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 editor.
Usually the oldest person at any of those publications (he had done national service in the RAF, watching radar screens in a base in Germany), he slipped easily into the role of an ultra-cool elder statesman. Wisdom was dispensed and enthusiasms fired over well lubricated lunches, often rewarded with his listeners’ undying affection for the man with the bebop vocabulary, the button-down shirts and the silvered military moustache.
Brian was born in Deptford, south London, the son of Anne (nee Davies), a Welsh nurse and midwife, and her Irish husband, Harry, an officer in the City of London police. Educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s grammar school in New Cross, he studied history at Hull University and worked as a teacher while writing a novel, The Users, published in 1968 and praised by Anthony Burgess as “a remarkable debut”. There would be no published sequel, and in 1974 he began submitting pieces to the NME. A collection of reflections on his interview subjects, titled On the Snap, was published in 2015.
A first marriage to Pam Jones, a teacher, ended in amicable divorce. His second wife, Sonia (nee Meller), was an actor working in a pub when they met. After they married in 1980, Sonia became a headteacher in south London schools. She survives him, with their two daughters, Daisy and Molly.
