to Wright’s Storyville editorials, which were unkind but far from libelous, with a series of caustic and disjointed letters, including one that Wright cannily ran in its entirety, unedited and without comment or reply. It accused Wright, Rust, and Jepsen of bad faith, lying, and financial conflict of interest. (To be fair, Rust, Jepsen, and Godrich did reply with their own rather brutal letter accusing Bruyninckx of, among other things, “near-libel” and “abysmal ignorance.”)11 Although it’s impossible to say with certainty, it seems that much of the animosity started with an advertisement that Brian Rust had placed in Vintage Jazz Mart for the new edition of his Jazz Records, A-Z. (This is the edition that Storyville took charge of when he was forced to abandon it because of ill health.)12 In his ad, Rust had joked that his new edition would be a regular hardback, so that “you won’t need a moving van or even a wheelbarrow to carry it.” Bruyninckx reached the hypersensitive conclusion that Rust was knocking his work, though both Wright and Rust claimed that Rust was referring to his own first edition, the famous post-binder version. Bruyninckx’s letter, while tactless, was not entirely off the mark: “What [Wright] is trying to say, dear readers, is that you are a bunch of monkeys satisfied with an incomplete work. You are sending heaps of work to [Rust], and to thank you he brings out a third edition at the ‘reasonable’ price of 10 pounds! Will [Wright] now kindly explain to us how it is possible to sell three editions of the same work?” Here, Bruyninckx was arguing that unless Rust tried to keep his work current, he was just dithering—slightly re­ arranging shopworn merchandise in an effort to pawn it off as fresh stock.13 Once again that old question, What is a discography? For Bruyninckx it was a universal catalog. “There is in my opinion only one good system and that is discography which, regardless of styles or recording date, lists the entire output of jazz records. . . . Personally, I think it is much more important to jazz collectors to know if a certain title appears on a still-available LP then to know if there are 7 other 78 rpm’s, all as rare as the original,

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on which the title appeared. . . . After all, most collectors are not label collectors, but jazz lovers.” For Rust it was the result of ongoing historical research and evaluation into a well-defined set of important but underdocumented musical artifacts from the dawn of sound recording. Voce, for one, took sides with a backhanded swipe at Rust: “Thus far the main line of discography runs from Delaunay through McCarthy-Carey to Jepsen. . . . [T]hey must receive equal credit for their enormous works on our behalf.” Notice the missing name.14 Bruyninckx sought to answer the question, How can I hear that music? Rust pursued a very different question: What exactly am I hearing in that music? While Rust would be the first to admit he had little interest in modern music, as a professional discographer he consistently held to the position that it served no useful purpose to move his discographies forward in time: that information was readily available in the form of industry documentation and published sources. While compilation might be required, no scholarly investigation or expert analysis was needed to know what was contained in a given recording from the postwar period. Given this fragmentation, and its effects on the economics of the discography market, 50 Years thus came to be seen as something of a watershed, for better or for worse. “In the early 1970’s Bruyninckx’s first edition reunified the field,” noted Kernfeld and Rye, “[but] at a considerable intellectual cost: clumsy homemade production, gross inaccuracy, and the plagiarism of those same splintered projects.” But the thing least expected happened: nothing. Instead of large-scale discography becoming institutionalized (as happened for bibliographies and library catalogs) or discarded altogether in favor of specialized artist, genre, topic, and label discographies (the preferred solution in art and architecture typology), “the splintered projects and the reunification simply coexisted, albeit with considerable bitterness.”15 This happened for two reasons. The first was the lack of formal academic recognition—indeed, even hostility—that jazz and popular music studies had received up to the 1970s. Not just jazz discography, but the entire field of jazz studies. As musicologist James Patrick pointed out in 1973, “There really is no such thing as a body of academic writing about jazz,” and “since trained music scholars have largely ignored the field of popular music . . . discography enjoys the special obscurity of being viewed as an esoteric bibliographical quirk of a small band of monomaniacal jazz collectors.” Consequently, the unwritten rules and ethics that tightly govern the ritualized scholastic world made little or no impression on jazz discographers. “Were this the world of academia,” note Kernfeld and Rye,” referring to the

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wholesale plagiarism and lack of source citation in 50 Years, “there would presumably have been a scandal, perhaps a ruined career, perhaps a quick end to Bruyninckx’s project.”16 Some saw a kind of law of the jungle at work: “Unscholarly behavior, not to mention ugly and unethical behavior, has long been a part of jazz, blues, and gospel literature.” But is that a fair assessment? Was there truly no “institutional morality”? Albert McCarthy at Jazz Monthly weighed in on the issue after most of his fellow journalists did, but having spent more time in the trenches himself (and emerged somewhat the worse for wear), he did so more thoughtfully. “All discographies have used what has gone before as their basis,” he wrote. “When Orin Blackstone published Index to Jazz he drew freely on M. Delaunay’s work, as Dave Carey and myself in turn drew freely on both M. Delaunay and Mr. Blackstone.” While he felt Bruyninckx’s work did initially seem to “offer a great deal less in the way of new information,” mostly because its treatment of microgroove and tape releases was less complete than Jepsen’s, the material showed “considerable improvement” as the project advanced.17 But after getting “beaten up, robbed and nearly shot” while doing his blues discography, wrote Mike Leadbitter, “the final insult was that Walter Bruyninckx . . . wrote asking if he could amalgamate the data from Blues Records into his own sorry opus. If anyone has the time to start a Discographer’s Protection Society, he can count on me for help!” Jepsen had grumbled that Bruyninckx “even copied [my] printing errors.” That led Sinclair Traill to recount how in the late 1940s he had prepared a small Benny Moten discography for Pickup, a magazine he was then editing. He listed the banjo player on one very early recording as “Sam (?),” which the typesetter mistakenly changed to “Sam Tall.” The error slipped through proofreading and into print. “And so he has remained ever since,” recalled Traill. “Rust, Delaunay, and even one LP sleeve, all have his surname as dreamed up or mis-set by some unknown compositor.”18 Bruyninckx replied that he simply relied on the same informal network of correspondents that Rust, Jepsen, and others used: “I had already about 40 people sending information to me. I never asked them which was the source of their information, so it could have come from anywhere.”19 Discographer Richard Johnson, who would later revise some of Rust’s work, agreed that this was a problem endemic to all general discographies: “When compiling a discography, one relies on other people for input, as it is not always possible to do all the research oneself. . . . There is no way of checking this data unless it is duplicated from another source.”20

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Critic Martin Williams noted that this problem occasionally afflicted even Brian Rust. While working on some reissues for Victor, “I naturally used Rust’s volume,” he recounted. “I began to notice all sorts of errors in his listings. For example, a tuba was listed when the man was playing string bass.” He finally realized that “probably Rust had not heard these records, and that he was probably taking the word of a lot of other people.” Kurt Mohr, who worked with Delaunay on the Hot discographie encyclopédique, was fatalistic: “All the post-war discographies of Blues, R&B and Jazz are so incomplete and full of error that the whole field will have to be worked over and re-published anyhow.”21 Thus, if there was some universally shared “institutional morality” within the community of discographers, it is hard to find, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, and there is little doubt that Kernfeld and Rye’s claim that much of the behavior discographers took for granted (or at least grudgingly tolerated) would be considered “unscholarly” by traditional academics is justified. But it’s a long way from “unscholarly” to the “law of the jungle,” and this leads to the second reason the discographic world was able to hang together in an uneasy truce: money. “Enthusiasts resented the need to buy so many overlapping works,” noted Kernfeld and Rye.22 Several commentators at the time—discographers, collectors, and librarians alike—chimed in with their dissatisfaction about gaps, fragmentation, and overlaps in the available discographies, and about the financial cost they imposed. The International Discographers Association, which met only once in early 1969, has already been mentioned. In addition to its unsuccessful attempt to organize an update to Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s post-1942 comprehensive discography, the IDA conference attempted to allocate turf roughly along the established lines of Rust/Jepsen/Godrich-Dixon/LeadbitterSlaven/Hayes. That went nowhere, especially after Bruyninckx came along. “There is a miserable lack of organization among discographers,” complained Bob Porter, an IDA attendee. “[D]uplication of effort leads in some cases to hard feelings, and in other cases to discrepancies in print.” Bernard Shirley, who was preparing an index to Jepsen’s discography similar to the one Richard Gandorge had prepared for Rust’s Jazz Records, abandoned it when he learned that someone else was doing the same thing. “Something must be done to cut down on the duplication of work,” he complained.23 Albert McCarthy actually ran the numbers. Rust’s Jazz Records, Godrich and Dixon’s Blues and Gospel Records, Jepsen’s Jazz Records, and Leadbitter and Slaven’s Blues Records together ran to fifteen volumes and cost roughly £36 to £40 ($80 to $90), depending on purchasing arrangements, while

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Bruyninckx’s eight thousand loose sheets (and the sixteen slipcases he now offered as optional equipment to organize them) likewise ran to £36. “From the cost viewpoint, there is nothing to it,” he concluded, “the advantages and disadvantages of both sets should be clear to prospective buyers and it is up to them to make their own decisions.”24 But others insisted that should not be the only criterion. George Hulme complained that Bruyninckx’s efforts could undermine support for the proposed update of Jepsen’s discography. “With the prospect of seeing the work copied almost immediately, what incentive was there for Jepsen to be updated?” he asked. Another discographer replied to McCarthy’s comparison by asking, “If, as . . . suggested recently, someone should compare the price of Mr. B’s work with the combined prices of the Jepsen, Rust, GodrichDixon and Leadbitter-Slaven books, perhaps we should also compare the years of original research that went into their production, or doesn’t that matter?” He added that since “copyright law is no protection for compliers of facts, . . . if Mr. Jepsen or any other discographer is to be accused of ‘sour grapes’ it might because protest is the only defense he has.” McCarthy had said earlier that “one cannot copyright discographical information . . . it would probably be legally impossible.”25 Was that really so? The basic law in most Western nations at the time Bruyninckx started producing 50 Years was that the pure factual information could be extracted without permission. But the pre-1976 version of the United States Copyright Act contained an ambiguity that some courts had interpreted to mean that dictionaries, encyclopedias, directories, and other compilations should be treated differently from other written works. Their raw information could be protected if it was the result of a sufficiently “industrious collection.”26 This evolved into what became known as the “sweat of the brow doctrine.” It was a fundamentally economic argument: if it required extraordinary time and cost to acquire a set of facts, and a competitor could just take them, the loss was something very similar to theft or false labeling. But the door was slammed on that theory in 1992 when the United States Supreme Court ruled in the “Feist case,”27 a dispute over allegedly purloined telephone directory data in rural western Kansas. Feist, a publisher of regional directories, had been caught copying information from local phone company books that were using the same type of phony “squib” entries that had been inserted in Leadbitter and Slaven’s Blues and Gospel Records. The Court ruled that factual compilations were copyrightable only if the “selection and arrangement are original.” It rejected the whole concept of “sweat of the brow.” No matter how much time and money an “industrious collector” puts into a compilation, it said, American law protects only “origi-

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nal works,” and unless the compiler could show a selection that exhibits some “minimal level of creativity” (a used-car “blue book” price guide is one example), then purely factual content cannot be copyrighted. Because the local phone companies could not show how “every telephone listing in our town” was a creative criterion, their information was not protected. “Copyright,” concluded the Court, “rewards originality, not effort.”28 Jazz music and copyright law have never gotten along well. “While copyright law may not have caused the precipitous end of jazz,” notes the staff of the Harvard Law Journal, “the current copyright scheme discourages jazz creation. . . . [C]opyright’s inability to fully comprehend and incorporate its own sine qua non—originality—lies at the heart of all these problems.” Like the jazz musician, the jazz discographer is ill served by copyright law—and for the same reason: a fundamental inability to grasp the nature of creativity within the realm of the derivative or transformative work. “The distinctive aspect of jazz itself—the partial use of prior works in the creation of new music—leads to negative consequences in terms of the copyright protections and reduced benefits,” they observe.29 While it is true that the old record company information already existed, waiting to be found, it was often so deeply buried or muddled as to be nearly useless. Through hard work and skill the discographer transformed it into something valuable. But neither hard work nor skill creates legal authorship. Just as the endless hours a jazz musician spends honing her skills do not legally make her resulting improvisation a composition, the time and money the discographer spends do not make him an author. A comprehensive discographer is in an even worse position. By emphasizing selection as a yardstick of originality, Anglo-American law relegates the all-inclusive discographer to a lower class than the specialist. “The more comprehensive a data collection becomes, the harder it is to protect it via copyright,” bluntly notes one legal scholar. Another pleads: “Although ‘all’ is an uncreative principle of selection, can’t it result in a compilation that is worth protecting?”30 England did have a parallel to the sweat of the brow doctrine, called the “sufficient degree of skill and labor test,” although it was narrowly applied in the 1960s and 1970s. It was broadened somewhat after a 1984 case held that a newspaper’s daily listing of television programs was protected, only to have the concept plunged back into disarray by later European Union directives regulating the protection of databases.31 But in general the prevailing 1970s assumption by discographers that they could not protect their information, should they choose to publish it, was valid. Bruyninckx’s main defense was, ironically, the economic one. Although the all-encompassing general discography was, in his opinion, the “only one

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good system,” he argued that it could never commercially challenge more specialized works. “By the turn of the century such a discography could well contain over 25,000 pages. Who, aside of a record library, music school and/ or university would buy a work as large as the Encyclopedia [sic] Britannica, or its equivalent the French Larousse? Certainly not the small collector.”32 He argued that comprehensive discographies would always be economically self-limiting, because they were the ultimate quixotic pursuit; they could never turn a profit. The technology would simply not permit it.

“[We have] probably received more inquiries about the quality of this work than any other jazz product that’s had advance billing,” wrote Cadence’s Bob Rusch in July 1978 about Bruyninckx’s second dreadnaught discography, 60 Years of Recorded Jazz. “I rarely used Bruyninckx’s first discography because I found it too cumbersome,” he admitted, “and though slightly updating Jepsen, it did little more than combine in one series the Rust & Jepsen works.” But he had a different opinion this time around. “With Bruyninckx’s second edition it became my primary general reference. . . . [ It] remains the most all-inclusive general jazz discography of the 20th century.”33 The new 60 Years shared several characteristics with its predecessor, but it also featured many improvements. Still following Jepsen, it started out at M, and to make rebinding by subscribers easier, each letter was still separately paginated (for example, M1–M993, N1–N251, etc.). Once again it generally listed only 78s and the first one or two LP releases of each tune, not a full publishing history. But it now listed album titles, an innovation that Kernfeld and Rye called “invaluable.” For the first time it was printed on both sides of each page, but with a lack of foresight that sometimes proved maddening. If a letter ended on the front of a leaf (recto), Bruyninckx began the next letter immediately, putting its first page on the verso instead of leaving a blank page. So if you were binding the sheets into hardbacks, you had to make a photocopy for the first page of the next volume, with its back blank. Even worse, although it started at M, the title page, preface, list of abbreviations, and other front matter didn’t appear until the start of A, after some six thousand pages had already been shipped. Almost comically, the title page was printed on the back of the last page of the Z section. The extra margin space that permitted binding ran down only one side, so an owner wanting a set bound in alphabetical volumes from A to Z had to place the opening title page in the first volume facing rearward, so the first thing visible on opening the cover was the last page of Z. (One wag, now lost to

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the annals of time, called it “the Finnegan’s Wake discography.”) Most owners simply made a duplicate title page for the A volume, which left two title pages, one at the front and a second at the rear.) But in the end what was most important was that the work was updated by almost a full decade at a time when many had given up hope that any update of Jepsen’s Jazz Records, 1942–196X would ever appear. “Rumors crop up now and then about an update and revision to Jepsen,” Rusch reported after 60 Years was well advanced, “but other rumors make this seem more and more unlikely.”34 Like its progenitor, Bruyninckx sold it by subscription. His original plans called for six installments totaling 9,500 pages. (It eventually ran to seven installments and 11,500 pages.) The subscription list started at 1,500 sets. Attrition over the three years whittled it down to about 1,350. An advance subscription cost $300, and after it was finished complete sets sold for $400 in the United States. “My God, even Joe McPhee is listed!” marveled Rusch. Cadence reviewed about 1,500 new records a year and had arranged to have them indexed by computer. This allowed a comparison between their index and 60 Years for about a ten-year period. The discrepancy rate (which Rusch somewhat chauvinistically called the “error rate”; after all, can you assume the Cadence index was never wrong?) worked out to about 10 percent. This was about two to four times better than 50 Years, depending on the particular letter of the alphabet, since the earlier work had improved markedly as it progressed. Rusch concluded that “I fear discography on this level is no longer containable and will again become specialized or [need to] accept higher percentages of incompleteness.” Other reviewers agreed that it was “the most complete to appear of any general discography,” but they cautioned that it “remains circumscribed by Bruyninckx’s continuing dependence on the research of others” and that he “has 12 volunteers working right now [but] he could use 9 more.”35 The last installment, and a musicians index of 576 pages, shipped in late 1981. This was the second time Bruyninckx had finished a project largely on time and on budget, and while his methods may have been controversial, he had now established a reputation for getting the job done, and in the discographic world that was something. “Despite his continued plagiarism,” recalled librarian Matthew Snyder, “by the late 1980’s the general opinion on Bruyninckx appeared to be that the improved quality of his work, combined with his extensive coverage, had produced the best available jazz discography.”36 After it was finished, Bruyninckx tried to update it by issuing replacement sheets on green paper, starting at A, not M, but he gave up at Gr

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because he could not keep up with the pace of additions and corrections. (They totaled about 1,500 in all.) He predicted that a fully updated revision would require about 20,000 double-sided sheets. Others thought it could run as high as 50,000.37 In 1984 Bruyninckx started producing a series of paperback extracts from 60 Years, with support from the Japanese jazz magazine Swing Journal. Although they initially targeted the Japanese market, they were also distributed in both the United States and Europe, and they sold well. While accurate bibliographic information on the series is hard to confirm (the volumes did not have ISBN numbers or title pages, nor were the titles printed on their spines in a consistent manner), it is believed that about 1,500 copies of the most popular books, the six-volume Modern Jazz, the twelve-volume Swing Jazz (big and small bands), and the six-volume Traditional Jazz series, were printed. While they were somewhat updated from 60 Years, they were not a complete revision, and to his credit, Bruyninckx never claimed they were. It is believed that there was a total of thirty-five volumes in six series (Modern Big Band, Modern Jazz, Progressive Jazz, Swing, Traditional Jazz, and Vocalists), all in a five-by-eight-inch trade paperback format.38 It has always been rumored that Bruyninckx intended to also produce a blues or blues/R&B series but cancelled when he came to believe the series was being copied without his permission. The main advantages of the Swing Journal paperbacks were their affordability, at roughly $13 to $18 each, and their convenience, especially for those interested in just one genre. “What is the purpose of possessing a work that lists the equivalent of 300,000 LP’s if [you have] specialized in a certain style and if, on top of this, [are] financially restricted to having only a couple of thousand LPs?” Bruyninckx asked. But the very degree of subdivision that made each book so affordable and easy to use also fragmented the information to the point where it seemed the first book you pulled off the shelf was never the right one. “There is no doubt that this form . . . is convenient,” noted one reviewer, “[but] if you go to look up someone you would include under a heading that the author has put elsewhere, you may then wish for a more all-encompassing work.” Bruyninckx himself agreed that the paperbacks were “especially aimed at the relatively small collectors who have from a few hundred to a few thousand records, mostly covering the same style . . . [because] it is almost impossible to classify jazz in welldefined series. Some records could well be put in two different series.”39 From the start, Cadence distributed the Bruyninckx paperbacks in North America. (Cadence’s affiliate, North Country Distributors, sold records and

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books by mail order.) Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye believed that “since the late 1970s Cadence has been by far the best magazine for the coverage of jazz from the bop style onwards,” but its dual role of jazz journalist and jazz merchant always held the potential for a conflict of interest. In 1987 Rusch wrote a lengthy review of the Bruyninckx paperbacks, which included this self-admitted “editorial note”: From the onset of Mr. Bruyninckx’s discographies, which goes back now some 20 years, there [have] developed two distinct discographical camps. On one side, those who have supported Walter Bruyninckx’s efforts to update the Jepsen discography . . . on the other side, those who don’t. . . . I have often sensed that the carping is, more often than not, politically motivated.40

The source of these “politics” was the long-rumored “authorized” update of  Jepsen’s work begun at the 1969 International Discographers Association conference. Many felt there shouldn’t be any “poaching” on its turf until the new series had become established. Others, like Rusch, weren’t convinced it would ever appear. “The Jepsen updates have been planned and announced periodically over the last 25 years. They still have not materialized,” he wrote. “If and when they do appear, Cadence will gladly bring them to our readers’ attention and welcome them. . . . In the meantime, Walter Bruyninckx does produce a very solid general discography and there is something to be said for that.” The last of the paperbacks came out in 1990, a year or so after Bruyninckx had embarked on a third version of his loose-sheet comprehensive discography, 70 Years of Recorded Jazz.

ii “Those of us who have witnessed such events as man walking on the moon have now seen the latest man-made miracle,” marveled Russ Chase in 1989, “the appearance of  Volume 1 of Jazz Records, 1942–1980.” The long-rumored update to Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s discography had finally made its debut.41 The project had been under the supervision of Erik Raben for almost twenty years. Raben first became interested in discography in the late 1950s after reading Carey and McCarthy’s Jazz Directory. Raben, like Jepsen, lived near Copenhagen, and in the mid-1960s he started helping Jepsen with fact-checking and manuscript review. In 1968 he also began contributing to Malcolm Walker’s Discographical Forum and published a “Discography of Free Jazz” covering younger artists such as Albert Ayer, Pharoah

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Sanders, and Ornette Coleman, whose careers had not really started by the time Jepsen’s Jazz Records came to a close. When Jepsen announced that he would retire after the last book of Jazz Records, 1942–1964 was finished, at the International Discographers Association meeting in London in November 1969 his publisher, Karl Emil Knudsen, tried to organize a team to take on an update, but with limited success. Raben began collecting corrections and additions to Jepsen’s series during the 1970s, and after several meetings with Knudsen he agreed to take over as supervising editor in 1977. At the same time, Knudsen arranged to start a new publishing venture, Stainless/Wintermoon, to produce the new series.42 Raben decided early on that the second edition would have to be a largescale cooperative project, and in the mid-1970s working drafts were sent to about twenty-five discographers across the globe for updating and correcting. The last of these were returned in 1977, when the decision was made to move forward to publication. The first volume’s manuscript was recirculated to five checkers, three Americans and two Europeans. The original schedule called for typesetting to begin in 1980, but Raben encountered computer problems that ultimately required new hardware, pushing the cutoff date back to the last day of 1980. This became the project’s permanent terminus. Raben, like Brian Rust, turned out to be a compulsive fact-checker. “It is my understanding that Erik will not include a disk in his discography until he has personally laid eyes on it,” reported Dan Morgenstern. A print run of 1,000 volumes was ordered. Give or take a hundred, this was the edition size for all seven of the printed volumes eventually produced.43 The first book was a thick blue hardback. Blues and gospel music were excluded to avoid overlapping the Dixon/Godrich/Rye and Leadbitter/ Slaven works. The latter duo had circulated a list of the artists who were to appear in the second edition of their original 1968 discography, which they planned to expand into three parts, each its own multivolume project: mainstream blues, R&B, and blues-rock. However, Mike Leadbitter died, and only the mainstream blues portion was published, with the first half delayed until 1987 and the second not appearing until 1994. Raben was dismayed by the gap this left, but given the slow progress of his series, the problem proved to be self-correcting, as broad genre discographies of blues, R&B, gospel, and other forms of black popular music, some of them descendants of the 1960s blues and gospel discographies previously discussed, were eventually published by the Canadian firm Eyeball Productions.44 Other than this, the treatment of associated genres in the Raben discographies was generally inclusive. “There’s a lot of jazz-rock fusion, rhythm-

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and-blues and Latin music,” noted one reviewer, although another believed that the coverage of these “neo-jazz” categories was slightly less comprehensive than in Bruyninckx’s 60 Years of Recorded Jazz.45 Raben’s team adopted a working definition of discography as “a compilation in standardized format about recorded performances and their issue in the form of sound recordings.” Generally, this reflected a desire to adhere to Jepsen’s policy of making Jazz Records, 1942–1964 a discography of commercial recordings. However, one reviewer did express mild surprise that the first volume included some noncommercial material, including broadcasts, concerts, and unissued studio recordings.46 The treatment of European and Japanese releases was generally far more comprehensive than anything previously attempted, and equivalence tables helped deal with firms such as Blue Note that tended to issue the same album title in alternative formats (LP, EP, ten-inch, CD) with different combinations of tracks included.47 Everyone agreed that its musicians index, included at the end of each volume and not as an appendix at the end of the series, was much needed and badly overdue, and that the $45 price tag (later $50) was justified. But looking at the 644 pages needed to just get from A to Ba, many feared that by the time twenty or more volumes rolled around, sticker shock could become an issue. And when the first three volumes took over two and a half years to produce, then barely got halfway through C, a bit of gallows humor began to intrude into the euphoria. “I don’t know the age of the editor,” joked one reviewer in 1992, “but I hope to see the series completed, which could be around 2005!”48 Again the dissenter was Bob Rusch’s Cadence, which was cautious in its praise but expansive with its concerns. When the first volume appeared Rusch himself fretted that “it is almost 10 years dated and so it only offers a limited improvement of part of period covered by Bruyninckx’s 60 Years of Recorded Jazz. When the Bruyninckx first edition came out, I would refer to it only if I found Rust or Jepsen lacking. With [60 Years] it became my primary general reference, now I feel ironically this Jepsen update will fill the role that [ 50 Years] had; I will use it as a secondary reference.”49 Cadence’s drumbeat continued through the second volume: “The whole series limits itself to the years 1942–1980. . . . The weaknesses are its limited period (1942–80) and the slowness in its publishing schedule. . . . [I]f this series were now complete, it, plus Rust’s Jazz Records, would serve one’s needs as adequate general discographies. . . . [But] it may not only be very obsolete but, considering today’s computer technology, already surpassed by another work.”50 This was a rather odd conjunction of statements for

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early 1991. First, at this point nobody except Bruyninckx had considered anything like combining Rust and Jepsen’s discographies, and Rusch, previously Bruyninckx’s apologist, now seems to have forgotten all about him, even though Cadence was still selling his paperbacks.51 Moreover, except for a modest 1983 Art Tatum bio-discography by Arnold Laubich and Ray Spencer published by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, nobody was talking seriously about using computers to actually compile discographies rather than just to perform the desktop publishing functions, along the lines of what Raben was doing. Did Rusch know something nobody else did?

iii “This is the start of something big, a major endeavor,” wrote a reviewer about the just-released first volume of Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography in mid-1992. “[It is] the first discography of its kind to be born since the 1940’s work of Orin Blackstone.” Lord had been a mechanical engineer and then an executive at a container company, and he had known Cadence’s Bob Rusch since 1977. (He was not related to the Tom Lord who had compiled a 1976 discography of pianist-songwriter Clarence Williams.) In 1981 Rusch and Lord started a record label, Cadence Jazz. “I provided the funding,” Lord says. “Cadence did all production and sales. Although listed as executive producer I was mainly a silent partner with some say over the music.”52 Rusch and Lord are listed coproducers on thirteen albums, most in the mid-1990s. Lord’s first book project for Rusch was called the Cadence All-Years Index. Cadence was well known for its reviews, especially recordings and books, but also videos, anthologies, and even calendars. By the early 1990s there were well over 27,000 reviewed items. The All-Years Index was a guide to all articles, interviews, and reviews that had appeared in the magazine since its first issue in 1976. Books and music were cross-referenced by review author, artist/author, title, song title (for albums), and magazine issue and page. “PC’s were quite new,” Lord recalls. “[I]t wasn’t until about 1985 that I started working on the Cadence All-Years Index.”53 The first two volumes of the Index were partial, the first one (1989) covering only 1976–80 and the second (1991) extending through 1988. The third volume (1992) brought the Index up to “real time,” and from that point on it was published biennially until 2002. There had been some reoccurring data management problems during this development phase. The Index frequently confused identical proper names (Bill Evans, pianist and Bill Evans, saxophonist), leading to complaints that Lord’s software was inadequate,

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that he was relying too much on it for quality control, and that he needed to do more manual proofreading. Lord solved the problem, but only by the relatively cumbersome method of inserting an instrument identifier directly into the name field: “Bill Evans (pn)” vs. “Bill Evans (tsax)” for example. Discographer Michael Fitzgerald later pointed out that Lord’s system tended to use fields that “have been established as free-form text instead of as entities that are defined once and reused.”54 The reason turned out to be that Lord had used Lotus 1–2-3, a simple and inexpensive spreadsheet program, to prepare the All-Years Index. “I learned computing and [I] had the Lotus 1–2-3 spreadsheet program. I saw that it could be used to develop the index,” Lord says. “I made an agreement to supply the indexes, which they sold through their normal sales channel. I was able to print the index masters right off my computer and then a printing company here in Vancouver printed the number of required copies.” Later Lord converted the All-Years Index into Dbase IV. He continued (and continues) to index each issue of Cadence, even though no All-Years Index has been published for a decade; it is now in an online-compatible format called PHP. (Rusch sold the magazine in 2011, and after an interruption of several months the new owners began publishing in hard copy again in 2012.)55 Bob Rusch encouraged Lord to embark on The Jazz Discography: “Bob was always very discographically oriented and thought if I could publish a general jazz discography in a database there would be a market for it. The All-Years Index had quite limited press runs, so it did not factor into whether the jazz discography could be commercially successful. The key was that I was able to produce the discography in a database.” Unlike the All-Years Index, Lotus 1–2-3 was never used for The Jazz Discography—it was started on Dbase IV and was converted to a Windows-based product, MySQL, in 2001, about the time the book series concluded and Lord was converting it to an interactive CD.56 At the time The Jazz Discography was launched, Lord was trumpeted as “a computer whiz adept at getting info onto and off his floppies fast,” but he later admitted that he had begun working on a personal computer only in 1983 and had no prior discographic experience.57 Nevertheless, he consistently maintained that his advanced computer hardware and software would overcome the problems that had plagued previous discographers. “The computer is the engine that will keep this discography dynamic,” he wrote: In the past . . . arbitrary time frames were chosen for the compilation of a general jazz discography. It was necessary to choose an arbitrary cut-off point so that information could be alphabetized and put into chronological order. . . .

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However, the necessity for this has changed with the advent of modern database technology. . . . [S]essions and/or new CDs for old sessions can be input right up to a publishing deadline.58

He originally predicted that he could produce the entire series—twentyone volumes, about 15,000 pages—in four years, one book every two or three months. Moreover, he planned to use cycle formatting: as an independent unit, each volume would stay current. But trouble soon started. “Tom Lord has actually borrowed 99.9 percent of my listings,” complained Miles Davis bio-discographer Jan Lohmann soon after volume 5 appeared in 1993, “and that without any credit at all.” Lord didn’t deny this but countered that he “added a substantial number of CDs and made several corrections” to Lohmann’s material, and that he would publish “an extensive bibliography at the end of my work.”59 While the reviews were mostly positive, each book appeared so quickly that there weren’t many after the first couple of volumes; only Cadence regularly reviewed each as it appeared, more or less on schedule about three times a year. The consistent criticisms were its small typeface and high price at $45 per volume. A dissenter was the IAJRC  Journal, the house organ of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors, which complained that while “it is perfectly acceptable for discographers to utilize discographical research that has already been published (the less gentle of you would say ‘copy’), but that the work should be corrected and updated where necessary, otherwise the whole exercise seems pointless. Mr. Lord has done a bare minimum.”60 Other reviewers noted the same type of data sorting problems that the All-Years Index had experienced, especially in the early volumes of The Jazz Discography. The rapid pace of Lord’s production “has been at the expense of necessary editing and proofreading,” they noted, and in spite of Lord’s claim that “he spent three years designing and programming the database,” they found that that the “data entry system seems rather undiscriminating,” with recurring problems that appeared to “stem from database design.”61 Robert Iannapolo commented that “Lord had generally delivered a worthwhile and usable work,” but that “if there is a problem I’ve had . . . it’s in the area of editing and proofreading.” Lord replied a month later that “it’s unfortunate I cannot spend more time proofreading. Many subscribers to my work, however, find it’s a minor miracle these volumes can even be published every three months, let alone error free.” Later critics would use this as evidence that Lord, at least for the earliest volumes, retained no staff

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at all apart from one or two data-entry clerks to transcribe others’ discographies, and that he was trying to do everything else himself.62 The earthquake struck in early 1995, about the time volume 9 appeared. In the course of a comprehensive, two-part overview of the history of comprehensive jazz discographies in the academic journal Notes, Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye asserted that 60 to 65 percent of The Jazz Discography up to that point was “material [that] has been appropriated without permission from Bruyninckx . . . material lifted from the paperbacks.”63 Later, discographer Han Enderman would corroborate this in the pages of the journal Names & Numbers. For example, in The Jazz Discography, a March 9, 1928, recording session by Texas Alexander contains seven correct matrix listings followed by a master that is wildly out of sequence. Then follow several missing sessions, after which the sequence correctly resumes in early April. At first this appears to be random error, but the gap has a pattern: it exactly matches the contents of page A84 of Bruyninckx’s 60 Years. The error pattern is consistent with a typist’s coming to the bottom of page A83, skipping all of page A84, then resuming at the top of page A85.64 Enderman believed that “evidently Lord was in a hurry,” and had a discographically unsophisticated typist enter all the material as fast as it could be gathered. An even more egregious example was found within Lord’s entries for the Casa Loma Orchestra. After a December 4, 1940, session there appears the notation, “Later recordings by the Casa Loma Orchestra will be found in volume 3 of the Swing series,” below which follow the rest of the Casa Loma entries. The notation makes no sense here, but in Bruyninckx’s Swing Jazz paperback series, the Casa Loma Orchestra section was broken between volumes 2 and 3, at the end of 1940. Consequently the note was placed at the bottom of the last page of Bruyninckx’s volume 2 to indicate the carry­ over to volume 3. Similarly, an annotation to a session for the European group Focus 65 that reads, “For details see under Bulgarian Jazz Quintet, Progressive Jazz, Vol. 1, page 211,” is an accurate cross-reference in the Bruyninckx paperbacks but senseless when it appears on page F221 of The Jazz Discography. “Such finds surely bring a lot of emotion in the existence of a discographer,” notes Enderman, in one of the greatest understatements in the history of discography.65 Actually, the idea that Lord would resort to what Kernfeld and Rye called a “full scale appropriation” didn’t particularly outrage a lot of people, because, as Kernfeld and Rye themselves put it, “There is some small satisfaction within the discographical community with the idea of Bruyninckx having himself been plagiarized.” Their real concerns lay elsewhere. First,

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they believed that Bruyninckx was about the worst possible platform to build a new discography on: “Anyone who aims to improve jazz discography,” they warned, “must not take anything from Bruyninckx without first checking the information elsewhere.” As a result, while The Jazz Discography may have been very comprehensive, it was also comprehensively wrong. “He [Lord] would have us compare his project only to the [Bruyninckx] paperback series—which it unquestionably improves considerably—as if these two works existed in a vacuum,” noted Kernfeld and Rye. “[But] if comparisons are to be made, why stop at the paperbacks?”66 One possible reason Lord relied so heavily on Bruyninckx’s works, especially the Swing Journal paperbacks, is that they had been distributed under contract in North America by Cadence and its mail-order sales affiliate North Country. Some believed the Swing Journal books’ distribution contract gave the magazine the right to incorporate them in other Cadence publications. Robert Campbell, a Clemson University psychology professor who runs the “Red Saunders Research Foundation” website dedicated to biographies and discographies of Chicago-area musicians and record labels, was working as a Cadence reviewer when, in 1994, they published his Sun Ra discography. Campbell does not recall if there was a specific condition in his publishing contract giving The Jazz Discography access to the information in his Sun Ra work, “but I assumed it was part of the deal,” and when the time came for Lord to do his S volume, “I just sent him my stuff, and said, ‘do it this way,’ and that’s what he did.”67 So there is a good chance that the distribution agreement Bruyninckx signed for the Swing Journal series gave Cadence at least some use rights. Bruyninckx later said that he and Karl Emil Knudsen conferred in 1997 or 1998 about suing Lord for copyright infringement, but nothing came of it, and this would explain why. Several sources maintain that the Swing Journal series was supposed to conclude with a three- to six-volume blues and R&B series but that Bruyninckx pulled the plug on it in 1991 when he discovered how much information Lord was extracting from the paperbacks, and as a result Lord was forced to omit coverage of blues music from The Jazz Discography after including it in the A volume.68 But leaving aside whether Bruyninckx had been wronged (and how much), the question many discographers wanted answered was, What was the source of the 40 percent of The Jazz Discography that didn’t come from the Swing Journal paperbacks and 60 Years? Lord told Kernfeld and Rye that he eventually “came to recognize Bruyninckx’s weaknesses,” and as a result the work had improved. However, “we suspect that this improve-

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f i g u r e 9 . A page from Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography (1992–2002).

ment is largely the result of his appropriating from better sources than Bruyninckx,” Kernfeld and Rye wrote, “including, for example, the entire text of Jan Lohmann’s landmark discography of Miles Davis.” Reviewing the earlier exchange between Lohmann and Lord in Down Beat, they judged that “Lord’s reply supports our suspicion that he has no understanding of the meaning of plagiarism. . . . Evidently, he thinks that this sort of fullscale appropriation is acceptable so long as a citation appears.”69 But Kernfeld and Rye’s deepest cut was their surmise (correct, as it turned out) that Lord’s alleged computer wizardry wasn’t what it seemed. They were skeptical that he had made some kind of quantum leap in discographic technology: “Lord’s project seems to be a plagiarism [and] we now wonder if there could be any other explanation for the rapid speed at which his volumes have appeared.” Matthew Snyder later put it more succinctly: “The rapid production pace of the original printed volumes seemed too good to be true, and it was.” Chris Sheridan (a discographer whose work was “incorporated” by both Bruyninckx and Lord) complained that The Jazz Discography “achieves it much-trumpeted speed of production (its raison d’être over Raben/Jepsen) by not running the thorough checks claimed in its advertisements.”70 In reply, Tom Lord complained that “Kernfeld and Rye carry on like I am some pirate on the high seas.” However, he clearly clung to his own idiosyncratic definition of plagiarism: “stealing from other works with no input of my own.” He defended himself by listing his own contribution, usually the addition of a relatively small number of CDs, mostly of recent

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vintage. This was likely information received as a by-product of updating the All-Years Index. For example, in 1995 he wrote that “there are over 230 CDs in my Ellington section, none of which are listed by Rust and only a handful by Raben,” but the 1994 edition of the All-Years Index lists about two hundred Duke Ellington CDs that had appeared in Cadence since it began publication in 1976. In addition, Lord asserted that his layout and format were vastly superior: “They say I follow Bruyninckx exactly. What about the Bold type, the page headers and footers, the detailed spine references?” In a brief response, Barry Kernfeld noted, “Lord has so completely missed the point of our severe criticisms. His letter seems further confirmation of our suspicion that he does not understand the distinction between building upon the work of others and plagiarizing the work of others.”71 “Plagiarism” not a legal term of art. Moreover, it is almost impossible to define. The most common version is “the intentional or reckless appropriation of another’s creative output without attribution.”72 But it is almost impossible to prepare a factual compilation without relying on prior material—without, in the words of Sinclair Traill, using “what has gone before”—so does it apply to these works at all? Does it make a difference if the resulting product is creative and original, or if the plagiarist’s contribution is insipid, erroneous, or banal? Does the absolute or proportional size of the taking matter? Does intent count, or is negligent or reckless plagiarism just as bad as intentional plagiarism? Is there a difference between plagiarism that harms the commercial value or reputation of the original work and harmless extraction? George Hulme, for one, believes this is the essential difference: copying is one thing, but copying to achieve a marketplace advantage over the victim is quite another. “My objection to this wholesale copying is the effect it has on other published works. What is the point of working to create a discography if it will simply be copied into Bruyninckx and Lord?” His conclusion was both economic and ethical: “Who can say what effect the production . . . had on the sales of Rust and Jepsen. . . . Although it may be convenient for us to buy books such as Bruyninckx and Lord, I believe that it remains morally wrong to take the work of someone else and use it without acknowledgement or compensation, especially for financial gain.”73 This, in the end, proved to be the vital difference between Bruyninckx and Lord in the eyes of most discographers. After reviewing both 70/75 Years of Recorded Jazz and The Jazz Discogra­ phy, Kernfeld and Rye asked “whether anyone with an ethical concern for

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intellectual property” should purchase either. They concluded that in the case of Bruyninckx’s work “on balance we think it worthwhile,” while in Lord’s case “we think not.” This was a controversial conclusion that appeared to many readers to be a blatant double standard.74 Their rationale had less to do with either Lord or Bruyninckx than with Erik Raben and the glacial Jazz Records, 1942–80. Months before the first volume of Lord’s discography series appeared, Krin Gabbard had written in a Cadence review of volume 3 of Raben’s Jazz Records: For all its virtues, Raben’s volumes bear a substantial price tag [$55]. In good conscience I must urge potential buyers of Raben’s work to investigate first the forthcoming jazz discography of Tom Lord. . . . Unlike Raben and Bruyninckx, Lord has compiled his listings using a computer elaborately programmed to allow for regular updates, cross-listings, and indexes for performers and titles. . . . The first volume is due out soon with 600 pages and a sticker price of $45. Twenty more volumes are scheduled to appear at a pace of one every three months. If Lord maintains this stride, and if he can achieve the same level of comprehensiveness as Raben, he will have completely replaced Bruyninckx, and all other jazz discographies within five years.75

But there was one other important difference Gabbard overlooked: Cadence was selling the Lord books, but not the Raben works. As Gabbard admitted many years later, he had never seen a copy of Lord’s new discography at the time he wrote this; he was merely passing on an oral description given him by Bob Rusch, who was Lord’s business partner in The Jazz Discography project. It was this type of coverage that led Kernfeld and Rye to complain that “since the late 1970s Cadence has been by far the best magazine for the coverage of jazz from the bop style onwards . . . [ but] the crew at Cadence have not applied their standards to themselves, but indeed have lightened up, concurrently publishing extremely enthusiastic, self serving reviews of Lord’s project while quietly sweeping proprieties under the rug.”76 “Why aren’t there any further issues of the Raben discography?” demanded Canadian discographer Olaf Syman, “Is that project dead, killed by Tom Lord?”77 The answer, according to Kernfeld and Rye, was “probably”: It is possible that Lord’s project has already taken over the market for Raben’s volumes, and that Raben’s project will die. This possibility, in combination with the frustrations of using Bruyninckx’s paperbacks and his inept marketing of 70 Years, may mean that that, in jazz discography’s own little version of a hostile corporate takeover, Lord’s project has already emerged the victor.78

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While Lord posed a serious threat to Erik Raben’s now-floundering series, Bruyninckx, with his disdained loose-sheet format, minute subscription list (only about eight hundred for 70/75 Years) and haphazard marketing, wasn’t much of a danger. Also, Bruyninckx was helping Raben, and both men agreed that their projects served different audiences. “Bruyninckx did help with preparation of the preliminary manuscripts that were circulated to discographers,” Raben later explained. “I didn’t see any competition from his project—he didn’t include as many details as we did in Jazz Records 1942–80, but he was progressing faster.”79 On the other hand, Lord made no attempt to hide the fact that his series was made to compete with Jazz Records, 1942–80. “One area where Lord has shown clear superiority over all other discographers is in the area of publicity and marketing,” noted Michael Fitzgerald.80 After discographer Chris Sheridan criticized him in late 1996, Lord replied, “I recently had a cursory glance at the latest Jazz Records, Vol. 5, and found some sessions actually missing. . . . How is this possible after some 25 years of research. . . . [W]here were the world’s leading discographers, that Mr. Sheridan mentions, when these texts were being passed around?” The line in the sand was now drawn: Lord was a businessman, a marketer who was peddling a product—the others were either professional academics or amateur scholars undertaking research. From that point forward the name Tom Lord became anathema in the community of music scholars and professional discographers. “Lord is more a collator than a researcher,” observed Edward Berger of the Institute for Jazz Studies. “He seems unqualified to be a jazz discographer,” echoed Michael Fitzgerald of the University of the District of Columbia.81 Whereas Lord registered the copyright of each volume of The Jazz Discography in both Canada and the United States, it appears that Bruyninckx hadn’t registered the copyrights of any of his discographies anywhere, which would have made legal action very difficult. What Bruyninckx did do was quickly discontinue the blues volumes of the Swing Journal paperbacks and hide the existence of the off-and-on 70/75 Years project from Cadence after learning that they were sponsoring Lord’s series. In the meantime he confined himself to writing caustic letters to discography magazines and preparing his next update, which he decided would have to appear on CD so he could distribute it himself, without the need for intermediaries like Bob Rusch and Cadence.82

chapter six

Specialized Discographies: Part 1

i In 1964 Paul Sheatsley predicted that “the stubborn refusal of the idea of a general discography to die—in spite of the sad examples of Blackstone, the Jazz Directory and Delaunay’s final effort—testifies to the need for this kind of volume.” But by the time the discographic community lost its preeminent historian in 1989, one could be forgiven for believing that the era of the comprehensive discography might have passed with him. Rust hadn’t published a new edition of  Jazz Records, A-Z in a decade (Storyville’s quirky little 1983 reprint notwithstanding), nor did the long-sought replacement for Jepsen’s Jazz Records, 1942–196X seem to be anywhere on the horizon, and Bruyninckx appeared to have given up the game altogether in favor of his Swing Journal paperbacks.1 Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye complained that “the rapidly expanding world of jazz, blues, and gospel discography [had become] splintered. . . . Rust on jazz to 1942; Jepsen, jazz from 1942 into the mid-1960s; Godrich and Dixon, blues and Gospel to 1943; Leadbitter and Slaven, blues from 1943 to 1966.” Although they found it “a shame that all these projects . . . cannot have been united by someone,” they admitted that as early as 1970 that goal had become “at least impractical, if not a complete fantasy.” Moreover, there had grown up a body of specialized biographical, label, topic, and genre discographies so extensive that many music librarians believed the most pressing need in discography during the 1970s was not “unification,” but the creation of a dynamic bibliography of discographies and the standardizing of discographic formats. (Twenty-five years later, neither had been fully achieved.)2

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Unlike Kernfeld and Rye, many welcomed the new emphasis on specialization. “I would think the future of discographies lies more in the development of selective discographies,” D. Russell Connor told a 1968 conference at the Institute of Jazz Studies. “It is the practical way to satisfy demands for more intense examination of a particular sector of recorded material.” Ethnomusicologist Pekka Gronow agreed: “Musicologists will, in the future, show far greater interest for discographic work than now. But they will also put new demands on it.” Gronow pointed out that previously “mu­ sicology” had meant the study of Western concert music, with its welldeveloped notational systems. But music scholars were increasingly turning to vernacular music, which often lacked scores. Their basic source material therefore became sound recordings. “And,” Gronow concluded, “the largest existing body of such materials are commercial phonograph records.”3 Discographers had gone beyond merely listing or cataloging records and were now trying to unravel and describe their contents, effectively making them the research partners of musicologists and ethnomusicologists. Moreover, such extensive analysis was becoming less and less compatible with existing discographic formats, originally developed for record collectors and often still little more than highly detailed catalog layouts. The one size fits all approach no longer worked. A discography now had to have a well-defined topic, an exact taxonomical method for admitting the information appropriate to that topic, precise data, a specific presentation format that maximized the usefulness of those data, and an overall development approach and marketing package targeted to a preselected, well-defined audience.

ii Single-artist discographies, also called bio-discographies, were among the first specialized works, and they have been the most numerous over the years. “In reality, discographies can be looked at as a musical biography— you can chart a musician’s development and get a feel for his musical history,” Cadence magazine’s Bob Rusch once observed. Victor C. Calver’s 1934 Ellington “handlist,” discovered by George Hulme in 2003, not only is the earliest known freestanding bio-discography, it may be the oldest monograph discography of all.4 Many of the early bio-discography pamphlets were simply extensions of the discographic magazine articles appearing in the 1920s. The British Gramophone and French Jazz Hot were probably the first, but in October

