Performance

The Jazz Academy is the home of the educational initiatives of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s (JALC) jazz education programs drive our organization’s efforts to advance the appreciation, understanding, and performance of jazz.

We believe in the power of jazz to uplift, inspire, and create a sense of community. It is in this spirit that we invite you to connect with the global jazz community through our digital programming.

Jazz at Lincoln Center's Jazz Academy is the world's largest free library of jazz lessons. Spend some time with some of the greatest jazz artists and teachers in music today, and build up your playing and your ears!

Voices of Freedom is an education series that explores the role of art as a vehicle for social change through the lens of Louis Armstrong. We invite students in High School and beyond to create new works while learning about the process and techniques of world class artists.

There was a time in the 1950s when musical giants strutted the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts. Be-boppers, folk singers, African drummers, blues singers, jazz legends, poets, and musicologists gathered at a place called Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, just a stone's throw away from classical music's most famous summer festival at Tanglewood, to share their converging traditions and go looking for roots most people didn't think even existed. In their search, they created not only the first summer-long Jazz Festival, and the First School of Jazz, but a new movement in American music.

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

1959 was the seismic year jazz broke away from complex bebop music to new forms, allowing soloists unprecedented freedom to explore and express. It was also a pivotal year for America: the nation was finding its groove, enjoying undreamt-of freedom and wealth social, racial and upheavals were just around the corner and jazz was ahead of the curve.