Influence and Similarity between Contemporary

Jazz Artists, plus Six Degrees of Kind of Blue

Gabriele Giaquinto, Cora Bledsoe, and Brian McGuirk

University of Michigan

1 INTRODUCTION
There is a large segment of modern jazz that does not fit any historical style and is very
difficult to categorize. With this project we use exploratory network analysis to understand which
artists have most influenced contemporary jazz artists, how contemporary jazz artists can be
categorized, which artists are central in contemporary jazz, and if centrality is correlated with
commercial success.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the data set and how we
collected it. Section 3 provides an exploratory network analysis for the similarity network.
Section 4 provides an exploratory network analysis for the influence network. Section 5 provides
a network analysis of a 1959 jazz recording collaboration network. Section 6 discusses related
work. In Section 7, we present our conclusion.

2 DATA SET
We have collected data from All Music Guide [1], a music recommendation network [4]. The
set of artists, their style and connections are created by music experts. Therefore, the data we
collected is subjective and does not represent objective data, such as collaborations between
artists (as done in [2] and [6]) or relationships between songwriters and singers (as done in [5]).
We defined a jazz artist to be contemporary if he or she is currently active and started his or her
career not earlier than the 90s. There are, of course, several jazz artists that started their careers
earlier and that give a great contribution to modern jazz. However, we wanted to study only
young jazz artists in this network and wanted the networks to be manageable in size.
To create the contemporary era networks we have developed a software tool that reads a set
of contemporary jazz artists pages, creates two Pajek networks, and generates a list of artists that
require further research. We started with the list of most important jazz artists, as provided by All
Music Guide, and performed several iterations.
To address the contributions of older jazz musicians we developed a network of 1959 jazz
recording collaborations using the personal playing on the five albums All About Jazz defines as
the back bone of a great jazz collection [8]. Using musicians playing on the following albums:
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
John Coltrane, Giant Steps
Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out
Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um
Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Things to Come

We then developed a collaboration network using additional data from the All Music Guide.
2.1 Similarities Network
Each node represents a contemporary jazz artist and an edge represents the similarity among
them, as defined by All Music Guide. The network has 216 nodes and 258 edges. The average
degree is 2.38 and the average shortest path is 8.23.

2.2 Influences Network

Each node represents a jazz artist and an arc represents the musical influence of an artist on
the other, as defined by All Music Guide. The network consists of group 1, contemporary jazz
artists and group 2, the earlier artists that influence them. It has 418 nodes and 335 arcs.

2.3 1959 Collaboration Network

Each node represents a jazz artist that either played on one of the albums listed above or an
artist who recorded with an artist who played on one of the five influential albums. Edges
represent artists having played together on an album. The network has 196 nodes and 1591 edges.

3 SIMILARITIES NETWORK ANALYSIS

We imported the network in GUESS and visualized it using the Bin Pack layout, as shown in
Figure 1.

Figure 1 Network of similarities among contemporary jazz artists

3.1 Centrality
We measured degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality. Figure 2
visualizes degree centrality; the size of a vertex is proportional to its degree and the vertices
colored in blue are the ones with highest degree centrality. Table 1 shows the 5 artists with the
highest degree centrality and the 5 artists with the highest closeness centrality. Table 2 shows the
5 artists with the highest betweenness centrality.
 Figure 2 Centrality degree in similarities network

Artist Degree Closeness Artist

Diana Krall 13 0.1209 David Sanchez
Bobby Sanabria 10 0.1188 Danilo Perez
Danilo Perez 10 0.1183 Leon Parker
David Sanchez 10 0.1155 Greg Tardy
Medeski, Martin & Wood 10 0.1128 The Bad Plus
Table 1: Degree and Closeness Centrality

Artist Betweenness
Medeski, Martin & Wood 0.198
Leon Parker 0.180
David Sanchez 0.173
Greg Tardy 0.152
Jim Black 0.145
Table 2: Betweenness Centrality

Four artists that have high centrality in more than just one metric are David Sanchez, Danilo
Perez, Leon Parker, and Greg Tardy; figure 3 shows them in white color. Sanchez and Perez
belong to the Latin Jazz community (see section 3.2 on community structure) and are similar
respectively to Parker (Contemporary Jazz community) and Tardy (Post Bop community). Being
part of a well-connected community and being able to cross musical styles boundaries seem to be
a good way of being central in modern jazz.
 Figure 3 Some artists that have high centrality in more than one metric

