[Dixielandjazz] Brian Rust NY Times Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Brian Rust, Father of Modern Discography, Dies at 88

NY TIMES - By MARGALIT FOX - January 25, 2011

Brian Rust, a discographic detective who compiled comprehensive guides  
to recorded jazz and other popular music, in the process setting the  
standard for the modern field, died on Jan. 5 in Swanage, in southern  
England. He was 88.

The cause was complications of prostate cancer, said his son, Victor,  
who was named for the RCA Victor record label. (The elder Mr. Rust,  
according to family oral tradition, declined a friend’s suggestion  
that he name Victor’s twin sister Decca.)

Often described as the father of contemporary discography, Mr. Rust  
embarked in the 1940s on a rigorous, deeply personal project that  
continued long afterward as he haunted archives and hunted down  
artists to reconstitute long-vanished recording sessions on paper.

He was best known for “Jazz Records,” first published in 1952 and  
reissued many times since. It is currently available in a two-volume,  
1,971-page version titled “Jazz and Ragtime Records,  
1897-1942” (Mainspring Press, 2002), edited by Malcolm Shaw.

For decades, “Jazz Records” — known to jazz mavens simply as “J. R.” —  
has been the de facto standard reference work in the field, furnishing  
meticulous information on session dates, personnel and much else for  
tens of thousands of recordings.

Aimed at scholars and aficionados, the book has also been the starting  
point for countless reissues of early-20th-century jazz.

“Discography is a road map to the recorded past,” said Tim Brooks, who  
collaborated with Mr. Rust on “The Columbia Master Book Discography,”  
a four-volume work published in 1999. “Virtually any historical jazz  
reissue goes back first to Rust to find out what to look for — what  
recordings an artist made, how many versions of each that artist made  
and where they might have been issued, so you can get your hands on  
it. And he would trace all of that.”

“All of that” is now standard information in discographies across  
musical genres, and it is to Mr. Rust, colleagues say, that such  
comprehensiveness is owed.

“Jazz research at its beginnings was the purview of dedicated  
amateurs,” Bill Kirchner, a jazz musician and historian, said in an  
interview. “There was no precedent to dictate what the nature of it  
was going to be, and what the details were going to be. And he was  
really one of those people who decided, ‘This is what it should  
encompass.’ ”

Brian Arthur Lovell Rust was born in London on March 19, 1922. As a  
boy, he became enraptured by the jazz he heard on the radio and was  
soon spending all his pocket money on secondhand recordings.

At its height, his collection comprised 8,000 to 10,000 records — a  
somewhat modest haul by the standards of truly obsessed collectors.  
With benevolent indifference to the ravages of summer heat and winter  
cold, Mr. Rust stored them in an extension behind his garage.

“He was not a particularly painstaking person in terms of caring for  
stuff, though his mental work was extremely painstaking,” Mr. Shaw said.

As a young man, Mr. Rust took a job as a clerk in the Bank of England,  
which pleased his mother though not him. A conscientious objector, he  
was a firefighter in London during the Blitz.

After the war, he joined the staff of the BBC Gramophone Library,  
where he worked until about 1950. It was there, wishing to improve on  
the scanty discographies then available, that Mr. Rust began his  
private research in earnest.

Reconstructing a long-ago recording session is like trying to grasp a  
fistful of quicksilver. Mr. Rust first scoured record-company archives  
to compile his data; because files were often lost or incomplete, he  
eventually left the BBC, packed a suitcase full of rare European jazz  
records and set out for the United States.

Arriving in 1951, he sold the recordings to American collectors and  
used the money for bus fare, traveling the country in search of aging  
jazzmen, whom he proceeded to debrief. The result was “Jazz Records,”  
originally issued by Mr. Rust as a mimeographed loose-leaf volume.

In the decades that followed, Mr. Rust devoted his life to freelance  
music writing and discography, an unremunerative, solitary but, to him  
and his fellow travelers, deeply necessary enterprise. He worked  
quietly, away from the limelight, from his home in Swanage, a coastal  
town in Dorset.

“Brian lived sort of a hermit’s life,” Mr. Shaw said. “He was quite  
content with his own company and the company of other collectors and  
his family.”

His other work includes “The American Dance Band Discography  
1917-1942” (1975), “British Music Hall on Record” (1979), “Discography  
of Historical Records on Cylinders and 78s” (1979) and legions of  
liner notes.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Rust played the drums in the  
Original Barnstormers Spasm Band, a British skiffle band.

In addition to his son, Victor, Mr. Rust is survived by his wife, the  
former Mary Denning; two daughters, Angela Kidd and Pamela Jackson- 
Cooke, (who escaped being named Decca); three grandchildren; and five  
great-grandchildren.

He is also survived by Brian, a discographic software program named  
for him. “Which is ironic,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview, “because  
he himself hated computers and never used them.”