I’ve been listening to complaints about jazz criticism for forty years. The same ones, mostly—JazzTimes and DownBeat haven’t changed much, the argument goes, even though the music has. The critics getting attention are still fighting battles from 1965. The institutional press has aged with its audience, and nobody under forty picks up a copy anymore.
I walked through The Jazz Omnibus expecting to find those same tired voices. Instead, I found something worth paying attention to: evidence that people kept showing up to write about this music, seriously and often thanklessly, for the past twenty years.
The book arrived from Cymbal Press last month—a 600-page anthology assembled by the Jazz Journalists Association, featuring ninety contributors, sixty-seven articles, and photographs by twenty-three photographers. Opening it felt like sorting through two decades of who was actually paying attention when everyone else thought jazz had become a museum piece.
Is This a Jazz History Book? Here’s What It Actually Does
Howard Mandel, the JJA president and editorial consultant who has spent four decades watching jazz criticism evolve, was clear about what the project isn’t. “We weren’t going out to write a history of the first quarter of the 21st century,” he told me. “We were showing what our members have done and what kind of coverage exists.”
That distinction matters. The Jazz Omnibus doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, which is why it works. It’s a cross-section—a snapshot of how working journalists engaged with the music between 2004 and 2023. Each writer submitted what they considered their best work from that period. The result reflects not just the music’s breadth but what these writers themselves thought they’d gotten right.
Editor David Adler organized everything into six thematic sections: Legends, Seekers, Scenes, Sounds, The World, and Remembered. They’re loose enough to contain almost anything but specific enough to feel intentional. Moving through them reminds me of how a good record works—the energy shifts, the subject pivots, but you stay connected to the same sensibility underneath.
What Mandel’s Frame Tells You
When Mandel says the book shows “what our members have done,” he’s making a quiet claim about labor and recognition. Jazz journalists have sustained the ecosystem for decades without much money or attention. Clubs depend on reviews. New artists need introductions. Historically overlooked figures need champions. This book is the record of that work—mostly invisible until you see it collected like this.
How the Sections Actually Function
The six categories don’t divide neatly. Legends don’t stay in their box, seekers turn out to be legends, sounds bleed into scenes. That overlapping quality is exactly what keeps the anthology from feeling like a textbook. It reads like someone knew exactly what they were doing when they built it.
Where Do the Strongest Pieces Land? A Survey of What Sticks
I came to this book expecting profiles and reviews. I found those, but the pieces that actually stopped me were the ones operating at a different register entirely.
Ted Panken on Sonny Rollins. Nate Chinen on Sun Ra. Ashley Kahn on American musicians in Europe. Ted Gioia on Amy Winehouse as a jazz singer—which functions as both provocation and argument, turns out.
But the pieces I keep returning to are the ones that work from the inside.
Howard Mandel’s “Ornette Throws Great Parties” is about a 2012 birthday party at Ornette Coleman’s apartment. It reads like a straightforward account, which is what makes it funny. The guest list alone—who’s-who of the creative music scene in one room—tells you what you need to know about the jazz world’s actual structure. Mandel doesn’t perform irony. He just reports what he saw.
Dorothy Longo’s short piece about Dizzy Gillespie and his band staying at her family’s house in Fort Lauderdale stops you cold. She writes about white neighbors calling police when they saw Black musicians using the pool. It’s personal, specific, free of self-consciousness. Jazz history told from inside someone’s living room—the kind of account you rarely see in print because it requires a different kind of trust.
Dan Bilawsky collected musician quotations about Bradley’s closing, the legendary piano bar on the Upper West Side. He managed something hard: funny and heartbreaking simultaneously. That tension—between the pleasure of the music and the fragility of the world that sustains it—runs through the whole book like a bass line.
| Contributor | Subject | Section | What It Does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ted Panken | Sonny Rollins | Legends | Deep dive into solo saxophone tradition |
| Nate Chinen | Sun Ra | Seekers | Explores unconventional pathways and philosophy |
| Ashley Kahn | American Musicians in Europe | The World | Maps diaspora and artistic agency |
| Howard Mandel | Ornette Coleman’s Party | Remembered | Portrait of jazz social structure |
| Dorothy Longo | Dizzy’s Visit | Remembered | Lived history from family perspective |
| Dan Bilawsky | Bradley’s Piano Bar | Remembered | Musician voices on loss and venue closure |
What Does the Critical Establishment Say? The Weight of Endorsement
Gary Giddins has been practicing jazz criticism at a high level for fifty years. He called this anthology “the most entertaining, illuminating anthology of its kind to appear in this century.” That matters because Giddins doesn’t praise easily. When he adds that nearly every facet of jazz writing is represented here, “all of it united by the cool breeze of honest enthusiasm,” it reads less like a marketing line than like relief—someone who was genuinely worried the project might fail.
A.B. Spellman, the poet and critic whose name the NEA Jazz Masters advocacy fellowship carries, put it differently. “The Jazz Omnibus really is a library,” he said. He meant it as compliment, and it lands as one.
A library implies permanence, organization, and faith that the accumulated material deserves keeping. The Jazz Omnibus rests on exactly that belief.
A library also implies something you can return to, something that gets better when you’ve been away from it. That’s what distinguishes this book from the standard anthology—it doesn’t exhaust itself on first reading.
What Didn’t Make the Cut? Understanding the Omissions
I kept track of what’s missing. The book covers 2004–2023, which means it starts at the tail end of jazz’s pre-streaming era and ends just as the current moment of abundance and confusion is crystallizing. The streaming question—what it’s done to how jazz gets discovered, heard, and paid for—is largely absent. Extended engagement with the global scene’s most recent phase doesn’t appear either: 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 in ways that didn’t exist a decade ago.
These aren’t criticisms. They’re invitations. Mandel and his collaborators positioned the book as a foundation, not a conclusion. As jazz moves through its second century, the writing will 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.
What This Book Reveals About Jazz Writing in 2026
Looking at what’s included and what’s omitted tells you something important about where jazz criticism actually stands right now. The emphasis falls on presence—on showing up, on being there, on witness. The book collects writers who made the choice to pay attention to music that refused to stay still. That choice matters more than any theoretical framework they might bring to it.
The writers represented here come from different outlets, different approaches, different sensibilities. What unites them isn’t a shared critical vocabulary. It’s a shared conviction that the music deserves sustained attention and that the act of writing about it is part of how the music survives.
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.
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