Monterey Jazz Festival Archive Collection

Inaugural program, 1958

About the Collection

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Jimmy Lyons and Ralph J. Gleason brought jazz to Monterey, California for the first time in 1958.  Dizzy Gillespie was there to start things off with "The Star Spangled Banner." This, and many subsequent performances from the past 50 years of the Monterey Jazz Festival, are preserved in the Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford University. The first festival featured such notable figures as Louis Armstrong, Velma Middleton, Harry James, Dave Brubeck, Billie Holiday, Paul Desmond and John Lewis. Over the years many major jazz musicians have performed there, and works by George Duke, Gil Evans, Jimmy Guiffre, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and others have been premiered at the Festival.

Since 1984 the Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford University has served as the archival repository for sound and video recordings from the Monterey Jazz Festival. The collection is more than 130 linear feet in size, consisting of nearly 1400 sound recordings and 500 moving image items, as well as supporting paper-based materials, such as festival programs and posters. To supplement this very important collection, and to support the jazz program at Stanford, the Archive has built up a significant collection of private and commercial jazz recordings, a comprehensive selection of discographies, and other reference materials.

Preservation

The preservation of the Monterey Jazz Festival Collection held by the Archive of Recorded Sound is a multi-year, multi-part project initiated jointly by Stanford University Libraries and the Monterey Jazz Festival.  The goal of the project is to preserve 775 original audio and 300 video recordings in the collection, which documents the world's longest continuously running jazz festival through recorded performances of the most significant jazz musicians from the second half of the twentieth century forward. This project is supported in part by awards from the Grammy Foundation, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Save America's Treasures program, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Over $350,000 in grant funds have been awarded to digitize the fragile, aging and degrading media and to improve the storage of the original tapes.  Databases containing in-depth information on the recordings' contents and high-quality listening copies have been created to provide unprecedented access to the collection.

Access

If one is interested in listening to materials from the collection, please contact the Archive Operations Manager to check on availability of the material as well as to schedule a listening appointment.