LibGuides: Berklee Global Jazz Institute: Research Resources

Research resources

A list of some of the databases available through the library that will help you find articles and other contextual information for your research

General Reference

Music Online: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
Comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world’s peoples. More than 9,000 pages of material and 300 audio recordings, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world.
Grove Music: Oxford Music Online
Includes the full text of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Features more than 67,000 articles on people and places; instruments and techniques; and genres and styles, including non-western and folk music. Periods covered range from ancient times to the present.

Academic Journal Articles

JSTOR

Spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. With more than a thousand academic journals and over 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full-Text

RILM abstracts of music literature with full text (RAFT) expands and enhances the unrivaled global bibliography of writings on music with the addition of a million pages of full-text content from more than 200 key periodicals. Coverage includes articles and reviews as well as obituaries, editorials, correspondence, advertisements, and news. Full publication runs back to the first issue will be present for most journals.
Music Index

Comprehensive coverage of the music field and every aspect of the classical and popular worlds of music. Featuring digitized content from 1970 to the present, the Music Index contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of articles about music, musicians and the music industry for more than 490 periodicals. It also provides selective coverage for more than 200 periodicals.
Music Periodicals Database

Formerly known as International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP). Music journal resource with more than half a million indexed articles, plus detailed abstracts and full text from 1874 to current, covering the scholarly to the popular.
Diversity Studies Collection
For social science, history and liberal arts coursework, this collection explores cultural differences, contributions and influences in our global community. This set includes more than 150 journals.
Project MUSE
Project MUSE is a database with both scholarly eBooks from University presses and scholarly societies in a wide range of subjects within the humanities and social sciences. Please note that we get very limited articles on this platform. While searching you should limit to "Only content I have access to" in the filters on the left.

Audio resources

Music Online: Contemporary World Music
The largest and most comprehensive streaming audio collection of contemporary world music. It currently provides streaming access to over 1.5 million tracks from 169 countries and 800 labels, with new recordings added regularly.
Music Online: Jazz Music Library
Streaming audio resource with thousands of jazz performers from legendary record labels. It currently provides access to more than half a million tracks, with new recordings added monthly. Covers the 1920s to today.
Naxos Music Library Jazz
Offers a wide range of jazz music, from jazz legends to contemporary jazz in streaming audio. More than 100,000 tracks by over 32,000 artists are represented. More than 250 labels, including Blue Note Records, Warner Jazz, EMI, Fantasy. Please note: we only have 20 simultaneous users at one time so if you receive a notice that you can't login, please try again later.

Helpful starting points for finding resources on jazz scholarship

Current Research in Jazz
Online open access journal designed to publish peer-reviewed articles of original jazz research and provides an outlet for detailed writing about jazz that is rooted in scholarly rigor and is not compromised by commercial interests.
Jazz Studies Online
Jazz Studies Online (JSO) brings together a rich and varied collection of digital resources - journal articles, books and book chapters, video and audio, teaching materials, and an extensive index of outside resources. The interactive archives is designed for use by jazz scholars, musicians, educators, journalists, and dedicated fans.

Interviews

Berklee Oral History Project
The BOHP is devoted to documenting the lives of musicians who have made significant contributions to the music world as well as the Berklee College of Music community. In short, the BOHP aims to chronicle the rich and diverse history of Berklee and Boston music from those who have lived, shaped and defined it.
Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program
Transcriptions and recordings of oral histories of NEA Jazz Masters are part of the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
National Jazz Museum in Harlem
The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, a Smithsonian Affiliate, is home to the widely acclaimed Savory Collection, which includes more than 100 hours of live recordings of jazz legends made from New York City radio broadcasts aired between 1935 and 1941.
Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College
The Fillius Jazz Archive holds a collection of videotaped interviews with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers and critics. The collection generally focuses on artists associated with mainstream jazz and the swing era. Former members of bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and the Dorsey brothers are well represented.
Jazz History Database
WPI’s Jazz History Database has been in existence for more than 20 years and has continued to grow in size and scope offering an easily accessed repository and archive of materials related to the history of jazz. The database focuses primarily on interviews and documents related to jazz musicians in the New England area and most of their content is fully accessible online.

Notable archival collection of jazz and related materials. Note that not all collections have been digitized.

