By Jon Garelick

There are few critics as worth re-reading as the late Francis Davis, whose writings are filled with musical and cultural insight, erudition, literary grace, and, most valued now, humor.

The name Francis Davis will be familiar to Arts Fuse readers for what has become known as the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, which the Fuse has published since 2021. Before that (2013-2020), it was the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, and before that (2006-2011), it was the jazz critics poll of the Village Voice, where Davis had been the main jazz columnist since 2004, following Gary Giddins.

Davis, who died on Monday, at age 78, compiled and shepherded these polls into print with his former colleague from the Voice, Tom Hull. A highlight was Davis’s annual essay, summing up the consensus (such as it was) of the jazz press in a given year.

But the bulk of Davis’s writing was contained in four collections from 1986 to 2004:  In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s; Bebop and Nothingness: Jazz and Pop at the end of the Century; Like Young: Jazz, Pop, Youth, and Middle Age; and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader. A fifth book was a history of the blues, and another was a long Q&A, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael.

Davis was also the first jazz critic on NPR’s Fresh Air. As recounted in Nate Chinen’s obituary for NPR, he met the show’s host, Terry Gross, in the record store where he worked, in Philadelphia. She invited him to write for Fresh Air. They became fast friends. Then, life partners. It makes sense — Davis was always a Fresh Air kind of guy. You can read it in the unpretentious erudition of his prose, his broad range of reference and interests, which extended well beyond jazz and pop. And you could occasionally hear it in Gross’s musician interviews — how many of her interview questions were the product of informed listening and animated discussion between her and Davis? Oh, to be a fly on their walls.

“Music criticism is a form of cultural criticism, if one goes about it the right way,” Davis wrote in his introduction to Like Young. “For me, it also seems to have become autobiography by other means.”

Which is maybe why there are few critics as worth rereading as Davis. His death sent me back to his books — the insight, musical and cultural, the erudition, the literary grace, and, most valued now, the humor. One of his most memorable pieces — for me — was one he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a phone interview with Miles Davis, in which Miles cusses him out. (“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Francis.”) True to form, rather than being insulted or getting defensive, Francis is actually kind of charmed, pointing out Miles’s savvy trick of addressing his interviewer by name even as he’s slagging him. The phone dialogue continues, and the resulting piece is a perfect miniature portrait of the artist. It includes his description of what Miles played with the Wayne Shorter-Herbie Hancock-Ron Carter-Tony Williams quintet of the 1960s: “The harmonically spacious, metrically suspended music [they played ] remains the dominant musical style two decades later, although nobody has yet [1987] put a satisfactory label on it.” Well, yeah, so that‘s what I’ve been trying to describe for 30 years! It’s also telling of Francis’s breadth of interests and curiosity — his passion — that another of my favorite pieces isn’t even about jazz — it’s about Dion (“The Wanderer,” “Runaround Sue”). And it has a typically great Francis Davis title: “The Moral of the Story from the Guy Who Knows.”

Davis closed his final jazz poll essay, which ruefully outlined the details of the Parkinson’s disease and emphysema that afflicted him, with these words: “When I was in college, I used to haunt downtown Philadelphia record shops, often going without lunch to put the few coins in my pocket toward buying that just-released Jackie McLean or Archie Shepp. Or if I couldn’t afford it right then and there, to wonder what Martin Williams or Nat Hentoff might have to say in the next issue of DownBeat. I was listening vicariously. Now, as I become increasingly disengaged, I find myself wondering what that esteemed critic Francis Davis would have to say about it — as if listening posthumously. I’ve become my own imaginary friend, as good a time as any to split.”

And that’s the moral of the story from the guy who knew.

Jon Garelick can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.