The Jazz Museum in Harlem

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Jazz for Curious Readers
Greg Thomas
October 5, 2009

Jazz critic and broadcast journalist Greg Thomas has been a consistent presence at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem for five years. He's co-producer of the Harlem Speaks public program as well as a marketing and education consultant working in collaboration with Executive Director Loren Schoenberg and Co-Director Christian McBride. In addition to booking and interviewing jazz artists for Harlem Speaks, Thomas has moderated several Saturday Panels, led Jazz for Curious Listeners sessions on Jon Hendricks and Dr. Billy Taylor as well as an overview of the profound insights of the cultural historian and novelist Albert Murray, author of The Hero and the Blues, Stomping the Blues, and many other works on blues and jazz, for Jazz for Curious Readers.

Thomas got bit by the jazz bug in the late '70s while in high school, and began playing the alto saxophone, clarinet and flute in various classical and jazz ensembles there. In college, where he minored in Music, he continued pursuing jazz as host of a music show and member of the Hamilton College Big Band. Thomas had the great honor of playing first alto sax chair when living legend Clark Terry came to play a concert on April 17, 1984. In a recent interview with fellow jazz journalist Willard Jenkins, Thomas described the experience of sharing a melody line with Terry as "an epiphany, a mystical experience of musical ecstasy."

His byline has been featured in numerous publications, including All About Jazz, Salon.com, London's Guardian Observer, American Legacy, Africana.com, Savoy, BlackAmericaWeb.com, New York's Daily News, The Black World Today, Callaloo, among others, for instance, Harlem World magazine, for which Thomas was founding Editor-in-Chief.

Thomas has taught jazz education on behalf of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and at the Thurgood Marshall Academy and the Frederick Douglass Academy for the Jazz Museum's Harlem Speaks Education Initiative.

He's been a member of the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University since 1999. Thomas hosts a monthly jazz radio program on WBAI-NY and an online jazz series, Jazz it Up!, which has garnered a viewership of nearly 3 million since its launch in 2007. His objective is to share his love and passion for jazz on as many media platforms as possible to reach current and new audiences for the music.

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