Gary Giddins
Jazz Critic and Author, "Jazz"
Gary Giddins is an award-winning American jazz and film critic. His column "Weather Bird" appeared in The Village Voice from 1973 through 2003 and won six ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Criticism. He has also won a Peabody Award for writing (for the PBS documentary "John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen") and a Grammy Award (for his liner notes to "Sinatra: The Voice"). He currently writes a music column for Jazz Times. His latest book, "Jazz," was published by W. W. Norton in 2009.
What are the five jazz albums everyone should own? It’s an impossible question, Gary Giddins says (then mentions six or seven).
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Is jazz dead? Hardly, says critic Gary Giddins, who believes we’re seeing “some kind of renaissance.”
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5 min
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Jazz is an African-American music, yet its major white figures initially received the top gigs, the big money—and the scorn of black musicians. Untangling the genre’s racial politics is part […]
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Can criticism be as ageless as art, or is it inseparable from its time and place? Gary Giddins takes a tough look at his own profession.
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4 min
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Yes, jazz should be studied in the academies, says critic Gary Giddins. But if its raw emotion gets “turned into homework assignments,” its whole meaning gets lost.
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“Jazz” author Gary Giddins explains why critics should err on the side of gushing, not bashing.
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7 min
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Once listeners learn to recognize stale pop music formulas, they often become enamored with the spontaneity of jazz.
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6 min
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A conversation with the award-winning jazz critic and author of “Jazz.”
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36 min
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“Jazz” author Gary Giddins looks back at his younger self: an avid reader of Dr. Johnson and would-be critic of English literature.
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4 min
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