I wrote this piece for the Daily Telegraph back in 1999. 'Not Jazzy Phil' their photo caption ran. This morning Kevin Jackson was having a bit of a discussion about the modernists and their reactions to jazz music, so I decided to dig it out and republish it here. I use the Telegraph's title below: THE MUSIC THAT CAME BEFORE THE CHATTERLY BAN
Philip Larkin may or may not have believed that ‘sex began in
1963’, but he certainly believed jazz had already died long before
the Beatles issued their first LP. In his words it was “as dead as Elizabethan
madrigal singing.” This collection seeks to rebut the received view of Larkin as musical
arch-conservative, but actually manages to reinforce strongly that judgement, thus
suggesting a terrible paradox. How does a man who feels music so
deeply and writes about it so well become so tone deaf?
Larkin discovered jazz through dance music, the pop of his youth. It
became part of his “private joke of existence”. He relished the
escape it provided. “I can live a week without poetry but not a day
without jazz,” he said. He disliked anything that took jazz away
from its roots in American folk blues, as if he begrudged jazz
musicians their own aspirations to more self-conscious art. There is of course a racial element; but Larkin has been attacked enough for his retroactive affronts to
political correctness. Yet while it would be churlish to use these
reviews as further ammunition against his prejudice, it’s impossible to see this
collection as in any way disproving it.
His complaints about be-bop taking jazz out of the realms of popular
music echo those of rock fans who complain the music hasn’t been
the same since Buddy Holly died. He never realised that pop music
was already moving away from his sort of jazz by the time he became a
fan, and it was inevitable that jazz itself would change. One may
prefer Johnny Hodges to Charlie Parker, Henry Allen to Miles Davis, but
would you feel comfortable asserting Hodges and Allen blew the
others “out of the room”? When, eventually, he acknowledges
Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane in his “year’s best” choices,
he does it only out of a grudging sense of responsibility to reality.
Larkin writes precisely, so it’s hard to grant him leeway. He even
has the chutzpah to criticize others for “dragging in culture
references”, while himself using the adjective “Henchardian".
Amusingly, the editors have culled Larkin’s poetic phrases and
listed them in the book’s introduction. This has the effect, like
a well-produced trailer for a bad movie, of suggesting that’s all
there is on offer. Fortunately, that isn’t the case.
While not
revealing a kinder, gentler Jazzy Phil, this is still a valuable
collection. Yet it's most revealing when Larkin reviews, not music, but a fellow writer, the New Yorker's jazz critic Whitney Balliett. He admires Balliet, but is also almost haughtily suspicious of his catholic
enthusiasms. And there is the crux of the matter. Larkin’s inability to gain pleasure from
anything but the music that first gave him that exciting release when he was young is the very definition of a fetishist, and reveals him as someone more intent on recapitulating that pleasure than making a fan's progress through the seasons of jazz.
Balliett once wrote “it is a compliment to jazz that nine-tenths of
the writing about it is bad.” Larkin’s writing falls into that
precious one-tenth. If only he could have shared one-tenth of Balliett’s
eclectic enthusiasm.
REFERENCE
BACK: Philip
Larkin’s Uncollected Jazz Writings 1940-84
Edited
by Richard Palmer and John White
University
of Hull Press, 191pp, 19.99
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