The View From the Center
This year the Center for Jazz Studies has focused on a “Jazz and Place” theme, taking seriously the specific sites and scenes where jazz performances happen, whether physical, social, or imagined.
Our biggest event of the fall was a day-long symposium titled “Jazz and Place: Cities, Soundscapes, Venues,” which brought together researchers, artists, and community historians to explore these questions in depth. Presenters included Matt Sakakeeny, Whitney Slaten, Kimberly Hannon Teal, Kelsey Klotz, Christi Jay Wells, Michael Heller, and John T. Reddick, and a jazz trio from the MPP graciously performed in various styles so that participants could experience how the actual physical space (Buell Hall) conditioned the performance. The symposium received a nice write-up in AllAboutJazz (https://rebrand.ly/JazzAndPlaceReview), and video of the full program is available at https://rebrand.ly/JazzAndPlaceVids.
The CJS also led three Harlem walking tours for students and community members. These included visits to the Apollo Theater, performances at Patrick’s Place and Sylvana, and stops at key monuments and historic sites. One guided evening tour—linked to the symposium—focused on Prohibition-era Harlem, visiting venues and sites of Black performance and community life such as the Studio Museum, Hotel Theresa (with its historic penthouse ballroom), Alhambra Ballroom, Salem Methodist Church (site of Countee Cullen and Yolande Du Bois’s “wedding of the century”), the Lafayette Theatre, the Tree of Hope, and the former Lenox Lounge (now a bank). We also spent time on “Swing Street” (West 133rd between Lenox and Seventh), discussing Bill’s Place in the former Nest Club speakeasy where Billie Holiday was discovered. That tour concluded at Patrick’s Place for a live set and jazz trivia with Patience Higgins’s quartet, where we closed the night with music, prizes, and a group photo inspired by “A Great Day in Harlem.” Across these walks, we heard not only from our guides but from neighborhood residents, underscoring how jazz places remain alive in local memory as well as in archives and scholarship.
For Black History Month, our first event will take place on February 23, which will feature a joint presentation between Harlem Historian and Columbia University A’Lelia Bundles Scholar John T. Reddick, and Rabbi Dimitry Ekshut of City University of New York, who will discuss the Harlem community and explore bridge-building, cultural exchange, and intersecting non-Jewish Black and Jewish histories. This will be the first of a series of collaborations with the Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program, which will pair student jazz sets with talks and presentations aimed at broader community engagement. These events, which will also include dates on March 30 and April 27, will be held in Columbia’s beautiful Bollinger Forum on 125thstreet and Broadway.
Looking ahead, April 3 will bring a landmark concert by the McIntosh County Shouters, one of the last active community-based ensembles preserving the coastal Georgia ring shout tradition. The formal concert at Miller Theater will be the capstone of day-long symposium on the Ring Shout, with a participatory workshop led by the Shouters.
On April 14, Ben Ratliff and Martin Daughtry will jointly present on the Open Door, a bulldozed downtown jazz club, and related “musical ghosts.” On April 9, the Center is also co-presenting the Next-Gen Jazz Festival: Celebrating Emerging Voices in Jazz, in partnership with the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. This gathering of professional musicians, students, and educators will be dedicated to building community and supporting emerging voices in jazz through participatory workshops, interdisciplinary discussions, and exploratory performances.
These spring events continue the “Jazz and Place” focus by treating streets, rooms, and institutions as ongoing sites where jazz is made, remembered, and contested.
Dr. Tom Wetmore, Director, Center for Jazz Studies
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.