2019 Nominees for Journalism

Nate Chinen has, since 2017, been director of editorial content at WBGO (responsible for Jazz Night in America, Jazz Night in America, The Checkout and other NPR jazz coverage). For nearly a dozen years a jazz and pop music reviewer for the New York Times, and columnist producing “The Gig” for JazzTimes, he is an 11-time winner of the JJA’s Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for excellence in writing during a given year, and winner of the JJA’s Best Book of the Year Award for his work with George Wein on Myself Among Others. Nate has been writing about jazz since 1996, when he began at Philadelphia City Paper; covered jazz for The Village Voice in the early ’00s, and has also been published in DownBeat, Blender and Vibe. His book Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century was published in 2018.

Eugene Holley, Jr. writes about jazz and culture for DownBeat, Publishers Weekly, Hot House, New Music Box, Chamber Music and Playbill. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, NPR: A Blog Supreme, Vibe, Wax Poetics, and The New York Times Book Review and in the books Writing Music: A Bedford Spotlight Reader, Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation, and Best Music Writing: 2010, also as liner notes for many albums. He was the program director of WCLK-FM, Clark-Atlanta University, a freelance arts reporter/producer for NPR and co-produced two radio documentaries, “Dizzy’s Diamonds” and “The Duke Ellington Radio Project.”

Dan Ouellette has been a freelance writer for more than 25 years, published in DownBeat, Billboard, Qwest.TV, the Huffington Post and The Absolute Sound, and is senior editor of ZEALNYC for which he writes the column “Jazz Notes Intel.” He’s the author of Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes and Bruce Lundvall: Playing By Ear, and has regularly presented public q&a sessions with major jazz artists at the Monterey Jazz Festival and North Sea Jazz Festival.

Ben Ratliff is a journalist and professor, jazz and pop critic for the New York Times (1996 – 2016), with writings in Esquire and a broad range of other publications including the New York Review of Books, NPR, Slate, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, 4Columns, Spin, Lingua Franca, Guardian, Metropolis, Village Voice, Coda, Option, Granta, Bookforum, Jazz Times and Wire. He is author of Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (2016); The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). He was host of the New York Times Popcast from 2012 to 2016. He teaches cultural criticism at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

John Szwed has written the biographies Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra), So What: The Life of Miles Davis, Billie Holiday: The Musician and The Myth, and Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, and authored Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz; Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music and Culture; Lovers, and Jazz: An American Story for Jazz at Lincoln Center. He was Louis Armstrong Professor of Jazz, Director of the Center for Jazz Studies, and editor of JazzStudiesOnline.org at Columbia University. He’s written for Epistrophy, The Wire, Jazziz, Pulse, and The Village Voice (1979-2009), and was the music critic for Terry Gross’s, Fresh Air (1980-1982). Szwed is editor of the Jazz Perspectives Book Series, University of Michigan Press, has produced records for Evidence and Mixtery, and was awarded a Grammy in 2005.