Essential Jazz Journalists
1. Leonard Feather
The dean of jazz journalists, the late Leonard Feather was born in London in 1914. He learned to play piano and clarinet and began writing about jazz and film during his teenage years. As a young adult, he traveled to the US and, after a brief period working as a record producer, he settled in New York in the late 1930s. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and lived there the remainder of his life.
As a magazine and newspaper journalist, he is best known for his work as co-editor of Metronome magazine and the chief jazz critic of the Los Angeles Times, positions he held until his death in 1994. As an author, he’s most famous for writing the widely known jazz encyclopedia, simply entitled The Encyclopedia of Jazz, and for the biographical encyclopedia he wrote with Ira Gitler.
Feather was also a composer whose works like “Blowtop Blues,” “Evil Gal Blues” and “How Blue Can You Get” were recorded by Dinah Washington and Louis Jordan. Feather also wrote the lyrics to “Whisper Not,” which was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald for Verve records in 1966.
2. Gary Giddins
Brooklyn-born writer Gary Giddins graduated with a degree in writing from Iowa's Grinnell College in 1970. In 1974, he joined Nat Hentoff at The Village Voice, where he wrote his column, “Weather Bird,” for nearly 30 years.
Since 1981, Giddins has written 11 books on jazz, including the highly lauded Visions of Jazz: The First Century for which he won awards from the National Book Critic Circle, The Ralph J. Gleason Foundation and the Bell Atlantic association. He, too, is a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of several ASCAP awards.
Giddins has also been involved in the making of several films, including the 2014 documentary Bing Crosby Rediscovered.
3. Ira Gitler
The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish parents, Ira Gitler grew up listening to the swing music of the 1930s and 40s. Upon discovering Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Gitler began working as a producer for Prestige Records, during which time he coined the expression “sheets of sound” to describe the playing of John Coltrane.
In addition to writing liner notes for countless recordings, Gitler was published extensively in a broad range of jazz and mainstream magazines and newspapers, including Modern Drummer, the New York Times, the Village Voice, Playboy and Downbeat, where he was an editor during the 1960s.
He’s published five books on jazz, his most famous being a collaboration with Leonard Feather called The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. A rabid hockey fan, he’s also written extensively on the sport in magazines like Goal and in the four books he’s published since the late 1960s.
4. Nat Hentoff
Nathan Irving Hentoff was born June 10, 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from Boston Latin School, he graduated with honors from Northeastern University, did graduate work at Harvard University and attended the Sorbonne in Paris as a Fulbright fellow.
During the late 1940s and throughout much of the 1950s, Hentoff hosted a number of radio programs, first on Boston’s WMEX and later on the city’s WGBH. His first work as a jazz journalist appeared in 1952 in Down Beat magazine, wherehe served as an associate editor from 1953 to 1957.
With a move to New York City in the late 1950s, Hentoff began his 50-year association with The Village Voice, a publication he joined in 1958 “because [he] wanted a place where [he] could write freely about anything [he] cared about.” For Hentoff, that included not only jazz but politics and social issues.
Over the course of his career, he has written thousands of articles, 20 nonfiction books, nine novels and two memoirs. He has been named a Guggenheim fellow and honored by numerous organizations for his work, including the American Bar Association, the National Press Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the NEA Jazz Masters.
At 90 years old, Hentoff continues writing as a syndicated columnist and appears regularly in The Wall Street Journal and on World Net Daily.
Source...