MISSION
To transform lives through jazz arts education and performance.
Jazz Power Initiative (JPI), the d/b/a of The Jazz Drama Program, transforms lives through jazz music performance and education. Founded in 2003 by jazz musician Eli Yamin and teacher/writer Clifford Carlson, JPI places jazz—rooted in African American culture—at the heart of American history and identity.
Jazz Power Youth Education provides free and low-cost opportunities for youth ages 6–18 to immerse themselves in jazz through voice, piano, dance, and acting. Participants learn classic jazz and blues repertoire by artists such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Celia Cruz, and Billie Holiday, while also performing original youth-centered jazz musicals developed by JPI.
Jazz Power Adult Education supports teachers and teaching artists through experiential, cross-disciplinary training at our annual Jazz Power Institute, and through our weekly Community Workshop, inspired by Barry Harris. These workshops welcome singers and instrumentalists of all levels to build skill and confidence expressing themselves through jazz.
Jazz Power Community Concerts engage, inspire, and empower diverse audiences through intergenerational performances of jazz music, dance, and theatre. These concerts unite veteran artists, emerging professionals, and youth, supporting the continuum and oral traditions of jazz.
Pioneered by African Americans and Latinos more than a century ago and now shared globally, jazz offers powerful models for creative self-expression, collaborative leadership, innovative thinking, and cross-cultural exchange.
Through performance and education, Jazz Power Initiative reaches thousands of New Yorkers and visitors annually in Upper Manhattan—serving audiences ages 6 to 80+—while elevating historically marginalized voices and building more creative and inclusive communities through jazz.
IMPACT
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.