Under the direction of Jason Moran, Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz, Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead is an international two-week jazz residency performance and composition project discovering and presenting the next generation of jazz greats.
Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead identifies outstanding, emerging jazz artist-composers (in their mid-teens to age 25) and brings them together under the tutelage of experienced artist-instructors who coach and counsel them, helping to polish their performance, composing, and arranging skills.
The two-week residency program—for which there is no tuition or application fee—includes daily workshops and rehearsal with established jazz artists and culminates in three concerts in the Kennedy Center Justice Forum, which will be livestreamed. The Kennedy Center will provide participants with lodging at a local hotel and per diem to cover meal expenses.
Betty Carter, who possessed one of this era’s most extraordinary voices, was devoted to jazz education. Her Jazz Ahead program, which she brought to the Kennedy Center in 1998, has helped launch the careers of several of today’s stars, including Cyrus Chestnut, Kendrick Scott, Jason Moran, Jazzmeia Horn, Nate Smith, Arco Iris Sandoval, and Matthew Whitaker, among others.
