Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program

  
Check back in summer '23 for audition information for fall '23 

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Since its founding in 2001, the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program (LAJPP) has grown dramatically. This vibrant program now comprises seventeen jazz ensembles, fourteen gifted professional jazz musicians who provide private lessons and ensemble coaching, a visiting Master Artist program, courses in jazz improvisation and composition, and a Special Concentration in Jazz. Students have numerous opportunities for jazz performance, both on and off-campus.

Columbia’s strength is its interdisciplinary approach to jazz studies, and the LAJPP is a central part of a larger mission which sees jazz as music without borders and ultimately without limits, and a mode for the integration of forward-thinking models of scholarly inquiry with innovative teaching and community dialogue. In fact, many students who participate in the LAJPP do not major in music; instead, they come from multiple programs across the campus. This is something that is actively promoted and encouraged, as it is what sets the LAJPP apart from every other jazz performance program in the country. Our student performers are young aspiring musicians intellectually engaged in the world bringing their training in jazz and improvisation to many disciplines far removed from musical performance. They not only receive instruction and guidance on how to play on a high level, but also explore the relevance of jazz in society today.  

Jazz is a required part of the Core Curriculum which means that all students graduate from Columbia having heard the music of Louis Armstrong, knowing about his important place in U.S. history and hearing live jazz performers in their classroom. Columbia is the only university that has such requirements and no other university offers such comprehensive exposure to jazz. The students participating in the LAJPP take this requirement to an even deeper level.

Contact

If you have any further questions about the Music Performance Program, please review our FAQ.

For general information, contact Beth Pratt, MPP Coordinator at bp2413 [at] columbia.edu.

LESSONS

The lesson fee is $300 per semester for all students - the second-lowest rate among our peer institutions. Each student will receive six (6) hours of lessons each semester. 

Columbia/Barnard undergraduate students are eligible to take private instrumental lessons for credit through the Music Performance Program. Auditions are required and are held during the first week of classes in the fall semester.  

Online audition sign up will be available in August, three weeks before auditions.  

We offer private instruction for the following instruments:

 

Students who audition and register for lessons receive six hours of lessons per semester. Lessons are taken for one credit and students receive a pass/fail grade for their participation.

Audition Requirements  

The jazz ensembles we offer are: 

  • Jazz Combos
  • Big Band
  • Piano Trio Workshop
  • Jazz Vocal Ensemble
  • Afro-Cuban Jazz
  • Brazilian Jazz
  • Free Jazz

For more information click

JAZZ ENSEMBLES

The Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University released its debut recording, Young Lions, Volume 1 in 2015, and Young Lions, Volume 2 in 2017. Columbia has had student led jazz bands since the mid 1930s, but had never released a recording in 80 years. These compilations of original compositions and arrangements demonstrates the amazing talent and wide range of music being improvised on the Morningside campus in 2015, showcasing a number of our “young lions” of jazz. All performers and arrangers on the recordings participate in the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program (LAJPP). Thanks to the generous support of parents of our current students, we will continue to release recordings annually for years to come. 

 

Students from LAJPP founded the Jazz House in the Fall of 2014 in the Residence Halls where fellow jazz musicians live and jam together, putting on concerts and lectures for the campus community. This is the first jazz residence at Columbia.

 

 

The special concentration in jazz studies is an interdisciplinary liberal arts course of study that uses jazz music—and the jazz culture from which the music emanated—as a prism through which to study jazz culture during what might be termed the long jazz century, the sprawling twentieth. The curriculum in jazz studies guides students in developing a firm grounding in the traditions and aesthetic motives of jazz music, viewed through the perspectives of music history and ethnomusicology as well as literary theory and cultural studies. It also explores in depth the development of jazz-oriented art works in the music’s sister arts—literature, dance, painting, photography, and film. And while a US focus is highly appropriate, considering the many ways in which jazz is a definitive music of this nation, our special majors will also explore jazz’s geographical history beyond these shorelines, including complex, ongoing interactions with Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia.

