About Me

My professional life, I recently realized, evolved from twin passions I picked up in high school: jazz and “The New Journalism.”

The latter, a narrative-driven style of literary journalism defined and promulgated by Tom Wolfe in a handful of essays he wrote for the 1973 anthology of that title that he co-edited (each of which appeared in New York or Esquire, the two magazines in which he’d forged his reputation), led me to the City News Bureau of Chicago; a subsequent master’s thesis at Columbia University, which involved interviewing Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, and other New Journalism luminaries; and a succession of magazine staff jobs and freelance work.

Jazz landed me an associate editor gig at DownBeat, and later led to my writing the weekly Jazz Notes column at the Boston Globe for three years and eventually my first book, Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century.

That whole package, coupled with a visiting professorship at Ohio University and adjunct teaching at Boston University, led me to where I am now: directing the graduate program in publishing and writing, and about to begin my 19th year teaching, at Emerson College in Boston.

But I also still write, mostly about music, books, and politics. I particularly like writing profiles.

My wife and I — and occasionally our two college-aged sons — live with our cat Sarah on Boston’s North Shore.