All What Jazz

Ahead of a meeting of Manchester Jazz Society in a fortnight on Larkin About Jazz:The Poet As Critic, I've just picked up a secondhand copy of Philip Larkin's All What Jazz, a collection of the record reviews he wrote for the Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971.

As well as being regarded as a major post-war English poet, Philip Larkin's posthumous reputation is at best that of a professional grump and commitment-phobic womaniser, and at worst that of an espouser of far-right views and composer of racist and other dubious ditties in his private letters to school and university friends such as his fellow writer and jazz fan Kingsley Amis.

Like Amis, Larkin's jazz tastes were for the New Orleans and swing bands of his youth, Armstrong, Bechet, Ellington and Basie, and he expresses his aversion to modern jazz, especially its leading proponents Charlie Parker ("compulsively fast and showy...His tone, though much better than that of his successors, was thin and sometimes shrill"),  Thelonious Monk ("his faux-naif elephant-dance piano style, with its gawky intervals and absence of swing, was made doubly tedious by his limited repertoire"), Miles Davis ("Davis had several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all") and John Coltrane ("metallic and passionless...exercises in gigantic absurdity...long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity"), in the introduction to this collection, although he does moderate his opinions of them to some extent in later reviews, even going so far as to half-heartedly praise the free jazz musician Ornette Coleman ("a slow ballad that sounds as if it is trying to be beautiful").

Larkin's love of the blues is unsurprising, but what did come as a bit of a shock is that as well as interwar figures like Bessie Smith, Big Maceo and Big Bill Broonzy his tastes also extended to the postwar Chicago electric blues bands of Muddy Waters, Little Walter, James Cotton, Howlin' Wolf and Big Walter Horton with their amplified guitars and harmonicas, the rediscovered Mississippi bluesman Fred McDowell and his protege R.L. Burnside, Texas acoustic guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins, swamp blues duo Lightnin' Slim and Lazy Lester, the late sixties soul-blues of Nina Simone and even black Cajun R&B/zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier.