Katie Malloch retires! Listeners distraught!

Katie Malloch, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s devoted voice of jazz, is retiring after four decades of support for a scene that’s grown from a small, scattered underground to a nationwide festival circuit, the envy of the music world.

Host since 2007 of the CBC Radio 2 weekday jazz-soul-Latin-world music show “Tonic,” before that the long-running “Jazz Beat,” before that “That Midnight Jazz” and a program of francophone music called “Radioactive,” Malloch has been widely praised for her warmth, intelligence, knowledge and support of homegrown as well as U.S. and international jazz. She began her career as a freelancer out of McGill University in 1972, became a staffer at the CBC in ’75 and has been essential to Canadian listeners and musicians for introducing them to music with in-concert recordings, knowledgable but personable interviews, steady good taste and personal charm.

Based in Montreal, Malloch is bi-lingual and has been a frequent onstage MC of jazz performances. Her retirement at the end of March has been preceded by a goodbye tour of parties she’s attended in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. She has received paeans online from Ottawa Citizen columnist and blogger Peter Hum, political pundit/editor Paul Wells in Macleans and Vancouver drummer Jesse Cahill, among others. Hum, for one, has written like an abandoned boyfriend: “Katie Malloch, what will jazz in Canada do without you?” is the headline of one of his articles.

Malloch is married to documentary filmmaker Paul Cowan, with whom she has two children. Educated as an anthropologist, she credits her musical interest to the the eclectic mix her parents listened to when she was growing up. She has not publicly announced any future professional plans. The JJA wishes her well, hoping that her love and understanding of music will not be completely lost to the audience that’s already missing her .