2025 JJA Awards Special Edition

The 2025 JJA Awards just dropped, and in this special episode The Buzz is breaking down the winners in some of the leading categories. 

Host Lawrence Peryer is joined by guests Neil Tesser and Mark Ruffin to discuss lifetime achievements, standout performers, and why some names keep winning year after year.

Both guests bring unique perspectives - Mark from his years as a writer and radio programmer and personality, Neil from his work as a critic and broadcaster who's earned his own lifetime achievement award.

The full list of 2025 JJA Awards is available online at jjajazzawards.org.

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Lawrence Peryer: Neil, Mark, thank you both so much for making time for this special episode of the Buzz, celebrating the 2025 JJA Award winners, both in the performance categories and the journalism categories. I think we've had an incredible group of talented nominees, an exciting roster of winners, but there's so much to dig into with so many categories. So let's stop with my preamble and jump right in.

Neil Tesser: I just want to say that in case you haven't covered it in your introduction, this is an international special assemblage because Mark is in Abu Dhabi for International Jazz Day as we're recording this.

Mark Ruffin: And I'd like to add that five of the winners are in Abu Dhabi.

Lawrence Peryer: Since we're talking to you, Mark, let's aim the first question your way. I want to talk about George Coleman and the Lifetime Achievement Award. Something that I think is important to a lot of us, I've heard it come up in other conversations, is that it's one thing to posthumously honor our greats in perpetuity, but to be able to talk about these people's contribution while they're still among us is so important. Can you talk a little bit about George Coleman and what he's meant to the form and why he's so worthy of this consideration?

Mark Ruffin: One is he's enduring, he's still here. He's still playing. He put out that record a little while ago. Maybe it's less than a couple years with One for All. But what I really have enjoyed about George over the last year and a half or so is the Mouths in France, multi-disc. Have you heard that, Neil? George is just blowing.

Neil Tesser: I haven't heard the whole set, but the album that you're talking about, which came out from the Antibes Jazz Festival, I think—

Mark Ruffin: Yes.

Neil Tesser: It was called "Miles in Europe," I believe, when I bought it. It was one of the very first albums I ever bought, and it's seared into my memory.

Mark Ruffin: And I understand why. Just amazing blowing from George. Just glad he's still here.

Neil Tesser: And Mark is from Chicago, though he now lives on the East Coast. I'm from the East Coast, but now live in Chicago, but we knew each other in Chicago, so we became friends. George Coleman has a Chicago connection. He was one of the Memphis Mafia, which is what they call the handful of musicians who came from Memphis, Tennessee to Chicago in the 1950s, largely as a kind of a stopover on their way to New York. But they came to Chicago first, and he was definitely one of them. Frank Strozier, the alto saxophonist, was one of them. They interacted with a lot of Chicago musicians, including Muhal Richard Abrams. So George Coleman has always had really big ears, such an important player, but also such an important influence. If you ask Eric Alexander, one of the leading tenor saxophonists of our time of any genre, who he studied, who he paid attention to, that's the name that comes up first. And there's many other saxophonists who would say the same thing.

Mark Ruffin: Not only that, Neil, but young people in New York today, they love George and the knowledge that he is spreading and helping young folks see the jazz life. He is amazing that way as well, still today and relevant.

Neil Tesser: Yeah, it's a great thing about a Lifetime Achievement winner within their lifetime, because they are still here. They can spread that knowledge, and it inspires people to maybe go see them. And that always deepens your connection with the music you're listening to when you can see it and see somebody working hard, and then he can explain what's going on or express his experiences. That's just so good for the music.

Lawrence Peryer: Another living legend that we need to talk about then is Marshall Allen and Musician of the Year. Fascinating choice. He's still out there leading the orchestra, up there doing it. What's that say about longevity and our genre and our world's respect for the elders? I think that's something that's special about the jazz world, that we can embrace change, fluidity, innovation, but we don't discard our—

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: I'm really—

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: —see him win.

Neil Tesser: Marshall, what does it say about jazz? It says that if you leash yourself to the rocket that was Sun Ra, you might live forever. That's what that says. My gosh—

Lawrence Peryer: He drank of the potion.

