The Center for Jazz Studies is the first academic center in the United States dedicated to exploring the interaction between jazz and American culture. The center was opened in September 1999 with $300,000 in funding from the Ford Foundation. Its founder and director, Professor Robert O'Meally, is a leading interpreter of the dynamics of jazz in American culture who, as a literary scholar, rather than a musician, brings a unique perspective to the study of jazz as a key element to an understanding of 20th century American culture.

Jazz centers that exist at major American universities are primarily focused on training musicians or musicologists. At Columbia, O'Meally, who holds the Zora Neale Hurston Professorship of American Literature and is the author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday and The Craft of Ralph Ellison , describes jazz as "a total way of life, where you have poets and novelists writing like the jazz musicians, trying to capture that sound in language, artists producing jazz paintings." Says O'Meally: "The jazz tradition brings resiliency and improvisation to music, just as our culture demands, with so many different kinds of people thrown together."

O'Meally is the editor of a seminal textbook for jazz studies and was nominated for a Grammy award last year as co-producer of "The Jazz Singers: A Smithsonian Collection."

O'Meally begins with the question: "How would modern American music sound had there been no Louis Armstrong, no Duke Ellington, no Bessie Smith, no Charlie Parker, no John Coltrane?" In fact, he says this question could be asked throughout American culture. "How would American speech sound without the impact of swing and bebop jive-talk specialists like Cab Calloway and Dizzy Gillespie? What would our notions of personal elegance be without the example ‹ and, in the case of commercials and movies, the background soundtrack ‹ of the cool stylings of jazz artists like Billie Holiday and Miles Davis?"