Keepnews honored by NEA

There was an announcement today in the SF Chronicle that Orrin Keepnews will be honored as a "Jazz Master" by the NEA at a ceremony in Washington DC (photo by Chris Hardy / The Chronicle).

Eons ago, when I was involved in the music biz and NARAS, Orrin was a NARAS trustee, and we worked on a string of Jazz reissue projects for MCA (my post about these projects).

Orrin has worked in Jazz forever, co-founding Riverside Records, a New York independent label that in the 1950s released material by jazz greats such as Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Wes Montgomery. He moved to SF in 1972, and since then has won four Grammy Awards (one for an Ella Fitzgerald boxed set we worked on together) and a Trustees Award for Lifetime Achievement from NARAS. A prolific writer of album liner notes throughout his career, he wrote a book published in 1988, The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-87. Jazz is his life... Congrats to Orrin on this much deserved recognition.

Here's a link to some of the reissue projects I did with him: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/kim-munson-mn0001369026/credits