Neil Tesser: He's been there—he joined Sun Ra in the 1950s, right, Mark?

Mark Ruffin: Yes.

Neil Tesser: He spent all that time with Sun Ra, who much controlled every aspect of his band members' lives. So he ate well, he didn't smoke, he didn't drink, so he lived a healthy life riding the comet.

Mark Ruffin: We should also note that just this past weekend he became an NEA Jazz Master. So it's nice that the NEA is honoring him as well as the JJA.

Neil Tesser: Yeah. That's terrific. Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: And pursuant to our earlier point, and he's here to—

Mark Ruffin: Yes.

Lawrence Peryer: —deserved.

Neil Tesser: Those are the two awards at the top. But the next two awards in the list are younger musicians. Myra Melford. She won for Composer of the Year, but she doesn't always get recognized by the, say, mainstream jazz press. And then up-and-coming musician, Mark?

Mark Ruffin: Isaiah Collier, man. Neil, I met another, I guess his brother plays drums for Stanley Clarke. And what an amazing human. I love his output and his tenacity as a musician, as a businessman, and an artist. An amazing guy who's going to be around. You can just tell he's going to be here for decades, man. What a voice.

Neil Tesser: He's only 27 or 28, and—

Mark Ruffin: I—

Neil Tesser: —and I get to see him a little more frequently, being here in Chicago, which is still his hometown. And he had quite a year. The album that he put out last year was just made a bunch of top 10 lists and was really well received and deserved to be.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Mark Ruffin: Yes. I loved seeing him on the cover of DownBeat this past year too. Yes, absolutely.

Lawrence Peryer: Mark, tell me about our Record of the Year: Charles Lloyd, "The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow." We had some nice discs to choose from this year. What makes Charles Lloyd stand out?

Mark Ruffin: The conversation he has continuously with his musicians. The inspiration that he gives those musicians. If you talk to Jason Moran and Eric, they talk about what he gives to them all the time as they watch him still developing. He's an amazing guy. He's an amazing guy. And the record, what can you say about his last few albums? They have been just so great, and it's so nice again to see a living legend in our field still contributing and still going forward. And much like George Coleman, what he's giving to young people is very important these days. I should say younger people because they aren't so young anymore, but—

Neil Tesser: But Charles is 89.

Lawrence Peryer: That's incredible. Mark, from all the nominees and winners, was there a particular category that had you, or a particular winner that had you, especially excited or that maybe surprised you? What jumped out at you when you had to comb through the list?

Mark Ruffin: I love seeing Kenny Barron getting recognized. He's been recognized for many years. I felt that Kenny Barron as a composer and a pianist has been under the radar, even though he has been out there and doing it, but to be getting the recognition that he's been getting lately. And those albums, the last couple, Grammy-nominated. So I think he's on an amazing roll, and he's here in Abu Dhabi. Tomorrow, at International Jazz Day, they're really honoring Kenny very nicely with a couple of his compositions. But it's just nice to see him get recognition. I've always felt, Neil, correct me, he's been under the radar for a lot of his career.

Neil Tesser: I've thought about that a lot. First of all, it's not just a couple of Grammys. He's had a lot of Grammy nominations. He's almost a perennial nominee, which is great to see. He's a wonderful player. I think that the reason he is a little under the radar is because he is so versatile and so malleable and can fit in with so many different groups that people don't listen, hear him, and go, "Oh, that's Kenny Barron." But the moment you do hear him, you say, "Wow, that's a great piano player." So I think you'd recognize Chick Corea from ten notes. I don't think that happens with Kenny Barron, but I don't think that's necessarily a weakness. I think it's a strength that allows him to be part of so many different groups that wouldn't otherwise have a lot in common.

And that maybe gets us into the idea of perennial winners, because there are a lot of them here, and they're deserving. But it does make me wonder, and I think all of us, about the nature of polls in general. This was a poll aimed at what musicians did and played the previous year. I would've preferred if some of my fellow voters in the Jazz Journalists Association had looked to see what everyone did this year. I'm just saying it would be great to see this open up a little bit beyond what we reach for first. There's a power to incumbency.