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1939 the American Down Beat started running George Hoefer’s Hot Box column­, and in 1941 Bill Elliott, secretary of Britain’s “no. 1 Rhythm Club,” began his Collector’s Corner feature in Melody Maker. In 1955 Albert Mc­ Carthy and Max Jones started Jazz Monthly, which ran a discographic feature almost every month. In September 1936 Edgar Jackson, in his Gram­ ophone column, explained in a general way how matrix numbers worked, and Elliott’s Collector’s Corner column of October 30, 1942, was probably the first in-depth presentation, at least in English, of how they could be deciphered.5 There were soon many small magazines on both sides of the Atlantic focusing partially or wholly on record research and discography. Discography was one of the earliest, in 1942, but it lasted only a couple of years before being absorbed into Jazz Music (itself renamed Jazz Times in 1960). The Discophile fared better, lasting from 1948 to 1958, when it was merged into Matrix, George Hulme’s discographic newsletter. Matrix itself lasted until 1975. Albert McCarthy and Malcolm Walker’s Discographical Forum began in 1960 and continued off and on into the 1980s, mostly under Walker’s management. In the United States, Gordon Gullickson’s Record Changer ran from 1944 to 1957, and Orin Blackstone’s two specialty journals, Jazzfinder ( Jazz Finder) and Playback, ran from 1948 to 1952. Record Research was the longest-lived of the American efforts, extending from 1955 into the 1990s. In Switzerland, Jazz Statistics, Kurt Mohr’s base, ran from 1958 to 1963. A little later, starting in the 1960s, Laurie Wright’s Storyville also became a prolific publisher of article-length discographies, mostly of traditional jazz. In addition to sponsoring two editions of Brian Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z and Dixon and Godrich’s Blues and Gospel Records, Wright was also responsible for several book-length artist discographies. John R. T. Davies, writing as “Ristic,” serialized a discography of Thomas “Fats” Waller in five issues of Jazz Journal in summer 1948, then collated them for a 1950 book, The Music of Thomas “Fats” Waller. A revised edition by Davies and R. M. Cooke was published three years later by the “Friends of Fats Society.”6 When Wright began Storyville in 1965, he invited Davies along as a sort of staff discographer. ( John R. T. Davies should not be confused with Ron Davies, the discographer who got crosswise with Brian Rust over the Clarence Williams article back in 1946. Ron wrote mainly for the Discophile.) John Davies and Bob Kumm revised Davies’s earlier Waller discography, which Wright ran in ten issues of Storyville between 1965 and 1967. Wright, in turn, incorporated them into his 1992 Storyville-published biography Fats in Fact. Earlier, Wright and Davies had written Morton’s Music, a 1969

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bio-discography of Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. It was revised and re­ issued in 1980, also by Storyville, as Mr. Jelly Lord. Finally, in 1976 Wright published Tom Lord’s 1976 Clarence Williams discography, which had also been serialized in Storyville. In addition to the usual biographical, critical, and discographic information, Lord’s book included transcriptions, something virtually unheard of at the time. (This Tom Lord is not related to the Tom Lord of The Jazz Discography.)7 But it was yet another serialization that formed the base for what is probably the first book-length single-artist discography, Brian Rust and Walter C. Allen’s King Joe Oliver. Harald Grut had prepared an Oliver discography in 1949 for Jazz Music. Rust then sent in a series of “additions and corrections” that ended up being longer than Grut’s original submission!8 However, Allen and Rust’s book was much more than simply an enlarged magazine article—it was the prototype of a new subgenre, the integrated bio-discography. Allen was a ceramics engineer by profession, working first in private industry, then at Rutgers. This gave him the means to pursue his passion for traditional jazz. When Rust first visited the United States in 1951, one of his main goals had been to seek out Allen and compare notes. Allen ran a mail-order business selling hard-to-find jazz books and magazines, and over the years this segued into a book publishing house, issuing King Joe Oliver as the first of perhaps a dozen works, most written by others. As much as anyone, he was responsible for getting Marshall Stearns’s Institute of Jazz Studies located at its current home at Rutgers-Newark, just a short train ride from downtown Manhattan.9 King  Joe Oliver ’s first forty-two pages, mostly prepared by Allen and based on interviews with twenty-six musicians, was given over to a narrative of Oliver’s life and a critical analysis of his work. The remaining two-thirds contained an Oliver discography painstakingly prepared by Rust. Every known King Oliver record was included, whether he appeared as a leader, sideman, or anonymous participant, but like most of Rust’s previous works, only the first commercial release was listed, almost always a 78. “Is it necessary that every issue and pirated dub . . . be documented, in all three speeds, not to mention tapes?” Allen asked in a column he wrote the year before King Joe Oliver appeared. “My feeling is, ‘the hell with it, better to concentrate on defining personnels, matrix and take numbers, and release dates of original and other contemporary issues.’ ” Nat Hentoff agreed: “Time is running out for historians of early jazz,” he argued in Down Beat, “[and] it has almost disappeared for those all-too-few researchers who are working on the even more illuminating—and less researched—fields of pre-jazz.”10

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“One of the objects of this discography, the identification of every King Oliver solo, has not been achieved in full, but very few have still to be cleared up,” wrote Eric Townley in a review of Allen and Rust’s book. “Possibly they never will be.” Originally privately published in paperback by Allen, King Joe Oliver gained a wide readership when the British commercial publisher Sidgwick and Jackson reprinted it as the sixth title in its Jazz Book Club Library, a series of popular, inexpensive hardbacks that ultimately reached sixty-six volumes.11

Europeans became particularly fond of issuing small, single-artist chapbooks of twenty to eighty pages, and several authors prepared scores of them starting in the late 1950s. One reason for this proliferation was the availability, beginning in 1959, of the Bielefelder Katalog Jazz, a listing of all jazz records produced in Germany and those produced by foreign labels with German distribution. Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, who, with Alun Morgan, served as Jazz Monthly’s in-house discographer during the 1950s, put together over fifty of these pamphlets. The early ones were either self-published or issued by Denmark’s Debut Records. (Not the same as the late 1950s American label of that name.) Examples include Count Basie (1959, revised 1960) and three-volume sets for Duke Ellington (1959) and Louis Armstrong (1960). Karl Emil Knudsen, who published most of Jazz Records, 1942–196X, also issued many of Jepsen’s later single-artist chapbooks, most notably Charlie Parker (1968), Miles Davis (1969), and John Coltrane (1969). He also published revised versions of many of Jepsen’s original Debut Records pamphlets.12 Kurt Mohr, who had earlier helped Charles Delaunay with Hot discographie encyclopédique, was another prolific chapbook discographer. Born in Switzerland in the 1920, he was a chemist by profession. Unable to get American jazz records in the 1930s, he started importing them from En­ gland for himself and his friends. By the late 1930s he was contributing article-length discographies to Pickup in England, Jazzfinder in America, and Jazz Hot in France, although he later recalled that he did not start formally compiling his files until 1943. After World War II he quit his chemistry career, moved to Paris, and started work at Vogue Records. In 1945 he wrote Discographie du jazz, a guide to American jazz records pressed in Europe. He published dozens of article-length discographies, and several were reprinted as chapbooks, most by the Swiss journal Jazz Statistics. The chapbooks were free to the journal’s subscribers and sold to others for the equivalent of $2

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to $4. Early examples included Mohr’s Tiny Bradshaw discography and a Lionel Hampton listing by Otto Flückiger, both released in 1961.13 In the late 1950s Mohr moved to the Odeon Record Company, the French distributor for the Chicago labels King and Vee-Jay, and here he gained an interest in blues and R&B, which thereafter became his focus. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he often contributed to Mike Leadbitter’s Blues Unlimited and to Soul Bag, a Paris-based journal Mohr helped found in 1968. In 1972 he and photographer Emmanuel Choisnel took an extended research trip to the United States, spending most of their time in Chicago. Many musicians were shocked when Mohr reeled off the names of bands they had played in a decade earlier. In many cases they had gone through a dozen or more groups since and had no recollection of their names or who played in them. Mohr, in turn, was flabbergasted by the number of blues artists he encountered who had given up music simply because it didn’t pay enough to support a family.14 Another jazz insider was the Dane Arne Astrup. Born in 1922, he cut his first record as a tenor saxophonist in 1942. After the war he led and arranged for both big bands and small groups, mostly in Sweden. In 1959 he stopped performing to teach at the Hellerup Music School, but he returned in the 1970s to record with Frank Rosolino, Jimmy Skidmore, Red Rodney, and several of his own big bands. In 1979 he edited his first discography, of Stan Getz, a 119-page chapbook that included eleven photographs from Astrup’s personal collection. This was followed in 1980 by a Zoot Sims tome, then a Gerry Mulligan discography in 1990. Astrup later documented the work of Brew Moore and, with coeditor John Kuehn, clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. All of Astrup’s small books were published by the Bidstrup firm in Søborg, Denmark, which also printed discographies by other compilers, such as Thorbjorn Sjogren’s 1992 Duke Jordan work. At 136 pages, Sjogren’s discography was really too extensive to be considered a chapbook, but it was a reworked edition of a small, self-published Jordan pamphlet he had issued a decade before. Arne Astrup died in 2005.15 Two other Low Country discographers kept chapbook publishing alive into the new century. Dutchman Gerard Bielderman started documenting European jazz musicians in 1984, ranging from British neotraditionalists to German and Dutch members of the avant-garde, with his EuroJazz Disco series topping number 138 by 1994. By the 1990s he had turned his attention to American swing revivalists (Swingin’ American Discographies, twenty or so by 2009) and New Orleans-genre veterans (Sounds of New Orleans Discographies, about twelve as of 2006). Almost all ran from thirty to seventy pages and sold for less than $20 in the United States.16

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Dieter Salemann, in Berlin, similarly embarked on a series of discographies, Roots of Modern American Jazz, focusing on traditional artists. The first twelve were published in Switzerland by Jazz Circle Basel and the last four by himself. Salemann was a second-generation German discographer, a student of the noted Horst Lange. Lange, born in 1924, had been inspired by Schleman’s Rhythm on Record and Delaunay’s Hot Discography, which he managed to acquire as a teenager. He was taken prisoner by the Americans in World War II but, being fluent in English, was able to secure work as a translator after the war. He did his work professionally and well, and as the allies demobilized, he was often given the V-Discs that would otherwise have been trashed. Lange started writing for Jazz Podium and Schlagzeug in the 1950s and wrote a 652-page discography of jazz records, Die deutsche Jazz-Discographie, issued in Germany in 1955. He was most widely known for Die deutsche “78er”: Discographie der Hot-Dance- und Jazz-Musik, 1903– 1958, a discography of indigenous German jazz and dance band music. Published in 1966, it was revised in 1978. In 1978 he published The Fabulous Fives, a work he helped compile with Ron Jewson, Derek Hamilton-Smith, and Ray Webb of Storyville magazine. Lange died in Berlin in 2001.17 A generation younger than Lange, Salemann was too young to have been conscripted. (His father, however, was killed in action.) Fortunately the Salemann family home in Berlin survived intact and was in the Allied sector. He began listening to jazz shows on the Armed Forces [Radio] Network (AFN) and checked out the growing number of jazz books available in the US Information Center’s “Amerika Haus” library. “German radio stations very seldom featured jazz,” Salemann recalls, “and it was late at night when they did.” Jazz records started to appear in stores about 1951, and after that Salemann remembers that availability was not the problem. (“What a selection! . . . [T]oday it’s still unbelievable to me.”) Money was. They were relatively expensive, given the state of the economy. One a month was his usual limit. In 1952 Salemann joined the German Jazz Collectors Group. (“Berlin’s Hot Club was very elite,” he notes. It was “restricted mostly to traditional sounds, not for progressives like me!”) That was where he met Lange, who, along with Franz Heinrich and Gerard Görsch, had founded the organization generally known by its German-language acronym, GJC. “They took me under their wings, gave me freedom to write record reviews and to hold recitals about my modernistic new heroes,” Salemann says. “I personally owe them all my dues.”18 He became a writer, starting with the GJC’s magazine Jazz Review and soon working his way up to commercial jazz journals, then radio script

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work and album liner notes. The pace of his discographic work accelerated as the demand for radio scripts fell off after 2000. Although the “Roots” discographies usually included only the first record issued from a given master (typically a 78), plus the most recent, most complete, best, or most available version on LP or CD, the books also contained such historical data as tour itineraries, broadcasts, and transcriptions and several indexes. Thus they tended to push the limit of what could properly be considered a chapbook, typically containing over a hundred full-size sheets, spiral binding, and a price tag of $20 to $30. Coming later to the scene was the Amsterdam-based discography journal Micrography and its successor, Names & Numbers. The former began publishing in 1979 and continued for seventy-eight issues. Under the editorship of Erik M. Bakker, it switched to a new name and numbering series in April 1985, but it was published for only six issues before halting production in early 1987. With the assistance of Coen Hofmann and Gerard Hoogeveen, Names & Numbers was revived in fall 1998. In 2002 Hofmann and Hoogeveen assumed control of the magazine as editor and business manager, respectively. So far about fifty-seven issues have been produced in the new series. One advantage enjoyed over the years by Micrography/Names & Numbers Discographical Publications has been that updates and corrections to its books can be published in the companion journal, an echo of Orin Blackstone’s Index to Jazz books and his Jazzfinder magazine of the late 1940s.19 The early Micrography discographies, from the first half of the 1980s, were inconsistent with the European chapbook tradition: 80 to 150 pages long, $8 to $15 in price. They included Vic Lewis, Kai Winding, Buddy Collette (by future editor/proprietor Hofmann), and Dizzy Gillespie. The revised Names & Numbers organization has generally expanded the size and scope of its offerings. A 2001 Lester Young discography by Piet Koster and Harm Mobach was 509 pages long, and a Charlie Parker discography prepared a year later, also by Koster, ran to 767 pages. What did stay the same was the high quality of production, as Bob Weir noted when he reviewed the Lester Young work: “This book, in English, is first rate in all respects. It is meticulously researched, clearly set out and very easy to use. . . . A major strength of the work is the thoroughness of the indexing. . . . [E]verything is cross-referenced.” Quality costs, however: the Young discography was listed at ¤75 (about $105), and the Parker book was priced at ¤80 ($115). Even when Names & Numbers Discographical Publications chose to issue shorter works, such as 90-page Helen Merrill and 135-page Shorty Rogers discographies (both in 2003), they were priced at ¤27 ($35). Clearly, in pur-

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suing a high-quality, fully indexed, and cross-referenced work, Names & Numbers elected to climb out of the chapbook world and into the same rarefied heights that only a handful of other firms, by now mostly international scholarly book publishers, were flying in.20 Although most chapbook discographies have originated in Europe, a few notable American chapbook series have been produced over the years. Ernie Edwards of Whittier, California, was for a time one of the most prolific discographers in the United States. A former professional saxophonist, he turned to discography as the demands of an increasingly successful family business pulled him in from the road. He published several articlelength discographies, mostly of big bands, in Discophile, Jazz Statistics, Jazz Monthly, and Matrix during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1963 he founded a publishing company, Erngeobil, along with George Hall and Bill Horst, and they published about thirty books in all, again mostly big band works. Several were expanded versions of Edwards’s discographic articles, including Les Brown (1964–65), a three-volume Woody Herman effort (1965), and a multivolume big band anthology. After Edwards died in 1970, Hall took over Erngeobil, but relatively few additional volumes appeared.21 A slightly later big band specialist was Charles Garrod, who published almost a hundred pamphlet discographies (most of which he also compiled or helped to compile) from the 1970s until the 1990s through his Florida-based Joyce Music Publications. A decade or so later, his operation had moved to Portland, Oregon, and changed its name to the Joyce Record Club, but it was still issuing new and updated discographies of fifty to seventy pages, now mostly compiled by others.22

A relatively recent (and highly specialized) variant on the short, singleartist discography is the solography. Jan Evensmo, the earliest, and so far the most visible proponent of this still-emerging concept, explains that “since the most important factor in jazz is the improviser himself, i.e. the artist, documentation should also be concentrated upon the individual performer.” The idea of the biographically based discography is no longer new, but Evensmo points out that “the next logical step is almost never taken: the identification of actual solo performances and the details associated with the improvisation itself.”23 The progenitor of this type of work was Hugues Panassié’s 1951 Discographie critique des meilleurs disques de jazz. Although still basically a critical listening guide along the lines of Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide,

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edited by a team assembled by Albert McCarthy, Panassié’s book was more expansive, and this let him include a great deal of individual solo information that normally would not have appeared in a jazz discography. He was still conservative in his inclusion of modern jazz, and thus rather selective. “Of course, the word ‘modern’ is taken in its true sense,” Panassié wrote, “and not the progressive pseudo-jazz (bop, cool, the music of Stan Kenton), which has nothing to do with real jazz, and not one title of which, therefore should appear.” Yet many contemporary musicians such as Lucky Thompson, Nat Cole, and Earl Bostic appeared, so the work was no exercise in atavism, but true to his word, almost all the Fifty-Second Street bop headliners were left out. To its credit, Dan Morgenstern believes it had probably the best by-ear solo attributions of any discography ever done and is therefore a useful reference for this purpose. It was republished in 1958 in greatly expanded form, mostly in French.24 But it is Evensmo who has been the most enthusiastic proponent of the concept. He has been involved with the Norwegian Jazz Archives since 1991, publishing his first hard-copy solography—an anthology of tenor saxophonists—in 1968–69, and his Jazz Solography Series, which included both individuals and groups of instrumentalists (guitarists, for example), eventually ran to about fourteen volumes. “Later I decided to document the history of the tenor saxophone more systematically,” he explained. This resulted in the History of Jazz Tenor Saxophone—Black Artists, a six-volume chronologically based series that in theory covered everything from 1917 to 1960. In reality, about three-quarters of its length was given over to the period between the end of the war and 1960.25 His format, like that of the typical discography, is session-based. But if, say, four titles were recorded at a given session, and only one contained a solo by the subject artists, the session will note only that three other titles were recorded that day for Label X. To find out the titles, master numbers, and other relevant information for these tunes, you have to consult one of the standard discographies. Any relevant master containing a significant solo is listed in the usual format: 12345–1 12346–1 12346–2

I’ve Got Rhythm Cherokee Cherokee

Solo 16 bars (M) Solo 16 bars (ssax)(F) Solo 16 bars (M) + 4 bars on bridge (ssax)

The format here is from Evensmo’s History of the Tenor Saxophone series, so the omission of an instrument identifier indicates that the musician

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was soloing with a tenor sax. For example, during the hypothetical session above, the artist soloed for one sixteen-bar chorus on “I’ve Got Rhythm.” The (M) is not an instrument but indicates that the solo was taken at a medium speed (128–184 beats a minute). On the first take of Cherokee, he took a fast, one-chorus solo on a soprano sax. On the second take his main solo was on the tenor, then he switched to the soprano for the bridge. Note that there is no issue information such as label or label number. “For those interested in this, a discography can be consulted, says Evensmo. “If discographical information should have been included, my work would never have been finished, and the purpose of the book would disappear in numbers.” Evensmo summarizes the difference: the solography treats music, not records.26 Although he says the solography “was never adopted by other jazz scholars as an interesting and necessary means for proper musical documentation,” a few other bio-discographers have used it. Evensmo himself points to Frank Büchmann-Møller, whose 1990 Lester Young discography comes very close to merging the solography and the bio-discography. Evensmo feared that putting the two together would result in a data-heavy book that “would disappear in numbers,” but Büchmann-Møller proved it can be done by applying selective judgment and good editing.27 Before he embarked on his “roots of ” discographic series during the mid-1990s, Dieter Salemann published a series of “solographies” he edited with Dieter Hartmann and Michael Vogel. Their list of subjects, as would be expected, were mostly modernists such as Sahib Shihab, Sonny Stitt, and Wardell Gray, who tended to specialize in extended solos played atop straight chord changes or bebop warhorses like “I’ve Got Rhythm” but also included some lesser-known European modernists like Stan Hasselgård. As was true for his later Roots of Modern American Jazz series, they included ancillary information such as band routes, engagements, and touring personnel.28 By the time he got to his History of Jazz Tenor Saxophone—Black Artists series, Evensmo was well beyond the pamphlet or chapbook stage. Volume 1 (1917–34, published 1996) was 139 pages long, but volume 4 (1945–49, 1999) came in at 489 pages, and the rest of the series were all near 500 pages. In 2011 Evensmo decided to move his publishing online and started the JazzArcheology website. “A strategic decision had to be made with regard to future research work and publication,” Evensmo says. “To continue to print and distribute research reports as large as telephone directories seemed to be too costly [and] to try to profit upon all the production, marketing and distribution costs involved would certainly result in a consumer

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price prohibitively high.” So he elected to create a website and make all his work—past and present—available free. “No need, really, to try to earn money from work which anyway is just a labor of love.”29 The History of Jazz Tenor Saxophone—Black Artists volumes are all there, and most of the Jazz Solography series has been uploaded, with the rest due up soon. “You may dislike the idea of segmenting art into individual components,” concludes Evensmo, “[b]ut often an excellent solo may not be recognized, because the surroundings are mediocre.”30

Instead of chapbooks or pamphlets, most Americans chose to concentrate on larger, more ambitious, single-artist discographies with narrative biographies and critical analysis. The first single-artist work after King Joe Oliver to expand beyond a list of sessions or records into a comprehensive bio-discography was D. Russell Connor’s BG—Off the Record (1958), which traced the career of Benny Goodman. Connor spent years assembling what he called “a greatly widened picture of the performing life of an artist, as contrasted to the narrower view of the commercial-recording life.” He included electrical transcriptions, air checks, television and movie transcriptions, privately recorded concerts, and other unissued material. “The future of discographies lies more in the development of selective discographies,” he told a conference of discographers in 1971, “and, most likely, in the combined bio-discography. . . . [I]t is the practical way to satisfy demands for more intense examination of a particular sector of recorded material [because] sheer bulk and prohibitive cost rule out inclusion of in-depth specialization and biographical material in general discographies.” One reason for reaching beyond regular commercial recordings was the narrow and unrepresentative scope of Goodman’s career on records. Even including numerous recordings made under fictitious names, Connor found six hundred Columbia masters that he could prove Goodman made up to 1955, but he believed there were at least another thousand “possibles,” both on Columbia and on other labels.31 He could afford such an extensive project, including publishing it himself, because he was a bank executive. However, his lack of formal training showed in his interpretive material, which at times could have used more analytical rigor. “It is a valuable and, as far as I know and have been able to check, accurate and thorough work,” noted Martin Williams, “but as its chatty, friendly style, its sometimes questionable critical comments, and its almost constant enthusiasm perhaps indicate, it may really be [too much] a

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labor of love.” Dan Morgenstern agreed: “It seems the work of a fan rather than a researcher.” Indeed, by the 1960s Connor was serving as Goodman’s financial adviser. Connor paid for a print run of two thousand copies, which eventually sold out, although it did take several years. (At Goodman’s insistence, the US State Department bought two hundred to distribute during his 1962 Soviet Union tour, four years after the book was published.)32 To his credit, Connor paid attention to his critics, improved his product, and in 1969 produced a second edition, much revised. This time he did not try to publish it himself but turned to Arlington House, much to his own relief. “Publication is the discographer’s major problem,” he admitted, and self-publishing, he had discovered, “is unrewarding. The expense involved, the myriad problems presented, the lack of expertise in advertising and distribution, all combine to bury the discographer. . . . [I]t doesn’t work well.”33 This was the time of Arlington House’s grand discographical dreams. It had already taken on Brian Rust’s Complete Entertainment Discography as well as Moonlight Serenade, a Glenn Miller bio-discography by John Flower. Soon it would also publish Rust’s American Dance Band Discography and a new edition of Jazz Records, A-Z. Apparently the plan was to use the Rust trilogy as a base for a series of single-artist big band discographies. The result would be a coordinated reference library comprehensively covering the prewar era. The firm’s abandonment of the project would have long-term detrimental consequences. Rust omitted the blockbuster white bands, such as Goodman and Miller, in the Arlington House editions of  Jazz Records, A-Z and American Dance Band Discography because they had been comprehensively covered in Connor’s and Flower’s books. Later, long after Arlington’s scheme fell apart, Rust (or a designated successor) had to reinsert the excised information. But this was now often a problem, because the information had worked its way into genre discographies of blues, gospel, R&B, or western swing prepared by reliable discographers, some of whom got their start working with Rust. Thus, rather than simply lifting this material (much of it original research) and inserting it wholesale into his latest edition, Rust chose to be selective. This in turn fed patently false rumors that Rust was biased against black musicians, especially black big bands and non-jazz dance orchestras. These problems can be traced back to Arlington House’s marketing plans from the late 1960s and early 1970s, not the ideological beliefs of any discographer or group of discographers.34 Connor recalled that Arlington House initially printed 4,500 copies of its 1969 edition of the Goodman bio-discography. He later asserted that

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Arlington House then sold the rights to at least two other publishers, who printed as many as 15,000 additional copies. (Supposedly they can be distinguished from the Arlington House edition because only the Arlington House printing has blue boards and a $10 price printed on the dust jacket. The others have black boards and no price.) Connor claims no royalties were paid for these additional editions. He sued Arlington House, which returned his copyrights in 1986.35 The third edition was originally to be printed by a small New York publisher with limited experience in music books. The production fell apart, and Connor again had to sue to get his copyrights returned. But Dan Morgenstern had been so impressed by BG—On the Record that he had his Institute of Jazz Studies publish the third edition as the sixth book in its Studies in Jazz series under the title Listen to His Legacy. An update eight years later followed as Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up (1996; Studies in Jazz 23).36 Howard Walter, on the other hand, nailed his bio-discography of Jack Teagarden on the first try. Walter Allen published it in 1960. So much space was given over to Teagarden’s personal and career information that the book has often been categorized as a biography with a very good discography appended to it. As an example of just how vague this line can be, Allen’s own Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians, which he brought out in 1973, is generally considered one of the best of the specialty bio-discographies, if not the epitome, although its format and content are little different from BG—On the Record and Jack Teagarden’s Music. Rust and Allen’s King Joe Oliver had completely separate biographical and discographical sections, but BG—On the Record, Jack Teagarden’s Music, and now Hendersonia had biographical chapters in chronological order, each followed by a discography. In Hendersonia, the last chapter was followed by an alphabetical list of arrangements, a chronological list of compositions, bibliography, sideman biographies, and title and label number indexes. “It is, in fact, four or five books combined,” lauded Jazz Journal. “Mr. Allen, who has been working on this project for some twenty years, has created something which will make all other discographical books look like midgets in comparison.” At 650 pages, it received praise from Dan Morgenstern as “a landmark of dedicated research and minutely detailed information.”37 The “include everything” school did have its limits, however, and these were highlighted by two contrasting self-published works: William Lee’s 1980 Stan Kenton book (730 pages) and Manfred Selchow’s 1998 Vic Dickenson bio-discography Ding! Ding! (947 pages). Reviewing the Dickenson book, Dan Morgenstern captured their essence when he coined

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the term scrapbook bio-discographies: they reproduced flyers, ads, press releases, reviews, photos, record labels, and interview transcripts—“the categories of ephemera found in scrapbooks.” But while the reviewers generally liked Ding! Ding! they were less enthusiastic about Lee’s Stan Kenton: Artistry in Motion. The difference was mainly in approach: Selchow treated his scrapbook memorabilia as entertaining visual tidbits, while Lee handled his like dead serious stuff. The problem was Kenton and his reputed aspirations to Paul Whitemantype art music grandeur. (In retrospect, critics/historians still debate whether that was something of a put-on, a marketing gimmick, a little of both, or neither.) It was “a problem with all Kentonia,” noted Cadence. “[I]t’s so clouded with defensiveness and attacks that any commentary on the man and his music becomes controversial.” Thus, instead of emphasizing material with lots of visual appeal, Lee piled up reviews, interview transcripts, and other (often duplicative) textual material. As a result “The reading here comes off much like the exploitive booklets the bands, bookers and agents used to prepare for press and promoters . . . documentation of sorts, but not the most thrilling reading.” On the other hand, Morgenstern found Ding! Ding! “particularly rich in materials that enhance the text . . . of interest even if Albert Victor Dickenson had not been one of jazz’s true originals.”38 There is, after all, a fundamental difference between a scrapbook and a dossier, although to the uninitiated, they may superficially look the same. Starting in the late 1970s, a few publishers of academic reference works started to show an interest in discographies, but for some reason they steered clear of bio-discographies, instead favoring topical or (especially) label-based works. Greenwood Press published the first of a long series of label discographies in 1979 when it issued Michel Ruppli’s Atlantic Records book, but it didn’t publish a single-artist discography until 1987, when it released Chris Sheridan’s Count Basie: A Bio-discography. Reviewers from both academic and jazz journals said basically the same thing: it was great; Greenwood’s books are almost always great; but nobody can afford them. Sheridan’s book came in at almost a thousand pages; it included two indexes, a bibliography, a Basie travel itinerary, and a cross-reference guide to the Basie-Murray autobiography Good Morning Blues; and it was librarybound. It also cost $75. “As with most Greenwood Publications, the price may be discouraging,” wrote William Shaman (who was, somewhat surprisingly, a librarian), but the book is essential and can be recommended without reservation.”39 Greenwood subsequently published Sheridan’s bio-discographies of

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Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk. Sheridan later became one of the most vocal critics of  Tom Lord’s multivolume The Jazz Discography, suggesting that the timing of the Ba volume was adjusted because Lord wanted to wait for his Basie book to be released so he could copy all its information before going to press with his own work. Lord attempted (rather weakly) to refute him by pointing out that he had added several dozen CD issues that did not appear in the Sheridan’s book (he probably got these from Cadence). Later, Sheridan implied that he had Greenwood delay his Monk discography, Brilliant Corners, until after Lord released his Mo volume. Increas­ ing the level of animosity, JazzMedia, the copublisher and distributor of Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80, had published yet another Sheridan discography, the two-volume Jazz Records: The Specialist Labels, and Sheridan had been an active participant in Raben’s update project since its early days.40 Lord was frequently accused in the 1990s of pursing a strategic course deliberately intended to kill off the slower, more scholarly, costlier, and therefore commercially marginal Jazz Records, 1942–80. While Greenwood did publish notable single-artist discographies by other compilers, including Frank Büchmann-Møller’s 1988 Lester Young discography and Dexter Morrill’s 1990 (admittedly selective) guide to the big band recordings of Woody Herman, it generally shied away from them, especially after controversy ensued over a 1999 discography of trumpeter Bobby Hackett. It was ostensibly prepared by Harold Jones, a retired building consultant untrained in musicology but with some experience as a jazz discographer. Writing in Notes, a reviewer found the discography itself quite good and the indexes adequate but considered the narrative biography and other introductory sections poorly written and the bibliographical essay hopelessly muddled. Greenwood soon placed the book “on hold while questions of acknowledgement and accreditation are being resolved.” It turned out that the discographical material was so much better than the rest of the book because it had actually been done by George Hulme and others. Jones, who had the financial resources to support the preparation of the book, had agreed to accept and collate the others’ work, add some brief narrative introductions, and forward it to Greenwood for publication under the name of three authors. Instead, Jones broke off contact with the others, expanded his introductions into entire chapters, and sent it in under his own name. “The ‘author’ had made the mistake of not only copying facts, but our opinions, conclusions and text as well,” Hulme explained in a letter to the journal Names & Numbers.41

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After this, Greenwood confined itself to editors and compilers in the area of jazz music who had an established track record or a solid institutional affiliation, such as Michel Ruppli, Bob Porter, Chris Sheridan, Michael Cuscuna, and Edward Komara, none of whom except Sheridan and Komara could be considered bio-discography specialists. The most prolific academic publisher of bio-discographies during the past thirty years has been Scarecrow Press, originally based in New Jersey. In 1967 the Institute of Jazz Studies moved from the home of Marshall Stearns in Manhattan to the Newark campus of Rutgers University. From the 1960s to the early 1980s a relatively small number of IJS publications were printed by Transaction Books, Rutgers’s quasi in-house imprint. But thereafter the IJS sent its books to Scarecrow, now based in Maryland. By the 1990s the IJS, and eventually Rutgers as well, had turned to Scarecrow as their de facto house publisher. In 1995 Scarecrow was acquired by the Rowman and Littlefield publishing firm in Maryland.42 The first in their Studies in Jazz series was a two-volume Benny Carter discography prepared by the father-and-son team of Morroe and Edward Berger, along with musicologist and librarian James Patrick. (Ed Berger, a librarian, was the IJS curator; his father was a sociology professor at Princeton. Morroe died shortly before the book was published in 1982.) The second edition was published as Studies in Jazz no. 40 in 2002. Since then over two dozen bio-discographies have been issued. Studies in Jazz no. 2 (1982), an Art Tatum discography by Arnold Laubich and Ray Spencer, was the first discography to be assembled from a computer database, Tom Lord’s claims for The Jazz Discography notwithstanding. The first edition of Fujioka, Porter, and Hamada’s innovative John Coltrane discography, discussed later, was published by Scarecrow as Studies in Jazz no. 20 (1997). Others include Red Nichols (no. 21, 1996, and no. 22, 1997), the third and fourth editions of D. Russell Connor’s Benny Goodman discography (no. 6, 1988, and no. 23, 1996) and the first, fourth, and fifth editions of W. E. Timner’s massive Duke Ellington discography Ellingtonia (no. 7, 1988). The latest entrant in the competitive field of jazz discography publishing is the North Carolina–based McFarland and Company. It has long been a publisher of scholarly material in areas not well covered by dissertations or other academic houses (automotive history and sports are two examples) and has lately gone to producing durable paperbacks for budget-squeezed university libraries. It has been a popular alternative to self-publishing for proven discographers with shorter works, in the 100- to 250-page range. McFarland published George Hulme’s Mel Torme disc- and filmography

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(2001), Dan Mather’s Charlie Barnet bio-discography (2002), and Malcolm Macfarlane and Ken Crossland’s Perry Como book (2009).43

It is ironic that the two most famous figures in the history of jazz, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, have until relatively recently been so incompletely documented. The first known Armstrong discography was a two-page survey by Victor Calver that appeared in the June 1935 edition of Swing Music. Paul Eduard Miller compiled a four-part Armstrong discography in Down Beat during summer 1939; George Hoefer prepared a five-part serialization in the same magazine during mid-1950; and Bob Hilbert edited a three-part discography in Record Research in December 1964 and May and July 1965. The first stand-alone discography was a three-volume chapbook prepared by Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, issued in late 1959 by the Danish Debut Records. As was true for many of the Jepsen Debut chapbooks, Karl Emil Knudson republished it in 1973, and of course it formed the base on which Jepsen built the Armstrong section of his Jazz Records, 1942–196X comprehensive discography.44 For decades it was mistakenly thought that this was the last book-length Armstrong discography, but in 1981 Hans Westerberg wrote The Boy from New Orleans, a disc-, film-, and teleography published in Copenhagen. However, it had a limited publication and was virtually unknown outside Europe.45 The first volume of Erik Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80 was released in mid-1989. Unlike Jepsen’s earlier Jazz Records, Raben’s update began at A, so it released the Armstrong canon right away, in the first volume. Louis had died in 1971, leaving nine years for posthumous works to be released before the discography’s cutoff date. Thus many jazz musicologists and collectors, not realizing how much of Armstrong’s work was not on traditional commercial records, simply assumed that Raben’s A-Ba volume would stand as the definitive Armstrong discography.46 It was not until 2007 that the Institute of  Jazz Studies issued  Jos Willems’s All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong as no. 51 in its Studies of Jazz series. It had the look, and the heft, of a library reference book, 442 nine-by-twelve-inch pages. Scarecrow wisely published it in two versions, a library hardback at $125 and a paperback for home users at $75. As with the earlier Westerberg work, it was Willems’s intent to catalog “as accurately as possible Louis Armstrong’s complete musical legacy, to safeguard this information for the future and to present it in a convenient form under one cover.” It began with an April 1923 recording session of King Oliver’s

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band at the Gennett studio in Indiana and ended with a March 1971 taping of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in which Armstrong and the band played two numbers, closing with “Blueberry Hill.”47 “The meticulous attention to detail is quite astonishing,” congratulated Bob Weir. Reflecting the evolution of the standards and conventions of what constituted acceptable “borrowing” of information from others, Thomas Brothers noted that the book’s “acknowledgement section is the most interesting I have ever read. It reads like an extensive ethnography on an extensive social network of collectors and fans. . . . [I]t is somewhat astonishing to read how the author built on the many previous efforts and depended on the independent work of many other people, some close friends, some rivals, some he had never met.”48 Quite possibly the single work hardest to pigeonhole in a single category was Edward Brooks’s 2002 The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Early Recordings, 1923–1928. Technically it is a listening guide, in that it lists every Armstrong tune from that first Gennett in spring 1923 to the last recording session held in 1928. Each song lists the basic discographic data and a summary of the song’s structure, with such things as solos, chord changes, and midchorus embellishments. This is followed by an extensive (500- to 2,000-word) critical analysis of the song. (Some later remakes of songs originally made during the subject period are also discussed.) The primary difference between this book and a typical listening guide is that it makes no attempt to provide consumer information. There are no listings for issues, either collectible 78s or currently available CDs. Moreover, the annotations do not consider such things as sound quality or listening enjoyment; they are decidedly musicological in tone yet are primarily descriptive, not analytical. Is it a bio-discography, a listening guide, or a biography loaded with discographic information? Given the extensive breakdown of each song’s structure—which, given the increasing sophistication of some tunes by 1928, can go on for as long as a page—the work could even be considered a solography. The answer will depend on who uses it and what it’s used for—and of course, who buys it.49 The opposite was true for Duke Ellington: an embarrassment of riches. The Ellington commercial catalog includes over 400 long play albums alone, and the range of his commercially released first issues spans more than 250 label names.50 In addition, there are thousands of recordings never released commercially, many taped by Ellington himself and intended only for his own enjoyment and reference. Also, a “complete” Ellington discography could be considered one that includes not only songs recorded by

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f i g u r e 1 0 . A page from Edward Brooks’s The Young Louis Armstrong on Records (2002).

the Ellington bands, but also Ellington compositions commercially released by others, a list that could run to 100,000 issues. It is notable that almost all the serious Ellington discographers have been Europeans. Benny Aaslund in Sweden compiled a 140-page discography titled The “Wax Works” of Duke Ellington, self-published in 1954 and updated in at least five issues of the Discophile from 1954 through 1956. It has been

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reprinted several times since. The irrepressible Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen edited another three-part chapbook for Danish Debut Records in 1959, with irregular updates in Orkester Journalen through 1962. In fact, by the late 1960s there were so many specialized article-length Ellington discographies that Matrix ran a column called Duke Ellington Forum for a couple of years starting in 1968 just to keep track of them.51 The first monographs after the Jepsen chapbooks were published in Italy by Luciano Massagli, Liborio Pusateri, and Giovanni Volonté as a chronologically arranged set of serials called Duke Ellington’s Story on Records (DESOR), starting in 1967. Each installment was a compact six-by-eightinch paperback, at first a chapbook of about 40 pages, but growing substantially over time. (The final installment, for example, covering 1963–65, was 162 pages.) Each featured a traditional discography but also included a solography, indexes, personnel lists, and an addendum and corrections section for the previous volume or two. At times the errata section seemed to take over. As early as the fourth volume, fifteen of the forty-three pages were given over to additions and corrections. The series ended in 1979 after thirteen volumes, covering the period through 1965, although at least one additional volume, through 1967, had originally been planned. A revised DESOR compilation in two volumes (one for the discography, the other for the indexes and ancillary material) was published in 1983.52 In 1976 W. E. Timner self-published the first edition of Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen; A Collector’s Manual. As the book’s subtitle suggests, and as Krin Gabbard explained in a review of its third edition, “strictly speaking, Ellingtonia is not a discography—the word does not even appear in the book.” To describe it, Gabbard coined a new word, “metadiscography.” (As I explained in chapter 1, Gabbard’s definition of metadiscography changed substantially between the time he first applied it to Timner’s book in 1989 and when he next used it for Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography three years later. In describing Ellingtonia, he implied a work that augments a specialist discography; when he applied it to Lord’s series, he meant a general discography that replaces specialist discographies.) Timner’s two editions had been prepared on photocopy machines, but by the time the Institute for Jazz Studies and Scarecrow Press published the third edition in 1988, it had grown to almost 550 offset press pages in an oversize nine-by-twelve-inch format. The fourth edition, also by Scarecrow and issued in 1996, was another hundred pages or so longer.53 Finally, note that the sixth volume of Erik Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80 was in effect a freestanding Duke Ellington project within a project. The

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entire book was given over to Ellington; it was edited by Ole J. Nielson, and it was issued out of sequence, after volume 3 (Bro-Cl ), in 1993. Unlike the other Raben volumes, it was excused from the 1980 cutoff date to include all of Ellington’s “post-1941 musical performances that were preserved one way or the other.” Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye noted that “this volume is, in effect, a specialist discography and includes both a title index and a location index as well as the usual index to musicians.” It was so complete that when Ellington collector Jerry Valburn attempted to edit a CD-only Ellington discography in 1994, he so scrupulously avoided anything already a part of the Nielson-Raben book that he made his own work almost incomprehensible. A better solution would have been to apply such honesty and sincerity to scrupulous citation instead of zealous omission.54

iii Somewhat less popular than bio-discographies have been genre-based works. “A work focused upon a single musical style, such as gospel, jazz or rockabilly, underscores both the strengths and limitations of most discographies,” notes Kip Lornell. “Although [it] allows one to spotlight and explore one genre carefully, it also brings up the critical issue of stylistic boundaries.”55 Some of the works already discussed as general discographies, including Brian Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z, Dixon and Godrich’s Blues and Gospel Records, and Hayes and Laughton’s Gospel Records can be so selective that they start to shade into the realm of genre discographies. In fact when Han Enderman, in the journal Names & Numbers, surveyed the field of discographies in 2002–3, he didn’t even include many of them among the comprehensive works, because he believed works of this type “are actually special general discographies.” While the late 1960s Storyville edition of Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z did present “the discographical information of its time and listed most jazz recordings known to collectors, the number of available non-commercial recordings [then] was small,” he explained. “[A]t present, the situation is very different.” Enderman believed that over the years Jazz Records, A-Z had evolved into “a discography of prewar jazz issued on commercial 78s, plus an incomplete amount of additional recordings.”56 Even taking into account his preference for pre–World War II music, Rust had started narrowing his scope as far back as 1962, when he agreed to sponsor Godrich and Dixon’s original Blues and Gospel Records, splitting those records off from his second edition. Beginning in the 1970s, he further subdivided his base. In 1973 Arlington House published his and Allen

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Debus’s Complete Entertainment Discography, an eclectic mix of American black and white vaudeville troupers, film stars, Broadway actors, and vintage radio performers from 1895 to 1942. This synthesis would have made almost no sense at all except that in England Laurie Wright’s Storyville had just published his British Dance Bands, 1912–1939, and Arlington House soon followed with the mammoth two-volume American Dance Band Discography, 1917–1942.57 Both the British and the American dance band discographies included the work of hot and sweet white bands, but, as I already noted, American Dance Bands omitted Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller because Arlington House had previously published specialized bio-discographies for them. As a result, Arlington House’s fourth edition of Jazz Records, A-Z, appearing a year after American Dance Bands, broadly contained black artists but only selectively included the big white dance bands, with The Complete Entertainment Discography covering a miscellany of Anglo-American popular show music that didn’t fit anywhere else. As if this weren’t confusing enough, a British specialty publisher, General Gramophone Publications, published two more Rust discographies that covered music hall routines— mostly spoken word acts and novelty songs—and London musical theater. So after 1976, Jazz Records, A-Z became a narrowly focused special discography covering prewar, mostly African American, largely non-pop jazz issued on commercial 78s, with a smattering of other material.58 Partly because it was hard to define meaningful stylistic boundaries, and partly because by 1980 the field had already become so carved up between Rust, Jepsen, Godrich/Dixon and Leadbitter/Slaven (and later Hayes/Laughton), genre discographies became something of an anomaly. The biggest exception has been in the area of ragtime and other proto-jazz vernacular music. Rust’s discographies always tended to shade back into ragtime, and in 1979 he compiled a discography of historical records on 78s and cylinders that included additional pre-jazz “hot” music. When he and Malcolm Shaw edited the sixth edition of Jazz Records, A-Z in 2002, they expanded it—retrospectively—adopting the title Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897–1942).59 One of the earliest monograph-length discographies dedicated entirely to ragtime was the 1973 book by David Jasen, Recorded Ragtime, 1897–1958. His coverage was broad across time, but it omitted cylinders and did not include matrix numbers or recording locations. In 1995 Greenwood Press published Tantalizing Tingles, Ross Laird’s discography of pre-1935 piano music within the fields of ragtime, jazz, and stride. (Surely one of the best titled discographies ever!) Laird’s discography was a very narrow genre within a genre, limited almost exclusively to solo piano tunes. It suffered

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the usual fate of innovative, cutting-edge specialty discographies—nearly instantaneous absorption into more comprehensive works. Allan Sutton, a commercial discography publisher out of Denver, published his own Cakewalks, Rags and Novelties in 2003. It was broad in coverage but narrow in chronology, cutting off at 1930. Finally, in 2007, once again David Jasen, this time with the assistance of Gene Jones, compiled Ragtime, a reference book combining a discography with an encyclopedia and a bibliography of sheet music (“sheetography”) that may prove more resilient to plagiaristic vacuuming.60 Moving back to jazz, in what is probably the ultimate example of tightly circumscribed genre drawing, Storyville published a 1978 revision of a 1959 Horst Lange discography that covered only eight to twelve (depending how you count permutations) early white quintets. The compilers, Ron Jewson, Derek Hamilton-Smith, and Ray Webb, argued that this grouping constituted a coherent genre because of stylistic similarities and was significant enough to justify consideration, despite its small size, without descending into critical trivia raking because of the groups’ joint musical significance. (To their credit, Lange’s previous 1959 edition had been based on the explicit premise that these groups represented the true roots of American jazz, a contention the 1978 editors were not willing to make.)61 It would probably be accurate to say that the genre discography has evolved into the even more specialized topical discography, one that bases its selection criteria more on some fixed, exogenous delineator than on musical style. Examples include Jan Leder’s 1985 discography of women jazz instrumentalists, Michael Meckna’s 1994 book on twentieth-century brass players, Stephen Barnett’s work on percussionists, or any of a growing list of national discographies. Leder’s work was a literal metadiscography, its data extracted from other discographies then reformatted to suit the topic, with appropriate source citations. The two instrument-based works both followed an encyclopedic format, arranged alphabetically by artist’s name with a brief biography, followed by a discography and bibliography. Neither was intended strictly for a jazz readership, and they included classical, jazz, and popular music artists.62 The subchapters of Georges Paczynski’s magisterial two-volume history of jazz drumming (1997–2000), written in French, were divided into individual musicians, with the chapters themselves organized by musicological concepts and the two volumes divided roughly by World War II. An extensive discography at the end of each book was then organized along the lines of these subchapters in a manner similar to footnotes. It is a shame that Paczynski’s books have never been translated into English.63

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The most popular subject for topical works has become the national discography. Hundreds of these have been compiled as article-length works for jazz and discography journals or as back matter in books on jazz. Booklength national discographies have been far rarer. In England, Compton Mackenzie’s magazine the Gramophone published an annual supplement called the Popular Record Catalog (soon the Long Playing Popular Record Catalog) that over the years evolved into something very close to a national music discography. Between June 1949 and December 1954, the Gramophone had a special section that listed all new releases each month, at least for all the major labels, and for many second-tier firms. Decca released the first British LP in mid-1950, and for the next four years the Gramophone tried to keep up with all the singles, LPs, EPs, and MPs (medium-plays, a Decca specialty) for the next four years. In July 1954 the Gramophone issued its first Long Playing Popular Record Catalog as a freestanding publication edited by Edgar Jackson. Thereafter the Catalog was issued quarterly, with the fourth issue of each year fully cumulative all the way back to 1950. This continued until 1962, when the format was changed to make the last quarterly issue cumulative only back to the start of that year. Albert McCarthy took over in 1966 when Jackson’s health no longer permitted him to continue (he died in August 1967). Unlike the Schwann catalogs, in The Gramophone Popular Record Catalog (its name after 1962) every song track title was listed, and if the album was reviewed in the Gramophone, the issue and page number of the review were listed.64 Being the home of the Bielefelder Katalog Jazz, Germany might seem to have a leg up on everyone else in the field of national discographies, but in 1955, four years before the first Bielefelder, Horst Lange had already compiled a 651-page discography of German jazz, Die deutsche Jazz-Discographie, and he would continue as a prolific documenter of German sound recordings. Best known for his 1966 Die deutsche “78er”: Discographie der Hot-Danceund Jazz-Musik, 1903–1958, a listing of all 78s pressed (not merely issued or sold) in Germany, Lange was an organizer of German discographic soci­ eties, a producer of records, and later on a producer of reissue LPs. He has been called the German Brian Rust for his tirelessness in promoting both traditional American and indigenous German jazz efforts.65 By most accounts, the Bielefelder is in itself a national discography, and in the opinion of Kernfeld and Rye, this is a detriment: The annual Bielefelder Katalog Jazz masquerades as a “mere” catalog of what is available this year in Germany, while in practice serving as yet as yet another comprehensive discography, giving much of the standard information . . .

