All What Jazz: A Record Diary

by philip-larkin

All What A Record Diary, 1961-1971

Genres: Music, Jazz, Nonfiction, Poetry, Criticism, Essays

Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many readers who admire Philip Larkin as one of England’s finest 20th century poets may be unaware that he was one of its best jazz record reviewers too. Larkin brought to his reviews the same virtues which inform his poetry: a fine ear, a clear style, a discerning intellect, and a devastating wit. He also came to the reviewer’s task with distinct musical prejudices that make many of his judgments sound old-fashioned and wrong-headed today. Still, Larkin had reasons for his strong likes and dislikes. And his style, his intellect, and his wit still shine bright after fifty years.

Larkin was indeed a great lover of jazz, but for him the real jazz was the old stuff, trad jazz and swing. He disliked Charlie Parker and loathed the modernist experiments of John Coltrane and Ornett Coleman, and—although he tried to be fair to each individual record—he was never afraid to tell his readers how their music affected him. His dislike of this new music was immediate and visceral, but eventually Larkin realized that his reaction was similar to his attitude toward comparable works in the other arts, specifically the products of "modernism.” As he tells us in the “Introduction”:

I am sure there are books in which the genesis of modernism is set out in full. My own theory is that it is related to an imbalance between the two tensions from which art springs: these are the tension between the artist and his material, and between the artist and his audience, and that in the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished. In consequence, the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage.

His rationale was simple:

This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound, or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure.

Whether or not you are in tune with his classical sensibilities, those of us who wish to write better reviews can learn a lot from Larkin. He says what he has to say about each record economically and clearly, assesses each player with precision and insight, and tells the reader exactly what he thinks. Above all, he keeps his reviews short.

Here are some examples of Larkin’s assessments:

BILLIE HOLIDAY: This talent was unique because it showed a singer of popular ballads fitting naturally into a jazz performance: it was also paradoxical, for in addition to exhibiting an intense jazz feeling that shaped the tune to its own ends...it held a strong emotional commitment to the lyrics, so that the Broadway ballads she sang were transfigured without losing their original appeal...Regrettably, she was not able to hold the balance between these conflicting elements. There came to be something a little willed about her distortions of the melody, while the success of “Strange Fruit” and the the more torchy side of her repertoire led her to specialize to an almost masochistic degree in songs of rejection and yearning.

CHARLIE PARKER: It is Parker’s solos that carry these records and have caused an alteration in the course of jazz. Granted that his technique and musical instinct for innovation were unrivalled, what was he like? His talent was indivisible; one cannot say that he would have been better if he had played more simply or with fewer rhythmic eccentricities; these are features of the wild, bubbling freedom that characterizes him, and that some say earned him his nickname. But freedom from what? As one listens to Parker spiralling away “out of this world”, as the phrase goes, one can only answer: ‘humanity’, and that is a fatal thing for an artist, or an art, to be separated from.

HOWLIN’ WOLF: Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin’" is an amazing performance, a piece of pure jazz Gothic, creating with no more properties than an echo chamber and his own remarkable voice, an impression of Coleridge’s demon lover wailing for his woman.

JOHNNY HODGES: Hodges brought as much beauty into jazz as Coltrane did ugliness (a large claim, but I’ll stick to it), but Coltrane got the Times' obituary and Hodges didn’t: that’s the world we live in. Towards the end of his life Hodges’ alto tone had become refined to the point at which it hardly seemed like an instrument: more like someone thinking. And, indeed, that’s what it was.

[Graham Power · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poet Philip Larkin was the jazz critic of the Daily Telegraph from 1961 to 1971. He was, as he acknowledges in the entertaining and contentious introduction to this collected edition of his record reviews, in many ways exactly the wrong man for the job. Larkin fell in love with jazz as a schoolboy in the interwar years. His heroes were Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong. But he took up his post in the era of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. It wasn’t just that Larkin didn’t like what these musicians did, he didn’t even recognise it as jazz. In fact, it was the antithesis of jazz as he understood it. In the jazz of the twenties and thirties Larkin found a life-affirming music of melody and rhythm that lifted his spirits and set his feet tapping. From bebop onwards it increasingly entered his ears as ‘broken glass’ rather than ‘honey’ and when it was wasn’t repelling him with atonal dissonance, it was boring him to death with cerebral aridity. For Larkin’s generation jazz had the rebellious and slightly illicit appeal that rock did for my own: something teenagers discovered for themselves and which parents and teachers disapproved of. By the early sixties, however, it was transforming itself from popular entertainment to art music. Jazz was entering the academy and becoming respectable. The music Larkin loved had gone wrong, worse than that abandoned him, and he felt the loss with the intensity of a personal betrayal.

