The Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program

In 1987, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution declaring jazz "a rare and valuable national treasure." The Smithsonian Institution Jazz Oral History Program, supported in part by a special congressional appropriation, reaffirms the Institution's commitment to the preservation of jazz as the most significant musical culture to emerge in the United States.

The Smithsonian Institution initiated the Jazz Oral History Project in 1972 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1980, the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, became the administrator and repository of the 122 taped and transcribed interviews collected until the project's end in 1984.

In 1992, a new collaboration reactivated the project and expanded its scope as the Jazz Oral History Program (JOHP). The Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund awarded a grant to the Smithsonian Institution to create "America's Jazz Heritage, A Partnership of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Smithsonian Institution." This partnership supports a ten-year national jazz celebration including touring exhibitions, performances, educational programs, recordings, special events, publications, radio programs, and the Jazz Oral History Program, located at the National Museum of American History.

The need for an oral history project grew out of the recognition that a fleeting opportunity still exists to record and document the knowledge and recollections of the generation of musicians who created the music we know as jazz. The JOHP also collects interviews with other performance artists, relatives, and business associates. Their accounts, which both corroborate and conflict with those of the musicians, are integral to a history that remains primarily an oral tradition. Each interview is conducted by a noted authority on jazz and recorded on digital audio tape by a professional engineer. The interviews average six hours in length. The insights gained from the ideas, aspirations, lives, and times shared in these stories are invaluable to the establishment of a comprehensive permanent record of American musical and cultural history.

In addition to collecting oral histories in the United States and abroad, the JOHP collaborates with several programs at the National Museum of American History to offer jazz in performance and educate both the scholarly community and the general public about jazz. The JOHP and other institutions are also working together to establish a national network of repositories for jazz oral histories.

Sample Interviews

The following audio clips require the free RealAudio G2 player available from www.real.com/products/player.

Peggy Gilbert on taking up the saxophone and her father's response

Frank Foster on bebop melodies

Jeannie Cheatham on how to run a jam session

Charlie Byrd on the guitar's awkward place in bebop

Dorothy Donnegan on movie contracts and unscrupulous managers