Black Creative Music at Dartmouth

Like many art forms emerging from the African American experience, jazz has long had a fraught relationship with institutions of higher education – from its outright dismissal and exclusion from Eurocentric music programs in decades past, to the current acceptance of the music in programs that too often ignore the social and political contexts that informed its innovations. Yet institutional support has also enabled a rich body of scholarship to develop and has introduced generations of practitioners and listeners to the music in an era when some traditional means of mentorship and exposure have evaporated. 

Dartmouth has had a similarly mixed relationship with the music over the past century. Performances of Black music on campus date back at least to 1872, when the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University offered a concert in one of their first national tours. This digital exhibit highlights some of the students, faculty, staff, and alums who made the music happen at Dartmouth. Through a combination of primary source research, interviews, and oral history, this project aims to generate lasting, honest, insightful, and engaging documentation of the complicated history of Black Creative Music (jazz, gospel, blues, R&B, funk, etc) at Dartmouth.

Explore the exhibit below:

Credits and Acknowledgements

Text and images for this digital exhibit were compiled and arranged by Daniel Lin ‘23. Research and writing for this exhibit was drawn from the following sources:

• Research and essays compiled in the Spring 2021 seminar “Advanced Studies in Jazz History: A Century of Jazz at Dartmouth” MUS 45.12/AAAS 39.03, done by Taylor Ho Bynum, Tamonie Brown ‘24 and Connor Quigley ‘21. This research includes oral histories and conversations with Noel Fidel ‘66, Fred Haas ‘73, Don Glasgo, and Bill Cole.
• Alumni accounts of jazz at Dartmouth archived via the Wayback Machine. 
• “The Story of the Barbary Coast,” an unpublished essay by Colin Hancock.
• “Collegiate: the College Bands, their Impact, and their Stories” by Colin Hancock and Hannah Krall, with Bryan Wright. This essay serves as the liner notes to Collegiate by The Original Cornell Syncopators.
• “Face the Music: My Improbable Trip to Saturn (Or Close Enough) with Sun Ra” by Michael Lowenthal ‘91.
• Various articles from the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, including but not limited to the following editions: November 1978, “Jazz Comes to College” by Dick Holbrook ‘31; “We will all make whoopee” by Dick Holbrook ‘31; March/April 2007, “Jazz Man” by Mark Weiss ’86
• John Coltrane by Bill Cole.
• "The Coast Through Time" written and researched by Sophia Kinne ’20, Iz Duan Hurley ’19, and Gray Christie ’20.
• Conversations between Daniel Lin and Bill Cole from 2023 to 2025. 

This digital exhibit supplements the Black Creative Music at Dartmouth digital collection which came out of Daniel Lin’s Edward Connery Lathem ‘51 Digital Library Fellowship. Until now, the history of the music had only existed as a few scattered essays and via oral tradition. By creating this exhibit and highlighting this history, Daniel hopes to show that the music has existed and even thrived at Dartmouth. And hopefully, by seeing how humanity has been, we can envision what humanity can be and reflect on what our roles and responsibilities might be in making that happen – particularly in the face of institutional and governmental crackdowns on humans who are simply trying to be.

This project would not have been possible without Laura Braunstein, Jenny Mullins, Noah Skogerboe, Taylor Ho Bynum, Don Glasgo, Linda Glasgo, Memory Apata, Elizabeth Shand, Jay Satterfield, Peter Carini, Scout Noffke, Shaun Akhtar, Emily Baumgart, Shawn Martin, Kent Randell, Joshua Shaw, Paul Merchant, Ryland Ianelli, Phil Garran, Bruce Wiedrick, the Rauner Special Collections staff, Ras Moshe, Bill Cole, Sarah Sully, Michael Zsoldos, Jesse Taitt, Bethany Younge, and many more! Thank you!

Exhibit last updated: June 30, 2025