You don’t have to be a jazz buff to understand what he was going through. Fans of almost every genre of music eventually experience that disorientating moment when it is not so sweet as it was before. For classical fans it might have been when everything went atonal in the twentieth century. The writer Nik Cohn, in his classic book Awapbobaloobop Alopbamboom, spoke for many fans of fifties rock ‘n’ roll who believed that the increasing sophistication of sixties pop, led by the Beatles, was a betrayal of the essential primal spirit of the music. It’s a recurring story: the mode of the music changes and the traditionalist is left stranded in the museum of his or her record collection.

Larkin’s introductory essay is an attack not just on modern jazz but the entire modernist tradition in art, neatly summarised for him by the alliterative trio of Parker, Picasso and Pound. Modernism, for Larkin, relied on mystification and outrage and was the triumph of technique over feeling. It was deliberately difficult, often ugly, and overly intellectualised; art to be endured rather than enjoyed. Along with it came a dubious intermediate class of professorial high priests intent on explicating aesthetic mysteries to a supposedly benighted public (‘this music only sounds terrible, buy my book on contemporary music and all will be explained’). Larkin thought you should trust your own ears, eyes and judgment. If something sounded or looked like worthless garbage then it probably was and the obliging intervention of an expert surplus to requirements. For Larkin art was less to do with virtuosic display, or formal innovation, than meaningful communication between artist and audience about shared experience. Above all, he thought it should give pleasure: ‘the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way [for a critic] to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not’.

He does have a tendency to get carried away though. He writes about modernist artists wading ‘deeper and deeper into violence and obscenity’. This is clearly hysterical and even, some might think, the authentic voice of the philistine alarmed at where all this artistic experimentation might lead. Conversely, I think of James Joyce spending seventeen years of his life writing an incomprehensible novel called Finnegans Wake, the ne plus ultra of modernism. Joyce said modestly: ‘the demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his entire life to reading my works’. Has anyone ever curled up of an evening with Finnegans Wake? Or described it as a good read? If it isn’t a good read, why is it worth reading? Larkin’s introduction is best understood as a manifesto or credo. As such things tend to be it’s overstated and full of simplifications, but he undeniably had a case nonetheless.

Reading the pieces in All What Jazz I sometimes felt I was eavesdropping on an arcane ecclesiastical argument rendered irrelevant by the passage of time. These reviews were written in the 1960s but carry the whiff of ancient history about them. Traditional? Modern? Who cares? We’re all post-modernists now, quite capable of listening to Bechet and Coltrane, enjoying both and recognising them as brilliant practitioners of a long and evolving tradition. Even the term ‘modern jazz’, which our man in Hull gets so worked up about and was the cause of such antagonism between trendy modernists and ‘mouldy figs’ like Larkin, now seems laughably anachronistic. Still, Larkin is touching on fundamental and fascinating questions about the nature and purpose of art.

I disagree with most of what Larkin says about ‘modern jazz’ but, unless you’re only happy when in an echo chamber lined with mirrors, it’s possible to disagree with a critic and still find them compelling. Larkin came to bury the modernists not to praise them, even so he carried out his doomed assassination attempt with considerable wit and style. His arguments are deeply felt and his prose has the same combination of complex thought and lucid expression found in his poetry. He is often very funny, particularly when in attack mode-: ‘I freely confess that there have been times recently when almost anything - the shape of a patch on the ceiling, a recipe for rhubarb jam read upside down in the paper - has seemed to me more interesting than the passionless creep of a Miles Davis trumpet solo’.

Luckily, there was still plenty of jazz around that was to Larkin’s taste (and there was no shortage of reissues, previously unreleased recordings and boxed sets even back then). When writing about the music he loved you can see Larkin wasn’t joking when he said he could live a week without poetry, but not a day without jazz. His deep appreciation, knowledge and understanding of the music comes through loud and clear. His taste was also more eclectic than is usually acknowledged (than he possibly acknowledged to himself). I wasn’t surprised to find him reduced to tears by an Armstrong track, but he also loved blues (on reflection this isn’t so surprising; Larkin’s poems are a sort of existential blues of the English suburbs), and praises Keith Jarrett, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited didn’t land in Larkin’s jazz bag by mistake; he placed it there out of genuine open-minded musical curiosity, and he liked what he heard). The reviews, while not short on splenetic exasperation, are far more nuanced than the gleeful dogmatism of the introduction leads one to expect. He even likes the odd Miles Davis album, though he still doesn’t think it’s jazz.

