Gary Giddins

Gary Giddins wrote the "Weather Bird" jazz column in the Village Voice for 30 years, and served as artistic director of the American Jazz Orchestra, 1986-92. He is Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, where he also teaches. His recent essays on music and film have appeared in The New Yorker, the DGA Quarterly, Vintage, and other publications. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Jazz Journalists Association Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim, a Peabody, Grammy, two Ralph J. Gleason Music Book awards, and six ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Criticism. He has written and/or directed three documentary films and appeared in many others. His books include Riding on a Blue Note, Rhythm-a-Ning, Faces in the Crowd, Satchmo, Visions of Jazz, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, Weather Bird, Natural Selection, Jazz (with Scott DeVeaux) and Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema. The textbook edition of Jazz is used at universities across the country. His most recent book is a revised edition of Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, published October 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press.