Barry Kernfeld is a jazz scholar and musician. A native of San Francisco, Kernfeld came east in 1975 to enter graduate school at Cornell University, where to his delight he discovered a traditionally oriented faculty willing to give enthusiastic support to musicological research on jazz. In mid-1981 he gained the Ph.d. in musicology for a study of techniques of improvisation in Miles Davis’s sextet with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. Thereafter Kernfeld spent two decades as a freelance contributor to reference works, most notably as the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (London: Macmillan, 1988; 2nd. ed. 2001), which has become the standard general reference source in the field, and as the author of What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), a highly successful book which endeavors to describe essential musical concepts and procedures underlying the process of making jazz, regardless of style. Kernfeld’s second, intermittent career as a local professional jazz saxophonist has become increasingly important in recent years. While playing, and wondering about the history of the bootleg jazz fake books (anthologies of jazz tunes, notated in a shorthand form) that nearly every jazz musician uses, Kernfeld found his way toward a project that took on a life of its own and pushed his research into the realms of pop music and the law. He had the honor of being invited to speak, mainly on topics stemming from the fake books project, at international jazz conferences in Jyväskylä, Finland (1999, 2003), Prague (2000), and Leeds, England (2001), and at a copyright convention in Washington, DC (2003). The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians will be published by Scarecrow in 2006.

From late 2004 into 2005 Kernfeld served as a consultant for a jazz auction held by Guernsey's. The most notable objects, Impulse! Records tape reels by John Coltrane, including the lost version of A Love Supreme, were pulled from the auction in a legal dispute, but Kernfeld published a catalogue and description of this music in the Belgian discographical journal Names and Numbers (2005) (see the Abstracts and Papers link). In 2005 he initiated a long-term project, transcribing and editing the contents of the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program; a number of lengthy interviews are now available at the institution's website. That same year Kernfeld began yet another career, taking a half-time appointment as staff archivist in the Historical Collections and Labor Archives within Special Collections at the Pennsylvania State University library. (posted August 2006)