About the Archive

Our Legacy

Since our founding in 1975, Kuumbwa Jazz has grown from humble beginnings to presenting over 130 concerts each year, and serving over 1,000 students annually. Kuumbwa (pronounced koo-um-baa) is a Swahili word meaning “act of spontaneous creativity,” and in that spirit we envision a community where all people can experience the joy of music, and understand the value and legacy of jazz as an original American art form.

To read our comprehensive institutional timeline, view historical highlights, and explore our ongoing live concert calendar, please visit the Main Kuumbwa Jazz Website.

The Digital Repository Project

This Omeka S platform serves as our official digital repository, built to catalog, preserve, and share our physical holdings. The active collection contains historical photographs, rare handbills, artist ephemera, and performance logs tracking our deep roots in jazz history.

Our digitization initiative is a growing, long-term project. Our archiving team is continuously preserving, metadata-tagging, and uploading records from our physical storage drawers to this open access ledger.

Funding & Support

The creation and deployment of this digital archiving initiative has been made possible through crucial academic partnerships and community infrastructure programs:

• The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz: Structural construction, configuration, and foundational development of this digital repository shell is supported by fellowship funding through THI.
• InterServer Charity Hosting Program: Web hosting infrastructure and server deployment resources for this repository are generously provided by the Powered by InterServer non-profit support services.

We extend our deep gratitude to these institutions for ensuring the histories of our artists, music, and community remain preserved and referenceable for future generations of listeners and scholars.