
Nate Chinen
Director of Editorial ContentNate Chinen has been writing about jazz for more than 20 years.
He spent a dozen of them working as a critic for The New York Times, and helmed a long-running column for JazzTimes. As Director of Editorial Content at WBGO, Chinen works with the multiplatform program Jazz Night in America and contributes a range of coverage to NPR Music.
He is author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century, published in hardcover by Pantheon in 2018, and on paperback by Vintage in 2019. Hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, GQ, Billboard, and JazzTimes, it's a chronicle of jazz in our time, and an argument for the music's continuing relevance. It has also been published internationally, in Italian and Spanish editions.
A thirteen-time winner of the Helen Dance–Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing, presented by the Jazz Journalists Association, Chinen is also coauthor of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, the 2003 autobiography of festival impresario and producer George Wein, which earned the JJA’s award for Best Book About Jazz.
Chinen was born in Honolulu, to a musical family: his parents were popular nightclub entertainers, and he grew up around the local Musicians Union. He went to college on the east coast and began writing about jazz in 1996, at the Philadelphia City Paper. His byline has also appeared in a range of national music publications, including DownBeat, Blender and Vibe. For several years he was the jazz critic for Weekend America, a radio program syndicated by American Public Media. And from 2003 to 2005 he covered jazz for the Village Voice.
His work appears in Best Music Writing 2011 (Da Capo); Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt (Duke University Press, 2012), and Miles Davis: The Complete Illustrated History (Voyageur Press, 2012).
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A songbook interpreter with a smoky, subtle style, Carole Sloane had a career equally touched by good fortune and bad timing. She died on Jan. 23, of complications from a stroke.
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During its first in-person edition since the start of the pandemic era, the Winter Jazzfest found familiar purpose and renewed conviction in delirious overabundance.
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A rising star in the world of improvised music with her group FLY or DIE, branch died on Monday at her home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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Groove is paramount in the latest installment of Take Five, featuring new tracks by The Comet is Coming, James Brandon Lewis, Louis Cole, Snarky Puppy, and Butcher Brown.
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Today BRIC announced the eighth annual BRIC JazzFest, which will take place Oct. 20-22, with a guest curation by trumpeter Maurice Brown.
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Have a first taste of Mal Waldron's 'Searching in Grenoble: The 1978 Solo Piano Concert,' due out on Tompkins Square Records on Sept. 23.
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A lot of great music is ahead this weekend at the Newport Jazz Festival, and WBGO can help get you there. Meanwhile, here are five acts to get excited about.
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Along with the all-star band formerly known as the Joshua Redman Quartet, this Take Five boasts two killer piano-and-drum duos, a tasty organ quartet, and a hermetic studio production.
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'Live At The Detroit Jazz Festival,' due out on Candid on Sept. 9, captures a climactic set from 2017, featuring Wayne Shorter with Terri Lyne Carrington, esperanza spalding and Leo Genovese.