Officials at the University of Idaho, wanting to help make their jazz history archives available online, were both surprised and delighted at the amount allotted them in a congressional bill passed at the end of Clinton’s tenure.
The university was granted $700,000 out of a $450 billion federal spending bill. Carl Cox Wait, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, commented on the generous gift, saying “we ought to be more frugal.” But Marty Peterson, the university president’s assisant, says that the musical scores, recordings, instruments, and papers of great jazz musicians “…are every bit as much a national treasure as collections in such places as the National Archives in Washington, DC.”
The allocation points to the future, indicating what might become a trend: the government-funded preservation of American history at countless, 24-hour Internet museums.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro