Jazz Sessionographies (Discographies)

About the most helpful thing when it comes to histories of recording are sessionographies. Many, including myself, use Lord's Disco as a main source. Jazz is only one of the genres covered at DAHR (Discography of American Historical Recordings) at ADP (American Discography Project) published by the University of California. Scott Alexander's Red Hot Jazz was a major source for the VF History which has vanished beyond caching. I didn't know that I should have taken a screen shot of every page instead. That's a little like not knowing that I should have downloaded everything I came across at YouTube in the course of writing VF, not knowing that up there near 99% of it would disappear, permanently if it couldn't be replaced. I've left the dead links to Red Hot Jazz in VF to show the source.

Beyond Lord, the most famous discographer of jazz is probably Brian Rust who published 'Jazz and Ragtime Records 1897 – 1942' in 1970. Another standard source is Walter Bruyninckx. Bruyninckx began to publish '50 Years of Recorded Jazz, 1917–1967' in 1967. An ongoing work, '93 Years of Recorded Jazz & Blues, 1917–2010' was issued on CD as recently as 2010. Less widely employed are the works of Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen who published 'Jazz Records, 1942-1965' in 1966. He also completed a number of discographies of individual musicians.

Of discographical catalogs, this site is pretty glued to Discogs. Also major are 45 Cat and 45 Worlds. RYM has often been helpful, and I've found information I couldn't come by elsewhere at Music Brainz.