Cornel Chiriac (May 8, 1941 March 4, 1975) was a Romanian journalist, radio producer, record producer and jazz drummer. Early life Chiriac was born on May 8, 1941, in , a village in Bessarabia, Soviet Union (previously in Cetatea Albă County, Kingdom of Romania, now in Odesa Oblast, Ukraine). He went to high school in Pitești and graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of English Language. Chiriac made his radio debut in 1963, with the show Jazz of Yesterday and Today, later Jazz magazin. Beginning on July 10, 1967, he produced for Radio România the most popular music show of its day, Metronom. Together with Geo Limbășanu, he presented listeners with the latest information from the pop, rock and jazz scenes. Shortly after the August 21, 1968, Invasion of Czechoslovakia (in which Romania did not participate) he played a ballad by Mircea Florian which relates how five small wolves and a bigger one attacked a sheepfold, and later put on The Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R." According to his nephew, "everything came to an end one evening" when he played the song, "which had escaped the censor, who didn't know English. But the song was heard on the show by the wrong people and was banned in 1969", also leading to Metronom's cancellation that year. From adolescence he developed a passion for jazz, gathering all the information he could about jazz musicians and listening to jazz songs wherever he could. In his notebooks he copied books, chronicles, interviews and news from specialty magazines. His aunt later recalled, "In high school music was his only preoccupation. He wasted nights writing. In the morning he would wake up with great difficulty to go to school." Some of the notebooks ended up in the possessions of important Romanian musicians, such as , Cristian Colan, and Johnny Răducanu, being the only possible source for ready information about jazz at the time. Chiriac wrote press articles as well as liner notes for the Jazz collection. In 1965, he published a study of jazz in the magazine Secolul XX; a year later, he wrote the preface for the Romanian edition of Louis Armstrong's My Life in New Orleans. He was a founding member of the European Jazz Federation in 1967. According to the minutes, he described the difficult conditions of Romanian jazz musicians at the time and accepted the idea of a federation under UNESCO