The special concentration in jazz studies is designed for music majors as well as for those majoring in other fields. The main difference here between music majors and non-music majors is that while music majors take advanced courses in arranging, composition, and transcription, others are required to take an introduction to music fundamentals. While there are some fields where the fit with jazz studies is very obvious—music, American Studies, African American Studies, English, Comparative Literature, History—our special majors can major in any field whatsoever. Is there a jazz or improvisatory philosophy? What might be its relation to studies of aesthetics or American pragmatism? And what are jazz’s implications for the student of law? How does one protect the intellectual property rights of an improvised jazz solo? What about business? What economic and political forces have shaped jazz? Who buys jazz? What is its audience? What is a jazz painting? A jazz novel? What is jazz poetry? What is jazz dance? What is a jazz film? What are the sources and meanings of art? What work does the music do for the whole community?

Along with problems of musical history, form, and definition, our special courses will explore jazz as a culture. Students will not only study individual jazz artists but also explore the immeasurably variegated worlds through which such artists moved, and which they helped to shape. As cultural historians-in-training—focused on questions of nationality, race, sexuality, gender, economics, and politics—our students explore the extraordinarily complicated terrains of the New Orleans of Bunk Johnson, for example, or the Baltimore of Billie Holiday (born in Philadelphia). They will explore such artists’ other geographical travels. What did their images, including mistaken conceptions of who they were, tell us about the cultures that mythologized them?

How did these jazz musicians influence not only musicians but other artists of their era and milieu: the poets and novelists, painters and sculptors, photographers and filmmakers, dancers and choreographers who regularly heard them play and often shared with them a sense of common project? One thinks of Tito Puente, working with singers and dancers at the Palladium; Jackson Pollack dancing to the music as he spun drips of paints on canvasses placed on the studio floor; Langston Hughes writing detailed instructions to the musicians he hoped would accompany performance of his poetry; Romare Bearden’s beautifully turned stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre, whose improvisatory jazz dance workshop was called Sound in Motion; the drummer Jo Jones in an interview naming as key influences a series of tap dancers he admired; of Stanley Crouch, stirring in his high-powered essays in a room where jazz drums stand at the center, the old dream-kit inspiration; Ralph Ellison, who kept in touch with his beginnings as a musician in Oklahoma City through hour-long conversations with his childhood friend the singer Jimmy Rushing; Toni Morrison reading her magical prose to improvisations by Max Roach and the dancer Bill T. Jones; the pianist Jason Moran playing at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he introduced his group as including Beauford Delany, whose paintings hung on the wall near the bandstand—vigorous all and recall across the art forms.

Perhaps above all, the special concentration in jazz studies is designed to prepare students to be well-prepared and flexible improvisers in a universe of change and possibility.

 

REQUIREMENTS FOR A SPECIAL CONCENTRATION IN JAZZ STUDIES

The Special Concentration in Jazz Studies is open both to music majors and those majoring or concentrating in any other field. This is a rigorous interdisciplinary concentration, and in addition to the requirements of the special concentration, students must complete a major or a full concentration. At Columbia, a Special Concentration constitutes the rough equivalent of a minor at other institutions.

Students interested in this special concentration should speak with Professor Chris Washburne (cjw5 [at] columbia.edu) no later than the fall semester of their sophomore year. Students interested in declaring a special concentration in Jazz Studies will be assigned an advisor. The program of study is to be planned with the advisor as early as possible. 

 

Courses of Study

Required Courses
* A total of seven courses (21 points minimum) are required:

Requirements for all students:
* V2016, Jazz History (survey course)
* W4612, Jazz and American Culture
* Senior Independent Study Project

Requirements for students not majoring in Music, or with little or no previous musical training:
* Three interdisciplinary jazz studies courses drawn from various disciplines, as approved by the Jazz Studies advisor. 
* V1002, Fundamentals of Western Music (for those with sufficient music skills, another class may be substituted with the approval of the Jazz Studies advisor)

Requirements for Music majors or advanced musicians:
* Two courses drawn from various disciplines, as approved by the Jazz Studies advisor.
* Jazz Composition and Arranging
* Jazz Transcription and Analysis

 Recommended for all students:
* V1618/V1619, Jazz Ensemble
* Private Lessons

Go to the Columbia Directory of Classes

For further information, please contact
Professor Chris Washburne
Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department
Email: cjw5 [at] columbia.edu