Larkin said that his one regret about this book is that it left some people thinking he hated jazz. They can’t have been reading very carefully is all I can say to that. Anyone who doubts how much jazz meant to Larkin, and the profoundly liberating effect it had on him, should read his love poem - that’s exactly what it is and no mistake - For Sidney Bechet. I’ll leave you with the magnificent closing lines-:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City
Is where your speech alone is understood,

And greeted as the natural noise of good,
Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.

[e b · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dear God, where to start with this thing. Well, how about where the book does: the introduction. In this section Larkin admits that more than half of the jazz record-review columns contained herein were written before he was willing to confess to the public that he hated Charlie Parker, bebop, and its descendants, and thus pretty much everything new after the second world war. Presumably if he had admitted that when he started the column in 1961 the record companies would not have sent him free records.

So by Larkin's own admission, more than half of this book is him being not entirely honest about his opinions. He reviews several Parker reissues during this section and is always respectful, so knowing what we know we can only wonder how full of shit he is in the other reviews in this first part. At least he does not pretend to like John Coltrane, and spews venom at him at just about every opportunity, including an obituary of sorts upon Coltrane's death (in place of the standard publication date, the end of this piece is marked "unpublished." Thank God for editors). It's a bit of a crisis for me here because, though I think far more highly of Coltrane than Larkin did, he does manage to nail every single one of my reservations with the man's music, just with 1000% more bile than I ever could think of generating.

Sadly the first, at least partly dishonest, section is the best. Once Larkin and his gravy train of free records are established, he lets loose on all and sundry and it's just depressing, regardless of whether you share his opinions or not. I am not especially concerned with his opinions for the most part, they are what they are, and what one loves is what one loves. But every single piece is laden with some bizarre statement, some peculiar logical fallacy, some contradiction of what he says elsewhere that, combined with much of his enthusiasm being reserved for compilations of old 78s, compilations which were probably available less than a year in the 60s, that this volume's musical commentary is virtually useless.

(But as for opinions ... I like Muggsy Spanier very much, revere his 1939/40 records with his own band and Sidney Bechet, but the frequency with which Larkin holds him up as an examplar beggars belief. It makes Whitney Balliett's Catlett fixation look under control. And what is one to make of his statement that no one could possibly prefer 'A Day in the Life' to 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'?)

Troubling above all of this, though, is that Larkin is just a flat-out racist. More than once he comments that jazz is at its best as a meeting of black and white musicians (when even the great trumpeter Roy Eldridge admitted defeat when Leonard Feather challenged him in a blindfold test to prove his assertion that one could tell the race of the player by music alone). He frequently tries his hardest to avoid giving the black race full credit if it can be avoided. Black jazz musicians' support for the civil rights movement is bemoaned repeatedly, with Larkin at one point throwing in "Little Rock" as a preoccupation deserving of dismissal in the manner that one might say the Kardashians are today. He cites "kill whitey" sentiments more than once but refuses to be specific about where he has heard such things. In discussion of the avant garde, Danish-born John Tchicai gets a pass because he was born in Europe and thus does not feel that civil rights nonsense like the others who play alongside him on Coltrane's Ascension do. It's frequent and depressing in that cavalier colonialist mindset that one, unfortunately, is not surprised to find in an arch-conservative writer in country who thrilled to a TV programme called "The Black and White Minstrel Show" for many years after the last of these pieces was written.

I considered giving this two stars because Larkin writes well enough that I almost made it to the end without skimming in spite of all of the above, but fuck Philip Larkin. If you can read this book without wanting to rip up that cover image, you are a much better person than I.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say I largely agree with Larkin’s assessment of the state of jazz in the 1960s, that the musicians were playing more for themselves than for the audience, that musicians were taking themselves too seriously. The jazz that Larkin enjoys is vibrant, joyous, and fun, music that swings no matter the tempo. It isn’t self-conscious or snobbish.

Perhaps my favorite bit was Larkin warning his readers to beware of men in “funny hats” (looking at you, Thelonius).

[Ric Cheyney · Rating 4 out of 5]

BOB DYLAN 1 – 0 THE BEATLES, AND ONE DEEP PUZZLE.

