Biography
Rudi Blesh championed New Orleans jazz and ragtime as an ardent supporter and vocal advocate, exerting a lasting influence on traditional jazz circles. Following his studies at Dartmouth College, he worked as a jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle in the early 1940s before joining the New York Herald Tribune in 1944. An early promoter of live jazz events, he hosted the notable radio series This Is Jazz in 1947, whose broadcasts are now being reissued by the Jazzology label. Although his narration often sounded stiff and relied on familiar phrases, his programming brought leading New Orleans jazz artists to regular radio audiences. Blesh’s 1946 book Shining Trumpets presented a sincere but uneven and partisan view of jazz, while the 1950 study They All Played Ragtime, written with Harriet Janis, remains a landmark text. The first in-depth survey of ragtime, it helped ignite a modest revival of the style. Around the same time Blesh launched the short-lived yet important Circle label, whose recordings Jazzology later acquired; the imprint documented new sessions by veteran players and released Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress performances. In later decades Rudi Blesh taught jazz history at several colleges, assisted in the rediscovery of Joseph Lamb and Eubie Blake, and contributed occasional liner notes into the 1980s.