The Buzz: The JJA Podcast

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.

Miles Davis would have turned one hundred this year. The centennial has brought the somewhat predictable wave of reissues, retrospectives, and tributes. But which Miles keeps coming back? The suit-and-narrow-lapels Miles of the fifties. Kind of Blue as sonic wallpaper. The Second Great Quintet as the canonical high point.
In this episode, Howard Mandel - JJA president emeritus and author of Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz - sits down with three guests who've spent serious time inside the music: bassist and author Melvin Gibbs, pianist and scholar Bob Gluck, and journalist Martin Johnson. They push past the myth and talk about what the centennial framing gets right, what it flattens, and why Miles keeps mattering even when the cultural idea of 'cool' has largely moved on without him.
Learn More About: 
Miles Davis 
Howard Mandel
Melvin Gibbs
Bob Gluck
Martin Johnson

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.

Jazz criticism has always operated in close quarters: small rooms, tight communities, artists who become sources and sometimes friends. That proximity is part of what makes the writing worth reading. It's also what makes the ethics complicated.
This episode explores that tension. The guests have significant experience between them navigating exactly these questions, and the conversation goes to some candid places, including a few confessions that probably took some time to make.
Featuring:
Rick Mitchell
Hannah Edgar
Paul de Barros
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.