photo by Fran Kaufman
Pianist Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus, vibraphonist Gary Burton and singer Dee Dee Bridgewater were given top honors — along with veteran author, editor, educator and radio show host W. Royal Stokes, freelance writer Nate Chinen, Spanish photographer Antonio Porcar Cano and videographer John Moultrie — at the 18th annual Jazz Journalists Association’s New York City awards party at the Blue Note in Manhattan on June 11, 2014.
The musicians were celebrated not for music but for their work in media. Members of the JJA voted Iverson’s Do The Math the Best Blog of the Year and Burton’s autobiography Learning To Listen: The Jazz Journey of Gary Burton (Berklee Press) Best Book of the Year. Bridgewater, on-air host of the NPR series Jazz Set, received the JJA’s Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting.
Stokes, who now lives in West Virginia — where he’s actively writing and publishing books, and guest lecturing on the blues at David & Elkins College — after a 60-year-career in and around Washington, D.C., was presented with the Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award. Chinen, contributor to the New York Times and JazzTimes, won the Helen Oakley Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Writing in 2013. Cano depicted tenor saxophonist Benny Golson blowing in front of a huge image of Billie Holiday for Photo of the Year. Moultrie’s Best Short Form Jazz News Video clip is the very candid “Gary Bartz Talks About Drug Use Among Jazz Greats.”
Awards were also announced to JazzTimes magazine and AllAboutJazz.com. All winners of the 2014 Jazz Awards, including musician recipients announced on April 15 and the 2014 Jazz Heroes feted in 23 North American cities for their activism, advocacy and altruism” are detailed at www.JJAJazzAwards.org.
Jazz Heroes Meghan Stabile of Revive Music, Maryland-based music educator John R. Lamkin II and WBGO CEO Cephas Bowles, currently on medical leave, were honored at the cocktails-and-hors d’ouevres party. The event was attended by some 125 music and media luminaries, and featured performances by Stephanie Richards’ Trumpet Quartet, singer Sheila Jordan with bassist Cameron Brown, and pianist Eilio Villafranca’s Jass Syncopators Septet.
Notable attendees included trombonist Roswell Rudd, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, composer-orchestra leader Maria Schneider, clarinetist Anat Cohen, electronic keyboardist Jason Lindner, JJA member-critics Gary Giddins, Francis Davis, Neil Tesser, Ron Scott and Yvonne Ervin, Motema Music principal Jana Herzen, presenters Mark Morganelli and Todd Barkan, publicists Jana La Sorte, Jim Eigo, Don Lucoff and Carolyn McClair and BMI’s Patrick Cook, who toasted “All the nominees.”
The JJA’s Jazz Awards are the only comprehensive honors for excellence in jazz and jazz journalism presented publicly in the U.S. Sponsors this year include the Ella Fitzgerald Foundation, WBGO, the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program, BMI, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Berklee College of Music, JazzFM, Century Media Partners, Brother Thelonious Belgian Style Abbey Ale, Mack Avenue Records, ECM, Motema Music, Columbia Legacy, Resonance Records, the Jazz Institute of Chicago, JazzBoston, MCGJazz, the Monterey Jazz Festival, DeBlaze and Associates, the Jazz Foundation of America, B Sharp’s (Tallahassee) and The Jazz Cruise.
Michal Shapiro video’d the JJA Jazz Awards party — her edited version of the proceedings will be posted soon.
