Nate Chinen

NATE CHINEN is the author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century, recognized as one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, GQ, Billboard and others. He served as the first assistant coordinator at the Kelly Writers House at Penn, before becoming a columnist for JazzTimes and a music critic for The New York Times.

A thirteen-time winner of the Helen Dance–Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing, Chinen is also coauthor of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, the 2003 autobiography of festival impresario and producer George Wein. His work appears in Best Music Writing 2011, Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt (Duke University Press, 2012), and Miles Davis: The Complete Illustrated History (Voyageur Press, 2012).

Chinen was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He started his career as a music critic in 1996, at the Philadelphia City Paper. He moved to New York City in 1998, and began writing for a range of publications. For several years he was the jazz critic for Weekend America, a syndicated radio program. He covered jazz for The Village Voice from 2003 through 2005, when he became a regular contributor to the Times.

At WRTI, Chinen coordinates coverage of both jazz and classical music, and co-hosts The Late Set podcast. He continues to contribute to NPR Music, where he served as a judge in the 2022 Tiny Desk Contest. He also maintains a popular Substack newsletter, The Gig.