2026 Jazz Heroes

When jazz pianist and educator Ellen Rowe moved to Ann Arbor in 1996 to help develop the University of Michigan’s jazz studies program, she quickly integrated into the state’s vibrant jazz scene. A native of Richfield, Connecticut and a graduate of Eastman School of Music, Rowe had already established a reputation as a serious jazz pianist and composer, earning praise from jazz legends such as Bill Evans, who commended her remarkable grasp of melody; Marian McPartland; and composer/producer Quincy Jones, who told her she was a “natural writer” after hearing her arrangement of one of his well-known works.

By Charles L. Latimer

Sam Skelton doesn’t just keep a foot firmly planted in the worlds of jazz and classical music. The veteran educator has played an essential role in opening doors between these realms, creating opportunities for young jazz musicians to learn and perform. While working as director of jazz studies at Kennesaw State University, he launched two new programs, serving as artistic director of both the Georgia Symphony Orchestra Jazz Ensemble and the Georgia Youth Symphony Orchestra Jazz Ensemble.

By Karla Harris,

Austin’s population has skyrocketed from 475,000 to over a million over the last 35 years, and the rapid growth has sparked numerous challenges. Longstanding institutions have shuttered as rents surged, with music venues hit particularly hard. So the idea that a small, dimly lit basement space Downtown could survive entirely by presenting local jazz acts sounds far-fetched. The fact that the Elephant Room, a bastion of local improvisational creativity, has not only endured but flourished is a testament to Michael Mordecai’s sweat and vision.

By Rob Shepherd

The Jazz Journalist Association is proud to name Javier Nero, a.k.a. Dr. Javier Nero, as Baltimore’s 2026 Jazz Hero. Nero is an award-winning trombonist, composer, arranger, and educator active in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area (DMV). At the Peabody Institute, Nero teaches the jazz trombone studio, arranging, harmony, ear training, graduate composition, and has also previously directed the Peabody Jazz Ensemble.

By Don Palmer

Alex Nauman is a consummate guitarist, but Nauman’s true talents lay in networking and communion, helping fill the ocean and making sure the jazz tide will keep rising. He’s taught at nearly every higher learning institution in the region. For over a decade, Nauman helped lead a weekly jazz jam in Billings that served as an opportunity for newbies to get better and good players to hone their craft.

By Jake Iverson

For a successful commercial attorney Con Chapman has been an incredibly prodigious author, with over five dozen books, plays, and novels in his bibliography. “I was a typesetter in my youth,” he explains, “so I type fast.” Most of his books focused on humor and sports until a decade ago, he began to explore an interest in older jazz styles rooted in his college years.

By Bob Blumenthal

By his own admission Robert “Bob” Myers was content with his life as a jazz enthusiast hanging out at New York City clubs. But when his brother, a chef, rented a two-story building in Brooklyn and asked him to take the top floor in 1996, his life changed course. He launched the Up Over Café, a jazz venue intended to replace the loss of neighborhood Brooklyn jazz venues like Blue Coronet.

By Ronald E. Scott

For more than 35 years Derrick Lucas has been Rochester’s voice of jazz as music director and DJ at Jazz 90.1 WGMC, the city’s only full-time jazz station. A three-time JazzWeek Jazz Programmer of the Year, he hosts weekday mornings and his signature program, The Spectrum, on Sunday nights.

By Greg Bell

Maggie Brown is a beloved local singer, songwriter, stage director, producer, and educator, frequent performer and warm presence in Chicago’s overall cultural scene. She’s particularly focused on addressing contemporary social issues in continuation of the legacy of her family, which has been a creative force for Black and progressive circles in Chicago and beyond for a century.

By Howard Mandel

Dr. Jack Marchbanks isn’t just a jazz fan—he’s someone who keeps its spirit alive and pushes it forward. For almost twenty years as the host and producer of Jazz Sunday on WCBE, he’s treated jazz as more than just music from the past. Every show shows his belief that jazz is a big part of what makes America, carrying the stories, ideas, and values that shape who we are.

