The following is a guest post by 2024-2025 Library of Congress Jazz Scholar and 2024 NEA Jazz Master, Willard Jenkins. Jenkins is Artistic Director of the DC Jazz Festival. The Library of Congress Jazz Scholar initiative is made possible through the generosity of the Revada Foundation of the Logan Family.
As Jazz Scholar at the Library of Congress, I got busy investigating their jazz collections assets through their online resources. Many of the resources within those collections are music scores, composition lead sheets, arrangements, and transcriptions—assets I refer to as the science of music side of these great artists’ careers.
Further exploration of the Library’s jazz collections online led me to invaluable details about the contents of each of their individual collections. The query function is remarkably responsive, enabling researchers and the purely inquisitive to focus on a single or specific resource in those collections.
I eagerly made my initial research visit to the Performing Arts Reading Room at the Madison Building in early March. Upon my arrival, I was met by my guide on this journey, Claudia Morales, one of the Music Division’s concert producers and an invaluable liaison to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. After a detailed orientation, Claudia displayed a box of works by Wayne Shorter exemplifying the Library’s jazz collection resources.
I was delighted to discover dozens of Wayne Shorter’s lead sheets, arrangements, and scores to several of his extended compositions—all apparently written in his own hand! I found myself humming Wayne Shorter themes, including from Wayne’s formative days with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, his subsequent Blue Note recordings and from Wayne’s Weather Report work.
What was someone like me to make of these vast resources, someone largely untrained in the technical aspect of music? How was I to report on what appeared to my untrained eyes as sheets and sheets of pure hieroglyphs? As I did a deeper dive into the list of the Library’s jazz special collections, having seen the February 21, 2025, PBS “American Masters” documentary on pianist and vocalist Hazel Scott, my eyes landed on her entry among the jazz special collections.
I quickly requested some of Scott’s boxes! As I leafed through the Hazel Scott Papers, it became clear that this Library of Congress residency would be a masterclass experience, even for a non-musician like myself, but someone who has otherwise been deeply immersed in this music. How could I make this a truly substantive experience, and have something to report on what I actually discovered during this appointment?
Initially, I examined the collections of Hazel Scott, Dexter Gordon and Max Roach. Throughout the Hazel Scott Papers, it became clear that Scott was not only an incredible musician, but she was also quite the advocate. I found her essay titled “Message to Young Black People.” I also found essays she had written about “Brother Malcolm” (Malcolm X), and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among others.
From the Max Roach Collection, I found fliers advertising performances of his classic “Freedom Now: We Insist” Suite, including fliers advertising performances to benefit the NAACP, and another for CORE. Max Roach was also a civil rights advocate of the first order. I discovered a warm handwritten letter to Roach from Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party.
At one point, the great poet Amiri Baraka worked with Roach on his memoirs. I found interview transcripts and unpublished memoir manuscripts from Baraka’s effort, which sadly never reached fruition. I was likewise fascinated by a detailed Max Roach budget sheet for a production of his “Freedom Now” Suite. I found several very loving letters Maya Angelou wrote to Roach and Abbey Lincoln in the collection with the salutation “Dear Abbey Max,” as though they were inseparable in their artistic quest.
In the Dexter Gordon Papers, I came upon an essay he wrote, “Dexter Gordon: On Arriving in New York – January 1941”, doubtless employed by Dexter’s widow, Maxine Gordon, for her masterful 2016 Dexter biography, “Sophisticated Giant.” Going through the collections of such giants as Hazel Scott, Max Roach and Dexter Gordon was riveting.
It was truly a thrill receiving the 2024 National Endowment for the Arts A.B. Spellman Jazz Master’s Fellowship for Advocacy Award. The more I thought about that, the more I began to focus on jazz advocacy as I explored the Library’s jazz collections. Further examining the list of jazz greats whose collections are held by the Library, my eyes fell on the names of those who had not only been great musicians and composers, but who had also worked tirelessly as jazz advocates.
