History

The Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective had humble beginnings. Starting originally as only a mailing list, YUJC was intended to connect Yale jazz musicians on campus and advertise student jazz groups. However, in 2012, Sam Frampton (Davenport '15) and Ethan Kyzivat (Morse ‘15) revived the inactive institution and reregistered YUJC as an official student organization. Will Gearty (Branford ‘14) joined the board in April 2012. The triumvirate met for the first time officially as YUJC on April 28, 2012. Inspired by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which sustains art creation through controlling institutions, YUJC set forth the goal to increase educational and artistic opportunities for jazz on Yale’s campus—beyond the Ellington Jazz Series, Yale Jazz Ensemble, and handful of jazz history and harmony courses offered semi-regularly. YUJC’s first event was hosting the Bulldog Days Concert and Jam Session that spring.

That same year, 2012, a YUJC fan suggested the creation a jazz festival. After working tirelessly to secure venues, equipment, artists and speakers, and funding, the annual Yale Jazz Festival was inaugurated the weekend of April 4, 2013, featuring performances, talks, and masterclasses by students, faculty, industry executives, and artists, notably Vijay Iyer (‘92). The Yale Jazz Festival has become a YUJC staple, annually attracting crowds in excess of 500 people from Yale, New Haven, and beyond, and hosting such high-profile talent as Cory Henry, Jane Ira Bloom (Davenport ‘76, YSM ‘77), Wayne Escoffery, Christian Scott, Randy Weston, Melissa Aldana, Nicholas Payton, and Robert Glasper.* 

When the Yale Jazz Ensemble, the University big band, went on hiatus in 2015, YUJC members filled the void by organizing the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Orchestra, a seventeen-piece student big band led by Benjy Steinberg (Morse ‘17) and Colum O’Connor (Franklin ‘18). YJE’s suspension was reported by the New York Times and sparked a resurgence in YUJC advocacy for increased jazz curricular offerings. Spearheaded by Professor Brian Kane and Alexander Dubovoy, YUJC proposed a jazz studies certificate program to keep up with the comprehensive jazz programs of Yale’s Ivy League peers, consisting of study in the theory, practice, and history of jazz. Then, in 2016, the Yale School of Music announced a three-year pilot Jazz Initiative that reinstated the Yale Jazz Ensemble, hired renowned saxophonist Wayne Escoffery to teach a jazz improvisation course, and introduced a jazz combo program, with three groups coached by Escoffery and New Haven bassist and Yale alumnus Jeff Fuller (Stiles ‘67, YSM ‘69). The Initiative was a significant milestone for the establishment of jazz at Yale and represented promising results of YUJC’s advocacy.

Furthermore, YUJC aims to help break down the fourth wall separating Yale and New Haven. To make the New Haven public aware of its free and open events, YUJC has worked with Jazz Haven, New Haven Jazz Underground, and WPKN; YUJC has also been featured in the New Haven Independent, Daily Nutmeg, New Haven Register, and countless local listservs over the years. Not only has Yale University Art Gallery allowed YUJC to host numerous concerts in its facilities, Will Gearty and Alexander Dubovoy helped curate and provide live music for the Lucie-nominated 2014 exhibit Jazz Lives: The Photographs of Lee Friedlander and Milt Hinton. Started by Ethan Kyzivat in the spring of 2014, YUJC board members revived YUJC teaching jazz history to middle and high-school students from New Haven and elsewhere through Yale Splash in the spring of 2019, which has become a semesterly YUJC commitment. Furthermore, in the fall of 2020, YUJC helped bring the Miles Davis documentary Birth of the Cool to the New Haven Criterion Cinema for limited screenings.

YUJC has also organized and produced various student shows and performances, in addition to the traditional jam sessions. In the spring of 2019, Thomas Hagen (Pierson ‘20) produced a collaboration between YUJC musicians and vocalists from Yale a cappella groups Whiffenpoofs, Mixed Company, and Shades for the “YUJC Vocal Jazz Concert.” In the winter of 2019, YUJC followed up on this show’s success with the “1959 Breaking Free Concert,” a show featuring 24 student performers and an introductory lecture by Professor Michael Veal in celebration of the 60th anniversary of a seminal year in jazz history. In the early spring of 2020, Yale’s own student jazz group Sentinels of Sound debuted its beat-driven free jazz in an Underbrook performance. 

In the spring of 2020, YUJC sought to do its part as a Yale organization to address the COVID-19 pandemic; to help support struggling New Haven musicians, YUJC organized a virtual student concert that raised $362 for the Arts Council for Greater New Haven’s Creative Sector Relief Fund. That summer, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country, YUJC made serious efforts towards diversity and inclusion in its internal operations and helped raise a total of $815 that was disbursed to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Connecticut Bail Fund, and Equal Justice Initiative.

Thanks in part to the support of Yale College Arts, YUJC has grown tremendously since its revival in 2012. The 2020-2021 YUJC board is not only the most diverse, but also the largest, in the group’s history, with 18 members distributed across five teams: Programming, Student Programming, Advocacy, Finance, and Publicity. YUJC received its first-ever government grant in 2019 in the form of $4,000 from the Connecticut Office of the Arts. In the summer of 2020, YUJC acquired 501(c)(3) non-profit corporate status and created an Alumni Board to manage these statuses and a future endowment to secure the institution’s longevity.