Midstream, Crossing That River: Ruth Griggs on the Northampton Jazz Festival

This episode of The Buzz comes from the JJA archive. In 2010, Django Reinhardt's centennial year, the JJA's Jazz Matters series at The New School in New York presented a panel titled Jazz Scholarship: The Next Generation. It opened with guitarist Paul Brady, then a member of the Hot Club of Detroit, who had written his master's thesis on Django. Brady argues that Django was, in his words, "in the truest sense, a jazz guitarist," and that writers spent too much time on the legend and too littl...

For John Coltrane's hundredth birthday, this episode of The Buzz has host Lawrence Peryer delivering a solo monologue tracing how critics heard Coltrane while he was alive, and how that judgment has shifted, or hasn't, in the sixty-five years since. The piece opens with discussion of John Tynan's 1961 Down Beat review calling Coltrane and Eric Dolphy's playing "anti-jazz," then turns to LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), who used the same root word, "anarchy," that Tynan had used derisively, b...

For this episode of The Buzz, JJA Book Committee chair Bob Blumenthal speaks with the winners of the 2026 JJA Jazz Awards’ two Book of the Year categories: pianist Matthew Shipp, honored for Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia), and pianist and critic Ethan Iverson, honored as the writer behind Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (Cymbal Press). Shipp and Iverson are both working musicians who write, and the conversation keeps circling back ...

For this episode ofThe Buzz, JJA President Emeritus Howard Mandel speaks with Zan Stewart, the JJA's 2026 Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism honoree. Zan Stewart spent thirty-five years covering jazz as a beat reporter writing weekly features, overnight reviews, and club listings through long-term runs at the Los Angeles Times and the Newark Star-Ledger. His liner notes to Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings earned an ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award. He is also a working tenor saxopho...

Miles Davis would have turned one hundred this year. The centennial has brought the somewhat predictable wave of reissues, retrospectives, and tributes. But which Miles keeps coming back? The suit-and-narrow-lapels Miles of the fifties. Kind of Blue as sonic wallpaper. The Second Great Quintet as the canonical high point. In this episode, Howard Mandel - JJA president emeritus and author of Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz - sits down with three guests who've spent serious time inside th...