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as well as indexes by tune title and musician’s name. The editor, Manfred Scheffner, does not claim to do original research, and he does not seek out records for inclusion. If a label fails to notify him of its current issues, there is no listing. Hence there are volumes in which a significant label has disappeared after years of coverage.66

Unlike their thought-provoking criticisms of contemporary large comprehensive discographies, this review landed with a dull thud amid the discographic community and was, by consensus, quickly carted off to that place where widely disregarded pronouncements from otherwise wellrespected pundits go to die in quiet, peaceful surroundings. Almost everyone still agreed with Cadence’s Bob Rusch that “to call it [the Bielefelder] a glorified Schwann catalog would put you on the right track, but also be a tremendous understatement. . . . [W]hat you have is a kind of a piece of a discography and a reference work that I’ve found very handy.” The truth was, everybody wished they had a Bielefelder of their own. By the mid-1980s it contained over 5,000 records and some 29,000 separate tracks. But because it included personnels and session information, it had also grown to over a thousand pages and cost DM298 (about $150). In 1999 its CD version, which had previously served merely as a supplemental, truncated “quick reference” tool, was expanded to include everything in the print edition, and at a third of the price it soon all but put its “telephone book” sibling out of business.67 Børge [Børje] J. C. Møller compiled a 94-page Danish national discography in 1945; in 1961 the National Discoteket (music library) incorporated it into its own four-volume Dansk Jazz, and in 1953 its Swedish counterpart, the 115-page Svensk jazzdiskografi, was prepared by Harry Nicolausson and published by Nordiska Musikforlaget. Nicolausson was editor of Orkester Journalen ( Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s magazine) and served as “our man in Sweden” to both Charles Delaunay and Albert McCarthy. As a result, Nicolausson’s book bore a strong family resemblance to McCarthy’s Jazz Directory. It included all recordings made there, even those by foreign nationals, but excluded recordings made by Swedes outside the country. One problem: an inordinate number of bands appeared under the generic name “Favoritorkestrar” (“All-Star Band”). Less egalitarianism, more ego, and the burning desire of a few more bandleaders to stick their own names out before the public may have helped. Those social idealists!68 Robert Pernet wrote a combination history and discography of Belgian jazz in 1967. Reviewing it, Pekka Gronow believed that the history was

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substandard but the discography was excellent. More recent efforts include Jack Litchfield’s massive 1982 Canadian Jazz Discography and Jack Mitchell’s 1988 Australian book.69 (The Canadian discography features a cover photo satirizing the famous Victor logo “His Master’s Voice,” with the faithful gramophone-puzzled dog Nipper replaced by one of the Dominion’s revered beavers. Alas, no kangaroos, koalas, or platypuses grace the cover of Mitchell’s book!) As far as can be determined, there has been no book-length “national” discography of jazz in Japan, but by the 1980s the Japanese had taken the lead in thinking outside the box across the whole field of jazz discography. The magazine Swing Journal had already run an extensive discography of Japanese jazzmen in two 1972 issues and followed it up with a “No hon no” jazz discography in 1976 when it decided to help sponsor a series of affordable paperback discographies by Walter Bruyninckx.70 Bruyninckx’s loose-sheet 50 Years of Recorded Jazz had sold only a few hundred copies, and his 1979 follow-up, 60 Years of Recorded Jazz, about 1,400, but he became fairly well known after the paperbacks. Mostly culled from 60 Years, they were divided into thirty-five volumes in six topical areas (Traditional, Swing, Modern Small Groups, Progressive Jazz, Modern Big Bands, and Vocalists). Released between 1980 and 1989, they proved quite popular in America and Europe as well as Japan. The two biggest sellers, the traditional and swing series, sold upward of three or four thousand sets. They helped change Bruyninckx’s reputation from that of an eccentric, incompetent hack to that of a serious discographer, if underfunded and often overwhelmed. “There [have] developed two distinct discographical camps. On one side, those who have supported Walter Bruyninckx’s efforts,” wrote Cadence’s Bob Rusch in 1987, “on the other side, those who don’t.”71 Swing Journal was, and continues to be, a Japanese institution. It began in April 1947 as Swing Music and Dance magazine, but starting about 1950 it adopted a rather puritan stance under editor Ko¯bun Nogawa, defending mainstream jazz as a form of serious art music. By 1997 it had the largest circulation of any jazz magazine in the world. “For forty years we were the only jazz magazine in Japan,” noted its chief editor at the time, Bunichi Murata. It was joined by Jazz Life in the late 1970s and Jazu Seisho ( Jazz Bible) in the 1980s, but Swing Journal remained the largest. “We publish the magazine not just for the jazz maniac but also for ordinary jazz fans,” explained Murata.72 As far back as 1949, a correspondent to Orin Blackstone’s Jazzfinder reported that “hot jazz record collecting in Japan is as interesting as it was

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back in the United States. . . . [N]ot only do the second-hand record shops of Tokyo provide rare items, but even now some of them are being pressed [here in Japan] and sold by Columbia and Victor. . . . [M]asters from all over the world have been used.” But when it came to live music, though there was plenty of jazz, “the solos are not the best.” It wasn’t that the musicians weren’t talented—they were good. But they seemed to lack confidence and worked too hard to please. “Naturally, what goes over biggest with the most, both occupationaires and nationals, is going to get the nod.” One exception was the pianist Shotaro Moriyasu, who introduced (some say forced) bop into the Japanese jazz scene. However, he committed suicide in 1955 at age 31, possibly in reaction to the death of Charlie Parker a few months earlier.73 This was basically the jazz culture that remained even after the “occupationaires” left at the end of the Korean War. By 1978, Jazz Journal claimed that “Japanese record stores have the greatest selection of jazz albums in the world,” and industry figures from the mid-1980s ranked Japan as the world’s largest per capita market for jazz LPs. Discographer Michael Cuscuna told the New York Times that “Japan almost single-handedly kept the jazz record business going during the late 1970’s. Without the Japanese market, a lot independent jazz labels probably would have folded.”74 But these facts and figures hid some sobering realities. A primary reason Japan had become the “jazz haven” of the 1970s was that the record companies were reissuing more of the classic American albums for that market than for anyone else. That said more about the firms’ utter neglect of their jazz backlists in America and Europe during this time than it did about the vibrancy of the jazz scene in all its forms in Japan. The sad truth was that relatively few established American and European jazz artists were able to get recording contracts in Japan until the late 1960s or early 1970s, and the contracts that were written were poor, although considering the situation in the United States, it was any port in a storm. As for the home-grown Japanese musicians, they were simply ignored or shunned. Critic Aikura Hisato quit Swing Journal while Bunichi Murata was chief editor because he was fed up with what he saw as the magazine’s neglect of native artists. Out of 380 jazz LPs issued by Japanese record companies in 1967, 11 were by Japanese artists. Pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi returned to the United States after living in Japan from 1963 to 1965 because she grew disgusted with its live music scene. Shunned by audiences for not playing “sweet” enough, she complained that Japanese jazz “lacked guts.” Fellow keyboardist Sato¯ Masahiko agreed, recalling that during the 1950s and early

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1960s there was no stigma to asking another jazz musician you had just met, “By the way, who are you imitating?” One unintended consequence of being pushed out of the jazz market by Americans and Europeans was that many of the young musicians decided to bide their time by following Toshiko Akiyoshi to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where they were able to hone their craft and get recruited—at least for a while—into well-paid, if unexciting, studio and big band work. Alto saxophonist Sadao Watanabe went in 1962, bassist Yasuro Arakawa in 1965, and pianist Sato¯ Masahiko in 1966.75 The Japanese jazz scene, at least until the post-CD, digital music era, was dominated by the economic and social upper classes who sought foreign, usually American, jazz artists and labels to fill their shelves. Ironically, now Western collectors are looking to Japan to find 1970s-era LPs that were never released in the West or, in the case of CDs, are available new but are being distributed only in Japan. This has been reflected in Japanese discography to date, which has tended toward the music of Western artists, usually as issued on American and European labels. Many of these albums, and the songs on them, were never released anywhere except on these Japanese-market LPs. Discographies of music recorded in Japan by Western jazz musicians are a growing specialty but are typically written only in Japanese. Often they are lush, artistic works, priced accordingly. Most are bio-discographies. One of Japan’s jazz cultural elite at the time this style of discography became popular was Yasuhiro Fujioka. He was manager of his family’s kimono shop in 1991 when he took on an update of David Wild’s 1979 Recordings of John Coltrane. Five years later, Fujioka had assembled a trans-Pacific research team of himself, Lewis Porter, and Yoi-ichi Hamada. Coltrane’s career was unusual compared with those of older jazz artists, but normal for those coming after him. It spanned twenty-two years (1946 to 1967), and because of the easy availability of inexpensive tape-based recording, any given day of that span could eventually yield some type of captured performance, formal or informal. Thus Fujioka abandoned the traditional Cary/McCarthy/Rust format in favor of a one page per day layout that intermingled formal recording sessions with other chronologically organized information. “This is not a biobibliography or bio-discography in what has become the accepted sense,” wrote Jim Farrington. It was, instead, “an excellent chronology or almanac. . . . [I]ndeed, it is much easier to grasp than the Rust-Bruyninckx-Lord design.” Wild, who had done the original 1979 version, subsequently joined

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Fujioka’s team, and in 2008 Routledge published an updated edition, now perceptively called The John Coltrane Reference. “Half of the book is taken up with a comprehensively revised and expanded update of previous Coltrane discographies, but it is so much more,” explained Bob Weir. “[I]t is an admirable example of the creative collaboration between discographers and jazz researchers. . . . [T]he book is beautifully illustrated.” The only drawback was the price, $150, putting it out of reach of all but institutional buyers and the most dedicated of collectors.76 In 1982 Michael Cuscuna, then still a production engineer for Blue Note Records and not yet a renowned discographer, slipped a copy of Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s forty-page 1969 Miles Davis discography to a jetlagged young fan from Tokyo named Yasuki Nakayama. Eighteen years later, Nakayama wrote and designed one of the most innovative (and now most sought-after) single-artist discographies: The Miles Davis Complete Discography. It was published in color, on glossy paper, featuring an illustration of every album cover, from First Miles in 1945 to Live Around the World, recorded thirty-three days before Davis’s death in 1991. Even the jacket and endpapers were shocking for the times: bright silver foil. “Although we well understand the pure meaning of a discography, it was time to create one appealing to a broad spectrum of fans, wrote Nakayama, [and to] emphasize the elements that appeal to buyers.”77 Some topic-based discographies are so exceptional that it is hard to classify them. In 1991, Allan Sutton compiled and published a chapbook titled AKA, a discography of records issued under pseudonyms and false names. A greatly expanded Greenwood Press version followed in 1993 as The Guide to Pseudonyms on American Records, 1892–1942. It was arranged alphabetically by the false name, with the artist or group’s real name and the issue (label) numbers of the relevant records listed underneath. A cross-index at the back permitted reference by real name. (The list of pseudonyms used by the Sam Lanin groups goes on for two columns.) In the late 1990s Sutton started his own publishing company, Mainspring Press, and in 2005 it published a revised version, listing it as the second edition, thereby consigning the 1991 chapbook to the status of proto-edition.78 Another example are those works cataloging the output of the American Armed Forces Radio Service and the closely associated “V-Disc” series. The Radio Section of the Special Service Division of the US War Department was established in 1942, adopting the acronym AFRS a year later. It was formed to provide low-power broadcast services at overseas bases. They were a combination of  low-cost wireless public address system and morale-boosting

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entertainment. To supply them with programming, the AFRS provided fully produced radio programs, typically on slow-turning sixteen-inch transcription discs. This continued until the mid-1950s, when electronic tape took over. Much of the material was copied from commercial radio shows, but some purpose-recorded programming was distributed, especially during World War II, when the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) recording strike limited the supply of material. The transcription discs were divided into various topical and stylistic groups: examples include the One Night Stand, GI Jive, and Command Performance series. Distribution was tightly controlled to prevent commercial infringement. (When a collection of eight thousand discs from the 1940s and 1950s was discovered behind a sealed wall at Fort Lewis in Washington State during a 2010 building renovation, they were promptly recalled for cataloging and destruction in accordance with their license agreement, to the horror of music archivists and historians.)79 The Special Service Division had a second operation, the Music Section. It was established in October 1943 to provide records for use on military base public address systems and long-distance shortwave broadcasts. The jazz critic George Simon assumed management of the Music Section in 1944. Its records, called “Victory Discs” and appearing with “V-Disc” labels, included exact duplicates of commercially sold records, alternative takes and outtakes, and some specially recorded material. V-Discs are especially important because many were recorded during the AFM labor dispute by special dispensation of the union, and they provide the only documentation of many artists and groups during the crucial transition from swing to bebop. The program was discontinued in 1949.80 Rainer Lotz, a German discographer, took an early interest in the various AFRS transcription series, compiling a discography of the Gold Label group in 1978 and the Jubilee series, the one most frequently containing African-American musicians, in 1985. The Jubilee discography was published in Frankfurt by Norbert Ruecker, who has, since the early 1980s, taken over from Karl Emil Knudsen as the leading European patron of discographic publishing. In 1991 Greenwood published two discographies of other AFRS transcriptions, the One Night Stand series of band music, by Harry Mackenzie and Lothar Polomski, and the “Basic Musical Library” (also known as the P-Series), also by Mackenzie, this time working with Larry Kiner. Both the One Night Stand and P-Series discographies were intended to be the first volumes in a continuing series, but no follow-ups have thus far appeared. Back in 1986, Mackenzie had also compiled a smaller

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discography of the Downbeat series, issued by American chapbook publisher Charles Garrod and his Joyce Music Publications operation.81 The story has been similar for the V-Discs. In 1954 Stephan Wante compiled an eighty-page discography of the first five hundred discs that was published by a small Antwerp publisher, and in 1974 Klaus Teubig followed this up with a 155-page discography of the second five hundred, issued by an equally small press out of Berlin. But in 1980 Greenwood published Richard Sears’s V-Discs: A History and Discography, a mammoth 1,166-page book that was, in the words of one reviewer, “an excellent example of what the very best of discographies can be.” While Wante and Teubig together had gotten only as far as V-Disc 904, Sears covered the entire series, about twelve hundred records. At least that was thought to be the entire series. In 1986 Greenwood issued a 272-page supplement, also by Sears, that included six hundred more discs, as well as additions and errata to the entries in the first book.82 (Some of the “new” discs were admittedly rather speculative: the data on one record by Oran “Hot Lips” Page could be summarized as “date unknown, location unknown, personnel unknown; not issued; recording and pressing both unverified; probably no longer extant.”) Especially in the case of the V-Discs, it could be argued that these works are not “genre” discographies at all but should be considered specialty “label” reference works, which brings us to this vital discographic subfield, discussed in the next chapter.

chapter seven

Specialized Discographies: Part 2

i Label discographies began to appear about the time of World War II. In the June 21, 1943, issue of Jazz Tempo, editor John Rowe wrote that a young bank clerk named Brian Rust was “in the throes of compiling complete Okeh and American Columbia catalogs dating from way back.” At the time, Jazz Tempo was a small club bulletin of the North London and Southgate Jazz Society. Several of its early issues cannot be found, so it’s not known exactly when Rust’s Okeh-Columbia discography appeared, but a follow-up article with corrections and additions appeared in the November 8, 1943, issue. Thus late summer or early fall 1943 seems likely.1 In the April 1944 issue of  Jazz Record, G. F. Gray Clarke wrote an article titled “The Brunswick Muddle.” It contained a discography of  UK-Brunswick’s KP series and special pressings. Two years later, Danish discographer Børge (Børje) J. C. Møller wrote a sixty-four-page chapbook discography of the British Parlophone company that is the earliest known monograph label discography.2 The first widely distributed label discography was Dan Mahoney’s 1951 Columbia 13/14000-D Series, documenting that firm’s “race records” series, produced between 1923 and 1932. Originally a self-published chapbook of twenty-six pages, it was rather expensive, given its size, and had limited circulation, but Walter Allen published a second edition in 1961 and another, greatly expanded, version in 1966. The 1966 edition was the first to be widely distributed. Even then, its entire universe comprised only 689 records, so the data provided for each release were extraordinarily detailed, including number ordered and shipped, breakdown by label design (there were twelve

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over the decade that the series lasted), and all discographic details. “A label discography is by its nature quite different from a work focused on a specific musical genre or artist,” observed Dan Morgenstern. “Is such information of practical use or is it merely a kind of indulgence of passion for research? It all depends on how one uses the material. . . . [ For example, Mahoney’s] figures provide striking illustration of the toll the Depression years took on the record market.”3 In 1969 Brian Rust self-published The Victor Master Book. It was intended to be the second volume of a multipart series, and it covered only 1925 to 1936. Its out-of-sequence release, and its being the only one published, has given rise to confusion ever since. Exactly why none of the other volumes ever appeared has never been made clear. Some believe Rust simply wasn’t interested enough in anything outside his specialty to see it through, but a more likely reason was the parallel work of two music collectors, Ted Fagan and William Moran. Starting in the early 1960s, they attempted to document every Victor 78 rpm record, approximately 200,000 items. Their first volume wasn’t published until 1983, and only two of the projected thirty-five to forty volumes ever appeared.4 But it is likely that Rust, after learning of their efforts, switched back to his first love, Columbia/Okeh. Malcolm Shaw later said he too had started a Victor 78 discography but abandoned it about this time on learning of the Fagan/Moran project. At the time he recounted this [2006] it looked as if the Fagan/Moran project had died, and Shaw admitted, “I kick myself, sometimes, for stopping my own plan.” (However, the Victor discography was later revived as an online project, which is discussed in chapter 8.)5 Unlike most of his other large-scale efforts, Rust’s Victor Master Book has never been reissued by a commercial or academic publisher, and it is highly prized by discography collectors. Rust needed almost half a century to finish his massive Columbia/Okeh project. The Columbia section was completed first. The Columbia Master Book Discography, coedited with Tim Brooks, covering roughly 1910 to 1930, was issued by Greenwood in four volumes in 1999. Five years later Rust and Ross Laird finished the Okeh discography, a one-volume work published by Praeger.6 A project similar to the 1966 Mahoney/Allen effort, but with a much longer gestation, was finally brought to fruition in 1971 when Storyville published Max Vreede’s Paramount 12000/13000 Series as a small hardback of about 160 pages. Vreede had started it almost twenty years earlier, and Albert McCarthy had serialized it in Jazz Monthly, beginning with its inau-

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gural March 1955 issue all the way to 1959, when the discography ground to a halt when about 85 percent finished. Vreede let it sit for a couple of years until Godrich and Dixon asked him to complete it for their upcoming Blues and Gospel Records. He agreed, and after editing it into book form, Storyville issued it as a companion to Blues and Gospel Records and Jazz Records, A-Z. The discographical information in The Paramount 12000/13000 Series was printed only on the front of each page; the verso reproduced an ad for Paramount race records, a nice touch that has made this one of the discographies most sought by book collectors.7 Label discographies really started coming into their own in 1972 when Michel Ruppli self-published a discography of Prestige Records. Prestige was a notable independent label begun in 1949 by music shop owner Bob Weinstock. A frequent starting place for up-and-coming postwar modern jazz musicians (who invariably left for more lucrative work elsewhere, it being the archetypal hand-to-mouth label), Prestige issued about 850 LPs under its own name and an equal number of singles, EPs, and LPs under various other labels before it was bought out by the Fantasy group in 1971. Ruppli was a graduate of the University of Paris and the École Normale Supérieure des Télécommunications who had been working since the early 1960s as an electronics engineer. He had published several article-length artist and label discographies, including a four-part Chess label discography in Hot Buttered Soul in late 1972 and, with Bob Porter, a four-part Argo/ Cadet article in the same magazine in 1975. The circulation of his original edition of Prestige Jazz Records was relatively small, but Karl Emil Knudson reissued it in Copenhagen a year later as a 350-page hardback.8 In 1979 Greenwood plunged into the market for jazz and popular music discographies, using Ruppli’s label-oriented works as its base. For the first offering it chose his Atlantic Records, followed the same year by The Savoy Label and an updated version of the Knudsen Prestige Jazz Records edition, now retitled The Prestige Label. The leap in scale up to the four-volume Atlantic Records was enormous compared with any previous attempts: Mahoney’s Columbia discography had 689 singles, Vreede’s Paramount book about 1,100, and Ruppli’s own Prestige discography about 1,400 recording sessions and 5,500 masters; even Rust’s Victor Master Book had only about 2,000 sessions and 9,000 masters. The Atlantic Records set contained some 45,000 masters.9 There was little doubt why Greenwood chose this highly specialized field for its plunge into commercial jazz discographies: Michel Ruppli. “The fact that the publishers issued these volumes alongside a bibliographic guide

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entitled ‘French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages’ is not entirely inappropriate,” wrote Chris Sheridan, “since a guarantee of scholarship attends Michel Ruppli’s undertakings.” Still, there were other solid reasons the format appealed to an established academic publisher. “Compilation by label is now the way to go in discography,” asserted Peter Lowry. “It has taken collectors and discographers a long time to realize that label listings are probably more valuable than artist discographies,” agreed Mark Gardner. “[ T ]he documentation of all a company’s record issues provides a source work of use to everybody.”10 Single-label discographies do have several advantages. First, there is little need for subjectivity: either a record company produced a session (or bought a master) or it didn’t, thus obviating any angst about whether it “should” be in or out. This was a source of all-around relief when Ruppli got around to tackling several of the famous small private labels that were, as Morgenstern put it, “a grab-bag” of musical genres. Kip Lornell guessed that Ruppli “was grateful that he did not have to worry about genres, because Aladdin and Imperial encompassed several important styles . . . jazz, popular singers, blues, and R&B . . . [ plus] ethnic (mostly Mexican musicians) and country music.”11 Second, label discographies make for the most efficient data mining be­ cause all the information presumably comes from one place. However, while record company information is “one of the best” sources of reliable information, it is “often [the] most frustrating,” notes Michael Gray. “Unlike precious master tapes, discographic materials suffer the most from cost-cutting executives, the looting of previous researchers, or dispersal among various offices.” Also, while most companies welcome the efforts of researchers with established reputations, “some companies consider discographers to be little more than industrial espionage agents.” This sometimes raises a dilemma: Should single-label discographers keep their work “pure,” including only the information extracted from the record company, no matter how incomplete, or should they include “outside” data, such as from journal articles, books, or liner notes?12 The advantage of the former is that the label discography then serves as original source material—there is no “pollution” from erroneous or untraceable data from secondary sources. The benefit of the latter is that it makes the final product more usable as a one-stop reference—no small consideration to a publisher trying to sell books that cost a hundred dollars or more. For Atlantic Records, Ruppli relied extensively on outside sources, but for 1983’s Chess Labels he obtained most of his information from Vogue

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Records, which reissued Chess in France. However, he did not incorporate data from Leadbitter and Slaven’s Blues Records, which some had criticized for poor quality control and inadequate citation.13 Instead, as his series progressed, he turned more toward an alternative strategy of teaming up with an enthusiastic insider willing to help him navigate a given label’s corporate maze. Bob Porter rarely called attention to himself, but his career tended to flow in parallel with many of the Ruppli projects, and he sometimes appeared as coauthor, sometimes not. Porter worked at Prestige until 1971, then worked for Arista (owner of Savoy) and later for Atlantic. Himself an experienced discographer, in the 1970s Porter had a regular column in Record Research called Modern Eyes-zing, and he frequently ran discographies of small specialty labels such as Majestic and National. In addition, in 1989 he had prepared a discography of Bob Thiele’s Signature Records for Charles Garrod’s Joyce Music Publications.14 Arista had hired Porter to manage a reissue program of Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy Records material. Lubinsky had started it just after World War II to take advantage of the AFM musicians’ strike against the major labels. After starting out as a full-line company, it settled into jazz and R&B about 1945 and stayed there until the mid-1960s, when it just seemed to run out of gas. “The funny thing is they never repackaged a lot of their jazz catalog and none of their R&B,” says Porter. “[E]ven guys like Paul Williams and Johnny Otis who had number one records and were monstrously big.” Arista bought Savoy in 1975 specifically to acquire its masters for reissuing. They were stored on both acetate discs and tape. “Lubinsky stored the acetates in a bank vault and took exceptionally good care of them, Porter recalls. “[ T ]he tapes were a disaster. . . . [ T ]apes were in every room of that three story building . . . with no rhyme or reason. We tried to organize it; found a lot of interesting stuff.”15 “Early on I decided to get together with my friend Michel Ruppli and do a Savoy discography in addition to the reissues,” Porter later recalled. “This task enabled me to go through the Savoy master books on a pretty regular basis.” The discography and the reissue program thus ended up moving forward together. “We were always on the lookout for things. . . . [S]ometimes we found great things, but more often [than] not, we’d find things that weren’t released for a real good reason.” However, in the end it was all productive, in that any discovery that couldn’t be used for the reissue program still contributed to the discography, which, along with Ruppli and Porter’s Prestige Jazz Records, 1949–1971, was published in 1980 by Greenwood as The Savoy Label: A Discography. “The Savoy and Prestige

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volumes are much the better for Porter’s on-the-spot and his intense interest in discography,” wrote one reviewer, “for such endeavors are not everyone’s idea of a good time.”16 Ruppli’s most notable partnership, however, was his teaming up with Michael Cuscuna to produce The Blue Note Label. Blue Note cofounder Alfred Lion retired in 1967, and his business partner, Francis Wolff, died in 1971. Sold off to Capitol Records, Cuscuna says, Blue Note “had become inactive by the end of the 70s.” Cuscuna and Charlie Lourie formed Mosaic records as a specialty collectors’ mail-order label. “That was in 1983 when Capitol still had little interest in a jazz reissue program,” recalled Cuscuna. Two of Mosaic’s first three boxed sets featured Blue Note reissues (Thelonious Monk and Albert Ammons/Meade Lux Lewis). Two years later, Capitol decided to relaunch Blue Note with Bruce Lundwall heading the project. Lundwall, in turn, hired Cuscuna. “My job was doing a little of everything,” Cuscuna says. The label quickly reissued twenty albums. “We kept that heavy pace after CDs began taking over,” Cuscuna marvels. Like Porter, he invited Ruppli to assist with the vault research. The first edition of  The Blue Note Label was published in 1988. “An apparently dry catalog of facts about recording sessions,” noted Chris Sheridan in a review, “is actually a plimsoll line measuring the achievements of the cream of three jazz generations. . . . [ T ]hese pages are rich in the detail of much of the finest of jazz of three decades.” A few years later, a special bilingual Japanese-English edition was published in Tokyo by Jazz Hihyo.17 But Greenwood was not in it for kudos from discographers, or even the long-term accolades of the scholastic community. It was in business to turn a profit, and as Han Enderman pointed out, label-based works do have an advantage over other types of specialized discographies: from a marketing perspective, they are impervious to damage from data extraction. The sales of label discographies are not threatened by absorption into larger, more comprehensive works, because they are intended for that purpose and are, in fact, typically bought by the compilers of other discographies. True, most of these are journal articles and appendixes at the back of scholarly books, but the logic applies to bigger commercial products as well. The value of label discographies isn’t diminished, because they will continue to be needed for decades, and (most important) they have been priced and marketed by their publisher accordingly. They are so specialized that the incorporation of their data into secondary sources with more commercial appeal doesn’t faze them. Theirs is the ultimate Olympic view.18 Yet despite this (or possibly because of it), label discographies have gained an almost cultlike following, and only Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z and

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Erik Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80 can elicit such joyful panegyrics from jazz scholars and fellow discographers. “I feel sorry for those who have yet to discover the pleasures of reading discographies, as distinct from merely looking things up in them,” sighed Dan Morgenstern after reviewing Ruppli’s first two Greenwood label-based releases. “[A] good discography is much more than a laundry list of dates and data. It is a key and supplement to the history of the music and can be as exciting to read as a good mystery or adventure story.”19 By the end of the 1990s Greenwood had followed its four-volume Atlantic work with discographies for Prestige (1980), Savoy (1980), Chess (1983, 2 vols.), King (1985, 2 vols.), Clef/Verve (1986, 2 vols.), Blue Note (1988), Aladdin/Imperial (1991), Mercury (1993, 5 vols.), and Decca (1996, 6 vols.). The Blue Note discography was reissued in 2001. In thirteen years it had expanded from 510 to 913 pages, and its price had shot up to a staggering $175. “The book is expensive, oh yes!” wrote Brian Davis.20 The Mercury and Decca works were the end of the line for Greenwood’s large label discographies. They ended up remaindering most of Mercury Records as a three-volume partial set, pulping the other two books, when almost nobody, including librarians, proved willing to pay $1,250 for the full 4,000-page set. Greenwood threw in the towel five years later when Ruppli and two coauthors presented them with the digital manuscript for a new Capitol Records discography. If printed out, it would have required thirteen 500-page volumes. Now a part of the Routledge publishing conglomerate, Greenwood’s corporate number crunchers blanched and released Ruppli from his contract. From then on, Micrography/Names & Numbers in the Netherlands published Ruppli’s label discographies, but only on CD-ROM. Capitol Records and The ABC-Paramount/Impulse Labels were issued in 2007, and a third edition of the Blue Note discography followed in 2008. Even on CD, the new Blue Note edition was more expensive ($100) than the original printed version had been twenty years earlier ($75).21 One of the last of the big multivolume Greenwood label discographies was Brian Rust’s half-century-long project the Columbia Master Book Discography, done with coeditor Tim Brooks. Controversy ensued after its four volumes were released in 1999, when Brooks, noting that he and Rust had identified the sources of their information listing by listing, asserted that this standard of citation should establish the minimum threshold of acceptance by all music journals and publishers, with those submissions falling short denied publication.22 “Does he feel that every recording session should have a list of sources?” retorted Bill Dean-Myatt. “In a perfect world this may be desirable, but in a general reference work . . . it is both impractical

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and unnecessary. . . . Just as there are specialist history books written by academics and read by academics, there are also popular ones aimed at the general public who have an interest in the subject.” Brooks’s response was sharp and to the point. “I am constantly amazed that discographers who suffer endlessly because previous compilers on whose work they rely failed to indicate their sources, then turn around and do exactly the same things themselves.” As to the argument that “general works” didn’t need specific source citations and that their audience didn’t want them, he was even more disdainful. In essence, Brooks asserted that the popular-interest discography no longer existed. Pointing to the $550 price of the most recent (2009) edition of Rust’s American Dance Band Discography, he complained, “I am frankly offended that after paying [that much] I am told I’m just the ‘general public.’ . . . [ T ]hat’s not how authors should treat buyers of their books.” Given the high standards (and high prices) that academic publishers like Greenwood had brought to the discographic world, the idea of a high-priced “hobby discography” was, to borrow the words of publisher Allan Sutton, “as dead as yesterday.”23 Discography was now a world of professionals, with its work done by professionals and its output sold to professionals.

ii By the end of the 1960s the comprehensive discography had already shed most of its vestiges as a junkshoppers’ guide for record collectors. “After acquiring a gramophone and some kind of record collection, the only other apparent essential for the jazz enthusiast has always been a discography of some kind,” Steve Voce once observed.24 But with their growing size, scope, and depth, jazz discographies were increasingly available only to institutions—libraries and universities—that needed comprehensive and reliable reference tools and could and would pay for them. On their own, with little academic guidance, early discographers had developed “standards that seem exceptionally high compared to most other fields,” marveled Institute of Jazz Studies archivist Thomas Spence. “How many professional librarians and professional catalogers have ever even looked, for example, at a discography by Rust or Jepsen?” Librarian Gordon Stevenson concurred: “Library-style cataloging does not ordinarily include information on matrix numbers, takes and reissues, or complete details about performers.” Spence recounted how one university library responded enthusiastically to a request from its music school to start a popular record

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collection. Only later did the school’s faculty discover to its dismay that the librarians, following accepted practice, had cataloged all the new albums by composer.25 With the library science practices of the 1960s and early 1970s proving inadequate for anything but classical music, discographies suddenly became more important to music librarians “than are bibliographies to . . . bookdom.” Their use went beyond merely identifying what a recording was and the ways it could be systematically stored it a library; it identified “those particulars which lead to its proper use and consequent understanding.”26 With discographic training just starting to work its way into the academy, the immediate solution was obvious: buy the best products of the experienced amateurs. But given this evolution, the average record consumer now needed a cheaper, more concise, more user-friendly alternative: the buyers’ guide. “The critical discography—a kind of How to Choose Good Records book—is sorely needed today when the volume of new record releases baffles even the experienced collector,” complained Rudi Blesh in 1959. He went on to succinctly describe the archetypal listening guide: “A handy small volume, giving a short jazz history, thumbnail biographies of jazz artists, and a comparatively evaluated list of current records.” Blesh, however, noted a puzzling contradiction: “These are perhaps the rarest publications among all jazz books.” Why? Records, especially jazz records, were more ephemeral than books. Discs rapidly appeared, were sold, disappeared, and were replaced with “newer and better” versions. In fact this is still true. So listening guides, unlike historical discographies, must be revised just as frequently—ideally, once a year. But that means a listening guide must sell extraordinarily well to be considered successful by book publishers. “All in all,” Blesh concluded, “we can wonder that any jazz [guide] ever achieves publication.”27 The earliest listening guides were themselves ephemeral: pamphlets or small books produced by record companies. In November 1935 Edgar Jackson, columnist at the Gramophone, prepared a list of the 268 releases in Parlophone’s three Rhythm Series of 78s. (This was six months before Hilton Schleman’s book came out.) The Parlophone list contained complete (at least as complete as possible) personnels for each record; updates were issued annually thereafter. At the same time, Jackson started including those band rosters (as well as composers and arrangers) in his Gramophone columns. For information on American releases, he turned to John Hammond, and later to Leonard Feather.28 In the 1930s and 1940s, Jackson followed his Parlophone booklets with guides to swing music recordings by HMV

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and Decca-Brunswick-Vocalion. Leonard Hibbs prepared 21 Years of Swing Music on Brunswick, which Dan Morgenstern called “one of the first and best” of these. All “were invaluable for providing a number of personnels and recording dates,” notes Horace Meunier Harris.29 The practice continued into the microgroove era. In 1956 British Decca prepared an annotated list of the twelve-inchers available on its various sublabels. It was reissued in 1978 by the music publisher Da Capo under the same title, Jazz on LPs: A Collector’s Guide to Jazz. Also in 1956, George Avakian wrote Jazz from Columbia. Although primarily an annotated catalog, some of Avakian’s commentary, including reprints from hard-to-get magazine articles and album liner notes, made this paperback sought after by jazz book collectors. In 1995 Fantasy Records, which had acquired Riverside, Prestige, Pablo, and several other classic jazz labels of the 1950s and 1960s, issued a “Collector’s Guide” to its CD reissues of these albums. It interspersed short biographies of greats like Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, and Chet Baker with listings of the 150 or so albums Fantasy had released thus far, with each album cover printed in color, a tune and personnel list, and recording information such as producer, engineer, date, and location. It was a great way to unify a disparate group of albums originating from nine labels (a few, such as Jazzland and Jazz Workshop, not well known) and of wildly differing genres (Sonny Rollins, Cal Tjader, King Pleasure, Flora Purim).30 In 1942 Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith, along with William Russell and several other contributors, many of them Jazzmen veterans, prepared a guide called The Jazz Record Book. It was modeled after David Hull’s classical music guide The Record Book, and it included historical essays and brief reviews. It was the ideal of Blesh’s “handy small volume”: a tight, comprehensive essay on the overall history and basic musicology of jazz, followed by a list of records that roughly paralleled the essay. Each record, in turn, was followed by a brief critique. In 1971 Don Kennington considered it “still one of the best” of the annotated record guides, although at the time it was savaged in Metronome by Barry Ulanov for what he felt was an unwarranted emphasis on Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet. This was one of the earlier shots fired in the 1940s war between the “mouldy figgs” and the “boppers.” Read today, the book’s alleged transgressions are decidedly obscure. Ulanov’s displeasure probably resulted from Smith’s recycling material from a 1941 Modern Music article on New Orleans music that he and William Russell had written, and from his liberal use of excerpts from the famous Lomax–Library of Congress Jelly Roll Morton interview recordings.31

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A measure of tribute to Ramsey and Smith’s work is that fifty-three years later the University of Iowa Press published Tom Piazza’s Guide to Recorded Classic Jazz using essentially the same approach and format. Covering the music in a narrative, chronological format, the text was interspersed with references to CDs and a handful of out-of-print LPs on the verge of being reissued. Reviewing it, Edward Berger of the Institute of Jazz Studies said that Piazza’s “approach is exemplary, displaying balanced judgments, clear and entertaining prose, enthusiasm, and innovative but effective organization.” However, one secret of the book’s success was that it was a guide to classic jazz, ending in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thus avoiding much of the later, and often bitter, stylistic, nationalistic, racial, and ideological friction between the neotraditional, jazz-rock, jazz-blues, avant-garde, and euro-jazz schools. This raises the very real question whether Piazza’s book is the end of the line for the critical listening guide.32 In 1954 Ramsey followed up The Jazz Record Book with a later work that technology forced into a different direction, A Guide to Longplay Jazz Records. It dispensed with much of the encyclopedic information, instead bulking up on factual data and indexes. High Fidelity liked Ramsey’s approach. “Let us suppose that we attended the Newport Jazz Festival in July of this year and were really knocked out by a young sax player named Gerry Mulligan,” the reviewer wrote, “and especially by one number, Lady Is a Tramp. Wanting to hear more, we turn “to our trusty Schwann, where we find only the albums Mulligan has made . . . no listing of the individual numbers.” Problem solved: Ramsey’s new LP guide contained a song index that cross-referenced to the appropriate album title. Not only that, the song index referenced albums made both as a leader and as a sideman. It also had a performers index, similarly cross-referenced.33 After The Jazz Record Book and A Guide to Longplay Jazz Records, two general approaches to listening guides started to branch off from each other. The first was the encyclopedic “small handy volume” approach, arranged alphabetically by musician, with a brief biography or a critical analysis, or both, followed by a list of representative LPs. Some had an introductory essay. Some had various types of cross-reference indexes of varying detail. Later ones could be quite selective in the number of musicians and records considered. Others, wanting to be inclusive, grew well beyond the bounds of anything that could reasonably be considered small or handy. Sometimes they weren’t even a single volume anymore, the concept of “encyclopedic” having come to dominate all other considerations. The second approach was that of the buyers’ guide, or “supercatalog.” It downplayed extensive narration in favor of covering all the music then

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currently in print. The object was to offer consumers purchasing information, not commentary. Completeness, extensiveness, accuracy, and thoroughness in cross-referencing and indexing were emphasized. As we shall see, computerization has had more of an impact on “supercatalogs” than on the “small handy guides” or “encyclopedias,” but both have fractured into their own various specialized subtypes. And eventually there were crossovers: some buyers’ guides began to offer extensive album-by-album critical commentary, and some encyclopedic “best of jazz” books started to rate albums. But these categories shouldn’t be considered hard-and-fast distinctions, let alone exclusive categories. For example, while the Guide to Longplay Jazz Records had the classic encyclopedic format, usually a tip-off to the “small handy volume” approach, Ramsey wrote that “everywhere, [the record buyer] is confronted with . . . spurious titles being offered in competition with more thoughtful ones, [to] the befuddlement of record buyers.”34 To help readers separate the wheat from the chaff, he offered (occasionally lengthy, and sometimes very acerbic) commentary about a particular LP— commentary more typical of the later, more specialized works. Flexible thinking will especially be required as we proceed into the 1980s and 1990s and start plowing through the multitude of “one to four stars” guidebooks, each competing for its own niche and for the rapidly shrinking shelf space in a dwindling number of book and record shops.

Rex Harris and Brian Rust compiled Recorded Jazz: A Critical Guide in 1958, but it was aimed as much at record collectors as at listeners. As one reviewer noted, “In the cover biographies, the authors were described as having ‘uncompromising principles,’ which in this case can be translated as narrowminded refusal. These self-appointed guardians of a poorly defined tradition continually fluff off performance after performance by superciliously declaring them not to be jazz.” Even Rudi Blesh, no shrinking violet when it came to upholding jazz traditionalism, was forced to admit that while Recorded Jazz was “unquestionably serviceable to English collectors with exclusively traditionalist tastes, this volume can, unfortunately, be of little help to American record buyers.” Somewhat less charitably, Jazz Review’s T. P. Hoffman snorted that the book “scrupulously lists the third and fourth banjoes in every washboard band in England.” Ever diplomatic, Dan Morgenstern described it as “rather idiosyncratic,” then quickly changed the subject.35

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John Wilson extended coverage into the postwar period in his Collector’s Jazz: Modern (1959), a follow-up to his Collector’s Jazz: Traditional and Swing, published the year before. Traditional and Swing combined a 21-page historical overview with a 276-page listening guide in encyclopedic format, alphabetically by musician. A regular reviewer for those twin bastions of bourgeois society in the popular music world, the New York Times and High Fidelity, Wilson eschewed the typical small-rag vitriol of the era: “He likes things!” marveled one reviewer. But the reviewers were somewhat less positive about Wilson’s second book, Modern Jazz. One reader thought it was still “open-minded” but had become too “acerbic in tone.” Others believed Wilson drifted too easily into clichéd categorizations of “schools,” such as cool, hard bop, West Coast, and so on, and was unfairly biased against the longer, free-form improvisations of John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, and Sonny Rollins. Overall, he appeared to show less interest in the subject or, more likely, suffered from tight deadlines. This was the start of what would grow into something of a consensus among reviewers: it was getting to the point where no one person had the breadth of knowledge, taste, or interest to do justice to everything. A team approach was needed.36 In 1961 Stanley Dance and seven coauthors (including, amazingly, Max Harrison, a man Dance reportedly couldn’t stand to be in the same room with) embarked on a four-volume set intended to cover each decade of jazz through the 1950s. Dance was a somewhat unlikely candidate for lead editor of a discography series. True, he had helped Hilton Schleman with Rhythm on Record, he was held in high regard for his Lightly and Politely column, appearing in Jazz Journal since 1948, and he had gained a reputation as one of the most adept interviewers of jazz musicians in the business, but up to then he had published no discographies of his own.37 The first book to appear, Jazz Era: The Forties, was actually the third book in the series, and therein lay the problem. It followed the encyclopedic format of biography followed by discography, but to avoid the problem of nearly instantaneous obsolescence, it didn’t list label or catalog numbers, only the song title and record company. Dance hoped this would be enough to allow readers to order the discs they wanted, a questionable assumption in the LP era, where album title mattered as much as song title. Moreover, to fit everything into a 252-page book, only a smattering of songs were listed for each entry, and they excluded sideman roles. (Max Roach, for example, had no records listed at all, because as a drummer he didn’t appear as a leader until the 1950s.) Had the books been issued in chronological order, each musician could

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have had his biography presented right at the dawn of his career, with brief updates in subsequent decades. As it was, nearly all the biographical information had to be duplicated in each book to make it comprehensible to readers. Because of these problems, the series never got beyond the first volume, although it did receive wide distribution as a 1962 reprint by the Jazz Book Club.38 The definitive form of the listening guide as we know it today was achieved in 1967 by the irrepressible Albert McCarthy and a team of three coeditors (Alun Morgan, Paul Oliver, and Max Harrison). Their Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years, 1917–1967 was an update of a 1960 book published under virtually the same title. The earlier work, however, had an almost completely different team of editors: Charles Fox, Peter Gammond, and Alun Morgan. Morgan was a modern jazz specialist. In 1956 he had written, with Raymond Horricks, an overview of the subject, Modern Jazz: A Survey of Developments. A writer for Jazz Journal since 1952, Morgan left in 1955 to go to work for McCarthy’s Jazz Monthly. He was also a reviewer for the Gramophone, where his editor was Charles Fox. Traditional jazz was Fox’s forte, and his biography of Thomas “Fats” Waller appeared the same year that Jazz on Record came out. If  Morgan was the modernist and Fox the traditionalist, Gammond was the big band specialist, and his well-regarded 1958 Duke Ellington biography had become another of the Jazz Book Club’s selections.39 The 1969 edition had nineteen contributing authors in addition to the four editors, so there was much less flavor of “this is his part of the book, this is mine,” and it was much bigger. But like its 1960 predecessor, Jazz on Record was essentially an encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically by artist. But now the narrative biography was much more than an introductory gloss; it was the core of the entry, truly a critical analysis of the musician’s style and evolution. “It has been assumed that the reader will possess some knowledge of jazz history,” warned McCarthy; “consequently, the various entries are devoted, for the most part, to an assessment of an artist’s work on record rather than an attempt to place musicians in perspective.” The titles of important songs were highlighted in the narrative, with footnotes sending readers to a following discography. The discography, in turn, provided information about where the tune could be acquired—generally an LP for newer works or a 45 single, commonly available 78, or compilation LP for older songs. The discography’s emphasis was not on collectibility, but on current accessibility for listening.40 It is interesting that in reviewing the book it was the jazz journalist who got the point, while the academic missed it entirely. Comparing it with

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Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of  Jazz, the University of Chicago’s Frank Tirro complained that Jazz on Record was less complete than Feather’s book and omitted separate entries for such important figures as Bennie Moten and Papa Celestin. Feather’s Encyclopedia of  Jazz (which in later editions was more accurately titled The Biographical Encyclopedia of  Jazz) was in essence a “Who’s Who of Jazz.”41 It contained capsule biographies for every significant person, living and dead, for whom information was available, but it did not list groups or bands. (Nor did it attempt any discographic tasks.) Tirro, who felt entitled to have reference materials tailored to suit him and his scholastic peers, believed it was Jazz on Record ’s duty to fill those gaps. He either didn’t grasp the importance of the title Jazz on Record or, more likely, didn’t care. For example, he complained that Jazz on Record hadn’t given enough consideration to Benny Moten in the historical essay on territory bands. That wasn’t because Moten was unimportant; it was because in 1969 he had almost no available records. Moten and his band switched from Okeh to Victor in 1926, and when he suddenly died in 1935, the band soon became the Count Basie Orchestra. Consequently only four Moten Okehs were then available, and his entire Victor output was contained on two RCA LPs and as part of a Basie retrospective.42 Steve Voce, on the other hand, grasped the idea that this was the maturation of a new type of reference work, a hybrid halfway between a biographical encyclopedia and a discography. It “reverses the procedures of most books on jazz,” he noted. “Instead of the usual irritating references to records to illustrate some point made by the writer, this book concentrates on providing information about the records themselves and looking at them in terms of their worthiness for acquisition and examining them in the context of the jazz life of the artist.”43 Tirro failed to grasp that  Jazz on Records was a listening guide, a layman’s alternative to such “closed system” discographies as Rust’s Jazz Records. Those had started out as a commercial alternative to the junkshoppers’ “little black book” but had evolved into works so complete, precise, and rigorous that they were no longer practical or affordable for the hobbyists they were originally intended for. They were “closed” in the sense that they confined themselves to a limited subject universe. Their goal was to present with perfect accuracy everything that could possibly be known within the narrow boundaries they set for themselves—regardless of whether it was still relevant or useful. Such “closed system” discographies made sense in the junkshoppers’ era, where information was scarce and bad information could prove costly. The majors had no interest in reissuing their old masters, and producers such as

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Milt Gabler and Steve Smith had to beg them to sell them small runs of custom pressings. Thus, scouring through junk shops was often the only way for the jazz fan to hear many classic recordings. But since World War II that was no longer true, and the big question now was figuring out which LP reissue contained what track. But this was something Brian Rust’s Jazz Records, for example, didn’t—or wouldn’t—discuss. “[ It ] was designed for record collectors,” explained Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye. “More often than not, the new audience had no experience with, no access to, and perhaps no interest in, 78 r.p.m. discs. Such a reader, picking up the book, finds that it cannot answer the single most important question, ‘how can I hear the music?’ ”44 Frank Tirro’s biographical leviathans would eventually be given their place in the ocean. After the initial publication of  The Encyclopedia of  Jazz in late 1955, Leonard Feather started issuing annual yearbooks that included a “Best Records of the Year” section. Two yearbooks were published, followed by a fully revised second edition, but then the series halted for many years. Updates for the decades of the 1960s and 1970s eventually followed, and a completely revised edition, edited after Feather’s death by Ira Gitler, was published in 2001. Shorn of everything but the biographical section, this latest edition had truly become the definitive international cyclopedia of jazz biography.45 Tirro’s dream reference appeared in 1974 when Arlington House published Roger Kinkle’s four-volume Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music. “It is difficult to review a mammoth work like this in a publication such as Discological Forum,” wrote Mike Weir, “[as it] gives so much information which can’t be reviewed thoroughly because of a lack of space.” Volume 1 was a year-by-year compendium of significant popular music from 1900 to 1950, taken from the listings of Broadway shows, music polls, Billboard Magazine rankings, and so on for that year. Volumes 2 and 3 were given over to musicians’ biographies. Volume 4 was a compilation of indexes and just about every list one could possibly want (major events, poll winners, awards, etc.). The four books (with dust jackets matching those of Brian Rust’s Jazz Records and American Dance Bands) together extended to over 1,600 pages—the two biography books alone took up 850. “Are they worth the money?” asked Weir. “Yes, I think they are but only if you are a jazz fan and a movie musicals fan and keen on popular music from the 30s and 40s.” In 1996 a small specialty press, Windmill Publications, condensed the biography volumes and deleted much of the old first and fourth volumes (the lists), thereby compressing the old four volumes into two, then added a 1996

