• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

2020 Jazz Heroes: The Complete List

April 5, 2020 by Doug Ramsey

Each year, the Jazz Journalists Association recognizes musicians, writers, broadcasters and others who have made important contributions to the health and success of jazz in their parts of the United States. Here are the new honorees.

For the list of 2020 heroes and their biographical sketches, scroll down and click on the names of the heroes who interest you. You’re likely to find at least one whom you know, or know about.

  • Ann Arbor, MI: Deanna Relyea
  • Atlanta, GA: Gwen Redding
  • Baltimore, MD: Sean Jones
  • Bay Area, CA: Richard Hadlock
  • Birmingham, AL: Leah Tucker
  • Boston, MA: Ran Blake
  • Brooklyn, NY: Matthew Garrison & Fortuna Sung
  • Capital Region, NY: Susan Cohen Brink
  • Charlotte, NC: Lonnie & Ocie Davis
  • Chicago, IL: Harriet Choice
  • Cleveland, OH: Terri Pontremoli
  • Denver, CO: Norman Provizer
  • Fort Lauderdale, FL: Dr. Ronald B. Weber
  • Hartford, CT: Ed Krech
  • Indianapolis, IN: Albert Coleman
  • Los Angeles, CA: Billy Mitchell
  • Minneapolis, MN: Patty Peterson
  • New York, NY: Roberta Alloway
  • Philadelphia, PA: Anthony Tidd
  • Portland, OR: Ron Steen
  • Seattle, WA: Jay Thomas
  • St. Louis, MO: Gene Dobbs Bradford
  • Tallahassee, FL: Jan & Mark Pudlow
  • Washington, DC: Sunny Sumter

Congratulations to all of the new jazz heroes and the past winners listed at the bottom of this post.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. Orsolya S. says

    April 5, 2020 at 4:35 pm

    Oh. They forgot about you. That’s not good.

  2. svetlana says

    April 5, 2020 at 10:27 pm

    Dear Orsolya S.,,

    Let me join you.
    To be just, some years ago Doug was rightfully given a JJA Award!.
    But for so many years Doug has been our hero and
    I believe will be for many more years to come if only
    for the fact that he, being his friend, created an inimitable story
    of private and public lives of super saxophonist Paul Desmond
    and for keeping us in knowledge of the main jazz events.. So he
    fully deserves some more of JJA Awards no doubt!

    • Orsolya S. says

      April 7, 2020 at 11:11 am

      Hi Svetlana,

      Thank you for your kind note– It’s a poem!
      I agree with you in all your praise of Mr. Doug Ramsey. Keep reading Rifftides.

      Take care!
      Be well!

  3. Peter Vacher says

    April 6, 2020 at 2:29 am

    No jazz heroes in New Orleans? Or overseas, for that matter. How come?

  4. Donald Molloy says

    April 6, 2020 at 8:03 am

    You may want to correct the spelling of Sidney Bechet in the Richard Hadlock article.

    Don Molloy
    St Cloud MN

    • Doug Ramsey says

      April 6, 2020 at 10:07 pm

      You would have to ask the Jazz Journalists Association’s copy desk to correct the misspelling of Bechet as “Becket” in the Hadlock biography.

  5. Jim Brown says

    April 10, 2020 at 10:26 am

    It’s good to see Harriet Choice recognized.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in