About Lynn Darroch
Reading, Writing and Music
I’ve been writing about jazz and other music in Portland area and nationally-circulated magazines and newspapers since 1979, including Jazz Times and Willamette Week. Currently, I edit the monthly magazine Jazzscene, host a weekly radio show on jazz station KMHD-89.1 FM, and contribute arts-related pieces regularly to The Oregonian. Along the way, I’ve written chapters on music figures for The Encyclopedia of United States Popular Culture (Popular Press) and covered the history of jazz in Portland, 1965-present, in the Afterword to Jumptown: the Golden Years of Portland Jazz (Oregon State University Press) . I also wrote the script for “The Journey of Jazz,” performed annually in area schools by the Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute.
My long involvement with Latin cultures led to the book Between Fire and Love: Contemporary Peruvian Writing. I’ve covered a variety of World Music, including Cuban, Peruvian and other Latin styles, for the Oregonian.
I taught full-time in the English department at Mt. Hood Community College for 18 years, published a little short fiction, and my work as a book editor includes history (The Jews of Oregon and Pottery Along the Willamette) and popular culture (Greetings from Southern California). I recently led a six-part film discussion series, “Looking at Jazz,” at the North Portland Library.
I also perform a series of live music/spoken word pieces: Jazz Stories, about jazz musicians, is recorded on the CD, Jazz Stories — Heroes of the Americas (2005), with John Stowell and Rob Davis. A companion act, Beyond the Border - Stories of the Latin World, with guitarist Alfredo Muro, released its CD by the same name in 2007.
Jazz Stories and Beyond the Border performance venues include the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival, the Portland Jazz Festival (which commissioned a piece on John Coltrane for 2006), Wordstock ‘06, The Kennedy School, Warner Pacific College, Mt. Hood Community College, and Multnomah County libraries.