Nate Chinen - MATRIX

Nate Chinen
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Name: Nate Chinen
City/Place: Beacon, New York
Country: United States

Life & Work

Bio: NATE CHINEN has been writing about jazz for more than twenty 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 the director of editorial content at WBGO, he works with the multiplatform program Jazz Night in America and contributes a range of coverage to NPR Music.

A twelve-time winner of the Helen Dance–Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing, presented by the Jazz Journalists Association, he is also coauthor of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, the 2003 autobiography of festival impresario and producer George Wein.

His work appears in Best Music Writing 2011, 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).

Chinen was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He started his career as a music critic in 1996, at the Philadelphia City Paper. There he covered one of the great jazz cities at ground level, writing a steady stream of reviews and features, along with a biweekly column, The Gig.

He moved to New York City in 1998, and began writing for a range of publications, including DownBeat, Blender and Vibe. For several years he was the jazz critic for Weekend America, a syndicated radio program. He covered jazz for the Village Voice from 2003 through 2005, when he became a regular contributor to The New York Times.

Chinen's closest affiliation with a music periodical has been with JazzTimes, since the turn of the century. In 2004 he revived The Gig as a column for the magazine, where it ran in 125 consecutive installments.

At the beginning of 2017, Chinen became director of editorial content at WBGO, the global leader in jazz radio, broadcasting from Newark. He manages the full spectrum of jazz coverage at wbgo.org; works closely with Jazz Night in America, a multimedia program hosted by Christian McBride; and writes regularly for NPR Music, about jazz and other genres.

He lives in Beacon, New York, with his wife and two daughters.

Contact Information

Email: [email protected]

Media | Markets

▶ Book Purchases: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/248047/playing-changes-by-nate-chinen/9781101873496/
▶ Website: http://www.playingchangesbook.com
▶ Website 2: http://bandcamp.com/natechinen

Quotes, Notes & Etc. “Nate Chinen has written a terrific book about the shape of contemporary jazz, and right now is a terrific time to read it.” —The Washington Post

“Essential. . . . Fascinating and vital. . . . A perfectly timed, well-tuned chronicle of the past, present, and future of jazz.” —Slate

“Chinen has excellent taste in unruly new sounds and big, bent ears.” —The New York Times

“Brilliant. Incisive. Jazz lives on and on and on, folks.” —Sonny Rollins

“Daring and illuminating. . . . No writer has confronted the of-this-moment character of contemporary jazz with the clarity and authority that Nate Chinen has brought to it. . . . He is a listener of true brilliance.” —David Hajdu, The Nation

“Graceful and comprehensive.” —Rolling Stone

“Chinen’s passion for the art form and deep understanding and knowledge of jazz make for a fascinating read. His firm support of the music and belief that the changes taking place within it will continue to serve it well—solidifying jazz as a global mode of communication without bounds—are truly uplifting.”—Herbie Hancock

“A sturdy, finely crafted and open-ended framework for consideration of where jazz is headed, and why.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Sharp in style and warm in feeling, Nate Chinen’s virtuoso survey dispenses with the familiar agendas and polemics that have too often boxed in writing on contemporary jazz. He follows the music where it goes and exults in its plurality of voices.”—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

“A thorough and thoughtful examination. . . . [Chinen] looks at the work of a generation of artists that includes Kamasi Washington, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Jason Moran and finds a level of imagination and expression that has stretched the genre beyond the ‘jazz wars’ of years ago into an ever-expanding sound of endless possibility.” —Los Angeles Times

“Exciting reading. . . . The book builds impressively. . . . Should delight musicians and readers of all kinds.” —DownBeat

“Dazzling. . . . A stunning and wondrous journey. . . . Chinen improvises brilliantly across the progressions of jazz so that every page of his book brims with insight.” —No Depression

“Elegant, evocative writing. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . Essential. . . . Like the best nonfiction, Playing Changes will motivate jazz diehards and neophytes alike to discover what’s out there and what’s on the horizon.” —PopMatters

“A brilliant and wide-ranging new history of jazz. . . . Chinen’s virtuoso jazz history will drive
readers to listen to the music anew, or for the first time.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Chinen is setting a new standard. . . . [Playing Changes] brings jazz criticism not only to a new period of history but also to a fascinating era of musical exploration and discovery.” —Booklist

Clips (more may be added)

"Playing Changes": In Conversation w/ Nate Chinen
Per: Nate Chinen

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