Jazz Scene in Ann Arbor

About This Project:

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Jazz Scene Omeka S Archive is the collaboration of four graduate students in SI 580, Records and Archives, at the University of Michigan School of Information. This project is intended to grow our skills related to archival selection, arrangement, and description, as well as practical implementation of the legal, ethical, and policy issues prevalent in the field. Our topic: the jazz scene in Ann Arbor, Michigan, between the 1950s and the turn of the 21st Century. 

Target Audience: Jazz Enjoyers, Ann Arbor Historians, and those who fall into both categories

Prevalent and Missing Voices: Our archive has been informed through collections at the Ann Arbor District Library, the Bentley Historical Library, and through local experts in the topic, such as Michael Erlewine. These perspectives are primarily from white individuals and are limited in geographical scope to Ann Arbor Michigan. We acknowledge that Detroit, and the largely Black communities that gathered there, are missing from this narrative, even though there is much influence that came from this area. Due to the timeline and scope of our project, we were not able to dive into this aspect of the scene. 

Record Selection: We divided our focus into two main buckets: community and student-led efforts. In our initial research, we discovered several key facets of the scene, including the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, and an anecdotal story about Miles Davis’s performance in 1981 and how it affected the student organization. We noticed a narrative thread between all these facets - the gradual rise of popularity and excitement around the genre, and its later decline and inability to withstand the economic climate of the later 1900s. With this in mind, we looked for key documents that would work well together in telling this story. 

Archival Concepts: We considered many archival practices in the creation of our archive, including archival representations and archival choice. Archival representation is important when constructing an archive. The way the archivist represents the items in a collection should include the historical context. Additionally, the way items in a collection are arranged and described should be thoughtfully considered so as to not misrepresent those included (Yakel, 2003). Our choices also surfaced the institutional and infrastructural conditions of producing a jazz scene. Yakel's coupling representation and infrastructure has been significant to our choices. In our project, we made sure to include information about the scene before and after our time period of interest, to create a more interesting narrative but also to give important context. We acknowledge that the Ann Arbor jazz scene is mostly white while the genre is mostly Black. We have discovered and included evidence that our individuals among our actors were aware of this tension. Nevertheless, and our representation of it is only one perspective of this specific piece of the jazz scene overall. 

Another critical concept to our project was making informed archival choices. There is an abundance of information on our topic and Ham (1984) discusses how to make decisions about what to keep and what to not. Regularly, we had to rein in our project scope, limit the items we wanted to include, and the topics we wanted to cover. We knew there was more to investigate but in order to tell a concise story, we had to divide the work into sections about the community and university scenes. This limited which items we chose but also forced us to work with the most important pieces of the story.

 

Authors:

Madeline Brookman (she/her): Responsible for finding relevant archival items, uploading them to the site, and entering metadata. Contributed to About page.

Sara Brooks: Responsible for discovery and proposed item inclusion from the Eclipse Jazz collection at the Bentley Historical Library. Uploaded and entered metadata for text items. Created Miles Davis and Eclipse Jazz pages.

Madison Haack (she/her): Responsible for the research into the historical context of the non-student jazz community in Ann Arbor. She created the Welcome and Community Scene pages. 

Abby Sypniewski (she/her): Responsible for research into historical context of the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, digitization of Eclipse Jazz resources, and performing QA on metadata.

 

References:

CPI inflation calculator (no date) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved December 2, 2024, from https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=4%2C000&year1=197810&year2=202410

Erlewine, M. (n.d.). The Forgotten Jazz Scene. Ann Arbor District Library: Michael Erlewine Collection. Retrieved November 3, 2024, from https://aadl.org/node/612504 

Glenn, A. (2009, August 27). Column: Singin’ the Ann Arbor Blues. Ann Arbor: The Ann Arbor Chronicle. Retrieve November 3, 2024, from http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/08/27/column-singin-the-ann-arbor-blues/ 

Ham, G.F. (1984). Archival choices: Managing the historical record in an age of abundance. American Archivist, 47(1), 11-22.

Nastos, M. (1985, April 27). Bird Of Paradise: Ron Brooks' Long-Awaited Jazz Club Is Finally On The Brink Of Opening. Ann Arbor News. 

Police Arrests At Blues & Jazz Festival. (1972, October 5).  Ann Arbor Sun.  Retrieved November 10, 2024, from https://aadl.org/node/195204

Rainbow Multi-media Folds. (1974, November 1). Ann Arbor Sun. Retrieved November 10, 2024, from https://aadl.org/node/198240

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972. (1972, September 1).  Ann Arbor Sun. Retrieved November 10, 2024, from https://aadl.org/node/195099 

Yakel, E. (2003). Archival representation. Archival Science, 3, 1-25.