Library of Congress Scholar Report

By Willard Jenkins, Artistic Director, DC Jazz Festival

Last winter I was delighted to be selected as a Jazz Scholar for 2025.  In subsequent weeks leading up to my LOC talk on Wednesday, June 18 – as a pre-concert conversation to that evening’s performance by NEA Jazz Master Gary Bartz – I spent some very valuable hours examining some of the LOC’s vast jazz Collections.  Here’s my report from that wonderful experience.

As a Jazz Scholar at the Library Of Congress, I eagerly got busy investigating their jazz collections assets through their online resources.  Many of the resources within those collections are music scores, composition lead sheets, arrangements, transcriptions, assets I refer to as the science of music side of these great artists’ careers. 

Further investigations of LOC Jazz Collections online led me to invaluable details of the contents of each of their jazz collections, including a very responsive query function, enabling researchers and the purely inquisitive to focus on a single or specific resources in those collections.

I eagerly made my initial research visit to the Reading Room at the Madison Building in early March.  On arrival I was met by my guide on this journey, Claudia Morales, LOC concert  producer, and an invaluable liaison to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude.  After a detailed orientation, Claudia displayed a box from the Wayne Shorter Collection exemplifying the LOC’s jazz collection resources. 

I was delighted to discover dozens of Wayne Shorter’s lead sheets, arrangements, and scores to several of his extended compositions… all apparently written in his own hand!  I found myself humming Wayne Shorter themes  – including from Wayne’s formative days with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, his subsequent Blue Note recordings, and from Wayne’s Weather Report work. 

What was someone like me to make of these vast resources, someone largely untrained in the technical aspect of music?  How was I to report on what appeared to my untrained eyes as sheets and sheets of pure hieroglyphics?  As I did a deeper dive into the list of the LOC’s jazz collections,  having seen the February 21st PBS American Masters series documentary on pianist & vocalist Hazel Scott, my eyes landed on her entry among the LOC’s jazz collections. 

I quickly requested some of Scott’s cartons!  As I leafed through the Hazel Scott Collection it became clear that this LOC residency would be a masterclass experience, even for a non-musician like myself, but someone who has otherwise been deeply immersed in this music.  How could I make this a truly substantive experience, AND have something to report on what I actually discovered during this appointment? 

Initially I examined the Hazel Scott, Dexter Gordon, and Max Roach Collections.  Throughout the Hazel Scott Collection it became clear that Hazel was not only an incredible musician, she was also quite the Race Woman.  I found her essay titled “Message To Young Black People”.  I also found essays she had written about “Brother Malcolm” (Malcolm X), and Martin Luther King Jr. among others.

From the Max Roach Collection I found fliers advertising performances of his classic Freedom Now: We Insist suite  – including fliers advertising performances to benefit the NAACP, and another for CORE.  Max Roach was also a ‘Race Man’ of the first order.  I discovered a warm hand-written letter to Max from Eldridge Cleaver, of the Black Panther Party.

At one point the great poet Amiri Baraka worked with Max on his memoirs.  I found interview transcripts and un-published memoir manuscripts from Baraka’s effort, which sadly never reached fruition.  I was likewise fascinated by a detailed Max Roach budget sheet for a production of his Freedom Now Suite.  I found several very loving letters Maya Angelou wrote to Max and Abbey Lincoln in the Collection, with the salutation “Dear Abbey Max” as though they were inseparable in their artistic quest.

In the Dexter Gordon Collection I came upon an essay he wrote,“Dexter Gordon: On Arriving in New York – January 1941”, doubtless employed by Dexter’s widow, Maxine Gordon for her masterful 2016 Dexter biography Sophisticated Giant.  Going through the Collections of such giants as Hazel Scott, Max Roach, and Dexter Gordon was riveting. 

It was truly a thrill receiving the 2024 National Endowment for the Arts A.B. Spellman Jazz Master’s Fellowship for Advocacy award.  The more I thought about that the more I began to focus on jazz advocacy as I visited those LOC Jazz Collections.  Further examining the list of jazz greats whose collections were bequeathed to the LOC, my eyes fell on the names of those who had not only been great musicians and composers, but who had also worked tirelessly as jazz advocates. 

