Altman Koss Jazz Archive

Altman Koss Jazz Archive at The Keep, University of Sussex.

The Altman Koss Jazz Archive arrived at the University of Sussex in the form of approximately 1600 VHS tapes, containing mainly footage of jazz performances recorded off-air from television broadcasts. The collection was donated to the University of Sussex music department in the early 2010s by Sussex alumnus John Altman, the celebrated jazz saxophonist and film composer, who, along with his colleague the late Eric Koss, had established a network of collectors who had been exchanging and sharing footage over a period of some years.

As an artefact, the collection bears the marks of a community of avid collectors who put huge amounts of time and effort into an area of study that has hitherto been overlooked. As the title of one of the catalogue attests, the collection is the extraordinary result of the dedicated efforts of a 'video freak'.

This unique archive of live performances of jazz was captured off air between 1970 and 2000.

Prof Björn Heile (formerly Head of Music at the University of Sussex) led an AHRC-funded project on ‘The Use of Audiovisual Resources in Jazz Historiography and Scholarship Performance, Embodiment and Mediatised Representations’, which was part of the ‘Beyond Text’ scheme, and based around research on the John Altman collection of audiovisual recordings of jazz performances. This project was presented at an IASPM conference and subsequently informed the book Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen, edited by Björn Heile, Peter Elsdon and Jenny Doctor.

The VHS tapes were later digitised by the University of Sussex music department at the instigation of Prof Ed Hughes, between approximately 2016 and 2024. The digitisation was undertaken within the terms of the ERA license. The 1600 VHS tapes have been converted into individual mp4s. These are now contained on a hard drive in the possession of The Keep special collection at the University of Sussex where they can be consulted by scholars and interested members of the public. For copyright reasons it is unlikely that they can be shared by online streaming services.

University of Sussex postgraduate researchers, including Edward Briggs and Jason Hazael, worked on the collection in 2016/17 to assist with evaluation and preparation for digitisation. The original catalogues were found not to align with many of the VHS tapes which were in a confused state. Digitisation was undertaken by Steve Wilson for Transfilm UK.

In the summer of 2017 Camellia Boutros, the Palestinian-American singer, composer, and trumpet player, and at the time a student at the University of California Santa Cruz, won a University of Sussex International Junior Research Associate award, to work on the collection in the Sussex Department of Music, supervised by Prof Ed Hughes.  Camellia Boutros produced a series of blog posts about her findings, and began a new database mapped to the digitised mp4s available at that point in time.

Camellia Boutros also carried out an interview with John Altman about the significance of the collection, and reported on the project via a poster presentation.

Due to the history of the collection and the uneven state of cataloguing, there are over a thousand video 'tapes' (mp4 files) which have not yet, or recently, been evaluated. It is likely that there are rare recordings of live jazz performances among them.