D.M. Legacy Foundation awards the 2026 Griot award

Mark Ruffin was born in Chicago and spent the formative years surrounded by the music of his parents’ record store where as a young child he was exposed to the jazz legends of the time. In a special promo produced for Jazz Appreciation Month by the National Endowment for the Arts, Ruffin speaks of being 5 years old when his mom was robbed in their record store while Miles Davis continued to play in the background on the record player. Ruffin states that as long as he heard Miles on the box, he felt protected, and he later states that the famed trumpeter became his patron saint from that moment. The sounds of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Motown and Black popular music of the 60’s were the soundtrack of his childhood and he knew from an early age that this was the world he wanted to be a part of. It was a time of immense growth and learning, and it solidified his passion for sharing the stories and sounds of this incredible art form.

While attending SIU, a broadcasting mecca, Ruffin took advantage of the resources at SIU. He was one of the very few Black students to have an FCC 3rd Class License and host a music shift on WSIU. How that happened is quite the story, but it landed him on the student station WIDB for two years. He was also editor of the Black student newspaper, Uhuru-Sasa, for two years. During this time, he worked part-time for Plaza Records for nearly all three years he was in Carbondale.

Always ahead of the curve, Ruffin is a pioneer in jazz broadcasting and worked at the first station to coin the term “Smooth Jazz” in the 80’s. With an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history, he immersed himself in jazz culture as a curator, tastemaker, host, journalist and producer.

For more than 25 years, from 1980 to 2007, Ruffin was a fixture on Chicago’s jazz scene, not just as a broadcaster on several well-known stations but also as the jazz editor to Chicago Magazine with over 600 articles under his belt. During this time he’s had the privilege of interviewing countless legends and shining a light on the city’s homegrown talent. Ruffin went on to produce two syndicated shows distributed to over 120 stations in the U.S. and Canada, and also produced nationally syndicated shows for legendary talent such as Ramsey Lewis, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King and others. Additionally, as a Cultural Correspondent for the Chicago PBS television station, his pieces on Jazz and American culture presented on the television shows Artbeat Chicago and Chicago Tonight garnered him 2 Emmy awards.

The microphone has always been his favorite instrument; a tool for connection and a bridge between artists and the listeners. This belief has inspired his current work as Program Director and Announcer for SiriusXM since 2007 to present, where he curates a sonic journey for over 1.5 million people in North America by setting the lineups for three jazz stations and hosts daily broadcasts on-air for the Real Jazz channel.

While the airwaves are his home, his work has taken him into other creative ventures. Ruffin has produced over 14 albums for some of the most gifted artists in the industry and was nominated for a Grammy for his work producing Rene Marie’s album I Wanna Be Evil: With Love to Eartha Kitt. He also had the opportunity to put his love of history and storytelling to paper in his book Bebop Fairy Tales: An Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance and Baseball, which received two “Feathered Quill” book award recognitions. Lastly, Ruffin was recognized with the Jazz Journalist Association’s Career Excellence Award in Broadcasting and the Duke DuBois Humanitarian Award from JazzWeek.com.

In addition, for the last 4 years, Ruffin has been a juror for the esteemed Peabody Awards, where he takes great pride in helping to curate the list of awardees that have created the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in all of television, radio, and digital media.

With nearly a dozen active projects in his pipeline, Ruffin shows no signs of slowing down his contributions to the jazz music he loves, despite closing in on 50 years in the industry. He sees jazz as a living organism that takes on the culture of the many different countries where it has traveled to and evolved. Ruffin will continue elevating, memorializing, creating, promoting and serving jazz worldwide.