iTunes vs. Phil Schaap
If you don’t know who Phil Schaap is, you don’t listen to jazz radio in New York City. But this post isn’t really about Phil Schaap the man, it is about Phil Schaap the type. You know, the person who knows which recording of which album has the sound of Max Roach clearing his throat between takes. Few of us can aspire to Phil Schaap levels of obsessiveness about Jazz minutia, but anyone who seriously loves Jazz wants to know something about an album: who was in the band, what year the recording was made, etc.
All of these things, including the liner notes, are missing from Jazz downloads on iTunes. I just discovered Wayne Bremser’s excellent article (from last year) about the implications of iTunes for the Jazz collector:
A full understanding of jazz goes beyond the “Great Man” theory and recognizes the influence of side players - the wide network of people that developed this musical language together. Selling songs and albums separated from names disrespects the artists and hinders the education of new listeners.
Phil Schaap is also famous for his liner notes on many a Grammy winning jazz album. Liner notes on Jazz albums are a literary art-form unto themselves and it is a shame to see these fall by the wayside. Not to mention the ever shrinking size of album covers:
Album design is a significant part of jazz culture. Before music video, record companies relied on striking graphic design and photographs to capture the feeling of music. The visual language of album cover art can be read by jazz fans to determine when an album was recorded and which label produced it.
As with Bremser, I am a big fan of iTMS, but it always seems strange to me that the information age actually gives us less information than we got in the jazz age.
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Comments
Alexandre,
I totally agree that there are new kinds of (social) information now available on the web. But limiting the other stuff strikes me as analogous to using just two digits for dates, or eight digits for file names. Why limit ourselves?
This has been bothering me for quite some time. It should be very easy to deliver to do this, but, alas, I think it is mostly Jazz fans who clamor for such information. The fact that Jazz constitutes such a small percentage of the music buying public doesn’t auger well for our needs.
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
Reading this as I’m putting finishing touches on liner notes for our band’s album… (Madou Diarra and Dakan, playing hunter’s music from Mali, West Africa)
Well, iTMS is itself severely limited but already expanded from most uses of ID3 tags for MP3s. Also, some albums sold on iTMS have accompanying material to help contextualise the recordings. But the “information age” is really about specific items of data (possibly including the full personnel listing) as opposed to the type of knowledge Jazz specialists share.
Instead of liner notes and cover art, music fans get most of their knowledge from social interactions, many of which may happen online through blogs and podcasts. With some newer recordings, people do get a more complete experience by going to the band’s MySpace than by relying on “Jazz specialists,” IMHO.