Smithsonian Jazz
Among their many collections, the Smithsonian houses the The National Museum of American History Archives, which documents America's popular music tradition. It holds the Duke Ellington Collection and several other music collections that you can find described on the Archive's website including The Sam DeVincent Collection of Illustrated American Sheet Music containing images, music, and lyrics of American life and culture between 1790 and the 1980s.
The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers
Billed as the world's foremost jazz archive and research facility. Part of Rutgers University Libraries. It was founded in 1952 by Marshall Stearns, a pioneer jazz scholar. The Institute is used by students from Rutgers and other institutions, teachers, scholars, authors, independent researchers, musicians, the media, record companies, libraries and other archives, and arts agencies.
The University of Idaho International Jazz Collection
The International Jazz Collections boasts world class jazz history archival and artifact collections of many great Jazz artists and critics, including complete collections of Lionel Hampton, Conte and Pete Candoli, and Leonard Feather, as well as partial collections of artists like Joe Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, and Stan Kenton.
Center for Black Music Research
Founded at Columbia College Chicago in 1983, The Center for Black Music Research is the only organization of its kind. It exists to illuminate the significant role that black music plays in world culture by serving as a nexus for all who value black music, by promoting scholarly thought and knowledge about black music, and by providing a safe haven for the materials and information that document the black music experience across Africa and the diaspora.
Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University
The Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) is a repository of materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era. The collections highlight popular, religious, and classical music, with genres ranging from blues and gospel to R&B and contemporary hip hop. The AAAMC supports the research of scholars, students, and the general public worldwide by providing access to holdings that include oral histories, photographs, musical and print manuscripts, audio and video recordings, educational broadcast programs, and the personal papers of individuals and organizations concerned with black music.

Regional Jazz archives

New Orleans - The Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane
The Hogan Jazz Archive is the leading research center for the study of New Orleans jazz and related musical genres, including New Orleans ragtime, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, and Creole songs. Among its holdings are 2,000 reels of oral history interviews with musicians, family members, and observers that document the stories surrounding the emergence of jazz in New Orleans from the late 19th century forward. Other holdings include sound recordings, film, photography, sheet music, personal papers, records of the American Federation of Musicians local 174-496, ephemera, and realia. Many Hogan Jazz Archive Oral Histories are available streaming online.
Chicago Jazz Archive
The Chicago Jazz Archive was founded in 1976 to preserve materials on the birth and early growth of Chicago jazz. Over time, and benefiting from a relationship with the Jazz Institute of Chicago, the collections have grown to span more than eight decades of Chicago and general jazz history. The collections include recordings, publications, photographs, articles, posters, programs, ticket stubs, and other ephemera of musicians, clubs, record companies, and jazz organizations.
West Coast Jazz - The Los Angeles Jazz Institute
The Los Angeles Jazz Institute houses and maintains one of the largest jazz archives in the world. All styles and eras are represented with a special emphasis on the preservation and documentation of jazz in Southern California. The Los Angeles Jazz Institute is housed on the campus of California State University, Long Beach. Research requests come from a variety of sources including musicians, scholars, members of the press, teachers, students and members of the general public.
West Coast Jazz - Stanford
Houses thousands of items related to the West Coast Jazz Revival that began in San Francisco about 1939. Collections include the Monterey Jazz Festival Collection, the Riverwalk Jazz Collection, the Jim Cullum Jazz Collection, and more.

Major Organizations & Institutions

Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM)
Founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology is a global, interdisciplinary network of individuals and institutions engaged in the study of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts.
International Council for Traditional Music
The International Council for Traditional Music is a Non-Governmental Organisation in formal consultative relations with UNESCO. Its aims are to further the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music and dance of all countries.
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is a research and educational unit of the Smithsonian Institution promoting the understanding and continuity of diverse, contemporary grassroots cultures in the United States and around the world.

Examples of specific regional, ethnic, or cultural music research organizations

To find similar websites for other organizations, try Google searching:

(region/culture/country) + "music" + "ethnomusicology" or "research" (ex. arab music ethnomusicology)

University collections and other major institutions

Harvard - Archive of World Music
Primary Collections:
Asia: Indian Classical music, Iranian Khorāsān, Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Music, Turkish Classical Music, Chinese Songs
Europe: Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Musics, Traditional Bulgarian Songs, Tvisöngur (male polyphony in Iceland)
Africa: Ethiopian Music
Americas: Rubén Blades Collection
Indiana University - Archives of Traditional Music
The Archives of Traditional Music is an audiovisual archive that documents music and culture from all over the world. With over 100,000 recordings that include more than 2,700 field collections, it is one of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the United States
Wesleyan University - World Music Archives
Primary Collections:
- Navajo music, Shona mbira music from Zimbabwe, Jewish cantor traditions, collections of Iranian, Japanese, Spanish, Shetland Islands, Greek, Indonesian, North Indian (Hindustani) music and South Indian (Karnatak) music.
Global Music Archive at Vanderbilt University
The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. It provide access to sound recordings and images of indigenous music from communities in Africa and the Americas.
Latin American Network Information Center
Links to major archives and collections in Latin American and Caribbean countries.
American Folklife Center
Includes the collections of Alan Lomax, Robert Winslow Gordon and other significant collections of regional and ethnic music
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage