2018 JJA Jazz Awards Winners Announced

The Jazz Journalists Association has announced the 2018 winners of the 22nd annual JJA Jazz Awards for music, recording, journalism and media.

Leading the 2018 honorees are saxophonist-composer Benny Golson, honored for his Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, and writer-researcher-historian Patricia Willard, the first woman to be celebrated for her Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism by the JJA. Other notable 2018 Jazz Awards winners include drummer Matt Wilson as Musician of the Year and for Record of the Year, Honey and Salt: Music Inspired by the Poetry of Carl Sandburg (Palmetto Records), and Fred Hersch, Pianist of the Year and author of Book of the Year About Jazz for his memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz (Crown Archetype).

Winners were chosen by the vote of JJA Professional Journalist members from among those previously nominated by those members.

Most musicians will receive their engraved statuettes in front of their audiences at U.S. performances during the summer. Awards for media-related work will be presented at the 2018 Jazz Awards party, a fundraiser for the non-profit JJA, open to the public, at the New School’s Arnhold Hall, 55 W. 13th St., from 4 to 7 pm on June 12, 2018. The Leni Stern trio, singer Polly Gibbons and others to be announced will perform. Tickets are on sale now.

The 22rd annual JJA Jazz Awards again celebrates the creativity of women in jazz, with soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, clarinetist Anat Cohen, baritone saxophonist Claire Daly, guitarist Mary Halvorson, flutist Nicole Mitchell, bassist Linda May Han Oh, cellist Tomeka Reid, vocalists Cecile McLorin Salvant and Jazzmeia Horn, and orchestra-leading composer-arranger Maria Schneider among the honorees. Jazz Awards also go to trumpeter Tom Harrell, saxophonists Chris Potter and Miguel Zenón, pianist Vijay Iyer, organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, writer Nate Chinen, broadcaster Neil Tesser and photographer Michael Jackson, among others.