By Stephanie Matthews

A jazz power couple who’ve been at the heart of the seven-county Denver Metropolitan scene for decades, Chris and Paul Romaine have built an educational institution responsible for nurturing hundreds of aspiring jazz musicians. A veteran player and educator, Paul has served on the music faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 2005, and also taught at MSU Denver. Together with Chris, he developed a far-reaching vision for jazz education, co-founding the nonprofit Colorado Conservatory for the Jazz Arts.

By Arturo Gomez

Leonard King made it his life’s work to champion the Detroit’s extraordinarily rich music scene even before Mark Stryker’s lauded book and documentary Jazz from Detroit became a hot topic. The drummer, raconteur, vocalist, bandleader, producer, historian, griot, and record label owner is at the center of a treasure trove of recordings via his Uuquipleu Records, which includes rare tracks covering rock, soul, R&B, blues, and jazz from the 1960s to present.

By Linda Yohn

Over the past four decades no one in the San Francisco Bay Area has done more to breathe life into freedom songs than Linda Tillery, the powerhouse Oakland singer, activist, educator, and leader of the Cultural Heritage Choir, a vocal and percussion ensemble that encompasses the entire history of African-American music.

By Andrew Gilbert

Tierney Malone first encountered the classic Texas tenor sound of Arnett Cobb in 1989 at an opening at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Cobb died not long after, but Malone struck up a friendship with his daughter, Lizette Cobb, who expanded his appreciation and knowledge of the history of jazz in Houston and its roots in the Jim Crow South.

By Rick Mitchell

They call bassist Henry Franklin, “The Skipper,” and with good reason. The big man wielding the double bass in the ensemble signifies that the ship will successfully navigate the musical waters—no matter how tumultuous–and he’ll guide it into port smoothly. As a player, bandleader, and jazz griot, Franklin has been a consistent fixture in Southern California jazz since the early 1960s.

By Kirk Silsbee

A prolific jazz and blues pianist, composer, singer, and producer, Eli Yamin has dedicated himself to passing on the knowledge he’s gleaned from elder masters. The East Patchogue, Long Island native was nurtured in the jazz bands of Illinois Jacquet, Walter Perkins, and Barry Harris and mentored by Amiri Baraka. Yamin was 19 when he met the intellectual, poet, playwright, and noted jazz journalist in Newark while working for the jazz radio station WBGO.

By Ronald E. Scott

Rev. Carl Walker and Grant West share a lifelong commitment to music education, community empowerment, and cultural preservation that has profoundly shaped the Twin Cities jazz scene. Their Walker West Music Academy in Saint Paul, one of the nation’s first African American-founded community music schools, has provided accessible, culturally-rooted instruction in jazz, gospel, and classical music to thousands of students since 1988.

By Andrea Carter, Patty Peterson, and Steve Kenny

Sustaining a healthy jazz scene in a small city is no easy feat, but Paul Arslanian has helped turn Northampton into Western Massachusetts’ swing central. For the past 16 years the pianist and composer has led the Northampton Jazz Workshop, a year-round organization that brings leading jazz musicians from New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia to Northampton every week to perform with the Green Street Trio.

By Ruth Griggs

In an interview for the 20th anniversary of the website All About Jazz, the site’s founder Michael Ricci mused about the future of his creation, suggesting that some sort of three-dimensional cyber experience may replace the now-conventional web design and presence. Ten years later, it is safe to say that the cyber vision isn’t immanent, and All About Jazz (AAJ) and its sister site Jazz Near You are traditional 2D entities that continue to champion jazz (and other genres) to fans across the globe.

By Jeff Cebulski

Neil Mattson is an arts leader, entrepreneur, and educator dedicated to strengthening arts and culture in his community. As the founding executive director of Montavilla Jazz, he has spent more than a decade elevating Portland’s jazz scene through innovative programming, strategic partnerships, and neighborhood-based cultural activation.

