The View From the Center
The three years I have spent helming the Center for Jazz Studies is ending all too soon. In that short time, the Center hosted three symposia – a fusion symposium in 2022, a symposium on Asian American jazz in 2023, and a symposium on gender and jazz in 2024. Each of the symposia featured amazing presentations by leading and emerging jazz scholars as well as deeply insightful and thoughtful keynote talks by Stephen Pond (2022), Deborah Wong (2023), and Angela Davis (2024). The 2023 symposium on Asian American jazz culminated in a solo piano performance by Sumi Tonooka at Miller Theatre.
The Center also hosted a number of presentations from jazz scholars from around the globe, including England, India, New Zealand, and the U.S.
In February 2025, the Jazz Study Group, co-led by Robert O’Meally and Brent Hayes Edwards, held a successful two-day meeting on oral history in jazz studies, which featured an evening performance led by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington.
The Center is entering a period of transition as discussions of moving from Prentis Hall to a space on the Morningside Campus are being held. There are a number of logistical issues, including the relocation of a vast collection of vinyl records, CDs, books, and ephemera such as posters that complicate an already-complex procedure. My hope is that the move into a space that can better accommodate the Center and its holdings will be settled in the near future.
I welcome incoming Director, Tom Wetmore, an emerging young jazz scholar as well as accomplished pianist, to lead the CJS. I have no doubt that Tom will bring a fresh vision and new energy to the Center and I wish him the best in his efforts.
I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, the Center’s Program Coordinator, Yulanda McKenzie, whose work and dedication to the Center exceed her job description and without whom the Center would not function as smoothly as it does. She is the Center’s behind-the-scenes miracle worker, and I will truly miss working alongside her.
Kevin Fellezs
Director, Center for Jazz Studies, 2022-25
Mission Statement
At the Center for Jazz Studies (CJS), jazz is a music without borders, providing innovative models for scholarship and teaching in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Scholars associated with the CJS continue to contribute to a field announced by founding Director, Robert G. O’Meally, in the title to the groundbreaking anthology he co-edited with Farah Jasmine Griffin and Brent Hayes Edwards, Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies. The CJS continues to pursue the rich interdisciplinary “new jazz studies'” discussion initiated by Uptown Conversations, which transformed debates in and out of the academy, the nightclub, the concert hall, and the recording studio about the music, the musicians, and the larger cultural context in which they sounded out their ideas, passions, and aspirations.
The CJS maintains its commitment to interdisciplinary musickings, listenings, and conversings. The CJS remains motivated by the idea that jazz is best heard by rallying a variety of disciplinary methodologies, perspectives, and concerns.
A guiding premise at the CJS is that the study of jazz presents more than a new animating paradigm for scholarly inquiry in the humanities and the arts, or in the social, political, and natural sciences. With improvisation at its aesthetic and performative heart, jazz provides students with models for dialoguing across difference that is alive to the moment yet shaped by creativity and empathy.
Since its founding in 1999, the Center for Jazz Studies has been an integral part of Columbia’s renowned Core Curriculum, introducing hundreds of undergraduate students to the interdisciplinary study of jazz each year. The CJS’s faculty offer a rich slate of courses from a number of departments across the university campus—many of which are part of an undergraduate jazz studies special concentration.
Generous support from the Dean of Social Sciences at Columbia University makes much of this possible. The Center for Jazz Studies’ philanthropic supporters include the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Jazz Studies at Columbia University
Since the Fall 2024 semester, Columbia University no longer recognizes special concentrations. For students interested in pursuing courses in jazz performance, please see the “Pathway: Jazz” listing in the Minor in Music section. For students interested in pursuing an interdisciplinary jazz program, please contact the Music department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Prior Directors
The Center for Jazz Studies has been led by some of the world’s leading jazz scholars. Their collective vision as well as their commitment to the study of creative improvised music continues to guide the efforts of the Center for Jazz Studies.
Robert G. O’Meally founded the Center for Jazz Studies in 1999. He served as Director from 1999-2007 and 2014-2022.
George E. Lewis served as Director of the Center for Jazz Studies from 2007-2011.
John Szwed served as Director of the Center for Jazz Studies from 2011-2014.
Kevin Fellezs served as Director of the Center for Jazz Studies from 2022-2025.