Recordings in the Jazz Collection

The Jazz Collection has close to 10,000 recordings in virtually every format ever used, from piano rolls to digital tape. Recordings were vitally important to the development of jazz, as they enabled it to find a widespread audience, without which it would have died out. The collection has about 4,000 78 rpm records ranging in condition from superb to broken and in date from about 1905 to the mid-1950s, when they stopped being made, several thousand 12-inch 33-1/3 rpm LP records, and hundreds of 10-inch LPs and 45 rpm records. Like the photos, they tend to run toward New Orleans traditional and Dixieland jazz. Reel-to-reel tapes, about 1,400 of them, fall into three groups, New Orleans Jazz Club radio programs, taped interviews, and music. The latter, typically tapes of concerts or private jam sessions, are again New Orleans traditional and Dixieland.

Visit our collections pages on Louis Digital Library for more online jazz audio.