Whichever of his enthusiasms he was describing, the music critic and author Ronald Atkins, who has died aged 88, instinctively kept his ego in the shadows and out of the way of the much more interesting minutiae of subjects he loved.
He was the Guardian’s principal jazz critic for three decades and a day-job civil servant, from the 1960s to the 90s.
A private, amiable, gently courteous man, Ron was one of a dedicated coterie of jazz writers who emerged in the 50s, including the musicologist Max Harrison, the writer and broadcaster Charles Fox, and the critics Alun Morgan, Albert McCarthy and Jack Cooke.
Harrison and this circle disliked PR-hyped, personality-centred writing, preferring a more precise objective method dealing simply with what had been played, and why those sounds worked artistically – or did not.
After dissecting the percussive piano style of the hard-bopper Horace Silver, Ron would astutely point to its impact on the understated approach of the sax star Stan Getz. “Getz loosened up, chucked quotes around, and matched Silver for uninhibited swing: no other contemporary pianist could have got that from him.”
Describing the vibraphone playing of the modern jazz quartet’s Milt Jackson alongside Thelonious Monk, he wrote: “The blend of Jackson’s pliant, but still percussive, phrasing with Monk’s blunt, corrosive chords – on such numbers as Misterioso and Epistrophy – still causes frissons of delight.” Analysis and heartfelt enthusiasm elegantly segued.
But Ron could handle the 70s glitzier shifts in traditionally downbeat jazz presentation with tolerance – and humour about himself and his colleagues, too. A 1975 piece on Herbie Hancock found him confessing: “For me, the most unexpected part of the group’s performance is the showmanship, from the staged entrance of Hancock to his final disappearance in a puff of smoke. This must upset the jazz purists more than would the presence of a flotilla of electric keyboards.”
In the 60s, happenstance gave Ron the opportunity to enthuse on jazz to an audience of hippies (a subcultural tribe he could hardly have resembled less in his haircut, dress and preference for pints over spliffs). In a rendezvous that could have deserved a remake of The Odd Couple with a bigger cast, he briefly shared a flat with the photographer, journalist and swinging London icon John “Hoppy” Hopkins and a variety of drop-in guests, including the touring Ornette Coleman. When Hopkins founded the Long Hair Times in 1966 (the prototype for the International Times), Ron was his nearest connection to be “the jazz guy” for the one edition published.
Ron’s piece in that mimeographed one-off commended African American gamechangers such as Coleman and Albert Ayler, describing a 1965 Coleman London concert as legendary, an accolade he rarely used, when other newspaper critics at the time were attacking the revolutionary saxophonist as a charlatan. In the 70s and 80s, Ron’s instincts and expertise also found their way to the socialist magazine Tribune (his politics leaned left, though he rarely declaimed about it), and occasionally the Economist.
Throughout his career Ron contributed to widely respected jazz books, including McCarthy’s Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years 1917-1967 (1968), and Modern Jazz – The Essential Records 1945-70 (1978). He also worked on Jazz Now – Masters of Jazz Saxophone (2000), the Rough Guide publication Jazz – 100 Essential CDs (2001), and edited, and wrote much of the material for, the comprehensive, strikingly illustrated and informative history Jazz – The Ultimate Guide (1996).
In retirement, Ron researched and self-published his last book, Fair Shares & Romanian Oil (2005), a work initially intended to unearth the mysterious life of his mostly absent father, which turned into an exhaustively documented account of that oil executive’s politicised role in the battle for control over Romanian oil reserves in wartime and the postwar world.
His father, Ralph Rosenberg, a Cape Town-born businessman, was running the oil company Steaua Română’s Turkish operations when Ron was born in Istanbul, and the Jewish family name was changed to Atkins in 1938 as Europe’s politics became increasingly terrifying.
His mother, Hedy (Hedwig, nee Warning), and four-year-old Ron were evacuated to South Africa in 1941. They moved to Britain in 1946, where the boy was sent to board at Fonthill school in East Grinstead (where he captained the football team, and excelled in most subjects) and then to Stowe school in Buckinghamshire, where he discovered jazz from friends there.
He began to learn the clarinet and played in a school band (“not very well”, he would later recall), soon expanding his interests from the postwar period’s revivalist embrace of vintage New Orleans music to include the devious bebop of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Monk, with the assistance of a US-connected schoolfriend.
From 1955 to 1957 he did national service in Britain, years in which he saw his father on the latter’s then more frequent UK visits. A rare memory of that time was a 1955 outing the pair took to Chelsea FC’s ground at Stamford Bridge, which led to Ron becoming a lifelong season-ticket holder.
He worked briefly in a library before discovering the job of his jazz dreams. In 1959, he heard of a vacancy at the drummer Carlo Krahmer’s Esquire Records label, and worked there in marketing and promotion and, from 1960 to 63, on the commissioning of album-cover designs from music photographers including Val Wilmer, who became a close friend.
The years with the civil service, and in discreet simultaneity reviewing live gigs, records and eventually writing insightful feature profiles (on such jazz luminaries as Herbie Hancock) for the Guardian, began in the mid-60s, as well as the book assignments that accompanied his widening reputation as a jazz authority.
His civil service colleagues, however, seem not to have discovered that he led a double-life in small-hours jazz haunts until the day he retired from the profession, in 1996.
And though I knew and respected him as a dedicated jazz scribe from the mid-70s, and would sometimes drop him back to “my aunt’s place” in Swiss Cottage after gigs, Ron never once mentioned that his aunt, Vera Atkins, happened to be one of the most significant spies in Britain’s Special Operations Executive in the second world war.
Another sidebar in Ron’s life was as a real-ale devotee: he was a long-term member of the Camra pressure group, a founding editor of the organisation’s London Drinker magazine, and a member of the British Guild of Beer Writers. He also wrote the Collins Gem Beer Guide (1999), detailing the beverage’s evolution across eras and cultures – launched on the arresting opening sentence: “There’s no mention of it in the Book of Genesis, but beer does go back a very, very long way.”
In retirement he moved to Lewes in East Sussex, where he attended quiz nights in the town’s Swan pub, and maintained his interest in jazz matters.
In 2020, I collaborated with him on EFG London jazz festival’s website, celebrating the heyday of the Esquire Records label. Ron, then 84, was articulate and flawless in his recollections – and refreshingly merciless with any errors that I or other contributors made.
His role in serious UK jazz journalism has been inestimable since the 60s, in particular as one of the music’s first scholarly specialists to secure space on a mainstream daily newspaper’s arts pages. Reporting on jazz for the Guardian is a role that I feel privileged to have inherited from him – following his typically offhand suggestion one night on a tube escalator after a gig in 1978, that we share the position because civil service mornings and jazz nightlife were getting increasingly incompatible.
He is survived by his cousin, Zenna.
• Ronald Atkins, jazz critic and civil servant, born 1 July 1936; died 19 March 2025
