Washington DC Jazz Hero
John Edward Hasse has quietly, studiously and continuously made a worldwide impact in the awareness of and the appreciation for jazz and jazz people: artists, composers, producers, record companies, photographers and journalists. For 33 years, he served as Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, where he founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and, in 2001, established April as Jazz Appreciation Month. He is now Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian.
John is a scholar and writer, the author of the acclaimed biography Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, co-author of Discover Jazz and co-producer/co-author of Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology. He has contributed to eight encyclopedias and for the past several years his columns on jazz icons and seminal jazz recordings have appeared frequently in The Wall Street Journal, garnering some of the newspaper’s largest reader audiences.
In 1990 he secured a Congressional appropriation to create the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, a 17-member big band, and oversaw it for almost a decade. The Orchestra has performed hundreds of concerts in the U.S, at festivals from the White House to Monterey and across Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Most impressively, John conceived of and realized the idea of a national “month” for jazz — Jazz Appreciation Month or JAM. He assembled a coalition of national and international organizations including the Smithsonian, the musicians’ union, the American Library Association, the Grammy Foundation, BMI, NPR, Sirius/XM Satellite Radio and the Voice of America as partners to “get the word out” in the U.S. and around the world. He spearheaded the publication of Jazz Appreciation Month posters, a program that grew to distribute as many as 200,000 posters each year to U.S. embassies and consulates globally, and to music educators and librarians’ associations. Major presenting organizations have anchored their annual jazz celebrations to Jazz Appreciation Month, including the National Endowment of the Arts’ Jazz Masters program.
Today, JAM represents John Hasse’s unique, enduring legacy in raising the public’s attention to jazz. But it is only one dimension of the work he’s steadily done, earning celebration as a Jazz Hero.
— Robbin Ahrold
Century Media Partners
