Make Jazz Trill Again

For the 2026–2027 academic year, the Center for the Arts welcomes Make Jazz Trill Again as our partner in developing a series of performances, workshops, and outside-the-box curriculum to explore jazz as a communal language of trust-building across differences—a genre rooted in Black culture and a civic project of fostering relationships across generations and discovering new ways to be in resonance with each other.

Make Jazz Trill Again is a cultural movement. Started by jazz artist Melanie Charles in 2016, it was initiated as a modest hashtag intended to reinvigorate the independent jazz scene in the digital age, but has since grown into a vibrant network of projects that include producing and curating performances, festivals, and jam sessions, collaborative music-making experiences, workshops, and a widely-followed podcast series that centers on artist empowerment and community connection. The roots of the project trace back to Charles’ experience as a student at The New School in New York, where she initiated the institution’s first “Gender and Jazz” workshops, challenging traditional instrumentation, incorporating emerging technologies into performance, and presenting jazz in unconventional venues to expand access and reach broader audiences. Today, the Make Jazz Trill Again team also includes producer and musician Yunie Mojica and documentary filmmaker and producer Darah Golub.

With Make Jazz Trill Again, the Center for the Arts will spend the year centering collective process as an essential element in artmaking. We welcome their organization as a way to decenter the individualism that burdens art-making today. Wesleyan’s campus has always been a space for convening, communing, reuniting, and gathering as an essential component of learning and growing collectively. Make Jazz Trill Again broadens the aperture of what artistic process can look like and exemplifies the bridging of many practices required to create interdisciplinary works and spaces of belonging.

Throughout the year, Make Jazz Trill Again will present and develop new work through three campus engagements, each anchored by a public “town hall” that invites open discussion and exploration of themes related to the residency, amplifying the lessons jazz can teach us—about process, creative practice, and collaboration—that are applicable well beyond the limits of the music field.