Max Roach was a tireless advocate for Black people, and the same held true for Hazel Scott. Another who was a great advocate on behalf of jazz musicians throughout his career was the “Record Man,” Bruce Lundvall, whose last station in the record industry was reviving the historic Blue Note Records label. In the annals of jazz, many so-called record men, primarily industry executives, had unsavory reputations among musicians, particularly Black musicians. That was not the case with Lundvall, who had a sterling reputation among musicians Black, white and otherwise, attested to by materials in his papers at the Library. Leafing through the Lundvall Papers, I came across warmly conveyed letters from such greats as Quincy Jones, Chick Corea and Benny Golson. I was also inevitably drawn to documents related to Bruce’s experiences recording Miles Davis for CBS Records.
Then I spotted a name on the list of Library of Congress Collections that resonated with me. Someone who had been a tireless jazz advocate from so many directions. Someone who had been incredibly supportive of my own advocacy work. Someone I interacted with during my relatively short time as executive director of the National Jazz Service Organization. Someone who was a musician, composer and bandleader, and worked his jazz advocacy magic on radio, television, in the classroom and as jazz presenter. Someone whose concerts I attended religiously at the Kennedy Center, and someone with a great feeling for Washington. That would be the great Dr. Billy Taylor. After a few research visits to the Performing Art Reading Room, I largely concentrated my investigation on the voluminous Billy Taylor Papers. As the late jazz critic Leonard Feather once said, “It is almost indisputable that Dr. Billy Taylor is the world’s foremost spokesman for jazz.”
My jazz radio broadcasting career began in 1972 as a student at Kent State University, continuing today in DC at WPFW 89.3FM. Billy Taylor worked as a jazz DJ and program director at WLIB in New York City. I spent 10 years doing jazz television for the former BET On Jazz. In 1958, Billy became music director of NBC’s “The Subject of Jazz,” then went on famously as the bandleader on the “David Frost Show” from 1969-1972, and later was a correspondent for the CBS “Sunday Morning” show with Charles Kuralt, conducting over 250 interviews with musicians, the great majority of which were jazz artists.
My jazz presenting efforts began at the Northeast Ohio Jazz Society in the late 1970s. I worked as a jazz advocate/arts administrator at Arts Midwest in Minneapolis until 1989, when I relocated to DC to serve as executive director of the former National Jazz Service Organization, with Billy Taylor on the Board. So, the sense of jazz advocacy parallels—mine on a much more modest scale—were obvious, not to mention our many writings on jazz.
The Billy Taylor Papers include great detail on his radio career advocating for jazz, including his “Jazz Alive!” series for National Public Radio. Before that, Taylor had morphed his jazz piano history book into a radio series bent on demystifying jazz and it’s history for the masses. The more I examined his papers, the deeper and broader his advocacy efforts clarified on behalf of jazz music, its musicians and its audience. Billy’s subsequent influence became even clearer. When you listen now to satellite radio on SiriusXM and hear their Real Jazz channel, you will hear specialty programs from such masters as bassists Christian McBride and Marcus Miller, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and organist Pat Bianchi. Clearly, Dr. Billy Taylor paved the way for them.
In 1995, Billy Taylor launched “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center.” The series proved to be a masterful jazz advocacy effort. Taylor engaged guest artists with his trio in a format where they played some and talked some in a manner that further de-mystified jazz music for audiences, providing insights into how the music is made and why the musicians make certain musical choices. I quickly learned that, in typical Billy Taylor fashion, this was an extraordinarily well-plotted series, not some seat-of-the-pants quasi jam session with friends. I found cue sheets in the collection, among them detailing the plots for shows with violin great and NEA Jazz Master Regina Carter, and another plotting a show featuring NEA Jazz Master alto saxophonist-educator Jackie McLean, to give a sense of the range of artists Taylor invited to encounter onstage at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.
I found the Reading Room personnel to be quite friendly and cooperative, and here I have to say a special thanks, particularly to the Music Reference Specialist Morgan Davis. I would communicate my research interests to Claudia and later to Morgan, and without fail the materials I requested from the various collections would be there upon my arrival. That was my journey through the jazz collections at the Library of Congress…for now!