2003-07-28

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NATURE: Swing era was a very small world: Scientists, dolphins and jazz musicians are connected.

Pablo Gleiser and Leon Danon of the University of Barcelona have analysed the community structure of the jazz world between 1912 and 1940, as recorded in the Red Hot Jazz Archive database. This lists more than 1,000 musicians who collaborated in a total of 198 bands. The pair find that the swing big band era had the same 'small world' property as friendship networks, movie actors and scientific collaborations. Any individual can be connected to any other in the network by a surprisingly small number of steps.