Pepper Adams Archive?

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

It occurred to me today that I wrote a will many years ago, directing my heirs to donate all of my jazz and Pepper Adams materials to the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark NJ.  Over the years much of my work has benefited from the Institute. But in a few weeks I'll be touring the Thad Jones Archives at William Paterson University.  William Paterson has an extraordinary jazz studies program that Thad started. Doesn't it make a lot of sense to establish a Pepper Adams Archive to encourage future work on Pepper at the same place that houses the Thad Jones Archive?  There's so much overlap, and so much of my Pepper materials can help Thad Jones researchers.  Pepper and Thad, like Carney and Duke, should be together.  I'll be exploring this with William Paterson and I'll report back about it. Hopefully this meeting will set in motion not just a future home for Pepper Adams materials, but a place of activity about him and his great body of work.