There is a standard complaint about jazz criticism — JazzTimes and DownBeat still anchor the field, and it runs roughly as follows: the music has changed, but the writing about it hasn’t. The critics who get the most attention are still relitigating arguments from 1965. The institutional jazz press has aged out with its readership. Nobody under forty reads DownBeat anymore.
The Jazz Omnibus — a 600-page anthology of 21st-century jazz journalism assembled by the Jazz Journalists Association and published by Cymbal Press — is a sustained, sometimes inadvertent, refutation of that complaint. Ninety contributors. Sixty-seven articles. Photographs by twenty-three photographers. The scope of what’s here makes the standard complaint look like someone who left the party early and assumed nothing interesting happened afterward.
What the Book Actually Is
Howard Mandel, the Jazz Journalists Association president and editorial consultant who has spent four decades at the center of jazz criticism, is careful about what the book claims to be. “We weren’t going out to write a history of the first quarter of the 21st century,” he has said of the project. “We were showing what our members have done and what kind of coverage exists.”
That’s a useful frame. The Jazz Omnibus is not comprehensive and doesn’t pretend to be. It is, instead, a cross-section — a snapshot of how working jazz journalists have engaged with the music across roughly twenty years. The contributions were selected by the writers themselves, each submitting what they considered their best work from between 2004 and 2023. The result is an anthology that reflects not just the music’s breadth but the writers’ own senses of what they got right.
Editor David Adler organized the submissions into six loose thematic sections — Legends, Seekers, Scenes, Sounds, The World, and Remembered — which manage the neat trick of being specific enough to feel curated and open enough to contain almost anything. The sections work. Moving through them feels less like reading a reference book and more like working your way through a well-sequenced record: the energy shifts, the subject matter pivots, but the underlying sensibility stays consistent.
The Pieces That Stick
The table of contents reads like a catalog of the best jazz minds of the last two decades writing about the things they know most deeply. Ted Panken on Sonny Rollins. Nate Chinen on Sun Ra. Ashley Kahn on American jazz musicians who moved to Europe. Ted Gioia on Amy Winehouse as a jazz singer — which is either a provocation or an argument, and turns out to be both.
Howard Mandel’s own contribution, “Ornette Throws Great Parties,” is a piece about attending a birthday party at Ornette Coleman’s apartment in 2012 that doubles as one of the best portraits of the jazz world’s social fabric in recent memory. The guest list alone — a who’s-who of the creative music scene assembled in a single room — is worth the admission. Mandel writes it straight, which is funnier than any amount of ironic distance would have been.
Dorothy Longo’s short remembrance of how Dizzy Gillespie and his band would stay at her family’s house in Fort Lauderdale — and how the white neighbors would call the police when they saw Black musicians swimming in the pool — is the kind of piece that stops you cold. It’s personal, specific, and entirely free of self-consciousness. Jazz history told from the inside of somebody’s living room.
Dan Bilawsky’s collection of musician quotations about the closure of Bradley’s, the legendary Upper West Side piano bar, is one of the few pieces that manages to be funny and heartbreaking at the same time. That balance — between the pleasure of the music and the precariousness of the world that sustains it — runs through the book like a ground note.
The Larger Argument
Gary Giddins, who knows something about jazz criticism having practiced it at a high level for fifty years, called the book “the most entertaining, illuminating anthology of its kind to appear in this century.” What makes that endorsement meaningful is that Giddins is not given to easy praise. When he adds that almost every facet of jazz writing is represented, “all of it united by the cool breeze of honest enthusiasm,” it reads less like a blurb than like a relief — the relief of someone who was worried the thing might not pull it off.
A.B. Spellman, poet, critic, and the man whose name the NEA Jazz Masters advocacy fellowship bears, put it differently: “The Jazz Omnibus really is a library.” He meant it as a compliment, and it lands as one. A library implies permanence, organization, and a belief that the accumulated material is worth keeping. The Jazz Omnibus is built on exactly that belief.
The book also makes a quiet argument that the music and the writing about it are connected in ways that get overlooked. Jazz has always depended on critics — not because musicians need validation, but because the conversations critics create and sustain become part of the ecosystem the music lives in. Clubs need reviews. New artists need introductions. Historically overlooked figures need champions. The JJA members whose work fills this anthology have been performing those functions, mostly without recognition, for decades. The Jazz Omnibus is the record of that labor.
A Note on Omissions
Any anthology this size will have omissions that feel like arguments. The book covers 2004–2023, which means it begins at the tail end of jazz’s pre-streaming era and ends just as the current moment of abundance and confusion is getting fully underway. The streaming question — what it has done to how jazz gets heard, discovered, and paid for — is largely absent. So is any extended engagement with the global scene’s most recent phase: the South African jazz explosion, the Tokyo avant-garde moment, the way musicians in Lagos and São Paulo and Seoul are now in direct conversation with New York and London in ways that didn’t exist ten years ago.
These aren’t criticisms so much as invitations. Mandel and his collaborators have explicitly positioned the book as a foundation rather than a conclusion. As jazz moves through its second century, the writing is going to keep changing — new platforms, new voices, new arguments about what the music is and who it belongs to. The Jazz Omnibus is the library that future critics will argue with. That’s the best thing a book like this can be.
The Jazz Omnibus: 21st-Century Photos and Writings by Members of the Jazz Journalists Association is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook from Cymbal Press. Discounted copies are available through the Jazz Journalists Association directly.
