Background
Gleason was born on March 1, 1917, in New York City, the son of Ralph A. Gleason and Mary Quinlisk.
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columnist editor journalist music critic
Gleason was born on March 1, 1917, in New York City, the son of Ralph A. Gleason and Mary Quinlisk.
Gleason grew up in suburban Chappaqua, New York, where as a student at Horace Greeley High School, and home sick with the measles, he first heard the music of Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and other legendary jazz players on the radio. It was, he said, love at first hearing and one of the factors that led him to Columbia University, so close to New York City's entertainment world, as an undergraduate in 1934. Through the following four years, Gleason used his role as a writer and then features editor for the Spectator, the college newspaper, as an excuse to become a regular visitor to the jazz clubs on Fifty-second Street. A student prank in his senior year caused his expulsion from Columbia and he left the school without graduating.
In 1939 Gleason co-founded with Gene Williams Jazz Information, the first American magazine devoted entirely to jazz. Gleason's first magazine venture lasted for two years. In 1942, he left New York for service in wartime Washington and overseas as a writer and editor with the Office of War Information. On his return to postwar life, he moved his family to California in 1946, saying later that, even though the Big Apple was the center of the jazz world, California gave him a greater opportunity than New York to appreciate the music. Gleason took up free-lance writing and, through the next three decades, contributed jazz and popular music criticism to Esquire, the New Statesman, American Scholar, Saturday Review, and other periodicals. In 1948 he began a twelve-year association with Downbeat as associate editor, columnist, critic, and eventually contributing editor. In the 1960's he was variously an editor of Ramparts and a contributing editor of HiFi Stereo and Scholastic Roto. He was an editor and columnist for Rolling Stone from 1967 until his death. He was, as well, a prolific writer of liner notes for record albums. In 1970, he became a vice-president of Fantasy-Prestige-Milestone Records, a producer of jazz recordings. He was a lecturer in music from 1960 to 1963 in the University of California, Extension Division, and from 1965 to 1967 at Sonoma State College. Joining the San Francisco Chronicle as a music reviewer in 1950, Gleason almost immediately broke new ground by treating folk music, jazz, and other popular musical forms with the same seriousness and critical standards that other critics applied to classical music performances. By 1953 he had been given a daily column in which he explored both contemporary musical trends and examined the history of American popular music, especially jazz. He spun off some of this material into the first syndicated weekly jazz column that ran in papers across the United States and in Europe for nearly ten years. In 1957, Gleason again tried to publish a scholarly jazz magazine but was no more successful with this venture than he had been in 1939. Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music folded after two years. By the late 1950's, Gleason's reputation and influence as America's best-known popular music critic were firmly established. He had spent the decade roaming the North Beach area of San Francisco and other cultural venues, where both young and old performers were experimenting with a variety of musical forms. He actively advanced the careers of innovative musicians like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. His early support of the Modern Jazz Quartet led Milt Jackson, the group's vibraharpist, to compose "Ralph's New Blues" in his honor. Gleason was instrumental in bringing serious critical attention to the music of Duke Ellington and in 1958 was the first critic to write favorably of comic and social satirist Lenny Bruce. By the early 1960's many younger musicians and other performers looked on Gleason as a starmaker, so influential were his reviews in attracting audiences to concerts or to recordings. He liked to say that his judgment had only failed him twice, once in the 1940's, when he denigrated swing as a prostitution of traditional New Orleans and Chicago jazz, and then in 1963 at the Monterey Folk Festival, when he initially dismissed a young folk singer, Bob Dylan, as boring and "oppressively mournful. " By 1964, however, he reversed himself on Dylan, just as he had reversed himself on swing in his Ellington essays, and the two became fast friends. He compared Dylan to Shakespeare and predicted that he would be the voice of his generation. He then turned his attention to Dylan's associates, protest singers like Joan Baez, and devoted his column to favorable reviews of emerging rock groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. During the 1960's, Gleason was a disk jockey on KHIP and KMPX in San Francisco and in 1962 produced and hosted "Jazz Casual, " a program featuring performers like John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, and the MJQ for National Education Television. His television documentary on Ellington, also in 1962, was nominated for two Emmys. Gleason died of a heart attack in Berkeley, California, on June 3, 1975.
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On October 12, 1940, Gleason married Jean Rayburn; they would have three children.