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Jazz Tales from Jazz Legends: Oral Histories from the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College by Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Fillius Jazz Archive and lecturer in music, was recently awarded a certificate of merit by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC).

The low and full sound of a bass guitar was accompanied by smooth chord progressions on the piano at the Little Pub on Oct. 16, as alumnus Grant Zubritsky ’07 played alongside Hamilton’s jazz combo, led by Fillius Jazz Archive Director Monk Rowe.

Having attracted more than 9,000 students to his first offering of Jazz: the Music, the Stories, the Players, Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive and Lecturer in Music Performance Monk Rowe will again offer this free six-week online program beginning on Sept. 6 via the edX platform. The course is designed to appeal equally to the casual listener, the avid fan and the proficient jazz player, according to Rowe. 

Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive and lecturer in music performance, recently presented two programs at the International Society for Music Educators conference in Glasgow, Scotland. He also conducted interviews with Swedish jazz pianist Hakan Rydin and British guitarist Laurence Juber to add to the Jazz Archive.

“I'm playing this out the window to the monkeys... The monkeys are still there...so you didn't scare them off. I thought they only liked classical music,” exclaimed a Costa Rican listener to the livestreamed jazz program delivered by Fillius Jazz Archive Director Monk Rowe as part of his edX course on March 6. More than 600 listeners from dozens of countries and states joined in with those in the college’s packed Little Pub to hear Rowe and his fellow musicians play and talk about jazz.

On the heels of two successful edX online course offerings in 2015, Hamilton will debut a third course, Jazz: the Music, the Stories, the Players, presented by Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive and Lecturer in Music Performance Monk Rowe beginning on Feb. 2.

Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Milt and Nelma Fillius Jazz Archive, presented “The Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College: Preserving Words and Images” on Oct. 16 at the fall meeting of the New York State/Ontario Chapter of the Music Library Association (NYS/O MLA).

Jazz Tales from Jazz Legends – a distillation of more than 325 interviews recorded over two decades with jazz greats, their band members and critics– has just been released by Couper Press. Written by Director of the Fillius Jazz Archive Monk Rowe, the book includes interviews with Dave Brubeck, Steve Allen, Marian McPartland, Joe Williams, Bela Fleck, among many others, as well as with former members of bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Stan Kenton. 

Legendary jazz trumpeter and Hamilton honorary degree recipient Clark Terry H’95 died on Feb. 21. The focus of a recent popular documentary, "Keep On Keepin’ On,” Terry recorded an interview about his life as a musician with another jazz great, singer Joe Williams, in 1995 for the Hamilton Fillius Jazz Archive. The complete interview may be heard here, preceded by a minute of Terry playing his trumpet.

To celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), each day in April Hamilton’s Fillius Jazz Archive has featured an artist on the news site along with that individual’s archived audio interview. Since 2012, April 30 has been designated International Jazz Day by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). To wrap up JAM, and in celebration of International Jazz Day, four artists are featured today: Eiji Kitamura, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Annie Ross and Keith Ingham.