Home » Member Page

Chris May

Chris May is a senior editor of All About Jazz. He was previously the editor of the pioneering magazine Black Music & Jazz Review, and more recently editor of the style / culture / history magazine Jocks & Nerds.

About Me

Chris May is a senior editor of All About Jazz. He began adult life as a tenor saxophonist and was a member of the Italian electric-jazz band Madre Superiore, who for much of 1970 were resident at Florence's Space Electronica, billed as the country's first psychedelic club.

After further travels, he returned to London, where he began writing about music rather than playing it. From 1979-84 he was editor of the pioneering magazine Black Music & Jazz Review and in the 2010s he was editor of the style/culture/history magazine Jocks & Nerds.

His books include African All-Stars: The Pop Music Of A Continent (Quartet Books hardback / Paladin paperback), an encyclopaedic survey of modern African music, and Vibes From The Scribes (Pluto Press paperback), a contextualised anthology of verse by rap forebears The Last Poets.

In the late 1980s, Chris ran the London office of Celluloid Records, then the platform for Bill Laswell's productions. From 1989-93 he was director of marketing at London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and then held the same position from 1994-98 at Rambert Dance Company.

From 1999-2008 he was executive director at Richard Alston Dance Company. He is retained by Partisan / Knitting Factory Records to write commentaries for every track on all releases in the ongoing Complete Works reissue series of his longtime friend Fela Kuti. (In spring 1977, in the wake of the Nigerian army's sack of Kalakuta, he was the first overseas journalist to travel to Nigeria to get the story direct from Fela.)

He was commissioned by Google Arts & Culture to create the content for an interactive, state-of-the-art Fela Kuti website. It is hoped this will go live in early 2025. In 2017, Seun Kuti appointed him Guardian of Afrobeat.

My Favorite Local Jazz Venues & Festivals

Use your mousepointer (or zoom in) to move the map.
Click a pin drop to identify a venue.