Frank Brown
Currently in the media, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" is a celebrity-networking game, where the objective is to find how many steps link the actor Kevin Bacon with any other given actor: Mr Bacon himself has a Bacon Number of 0; for each of his films, his co-stars are awarded a Bacon Number of 1; other actors, who have not appeared with Bacon himself but have appeared in a different film with an actor who has appeared with Kevin Bacon earn a Bacon Number of 2. And so on. The idea is based on the "Erdos Number" (same thing, calculated from collaborations on academic papers with the unusually prolific mathematician Paul Erdos).
Ed: There is actually a practical use for Bacon numbers. If you were a supermarket with a sophisticated loyalty-card system to record all purchases against socio-demographic profiles, you might do a bit of data-mining through your records to establish, for instance, that people who often buy bacon (small-b bacon number 0, your Ed has to admit that this example is plagiarised wholesale from an old issue of the Guardian science supplement) are also likely to buy eggs (bacon number 1). But then you might discover that a commercially significant number of egg-purchasers never buy bacon at all, but they do buy tomatoes (bn=2). That might imply a potential new bacon market within tomato-lovers who can then be directly marketed: Your Omelettes Are Even Tastier With Bacon!
Following the above models, I declare that the trumpeter Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) has a "Bolden Number" of zero. Every other jazz musician therefore has a Bolden Number equal to one plus the lowest Bolden Number of anyone they have ever played with. Consequently, Buddy Bolden's sidemen had a number of 1, others they played with had a number of 2 and so on. Of course, we don't have to stop with Buddy Bolden but I rather like the idea of using "Bolden" as a generic term. Thus I might say (unsubstantiatedly - Ed) that my Bolden number for Sidney Bechet is 3 and my Bolden number for Duke Ellington is also 3. For Django it is 4. Of course I may discover other links that will reduce those numbers. And since you asked (no we didn't - Ed again), my Bolden number for Buddy Bolden himself is 6.
Ed yet again: so we (the editorial team) can't let Frank get away with claiming great-great-great-nephewhood of New Orleans jazz and the entire basis of American popular culture. I've done it the other way, working out everybody else's Hayden Number: with this rule, anybody who has ever played professionally with me gets a Hayden Number of 1 and so on. Now that shouldn't be too difficult to work out on my fingers, because I've only ever earned a single £25 fee in my entire career. But surprisingly, Miles Davis immediately earns himself a Hayden Number of 3. So work out a few (insert your name here) Numbers yourself. I think Mr Davis would be proud to count us all as colleagues and co-geniuses.