A passionate jazzman: Jack Massarik obituary

A formidable chess player, Massarik’s love of chess, boxing and football — particularly his cherished QPR — was almost as great as his love of jazz.

“Jack was as much a fixture on the UK jazz scene as any musician,” says Simon Cooke, managing director of Ronnie Scott’s. “His forthright and highly candid views mixed with his love for, and deep knowledge of, the music made him a must-read; his willingness to support the newer musicians led to the development of many of the UK’s present jazz stars.”

Stars such as the rapper and saxophonist Soweto Kinch: “Jack’s review of a gig I did at Pizza Express in 2002 was one of the strongest endorsements I’d had. Then we did an interview at his place and I remember him taking this rare Grafton Plastic Alto [saxophone] down from a shelf and dusting it off with pride. I thought, ‘This guy isn’t just a writer, he’s a collector and a player and he’s steeped in music’. We were two jazz enthusiasts having a chat. Right from the start, I felt that he got where I was going.”

Following a heart attack while on sabbatical in New Orleans in 1998, Massarik left the Guardian and devoted himself to jazz music, contributing more regularly to the Evening Standard and titles including Jazzwise magazine. For three years he was a regular guest on BBC Radio 3’s Jazz Line-Up, memorably describing a John Coltrane track as “torrents of hate” in his inimitable, old-school way.

“Jack was well aware of Coltrane’s ideas about harmonics,” says fellow critic Peter Vacher. “But as a sax player he followed the broad path that Bird laid down; he loved Oscar Peterson and the great post-bop artists. When I heard him play guitar [recent gigs with mates including drummer Matt Skelton featured Massarik on a Les Paul] it was clear that he was influenced by guys with great technical knowledge, like Barney Kessel. Jack appreciated creativity.”

“How often do you play?” I once asked Massarik, whose longest stint as a professional musician was alongside guitarist Roger Dean in Ronnie Jones and the Night-Timers, who were later called the Blue Jays, from 1962 until 1964. “I’m still a performing musician,” he said. “Though nowadays I only play for my own amazement.”

Stories of Massarik at his irascible best are legion: walking out of an Ornette Coleman concert at the Festival Hall in 2007 and lambasting the free-jazz guru as “too crude to be taken seriously” in this paper the following day; marching up to Giles Peterson in the DJ booth at a London Jazz Festival launch (“Oi!”) to reprimand him for not playing jazz.

“I think Jack started off trying to roast anyone who didn’t know as much about jazz as he did,” says David Jones of music promoter Serious. “But one of the things I most admired about him was the way he’d be holding a viewpoint vehemently, and you would discuss it with him, and then the next time you saw him he’d have listened to the music and be telling you this was a good record.”

Massarik lived it as he wrote it. A friend to many of the musicians he covered in these pages and to fellow critics including myself, he had a wise-cracking charm that forgave him the odd dodgy comment. His peccadilloes made him loveable. He’d worked through the transition from print to digital and sometimes it showed. “Jack, you sound like you’re shouting,” I’d email. He had a tendency to leave his caps lock on. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, BABY?” he’d email back.

Pianist Nikki Yeoh still has the clock Massarik made for her out of a flier for an early show she did with Cleveland Watkiss, who recently told me how honoured he was by his Massarik-bestowed sobriquet, “the best male jazz singer in Britain”. “Jack and I would always greet each other with ‘Tick tock’,” says Yeoh.

I rang him as soon as he announced his illness, only a couple of weeks ago. He recited his landline out loud, as he always did. “At least this proves that not only the old die young,” he said with a remarkable lack of bitterness. “Let’s cut the rug when I get used to this medication.” Sadly, this was not to be. Massarik died peacefully at home on Sunday evening surrounded by his family. His sister Vicky, son Mark, daughter Nina and two grandsons, Danny and Ben, survive him.

Charlie Parker’s Moose the Mooche, Miles Davis’s I Thought About You and Nat King Cole’s (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 are among the tunes he has chosen for his funeral.