Hello Montreux Jazz Festival

May 4, 2015

This post is the first of a (long?) series on the Montreux Jazz Festival (MJF), a very famous music festival held every year in Montreux, Switzerland. I am one of the happy few who has privileged access to the archive, currently digitized by the Metamedia here at EPFL.
Disclaimer: The archives are far from being completely digitized and a discrepancy might exist between the data posted here and the real deal.

So what can you tell me about it?

As of May 2015, the database contains 4331 concerts. The first concert ever recorded in the archive took place on 16th June 1967. This year, the festival will celebrate its 49th birthday. The latest concerts are obviously from last year.

What are the most popular bands?

Let’s have a look at the number of concerts of the most popular bands in the archive.

Number of concerts per band

What are the most popular artists?

Here, we can see the number of concerts performed by the top artists.

Finally, and interactive graph visualization

In this interactive graph the principal artists of the MJF are connected if they played together in a concert. A node represents an artist and an edge (link) between two artists is created if they have performed together in a concert. Nodes are colored according to their communities, which is here computed according to the modularity measure. Colors are chosen at random and since the palette is limited different communities may have the same color.

Artists and their neighbors can be dynamically seen by clicking on a node. Zooming and moving the graph around is also supported. If you zoom enough all the artists names automatically appear. For the curious, this plot uses Sigma.js: a nice graph plotting library in the browser. Note: it apparently works best on Chrome or Safari…

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This interactive chart concludes the first post on the Montreux Jazz Festival. Stay tuned for more awesome insights on the festival!

Enroll now to learn how to create art with data.

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