Hi
Is anyone working on a Jazz or world Music style guide?
Below just a few samples of issues I encountered.
For Jazz I think in terms of:
A. Relating the recording session to tracks This would require a
Session_ID,
session_DateTime and Session_Description and a Session_Source See for
eample: http://www.jazzdisco.org/miles/dis/
Session_source would include the more or less authorative source from
which
the session information is derived.
If you look at http://www.crisscrossjazz.com/album/1089.html you see that
this could be the record label database or official public domain
discographies.
B. relating personnel to track
For example soemthing like
Miles Davis (tp) David Sanborn (as) David Paich, Steve Porcaro (key)
Steve
Lukather (el-g) Michael Porcaro (el-b) Jeff Porcaro (d, per) Joe Porcaro
(per) For TOTO - Fahrenheit (Columbia FC 40273)
For ease of use this could be at release level inherited by the tracks
with
the possibility of EXCEPT(n1,n2...) and ADDIOTIONAL to enable a server
side
script to cascade it down to tracks properly.
The style issue here is defining the abbreviations of the instruments,
defining the delimiters in the text frame used,etc.
In short something that would enable bulk upload from session data by a
user
(or record label like CrissCross) who already has the data available in a
proper format.
C. Relating to the Lable and label_Id
Just as an example, I own five official releases of a series of Miles
Davis'
concerts in Europe and have copies of some other as bootlegs.
The names of the tracks are the same in most cases, though being long
medley-suites they are different. MB (both TRM and PUID) wanted to map
them
all to the same Release. I would want to see them all as different
releases
(which they are) with a likelyhood value attached to each release. The
likelyhood is important to avoid confusing the average user with only a
few
Miles Davis records with several options, reducing it to the most likely
Columbia Legacy. But the Miles freaks still can catalog and tag their
obscure Jazz Door (semi-bootleg, though offical) and even bootlegs.
This may explain why several Jazz releases have multiple Disc_IDs (though
another cause may be the flawed tagging of re-releases with bonus tracks)
D. Different releases that are actually the same (Disc_ID) but with
different packaging.
Example1:
Affinty is a release by Toots Thielemans and Bill Evans.
In real life this could be packaged as one of three A. Toots Thielemans
(featuring Bill Evans) as on MB B. Bill featuring Toots C. both (I
haven't
seen this one yet) This is not really a user issue (initially), but
eventually three different users submit the same disc_ID with different
Titles and Main artist.
So the system has to build in build in some sort of ISIDENTICAL_EXCEPT
relation.
Example2:
Over time the issue is even worse: Miles Davis play trumpet on one track
of
a certain Charlie Parker release in the 1940s; now it is re-released as
Miles Davis featuring Charlie Parker. Just clever marketing bollocks, no
problem with that, except that it is the same release (be it remastered),
with a different Disc_ID.
E. for the live performances the coding of dates, venues, sets etc.
F. for compaitbilty with other sources a reference to the native Table Of
Content of a CD.
You would probably end up with three levels of title/track name data 1.
native TOC 2. cover 3. corrected for spelling mistakes And the search
engine
should enable querying all three
Example: I have about 30 versions of the Miles Davis Track [Woody 'N'
You],
in a few cases misquoted even in the TOC as [Wouldn't You]
For World Music I would think about:
The country and region of the music the artist performs In case of
vocals:
The language and regional dialect they sing in There are differences
between
Celtic-Scots, Celtic-Irish, Celtic-Brittany(France) Celtic-Welsh and
Celtic-Welsh of the Welsh speaking peoplein Patagonia (Agentina)
Related to internationalisation I would also want a proper transcription
of
the name in Latin characters (from my Western Europe perspective).
I CANNOT do anything with names in Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese,
etc.
characters. Just like I read Bejing, Moscow, Seoul, etc. in the paper
instead of the name in the local script, I want at least international
English characters.
The gold standard here is probably the way the offical gouvernment of the
country transcribes the name Latin characters though this may be a bit
controversial for artists from communities who feel themselves
discriminated
by their formal government.
At the moment MB messes up the tagging of my Cheb Khaled releases
(because
the name is in arabic on the system (strange enough it has an English
sort
name).
As you see, Jazz and World Music poses far more interesting problems than
Classical or Rock?
And I haven't even mentioned the fact that many a Jazz track is a medley
(sort of) pieces of other tracks.
If there are a few interested persons I would want to give it a try
Personally I could tag the (almost) complete Miles Davis and Keith Jarret
Discographies, as a proof of concept.
But I would not want to use the current interface which is far to slow
for
this.
That's it for now
Cheers
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