The anxiety is mounting whenever I open up a social network. We are losing pivotal figures at a rapid rate – each announcement feels like an ambush. Artists, musicians especially, will always be huge inspirations. But I have to give it up to the writers too, no doubt. They are all mentors. Because without them, would I be doing what I do?

Well Greg Tate was all of the above and more. When I first contemplated puttin’ down words for a living, there were certain scribes and texts that were required reading. I think it was a review in an early issue of Straight No Chaser magazine that put me on to Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Greg's essays on contemporary America, where he raged curiously through the prisms of race, politics, literature and music.

Flyboy's 80's/90's dispatches for publications such as The Village Voice traversed an extraordinary range of characters: James Blood Ulmer, Santana, George Clinton, Michael Jackson [read the obituary straight afterwards], electric Miles Davis, William Gibson, King Sunny Ade, Jean-Michael Basquiat, Robert Farris Thompson and on and on. Each one, a launchpad to surveying and then riffing on the wider culture.

Within them, he could make connections like stargates – nascent hip-hop to jazz, Kara Walker to Michael Jordan, AR Kane to The Color Purple, dancer Storyboard P to composer Terry Riley – reference leaps somewhere between cryptic and catalytic. As friend Touré writes in his tribute, “[Greg's] work was routinely more artful than the work he was writing about." Duke University’s Dr Anthony Mark Neal puts it like this to BNC News: “Greg was just committed to a different kind of expressive art around criticism …advancing the work” even in an age where “everyone tries to get their digs in in around 240 characters”.

Then came Flyboy 2, with musings on Sade, Bjork, Rammellzee, Lonnie Holley and Azealia Banks among others. Together, they set the benchmark for critical writing on black culture in the US. But there were hundreds more crucial pieces. His was the sort of pen that made you look closer, listen broader, think harder. Even if you recoiled at his strident viewpoint, he made you want to work to appreciate it. And when he took someone to task like Public Enemy (for misogyny) or Davis (for his treatment of women), he did it with a fierce intellect.

One of the greatest tussles he had was with himself was over a key influence, Amiri Baraka. "The beauty, as well as the bullshit of Baraka, has always been how eloquently he's managed to confuse his head with the Godhead, his mental problems with the world's ills, his identity complexes with those of all black people,” he wrote.

Greg would place the transformative potential of the now in the context of its lineage or cosmology, with a scholar's stature, a griot's oratory and a fan's fervour. Often all in one line. A rare skill. Deep knowledge aside, he also had a swagger in his vernacular. He was rappin' to us, exploding black culture with his critique. And you could ride the rhythm of his sentences down all sorts of tributaries.

Like this on hip-hop in Long Island in '89: "While too many rappers run the same cadence into the ground album after album, Strong Island rappers are liable to switch up the rhyme-flow midsyllable. That magic that used to be in jazz, when brothers routinely blew chorus after chorus of stupid-fresh riffs, snatching the music out the air like they had mental telepathy cosmic ray antennae, crystal radios in they cap-fillings or sumpin', has at last made its cultural comeback. Give me that old-time religion, this year's Chinese music by any other name, and somebody alert the jazz police. Future-shock just rode in on the LIRR."

Or this on Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly: "Roll over Beethoven, tell Thomas Jefferson and his overseer Bull Connor the news: Kendrick Lamar and his jazzy guerrilla hands just mob-deeped the new Jim Crow, then stomped a mud hole out that ass.”

Greg was also an educator and organiser, founding member of the Black Rock Coalition, a non-profit formed to champion black authorship and safeguard the creative freedom of artists. Inspired by the conduction techniques of Butch Morris – and his compulsion to never play the same way twice – Greg formed Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber [listen to the discography starting with Blood on the Leaf Opus No 1] with bassist Jared Michael Nickerson, an ever-expanding ensemble that ran the voodoo down from Arkestra arrangements to p-funk to Miles' Get Up With It fusion and myriad other expressions of black music.

"I work with world-class virtuosos who can handle any canon of pop music," he said, "and also bring our own stank to it. We’ve done an all–Rick James show, a show called “Fleetwood Black,” Sun Ra with burlesque dancers, electric Miles, Bowie stuff. There are openings in the music that we can treat like a wormhole and come out on the other side."

I would always lean expectantly whenever Greg appeared in documentaries such as John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History, One Nation Under A Groove (about Parliament Funkadelic), Miles Davis: Birth of Cool, an AJ+ short on black punk/hardcore or this year's Summer of Soul. Invariably, he would open up some portal to discovery.

Although neither the most prolific nor effusive of IG posters (ironically), he would appear here on my feed jamming … transmitting… on either electric guitar or kalimba. Always delightful.

It would have been nice to meet him. A learned and very fly guy. A gracious, big teddy bear too, I hear. To the words, instead.