Stomp Off 1001 - Dickbaker.org

Further background notes in case I end up handing this out to others besides Bob Erdos:The first two Tune Title-Composer indexes were compiled by Vince Saunders “mechanically” (dare I say analog)? But allthrough the 1980s I’d been working my way through a succession of early computers, hoping, among other things, to putmy extensive record collection in an easily searchable database. The first PCs just couldn’t handle it, but when I finally diddevelop the capacity to, e.g., sort my collection by tune title, I was dismayed to discover manifold discrepancies incomposer credits for many tunes, and even variations on titles. I even noticed that within Stomp Off records, the sametunes had different composer credits on different LPs.When I mentioned this to Erdos, a very punctilious gentlemen, he was aghast, and he asked me to try to reconcile theconflicts and confusion for a new edition of the list. That happened in 1990, and was updated in 1993, 1996, and 2001—mostly the old fashioned way by writing long, detailed letters and trying to collect copies of sheet music: We had Xeroxmachines, but the Internet was in its infancy and the vast resources that are available now were not to be found.Because it’s such a labor-intensive undertaking for me, and an expensive one for him (he was publishing them in oversize,slick-paper, color catalogs that cost a fortune to print), Bob and I have put off another update for a long time. But theStomp Off collection has grown by nearly 20% since the 5th edition, and the power of the Internet and near-universalcontact by email has made the task a good deal easier, so we’re going to try for a 6th edition. But we’ll need a lot of helpfrom a lot of people.Over the years, as I did research, collected information, and—with Bob Erdos—made decisions, I entered hidden “author’snotes” in the manuscript. For this—probably the last—edition, I’ve decided to break those many notes out and make themreadable. Unfortunately, they’re often pretty darned cryptic, since they were essentially notes to myself.One more note relating especially to this 6th edition: As I noted above, this whole project began when I noticeddiscrepancies—conflicts between different recordings of the same tune. So from the very start, our focus has been toresolve such conflicts, to find differences in titles and composer credits and figure out which is correct. But many titlesnever got a second look because either (a) there was only one recording of that title in Stomp Off or (b) there were multiplerecordings, but the bandleaders all gave Erdos the same title/composer info. I feared all along that other mistakes werelurking in the list, but it would be hard to find them and resolving obvious discrepancies was of more importance. Finally,though, in 2013 we come to this edition, which is bound to be the last and for which the incredible power of the internetallows easier searches. So I’m endeavoring to double-check and confirm every last one of nearly 4,000 titles. And sureenough, I’m finding a pretty healthy percentage of errors in titles that we’d never thought to check before. For this reason,while I can’t guarantee anything, and I’m sure that some problems linger, I think I can state that this is easily the mostcomplete and accurate account of the jazz repertoire that ever has been compiled.“cy” or “copyright” files refers to the vast copyright card catalog at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which has(or should have) a 3"x5" file card for every tune ever submitted for copyright. When I was visiting the LC in person, I alwayswent directly to the card catalog, which had everything. I was aware that LC also published annual volumes of all tunes fora given year, but didn’t use it. In my 2013 work on this edition, I discovered that some, if not all, of those annual volumeshave been scanned and made available online via the big Google Books project. Try searching oncatalog of copyright entries musical compositions 19??If you get a chance to download a large PDF, do so and search it. And beware that some years are divided into twobooks, a “first half” of year and a “last half.”If that doesn’t work, try searching oncatalog of copyright entries musical compositions “title of tune”and hope you get lucky.“MRR” refers to the Music Reading Room of the Library of Congress, where one can—if lucky—request access to bothpublished sheet music and handwritten lead sheets submitted in support of copyright applications. (Just recently abandleader in Pennsylvania asked me if “King of the Zulus” had ever been published; it had not, but I was able to sendhim a lead sheet in Lil Hardin’s own handwriting that I’d copied from those marvelous files.