The RIPM Jazz Periodicals are available to access until 31st May 2020.
Please send your feedback about this eresource via the online form.
RIPM (Le Répertoire international de la presse musicale) was founded in 1980 and has focused, until now, on periodicals that reflect the European concert tradition, producing online the Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals with Full Text, and North American and European Music Periodicals (Preservation Series, Full Text). Collectively these databases provide access to near four hundred music journals and to more than 1,150,000 full-text pages.
Just as the development of the European concert music tradition coincided with the parallel development of a related periodical literature, the same can be said of jazz. But while much attention over the past forty years has focused on preserving and making accessible periodicals dealing with the European concert music tradition, the treatment of historical jazz journals has, until today, remained conspicuously absent. With the first installment of RIPM Jazz Periodicals, RIPM brings to the fore this remarkable, often neglected documentary resource.
Historical, sociological and geographical factors (e.g., where jazz was born, race relations, its first performance venues and initial audience), did not allow for the creation of genre-specific American jazz magazines in the early years of the twentieth century. While there are some early twentieth-century American periodicals that, on occasion, treat a subject related to jazz, and, several journals dealing with jazz-precursors, [Christensen’s Ragtime Review (1914-16) and The Ragtime Review (1916-1918)], it was not until 1933 that the first fully-fledged jazz periodicals were published in United States.³ And it is during this period that American jazz magazines begin to flourish, which they have continued to do with varying degrees of success to the present day.
The periodicals in this collections cover the period from 1914 to 2006. With the earliest title being Christiensen’s Ragtime Review (1914-1916).
Image credit: ‘Jazz Saxaphone’ by Sachitha Obeysekara on Flickr – https://flic.kr/p/3gzLXw
Text from the RIPM Jazz Periodicals platform.
Electronic Collection Management 
Hi – I’m really excited about this online resource. I would definitely get stuck into it if I had time at the moment. But between now and the end of May I’m examining, supervising, etc. etc. etc and won’t have a spare hour to look at this. I’m trying to write about jazz dance, and if this resource were available over the summer I’d definitely use it.
Clair Wills
King Edward Professor of English Literature, Faculty of English