The View From the Center
While I am excited to be given the opportunity to lead the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, I am well aware of the giants on whose shoulders I now sit. As Sonny Rollins put it when he was honored as a jazz master, “It was a distinct honor because of the people inducted. Some were such giants of the music. I didn’t really feel worthy to be included with Fats Waller.” I, too, am humbled to be found among the “giants of jazz studies.”
Founder and former Director, Robert G. O’Meally, set a high bar as he established the Center as a leading jazz studies forum. His efforts to highlight jazz as a cultural form worthy of study as well as his continuing commitment to jazz in all the ways in which it informs and engages the broader culture “beyond the notes” provides a beacon, lighting my footsteps as the Center marks its way forward.
The Center will continue to think about jazz in a global sense, gathering scholars and artists interested in the myriad ways that jazz – as music, as philosophy, as a way of life – provides us with ways of grappling with the crucial issues of the day with creativity and improvisational acumen, as its musicians have so brilliantly accomplished since jazz’s inception more than a century ago.
I look forward to joining with my inspiring and always-creative colleagues in challenging orthodoxies and forging new approaches to the study of jazz.
Thelonious Monk asserted, “There are no wrong notes.” I want Monk’s spirit to guide the Center, allowing for the openness to pluralism and the spontaneity found in his music – and the traditions he drew from – to continue shaping, and reshaping, jazz studies.
Kevin Fellezs
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
Special Concentration in Jazz Studies : an interdisciplinary program for music and non-music majors
Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program: a performance program for music majors interested in jazz
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.