UI’s Berry Fellow once again breaks the mold in 2024

Having started at the University of Idaho Library as the Digital Initiatives Librarian this past August, this was my first opportunity to work with an undergraduate recipient of the Berry Fellowship.

The program funds one student each year to increase the visibility and use of our International Jazz Collections by working on a research project which highlights different elements of the archive. The IJC was established at the UI through the accession of the Lionel Hampton collection and now spans 25 repositories, now the most comprehensive in the Pacific Northwest.

Over the past five years, the Fellowship has produced diverse research in both focus and format. In 2019, Fellow Mitchell Gibbs created a series of oral histories documenting musician Leonard Feather’s “Blindfold Test” radio program. In 2020, Spencer Manning developed a long-form digital essay on music professor and Idaho Jazz Festival Director Lynn “Doc” Skinner, integrating pandemic-era Zoom interviews with archival materials to provide an overview of the festival’s origins and evolution. In 2021, Destiny Angel-Hubble explored Ella Fitzgerald’s legacy through a material cultural lens, focusing on her dresses, shoes, hats and other aesthetic ephemera from our collection. In 2022, Berry Fellow Esther David produced another long form essay on the life of trumpeter Adolphus Anthony “Doc” Cheatham, implementing more than 60 digitized items from the archive which span almost 100 years of jazz history.

These projects are created and maintained on UI’s CollectionBuilder, an open-source framework for creating digital collections and exhibit websites driven by metadata and modern static web technology. A crucial pedagogical element of the Berry Fellowship is to impart archival research skills and a basic understanding of static web design, which can be daunting for students from other disciplines. Our 2024 Berry Fellows Irene Koreski once again broke the mold for what these projects can look like, implementing the UI’s Oral History as Data framework, an iteration of CollectionBuilder that allows for the visualization and indexing of oral history recordings, making them fully keyword searchable.

Koreski, a professional conductor, flutist and vocalist studying at the University of Idaho, initially wanted to focus on early 20th-century jazz spirituals. However, the IJC’s more mid-century holdings necessitated a contemporary focus. After a few roundabouts inherent in any archival research, Koreski eventually found a rare recording from a leading figure of jazz spiritualism, but one quite different from her early twentieth century predecessors.

Alice Coltrane was raised in Detroit, trained in piano with legendary jazz pianist Bud Powell and in harp with the equally luminary Dorothy Ashby. Gigging around Detroit with her trio throughout the 1960s, she would meet her future husband, the saxophonist John Coltrane, eventually replacing McCoy Tyner as the pianist of his quartet not long before John’s untimely passing, leaving three children: Ravi, Oran and John Jr. Her husband’s passing and subsequent death of John Jr. to a car crash in 1982 would inspire Alice to explore Hinduism, traveling to India to study under a guru and eventually opening a spiritual retreat in the Santa Monica Mountains of Agoura, Calif., called The Vedantic Center, where this recording was most likely conducted in 1981.

The recording Koreski selected is a 45-minute interview between Alice Coltrane and fellow musician, broadcaster and writer Leonard Feather. Feather, who had written the liner notes for Coltrane’s “Ptah, The El Daoud,” takes an informal approach, discussing spirituality, her late husband, and her musical and meditative practices. Importantly, all three of her sons contribute to the interview, offering a rare glimpse into their family dynamic after John Coltrane’s death and before John Jr.’s passing in 1982.

The cassette tape was digitized, transcribed and coded into subjects, such as “teaching,” “father” and “nature,” so visitors can focus specifically on their areas of interest or search the transcript more generally by keyword. The recording is supplemented with a longform essay by Koreski, incorporating visual resources to add context for readers. Koreski presented this work during our last Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, interweaving samples of Coltrane’s work to demonstrate its evolution over time.

The stewardship of such unique material by UI’s Special Collections, detailed curation by the CDIL and ambitious reenvisioning by our Berry Fellows is what makes the program such a dynamic and surprising program every year. With its unwavering commitment to preservation and scholarly inquiry, the University of Idaho Library remains dedicated to ensuring that the legacy of this great art form thrives for generations to come.

Visit this exhibit here: lib.uidaho.edu/digital/coltrane.

Weymouth is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Idaho Library.