Mark Ruffin: You said there's power in incumbency—

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Mark Ruffin: —and sometimes, like in the DownBeat poll, I think people think they're the best alive instead of the last 12 months, so you could have a great point there, Neil.

Neil Tesser: Your point that you just edged into is, this is not unique to our poll, to the Jazz Journalists Association. This is true of DownBeat polls, of the Grammys, of Congress. If you've been there for a while, you get a little extra attention.

Lawrence Peryer: The other question that raises for me, though, to reframe it slightly, is: are people voting who, to badly paraphrase Neil, they think of a certain category and they think of a person that automatically identifies with that category? Is that saying something about the incumbents not being challenged hard enough?

Mark Ruffin: That is true. But also on the other end, if a voice comes along that's powerful enough to knock everybody out, like Immanuel Wilkins—his voice is so strong, man. He is doing so much that you don't think about the other players. It knocks out the incumbent.

Lawrence Peryer: How I feel about Mary Halvorson on guitar. To me, that's a generational voice, and she's still developing.

Let me ask you the question I started with, Mark, which is: did something jump off the page at you as exciting or deserving special mention here? What did you see that really tickled you?

Neil Tesser: A couple of things. One, Cécile McLorin Salvant is not a stranger to any of us, winning as female vocalist and also as part of a duet with Sullivan Fortner. But for the last few years, most people, when they think of jazz vocals, have been on the Samara Joy train because she's gotten so much publicity, and she won at least one or two of these. This kind of goes against what I was saying earlier—the easy choice would've been Samara Joy. I think people were taken by this particular album and voted for it.

I'm really glad to see Patricia Brennan on mallet instruments because you're talking about a generational voice, with Mary Halvorson, in whose groups they each play—each of them plays in the other's groups. And I think what she's doing is just ear-opening. The first time I heard Patricia Brennan, I went—my head spun around. I was like, "Whoa, who is that? What is going on there?"

So that's great to see. There's a posthumous award here for... we have a category called "Player of Rare Instruments in Jazz," which Scott Robinson usually wins because he plays about 40 instruments, several of which are pretty rare. But this year it went to Susan Alcorn, who was really beloved by a lot of people in the music community, a pedal steel player who brought that instrument to jazz in a way it had never been done before. I think that's pretty cool.

Lawrence Peryer: I have to say, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Susan, and she was a fascinating, open-hearted, eccentric, just beautiful person. The hour or so I spent talking with her was one of the highlights of my year. She was really a fascinating woman.

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: What an incredible life. And such an open heart for music.

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: I want to stay with you for one second, Neil, before we go back to Mark. As a fellow recipient of this award, let's talk about Paul de Barros, everyone's friend. I have the pleasure of serving on the art commission in my small town in Washington state with Paul. So we do a lot of work together. We program a concert series in our little town together. So this is somebody who's making an impact at the hyper-local level, but whose work has traveled internationally. What can you tell us about Paul and this Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism?

Neil Tesser: Really deserved, way overdue. I've known Paul for decades. He is one of the smartest—certainly an excellent writer, but personally one of the smartest, most personable—and you mentioned "open-hearted" about Susan Alcorn—that is Paul de Barros, who has really done so much that people read and see, but so much, as you said, on a local level, especially in Seattle. Working for the newspaper there for way beyond the amount of time that most newspapers will keep an arts reviewer on, working with Earshot, the festival out there, and just being a go-to guy. And also a fine book author. He's written a couple of books. The one on Seattle jazz, which is a model of how you drill down into a specific subject—something very specific—in this case, one city's jazz history, and make it universal for any reader.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. I love the Marian McPartland book. When—

Neil Tesser: And right, and he did the Marian McPartland book too. Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: —when I first got my hands on it, I thought, do I need several hundred pages about Marian McPartland? Is there several hundred pages about Marian McPartland? And the answer is a definitive yes. What Paul uncovered and what he got from her and those around her—it's really a landmark book.