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update to the biographies as a new volume 3. It was expensive, distribution was small, and it is much sought as a collector’s item.46 Smaller biographical encyclopedias, most containing at least rudimentary discographies, later became so ubiquitous that it is not really possible to discuss them all, but two warrant a brief mention. In 1970 the Bloomsbury Book Shop in London published John Chilton’s Who’s Who of  Jazz (Storyville to Swing Street). It was published two years later in the United States by a major trade publisher (confusingly, also named Chilton). Except for Feather’s Encyclopedia of  Jazz, it was probably the first biographical encyclopedia, and it was almost certainly the first completely dedicated to that task. Although inexpensive and fairly well written, it was limited in scope, including only Americans born before 1920. Chilton (the publisher) reissued it often, it came out in at least one book club edition, and though now out of print, it can be found almost everywhere. Its discographic information was minimal at best, limited to the mention of notable songs or album titles.47 An interesting case study of the vagaries of the publishing business was Jazz: The Essential Companion, a 1987 book edited by Ian Carr, Digby Fair­ weather, and Brian Priestley. It was a biographical encyclopedia of 1,600 entries, and reviewers found it one of the best of the lot, mostly because of its strong editing team. Fairweather, the traditional jazz man, was a former librarian who became a professional musician in the early 1970s. Priestley, the “swing to bop” expert, was a Charlie Parker biographer, and Carr, the modern guy, had done the same for Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett. Like Fairweather, both were professional musicians. But reference books don’t sell particularly well. In 1996 it was acquired by a publishing firm that specialized in popular paperback “how to” guides covering everything from plumbing to sex and repackaged into Jazz: The Rough Guide. In its new guise it started to became a buyers’ guide, with specific song references in the biographies and discographies that emphasized currently available CDs.48 The problem was that the Rough Guide series was distributed by the Penguin Publishing Group, and Penguin had its own blockbuster buyers’ guide, The Penguin Guide to Jazz, by Richard Cook and Brian Morton. Needless to say, the Rough Guide to Jazz never made it near the front of the Penguin bookseller’s catalog, and compared with the Penguin Guide, the Rough Guide did at first read a lot like an encyclopedia with a few CD references tacked on.49 But as they are wont to do, when things go bad, they tend to get worse. In 2005 Penguin purchased the Rough Guides’ publisher outright, and a year later introduced Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia, written

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by the lead editor of The Penguin Guide to Jazz, by now in its sixth edition. “This seems to be, rather strangely, a direct competitor to the widely acclaimed Rough Guide to Jazz,” puzzled Graham Colombé, “[as] the two books are now produced by the same company.” That wasn’t a problem for long—Penguin killed off the Rough Guide to Jazz in 2008.50

Up to this point, listening guides had been a combination of history, biography, and discography. Organized much like encyclopedias, they still emphasized either critical context or history as expressed through the rec­ ordings. The next step was to largely dispense with the biographical artist entries, concentrating only on the records themselves, usually by focusing on those considered the best, most representative, or simply most enjoyable. Max Harrison, along with various combinations of coeditors, issued a number of these over the years under the unifying title theme “essential,” an umbrella that covered a surprising variety of editorial strategies, approaches, and methods. He and four other editors (most notably Alun Morgan) compiled the first, Modern Jazz: The Essential Records, in 1975. It included only two hundred records but, as the title indicates, covered a relatively narrow, postwar period, and as one would expect, the selections were dominated by Coleman, Coltrane, Monk, Parker, and Rollins. There was little biographical information, but the editors attempted to include all the British and American issue information they could get right up to the publication deadline.51 Ten years later, Harrison combined with Fox and Eric Thacker, a regular contributor to Jazz Monthly (where in 1972 Harrison had taken over from Albert McCarthy as editor), to edit The Essential Jazz Recordings, volume 1, Ragtime to Swing, which many considered the exemplar of what a “best of ” listening guide should be. Dan Morgenstern called it “the Mona Lisa of its genre . . . an enlightened and enlightening overview of the music it surveys,” with “often unorthodox and unexpected choices.” Because it was intended to be the first of two volumes, it covered only the prewar period, but its 250 entries were surprisingly catholic, including the usual material, but also European bands, early Fifty-Second Street, and even some New Orleans revivalism, including the controversial 1942–43 Bunk Johnson recordings. Morgenstern did catch Harrison aiming a couple of nasty haymakers at Dance in the endnotes. (“Not worthy of the level on which this work is conceived and executed,” he sniffed.)52 The book’s two main problems were that it was expensive ($40, a good hunk of money in 1984), though, being a Greenwood Press book, it was well

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f i g u r e 1 1 . A page from Max Harrison, Charles Fox, and Eric Thacker’s The Essential  Jazz Records (1984 edition).

done, and that it took sixteen years for volume 2, Modernism to Postmodernism, to appear. When it finally came out in 2000, it emerged as a more affordable paperback published by an American firm, Mansell, which also reprinted the 1984 Greenwood first volume to make a matched set. Thacker had died in 1997 and Fox in 1991, but although the second volume was coedited by Harrison and Stuart Nicholson, everyone was listed on the title page, because all had contributed. (Thacker in particular had several posthumous pieces.) Even then, “more affordable” was a relative term, the two-volume set costing $80.53

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Moreover, like the first volume (which was a straight reprint of the 1984 edition), Modernism to Postmodernism included only 250 albums. However, jazz had become so broad and fractured that a selection that narrow no longer worked very well. Barry McRae, writing in Jazz Journal International, found the selection and treatment of free jazz and the European scene “expansive” and “analyzed with acuity,” but Lawrence Kart, in the Review of Jazz Studies, found those same sections “deeply flawed.” (Both, however, were gratified to see neotraditionalist trumpeter and television star Wynton Marsalis thoroughly thrashed.) Meanwhile, librarian Jim Farrington pragmatically noted that while it was noble of the editors not to limit themselves to recordings in print, or even those widely available on the used-record mar­ ket, at $42 the second volume was going to have a hard time competing with the new generation of buyers’ guides, some listing upward of 1,700 LPs and CDs. What had seemed erudite sixteen years earlier now seemed pedantic, arbitrary, elitist, or reactionary, depending on who you were. People just didn’t like to be told what their tastes ought to be anymore.54 The new books expressed this philosophy of “hey, its up to you” by including as much as possible, then either rating the records or giving a “star” to the ones the compilers thought had merit. Arguably the most popular was The Penguin Guide to Jazz, edited by Richard Cook and Brian Morton. A spin-off of a classical music guide that British Penguin had been publishing for years, the first edition appeared in England in 1990, then moved to the United States two years later for the second edition. Thereafter, new editions were usually issued biennially, but the editing team remained British. Cook was former head of jazz repertoire at Polygram-UK and a writer for the Wire. In the mid-1990s he helped establish a new magazine, Jazz Review, and edited it until his death in 2007. The younger Morton was also a writer, but he spent most of his time at Penguin, working on the Guide. As early as the second edition, it was up to almost 1,300 pages—the index alone ran to 100. The format could be described as “raggedy encyclopedia”: alphabetically by artist or group; each entry opening with a short narrative introduction, followed by a discography of currently available products with a commentary added for albums of particular interest or significance. In some cases the record commentaries exceeded the biographical introduction. Each record was rated from one to four stars. By the sixth edition (2002) it was up to 1,700 pages, but the price was a still a modest $35. It sold hugely for a jazz book. After Cook died Brian Morton carried on alone, and the tenth edition appeared in 2010, but in a very different way. The old approach was abandoned in favor of an Essential Guide “best of ” format! “The

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recent flood of CDs, many from artist-owned labels,” wrote reviewer Simon Adams, “meant this all-embracing approach was no longer possible. So the decision was taken by Brian to wipe the slate clean and adopt a highly selective approach.” The selection was reduced to 1,001 albums, the narrative sections were much longer, and the grading by stars was abandoned. The verdict? “It’s not the guide as we know it,” Adams repined. As if to seal this “back to the future” approach, Adams noted that it didn’t even have an artists index anymore. “Best approach this book as a magnificent jumble bag,” he concluded. So much for the comprehensive buyers’ guide.55 The evolutionary path of the second of these “rate-a-record” megaguides was even more fascinating. The All Music Guide to Jazz was likewise the scion of another work, in this case the popular-music All Music Guide. The All Music Guide appeared in 1992, and the first edition of its jazz derivative followed in 1994. Its format was much like The Penguin Guide: introductiondiscography-record discussion. The rankings were on a scale of one to three. It was an in-house, staff effort, and Edward Berger of the Institute of Jazz Studies found an embarrassing number of instances where some overworked editor had apparently lifted text from one or another popular reference work to fill out an entry. The New Grove Dictionary of  Jazz was hit especially hard. However, when oversight moved from Miller-Freeman to a new company, All Music Guides (AMG), new genre guides for blues, pop, and country music appeared, and the quality of the existing ones improved markedly. The firm’s strategic plan came more into focus in when AMG announced that it was expanding into commercial music services, providing publishing data and encapsulated critical information for music stores, online retailers, and department stores. Amazon.com eventually became a major client. Although it kept producing paper guides, AMG took the next big step in 1993 when it announced that it would create a public-access room on its website, previously available only to paying clients. While Brian Morton and the Penguin Guide reacted to this twentieth-century version of “the Flood” by retrenching to a selective guide format, AMG answered the challenge by going to a digital-paper symbiosis. Insofar as that worked, it may have lost the battle but won the war: AMG’s website now eclipses any of its paper guides. It also eclipses just about everything else.

iii In 1936 there was still one thing that set Hilton Schleman’s Rhythm on Re­ cord apart from the junkshoppers’ little black book. It was the one area that

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he and Melody Maker still feared to tread: prices. Ernest Borneman recalled hearing his first jazz record in 1921. It was Ory’s Creole Trombone, recorded in Los Angeles on the Nordskog label. Ten years later, a friend of his bought a copy for five cents, with a new label by Sunshine pasted over the Nordskog label. After removing the second label and otherwise cleaning the record up, the friend sold it for $125. Brian Rust funded most of his first research trip to the United States in the early 1950s by brokering records. Borneman’s British friend Norman put himself through medical school doing the same thing. “The old mimeographed record list priced according to the vendor’s whims has now been replaced by the printed auction list with minimum bids,” reported George Hoefer in 1944, “which on certain rarities has reached a sum of sixty-five dollars.” The days when junkshoppers spent hours digging through piles in dark, dusty shops to find one or two rarities were coming to an end. More often than not, a collector would ask “Do you have any old records?” only to be told that everything in the store had been sold en masse to a music shop. The smart collectors started to emulate that strategy. Buy everything. Sort. Sell the scrap. Broker the middling stuff out in lots. Keep the gems for yourself, list them in trading magazines, or print a catalog. Rust may tell you what’s a gem, but how do you tell the middling stuff from scrap?56 The trading journals came well in advance of price books, which were rel­atively recent (and infrequent). Gordon Gullickson’s Record Changer, published from 1942 to 1955, provided an exchange market, much as AB Bookman’s Weekly did for books. The main difference was that AB Bookman’s was circulated almost exclusively to booksellers, whereas Record Changer’s lists of records sought and offered were used about equally by retailers and individuals. Like its bookish counterpart, Record Changer featured some good feature writing and a few regular features; Orin Blackstone wrote its Hot Copy column. Similarly, Blackstone’s own Jazzfinder and Playback had extensive buy/sell ads. Record Research, a bimonthly that commenced publication in 1955, combined the two, with features and columns at the highest level of scholarship and journalism (it published Paul Sheatsley’s famous 1964 “A Quarter Century of  Jazz Discography”) and a substantial “records wanted/ records offered” section in the center. It remained in print through the early 1980s. Vintage Jazz Mart, a British journal, started in 1953 as an irregular publication. It focused on 78s and the interests of traditional jazz collectors. It often featured advertisements and articles by Brian Rust, and as of 2012 is still going as V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart. Goldmine, started in 1974, was a general-interest record traders’ journal. Its content, apart from its “wanted/ offered” lists, was often limited, but it was a valuable source of information

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on rock and roll and jazz-rock fusion. Published every two weeks, it probably had the biggest circulation within the used wax retail trade. It is no longer published.57 Price guides in book form have always been far rarer than lists in journals and ephemera. “Prices in a price guide, de rigueur as they are, are always con­troversial, even with the best of intentions,” noted Stephen Braitman. “Valuing records is a difficult and often thankless task . . . and any price, high or low, will have outliers that prove the rule is the exception.” In other types of collectibles, there are two approaches: either present a single “best estimate” figure or report specific facts, such as auction results and other notable transactions, along with date, place, and circumstances. Generally, because most records are too low in value and too infrequently auctioned as individual items, the “estimated price” approach is the norm.58 Although references to general record price guides and rock and roll album guides can be found far earlier, the earliest published jazz record price guide appears to be Ferguson and Johnson’s (no first names!) Mainstream Jazz Reference and Price Guide, published in 1984. It covered only about 8,000 albums, but Dance Bands and Big Bands, compiled two years later by Alice Rogers, contained over 30,000 entries, all 78s. While reviewer Shirley Klett called it “a valuable reference book for the collector of 78s,” she did note with interest that most records were priced between $2 and $5. Few albums in Ferguson and Johnson’s book were priced below $25, and most were in the range of $35 to $75, casting some doubt on whether they were reporting market prices or trying to establish them. This is a problem endemic to all types of collectors’ price guides—not just for records—where the editors are also active dealers. In 1991 Cadence reviewed The Jazz Price Guide, by Terry Leonard. “This guide is comparable to the Ferguson & Johnson Price Guide, and while this work lists far more artists and records, it is hard to feel that it is any more a dependable guide than the earlier work,” it complained. Like Ferguson and Johnson, Leonard had what appeared to be a base price ($15), an average ($30), and several prices over $750. “Obviously, these speculations are subjective but anyone slightly familiar with this business need only to glance at a few pages of this work to see its constant ignorance,” the review concluded.59 It should be becoming apparent at this point just why the collectors’ price guide lagged so far behind the listeners’ guide, and why they have been so few and so short-lived. Geoff Wheeler, the colorful former president of the International Asso­ ciation of Jazz Record Collectors (IAJRC), self-published in 2009 one of the most unusual collectors’ guides ever: a guide to bootleg and reissue 78s. A

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“bootleg” recording, as defined by Wheeler, is not, as the word is typically used, an illegally recorded performance. It is a legitimately recorded song, previously released, that reappears on a pressing not authorized by the original record label or the artist. A “reissue,” on the other hand, is an authorized re-pressing by a subsidiary or specialty label, such as an RCA Victor release on its Bluebird subsidiary. It would also include contract pressings such as Milt Gabler’s Commodore and United Hot Clubs labels. As Wheeler argues, “Fifty and sixty years ago, there were still copies of rare recordings to be found in excellent to mint condition. Today, that likelihood is remote. . . . [A]s more collectors appreciate this fact, the more the 78 bootlegs of the 1940s will be valued. . . . [ M ]any 78 bootlegs now play better than any of the best original recordings that may exist.” Also, unlike contemporary CD reissues, they have not been run through noise-reduction filters. In a narrow sense, Wheeler’s three-volume work was not a “collectors’ guide,” in that he did not attempt to provide a hard-and-fast expectation of prices. However, the book did provide a long list of discographic and manufacturing data (production runs, variations, pressing locations, etc.) facilitating a very careful selection between seemingly identical discs. This allowed collectors to reach their own careful pricing decisions. In this regard it probably is indicative of the future of works of this type. They will likely occupy a narrow but deep specialty niche, as this book’s self-publication, self-distribution, and not inconsequential (compared with earlier works) $45 price tag suggest.60

chapter eight

What Kind of Discographies Do We Want? From 1979 into the Future

i The fourth edition of Brian Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z was released in 1978 by the American publisher Arlington House as a two-volume set. Much of the additional bulk came from new information gleaned from record companies that had given Rust access to their files over the intervening decade. A great deal had also been deleted: this was the material that had been moved to British Dance Bands (1973), The American Dance Band Discography (1975), and to a lesser degree The Complete Entertainment Discography (1973). The vast scope of Rust’s career could be measured through these four works. Together they now extended to almost 6,000 pages, yet they covered the same fifty years as the 750 pages of his 1962 second edition of  Jazz Records, A-Z and its 1965 supplement. Rust’s usual selective criteria applied, but for the first time a 150-page tune index was added. There were 135 versions of “St. Louis Blues” and 47 of “China Boy.” “Long Live Brian Rust!” exclaimed Donald McCormack of the New York Public Library. “How did we ever get by without him?” Others, while equally appreciative, were more reserved. “His primary aim was to create a guide for the 78 r.p.m. collector, not to provide a scholarly survey of the field,” cautioned Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye. Try as you might to use Jazz Records as a musicological time machine “meant to land in Chicago and New York in the 1920’s,” one would instead find that “their time machine broke and instead brought them to London in the 1960s, at the home of a lovable record collector whose eccentric overview of jazz holds no special authority.”1 Music writer Will Friedwald argues that to put Rust’s principal works in

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their proper perspective, one has to see Jazz Records, A-Z as “Brian’s real baby, the crown jewel,” with American Dance Bands and The Entertainment Discography as derivatives that “grew out of the leftover research.” That, he asserts, is the “key idea in understanding how the three books—and the music of the prewar period in general—work.” Whereas American Dance Bands and The Entertainment Discography both document formats (“big bands” and “popular vocalists”), Jazz Records deals with something quite different: a style of music. “So there are bound to be big band records or vocal records that are also jazz records.” The canon Rust reserved to Jazz Records was recordings by black bands, so “it doesn’t matter if it’s a hardcore jazz act like Ellington or Basie,” Friedwald says, “or Noble Sissle, who led more of a society-oriented dance orchestra.” All were included. White bands were also added, of course, but they had to be “legitimate” jazz bands. “When it comes to white dance bands, that’s when Rust starts getting subjective,” he notes, “and Jazz Records becomes a work of interpretation rather than just a straightforward laying out of names and numbers.”2 Howard Rye acknowledges both of Friedwald’s points. Responding to the accusation of excluding black artists, he strongly holds that “none of his discographical works do [so],” but he agrees that Rust “shared the generally held view that all African-American big bands belong in a jazz discography while the larger proportion of non-jazz performances in the recorded output of some white big bands necessitates the making of a selection on space grounds, a perception which in turn led him to exclude African-American bands from his dance-band discography to avoid pointless duplication.” He likewise finds Rust’s inclusion of white groups to reflect his personal, sometimes idiosyncratic, brand of musicology.3 (Indeed, Rust titled his 1990 autobiography My Kind of  Jazz.)4 For example, Rust long ago started including western swing groups such as the Light Crust Doughboys in his jazz discographies. At the time that was a controversial decision, but he was eventually proved correct when Ross Russell and others showed they were important stylistic contributors to southwestern territory bands. The process of selecting them was always uneven, however, and Rye believes that Rust systematically excluded bands with a fiddler and included those without one. “[ Rust’s] idiosyncrasies of selection at the margins have almost become an institution in themselves,” he notes.5 Friedwald believes that while “Brian Rust’s Jazz Records is remarkable for its subjectivity,” it is still a model of how a good comprehensive discography should be done. “It’s worth noting that Rust’s successors, those chroni-

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clers of the modern jazz era, such as Jepsen, Lord, Raben, and Bruyninckx, all followed Rust’s lead: they follow his example, for instance, in drawing attention to those albums by, say, The Jackie Gleason Orchestra that are ‘of jazz interest,’ the same way Rust did for Whiteman.”6 In 1983 Laurie Wright’s Storyville magazine issued a fifth edition of  Jazz Records. Its debut was both surprising and, to most discographers, somewhat inexplicable. The 1978 Arlington House edition had been produced in a substantial print run: to this day it is the version most frequently encountered. Moreover, this new edition looked like a straight reprint of Arlington House’s 1978 version, but with the pages shrunk 25 percent to match the size of Storyville’s 1969-70 edition and with two errata pages tacked on at the end. Its market prospects were poor, and many questioned why Wright brought it out at all. The answer can be summed up in the old expression “pay­backs are hell.” At the time of the Arlington House edition, Wright still had a valid contract from the previous Storyville edition giving him a right of first refusal to the next edition. Litigating the matter across the ocean and against a much larger firm was out of the question, so from Wright’s point of view, Storyville’s fifth edition was simply a proper exercise of rights carried over from the 1969-70 version; Arlington House likely thought it more akin to a pirated edition, if it cared at all.7 But while the Storyville two-volume set looks like a straight reproduction of the 1978 Arlington House edition with smaller pages, in 1999 Han Enderman undertook a detailed comparison of the third, fourth, and fifth editions, and his review—admittedly only a random sampling—found fourteen instances where the text itself had been changed from the Arlington House edition to the subsequent Storyville edition. He concluded that while “[it] was published rather shortly (only 5 years) [ later], and for cost reasons as a revised photocopy, [within] these restrictions Rust has made a considerable number of additions and corrections.” But others believe the changes were inserted by Laurie Wright, not Rust, and were made merely as a defense against accusations of copyright infringement. However, if the volume of changes indicated by extrapolating up from those found in Enderman’s limited sample is accurate, it seems that a more thorough revision was done.8 In 2002 Mainspring Press, a Denver-based specialty publisher, released a sixth edition, now retitled Jazz and Ragtime Records, 1897–1942. Malcolm Shaw, who had assisted Rust on some of his earlier works, and who lived in the Denver area, approached Allan Sutton, Mainspring’s owner, about taking on the project. Sutton had started Mainspring in 1999 as a publisher of

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online discographies, subsequently sold it, but then bought it back shortly before Shaw contacted him. Sutton was interested in moving into print format and saw Shaw and Rust’s offer as an ideal opportunity for breaking into that market.9 There is a slight discrepancy about what happened next. According to Sutton, the original plan was that the book “would be deconstructed down to its base level” and rebuilt, but Rust’s health didn’t permit this, so there was a more traditional updating and editing, which itself took about eighteen months. Sutton recalls that Rust was able to provide “only about five pages of material.” But Shaw emphasizes that “the authorship and control of the contents, in all versions to date, is indisputably Brian’s. In compiling the content of the last edition for Brian, I inserted his own changes and additions, plus polled as many respected friends as I could . . . ran all the changes past Brian, and compiled new indexes. Allan Sutton at Mainspring added material, largely ragtime-related.”10 As one can see, the differences are not so much factual as interpretative. Mainspring worked from the fifth edition, using a scanner with optical character recognition (OCR), “but the format of the Storyville edition was not good, and the OCR inputs required a lot of work,” recalled Sutton.11 After reviewing the new edition, Han Enderman concluded that “the new Rust fails as a comprehensive survey of prewar American jazz. . . . [A]ctually, this is a discography of prewar jazz issued on commercial 78s plus an incomplete amount of additional recordings.” Enderman believed “it could have been a good discography” if the editors had made a conscious decision to limit it to commercial records, “aimed at the collector of 78s,” and spent more of their effort on making it current. Many of the masters that had been recorded in the 1920s and 1930s but not issued (either passed over in favor of another take or rejected entirely) were now being released more and more frequently, often as “bonus” tracks added to CD reissues of old LPs or as stand-alone CDs composed entirely of unreleased (and often commercially unusable) material intended for the specialist academic market. While Enderman agreed it served no good purpose to try to include every “price buster” generic-label CD, he did believe that Rust’s Jazz Records should have tried to embrace some concept of completeness within the chronological and genre sphere it had carved out for itself.12 But Allan Sutton thinks even that level of currency and inclusiveness may be impossible and believes the ink-on-paper comprehensive discography is marketable only to older, affluent specialty record collectors.13 In the end Jazz Records remains, as Enderman puts it, a discography of American jazz

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recorded before 1942, released on commercial 78s, with at least some value to collectors, along with a smattering of more recent material that may be of listening interest to those same collectors. Mainspring Press issued the sixth edition as a CD-ROM a year or so after the paper version. The paper edition sold out in a little over two years, and Mainspring has no plans to print more, although it will continue to offer the CD version. Sutton himself picked up where Brian Rust and Allen Debus had left off in 1973 with Rust and Debus’s Complete Entertainment Discography. In 2007 Sutton compiled and issued, as a Mainspring Press publication, the first volume (1891–1932) of The American Stage Performers Discography. It was not an update or a revision of the earlier work, but it did, with Rust’s permission, fold in the Complete Entertainment Discography. Focusing on actors, vaudevillians, and musical comedy stars, it was not a pure discography but an encyclopedic multi-bio-discography, somewhat like Albert McCarthy’s 1968 Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide. Sutton’s book drew from several authoritative narrative histories of the American light theater and early film industry, as well as many specialty discographies (mainly of labels) that had been compiled over the past thirty years. In keeping with recent standards, both the discographic and the biographical material was cited entry by entry.14 Malcolm Shaw, who had coedited the sixth edition of Rust’s Jazz Records, stepped into the role of publisher for what turned into a mammoth second edition of his 1975 American Dance Band Discography. The first version, by Arlington House, was already two volumes and 2,066 pages long when Richard Johnson and Bernard Shirley started revising it. Johnson reported in 1999 that the work was only up to the “second proof stage” and had gotten only as far as “Glen Lyte’s Orchestra on page 2,221.” “We don’t have a publication date yet,” he admitted. (Even at this relatively early date, it appeared that advanced age and ill health were preventing Rust’s active participation.) Completing the project took another decade. Released in late 2009, the new version, now titled American Dance Bands on Record and Film, 1915–1942, needed five massive volumes to hold its 4,880 pages.15 Rust’s old taxonomy issues continued to create problems. Johnson and Shirley completely excised black jazz bands, even such traditionally “sweet” bands as Fletcher Henderson’s. Their reasoning, carried over from the 1975 edition, was that they were included in Jazz Records, and duplication would simply drive up costs for no good reason. However, back in 1975 Arlington House had published not only both Jazz Records and American Dance Band Discography, but also the Complete Entertainment Discography and individual

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bio-discographies of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, planning what they hoped would be a dovetailed bookshelf of jazz and popular show music from both sides of the Atlantic for the prewar period. These works were now all out of print, so Shaw had reinserted whatever jazz material could be gleaned from The Complete Entertainment Discography and (far more important) the American Dance Band and the Goodman and Miller discographies back into the Mainspring Press edition of  Jazz Records. Johnson and Shirley now did the same, but only for white bands. As a result, the new American Dance Bands on Record and Film and Jazz Records both contained big white bands such as Goodman, the Dorseys, and Jean Goldkette, while lesser-known units of both races were restricted to Jazz Records or, on occasion, omitted altogether if the editors felt they never recorded anything of sufficient jazz interest. (For example, Red Nichols was in, but the Five Pennies were out. The Bob Crosby Orchestra was in, but his small group, the Bob Cats, was out.) The old charges of disparate treatment were suggested anew, and while there was no bad intent, the new structures continued to reflect flaws built into foundations laid half a century earlier.16 Another concern was American Dance Bands on Record and Film’s failure to keep abreast of the advancing standards in citation and source control. “In some ways it was like stepping back into 1975,” complained Tim Brooks, “back in the days when simply being ‘the first to do it’ was sufficient. There is not a clue where any of this information came from, or how reliable it is.” Discographer Bill Dean-Myatt jumped to Johnson and Shirley’s defense. “Does [Brooks] believe that every recording session should have a list of sources[?] . . . [S]urely in a general reference work like this it is both impractical and unnecessary.” Brooks’s reply was, in effect, “Yes, I mean every session should be sourced.”17 A decade earlier, Brooks had written an editorial in the ARSC Journal rec­ommending that discographies submitted for publication should pass a “basic test of sourcing” that was “the same for discographies as for scholarly text. Does it allow the reader to literally retrace the author’s steps and locate the source of factual information?” While an article-length discography may require a footnote or citation for every line, a longer work could probably get away with one note at the bottom of each session, or possibly a bibliographic essay at the bottom of each artist entry. “Some compilers may be reluctant to admit that they have drawn much of their information from prior discographies,” admitted Brooks, “[ but] a great deal of inaccurate information has been propagated by discographers who copied from

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each others’ [sic] work without regard to typos, unsubstantiated assumptions, and even blatantly wrong original sources.” Brooks complained that in the new “American Dance Bands on Record and Film “I am listed [in the source essay] and I couldn’t even tell you now what I contributed! These are acknowledgements, not sourcing.”18 As to Dean-Myatt’s argument that American Dance Bands on Record and Film was a “general reference work” that was “aimed not at an academic readership but at a general public,” Brooks’s reply was succinct: Look at the sticker price. “I am frankly offended that after paying $550 for this set I am told that I’m just the ‘general public’ and not entitled to quality work.” What Brooks didn’t say was that the worldwide clientele for a $550, five-volume discography—apart from music schools, libraries, and other institutions— could probably fit comfortably into a small city bus. Björn Englund, who had been running a column of amendments and additions to Rust’s Jazz Records for many years in Vintage Jazz Mart, noted that “Orin Blackstone’s Index to Jazz was not an outstanding discography, but at least for older recordings he often gave the source of the personnel (such as the ‘Hot Box’ in Down Beat or Jazz Information magazine). Future editions should have some sort of citation to indicate the source of the personnel.”19 Rye, for one, doubts that even Brooks’s level of detail will solve the problem, since there is “a lot of information in the standard discographies which is of uncertain and unverifiable origins and rests on anyone’s guess.” He worries that it is now “difficult to impossible” to go back and document enough of the old recording sessions strictly from primary sources to permit any comprehensive discography to be truly original. Today’s real problem, he believes, isn’t that information is being copied, but that it is copied uncritically, sometimes quite evidently without even reading what is being copied, from sources that are themselves cut-and-paste jobs.20 But even access to an original source may not be enough. Richard Johnson himself related how a popular vocalist of the 1930s once wrote to him about a session that was notable because almost every musician was a well-known bandleader. Later, Johnson was able to check his claim against the recording ledger and discovered that the vocalist’s memory “was not borne out.” Further research showed that “four of the named band leaders were on tours across America” at the time.21 Allan Sutton agrees that there has been a “great deal of pressure” over the years to improve the source documentation of discographies, but that “figuring out what those sources were” will be very difficult because so many of the original sources are “now deceased, soon to be deceased, or likely not to cooperate.”22

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ii The twenty-sixth and final volume of Lord’s The Jazz Discography appeared in 2001, almost exactly ten years after the series started. In subsequent years it would be followed by a five-volume index of artists and tunes, then a fourvolume supplement that stretched the series to a mind-boggling thirty-five books. Shortly before volume 26, Lord had started offering his hard-copy customers, at a nominal price, a CD-ROM containing most of the contents of the first twenty-five books. He had parted ways with Cadence in 1999, thereafter selling the last few volumes, the indexes, and the four supplements himself. The preliminary CD was apparently offered both as a way to make the last volumes useful to customers without their having to buy any of the earlier Cadence-distributed products (which Cadence was still selling) and as a beta test for a future all-CD version.23 Lord says it was Bob Rusch’s decision to terminate their agreement: “I’m not a hundred percent sure why he wanted to do that, but I believe he felt threatened by the imminent production of our Jazz Discography on CD-ROM.” Thus Lord had decided not to sell the CD version through Cadence even before reaching the end of the print series. In its market-ready form, the CD sold for $277, leaving Cadence with the first twenty-five volumes of a thirty-five-book series, each selling for $45.24 (Several years later, Cadence remaindered the first twenty-five volumes as partial sets for $300.) In addition, Lord’s hand may have been forced by Walter Bruyninckx’s announcement of his next project, 85 Years of Recorded Jazz, which he compiled with Domi Truffandier. As with his earlier loose-sheet discographies, Bruyninckx sold this new CD-based product by subscription, in four parts. Also as with his earlier works, he made no attempt to impose any sort of alphabetical logic. In January 2000 F-K was released, followed by A-C, D-E, and M-R. By early 2002 things had apparently grown a bit hectic, and Bruyninckx was issuing his CDs one letter at a time. A compilation disc containing the entire alphabet was released in late 2004 or early 2005, and a further proofread, updated, and revised one-disc version was released in mid-2006.25 Bruyninckx’s approach was simple. The finalized CD comprised twentysix Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files, one for each letter of the alphabet. Opening one of these revealed a plain black-on-white text document. Bruyninckx and Truffandier had prepared a new paper update of 70/75 Years and then, instead of photocopying it, had scanned it into a computer, sorted it into twenty-six files, and duplicated it onto CDs. The manipulation functions

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were limited to what the proprietary Adobe software allowed. The basic Adobe Reader package, available free and familiar to most personal computer users, has basic search functions and allows text to be cut and pasted onto another medium—a page of word processing software, for example, but only as a fixed image. Purchasing the full Adobe Acrobat package permits customers to manipulate the files sent by Bruyninckx in a number of ways. It was the next logical step beyond the “impossibly stuffed” brown cardboard boxes of loose sheets. By 2005 the price of the all-in-one disc was $350, and Bruyninckx had established a series of overseas sales representatives to ease the problems of money transfer and currency conversion. The full commercial CD version of Lord’s The Jazz Discography, designated Version 3.3, was issued in mid-2002. (Version 4.4 followed in 2004.) It was far different from Bruyninckx and Truffandier’s work. It used a relational database with two points of entry: a search engine and an index. (The index, in turn, was subdivided into lists of musicians, tunes, locations, dates, and matrices.) Clicking on an index entry such as Blue Mitchell or entering Blue Mitchell into the search engine yielded a list of session numbers. Clicking on an individual session number, or specifying “all,” opened a series of standard McCarthy-Rust formatted sessions, each with its own serial number.26 Although the plagiarism controversy quieted over the years, it never fully died out, and long after the book series finished, Michael Fitzgerald concluded that “more than two decades after this project’s start, it is readily apparent that Kernfeld and Rye’s assessment that ‘in crucial respects [ Lord ] seems unqualified to be a jazz discographer,’ still holds true.” On the other hand, critic and writer Steve Voce believed that the “dozens of individual discographies” in his personal library “have all been trumped, stomped-on and made obsolete” by the new CD format, which he called “one of . . . the most indispensable devices you can use.” Dan Morgenstern, one of a relatively few people within the discographic community to speak directly with Lord, believes that he harbored no bad intent but was instead simply “rather naïve” in initiating his project by first amassing a foundation database and only then working to update and improve it, instead of undertaking all the quality assurance checks at the time the information was compiled.27 But some of Lord’s early responses to his critics suggest that he may have been better versed in some of the legal and business implications of his methods than Morgenstern believed. In both his mid-1995 response to Kernfeld and Rye and a mid-1996 response to a letter in Jazz Journal written by Olaf Syman, Lord placed great emphasis on the format used in The

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Jazz Discography. He emphasized how he had made his work different by underlining leader names, using dictionary-style page headers and footers, and changing the treatment of CD titles.28 These might seem trivial points to raise over and over unless one had been advised that these features could well determine the difference between success and failure in litigation over copyright infringement. What must have been even more puzzling was Lord’s repeated emphasis on sessions, and his avoiding the words book and volume. For example, “With the advent of modern computer database technology and its application to jazz discography,” Lord claimed in 1995, “sessions and/or new CDs applied to old sessions can be input right up to a publishing deadline.” Elsewhere, in 1996 he stated, “I am adding well over one hundred sessions to each volume from LPs. . . . [ T ]here are over one hundred sessions added by one of my Japanese correspondents alone.” From the very start of the book series, each session had been assigned its own serial number. These started over for each letter (A1–A4676; B1–B10430, etc.), but not for each artist, so the last session for Cannonball Adderley was A536, and the next session, A537, was the first entry for his brother, Nat Adderley. This suggested that Lord’s database relied heavily on session numbers for its operations. This, in turn, implied two things: first, that Lord probably anticipated from the start that he would likely move beyond ink on paper into some type of digital format, either CD-ROM or a subscription online service; and second, that he anticipated that a large number of disparate and overlapping sessions would need culling, the result of having multiple semiskilled clerks independently entering data from different sources. Serializing sessions made it easier to designate which session or sessions should be deleted after they were identified as duplicates by comparing names, dates, or other information. But the search engine of the first CD version was probably the most revealing indicator of Lord’s thinking. It contained no inherent order; there was nothing to browse. Although it had a sophisticated Boolean search function, some of the more computer-savvy reviewers found it “stiff ” and “awkward,” because they wanted it to yield data below the session level, but the software could penetrate only down to the session. For example, it couldn’t provide a list of every bassist who played on a version of “St. Louis Blues,” it could only provide the list of sessions in which “St. Louis Blues” was played. The user then had to go through each session to find out who the bassist was. Similarly, it could not indicate if Arvell Shaw ever played on a version of “St. Louis Blues,” but entering both “Arvell Shaw” and “St. Louis

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Blues” in the search engine returned a list of those sessions in which both Shaw played and “St. Louis Blues” was recorded. This is significant when combined with Lord’s emphasis on format, not content. It is possible that by developing a unique variant of the McCarthyRust format for sessions, then assigning each session an individual serial number, each session block becomes a copyrightable unit, and duplicating a single session in its entirety, unaltered, can be construed as copyright in­ fringement. On the other hand, Steve Albin, developer of the discographic software BRIAN, agrees that “it is possible to go deeper than the session level” in a relational database, but given Lord’s software architecture, “the programming would take a lot of work.” BRIAN does go deeper than the session level, and Albin asserts that “it is not a lot of work if you do it from the beginning [but] it would be a lot of work for Lord to go back and do this if his foundation does not support it.” He also notes that BRIAN creates a serial number for each session but that normally it is not visible to the user. In fact, he believes that it would be hard not to create session serial numbers, and that Lord’s heavy reliance on them as a navigation tool is simply a matter of programming style.29 In early 2008 Tom Lord released an online version of The Jazz Discog­ raphy. An annual subscription for an individual user in mid-2009 was $150 to $180 (depending on whether the user wanted multiple site access), $250 to $480 for multicomputer library use (again, the price varied by number of terminals), and $500 to $930 for libraries wanting both on- and off-site access.30 Writing for the journal of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors, Gary Herzenstiel was enthusiastic: “Every genre and hobby should be so lucky! Truly, The Jazz Directory Online is a work very worthy of including in your portfolio.” Similarly, Steve Voce claimed that “what [ Lord ] has come up with is a change as fundamental as was the change from book to CD.”31 Michael Fitzgerald, writing in Notes, the journal of professional music librarians, was predictably more reserved. “Users for whom completeness or accuracy are not of paramount importance; who are interested in ‘some information’ or ‘any answer’ will find Lord’s products convenient and helpful,” he concluded. Since Kernfeld and Rye’s 1994–95 articles, Fitzgerald had become Lord’s self-appointed gadfly, documenting, for example, “thousands” of errors in CD Version 4.4. “I have used Lord’s products,” Fitzgerald admitted, “practically daily. They have value, are easy to use and the basic organization suffices.” However, he cautioned, “[the online version] cannot

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be considered a definitive source. . . . [ I ]t contains a huge amount of information amassed from many sources of varying quality, presented with very little oversight [or] editing.”32 Lord continued to produce a CD version of The Jazz Discography, but whereas it is issued annually, the online version is updated almost daily and has an information window that tracks the changes entered since the most recent CD shipped, so those who use both the CD and the online version can check for update discrepancies. Bruyninckx did release an updated CD called 90 Years of Recorded Jazz in the mid-2000s, but there are apparently no plans to go online, and his format—scanned-page PDF files—does not lend itself to such conversion. Meanwhile Erik Raben and his team released the seventh part of their massive discography in early 1999. Stainless/Wintermoon/JazzAps was an offshoot of Karl Emil Knudsen’s book and music publishing business, and his record label (Storyville Records) had fallen on hard times. With the financial problems, “it was hard for him to find a way to publish volume 7,” Raben recalls, and while volume 8 “was more or less ready to be printed . . . it was not possible to find the money.” Then Knudsen died in September 2003. Since the material was ready to be used, volume 8 was issued on CD-ROM in 2005, but “it was decided that this was the final Jazz Records, 1942–80 output.” Volume 8 was never published in an ink-on-paper version. Raben refuses to speculate on whether Lord’s Jazz Discography killed off Jazz Records, 1942–80, and one gets the impression that he is undecided in his own mind. He does agree that “Lord’s discography started more or less as a copy of Bruyninckx,” but he believes Lord improved his product as he went along. Moreover, “what makes his discographies exceptional is the way he has organized them and the search possibilities.” As for Jazz Records, 1942–80, even before Knudsen’s death “we saw that the speed of progression did not allow us to prepare a realistic plan for the following volumes.”33

iii The Internet may have greatly expanded the commercial reach of Tom Lord’s all-encompassing general discography, but it also opened a host of new alternatives to those seeking to avoid his monopoly. “The big difference is that Lord’s service costs hundreds or thousands of dollars, and the [other] online projects are freely available to all,” notes Fitzgerald.34 Many

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of these are not, strictly speaking, even discographic reference tools. For example, numerous sites are now maintained by the online retailers of new and used records, CDs, and digital downloads. “Vast amounts of information of value to discographers are now readily available on a multitude of e-commerce sites,” Edward Berger noted as early as 1999. Although “they exist to sell CDs, not to serve the jazz research community,” Berger found them “particularly useful” when he coedited his two-volume Benny Carter discography. “Keeping up with legitimate reissues by major labels can be difficult,” he noted. “[W]hile it is possible to locate many of these issues by visiting record stores or perusing catalogs, the commercial CD sites offer a much more expeditious method.”35 Because such sites as Amazon.com and Tower Records were never intended for research or reference use, they are, of course, far from perfect for the task. Material frequently is arranged using in-house stock numbers that have no relation to the record company’s catalog numbers. This is often by design, to discourage manual or automated comparison shopping. For the same reason, cross-references to the standard identifiers are omitted or obscured. In other cases the information provided by the record company itself may be—inadvertently or intentionally—ambiguous. For example, the re­cord company may give the e-retailer a distributor’s name different from the one on the face of the label, so that the distributor’s name appears on the screen, not the label name. This helps disguise the true extent of the label’s Internet (i.e., discount) sales. On the plus side, online site search functions are invariably quick and easy to use, and Berger found that “a search by artist or song title on the sites of the major vendors yields a surprising number of even the more ephemeral foreign and bootleg reissues.” Most e-commerce sites use a subscription data service to help them prepare their screen data for each CD. The most popular is All Music Guide, or AMG. It began as a book publisher in 1991, a branch of the Miller-Freeman publishing house. It first released a consumers’ guide to popular music CDs, to decidedly mixed reviews. Miller-Freeman then spun off this division as its own freestanding company called All Music Guides, Inc. Afterward, the quality of the original pop music guide quickly improved and sales improved, allowing AMG to diversify into guides for other genres, including blues, jazz, and classical music. AMG started offering its services to retailers and other commercial vendors in 1993. A computer version was introduced in 1995, and, according to the firm, “licensing remains the core of our business,” with clients including Microsoft, AOL, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Ticketmaster. AMG began offering free public access to its

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site in the late 1990s, though not all features and functions available to subscribers are open to the public (mostly those of value to commercial oper­ations). A public user can browse by genre, searching through lists of artists, albums, or songs, or can skip the lists and enter a search window. A search by artist includes that musician’s work both as a leader and as a sideman. The site also contains descriptive data, criticism by professionals, and commentary by readers.36 There is a lot of information, some of it very good, some of it, well, bloggish. Columbia University is attempting to do a cooperative, community-based project similar to AMG called J-Disc as part of its Columbia Jazz Studies Online Project. J-Disc is assembling a searchable online database with editing and commentary by recognized jazz scholars. User-contributed data and content will be accepted, but only after evaluation and verification. The goal is a slightly higher level of review and quality control than is achieved at AMG. “They originally wanted a very grand, very complex thing,” recalls Steve Albin of jazzdiscography.com. “I had to stop them and caution them to keep it very simple.” His own experience building the BRIAN software and its associated users’ website convinced him that “very few want to contribute, especially when it’s highly structured. . . . [ Y ]ou can build a great thing but no one will use it.” J-Disc is planned to be a two-year project. The initial phase has received grant funding and went online for testing in early 2011. The final data will become generally accessible on completion of the project. More academically oriented, J-Disc has not yet proved as popular as the less structured, more freewheeling public areas of AMG, and its success is as yet uncertain.37 Increasingly, universities, libraries, and other institutions are turning to the Internet to publish reference guides to their own collections of sound recordings, both because it avoids the often backbreaking up-front costs of ink-on-paper publishing and because the discography can be thrown open for use even while under construction. The consensus is that it is better to make a half-completed project available today than to wait another five or ten years until all the research and data entry are complete and the work is ready to ship to a printer. One of the best examples of an accessible work in progress is the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (EDVR) at the University of California at Santa Barbara. EDVR is the continuation of a project started in the early 1960s by two amateur collector-scholars, Ted Fagan (1921–87) and William Moran (1919– 2004). Fagan was an interpreter for the United Nations, and Moran was independently wealthy. They were primarily classical music collectors who

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wanted to know more about Victor’s famous high-quality Red Seal classical recordings. At first they wanted to catalog every Red Seal ever made, then they expanded their horizons to include all Victor classical recordings, then all Victor 78s. The definitive moment came in 1966, when Fagan was given access to the RCA Victor recording files. These were kept on some 200,000 “blue cards,” and Fagan, in essence, created his own duplicate blue card file. He undertook most of the discographic research while Moran reviewed the entries, examined discs, wrote the introductory material, and—most important—financed the project.38 In the early 1980s, Greenwood Press committed to publishing the resulting work under the title The Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings. According to Moran, they believed at the time that it would require thirtyfive to forty oversized volumes. In the end only two were published, in 1983 and 1986, before Fagan died and the series halted.39 Moran donated the material to Stanford University, which planned to proceed along the lines of the original contract. But the size of the project and the resources required were overwhelming, and nothing was produced until the project was transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2002, along with an endowment from Moran, who himself died a year later. The plan shifted to an all-electronic online database, EDVR, which went live in June 2008. With grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project is currently adding about a thousand new masters a month and will eventually extend to the end of the 78-rpm era.40 As of the end of 2012, jazz holdings are a small minority of the total catalog, simply because the project has not yet extended far into the jazz era. However, a few cursory exploratory searches yielded some interesting Perry Bradford sessions and other notable proto-jazz titles from the very early 1920s. The search engine has both a basic and an advanced mode. The former functions much like a typical search engine, while the latter looks and feels more like a library catalog capable of advanced Boolean search strings. The results field is not in any of the standard discographic formats, but it contains most of the typical information and appears capable of being downloaded and reformatted without the need for extensive manual typing. Mark Berresford, editor of V JM’s Vintage Jazz and Blues Mart, wonders if EDVR will influence the “debate over the future of discography—whether it is going to go exclusively online or whether there is a future for hard copy heavyweight discographies.” Richard Spottswood, who used Fagan’s data in preparing his own discography, Ethnic Music on Records, notes that the two Victor books and similar “comprehensive and expensive Greenwood Press

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labelographies . . . have proliferated in recent years . . . [ but] the expense of these works has tended to outweigh their usefulness, and many collectors have reluctantly done without them.”41 A far larger project is that in place at the Recorded Sound Collection division of the Library of Congress (LC), comprising about 2.5 million recordings (including duplicates), counting both musical and nonmusical works. At present, only about half of the LC’s holdings are indexed in any form. These are contained in one of three catalogs. The oldest is the microfiche catalog of the Rigler-Deutsch 78-rpm disc project, which contains most of the library’s holdings in that format. The LC’s Integrated Library System (LCILS), the library’s overall main electronic catalog, holds about 20 percent of its cataloged sound recordings. These are mainly commercial LPs and CDs containing Western classical music, ethnographic recordings, and popular music. The newest project is SONIC—the Sound Online Inventory and Catalog. Holding about 25 percent of the library’s cataloged collection, it includes sound recordings in all formats, although radio broadcast transcriptions make up about 30 percent of its entries. In addition, it lists some 78s and nearly all of the LC’s cataloged 45s, cassettes, and special formats, including Newport Jazz Festival recordings, NBC Meet the Press recordings, and copyright submissions on cassettes. As of early 2013, SONIC contains about 380,000 entries. SONIC is based on a commercial software package, STAR. Owing to limited personnel resources, SONIC entries do not conform to all interlibrary cataloging standards, including AACR2, MARC, or the library’s own well-known LC headings authority. Nor do SONIC entries follow current discographic practice. Entries for jazz and early popular music entries indicate only label number (or tape ID number), title (usually album title), titles of the works contained (usually individual songs), performers (typically aggregated if there are more than three or four individuals), and a physical description of the item. In general, entries are more like those for library catalogs than traditional jazz or popular music discographies.

