Carleton University has received a large donation of jazz collection and recordings from the late Trevor Tolley, a Carleton professor and dean of arts.
Tolley’s donation adds to a previous gift of vinyl jazz records Carleton received from a former Ottawa Jazz festival director, making Carleton one of the largest jazz repositories in Canada. Tolley passed away in March.
The collection was given to Carleton to benefit professors and students interested in the history of jazz. Tolley expressed his desire to keep the collection at Carleton to Jesse Stewart, a music professor at Carleton who helped bring the collection to the school.
Stewart also had the collection appraised. Tolley’s 75-year-old collection contains 7,000 records and is valued at around $200,000.
“The thing with that appraisal though, is how do you put a price on a recording that only has one copy?” Stewart said.
Some records in Tolley’s collection are the only of their kind.
“For someone interested in jazz and the history of jazz, it’s priceless,” Stewart said.
Rachel Cloutier is a master’s student in arts and culture and has been organizing the collection in Carleton’s Audio-Visual Research Centre in the St. Patrick’s Building.
“I think any chance [Tolley] got to obtain any jazz record, he took it,” Rachel Cloutier, a master’s student in arts and culture, said.
“I think Trevor wanted his music to still be appreciated once he left,” she said.
The collection contains many rare and fragile recordings and illustrates the history of jazz music. Cloutier says it will be a useful resource for Carleton music students and professors studying jazz music.
“It’s a great teaching resource for a lot of music teachers . . . and it’s a very comprehensive look at the history of jazz itself, because there’s records from 1917 all the way up to the 1970s,” Cloutier said.
For Cloutier, organizing the collection has been an opportunity to learn more about the history of jazz. She’s found shellac recordings, “hit of the week” records, and other relics of jazz’s past.
“I’ve just really enjoyed working on it,” she said.
Some of the earliest records were made out of a material called shellac. These shellac recordings are rare and highly valuable—valued between $100 and $500 each.
While the collection contains many rare and old recordings, it also contains significant jazz albums from renowned jazz musicians like Miles Davies and Bud Powell.
The collection will be available for anyone to see in the Audio-Visual Research Center—jazz lovers and scholars alike.
“For people who just love jazz, they can come and experience these old records,” Cloutier said. “Most people studying music don’t actually get a chance to . . . they’re too busy writing about the music instead of experiencing the music, so I think this is a great way to see it in person.”
Photo by Jasmine Foong
