He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood (1954–60), and the Royal College of Music, London (1961–64), where he studied composition with Peter Racine Fricker, fugue and orchestration with Gordon Jacob, piano with Antony Hopkins and organ with John Birch.
Hearing Boulez's "Le marteau sans maitre" brought a new atonal complexity to his music, replaced by an austere paring-down following his discovery of Edgard Varèse.
For the next 20 years, Jack composed somewhat intermittently, but his works included "Holly Bush", written in Poland and given a public rehearsal by the London Sinfonietta under Roger Norrington at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London; a piano concerto for Roger Woodward, which was never performed; a monodic piece for any instruments or voices, "You told me so yourself", which received performances by different soloists and groups both in England and abroad; and "A piece for learning" – a "variable" score performed under Richard Bernas's direction at the Dartington Summer School.
[2] He left the BBC in 1993 and for the next ten years was active as a freelance music critic and devised and presented several radio programmes on music and architecture for BBC Radio 3 with the producers Tim Thorne and Antony Pitts, and two notable examples of radiogenic work, "Chromatic Fantasy" and "From the Diary of a Fly".
Owing to ill health Adrian Jack no longer composes or makes public appearances.