Terri Hinte, the independent Bay Area-based publicist renowned for her love of
photo © Margaretta K. Mitchell
Brazilian music, representation of jazz artists including Sonny Rollins, and 33-year career at Fantasy Records, has agreed to join the board of the Jazz Journalists Association.
A longtime associate member of the JJA, honored in 2006 as a member of the “A Team” (since renamed “Jazz Heroes”), she comes on as the organization shifts into its spring 2022 programs, including announcement of this year’s class of U.S.-wide Jazz Heroes (scheduled for April 1) and the 27th annual JJA Jazz Awards.
Born in Brooklyn, Terri studied French at New York University for two years before being hired as an editor for the monthly magazine Scripts, published by the New York Shakespeare Festival. There she sharpened her copyediting skills, which, following a cross-country move, got her in the door at Berkeley’s Fantasy Records. In 1973 she began work as copy chief at the label. Among those she interacted with regularly were director of jazz a&r Orrin Keepnews and publicity director Gretchen Horton, to whose job she ascended in 1978 and where she remained for the next 28 years.
During the ’70s, Terri represented artists ranging from McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, Bill Evans, and Sonny Rollins (still a client of hers) to the Blackbyrds, Pleasure and Sylvester. Smitten upon being introduced to the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, she began studies of Portuguese. At the same time, the Rio-based trio Azymuth was finding success on the American jazz charts; Terri managed three North American tours for the group. During the ’80s and ’90s she traveled frequently to Brazil and in 1993 contributed to the Brazilian music section of the original All Music Guide.
She later wrote the notes for the 3-CD set The Prime of Antonio Carlos Jobim (Runt/DBK Works).
In the late ’90s Terri started The Berkeley Item, a weekly email newsletter —the first of its kind in the music biz — that aimed to highlight aspects of the sprawling Fantasy catalog in an easily digestible format. She continued to publish it for seven years. She became the first publicist to receive a JJA award as an “activist, advocate, altruist, aider and abettor of jazz” the year she left Fantasy and started her own publicity firm, www.TerrriHinte.com.
Terri’s first-person travel stories have appeared in Travelers’ Tales Brazil, Passionfruit magazine, and the East Bay Monthly and were honored in the annual Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing in 2007 and 2010. She is a former Chair of the Arts & Culture Commission in Richmond, California, where she’s resided for 20 years.
The JJA’s other active board members are Bob Blumenthal, Susan Brink, Andrew Gilbert, Janis Lane-Ewart, Carolyn McClair, Rick Mitchell, Don Palmer and Neil Tesser. The JJA is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit, registered in the state of New York; Howard Mandel serves as president.
