The JJA will host its first Zoom Jazz Book Party Sunday, Jan 17, 3 pm ET, with five jazz journalist
members — Karl Ackermann, Debbie Burke, Tish Oney, Ted Panken and Mark Ruffin — whose books were published in 2020. The 90-minute, interactive Zoom event is free to registrants, will be streamed to the JJA Facebook page and archived on the JJA Youtube channel.
The JJA has presented a Jazz Book of the Year annually since 1999. Most recent winners have been Jazz From Detroit by Mark Stryker (2020), Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon by Maxine Gordon (2019); Good Things Happen Slowly by Fred Hersch (2018); Better Git It In Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus by Krin Gabbard (2017), Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth by John Szwed (2016) and Herbie Hancock: Possibilities by Herbie Hancock with Lisa Dickey (2015).
Discussing their books, their writing processes and their publishing experiences at the Zoom Book Party are:
- Karl Ackermann, a senior writer for All About Jazz, published in The New York Times and Chicago Jazz Magazine with a column, Under the Radar , since 2016, is the author of A Map of Jazz: Crossroads of Music and Human Rights, an ambitious and broad-ranging history of jazz in parallel with world events.
- Debbie Burke, four-time author, award-winning business journal editor, lifestyle editor and newspaper columnist based outside Atlanta has
published Tasty Jazz Jams for Our Times, which she describes as turning a “warm and loving spotlight on jazz artists around the globe. . . tipped towards indie musicians (on guitar, vocals, keys, harp, percussion, etc. from Sweden, Italy, Brazil, Israel, Hong Kong and Russia, but Americans such as Houston Person, Christian McBride, Andy Snitzer, Jane Ira Bloom and Bobby Sanabria, too.”
- Ted Panken, who’s written for DownBeat, Jazziz, and Jazz Times,programmed jazz and creative music on New York City’s
WKCR-FM for 23 years and has conducted numerous interviews (more than 290 of them posted on his blog Today Is The Question) is the co-author of Life in E-flat – The Autobiography of Phil Woods. The candid memoir of the great alto saxophonist, one of the legitimate heirs of Charlie Parker, is one of the first two titles published by Cymbal Press, an enterprise of JJA member Gary S. Stager (the other is Jazz Dialogues, by Jon Gordon).
- Tish Oney performs internationally as a composer-arranger, conductor and vocalist; she’s also a recording artist, musicologist and master teacher.
Her biography Peggy Lee: A Century of Song focuses on the evolution of the recorded music, vocal development, artistic achievements, and contributions of an iconic American musician over her fifty-plus albums, radio and TV performances, creative contributions to the film industry and decades of finely-polished live performance. Oney draws on interviews with Lee’s family, friends, and music colleagues.
- Mark Ruffin is the voice of jazz, daily, nationwide, for Sirius XM Satellite radio. A native of Chicago’s West Side, former jazz editor of Chicago magazine and a two-time Emmy
Award winner for broadcasting long staked in New York City, Ruffin in Bebop Fairy Tales: A Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance, and Baseball spins fictions about Gene Ammons and Bob Fosse, Lee Morgan and the Philadelphia Phillies, hate and transcendence.
Bob Blumenthal of the JJA’s 2021 Jazz Awards Book of the Year committee will speak briefly, and JJA president Howard Mandel will moderate. Register to be on the call here.
