Steve Voce, 1933-2023 - Jazz Journal

Steve Voce, long-serving contributor to Jazz Journal, died 23 November, aged 89, his wife Jenny reports. He had been popular (and often reviled) for his columns variously titled What’d I Say, It Don’t Mean Thing, Scratching The Surface and Still Clinging To The Wreckage. These columns covered 42 of the 56 years of the publication of Jazz Journal.

Steve had written for JJ since the 1950s, his lively, witty and often acerbic style much appreciated by many JJ readers. Many must have turned first to his column. He began in an era when factionalism and stylistic and professional rivalry were an intrinsic part of the scene and writers were generally less charitable than today towards jazz they didn’t like. Sadly, that individualism has pretty much disappeared in the last three or four decades as the “jazz industry” has been exhorted to pull together and be positive as if it were a homogenous mass, and as the jazz media has come to depend so much on keeping advertisers and political factions happy.

Background on Steve’s life is as short in supply as his tolerance for pretension in jazz. When I asked him for a biography for our contributors page, I got simply “In the first half of his life Steve Voce was preoccupied with listening to jazz, boozing and adultery. In the second half of his life he gave up adultery.” There was a lot more to the life and work for jazz than that. It probably isn’t excessive to suggest he lived for the music. Thinking of retrieving an unreviewed record set, Jenny speaks of “masses of paperwork and all sorts of things in most of the house” (the scene may be familiar to jazz spouses) and his passion for jazz, positive or negative, was always palpable. At the Nice festival in the 1980s, when I was getting excited about David Sanborn and about Miles Davis’s band with Stern et al, he made a point of telling me that the difference between what he liked and what I liked is that what he liked would last.

He wasn’t entirely reactionary, writing favourably in the 1960s and 1970s on experimental developments, especially in British jazz from such as Mike Gibbs. But in later years he reverted to what were probably his first loves in the swing to 1950s mainstream, asking me on various occasions “We lived through the best of it, didn’t we?” (I hadn’t, being of a later generation, but age and long service on both our parts blurred the generational boundaries.)

This is a short news item, and I hope to extend it into a fuller biography for Steve. Anyone with information on his life and work or recollections of him is welcome to write to editor[at]jazzjournal.co.uk. All Steve’s writings for the are on the Jazz Journal website (i.e., since January 2019)

MARK GILBERT

As well as writing obituaries for The Independent, he was a columnist for Jazz Journal, and presented the Jazz Panorama radio programme on BBC Radio Merseyside