NEA Jazz Masters: Tribute to Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins—recipient of the 2025 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy—has been one of the leading critics in the field of jazz for more than 50 years, having written highly acclaimed books as well as essays for the New York Times, New Yorker, Esquire, and many other publications. As a teacher, Giddins has spurred new generations of jazz fans at several universities.
After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, Giddins began his career writing jazz criticism at Downbeat, under Dan Morgenstern. In 1973, he joined the staff of the Village Voice, and a year later introduced his column "Weather Bird," which during its 30-year run received international recognition and won many prizes, including six ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Criticism.
In 1986, Giddins together with the late pianist-composer John Lewis and Roberta Swann created the American Jazz Orchestra, which presented jazz repertory concerts through 1992—more than 35 concerts featuring the highest-profile jazz artists of the day.
He has been nominated three times for Grammy Awards and won in 1987 for his liner notes for The Voice: Frank Sinatra, the Columbia Years (1943–1952). His books have won many awards as well, including Visions of Jazz, which received the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism—the only time a work on jazz has won a major American literary prize. In 2001, he published the first volume of his biography on the popular singer Bing Crosby: Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams – The Early Years, 1903-1940, which won the Ralph Gleason Music Book Award, the Theater Library Association Award for books on film and broadcasting, and an ARSC award for historical research into sound recordings.Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star – The War Years, 1940-1946 came out in 2018.
Giddins has worked in television as well, winning a Peabody Award for writing the PBS American Masters episode John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen in 1990. He was also prominently featured in Ken Burns’ epic documentary Jazz in 2001. In 2006, Giddins and Scott DeVeaux introduced their widely taught textbook, Jazz, now in its third edition.
Giddins has held teaching posts at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers University, and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he taught courses on jazz history, postwar American culture, and representations of jazz in literature and film. He served as executive director of CUNY’s Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center from 2011 to 2016.
