The Philadelphia Jazz Legacy Project in Coltrane's Centennial Year

The September newsletter from the Philadelphia Jazz Legacy Project reached my inbox a little before nine on the morning of September 23, the day John Coltrane would have turned 100. I am Harry Hayman, I founded the Philadelphia Jazz Experience, and I forwarded it within the hour with a note that it deserved a post. Suzanne Cloud had packed the issue with announcements, videos and a plain request that people who love Philadelphia jazz show up and help. There was an invitation to free listening sessions at the Free Library. There was an oral history with Dr. Chenet Larose, who left Haiti in the early 1970s and later owned a Germantown restaurant that became a gathering place for the jazz community. There was a reminder that the Project is a nonprofit doing careful archival work. A caption turned out to be too short for what I wanted to say, so this is the longer version of why we back the Project, what it does and how you can help.

What the Philadelphia Jazz Legacy Project Does

The Philadelphia Jazz Legacy Project is a collaborative effort to preserve and share the city’s jazz history. Five Philadelphia organizations formed it in 2018 and 2019: Jazz Bridge, the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, the Painted Bride Art Center, Jazz Philadelphia and Ars Nova Workshop. Their goal was a Philly Jazz Archives, and the Project’s own description says that archive now lives at the Charles L. Blockson Collection at Temple University.

The work itself is collecting. The Project gathers personal papers, memorabilia and other materials from musicians, photographers, club owners, writers and jazz families, and it asks for photographs, manuscripts, concert programs, clippings, scrapbooks and recordings from anywhere in greater Philadelphia, including Trenton, Camden and Atlantic City. Its holdings already include the collections of the organist Jimmy McGriff, the drummer Charlie Rice, the saxophonist Bootsie Barnes and the bassist Jymie Merritt.

Suzanne Cloud is the project director. She is a writer, historian and jazz singer with a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and she founded Jazz Bridge. Jack McCarthy, a longtime Philadelphia archivist with a master’s degree in music history, is the consulting archivist. The Painted Bride Art Center is the Project’s fiscal sponsor, and support so far has come from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Grammy Museum and individual donors in the jazz community.

Why the Paperwork Matters

The clearest picture I know of this work comes from a 2019 WHYY report by Peter Crimmins. Suzanne Cloud and Jack McCarthy were at Margaret McGriff’s kitchen table in Marlton, New Jersey, going through what her late husband Jimmy McGriff left behind: handwritten band arrangements, contracts with clubs, correspondence and flyers. She had kept all of it. A large box of the cassettes he recorded at home was gone, though. McCarthy called that kind of unreleased tape precious, and I agree with him. Cloud could still see what the surviving paper would tell a historian: what it cost to mount a big band, what each player earned, where the band stayed between gigs.

That scene explains the whole project to me. Most working musicians, McCarthy told WHYY, were busy getting to the next gig and never thought about documenting any of it, so when the Project asks what they saved, the first answer is often nothing. Then a doodle on a bar napkin, a business card or the trombone part to a tune turns out to be history. The music is what we hear. The paper is how we know who was in the room and what it paid.

The Project records people as well as paper, and not only players. Its September interview with Dr. Larose, conducted by Suzanne Cloud, Jack McCarthy and Diane Turner, follows a man who came to Philadelphia in the Haitian migration of the 1970s and eventually owned a restaurant in the heart of Germantown that became an important gathering place for the jazz community. It sits with the Project’s other life history interviews on its YouTube channel. The rooms where jazz lives are also kitchens and bar tops, and a great deal of a city’s music history is carried by the people who keep the lights on.

Coltrane’s Philadelphia Years

John Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina, and grew up in High Point. WHYY reports that he moved to Philadelphia in 1943 with his mother and his cousin Mary, joined the Navy in 1945 and came home in 1946 to a North Philadelphia scene that included McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Hassan Ibn Ali, Odean Pope, Sam Reed and the brothers Jimmy and Albert Heath. Jazz Philadelphia puts it in a sentence: he came of age here, found his voice here and built his community here.

In the spring of 1952 he bought his first house, at 1511 North 33rd Street in Strawberry Mansion on the eastern edge of Fairmount Park, with a loan through the G.I. Bill. He lived there until 1958, when he moved to New York, according to WRTI’s Nate Chinen. Ravi Coltrane told a crowd in October 2025 that musicians gathered at that house in those years and that his grandmother made pound cake for them. The house is a National Historic Landmark, named in 1999, and for years its future was uncertain because of a contested ownership history. The Coltrane family reclaimed it in 2024 after litigation and a settlement, and WHYY reports that the front facade has been rebuilt and the back wall is being rebuilt as the house moves toward life as a museum and community cultural center.

