Black Creative Music at Dartmouth

Outside of performances by (all or mostly White) student ensembles, most of the guest artists brought to campus in earlier years seem to have been sponsored by student groups rather than the institution itself, and included some major figures in jazz and Black creative music. Highlights include a Duke Ellington for Green Key in May 1946, “the first all-College back-to-normal social affair after the war,” a  1947 performance starring early jazz icon Sidney Bechet, and a 1950 concert by Hazel Scott, a groundbreaking female Afro-Caribbean pianist whose recitals included both classical repertoire and original improvisations and compositions. The fifties and sixties saw concerts by traditional New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis (1957), a package tour including Teddy Charles, Marian McPartland, Zoot Sims, and Mose Allison (1958), and Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji (1964), as well as multiple visits from mainstays like Duke Ellington (1960, 1962), Stan Kenton (1953, 1963), and Dave Brubeck (1962, 1963). However, the Music Department and university in general continued to have little direct involvement with jazz or associated art forms.

This began to change in the late 1960s. While the school had a tiny contingent of Black students dating back to the early nineteenth century, numbers began significantly increasing in the late 1960s into the mid ‘70s. As the movement to establish an African/African American Studies program gained momentum, jazz and Black creative music were often included in the context of the growing demand for multicultural studies. A Black Arts Festival in January 1968 included a performance by seminal free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor alongside filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playwright Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), choreographer Alvin Ailey, and visual artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Richard Mayhew. A Black Culture Festival in November 1970 featured artists from the revolutionary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians collective, the Dwike Mitchell/Willie Ruff duo (artists-in-residence at the college at the time), the McCoy Tyner Quartet, and Roberta Flack.