Columbia Jazz Studies

Jazz Research at Columbia

The revolutionary integration of research and teaching at the Center for Jazz Studies is powered by Columbia faculty who count among the leading figures in the field: John Szwed, Brent Hayes Edwards, Christopher Washburne, Robert O’Meally, Ann Douglas, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and George E. Lewis, the Center’s current Director. Core and affiliated Center faculty serve as sponsors, co-sponsors, and readers for doctoral students engaged in research related to jazz studies, working to create the next generation of scholars in the field.

Jazz Studies Online brings together a rich and varied collection of digital resources–journal articles, books and book chapters, video and audio, teaching materials, and an extensive index of outside resources. This ever-growing, interactive archive is proving tremendously exciting for jazz scholars, musicians, educators, journalists, and the general public. Jazz Studies Online engages with issues that inform and broaden our thinking about jazz–issues such as race, ethnicity, and gender, improvisation, and modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism.

The Jazz Study Group is the origin and core of the Center for Jazz Studies. Founded by Robert G. O’Meally in 1995 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Group is a shifting collective of more than thirty members who meet several times yearly to explore new methods of studying the history of jazz, its social context, and its cultural ramifications, cultivating and strengthening the interdisciplinary field of jazz studies as a discrete area of scholarship within the context of African American and American Studies.

Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice is an international project supported by a $4 million dollar grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Centered at the University of Guelph (and in partnership with McGill University, the University of British Columbia, and Université de Montréal), this international research project brings together a dynamic international research team of more than thirty scholars from eighteen universities, as well as twelve community groups.