Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture > Video Oral History Gallery

About the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of four major research centers of The New York Public Library, is the world's leading publicly- accessible research institution for the study of the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Among the jazz holdings of the Center are tens of thousands of sound recordings, retrievable by individual performer (including side musicians), song title, composer and arranger, stored on a computer database; recordings of thirty years of meetings of the New York Chapter of The Duke Ellington Society; thousands of photographs; eighty-four reels of microfilm containing long runs of 240 jazz periodical titles from around the world, currently being indexed; clipping files from the international press; numerous sheet music titles; the Ernie Smith Collection of Jazz and Dance Film; and the personal papers of Alberta Hunter, Don Redman and others.

During the 1990s, under the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project (funded by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, Inc.), the Center has:

  • conducted video oral history interviews with Nat Adderley, Doc Cheatham, Jon Faddis, Art Farmer, Jimmy Heath, Milt Hinton, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Marian McPartland, Coleridge- Taylor Perkinson, Larry Ridley, Warren Smith, Grady Tate, Arthur Taylor, Clark Terry, Leon Thomas, Charles Tolliver, Tommy Turrentine, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston and numerous others.
  • sponsored concert performance programs (in our Langston Hughes Auditorium) with Dr. Billy Taylor on The History of Jazz through Piano; Max Roach with M'Boom; the Duke Ellington Orchestra (conducted by Mercer Ellington) in a program entitled: Rockin' in Rhythm: A Retrospective of the Music of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington; McCoy Tyner in Solo Piano Concert; and an episode of NPR's Piano Jazz with host Marian McPartland and special guest Geri Allen.
  • become a repository for the complete interviews conducted by Jean Bach for her landmark film, A Great Day in Harlem.
  • rescued the filmed outtakes of Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day (from a storage warehouse in Spain); included in this rare footage from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival are Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Chico Hamilton, Mahalia Jackson, Big Maybelle, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O'Day, Sonny Stitt, Dinah Washington and others.