Francis Davis, a prolific jazz critic with a sharp eye and ear for music’s cultural context, died on Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 78.
His wife, Terry Gross, the host of the NPR program “Fresh Air,” said the cause was emphysema and complications of Parkinson’s disease.
As a contributing editor at The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century and a columnist at The Village Voice for even longer, Mr. Davis wrote hundreds of articles on music, film, television and popular culture, focusing on jazz — an art form he both celebrated and bemoaned, worried that its future would not live up to its past. (He also wrote for The New York Times and other publications.)
His specialty was teasing meaning from the sounds he heard, situating them in America’s history, culture and society. That approach, and the fluency of his writing, made him one of the most influential writers on jazz in the 1980s and beyond, drawing a wide readership and praise from other critics. The cultural figures and artifacts he took on — Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, “Seinfeld,” Billie Holiday, the director William Wyler — amount to a group portrait of America in the postwar years, largely in the pages of The Atlantic.
“He is a sensitive, knowledgeable, perceptive, imaginative critic, and even when he’s moping he’s a pleasure to read,” The Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of Mr. Davis’s 1990 collection, “Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers.”
His “insights, investigations and opinions,” Eugene Holley Jr. wrote of “Jazz and its Discontents” in The New York Times Book Review in 2004, “are funny, fierce and fair, and are as diverse as the music he loves.”
Mr. Davis’s criticism was never just about the music. A 2000 essay in The Atlantic about Billie Holiday drew out the larger meaning of her life’s work, tying her personality and its context to the sounds she produced.
“Strange Fruit,” the harrowing ballad about lynching that was a staple of her repertoire, “ultimately became a way for her to release her anger,” Mr. Davis wrote, adding, “Her anger could be unfocused, her racial indignation mixed up with resentment at her mistreatment by the men in her life, her persecution by the law, and the public’s preference for blander female singers.”
A portrait of Frank Sinatra, written for The Atlantic shortly after his death in 1998, includes Mr. Davis’s recollection of seeing him in concert seven years earlier and is flecked with subtle details denoting the fading of the aging crooner, who is described as a “tuxedoed snowcap” with “arthritic hands.”
Mr. Davis paid Sinatra his musical due — “No other popular singer ever knew better the combined value of precise diction and conversational delivery” — but he went further, drawing out Sinatra’s precise meaning for a bygone period in the country’s history.
“At least two generations of American men came to love him not just for his singing but for his having met middle age head on, with a combination of style and swagger they hoped might also do the trick for them,” he wrote. “He was them with talent and the privilege it can buy.”
Mr. Davis was acutely aware of the ambiguous position of jazz in contemporary culture, caught between fading roots that seemed ever more distant and a future that often appeared perilously close to pastiche. His optimism about the present was strictly tempered.
Of Miles Davis, he wrote in 1990: “His magnetism is so powerful that fans who haven’t liked anything he’s done in years continue to buy his records and to attend his concerts, irrationally hoping for a reversal of form.”
“It is time to ask,” Mr. Davis wrote about the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in 1988, “if Marsalis has fulfilled his potential, what his influence has been on musicians his own age and younger, and whether he has expanded the audience for jazz, as many hoped that he would.”
“The answer to the first question,” he added, “is a qualified yes.”
And he worried about how the music was coming across to a distracted public enamored of other forms. He told an interviewer for The Atlantic in 1996, “I sometimes wind up jotting down as much about the audience as I do about the performers,” adding: “What does music mean to people? What does it signify to them?”
Francis John Davis was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 30, 1946. His mother was Dorothy (McCartney) Davis, a clerical worker. He never knew his father.
He attended John Bartram High School in Philadelphia and was drawn to writing after reading Norman Mailer’s essay collection “Advertisements for Myself,” he told an interviewer in 2001: “He would talk about word choices, and how he had changed one word to another.”
Mr. Davis attended Temple University, but dropped out before getting a degree; in later life, he returned to teach a graduate seminar in jazz history there.
He was the jazz critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 2006 and a contributing editor at The Atlantic from 1984 to 2010. He was appointed lead jazz critic for The Village Voice in 2004, replacing Gary Giddins, and conducted the paper’s annual jazz critics poll.
He won a Grammy Award in 2009 for his notes to the Miles Davis reissue “Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.” He also won five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music journalism.
Mr. Davis was the author of seven books, which also included “In the Moment” (1986), “The History of the Blues” (1995), “Bebop and Nothingness” (1996), “Like Young” (2001) and “Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael” (2002).
His wife, Ms. Gross, is his only immediate survivor.
Mr. Davis never learned to read music, and he was less attuned to technical description — though he could easily recognize variations in time signature — than to teasing out the larger meaning of what was playing.
“His brilliance wasn’t in describing technique,” Ms. Gross said on Wednesday. “He described the meaning of the sound, and where it fit in jazz culture, and what it was connected to.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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