Artifactual Echoes: “Jazz” in Their Own Words

Echoes are sounds that bounce off distant surfaces and come back to us in altered form. Like echoes, musical vibrations can outlast their point of origin, carrying voices, memories, and creative ideas into the future, when new listeners hear them differently. Similarly, archives, libraries, and museums hold evidence of the past that takes on new meaning today. Artifactual Echoes: “Jazz” in Their Own Words shows how this works, drawing from the collections of the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS). These collections echo jazz history through documents, photographs, artifacts, publications, written and recorded music, and more.

Artifactual Echoes also reflects another exhibition. Ten years ago, IJS helped inaugurate this building with Records at Play: The Institute of Jazz Studies @ 50. It celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of IJS on the campus of Rutgers University—Newark. This new exhibition “bounces” off the earlier one while keeping ties with the past through the materials on display.

Records at Play examined how and why the IJS collects and preserves jazz history. Artifactual Echoes asks who defines jazz and considers what they have to say. It also explores how the music expands beyond these definitions and continues to change over time. Jazz has influenced and created other styles of music. So the artifacts in this gallery are more than just objects from long ago—they reflect jazz as an evolving art form that draws on its history while it pushes forward and out.

To understand this back and forth, we must hear from the musicians themselves. They offer different views of what the music is, who it belongs to, and whether the word “jazz” should even be used. Instead of relying only on archivists and curators to explain these questions, Artifactual Echoes emphasizes the words and creative output of the musicians featured in the exhibition. They are the ones who create the sounds that resonate across time.