ON FEB. 16, Philip Elwood wrote, "This column will be my last as a staff writer for The Chronicle, but it's not the last you'll hear from me." As farewell addresses go, it might not rank with Douglas MacArthur's "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away," or Tricky Dick's "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." But in its own way, Phil's valediction is just as historic. It not only marks the end of an extraordinary 36-year run in local music journalism, which began at the San Francisco Examiner in July 1965, but it also signals the demise of meaningful jazz coverage in the Bay Area's major daily newspaper. Last week sources at the San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that the position of jazz critic is being retired there, along with Phil.

This probably hurts me more than it does you. I've known Phil since 1968. I was a teenage cook, cabin cleaner, and handyman at Packer Lake Lodge, a small, old resort about an hour's drive north of Truckee, when he and his family arrived for their first stay. I thought his Examiner music critic job was pretty cool, but it wasn't anything I aspired toward. It would be another 10 or 11 years before I would back into the parallel universe of the alternative press. After I picked up pen and notebook, in addition to crossing paths with Phil in the shadow of the Sierra Buttes, I would rub shoulders with him at Bay Area shows for more than two decades. We didn't run into each other only in jazz clubs, for Phil covered everything, serving a staggeringly broad music community. Ralph J. Gleason pioneered the turf, opening up coverage of jazz, rock, and folk musicians during his 25 years at the Chronicle. But Gleason died too early, in 1975, to be the kind of role model Phil has been for me.

As he noted in his swan song column, Phil's first seven weeks at the Examiner produced 21 pieces, including reviews of Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, the Mills Brothers, Tom Lehrer, and in same-day appearances at the Cow Palace and Circle Star Theater, respectively, the Beatles and Judy Garland. As I sidled into full-time reviewing in the 1980s, I would find myself seated near Phil at a Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band concert in Zellerbach Hall, a Darol Anger-Mike Marshall show at the Freight and Salvage, or an Etta James-Tracy Nelson gig at Blakes. A search on the Internet turned up thousands of links to Phil's work, including a reference to his liner notes for the Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band box set, sandwiched between a 1984 review of the Pretenders at the Greek Theater and a 1996 account of the Who at the San Jose Arena.

A member of the Berkeley High School Hall of Fame (Class of 1943) and a jazz programmer on KPFA-FM radio from 1952 to 1995, Phil often drew on his educational training in history (at UC Berkeley) and his vast store of personal memories to enrich his journalism. Occasionally, seemingly abstruse allusions to Mildred Bailey, Pete Johnson, or Sweet's Ballroom would boggle younger readers and create almost psychedelic disjunctions. More often they added texture and nuance, as in the opening lines to his 1998 tribute to Frank Sinatra: "Leaving a movie matinee in the summer of 1940, I noticed a headline proclaiming Wendell Willkie's nomination as the Republican presidential candidate. At the same time, coming from a soda fountain jukebox, I heard a remarkable voice singing 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams.' "