| Arnaud Merlin | |
| Birth Place: | Tours, France |
| Nationality: | French |
| Alma Mater: | Conservatoire de Paris, Paris-Sorbonne University |
| Occupation: | Music journalist, radio producer, jazz critic |
Arnaud Merlin (born 1963) is a French jazz critic, music journalist and radio producer who has worked mainly for France Musique in recent years.
Arnaud Merlin studied music at the Paris-Sorbonne University and Conservatoire de Paris, where he was awarded the History of Music and Aesthetics Prizes. He works as a music journalist since 1985, mainly for magazines like Jazz Hot, Jazzman and Le Monde de la musique.[1]
From 1992 to 2004, he was member of the Académie Charles-Cros and Académie du Jazz, editorial secretary of Cité Musiques (the newspaper of Cité de la Musique), . Since 1996 he started to produce music programmes on jazz and contemporary music for France Musique and Radio France. In 2002 he was a juror at the for the Concours de piano jazz Martial Solal.[2] He was a member of the Artistic Committee of the Anglo-French Fund for Contemporary Music “Diaphonique”[3] and the Commission Jazz & Blues.[4] In 2012, he was awarded the Irmaward in the Jazz category of the .[5] Merlin is also the director of and Orchestre National de Jazz and president of the Centre régional du Jazz in Burgundy.
With Franck Bergerot, he co-authored a two-volume miniseries about jazz music entitled French: L’épopée du jazz|italic=yes (lit. “The Epic of Jazz”), which are two heavily illustrated pocket books published in the collection “Découvertes Gallimard”, in 1991. The second volume French: L’épopée du jazz 2/ Au-delà du bop|italic=yes has been translated into English, Italian, Russian and Korean.