| Jeff Kaliss has written about music, theater, film, and
other forms of entertainment, and the social and historical
contexts in which they function, for over a quarter-century.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the late sixties,
Kaliss began writing for the San Francisco State College
paper while pursuing a graduate degree in social science
there, covering the Black Power movement and other campus
issues and grooving to Sly and the Family Stone’s first sorties
over Bay Area radio. While working as a civil rights investigator
for the Federal government, Kaliss began freelancing for
the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday magazine, the San
Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, the San
Jose Mercury-News,
and the Marin Independent-Journal, profiling and reviewing
rock, jazz, and classical, country, and world musics, as
well as theater, film, and comedy. Leaving his government
job in 1988 to freelance full-time, Kaliss also penned album
liner notes and features and artist bios for the Monterey
Jazz Festival. His periodical writing expanded out to the
San Diego Union-Tribune, Creative Loafing in Atlanta, the
Christian Science Monitor, and Songlines magazine in London,
as well as onto the Internet. He was heard regularly on KCSM
radio’s Critics’ Corner, which he co-founded with the station’s
Alisa Clancy, and he discussed world music on KQED-TV. Kaliss
contributed to the encylopedic Rough Guide to Jazz and Rough
Guide to World Music (The Rough Guides) and to the Music
in the 20th Century series (Sharpe Reference). He also
authored the Introduction to Dizzy: John Birks Gillespie
in His 75th Year for jazz photographer Lee Tanner (Pomegranate Books)
and the volume Music From Around the World for Grolier’s
The Story of Music series. His hundreds of interviews,
in-person or by phone, have included Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte,
James Brown, Don Byron, George Clinton, Sally Field, Marilyn
Horne, Shirley MacLaine, Hugh Masekela,Willie Nelson, Pete
Seeger, Ravi Shankar, Jerry Wexler, and Jonathan Winters,
to alphabetically name just a few. With the births of daughter
Natalie and son Nicholas, Kaliss has been putting in time
as a caring father and husband, blessed by the sound of his
nine-and-six-year olds singing along to "Dance to the
Music.” At his kids’ elementary school, Kaliss deploys
his modest skills on guitar and piano to help keep the music
coming to the next generation.
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