We want to hear from you! 

We invite you to share your stories, memories and perspectives about the connections between Jazz and Hip-Hop in Queens.  What have you seen? What have you heard? What’s been passed down to you about how these influential genres developed in Queens?

Click here to tell us your story or nominate someone whose story you think should be told.

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Mapping Jazz and Hip-Hop in Queens

January 2022

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Flushing Town Hall and the Kupferberg Center for the Arts.  Together we’ll create an interactive digital experience that maps the histories of Jazz and Hip-Hop in Queens. 

Many jazz legends lived in Queens during the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Dizzy Gillespie. Also, seminal hip-hop musicians including Nas, Marly Marl, MC Serch, MC Shan, LL Cool J, Q-Tip and many more grew up in Queens during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Mapping Jazz and Hip-Hop in Queens will explore how a prolific jazz community in Queens had significant influence on the rise of hip-hop in the borough.

Building upon The Queens Jazz Trail map commissioned by Flushing Town Hall in 1998 and the 60,000-piece Louis Armstrong Archives, Mapping Jazz and Hip-Hop in Queens will conduct interviews and research to chart the homes of both jazz and hip-hop artists affiliated with Queens. We will also explore the genealogy of connection, including neighborhoods, familial and friendship ties, as well as listening and sampling patterns.  By convening jazz and hip-hop historians, artists and practitioners, the project will document the oral history of these two major art forms in Queens and make this knowledge accessible to the public through an interactive digital map. 

Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities will support the exploratory phase of the project. We will convene teams of digital experience creators and subject-matter experts who will develop the storylines that will convey our narrative and also determine appropriate platform designs and strategies for interactive engagement with our various audiences. 

The community of artists, historians, and designers connected to this project include: