Ben Ratliff

Ben Ratliff has written about pop, jazz, traditional and experimental music for publications including Granta, Slate, Artforum, Wire, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and The New York Times, where he worked as a music critic for twenty years. His subjects are popular music, listening, journalism, creative nonfiction, and the practice and history of cultural criticism. He has taught criticism and nonfiction writing at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the author of four books: Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016); The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (St. Martin's/Griffin, 2009); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Picador, 2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in Criticism); and Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (Times Books, 2002). Ratliff garnered a 2018 Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes for his essay “The 1960 Time Sessions” for the Sonny Clark Trio.