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This delightful article that appeared in the NY Times recently details the preservation of a life in jazz - namely, the great vocalist, Maxine Sullivan's life.

Unlocking the padlocked door, 31-year old real estate developer, Ed Poteat, stepped into a dim and dusty entry hall. Suddenly, he remembered the memorabilia collection in the attic. He assumed that Ms. Morris (Maxine Sullivan's daughter) had had them carted away to storage somewhere, but when he made his way up to the attic, there sat the mounds of crates.

He began to examine the boxes' contents. There were notes written in Ms. Sullivan's tidy hand, fading music manuscripts, bills addressed to Marietta Williams, press clippings detailing Ms. Sullivan's career, old magazines, sealed manila envelopes and odd scraps of paper. Some items seemed to disintegrate as he touched them.

Though Ms. Sullivan's career had ebbed and flowed over the years, this closer look at the crates made Mr. Poteat realize something: Ms. Sullivan had saved seemingly every item that came into her hands. The always-growing pile of memorabilia had come to include Mr. Jackson's (Maxine's last husband) musical manuscripts, programs from performances, a letter filled with lyrics-in-progress from the ragtime pianist and jazz composer Eubie Blake, a get-well card from the bassist Milt Hinton, a congratulatory note from Ronald Reagan, and reels of audiotape from her radio appearances.

More digging revealed sealed envelopes, personal correspondence and notebooks filled with Ms. Sullivan's ideas and plans. ''The feeling that you're going through someone's diary, that's the feeling I got,'' Mr. Poteat said during an October visit to the memorabilia collection, as he leafed through some newspaper clippings.

In a gray duffel bag, he found a pile of photo negatives and slides of performances, including Art Blakey at the Cafe' Society and Fletcher Henderson at the Cotton Club. ''You'd need a jazz archivist to sit here and grab a week and sort through this stuff,'' Mr. Poteat said.

Unbelievable! What a find! What a treasure trove of jazz history...

In addition, the article does a fabulous job of detailing how active Maxine was in her community in the Bronx:

In 1957, however, Ms. Sullivan stepped away from the music industry, to devote herself full time to raising her daughter, then 12, and engaging in community activities. She joined the local school board and served as P.T.A. president, roles in which she was known by her birth name, Marietta Williams, though it didn't take long for local residents to discover that the cheery woman who patrolled the school hallways and helped out in the cafeteria had been a renowned jazz singer.

''Her reputation in the performing arts is twin to her social consciousness,'' said Jim Bartow, a jazz guitarist. ''The vocal delivery, the smoothness, the ease, that's the way she operated with everybody and everything.

''To have an interlude of being a mother and raising children and then coming back, and using her organizational skills in the community, which were legendary, having block parties, parties at her house -- in hindsight, because you're in it, and you just don't know the good things that are happening -- the quality that she represented was big time, big league, and rare.''

During those years, Ms. Sullivan's home at 818 Ritter Place became the headquarters of her community organizing. She held neighborhood parties there, as well as meetings of a group she called the Good Words Club, in which she taught children vocabulary words and asked them to read poetry aloud to a rhythm.

You can read about her rich recording career and pick up a few of her CDs from our CD Picks Page.

And you can check out her bio here.

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