2021 Nominees for Journalism and Media

HOWARD REICH covered music — classical as well as jazz — for the Chicago Tribune starting in 1978, joining the staff in 1983 and filing weekly until his retirement in 2021. During his tenure, he served on the Pulitzer Prize music jury four times, including for honorees Wynton Marsalis (1997 winner) and Wadada Leo Smith (2013 finalist). His six books include Jelly’s Blues, Let Freedom Swing, Portraits in Jazz (also Van Clyburn), and The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel. He wrote Prisoner of Her Past about his mother, a Holocaust survivor, and co-produced the award-winning documentary of the same name about her experience of post-traumatic stress disorder; he won an Emmy for Kenwood’s Journey about the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band. and has a new film, Left-Handed Pianist, ready for 2021 release.

NATE CHINEN, director of editorial content at WBGO.org, is also the author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century; co-author of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, George Wein’s autobiography; former music critic at the New York Times and columnist for JazzTimes and 13-times winner of the JJA’s Helen Oakley Dance – Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing. He began covering jazz in 1996, at the Philadelphia City Paper; his work has appeared in DownBeat, Blender, Vibe, the Village Voice, Texas Monthly, and the books Best Music Writing 2011; Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt, and Miles Davis: The Complete Illustrated History. He is co-host, with Greg Bryant, of the Jazz United podcast from WBGO, and he moderates an annual Critics Roundtable, at the National Jazz Museum of Harlem.

MARC MYERS has been a six-days-a-week blogger at JazzWax since its founding in 2007, where he’s conducted more than 300 interviews with jazz legends, many of which have been quoted in the media, most notably by The New York Times and the Washington Post. A three-time winner of the JJA’s Blog of the Year Award, he is a contributing columnist at The Wall Street Journal, where he also writes regularly on music and the arts. He most recently interviewed Carla Bley. His books are Why Jazz Happened, Anatomy of a Song, and Rock Concert: The Oral History of an American Rite of Passage, scheduled for in November from Grove Press. A monthly guest on SiriusXM, he has also annotated many jazz record albums.

PAUL DE BARROS has been jazz critic, columnist and music editor of the Seattle Times, from which he’s covered his city, region and fests world-wide, and a contributor to DownBeat, Musician, JAZZIZ, Modern Drummer, Fretboard Journal, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He is the author of Shall We Play That One Together?: The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland (JJA Book of the Year Award winner in 2005), and Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots Of Jazz In Seattle (the State of Washington Governor’s Writers Award winner in 1994). In 1984 Paul was one of three co- founders of Earshot Jazz, was its first executive director, co-founder and first editor of Earshot Jazz magazine; he writes still for Earshot’s monthly newsletter/webpage.

BEN RATLIFF is the author of four books, including Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty,The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music, Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings, and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (semifinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He was a jazz and pop critic at the New York Times from 1996 to 2016 and has published essays on music in publications including 4Columns, Affidavit, npr.org, Pitchfork, Granta, Rolling Stone, Spin, The Village Voice, Slate, Lingua Franca and the New York Review of Books. He teaches cultural criticism at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. In 2005 he received the JJA’s Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing.

KEVIN WHITEHEAD is jazz critic for NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where he’s filed over 750 reviews since 1987. He has written about jazz since 1979 for publications including Coda, JazzTimes, Down Beat, the Baltimore and Washington City Paper, Village Voice, de Volkskrant (Netherlands, where he lived in the late 1990s), Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Reader, and on the web for Point of Departure and The Audio Beat, among others. He is the author of New Dutch Swing, Why Jazz? A Concise Guide, Instant Composers Pool Orchestra: You Have to See It (with the photographer Ton Mijs), and Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, a nominee for the JJA’s 2021 Book of the Year Award. He was also principal editor of Bimhuis 25: Stories of Twenty-Five Years at the Bimhuis. His work has appeared in anthologies including Jazz: The First Century, The Gramophone Jazz Good CD Guide, Mixtery: a Festschrift for Anthony Braxton, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006, and Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black and Other Solar Myths. Kevin has taught jazz history at the University of Kansas and Towson University.