From the earliest days of his youth, Wayne Winborne has been a “jazz head.”
Back when he used to visit his school library as a seventh-grader in his native Portsmouth, Va., for example, Winborne would bypass the books and head straight for albums.
“I would check out jazz,” Winborne recalled of taking home records of artists that ranged from Duke Ellington to Grover Washington Jr. and studying their music “note for note.”
“I’ve been a jazz head for a long time,” Winborne said.
Winborne’s lifelong love of jazz recently landed him a position as executive director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University — Newark.
In that capacity, Winborne—who heads the Winborne Group, a national consulting company that specializes in diversity and multicultural marketing, among other things—will draw upon his extensive experience in higher education and corporate America to take the Institute of Jazz Studies to the next level.
Rutgers Chancellor Nancy Cantor said Winborne’s appointment will help the institute—a world-renowned archive for jazz scholars—“play on a much bigger stage while connecting new audiences to jazz.”
