Larry Blumenfeld has written regularly about music and culture for The Wall Street Journal since 2004.
His work has appeared in publications and websites including The New York Times, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Daily Beast, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard, Chamber Music Magazine and the Village Voice, for which he wrote for a decade. His work often focuses on the connections between arts and issues of politics, social justice, globalism and economics, especially in times of crisis; as a critic, he specializes in jazz and Afro-Latin music.
He was the 2019 Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University. He has received the Jazz Journalists Association’s Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Writing, a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute; and was a Fellow in the National Arts Journalism program at Columbia University. He curates the Wells Fargo Jazz Series for Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, SC, and co-founded the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York, travels to New Orleans and Cuba when he can and is always up for a basketball game.