More Important Than the Music (eBook)

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.