The Jazz Institute at 50
Preserving an American art form
Archived article from Oct 7, 2002
By Carla Capizzi
Jazz has rightfully been described as a national treasure, and one of the primary keepers of that treasure is the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) on the Newark campus.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, IJS will hold a gala Wednesday, Oct. 23, that will include a jazz performance and a slide presentation on the history of IJS. The night will be capped off by a "jazz jam." The gala will be held at the Newark Club from 6 to 9 p.m.; tickets are $50. For more information, call ext. 5595 or 5180.
Jazz scholar Marshall Stearns founded IJS in 1952 by transforming his personal jazz collection into an archive in his Greenwich Village apartment. In 1967, a year after Stearns' death, the IJS came to the Newark campus. The "institute" back then was little more than boxes of records, periodicals, correspondence, a small number of photos, some sheet music, a few instruments and antique phonographs, and .several hundred books about jazz and related music.
During its years at Rutgers, the IJS grew tenfold into the foremost jazz archives in the world, so comprehensive and well-organized that television documentary-maker Ken Burns used both the IJS and its director, noted jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern, as resources for making his PBS series "Jazz."
Gary Giddens of the Village Voice once said of the IJS: "In jazz, it has no rivals," while jazz biographer Stuart Nicholson called the IJS "unquestionably the most important resource in jazz ... one of the Seven Wonders of the World."
Currently housed on the fourth floor of the Dana Library, the collection encompasses more than 100,000 commercial and non-commercial sound recordings — including piano rolls and phonograph cylinders — music manuscripts, films, videos, memorabilia such as diaries and instruments, 30,000 photos, books, periodicals, the Jazz Oral History Project and 100 archival collections, among them the collections of Mary Lou Williams and Benny Carter.
The master's program in jazz history and research — the first in the nation — uses the IJS as its key research resource, while the institute's Jazz Research Roundtables and weekly WBGO radio broadcast, "Jazz From the Archives," extend its outreach into the greater community of music lovers.
The institute is now moving forward with plans to digitize its collections to further preserve its extensive holdings and to make them available to wider audiences through interactive multimedia Web sites.
|
