Alan Rich so i ve heard https://www.soiveheard.com/ was a towering figure in the American music community, a longtime critic for many publications who wrote with unabashed gusto and with such passion that his writings helped create a major new music scene in Los Angeles. Now 85, he died April 23 at his home in West Los Angeles of natural causes.

He was a natural teacher, with a first-rate mind and memory; a passionate desire for the new, the original, and the excellent; and a missionary zeal to share his discoveries with the widest possible audience.

A witty, forceful yet chuckling, prose-singing artist with a rhapsodic memory of the finest musical moments that ever came his way, Rich was one of the most popular and revered music critics in America. He was a fixture of the music community, writing for The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, Newsweek, California magazine and, from 1992 to 2008, LA Weekly.