The Buzz: The JJA Podcast

This episode of The Buzz comes from the JJA archive. In 2010, Django Reinhardt's centennial year, the JJA's Jazz Matters series at The New School in New York presented a panel titled Jazz Scholarship: The Next Generation. It opened with guitarist Paul Brady, then a member of the Hot Club of Detroit, who had written his master's thesis on Django.
Brady argues that Django was, in his words, "in the truest sense, a jazz guitarist," and that writers spent too much time on the legend and too little on the playing. He builds the case from the records: Django landing on thirds and ninths in "Django's Tiger" before he had heard Dizzy Gillespie, the "Salt Peanuts" quote in "Babik," and voice leading in "Moppin' the Bride" that Charlie Parker would have recognized. Along the way he takes issue with Gunther Schuller's view that Django's style grew out of folk traditions, and he closes on two players who honor Django in their own voices, guitarist Biréli Lagrène and saxophonist James Carter.
In the Q&A that follows, moderator David Adler and Howard Mandel ask about Thelonious Monk, the soundtrack of Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, and how Carter imitates Django's picking on the saxophone. Host Lawrence Peryer bookends the talk with a look at what has changed in the sixteen years since, from new research on Django's injured hand to Siv Lie's work with the Manouche musicians who play this music in France today.
Musical excerpts heard in this episode: Django Reinhardt, "Babik"; Django Reinhardt, "Moppin' the Bride"; Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, "Shaw 'Nuff"; Biréli Lagrène, "Coquette"; Biréli Lagrène, "Incertitude" (Electric Side, 2008); Django Reinhardt, "Diminishing"; James Carter, "Diminishing" (Heaven on Earth, 2009).
Buzzworthy Notes
Guest & Host
Paul Brady: guitarist, formerly of the Hot Club of Detroit; now winemaker, Paul Brady Wine
David Adler: moderator
Howard Mandel: JJA President Emeritus
Lawrence Peryer: host; managing editor of The Buzz
Discussed
Django Reinhardt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_Reinhardt
Michael Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (Oxford, 2004): https://books.google.com/books/about/Django.html?id=V4fujovyvCYC
Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_Schuller
Dan Morgenstern, Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Morgenstern
Rex Stewart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Stewart
Stéphane Grappelli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Grappelli
Quintette du Hot Club de France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintette_du_Hot_Club_de_France
Eddie Lang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Lang
Joe Venuti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Venuti
Dizzy Gillespie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizzy_Gillespie
Lewis Porter, Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Porter
Sweet and Lowdown (1999): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_and_Lowdown
Howard Alden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Alden
Ken Peplowski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Peplowski
Hubert Rostaing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Rostaing
Biréli Lagrène: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir%C3%A9li_Lagr%C3%A8ne
Babik Reinhardt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babik_Reinhardt
James Carter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carter_(musician)
Julian Bream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Bream
Benjamin Givan, The Music of Django Reinhardt (Michigan, 2009): https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-Music-of-Django-Reinhardt
Michael Wininger and David J. Williams, "More with less: A comparative kinematical analysis of Django Reinhardt's adaptations to hand injury" (2014): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0309364614523173
Siv B. Lie, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (Chicago, 2021): https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo114656860.html
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 
For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

For John Coltrane's hundredth birthday, this episode of The Buzz has host Lawrence Peryer delivering a solo monologue tracing how critics heard Coltrane while he was alive, and how that judgment has shifted, or hasn't, in the sixty-five years since.
The piece opens with discussion of John Tynan's 1961 Down Beat review calling Coltrane and Eric Dolphy's playing "anti-jazz," then turns to LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), who used the same root word, "anarchy," that Tynan had used derisively, but as praise, in his essay "Jazz and the White Critic." From there it follows Ira Gitler's "sheets of sound," coined to give critics language for what Coltrane was doing instead of dismissing it as noise, and Miles Davis's On the Corner, hated at release and reclaimed twenty years later.
The heart of the episode is Coltrane's relationship with Albert Ayler: the phone calls, the shared bills at the Village Vanguard, Coltrane pushing producer Bob Thiele to sign Ayler to Impulse, and Ayler's quartet opening Coltrane's 1967 funeral with a set built from their own compositions. Coltrane is close to a saint today. Ayler is still a name that has to be explained.
The episode closes on a live critical fight: Phil Freeman's recent Brooklyn Rail case that Coltrane's real peak ended in 1965, against guitarist Nels Cline, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's defense of the late recordings Freeman dismisses. The same argument that split critics in 1961 is still unresolved in 2026.
Musical excerpts heard in this episode: John Coltrane, "Chasin' the Trane" (Live at the Village Vanguard, 1961); Miles Davis, "Black Satin" (On the Corner, 1972); Albert Ayler Quartet, "Truth Is Marching In," from the album, In Greenwich Village.
Buzzworthy Notes
Guest & Host
Lawrence Peryer — host and managing editor of The Buzz
Discussed
John Coltrane · Eric Dolphy · John Tynan (Down Beat critic who wrote the 1961 "anti-jazz" review) · LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka ("Jazz and the White Critic," collected in Black Music) · Ira Gitler (coined "sheets of sound") · Miles Davis, On the Corner (1972) · Albert Ayler · Ornette Coleman · Phil Freeman (critic, Brooklyn Rail / Burning Ambulance) · Nels Cline · Jack DeJohnette · Peter Brötzmann · Meditations (1966) · Interstellar Space (recorded 1967) · Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 
For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

