More Important Than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography

BRUCE D. EPPERSON 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.

ML406.E67 2013

016.78165026'6—dc23

2013016636

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

More Important Than the Music

A History of Jazz Discography

BRUCE D. EPPERSON

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

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.

ERNEST BORNEMAN, The Jazz Cult, Esquire, 1947

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE. The Sage of Edgware

CHAPTER TWO. Those Frenchmen Got a Hellova Nerve

CHAPTER THREE. A Form of Musical Bookkeeping

CHAPTER FOUR. You Live in a Numerical World of Your Own

CHAPTER FIVE. What a Mess

CHAPTER SIX. Specialized Discographies, Part 1

CHAPTER SEVEN. Specialized Discographies, Part 2

CHAPTER EIGHT. What Kind of Discographies Do We Want?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. A page from Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography (1992–2002)

10. A page from Edward Brooks’s The Young Louis Armstrong on Records (2002)

11. A page from Max Harrison, Charles Fox, and Eric Thacker’s Essential Jazz Recordings, vol. 1 (1984)

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 seventy-five 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 Dictionary 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 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.

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.

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/on-line 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 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 mid-1950s in favor of microgroove 45 rpm singles and 33-1/3 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 runoff 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 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 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 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 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, 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 further 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 full-length 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 sharp-eyed 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 "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 last-minute 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 single-artist 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