My friend Victor Schonfield, who has died aged 81, set up the Music Now charity in the late 1960s to promote the kind of jazz and avant-garde music that he loved so much. As director of the organisation he was involved in organising around 80 concerts in Britain and continental Europe, bringing the experimental jazz composer Sun Ra to Britain for the first time – at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1970 – and staging a John Cage event at the Royal Albert Hall in 1972.
Vic was born in London, to Judith Hertz, a housewife, and Solomon Schonfeld, a rabbi. I met him at the age of 11, when I became a pupil at his father’s school, the Orthodox Hasmonean high school for boys in Hendon, north-west London. We both began buying jazz records with our pocket money, Vic quickly amassing a vast collection.
