The John H. Baker Collection

As part of its permanent collection, the American Jazz Museum is home to one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of film footage pertaining to jazz.

This includes more than 5,000 titles, consisting of approximately 1,497,000 feet of 16- and 35-mm black and white and color films – roughly 700 hours – dating from 1927 through the early 1970s.

Originally amassed by John H. Baker, an Ohio attorney and collector, and acquired by the City of Kansas City, Mo., in 1984, the collection spotlights many of the legendary performers with whom we immediately associate the sights and sounds of jazz.

The collection features a wide range of titles and genres, including:
• Feature films, kinescopes, and shorts,
• News clips and cartoons,
• Biographical features and educational films
• Jazz musical documentaries, and
• An extraordinary group of 2,000 unduplicated “soundies.”

Soundies are three-minute films featuring performances that were played on a Panoram, a video jukebox of the 1940s that were precursors to today’s music videos.

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