Back in the 1980s, the Warsaw-based International Jazz Federation held an annual competition, Jazz Photo International, featuring submissions in an exhibition at Poland’s premier festival, the Jazz Jamboree, and publishing the winning images in Jazz Forum magazine, also based in Warsaw. (The magazine is still alive and well, though now only in Polish: www.jazzforum.com.pl.) On an international scale, this was… [read more]

Can’t make it to the JJA Jazz Awards gala on June 14 in New York City?

This year, for the first time ever,  friends of jazz in other locales are throwing satellite parties so local jazz fans can follow the JJA Jazz Awards live on streaming internet video. They’ll  celebrate simultaneously with the Jazz Awards ceremony and reception in New York.

2010… [read more]

New York, May 24 — Five submissions to the Jazz Journalists Association’s 2010 Jazz Awards “Photo of the Year” category have been elevated to finalist status by voting members of the JJA. European photographers dominate the finalist field. Images of Zim Ngqawana by Dragan Tasic, Eddie Henderson by Gulnara Khamatova, Sonny Rollins by John Watson and Tom Harrell by Lena… [read more]

It’s been just over a year that I have semi-officially considered myself a jazz writer. It started with this post, which began as an essay for a graduate course on jazz and film (I am currently finishing my MA in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers-Newark, the only masters program currently offered in jazz history worldwide). Since then I’ve been… [read more]

The JJA Jazz Awards is going bi-coastal, as the Jazzschool for Music Study and Performance in downtown Berkeley, California, has announced a free and public “satellite party” on Monday, June 14 from 12:30 to 3:30 PDT, simultaneously with the Jazz Awards ceremony and reception at City Winery in Manhattan.

The Jazzschool invites musicians, journalists and jazz fans to toast trumpeter-bandleader-educator… [read more]

Swing Journal, the magazine promoting American jazz in Japan since the end of WWII, ceases publication with its June issue. According to editor-in-chief Takafumi Mimori, “We will make efforts to revive it somehow,” but the monthly publication known for its photography, articles by U.S. as well as Japanese commentators and previously robust support from electronics firms and instrument manufacturers has… [read more]

For the past 38 years, Jack Kleinsinger was impresario and host of “Highlights In Jazz,” a moveable fete of jazz luminaries presented in not-really-jam-sessions. And now, in light of financial considerations, it ends. “I’m not giving up on jazz, it’s just this deepening recession,” Kleinsinger says. The final Highlights In Jazz concert took place last night, Thursday, May 13.

May 13, 2010, New York — “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” producers of the Jazz Icons DVD series scolded the Jazz Journalists Association for naming Count Basie & His Orchestra — Live in Berlin & Stockholm 1968 a “Jazz Video of the Year” finalist in the 2010 JJA Jazz Awards. In an “open letter” sent to a selection of… [read more]

Wednesday, May 12 — Boston: The Tanglewood Jazz Festival (Sept. 4-5, 2010, in Lenox MA) has announced it will award four performance spots on the “Jazz Café” stage of its annual Labor Day weekend programming on the basis of musicians’ videotapes and electronic press kits. For what appears to be the first time, emerging artists are being asked to submit… [read more]

This article originally appeared in the Post Mortem blog published by The Washington Post. It is reproduced with the permission of JJA member Matt Schudel.

It just so happened that I renewed my membership in the Jazz Journalists Association on Friday [April 23], the same day I heard that Gene Lees had died. I’ve been writing about jazz since 1992,

… [read more]