I read this book because Clive James told me to, in his collection of Larkin criticism, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin. Otherwise I would probably not have bothered with a gathering of dusty old reviews of jazz records, many of which were already reissues at the time. Was it worthwhile? Definitely. There are many, many delights and curiosities contained within this book.
First, I suppose, there is the music. It’s not just jazz. In the course of these reviews, originally published between 1961 and 1971, Larkin covers a wide range of classic jazz (Armstrong, Ellington, Bechet etc) while watching in dismay at the emergence of modern figures like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman et al. Along the way he keeps an eye on the blues boom (mainly positive), the progression of The Beatles (not impressed), Bob Dylan (thumbs up) and Aretha Franklin (showing promise). Larkin spots Keith Jarrett very early on, and Peter Green gets a couple of mentions too. There is not a proper index, unfortunately, just a list of records reviewed, so you’ll need to read the whole book to find some of these names.
The voice throughout reminds me of the curmudgeon that surfaces in some of the great man’s poetry; he knows what jazz should sound like, mainly the way it sounded in his younger days when it held huge excitement (a key criterion) for him. He has little or no time for Charlie Parker, bop, tuneless experimentation or Latin American rhythms. His most passionate sneers are reserved for John Coltrane, ‘free’ jazz and the bass solo wherever it rears its pointless head.
But Larkin, as always, has extra dimensions you might not expect. He listens dutifully (and objectively) to every record, even when he hates it. He dislikes Parker and Miles most of the time, but finds pleasure in some of their work nonetheless. I was surprised to find he had a soft spot for Charlie Byrd. Best of all, of course, there are many gems of critical expression that would not disgrace a poem on the page. Here are a few examples.
Of Henry ‘Red’ Allen: “Even at the start he tended to sound like Louis Armstrong in a distorting mirror, and by the end of his life an Allen solo was a brooding, gobbling, stretched, telegraphic thing of half notes and quarter-tones, while an Allen vocal sounded like a man with a bad conscience talking in his sleep.”
Hines, Tatum and Wilson, however, produce “music to go shopping in the fields of heaven by.”
Miles Davis’s “muted tone, at once hollow and unresonant, creeps along only just in tempo, the ends of notes hanging down like Dali watches.”
There’s plenty of humour too. Miles and Ornette Coleman “stand in an evolutionary relation to each other, like green apples and stomach-ache,” and “I listened conscientiously to ‘Cecil Taylor At The Cafe Montmarte’ and didn’t want to send a gunboat to that establishment more than four or five times.”
He saves his most acerbic phrasing for John Coltrane. “That reedy, catarrhal tone, sawing backwards and forwards for ten minutes between a couple of chords”, “turgid suites … that set up pretension as a way of life”, “the master of the thinly disagreeable sounds as if he is playing for an audience of cobras.”
So yes, Clive James was right to recommend this to all lovers of Larkin, but I was left with one deep puzzle: how could the man who wrote such heartbreakingly beautiful poems about the quiet, minor tragedies and ironies of ordinary life dismiss works like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Lovely Rita’ and ‘She’s Leaving Home’, when they are surely Larkin poems in musical form? Evidently his desire for foot-tapping musical excitement shoved most other considerations into the margins of his attention.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are relatively obscure pieces published 50 years ago by one of England's greatest poets of the last century.

They are short pieces. You have to have an interest in jazz to begin with or this is not a book that should be on your list. Of the jazz books I have read, this is one of the better ones. You can skip around to particular subjects that interest you. The author clearly loves jazz music, though he does bring quite strongly his opinions on what constitutes jazz and why he likes a particular jazz style.

These are novelty set pieces from a different era, written by a great poet who was also a great prose stylist. The lively writing itself may be worth the venture.

[Jeff Crompton · Rating 4 out of 5]

So why should one read criticism by a writer who is often, to put it bluntly, flat-out wrong?

I admire Larkin as a poet, but I first read this book, a collection of his monthly jazz columns written for the Daily Telegraph, before I had read any of his poetry. I've read it at least once from cover to cover, but it is one of my favorite books to pull off the shelf and thumb through, reading bits at random. Why, if Larkin is so often wrong?

And wrong he is, much of the time. Larkin was what used to be called a "moldy fig" in jazz circles, meaning that he didn't care for the modern jazz that evolved in the 1940s. Larkin's jazz was King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong - not Charlie Parker, not Miles Davis, and certainly not John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Larkin has written an introduction for the book which is enlightening, entertaining, and a little sad. In it, he describes his growing horror at the modern jazz records he has been sent to review, and how he developed his theory that the "modern" in any art form is designed to willfully mystify and outrage.

Except in certain extreme cases, this is nonsense, of course. So again, why read Larkin on jazz? There are several answers, which all basically come down to one: he is a great writer. Here he is in 1963, writing about a record he doesn't like:

'I usually don't buy jazz records,' Miles Davis told an interviewer recently. 'They make me tired and depressed.' At least half of his new LP 'Seven Steps to Heaven' (CBS) has me feeling the same way. For three tracks (made in San Francisco with Victor Feldman) his lifeless muted tone, at once hollow and unresonant, creeps along just in tempo, the ends of his notes hanging down like Dali watches, and since two of the tunes are 'Basin Street Blues' and 'Baby Won't You Please Come Home', an atmosphere approaching burlesque is created, as if Miles were in for a how-unlike-Wild-Bill-Davison-can-you-get competition.

