Nearly 25 years ago, critic Martin Williams called Gary Giddins "probably the most impressive journalist ever to have written about music." Born in Brooklyn, New York, Giddins graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa, and the following year began working as a freelance writer. In 1973, he joined the Village Voice, and a year later introduced his column "Weather Bird," which he ended in December 2003, closing a 30-year run during which he received international recognition and won many prizes, including an unparalleled six ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Criticism.
Giddins' writings on music, books, and movies have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, Grand Street, The Nation, and many other publications. He presently writes columns about music for Jazz Times and about film for the New York Sun. His first book, Riding on a Blue Note, appeared in 1981, and was followed by Rhythm-a-Ning, Faces in the Crowd, and critical biographies of Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong that he adapted into documen-tary films for PBS; he won a Peabody award for writing the PBS documentary, John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen. He has been nominated three times for Grammy Awards, and won in 1987 for his liner notes to Sinatra: The Voice.
In 1986, Giddins and the late pianist-composer John Lewis introduced the American Jazz Orchestra, which presented jazz repertory concerts for the next seven years—more than 35 concerts involving Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Tony Bennett, Bobby Short, Muhal Richard Abrams, Gerry Mulligan, Henry Threadgill, Jimmy Heath, David Murray, and many others. He also produced four concerts for Festival Productions at the JVC Jazz Festival, working with Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Gil Evans, Lee Konitz, Joe Williams, Carmen McRae, Johnny Hartman, and, in his New York debut, Bobby Mcferrin.
In 1998, Giddins’s landmark work Visions of Jazz received the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism—the first time a work on jazz has won a major American literary prize. In 2001, he was featured in Ken Burns's Jazz. That year he also published his best-selling biography, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, the Theater Library Association Award for books on film and broadcasting, and the ARSC award for historical research into sound recordings.
Giddins has held teaching posts at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and New York University, and is presently on the faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to teaching at the Graduate Center, he has conducted a series of public conversations there with Sonny Rollins, Jason Moran, Cassandra Wilson, and others.
In 2003, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Journalist's Association. Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century, music essays written between 1990 and 2003, was published by Oxford in 2004. Oxford published Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books, in 2006 (paperback, October 2008). Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich called it “as good as humanist, personal criticism can possibly get,” and the critic Richard Schickel, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote: “We see our culture more clearly because of [Giddins’s] force, intelligence and alertness to overlooked detail.” Giddins textbook, Jazz, written with Scott DeVeaux, will be published by Norton in 2009; Norton will publish a collection of his film essays, Warning Shadows, in 2010. He is presently completing the final volume of his Bing Crosby biography. Mr. Giddins lives with his wife and daughter in New York.
