The Duplicate Men

A census, before the mystery. The database knows 2,941,276 named artists. Among them they make do with 2,646,513 names, which is not enough to go around: 126,949 names are worn by at least two working musicians, and 421,712 musicians — one in every seven — go to work under a name that is also somebody else's. We have counted the 249 artists named Indigo before, and the 83 Medusas, but those are stage names, built for collision the way sports cars are built for speed. The civilian names are the strange ones. This database contains 37 musicians named Mike Smith. It contains 35 named Chris Smith and another 35 named Steve Smith, 33 named Paul Smith, 33 named David Williams, 31 named John Davis. None of these men chose to be a crowd. Each was issued a name in the ordinary way, by parents acting in good faith, and walked into a profession where the name was already on the marquee.

Which brings us to the case.

The two Bill Evanses

Consider the following facts, every one of them a link you can pull. In 1958, Miles Davis began recording with a pianist named Bill Evans — born 1929, and fifty-two recordings in this database carry the two of them together. In 1981, Miles Davis, hiring for his comeback band, engaged a saxophonist named Bill Evans — forty-five recordings together. This was a different man entirely. He was born in 1958, the year the first Bill Evans sat down at Miles's piano. The most discerning bandleader of the twentieth century reached into the telephone book of American music twice, twenty-three years apart, and pulled out the same name attached to two different human beings. Here is the exhibit:

Both halves of the exhibit are drawn to the same scale, which is its own small essay on fame. And observe the top half after 1980. The pianist died that year, whereupon his output improved: of his 4,356 dated recordings, 3,779 — 86.8 percent — are dated after his death. These are the vault's children, the alternate takes and session reels issued and reissued by an industry that found the dead man easier to work with than the living one — an economy this collection has audited before — and the database dates the tape when the tape surfaces. He has entries dated 2026. He has been gone for forty-six years and he is, by the calendar of commerce, having a productive spring.

Thirty-three John Williamses

The name John Williams belongs, in this database, to thirty-three artists. You are thinking of the film composer — 8,601 recordings credit him, which is what happens when your workplace is Hollywood and your colleague is an eighty-piece orchestra. But the graph is obliged to report that the name was already well employed before he made it famous: a jazz saxophonist born in 1905, a jazz pianist, a saxophonist and clarinetist who held the reed chair in the Count Basie Orchestra and worked until 2025, a bassist born 1941, and a classical guitarist with 1,141 recordings of his own. Every one of them a John Williams, every one of them entitled to the name, every one of them obliged to share it. Ten of the thirty-three, the record shows, never made a recording at all — quiet men who came to the profession, found the name fully staffed, and left without adding to the noise.

The six-year-old

The name Steve Lacy belongs to a soprano saxophonist, 1934–2004, who spent fifty years playing Thelonious Monk tunes, and to a guitarist born in 1998 who plays with The Internet — a pair that has already ambushed this collection once, in the Monk coda. When the first Steve Lacy died, the second was six years old. The boy grew up, took up the guitar, and found a working name waiting for him with the seat still warm. Nothing connects the two men — not a recording, not a bandstand, not a city — except the name, which served one master for seventy years and then, without ceremony, took the next.

That is what names are, in the end: equipment. The database keeps every duplicate man separate — each one anchored to his own dates, his own recordings, his own corner of the graph — which is more courtesy than the record bins ever managed. What it cannot do is say who deserves a name. Nobody deserves a name. You are handed one, you do your work under it, and when you set it down, somebody else picks it up.

Method: exact-string name census over all 2,941,276 named artists (special-purpose bracketed names excluded); persons vs. groups by MB artist type. Shared recordings = intersection of performer + credit edges per artist pair. Recording years are the dates carried by each recording entry; archival and reissue-era entries keep their archival dates, which is why a man who died in 1980 has entries dated 2026 — the 86.8% figure counts exactly that phenomenon and is labeled as such. Identities verified against Wikidata anchors (the two Bill Evanses are Q208205 and Q862106). Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 MusicBrainz build.