New to Newark

As some of you know, since January I've been fortunate enough to be gainfully employed as a part-time assistant to Phil Schaap, Curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center. My Phil-duties are varied, and rely much more on my knack for figuring out new things than on any particular professional experience I happen to possess. The thrust of our efforts thus far has been into the realm of independent Jazz book publishing. In fact, I'm quite proud to announce that our first book - a republication of This is Ragtime by Terry Waldo - is just being released and we're very happy with the end result. I guess I should probably post something more formal about it, but for now you'll just have to live with this link to our sales portal (soon to be rebuilt for the 21st century).

With This is Ragtime now on the shelves, my duties swell to include marketing and academic/library sales, but my core job is still book layout/design/research/production. Our next project is a biography focusing on the early period of Duke Ellington by the late Columbia professor Mark Tucker.

Part of bringing a book (that never existed digitally) back into publication is reassembling the original material. For text, this means a lot of scanning and copy-editing. For music scores this means new transcriptions. For images, it usually involves either access to the author's personal collection, or digging through one of only a handful of nationally-recognized Jazz archives.

One is at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in DC, and another is the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Newark NJ.

And so last Wednesday, with the author unfortunately no longer around to help us reassemble his sources, I set out on a field trip to the distant (mythical?) land of Newark.

For those not familiar with the geography of NY/NJ, they are separated by the Hudson river, but not actually very far apart. In fact, WBGO, one of the biggest Jazz radio stations in the world, is broadcast from Newark into New York (it's cheaper). If commercial FM radio can reach, you understand the limited distance we're talking about.

To accomplish this travel (one-way) required in total 10 minutes of walking, 20 minutes on a subway, and another 20 minutes on the NJTransit Northeast Corridor train. Grand total: $6.25

When the NJTransit train emerges from under the Hudson, about 4 minutes from NYC, you are immediately struck by the transformation. Grass! Space! Sky!

While I got the impression that Newark wasn't exactly the pearl of New Jersey (if NJ has a pearl...), I must say I was struck by how nice it looked in my brief time there. Newark Penn Station (left) is great, and the downtown area was thriving - if only 10% as manic as Manhattan.




Rutgers University is located practically within downtown Newark, so I had another short walk on a beautiful September afternoon - no sweat there. Much like the city in which it is enveloped, Rutgers is a great campus. In the dead center of it is the Dana Library (at left), on the 4th floor of which you will find the famed Institute of Jazz Studies.


IJS is a storehouse for a variety of Jazz archive material, from sound recordings and photographs to physical documents like concert posters, personal correspondences, and even musical instruments played by famous musicians. In the world of Jazz Miscellany, IJS is a very humble but holy Mecca.

My task was to locate 5 photographs from the Driggs Collection which were featured in the original publication of my Tucker project. To achieve this, I was handed two piles of photographs, and I got to flip through them - carefully - until I found what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the effort was only a partial success. By the end of the day, I left with digital scans for 3 of the 5 I needed, and one potential alternate photo to replace another, in case I wasn't able to find the original. That's progress, but it leaves me with few options to find the remaining images - - looks like I might be DC bound in the near future.

So long as I was in Newark - and enjoying the lack of noise, crowds, and general NYC grime - I decided to have dinner and explore downtown more thoroughly. It was really wonderful, though I suspect Newark is only a wonderland to those looking to escape New York. I happen to be just such a person.


when it was finally time to go, I got another $4 ticket back to NYC, boarded a slightly-less upscale train, and braced myself for reintegration into the press of humanity. Newark was in no way like "going to the country" or any other true escape from the metropolitan mash, but it was certainly the type of excursion that makes one want for more excuses to do archival research.

Weber
::(lame) Texpatriot