Willard Jenkins

Programmer, Open Sky

Willard Jenkins has spent his working life uplifting jazz — as a broadcaster, a writer, a festival director, and an advocate. He came to Washington in 1989 to serve as executive director of the former National Jazz Service Organization, and word reached WPFW that someone new in town had jazz radio experience. Tom Porter, then the station's general manager and program director, invited him down to the studios at 7th and H Streets NW in Chinatown. Like most programmers in that era, Willard signed up as a substitute, did some subbing, and gradually grew into a program of his own. He has been on the WPFW air since October 1989.

Over those decades he has held afternoon drivetime, morning drivetime, and the 10-to-midnight slot before settling into Sunday afternoons with Open Sky. The program is built on a simple split: the first hour is the classic side of the music, and the second is "What's New," devoted to contemporary and recent releases. He engages listeners by playing compelling music and speaking to it with a degree of lived authority.

Willard grew up in Cleveland and is a proud graduate of Kent State University, where his interest in public media began as part of a Black student movement that pushed for, among other things, a Black student newspaper on campus. That is where he started writing about jazz. The work carried him to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then to jazz and arts publications around the world. He has broadcast at WWOZ in New Orleans, KFAI in Minneapolis-St. Paul, WKSU at Kent State, and WABQ and WERE in Cleveland, nearly all of it as an unpaid volunteer, and spent ten years with the former BET Jazz Channel developing and hosting programming including a weekly show devoted to jazz education. He founded the Northeast Ohio Jazz Society and spent eighteen years as artistic director of Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland. Since 2015 he has served as Artistic Director of the DC Jazz Festival.

He is the author of two books published by Duke University Press: African Rhythms in 2010 and Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story in 2022, which was named Book of the Year About Jazz by the Jazz Journalists Association. The JJA gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. In 2024 he received the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy and an honorary doctorate from Kent State. More of his work is at openskyjazz.com.