Reuben Jackson, Poet, Jazz Scholar and Longtime Vermont Public DJ, Dies at 67

Reuben Jackson Credit: Courtesy ©️ Seven Days

Reuben Jackson, the longtime Vermont poet, jazz historian, music reviewer and educator whose smooth and authoritative voice distinguished him as a host of Vermont Public’s “Friday Night Jazz,” died on Friday morning, February 16. Jackson suffered a stroke on February 2, just hours after finishing a radio show in Washington, D.C. He was 67.

A Georgia native, Jackson grew up in D.C. and spent two decades as curator of the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, which he once called “the job of a lifetime.”

Reuben Jackson at Goddard College in 1975 Credit: Courtesy

Jackson moved to Vermont for the first time in 1975 to attend Goddard College in Plainfield but moved back to D.C. in 1978. He returned to Vermont years later for a job teaching English at Burlington High School.

In 2012, Jackson took over then-Vermont Public Radio’s Friday night jazz program when its longtime host, George Thomas, retired. Jackson hosted “Friday Night Jazz” until 2018 before returning to the D.C. area to be closer to family and friends.

Upon his return to the city, he worked as the archivist in Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives at the University of the District of Columbia. He also cohosted “The Sound Of Surprise,” a jazz program on WPFW 89.3 FM.

Jackson was an accomplished poet and music critic, having written for the Washington Post, JazzTimes, DownBeat and All About Jazz. His reviews were occasionally featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” His most recent poetry book was Scattered Clouds in 2019.

Many Vermonters will remember him for his soothing and resonant voice, which listeners frequently recognized when Jackson traveled around the state.

“I would call him the ‘Velvet Fog’ because his voice was just so magical,” longtime friend and fellow DJ Craig Mitchell said. “His knowledge of the music was just mind-blowing.”

Despite his confident on-air persona, Jackson was also an intensely shy and private man, a quality which, in addition to their mutual love of music, he and Mitchell shared and bonded over. Mitchell said he often tried to make plans with Jackson to meet for coffee or dinner, only to have his friend cancel on him at the last minute.

“He said, ‘Craig, I love you, but I just can’t do that. I’m way too introverted,” Mitchell recalled.

Molly Stone, artistic director at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, first became friends with Jackson after he reached out to her via Facebook in 2021. “From that moment forward, we began sending Facebook messages every day, all day,” she said. Stone described Jackson, whom she considered more like a family member, as “a very introverted people lover.”

She noted that Jackson had strong opinions on grief, which he felt that our society rushes through in the relentless churn of the 24-hour news cycle.

“Reuben was a self-proclaimed crier — ‘Crying while Black,’ he’d often quip,” she added. “His strength was his vulnerability, and I think we all felt … psychologically safe in his presence.”

Fellow music historian and DJ Joel Najman, who has hosted Vermont Public’s weekly “My Place” program since 1982, worked with Jackson for years at the station. Nevertheless, much of what Najman knew about Jackson he learned secondhand.

“He was a very private person,” Najman said, “but I greatly admired his deep institutional knowledge of jazz.”

Najman also has a deep respect for Jackson as a poet, calling him “a gentle giant who was very, very observant of the world around him.” This was particularly true regarding Jackson’s dedication to the cause of racial equity and social justice. In recent years, much of his poetry addressed the death of young Black men at the hands of police.

As Jackson told Seven Days’ Eva Sollberger in a September 2017 “Stuck in Vermont” episode marking his five-year anniversary on “Friday Night Jazz,” having to constantly represent his race in Vermont eventually wore on him.

Nevertheless, Jackson considered it a privilege to speak to listeners through radio, which he once described as an intimate medium and a conversation between strangers. As he told Sollberger in 2017, a Black woman once thanked him for his show by telling him that, for three hours each week, she felt like she wasn’t in Vermont anymore.

“The kind of community that music can engender even by way of radio is powerful,” he said.

And, as the self-described “geek emeritus” of Vermont’s jazz music scene, Jackson always appreciated his fans and the opportunity that radio gave him to share his love of music with others.

“Do I love this?” he said to Sollberger with a whistle. “Boy, oh boy, I do!”

Jackson is survived by his partner, Jenae Michelle, his extended family in Georgia and, as Jenae put it in a text message to Stone, his “wonderful group of chosen family.”

This story was updated on Monday, February 19.