Ira Sabin, a bebop drummer and the founder of JazzTimes magazine, one of the world’s leading jazz publications has died at the age of 90. He started the magazine as a four-page newspaper to promote new releases at his record store in Washington. JazzTimes reflected the passion he had had for the music since he was a teenager. It was stirred and the early 1940s on a trip to New York City with a neighbor, who dropped him off at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street promising to return soon.

And he brought it to JazzTimes (originally called Radio Free Jazz), which he built into a strong rival of the long-established DownBeat, publishing leading critics like Leonard Feather, Stanley Dance, Martin Williams and Ira Gitler. At its peak in the late 1990s, JazzTimes had a circulation of about 115,000.
He also brought the industry together at his nearly annual JazzTimes conventions, gathering representatives of radio stations, record companies, nightclubs, jazz societies, jazz festivals and musician-union locals. At the inaugural event, at a hotel in Washington in 1979, Gillespie, Frank Foster and other musicians jammed all night.

Soon after the convention, Sabin sold his record store to work full time publishing the magazine, which would evolve to a glossy monthly publication.
Sabin was born on Aug. 10, 1928, in Brooklyn and moved with his parents to Washington when he was 11. His father, Herman, was a businessman, and his mother, Rachael, was a pharmacist before becoming a homemaker.

Ira began taking drum lessons at 12 and became proficient enough to be playing professionally by 15. With many musicians in the military during World War II, he found steady employment. When he himself was in the Army during the Korean War, his musical career was not interrupted: He played with a 60-piece band at Fort Meade in Maryland, and with a six-piece combo in Japan.
Following his discharge, Sabin began producing concerts in Washington and played with his trio at society events, including some at Senator John F. Kennedy’s home in Georgetown.

He went into the record-store business with his brother-in-law in 1962 and bought him out after several months. He renamed the store, at Ninth and U Streets, Sabin’s Discount Records; it became a musicians’ hangout, and in an era before chains like Tower Records started to dominate music retailing, it grew to hold what is believed to have been the largest jazz inventory of any record shop in the United States.

Sabin’s publishing career started in the late 1960s with a handout for his customers called Sabin’s Happenings; by 1970 it had evolved into Radio Free Jazz. By then, Mr. Sabin had moved his store to a new location in Washington after his original store was looted in race riots in 1968.

He recalled doing virtually everything in the early years of the publication.
“I was the writer, editor, publisher, advertising salesperson, artist, proofreader, distributor, you name it,” he wrote in JazzTimes in 1995. But he had no problem deciding whom to cover. “Whenever I’d hear a player that knocked me out,” he said, “he or should be on our next cover.”

The author and jazz critic Gary Giddins, who wrote regularly for JazzTimes, said Sabin began his publication at a critical time.
“He started at the very moment when rock had chased jazz criticism from the press and jazz musicians from the clubs; many writers and musicians alike found new sanctuary in academia,” Mr. Giddins wrote in an email. “And then Ira launched a newsprint magazine that lured the best of the established critics and encouraged a new generation of them.”

Sabin’s role at the magazine evolved after his sons, Glenn and Jeffrey, joined the publication; he eventually focused on increasing its circulation.
In 2009, with JazzTimes experiencing financial difficulties, the family sold it to Madavor Media, a Boston-based company.