In this episode of The Buzz, JJA board member Bob Blumenthal speaks with two 2025 book award winners: Jonathan Grasse and Elijah Wald.
Jonathan Grasse teaches music at California State University, Dominguez Hills, focusing on world music, theory, and composition. He wrote the definitive English-language study of Brazilian regional music in Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories, and Minas Gerais and examined Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges's 1972 album in The Corner Club. His latest work, Jazz Revolutionary: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy (Jawbone Press), won JJA's 2025 Biography of the Year.
Elijah Wald is a musician and author of over a dozen books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, The Dozens (about insult games in rap development), and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music. He also wrote Dylan Goes Electric, which inspired the film A Complete Unknown. With a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics plus a Grammy for production and liner notes, Wald's Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories earned JJA's 2025 Book of the Year for history, criticism, and culture.
Take a look at the Jazz Omnibus, the 600-page anthology of 21st century photos and writings by members of the Jazz Journalist Association, available online and wherever books are sold
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For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.
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