Short-lived eponymous groups

Several months ago there was a discussion around handling of eponymous groups. There were valid objections raised to the idea of merging eponymous groups with their leader, and I’m not intending to reopen that question in full (sorry, @Mapache_Del_Raton).

I would however like to propose an exception for short-lived groups. These often just represent the configuration of a specific studio session; the producer booked seven musicians to back the hypothetical Joe Cool on one date, so the results get released as the Joe Cool Octet. (If the trumpeter called in sick, it might’ve been the Joe Cool Septet…)

In some cases, the names on the label are not distinct groups at all - an extreme example comes from one J.J. Johnson recording session where four tracks were recorded, all on the same day and with the same personnel, and released under three different names. (They’re the first four tracks on this compilation, which also includes four tracks released as “Jay Jay Johnson’s Bop Quintet”, the only output of that particular “group”.)

In practice there is a mix of how these have been handled. The JJ Johnson groups have been created as separate artists; others, like Charles Mingus’ “Baron Mingus and his Octet” are treated as ACs of the leader.

Ideally, I’d like to see the AC approach noted as a viable option in the guidelines. Something like “For short-lived eponymous groups, it’s acceptable to list recordings and releases under the leader’s name, using the credited-as feature for the group name, rather than creating a separate artist.”

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I haven’t read the other discussion.

But, yes, I have done that. Add the name of the group to the alias list. Add the credit to the man using ‘credited as’.
We can always come back and create a group later. It is one of the nice things about having editable data.

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I hate to be a pill, but you know darn well that 50 years later, some compilation (or streaming service) is going to credit the recording as just Joe Cool, and will neglect the octet.

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They do that already. Many compilations are released under the leader’s name, and only a few (like the Chronological Classics series linked above) reference the original as-released band names. This J.J. Johnson compilation is a common example that contains some of the same tracks as the Chronological Classics release but with no reference to the groups.

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Some more examples:

The Thelonious Monk Quartet was Monk’s main touring group for most of his career. There are musicians who were members of the group, notable Charlie Rouse (saxophonist for the group for almost a decade) and John Coltrane (for a short but significant period). I would not propose to change this group.

The Thelonious Monk Sextet, is one of these non-groups. The name is used for the output of two recording sessions, five years apart, which feature no musicians in common other than Monk himself. This is one I would propose to treat as an AC instead of a separate artist.

Likewise the Thelonious Monk Septet, a group assembled solely for the Monk’s Music session on June 26, 1957. Other than that one day in the studio this “group” never played together, and in fact may not have ever all been in the same room together. It is strange to refer to someone as a member of a group when in fact they were a side musician hired for a single recording date.

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This is a great thread, I agree with every word, and make many funky edits here to get my stuff to present and sort the way I want it, which is usually after extensive research. I read all the bios, look up all the session info, retrieve the copyright info from the US Copyright Office, and essentially, examine the original record release(s). Whatever I do, I want it to be right, and it’s only fair to back up your claims.

Have you or are you making a ticket for this? Or are you still fleshing it out?

I have now: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/STYLE-2000 , feedback welcome.

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The more I’m editing old stuff the more this request makes sense.
As explained upper this ends up to “corrupt” some bands entities with not irrelevant data like names and members.

Given solution would work for most cases but the minor issues created by this could become more problematic when there are many of those short live bands linked to the same person.

  • difficulty to write some annotations
  • difficulty to mix solo data with the ones from those groups

  • and upper that the entities could always be created again without serious control :confused:

To avoid this we could rely on same workaround as for Works with with multiple arrangements: a catch up entity listing them all.
ex: creating a generic “Thelonious Monk and Band” then list inside all the different aliases + add disambiguation “catch-up for short live bands”.
This would allow to clearly appear in search as keeping all the different annotations and data split from the main artist.

What you think of it?

PS: voted yes on the ticket

not so much for Thelonious Monk, but I would like to see non-existent groups created more often for solo artists.
To me, sometimes it makes more sense to have a ‘solo artist backing band’ with 40 members, then it does to make the solo artist have 4 supporting guitar 5 supporting drums 10 supporting backing vocals etc etc

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My hesitation is that we would be creating a named entity that never existed, which is different than how we handle works.

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I will usually take the shortest path to getting all the artists’ stuff together
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys is where all their recordings are, but later in life the compilation makers got lazy after naming Bob. However, I knew almost every recording was the band. So I read the album cover, put that name for release, but the recordings I did not rewrite history. after you discuss here, be consistent!