大象传媒

After beginning his broadcasting career in local radio, Alyn joined 大象传媒 Radio 3 in 1989, and has subsequently presented several series for the station, including the contemporary strand Impressions (with Brian Morton), the nightly Jazz Notes, the documentary series Jazz File, and the guide to the works of individual musicians, Jazz Library (over 100 of which remain in perpetuity as podcasts on 大象传媒 Sounds).

For these programmes and his work on the 大象传媒 World Service series Jazzmatazz, for which he interviewed over 200 of the world’s leading musicians, he was awarded the 2010 Parliamentary Award as Jazz Broadcaster of the Year. He also won the Marian McPartland / Willis Conover Award for lifetime achievement in jazz broadcasting from the Jazz Journalists’ Association in New York.

Alyn has also presented other features and documentaries on jazz and classical music for 大象传媒 Radio, on subjects as varied 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 gipsy music of Django Reinhardt and his circle.

Alyn’s books on jazz and popular music have garnered several awards, 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 in jazz. His biography of the singer Harry Nilsson won an ASCAP Virgil Thomson / Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Pop Music Research in 2014. He has written several more biographies, including lives of Ian Carr, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, and collaborated in writing the memoirs of jazz musicians as varied as Danny Barker, Doc Cheatham, Chris Barber and Sir George Shearing. His book The Art of Jazz, an illustrated study of the relationship between visual arts and jazz, was published in 2020.

A bass player since his school days, Alyn has performed and recorded with numerous bands, including a long association with trumpeter Ken Colyer, tours with American stars such as Bud Freeman, Herbie Hall and Don Ewell, and most recently, co-leading the Buck Clayton Legacy Band, playing music bequeathed to him by the great swing trumpeter.

Alyn is jazz research fellow at the Royal Academy of Music. For twenty years he was jazz critic at The Times, and he currently writes for Jazzwise magazine.