While do-it-yourself discography may have started with publishers, universities, libraries, and other institutions, it has spread to clubs, unofficial groups, and even individuals as web management has become easier and the capabilities of today’s relatively inexpensive personal computers have begun to approach that of yesterday’s specialty website servers. In chapter 6 I discussed the “solographies” of Jan Evensmo, primarily his pre-2008

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paper-based works. The solography is much like a bio-discography, except that songs from a given session in which the subject artist did not solo are noted only in passing, and all issue (label number) data are likewise omitted. This is done to make room for the very detailed information about every solo performed by the subject artist—even a four-bar bridge. Evensmo published his first hard-copy solography in 1968 and started on his History of Jazz Tenor Saxophone: Black Artists in 1996. By the time he finished vol­ume 6 in 2008, the series totaled some 1,500 pages. At that point, as Evensmo himself explains, “a strategic decision had to be made with regard to future publication. . . . [ T ]o continue to print and distribute research reports as large as telephone directories seemed to be too costly,” and to try to make a profit with “all the production marketing and distribution costs involved would certainly result in a consumer price prohibitively high.”42 He elected to open his own website, JazzArcheology ( jazzarcheology. com). He started by posting the six History of  Jazz Tenor Saxophone volumes, then worked backward, digitizing his older work. There are now some two dozen solographies available for downloading, mostly in Adobe format. There are also annotation and support pages in HTML format. Evensmo’s site is probably one of the better-built and more comprehensive examples of a solo do-it-yourself site. It is the equivalent of self-publishing one’s own discography, only cheaper and, with the availability of low-cost web-hosting services, easier. The downside, of course, is that you are giving your product away (Evensmo’s site has no ads); the upside is that you are assured of reaching a wider audience than all but the oldest, most classic comprehensive discographies. But from the standpoint of the user, “free” may not be much of a bargain. Not every online discographer is a Jan Evensmo, who has had thirty years of experience and built a solid reputation through hard-copy publishing before posting his first work online. Self-promoted do-it-yourself website discographies from unknown sources can be very good, or they can just as easily be error-filled, incomplete, plagiarized, or even deliberately deceptive. The online discographic forum is the ultimate street bazaar, and “buyer beware” is still the golden rule. A completely different approach, one that uses the Internet as an interactive tool to build collaborative discographies, is the whimsically named “Red Saunders Research Foundation” housed at Clemson University in South Carolina. (The humor lies in the collaborators’ utter lack of material resources to sponsor research in the traditional sense.) It was established in 1997 by Robert Campbell, a psychology professor, to make communication

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between collaborators easier. “Electronic mail and the world wide web have revolutionized the whole process of retrieving information from fellow researchers,” Campbell says. “In the snail-mail days, collaborative discographical research tended to be conducted within [one’s] own limited cir­ cle. . . . [S]earch engines on the internet changed all that. A jazz researcher who posts a discography on a web site may get contacted by blues, doowop, rock ’n roll and other researchers. . . . [ I ]f it had been published in a hardcopy jazz journal it would have completely escaped them.”43 The first two discographies were for the Chicago-area musicians Tom Archia and Red Saunders. In fact, one of the main purposes of the site is to gather information about Chicago-area musicians and labels. “Probably the most extreme example was Rondo, a label that operated between 1946 and 1954,” recalls Campbell. “They recorded some jazz and R&B, mostly material they acquired from other defunct labels, but primarily they were involved with organ music and polka. I learned an awful lot about Wisconsin polka music.”44 The site’s “Potted Biographies Index” lists over four hundred entries for musicians, record executives, and record labels. To establish a new entry, a contributor submits a page reflecting biographical and discographic information about a label or musician, then solicits corrections or additions. A Jan Evensmo discography is basically a plain text file in Adobe (PDF) format, but a Red Saunders Research Foundation (RSRF) file looks like your typical scrapbook-type web page. You open it; it has a heading for the musician or record label; and you scroll down past photos, drawings, short blocks of texts and brief interspersed discographies in table format. As Campbell noted earlier, almost all contributions to the site are by e-mail. There is no direct access to the individual web pages— contributors submit their material to the site’s managers, who then do the posting. The RSRF uses only basic software tools, relying primarily on unmodified HTML (hypertext markup language). “Standard HTML works well for us, especially the table feature,” notes Campbell. “Although it sometimes makes for strange columns, it handles variable widths gracefully.” Each discographic entry uses a number/letter code, but it is not part of any database function. “It is plain text,” explains Campbell, “the letter is an abbreviation for the artist or label, and the number is a serial number. Occasionally I’ll have to do an insertion, and you’ll see an a or b suffix.”45 A particular feature of the RSRF site is its extensive use of the MohrFlückiger-Demeusy files, the progeny of Kurt Mohr’s original jazz and blues research from the 1950s and 1960s. The hard copies of this material had

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been in the possession of Swiss music journalist Armin Buettner since Otto Flückiger’s death in 2006. Indirectly, this led to one of the RSRF’s few unsuccessful experiments. The organizers attempted to create working audio links to many of the entries, with Armin Buettner hosting the music clips out of a server in Switzerland while the rest of the site remained based out of South Carolina. But by 2001 most of the links had become broken. “We were not in a good position to do that, we needed too much technical support,” Campbell recalls. “Reliability and the necessary amount of maintenance, the needed time and effort, did not work out. A larger organization may be able to do it, but we could not.”46 Campbell agrees that many of the older or more popular discographies at the RSRF site have become so heavily annotated that they now function as musician biographies or label histories as much as discographies. “I’m not sure we’re setting a trend at the Red Saunders Research Foundation, it’s just the way we prefer to do it. [Steve Albin and Michael Fitzgerald ] at jazzdiscography.com have very little annotation and historical material, and because they are using a database, it can be highly constraining. It’s just preference.”47 As Robert Campbell notes, the style and appearance of jazzdiscography .com, the other best-known site where contributors can contribute their discographic work, are very different. Where the Red Saunders Research Foundation relies on standard, off-the-shelf hypertext markup language, jazzdiscography.com uses a custom-built discographic software package developed by Steve Albin. It’s called BRIAN, and as you have probably guessed, it’s named in honor of Brian Rust. Where the goal of the RSRF is to build loose-knit biography/discography compilations, the purpose of BRIAN is to create well-defined, highly structured Rust-format discographies. When you talk to Steve Albin or Michael Fitzgerald about discography, the word consistency frequently comes up. BRIAN was first developed in 1994 by Albin, a freelance software developer in New Jersey. It was based on the general-purpose SQL database software and first debuted in 1997 at the Jazz Roundtable at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers. In 2003 Albin and Fitzgerald started the jazzdiscography. com website to make BRIAN available free to anyone who wanted to use it, and to post the discographies its users prepared. “BRIAN was intended to be used for discography, but I’m finding that more and more people are using BRIAN to catalog their personal collections,” Albin explains. “I know of one musician that uses BRIAN to keep track of all his gigs.”48 However, most BRIAN databases are scholarly-quality artist discographies. The largest is

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Fitzgerald’s, about twelve thousand sessions of several artists. (Albin recommends against creating a separate database for each musician.)49 BRIAN is designed to structure the input information in a certain way. All entries must be part of a session of some kind, which must have a date and one or more performances. Each performance, in turn, must have one or more performers, each playing an instrument (a performer who doubles is listed twice). A performance results in an issue, which may be a matrix, a label number, or some other identifier. “It doesn’t let you enter data that doesn’t conform to the structure,” Albin points out. “[ T ]here are no performers without a performance, for example.” But it is not trouble-free. “An emerging problem is dealing with digital downloads as issues, which have no identifying numbers,” Albin says. Lucky Thompson collector/discographer Noal Cohen has recently come across previously unknown tunes by the saxophonist offered for sale as down­loads—fifty years after they were recorded. Another problem is digital master recordings, which may be manipulated an infinite number of times. Still, Albin believes the biggest problems are—and always will be—due to the human element. “There are not many researchers interested in digging up data, and those that are tend not to be the types who want to enter it in a set format. These are individualists, they like their way of doing things. . . . They would rather be listening or studying some artist.” Another problem is that potential users frequently misunderstand Albin’s purpose: “I can’t tell you how many times I get a query from a user that downloaded BRIAN and they want to know, ‘where is the data?’ ” For Albin it boils down to a basic disconnect: “Many people want a discography, but few want to create it.”50 The many BRIAN-built discographies posted to the jazzdiscography .com website somewhat belie Albin’s pessimistic outlook. There are over eighty “artist” discographies and about four hundred “leader” discographies on different screens. All are in HTML, the standard format used for BRIAN’s on-screen outputs. Normally an HTML field is entirely free-form: it allows users to insert pretty much anything they want wherever they want to put it. “But with BRIAN, consistency is maintained because all the artist names, instrument abbreviations, etc., were entered as pull-down lists,” says Fitzgerald. “You can, if you want, insert your spelling of an artist or an abbreviation for a trumpet, but of course it’s not recommended.”51 It’s also slower, creating a natural disincentive. In the end, the discographies as they appear on the website are as easy to use as any other HTML file. Their consistency with other BRIAN-origin discographies has already been built into them through their origin in BRIAN, before the HTML conversion. And

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indeed their formats are very uniform—just as uniform as those in Brian Rust’s various paper discographies, prepared over a span of some twentyfive years. In addition, a session in the BRIAN database that is shared between two musicians (Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, for example) is a single computer record, unlike the system architecture used by Tom Lord in The Jazz Discography, so it is impossible to have one set of data for that session in the Davis discography and a different set in the Adderley discography. While the output of jazzdiscography.com is very different from that of the Red Saunders Research Foundation, Fitzgerald says the two approaches can to some degree be blended: “Look at the Peggy Lee discography [at jazzdiscography.com]. There’s a huge amount of narration in its notes fields, but my own feeling is when it’s time to write a biography, it’s time to write a biography. Also, Robert’s using these basic HTML tools, so there is naturally going to be a lower level of consistency. Nevertheless, what Campbell is doing is tremendous because it adds to what we know.” A web-based trend that both Campbell and Fitzgerald mention is increasingly called “crowdsourcing.” Fitzgerald applies it in discographic terms: “People are always trying to come up with one more Bix solo. You find a disc, a tape in a closet. Who is it? Where did it come from? When? That ties it to the Internet. You can have thousands of people look it over or listen to your artifact to help you.”52 Stephen Mihm says that “online gathering spots . . . represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, crowdsourcing . . . may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single scholar.” Mention “online data gathering spots” and people immediately think of Wikipedia, that nemesis of every high-school teacher, with its reputation for bad grammar and worse information. But unlike true crowdsourcing sites—for example, a 9/11 site used to help identify individuals who may have disappeared forever in the collapse of the twin towers, or a Civil War photography site maintained by the Library of Congress— Wikipedia’s protocols actually ban original research, permitting only contributions of independently verifiable information. Although a study by George Mason University professor Roy Rosenzweig did find a tremendous amount of bad style and bad grammar in Wikipedia, his conclusion was that the bare facts offered typically were verifiable. In general, Helena Zinkham of the Library of Congress has found that

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crowdsourcing participants tend to be self-policing and that the approach is fairly effective in helping to identify specific, hard-to-verify facts and events (Is this actually a photo taken at Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg?), but it is less useful for matters of interpretation and syntheses (Was Lee’s Pennsylvania campaign warranted?).53

iv In 2004 discographer and Names & Numbers editor Han Enderman asked, “What Kind of Discographies Do We Get, and What Do We Want?” Ignoring listening guides, he identified three broad types of discographies: general comprehensive discographies (Bruyninckx, Lord); large specialized discographies that attempt to cover everything within a defined time period (Rust, Jepsen, Raben); and specialized discographies, including artist, label, and bio-discographies. Enderman believed the basic building block of the jazz discography ought to be the individual recording. “A discography is a study of existing recordings for collectors and researchers . . . those releases which are of  historical interest or are a good way to obtain and study the music. . . . I think only interesting releases should be included.” By “interesting,” he meant such things as first issues, collector-quality reissues, and well-edited anthologies.54 Matthew Snyder, on the other hand, has argued that it is the recording session, not the record, that has become institutionalized as the fundamental discographic element. The basic difference between record-based discographers such as Enderman and session-based advocates such as Snyder is that the record-based discographers believe recording sessions that produce no masters (or no masters that ever became a commercial product) are intrinsically of lesser importance—or no value at all. “For the jazz researcher, a discography in the modern format,” Snyder wrote, “is a different, more complex tool. . . . [ R ]esearchers look to discographies to trace the evolution of jazz musicians and the music as a whole through the primary sources— sound recordings—regardless of how (or whether) those recordings were issued commercially.”55 Michael Fitzgerald agrees: Very early on we became session-based. McCarthy, Rust, Jepsen, Bruyninckx, and so on. There’s a reason they went with a session-based format. The music is an artifact of the session—no session, no record. I can understand people who want a catalog approach; who want to know about records, period. But

w h a t k i n d o f d i s c o g r a p h i e s d o w e w a n t ?   205 a session-based format is a chronology of the artist—on this date, at this place, something happened. Now, that “something” may or may not have been a commercial record. But if a significant event happened on Tuesday, May 2, I want to know it in the continuum of his or her career relative to that Tuesday. Discography is just as much about what people were doing when they weren’t making records.56

This is not a new or radical concept. Walter Allen attempted it, successfully, in his 1973 book Hendersonia, as did Wild, Fujioka, Porter, and Hamada in their day-by-day John Coltrane reference chronologies (1995 and 2008). But as Fitzgerald admits, “It’s very hard to do on paper.” And very expensive. But for many session-based discographers, whether a session led to a commercial record no longer mattered, largely because collecting records no longer mattered. Their discographies weren’t being produced for collectors. They weren’t collectors. They were professional scholars, and their discographies were being made for scholars working in other institutions, where the whole idea of collectibility had long since become either a quaint relic or of concern only to acquisitions librarians.57 The primary reason Enderman chose the recording as the discography’s basic element is that he placed greater emphasis on the role of selection and the function of the jazz discographer as a gatekeeper. Earlier, Howard Rye had argued that although there would always be a need to make critical distinctions between recordings that were, or were not, of interest to jazz specialists, “a discography is not the place to do it.” “I do not agree,” Enderman responded. “[A]ctually, selection and duplication are among the major problems of the question ‘What Kind of Discographies Do We Want?,’ and without selection there can be no jazz discography.”58 This is the basic taxonomic quandary that confronts the jazz discographer. Clearly, any single-topic specialized discography is predicated on the idea of selection. A single artist. A single record label. A single nation. It is a world unto itself. But what about the other two categories, those that aspire, to a greater or lesser degree, to comprehensiveness, but some type of defined comprehensiveness? Will the jazz discography of the future tend toward the “large specialized discography,” in which the compiler selects what is “in” or “out” through some sort of critical evaluation, or will the “jazz discography” be a component embedded within a much, much larger all-inclusive popular music discography, one free of any critical gatekeeping standards, in which it is up to the end user to decide what is “interesting” or “trivial”? On the other hand, while unlikely, it is not impossible that the opposite may

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occur. It could be that we have already seen the high-water mark in comprehensiveness and that the future of  jazz discography lies scattered among a plethora of ever more specialized label, topic, and bio-discographies. “Selection” can be based on what a record is or on what it contains. As Pekka Gronow notes, “Anyone compiling discographies of a particular type of music must make two definitions, what is a record, and what are the characteristics of the musical style?” Gordon Stevenson adds that “the artifacts and their contents . . . are, of course, interrelated.”59 The best example of this naturally is Rust’s Jazz Records, on its face a format criterion (only 78s). Rust’s decision obviated most of the selection needed to impose an effective aesthetic criterion (traditional jazz and British big band dance music). One filter limited both format and content simultaneously. In the end, Jazz Records narrowed itself into a closed system. But that closed system worked because its goal was equally narrow: to report the results of research into a carefully defined group of recordings that typically were poorly documented.60 Furthermore, keep in mind that history has a context—things exist and events occur in real time, at a real place, and not as Platonic abstractions. The early discographers had their hands full just dealing with 78s: over 100,000 were issued between 1900 and 1925 alone, and as Jerome Weber points out, this was a period when Rust and his colleagues “faced a problem that has not generally hampered [subsequent] discographers—the absence of dates, either of recording, or less, often, of publication.” The same can said for places, personnels, instrument lineups, and most other data. As Rudi Blesh bluntly put it, this was a time when “the record labels told you nothing.”61 But let me emphasize that such criteria as 78s only (or first issues only, or direct pressings only) are an entirely synthetic distinction—one originating only from the mind of the compiler, not from anything that existed in the real world. Rust’s discriminatory treatment of dubbings—issues not taken directly from a matrix (or a stamper plate mechanically pressed from it)—was born purely from his tastes as the record collector, not from the purity of sound quality, as is frequently claimed. George Avakian, who managed the Columbia record reissue program of the 1940s, explained why they used dubbings, even though the masters were available and often in good shape: The 1920s Okeh and Columbia masters were cut for pressings exactly ten inches in diameter. But sometime in the thirties, the international standard of 25 centimeters was adopted, which is a bit less than ten inches [9.84 inches]. . . . [O]n most of the old ten-inch masters the lean-in groove all but disappeared on

w h a t k i n d o f d i s c o g r a p h i e s d o w e w a n t ?   207 a modern pressing. . . . [ U ]nless you picked up the tone arm and carefully laid it into the first groove, you’d miss the first notes. . . . That’s why most of the Okehs had to be dubbed.62

Avakian adds that he was startled by the old discs when he played them through new 1940s and 1950s studio equipment: “There was much more sound on those old recordings than we’d ever heard before. . . . [ T ]he original recording and cutting equipment technology was more advanced than any of the playbacks, so they couldn’t be heard.” In many cases reproduction quality didn’t reach parity with recording technology until the LPmicrogroove era in the mid- to late 1950s. So what was more “authentic,” a 1920s Okeh 78, or a 1968 Columbia LP capable of reproducing the full sonic range that the cutting machine had put in the matrix? Beauty is in the ear—or rather, the mind—of the beholder. “Collectors are motivated by diverse interests, but the most pervasive drive surely comes from an interest in some specific category of sound.” This was true forty years ago, when Gordon Stevenson said it, and it continues to be true today.63 Fitzgerald thinks these days are drawing to a close: There is a real need [in discography] for other talents, such as music performance, expertise in the administration of the entertainment business and its finance, music engineering, librarianship, and musicology and ethnomusicology. For example, we know that a lot of the attributions in Rust are guesswork, but it’s all a matter of who is doing the guessing. To equal the kind of proficiency he exercised within his restricted sphere across the board requires a formal musicological education or training in music performance.64

In 1949 the Carey/McCarthy “session-matrix-label number” hierarchy helped alleviate the need to decide between format selectivity and inclusiveness, because it became much easier to catalog new issues from old sessions in parallel with new sessions and new artists. But also at this time there emerged the parade of new formats that never let up over the years: LP, 45, reel-to-reel tape, cassette tape, quadraphonic LP, CD, digital downloads. By the 1950s, Albert McCarthy realized that discographers were facing a new era, and that not even the discographic innovations he helped develop were enough: “The LP record, with its use of alternative masters in many instances, has presented its own problems. . . . [ but] the discographer is [also] faced with a mass of new issues at present that is in excess of any calculations he might have made even five years ago.”65 More recently, format selection approaches have broken down into four general strategies: 78s only; all releases; significance for collectors; and

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most available.66 Although the “technology” of discography advanced, the technology of sound recording advanced even faster. Today there is no need to generate a tangible object to disseminate a sound recording. What is the label number of a digital download available through Apple’s iTunes Store or Netflix? It anything, the problems of selection and duplication are even more chaotic when it comes to content—that is, what’s on the record. “Which recordings should be included in a jazz discography? There is no sharp dividing line between real jazz and all kinds of music containing some jazz or various kinds of jazz and blues,” Enderman notes.67 Hilton Schleman and Melody Maker made no pretense of ever calling Rhythm on Record anything other than a reference book to dance music. Charles Delaunay neatly dodged the problem in 1936 by calling his book Hot Discography, not Jazz Discography. In their seminal 1995 article, Kernfeld and Rye concluded, However foolish it may be to imagine a single, unified discography, it is still more foolish to imagine a single, unified and critical discography that would serve both purposes—documenting and guiding. The mid-century promises of Orin Blackstone’s discography for collectors, and of his subsequent collector’s periodical The Jazzfinder, retain great emotional appeal for those who have involved their lives in this music, but is it mere nostalgia for an uncomplicated musical realm in which there was felt to be “real jazz” and “commercial music,” and that was that?68

The early discographies were jazz discographies, in that they consciously tried to divide “real jazz” from “commercial music” (read schmaltz) using a more or less stock formula: “Most pre-1950 recordings by black artists could be included, but for the white recordings, including dance bands and popular vocalists, a selection had to be made, based on the quality of the music or the prestige of the artists.”69 Delaunay’s own idiosyncratic formula was intended to support Hugues Panassié’s theories of jazz development, and as Panassié’s theories evolved, so did Delaunay’s definition of hot. (Best example: 1936—Jelly Roll is not hot; 1938—Jelly Roll is hot.) On the other extreme, Bruyninckx and Lord’s newest products try to include everything, but Bruyninckx’s 85 Years of Recorded Jazz omits western swing and white country blues, while Lord’s The Jazz Discography Online did not include county blues to any significant extent during the time it was available only in print or CD formats.70 On the other hand, specialized discographies that stick to a clear-cut objective boundary, such as label or bio-discographies, place the burden of choice on the consumer or user. Michel Ruppli, for one,

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notes that he came to the one-label/one-discography concept partially because he found it too hard to separate jazz from non-jazz pop and country music recordings. Better to include the entire works of a label “where everyone can make his own choice and find what he is looking for.”71 But specialized single-topic discographies are beginning to encounter their own problems as they grow progressively broader (more entries) and deeper (more data per entry). First, they are starting to exceed the inherent capacities of the McCarthyRust session-block format. Even in the newest electronic databases, “discographical information is available in only one view, based on the standard print format,” notes Fitzgerald. “This has not changed much since Brian Rust first published in the 1960s. . . . a session-based approach works well for most tasks, but the storage and display of issue contents . . . presents particular difficulties and, for the most part, discographies have sidestepped this challenge.” In other words, the traditional McCarthy-Rust format assumes that an issue is the product of a matrix, which is itself the product of a session.72 But as Steve Albin points out, first magnetic tape, and now digital recording plus computer sound manipulation (such as the ProTools software package) have erased the session/matrix/issue hierarchy: “A master recording in the digital era may be manipulated an infinite number of times and need not be affixed. The problem is akin to the old Miles Davis-Gil Evans recordings in which ten or more takes were spliced together. . . . In one case, Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” twenty-two takes were recorded to get a closing trumpet solo.”73 In the era of the computer database discography, the answer is “add another text note or crossreference field” to the session from which the tape splice or sound sample was taken. But is that practical? “How much information do we need?” asks Tim Brooks. “I’ve seen some proposals with 180 fields—what time of day did the recording session take place, and so on.”74 The McCarthy-Rust format is also a relatively inflexible tool for going beyond a single-line listing of an issue by label number and title—the data Fitzgerald calls “issue contents.” This is why the large online catalogs, such as the Library of Congress’s SONIC project, do not use a discographic format: SONIC’s purpose is to describe each physical object in the LC’s collection and document the sounds it contains, not to present each recording’s history or the background of how it was created. The concept of data surfeit leads directly to the second, and many think overriding, issue surrounding specialized discographies: they’re expensive,

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and if their information can’t be protected, it will soon become impossible to convince potential publishers that they can be done profitably. As George Hulme once succinctly put it: “What is the point of working to create a discography if it simply will be copied?” Unless completely subsidized by a government or philanthropic organization, a discography must hold out the reasonable promise of commercial success, and to be a success, it must offer something that will make customers buy it. That “something” must be some kind of content that others cannot easily extract without subjecting themselves to legal sanctions. Thus it has to be original to the author—opinions, observations, commentary, criticism, or narrative of some sort.75 Enderman believes such material is precisely what makes the specialized discography valuable: “The long-term value of these books is in the annotations, i.e. specific information outside the scope of the general works.” In this regard, discographies can be analogized to other reference works: “An artist discography can be compared with a ‘catalogue raisonné’ of a painter or photographer, listing all known works with dates, sizes, notes on subjects, etc. . . . But you do not want (and will not get) an exhaustive inventory of all publications and objects containing reproductions of that artist’s work.”76 D. Russell Connor, Benny Goodman’s discographer, noted as far back as 1971 that “the specialized [artist] discography can and should include classes of recorded material omitted or ignored by the general discography.” For this reason they are, in effect, “insulated” from plagiarism, since their value lies not only in the list of sessions, matrices, and releases, but also in their biographical materials, solographies, comments, sources, and other material. Yet Enderman believes their future is bleak, because “all [the] basic data . . . will be copied.”77 Eric Charry disagrees, because “unlike record label and artist discographies, which enjoy solid authoritative publications on reputable academic presses . . . academia has not embraced comprehensive discographies, nor have academic presses.” With the possible exception of  Lord’s subscription online service (and there the jury is still out), the only commercial success for discographies over the past twenty years has been the output of two or three academic presses, and they have generally chosen to publish only specialized works, mostly label discographies, prepared by widely respected editorial teams. Moreover, unlike a specialized label or bio-discography, which is a self-contained project, one can no longer build a comprehensive discography from scratch. With the foundation already based on a series of works that falls below the threshold of academic acceptability, any new

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edifice will be structurally suspect. The last attempt to build a new structure totally from the foundation up, Erik Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80, died before the first floor was finished. With the single exception of Lord’s The Jazz Discography—planned from the start as a pure commercial enterprise—all the successful (or at least all the completed) comprehensive discographies have been enthusiasts’ projects: done by enthusiasts for sale to enthusiasts. “Discography has developed largely as a by-product of the activities of collectors, and its structure reflects their interests and needs,” explains Gordon Stevenson. But many believe even this must change. Tim Brooks notes that “discography is at a crossroads. Its past has been record collectors, and if people said ‘it’s Bix on that record,’ well, it’s Bix.” But Rye cautions that “most of the illogicalities in discography go back ultimately to the tension between, first, providing what they want to the record collectors who will actually buy the results and second, satisfying the needs of scholars.”78 Fitzgerald regrets that “much of discography is standing still; it’s not advancing. We don’t worry about track times. Why? Because Rust wasn’t worried about them—everything he dealt with was three minutes long, give or take a few seconds. Why not album titles? Same thing. Nothing he handled had an album title, but does that really need to be perpetuated into Jepsen, into the first twenty-five years of Bruyninckx? We have to start thinking beyond Rust.”79 Sutton believes it is source identification problems that will push large specialized works into undergoing profound changes over the next two decades. He thinks discographies such as Jazz Records will evolve into something more like a bibliography. Since much of the supposedly “factual” material (“It’s Bix on that record . . .”) can no longer be credibly presented as unassailable truth, the information will have to be displayed more along the lines of “Source 1 says Smith played trumpet, but Source 2 says Jones, and Source 3 says Brown.”80 It will be very difficult to fit that kind of information into a Rust-style session block, which will probably need to be extensively reworked or even replaced. But Rye is skeptical that such a grand plan is still feasible. “There is a lot of information in the ‘standard discographies’ which is of uncertain and unverifiable origins and rests ultimately on anybody’s guess. Any scholar using any of them has essentially to start over again and re-generate the session level citations which are not there. This is difficult to impossible.” Sutton believes his views “will not be taken well by the collector community” because collectors, who still constitute the majority of the customers for his discographies, “want no ambiguity, partially because that is the

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collector mentality, but also because of the potential financial impact on the value of the recordings they hold.” And this, warns Brooks, should not be taken lightly: “As long as discography continues to be supported by nonacademic sources, it will be nonacademic in form and content.”81 Rye agrees: “The single biggest factor in jazz discography is that neither Brian Rust nor Jørgen Jepsen gave a damn about the needs of those who wouldn’t buy their books!”82

Notes

chapter one 1. Vincent Pelote, “President’s Message,” ARSC Newsletter 125 (Winter 2011): 2–3; Bob Weir, “Brian Rust” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 64, no. 3 (March 2011): 14; “Brian Rust,” Storyville 26 (December–January 1969): 41; “Bible,” Storyville 29 ( June–July 1970): 161–62; Editorial, Storyville 39 (February–March 1972): 81–82; George Crump, “My Discographic Mate,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 15. 2. Nick Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 1),” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 132 (Winter 2003): 10–14. 3. George Hulme, “Brian Rust: The Sage of Hatch End,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 10–11; Bob Weir, Review of American Dance Bands on Record and Film, IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 89; Dick Spottswood, Review of American Dance Bands on Record and Film, ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 268–70; George Hulme and Andy Simons, “The Brian Rust Discographies,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 18; Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 8, The New Rust,” Names & Numbers 26 ( July 2003): 2–13. 4. “Guidelines for Discographies in the ARSC Journal,” ARSC Journal 37, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 14–20. The “Rust format” is “essentially an adaptation of the columnar format, in which artist, location and recording date information are grouped in a heading, beneath which appear three columns: matrix and take on the left, title and composer in the middle, and releases on the right.” BRIAN program: www.jazzdiscography.org (last accessed March 30, 2011). 5. Matthew F. Snyder, “The End of Do-It-Yourself? An Investigation of Publishing Options for Jazz Metadiscographies” (master’s thesis, Queens College, City University of New York, 2004), 13–14. 6. Nick Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 2),” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 133 (Spring 2004): 5–9. 7. Malcolm Shaw, “Jazz Records, Whence and Whither,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 142 (Summer 2006): 10–11. 8. Bruce B. Raeburn, “Appreciating Jazz Discography,” Jazz Archivist 3, nos. 1–2 (March 1989): 1, 3–4, 8. 9. Michael Fitzgerald, telephone interview, August 30, 2012. 10. Allan Sutton, interview, Washington, DC, May 9, 2009. 11. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1980), s.v. “Discography”; Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1–2.

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12. Dan Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Dan Morgenstern and Sheldon Meyer (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 545–55; Snyder, “End of Do-It-Yourself?” 4. 13. Steve Voce, “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” Jazz Journal International 42, no. 1 ( January 1989): 9; Fitzgerald interview, August 30, 2012. 14. Richard B. Kamens, Book Look, “The Jazz Discography,” Cadence 12, no. 6 ( June 1986): 20–23; Dan Morgenstern, Review of Prestige and Savoy discographies, ARSC Journal 14, no. 1 (1982): 94–96. 15. Jos Willems, All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), xi. 16. Rudi Blesh, “Some Thoughts on the Jazz Revival,” Record Changer 7, no. 11 (November 1948): 14, 23; Rudi Blesh, “The Birth of Discography,” in Studies in Jazz Discography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1971), 31–34. 17. Paul Oliver, “Blues Research: Problems and Possibilities,” Journal of Musicology 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 377–90, quotations at 380, 385. 18. Mark Tucker, “Musicology and the New Jazz Studies,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 131–48. 19. Compton Mackenzie, Editorial, Gramophone 6, no. 1 ( January 1930): 1–3. 20. H. o. M. Cameron, “Abridged Operas” (letter). Gramophone 7, no. 4 (April 1931): 46. 21. R. D. Darrell, “Discoveries: The Origin of the Word Discography,” ARSC Journal 17, no. 1 (1984): 165–66. 22. P. G. Hurst, Collector’s Corner, Gramophone 8, no. 6 ( June 1933): 65. 23. Charles Delaunay, “Discographie de Bix et Trumbauer,” Jazz Hot 1 (March 1935): 21. 24. R. D. Darrell, The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (New York: Gramophone Shop, 1936), vi. 25. Darrell, “Discoveries: The Origin of the Word Discography,” 166. Darrell asserts that the Era review appeared on December 28, 1936, but 1935 is possible. Hilton R. Schleman, Rhythm on Record (London: Melody Maker, 1936); “Amazing Book All about Dance Records and Their Makers,” Melody Maker 12, no. 152 (April 18, 1936); Charles Delaunay, Hot Discography (Paris: Jazz Hot, 1936). 26. Jim Hayes, “The Origins of Discography” (letter), Jazz Journal International 44, no. 11 (November 1991): 5; Horace Meunier Harris, “The Birth of Discography,” IAJRC Journal 33, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 33–35; Darrell, “Discoveries: The Origin of the Word Discography.” 166. As late as 2005–6, both Dan Morgenstern and George Avakian were attributing the first use of “discography” to Delaunay: Dan Morgenstern, “Editor’s Foreword,” and George Avakian, “Foreword,” in Willems, All of Me, vii, ix. 27. Snyder, “End of Do-It-Yourself?” 4–6. 28. Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “Timner’s Ellingtonia,” Cadence 15, no. 5 (May 1989): 26–27. 29. “Meta Analysis: A systematic method that uses statistical techniques for combining results from different studies to obtain a quantitative estimate of the overall effect of a particular intervention or variable on a defined outcome.” McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002). 30. Krin Gabbard, “Introduction: Writing the Other History,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1–8. 31. Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “The Jazz Discography, Vol. 1,” Cadence 18, no. 8 (August 1992): 19–21, 105; Bruce Epperson, “Uncertain and Unverifiable: Jazz Metadiscography and the Paradox of Originality,” ARSC Journal 39, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 215–39. 32. Webster’s New International Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.vv. “mega-” and “omni-.” 33. Gabbard, Book Look, “The Jazz Discography, vol. 1,” 19. 34. Krin Gabbard, e-mail to the author, April 19, 2012. 35. Gabbard was referring to volume 3 of Raben’s series: Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “Erik

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 – 1 9  215 Raben, Jazz Records 1942–80, Vol. 3,” Cadence 18, no. 6 ( June 1992): 19–21. General information on Raben’s project: Jerry Atkins, “Discographies and Discographers,” IAJRC Journal 22, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 55–61. 36. Krin Gabbard, e-mail to the author, April 19, 2012. 37. Gabbard, Book Look, “The Jazz Discography, Vol. 1,” 19. 38. Alleged plagiarism of Miles Davis discography: Jim Corbett, Book Reviews, “The Sound of Miles Davis,” Down Beat 61, no. 2 (February 1994): 68, and Tom Lord, “Credit Where It’s Due” (letter), Down Beat 61, no. 4 (April 1994): 9. Alleged plagiarism of Bruyninckx: Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 3,” Names & Numbers 12 ( January 2000): 7–12. Enderman based his conclusion on the inclusion in The Jazz Discography of cross-references and page break notes that are meaningful only in the Bruyninckx series, and in another example he found a series of omitted sessions that suggests a transcriptionist skipped over a single page in another Bruyninckx work titled 60 Years of Recorded Jazz. The thirty-five-volume Bruyninckx series, titled only “Jazz,” is often referred to as the Swing Journal discographies because publication was sponsored by the Japanese jazz journal of that name. 39. Lord quotation: Lord, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 9. Lack of standards at Cadence magazine: Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 3 (March 1995): 865–91, quotation at 879. 40. Erik Raben, e-mail to the author, March 28, 2012, and April 17, 2012; Bruyninckx, “Fantasies” (letter), Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 16–18. Lord says he used Clipper’s version of DBase IV running on an IBM-PC-compatible personal computer when he started The Jazz Discography: Tom Lord, e-mail to the author, July 10, 2012. Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 3,” 8–9. 41. “I thought for many years”: Klaus D. Mueller, “Who Is to Be Arrested?” (letter), Names & Numbers 10 ( June 1999): 3. Gabbard quotation: Krin Gabbard, e-mail to the author, April 17, 2012. Blues inclusion in Lord’s discography: Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 3,” 9. To quote Enderman: “Lord, in the introduction to his discography, says that a limited number of blues listings were included in the ‘A’ section (vol. 1) prior to his learning of a new blues compilation currently in preparation. This is an odd argument for someone preparing the general jazz discography, who in his introduction explicitly states that ‘clearly a complete single source discography was necessary’ after the publication of Bruyninckx’s thematic paperbacks. . . . Presumably Lord omitted blues recordings when it became evident that Bruyninckx would not publish them in paperback format. It would have taken too much effort to update the blues information published in [60 Years of Recorded Jazz], especially since Leadbitter’s 2nd volume [of Blues Records] had not yet been issued.” 42. Tim Brooks pointed out the need for precise language in this regard in his Review of DiscoFile: The Discographical Catalog of American Race, Rhythm & Blues, ARSC Journal 40, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 68–70. 43. Jerry L. Atkins, “Magnificent Obsession,” in Proceedings of NASE Research 1983, ed. Charles T. Brown (Manhattan, KS: National Association of Jazz Educators, 1984), 12–16. An updated version of this article was also available as of September 2012 at www.jazzdiscography.com. Paul B. Sheatsley, “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” Record Research 58 (February 1964): 3–6. 44. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 7,” Names & Numbers 20 ( January 2000): 41–43.

chapter two 1. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2005), 56. 2. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Authors (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942), s.v. “Compton Mackenzie”; Bruce

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Epperson, “What’s in a Word (or Two): An Etymological Investigation,” ARSC Journal 42, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 225–30; Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Three, 1900–1907 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 169–77. 3. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Five, 1915-1923 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1966): 232. 4. Ibid., 232–52. 5. Björn Englund, “Edgar Jackson and the Gramophone,” Names & Numbers 56 ( January 2011): 26–28; Edgar Jackson, “Dance and Popular Rhythmic Records,” Gramophone 7 ( June 1930): 35. It is likely that Jackson was writing occasional earlier articles for the Gramophone. An anonymous review of a Fred Elizalde concert the previous summer (“West End at Shepard’s Bush,” Gramophone 6 [ July 1929]: 13) likely was written by him, since it included a rather overblown commentary on the virtues of the day’s master of ceremonies, a Mr. Edgar Jackson. 6. Michael H. Gray and Gerald D. Gibson, eds., Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 1, Classical Music, 1925–1975 (New York, R. R. Bowker, 1977), entry 2850; Compton Mackenzie, “John McCormack,” Gramophone 2, no. 5 (October 1924): 153–55. 7. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Six, 1923–1930 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), 41–42; 50–53. 8. Ron Wellburn, “Jazz Magazines of the 1930’s: An Overview of Their Provocative Jour­ nalism,” American Music 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 255–70; Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–50 (London: Quartet Books, 1984), 18; Gray and Gibson, Bibliography of  Discographies, vol. 1, Classical Music, entry 940; R. D. Darrell, “Dvorak’s Recorded Works,” Phonograph Monthly Review 3, no. 8 (May 1929): 259. 9. R. D. Darrell, The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (New York: Gramophone Shop, 1936), vii; Ronald G. Wellburn, “American Jazz Criticism, 1914–1940” (PhD diss., New York University, 1983), 59–61, 182–83, 185–86. 10. James Lincoln Collier, The Reception of  Jazz in America: A New View (Brooklyn: Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 1988), 38–41; R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” disques 3 ( June 1932): 155–59: disques should not be confused with its contemporary French counterpart Disques. The essay, but not the discography, is reprinted in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 57–65. 11. R. D. Darrell, “O Pioneer! (a Half Century Later),” ARSC Journal 19, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 4–10. 12. Darrell, “O Pioneer!” 5–7. 13. Even the most cursory examination: Darrell, Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music, vi. He was surprised and disappointed: Darrell, “O Pioneer!” 7. The other two formats are the “columnar,” used mostly for summary discographies, and the “Rust format,” for popular and vernacular music: “Guidelines for Discographies in the ARSC Journal,” ARSC Journal 37, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 14–20. 14. Darrell, Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia, 152; letters from Darrell to Ron Wellburn, May 12, 1980, and June 23, 1980, reproduced in Wellburn, “American Jazz Criticism,” 182–83 and 185–86. 15. Darrell, “O Pioneer!” 10. 16. George Hulme, “The First Discographer?” Names & Numbers 25 (April 2003): 20. Ironically, I initially found the story of the Calver “handlist” so improbable (and its implications so significant) that I believed it was an April Fools’ Day hoax until I verified it with Mr. Hulme, who was understandably somewhat put out with me. My apologies to Mr. Hulme. 17. Daniel Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), entries A35 and E55. 18. Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959; New York: Pantheon, 1993), 213.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 6 – 3 3  217 19. Godbolt, History of Jazz in Britain, 18–22, 47–48; Vincent Pelote, “An Annotated Bibliography of British Periodicals, 1930–40,” Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 5 (1989): 91–107. 20. Hobsbawm, Jazz Scene, 212–16. 21. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 80–81. 22. Horace Meunier Harris, “Rhythm Club Stomp,” IAJRC Journal 41, no. 1 (February 2008): 21–22. 23. Ernest Borneman, “The Jazz Cult, Part 1,” Harper’s Magazine 194, no. 1161 (February 1947): 141–47. 24. Rudi Blesh, “The Birth of Discography,” in Studies in Jazz Discography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1971), 31–34. 25. The 1962 edition of Brian Rust’s Jazz Records, A-Z states that the Louis Armstrong “Black and Tan Fantasy” on Parlophone (UK) label no. R-3492 was really two Duke Ellington masters, Okeh 81776-B and –C, both recorded on November 3, 1927, and most subsequent discographies agree. Borneman says that when he heard the bogus Armstrong “Black and Tan Fantasy” it was actually a “jazzed-up paraphrase” of the Adams song (Borneman, “Jazz Cult, Part 1,” 144). 26. Borneman, “Jazz Cult, Part 1,” 144–45. 27. Stanley Dance, “Neglected Areas of Discographical Research,” in Studies in Jazz Disco­ graphy I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1971), 38–40. 28. Hilton R. Schleman, Rhythm on Record (London: Melody Maker, 1936), 9; John R. Hammond, “Foreword,” in Schleman, Rhythm on Record, 7. 29. “Amazing Book All about Dance Records and Their Makers,” Melody Maker 12, no. 152 (April 18, 1936): 1; Hugues Panassié, Review of Rhythm on Record, trans. Ian Monroe-Smith, Jazz Hot 10 ( July 1936): 15. 30. Schleman, Rhythm on Record, 8. 31. Paul B. Sheatsley, “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” Record Research 58 (February 1964): 3–4. 32. Han Enderman, “The Discographic Truth, Part 6,” Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 2–4; John Davis and Grey Clarke, “How to Compile a Discography,” Jazz Journal 1, no. 8 (December 1948): 19–20; Björn Englund, “A Discographical Challenge—a Perfect Edition of Jazz Records, 1897-1942,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 156 (Winter–Spring 2010): 14–15. 33. Dan Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Dan Morgenstern and Sheldon Meyer (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 545–55; Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 3; Edgar Jackson, “Swing Music: Rhythm on Record,” Gramophone 14 ( June 1936): 30. 34. Current Biography 1977 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1977), s.v. “Sonia Delaunay.” 35. Whitney Balliett, “Panassié, Delaunay et cie,” in Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3–16. 36. “Sonia Delaunay, Artist” (obituary), New York Times, January 27, 1974; Stanley Barron and Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay: The Life of an Artist (New York: Abrams, 1995), 13–29; Balliett, “Panassié, Delaunay et cie,” 14–15. 37. Wellburn, “Interview With Charles Delaunay,” in “American Jazz Criticism, 1914–1940,” 192–83; Jeffery H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 162–63. 38. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 173–75. 39. Wellburn, “Interview with George T. Simon,” in “American Jazz Criticism, 1914–1940,” 280–82; Russ Shor, “Silent Partners: Interview with George T. Simon, Part 1,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 109 (Spring 1998): 5–6.

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n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 3 –3 9

40. A. David Franklin, “A Preliminary Study of the Acceptance of  Jazz by French Music Critics in the 1920’s and Early 1930’s,” in Jazz Research Papers 1984, ed. Charles T. Brown (Manhattan, KS: National Association of  Jazz Educators, 1984), 60–66. The source for Franklin’s claim of fortytwo articles is Alan Merriam and Robert J. Brenford, eds., A Bibliography of Jazz (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1954). French magazines: Jackson, Making Jazz French, 132–33; English and American magazines: Wellburn, “Jazz Magazines of the 1930’s,” 256. 41. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 172; Hugues Panassié, Le jazz hot (Paris: Éditions R. A. Correa, 1934); Hugues Panassié, Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music, trans. Eleanor Dowling and Lyle Dowling (New York: M. Witmark, 1936); Robert Goffin, Aux frontières du jazz (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1932). Other contenders for the title of “first jazz book” include Alfred Frankenstein’s Syncopated Saxophones (1925) and Henry O. Osgood’s So This Is Jazz (1926). 42. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 184, citing “Le jazz hot: Livre de Hugues Panassié,” JazzTango ( January 1935): 30; William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 96. 43. Mike Zwerin, La tristesse de St. Louis (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 137. 44. Michael Drengi, Django: The Life and Times of a Gypsy Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 82–83; Wellburn, “Charles Delaunay Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 196–97. 45. Charles Delaunay, “Discographie de Bix et Trumbauer,” Hot Jazz 1 (March 1935): 21; untitled sidebar, Hot Jazz 1 (March 1935): 19. 46. Michael Brooks and Dave Carey, Liner notes, Bix Beiderbecke, vol. 1, Singin’ the Blues, Columbia CK 45450 [CD], 1990. The mole/Lang substitution is disputed by Rust and others. 47. Jerry Atkins, “Letter from Delaunay,” IAJRC Journal 22, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 27–28. 48. Wellburn, “Charles Delaunay Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 196–97. 49. Editorial, Jazz Hot 11 (September–October 1936): 3; Wellburn, “Charles Delaunay In­ terview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 193. 50. Wellburn, “Charles Delaunay Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 193; Colin Salt, “On Discography, Part 3,” Discophile 9 (December 1949): 10; Orin Blackstone, “On Discography, Part 1,” Discophile 7 (August 1949): 9; Charles Delaunay, Hot Discography (Paris; Jazz Hot, 1936), ii. 51. Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 3. 52. Morgenstern, “Discography,” 548–49; Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Disco­ graphy,” 3. 53. Wellburn, “Charles Delaunay Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 193. 54. Edgar Jackson, “Swing Music: Hot Discography by Charles Delaunay,” Gramophone 14 (December 1936): 24. 55. Wellburn, “George Simon Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 294; Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 3; Morgenstern, “Discography,” 549. 56. Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 3. 57. Edgar Jackson, “Swing Music: Rhythm-Style Personnels,” Gramophone 13 (November 1935): 28; Englund, “Edgar Jackson and the Gramophone,” 26–28. 58. Edgar Jackson, “Swing Music: Matrix Numbers as an Aid to Personnel Tracing,” Gramo­ phone 14 (September 1936): 24. 59. For contrasting views, see Wellburn, “Jazz Magazines of the 1930s,” 255–70; Collier, Reception of Jazz in America; Carl Engel, “Jazz: A Musical Discussion,” Atlantic Monthly 130 (August 1922): 182–89; and Charles E. Smith, “Jazz: Some Little-Known Aspects,” Symposium 1, no. 4 (October 1930): 513. Some popular consumer magazines: Gramophone (UK), 1923 (popular music added 1926); Melody Maker (UK), 1926 (shifted from trade to consumer focus ca. 1932); Hot News & Rhythm Record Review (UK), 1935; Metronome (USA), ca. 1922 (shifted from trade to consumer focus 1933–35); Phonograph Monthly Review (USA) (mostly classical, some dance music),

n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 9 – 4 6  219 1929; Down Beat (USA), 1934; Jazz-Tango (France), 1929; Revue du Jazz (France), 1929; Hot Jazz (France), 1935; Jazzwereld (Netherlands), 1930. 60. Down Beat a girlie magazine: Wellburn, “George Simon Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 294; Maher didn’t overpay: Wellburn, “Russell Sanjek Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 257. 61. No magazine has reviewed: Peter Clayton and Peter Gammond, eds., The Guinness Jazz, A-Z (London: Guinness Superlatives, 1986), s.v. “Metronome” (magazine). Metronome history: John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 88–89, 173; Russ Shor, “Silent Partners, Interview with Dan Morgenstern, Part I,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 101 (Spring 1996): 5–8. 62. Gilbert Millstern, “The Commodore Shop and Milt Gabler,” in Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz, ed. Eddie Condon and Richard Gehman (New York: Dial Press, 1956), 80–100; Dan Morgenstern, “The Hot Record Society,” in Morgenstern and Meyer, Living with Jazz, 479–585. 63. “Milt Gabler Interview,” in Reading Jazz, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 214–42. This is an excerpt from a Dan Morgenstern interview. Russ Shor, Silent Partners, “Interview with Milt Gabler, Part 1,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 103 (Autumn 1996): 5–7. 64. Millstern, “Commodore Shop and Milt Gabler,” 83–84; “Milt Gabler Interview,” in Gottlieb, Reading Jazz, 216–20. 65. “Milt Gabler Interview,” in Gottlieb, Reading Jazz, 225–26; Russ Shor, Silent Partners, “Interview with Milt Gabler, Part 3,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 105 (Spring 1997): 7–10; George Avakian, “The Vanishing American,” Record Changer 7, no. 12 (December 1948): 14, 22. 66. Morgenstern, “Milt Gabler Interview, in Gottlieb, Reading Jazz, 225–26; Shor, Silent Partners, “Interview with Milt Gabler, Part 3, 8. 67. Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, eds., Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939); Wellburn, “Russell Sanjek Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 250, 257, 259. 68. Arnold Gingrich, “Introduction,” in Esquire’s 1946 Jazz Book (New York: Esquire Mag­ azine, 1946), vii; Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak, 1965), 26. 69. Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 174–76. Ramsey worked at Harcourt from 1936 to 1939: The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. Barry Kernfeld (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), s.v. “Ramsey, Frederic Charles.” 70. Otis Ferguson, “The Five Pennies,” in Ramsey and Smith, Jazzmen, 221–42. 71. Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool, 93; Wellburn, “Walter Schaap Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 270. 72. Meet the Critics, “Charles Edward Smith,” in The Encyclopedia Yearbooks of Jazz, ed. Leonard Feather (1958; New York: Da Capo, 1993), 93–94; Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 145; Wellburn, “Russell Sanjek Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 259. 73. Morgenstern, “Hot Record Society,” 581–82. 74. Morgenstern, “Milt Gabler Interview,” in Gottlieb, Reading Jazz, 218–19. 75. Wellburn, “Russell Sanjek Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 259; Russell Sanjek, “Foreword,” in Charles Delaunay, Hot Discography (New York: Commodore Music Shop, 1940). 76. Wellburn, “Walter Schaap Interview,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 271–72. 77. Margaret Kidder, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” HRS Society Rag, February 1941, 8–13. 78. Bill Gottlieb, “Delaunay Escapades with Gestapo Related,” Down Beat 13 (September 9, 1946): 13. 79. Meet the Critics, “Dr. Dietrich Schulz-Koehn,” in Encyclopedia Yearbooks of Jazz, 97; Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71. 80. Zwerin, Tristesse de Saint Louis, 35.

