The Buzz: The JJA Podcast

72 Episodes

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Where Have All The Critics Gone?

2026-11-0237:09

For this episode of The Buzz, moderator Rick Mitchell asks two critics a generation apart, Bob Blumenthal and Hannah Edgar, where all the critics have gone. There’s more opinion about music than ever, and fewer staff jobs and outlets to back the people writing it. Bob and Hannah talk about how writers break in now, why younger critics ignore genre lines, and what mentorship gave each of them, from the Smithsonian seminars of the 1970s to the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. They also take...

From the JJA Archive: Paul Brady on Django Reinhardt's Jazz

2026-10-0530:09

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 littl...

John Coltrane at 100: The Rehabilitation Gap

2026-09-0712:47

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, b...

Midstream, Crossing That River: Ruth Griggs on the Northampton Jazz Festival

2026-08-0328:26

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 f...

"We Should Talk About Music": Matthew Shipp and Ethan Iverson on Writing as Practice

2026-07-0653:55

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 ...

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