We tried to correlate centrality with the number of albums sold by an artist. We have
collected the number of gold and platinum albums awarded to an artist by the Recording Industry
Association of America [7] to figure out the number of albums sold. A gold album certifies the
sale of 500,000 albums; a platinum album certifies the sale of 1,000,000 albums. The first
interesting result of this research is that only a handful of contemporary jazz artists have been
awarded gold albums and only superstar Diana Krall has been awarded platinum albums. Table 3
shows the number of albums sold by contemporary jazz artists. The second observation we make
is that there is no correlation between centrality and number of albums sold: being central has
little to do with making money in modern jazz. The only exception is Diana Krall, which has the
highest degree centrality and the highest number of albums sold. We think this correlation can be
explained by a couple of things: when an artist gains commercial success, Music Labels tend to
favor artists that are similar, maybe because the artists success is the indication of a particular
style favored by the general public; the other explanation is that the commercial success inspires
many artists to follow the same stylistic road (there is a fine line between emulation and
inspiration here).

Artist Albums Sold (in millions)

Diana Krall 5
Boney James 1.5
Fourplay 1.5
Chris Botti 1
Candy Dulfur 0.5
Rachelle Ferrel 0.5
Table 3: Number of albums sold

3.2 Community structure

We used the Girvan-Newman betweenness clustering algorithm to find communities of
similar contemporary jazz artists. We immediately notice that there are several artists that are not
similar to any other artist. There are also some very small communities that are isolated from the
rest of the network. The isolated nodes and the small isolated components are immediately
identified by the algorithm (Figure 4). The interesting part is how the algorithm finds
communities in the giant component. As a stop criterion we just eyeballed the network and
stopped removing edges when it felt right. Here is a list of the components found by the algorithm
within the giant component (Figure 5):
Vocal Jazz (light green component top-left corner): it seems to be centered around Diana
Krall
Jazz influenced by other genres like Rock, Funk, and Pop (brown component): this
component has low density
A Contemporary Jazz component (green component middle-left side)
Smooth Jazz (light blue component in the middle): pretty small and with low density
Latin Jazz (light violet middle-left side): this group seems to have high density)
Post Bop (purple component left-bottom)
Another Post Bop component (light green component bottom-left side): practically attached
to the previous component. Together, these two components are pretty large. These two
components should really be only one component. The algorithm did not work very well in
this case
A group that is difficult to identity (purple component middle-bottom)
Avant-Garde Jazz (violet component middle-right): this seems to be a large component, but it
is not very dense

Figure 4 Similarity network with zero edges removed

Figure 5 Community structure in similarity network

4 INFLUENCES NETWORK ANALYSIS
At first glance, even after being laid out with the Fructerman-Reingold or Kamada-Kawai
algorithms, the Influence Network appears roughly circular with many single 0-degree nodes.
None of the group 2 algorithms have positive indegrees as their outdegrees represent the
influence they have on more recent artists.

4.1 Community Structure

To uncover the community structure, we use the Girvan-Newman algorithm in Guess, which
removes edges in order of descending betweenness.

Figure 6-10 Even after several iterations of removing edges, the Influence Network shows no real
sign of community structure

Unlike the Similarity Network, the Influence Network, shows little to no community
structure. Rather than several smaller sub-communities, there appears to be one large community
with many 0 degree nodes that are connected to any others.
In order to determine some sort of structure for the Influence Network, we also did a
hierarchical clustering. This was done using Pajek and exporting the file in a dendogram format.
Figure 11 Dendogram showing hierarchical clustering in the Influence Network

Even without reading the name of all the Jazz artists in the network, we can see that some
more structure starts to take shape after a few iterations when we look at hierarchical clustering
rather than the Girvan-Newman betweenness algorithm.

