Black Creative Music at Dartmouth: a new collection and digital exhibit

November 03, 2025

Duke Ellington plays Green Key at Dartmouth in the 1940s

Duke Ellington at Dartmouth Green Key 1946

A History of Jazz at Dartmouth

In mid-2023, Daniel Lin ‘23, a recently minted Digital Library Fellow, received two large boxes of physical time-based media from Memory Apata, Music and Performing Arts Librarian, and Taylor Ho Bynum, director of the Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth. The boxes contained VHS, DAT, and cassette tapes; magnetic reel-to-reels; CDs; and DVDs. Both Memory and Taylor had informally received these boxes from Don Glasgo, a former library staff member who joined Dartmouth in 1974 and in 1975 became the director of the Coast Jazz Orchestra. Rifling through the boxes sparked Daniel’s curiosity, leading him to investigate what related music recordings existed in Rauner Special Collections Library and in Hallgarten Hall, home to Dartmouth's M.F.A. in Sonic Practice. What Daniel discovered among the contents, in numerous other boxes, during one-to-one interviews, and via archival research in the months following, was a rich history of Black creative music at Dartmouth. He also discovered Dartmouth’s complicated relationship with the musicians who created, played, and taught it.

Dartmouth’s history with Black creative music is checkered. Knowing that history in all its complexity is essential, not just in understanding jazz at Dartmouth, but in finding better ways to incorporate creative practices of all types into institutional academia, especially those outside the dominant culture.

Taylor Ho Bynum, Director of Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth

Collaborating with library digitization and digital collection experts, including Noah Skogerboe and Elizabeth Shand, Daniel compiled the research and findings in the new digital collection, Black Creative Music at Dartmouth. The breadth of the collection was made possible thanks to multiple donations of recordings, comprising items from Don’s private collection and other items archived in the Hopkins Center records at Rauner Library. Elizabeth shares how, without digitization and the item-by-item processing work that digitization entails, “this archive would remain undiscovered, and this history would have remained untold.” She adds, "All digital collections aim to preserve historical documents and to make materials accessible to the broader public. Some digital collections, like Black Creative Music, are also important moments of intervention.” A significant proportion of this collection highlights:

Dartmouth’s student-led jazz orchestra, from 1915 to the 1970s
the Coast Jazz Orchestra’s performances and workshops since 1974.

The Fourth Cycle by Bill Cole Performers stand onstage in Spaulding Auditorium after the Fourth Cycle, as a part of the John Coltrane Memorial World Music Series. September 24, 1978

The Fourth Cycle by Bill Cole performed as a part of the John Coltrane Memorial World Music Series, September 24, 1978

Daniel also led the development of a complementary digital exhibit in collaboration with alum researchers, a scholar of collegiate jazz, and Taylor. Taylor is “beyond thrilled to have this assembled collection and exhibit now available on the permanent record, and for students and future scholars.” To “generate lasting, honest, insightful, and engaging documentation of the complicated history of Black creative music… at Dartmouth,” the digital exhibit provides a historical overview starting in 1872, when the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University played at Dartmouth. The exhibit highlights the rise of jazz’s popularity at Dartmouth, its decline, and later resurgence. Black Creative Music at Dartmouth documents “ways jazz and Black creative music challenged and enriched the culture and pedagogy at Dartmouth and across higher education,” says Taylor, adding that the collection and exhibit showcase “the vibrancy and diversity of music that has happened at Dartmouth.”

A digital collection of live performances is a tricky thing: how do you preserve the experience of performed music, rooted in a time and place? What we have in this collection are not only the recordings but also their packaging, concert programs, and even notes from rehearsals. It’s a digital collection of musical remediation, of the traces left by performed music.

Elizabeth Shand, Digital Collections Librarian

Dartmouth's Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, 1986

The exhibit also demonstrates how interest in Black creative music was largely student-led and disregarded in the early days by the institution and its music department. For instance, it was Dartmouth students who invited Duke Ellington to headline Green Key in May 1946. That position shifted slightly in the late 1960s and 70s as the students’ campaign for an African/African American Studies program gained momentum and growing demand to include Black creative music in multicultural studies. It was then in the 1970s that Jon Appleton, a junior faculty member in the Music Department and electronic music pioneer, catalyzed a shift. Jon brought in Black creative music experts as artists-in-residence and visiting faculty, changing the music landscape at Dartmouth forever.

In the late 20th century, under the tutelage of legends like Don Cherry, Robert Northern (aka Brother Ahh), and Bill Cole, Black creative music flourished at Dartmouth, even while the musicians themselves struggled with limited opportunities for tenure and the adverse impacts of racism. From the exhibit, “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 introduced generations of practitioners and listeners to the music.”

Explore the trajectory of this musical form and the musicians who made it all possible.

Black Creative Music at Dartmouth: a new collection and digital exhibit

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A History of Jazz at Dartmouth