The Center for Black Music Research Collection contains materials that reflect many areas of Black music including collections from composers, ethnomusicologists, music researchers, music journalists, and also scores, published music, and audiovisual collections across all genres. These collection guides, or finding aids, provide access to materials held in archival special collections. The guide describes the organization and offers content information so researchers can discover relevant information.
Many musical works listed in these guides are handwritten; those listed with a publisher's name are printed. Please check the guides for more information.
Additional guides will be added as they are completed..
Please contact archives@colum.edu with questions.
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Guide to the Melba Liston Collection
Columbia College Chicago
The Melba Liston Collection primarily documents her careers as arranger, composer, and educator rather than her accomplishments as a trombonist. It contains lead sheets to her own and other people’s compositions and manuscript scores of many of her arrangements for Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, and Mary Lou Williams, among others. One extensive series contains numerous arrangements for Randy Weston, and her late computer scores for him are also present.
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Guide to the Micah Salkind Collection
Columbia College Chicago
Dr. Micah Salkind is a DJ, sound designer, curator, and author of "Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds" for which these oral history interviews were collected. There are 58 interviews available online with 61 people about “house music, the rhythmically focused electronic dance sound born in the post-industrial maroon spaces of Chicago's queer, black, and Latino social dancers.” The interviews are with DJs, musicians, club owners, and publishers and were completed over the course of two years, 2013-2014.
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Guide to "The Music of Black America" Radio Script Collection
Columbia College Chicago
The collection contains scripts from “The Music of Black America,” a radio show written and produced in Los Angeles in 1982, hosted by J.J. Johnson (a Los Angeles radio personality) and Grammy Award winning singer Lou Rawls. The program featured a mix of contemporary and historical music, along with interviews. The donor, Albert D. Cunningham, was the show’s principal writer and producer.
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Guide to the Patsy Ford Simms Collection
Columbia College Chicago
Patsy Ford Simms is an internationally recognized arranger, composer and clinician who began writing and arranging out of necessity due to the lack of choral octavos for the junior high/middle school voice during the first decade of her teaching career. The collection contains original sheet music, arrangements, concert programs, press clippings, catalogues, and recordings.
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Guide to the Paul Eduard Miller Collection
Columbia College Chicago
Paul Eduard Miller was a jazz critic and journalist who wrote from Down Beat and Esquire, and hosted a Chicago radio show called “This is Jazz”. The collection contains typescripts of his published and unpublished writings, radio scripts, playlists, photographs, sound recordings, and copies of his publications.