NEA announces its 2021 Jazz Masters
A hard-bop stalwart. An avant-garde original. A ceiling-shattering bandleader. A bebop-obsessive broadcaster.
These are some brief descriptors for the incoming class of NEA Jazz Masters, announced this morning by the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Those four 2021 inductees — saxophonist, flutist and composer Henry Threadgill; drummers Albert "Tootie"
Heath and Terri Lyne Carrington; and radio host and jazz historian Phil Schaap — will each receive $25,000
along with their title. The NEA Jazz Masters fellowship, awarded every year since 1982, is the nation's
highest honor reserved for living jazz artists and advocates. Selections are made through a public
nomination process, followed by an expert panel review.
The drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath.
Ghylian Bell & Mychal Watts / Courtesy of the NEA
Heath, who at 85 is the elder of this class, has been a first-call sideman since his earliest recording date — in 1957, on John Coltrane's debut album, Coltrane. He went on to back an array of other leading jazz modernists, from Art Farmer to Yusef Lateef, before establishing his track record as a bandleader. For years he also worked extensively with The Heath Brothers, alongside his older siblings Percy, a bassist, and Jimmy, a saxophonist. (Percy and Jimmy were both named NEA Jazz Masters in the early 2000s; Percy died in 2005, and Jimmy died last year.)
Broadcaster, educator and curator Phil Schaap, recipient of the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters
Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy for 2021.
Courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center
Threadgill, 76 and pictured above, is one of the most distinguished composers in improvised music, and a
bandleader of relentless invention. An original member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians in his hometown of Chicago, he rose to prominence in the 1970s with a cooperative trio called Air,
featuring bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall. Then came a succession of his own rollicking bands,
including the Henry Threadgill Sextett (in the 1980s) and Very Very Circus (in the '90s). He won the
Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016 for the double album In For a Penny, In For a Pound, featuring his
inimitable 21st-century ensemble Zooid.
The A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy is awarded each year to a figure whose
contribution occurs off the bandstand. Schaap, 69, who has been on the air at the Columbia University radio
station WKCR for almost half a century, decisively fits the bill. His signature program — Bird Flight, a
garrulous, fact-filled examination of Charlie Parker's music — has earned enough cult appreciation to
warrant a profile in The New Yorker (by its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, no less). Schaap has won six
Grammy awards, either as a producer or for his liner notes, and taught jazz history at Columbia and
elsewhere. As a curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center, he created that organization's educational program Swing
University.