Willard Jenkins Interview
Willard Jenkins is the artistic director of the DC Jazz Festival as well as an arts consultant, producer, educator, and print and broadcast journalist whose work has spanned decades in the jazz world. His new book is the anthology Ain’t But a Few of Us, a collection of “more than two dozen candid dialogues with Black jazz critics and journalists ranging from Greg Tate, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Robin D. G. Kelley to Tammy Kernodle, Ron Welburn, and John Murph.”
How did you get to where you are today professionally?
As I detailed in the Introduction to Ain’t But a Few of Us, my original interest in music was fueled primarily by my father’s record collection and radio dabbling. I was born in Pittsburgh and we relocated to Cleveland when I was 11. My father was a newspaperman and when the Pittsburgh’s afternoon daily merged, his typographer’s union provided an opportunity for him at the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the Composing Room.
Once in Cleveland my father’s record collection grew and he eventually became an early adapter to stereophonic sound, buying a new stereo system for his records. So my interest began to grow courtesy of his record collection and the fact that at the time Cleveland had what is now a dinosaur: a 24-hour commercial jazz radio station, WCUY, which I began sampling and enjoying from his listening and my own exploration. With his records I paid attention to the notes and the personnel listings, so that next time I went to the record store maybe I’d look for something by that sideman/woman who really impressed me on the leader’s date. That became a never-ending cycle of research.