220 

notes to pages 46–53

81. Borneman, “Jazz Cult, Part 1,” 270–71. 82. Charles Delaunay, Hot discographie 1943 (Paris: Collection du Hot Club de France, 1943), 4–5. 83. Gottlieb, “Delaunay Escapades with Gestapo Related,” 13. 84. For the details of the differences between the 1940 and 1943 Commodore books, see Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 6,” Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 2–8. 85. Charles Delaunay and Kurt Mohr, Hot discographie encyclopédique, 1951, vol. 1, A-B (Paris: Éditions Jazz Disques), [ii]. 86. Borneman, “Jazz Cult, Part 1,” 270–71; Meet the Critics, “Dr. Dietrich Schulz-Koehn,” 97. 87. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 195–96; Gordon Darrah, “Jazz under German Occupation,” Record Changer 4, no. 12 (February 1946): 16–17.

chapter three 1. Richard B. Allen, “Oren Blackstone, 1907–1980: A Personal Tribute,” Second Line 32 (Fall 1980): 33–35; Tom Brown, Orin Blackstone biography, Second Line 1, nos. 4–5 ( July–August 1950): 1, 8–9. 2. Letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, August 22, 1944, “Orin Blackstone” vertical file, Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey (hereafter, “IJS Rutgers-Newark”). 3. Horace Meunier Harris, “Orin Blackstone: The Pioneer American Discographer,” IA JRC Journal 42, no. 3 (September 2009): 8–14. 4. Gilbert Erskine, “The New Orleans Record Shop,” Second Line 28 (Spring 1976): 43–44; Brown, Orin Blackstone biography, 1, 8. 5. Letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, August 22, 1944, “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 6. Gave me the courage: Harris, “Orin Blackstone,” 9. After almost despairing: letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, [ca. September 1945], “Orin Blackstone” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 7. Orin Blackstone, “Hot Copy,” Record Changer 4, no. 5 ( July 1945): 29, 33; Gordon Gullickson, Editor’s Notes, Record Changer 4, no. 5 ( July 1945): 34–35. 8. It had gotten to the point: letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, [ca. September 1945], “Orin Blackstone” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. Record store: “Calling All Collectors!” Basin Street 1, no. 8 (October 1945): 4; Erskine, “New Orleans Record Shop,” 43. 9. “Self Service Record Shop,” Printer’s Ink, January 11, 1946, 21; Erskine, “New Orleans Record Shop,” 44. 10. “Introduction,” in Orin Blackstone, Index to Jazz, vol. 1, A-E (Fairfax, VA: Record Changer, [1945]), 4. 11. “Introduction,” in Orin Blackstone, Index to Jazz, vol. 4, S-Z (Fairfax, VA: Gordon Gullickson, 1948), 2. 12. Brown, Orin Blackstone biography, 8. 13. Paul B. Sheatsley, “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” Record Research 58 (February 1964): 3–4. 14. Horace Meunier Harris, “The Birth of Discography,” IAJRC Journal 33, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 33–34. 15. “Introduction,” in Orin Blackstone, Index to Jazz, vol. 3, M-R (Fairfax, VA: Record Changer, 1947), 4.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 3 – 5 9  221 16. Marshall Stearns, Review of Index to Jazz, Part I, Notes, 2nd ser., 10, no. 1 (December 1952): 111–12. 17. Ron Davies, “Discography or Catalogue?” Discophile 9 (December 1949): 10–11. 18. Arnold Gingrich, “Introduction,” in Esquire’s 1944 Jazz Book, ed. Paul Eduard Miller (New York: Smith and Durrell, 1944), v–vii; Stearns, Review of Index to Jazz, 112. 19. Gordon Darrah, “Jazz under German Occupation,” Record Changer 4, no. 12 (February 1946): 16–17; “Interview with Charles Delaunay,” in Ronald G. Wellburn, “American Jazz Criticism, 1914–1940” (PhD diss., New York University, 1983), 192–99. 20. Russ Shor, Silent Partners, “Interview with George Avakian, Part 1,” Vintage Jazz Mart 93 (Spring 1994): 4–8. 21. Meet the Critics, “Marshall W. Stearns,” in The Encyclopedia Yearbooks of  Jazz, ed. Leonard Feather (1958; New York: Da Capo, 1993), 98; Sheldon Meyer, “The Story of Jazz Books in America,” Jazz Review 2, no. 10 (November 1959): 64–65. 22. Wellburn, “Interview with Russell Sanjek,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 245–59. 23. Nat Hentoff, “George Avakian: Columbia’s A&R Director Boasts One of Longest Jazz-Waxing Careers,” Down Beat 23 (December 12, 1956): 17–18, 53–54. Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy, Columbia CL591 [CK40242; CK64925]; Ellington at Newport, Columbia CL1245 [CK40587]. 24. Bert Whyatt, “Milt Gabler,” Jazz Journal International 54, no. 10 (October 2010): 18-19. 25. Bert Whyatt, “Milt Gabler” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 54, no. 10 (October 2001): 18–19; Jerry Atkins, “Letter from Delaunay, June 1981,” IAJRC Journal 32, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 27–28; Björn Englund, “A Discographical Challenge—a Perfect Edition of Jazz Records, 1897–1942,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 156 (Winter–Spring 2010): 14–15. 26. Charles Delaunay, Walter E. Schaap, and George Avakian, New Hot Discography (New York: Criterion, 1948). 27. Wellburn, “Interview with Charles Delaunay,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 198. 28. “This choice of date will, of course, appear somewhat arbitrary at first sight. But . . . from this time on, orchestral combinations became increasingly unstable and transitory, and, equally important, Negro and white musicians began to record together”: Charles Delaunay, “Foreword,” in Delaunay, Schaap, and Avakian, New Hot Discography, x. 29. David Strauss, “French Critics and American Jazz,” American Quarterly 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1965): 582–87. 30. Bill Gottlieb, “Delaunay Escapades with Gestapo Related,” Down Beat 13 (September 9, 1946): 13; Charles Delaunay, “New Orleans to Bebop,” Pickup 2, no. 8 (August 1947): 7–13. 31. Whitney Balliett, “Panassié, Delaunay, et cie,” in Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3–16. 32. Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 193–95; Wellburn, “Interview with Walter Schaap,” in “American Jazz Criticism,” 268–78. Others maintained that Panassié used the family château to hide escapees and that is why he stayed in the south of France: Darrah, “Jazz under German Occupation,” 17. 33. Rudi Blesh, “Some Thoughts on the Jazz Revival,” Record Changer 7, no. 11 (November 1948): 14, 23. 34. Bucklin Moon, Books Noted, The New Hot Discography, Record Changer 7, no. 11 (November 1948): 15. 35. Charles Delaunay, “An Attack on Critical Jabberwocky,” Record Changer 8, no. 3 (March 1949): 13–14; Bucklin Moon, “Let That Foul Air Out” (letter), Record Changer 8, no. 3 (March 1949): 13–14. 36. Blesh, “Some Thoughts on the Jazz Revival,” 14. 37. Delaunay, Schaap, and Avakian, New Hot Discography, 139–40.

222 

notes to pages 62–68

38. Orin Blackstone, “Stomp Off, Let’s Go,” Jazzfinder 1, no. 1 ( January 1948): 2. 39. Allen, “Oren Blackstone, 1907–1980,” 33–35. 40. Letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, April 26, 1949, “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark; Harris, “Orin Blackstone,” 10. 41. Orin Blackstone, “Modern Record Research,” in Jazzfinder 1949 Annual (1949), 143–47. 42. Andy Simmons, “Richard B. Allen, 1927–2007,” IAJRC Journal 40, no. 3 (August 2007): 116; Harris, “Orin Blackstone,” 10. 43. Letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, April 22, 1952, “Orin Blackstone” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 44. Orin Blackstone, “Memo on the Mails,” Playback 4, no. 28 (February 1952): 2. 45. Orin Blackstone, Index to Jazz: Loose Leaf Edition, part 1, A-E (New Orleans: Orin Blackstone, 1950). Release information for the volume was contained in a laid-in, one-page flyer dated June 26, 1950. 46. Letter from Orin Blackstone to George Hoefer, April 22, 1952, “Orin Blackstone” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark; Harris, “Orin Blackstone,” 10; Erskine, “New Orleans Record Shop,” 43; Allen, “Oren Blackstone, 1907–1980,” 34. 47. Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 4. 48. Bucklin Moon, “Some Notes on Discographies,” Record Changer 11, no. 10 (November 1953): 9. The price of the first volume of The Jazz Directory was initially $1.50 (Books Noted, Record Changer 9, no. 3 [March, 1950]: 7, 18), but by the time Moon reviewed it in mid-1953 it was up to $2.00 and would increase still more. 49. Albert J. McCarthy, “Discography Today,” Jazz Monthly 4, no. 8 (October 1958): 26–27; Dave Carey, “Introduction,” in David A. Carey, Albert J. McCarthy, and Ralph G. V. Venables, The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music [The Jazz Directory], vol. 1, A-B (Fordingbridge, UK: Delphic Press, 1949), [i]. 50. Pat Hawes, “David Arthur Carey” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 52, no. 12 (De­ cember 1999): 16–17; Carey, “Introduction,” in The Jazz Directory, vol. 1, [i]; Albert McCarthy, “Selections from Jazz Directory,” Jazz Monthly 3, no. 1 (1946): 19. 51. Dated from mid-1930s: Albert McCarthy, Editorial, Jazz Monthly 1, no. 5 ( July 1955): 3. Each country has . . . talentless: Tony Russell, “Albert McCarthy” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 40, no. 12 (December 1981): 10. Avoiding the draft: Steve Voce, “Obituary: Max Jones,” London Independent, August 4, 1993. 52. Jim Godbolt, A History of  Jazz in Britain, 1919–1950 (London: Quartet Books, 1984), 18– 28, 160–69; Max Jones, Editorial, Jazz Music 3, no. 1 (1946): 3–4, 18; Peter Clayton and Peter Gammond, eds., The Guinness Jazz, A-Z (London: Guinness Superlatives, 1986), s.v. “Jazz Music” (magazine). 53. Brian Rust, “Ode to Jelly Roll Morton,” Pickup 1, no. 11 (November 1946): 12. 54. John Davis and Grey Clarke, “How to Become an Authority on Jazz,” Jazz Journal 1, no. 1 (May 1948): 10. 55. A fanatical propagandist: Godbolt, History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–1950, 175–76. I do not share Ralph’s . . . tendencies: letter from Dave Carey to George Hoefer, “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 56. Max Jones, Editorial, Jazz Music 3, no. 3 (December 1946): 3. 57. Ralph Venables [Shep Landis, pseud.], “Now It Can Be Told,” Jazzology 10 (October 1946): 10–13; Derrick Stewart-Baxter [George Lucien, pseud.], “A Meeting with Marty,” Jazzology 11 (November 1946): 18–20. The December article is not available. 58. Letter from Ralph Venables to George Hoefer, January 3, 1947, “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 59. Letter from Venables to Hoefer, January 3, 1947, “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 8 – 7 3  223 60. Letter from David Carey to Down Beat, January 20, 1947; letter from Ralph Venables to George Hoefer, January 20, 1947, both in “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 61. Godbolt, History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–1950, 176; “George Hoefer Dies,” Down Beat 34, no. 26 (December 28, 1967): 13; “George Hoefer, 58, Jazz Writer, Dies,” New York Times, November 20, 1967. 62. However, it appears that not every take with an extant matrix may have been shown. For example, on February 2, 1934, the Benny Goodman orchestra recorded two masters of “Junk Man,” 152702–2 (released by US Columbia and Temple), and 152702–3 (released by English Columbia). Did 152702–1 ever exist, or was it destroyed at the time? Dave Carey and Albert J. McCarthy, The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music [The Jazz Directory], vol. 3, E-G (Fordingbridge, UK: Delphic Press, 1951). 63. Ralph Gleason, “A New Jazz Discography,” Gramophone 27 ( January 1950): 149. 64. Editorial, Discophile 5 (April 1949): 1; Editorial, Discophile 6 ( June 1949): 1; Pete Goulding, Review of [The] Jazz Directory, vol. 1, Discophile 9 (December 1949): 4; Gleason, “New Jazz Discography,” 149; Books Noted, Record Changer 9, no. 3 (March 1950): 7. 65. Doomed from the start: Carey, “Introduction,” in Jazz Directory, vol. 1, [ii]. “Several hundred pounds” and “very shaky”: “Introduction,” in Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy, The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music [The Jazz Directory], vol. 2, C-D (Fordingbridge, UK: Delphic Press, 1950), [i]. “Introduction to Volume Three,” in Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy, The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music [The Jazz Directory], vol. 3, (Fordingbridge, UK: Delphic Press, 1951), [i]. After the 1971 decimal conversion, the equivalent of 7d. 6p. would be £0.38; 12d. 6p. would be £0.63. At an exchange rate of $4.30 to the pound, these would convert to $1.63 and $2.71. However, based on reviews, it appears that actual prices in the United States were $2.00 initially, and $4.00 by volume 6. (As a comparison, Delaunay’s New Hot Discography, a 606-page hardback, was $6.00 in the United States in 1948, and a typical hardback in the mid1950s cost $2.75 to $4.25.) 66. Carey, “Introduction,” in Jazz Directory, vol. 1, [i]. 67. Goulding, Review of Jazz Directory, vol. 1, 4; Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Dis­ cography,” 4. However, Blackstone, in the Index to Jazz: Loose Leaf Series, did omit all the personnels of the Chick Bullock sides, except for noting when the Dorseys, Berigan, et al. played (see 138–42). 68. Books Noted, Record Changer 9, no. 3 (March 1950): 7; Sheatsley. “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 4. 69. The belief that it was a Williams studio band, not Blythe’s group, that played on the Barrelhouse Five sides probably came from Blackstone’s Index to Jazz: Loose Leaf Edition, Part 1, A-E, 57, where Blackstone argues against earlier claims that the BH5 was a Blythe pseudonym. His belief was based on Williams’s appearance as vocalist on one of the six recordings made that day. On the other hand, The Jazz Directory referred readers looking up the BH5 to Blythe. For a more in-depth comparison of how Blackstone and the Jazz Directory dealt with the “Blythe problem,” see Moon, “Some Notes on Discographies,” 9. Delaunay before 1949 does not list the BH5 at all. Blackstone’s first edition attributes them to Blythe. So does Delaunay’s 1949 edition. All Rust editions say they are a Williams band, as do Bruyninckx and Lord. 70. “Introduction,” in Albert J. McCarthy, Jazz Discography 1958 [ Jazz Discography 1] (London: Cassell: 1958), [i]. 71. Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 5. 72. Russell Sanjeck, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3:333–85. 73. The Flood: Alun Morgan, Review of  Jazz Records, 1932–1942, A-Z, compiled by Brian Rust, Jazz Monthly 12, no. 1 (March 1966): 5–6. In all fairness, I have found references to microgroove technology’s leading to “a flood” of new music as early as 1960: Ralph Gleason, Review of Jazz

224 

notes to pages 73–78

Discography 1958, Gramophone 38 (October 1960): 121. But Morgan was the first I know to use the word as a proper noun. Lure of the hunt is gone: George Hoefer, “The Collector’s Era; What LPs Have Done to Wax Heads,” Down Beat 22 (September 21, 1955): 16. 74. George Avakian, “The Vanishing American,” Record Changer 7, no. 12 (December 1948): 14, 22. 75. Walter C. Allen, “Discomania: Discographer’s Dilemma,” Jazz Journal 8, no. 2 (February 1955): 26. 76. In the era of videorecording and digital storage, some highly specialized libraries such as the Folger Shakespeare Library do store and catalog performances of special historical or artistic value, but this is atypical. 77. The discographer is faced: Albert J. McCarthy, “Discography Today,” Jazz Monthly 4, no. 8 (October 1958): 26–27. The sheer volume: Albert J. McCarthy, “Introduction,” in Jazz Directory 1958, i. “I am only too aware”: Albert J. McCarthy, “Discographical Publications,” Jazz Monthly 189 (November 1970): 32–33. 78. A reasonable chance: “Introduction,” in Albert J. McCarthy and Dave Carey, The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music Including Gospel and Blues Records [The Jazz Directory], vol. 5, J-Kirk (London, Cassell, 1955), [i]. A name immortalized by discographers: Albert J. McCarthy, “Discographical Publications,” Jazz Monthly 167 ( January 1969): 26. 79. McCarthy, “Discography Today,” 26. 80. “Revised Edition of Volume One of [Carey and McCarthy’s] Jazz Directory,” Discophile 56 (October 1957): 1; McCarthy, “Discography Today,” 26. Unfinished masterpiece: Dan Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Dan Morgenstern and Sheldon Meyer (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 545–55, quotation at 551. 81. Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 4. 82. Kurt Mohr, Discographie du jazz (Geneva: Vuagat, 1945). Andy Gurwitch, in a 1947 letter to George Hoefer, described a then-recent Mohr discography titled Swing Discography. While Gurwitch believed it was competently done, he noted it was limited to black bands. It is not clear if this is the same as Discographie du jazz: letter from Andy Gurwitch to George Hoefer, Decem­ ber 18, 1947, “George Hoefer” vertical file, IJS Rutgers-Newark. 83. Orin Blackstone, “Wood-Sheddin,” Jazzfinder 1, no. 9 (September 1948): 2. 84. Kurt Mohr, “R&B Discography” (letter), Jazz Journal 18, no. 5 (May 1965): 27, 40. 85. “Foreword,” in Delaunay, Hot discographie encyclopédique, 1951, vol. 1, A-B, [ii]; Alun Morgan, “A Modernist Looks at HD51,” Discophile 22 (February 1952): 7. 86. The decimal equivalents would be £0.625 vs. £0.50 (roughly $2.75 vs. $2.15, but actual prices in the United States were higher because of shipping and fees). The price of The Jazz Directory would also go up to 12s. 6d., but not until two years after Hot discographie encyclopédique suspended publication. Don Waterhouse, “An Appreciation of Charles Delaunay,” Jazz Journal International 41, no. 4 (April 1988): 18–19. 87. Gleason, Review of Jazz Discography 1958, 121; McCarthy, “Introduction,” in Jazz Discography 1958, [i]. 88. Gleason, Review of Jazz Discography 1958, 121. 89. Pat Hawes, “David Arthur Carey” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 52, no. 12 (Decem­ ber 1999): 16–17. 90. Jazz Monthly became Jazz and Blues Monthly in April 1971. In December 1972 Max Harrison took over as editor. Publication ceased in 1973. 91. Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 5; Albert J. McCarthy, Big Band Jazz ( New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974); Albert McCarthy, Alun Morgan, Paul Oliver, and Max Harrison, Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years, 1917–1967 (London: Hanover Books, 1968; New York: Oak Books, 1968); McCarthy, “Discography Today,” 27; Malcolm Walker, Editorial, Discographical Forum 5 (1968): 1; Tony Russell, “Albert McCarthy” (obituary)

n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 8 – 8 3  225 Jazz Journal International 40, no. 12 (December 1987): 11–12; “Albert McCarthy” (obituary), Jazz Forum 110, no. 1 (1988): 21. 92. Two ill-tempered cats: Steve Voce, “It Don’t Mean a Thing: The Discographer’s Dreaded Big Toe Double Nelson,” Jazz Journal 21, no. 10 (October 1968): 12. Works together in reasonable amity: Albert McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, 50 Years of Recorded Jazz, Jazz Monthly 166 (December 1968): 28–30.

chapter four 1. Dan Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Dan Morgenstern and Sheldon Meyer (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 545–55; Nat Hentoff, “More Clams and Consonances,” Metronome 78, no. 7 ( July 1961): 18–19. Hentoff gave the US price as $11.20, but given the £4.00 British price (Review of Jazz Records, vol. 1 [1897–1931], by Brian Rust, Matrix 35–36 [September 1961]: 32–33) and the necessary shipping costs, Morgenstern’s $16.95 seems more accurate. 2. Michael Wyler, “Collector’s Profiles 4: Brian Rust,” Jazz Monthly 2 (October 1956): 29–30; Nick Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 1),” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 132 (Winter 2003): 10–14. 3. Malcolm Shaw, “Editor’s Preface,” in Jazz and Ragtime Records, 1897–1942, 6th ed., 4 vols., ed. Brian Rust and Malcolm Shaw (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2002), 2:vii–ix. 4. George Hulme, “Brian Rust: The Sage of Hatch End,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 10–11; Max Jones, Editorial, Jazz Music 3, no. 1 (1946): 3–4; Horace Meunier Harris, “The Young Life of Brian,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 12–13; Richard H. Johnson, “Brian Rust, the Mentor,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 16–17; Bob Weir, “Brian Rust” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 64, no. 3 (March 2011): 14. 5. Wyler, “Collector’s Profiles 4: Brian Rust,” 30. 6. Brian Rust, “Music of the Masses?” Pickup 1, no. 10 (October 1946): 12-14, quotation at 12. 7. Brian Rust, “Music of the Masses?” Pickup 1, no. 10 (October 1946): 12–14; Jim Godbolt, “I’m Going to Sit Right Down” (letter), Pickup 1, no. 12 (December 1946): 28; Brian Rust, “I’m Going to Sit Right Down” (letter), Pickup 2, no. 1 ( January 1947): 7, 9; Jim Godbolt, “I’m Going to Sit Right Down” (letter), Pickup 2, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1947): 11. 8. Ron Davies, George Avakian, and Charles Delaunay, “Discography of Clarence Williams,” Record Changer 5, no. 10 (December 1946): 23. 9. Brian Rust, “Elegy on a Clarence Williams Discography,” Pickup 2, nos. 2–3 (FebruaryMarch 1947): 14–16. 10. Ron Davies, “Be Your Age, Sage,” Pickup 2, no. 5 (May 1947): 24–26. 11. Nick Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 2),” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 133 (Spring 2004): 5; Paul Oliver, “Blues Research: Problems and Possibilities,” Journal of Musicology 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 377–90, quotations at 380, 385. 12. Irresponsible individuals: Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 2),” 5; Rust, “Elegy on a Clarence Williams Discography,” 17. Shortcomings in playback technology: Russ Shor, Silent Partners, Interview with George Avakian, Conclusion (Part 4), V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 96 (Winter 1994): 5–7. 13. Davies, “Be Your Age, Sage,” 26. 14. Editorial, Pickup 2, no. 8 (August 1947): 2. 15. Tim Brooks, telephone interview, June 8, 2011; Malcolm Shaw, “Jazz Records, Whence and Whither,” V JM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 142 (Summer 2006): 10–11. 16. Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 2),” 6.

226 

notes to pages 83–90

17. Ibid., 5. 18. Brian A. L. Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931 (Hatch End, UK: Brian Rust, 1962). The first printing of Jazz Records was done by Steven Lane, who had printed some issues of the journal Matrix: Review of Jazz Records, Matrix 35—36 (September 1961): 32–33. Modeled after Jazz Directory, and a bit of a mess: Dellow, “Brian Rust, Jazz Discographer (Part 2),” 5. 19. LPs generally not covered: Review of Jazz Records A-Z, 1897–1931, 2nd ed., Matrix 46 (April 1963): 9. Rust quotation: “Introduction,” in Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931 (1962 edition), 1. 20. “Introduction,” in Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931 (1962 edition), 1. 21. Johnson, “Brian Rust, the Mentor,” 16; Paul B. Sheatsley, “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” Record Research 58 (February 1964): 3–4. 22. Tim Brooks and Barry Ashpole, “Guidelines for Discographies in the ARSC Journal,” ARSC Journal 37, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 14–20. 23. Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” 552. 24. Ray Spencer, “Discographers Unite” letter), Jazz Journal 15, no. 2 (February 1962): 36–37. 25. Hulme, “Brian Rust: The Sage of Hatch End,” 11. 26. Will Friedwald, “Detectives of Jazz” (four-part series), www.jazz.com (posted ca. July 2009–May 2010). Last accessed August 24, 2011. 27. Howard Rye, electronic mail to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, University of Chicago Press (review of this book’s manuscript), June 2012. 28. Second printing of post-binder edition: Review of  Jazz Records (Matrix, September 1961), 32–33. Strong men and a crane: Sinclair Traill, Editorial (letter of Brian Rust), Jazz Journal 21, no. 9 (September 1968): 1. Rust’s plans for publishing Godrich and Dixon’s discography: Editorial, Matrix 41 ( June 1962): 1; Editorial, Matrix 42 (August 1962): 1. 29. The musicians’ union imposed the ban to coerce record companies to agree to a performance royalty to compensate musicians for the radio airplay of their records. Some smaller firms negotiated settlements earlier in 1944. Jazz historians believe that much of the earliest development of bebop went undocumented because of the recording ban. A shorter strike occurred in 1948. 30. G. E. Lambert, “General Catalog of Duke Ellington’s Recorded Music,” Jazz Monthly 12, no. 1 (March 1966): 5. 31. Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942–1962, vol. 5, M-N (Copenhagen: Nordisk Tidsskrift, 1963). 32. Release of Jepsen’s first volume: Advertisement for Jazz Records, 1942–1962, Matrix 45 (February 1963): 15; Review of  Jazz Records, 1942–1962, vol. 5 (M-N),” Matrix 46 (April 1963): 8. First projected at four volumes: Editorial, Matrix 42 (August 1962): 1. Estimated at eight volumes by launch: Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 5. 33. “Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen” (obituary), Orkester Journalen 554 ( January 1982): 1–2; Louis Levy, Book Reviews, “Discography of Duke Ellington,” Jazz Review 3, no. 1 ( January 1959): 34; Ira Gitler, Book Reviews, “Discography of Miles Davis,” Jazz Review 3, no. 1 ( January 1959): 34–35; Bernard Hefele, ed., Jazz Bibliography (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1981), passim. 34. Pekka Gronow, “Jazz Discographies: A Review Essay,” Ethnomusicology 10, no. 3 (Septem­ ber 1966): 335–41; Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 5. 35. “Foreword,” in Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942–1962, vol. 5, M-N ([Copenha­ gen]: [Nordisk Tidsskrift], 1963), i; Sheatsley, “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” 6. 36. Alun Morgan, Review of Jazz Records, 1942–1962, vols. 1 (A-Bl ) and 2 (Bl-Co),” Jazz Monthly 12, no. 2 (February 1967): 28–29. 37. Brian Hainsworth, “The Missing Years” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 2 (February 1969): 33; Morgan, Review of Jazz Records, 1942–1962, 28.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 0 – 9 4  227 38. John Godrich and Robert M. W. Dixon, Blues and Gospel Records, 1902–1942 (Hatch End, UK: Brian Rust, 1964). Prices: “Christmas Books,” Second Line 15, nos. 11–12 (December 1964): 27–28. 39. “Procedure Followed,” in Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Blues and Gospel Records, 1902–1943. (London: Storyville, 1982), 2–5; Editorial, Matrix 42 (August 1962): 1. Expect no pictures: “Christmas Books, 27. It was a primary goal: Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 2 (December 1994): 501–47. 40. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 5–7, 30–33, 103–5, 192–214. Blues and Gospel Records did not include the Kentucky Jubilee Singers owing to a lack of existing recordings, and it excluded the Fisk Singers until the fourth edition because their authenticity was considered suspect. 41. Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak, 1965), 114–25; William Howland Kennedy, Recorded Music in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114–18; Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 14–25. 42. Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 25–38, 43–51; Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926). 43. Guy B. Johnson and Guion G. Johnson, Research in Service to Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 136–38. 44. Benjamin Filine, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 34–35. 45. Ibid., 42–44. 46. Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 95–97. Seven hundred discs: Filine, Romancing the Folk, 136. In 1939 John Lomax and his second wife, Ruby Terrill, did make some commercial recordings for the Gamut label during an Archive trip through Texas: Chris Smith, “The Possibility of Making a Little Extra Money: John A. Lomax and Gamut Records,” Names & Numbers 20 ( January 2002): 2–8. 47. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a federal agency that provided temporary employment to those left out of work by the Great Depression: Kenneth J. Bindas, All This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society, 1935–1939 (Knoxville: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), passim; Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (New York: Avon Books, 1972), 263–76. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Macmillan, 1980), s.v. “Charles (Louis) Seeger.” 48. Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 142–43; quotations from Filene, Romancing the Folk, 142–43. 49. Filene, Romancing the Folk, 150. 50. Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993). There is a world of difference: Paul Lopez, The Rise of a Jazz Art World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 198. 51. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” 517, 527, 531. 52. John Godrich and Robert M. W. Dixon, Recording the Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970). 53. “Introduction,” in Dixon and Godrich, Blues and Gospel Records ( 3rd edition, 1982), 7–9. 54. John Cowley, “Library of Congress Archive of Folk Sound Recordings,” in Dixon and Godrich, Blues and Gospel Records ( 3rd edition, 1982), 25–27; Han Enderman, “The Discographic Truth, Part 6,” Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 2–8.

228 

notes to pages 94–98

55. Oliver, “Blues Research,” 387–90. 56. Albert McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, Fifty Years of Recorded Jazz, Jazz Monthly 166 (December 1968): 28–30; “Laurie Wright, Storyville Publisher” (obituary), IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 111. 57. “Introduction” and “Procedure Followed,” in Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). i–iii, xiv. 58. Edward Komara, Book Reviews, “Blues and Gospel Records,” Notes, 2nd ser. 55, no. 2 (December 1998): 361–63. 59. Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931 (1962 edition); Review of Jazz Records, 1897–1931 (Matrix, April 1963), 9. The first printing sold for £4, the second for £5. 5d. ( £5.25). The book was apparently delayed for several months owing to paper shortages. Its copyright page carries a 1962 date, but shipments did not actually start until sometime after March 1963: “Editorial,” Matrix 45 (February 1963), 1. 60. Richard Gandorge, Index to Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931 (Hatch End, UK: Brian Rust, 1963). 61. “Introduction,” in Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931 (1962 edition), i–ii. Similar wording appeared in the introduction of subsequent editions. 62. Allan Sutton, interview, Washington, DC, May 28, 2009. 63. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” 517, 527–31. 64. Brian Rust, “Introduction,” in Jazz Records, A-Z, 1932–1942 (Hatch End, UK: Brian Rust, 1966) (hereafter, “1962 edition supplement”). 65. Gronow, “Jazz Discographies,” 338; Alun Morgan, Review: Jazz Records 1932-1942, A-Z, compiled by Brian Rust,” Jazz Monthly 12, no. 1 (March 1966): 5-6. 66. Howard Rye notes that “Rust’s works do [contrary to popular belief] include dubbings, though only those which rotate at 78 r.p.m., but they are distinguished in a way which gives them prominence, which can be (and probably was intended to be) read as a warning to the record collectors Rust expected to be the users of his book that they should not acquire these issues.” Howard Rye electronic mail to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, University of Chicago Press (review of this book’s manuscript), June 2012. 67. See Ross Russell, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Nathan W. Person, Goin’ to Kansas City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (New York: William Morrow, 1993). 68. Brian Rust and Allen G. Debus, The Complete Entertainment Discography: From the Mid1890’s to 1942 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973); Brian Rust, The American Dance Band Discography, 1917–1942, 2 vols. (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975). 69. “Brian Rust,” Storyville 26 (December 1, 1969): 41; “Bible,” Storyville 29 ( June 1, 1970): 161–62; Shaw, “Jazz Records, Whence and Whither,” 10–11. 70. Mike Leadbitter and Neil Slaven, Blues Records, 1943–1966: An Encyclopedic Discography to More Than Two Decades of Recorded Blues (London: Hanover Books, 1968). 71. Bill Daynes-Wood, Review of Blues Records, 1943–1966, Jazz Journal 22, no. 2 (February 1969): 21; Frank Tirro, Review of Blues Records, 1943 to December 1966, Notes, 2nd ser., 26, no. 4 ( June 1970): 756–57. One of  Tirro’s most vociferous complaints was bad alphabetizing, using this example, taken from page 261: Earl Payton Memphis Eddie Pee Peetie Wheatstraw’s Buddy Morris Pejoe

n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 8 – 1 0 4  229 Based on the alphabetizing guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, this criticism, and certainly the acerbic way it was condemned, was misplaced, although his point that a name index should have been included was probably warranted. 72. For more, see Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” 542. 73. Mike Leadbitter, “Blues Records” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 3 (March 1969): 48. 74. Paul Oliver, Review of Blues Records, 1943–70: A Selective Discography, Popular Music 7, no. 2 (May 1988): 240–43. 75. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” 543. 76. Neil Slaven, “Introduction,” in Mike Leadbitter and Neil Slaven, Blues Records, 1943– 1970: A Selective Discography, vol. 1, A-K (London: Record Information Services, 1987), i; Mike Leadbitter, Neil Slaven, and Leslie Fancourt, Blues Records, 1943–1970: A Selective Discography, vol. 2, L-Z (London: Record Information Services, 1994). 77. Oliver, Review of Blues Records, 1943–70, 241. 78. Howard Rye, “Spoof Entries in Blues Records, 1943–1970,” Names & Numbers 23 (October 2002): 5; Leadbitter and Slaven, Blues Records, 1943–1970, vol. 1, A-K, 309, 406, 421, 561; Leadbitter, Slaven and Fancourt, Blues Records, 1943–1970, vol. 2, L-Z, 305. 79. Edward Komara, Book Reviews, “The Blues Discography, 1943–70,” ARSC Journal 38, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 255–57. 80. Cedric  J. Hayes and Robert Laughton, Gospel Records, 1943–1969: A Black Music Discog­ raphy, 2 vols. (London: Record Information Services, 1992). 81. “Foreword,” in Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942–1969, vol. 4d, Kl-L (Copenhagen: Karl Emil Knudsen, 1970), i; “Foreword,” in Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942–1969, vol. 4b, Goo-Iwr (Holte, Denmark: Karl Emil Knudsen, 1969):i. A copy of IDA News, the newsletter of the short-lived International Discographers Association, is inserted at the front of volumes 4c and 4d of  Jazz Records, 1942–1969. “Forum Notes,” Discographical Forum 10 ( January 1969): 1; Jerry Atkins, “Discographies and Discographers,” IAJRC Journal 22, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 55–61. 82. “Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen” (obituary), Orkester Journalen 554 ( January 1982): 1–2.

chapter five 1. Albert J. McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” Jazz Monthly 166 (December 1968): 28–30; “New Discography,” Storyville 16 (April–May 1968): 2. Laurie Wright, “Dissention,” Storyville 18 (August–September 1968): 1–2. 2. Walter Bruyninckx, “Fantasies” (letter), Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 16–18; Walter Bruyninckx, “Introduction,” in 60 Years of Recorded Jazz, 1917–1977 (Mechelen, Belgium: Walter Bruyninckx, [ca. 1977–80]); “Discography—Fifty Years of Recorded Jazz,” Jazz Journal 21, no. 5 (May 1968): 3. 3. Although there were accusations that the flyer was deliberately deceptive about the price (“A Letter from Godrich, Jepsen and Rust,” Storyville 20 [December 1968—January 1969]: 57), Traill admitted that he had simply misread it: Editorial, Jazz Journal 21, no. 9 (September 1968): 1. George Hulme received the same flyer and correctly interpreted it: George Hulme, Review of 50 Years of Recorded Jazz, Matrix 77 ( June 1968): 28. Subscription marketing plan: Barry Kern­ feld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” Notes, 2nd ser. 51, no. 3 (March 1995): 865–91. Early flyers received three hundred replies: Jerry Atkins, “Discographies and Discographers,” IAJRC Journal 22, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 55–61. Albert McCarthy later believed the print run had been increased to a thousand copies, but given how few copies survive in libraries and private collections, five hundred seems more likely: McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” 28–30. 4. Steve Voce, “It Don’t Mean a Thing: The Discographer’s Dreaded Big Toe Double Nelson,” Jazz Journal 21, no. 10 (October 1968): 12.

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notes to pages 105–10

5. Sinclair Traill, Editorial, Jazz Journal 21, no. 7 ( July 1968): 1; Wright, “Dissention,” 2; Laurie Wright, “Editorial” (letter, ed. Sinclair Traill), Jazz Journal 21, no. 9 (September 1968): 1. 6. Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Review of 50 Years of Recorded Jazz, Jazz Journal 21, no. 9 (Sep­ tember 1968): 24. 7. Hulme, Review of 50 Years of  Recorded  Jazz, 28. 8. Ibid.; George Hulme, “The Ethics of Discography” (letter), Names & Numbers 15 (October 2000): 18. 9. Voce, “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” 12. 10. Hulme, Review of 50 Years of Recorded Jazz, 28. 11. Bruyninckx, “Walter Bruyninckx Writes” (letter), Storyville 19 (October–November 1968): 27–28; “Letter from Godrich, Jepsen and Rust,” Storyville 20 (December–January 1969): 57. 12. One conclusion we can draw is that Storyville was already planning at this stage to publish Jazz Records, A-Z, and thus Bruyninckx’s work posed an economic threat. There is no evidence to substantiate this except that Storyville was, by this time, already publishing Dixon and Godrich’s Blues and Gospel Records. Bruyninckx did attribute some of Wright’s animosity to this: “Walter Bruyninckx Writes,” 28. 13. Brian Rust adds: Wright, “Dissention,” 1–2; Brian Rust, Editorial (letter, ed. Sinclair Traill), Jazz Journal 21, no. 9 (September 1968): 1. 14. Walter Bruyninckx, “Introduction,” in Swing/Dance Bands/Combos, 1920-1985, vol. 1, A-Ba ([Mechelen: Walter Bruyninckx, ca. 1985]), i; Bruyninckx, “Introduction,” in 60 Years of  Recorded Jazz, iii; Voce, “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” 12. 15. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 889. 16. James S. Patrick, “Discography as a Tool for Musical Research and Vice Versa,” Journal of Jazz Studies 1, no. 1 (October 1973): 65–81; James Patrick, “The Uses of  Jazz Discography,” Notes, 2nd ser., 29, no. 1 (September 1972): 17–23; Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 890. 17. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 889; McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” 29. Dave McCarthy, Discographical Publications, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” Jazz Monthly 169 (March 1969): 26. 18. Wright quotation: Wright, “Dissention,” 1; Traill quotation: Editorial ( Jazz Journal, July 1968), 1; Leadbitter quotation: Mike Leadbitter, “Blues Records” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 3 (March 1969): 46; 19. Bruyninckx, “Fantasies,” 16–18. 20. Richard J. Johnson, “Freudian Slip” (letter), Names & Numbers 14 ( July 2000): 17. 21. Martin Williams (panelist), “Neglected Areas of Jazz Research,” in Studies in Jazz Discography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 38–43. Mohr quotation: Kurt Mohr, “Discographical Overlap” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 4 (April 1969): 39; Bruyninckx quotation: Bruyninckx, “Fantasies,” 16–18. 22. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 889. 23. Bob Porter, “Bebopdiscog” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 1 ( January 1969): 33; Bernard Shirley, “Discographers of the World Unite” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 2 (February 1969): 34. 24. McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” 29. McCarthy, Discographical Publications, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” 26. I have adjusted McCarthy’s estimate to compensate for the fact that Jepsen’s series eventually ran to eleven volumes, not ten as McCarthy predicted. 25. George Hulme, “Condoning Bruyninckx” ( letter), Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 16; Gordon Winter, “Discographer’s Discontent” (letter), Jazz Journal 22, no. 2 (February 1969): 33; McCarthy, Jazz Bookshelf, “50 Years of Recorded Jazz,” 166.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 0 – 1 6  231 26. See Bruce Epperson, “Uncertain and Unverifiable: Jazz Metadiscography and the Paradox of  Originality,” ARSC Journal 39, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 215–40. 27. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc. 499 U.S. 341 (1991). 28. Other examples of “facts” that are protected include price estimate guides for rare coins and books; a failure prediction guide for various makes of computer hard drives by age and hours of use; and crop yield risk tables to help farmers select which crop to plant. 29. “Jazz Has Got Copyright Law and That Ain’t Good,” Harvard Law Review 118, no. 6 ( June 2007): 1940–61. 30. The more comprehensive a compilation becomes: M. Nimmer and D. Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright, Release 63 (San Francisco, CA: Lexis, April 2004), sec. 3.34. Although ‘all’ is an uncreative principle: Michael Steven Green, “Copyrighting Facts,” Indiana Law Review 78, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 919–64. 31. Epperson, “Uncertain and Unverifiable,” 215–17, 227–32. 32. Walter Bruyninckx, “Introduction,” in Modern Jazz, vol. 1, A-D (Mechelen, Belgium: Copy Express, ca. 1988), ii. 33. Bob Rusch, Book Look, “60 Years of Recorded Jazz, pt. 1,” Cadence 4, nos. 4–5 ( July 1978): 26–28; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “60 Years of Recorded Jazz, pt. 5,” Cadence 7, no. 1 ( January 1981): 26–27; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 1,” Cadence 15, no. 7 ( July 1989): 19. 34. Atkins, “Discographies and Discographers,” 55–61. Bob Rusch, Book Look, Cadence 5, no. 4 (April 1979): 29–30; Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 871; Rusch, Book Look, “60 Years of Recorded Jazz, pt. 5,” 27. The specific examples here are taken from my own nineteen-volume set (seventeen volumes plus a two-volume green-page supplement) of 60 Years of Recorded Jazz, which was custom-bound for the Danish musician Karl Hermans. As is true for every bound set I have examined, it begins at A and uses photocopied sheets to compensate for the recto/verso problem. That means it also has two title pages, one at the start of A and another at the end of Z. 35. The most complete discography around: Rusch, Book Look, “60 Years of Recorded Jazz, pt. 1,” 28. Joe McPhee ( b. 1939) is a trumpeter and saxophonist who at this time had recorded only three albums for the small CJS and HatHut labels. Error rates: Rusch, Book Look, “60 Years of Recorded Jazz, pt. 1,” 28; Rusch, Book Look, 60 Years of Recorded Jazz, pt. 5,” 27; Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 872, 876. 36. Matthew F. Snyder, “The End of  Do-It-Yourself? An Investigation of  Publishing Options for Jazz Metadiscographies” (master’s thesis, Queens College, City University of New York, 2004), 8. 37. Atkins, “Discographies and Discographers,” 57. 38. Walter Bruyninckx, Jazz [the Swing Journal Paperbacks] (ca. 35 vols., various title page designations, in six series) ([Mechelen, Belgium: [various publishers, ca. 1984–90]). See bibliography for more details. Involvement of Swing Journal: Bruyninckx, “Fantasies,” 17. 39. Bruyninckx, “Introduction,” in Modern Jazz Discography, 1:ii–iii; Review of Bruyninckx softcover series, Modern Jazz, Cadence 10, no. 9 (September 1984): 25; Carl Baugher, Book Look, “Bruyninckx Softcover Discographies,” Cadence, 16, no. 6 ( June 1990): 15, 26; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Bruyninckx Softcover Discographies,” Cadence 17, no. 3 (March 1991): 15. 40. Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Bruyninckx Softcover Series, Traditional and Swing,” Cadence 13, no. 8 (August 1987): 31. 41. Russ Chase, Review of Jazz Records, 1942–1980, IAJRC Journal 22, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 76. 42. Atkins, “Discographies and Discographers,” 55–61; Erik Raben, e-mail to the author, March 29, 2012, and April 17, 2012. 43. Dan Morgenstern, interview, Newark, New Jersey, May 6, 2008; Erik Raben, e-mail to the author, April 17, 2012. 44. Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 2 (December 1994): 501–47.

