Photographs, 1951 - 1959

Highlights include 25 photographs from Music Inn, some by noted photographer Clemens Kalisher (who as of 2012 when this collection was processed stilled maintained a studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts), as well as other programs at Newport Jazz Festival in the mid to late 1950s and the New School for Social Research. Stearns's negatives and prints provide an inside view of the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra's overwhelmingly successful spring 1956 tour of the Near East, the first such undertaking by the U.S. Department of State to use jazz as a diplomatic tool in the midst of the cold war.