Dr Alyn Shipton

Author of award-winning music histories and biographies, broadcaster on jazz and classical music, jazz double bassist and bandleader

Alyn Shipton’s extensive research in jazz and popular music has been defined by correlating the fields of oral history, primary documentary sources and discography. He has written biographies of musicians as varied as the songwriter Jimmy McHugh, the singer Harry Nilsson, and jazz luminaries Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, Ian Carr, and Cab Calloway. He has also collaborated with musicians on their autobiographies, including jazz musicians George Shearing, Danny Barker, Chris Barber and Doc Cheatham and 1960s pop star Billy J Kramer. His New History of Jazz (first published in 2001) has become a standard text.

After reading English at Oxford, Alyn Shipton became a publisher, and in 1981 was appointed the commissioning editor of the music list at Macmillan, where he was in charge of Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, seeing into print volumes on Musical Instruments, American Music and Jazz, as well as the Grove Handbooks in Musicology and Composer Biography series. Since then, he has commissioned music titles for several other publishers and currently works with Equinox Publishing in Sheffield. After beginning his broadcasting career in local radio, Alyn joined BBC Radio 3 in 1989, including the series Jazz Library, over 100 episodes of which remain on the BBC website as podcasts. For this, and his work on the BBC World Service, he was Broadcaster of the Year in the 2010 Parliamentary Jazz Awards and given a lifetime achievement award in jazz broadcasting from the Jazz Journalists’ Association in the USA. He currently presents Jazz Record Requests on Radio 3.

Alyn has also presented and researched features and documentaries on other areas of music for BBC Radio, on subjects as different as the history of music publishing; the relationship between Haydn and Admiral Lord Nelson; the operatic collaboration between Purcell and Dryden; Alma Rose and the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, the role of bells in European cultural life, and the music of Django Reinhardt and his circle.

Alyn’s books on jazz and popular music have garnered several commendations, notably for his biography of Dizzy Gillespie and his New History of Jazz, which both won Association of Recorded Sound Collections awards for outstanding research. His biography of the singer Harry Nilsson won the ASCAP Virgil Thomson / Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Pop Music Research in 2014. He has written several other musicians’ biographies. His Art of Jazz, an illustrated study of the relationship between visual arts and jazz, was published in 2020, and On Jazz – A Personal Journey appeared in 2022. His most recent book The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets came out in 2023.

Alyn has performed and recorded with numerous bands, including a long association with trumpeter Ken Colyer, tours with American swing stars including Bud Freeman, Herbie Hall and Don Ewell and, since 2011, co-leading the Buck Clayton Legacy Band, playing music bequeathed to him by the great swing trumpeter. His New Orleans Friends, founded in 2019, plays the traditional repertoire associated with the clarinettist George Lewis.

Image: Fundación Juan March, Madrid

Selected Publications

• A New History of Jazz (Continuum, 2001. Revised edition, Bloomsbury, 2007)
• Out of the Long Dark - The Life of Ian Carr (Equinox, 2006)
• I Feel A Song Coming On - The Life of Jimmy McHugh (Illinois UP, 2009)
• Hi De Ho - The Life of Cab Calloway (Oxford, 2010)
• Nilsson - The Life of a Singer-Songwriter (Oxford, 2013)
• Danny Barker: A Life In Jazz (Edited Alyn Shipton: Revised edition, New Orleans Historic Collection, 2016)
• The Art Of Jazz (Imagine, 2020)
• On Jazz - A Personal Journey (Cambridge, 2022)
• The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets (Oxford, 2023)