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: Would like to see that treatment for so many other great artists. Yeah, really so excited to see his name there.

I'll take the next one, which is the Book of the Year that went to Jonathan Gresse and his biography of Eric Dolphy. Another person I got to spend some time with, talking to him earlier this year. And I have to say, Dolphy is a figure—he's right in the most important music to me personally, that early 1960 to late 1961 period, the Coltrane period, in particular the Village Vanguard, that fall of 1961. I don't think there's music better. It's just peak music for me, very important in my development as a listener and as an aficionado. And to have that deep dive now into Dolphy's life, it's a really special book. One thing I would say to anybody who hasn't read it is it's highly readable. It's a very quick read, but it's not superficial. I really enjoyed it. It's a wonderful book. I encourage everybody to pick it up. Very deserving of the award.

Mark Ruffin: You guys mentioned Marian McPartland, and as a past winner of the Marian McPartland-Willis Conover Award for Career Excellence in Broadcasting, my buddy Arturo Gomez got that, and I think jazz broadcasting right now is in trouble. I think with NPR and college stations taking jazz off the air, that took our minor leagues off the air.

Lawrence Peryer: Yes.

Mark Ruffin: And there's, as far as this award goes, there's still a number of people that you know are deserving, but after that it's going to get thin. And Arturo is a wonderful, overdue choice. He has shaped two major radio stations, WDNA in Miami and then from there he went to KUVO. He changed KUVO totally. And just what a great spirit he is as a broadcaster. And I'm worried about the minor leagues.

Neil Tesser: No, I was really happy to see that. I've been actually voting for him for about the last eight years, so I was glad that it broke through.

Lawrence Peryer: Neil, if you will, talk to me a little bit more about journalism and where we're at in terms of some of our generational figures. I know we've recently suffered a pretty big loss in our community. Maybe you—

Neil Tesser: Yeah. Francis Davis died a couple weeks ago. And for me personally, when I was just starting to think about writing about this music, I read Gary Giddins, I read Francis Davis among the younger guys. We all read Ira Gitler and Dan Morgenstern and learned a lot of history, but it was from Gary and Francis Davis that I think I saw how deeply you could peer into the music and how perceptive you could be about it, things that I'm still constantly trying to do for myself with limited success. And also the elegance and clarity of the writing.

And as more people have talked about Francis Davis, especially in recent years since his death than I was able to—I tuned in and streamed his memorial service last week—what comes up is that it wasn't just about jazz, it was about all the arts. It was about an approach to the arts that made him beloved among writers and also his editors. And one of them told the story about how he had been Francis's editor at the Atlantic Monthly, to which he was a contributing editor for many years. And that when new ownership came in and they were bringing in a new chief editor, the old editor walked in after a week or so with a pile of magazines open to Francis's articles and said, "You have to keep this guy." So they let a lot of other writers go, but they kept Francis because that's how much he was respected beyond just jazz. It's really a shame. He'd been sick for several years, had not been really writing, I'd say, for four or five years. But it's just a reminder to go back and revisit some of his work.

Lawrence Peryer: It would be remiss, despite the fact that it's self-serving for the organization, but as we talk about maybe where broadcasting is going in the future, we do have this wonderful world of audio in the podcast realm. And this very podcast was voted in by our fellow members. So the Buzz did win for Podcast of the Year, which is—I say it sheepishly because it feels a little self-serving for us all to talk about it. It's nice to know that our fellow members do listen to what we're doing here, and hopefully we're bringing them something of value, and that's reflected in the—

Neil Tesser: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: As a way to take us into the home stretch, Mark, I'll start with you. Looking at these winners collectively, looking at the full roster, and even if you want to extend it back to the nominees, what impressions do you walk away from this year about the state and the health of our vibrant American art form we call jazz?

