Welcome to the Thompson Jazz Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder College of Music! CU Boulder jazz ensembles offer students exposure to a variety of jazz styles through the rehearsal ...

Thompson Jazz Studies is pleased to announce two graduate teaching assistantships available for fall 2026. For more info, please contact Professor of Jazz Studies John Gunther, ...

An introduction to the fundamental materials of a variety of music, including Western concert music, jazz, and popular music. Course activities center around interrelated theoretical, compositional, ...

A new study says that sharks might be jazzier than previously thought. Like other fish, sharks are adept at homing in on sounds. Sound waves can travel up to four times faster in water than they do in ...

Question: What values does a jazz education offer beyond the music itself? \Artists have always had a supply and demand problem. Since time immemorial there have been more people with creative ideas ...

Music and language seem to be processed in the same part of the brain, a new study has found. Researchers studied the brain activity of 11 male jazz pianists while they engaged in a spontaneous ...

When jazz pianists are improvising riffs, their brains act much more like the dreaming brain, with inhibition turned down and creativity cranked way up, a new study finds. It seems almost a ...

Jamming out at a concert puts music front and center in a person’s life, but only for a moment. Most of the time, music serves more as sonic wallpaper, spicing up the background while we go about the ...

When I began this Race and Jazz series several months ago, I knew the topics I wanted to touch upon, and the general culture vs. race point-of-view I intended to pursue. With those chord changes ...

Over the past 50 years, the music has become entrenched in academic institutions. As a result, it’s often inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black ...