The Mellon Foundation has announced a major contribution to the Jazz Study Group – led by Columbia professor Robert O’Meally – to expand jazz scholarship and strengthen its cultural infrastructure as part of the Foundation's $35 million commitment to preserving America's first original art form.
The award totals $5.8 million to the jazz group, an interdisciplinary collective of scholars, artists, and musicians that has transformed jazz scholarship since O’Meally formed the group in 1995. Read the full story on the Mellon Foundation website.
The group is a collective comprising more than 30 U.S.-based and international members who convene annually to explore interdisciplinary approaches to studying jazz. The award will help the group form the Jazz Generations Initiative to foster intergenerational dialogue and preserve jazz heritage, partially through oral history interviews conducted with celebrated jazz elders.
“Jazz has always been about connection — between disciplines, between generations, between communities,” said O’Meally. “With the Jazz Generations Initiative, co-led by composer Courtney Bryan and myself in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, we are creating a bridge between New York and New Orleans — a living network where artists and scholars can listen, learn, and carry forward the transformative stories and sounds of this music.”
The Jazz Study Group met at Reid Hall in 2012, where they organized a conference featuring leading French thinkers, jazz scholars, and musicians in dialogue with their American colleagues, many from Columbia. This sparked French-American relationships which have endured. These shows and panels demonstrated precisely the sort of interdisciplinary and multi-generational work for which the group has now been funded for three years.
O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is the founder and director emeritus of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is also a research fellow with the Institute for Research in African American Studies. O’Meally was an inaugural Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in 2018.
