Jazz Jam Sessions is directed by pianist and bandleader James Austin Jr. and feature some of the Garden State’s finest jazz musicians. Musicians and singers of all levels are encouraged to jam and improvise with the professional band throughout the night.
Admission is free, but guests must RSVP to attend. For more information, please visit this link. Follow IJS on Facebook to watch live streams of the jam sessions and on Eventbrite to stay up to date with the latest performances.
Upcoming Schedule
• Thursday, March 16, 2023: RSVP
• Thursday, April 20, 2023: RSVP
• Thursday, May 18, 2023: RSVP
• Thursday, June 15, 2023: RSVP
A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, William James “Count” Basie (1904–1984) was one of the giants of jazz, a global icon, and still one of the most influential, popular, and recognized figures in American music. The Institute acquired Basie’s papers and artifacts in 2018 and is responsible for ensuring its long-term preservation. The roughly 200-cubic-foot collection, consisting of more than 1,000 items, is unparalleled in its size and thorough documentation of Basie’s life and career, as well as those of his wife, Catherine, and daughter, Diane.
Basie family photo album (photo courtesy of the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts).Basie news clippings album (photo courtesy of the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts).Basie photo album with musical performance pictures (photo courtesy of the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts).
The papers portion of his collection is now available to the public for research and enjoyment. The artifacts and the remainder of the collection will be accessible in mid-2023. Please visit libraries.rutgers.edu/basie to access the finding aid.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s telegram to Catherine Basie, 1962.Baseball great Jackie Robinson’s telegram to Catherine Basie, 1963.Count Basie’s telegram to Catherine Basie on their anniversary (signed “Bill”; 1963).
About the Collection
The Basie Family Papers and Artifacts document the vast impact of Count Basie’s enduring and storied career in jazz and American history and provide an unparalleled view of his family and private life. The collection is an essential resource for researchers in jazz, music, post-war American history, and American culture, especially black American culture. It is also critical for scholars, educators, writers, filmmakers, students, and the general public because of its breadth and depth.
Count Basie with his daughter, Diane.
The collection contains extensive primary sources and objects ranging from Basie’s earliest years in Kansas City until his death. One-of-a-kind artifacts comprise approximately half of the items, including Basie’s piano and organ, select home furnishings, artwork, apparel, and accessories. Although the materials cover the entirety of Basie’s lifetime, the artifacts represent the latter years of his life and career particularly well, including many accolades, awards, honorary degrees, and proclamations he received during that period. Unique archival materials never before available to researchers comprise about one-third of the collection, including personal papers, business records, photographs, clippings, scrapbooks, ephemera, correspondence, and audio and moving image recordings.
Catherine Basie (left) with legendary jazz singer Sarah Vaughan.
Catherine Basie’s life and accomplishments are also well documented in the collection, including her extensive civic and charity work (for which she was recognized by the major leaders of the day), her background as a dancer and singer, her social network, and the centrality of family in her home life.
The Institute of Jazz Studies is the world’s foremost archives and research library exclusively dedicated to jazz, an American art form that has transformed the world. Founded in 1952 by pioneer jazz scholar Marshall Stearns (1908–1966), IJS has been a leading institution in the preservation and access of jazz heritage. The Institute relocated from Stearns’ apartment to Rutgers University–Newark in 1966 and is part of the Rutgers University Libraries. In 1994, IJS moved to spacious new quarters on the fourth floor of the John Cotton Dana Library at Rutgers–Newark.
The Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) is excited to announce that it published its 200th finding aid on the Archives and Special Collections at Rutgers website. For many decades, the IJS’s world-renowned collections had many access tools and inventories ranging from spreadsheets to typed lists on binders, reflecting the evolution of archival description over the past 60 years. Since installing ArchivesSpace (the engine behind the website) and having a central location for finding aids on the website, Rutgers University Libraries is moving towards facilitating researchers’ use of all the unique collections that make our libraries shine. This tool allows the user to search across all finding aids within the Institute.
