Miles & Trane at 100
Exploring the Davis and Coltrane centennial with Linked Jazz
Matt Miller | 17 August 2026
This year marks the centennial anniversary for both Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Being such prolific and seminal figures in Jazz much has been written about them. But hearing first hand from the people who knew them and what the waves of musicians they influenced have said about them since provides such a novel angle into who they were. Oral histories provide these glimpses and Semantic Lab's first project, Linked Jazz, focused on encoding the relationships in these documents to map the Jazz world using Linked Data methodologies. Over a decade later the Linked Jazz data is still maintained in our Wikibase but recently we've been doing experiments thinking of how to radically scale up the corpus.
This is just a preliminary test but there are a lot of use cases where having a more comprehensive corpus could be really powerful, this centennial being a good example. The original Linked Jazz corpus of course has mentions of Davis and Coltrane showing about ~20 relationships mapped out:
With a new greatly expanded corpus (meaning more oral histories) we have over 600 relationships now available to explore. To explore that data and also to start thinking about how to layer discography data we've built this special centennial page to explore the data:
The site is separated into different layers of relationships starting with the ones closest to the two. You can expand dropdowns to see the transcript text and also the discography information. This is just a test of how this data can be applied in new ways to explore Jazz related narratives. We hope to continue to look at this dataset and see how it can be refined or improved for more uses.
Cite this post:
Matt Miller "Miles & Trane at 100: Exploring the Davis and Coltrane centennial with Linked Jazz" Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute (blog), 17 August 2026, https://semlab.io/blog/davis-coltrane-centennial.html.