232 

notes to pages 117–21

45. Lots of  jazz-rock: Paige Van Vorst, Review of  Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 1, Mississippi Rag, 18, no. 10 (August 1990): 29. Less than Bruyninckx: Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 3,” Cadence 18, no. 6 ( June 1992): 21. 46. Definition of discography: “Preface,” in Erik Raben, Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 1, A-Ba (Copenhagen: Stainless/Wintermoon, [1989]). Fundamentally a commercial discography: Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” 539. Inclusion of unpublished material: Chase, Review of  Jazz Records, 1942–1980, 76. 47. Gabbard, Book Look, “Jazz Records, 1942–80,” 21. 48. A 2005 date: Eddie Cook, Book Reviews, “Jazz Records 1942–80, vols. 2 and 3,” Jazz Journal International 45, no. 5 (May 1992): 19; Eric Charry, Digital Media Reviews, “The Jazz Discography, Version 4.4 and 85 Years of  Recorded Jazz,” ed. Alec McLane, Notes, 2nd ser. 61, no. 3 (March 2005): 833–37. 49. Rusch, Book Look, “Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 1,” 19. 50. Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 2,” Cadence 17, no. 1 ( January 1991): 24, 91. 51. Cadence selling Bruyninckx paperbacks: Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Bruyninckx Softcover Discographies,” Cadence 17, no. 3 (March 1991): 15. 52. “Something big”: Russ Chase, Review of The Jazz Discography, vol. 1, IA JRC Journal 25, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 73. Two Tom Lords: Michael Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” Notes, 2nd ser., 66, no. 1 (September 2009): 132–39. Lord’s background: Tom Lord, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2012; John McDonough, “Lord of the Files,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2007. 53. Tom Lord, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2012; Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “Cadence AllYears Index, 1976–91,” Cadence 18, no. 6 ( June 1992): 19–20. 54. Chase, Review of Cadence All-Years Index, 74; Chase, Review of The Jazz Discography, 73–74; Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” Notes, 2nd ser., 66, no. 1 (September 2009): 132–39. 55. Tom Lord, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2012. 56. Ibid. 57. Kevin Whitehead, “Pump Up the Volumes,” Down Beat 60, no. 1 ( January 1993): 48. 58. The computer is the engine: Tom Lord, “Call and Response” (letter), Cadence 18, no. 9 (September 1992): 36, 108–9. In the past: Tom Lord, “Lordly Virtues” (letter), Jazz Journal International 49, no. 8 (August 1996): 4. 59. Jim Corbett, Book Reviews, “Reading Jazz,” Down Beat 61, no. 2 (February 1994): 68; Tom Lord, “Where Credit Is Due” (letter), Down Beat, 61, no. 4 (April 1994): 9. 60. Chase, Review of The Jazz Discography, 73. 61. Chris Sheridan, “Lord Knows What” (letter), Jazz Journal International 49, no. 12 (December 1996): 5; Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” 132–39. 62. Lack of editing: Robert Iannapollo, Book Look, “The Jazz Discography, vol. 8,” Cadence 20, no. 8 (August 1994): 36; Lord, “Call and Response” (letter), 108. Lord states that during the development phase of The Jazz Discography, he had a computer programmer working for him. Tom Lord, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2012. It also appears that he later retained experienced discographers to improve specific sections of the CD and online versions. Dave Dixon, for instance, prepared the Louis Armstrong section of the 2002 CD-ROM version: Jos Willems, All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), xviii. 63. Material [that] has been appropriated: Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 877. 64. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 3,” Names & Numbers 12 ( January 2000): 7–12. 65. Casa Loma error: Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 1,” Names & Numbers

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 2 – 2 7  233 10 ( June 1999): 22–25. Focus 65 error: Bruyninckx, “Fantasies,” 16–18. “Such finds”: Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 3,” 11. 66. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 878. 67. Robert Campbell, telephone interview, August 7, 2012. 68. Bruyninckx, “Fantasies,” 17; Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 3,” 8. 69. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 879, 885, 885n12. 70. Matthew Snyder, “The End of Do It Yourself?” 23; Sheridan, “Lord Knows What,” 5; Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 888. 71. Tom Lord, “Communications” (letter), Notes, 2nd ser., 52, no. 2 (December 1995): 662–63; Barry Kernfeld, “Communications” (letter), Notes, 2nd ser., 52, no. 2 (December 1995): 663; Tom Lord, Cadence All-Years Index, 1976–1994 (West Vancouver, BC: Lord Music Reference, 1995). 72. Laurie Sterns, “Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law,” California Law Review 80 (March 1992): 513–53; Green, “Copyrighting Facts,” 933–36. 73. George Hulme, “The Ethics of  Discography” (letter), Names & Numbers 15 (October 2000): 18; Hulme, “Condoning Bruyninckx,” 16. 74. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 890. Double standard: Hulme, “Ethics of Discography”; Derk Collier, “Denigrating Lord” (letter), Names & Numbers 17 (April 2001): 17. 75. Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 3,” Cadence 18, no. 6 ( June 1992): 19–21; Krin Gabbard, e-mail to the author, April 17, 2012. 76. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 879. 77. Olaf Syman, “Discomfited” (letter), Jazz Journal International 49, no. 2 (February 1996): 5. 78. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 890. 79. In a letter to Barry Kernfeld dated November 19, 1993, Lord wrote that Bruyninckx had told him the circulation for 70/75 Years of Recorded Jazz was 820: Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 869. “I don’t see any competition”: Erik Raben, e-mail to the author, March 29, 2012. 80. Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” 132. 81. Sheridan, “Lord Knows What,” 5; Tom Lord, “Lord of All He Surveys” (letter), Jazz Journal International 50, no. 2 (February 1997): 4; Edward Berger, “CD-ROM Review: The Jazz Discography, Version 3.3,” Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 12 (2001): 230; Fitzgerald, Media Reviews, “Jazz Discography Online,” Notes, 2nd ser., 66, no. 1 (September 2009): 132–39. 82. Bruyninckx kept the knowledge of his 70/75 Years hidden: Kernfeld and Rye, “Compre­ hensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 879–81.

chapter six 1. Derek Collier, “Paul Sheatsley” (obituary letter), Jazz Journal International 42, no. 9 (September 1989): 5; Paul Sheatsley, “A Quarter Century of Jazz Discography,” Record Research 58 (February 1964): 3–6. 2. Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 3 (March 1995): 888–89, 891. Call for bibliographies and standards: Gordon Stevenson, “Discography: Scientific, Analytical, Historical and Systematic,” Library Trends 21 ( July 1972): 101–35 (esp. 131); Gordon Stevenson, “Collectors, Catalogs, and Librarians,” ARSC Journal 7, nos. 1–2 (1976): 21–32 (esp. 28). By 2006, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections had achieved only partial success in imposing discographic

234 

notes to pages 127–32

standards: Tim Brooks and Barry Ashpole, “Guidelines for Discographies in the ARSC Journal,” ARSC Journal 37, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 14–20. All general bibliographies of discographies after two notable 1981 works—Daniel Allen’s Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, and Bernard Hefele’s Jazz Bibliography—have been notably disappointing: Edward Berger, “Review of Jazz Research and Performance Materials,” Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 9 (1998): 391–401. 3. D. Russell Connor, “What Is Discography? Its Goals and Methods,” in Studies in Jazz Discography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1971), 1–7; Pekka Gronow, “Discography as a Science,” Jazz Monthly 162 (August 1968): 9–12. 4. George Hulme, “The First Discographer?” Names & Numbers 25 (April 2003): 20. 5. Bob Rusch, Book Look, Cadence 12, no. 6 ( June 1986): 20; Dan Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Dan Morgenstern and Sheldon Meyer (1966; New York: Pantheon, 2004): 209–13; Edgar Jackson, “Swing Music: Matrix Numbers as an Aid to Personnel Tracing,” Gramophone 14 (September 1936): 24; Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–1950 (London: Quartet Books, 1984), 155–60. 6. Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of  Jazz (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994): s.vv. “Digby Fairweather” and “John R. T. Davies.” Discographies of Fats Waller: Daniel Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), entries W11, W12, W13, and W14. 7. “Laurie Wright, Storyville Publisher” (obituary), IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 11; John R. T. Davies and Laurie Wright, Morton’s Music (London: Storyville, 1968); Ray Spencer, Book Reviews, “Fats in Fact,” Jazz Journal International 45, no. 8 (August 1992): 12; Tom Lord, Clarence Williams (Chigwell, UK: Storyville, 1976); Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entries W136, W137. 8. Harald Grut: “King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: A Discography,” Jazz Music 4, no. 2 (1949): 19–20; Brian Rust, “King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band Discography: Additions and Corrections, Part 1,” Jazz Music 4, no. 2 (1949): 21; Brian Rust, “King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band Discography: Additions and Corrections, Part 2,” Jazz Music 4, no. 4 (1950): 23–24. 9. J. R. Taylor, “Walter C. Allen” (obituary), ARSC Journal 6, no. 3 (1975): 1; “Tribute to Walter C. Allen,” Matrix 107–8 (December 1975): 11–12. 10. Walter C. Allen, “Discomania: Discographer’s Dilemma,” Jazz Journal 8, no. 2 (February 1955): 26; Nat Hentoff, “Counterpoint,” Down Beat 22 (October 5, 1955): 65–66. 11. Walter C. Allen and Brian A. L. Rust, King Joe Oliver (Belleville, NJ: Walter Allen, 1955; London, Jazz Book Club, 1957); Nat Hentoff, Counterpoint, Down Beat 23 (February 8, 1956): 32; Eric Townley, Review of King Joe Oliver, Discophile 46 (February 1956): 8; Review of King Joe Oliver, Gramophone 35 (August 1957): 116. 12. Review of Ellington and Davis discographies, Jazz Review 3, no. 1 ( January 1959): 34–35; “Who’s Who at Jazz Journal: Alun Morgan,” Jazz Journal International 50, no. 5 (May 1997): 14. 13. Review of Tiny Bradshaw and Lionel Hampton discographies, Matrix 35–36 (September 1961): 32–33. 14. Kurt Mohr, “R&B Discography” (letter), Jazz Journal 18, no. 5 (May 1965): 27, 40; André J. M. Prévos, “Four Decades of French Blues Research in Chicago,” Black Music Research Journal 12, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 97–112. 15. Bruce Cowther, “Arne Astrup” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 58, no. 11 (November 2005): 12; Reg Cooper, Review of the Stan Getz discography, Jazz Forum 59, no. 3 (1979): 54; Book Look, “Zoot Sims Discography,” Cadence 6, no. 9 (September 1980): 16; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “The Gerry Mulligan Discography,” Cadence 16, no. 6 ( June 1990): 15; Steve Voce, Book Reviews, “Brew Moore and Duke Jordan Discographies,” Jazz Journal International 45, no. 5 (May 1992): 19.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 3 2 – 4 0  235 16. Review of three EuroJazz discographies, Jazz Journal International 47, no. 1 ( January 1994): 15; Bob Weir, Review of Sandy Brown discography, Jazz Journal International 50, no. 7 ( July 1997): 19; Book Reviews, “Peter Ecklund and Scott Hamilton Discographies,” Jazz Journal International 54, no. 9 (September 2001): 17; Review of Dick Sudhalter discography, Jazz Journal International 57, no. 7 ( July 2004): 17; Review of Eddie Higgins discography, Jazz Journal International 60, no. 7 ( July 2007): 18. 17. Gerhard Conrad, “Horst H. Lange, Discographic Star,” IAJRC Journal 44, no. 3 (September 2011): 40–43. 18. Dieter Salemann, “The Americanization of Dieter,” IAJRC Journal 41, no. 1 (February 2008): 28–30. 19. Coen Hofmann, Editorial, Names & Numbers 12 ( January 2000): 1; Gerard J. Hoogeveen and Coen Hofmann, Editorial, Names & Numbers 22 ( July 2002): 1. 20. Book Look, “Five Discographies by Micrography,” Cadence 12, no. 6 ( June 1986): 20, 23; Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “Lestorian Notes: A Discography,” Jazz Journal International 54, no. 2 (February 2001): 24; Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “Bird Lore,” Jazz Journal International 55, no. 11 (November 2002): 18; Review of Shorty Rogers: A Discography, Jazz Journal International 56, no. 4 (April 2003): 12; George Hulme, “Helen Merrill Discography,” Names & Numbers 26 ( July 2003): 41. 21. “Ernie Edwards Jr.” (obituary), Discographical Forum 18 (May 1970): 4–5. 22. Joyce Music Publications: see generally Eddie S. Meadows, Jazz Scholarship and Pedagogy, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 289–54; Joyce Record Club: Bob Weir, Book Reviews, Jazz Journal International 56, no. 10 (October 2003): 13. 23. “History,” in http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed July 22, 2012). 24. Hugues Panassié, Discographie critique des meilleurs disques de jazz, 1920–1951, 2nd ed. (1951; Paris: Laffont, 1958); Donald Kennington, The Literature of Jazz: A Critical Guide (Chicago: American Library Association, 1971), 78–88; Morgenstern, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, 209; Berger, “Survey of Critical Jazz Record Guides,” 254. 25. Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entries A41, B135, C108, C162, E34, H73, S31, “Personal Section,” in http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed July 22, 2012). 26. “Methodology,” in http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed July 22, 2012). 27. “History,” in http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed July 22, 2012). 28. Meadows, Jazz Scholarship and Pedagogy, entry 1503; Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “Georgie Auld Discography,” Jazz Journal International 55, no. 11 (November 2002): 19. 29. “History,” in http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed July 22, 2012). 30. “Methodology” in http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed July 22, 2012). 31. D. R. Connor, BG—Off the Record: A Bio-discography of Benny Goodman (Fairless Hills, PA: Gaildonna, 1958); Connor, “What Is Discography,” 4. Six hundred certains and a thousand possibles: D. Russell Connor, Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996): xix–xxi. 32. Martin Williams, Book Note, “BG—Off the Record,” American Record Guide 25, no. 3 (November 1958): 211; Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” 553–54. Book sales: Connor, Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up, xix–xxi. 33. Connor, “What Is Discography,” 4–5. 34. Review of Moonlight Serenade by John Flower, Jazz Digest 4–5 (April–May 1972): 19; Dick Spottswood, Review of American Dance Bands on Record and Film, ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 268–70. 35. D. Russell Connor and Warren W. Hicks, BG—On the Record: A Bio-discography of Benny Goodman (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969). He later asserted: Connor, Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up, xix–xxi. A print run of 4,500 would be very large for a discography, about double that for Rust’s two-volume Jazz Records, A-Z, which appeared nine years later. If, as Connor

236 

notes to pages 140–47

claimed, a total of 18,000 to 20,000 copies of BG—Off the Record were printed, it would easily be the largest-selling discography ever, and one of the better-selling jazz books of all kinds. 36. D. Russell Connor, Benny Goodman: Listen to His Legacy (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988). Again, the subsequent information comes from Connor, Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up, xix–xxi. Connor asserts that some copies of the abortive third edition (by Eugene Frank) were printed and a few were sold. 37. Walter C. Allen, Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians (Highland Park, NJ: Walter Allen, 1973); Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” 553–54, 556; Derrick Stewart-Baxter, Review of Hendersonia, Jazz Journal 27, no. 6 ( June 1974): 31, 35. 38. William F. Lee and Audree Coke, Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm (Los Angeles: Creative Press, 1980); Manfred Selchow, Ding! Ding! A Bio-discographical Scrapbook of Vic Dickenson (Westoverledingen, Germany: Manfred Selchow, 1998); Book Look, “60 Years of Recorded Jazz.” Cadence 7, no. 1 ( January 1981): 26–27; Dan Morgenstern, Review of Ding! Ding! A Vic Dickenson Scrapbook, Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 11 (2000): 281–82. 39. Book Look, “Count Basie Bio-discography,” Cadence 13, no. 2 (February 1987): 20–21; William Shaman, Book Reviews, “Count Basie: A Bio-discography,” American Music 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 337–38; 40. Chris Sheridan, Dis Here: A Bio-discography of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Chris Sheridan, Brilliant Corners: A Bio-discography of Thelonious Monk (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001); Chris Sheridan, “Lord Knows What” (letter), Jazz Journal International 49, no. 12 (December 1996): 5; Tom Lord, “Lord of All He Surveys” (letter), Jazz Journal International 50, no. 2 (February 1997): 4; Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “Brilliant Corners,” Jazz Journal International 54, no. 12 (December 2001): 22. 41. Charles Turner, Review of Bobby Hackett: A Bio-discography, Notes, 2nd ser., 56, no. 4 ( June 2000): 962–63; George Hulme, “The Ethics of Discography” (letter), Names & Numbers 15 (October 2000): 18; Derek Collier, “Is It Generally Agreed?” (letter), Names & Numbers 15 (October 2000): 18. 42. Pawel Brodowski, “This Music Will Survive: An Interview with Dan Morgenstern,” Jazz Forum 111, no. 2 (1988): 44–50. 43. George Hulme, Mel Torme: A Chronicle ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001); Dan Mather, Charlie Barnet: An Illustrated Biography and Discography ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001); Malcolm Macfarlane and Ken Crossland, Perry Como: A Bibliography and Complete Career Record ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). 44. Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entries A80–A111. Calver is the same discographer who compiled the 1934 Duke Ellington handlist discovered by George Hulme (see chapter 2). 45. Hans Westerberg, Boy from New Orleans: Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong on Records, Film, Radio and Television (Copenhagen: Jazzmedia, 1981). 46. Eddie Cook, Review of Jazz Records, vol. 1, Jazz Journal International 42, no. 6 ( June 1989): 23; Russ Chase, Review of Jazz Records, 1942–80, vol. 1,” IAJRC Journal 22, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 76. 47. Jos Willems, All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), xi, 1, 405. 48. Bob Weir, Review of All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong, Jazz Journal International 60, no. 7 ( July 2007): 18; Thomas Brothers, Review of All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong, ARSC Journal 38, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 114–15. 49. Edward Brooks, The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Early Recordings, 1923–1928 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002). 50. Krin Gabbard, Book Look, “Timner’s Ellingtonia,” Cadence 15, no. 5 (May 1989): 26–27. 51. Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entries E40–E91.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 7 – 5 1  237 52. Brian Knight, Review of Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, Jazz Journal 21, no. 9 (Septem­ ber 1968): 24; Dan Morgenstern, Review of DESOR, 1963–1965, ARSC Journal 12, nos. 1–2 (1980): 130–31; Kernfeld, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, s.v. “Duke Ellington.” 53. Gabbard, Review of Timner’s Ellingtonia, 26–27; Krin Gabbard, Review of The Jazz Discography, vol. 1, Cadence 18, no. 8 (August 1992): 19. 54. Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 2 (December 1994): 501–47; Shirley Klett, Book Look, “Duke Ellington on Compact Disc,” Cadence 20, no. 1 ( January 1994): 19. 55. Kip Lornell, Review of the Aladdin/Imperial labels, Notes, 2nd ser., 49, no. 3 (March 1993) 1077–78. 56. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 7,” Names & Numbers 20 ( January 2002): 41–42; Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 8: The New Rust,” Names & Numbers 26 (January 2003): 2–13. 57. Brian Rust and Allen G. Debus, The Complete Entertainment Discography: From the Mid1890’s to 1942 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), iii; Brian Rust, British Dance Bands, 1912–1939 (London: Storyville, 1973); Brian Rust, The American Dance Band Discography, 19171942, 2 vols. (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975). 58. Brian Rust and Rex Bunnett, London Musical Shows on Record, 1897–1976 (Harrow, UK: General Gramophone, 1977); Brian Rust, The British Music Hall on Record (Harrow, UK: General Gramophone, 1979); Sinclair Traill, Review of The Complete Entertainment Discography, Jazz Journal 27, no. 6 ( June 1974): 30; Leslie Carole Johnson, Review of The American Dance Band Discography, 1917–1942, Mississippi Rag 3, no. 6 (April 1976): 13; Frank Tirro, Review of The American Dance Band Discography, 1917–1942, Notes, 2nd ser., 33, no. 2 (December 1976): 293–94. 59. George Hulme and Andy Simons, “The Brian Rust Discographies,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 18; Brian Rust, Discography of Historical Records on Cylinders and 78s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). 60. David A. Jasen, Recorded Ragtime, 1897–1958 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973); Ross Laird, Tantalizing Tingles: A Discography of Early Ragtime, Jazz, and Novelty Syncopated Piano Recordings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); Allan Sutton, Cakewalks, Rags and Novelties: The International Ragtime Discography, 1894–1930 (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2005); Edward A. Berlin, Review of Cakewalks, Rags and Novelties, ARSC Journal 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 89; David A. Jasen, Ragtime: An Encyclopedia, Discography, and Sheetography (London: Routledge, 2007); Jim Farrington, Review of Ragtime: An Encyclopedia, Discography, and Sheetography, ARSC Journal 40, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 87–88. 61. Ron Jewson, Derek Hamilton-Smith, and Ray Webb, Horst Lange’s “The Fabulous Fives” Revised (1959; Chigwell, UK: Storyville, 1978). 62. Jan Leder, Women in Jazz: A Discography of Instrumentalists, 1913–1968 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Michael Meckna, Twentieth Century Brass Soloists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); Stephen L. Barnett, Percussionists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). 63. Georges Paczynski, Une histoire de la batterie de jazz, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Outre Mesure, 1997); ­­Georges Paczynski, Une histoire de la batterie de jazz, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions Outre Mesure, 2000). 64. Björn Englund, “Edgar Jackson and the Gramophone,” Names & Numbers 56 ( January 2011): 26–28. 65. Horst H. Lange, Die deutsche Jazz-Discographie, 1902–1955 (Berlin: Bote und Bock, 1955); Horst H. Lange, Die deutsche “78er”: Discographie der Hot-Dance- und Jazz-Musik, 1903–1958 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1966); Gerhard Conrad, “Horst H. Lange, Discographic Star,” IAJRC Journal 44, no. 3 (September 2011): 40–43.

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66. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” 889n14. 67. Review of The Bielefelder Katalog Jazz 1999,” Names & Numbers 12 ( January 2000): 33–34; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “The 1986 Bielefelder Katalog,” Cadence 13, no. 1 ( January 1987): 26. 68. Børge [Børje] J. C. Møller, Dansk jazz discography (Copenhagen: Artum Musikforlag, 1945); Nationale Diskoteket, Dansk Jazz, 4 vols. (Ordrup: Nationalmuseet, 1961); Harry Nicolausson, Svensk jazzdiskografi (Stockholm: Nordiska Musikforlaget, 1953); Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Review of Svensk Jazzdiscographi, Discophile 31 (August 1953): 13. 69. Gronow, “Discography as a Science,” 9–12; Robert Pernet, Little Jazz in Belgium (Brussels: Éditions Sigma, 1967); Jack Litchfield, The Canadian Jazz Discography: 1916–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Jack Mitchell, Australian Jazz on Record, 1925–80 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988). 70. Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entries J217–J219. 71. Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Walter Bruyninckx Softcover Discographies,” Cadence 13, no. 8 (August 1987): 31; Carl Baugher, Book Look, “Walter Bruyninckx Discographies,” Cadence, 16, no. 6 ( June 1990): 15, 26; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Walter Bruyninckx Discographies,” Cadence 17, no. 3 (March 1991): 15. 72. E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 188, 222, 263; William Minor, Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 95, 318–19. 73. Bob Connolly, “Jazz in Japan,” Jazzfinder 2, no. 3 (March 1949): 9–15; Kiyoshi Koyama, “Jazz in Japan,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 566–74. 74. Haruhiko Fukuhara, “The Great Jazz Boom,” Jazz Journal International 21, no. 10 (October 1978): 33, 36; Minor, Jazz Journeys to Japan, 4. Cuscuna quotation: “In Japan, Jazz Resurges as a National Passion,” New York Times, January 7, 1988. 75. Atkins, Blue Nippon, 225, 213–14; Koyama, “Jazz in Japan,” 569–70. 76. David Wild, The Recordings of John Coltrane: A Discography. (Ann Arbor, MI: Wildmusic, 1977). Two supplements were reportedly issued, but no information on them is available. Yasuhiro Fujioka, Lewis Porter, and Yoi-ichi Hamada, John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995); Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler, and David Wild, The John Coltrane Reference, ed. Lewis Porter (London: Routledge, 2008); Mark Gilbert, Book Reviews, “John Coltrane Discography,” Jazz Journal International 49, no. 4 (April 1996): 20; Jim Farrington, Review of John Coltrane discography, Notes, 2nd ser., 53, no. 3 (March 1997): 810–11; Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “The John Coltrane Reference,” Jazz Journal International 61, no. 10 (October 2008): 9. 77. Yasuki Nakayama, “About This Book,” in The Miles Davis Complete Discography (Tokyo: Futabasha, 2000). 78. Allan Sutton, “Introduction,” in Pseudonyms on American Records (1892–1942): A Guide to False Names and Label Errors, 2nd ed. (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2005). 79. “8000 Transcriptions Discovered in Fort Lewis, Washington Gym Remodel,” ARSC Newsletter 125 (Winter 2011): 14. 80. Kernfeld, New Grove Dictionary of  Jazz, s.vv. “AFRS” and “V-Disc.” 81. Rainer E. Lotz and Ulrich Neuert, The AFRS “Jubilee” Transcription Programs: An Exploratory Discography, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Norbert Ruecker, 1985); Harry Mackenzie, AFRS Downbeat Series, Working Draft (Zephyrhills, FL: Joyce Music Publications, 1986); Harry Mackenzie and Lothar Polomski, One Night Stand Series, 1–1001 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). 82. Henryk Cholinski, Review of V-Disc Catalog Discography Nos. 500–904, Jazz Forum 57, no. 1 (1979): 49; Donald McCormack, Review of V-Discs: A History and Discography, Notes, 2nd ser., 38, no. 1 (September 1981): 61–63; Bob Rusch, Review of V-Discs, First Supplement, Cadence 13, no. 5 (May 1987): 26.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 5 9 – 6 4  239

chapter seven 1. Horace Meunier Harris, “The Young Life of Brian,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 12–13; George Hulme, “Brian Rust: The Sage of Hatch End,” IAJRC Journal 43, no. 2 ( June 2010): 10–11. It is believed that Rust’s first discography, of the Goofus Five, appeared in issue 16 of Jazz Tempo, but its date is uncertain; probably about March 1943. Daniel Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entry G83. 2. Allen, Bibliography of Discographies, vol. 2, Jazz, entries B356 (Brunswick), 010 (Okeh), and P76 (Parlophone). 3. Editorial, Discophile 19 (August 1951): 1; Dan Morgenstern, Review of Atlantic Records: A Discography, ARSC Journal 12, nos. 1–2 (1980): 128–30; Dan Morgenstern, “Discography, the Thankless Science,” in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Dan Morgenstern and Sheldon Meyer (1996; New York: Pantheon, 2004), 551–55. 4. “History of the EDVR Project,” http://victor.library.ucsb.edu (last accessed February 22, 2011). 5. Malcolm Shaw, “Jazz Records, Whence and Whither,” VJM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 142 (Summer 2006): 10–11. 6. Brian Rust and Tim Brooks, Columbia Master Book Discography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), vols. 1–2, Principal U.S. Matrix Series, 1910–24; vol. 3, U.S. Matrix Series, 1924–34; vol. 4, Twelve-Inch Matrix Series, 1906–1931. Brian Rust and Ross Laird, Discography of Okeh Records, 1918–1934 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). 7. “Introduction,” in Max E. Vreede, Paramount 12000/13000 Series (London: Storyville, 1971), ii. 8. Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of  Jazz (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), s.v. “Michel Ruppli”; Michel Ruppli, Prestige Jazz Records, 1949–1969 (Soisy-sous-Montmorency: Michel Ruppli, 1972); Michel Ruppli, Prestige Jazz Records, 1949–1971 (Copenhagen: Karl Emil Knudson, 1973); Mark Gardner, Review of Prestige Jazz Records, Jazz Journal 27, no. 6 ( June 1974): 30. 9. Michel Ruppli, Atlantic Records: A Discography, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979); Michel Ruppli and Bob Porter, The Savoy Label: A Discography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), xi; Morgenstern, Review of Atlantic Records: A Discography, 128–30. 10. Chris Sheridan, Book Reviews, “Atlantic Records: A Discography,” Jazz Journal International 33, no. 4 (April 1980): 17; Peter B. Lowry, Book Reviews, “Five Greenwood Press Discographies,” Living Blues 66 (1985): 43; Gardner, Review of Prestige Jazz Records, 1949–1971. 11. Kip Lornell, Review of The Aladdin/Imperial Labels, Notes, 2nd ser., 49, no. 3 (March 1993): 1077–78; Dan Morgenstern, Review of Prestige and Savoy discographies, ARSC Journal 14, no. 1 (1982): 94–96. 12. Michael Gray, “Discography: Discipline and Musical Ally,” in Foundations in Music Bibliography, ed. Richard D. Green (New York: Haworth Press, 1993), 319–25. 13. Don McCormack, Review of The Chess Records: A Discography,” Notes, 2nd ser., 40, no. 4 ( June 1984): 791–92. 14. Bob Porter, Signature Record Listing by Master Numbers (Zephyrhills, FL: Joyce Music Publications, 1989). 15. Russ Shor, Silent Partners, “Interview with Bob Porter, Part 2,” VJM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 98 (Summer 1995): 4–6. 16. Peter B. Lowry, Book Reviews, “Four Michel Ruppli Discographies,” Living Blues 66 (1985): 43; Shor, Silent Partners, Interview with Bob Porter, Part 2, 5–6. 17. Kernfeld, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, s.v. “Blue Note” (record label); Russ Shor, Silent Partners, Interview with Michael Cuscuna, Vintage Jazz Mart 92 (Winter 1993): 4–5; Chris Sheridan, Review of Blue Note Discography, Jazz Journal International 42, no. 3 (March 1989): 18; Han Schulte, Review of The Blue Note Label, 1939–1999, Names & Numbers 45 (April 2008): 33–34.

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notes to pages 164–71

18. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 10,” Names & Numbers 28 ( January 2004): 2–8. 19. Morgenstern, Review of Atlantic Records: A Discography, 130. 20. Brian Davis, Review of The Blue Note Discography, 2nd ed., Jazz Journal International 54, no. 10 (October 2001): 16. 21. Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “The Blue Note Discography, CD-ROM edition,” Jazz Journal International, 61, no. 9 (September 2008): 9; Bob Weir, Book Reviews, “Capitol and ABCParamount Discographies,” Jazz Journal International 61, no. 1 ( January 2008): 16–17. 22. Brian Rust and Tim Brooks, Columbia Master Book Discography, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), passim; Tim Brooks, “Identifying Sources in Discographies,” ARSC Journal 32, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 276–81. 23. Bill Dean-Myatt (letter), ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 256–57; Tim Brooks, “Letter of Bill Dean-Myatt: Response of Tim Brooks,” ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 257–58. 24. Steve Voce, Book Reviews, “Jazz on Record,” Jazz Journal 22, no. 2 (February 1969): 20–21. 25. Gordon Stevenson, “Discography: Scientific, Analytical, Historical and Systematic,” Library Trends 21 ( July 1972): 101-35; Gordon Stevenson, “Collectors, Catalogs, and Librarians,” ARSC Journal 7, nos. 1–2 (1976): 21–32; Thomas Spence, “Toward the Ideal Archival Catalog,” Journal of Jazz Studies 1, no. 2 ( June 1974): 97–106. 26. Steve Smolian, “Standards for the Review of Discographic Works,” ARSC Journal 7, no. 3 (1976): 47–55. 27. Rudi Blesh, Book Reviews, “Two Guides, Two Views,” Jazz Review 2, no. 1 ( January 1959): 44–45. 28. Edgar Jackson, “Swing Music: Rhythm-Style Personnels,” Gramophone 13 (November 1935): 28; Björn Englund, “Edgar Jackson and the Gramophone,” Names & Numbers 56 ( January 2011): 26–28. 29. Dan Morgenstern, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 4 (1988): 209–13: Horace Meunier Harris, “A Gramophone Love Affair,” IAJRC Journal 41, no. 2 (May 2008): 61–63. 30. Jazz on LPs: A Collector’s Guide to Jazz (London: Decca, 1956; New York: Da Capo, 1978); George Avakian, Jazz from Columbia: A Complete Jazz Catalog (New York: Columbia Records, 1956); Edward Berger, “A Survey of Critical Jazz Record Guides,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7 (1996): 251–62; Original Jazz Classics Collectors’ Guide (Berkeley, CA: Fantasy Records, 1995). 31. Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith, The Jazz Record Guide (New York: Smith and Durrell, 1942); Morgenstern, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, 209; Bruce Boyd Raeburn, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 151–53. 32. Tom Piazza, The Guide to Recorded Classic Jazz (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995); Berger, “Survey of Critical Jazz Record Guides,” 261. 33. Frederic Ramsey, A Guide to Longplay Jazz Records (New York: Long Player, 1954); Roy H. Hoopes Jr., Review of A Guide to Longplay Jazz Records, High Fidelity 4, no. 7 (September 1954): 122, 125. 34. Ramsey, Guide to Longplay Jazz Records, v. 35. Rex Harris and Brian Rust, Recorded Jazz: A Critical Guide (London: Penguin Books, 1958); T. P. Hoffman, Book Reviews, “Two Guides, Two Views,” Jazz Review 2, no. 1 ( January 1959): 44–45; Blesh, Book Reviews “Two Guides, Two Views,” 44–45. 36. John S. Wilson, The Collector’s Jazz: Traditional and Swing (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958); John S. Wilson, The Collector’s Jazz: Modern (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959); Hoffman, Book Reviews, “Two Guides, Two Views,” 44–45; Michael James, Review of  The Collector’s Jazz, Modern, Jazz Review 3, no. 1 ( January 1960): 35; Berger, “Survey of Critical  Jazz Record Guides,” 254.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 1 – 7 6  241 37. Morgenstern, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, 210, 213. Harrison was an advocate of postwar modern jazz; Dance was not. Moreover, they disagreed over the value of composition in jazz and, more particularly, the contributions of Duke Ellington. Dance was a lifelong champion of Ellington. When Harrison was selected to write the “Jazz” entry for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, he damned Ellington with faint praise. 38. Stanley Dance, “Neglected Areas of Discographical Research,” in Studies in Jazz Dis­ cography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, 1971): Stanley Dance et al., Jazz Era: The Forties (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961; London: Jazz Book Club, 1962). 39. Albert McCarthy, Alun Morgan, Paul Oliver, and Max Harrison, Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years, 1917–1967 (London: Hanover Books, 1968; New York: Oak Books, 1968); Charles Fox, Peter Gammon, and Alun Morgan, Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide (London: Hutchinson, 1960); “Who’s Who at Jazz Journal: Alun Morgan,” Jazz Journal International 50, no. 5 (May 1997): 14. For the various publications of Morgan, Gammon, and Fox, see Donald Kennington, The Literature of Jazz: A Critical Guide (Chicago: American Library Association, 1971), passim. 40. “Introduction,” in McCarthy et al., Jazz on Record, v. 41. Frank Tirro, Review of Recorded Jazz: A Critical Guide, Notes, 2nd ser., 26, no. 4 ( June 1970): 756–57; Leonard Feather, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York: Horizon Press, 1955). The Encyclopedia of Jazz contained other information in separate sections in addition to its biographical encyclopedia, but it is best known for the biographies. 42. Many more Moten recordings are now available, mostly noncommercial recordings or outtakes. 43. Steve Voce, Book Reviews, “Jazz on Record,” Jazz Journal 22, no. 2 (February 1969): 20–21. 44. Kernfeld and Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” 517. 45. Leonard Feather, “Introduction to the Da Capo Edition,” in The Encyclopedia Yearbooks of Jazz (compilation reprint of 1956, 1957, and 1958 annuals) (New York: Da Capo, 1993), ii. 46. Roger D. Kinkle, The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Arlington House, 1974): Roger D. Kinkle, Leading Musical Performers (Popular Music and Jazz), 1900–1950, Updated to 1996, 3 vols. (Mount Vernon, IN, Windmill, 1996); Mike Weir, Review of The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950,” Matrix 35 ([1975]): 19. 47. John Chilton, Who’s Who of Jazz (Storyville to Swing Street) (London: Bloomsbury Book Shop, 1970). 48. Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley, Jazz: The Essential Companion (London: Grafton, 1987); Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley, Jazz: The Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1995); John White, Review of  Jazz Handbook and Jazz: The Essential Companion, Popular Music 7, no. 2 (May 1998): 238–40; Alun Morgan, Review of Jazz—the Rough Guide, Jazz Journal International 49, no. 1 ( January 1996): 14; Review of Notes from a Jazz Life, by Digby Fairweather, Jazz Journal International 56, no. 4 (April 2003): 13. 49. James Maxfield, Book Look “The Penguin Guide to Jazz,” Cadence 19, no. 12 (December 1993): 19; Graham Colombé, Review of  The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD,  Jazz Journal Interna­ tional 56, no. 4 (April 2003): 13. 50. Graham Colombé, Review of Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia, Jazz Journal International 59, no. 2 (February 2006): 17; Simon Adams, Review of The Penguin Jazz Guide, Jazz Journal International 63, no. 12 (December 2010): 13. 51. Max Harrison, Alun Morgan, Ronald Atkins, Michael James, and  Jack Cooke, Modern Jazz: The Essential Records, a Critical Selection (London: Aquarius Books, 1975).

242 

notes to pages 176–86

52. Max Harrison, Charles Fox, and Eric Thacker, The Essential Jazz Records, vol. 1, Ragtime to Swing (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984); Morgenstern, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, vol. 1, 598. 53. Max Harrison, Eric Thacker, and Stuart Nicholson, The Essential Jazz Records, vol. 2, Modernism to Postmodernism (New York: Mansell, 2000). 54. Barry McRae, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, vol. 2, Jazz Journal International 53, no. 5 (May 2000): 16–17; Lawrence Kart, Review of The Essential Jazz Records, vol. 2, Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 12 (2001): 195–204. Jim Farrington, Review of  The Essential Jazz Records, vols. 1 and 2, ARSC Journal 32, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 269. 55. Richard Cook and Brian Morgan, The Penguin Guide to Jazz (New York: Penguin, 1993); Brian Morton and Richard Cook, The Penguin Jazz Guide: The History of the Music in 1001 Best Albums (New York: Penguin, 2010); James Maxfield, Book Look, “The Penguin Guide to Jazz,” Cadence 19, no. 12 (December 1993): 19; Colombé, Book Review, “The Penguin Guide to Jazz,” 13; Derek Ansell, “Richard Cook” (obituary), Jazz Journal International 60, no. 11 (November 2007): 18; Simon Adams, Review of The Penguin Jazz Guide, Jazz Journal International 63, no. 12 (December 2010): 13. 56. Ernest Borneman, “The Jazz Cult, Part 1,” Harper’s Magazine 194, no. 1161 (February 1947): 141–47; George Hoefer, “Collectors: Personalities and Anecdotes,” in Esquire’s Jazz Book, 1944, ed. Paul Eduard Miller (New York: Smith and Durrell, 1944), 69–78. 57. Horace Meunier Harris, “Orin Blackstone: The Pioneer American Discographer,” IAJRC Journal 42, no. 3 (September 2009): 8–14; Peter Clayton and Peter Gammond, eds., The Guinness Jazz, A-Z (London: Guinness Superlatives, 1986), s.vv. “Record Changer” [magazine]; “Record Research” [magazine]. 58. Stephen M. H. Braitman, Review of Price and Reference Guide for 1960s Rock 45s, ARSC Journal 40, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 256–58. 59. Shirley Klett, Book Look, “Dance Bands and Big Bands,” Cadence 13, no. 6 ( June 1987): 24; Bob Rusch, Book Look, “Jazz Price Guide,” Cadence 17, no. 3 (March 1991): 15. 60. Geoffrey Wheeler, Collectors Guide to Jazz on Bootleg and Reissue 78 R.P.M. Records (Fort Wayne, IN: Hillbrook Press, 2009).

chapter eight 1. Brian Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z: 1897–1942, 4th ed., 2 vols. (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978); Donald McCormack, Review of Jazz Records, A-Z, Notes, 2nd ser., 35, no. 3 (March 1979): 638; Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of  Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 1,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 2 (December 1994): 501–47, quotation at 527. 2. Will Friedwald, “Detectives of  Jazz,” four-part series posted ca. July 2009 to May 2010 at www.jazz.com (last accessed August 24, 2011). 3. “None of his discographical works” and “shared the generally held view”: Howard Rye, e-mail to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, University of Chicago Press (review of this book’s manuscript), June 2012. 4. Brian Rust, My Kind of  Jazz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990). 5. “Idiosyncrasies”: “Letter from Howard Rye,” Names & Numbers 27 (October 2003): 34. 6. Friedwald, “Detectives of  Jazz.” 7. I am grateful to an anonymous manuscript reviewer, familiar with Storyville, for providing this information. 8. Han Enderman, “The Discographic Truth, Part 1,” Names & Numbers 10 ( June 1999): 22– 27; comments of anonymous manuscript reviewer. 9. Allan Sutton, interview, Washington, DC, May 9, 2009.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 6 – 9 3  243 10. Malcolm Shaw, “Jazz Records, Whence and Whither,” VJM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 142 (Summer 2006): 10–11. 11. Allan Sutton interview, May 9, 2009. 12. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 8: The New Rust,” Names & Numbers 26 ( July 2003): 2–13. 13. Allan Sutton interview, May 9, 2009. 14. Allan Sutton, The American Stage Performers Discography, vol. 1, 1891–1932 (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2007); Ryan Barna, Review of The American Stage Performers Discography, ARSC Journal 39, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 308–9. 15. Review of American Dance Band Discography, Names & Numbers 9 (March 1999): 7. 16. Dick Spottswood, Review of American Dance Bands, ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 268–70; Review of American Dance Band Discography, 7. 17. Tim Brooks, “Current Bibliography,” ARSC Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 160–61; Bill Dean-Myatt, “American Dance Bands on Record” (letter), ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 256– 57; Tim Brooks, “Letter of Bill Dean-Myatt: Response of Tim Brooks,” ARSC Journal 41, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 257–58. 18. “Basic test,” and “some compilers may be reluctant”: Tim Brooks, “Identifying Sources in Discographies,” ARSC Journal 32, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 276–81. “A great deal of inaccurate information”: Tim Brooks and Barry Ashpole, “Guidelines for Discographies in the ARSC Journal,” ARSC Journal 37, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 14–20. 19. Dean-Myatt, “American Dance Bands on Record,” 257; Brooks, “Reply to Bill Dean-Myatt,” 257–58; Björn Englund, “A Discographical Challenge—a Perfect Edition of Jazz Records, 1897– 1942,” VJM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 156 (Winter/Spring 2010): 14–15. 20. Howard Rye, e-mail to the author, July 24, 2007; Bruce Epperson, “Uncertain and Un­ verifiable: Jazz Metadiscography and the Paradox of Originality,” ARSC Journal 39, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 215–39. 21. “Letter of Richard Johnson,” Names & Numbers 28 ( January 2004): 43. 22. Allan Sutton interview, May 9, 2009. 23. Tim Brooks, CD-ROM Reviews, ARSC Journal 33, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 260–66; Edward Berger, CD-ROM review of Tom Lord, The Jazz Discography,” Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 12 (2001): 227–33. 24. Lord quotation: Tom Lord, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2012. CD price: Brooks, CDROM review, 261. 25. “CD-ROM Preview” (Bruyninckx discography), Names & Numbers 9 (March 1999): 23; Brooks, CD-ROM Reviews, 260–61; Eric Charry, Digital Media Reviews, “The Jazz Discography, Version 4.4 and 85 Years of Recorded Jazz,” edited by Alec McLane, Notes, 2nd ser., 61, no. 3 (March 2005): 833–37. 26. Brooks, CD-ROM Reviews, 260–62; Berger, CD-ROM review of The Jazz Discography, 227–30; Charry, Digital Media Reviews, 833–35. 27. Michael Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” Notes, 2nd ser., 66, no. 1 (September 2009): 132–39; Steve Voce, Review of The Jazz Discography on CD-ROM 3.3, Jazz Journal International 55, no. 10 (October 2002): 19. 28. Tom Lord, “Lordly Virtues” (letter), Jazz Journal International 49, no. 8 (August 1996): 4; Tom Lord, “Lord of All He Surveys” (letter), Jazz Journal International 50, no. 2 (February 1997): 4; Tom Lord, “Communications” (letter), Notes, 2nd ser., 52, no. 2 (December 1995): 662–63. 29. Steve Albin, telephone interview, February 9, 2011; e-mail from Michael Fitzgerald to Ryo Yamaguchi, University of Chicago Press, May 17, 2013. 30. Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online, 132. 31. Gary Herzenstiel, “The Jazz Directory Goes Online,” IAJRC Journal 41, no. 1 (February 2008): 99–101; Steve Voce, Review of  The Jazz Discography On-line,” Jazz Journal International 61, no. 1 ( January 2008): 17.

244 

notes to pages 194–206

32. Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” 137–38. Self-appointed gadfly: Matthew F. Snyder, “The End of Do-It-Yourself? An Investigation of Publishing Options for Jazz Metadiscographies” (Master’s thesis, Queens College, City University of New York, 2004), 24. 33. Erik Raben, e-mail to the author, March 29, 2012. 34. Fitzgerald, Media Review, “Jazz Discography Online,” 137. 35. Edward Berger, “Using E-Commerce Music Sites for Discographic Research,” Annual Review of  Jazz Studies 10 (1999): 237–45. 36. “About the All Music Website,” www.allmusic.com/about (last accessed February 3, 2011); Berger, “Using E-Commerce Music Sites for Discographic Research,” 238-39. 37. Columbia jazz studies website, http://jazzstudiesonline.org (last accessed March 24, 2011); Steve Albin interview, February 9, 2011. 38. “About This Site,” in Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings: http://victor .library.ucsb.edu (last accessed February 5, 2011); Dick Spottswood, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” VJM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 151 (Autumn 2008): 5–6. 39. Ted Fagan and Bill Moran, The Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, vol. 1, PreMatrix Series (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); Ted Fagan and Bill Moran, The Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, vol. 2, Matrix Series 1 through 4999 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). 40. “About This Site,” in University of California at Santa Barbara, “Encyclopedic Discography of  Victor Recordings,” http://victor.library.ucsb.edu. 41. Spottswood, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Discography, 6. 42. “History” and “Methodology” at http://www.jazzarcheology.com (last accessed August 11, 2012). 43. Robert Prutner and Robert Campbell, “Research in Progress: The Red Saunders Research Foundation,” ARSC Journal 30, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 134–42; http://www.redsaunders.com, also http://hubcap.clemson.edu~camber/rsfr.html (last accessed August 30, 2011). 44. Robert Campbell, telephone interview, August 7, 2012. 45. Ibid. 46. Prutner and Campbell, “Research in Progress: The Red Saunders Research Foundation,” 138–40; Robert Campbell interview, August 7, 2012. 47. Robert Campbell interview, August 7, 2012. 48. Steve Albin, e-mail to the author, February 3, 2011. 49. Steve Albin interview, February 9, 2011. 50. Steve Albin, e-mails to the author, February 3 and 4, 2011; Steve Albin interview, Febru­ ary 9, 2011. 51. Michael Fitzgerald, telephone interview, August 31, 2012. 52. Ibid. 53. Stephen Mihm, “Everyone’s a Historian Now,” Boston Globe, May 25, 2008. 54. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 10,” Names & Numbers 28 ( January 2004): 2–10. 55. Snyder, “End of Do-It-Yourself?” 11. 56. Michael Fitzgerald interview, August 30, 2012. 57. Fitzgerald, Review of  Jazz Discography Online, 132. 58. Han Enderman, “The Discographical Truth, Part 14,” Names & Numbers 34 ( July 2005): 10–13. 59. Pekka Gronow, “Jazz Discographies: A Review Essay,” Ethnomusicology 10, no. 3 (Sep­ tember 1966): 335–41; Gordon Stevenson, “Discography: Scientific, Analytical, Historical and Systematic,” Library Trends 21 ( July 1972): 101–35. 60. Gordon Stevenson, “Collectors, Catalogs, and Librarians,” ARSC Journal 7, nos. 1–2 (1976): 21–32.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 0 6 – 1 2  245 61. Over 100,000 78s: Michael H. Gray, “Discography: Discipline and Musical Ally,” in Foundations in Music Bibliography, ed. Richard D. Green (New York: Haworth Press, 1993), 319– 25; Jerome F. Weber, “Formulating Guidelines for Discographies to Be Published in the ARSC Journal,” ARSC Journal 28, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 198–208; Rudi Blesh, “The Birth of Discography,” in Studies in Jazz Discography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1971), 31–34. 62. Russ Shor, Silent Partners, “Interview with George Avakian, Conclusion” [Part 4], VJM’s Jazz and Blues Mart 96 (Winter 1994): 5–7. 63. Stevenson, “Discography: Scientific, Analytical, Historical and Systematic,” 103–5. 64. Michael Fitzgerald interview, August 30, 2012. 65. Albert J. McCarthy, “Discography Today,” Jazz Monthly 4, no. 8 (October 1958): 26–27. 66. Modified somewhat from categories presented in Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 10,” 2. 67. Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 10,” 2–4. 68. Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, “Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues and Gospel, Part 2,” Notes, 2nd ser., 51, no. 3 (March 1995): 865–91, quotation at 891. 69. Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 14,” 13. 70. Ibid., 11. 71. Quoted in ibid., 11. 72. Fitzgerald, Review of Jazz Discography Online, 132–34. 73. Steve Albin interview, February 9, 2011. 74. Tim Brooks, telephone interview, June 8, 2011. 75. George Hulme, “The Ethics of Discography” (letter), Names & Numbers 15 (October 2000): 18. 76. Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 10,” 2. 77. D. Russell Connor, “What Is Discography? Its Goals and Methods,” in Studies in Jazz Discography I, ed. Walter C. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1971), 1–7; Enderman, “Discographical Truth, Part 10,” 2. 78. Howard Rye, e-mail to the author, June 12, 2007. 79. Michael Fitzgerald interview, August 30, 2012. 80. Allan Sutton interview, May 9, 2009. 81. Tim Brooks interview, June 8, 2011. 82. Allan Sutton interview, May 9, 2009; Howard Rye, e-mail to the author, June 12, 2007.

