As days go, yesterday was pretty fabulous. First came lunch 
with Doug Ramsey and Bill Kirchner. Doug, of course, posts at Rifftides, has written hundreds of jazz album liner notes, and is author of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond here. Bill is a jazz saxophonist, jazz historian who has written award-winning liner notes, and now teaches jazz at The New School University. Catching up with Doug and Bill was terrific fun. [Sunrise, 1965, by Roy Lichtenstein]
Then it was off to The Jazz Standard to attend the Jazz Journalists Association Awards. I spoke with singer Mark Murphy, organist Dr. Lonnie Smith and pianist Hank Jones. I also was nominated in two 
categories—The Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Newspaper Magazine or Online Writing and Best Blog About Jazz. The winner of the first category was Nate Chinen of The New York Times. The second category winner was Howard Mandel, president of the Jazz Journalism Association and producer of the event.
For a complete list of the JJA winners, go here.
As soon as the JJA event ended at 6 p.m., Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler, Doug Ramsey and I hopped into a car and headed up to ASCAP's annual Jazz Wall of Fame Ceremony, where 
John Coltrane, Tito Puente, Randy Weston, Johnny Mandel and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross were inducted. In addition, Anat Cohen was awarded the Jazz Wall of Fame Prize and Regina Carter was given The ASCAP Foundation Vanguard Award. Anat, Regina, Joe Lovano, Eddie Palmieri, Randy Weston, Karrin Allyson and Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks each performed with their groups.
The high point was a touching and instructive acceptance speech by pianist Randy 
Weston, who talked for about 10 minutes about the feeling and meaning of jazz. Before his speech, Weston performed Hi-Fly with Benny Powell, TK Blue and Billy Harper. Another touching and rousing segment came when Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks flawlessly sang Everyday I Have the Blues, Twisted, Jumpin' at the Woodside and Cloudburst.
Before the event I spoke with Jon Hendricks, pianist Tardo Hammer and trombone legend Benny
Powell (see my interview series with Benny here). At the end of the evening, I caught up with Johnny Mandel, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing last year. Go here to read my series of conversations with Johnny. [Pictured: Bill Holman and Johnny Mandel at last year's ASCAP Wall of Fame Induction Ceremony]
An exciting day all around!
I read the news today, oh boy--the other writers had just won awards... Do what you love: keep turning us on to Jazz.
Posted by: Ed Leimbacher | June 17, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Congrats on the two nominations, Marc. As I always say -- and it's true! -- JazzWax is a daily must-read for me. Even if this blog does deplete my wallet by forcing me to purchase all the great music you write about. Most recent purchase: the Roland Hanna record you mentioned in this past Sunday's Bits. Looking forward to having you as a guest on The Jazz Session, too! (See what I did there?)
Posted by: Jason Crane | June 17, 2009 at 02:20 PM
My congrats as well, if it were up to me, you would have won going away with Blog Jazzer of the year, or whatever you prefer to call it. Keep up the fine work, Marc, and I completely agree with the earlier poster that you may end up bankrupting a lot of us...but we can hope that the market for jazz will get better in return, right?
Posted by: Greg Lee | June 18, 2009 at 02:51 PM