[mb-users] Interpreting FeaturingArtistStyle

[Olivier]

2007/2/3, Chris Bransden <chris at whenironsattack.com>:
> >
> > *When they are*. Sure. Keep them.
> > When they are edition dependent fantasy, I don't think so.
>
> are they in this case, though?

I don't think so. I think they are sidemen. And sidemen in jazz are
not  featuring artists (and yes, there are numerous legit cases of
featuring artists in jazz).

> > They can be trivia. They can also be entirely wrong (think label
> > "Giants of Jazz").
>
> plus it would basically boil down to peoples opinions on musical input
> if we decided to AR trivial artists, and feature non-trivial.

I've hardly seen any discussion (again, in jazz) about who is sideman
and who is featuring artist. It's usually (most case) pretty straight
forward.

> >
> > Actually, there are more id3 fields than just the track titles, right?
>
> sure! in fact i hope that the notes field will eventually store some
> kind of formatted credit sheet for tracks. but 100% disagree that
> featuring artist info deserves to be anywhere other than the Artist,
> TrackTitle or AlbumTitle fields, unless there was some kind of special
> featuring artist field (and even then i don't think that would be
> entirely ok due to the stuff i said in the previous mail).

Why?
There are some players that let you use/invent any kind of tag.
Anyhow, MB is not only about tagging. In fact, tagging is pretty much
a side-effect ;)

>
> sure! though looking at the covers -
> http://www.bluenote.com/detail.asp?SelectionID=10602 (making do with
> small scans, amazon's not loading for me at the mo) - it seems this is
> being presented more as a series, rather than featuring artists, so
> SeriesNumberStyle would apply.

Actually, this is "edition specific" details that we don't keep at all
in the release title. Belong to release annotation IMHO.

> the front cover showing "with Elvin Jones and Joey DeFrancesco" -
> that's a feat. by anyone's definition, surely?

I'm stressing it again: it's *usual* in jazz to list sidemen on the
front cover - while it's not in other music genres.
FeatStyle has been established bearing in mind the idea that if it's
printed on the sleeve, it's a feat. This is certainly right for most
music genres. In the case of (part of) jazz, it is not.
Sidemen are not featuring artists.

> >
> > What is included or not on the sleeve (at least in jazz), as said
> > previously, may be edition dependent, and may not reflect the
> > importance of people work in the album.
>
> same in contemporary music, but it shouldn't make any difference IMO.
> it's not up to us to decide how 'important' musicians are, just
> catalog what's been said, even if that means going with some marketing
> execs decision.

This completely contradict how most jazz editors think about it
(again, this is only my perception).

>
> if it's the same release (by MBz standards), it gets merged. which one
> it is merged in...in my experience it's usually the most recent one,
> or most popular (usually one and the same i would have thought). 2
> different release entries (by MBz standards) can have different
> featuring layouts...no harm in it.

This is unmanageable.
If you don't merge, you'll have *a huge lot* of duplicates with
different feats layout (5 to 10 different editions with (slightly to
really) different covers for the same 50s album is not uncommon).
If you do merge into the last issue, you'll have to keep it up to date
each time they change the cover (not to say you'll have to determine
which is the last issue). You'll also have to deal with differences
between countries for the same edition, etc.
And you'll end up in a situation where different reissues of the same
stuff (eg: additional track), doesn't have the same feats/artist while
it's from the same session...

- Olivier