He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and cofounder of the Monterey Jazz Festival.

Gleason discovered jazz when, during a siege of measles while a student at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, he heard Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Fletcher Henderson on the radio.

when he began to support several Bay Area rock bands, including Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, in the late 1960s.

[8] With Jann Wenner, another Ramparts staffer, Gleason founded the bi-weekly music magazine Rolling Stone, to which he contributed as a consulting editor until his death in 1975.

For ten years he also wrote a syndicated weekly column on jazz and pop music that ran in the New York Post and many other papers throughout the United States and Europe.

King, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Vince Guaraldi with Bola Sete, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Sonny Rollins, among others.

Currently awarded by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and The Pop Conference.