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Todd S. Jenkins

I am an author and former contributor to All About Jazz, Down Beat, Route 66 Magazine, Signal To Noise and American Songwriter.

About Me

I am the author of Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia (2 vols; Greenwood Press, Sept. 2004), and I Know What I Know: The Music of Charles Mingus (Praeger, May 2006). I contributed the sections on 1960s jazz and 1970s blues in The Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (edited by Howard Mandel; Watson-Guptill, Oct. 2005). I have written liner notes for Jimmy & Stacy Rowles, Mike Vax & Clark Terry, Estelle Reiner, Fred Forney, Chuck Marohnic and Heather Myles. I am a member of the Jazz Journalists Association.

Since 1997 I have been married to my lovely wife Christie, who is also my songwriting partner. In what remains of my spare time, I'm a stay-at-home dad to two boys, Nicholas and Steven, who run me ragged.

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My Jazz Story

I love jazz because I have been immersed in it my whole life. My father was the drummer in an Atlanta swing band when I was a kid, so I was around everything from Woody to Dorsey to Dizzy early on. I continued listening to jazz into the 1980s and beyond because no other music spoke to me in that way.

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