Description: Critic and author Howard Mandel covers jazz, blues and other popular American musics as well as world music. He is president of the Jazz Journalists Association and blogs at ArtsJournal.
I'm a New York-based writer, editor, author, and producer for National Public Radio. For more than 30 years, I've covered jazz, blues and new and unusual musics for newspapers, magazines and websites. I teach at New York University and elsewhere and consult for various arts organizations. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association . I blog at ArtsJournal.com.
Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz , my new book, is an introduction to three musicians who have enlarged the scope of music by pursuing their own uniquely personal paths into what sounds original, meaningful and true. But --if the work of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor is truly new --that is, avant garde-- how do we understand what we've never heard before ?
I'm also the author of Future Jazz and senior editor of The Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues . I created the new blues curriculum for the Thelonious Monk Institute's Jazz in America website.