Mark Ruffin: If I take one category, the male vocal category, I used to be worried about the number of jazz vocalists, male jazz vocalists. I think in that category alone, with Michael Mayo and Kurt Elling as bookends, it says a lot overall about the state of our music, that there are some new voices, exciting voices coming out along with the incumbents, as Neil said. And I think we're in a healthy, healthier place than we were maybe four or five years ago. There are a lot of new voices, and I think part of that is kids nowadays, they have knocked down the walls. They are not afraid to try anything. Like Michael Mayo—do you guys know Michael Mayo has a band, another band, based on the movie "Shrek"?

Neil Tesser: I did not know that.

Mark Ruffin: Yes. And they're very popular in LA, and he's combining jazz elements with different things. So I think to answer your question, Lawrence, I think when you look at the nominees, it says a lot about the future of jazz and also the masters.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. Neil, before I let you answer that, I want to just echo something Mark said. I went to a show here in Brooklyn last night—the saxophonist Keaton Sun, great young saxophonist. I think he's really developing as a composer especially, but he draws from video game music. This younger generation, they have their own songbook, their own influences, and it's only contributing to the form. And it's really beautiful to see. I agree with you. Five years ago, I don't know if I would've had the same enthusiasm and excitement, but here in 2025, I find it really exciting.

Mark Ruffin: Okay, wait, I have to add to that. So yesterday I was at an event in Abu Dhabi, and there's hardly any jazz here, but it was a bunch of Herbie Hancock Institute fellows playing jazz and trying to explain it to a huge Middle East audience. And so when it came to question time, one little girl said, "Oh, I've heard jazz on a video game," and she named a video game, and someone pointed out that it was Roy Haynes. And so I do think video games are a new frontier for the young folks.

Neil Tesser: It's not something that we're familiar with, being who we are. I never got into gaming in any way, but I'm fascinated by what you just told me and the fact that it is going that direction. But I guess that this—I don't know if we anticipated it, but it fits into a pattern where jazz has always taken what's around it and adapted it. I've always thought of jazz as a sponge, reclaiming and often re-energizing and uplifting. That's what Louis Armstrong did with pop ditties from the twenties, and what the swing era guys did, and what soul jazz did—taking things that were out there but investing them with a whole different level of meaning and influence. And so the fact that it's happening now in these ways may not strike me at first as, "Oh yeah, that's what we should be doing, taking video game music." But the fact that they are doing it and making it work is great.

And the other thing is, when you have a lot of musicians—jazz musicians who are definitely jazz musicians—who have now brought in elements of spoken word, of rap, of hip-hop, of other things, that also spreads the umbrella. We could make a list of all of the albums that involved spoken word of some kind, whether rap or poetry, in the last year, and it would be longer than my arm. It's amazing how many people have been turning to that and creating these really hybrid forms of jazz and other forms. And I think that keeps it fresh. As long as we don't lose sight of, as this poll shows, Marshall Allen and George Coleman and Joe Lovano and folks like that, Branford Marsalis... I think that's really important.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. Yeah. And I think my contribution to this point would be I love seeing so many women represented now—

Neil Tesser: Oh yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: —and across categories. Val Jeanty in the electronics category, and obviously Myra and Maria Schneider and Mary Halvorson as some of the recurring—

Neil Tesser: Anat Cohen, Nicole Mitchell, Tamika Reid, Linda May Han Oh—

Mark Ruffin: Artemis.

Neil Tesser: Yeah. Yeah. Artemis, the whole—yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: Having more voices, more voices drawing from more wells is nothing but good, I think. That—thank you so much.

Neil Tesser: Thank you, Lawrence.

Lawrence Peryer: Appreciate your service. Appreciate you dialing in from the far-flung corners of the globe—

Neil Tesser: Abu Dhabi and Chicago—

Lawrence Peryer: —and Brooklyn in the house.

Neil Tesser: Brooklyn in the house.

Lawrence Peryer: All right, my friends, be well, be—

Neil Tesser: Thank you.

Lawrence Peryer: —keep listening, and we'll talk to you all soon.

Neil Tesser: Thanks so much.

Mark Ruffin: Thank you, Lawrence. Thank you, Neil.

Neil Tesser: Mark, have fun out there. I want to hear more about it.

Mark Ruffin: Thank you, sir.