Today's Featured Biography

 
Doug Ramsey

In June, 2008, the Jazz Journalists Association gave Doug its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Doug's latest book (2007)is a novel, "Poodie James." It is set in the mid-twentieth century in a town surprisingly like Wenatchee. Its central character will remind you of James Speedie, familiar to virtually everyone who grew up in Wenatchee in those years. Resemblances end there, but the atmosphere of the story will be familiar.

Doug is a veteran newspaper, radio and television newsman, who also has a distinguished history as a jazz critic and music broadcaster. He began his journalism career as a reporter and copy editor at The Seattle Times. In the United States Marine Corps, with the final rank of captain, Ramsey was the first Marine officer assigned to Armed Forces Radio. He managed a station of the Far East Network in Japan, also conducting the program called Far East Network Jazz Concert. Following active duty, his television career began in Yakima at KIMA-TV.

Then, as an anchor, reporter and news director, he worked for 24 years in television news in Cleveland, Portland, New Orleans, New York City, Washington DC, San Antonio and San Francisco. He was chief correspondent for UPI Television News, covering the White House, Watergate and the United Nations. He left daily journalism to become senior vice president of FACS (Foundation for American Communications). At FACS, Ramsey was responsible for programs and publications designed to improve journalists' understanding of public policy issues involving the economy, foreign affairs, science and the environment, journalism ethics and law. He also oversaw programs to educate sources of news about the journalism process.
    
While all that was going on, he continued to write about jazz, a parallel profession he began at the University of Washington Daily when he was a student. He is the author of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (Parkside Publications) and Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers (University of Arkansas Press). Take Five is the winner of the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the 2006 Jazz Journalists Association award for best book of the year. He is a regular contributor to Jazz Times and has written for Down Beat, Jazz Journal, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other publications. A former contributing editor of Texas Monthly, Ramsey was also a columnist for The Dallas Morning News. His notes and essays have accompanied hundreds of jazz albums. He won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1997 for his essay for The Secret Sessions, a collection of previously unreleased music by pianist Bill Evans. His essay, Jazz Arranging And Composing And Big Bands Since World War Two, is in The Oxford Companion to Jazz (2000). His Jazz Review program ran for several years on WDSU-AM and WDSU-FM in New Orleans. He was a founding member of the board of the original New Orleans Jazz Festival.

Ramsey is included in Marquis Who’s Who In America. He and his wife Charlene live in Yakima, where he continues his career as a writer. He is at work on another novel.

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