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(b Cambridge, MA, 18 Oct 1908; d Key West, FL, 18 Dec 1966). American writer. He learned to play drums before attending Harvard University as an undergraduate (BS 1931) and law student (1932–4), then studied medieval English literature at Yale University (PhD 1942); at graduate school he was a founder of the United Hot Clubs of America, a jazz appreciation society. While pursuing a career as a professor in English literature at several universities he served as a columnist on jazz for Variety and Saturday Review, contributed to Down Beat, Record Changer, Esquire, Harper’s, and Life, and edited articles on jazz for Musical America. In 1950 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin work on The Story of Jazz (1956), a historical survey that became widely used. He developed a course on jazz at New York University in 1950 and another at Hunter College, where he settled the following year. Stearns founded the Institute of jazz studies in 1952 and later became its first executive director; he also taught music at the New School for Social Research (1954–66) and was a consultant in the 1950s to the US State Department and the Voice of America. In 1956 he accompanied Dizzy Gillespie’s band on a tour of the Middle East sponsored by the State Department. He was an advisor for the television series “The Subject is Jazz” (1958), and around the same time he taught at the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts. Later, with his second wife, Jean Stearns (née Barnett), he wrote a pioneering survey of jazz dance (1968).
Reference Entry. 392 words.
Subjects: music
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