16 Facts About Greg Tate

Gregory Stephen Tate was an American writer, musician, and producer.

In 2024, Greg Tate was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a Special Citation award.

Gregory Stephen Tate was born on October 14,1957, in Dayton, Ohio.

When he was 13 years old, his family moved to Washington, DC His parents Charles and Florence Greg Tate were civil rights movement activists involved in the Congress of Racial Equality, and played Malcolm X speeches and Nina Simone's music around the house.

Greg Tate credited Amiri Baraka's Black Music and Rolling Stone, which he first read when he was 14, with stimulating his interest in collecting and writing about music.

Greg Tate attended Howard University, where he studied journalism and film.

In 1981, following an introduction by family friend Thulani Davis, The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau asked Greg Tate to contribute to the Voice.

In 1999, Greg Tate established Burnt Sugar, an improvisational ensemble that varies in size between 13 and 35 musicians and blended a range of genres including funk, free jazz, and psychedelic rock.

Greg Tate, who played guitar and conducted the group, described it in 2004 as "a band I wanted to hear but could not find".

Greg Tate became a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1987, a position he held until 2003.

Greg Tate's work was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Artforum, DownBeat, Essence, JazzTimes, Rolling Stone, and VIBE.

In 1992, Greg Tate published Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, a collection of 40 essays on culture and politics, drawn from his writing for the Village Voice.

Greg Tate often had the admiration of the musicians he wrote about, like David Bowie and Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers; Flea cried in appreciation when Greg Tate reviewed their 1999 album Californication.

In 2003, Greg Tate published Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, an edited collection of 18 Black writers addressing the topic of white appropriation of Black art.

Greg Tate was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies in 2009 and a visiting professor of Africana studies at Brown University in 2012.

Greg Tate died on December 7,2021, in New York City, at the age of 64.