Richard Cook

Richard Cook wrote professionally about jazz and other music for over 20 years. He worked for NME in the early 80s before becoming editor of The Wire for seven years from 1985. At the same time he was the jazz correspondent for the Sunday Times and a weekly broadcaster on GLR where he hosted GLR Jazz for five years. He was also frequently heard elsewhere on the BBC, scripting and presenting three jazz series for Radio 3, including the acclaimed four-part history of ECM Records. He joined the corporate life in 1992 and was Head of Jazz for Polygram for six years, a post which he decided to leave in 1998 to concentrate on other interests in the jazz business. He also produced three albums for trumpeter Guy Barker, whom he signed to Polygram, and a fourth by the actress Sheila Steafel. He co-wrote and directed the West End production A Sparkling Evening With Caroline Jackson. He was the editor of Jazz Review, the leading British Jazz magazine, and was among the world’s best-selling contemporary jazz writers. His published books were Blue Note: A Brief History, It’s About That Time: The Music of Miles Davis, Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopaedia and eight editions of The Penguin Guide to Jazz. Only grave illness prevented him from working on the ninth.

Richard died in August 2007.

Richard Cook's It's About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record is not a conventional biography. Instead, it evaluates, in the order in which they were made, all the trumpeter's recordings (official and unauthorized), and relates them to events in Miles's life, as well as the wider currents in music. For Cook, fourteen albums in particular are key to understanding Davis's evolution. Each of these is considered in detail, in particular their contribution to Davis's development as instrumentalist, group leader and composer. Cooks also reassesses the contributions of his fellow musicians, which have all too often been ignored or underplayed. It's About That Time is a comprehensive and rigorous guide to the music and times of Miles Davis that burns away the fog of myth that surrounds its complex and contrary subject. It is an essential companion for anyone wanting to understand the trumpeter's musical odyssey over four exhilarating decades.