For this episode of The Buzz, Lawrence Peryer talks with 2025 JJA Jazz Hero Ruth Griggs, longtime director of the Northampton Jazz Festival, about the trade-off facing a fifteen-year-old, mostly-free festival built for a loyal, older jazz audience: book an artist who can pull in a younger crowd, or keep playing to the room you already have.
Griggs traces the festival's history from its accidental start in 2011, when five men more interested in reviving a defunct food fair backed into a jazz festival almost as an afterthought, through its 2017 relaunch as a genuinely jazz-focused event spread across Northampton's churches, galleries, and the eight-hundred-seat Academy of Music. No food trucks, no vendors: the festival sends people into the town's own restaurants and shops instead, which Griggs credits as much as the music for its financial health.
This year's headliner, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, is the pressure test. Benjamin plays jazz, hip hop, R&B, and funk in the same set, and Griggs, a marketing strategist by trade, has been restructuring the festival's outreach around her: shifting weight from Facebook to Instagram, hiring an intern to research college radio stations and newspapers across Albany, New Haven, Hartford, and Worcester, and reaching out to other festivals with more diverse audiences to help promote the booking. Griggs is candid that she doesn't yet know what will work, only that the old methods won't.
Griggs also talks about what keeps out-of-town artists coming back, and why the festival's pipeline into UMass Amherst, Smith College, Amherst College, and now Northampton's public schools gets equal billing in Griggs's account of what keeps the thing alive.
(The musical excerpts heard in this episode are “So You Want to Be a Woman” by Somi featuring Lakecia Benjamin, and “RonJackRuba,” an unplanned improvisation from Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s 2021 album Skyline. A companion playlist for this episode featuring those songs and other artists mentioned is available on Spotify.)
Buzzworthy Notes
Guest & Host
Ruth Griggs — director, Northampton Jazz Festival
Lawrence Peryer — host; managing editor of The Buzz
Discussed
Northampton Jazz Festival — official site
Lakecia Benjamin — this year's headliner; saxophonist, six-time Grammy nominee
Academy of Music — Northampton's 800-seat theater, festival's largest venue
BOMBYX Center for Arts & Equity — Florence, Massachusetts venue, where Bill Charlap performed after the festival
Bill Charlap — pianist; praised the festival's hospitality after a BOMBYX performance
Miki Yamanaka — pianist; performed a solo set at last year's festival
Bonnie Johnson — WICN's Colors of Jazz host, Worcester; interviewed Yamanaka after her festival set
Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival — the single-stage model Griggs says she's studying
Max Roach and Yusef Lateef — among the jazz musicians who taught at UMass Amherst, part of the festival's regional lineage
Ron Carter — cited alongside Lakecia Benjamin as an example of the festival's range
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.
For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 
For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

