More important than the music : a history of jazz discography / Bruce D. Epperson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Epperson, Bruce D., 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jazz--Discography--History.

Jazz.

Sound recordings--Collectors and collecting.

Sound recordings.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 p.) 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

The sage of Edgware

"Those Frenchmen got a hellova nerve"

"A form of musical bookkeeping"

"You live in a numerical world of your own"

"What a mess"

Specialized discographies, part 1

Specialized discographies, part 2

What kind of discographies do we want?.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes discography.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226067537

9780226067674

022606767X

OCLC:

855505489