20 Years of Jazz Concerts, Heading to Harlem

NEW YORK — The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem has received a vast new archive of concert footage and interviews covering 20 of jazz’s most underexplored years.

The Jazz and Blues Art Box comprises 230 concerts and 96 interviews, all filmed at the International Jazz Festival Bern in Switzerland from 1983 to 2002. It contains performances by most of jazz’s biggest stars from the era, including Sonny Rollins, Sarah Vaughan, Wynton Marsalis and Dizzy Gillespie. Each of the concerts was originally broadcast on Swiss television and is rendered here in full.

The DVD collection, which comes in a nearly-4-foot-tall black cabinet, was donated by jazz impresario George Wein, who served as an adviser on the art box project.

At the Schomburg Center, a branch of the New York Public Library, the collection enters a newly renovated Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, where visitors can watch the videos on either a desktop screen or a wall-mounted projector.

“We have a rich collection of jazz, but it’s all in the ‘classic’ period,” said Shola Lynch, curator of the division. “Here’s this wonderful artifact that shows us, between 1983 and 2002, there was a lot of great jazz.”

The Jazz and Blues Art Box comes thoroughly notated, with separate liner notes devoted to each performer. The box also includes a 344-page coffee table book.

At a retail price of $8,500, the box is not built for the casual collector. Hans Zurbrügg, head of the Bern festival and the executive producer of the box, donated a copy to the New School in New York City. Ed Arrendell, who manages Marsalis, donated a copy to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a high school in Washington.