Martin Williams

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Martin T. Williams (1924–1992) was born in Richmond, Virginia. He was a critic, specializing in jazz and American popular culture. He wrote for major jazz magazines, notably Down Beat, cofounded The Jazz Review, and wrote many books on jazz, summing up his understanding of its history in The Jazz Tradition (1970). From 1971 to 1981 he directed the Jazz and American Culture programs at the Smithsonian Institution, where he compiled The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (1973), acquiring rights from all major record labels in order to produce the first truly comprehensive historical anthology.