Dear Colleagues,
The Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford University, in collaboration with the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation, is pleased to announce the completion of a multi-year project which has resulted in the opening of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection for research and also the launching of an online exhibit which highlights the content of this historically significant collection.
The San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection documents the history of traditional jazz in the San Francisco Bay Area from the pre-jazz 1890s Barbary Coast dance halls to the present.   Focusing largely on the career of Turk Murphy, this collection was assembled primarily by Jim Goggin and other members of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation.  Similar sub-collections of materials about other traditional jazz musicians were added to this core collection containing items related to Murphy, Lu Watters, and Murphy's side men, such as William Miskell and Bob Helm, some of whom also had their own bands. The collection includes over 650 manuscript jazz arrangements (scores and parts) for the Turk Murphy band, musical arrangements by Lu Watters, and related groups; original transcription discs of unique sound and video recordings by Turk Murphy, Lu Watters, Kid Ory, and other musicians and bands; 218 loose leaf notebooks of materials compiled by Jim Goggin documenting the careers of Turk Murphy, Burt Bales, Clancy Hayes, Bob Scobey and similar jazz musicians; hundreds of recordings in various formats, including lacquer transcription discs, open reel tapes, audio cassettes, CDs, CD-Roms, and videocassettes; thousands of photographs documenting the career of Turk Murphy and other West Coast traditional jazz musicians; correspondence and business records of Murphy and his jazz club, Earthquake McGoon's; and numerous boxes of ephemera, posters, and realia relating to Earthquake McGoon's and Turk Murphy's performances there. In total the collection consists of about 300 linear feet of materials comprised of 155 linear feet of archival materials and 145 linear feet of sound recordings.
A web design team, organized by the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation, worked with a team from Stanford Libraries to create an online exhibit mounted on Stanford's Spotlight platform which uses materials from the collection to tell the story of the Great Traditional Jazz Revival that took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, beginning in 1938 when Lu Watters founded the Yerba Buena Jass Band.  The online exhibit includes videos created especially for the exhibit, as well as numerous photographs, manuscript scores and parts, other documents, and audio recordings related to the musicians, the clubs, and other venues in which they performed.
The finding aid to the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection is mounted on the Online Archive of California:  https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8vt1zt8/
The catalog record for the collection in Stanford's Searchworks can be found here:  https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/6798695
The Spotlight exhibit featuring this collection can be found here:  https://exhibits.stanford.edu/sftjf
We invite you to explore the extensive online documentation of this collection and to share this information with faculty, students, and other researchers who may be interested in jazz, and particularly in the West Coast revival of traditional jazz, and the people who made it happen.
With best regards,
Frank

Frank Ferko
Sound Archives Metadata Librarian
Archive of Recorded Sound
Braun Music Center
541 Lasuen Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
650-721-2142