My friend Jen Wilson, who has died aged 78, was the founder of Jazz Heritage Wales, a multimedia collection of material that maintains a particular focus on the role of women in jazz.
Jen set up the collection in 1986. After periods when it was housed by Swansea council and then in a privately owned building, it was moved in 2008 to its current home at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
Among the key elements of the collection are a series of oral history recordings that Jen made with a number of women in jazz and which have been used by BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Lost Women of British Jazz programme, as well as the BBC One documentary My Name Is Ottilie, about the Northern Irish jazz and blues singer Ottilie Patterson. The recordings are also held in the British Library’s sound archive.
Jen’s book, Freedom Music: Wales, Emancipation and Jazz 1850-1950, published in 2019, emphasised the strong links between emerging African American music in the US and the development of jazz in mainstream popular culture in Wales, as well as the contribution of Welsh women to the music and its sociocultural heritage. She helped the playwright Alan Plater with research that led to a series of three plays, The Devil’s Music, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2001. In 2017 she received the St David award for culture.
Jen was born in Swansea, south Wales, to Haulwen (nee Davies), who worked in her family’s newsagent shop, and her husband, Bill Evans, a bus driver. She left Swansea secondary technical school for girls at 16, after which she became a secretary at the British Anthracite Company in Swansea (1960-68), and married Mike Wilson in 1965. After a brief period working in London as a care worker, Jen spent the early 1970s as a stay-at-home mother in Newcastle before becoming an auxiliary nurse at Mount Pleasant hospital back in Swansea, staying there until the late 80s.
She then took on a job as an administrator in Swansea University’s adult education department, which was when she started on the oral history interviews that became the backbone of the Jazz Heritage Wales collection. She retired from Swansea University in 1996.
Once Jazz Heritage Wales had become fully established, University of Wales Trinity Saint David made Jen an honorary professor in recognition of her expertise.
She is survived by Mike, their children, Rhydderch, Meredydd and Anwen, and their grandson, Marty.
