Best Jazz Reference Sources, and INDEX to this site! EXPANDED re FILMS, etc.

(In response to requests by subscribers, I wrote a paragraph about films at the bottom, and added more links throughout.)

FIRST—Great News! Substack has added a way to create an index of one’s essays. Every essay is now indexed by the artist(s) or topic(s) given in its title. I will index new ones as they are published. Click on INDEX at the top of my home page. and then click on the subject that interests you at the moment. Every relevant essay will immediately pop up for you.

I have not specifically indexed Bonuses for Paying Subscribers, but every essay that has a bonus says +Bonus in the title. So those are easy to find. In addition, if you’re searching for any particular word or phrase you can still use the search bar at the top of the home page.

NOW:

Many of you have asked how I do all this work and find all this information and all of these unknown items. That’s a long story, but first let me remind you that I’ve been doing this kind of research for something like 50 years. These essays don’t happen overnight. They build on years of performing, listening, reading, teaching, and thinking. And materials come to me from a huge international network of musicians, record producers, collectors, and scholars. In some cases I’ve had the relevant materials for many years, but never before had the proper forum in which to present them. And now, in the course of testing, refining, and triple-checking my thoughts, in order to write them up for you, I’ve also come up with a huge amount of new material. I have also developed new insights that have even surprised myself, and that have required me to throw out old beliefs. After all, many of my essays are “think pieces.” I try not to simply present things, but instead, to share my thinking about them, and, I hope, to make some connections that haven’t been commonly made before.

I use a great variety of resources in my research—including visiting places in person and calling people on the telephone. And the basic foundation behind my essays consists of many years of reading and listening. But how does one even know what recordings and writings exist? And, once one knows about them, how does one find them? Years ago, I had to find these things the hard way—and that’s a long story. But there is now a tremendous amount of information available online. My goal today is to alert you to just a few of the online resources that I consider essential. Even if you are very experienced, there are probably a few links below that will be new to you, and that you will welcome:

TO KNOW WHAT RECORDINGS EXIST:

Tom Lord, The Jazz Discography: There have been many attempts to catalogue all jazz recordings, internationally. (Of course there are significant jazz scenes in almost every country.) In such a big endeavor there are always a few errors and glitches. But Lord’s work has superseded all previous attempts and is now the state of the art. It’s totally searchable by artist, tune, label, location, and by combinations of these and other criteria. Lord includes unissued recordings, and many film and TV performances, if the soundtrack has been available in an audio format. Because it’s online, it’s constantly updated. If you find errors, you can email him and he will correct them.

If your college doesn’t have a subscription, consider asking them to start one. But individuals can easily subscribe for only $10 a month, without a long-term commitment. (Tom also sells the entire database on CD-ROM, which is nice because you don’t need internet access to use it. But the website is updated weekly, so a CD-ROM will soon go out of date.)

Specialized website discographies on specific artists or labels will always offer detailed information that would not appear in a “master discography” like Lord’s. In my essays I have linked to, for example, the discography sites for Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and others. These sites include listings of private tapes and contain all kinds of other details that won’t make it into a general discography. Among the most useful are the more than 200 artist discographies posted online as free PDFs by the late Jan Evensmo (1939-2024). He not only lists every known recording for each artist, with the help of James Accardi and other researchers, but—a unique and helpful feature—he tells you which tracks have solos by the featured artist, and for how many measures. So, if you’re trying to get a sense of an artist’s style, you needn’t take up time checking recordings where he or she only plays in the written ensemble passages.

TO HEAR RECORDINGS:

Everybody knows about Youtube—and about streaming services (Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, etc.), which are better for listening to complete albums. But you might not know about this site which legally offers over 43,000 MP3s of historic jazz recordings (through the early 1950s) for free! (UPDATE: I am sorry to say that the sire just mentioned appears toi have gone out of business just recently!) And there are over 400,000 digitized 78s (all types of music, not only jazz) at the huge website archive.org, which also lends out digitized books. The site is currently being sued for offering some recent audio and books, but that shouldn’t affect older items (I hope).

TO KNOW WHAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN ON A CERTAIN TOPIC OR ARTIST:

The Darmstadt Jazz Institut has a bibliography service—free. Simply send an email to: jazz@jazzinstitut.de . List up to three requests per email. (I would appreciate if you would mention that you learned about this from me.) They can provide bibliographies on any artist or topic—Miles Davis, Big Bands, Cecil Taylor, Free Jazz, etc. You’ll receive the bibliographies quickly by email. No bibliography is complete, but theirs are very thorough for jazz periodicals and books from about 1950 to the present, in English and in most European languages. (It’s important to know about writings on jazz that are not in English.) You can see samples of older bibliographies at their site, but they update every month so it’s best to get the latest ones.

TO FIND BOOKS and SHEET MUSIC:

I already mentioned archive.org, which has millions of scanned books to loan for free. These days most public libraries also loan ebooks. My favorite site for finding printed books, including sheet music books, is addall.com, which searches Amazon, Ebay, and most other book sites, internationally, with one click, then shows you a list of available new and used copies of the book you seek, from the lowest price on up. (When buying used books, please remember to read what the listing says about the condition of the book. And of course, if the seller is outside of your country, ask about shipping fees.)

