Larry Blumenfeld

Larry Blumenfeld writes regularly about music and culture for The Wall Street Journal and Daily Beast. His work has appeared in publications and websites including The Village Voice, The New York Times and Salon. His reporting and essays often focus on connections between arts and issues of politics and social justice, especially in times of crisis; as a critic, he specializes in jazz and Afro-Latin music. He was the 2019 Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University and has received the Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Writing from the Jazz Journalists Association, a Katrina Media Fellowship with the Open Society Institute, and a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University. He programs and hosts the “Jazz and Social Justice” series for the National Jazz Museum in Harlem; is editor-at-large of Jazziz Magazine; Jazz Adviser for the Wells Fargo Jazz Series of Spoleto Festival USA; and the co-founder and curator of the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, travels to New Orleans whenever he can, and occasionally still plays basketball. He blogs (sometimes) at http://larryblumenfeld.com.