Con Chapman‘s Sax Expat: Don Byas will be published by University Press of Mississippi on April 15. It will include never-before published pictures of Don as a child, his parents, siblings and schoolmates, and covers his career from high school bandleader in Oklahoma, to the toast of Paris, to his final years in Amsterdam.
Paul de Barros launched the Jackson Street Jazz Trail, a self-guided walking tour of Seattle’s historic Jackson Street jazz district, at the Earshot Jazz Festival this past October. Have a look at the tour at JacksonStreetJazzTrail.org.
John Edward Hasse gave public presentations in 2024 to audiences in Vienna, Stockholm, Denver, and Boston, and at Indiana University and the University of Southern California. Topics included Duke Ellington, “The Music of Civil Rights,” “How Jazz Captivated France,” and “Curating American Music at the Smithsonian.” Hasse served as guest curator for a Kennedy Center concert of Ellington’s chamber music, performed by the Post-Classical Ensemble. He completed his 60th article on music for The Wall Street Journal.
Patrick Hinely revisited his 1974 debut visit to the jazz world of New York City in 2025’s first quarterly issue of Cadence, in which he bade a brief pictorial farewell to Barre Phillips.
Gloria Krolak is a contributor to Sea Change, published in November 2024, the eighth anthology in the series by the Island Writers Network of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina,. The theme is the profound effects of change. Forty-two members of the IWN, were chosen for inclusion. Krolak’s contributions were “Varady Grove,” a remembrance of her youth; two poems; and a photograph, “On A Bookshelf” which accompanies her poem “I Had the Craziest Dream.”
Howard Mandel reviewed Burnt Sugar’s If You Can’t Dazzle Them With Your Brilliance, Then Baffle Them With Your Blisluth Pt 2 for DownBeat, was interviewed by Joe Dimino regarding The Jazz Omnibus and his own background in jazz journalism, wrote liner notes for trombonist Michael Dease’s new album Confluence, and completed a draft of the non-jazz novel he’s been working on for three years.
Meisha Rosenberg‘s essay “Chick Webb’s Extraordinary Body of Music” was published in the anthology Freak Inheritance: Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance, edited by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Michael Mark Chemers, and Analola Santana, Oxford University Press (August 2024). It contains some original research from her work-in-progress biography.
Kay Shackelford recently interviewed Pulitzer Prize Winner Tyshawn Sorey, Grammy-nominated bassist Vicente Archer, Jazz Arts Founder Lonnie Davis, and singer Imani Grace Cooper. She recently reviewed the Kurt Elling Show at Birdland Jazz on Jan 11, 2025. She was named the booking manager for Miles & Coltrane: Blue (.), a theater performance about the two musicians and colleagues.
Brad Stone continues to produce his radio program “The Creative Source,” featuring new releases, streaming #OnDemand via SoulandJazz.com. His new interview program, “Chats with the Cats,” now appears on the SoulandJazz.com YouTube channel. He will be teaching his “History of Jazz and Rock” course at Gavilan Community College this Spring. He just attended the Jazz Congress at JALC in New York and moderated the Jukebox Jury once again. He attended the 2024 Monterey Jazz Festival, where he did some emceeing.
Michael J. West has signed an agreement with Backbeat Books to publish his biography, tentatively titled Time Lines: The Life and Music of Andrew Hill, in 2026.
Deanna Witkowski is the winner of the 2025 Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation/Jazz Education Network (JEN) research grant. The funding will support archival research that Witkowski will conduct at the Smithsonian Jazz archives in relation to her current book project, “Jazz in the Pews: ‘Experiments in Sunday Worship’ in the 1960s.” Witkowski gave two “Jazz in the Pews” paper presentations in January at the JEN conference in Atlanta and the American Catholic Historical Association conference in New York.
