Bruce D. Epperson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226067537
- eISBN:
- 9780226067674
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226067674.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
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 ...
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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 a full-length treatment in this book. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz's legacy organized, it tells a 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. This book examines the documentation of recorded jazz from its casual origins as a novelty in the 1920s and 1930s, 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 the book focuses much of its attention on comprehensive discographies, it also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer's guides and library catalogs, and the book closes with a look toward discography's future.Less
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 a full-length treatment in this book. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz's legacy organized, it tells a 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. This book examines the documentation of recorded jazz from its casual origins as a novelty in the 1920s and 1930s, 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 the book focuses much of its attention on comprehensive discographies, it also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer's guides and library catalogs, and the book closes with a look toward discography's future.
