Ben Ratliff
Ben Ratliff (born 1968 in New York City) is an American journalist, music critic and author.
Ratliff was the son of an English mother and an American father, growing up in London and in Rockland County, New York. Since 1996, he has written about pop music and jazz for the New York Times and published three books: The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008), Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002) and a biography of John Coltrane (The Story of a Sound, 2007), the finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His articles have appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, Spin, The Village Voice, Slate and Lingua Franca.[1] He also wrote the liner notes for a number of albums, such as By the Law of Music by Matthew Shipp. In 2005 he received the Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for "Excellence in Newspaper, Magazine or Online Writing" from the Jazz Journalists Association.[2]
Publications
- The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz. Times Books, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8050-7068-0.
- Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2007.
- Coltrane. Siegeszug eines Sounds. Hannibal Verlag, Höfen 2008, ISBN 978-3-85445-290-4.