David Yaffe was the author of several books, including *Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell.*

Inside the Music

An insightful critic and a skilled jazz pianist in his own right, David Yaffe had the rare ability to parse both the mechanics and the mysteries of a song

By Matthew Gasda

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.