By Marcia Hocker and Pancho Savary

Far more than an ace accompanist and educator of thousands of musicians, Joe Gilman is a force that has changed the face of jazz in Sacramento. He’s taught at American River College and Sacramento State University and the Brubeck Institute in Stockton. He formed and directed the Capital Jazz Project. He toured the world as part of the Kennedy Center/USIA Jazz Ambassador program, and he was the grand prize winner of the 2004 Great American Jazz Piano Competition in Jacksonville, Florida.

By Susan Skinner 

When a presenter is having trouble procuring a visa for a Cuban musician to perform in the United States, Bill Martinez often gets the call. The San Francisco immigration attorney has spent the past half century figuring out avenues to break through the barriers imposed by both governments that keep Cuban artists off American stages.

By Andrew Gilbert

A tireless champion of Puerto Rican music and musicians, Brenda Hopkins Miranda is a pianist, composer, educator, and scholar who has played an essential role enriching the island’s cultural scene. Born and raised in San Juan, she has long connected Puerto Rico’s musical heritage to far-flung traditions, embracing flamenco, jazz, rock, pop, Brazilian, Afro-Caribbean, and European classical music as well as multicultural fusions of all kinds.

By Wilbert Sostre

The Jazz Journalists Association presents the Seattle Jazz Hero award for 2026 to Lisa Hagen Glynn for her diverse and talented coverage of arts, culture, and justice events in Seattle, though most notably in jazz. A familiar and friendly face on the scene to many who know that wherever there’s jazz, there’s Lisa!

By Rayna Mathis

The president and program director of South Bend, Indiana’s WETF-FM, Brent Banulis oversees a 24-hour jazz radio station with a small studio and a global reach. The Hoosier institution, which streams at https://jazzradiowetf.org, offers 168 hours of commercial-free programming each week.

By Leslie Lynnton Fuller

Decades after Miles Davis redefined the sound of jazz and became one of the most influential musicians in history the East St. Louis house where he grew up sat vacant and in disrepair. The property, where Davis learned to play trumpet, had suffered a fire and had been vandalized. It was set for demolition when East St. Louis Jazz Hero Lauren Parks changed everything.

By Jasmine Osby

Damen Cook is a dynamic drummer and vocalist based in Toledo, Ohio, which is where I first saw him at Lucille’s Jazz Lounge for his weekly Tuesday jam, a wonderful respite during the first years of Covid. Lucille’s was one of several projects housed in The TolHouse in downtown. Cook, whom I teased as trying to be the Grady Tate of Toledo, has kept the jam and various Holiday shows going for the four years I’ve known him. For this dedication to keeping jazz alive in Toledo, Cook is being honored as the Jazz Journalist Association’s 2026 Toledo Jazz Hero.

By Don Palmer

As I write these words, I am listening to Dave Robinson’s weekly “Jazz Gumbo” radio show – just one of the many and varied ways my brother serves the traditional jazz music he loves, the music that has been his guiding passion since childhood. This passion has led him to found the Traditional Jazz Educators Network and the JEN Traditional Jazz Society.

By Scott Robinson

As jazz music director at Connecticut’s WWUH, licensed to the University of Hartford, Chuck Obuchowski for the past 25 years has presided over a station that has been the heartbeat of jazz in the Greater Hartford area. Along with hosting the morning show “Out Here and Beyond” (note the veiled reference to Eric Dolphy’s Out There, a personal favorite), his mission at the station remains the dissemination of the music he discovered and fell in love with during the late ’70s as a student at Syracuse University.

By Bill Milkowski

For thirty years, Kevin Struthers did something remarkable — he made the extraordinary look routine. As director of jazz programming at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., he shaped one of the nation’s most vital stages for America’s most vital art form, all while commuting 75 miles each way from his home in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, with what colleagues describe as seemingly endless energy and good spirits.

By John Edward Hasse

An award-winning jazz artist, Fiona Ross is a pianist, songwriter, and vocalist, but what makes her a Jazz Hero are her tireless efforts championing other women on the scene as a journalist and founder of the Women in Jazz Media organization.

By Isabel Marquez