While surfing the net today, I came across a collection of jazz resources at Columbia University. It has a couple of interesting things like close analysis of Lonely Woman and Haitian Fight Song, with audio links directly into relevant segments of the songs.

It also has a little page for “Jazz History” which reproduces Art Kane’s “Great Day in Harlem” picture, and a graphical “style map” representing “one man’s interpretation of the development of jazz styles over time and in relation to other musical styles.”

The man they credit is Ivan Patterson, who uses the image on a page of his own about Jazz History. In truth, though, I made that image myself about ten years ago when I set out to make a web site about Jazz in connection with my work at WNUR — the “WNUR JazzWeb”. And I stole the entire concept for the image from Joachim Ernst-Berendt’s The Jazz Book. I actually adapted the image slightly, and gave credit accordingly on the page. Mr. Patterson makes no credit of any kind on his page.

In truth, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest, especially since I’m not due much credit. I just made some arrows in Illustrator and added in a line for “world music” and maybe one or two boxes. And further, looking at it now I’m amused to think that I once believed that “jazz history” could be drawn out so simplistically. After all, it’s hard enough to make maps of physical geography, projecting three dimensions into two. I don’t even know how many dimensions one would rightfully attribute to jazz, but there are definitely some holes on that diagram. I mean, if I were just to try starting with the box labeled “free”, I could end up with a diagram substantially more complex than the one under discussion. (See, for example, Walt Davis’ “So You Wanna Be An Avant-Garde Fan)