"What's in a name?"

This question, written by Shakespeare and spoken from the mouth of his Juliet, really touches on an important line of thought. Juliet continued and said, "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." While she was dealing with the Montague/Capulet issue, she sought to downplay the importance of names and highlight the fact that they don't change the inherent beauty of a person.

While nobody can really argue the merits of this statement and, connecting this to music, it's easy to agree that what musicians play is more important than what we might call it, names do tend to matter and often carry weight. When perusing racks of CDs and records in stores, people are forced to look at the names or genre descriptors that have been thrust upon the music listening public in order to find the music they seek. Then we get to the names on the albums. If it's rock music, or some subsidiary of this umbrella genre, scant information is present on the outside packaging. The name of the group, some fancy artwork or pictures and a song list is par for the course. Classical music usually fares slightly better and lists the names of soloists, conductors and, occasionally, some other high profile musicians. It seems that jazz albums, very often, are the only place where you can find out the names of everybody who is playing by simply looking at the back cover.

Oftentimes, jazz fans look at these back covers to see if some of our favorite musicians are on the album. Sometimes unique groupings of musicians are sought out and other times people want to see familiar names—like scanning a