Ira Gitler is an American jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 historian and journalist. Perhaps best known for The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz written with Leonard Feather

Leonard Feather

Leonard Geoffrey Feather was a British-born jazz pianist, composer, and producer who was best known for his music journalism and other writing.-Biography:...

—the most recent edition appeared in 1999—he has written hundreds of liner notes for jazz recordings since the early 1950s and is the author of dozens of books about jazz and ice hockey

Ice hockey

Ice hockey, often referred to as hockey, is a team sport played on ice, in which skaters use wooden or composite sticks to shoot a hard rubber puck into their opponent's net. The game is played between two teams of six players each. Five members of each team skate up and down the ice trying to take...

, two of his passions.

Jazz

Gitler grew up listening to swing bands in the late 1930s and 1940s, before discovering the new music of Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker

Charles Parker, Jr. , famously called Bird or Yardbird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer....

 and Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpet player, bandleader, singer, and composer dubbed "the sound of surprise".Together with Charlie Parker, he was a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz...

. In the early 1950s, he worked as a producer for many recording sessions of Prestige Records

Prestige Records

Prestige Records was a jazz record label founded in 1949 by Bob Weinstock. The company was located at 203 South Washington Avenue in Bergenfield, New Jersey, and recorded hundreds of albums by many of the leading jazz musicians of the day, sometimes issuing them under the names of several...

. He is credited with coining the term "sheets of sound

Sheets of sound

Sheets of sound was a term coined in 1958 by Down Beat magazine jazz critic Ira Gitler to describe the new, unique improvisational style of John Coltrane...

" in the late 1950s, to describe the playing of John Coltrane

John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz and later was at the forefront of free jazz...

.

Editor

Gitler was the New York editor of Down Beat

Down Beat

Down Beat is an American magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond" to indicate its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chicago, Illinois...

magazine, during the 1960s, and has written for Metronome Magazine

Metronome magazine

Metronome Magazine was a music-guide magazine published from the 1881 until 1961.The magazine in its early years catered for musicians in marching and then dance bands, but from the swing era, Metronome focused primarily on the genre of Jazz music appealing to fans...

, JazzTimes

JazzTimes

JazzTimes is a magazine that dates back to Radio Free Jazz, a publication founded in 1970 by Ira Sabin when he was operating a record store in Washington, DC. It was originally a newsletter designed to update shoppers on the latest jazz releases and provide jazz radio programmers with a means of...

, Jazz Improv, Modern Drummer

Modern Drummer

Modern Drummer is a monthly publication targeting the interests of on drummers and percussionists. The magazine features interviews, equipment reviews, and columns offering advice on technique, as well as information for the general public...

, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

, the Village Voice, Vibe

VIBE

Vibe is a music and entertainment magazine founded by producer Quincy Jones. The publication predominantly features R&B and hip-hop music artists, actors and other entertainers...

, Playboy

Playboy

Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...

, World Monitor, and New York Magazine. Internationally he has contributed to the magazines Swing Journal (Japan), Musica Jazz (Italy) and Jazz Magazine (France). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

 in 1974.

Gitler was given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the New Jersey Jazz Society (in 2001) and by the Jazz Journalists Association

Jazz Journalists Association

The Jazz Journalists Association is an international organization of all types of media professionals who document, promulgate, or appreciate jazz. As of 2011, it has approximately 500 members, primarily in North America but also on other continents...

 (in 2002).

Gitler's passion for ice hockey has prompted him to write several books on the subject. He also wrote for the New York Rangers

New York Rangers

The New York Rangers are a professional ice hockey team based in the borough of Manhattan in New York, New York, USA. They are members of the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League . Playing their home games at Madison Square Garden, the Rangers are one of the...

 as well as the National Hockey League

National Hockey League

The National Hockey League is an unincorporated not-for-profit association which operates a major professional ice hockey league of 30 franchised member clubs, of which 7 are currently located in Canada and 23 in the United States...

 in their former magazine, Goal.

Books

• Jazz Masters of the Forties; New York: Macmillan, 1966.
• Make the Team in Ice Hockey; New York: Macmillan, 1968.
• Hockey! The Story of the World's Fastest Sport, with Richard Beddoes and Stan Fischler; New York: Macmillan, 1969.
• Blood on the Ice: Hockey's Most Violent Moments; Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1974.
• The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies, with Leonard Feather
  Leonard Feather
  Leonard Geoffrey Feather was a British-born jazz pianist, composer, and producer who was best known for his music journalism and other writing.-Biography:...
  
  ; New York: Horizon Press, 1976. ISBN 0-8180-1215-3.
• Ice Hockey A to Z; New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1978. ISBN 0-6884-1842-2.
• Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-1950-3664-6.
• The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, with Leonard Feather and the assistance of Swing journal (Tokyo); New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-1950-7418-1.
• The Masters of Bebop: A Listener's Guide; New York: Da Capo Press, 2001. ISBN 0-3068-1009-3.