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Index

AACR2. See cataloging tools, library Aaslund, Benny H., 146–47 AB Bookman’s Weekly (magazine), 180 Adams, Simon, 179 Adderley, Cannonball, 192, 203 discographies about, 88, 142 Adderley, Nat, 192 AFRS Downbeat Series, Working Draft (Mac­ kenzie), 157–58 AFRS “Jubilee” Transcription Programs (Lotz/ Nevert), 157 Akiyoshi, Toshiko, 154–55 Aladdin-Imperial Labels, The: A Discography (Ruppli), 165 Albin, Steve, 193, 196, 201, 202, 209. See also BRIAN computer program Alexander, Texas, 121 Allen, Richard B., 62–64 Allen, Walter C., 62, 73, 83, 140, 159 Hendersonia, 140, 205 King Joe Oliver, 83, 130–31, 138, 140 All Music Guides (print and online), 179, 195–96 Amazon.com, 195 American Dance Band Discography (Rust), 2, 86, 97, 139, 149, 166, 174, 183, 184, 187–89 American Federation of Musicians (AFM), 55–56, 157, 226n29 American Stage Performers Discography (Sut­ ton), 207. See also Complete Entertain-

ment Discography (Rust/Debus); Rust, Brian annualization defined, 17 applied to Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, 147 applied to Jazz Directory 1958, 77–78 Ansermet, Ernest, 33 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 31 Arakawa, Yasuro, 155 Archia, Tom, 200 Archive of American Folk Song. See Library of Congress Arista Records, 163 Arlington House (publisher), 139–40, 148–49, 183, 185, 189 Armstrong, Louis, 2, 26, 27, 28, 36, 42, 46, 50, 55, 59, 74, 83 discographies about, 6, 25, 88, 131, 144–46 Arodin, Sidney, 53 ARSC Journal, 11, 188–89 Art Tatum: A Guide to His Recorded Music (Lau­ bich/Spencer), 118, 143 Astrup, Arne, 132 Atkins, Jerry, 15 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 39 Atlantic Records: A Discography (Ruppli), 141, 161, 162, 163, 165 Austin Hill Gang, 28 Australian Jazz on Record (Mitchell), 150 Aux frontières du jazz (Goffin), 33

272 

index

Avakian, George, 39, 41, 54–55, 73, 80, 168, 206–7 Jazz from Columbia: A Complete Jazz Catalog, 168 New Hot Discography, 45–56 Baker, Chet, discographies about, 168 Baker, Josephene, 95 Bakker, Erik M., 134 Balliett, Whitney, 57 Barnet, Charlie, discographies about, 144 Barnett, Stephen L., 150 Barrelhouse Five, 72, 188, 223n69 Basie, Count, 97, 184 discographies about, 88, 131, 173 Bauer, Eugénie Marion, 33 bebop, 7, 16, 43, 48, 58, 59, 84, 137, 157 Bechet, Sidney, 33, 168 Beiderbecke, Bix, 36, 41, 42, 46, 67–68, 211 discographies about, 9, 34–36 Benny Carter: A Life in American Music, 143 Benny Goodman: Listen to His Legacy (Connor), 143 Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ it Up (Connor), 140, 143 Berger, Edward, 126, 143, 169, 195 Berger, Morroe, 143 Berigan, Bunny, 70 Berklee College of Music, 155 Berresford, Mark, 197 Betts, Edward, 9 B.G. Off the Record (Connor), 138 B.G. On the Record (Connor), 139–40 Bielderman, Gerard, 132 Bielefelder Katalog Jazz, 131, 151–52 bio-discographies, 15, 83, 118, 128–45, 149, 187, 188, 199, 204, 208, 210 “Black Beauty” (Darrell), 22 Blackstone, Harvey, 51, 62 Blackstone, Orin, 49–54, 61–63, 69, 89, 108, 118, 127, 129, 134, 153, 180 Index to Jazz, 49–54, 58–59, 69, 89 Index to Jazz: Loose Leaf Edition, 62, 63 magazine publisher, 61, 62, 76, 129, 131, 134, 153–54, 180, 208 newspaper editor, 49–51, 63 record store owner, 51, 62 Blesh, Rudi, 7, 27, 57–58, 167, 170, 206 Blue Note Label, The (Cuscuna/Ruppli), 164–65 Blue Note Records, 117, 156, 164

Blues and Gospel Records (Dixon/Godrich/Rye), 87, 90–95, 109, 116, 148, 161, 163, 227n40. See also Dixon, Robert M. W.; Godrich, John; Rye, Howard Blues Records (Leadbitter/Slaven/Fancourt), 43–66, 68–70, 97–100, 100–101, 108, 109, 116. See also Fancourt, Leslie; Lead­ bitter, Mike; Slaven, Neil Blues Unlimited (magazine), 98, 132 Blythe, Jimmy, 72, 103, 223n69 Boîte à Musique, La (music store), 32 Borbee’s Jass Orchestra, 91 Borneman, Ernest, 27, 28, 48, 100 Bostic, Earl, 136 Botkin, Benjamin, 92–93 Boy from New Orleans (Westerbrook), 144 Bradford, Perry, 34, 42, 91, 197 Bradshaw, Tiny, discographies about, 132 BRIAN computer program, 3, 196, 201–3 Brilliant Corners: A Bio-Discography of  Thelonious Monk (Sheridan), 142 British Dance Bands, 1912–1939 (Rust), 97, 149, 183 British Music Hall on Record (Rust), 149 Britten, Valentine, 80 Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), 39 Brooks, Edward, 145–46 Brooks, Tim, 83, 90, 209, 210, 212 on appropriate source control, 165–66, 188–89 Columbia Master Book Discography, 83, 160, 165–66 Broun, Heywood, 40 Brunswick Records, 25, 41, 44, 46, 59, 91, 159, 168 Brunswick-Vocalion, 19, 25, 91 Deutsch Brunswick, 44, 46 discographies about, 159, 168 Bruyninckx, Walter, 11, 13, 103–4, 185, 204, 208, 211, 230n12 biography, 103–4 criticized as “canon-builder,” 7–8 plagiarism, accused of, 104–7, 110, 121 plagiarism, victim of, 121–26 Swing Journal paperback series, 12, 13, 114–15, 121–23, 127, 153, 233n79 Years of Recorded Jazz series, 16, 103–12, 114, 117, 124–25, 153, 190–92, 208 Büchmann-Møller, Frank, 137 Buettner, Armin, 201

i n d e x  273 Bullock, Chick, 70 Bureau, Jacques, 34 buyers’ guides, 166–79 Cadence (magazine), 112, 113, 115, 117, 118–20, 124, 125–26, 128, 140, 142, 152, 153, 181, 190 copublishes Lord’s Jazz Discography, 10, 12, 13, 118, 125, 190 distributes Bruyninckx’s Swing Journal paperbacks, 114, 115, 118 Cadence All-Years Index (Lord), 118–19, 120, 124 Cakewalks, Rags and Novelties (Sutton), 150 Caldwell, Happy, 53 Calver, Victor Carol, 25–26, 128, 144 Campbell, Robert, 122, 199–201 Canadian Jazz Discography (Litchfield), 153 Canetti, Jacques, 34 Capitol Records, 73, 164–65 Carey, David A., 3, 38, 51, 64, 69, 72, 77, 84, 87, 89, 96, 103, 107, 108, 115, 207 edits Jazz Directory, 3, 64–76 Carey/McCarthy/Rust format. See Rust format Carr, Ian, 175 Carter, Benny, discographies about, 143, 195 Casa Loma Orchestra, 121 Cassell (publishers), 75, 77 cataloging tools, library, 4, 166–67, 198, 209 Celestin, Papa, 173 chapbook discographies, 88, 131–35, 137, 144, 147, 156, 158, 159 Charlie Barnet: An illustrated Biography and Discography (Mather), 144 Charry, Eric, 210 Chase, Russ, 115 “Check-List of Recorded Songs in the English Language” (Library of Congress), 93–94 Chess Labels, The (Ruppli), 161, 162, 163, 165 Chicago school of jazz, 42 Chilton, John, 175 Clarence Williams (Lord), 118, 130 Clark, Alfred, 20 Clarke, Grey, 30, 66, 159 Clef-Verve Labels, The (Ruppli), 165 closed-system discographies, 173–74, 206 close listening limitations of, 82–83, 96 as practiced by Brian Rust, 82, 96 Cohen, Noal, 202

Cole, Nat, 136 Coleman, Ornette, 97, 176 Collectors Guide to Jazz on Bootleg and Reissue 78 R.P.M. Records (Wheeler), 181–82 Collector’s Jazz: Modern (Wilson), 171 Collector’s Jazz: Traditional and Swing (Wil­ son), 171 collectors’ price guides, 179–82 Collette, Buddy, discographies about, 134 Coltrane, John, 171, 176 discographies about, 88, 131, 143, 155–56 Columbia Master Book Discography (Rust/ Brooks), 80, 83, 160, 165–66, 183 Columbia Records, 2, 19, 26, 41, 43, 54, 55, 73, 81, 82, 91, 154, 159–61, 165, 168, 196, 206, 207 columnar format, 213n4, 216n13 Commodore Music Shop, 40–43, 54–55 Commodore Record Label, 41, 43, 182 Como, Perry, discographies about, 144 Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz (Kinkle), 174–75 Complete Entertainment Discography (Rust/De­ bus), 2, 89, 139, 149, 183, 184, 187–89 comprehensive discographies as compilation of specialized discographies, 10–12 defined, 15–16, 204–5 “metadiscography” as inappropriate label, 10–14 strategies to limit scope, 16–18 Condon, Eddy, 57 Connor, D. Russell, 138, 143, 210, 235n35 Benny Goodman discographer, 138–40, 143, 235n35 proponent of specialized discographies, 128, 210 Cook, Richard, 175, 178 Penguin Guide to Jazz, 175, 178 Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia, 175–76 Cook, Will Marion, 33 copyright law, 110–12, 191–93 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Songs (Lomax), 92 Cowell, Henry, 54 Criterion Music Company, 40, 47, 56 Crosby, Bob, 188 crowdsourcing, 203–4 Cuscuna, Michael, 143, 154, 156 Blue Note Label: A Discography, 164

274 

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cycle formatting in Carey and McCarthy’s Jazz Directory, 74–75 in Delauny’s HDE, 78 in Jepsen’s Jazz Records, 88–90 in Lord’s The Jazz Discography, 120 why it’s typically unsuccessful, 75, 89–90 Dance, Stanley, 28, 171, 176, 241n37 Jazz Era: The Forties, 171 “Dance and Popular Rhythmic” ( Jackson), 20, 26 Dansk Jazz Discographie (Moller), 152 Darrell, R. D., 8–9, 33, 35 Good Listening, 23–24 Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music, 21–25, 35 role in inventing term “discography,” 9, 21 Shirmer’s Guide to Books on Music and Musicians, 23–24 work as magazine editor, 8–9, 21 Davies, John R. T., 129–30 Davies, Ron, 53, 80–83 Davis, John, 30, 66 Davis, Miles, 175, 203 discographies about, 12–13, 88, 120, 131, 156, 168, 209 Dean-Myatt, Bill, 165–66, 188–89 Debus, Allen G., 187 Debut Records (Denmark), 88, 131, 144, 147 Decca Records, 54, 55, 73, 91, 98, 151, 168 Delaunay, Charles, 31–32, 77 affinities of style approach, 17, 36, 37, 42, 46, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59 “Discographie de Bix et Trumbauer,” 34–35 “Essis de discographie,” 34–35 Hot Club of Paris, manager of, 34–35, 40, 44, 48 Hot Discographie Encyclopedique, 47, 76–77, 81, 89, 103, 109, 127, 131 Hot Discography (1936–46), 9, 29, 34–39, 40–43, 45, 47, 50, 53, 58, 69, 208 Hot Jazz magazine, editor of, 9, 34–35, 48 matrix numbers, early use of, 3, 26, 38 New Hot Discography, 47, 54–61, 81 Reinhardt, Django, discographer of, 77 Delaunay, Robert, 31–32, 44 Delaunay, Sonia, 31–32 Delphic Press, 69 DESOR (Duke Ellington’s Story on Records), 147

deutsche Jazz-Discographie, Die (Lange), 133, 150, 151 deutsche “78er”, Die: Discographie der HotDance- und Jazz-Musik, 1903–1958 (Lange), 130, 150, 151 Dickenson, Vic, discographies about, 140–41 Ding! Ding! A Biographical Scrapbook of Vic Dickenson (Selchow), 140–41 discode, 59, 61 Discographical Forum (magazine), 77, 102, 115, 129 Discographie Critique des Meilleurs Disques de Jazz (Panassie), 135–36 Discographie du Jazz (Mohr), 131–32 discography as allegedly “canon building,” 12, 37, 41– 42, 57–58, 208 as allegedly subjective and unscientific, 6, 81–83, 211 as compilation of recording sessions versus list of records, 3, 6, 204–6 comprehensive discographies: defined, 15, 205–6; contrasted to large specific discog­ raphies, 148, 204; considered no longer possible, 205–6; future of, 210–12 contrasted to bibliography, 5 contrasted to library cataloging tools, 4, 209 definitions of discography, 5–6, 204–5 difficulties keeping pace with output of new records, 72–73, 75, 98–100 limitations on future development, 209, 211–12 as literature, 6, 38, 165 matrix numbers, early use of, 17, 35, 59–61 as musician biographies, 6 origins and early use of the word “discogra­ phy,” 5–6, 8–9, 21 origins in collectors’ “little black books,” 3, 27–28, 74 plagiarism in discographies, 12–13, 105, 107, 108–12, 118–26, 142, 150, 164 (see also plagiarism) problems of source control and documenta­ tion, 82, 96, 165–66, 188–89 specialized discographies: bio-discographies, 128–48; chapbook discographies, 88, 131–35, 137, 144, 147, 156, 158, 159; collectors’ (price) guides, 179–82; genre (musical style) discographies, 127, 137, 148–50; label discographies, 159–66; listeners’ guides, 166–79; national discog­

i n d e x  275 raphies, 151–54; online discographies, 193–204; solographies, 148–50 as work of dedicated amateurs, 4, 6, 107, 207, 210 Discography (magazine), 65, 66–67, 129 Discography of Historical Records on Cylinders and 78s (Rust), 149 Discography of Okeh Records (Rust/Laird), 159–60 Discophile (magazine), 36, 65, 69, 129, 135 Dis Here: A Bio-Discography of  Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (Sheridan), 142 Disques (Paris magazine), 22, 25 disques (Philadelphia magazine), 22 Dixon, Dave, 232n62 Dixon, Robert M. W., 109, 110, 116, 127, 148, 149, 161, 163 Blues and Gospel Records, 87, 90, 93, 95, 109, 116, 148, 161, 163 Recording the Blues, 94 See also Godrich, John Dodds brothers, 34, 73 Dominique, Natty, 72 Dorsey, Jimmy, 35, 52 Dorsey brothers, 70 Down Beat (magazine), 12, 33, 39–40, 46, 47, 55, 57, 67–68, 73, 129, 123, 130, 144, 189 Duke Ellington’s Story on Records (DESOR), 147 “Dvorak’s Recorded Works” (Darrell), 21

Essential Jazz Recordings, The (Harrison, Thacker, Nicholson), 176–78 Eurojazz series (Bielderman), 132 Evensmo, Jan, 135, 136–38, 198–99, 200. See also JazzArcheology.com Eyeball Productions, 101–2, 116

Eckstine, Billy, 48 Edwards, Ernie, 135 85 Years of Recorded Jazz (Bruyninckx), 190–92, 208 Ellington, Duke, 28, 55, 86, 172, 184 discographies about, 10, 22, 23, 131, 143, 144, 146–48 Ellingtonia (Timner), 10, 143, 147 Elliott, Bill, 129 Encyclopedia of  Jazz (Feather), 173–74 Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Record­ ings (EDVR) (Fagan/Moran), 160, 196–98 Enderman, Han, 94, 121, 164, 185, 186, 204, 205, 208, 210 Englund, Björn, 30 Era (magazine), 9 Erngeobil Publishing, 135 Erskine, Gilbert, 50, 51, 63 Esquire (magazine), 43, 47, 48, 54

Gabler, Milt, 40–44, 54–55, 56, 174, 182 Gains, Charlie, 59 Gammon, Peter, 172, 176 Gandorge, Richard, 96, 109 Gardner, Fred, 67–68 Gardner, Mark, 162 Garrod, Charles, 135, 158 General Gramophone Publications, 149 Gennett Records, 19, 145 genre discographies, 127, 137, 148–58 Getz, Stan, discographies about, 132 Gilbert, Richard, 22 Gingrich, Arnold, 54 Gitler, Ira, 88, 174 Gleason, Ralph, 77 Godbolt, Jim, 66, 80 Godrich, John, 87, 90, 93, 106, 109, 110, 116, 127, 148, 149, 149, 161, 163 Blues and Gospel Records, 87, 90–95, 109, 116, 148

Fabulous Fives, The ( Jewson, Hamilton-Smith, Webb), 133, 150 Fagan, Ted, 160, 196–97 Fairweather, Digby, 175–76 Fancourt, Leslie, 100–101 Farrar, Geraldine, 8 Farrington, Jim, 155, 178 Feather, Leonard, 38, 39, 43, 173–74 Ferguson, Otis, 42 Ferguson and Johnson Price Guide, 181 50 Years of Recorded Jazz (Bruyninckx) 103–12, 114, 185, 153 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 91, 95, 227n40 Fitzgerald, Michael, 4, 119, 126, 191, 193, 194, 201–3, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211 “Flood, the,” 73, 76, 179, 223n73 Folger Shakespeare Library, 73–74, 224n76 Flower, John, 139 Flückenger, Otto, 201 Fox, Charles, 172, 176, 177 Freeman, Bud, 42 Friedwald, Will, 86, 183–84 Fujioka, Yasuhiro, 143, 155–56

276 

index

Godrich (cont.) death, 95 Recording the Blues, 94 Goffin, Robert, 33 Golding, Pete, 70 Golshen, Mike, 56 Goodman, Benny, 28, 43 discographies about, 138–40, 143, 149, 188 Good Morning Blues (Murray), 141 Goody, Sam, 37 Gordon, John Wesley, 91 Gorsch, Gerard, 133 Gospel Records, 1943–1969 (Hayes/Laughton), 101–2, 148, 149 Gottlieb, Bill, 57 Gramophone (magazine), 8, 19–21, 26, 37, 38, 65, 69, 77, 80, 128, 129, 151, 167, 172 Gramphone Company (UK), 20 Gramophone Popular Record Catalog, 151 Gramophone Shop (New York), 22 Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music, The (Darrell), 21–25, 35 Gray, Michael, 21, 162 Gray, Wardell, discographies about, 137 Greenwood Press, 141–43, 156, 157, 161–66, 176, 197–98 Gronow, Pekka, 88, 96, 128, 152–53, 206 Groove Record Shop, 51 Guide to Longplay Jazz Records (Ramsey), 196 Guide to Recorded Classic Jazz (Piazza), 169 Guillickson, Gordon, 50–51, 94, 129, 180 Hackett, Bobby, discographies about, 142 Hagar, Fred, 91 Hainsworth, Brian, 90 Hall, George, 135 Hamada, Yoi-ichi, 143, 155–56, 205 Hamilton-Smith, Derek, 133, 150 Hammond, John, 26, 29, 38, 41, 55, 167 Handy, W. C., 34, 91 Harris, Horace Meunier, 9, 168 Harris, Rex, 170 Harrison, Max, 171, 176, 177, 241n37 Hartmann, Dieter, 137 Harvey, Charles, 67–68 Hasselgård, Stan, 137 Hayes, Cedric J., 101–2, 148, 149 Hayes, Jim, 9 Heinrich, Franz, 133

Henderson, Fletcher, 187 discographies about, 140, 205 Hentoff, Nat, 39, 130 Herman, Woody, discographies about, 142 Herzenstiel, Gary, 193 Hicks, Warren W., 138–40 High Fidelity (magazine), 23, 169, 170 Hilton, Jack, 20 Hobsbawm, Eric, 27 Hoefer, George, 63, 67–68, 73, 129, 144, 180 Hoffman, T. P., 170 Hofmann, Coen, 134 Hogan jazz archives, 4, 63 Hoogeveen, Gerard, 134 Horricks, Raymond, 172 Horst, Bill, 135 “Hot Box” (Hoefer), 67, 68, 129, 189 Hot Buttered Soul (magazine), 161 Hot Club of Paris (Hot Club of France), 32, 44, 57 Hot Copy (Blackstone), 50, 90, 180 Hot Discography (Delaunay, 4 eds.), 9, 17, 29, 36, 37, 38, 40–43, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 133, 208, 229n3. See also New Hot Discography (Delaunay, Schaap, Avakian) Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music (Panassié), 33, 34, 41–42, 48 Hot News (magazine), 65 Hot Record Society, 40–43 HRS Rag (magazine), 40, 44, 46 HRS Record Shop, 40–43 Hugues, Spike, 25 Hulme, George, 25, 86, 95, 105, 106, 124, 128, 142, 143–44, 210. See also Calver, Victor Carol Hulsizer, Ken, 49 Hurst, P. C., 8 IAJRC Journal, 9, 120, 193 Iannapollo, Robert, 120 Imperial Records, 165 Index to Jazz (Blackstone), 49–54, 58–59, 69, 89, 108, 134 Index to Jazz: Loose Leaf Edition (Blackstone), 62, 63 Index to Jazz Records, A–Z (Gandorge), 96, 109 Institute for Jazz Studies, 5, 39, 55, 118, 126, 128, 128, 130, 140, 143, 169, 201 International Discographers’ Association, 102, 109, 115

i n d e x  277 issue (tune) defined, 15 problems identifying, 14, 15, 166–67, 205–7, 209–10 Jackson, Edgar, 20, 26, 31, 37, 38, 65, 129, 151, 167, 216n5 Jack Teagarden’s Music (Walter), 140 James, Harry, 70 Japan, jazz in, 153–55 Jarrett, Keith, 175 Jasen, David A., 149, 150 Jazz (Bruyninckx). See Swing Journal paper­ back series (Bruyninckx) Jazz and Ragtime Records, A–Z (Rust/Shaw), 4, 186–87. See also Rust, Brian: books JazzArchaeology.com, 137–38, 199. See also Evensmo, Jan Jazz Discography, The (CD-ROM) (Lord), 190–91 Jazz Discography, The (online version) (Lord), 193–94, 208, 210 Jazz Discography, The (print) (Lord), 118–26, 130 alleged plagiarism, 121–26, 142, 191 alleged technological superiority, 119 See also Bruyninckx, Walter; Lord, Tom (comprehensive discographer) Jazz Discography 1958 [ Jazz Discography 1] (McCarthy), 77–78 Jazz Era: The Forties (Dance et al.), 171 Jazzfinder (magazine), 61, 62, 76, 129, 131, 134, 153–54, 180, 208 Jazzfinder 1949, 62 Jazz Forum (magazine), 65, 69 Jazz from Columbia (Avakian), 168 Jazz Hot (magazine), 9, 25, 29, 34, 35, 41–42, 57, 128, 131 Jazz Hot, Le (book). See Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music (Panassié) Jazz Illustrated (magazine), 65, 66 Jazz Information (magazine), 40, 65, 189 Jazz Journal (magazine), 9, 65, 85, 104–5, 140, 154, 171, 172, 178 Jazz Journal International (magazine). See Jazz Journal (magazine) Jazz Magazine, 40 Jazz Man Record Shop, 51 Jazzmen (Ramsey, Smith), 41, 42, 43, 62, 93, 153, 168

Jazz Monthly (magazine), 77, 108, 129, 131, 135, 172, 176, 223n90 Jazz Music (magazine) 65, 66, 129 Jazzolog y (magazine), 67–68 Jazz on LPs: A Collector’s Guide to Jazz, 168 Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years (McCarthy et al.), 172, 176 Jazz Podium (magazine), 133 Jazz Record (magazine), 159 Jazz Record Guide, The (Ramsey), 168 Jazz Records, A–Z (Rust) 2, 4, 5, 79, 84–86, 87, 95–97, 129, 139, 148, 149, 164–65, 173, 183–85, 189, 206. See also Rust, Brian Jazz Records, 1942–196X ( Jepsen), 87–90, 100, 102, 105, 107, 113, 116, 127, 131, 144. See also Jepsen, Jørgen Grunnet; Knudsen, Karl Emil; Raben, Erik Jazz Records, 1942–1980 (Raben), 115–18, 142, 144, 164–65. See also International Discographers’ Association; Knudsen, Karl Emil adversely affected by Lord’s The Jazz Discography, 125–26, 194 planned as follow-up to Jepsen’s Jazz Records, 102, 115, 116 volume 6 as dedicated Ellington discog­ raphy, 144, 147–48 (see also Nielson, Ole J.) Jazz Review (magazine), 133, 178 Jazz Seisho (magazine), 153 Jazz Statistics (magazine), 129, 132, 135 Jazz-Tango-Dancing (magazine), 33, 24, 39 Jazz Tempo (magazine), 65, 66, 159 Jazz: The Essential Companion (Carr, Fair­ weather, Priestley), 175–77 Jazz: The Rough Guide (Carr, Fairweather, Priestley), 175–76 Jazz Times (magazine), 129 Jazzways (magazine), 65 Jazz Writings (magazine), 65 Jazzwereld (magazine), 39 J-Disc project (Columbia Univ.), 196 Jepsen, Jørgen Grunnet, 87, 96, 100, 102, 107, 109, 113, 115, 117, 127, 144, 147, 149, 152, 185, 204, 211, 212 accuses Bruyninckx of plagiarism, 105 biography and early work, 88, 144, 147, 156 death, 102

278 

index

John Coltrane: A Discographical and Musical Biography (Fujioka, Porter, Hamada), 143, 155–56, 205 Johnson, Axel, 21 Johnson, George, 90 Johnson, Guy, 91 Johnson, Richard, 84, 108, 187–89 Jones, Cliff, 66 Jones, Gene, 150 Jones, Harold, 142 Jones, Max, 65, 66, 67 Joyce Music Publications, 135, 158, 163 Junkshoppers’ Discography, 65 Kamens, Richard, 6 Kart, Lawrence, 178 Kennington, Don, 168 Kenton, Stan, 136 discographies about, 88, 140–41 Kentucky Jubilee Singers, 90, 227n40 Kernfeld, Barry, 5, 13, 96, 100, 107, 109, 112, 115, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 148, 174, 191, 193, 208, 233n79 Kidder, Margaret, 44, 46 King Joe Oliver (Allen/Rust), 88, 130–31, 138, 140 Kinkle, Roger, 174–75 Klett, Shirley, 181 Knopf, Alfred A., 23 Knudsen, Karl Emil, 88, 102, 116, 122, 131, 144, 157, 161, 194 Komara, Edward, 95, 143 Koster, Piet, 134 Kuehn, John, 132 label discographies, 141, 156–58, 159–66 and plagiarism, 164 Laird, Ross, 149–50, 160 Landis, Shep, 67–68. See also Venables, Ralph G. V. Lange, Horst H., 133, 150, 151 LaRocca, Nick, 42 Laubich, Arnold, 118, 143 Laughton, Robert, 101–2, 148, 149 Leadbitter, Mike, 102, 109, 110, 116, 127, 149 death, 116 edits Blues Records, 1943–1966, 97–98, 100, 108, 163 edits Blues Unlimited magazine, 101, 132

Leading Musical Performers, 1900–1950, Updated to 1996 (Kinkle), 175 Leder, Jan, 150 Lee, Peggy, 203 Lee, William F., 140–41 Lees, Gene, 39 Legge, Robin, 20 Lehman, Jan, 120 Levaphone-Oriole Records, 26 Levy, Louis, 88 Library of Congress, 198, 203–4, 209 Archive of American Folk Song, 92–93 Rigler-Deutsch 78 project, 198 SONIC cataloging project, 198 Light Crust Doughboys, 97, 184 Lion, Alfred, 164 listening guides, 14, 15, 78, 135, 145, 166–79, 204 “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” (Lomax), 93 Litchfield, Jack, 153 “little black book” as precursor to discogra­ phies, 3, 6, 28, 74, 166, 179–80 Little Jazz in Belgium (Pernet), 152 Lohmann, Jan, 12 Lomax, Alan, 92–93 Lomax, John, Jr., 92 Lomax, John, Sr., 91–92, 227n46 Long-Playing Popular Record Catalog ( Jackson), 151 Longshaw, Fred, 75, 88 loose-leafing, 18, 62, 84, 105 Lord, Tom (Clarence Williams discographer), 118, 130 Lord, Tom (comprehensive discographer), 12, 118, 119, 130, 143, 147, 185, 190–94, 204, 208, 210 business partner of Bob Rusch, 12, 118 Cadence All-Years Index, 118–19, 120, 124 Jazz Discography, The (CD-ROM and on­line versions), 190–91, 193–94, 208, 210 Jazz Discography, The (print version) 118– 26, 130; plagiarism accusations, 121–26, 142, 191; plagiarism defense, 122, 123; technological advance, alleged, 119 Lornell, Kip, 148, 162 Lotz, Ranier, 157–58 Louis, Vic, discographies about, 134 Lourie, Charlie, 164

i n d e x  279 Lowry, Peter, 162 Lubinsky, Herman, 163 Lucien, George, 67–68. See also StewartBaxter, Derrick Lundwall, Bruce, 164 Macfarlane, Malcolm, 144 Mackenzie, Compton, 8, 19–151. See also Gramophone (magazine) Mackenzie, Harry, 157–58 “Magnificent Obsession” (Atkins), 15 Maher, John, 39 Mahoney, Dan, 159–60 Mainspring Press, 5, 156, 185–87. See also Sutton, Allan Mainstream (magazine), 77 Mainstream Jazz Reference and Price Guide, 181 MARC. See cataloging tools, library Marsalis, Wynton, 178 Masahiko, Satô, 151 Massagli, Luciano, 147 master numbers. See matrix numbers Mather, Dan, 144 Matrix (magazine), 96, 105, 129, 147 matrix numbers, 2, 3, 5, 10, 149, 166 in Blackstone’s work, 51, 53 in Carey and McCarthy’s work, 69, 74 defined, 14–15 in Delaunay’s work, 59, 61, 62 in digital formats, 15, 207, 209 early use in discographies, 25–26, 29, 34, 35, 38, 129 on LPs, 15 in Rust’s work, 79, 83, 84, 96, 130 McCarthy, Albert J., 3, 38, 40, 65, 72, 87, 96, 129, 136, 152, 155, 176, 181, 208 comments on plagiarism, 107, 110 complains about “the Flood” of new re­ leases, 70, 74, 90, 207 contributor to development of Rust format, 38, 51, 107, 191, 193, 204, 209 cycle formatting, use of, 74–75 death, 78 edits Gramophone Popular Record Catalog, 151 edits Jazz Directory, 3, 64–76, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 115, 127 edits Jazz Discography 1958, 77 edits Jazz on Record, 136, 172, 176, 187 “elder statesman” of jazz discography, 78, 103

magazine editor, 40, 66, 77, 108, 109–10, 115, 129, 160, 172, 176, 180 See also Carey, David A.; Venables, Ralph G. V. McCarthy/Cary/Rust format. See Rust format McCormack, Donald, 183 McCormack, Jack, 21 McFarland and Company, 143–44 McLean, Jackie, discographies about, 171 McPartland, Jimmy, 42 McPhee, Joe, 113, 231n35 McRae, Barry, 178 Meckna, Michael, 150 Melodie-Klub (Berlin), 46 Melody Maker (magazine), 9, 20, 25, 26, 27, 39, 65, 129, 208 publishes Rhythm on Record, 29–31 Mel Torme: A Chronicle (Hulme), 144–45 Mercury Labels: A Discography (Ruppli/ Novitsky), 165 Merrill, Helen, discographies about, 134 Mertz, Paul, 35 meta-analysis, 10, 214n29 metadiscography, as disfavored terminology, 10–14 Metronome (magazine), 33, 37, 40, 44, 168. See also Simon, George T. Meyer, Sheldon, 55 Mezzrow, Milton (“Mezz”), 32 Micrography (magazine). See Names and Numbers (magazine) Miles Davis Complete Discography (Nakayama), 156–57 Miller, Glen, discographies about, 139, 149, 188 Miller, Paul Edward, 144 Mitchell, Blue, 191 Mitchell, Jack, 153 Mobach, Harm, 134 Modern Jazz: The Essential Records (Harrison et al.), 176 Mohr, Kurt, 129, 131, 200–201, 224n82 Discographie du Jazz, 131–32 Hot Discographie Encyclopedique, 47, 76–77, 81, 89, 103, 109, 127, 131 Mole, Miff, 35 Moller, Borge J. C., 152, 159 Moonlight Serenade (Flower), 139 Monk, Thelonious, 176 discographies about, 142

280 

index

Montgomery, Wes, discographies about, 168 Moon, Bucklin, 58, 59, 63 Moore, Brew, discographies about, 132 Moran, Bill, 160 EDVR online, 196–98 Encyclopedic Dictionary of Victor Record­ ings (EDVR), 160 Morehouse, Chauncey, 35 Morgan, Alun, 73, 89–90, 96, 131, 176 Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide, 172, 176 Jazz on Record: A Guide to the First 50 Years, 172, 176 Modern Jazz: The Essential Records, 176 Morgenstern, Dan, 5, 6, 37, 38, 40, 85, 116, 136, 139, 140, 141, 160, 162, 165, 168, 170, 176, 191 Moriyasu, Shotaro, 154 Morrill, Dexter, 142 Morton, Brian, 175, 178–79 Morton, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll,” 26, 28, 33, 37, 50, 73, 168, 208 discographies about, 129–30 Morton’s Music (Davies/Wright), 129–30 Moten, Benny, 173 Mulligan, Gerry, 169 discographies about, 132 Murata, Bunichi, 153, 154 Music (magazine), 33 Music Lovers’ Guide (magazine), 22–23 Music of  Thomas “Fats” Waller, The (Davies), 129, 172 Nakayama, Yasuki, 156 Names and Numbers (magazine), 13, 121, 142, 148, 204 publishes discographies, 134–35, 165 national discographies, 151–54 New England Conservatory of Music, 21 New Grove Dictionary of  Jazz, 5, 179 New Hot Discography (Delaunay, Schaap, Avakian), 47, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 69, 76, 53, 69, 77, 81, 89, 103, 109, 127, 131 New Orleans Record Shop, 51 New Orleans Rhythm Kings, 36, 42 New Orleans Times-Picayune, 49, 51, 80 Newton, Francis. See Hobsbawm, Eric Nichols, Red, 188 Nicolausson, Harry, 152 Nicolson, Stuart, 177 Nielson, Ole J., 147–48

No. 1 Rhythm Club. 27, 129 Nordskog Records, 180 North Country Distributors. See Cadence (mag­ azine); Rusch, Bob (Cadence magazine) Notes (magazine), 121, 142, 193 Norwegian Jazz Archives, 136 Novitsky, Ed, 165 Oakley, Helen, 39 Odeon Record Company, 132 Odum, Howard, 91 Okeh Records, 19, 35, 73, 81, 91, 173, 206–7 discographies about, 159–60 Oldham’s Press, 26 Oliver, King Joe, 73 discographies about, 130–31 Oliver, Paul, 7, 82, 95, 100, 101 One Night Stand Series, 1–1001 (Mackenzie/ Polomski), 157 online discographies, 191–93, 194–204 Orchestra World (magazine), 39 Original Barnstormers Spasm Band, 79 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 42, 84 Original Jazz Classics Collectors’ Guide, 168 Orkester Journalen (magazine), 88, 147, 152 Ory, Kid, 33, 180 Oxford Companion to Music, 20 Paczynski, Georges, 150 Page, Oran “Hot Lips,” 158 Panassie, Hugues, 17, 32–34, 36, 37, 40–42, 44, 50, 57, 208 Discographie Critique des Meilleurs Disques de Jazz (Panassie), 135–36 Hot Jazz (book), 41–42, 48 Jazz Hot, Le, 33, 34 Paramount Records, 19 discographies about, 160–61 Paramount 12000/13000 Series (Vreede), 160–61 Parker, Charlie, 97, 154, 175, 176 discographies about, 131, 134 Parlophone Records, 26, 28, 159 discographies about, 159, 167 Pathé Feres Records, 19 Patrick, James, 107, 143 Pelletier, Paul, 100, 101 Penguin Guide to Jazz (Cook/Morton), 17, 175, 176, 178, 179 Pernet, Robert, 152 Petrillo, James Caesar, 55–56

i n d e x  281 Phonograph Monthly Review, 8, 21–22, 33 Piazza, Tom, 169 Pickup (magazine), 65, 66, 81, 108, 131 plagiarism allegedly committed by Bruyninckx, 104–8, 113, 121 allegedly committed by Lord, 118–26, 142, 215n38, 215n41; but denied by Lord, 123; effect on Raben’s Jazz Records, 1942–80, 194; but possibly permitted under Cadence agreement, 122 claimed to destroy economic viability of discography, 108, 124 defended as necessary, 104, 107–8, 191 distinct from copyright infringement, 110–12, 124, 191–93 impossible to define accurately, 124 “metadiscography” as euphemism for, 7–14 promoted by conflicts of interest in jazz publishing, 11–14 specialized discographies as protection against, 150, 164, 210 Playback (magazine). See Jazzfinder (magazine) Polomski, Lothar, 157–58 Polygram Records, 178 Popular Music (magazine), 49 Porter, Bob, 109, 155–56, 161, 163 Savoy Label: A Discography, 161, 165 Porter, Lewis, 143, 155–56 John Coltrane: A Discographical and Musical Biography, 143, 155–56, 205 Prestige Jazz Records (Ruppli) 161, 165 Prestige Label, The: A Discography (Ruppli) 161, 164, 165 price guides (collectors’ guides), 179–82 Priestley, Brian, 175 Printer’s Ink (magazine), 51 Pseudonyms on American Records (Sutton), 156 Pusateri, Liborio, 147 “Quarter Century of Jazz Discography, A” (Sheatsley), 180 Raben, Erik, 11, 13, 100, 123, 125, 126, 142, 144, 147–48, 185, 194, 204, 210 defines word “discography,” 6 Jazz Records, 1942–80, 12, 115–18, 142, 144, 165–66, 194; adversely impacted by Lord’s The Jazz Discography, 12, 125–26, 194; as Ellington specialized

discography, 144, 147–48; planned as follow-up to Jepsen’s discography, 144, 147–48; project terminated after eight volumes, 194 See also Knudsen, Karl Emil Raeburn, Bruce Boyd, 4 ragtime, discographies about, 149–50, 178, 185–86 Ragtime: An Encyclopedic Dictionary (Laird, Jasen, Jones), 149–50 Rainey, Ma, 36, 46 Ramsey, Frederic, 41–43, 168, 169 Guide to Longplay Jazz Records, 169 Jazzmen, 41, 42, 43, 62, 93, 153, 168 Jazz Record Guide, 168 Rank, Bill, 35 R&B Monthly (magazine), 98 Record Changer (magazine), 50–51, 53, 63, 70, 80, 94, 129, 144, 163, 180. See also Gullickson, Gordon; Hot Copy (Blackstone) record collecting, as source of jazz discogra­ phy, 3, 27–29, 180 Recorded Jazz: A Critical Guide (1958) Recorded Ragtime, 1897–1958 ( Jasen), 149 Record Information Services (RIS), 100, 101 recording sessions, as organizing principle of jazz discographies, 2, 6, 204–7 Recording the Blues (Godrich/Dixon), 94 Record Research (magazine), 180 Red Saunders Research Foundation, 122, 199–201 Reinhardt, Django, 46 Review Romande (magazine), 33 Revue du Jazz (magazine), 33, 39 Revue Musicale (magazine), 33 Rhythm (magazine), 26, 65 Rhythm on Record (Schleman), 9, 28–31, 35, 36, 37, 51, 52, 76, 82, 133, 167, 171, 179–80, 208 RIS (Record Information Services), 100, 101 Riverside Records, 73, 168 Roach, Max, 88, 171 Robertson, Sidney, 92 Rodney, Red, discographies about, 132 Rogers, Alice, 181 Rogers, Shorty, discographies about, 134–35 Rollins, Sonny, 171, 176 Roots of Modern American Jazz series (Has­ selgård), 137 Rosolino, Frank, discographies about, 132

282 

index

Rondo Records, 200 Rosenzweig, Roy, 203–4 Rowe, John, 132 Ruecker, Norbert, 157 Ruppli, Michel, 141, 143, 161–65, 208 Rusch, Bob (Cadence magazine), 12, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 125, 128, 152, 190 copublishes Lord’s The Jazz Discography, 119–20 ends partnership with Lord Music, 190 Russell, Luis, 26 Russell, William, 62, 168 Rust, Brian, 11, 17, 66, 88, 90, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 116, 117, 118, 124, 127, 148, 149, 151, 155, 159, 160, 166, 180, 191, 193, 201, 203, 204, 206, 209, 211, 213 BBC music librarian, 1–2, 80, 84 books: American Dance Band Discography, 2, 86, 97, 139, 149, 174, 183, 184, 187– 89; The British Dance Bands, 97, 149, 183; The British Music Hall on Record, 149; Columbia Master Book Discography, 80, 83, 160, 165–66, 183; The Com­plete Entertainment Discography, 2, 89, 139, 149, 183, 184, 187–89; Discography of Okeh Records, 159–60; Jazz Records, A–Z (including Jazz and Ragtime Records, A–Z), 4, 5, 79, 83, 84–86, 96–97, 129, 139, 148, 149, 164–65, 173, 174, 175, 183, 184, 185–87, 189, 206; King Joe Oliver, 83, 130–31, 138, 140; My Kind of  Jazz, 184; Recorded Jazz: A Critical Guide, 170 close listening, 36, 82, 96 confusion over inclusion and selectivity, including race, 86, 139, 183–84 death, 1 discographic methods, 81–83, 85–86, 96, 107, 109, 139, 184, 207, 209 disputes with other discographers, 80–83, 105–7 early years, 1, 79–80 Mardi Gras (radio show), 2, 80, 84 Needle Time (magazine), 2 “Sage of Edgware,” 1, 80 visits United States, 3–4, 180 Rust format, 51, 84, 85, 191, 193, 201, 216n13 as basis for BRIAN computer program, 201–3 defined, 2, 3, 213n4

Delaunay, contributions of, 3 derived from “little black books,” 3 imposing aesthetic criteria, 206–7 limitations of, 4, 173–74, 155, 186, 188, 207–9 McCarthy, contributions of, 3 strengths of, 204–5 Rye, Howard, 13, 86, 100, 107, 112, 127, 128, 148, 174, 184, 193, 205, 208, 211, 212 Blues and Gospel Records, 87, 94–96, 109, 115–16, 148, 161, 163 on plagiarism, 121–26, 191, 211 Ryker, Doc, 35 Salemann, Dieter, 133–34, 137 Salt, Colin, 36 Sanders, Pharoah, 115 Sanjek, Russell, 39, 41, 43, 55 Saturday Night Swing Session (TV show), 43 Saturday Review (magazine), 21 Savoy Record Label, 163 Scarecrow Press, 143 Schaap, Walter E., 43, 44, 56, 60 Schlagzevg (magazine), 133 Schleman, Hilton R., 35, 36, 38, 171, 179–80, 208 Rhythm on Record, 9, 28–31, 35, 36, 37, 51, 52, 76, 82, 133, 167, 171, 179–80 Schultz-Koehn, Dietrich, 44, 46–48 Sears, Richard, 158 Second Line (magazine), 90 Seeger, Charles, 92 Selchow, Manfred, 140–41 selective genre inclusion, defined, 17 session-based format. See Rust format Shaman, William, 141–42 Shaw, Artie, 70 Shaw, Arvell, 192–93 Shaw, Malcolm, 3, 83, 97, 160 Jazz and Ragtime Records (Rust/Shaw), 97, 149, 185–86, 188 Sheatsley, Paul, 15, 29, 31, 37, 38, 52, 63, 72, 89, 127, 180 Sheridan, Chris, 123, 126, 141, 142, 143, 162, 164. See also Adderley, Cannonball: discographies about; Basie, Count: discographies about; Monk, Thelonious: discographies about Shihab, Sahib, discographies about, 137 Shirley, Bernard, 109, 187–89 Signature Records, 163

i n d e x  283 Simon, George T., 33, 37, 39–40, 157 Sims, Zoot, discographies about, 132 Sinatra, Frank, 209 Sjogren, Thorbjorn, 132 Skidmore, Jimmy, discographies about, 132 Slaven, Neil, 98, 100, 101, 110, 127, 149 Blues Records, 97–100, 101, 108, 109, 116 See also Blues Unlimited (magazine); Hayes, Cedric J.; Laughton, Robert; Leadbitter, Mike Smith, Bessie, 36, 46, 55 solographies, 135–38. See also Evensmo, Jan Soul Bag (magazine), 132 Sounds of New Orleans Series (Bielderman), 132 Smith, Charles Edward, 39, 41–43, 93, 168. See also Jazzmen (Ramsey, Smith) Smith, H. Royer, 22 Smith, Mamie, 91 Smith, Stephen, 40–43, 174. See also Gabler, Milt; HRS Record Shop Snyder, Matthew, 3, 6, 10, 11, 113, 123, 204 Spand, Charlie, 59 specialized discographies. See under discography Spence, Thomas, 166 Spottswood, Richard, 197 squib entries, 101, 110 stacked discographic format, 23 Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm (Lee), 140–41 Stearns, Marshall, 39, 53–55, 130, 143 Stege, Fritz, 46 Stein, Gertrude, 31 Stevenson, Gordon, 166, 206, 207, 211 Stewart-Baxter, Derrick, 67–68. See also Lucien, George Story of  Jazz, The (Stearns), 54–55 Storyville (magazine), 86, 129, 133, 186 criticizes Bruyninckx, 103–6 publishes book-length discographies, 94–95, 97, 148, 150, 161, 185, 230n12 See also Wright, Laurie Strauss, David, 56 “supercatalogs,” 169–70 Sutton, Allan, 150, 156, 166 on close listening, 96 on the future of comprehensive works, 211 publisher of Rust’s Jazz Records, A–Z, 5, 185–86 on source identification in comprehensive works, 189, 211 Svensk Jazzdiskografi (Nicolausson), 152

Sweatman, Wilbur, 91 “sweat of the brow” copyright doctrine, 110–12 Swingin’ Americans series (Bielderman), 132 Swing Journal (magazine), 114, 153, 154 Swing Journal paperback series (Bruyninckx), 12, 13, 114, 115, 122, 126, 127, 153, 215n38 Swing Music ( Jackson column), 38 Swing Music (magazine) 25, 65 Syman, Olaf, 125, 191 Symposium (magazine), 39 Tantalizing Tingles (Laird), 149–50 Tatum, Art, discographies about, 118 Teagarden, Jack, discographies about, 140 Telefunken Records, 44 Tempo (magazine), 55 temporal cutoff, 72, 73, 75, 90, 119–20 defined, 17 Teshmaker, Frank, 42 Teubig, Klaus, 158 Thacker, Eric, 176–77 Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), 91 Thiele, Bob, 163 Thompson, Lucky, 136, 202 Timner, W. E., 10, 143, 147 Tirro, Frank, 98, 100, 173, 174 TOBA (Theatre Owners Booking Associa­ tion), 91 Torme, Mel, discographies about, 143–44 Townley, Eric, 131 Traill, Sinclair, 66, 104, 105, 108, 124, 229n2 Truffandier, Domi, 190–91. See also Bruyninckx, Walter Trumbauer, Frank, 34, 35, 42 Tucker, Mark, 7 Tyler, William, 22–23 Ulanov, Barry, 168 United Hot Clubs of America, 40–43, 54. See also Commodore Music Shop; Gabler, Milt V-Discs, 156–58 discographies about, 157–58 Vee-Jay Records, 132 Venables, Ralph G. V. coedits Jazz Directory, 64, 68–72 perpetrates “Shep Landis” hoax, 66–68 Verve Records (Clef-Verve), 165

284 

index

Victor Records, 2, 19, 59, 61, 73, 91, 109, 153, 173, 182 discographies about, 25, 59, 128, 154, 160, 161, 196–98 Vocalion Records, 19, 25, 91, 168 Voce, Steve, 6, 104, 105, 166, 173, 193 Vintage Jazz Mart (magazine), 106, 180, 189, 197 Vogel, Michael, 137 Vogue Records, 131 Volonté, Giovanni, 147 Vreede, Max E., 160–61 Wagner, Christian, 32 Walker, Malcolm, 102, 115, 129 Waller, Fats (Thomas), discographies and books about, 127–30, 172 Walter, Howard, 140 Wante, Stephan, 158 Wax Works of Duke Ellington (Aaslund), 146–47 Webb, Ray, 133, 150 Weber, Jerome, 206 Weinstock, Bob, 161 Weir, Bob, 145, 175

Westerbrook, Hans, 144 Wheeler, Geoffrey, 181–82 Wiggs, Johnny, 62–63 Wild, David, 155–56 Willems, Jos describes discography as subjective and unscientific, 6 Louis Armstrong discographer, 144–45 Williams, Clarence, 72, 118 discographies about, 80, 83, 130 Williams, Martin, 109, 138–39 Wilson, John S., 170 Winding, Kai, discographies about, 134 Wire (magazine), 178 Wolff, Francis, 164 Wolverines, 36, 41 Women in Jazz: A Discography of Instrumentalists (Leder), 150 Woody Herman, discographies about, 142 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 92–94 Wright, Laurie, 94, 97, 105, 106, 129, 185, 230n12. See also Storyville (magazine) Wright, Lawrence, 26 Zinkham, Helena, 203–4