Trumpet professor lands jazz research grant

Date of Release: 02/16/2005

SAN MARCOS—Keith Winking, professor of trumpet in the School of Music at Texas State University-San Marcos, has been awarded a research grant from the Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund.

The grant will support Winking’s work with the Marshall Brown Collection at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) Library, making him the first two-time recipient of the grant. In 2004, Winking received a Benny Carter Grant from the Research Fund in support of research on Sylvia Syms.

“I was told that this is the first time that they have ever awarded two to the same person, so I am honored,” Winking said, “especially in light of the fact that this is the only jazz grant I am familiar with.”

Benny Carter was a jazz legend and his contributions to jazz are on par with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. Duke Ellington once said about him: “The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.”

This Fund was established in 1987 with a gift by Benny Carter in memory of Morroe Berger. Berger, a close friend and Carter’s biographer, was a professor of sociology at Princeton University until his death in 1981. Carter’s initial gift was matched by the Berger family, who asked that Carter’s name be added to the Fund’s title. Carter and other donors have regularly added to the endowment.

The Fund provides grants to jazz researchers to enable them to carry out research projects at the Institute, to publish the results in the Institute’s Annual Review of Jazz Studies and in other publications, and/or to lecture at the university. Additional information about Benny Carter can be found at www.bennycarter.com/indexmain.shtml.