Wrong, wrong, wrong - but pretty good writing. And if you know the record in question, you can kind of understand where Larkin was coming from. But of course, he's much better writing about music he likes:

Positive as I am that Sidney Bechet is one of the half-dozen leading figures in jazz, I sometimes hesitate when asked to name a record by him that will bring any unbeliever round to my way of thinking. For his particular power resides, after all, in generalities - the majestic cantabile sustenuto, the authoritative vitality - and these exist despite innumerable individual records that reveal gobbling irrelevancy, mannered quotes from minor classics, sticky balladry, instant Dixieland, frightful traveling companions.

I don't totally agree with everything in that paragraph, but there is some real insight there. And that's why Larkin on jazz is worth reading, including many (but not all) of the passages in which he misses the boat.

There is an index of the recordings Larkin writes about - I've found a few mistakes/omissions, but it's a useful feature. Again, this is a great book for the jazz love to pick up an thumb through, even if doing so is occasionally infuriating.

[Stewart Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's fascinating to read the poet's collected columns as a jazz record reviewer, not because I often agree with them (for one thing, he absolutely despises my beloved bossa nova), but because his biases and prejudices are kind of fascinating to discover with 50+ years hindsight. I can understand someone who fell in love with jazz in England in the 1930s to have trouble enjoying The New Thing during the '60s. But referring to the likes of Archie Schepp was "Civil Rights Jazz" carries a strong whiff of "It was ever so much better when these darkies knew their place."

[David Mccairley · Rating 1 out of 5]

horrible man

[Jinjer]

why this book? A record diary!!!! How cool is that??? Are there other record diaries out there????

[Oscar Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flipping the positive for the negative. A true prick of a critic. I love him.

[Mmars · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately GR doesn't have an image of the edition I checked out from the library. It's booklover eye candy. Larkin's image is imposed in front of two shelves of jazz books including some from two series: the "Jazz Book Club" and "Kings of Jazz" and one in which Larkin's ear covers the title but a piano keyboard runs down the spine. Ooooh, I wish I owned that book, whatever it is.

This edition was published in 1970 and is subtitled "A Record Diary 1961-68." It's a compilation of monthly articles Larkin wrote on new and reissued jazz records. I was curious how this well-known poet would review jazz and am largely disappointed. He writes with carefully chosen descriptors but there's little flow or analysis. He definitely knows jazz though. However, unless you have an extensive LP collection from the era, it will be difficult to listen to many of these recordings as they are either out of print, reissued under other ubiquitious titles such as best of, or the Verve years of, etc.

But, for jazz afficiandos and writers this book is a trove of information chronicling what was issued when and accompanied by a brief opinion of the recording. Plus...there's that cover!!!

[Chris Lilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Larkin was a deeply unpleasant human being who wrote a number of exceptionally fine poems. Being talented doesn't make you nice, or vice versa. He wrote pieces on jazz for the Daily Torygraph for a decade (61-71) and believed he was observing jazz going to hell in a hand basket, as bop became the standard, and post-bop and free form jazzers overtook the big band and Dixieland heroes of Larkin's youth. He writes well of the players he likes, particularly Ellington and Armstrong, Bechet and Django Reinhardt. He writes horribly about Parker and Miles Davis, and witlessly about Coltrane. If you think Johnny Hodges was the last great jazzer, this is an interesting book. If you started loving jazz with 'Kind of Blue', then it should probably be avoided. He's kind of nice about Ornette Coleman. Go figure.

[Bob Primosch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun read even if you haven't heard any of the records he's reviewed -- his writing style and attention to detail brings you in. Some might say his dislike of folks like Miles and Coltrane (and modern jazz generally, especially free jazz) discredits him, but his arguments are reasoned well enough even if you have a different opinion.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag of record review, mostly Jazz from the 1960s and early 1970s. OK, if you accept that the review has some strong preferences, he does not like Coltrane, but like Armstrong. Useful as a reference.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've long admired Larkin's poetry and, while he and I mos DEF do not see eye to eye on post-swing jazz--his aesthetic obstinacy cost him much aural joy--this collection of columns passes my test of music books: DOES IT ADD TO THE LIST OF RECORDS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THAT YOU NOW HAVE TO HEAR? Also, when he is writing about jazz he loves (say, about somebody like Jimmy Rushing), he is astute, witty, and insightful. Not for everyone, for sure, but I obsess over collections like this--they're like treasure hunts.