Bento

Duke Ellington Catalog: Bento serves up the “Duke”

Retired art critic and
“Bento Master” Owen
Findsen

Duke Ellington laid down more than a thousand tracks in his lifetime, from scratchy swing singles in the mid ‘20s to full-length jazz LPs in the early ‘70s. His complete works would occupy hundreds of full-length audio CDs. It’s a baffling amount of music to keep track of, however you look at it. But for a dedicated collector like Owen Findsen, it’s heaven. “When you organize all these recordings, put them in one place, you get to see things that other people don’t usually think about,” he says. “It gives you a real insight into his career and his music.”

Findsen organizes his collection using a vast Bento database that contains everything from liner notes to actual audio files. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, but I haven’t been able to find the right program to make it happen,” he says. “With Bento, entering the data and audio files is just easy.”

From Fan to Aficionado

Findsen got hooked on Ellington when he was a teenager. “My brother was into jazz, but he didn’t like Ellington,” says Findsen. “Ellington was the only thing he didn’t have, so I picked it up.” And there was a lot of Ellington to pick up, even then. The jazz master released records under his own name and many aliases. Findsen’s collection and fandom grew. Then the jazz aficionado landed a dream job—arts and entertainment reporter at a big daily newspaper, the Cincinnati Inquirer. He eventually became the art critic and stayed on with the paper for 40 years.

Seven years ago, Findsen retired. That’s when he decided to give his sizable collection some much-needed attention. “We used Macs at the paper and I’ve always been a Mac user,” he says. “I had been looking for an easy-to-use, flexible database and when Bento was released, I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 and purchased the program.”

Findsen set up his Bento database in a matter of minutes and entered info for more than 100 songs in just a few hours. It’s no easy task when you consider exactly how much information Findsen has about each recording. “I’ve included all the general information, like album title and song title, but I also have information about what musician played which solos and how many times the band recorded that particular song,” says Findsen. Add album artwork and a digital audio file and you have one hefty database.

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