ABSTRACT
The landscape and potentials of jazz studies have changed markedly over the last forty years or so, and the projects gathered under that label have gained both depth and breadth in the process. The work done by a few generations of enthusiasts, scholars, and musicians 1 has thus borne unexpected fruit: where jazz in the mid-1970s seemed to some commentators to be dying one of several rumored deaths-with free jazz and fusion as the reputed cause 2 —today the music appears to be sharing the top of the US cultural hierarchy with, and gaining the institutional stability of much older incumbents. After its humble beginnings as a summer “classical jazz” series in 1989, for instance, New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center is now housed in a $128 million complex overlooking Columbus Circle, thanks in part to an extensive capital campaign in the late 1990s and partly to the artistic stewardship and celebrity of Wynton Marsalis. It operates, moreover, as a full constituent of Lincoln Center-on par with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. 3 Likewise, San Francisco’s SFJazz, which had nomadically relied on a range of venues from its founding by artistic director Randall Kline in 1983, used the proceeds from its own capital campaign to open a jazz-club-and Unitarian-church-inspired performing arts complex, at a cost of more than $60 million, in January of 2013. 4 These two events are signs at the very least that a range of individual and corporate donors see jazz as worthy of long-term investment, even in the midst of economic crisis.
