Francis Davis accepts the Grammy award for greatest album notes for his work on Miles Davis’ Sort Of Blue: fiftieth Anniversary Collector’s Version in 2009.
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Francis Davis, an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz, died on Monday at his residence in Philadelphia. He was 78.
His spouse, Terry Gross, the co-executive producer and host of Contemporary Air, confirmed his demise to NPR Music. Davis had been underneath the care of residence hospice since final fall, residing with emphysema and Parkinson’s illness.
Davis held an influential submit at The Village Voice, inheriting its important jazz column from Gary Giddins in 2004. Two years later he began a year-end Jazz Critics Ballot on the Voice, working it yearly there till 2011. Davis later introduced this ballot to NPR Music, the place it resided from 2013 to 2020; within the years since, it has had a house at ArtsFuse. Wherever it landed, the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Ballot, because it got here to be recognized, at all times gestured towards a notion of consensus, underscoring his standing as a frontrunner amongst his friends.
For many years, Davis was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, defining its protection of jazz. “Francis’s body of imaginative and prescient was so broad: He profiled John Zorn and Benny Carter in the identical yr, and each items are equally sharp,” David A. Graham, a present employees author on the journal, tells NPR Music. “I am at all times impressed by how simply he noticed by fads — from the ‘piousness’ of ’70s fusion to the backward look of the Younger Lions — whereas conveying for even informal readers what made one of the best jazz so nice.”
Throughout his lengthy tenure with The Atlantic, Davis did a lot of the reporting and writing that furnished his essay collections. One in all these, Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader, from 2004, opens along with his wry recommendation about courting e-book publishers: “Promise them an idea album and provides them your biggest hits.”
However Davis stamped every of his books with considered editorial rigor, together with ample literary aptitude. In 1990, reviewing his assortment Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers, the Washington Publish e-book critic Jonathan Yardley pegged Davis as “a sympathetic observer of the complexities of the inventive life,” including that “he’s a delicate, educated, perceptive, imaginative critic, and even when he is moping he is a pleasure to learn.”
Greater than a lot of his contemporaries, Davis peered past the given framework of any musical topic, eager to contemplate the context, each cultural and business. His liner notes for the 2009 Miles Davis reissue Type of Blue: fiftieth Anniversary Collector’s Version present a living proof. “When it comes to the place it falls in jazz historical past, Type of Blue is widely known for being the album that popularized improvising on modes — that’s, improvising within the sparest and starkest of scales as a substitute for bebop’s dense thickets of chord adjustments,” Davis wrote. “However this hardly explains the album’s maintain on three successive generations of listeners, most of whom in all probability would not know a mode from a Mercedes Benz.”
He received a Grammy award for these album notes. He was additionally awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and a Pew Fellowship in 1994. He acquired the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award on quite a few events, together with a particular recognition for his 2001 essay assortment Like Younger: Jazz, Pop, Youth and Center Age.
Francis John Davis was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 30, 1946. His mom, the previous Dorothy McCartney, labored as a medical clerk; he by no means knew his father. “I consider myself as a struggle child, in a approach,” he mentioned in a 2001 interview with Joe Maita, for the web journal Jerry Jazz Musician. “I grew up in a house the place my mom had misplaced her brother in WWII. I’m named after her brother. We had my grandmother in the home as effectively.”
As a young person, Davis recalled in the identical interview, he received a part-time job at a department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. There he indulged a ardour for books, and was struck particularly by a 1959 Norman Mailer assortment, Ads for Myself. “It was the primary time I learn anyone who wrote on writing,” Davis mentioned. “He would speak about phrase selections, and the way he had modified one phrase to a different. It was additionally a e-book that gave a way of writing as an intensely masculine exercise.”
Davis attended Temple College from 1964 to ’69. He was there for saxophonist John Coltrane’s efficiency in ’66, launched almost half a century later as Providing: Dwell at Temple College. “The walkouts started quarter-hour or so into the night’s first tune,” Davis later wrote of the live performance, a deep plunge into avant-garde expression. “What was surprising concerning the exodus was that these had been Coltrane addicts presumably undaunted by the turbulence and complexity of his music to that time, however grief-stricken by what they had been listening to now.”
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He himself was removed from grief-stricken; by the live performance’s finish, he was on his ft cheering. He’d later recall this as one second that impressed him to turn into a music critic, although it took a short time. Within the meantime, he labored at document shops — together with a department of Listening Sales space, on the campus of the College of Pennsylvania. He was a supervisor of that retailer within the late Seventies, when Terry Gross, an up-and-coming host at WHYY, started stopping in.
“It was close to the radio station, possibly 10 blocks away,” Gross says of the Listening Sales space, the place she knew a fellow worker. “It was straightforward to stroll over once I wanted a document. I had a three-hour present 5 days per week, so I wanted to fill time: I wanted movie critics and artwork critics and music critics. I requested him if he would take into account doing a chunk on spec the place he would select an out-of-print jazz recording that nobody had entry to, and play excerpts of the album and speak about why it mattered — when it comes to the musician, the composition, but additionally within the context of the jazz and popular-culture world. And the script he despatched in was so fantastically written. I did not even know he was a author. He began doing that commonly, for a weekly collection he referred to as Interval.”
As they labored collectively, Gross and Davis shaped a friendship that blossomed into one thing extra. “Our first date, so to talk, was an Abdullah Ibrahim live performance in West Philly; I am fairly certain it was at St. Mary’s Church,” Gross remembers. “Then we went to listen to Jonathan Richman and The Trendy Lovers, after which we went to listen to Lou Reed. And by then, the deal was sealed.” Davis and Gross turned a pair in 1978. They married in 1994.
Davis lined jazz for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1978 to 1983. And when Contemporary Air with Terry Gross went nationwide in 1987, Davis was its first jazz critic. Inside a yr, he determined that radio was not his pure medium; for his substitute, he beneficial Kevin Whitehead, whose opinions he’d learn in Cadence journal. (Final yr, Whitehead stepped down after greater than 35 years with the present.) “It was such an ideal suggestion,” Gross says of the handoff. “Kevin additionally has that type of hard-boiled sound on air. Francis’ sensibility was so formed by movie noir and hard-boiled detective fiction. All of it actually made sense.”
Davis’ curiosity in movie, literature and well-liked track resulted in a variety of articles exterior his jazz purview. His friendship with the legendary movie critic Pauline Kael resulted in a e-book with a self-explanatory title: Afterglow: A Final Dialog With Pauline Kael. (Writing in Salon, Allen Barra described it as “an essential little e-book that serves as each oral historical past and memoir.”)
As for a Final Dialog with Francis Davis, he offered one, in a fashion of talking, as the keynote essay for the nineteenth Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Ballot. Divulging particulars about his ongoing well being wrestle, in a characteristically sardonic tone, he additionally expresses some rueful emotions for the calling to which he’d devoted a distinguished profession. “Perhaps I used to be the final to study that criticism had outlived its usefulness so far as the humanities and leisure business had been involved,” he writes. “Or possibly solely I’ve outlived mine.”
