Emily Steinhilber

Since: 2026 | Position: Contributor | Reviews Albums | Location: New York City | Page Views: 74

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About Me

Seattle-based journalist Emily Steinhilber writes about jazz, culture, place and the people who keep music moving.

Emily Steinhilber is a Seattle-based journalist, culture writer and member of the Jazz Journalists Association whose work explores music through the people, places and histories that give it meaning. She contributes to Earshot Jazz and publishes independent criticism, interviews and reported essays on Substack, with recent reporting from the Newport Jazz Festival and across the Pacific Northwest. Raised outside Chicago by a jazz percussionist father and later working around artists and venues in Nashville, she brings a lifelong relationship with live music to reporting concerned with deep listening, cultural history, archives, audiences and the communities surrounding the music.

Badge

Tier

Explorer

Points Earned

250

Favorite Musicians / Bands

Ella Fitzgerald

John Coltrane

My Jazz Story

I was first exposed to jazz before I knew it had a name. My father is a jazz percussionist, so growing up outside Chicago meant musicians coming through the house, private lessons, rehearsals, gigs, marching bands and an enormous amount of listening. Jazz was simply something already happening around me. I learned music, practiced it and performed it, but somewhere along the way I chose the pen, perhaps with a little natural rebellion and a lot of curiosity. I became fascinated by the strange chemistry between musicians, the personality of a room, the audience becoming part of the sound, and the extraordinary fact that decades of history can walk into a room with you while the musicians onstage make something that has never existed before. It took me a surprisingly long time to recognize this as a clue. I wandered through music and other creative work, spent time in Nashville working around artists and venues, moved back to Seattle, and eventually found myself writing about jazz— the thing that had been sitting there patiently all along. These days I contribute to Earshot Jazz, belong to the Jazz Journalists Association, write independently on Substack, and follow stories wherever they insist on going: into clubs and archives, backstage and across festival grounds, onto ferries to Newport, through old photographs, and into conversations with musicians I once would have known only from a record sleeve. The more closely I listen, the larger jazz gets. That may be my favorite thing about it. There is always another person, another room, another history hiding underneath the one you thought you knew, and another rabbit hole from which I am increasingly unlikely to return. These days I play the records aloud for my own children. They don't know yet that this may be how it starts.