4.2 Prestige and PageRank

By running the PageRank algorithm responsible for Googles search capabilities, we can tell
which artists carry prestige within the network.
 Diego Rivera Jorge Pescara

Gretchen Parlato

Figure 12 PageRank algorithm shows prestige in the Influence Network

In link analysis, where PageRank is normally used, a webpage will have high PageRank if it
has some combiniation of high in-links, low out-links, and specific in-links from other high
ranking pages. In the world of jazz artists, these artists with high PageRank like Gretchen Parlato,
Diego Rivera, and Jorge Pescara have most likely been influenced by either a lot of people, a few
very important people, or some combination of the two.

4.3 Motifs
We wanted to find the most common types of groupings of connections within the Influence
Network, so we looked at a motif analysis. Using FANMOD, A Tool for Fast Network Motif
Detection (http://www.minet.uni-jena.de/~wernicke/motifs/index.html) , we found a single
recurring theme. To find the motif, we constructed 1000 random networks with the same number
of nodes and arcs as the original Influence Network.

Adjacency Matrix Frequency Mean-Frequency Std. Dev. p-value

(original) (random) (random)
72.917% 72.82% 0.00047829 0.019

Figure 13 FANMOD output showing the single motif and its frequencies.

The FANMOD output describes the single recurring 3-node motif as one jazz artist with two
influencers and those two influencers do not influence each other in any way.
 The motif occurred in 72.92% of the original network
On average, the motif occurred with a frequency of 72.82% in each of the random
networks
The standard deviation from the mean frequency is very close to zero at .00047829
The p-Value of a motif is the number of random networks in which it occurred more
often than in the original network, divided by the total number of random networks. Here,
we have a p-value of .019, which is closer to 0 making our motif fairly significant.

5 1959 JAZZ RECORDING COLLABORATION

We first imported the network in Pajek. To reduce the number of nodes in visualizations we
set the degree threshold to 13 or higher leaving us with 54 nodes. Community finding was
performed with the entire network of 196 nodes imported into Guess.

5.1 Centrality
After importing and node reduction we measured degree centrality, closeness centrality, and
betweenness centrality as with the similarities network. Figure 14 visualizes betweenness
centrality with the size of a node proportional to its betweenness. Table 4 shows the 5 artists with
the highest degree centrality. Table 5 shows the 5 artists with the highest closeness centrality.
Table 6 shows the 5 artists with the highest betweenness centrality.

Figure 14 Betweenness display of the 1959 Jazz Network. Larger node size denotes higher betweenness

Degree Musician
169 Paul Chambers
99 Wynton Kelly
97 Jimmy Cobb
70 Philly Joe Jones
53 Tommy Flanagan
Table 4: Top 5 Degree in the 1959 Jazz Network
 Closeness Musician
0.550389 Paul Chambers
0.490848 Philly Joe Jones
0.461616 Scott Lafaro
0.445051 Jimmy Cobb
0.440833 Wynton Kelly
Table 5: Top 5 Closeness in the 1959 Jazz Network

Betweenness Musician
.39 Paul Chambers
.32 Scott Lafaro
.08 Philly Joe Jones
.05 Danny Bank
.05 Jimmy Cobb
Table 6: Top 5 Betweenness in the 1959 Jazz Network

With the exception of Danny Bank in the betweenness table, all of the musicians with the top
centrality scores play a rhythm section instrument (drums, bass, or piano). This would make
sense because nearly every jazz album recorded uses these three instruments, but several albums
do not use woodwind or brass instruments so the rhythm instruments degree would be higher in
addition to the other measures because of the amount of work these artists get (though the
network seed albums all used woodwind instruments).
Of all the centrality measures, the most interesting is the high betweenness of Paul Chambers
and Scott Lafaro whose nodes are largest in the betweenness visualization.. Both musicians play
the bass, but they have very different degree scores. While Chambers has the highest degree in
the network (169) Lafaro is near the bottom (14). Figure 15 illustrates their connections to two
very large bands. Paul Chambers is connected to a network comprising of musicians who played
on the Miles Davis album Sketches of Spain shown in the yellow colored nodes. Scott Lafaro
(brown node) is connected to a network of musicians appearing on several Stank Kenton big band
albums shown in the blue and grey nodes in the northern portion of the visualization. Because
Lafaro and Chambers have an edge between themselves, they both receive the benefits of their
fellow bass players connection to large but less connected networks. It is likely that they never
played together on the album they both appear on and instead two different recording sessions
were cobbled together to make one album which is a common practice of the era. Their high
betweenness and the general high betweenness of rhythm section players makes these musicians
the people to get in touch with should one be looking for recording work in 1959 do to their
connections to several clusters in the network.
 Figure 15 Demonstrating Betweenness of Scott Lafaro and Paul Chambers

