MISSION
To transform lives through jazz arts education and performance.
Jazz Power Initiative (JPI) is a non profit, 501 (c) (3) organization that has been located in Inwood in Northern Manhattan since its founding in 2003. What started as a fledgling startup founded by a jazz musician and a teacher has grown into a a thriving community-based arts provider offering high quality youth music education at low or no cost to families, community concerts, and artist and teacher training to hundreds of students and thousands of audience members annually.
Our unique youth education program immerses students in jazz music and culture through multidisciplinary in-school and after-school voice, theatre, movement, and piano musicianship workshops for youth ages 6-18 primarily in Washington Heights, Inwood, Harlem, and the Bronx; our monthly Intergenerational Jazz Power Jam at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center features veteran performers playing alongside rising stars; our annual Jazz Power Institute at Lehman College (CUNY), offers professional development for artists and educators; and Intergenerational Jazz Power Festival brings diverse audiences together each summer in Inwood Hill Park.
At Jazz Power Initiative, we center top level artistry combined with community advocacy rooted in the African American and Latin American cultures we serve and celebrate. Each year we teach over 750 youth, produce over 30 concerts for over 4000 audience members, employ over 100 professional artists, providing a total of over 10,000 program impact hours to uplift and enrich our community.
Our programs cultivate knowledge and skilled implementation of jazz values such as teamwork, deep listening, risk taking in a mutually supportive environment, humor, telling your story with all its highs and lows, and being aware and responsive to the stories of others.
Our students earn admission to NYC arts specialized high schools and scholarships to leading university programs inside and outside of the arts.
Our performers grace the world’s most prominent stages before and after gracing ours in Northern Manhattan.
HISTORY
Jazz Power Initiative, formerly The Jazz Drama Program, began as a collaboration between Eli Yamin and Clifford Carlson in 1998.
Though officially incorporated as The Jazz Drama Program (JDP) in December of 2003, The JDP began as an idea through a 1998 “Meet the Composer/New Music for Schools Grant” awarded to jazz composer Eli Yamin and monies from The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.
That year saw a workshop production of a jazz musical composed by Yamin and Clifford Carlson. The resulting effort, When Malindy Swings, inspired by a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and a song by Abbey Lincoln, was a smash success. National Public Radio’s Jazz Set with Branford Marsalis aired a 10-minute feature on the project nationwide and NYC youth grades 5-8th embraced the work with great enthusiasm. This prompted Yamin and Carlson to write four more jazz musicals over the next four years and in so doing, establish a groundbreaking idea in jazz education: to combine the power of experiential learning with story-telling and total immersion in the language and culture of jazz as a potent tool for communication, youth experience jazz across a multi-disciplinary curriculum, as it had never been done before.
The Jazz Drama Program, founded as a corporation in 2003 and receiving its tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) status in September of 2004.
In 2010-2016, In collaboration with Avatar studios, and Grammy Award winning producer/engineers Jim Anderson and Jeff Jones, “The Jedi Master,” three of Yamin and Carlson’s jazz musicals were recorded and published enabling local productions in 12 United States as well as translations into Polish, Serb-Croatian, and Russian for productions in Poland, Montenegro, Russia, and the U.K. Successful collaborations with the U.S. Department of State to bring this work abroad as a platform for cross cultural collaboration and mutual understanding demonstrated how effective this immersive model of multi-disciplinary jazz education can be, uniting people across cultures and empowering them through jazz music, theatre and dance. A strategic decision was made to return home to the U.S. to address inequities in music education by providing these opportunities to the multicultural community of Northern Manhattan with a particular focus on making jazz accessible in the African American and Latin American communities that originally created it.
Since it’s inception, Jazz Power Initiative (formerly The Jazz Drama Program), has provided jazz immersion experiences to over 6400 youth, trained over 1000 artists and educators in its methods, produced over 200 concerts for an audience of over 100,000 people.