DETROIT, MI -- Passionate music lovers are working to save a piece of Detroit's jazz history for the second time.



Scavenging through broken glass and pigeon feathers a small group of volunteers armed with work gloves and face masks recently searched for anything salvageable from the former Graystone International Jazz Museum collection left abandoned inside the long-vacant Book Building in Downtown Detroit.



The Graystone Ballroom, "billed as Detroit's Million Dollar Ballroom," was once a great jazz venue that hosted the top performers of its day like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.



In the 1950's the venue, on Woodward Ave. between E. Canfield St. and Willis Ave. in Detroit's Midtown, closed and struggled to open again before its eventual demolition in 1980.

In 1974, before the wrecking ball, retired Detroit bus driver James Jenkins set out to save the ballroom, which he hoped to convert into a museum commemorating Detroit's jazz heritage.



Jenkins couldn't save the Graystone, but he did recover everything from instruments and posters to the ballroom's windows. The items created the foundation for what became the Graystone International Jazz Museum which Jenkins reportedly spent much of his pension to form.



Jenkins' museum struggled with funding after his death in 1994. Some of the collection was moved into warehouse storage when the museum closed some time after 2004, while the rest was left on the Book Building's fourth floor where it was all but forgotten after the building was vacated in 2009.



The Detroit Sound Conservancy, a non-profit formed by "sound activists" to raise awareness of Detroit's musical heritage through preservation and education, is trying to change that.



Salvaging the Graystone International Jazz Museum



"We knew that things were bad," said DSC's Founder and President Carleton Gholz about the neglected collection, but Gholz didn't know how bad until he discovered many of the former museum's records were broken and strewn across the floor. Historic band stands thrown into a pile and historic concert posters and sheet music left unprotected to the elements.



"When I heard they were salvaging things, I wanted to get involved," said Rob McCallum, of Dearborn, who signed up to help save the jazz relics from the Book Building.



It was personal for McCallum, who volunteered for Jenkins between 1989-1991 when the museum was located in the city's New Center neighborhood.



"He was the heart and soul of it," said McCallum, a trombone player, who even named his small swing group 'The Graystone Stompers' as a tribute to Detroit's heyday of jazz.



Future of the Graystone jazz collection



The DSC worked on acquiring the rights to the Graystone collection from its remaining board members for the past two years. The DSC was gifted the artifacts and has begun the recovery and preservation process with the help of the Detroit Historical Society.





The Book Building in Downtown Detroit has sat vacant since 2009.

"We feel strongly that if we waited another season that this opportunity might not exist anymore," said Gholz who secured access to the Book Building through a building manager to recover the artifacts. His fear was that if the building were to be purchased that, "everything could go into a dumpster."

The DSC has moved the relics to a storage warehouse where they will begin the process of archiving and digitizing the collection.

The non-profit would like to have parts of the collection in some sort of gallery space for the public to view in the next couple of years.

In five years, the DSC would like to see an entire space and museum devoted to Detroit's musical heritage.