Jazz Academy

 

Our Goals

Jazz is an integrative music that continually develops and renews itself in theoretical, harmonic and conceptual terms, while growing by absorbing the cultural heritage, diverse sounds, dance rhythms and traditional music of the places it reaches. In this context, throughout its 150-year history, jazz, which embraces the music of many cultures such as African American, European, Italian, Irish, Latin American, Turkish, Indian, Arab, Korean, Chinese and Russian, has established itself as a major discipline both institutionally and in terms of musical production. In Türkiye, during the transformation process following the legacy of Ottoman Turkish music, the integrative nature of jazz, which "takes in whatever comes its way", has been and continues to be an important tool both for viewing Turkish music from different perspectives and for the emergence of jazz forms of our own, modeled on the discipline jazz has developed.

Our jazz musicians and producers who have made a name for themselves worldwide, such as Aydın Esen, Baki Duyarlar, Sibel Köse, Şevket Akıncı, Nesuhi Ertegün, Ahmet Ertegün and Arif Mardin, have shown how successful Turkish musicians can be in this field.

Although our country has a significant pool of internationally renowned jazz musicians and educators who completed their education at major jazz schools abroad, due to the lack of an educational institution in the field of jazz, these people are unable to share their knowledge and experience, which could lead the training of younger generations of musicians, within an institutional structure or turn it into an educational tradition. This prevents the growing interest in jazz education among all generations in our country from being met and the musical potential of the younger generation from being realized. By filling this gap, the master's program in jazz education will be an important educational tool for training both jazz musicians and jazz/general music educators.