Janna Tull Steed has written for publications such as The Christian Century, Christianity and the Arts, the New York Daily News, the national edition of the United Methodist Reporter, Berkshires Week, and The Berkshire Eagle, a daily paper in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she worked several years.

Here's how she describes her background:

"My professional writing has covered a range of the arts, religion, literature, and popular culture. Any claim I might have to being a jazz journalist rests on one book and one newspaper article. The latter was a feature written on bassist Vishnu Wood some 25 years ago. The title, 'Jazz: A Four-Letter Word for a Mystical Musician,' could just as well have graced the cover of my recently published spiritual biography of Duke Ellington.

"In the years between I went through two conversions. Both of them involved deeper explorations of spiritual sources that were present early in my life, one religious and one musical. The first conversion gave me a new sense of the presence and activity of the trinitarian God in my life and consequently (though not necessarily) led me to seminary and ordination as a Christian minister. The second conversion was, in my view, not a repudiation of the first, but an expansion of it as I reclaimed and incorporated an early love for jazz and other African-American music into my life and vocation.

"Growing up white in a small Arkansas town in the 1950s was not an ideal way to learn an appreciation for African American music, and yet somehow I did, perhaps in part because of the quiet but ubiquitous presence of Josie Mead. She had a dignity undiminished by her "place" in that social order. She encouraged me to stand up for myself in sibling conflicts and to be spontaneously expressive. Above all, she gave me an instinctive admiration for and curiosity about her people.

"My mother taught voice and cautioned me against the 'sliding' and 'slurring' of popular singers. No lover of jazz, she still sang 'Summertime' in our backyard and W. T. Burleigh's arrangements of Negro spirituals in church. Ella's version of 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket' was played for Vacation Bible School playtime circle games. My maternal grandfather's favorite request was 'St. Louis Blues' when my Aunt Janelle came home from college, where she played piano by ear for a dance band while earning a music degree. She introduced me to "boogie-woogie" and taught me to sing "Stormy Weather" at too tender an age, an experience that fed adolescent fantasies of being the next Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, or Julie London. The jazz theme songs of 1950s television shows and movies excited me more than Elvis did. And I remember when I first heard 'Mood Indigo,' 'Don't Get Around Much Anymore,' and 'Prelude to a Kiss,' though I couldn't have told you who wrote them.

"As a young adult, when I was doing community work in North Carolina, I occasionally worshiped with an all-black Baptist congregation in that neighborhood. I still remember the call-and-response processional with the deacons moving rhythmically down the aisles and the congregation singing and clapping in the pews. All of these experiences affected me deeply and eventually drew me into the world of jazz."

Steed left journalism and completed a Master of Divinity degree at Yale University in 1979, when she was ordained to the Christian ministry. For more than a decade she served as a pastor of United Methodist churches in Connecticut and California. Her interest in the arts and special training in spiritual formation led her back to Yale to complete an interdisciplinary degree at the Institute of Sacred Music. This marked the beginning of her research of Duke Ellington's sacred concerts, presented in the last decade of his life. Since then, her scholarship, lecturing, performing, consulting, and writing have established her as an authority on Ellington's sacred music. Her article on this topic, published in Christianity and the Arts magazine, won an award of merit for biographical profile from Associated Church Press in 1995.

In 1999 Steed was co-writer and producer of an hour-long documentary on Ellington's sacred music, part of the Duke Ellington Centennial Radio Project series narrated by Stanley Crouch and funded by Public Radio International.

She has appeared at Yale University, the Yale Art Gallery, Berklee College of Music, the University of Colorado at Boulder, The Duke Ellington Society of New York City, the Smithsonian Institution's traveling Ellington exhibit Beyond Category, the 1998 Duke Ellington International Conference, the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, and the 1999 American Choral Directors Association national meeting.

Steed grew up in Crossett, Arkansas, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She now lives in Creston, Iowa, where she was adopted by the resident cat in her Victorian house.

Visitors to the All About Jazz website are welcome to e-mail her at this address: janna@mddc.com.