Map of Jazz
August 24, 2015 8:22 PM   Subscribe

Map of Jazz A visualization of collaboration in jazz through mapping players by session, for roughly 14,000 sessions. Full methodology described here (PDF)
posted by klangklangston (13 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Looks interesting. I've always been fascinated by the way jazz players hop around from session to session.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all on my iPad, so I'll have to wait til tomorrow to really dig into it.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:21 PM on August 24, 2015


Nice idea.

Mapping though Flash suggests they don't know how to deliver content on the web.

Also, faulty data:

Grant Green

Sessions:0
Collaborators:0

posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:39 PM on August 24, 2015


Grant Green shows up for me if I adjust the timeline scale. When I searched Grant Green, it started me off with no hits, but then I realized it had defaulted to only show 1972, and he just didn't put out anything they've coded then.
posted by klangklangston at 11:08 PM on August 24, 2015


This is pretty neat once you figure out the controls, though the slider behavior is weird. I see session info, but are album titles somewhere?
posted by Standard Orange at 12:17 AM on August 25, 2015


the paper (second link) makes things more interesting.

i can't see anywhere that makes the database public, which is a pity - it would be interesting to see alternative interfaces.
posted by andrewcooke at 2:44 AM on August 25, 2015


Same thing happened to me that I searched Art Tatum. I had to adjust the timeline to get any results.

I thought it was strange that a similar search for another pianist, Chick Corea, revealed in comparison a tangled mess of associations, then I remembered that *well duh* Tatum mostly played solo.
posted by three blind mice at 2:52 AM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


I see session info, but are album titles somewhere?

Seems to be intentional:

At the heart of BRIAN is the conceptual idea that the session is the primary entity, unlike many other databases designed to store sound recordings information. Sessions are events that have defined locations, both chronologically and geographically. Out of the many layers of details available in BRIAN, the Map of Jazz uses the top-level data on the sessions and musicians who performed during them, thus shifting the focus to the interpersonal relationships between the artists.

But I think it would be more useful if there were a way to find what recordings are associated with these sessions, too. You could do a lot worse in exploring jazz than to listen to all the records that a top sideman like Paul Chambers played on, for example.
posted by thelonius at 5:39 AM on August 25, 2015 [4 favorites]


Not bad. It would be useful to be able to search for pairs of musicians. (When did Coleman Hawkins play with Sonny Rollins?) It would also be interesting to see what instrument(s) a musician played on a session.
posted by Jode at 6:28 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


Don't want to knock what is no small achievement, but I was a little disappointed when I was checking out Miles and the timeline ran out at about 1968/1969. A lot of interesting sessions happened after that.
posted by univac at 7:55 AM on August 25, 2015


Don't want to knock what is no small achievement, but I was a little disappointed when I was checking out Miles and the timeline ran out at about 1968/1969. A lot of interesting sessions happened after that.

Well, except for the one session in 1990 that managed to make it into the dataset. My status as a music historian is pretty much "armchair", but I'm pretty sure Davis stepped into the studio once or twice during the interim.
posted by vverse23 at 9:24 AM on August 25, 2015


Great idea, horrible interface. There's a lot of snazzy looking web development that's just horrible to navigate. Until they get that sorted out, I feel like the Jazz Discography Project is a much better resource, which has both session & discography information, as well as sections for the major jazz labels. It's also licensed under the GFDL, which is an added plus in my book. I can't say how they compare in comprehensiveness, as the map was so frustrating I gave up on it pretty quickly.
posted by talking leaf at 11:28 AM on August 25, 2015


"i can't see anywhere that makes the database public, which is a pity - it would be interesting to see alternative interfaces."

I found this map while trying to help a buddy fact-check some crossword clues he'd written, and one of the things that I have written down in part of my ever-growing, inchoate "projects" list is to contact them to see if there's a way to get access to the dataset — if there is, I figure I can learn enough Python or something to display it like what I was really looking for: a bar timeline of sidemen for a handful of bandleaders. Since the project was published in 2012 and they don't seem to be actively updating it anymore (and because it's funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities), I'm hoping that they're more willing to give a raw export of the underlying session info, without the fields returned for their mapping formulas.
posted by klangklangston at 11:46 AM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Reminds me of the first time I sat in with a bunch of very talented jazz musicians, thinking I could fake it through one tune. They called a difficult tune (well, a kiiler tempo, anyway) and I was humiliated. This website needs a lot of woodshedding before it hits the stage again, I think.
posted by kozad at 9:12 PM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


« Older An advertisement for planet Earth.   |   He said he'd break my arm off if I ever referred... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments