Brian Case obituary

No one wrote about jazz and related music with the pungency of my friend and former colleague Brian Case, who has died aged 88. His pieces on favourite figures, from Dexter Gordon to Ian Dury, crackled with allusions and insights drawn from a broad cultural hinterland. Here he is, introducing the young readers of the NME to Miles Davis in 1974: “By the close of the 50s, Miles’s trumpet was the most syndicated sound in jazz. That lovely, elegiac, choked-down tone evoked rain on windows, the exquisite melancholia of Roderick Usher. It could have been Montgomery Clift playing taps for dead Maggio, Gatsby lounging at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.” If you didn’t know who Roderick Usher, Maggio or Gatsby were, there was a chance you’d go and find out, and the discoveries might set you off on a journey to discover a richer cultural hinterland of your own. Brian did that with movie people and novelists, too, from Al Pacino to James Ellroy, during a career that took him from the NME to the Melody Maker and thence to an 18-year spell at Time Out, in its heyday as a fat, content-rich print magazine, where he was successively the film editor, a senior feature writer, and books ed