discography Archives - William J. Levay

I had the great privilege of compiling the discography at the back of the newly-published Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero, a totally revised and expanded edition of Ed Ward’s 1983 biography of the Chicago-born blues guitarist, from Chicago Review Press.

There have been a few nice write-ups of the book, from Rolling Stone, among others. And a blurb on the back cover from Douglas Brinkley reads, in part: “The discography alone is worth the price of admission. Highly recommended!”

It was thanks to Ed Berger, of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, that I got the gig. Continue reading If you love these blues: A Mike Bloomfield discography

As jazz music evolved alongside sound recording technology and the record industry, so too did the study and cataloging of sound recordings, or discography. From the early discographies of Charles Delaunay through the work of Brian Rust, Tom Lord, and many others, jazz discographers have published thousands upon thousands of pages of highly structured data about jazz records and jazz musicians.

The free database software BRIAN (in honor of Brian Rust), by Steve Albin, allows users to compile their own discographies in the Rust style and easily output this information as HTML. By web-scraping and parsing this data, we can visualize musicians’ performance and recording careers, and better understand the professional relationships of working musicians. Continue reading Visualizing jazz discography