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This button is from the San Diego Jazz Party, in 1992. The button is a made of white paper with black and red ink covered with a clear film, on a round two-piece metal button with a pin back. The button serves as an attendee identifier to the SDJP. The button is printed:

SAN DIEGO JAZZ PARTY
No 0370
1992

The San Diego Jazz Party (SDJP) is an annual weekend-long event featuring public live performances of traditional jazz music. It is a non-profit organization that also provides scholarships for young jazz musicians at the high school or college level. The SDJP was originally presented in Downtown San Diego by Bill and Beverly Muchnic, in 1988.

Floyd Levin (1922-2007) was a Los Angeles textile manufacturer who turned his passion for jazz into a second career as an influential jazz journalist and historian. His numerous reviews, profiles, and articles were published in magazines such as Down Beat, Jazz Journal International, Metronome, and American Rag. He also authored Classic Jazz: A Personal View of the Music and the Musicians. Items in this collection (2011.3086) were acquired from Levin’s attendance at Jazz Festivals, conferences, and other music events.

This button is from the Queen Mary Jazz Festival in Long Beach, California, in 1980. It is made of white paper with red ink covered with a clear film, on a two-piece metal button with a pin back. The button is printed:

UNITED JAZZ CLUBS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
1980
5TH ANNUAL
QUEEN [crown] MARY
JAZZ FESTIVAL
SUN. NOV.30, 1980
TO
HELP
OURKIDS!
$7.50
DONATION
VARIETY CLUB OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TENT 25

Floyd Levin (1922-2007) was a Los Angeles textile manufacturer who turned his passion for jazz into a second career as an influential jazz journalist and historian. His numerous reviews, profiles, and articles were published in magazines such as Down Beat, Jazz Journal International, Metronome, and American Rag. He also authored Classic Jazz: A Personal View of the Music and the Musicians. Items in this collection (2011.3086) were acquired from Levin’s attendance at Jazz Festivals, conferences, and other music events.

This sheet music is for the song “Hong Kong Blues,” with words and music by Hoagy Carmichael. It was published by Larry Spier, Inc. in New York, New York in 1939. There is an inset image of Hoagy Carmichael on the cover.

”Hong Kong Blues” was featured in the 1944 Warner Bros. romance-war-adventure film, To Have and Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks and starred Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran, and Hoagy Carmichael.

This chalkware statue of American jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) was made by Esco Products, Inc. in New York, circa 1972. The statue depicts Armstrong in a burgundy jacket with white shirt, black bowtie, pants and shoes, holding a trumpet in his right hand and a handkerchief in his left hand. As in many of Esco’s celebrity statues, the heads are exaggerated in size.

The statue was given to American jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald and is inscribed on the bottom of the statue, “FROM PHOEBE.”

This sheet music is for the song “Three Wonderful Letters from Home.” with words by Joe Goodwin and Ballard MacDonald and music by James F. Hanley. It was published by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. in New York, New York in 1918. The cover of this popular World War I song depicts a mother, wife, and daughter writing letters with marching troops and a plane, ship, and tank in the background.

The cover art for this sheet music was made by American artist and designer Albert Wilfred Barbelle (1887-1957). With a prolific career spanning over forty years, Barbelle created numerous works of cover art for sheet music and albums.

This player harmonica was made by the PlaRola Corporation in Easton, Maryland, around 1931. It is a player harmonica with a painted metal body with picture of organ pipes and keyboard, 16 single holes and 32 reeds, metal sprocket, metal handle, and a metal mouth piece. The instruments is marked:

PlaRola
ORGAN
If you can breathe, you can Pla Rola

This instrument features U. S. Patent #1813337, dated July 7, 1931 by Martin D. Zimmerman and Henry Pullen.

Johnny's Machines written by Helen Palmer with illustrations by Cornelius De Witt, and published by Simon & Schuster in New York, New York, in 1949, reprint 1950.

Cornelius De Witt (1905-1956) was born in Germany but spent most of his life in and around New York. De Witt worked successfully in several mediums including printmaking, painting and illustration. De Witt‘s realistic style of drawing created distinctly visual images and in turn children found the books easy to read and comprehend. He was best known for his Golden book on the human body.

Come Play House written by Edith Osswald with illustrations by Eloise Wilkin. This book was published by Simon and Schuster in New York, New York, in 1948, reprinted 1949.

A Graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Eloise Wilkin (1904-1987) studied illustration. In her early years she worked as a freelance artist in New York City, illustrating schoolbooks for children learning to read, paper dolls and puzzles. She was married and raising a family in upstate New York when she started working from home creating illustrations for Little Golden Books in 1946. A prolific illustrator, Wilkin's work is easily identifiable for her adorable images of children with round faces and rosy pink cheeks. It is reported that she modeled her characters on her own family members and friends. Her beautifully detailed settings and backgrounds demonstrate her meticulous research and attention to detail. Her depiction of the idyllic home and family life reflected the post war optimism of the 1950s. She worked for Little Golden Books until 1984 and continued to design dolls for Vogue and Madame Alexander.

A stalwart Catholic, Wilkins was much attuned to the awakening social conscious of the 1960s. In 1964, the National Urban League, headed up by Whitney Young, brought attention to what he considered a fundamental omission on the part of the juvenile publishing world who he accused of racial stereotyping. Indeed, there were no children of color depicted in this vast category of books, but Eleanor Wilkin was one of the first illustrators to include an integrated classroom in We Like Kindergarten.

This banjo was made by William Boucher, Jr. in Baltimore, Maryland in 1845. It is a Five-String Fretless Banjo, with a wood shell with a decorative strip, red painted metal hoops, 6 brackets, and friction pegs. The banjo is stamped:

W.BOUCHER.JR
BALTIMORE

William Boucher was a drum maker and musical instrument dealer in Baltimore, Maryland. He became the first commercial maker of banjos, perhaps through his association with the celebrated minstrel banjoist Joel Walker Sweeney.

His instruments were important in standardizing the form of the banjo in its transition from a homemade rural instrument to urban commercial manufacture. The basic shape and string arrangement has changed little up to the present day. Boucher’s design copied important features of earlier home-made African American instruments: the skin head, short thumb string and fretless neck. He added a scrolled peghead similar to those used by guitar makers W. Stauffer and C. F. Martin, and replaced the traditional gourd body with a thin, bentwood rim construction with screw-tightening brackets similar to that used for drumheads. Boucher’s innovations were well-adapted to commercial mass-production and urban musical tastes and played a large part in the subsequent worldwide enthusiasm for the banjo.

These commercial “improvements” were never adopted by many traditional rural musicians, who continued to make good sounding instruments that were entirely adequate for their musical needs from locally available materials, at little or no expense.

This doctor’s bag, also known as a gladstone bag, was made in Italy, undetermined date. The bag was used by Duke Ellington on his many travels. It is made of black stained leather with brass fittings. The bag is stamped:

DR. E.K.E.

(and has a printed sticker):

DUKE
ELLINGTON