5.2 Community structure

Figure 16 Givan-Newman Betweenness Clustering of 1959 Jazz Network

We used the Girvan-Newman betweenness clustering algorithm to find communities of

musicians appearing on the same album together. The enlarged red nodes represent leaders from
the five albums that seeded the network while the large black node represents Stan Kenton from
the Stan Kenton big band. Three distinct communities form through the removal of high
betweenness edges. The community in blue with the leaders John Coltrane and Miles Davis
started from the albums Kind of Blue and Giant Steps. Because these two albums share 6
musicians between them they form the largest cluster. The lime colored cluster represents the
Dave Brubeck and Orenette Coleman bands. Several of the sideman (non-leaders) of these
albums play together on each others albums when they appear as leaders linking these two
albums communities into one cluster. The darker green cluster consists of Charles Mingus
associated players and the Stan Kenton band. Charles Mingus is a bit of an anomaly in the
network. Earlier we discussed the high betweeness of rhythm section players and this is usually
the case, but Charles Mingus as a bassist records as a leader and does not appear on any other
leaders albums so he is in a community on his own linked to the 7-12 musicians he uses on
projects depending on the musical need. Scot Lafaro is the bassist of choice for Charles Mingus
musicians when Mingus isnt leading so his link to them also links the Stan Kenton big band
(cluster with the large black dot) to the Charles Mingus community placing the Mingus big band
and Kenton big band in the same community. These are also the only two big bands in the
network.
Also interesting in this community finding and the data as a whole are the musicians who are
not represented. Some very famous and influential leaders were playing in 1959 including Stan
Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonius Monk, yet none of these leaders connect to this album
collaboration network. Further work could search how many steps it would take until these
leaders entered the data.

6 RELATED WORK
Managing Metadata [3], written by David Datta, provides helpful hints and pitfalls to
consider when building a robust, usable database. He mentions that one must understand how the
data will be used, how the different pieces will link to each other and what the legal ramifications
are before building the database. For the All Music Guide (AMG), one of the most used aspects is
not the factual information taken from the disc jacket but rather the creative content written by the
AMG staff. This includes genres, influence, keywords, moods, etc.. Users of the site will often
get lost for hours exploring and browsing with the creative content, says Datta. He acknowledges
that there is much more to consider when building a good database but that this paper provides a
good understanding of the basics.
Community Structure in Jazz [2].
Data: The study uses data from The Red Hot Jazz Archive database which stores 198 bands
that performed from 1912-1940 . 1275 musician names appear in the database. Band size average
around 5-10 members, but some very large bands have 171 members.
The authors derive two networks from the data. The first network is a musician to musician
network where musicians represent nodes and edges between musicians are created if two
musicians have played together in a band. The second network is a band to band network where
bands are represented by nodes and edges represent bands with at least one shared member. Both
networks exhibited small world properties and high degrees of clustering. After deriving the
networks the authors remove edges having high betweenness from the networks one by one to
form communities. In the musician network the authors find two communities which represent
black/white racial segregation. The band network the authors identify the same two communities
as the musician network, but they also find two communities within the black musician
community which represent the cities (Chicago and New York) that bands recorded in.

7 CONCLUSIONS
In examining these three networks we learned a few aspects of Jazz musicians that carried
across networks. From the community finding done in all three networks using two separate
methods we learned that jazz musicians work in communities and these communities are bridged
by musicians having high centrality due to their ability to play in different settings and styles or
by musicians who incorporate many influences into their own style. We also learned that
centrality has more to do with a musician's ability to adapt to play in many musical settings rather
than high album sales (demonstrated in the similarity network) or name recognition
(demonstrated in the 1959 recording network). The fact that these characteristics appear to extend
over a period of forty plus years is interesting and could be the subject of further work on
different time periods representing the community.
REFERENCES

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