'Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,' the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis 'an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.' Davis wrote for The Atlantic for more than three decades, from 1984 to 2016, and was a contributing editor for much of that time. He also had a high-profile stint at The Village Voice, where he originated an annual jazz critics' poll that continues today elsewhere and now bears his name. (His influence can also be detected on NPR's Fresh Air, which is hosted by his widow, Terry Gross, and where he served as the program's first jazz critic.) Corby Kummer, a longtime Atlantic staffer who edited Davis, told me that one thing that set Davis apart was how catholic his taste was. 'There were no avant-garde novels or musicians or art-house movies he didn't know, and...
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