The summer I graduated from Syracuse University, I walked around Syracuse, the town, for several hours one day, with my friend David Yaffe. David was an English professor at the school whose classes I never took, but whom I had met at a coffee shop a few months earlier, through a friend who had taken his class on criticism. We talked about Radiohead’s new album, King of Limbs, among many other things.
I was 22, a lapsed Catholic and aspiring novelist. David was 38, Jewish, married. The difference in our ages was the same as that of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, a book we both loved and which I was then in the process of re-reading.
In many ways, David’s life resembled Bloom’s, that outstanding fictional character in Western literature, and I hope to honor him by saying this. I’m now almost 36, no longer the ultra-serious, pretentious Dedalus type I suppose I was then. Yet David remained a genuinely novelistic character: whimsical, musical, tragicomic, funny, neurotic, thoughtful, a deeply loving person, sensitive, and deeply liberal, in terms of cast of mind—someone who, like Bloom, hated violence and lies.
Literary friendships have this quality, of always being something more than a series of conversations and encounters at parties and phone calls. They become mythic, even if that mythology is one that only you and one or two other people share, as was the case with our friendship.
David worked at Delmore Schwartz’s old desk at Syracuse, which struck me as fitting. We saw ourselves in another literary pair, from Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift: David as Von Humboldt Fleisher, the gifted but troubled poet, based on Schwartz himself, and me as Charlie Citrine, the younger writer-narrator, modeled on Bellow. Like the characters in the novel, we once wrote an eccentric screenplay together. Schwartz died at 52; David died last week, a few months short of that age.
David began his remarkable career in music criticism at just 20 years old, working as Richard Goldstein’s assistant at The Village Voice, an early sign of the critical intuition that would define his work. Over the next three decades, his writing appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Rolling Stone, among other publications.
David worked at Delmore Schwartz’s old desk at Syracuse, which struck me as fitting.
Unlike most music critics, David was a skilled jazz pianist himself, with perfect pitch, and his writing about music always spoke from inside the songs he loved and obsessed over. While he often wrote with the ardor of a fan, he never wrote as anything less than a practitioner and scholar.
He produced three major books that crossed back and forth between different modes of criticism: Fascinating Rhythm (2005), which explored the complex relationship between jazz and American literature; Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (2011), a penetrating study of Dylan’s persona and compositional techniques; and Reckless Daughter (2017), his widely praised biography of Joni Mitchell.
What set David apart as a critic was his rare combination of technical precision and emotional insight, his ability to parse both the mechanics of a song and the mysteries of its effects.
As a prolific contributor to Air Mail (where he wrote 46 pieces), David moved fluidly between the worlds of musicology and journalism, bringing scholarly depth to popular criticism and vivid accessibility to academic analysis. Whether writing about the influence of jazz on Jewish novelists, Dylan’s relationship to the civil-rights movement, or the intricacies of Mitchell’s compositions, David brought both rigor and passion to his work, demonstrating again and again that serious criticism for a general audience could itself be a form of art.
I will miss him.
David Yaffe was born on January 1, 1973, in Dallas, Texas. He died on November 15
Matthew Gasda is a writer, theater director, and critic. His novel The Sleepers will be released by Arcade Publishing in May 2025
