Rast, Brian (music critic)

Brian Arthur Lowell Rast ( born Brian Arthur Lovell Rust ; March 19, 1922 , London - January 5, 2011 , Swanage , Dorset ) is a British music critic and bibliographer, specialist in jazz discography.

Initially, he worked as a bank clerk, during the Second World War he refused the conscientious army service and was engaged in fire fighting during the bombing of London. Over the years, collecting a collection of jazz records. At the turn of 1950-1960. played drums in Original Barnstormers Spasm Band , which played skiffle music.

In 1945-1960 worked in the BBC music library, in 1948 he made his debut as a music critic on the pages of Gramophone magazine. In 1951 he traveled to the United States in order to replenish on-site his data on early jazz discography, gathered from archives, but not sufficiently complete and accurate. The result of this work was the directory “Jazz Records. 1897-1942 ”( English Jazz Records 1897-1942 ), first published in 1961 and withstood many updated editions (the latest version, two volumes with a total volume of 1971 pages, was published in 2002 under the editorship of Malcolm Shaw). Other reference books prepared by Rast were Discography of American Dance Ensembles, 1917-1942 ( The American Dance Band Discography 1917-1942 ; 1975), British Music Hall on Records ( British Music Hall on Record ; 1979), Discography of Historical Cylinder and Long-Play Records ( Discography of Historical Records on Cylinders and 78s ; 1979). The search for Rast, according to experts, dates back not only to the modern set of ideas about the history of jazz sound recording, but also to many of the latest reprints of records that connoisseurs and experts learned from his work ^[1] .

Brian Rast named the computer program that forms the database of musical audio recordings ^[2] .