Richard Cook was a dominant presence among jazz’s critical fraternity. As editor of the avant-garde-leaning magazine The Wire he was a close observer of the British jazz revival of the 1980s, and went on to mould the taste of a swath of listeners as co-author of the compendious Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD. Unlike most jazz writers, Cook – who invariably used the laconic R. D. Cook as a byline – preferred to roam across the musical landscape, turning out elegant and well-researched pieces on Frank Sinatra, Abba and all manner of esoteric groups from the fringes of punk and electronica.

Born in Kew, he inherited his love of music from his father, a teacher. Even in the age of the sleek, indestructible compact disc, Cook made no secret of his enthusiasm for the aesthetic qualities of old-fashioned 78s. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, and, deciding not to go to university, began his working career at the Charities Commission. In the early 1980s, after moonlighting for various music magazines, he joined the staff of NME – once famous as the home to the young Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons – and soon established a reputation as a critic and feature writer with the broadest of tastes.

In 1985 he assumed the helm at The Wire, an esoteric music journal which had been absorbed into the publishing empire of the colourful owner of Quartet Books, the bon viveur Naim Attalah. Cook, a tall, saturnine figure who cultivated a passion for the turf, cricket and fine wines, turned the magazine into an authoritative source on jazz and experimental music. (At one point the magazine even entered the awards industry, culminating in a lavish event at the South Bank.)

Sometimes the results were undeniably pretentious and overbearing: the more arcane free-jazz performers were arguably given more space than they warranted, and a number of the leading contributors made the process of making a record sound more akin to quantum physics. But the best of Cook’s own pieces were based on the exhaustive knowledge of the reporter and exuded a dry and very English sense of humour. If his Eeyoreish exterior could seem forbidding to strangers, friends came to know a warmer personality behind the magisterial pronouncements.

During his tenure with Attalah, Cook was also briefly assigned the role of publisher of another of the company’s magazines, The Literary Review. Relations with the founding editor, Auberon Waugh, were said to be strained, Waugh extracting his revenge by spelling Cook’s name as “Cock” on the magazine’s masthead.

Cook was jazz critic for The Sunday Times from 1986 to 1992, and also presented a jazz programme on the London radio station GLR in the late 1980s. In 1993 he turned gamekeeper as head of jazz at Polygram’s offices in Hammersmith. While there he signed the trumpeter Guy Barker to the Verve label and instituted a series of well-reviewed reissue programmes including discs by underexposed British artists such as the saxophonist Joe Harriott. To the surprise of those who knew him only through his more austere writings in The Wire, he also supervised a droll collection of obscure musical hall songs, Victoria Plums, performed by the singer and comedienne, Sheila Steafel.

He returned full-time to writing and journalism at the end of the decade.

The Penguin Guide, co-edited with Brian Morton, quickly established a reputation for its pithy assessments of the famous and not so famous. The book, now in its eighth edition, left few byways unexplored, yet tended to play down singers and artists working at the more commercial end of the spectrum.

Throughout, Cook’s passion for collecting appeared undimmed; he made no attempt to hide his disdain for critics who seldom made sorties into record shops. Among his other publications was a brisk and affectionate history of the Blue Note label, a thoughtful study of Miles Davis’s recordings, It's About That Time, and the opinionated and eminently readable Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopaedia.

Cook married the music publicist Lee-Ellen Newman in 1987. He had bowel and liver cancer diagnosed in 2006.

Richard Cook, music writer and critic, was born on February 7, 1957. He died on August 25, 2007, aged 50