For this episode of The Buzz, JJA Book Committee chair Bob Blumenthal speaks with the winners of the 2026 JJA Jazz Awards’ two Book of the Year categories: pianist Matthew Shipp, honored for Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia), and pianist and critic Ethan Iverson, honored as the writer behind Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (Cymbal Press).
Shipp and Iverson are both working musicians who write, and the conversation keeps circling back to what that dual life costs and gives them. Shipp traces his path from commissioned blog pieces to a book collecting essays on David S. Ware, Paul Bley, and Wayne Shorter, plus prose poems on boxing, decadence, and the New York club scene he came up in during the 1980s. Iverson describes fifteen years on the road with Billy Hart before finally getting the older drummer on tape, reading him the manuscript twice, and watching Hart pull stories back out both times. Both men also discovered, mid-conversation, an unlikely shared history: each once worked as a dance-company music director, Shipp for a small post-Cunningham troupe in the 1980s, Iverson for the Mark Morris Dance Group decades later.
The episode also catches Shipp and Iverson comparing notes on a much more recent flashpoint: the online reaction to André 3000’s ambient flute album, which briefly made Shipp’s own criticism go viral. But the conversation’s real center is a shared argument about criticism itself. Both reject the old line that music writing is “dancing about architecture,” insisting instead that jazz criticism, done by people who actually play the music, is inseparable from the playing.
(The musical excerpts heard in this episode are “Iverson’s Odyssey” from the Billy Hart Quartet’s 2006 album Quartet and “Nu Bop,” the title track from Matthew Shipp’s 2002 album on Thirsty Ear.)
Buzzworthy Notes
Guest & Host
Matthew Shipp — official site
Ethan Iverson — official site and Do the Math archive
Bob Blumenthal — JJA Book Committee chair; two-time Grammy winner for album notes
Discussed
Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings — Matthew Shipp (Autonomedia, 2025); introduction by Yuko Otomo
Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart — Billy Hart, as told to Ethan Iverson (Cymbal Press, 2025)
Billy Hart — NEA Jazz Master; Iverson has played in his working quartet since 2003
David S. Ware — saxophonist; Shipp played in his quartet for sixteen years
Paul Bley — pianist; subject of one of Shipp’s essays
Wayne Shorter, “Night Dreamer” — the 1964 Blue Note album Bob Blumenthal cites as still holding up on repeat listening
Steve Dalachinsky — poet; longtime friend and collaborator of Shipp’s, referenced throughout the book
Dewey Redman — saxophonist; the first musician whose stories convinced Iverson of the value of oral history
Nasheet Waits — drummer; source of the “start playing like I’m teaching” line Iverson cites
Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original — the Monk biography both guests recommend; Kelley also blurbed Shipp’s book
Thelonious Monk / Joe Turner, "In Paris" - the 1954 album both Matt and Ethan enthused over near the end of the discussion
Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones — 1977 collection of musician-to-musician interviews Shipp calls a formative read
J. C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane — early Coltrane biography Shipp says changed his life at twelve or fourteen
Hampton Hawes with Don Asher, Raise Up Off Me — the memoir Iverson used as his model for pacing and length while writing Oceans of Time
The 2026 JJA Jazz Awards
Oceans of Time is Book of the Year, Biography or Autobiography
Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings is Book of the Year about Jazz: History, Criticism and Culture
Full list of 2026 winners: JJA Jazz Awards · announcement
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 
For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

For this episode ofThe Buzz, JJA President Emeritus Howard Mandel speaks with Zan Stewart, the JJA's 2026 Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism honoree.
Zan Stewart spent thirty-five years covering jazz as a beat reporter writing weekly features, overnight reviews, and club listings through long-term runs at the Los Angeles Times and the Newark Star-Ledger. His liner notes to Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings earned an ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award. He is also a working tenor saxophonist, and the two roles were always intertwined: Stewart came to jazz journalism as an advocate with a reporter's eye and a player's ear. In this conversation, he retraces his path from a hi-fi in Ojai to the clubs of San Francisco, with a lot of music in between.
They cover his early formation in the music (his father was at the Palomar Ballroom in 1935 the night Benny Goodman kicked off the swing era), two decades at the LA Times under Leonard Feather, his move to the Star-Ledger in Newark, his 2014 debut recording The Street Is Making Music, and his current work writing liner notes after a medical battle with oral cancer and osteonecrosis that has sidelined his playing. He also describes the box of cassette tapes in his possession containing unarchived conversations with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, and McCoy Tyner, that he hopes to get out into the world.
(The musical excerpts heard in this episode are "Hampton's Pulpit" from the Hampton Hawes Quartet's 1991 reissue All Night Session and "The Street Is Making Music" from Zan Stewart's 2014 album of the same name.)
Buzzworthy Notes 
Guest & Host
Zan Stewart
Howard Mandel
Discussed
Leonard Feather — jazz critic, Los Angeles Times; mentor to Stewart
Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings — liner notes by Zan Stewart; recipient of the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award
Hampton Hawes — pianist; subject of Stewart's first published interview
Hear Me Talkin' to Ya — edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (Rinehart, 1955); a formative text for Stewart
Sonny Rollins — official website
Oliver Nelson, Straight Ahead — Prestige, 1961; features Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet
Albert Dailey — pianist; performed with Stewart's early band in Santa Barbara
The 2026 JJA Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award
Other nominees: Dan Ouellette, Nate Chinen, and Ben Ratliff
Learn more about JJA Awards
Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.
This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 
For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.