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Alonzo Weston joined the St. Joseph News-Press in 1989 as an intern. He currently covers education and mental health and is also an award-winning columnist.
The St. Joseph native is a 2002 graduate of the inaugural class of the Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He has been voted the city’s favorite newspaper columnist for the past 12 years. He has also won numerous Missouri Press Association awards for his columns, features and investigative reporting.
He’s been published in magazines and has had byline stories in the Nashville Tennessean, and the New York Daily news He has been voted the city’s Favorite Newspaper Columnist for the past eight years. He has also won Missouri Press Association awards for his columns and features.
Alonzo is also active in the community in a number of ways. He and former News-Press editor Mark Sheehan started the Coleman Hawkins jazz festival in the city 11 years ago to honor the jazz legend and St. Joseph native.
The duo also created the Coleman Hawkins Mardi Gras parade and blues festival and hosted an all night youth basketball tournament to help raise funds for local community agencies.
Alonzo has served on the St. Joseph library board is currently a research associate for St. Joseph Museums. He received the YWCA/ NAACP Kelsey Beshears Racial Justice Award in 2005. The East Side Rotary Club also recognized Alonzo for his work by awarding him its Community Service award in 2004.
He and his wife, Deanna, who works as an interview coordinator for the Northwest Missouri Children’s Advocacy Center, have been married for 16 years. They have two children, Alonzo Jr., and Nicole Hughes, one granddaughter, Asia Ann Weston, and a dog named Maxwell.
Alonzo enjoys reading, jazz and playing sports video games.
- Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia
- Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008
- I don’t understand this recent fascination with the Philly Soul sound. Sure it’s good music. Who doesn’t get a good old school party vibe listening to the O’Jay’s “Backstabbers” or The Spinners “I’ll Be Around?”
- Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition
- Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008
- If a space alien wanted to know what jazz sounded like you’d play him “Kind of Blue.” This 1959 modal jazz masterpiece is widely esteemed as the definitive jazz album. It should be the first piece of music to start any serious jazz collection.
- New Kids On The Block: Greatest Hits
- Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2008
- I never listened to New Kids on the Block. But I suppose if you were a pre-teen girl in the late 1980s they would have been the greatest thing since Barbie dolls.
- Aaron Parks - "Invisible Cinema"
- Friday, Aug. 8, 2008
- Good instrumental jazz is like watching a movie. The story line, plot and climax all takes place between your ears. With rhythmic and harmonic colorings and textures, it creates subconscious visual images. Piano licks become raindrops. A guitar solo evokes a lonely highway. The melody itself becomes a musical journey with the artist as tour guide.
- Cassandra Wilson - Loverly
- Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2008
- Cassandra Wilson is what I want a female jazz vocalist to sound like. Her deep, husky voice just seems right for a jazz chanteuse doing a late night set in a smoky nightclub.
- Mad Men: Music from the series Vol. 1
- Tuesday, July 22, 2008
- The early 1960s were uncomplicated times compared to the multi-tasking, perpetually wired society we find ourselves into today. TV had yet to become risque and music had yet to become angry.
- The Essential Patti Labelle & The Essential O’Jays
- Thursday, July 3, 2008
- If any two musical entities personify the Philly Soul sound it’s Patti Labelle and the O’Jays. These two new Legacy Essential CDS covers the careers of both of these successful Philadelphia-based acts from their 1960s roots to the present.
- Al Green - Lay it down
- Tuesday, June 24, 2008
- When the album “Let’s Stay Together” came out in 1972 it was on everybody’s turntable and car 8-track player. And the title tune seemed to play continuously on every juke box in town.
- Two Men With The Blues
- Friday, May 30, 2008
- Gussy the blues up too much and it loses some of that earthy, visceral emotion. It’s no longer the blues as we’ve come to know it but something else entirely. Now that in no way means the blues becomes less entertaining. It’s just that when you add sax, trumpet and a few jazz chords, it beings to operate in a different area of your musical soul.
- Liz McComb - Spirit of New Orleans
- Thursday, May 1, 2008
- If the south had a soundtrack it would be a mix of jazz, blues and holy rolling church music. Both “Devil’s Music” and “God’s Music,” as some called it, and the twain should never meet. Of course what was played on Saturday night would oftimes spill over into the pews on Sunday morning.
