Michael J. West has been a music journalist and jazz critic for almost 20 years. He is the reviews editor at DownBeat magazine and was previously reviews editor and interim editor-in-chief at JazzTimes. He writes a monthly column about local jazz for Washington City Paper and is a regular contributor to DownBeat, The Washington Post, Bandcamp Daily, and NPR Music. His work has also appeared in Jazziz, The Village Voice, TIDAL, and Slate. In 2024, West received the Berger-Carter-Berger Fellowship grant from Rutgers University’s Institute of Jazz Studies to conduct research in the Institute’s Andrew Hill collection.
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Andrew Hill occupies a unique niche in jazz history: Too iconoclastic to be part of the mainstream, he was initially marketed as part of the “second wave” avant-garde in the 1960s, yet he was too structured and anchored in the tradition to fit comfort... SEE MORE