For new (not used) sheet music and books for musicians: Jamey Aebersold’s site is the oldest, and has thousands of books for all instruments, many published by Jamey himself, and many from small publishers that are hard to find elsewhere. His famous “play-along” series (now available as downloads) is only the tip of a very large iceberg. The Duboff brothers have personally supervised accurate editions of a huge number of classic jazz scores and parts (downloadable) for big bands and small groups—Ellington, Basie, also Golson, Pearson, etc.—and they also sell a large catalog of books for musicians. They offer a discount to educators, and are very helpful about answering queries.

Trumpeter and music publisher Don Sickler has a growing list, now over 1,000, of accurate leadsheets and small group scores and parts by over 200 modern jazz composers such as Hank Mobley and Herbie Nichols, which are not available in any standard “fakebooks.”

TO FIND JAZZ MAGAZINE ARTICLES:

When you get a bibliography from the Darmstadt Jazz Institut, it comes with information about which articles are available as PDFs, and how to order from them for a small fee. In addition, this amazing site has searchable scans of all issues of over 120 English language jazz magazines, from the early 1930s through about 1999. These are from the collection of the Institute of Jazz Studies (based at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., where I taught for many years in the music department). You can save the articles that you find, in PDF format. At the moment subscriptions are only open to institutions, so if you are affiliated with a university, music school, library, or so on, see if you can persuade them to subscribe.

Another great magazine resource is this site, although you would never guess it from the name “World Radio History.” If you click on Music Magazines, there are thousands of magazines, organized year by year, and easily downloadable. (They used to have DownBeat, but they were ordered to stop. The magazines that are still there are public domain I believe.) And our favorite archive.org also has many jazz magazines such as Coda and Record Changer, and most DownBeats!

The following additional magazine information is provided by the Darmstadt Jazz Institut (mentioned above): The Canadian journal Coda between 1973 and 2008 an be found here. The Polish journal Jazz Forum can be viewed here. The British National Jazz Archive provides free online access to a number of historical U.K. periodicals, among them Jazz News, Crescendo, Storyville (an important source for research on early jazz), Swing Music, and a number of others. The former New Orleans magazine Wavelength can be found online here. The late Gene Lees' respected Jazzletter can be found at this website.

TO FIND NEWSPAPER ARTICLES:

Newspaper advertisements and articles are a major source of jazz information. In the old days one had to search through them on microfilm. Now many, maybe most newspapers have been digitized. The Library of Congress has searchable scans of every page of almost 3,000 newspapers from the first issue through 1963. These are mostly small local papers. Most (but not all) issues of the Village Voice are here, with lots of information about jazz in New York’s Greenwich Village.

There are of course many other newspaper sites that are not free. Newspapers.com and similar sites offer mostly small local papers, but they include many that are not at the Library of Congress site, and they cover up to recent years. They do usually offer a free trial before you have to pay. And most major newspapers now have their own digital archives, such as the New York Times (which I believe was the first to digitize every issue in its history), the Boston Globe, and so on.

You will often hear that there are no Black jazz critics, but in fact newspapers by and for the Black communities almost always had a person who wrote about jazz, far more than in the general newspapers. Many of these Black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender and New York’s Amsterdam News, have now been digitized.

All of these sites cost money, but in many cases they are available for free through the websites of public libraries and university libraries. Also, some newspaper sites will allow you to pay a small fee per article instead of subscribing. And Archive.org is useful here as well because they have digitized some issues of the California Eagle, an historic Black newspaper, and others, and that site is always free.

BUT—this is important—my friend Franz Hoffman in Berlin has already done a huge amount of jazz newspaper research for you, for free. Many years ago, he carefully went through about ten American newspapers on microfilm. He printed out good copies of every ad or listing for a jazz group from 1910 through 1967. Then he arranged them in date order. He made separate volumes for the New York Times, the Defender, and several other newspapers. He added smaller books of newspaper clippings for specific artists such as Red Allen, Ellington, Gillespie, and others. (You have to look closely for these on the site listed below, because some of them are simply labeled 8.1, 8.2, and so on.) He added three volumes of historic reviews of jazz artists. Finally, he made index volumes so that one can find everything more easily! He used to sell printed copies of all these thousands of pages, but in recent years he digitized everything, and, thanks to the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives in Washington, D.C., all of the volumes are now downloadable for free! Sure, one could search online newspapers, but it's much faster, and free, to go first to the relevant pages in his PDFs, to see if they have the information that you need. My advice is to download All of his PDFs now, while they are available.

A NOTE ABOUT FILMS AND TV APPEARANCES:

Several people asked me, what about jazz on film and television, such as the series I’ve posted on Bird? These days much of it is on YouTube, but it is not easy to know what to look for, what exists. There is no “master list,” but there is a long, old list to start with here (and it’s downloadable as a PDF). The discographies also help because, as I said, they will list all films for which a soundtrack has been released. And my friend Mark Cantor, who has one of the world’s largest collections of jazz on film, is very responsive to queries through his site here.

There are of course MANY MANY more resources, but I’m only writing an essay here, not another book! These are great ones that I use just about every day. Which reminds me—I need to get back to work on my next essay for you! See you soon.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. You might enjoy these excerpts from a presentation I gave on jazz research in 2012—there are 11 short videos in all.