Jazz is by birth an original American art form, a music born of a racial and cultural melting pot in the American South. Quickly traveling throughout the country, appropriated, reimagined, renewed, jazz came to permeate many facets - historical, cultural, sociological - of American life, and has been seen ever since as an art form which the United States has contributed to the world. Now, jazz is also an international art form with a global diaspora that demonstrates its transformation and influence upon the other arts. From gypsy jazz of Paris to South African township Mirabai, Indo jazz in Mumbai, Colonial Dutch clubs in Jakarta, Brazilian bossa nova, Cuban mambo, postwar jazz waves in Rome and Tokyo, American jazz created, inspired and merged with innumerable genres of what we can collectively call popular musics. Jazz and its cousin the blues, of course, played a great role in influencing later genres such as rock n roll and rhythm and blues or R&B. Perhaps even more remarkable, jazz’s history is not merely a recorded one living on old 78s, 45s and LPs, but it spawned a very large specialized journalism. Jazz journals, some 2000 that we know of, document, analyze and debate performers, recordings and the broader meanings of the music. They contain copious interviews with and articles about the musicians themselves, along with articles on the music industry, Hollywood, popular culture in America and abroad. Published across the 20th century, they document civil rights movements, especially in the United States. And finally, beyond a certain number of large circulation titles, large numbers of journals were tied to the socioeconomic racial status of the art. That is, distributed within small networks, but which held an outsized influence on the music and musicians which created it. However, deemed by the academic world to be documents of a low art since the 1960s, these journals were not collected by libraries and were largely the domain of collectors and enthusiasts. As a result, few copies remain of many of the titles. Many journals exist with unique or near unique copies. Some appear to have vanished entirely. All this to say, the essential documents of an art so important that historians name an era after it - the Jazz Age - has been at risk of loss. Now, we might normally think of old journals as simply the documents which inhabit our libraries, sit on shelves collecting dust, might appear in mass digitization collections or with antiquarians. However, in the case I will be discussing today, they are more than that. They have the documentation of a significant international cultural heritage. In this talk, I will speak about RIPM's efforts to preserve the written history of jazz, both here in the United States and increasingly throughout its global diaspora. Our efforts have resulted in RIPM Jazz Periodicals, a growing full text resource of 165 jazz journals originally published from 1914 to 2010, available on RIPM’s own platform since 2019, and on EBSCOhost since 2024. The Répertoire Internationale de la Presse Musicale (RIPM), of which I am the Executive Editor, is a nonprofit organization based in Baltimore, very close to the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. RIPM was founded in 1980 under the auspices of two international scholarly societies to preserve and provide access to the historic musical press - that is, music journals published from roughly 1700 - and to facilitate and encourage research based upon this previously neglected resource. We are the sister project to RILM, with whom we coordinate our efforts on behalf of the music research community. Since our founding, we have worked predominantly on the literature of the Western art music tradition or “Western classical music.” For this we have two large full text databases which contain journals from the 18th through the mid 20th centuries, available on both EBSCOhost and our own platform. You can find all you want to know about us at RIPM.org. So what is the scope of the jazz press then? Well, to broadly categorize, these range from general journals, that is, those which circulated most widely and were written for a broad readership, and those which you might already be familiar: Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazz Hop in France, Jazz Journal in the UK. These titles tend to be well preserved, though previously seldom online. The flip side of this are the numerous “rags” - journals published in less formal means for smaller networks, but which often had an outsized influence. These titles are rarely held in libraries and archives. Naturally, African-American publications, published by and for the African-American public, form an important core of this collection. These did not appear until the late 1930s, and often had short publication runs due to economic difficulties. While we have been able to add a significant number to the collection, we also know of many others which existed - published in Harlem, noted in the black press - but copies appear to be lost. Other journals focus on avant garde art, traditional or “trad jazz” periodicals, others on swing and big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, critical research, discographical publications, titles focused on specific cities such as New York, New Orleans, Kansas City, the entertainment industry, and Hollywood publications, and those which discussed jazz alongside its sister genres such as the blues, R&B, soul, even country and western. Internationally, these categories often apply, but with distinct local themes. So how do we go about our work? Well, it helps to have friends. Much of the foundational work for this project was done with our partner, the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, the world's foremost jazz archive. One of the principal foundations of the IJS is the collection of Harold Flakser, an obsessive collector beginning in the late 1930s who collected periodicals from Harlem to Holland, New Orleans to Novi Sad. Other initial contributors included our partner libraries, including the Library of Congress and other research library collections. However, these runs were frequently incomplete, reflecting delayed collecting and the often maddening nature of serial publications, where issues are frequently discarded or lost. Fortunately, we've been at this for 50-some years, and we know how to count. Even eBay and AbeBooks have been helpful. Our other great friends in this effort, though, have been the rights holders and their heirs. Since we are dealing with material which is frequently under copyright, working with rights holders has been a central aspect of our work. We've worked with families, prominent record producers, well-known musicians, photographers and more. This work has also shed light onto certain aspects of the jazz world. We've worked with rights holders who published while detained in prison, a journal which was published by somebody who robbed a bank when the station they worked for changed formats to country western. But regardless, the opportunity to see one's work or the work of one's family made newly available has brought great joy to these rights holders. Now, approximately two years ago, we began to turn our attention to publications in Jazz's diaspora. As is well known, jazz quickly spread and flourished outside of the United States, famously in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, but also throughout Europe, the Americas, Pacific Asia and Africa. For instance, Mirabai, a genre performed in South African townships such as Soweto, was deeply influenced by jazz, which in turn influenced a generation of musicians who would play a significant role in the anti-apartheid movement. Indo jazz was born from the colonial period of British touring performers and recordings, which, when mixed with Indian musics and traditions, produced something new. With the cultural relaxation following the death of Joseph Stalin, jazz began to be performed and written about throughout the Soviet sphere, especially in Gdansk, where jazz journalism exploded in 1956, spawning jazz and popular musics which intermingled with Cold War anti-Western politics. Racial conflicts, emigration, Cold War politics, modernization and many other issues thread through each of these examples, and many others also. Through our ever-growing networks, we have been able to access important international collections. For example, in Switzerland we have accessed a collection held outside of Zurich and were able to send it to our Baltimore offices in an oceangoing shipping container. In other cases, through the efforts of RIPM staff on the ground in specific countries, we have developed our own networks and identified individual journals and collections. Many of the journals that we have been able to locate and save have been unique or near unique copies. Unfortunately, these documents of a perceived “low art” were frequently treated no different than here in the US. Thankfully, though, there have been collectors who, through wise foresight or simple hoarding, have literally saved the documentation of an important cultural history. So where do we go from here? Well, there's still much to be done. We are working in various countries, building networks and partnerships, working to identify journals, rights holders, collections and more to scan and describe this content. Needless to say, this work is a great joy. Not only are we creating an international research resource for academics and aficionados, but we are preserving the documents of a national and global cultural heritage.