More Important Than the Music

A History of Jazz Discography

Bruce D. Epperson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226067674
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Today, jazz is considered high art, America's national music, and the catalog of its recordings—its discography—is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the intense desire to know who played what, where, and when. This history gets its first full-length treatment in Bruce D. Epperson's More Important Than the Music. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz's legacy organized, Epperson tells a fascinating story of archival pursuit in the face of negligence and deception, a tale that saw curses and threats regularly employed, with fisticuffs and lawsuits only slightly rarer. Epperson examines the documentation of recorded jazz from its casual origins as a novelty in the 1920s and '30s, through the overwhelming deluge of 12-inch vinyl records in the middle of the twentieth century, to the use of computers by today's discographers. Though he focuses much of his attention on comprehensive discographies, he also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer's guides and library catalogs, and he closes with a look toward discography's future. From the little black book to the full-featured online database, More Important Than the Music offers a history not just of jazz discography but of the profoundly human desire to preserve history itself.

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

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 “musicology” had meant the study of Western concert music, with its well-developed 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 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 McCarthy and Max Jones started Jazz Monthly, which ran a discographic feature almost every month. In September 1936 Edgar Jackson, in his Gramophone 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 bio-discography of Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. It was revised and reissued 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

“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 England 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 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, ab...