The library belongs in this story too. The Free Library’s Music Department says Coltrane came to Parkway Central Library in the late 1940s and early 1950s to hear Bartok and Stravinsky records at the listening stations, and the library says it still has a Stravinsky record from that period, shown with other Coltrane materials in its Social Science and History Department. I like that detail because it shows how history survives. Somebody at a library keeps the records, and decades later they mean something.

Two Free Listening Sessions

The Project is turning these connections into programs. On Wednesday, September 30, Suzanne Cloud is the guest cohost of a session called John Coltrane at 100, presented by the library’s Library Mixtape club and the Project in the Music Department at Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street. It starts at 5:30 in the evening, and the Free Library’s listing describes Library Mixtape as a club for listening to and discussing vinyl records. On Saturday, October 10, the Project brings a free, 90 minute program called Coltrane at 100: A Neighborhood Listening Experience to the Kingsessing Library at 1201 South 51st Street. The library’s listing says a noted jazz scholar guides it and that no musical background is required, and it carries the start time, so please check that page before you go. The Project’s September newsletter names Jack McCarthy as the guide and lists both sessions as free.

A third session has already happened. Jack McCarthy stepped in for Suzanne Cloud at the Fishtown Library, and the Project posted the video of his Coltrane talk and listening session.

Those sessions sit inside a season much larger than one organization. Coltrane 100 Philly is led by Jazz Philadelphia, Creative PHL, WRTI and Ars Nova Workshop with the support of Senator Vincent Hughes. The North Philadelphia History Festival, presented by Scribe Video Center from September 25 to 27, put free installations, screenings and oral histories at sites across North Philadelphia, and staff from the Blockson Collection, where the Project’s archive lives, presented newly recorded oral histories and curated a Coltrane exhibition.

The season closes on November 12 at the Temple Performing Arts Center with a 60th anniversary concert of Offering, which Coltrane performed at Temple’s Mitten Hall on November 11, 1966. Hidden City tells the rest. The student run station WRTI recorded the concert, the tapes were forgotten, a Japanese Coltrane fan eventually tracked them down, and the album finally came out in 2014. A forgotten tape survived long enough to become a record. I cannot think of a better argument for what the Project does.

Why the Philadelphia Jazz Experience Backs the Project

We at the Philadelphia Jazz Experience are proud to support the Project. I started the Philadelphia Jazz Experience to teach young people about the music and culture of jazz and to get them interested in the arts more broadly. My own love of jazz grew out of my years tending bar at a jazz club in the nineties, a story my community involvement page tells. Teaching the music only works if the history is still there to teach from, and that history sits in closets and attics, on kitchen tables and in cassette boxes. Once a household clears out, it can be gone for good.

A centennial is loud, and then it ends. I wrote earlier this season about the Coltrane 100 Philly community grants, which put money directly into the hands of working artists while the celebration runs. An archive is the slower commitment that keeps working after the banners come down. We pay for roads and bridges without asking whether they are exciting, and a stack of contracts and flyers deserves some of that same patience.

How You Can Help

Start by listening. Come to Parkway Central on September 30 or Kingsessing on October 10, or watch the Project’s interviews and sessions on its YouTube channel. The Project also keeps a Spotify playlist called The Philly Jazz Legacy, and its newsletter invites listeners to keep adding songs to a collaborative list of Philadelphia area jazz. That monthly newsletter is where sessions like these are announced.

If you have material, share it. The Project’s Who We Are page carries a submission form for photographs, manuscripts, concert programs, clippings, scrapbooks and recordings, and it lists Suzanne Cloud and Jack McCarthy as the contacts.

If you can give, the donation page says gifts are tax deductible and that a check can go to the fiscal sponsor, the Painted Bride Art Center, with a note that it is for the Philadelphia Jazz Legacy Project.

A hundred years after Coltrane’s birth, we can talk about his Philadelphia at all because people kept things: a house, a tape, a record on a library shelf, a stack of contracts on a kitchen table. The Project’s job is to give the next hundred years of Philadelphia jazz the same care. I would like the Philadelphia Jazz Experience to be part of that, and I hope you will be too.