At the 2016 Jazz Festival, we invited a talented group of jazz musicians from Yale University to play on the Second Stage. One of these young men, Jack Broza Lawrence, published an article last week in a Yale magazine on the status of Jazz Studies at Yale and the university’s rejection of a jazz studies proposal.

Lawrence writes: “Unfortunately, the Jazz Initiative fails to address the deeper issue: Jazz is still largely excluded from Yale’s academic world. The music department’s deep Western classical focus mainstreams white culture while sidelining art produced by people of color. Music is by no means the only humanity department in which Eurocentrism persists. English and Directed Studies often provoke similar debates, but the void in the music curriculum is particularly gaping because African-American music is so deeply central to our national sound.”

Read the full article HERE