Max Roach was a tireless advocate for Black people, and the same held true for Hazel Scott.  Another who was a great advocate on behalf of jazz musicians throughout his career was the Record Man, Bruce Lundvall, whose last station in the record industry was reviving the historic Blue Note Records label.  In the annals of jazz, many so-called Record Men, primarily industry executives, had unsavory reputations among musicians – particularly Black musicians – as essentially slave drivers, veritable Simon Legrees.  That was not the case with Lundvall, who had a sterling reputation among musicians Black, White and otherwise, attested to by materials in his LOC Collection.  Leafing through the Lundvall Collection I came across warmly conveyed letters from such giants as Quincy Jones, Chick Corea, and Benny Golson.  I was also inevitably drawn to documents related to Bruce’s experiences recording Miles Davis for CBS Records.

Then I spotted a name on the list of Library of Congress Collections that resonated with me, someone who’d been a tireless jazz advocate from so many directions.  Someone who’d been incredibly supportive of my own advocacy work.  Someone I’d interacted with during my relatively short time as executive director of the National Jazz Service Organization.  Someone who’d been not only musician-composer-bandleader, but who’d also worked his jazz advocacy magic on radio, television, in the classroom, and as jazz presenter.  Someone whose concerts I’d attended religiously at the Kennedy Center, and someone with a great feeling for Washington.  That would be the great Dr. Billy Taylor.  After a few research visits to the first floor Reading Room in the Library of Congress’ Madison Building, I largely concentrated my investigation on the voluminous Collection of Dr. Billy Taylor.  As the late jazz critic Leonard Feather once said, “It is almost indisputable that Dr. Billy Taylor is the world’s foremost spokesman for jazz.”

My jazz radio broadcasting began in 1972 as a student at Kent State University, continuing today in DC at WPFW 89.3FM.  Billy Taylor had worked as a jazz DJ and program director at WLIB in New York City.  I spent 10 years doing jazz television for the former BET On Jazz.  In 1958 Billy became music director of NBC’s The Subject of Jazz, then went on famously as the bandleader on the David Frost Show from 1969-1972, and later as correspondent on the CBS Sunday Morning show with Charles Kuralt, conducting over 250 interviews with musicians, the great majority of which were jazz artists. 

My jazz presenting efforts began at the Northeast Ohio Jazz Society in the late 1970s.  I worked as a jazz advocate/arts administrator at Arts Midwest in Minneapolis until 1989, at which point we relocated to DC, as executive director of the former National Jazz Service Organization, with Billy Taylor on the Board.  So the sense of jazz advocacy parallels – mine on a much more modest scale – were obvious, not to mention both of our many writings on jazz.

The Billy Taylor Collection houses great detail on his radio career advocating for jazz, including his Jazz Alive! series for National Public Radio.  Prior to that, Billy had morphed his jazz piano history book into a radio series bent on demystifying jazz and it’s history for the masses.  The more I examined his papers the deeper and broader his advocacy efforts clarified on behalf of jazz music, its musicians, its audience, Billy’s subsequent influence became even clearer.  When you listen now to satellite radio on SiriusXM and hear their Real Jazz channel you’ll hear specialty programs from such masters as bassists Christian McBride and Marcus Miller, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and organist Pat Bianchi.  Clearly Dr. Billy Taylor paved the way for them.

In 1995 Billy Taylor launched Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center.  That series proved to be a masterful jazz advocacy effort.  Billy engaged guest artists with his trio in a format where they played some and talked some in a manner that further de-mystifyed jazz music for audiences, providing insights into how the music is made and why the musicians make certain musical choices.  I quickly learned that in typical Billy Taylor fashion, this was an extraordinarily well-plotted series, not some seat-of-the-pants quasi jam session with friends.  I found cue sheets in the Collection, among them detailing the plots for shows with violin great and NEA Jazz Master Regina Carter, another plotting a show featuring NEA Jazz Master alto saxophonist-educator Jackie McLean, just to give a sense of the range of artists Billy invited to encounter onstage at the KC’s Terrace Theatre. 

I found the Reading Room personnel to be quite friendly and cooperative, and here I have to say a special thanks particularly to the reference librarian Morgan Davis.  I’d communicate my research interests to Claudia, and later to Morgan, and without fail the materials I requested from the various collections would be there on my arrival.  That was my journey through the Jazz Collection resources at the Library of Congress… for now!