Ira Sabin, founder of JazzTimes, dies at 90

Ira Sabin, a bebop drummer who in 1970 started what became JazzTimes magazine, one of the world's leading jazz publications, as a four-page newspaper to promote new releases at his record store in Washington, died Wednesday at an assisted living facility in Rockville, Maryland. He was 90.

His son Glenn said the cause was colorectal cancer.

For Sabin, JazzTimes reflected the passion he had had for the music since he was a teenager. It was stirred in the early 1940s on a trip to New York City with a neighbor, who dropped him off at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street, promising to return soon.

"A man came over and asked me what a young kid was doing at a place like this," Sabin recalled in JazzTimes in 1995. "We spoke for a few minutes before he walked over to the bandstand and picked up an alto. He turned out to be Charlie Parker."

That thrill resonated for decades. He brought it to his record store, which, in its original location, was at the hub of Washington, D.C.'s jazz district, in the Shaw neighborhood.

And he brought it to JazzTimes (originally called Radio Free Jazz), which he built into a strong rival of the long-established DownBeat, publishing leading critics like Leonard Feather, Stanley Dance, Martin Williams and Ira Gitler.

At its peak in the late 1990s, JazzTimes had a circulation of about 115,000.

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