“A long time in the making, publishing the 200th finding aid to ArchivesSpace is a great milestone for the Institute,” said IJS Metadata Archivist Diane Biunno, who works behind the scenes to update the finding aids. “I am proud to have been part of the collaborative effort at IJS to improve the discoverability of and access to our archival holdings.”
These access tools are a mix of some legacy “old-fashioned” finding aids and newly created ones. The work that went into making this happen was a team effort first started by IJS Archivist Elizabeth Surles. In 2014, she developed and led a collections-wide survey to ascertain the collections’ provenance and pin down exact locations for different materials. Building on this work, the IJS now has intellectual and physical control of the collections under its care and is looking ahead to growing our descriptive footprint. These 200 finding aids are only the tip of the iceberg, as the IJS continues to create access tools for holdings such as the William “Count” Basie and Mary Lou Williams papers, two of its most robust and extensive collections.
Ed Berger, 2001. Photograph by Joe Wilder. Berger’s biography of trumpeter and fellow photographer Joe Wilder, Softly with Feeling, was published in 2014.
Tears and laughter punctuated remembrances of longtime Institute of Jazz Studies associate director Ed Berger, during a celebration of his life on August 18 at the Dana Library.
Berger, who died of heart failure January 21 at his home in Princeton Junction, joined the staff of the Institute in 1975. He filled many roles with uniform excellence: administrator, librarian, educator, discographer, scholar, editor, photographer, author, record producer, and label owner. He was known by those who met him in casual encounters and others who interacted with him over decades for his dedication to disseminating jazz history and for his compassion, modesty, and quiet killer wit.
Among those taking the podium in the Dana Room included Institute colleagues: former director Dan Morgenstern; director of operations Vincent Pelote; executive director Wayne Winborne; associate director Adriana Cuervo; archivists Elizabeth Surles, Angela Lawrence, and Tad Hershorn; public service associate Joe Peterson; and collections manager Elsa Alves. Morgenstern, who led the Institute for 36 years, stressed his admiration for Berger’s expertise and many talents that, along with the efforts of Pelote, positioned the Institute to extend its international reputation.
Morroe Berger and Malcolm X listen to jazz records in the Bergers’ apartment in Cairo in 1964. Photograph by Ed Berger
Hershorn produced a slide show of images of Berger’s life and photography, entitled “Triumph of the Quiet Man,” which focused on his family, jazz photography, and years at the Institute. (Among the photos was one of his father Morroe Berger, a famous Princeton sociologist, whose work took him to the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. Ed’s picture shows his father with Malcolm X in the living room of the Bergers’ Cairo apartment in 1964 listening to recordings of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.)
Other guests included vice president for information services and university librarian Krisellen Maloney and Tom Frusciano and Erika Gorder from Special Collections and University Archives.
The long association between the Benny Carter and the Berger families, which went on from the early 1970s until Berger’s death in January, was one their most fruitful associations. Photograph by Ed Berger, 1989.
Musical tributes were offered by Newark veteran tenor saxophonist Leo Johnson and New York singer and pianist Daryl Sherman, both of whose CD covers were graced by the work of Berger (gratis, of course). Drummer Kenny Washington, one of the busiest drummers in New York and a frequent Institute patron, said Berger was one of the go-to guys to answer questions on the history and the music, as did Scott Wenzel, a 30-year veteran of Mosaic Records, jazz’s premiere reissue label.
Berger’s younger brother Ken, also of Princeton Junction, who–along with another brother Larry of San Francisco–provided images for the slide show, represented the family at the event at Dana Library.
Another gathering in Berger’s honor will take place between 3-5:30 on Sunday, September 24 at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where Berger taught courses as part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University. Please RSVP by September 1 by contacting Larry Berger at rsvp@lpb.com.
The Berger-Carter Jazz Research Fund at the Institute, memorializing the relationship between the Berger family and jazz great Benny Carter, will soon be renamed to include Ed’s name.
