OUR VISION
The Scottish Jazz Archive exists to ensure Scotland’s jazz history is not lost to time but is actively used.
Our vision is to create story-led community archive that anyone can explore, learn from, and contribute to.
We will preserve and digitise the materials and oral histories that tell Scotland’s jazz stories, and make them available as a public resource.
In doing so, we honour the communities that built this heritage and support the next generation to carry it forward.
A SMALL CHARITY
WITH BIG AMBITIONS
WHO WE ARE
The Scottish Jazz Archive (SJA) was established as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) in 2019 for the twin purposes of:
Advancing heritage by identifying, collecting, cataloguing and digitising materials, and the production of filmed oral histories relating to the history of jazz in Scotland through the preservation and curation of tangible cultural artefacts foundational to current practices in the field.
Advancing education by raising awareness and providing access to the history of jazz in Scotland through a permanent and publicly accessible online educational resource and through public events including talks and exhibitions.
As a small organisation, with no physical home, our focus is to engage with the jazz community across Scotland and develop a digital living archive to document Scotland’s long and active relationship with jazz.
The Scottish Jazz Archive captures stories, memories and materials that help keep the music and memories of its communities alive, offering future generations a deeper understanding of Scotland’s place in jazz history and a context for historically informed sustainability.
Equally, we are dedicated to archiving today for tomorrow by capturing a representative range of diverse engagement with jazz in contemporary Scotland, paving the way for future archivists.
OUR PEOPLE
Prof Haftor Medbøe - Chair
Haftor is Professor Emeritus of Jazz & Improvised Music at Edinburgh Napier University where he gained his doctorate in 2013. His internationally published research focuses on communities of practice and artistic research. As a musician, he is an active member of the Scottish jazz scene.
Norrie Thomson – Treasurer
Norrie is a life-long jazz enthusiast who following retirement from Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, was logistics manager for Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival and co-founder of Edinburgh Jazz & Jive Club.
Sonny Scott – Secretary
Sonny is currently completing a Master’s by Research focussing on understandings of archives as dynamic entities of co-production while juggling a career as a touring musician.
Sue McKenzie - Trustee
Sue is a highly regarded musician whose oeuvre spans contemporary classical, jazz and improvised music. She is director of the Scottish Saxophone Academy and Edinburgh Napier University Jazz Summer School and tours her work internationally.
Dr Marian Jago - Trustee
Marian is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Edinburgh, where her research interests include jazz studies, ethnography, and American popular music of the mid-20th century. Her research has been published in Jazz Perspectives, Jazz Research Journal, and the Journal of Jazz Studies.
Dr Pedro Cravinho - Trustee
Pedro is a Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, and the Keeper of the Archives at the Faculty of Arts, Design & Media. He researches and writes about jazz, media, and archives, with primary focus on the twentieth-century jazz diaspora social, political and musical history.
Graham Blamire - Trustee
Graham is a central figure in the Edinburgh traditional jazz scene both as a bassist and a chronicler of its bands and musicians. His 2012 book, Edinburgh Jazz Enlightenment, is the key reference text detailing jazz in the capital city and he has contributed a range of additionally valuable resources through the SJA.
In November 2017, an event was held in association with Scotland's Sounds (National Library of Scotland) at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh at which we welcomed over 100 jazz musicians and members of the public to present the idea of a national archive for jazz in Scotland.
In the months following, we began to identify funding for what we believe to be a vitally important undertaking: namely, the identification, digitisation and cataloguing of Scotland's rich history of jazz. We have taken the first modest steps in capturing the stories of some of the music's pioneers in a bid to preserve their experiences for coming generations of musicians and fans alike. Examples of these filmed interviews are available on this blog.
Our aim, support permitting, is to document through interviews, text, photography and audio, the breadth of Scotland's long and active relationship with jazz and to present the stories of those who served to create the foundations on which the current scene is built. This site has been established to initially present a small sample of materials already originated or collected by the team and to raise awareness and support for the project as it takes shape and gathers momentum.
We operate a strict 'take-down' policy and, therefore, if you believe that any site-content represents a violation of copyright please make us aware via the website contact form and it will be removed forthwith. If you have materials that might be of interest to the archive team, we would be delighted to hear from you.
Please follow us on FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram to keep up to date with developments.
Fionna Duncan - Photographed by Allan Shedlock