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Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1996 by B.J. Leggett
In this multiplicity of gaps there is one further gap that the first two are meant to account for - the real motive for the story Larkin supposedly discovers - and that is the gap between the conception of jazz in Larkin's introduction to All What Jazz and that in the reviews it introduces. A number of readers of the collection have noted the contradiction - a bitter denunciation of modern jazz and its practitioners in the introduction and a fair-minded and appreciative view of the same music and musicians in the essays that immediately follow. To take the most obvious example, in the introduction Charlie Parker (as a member of the Parker/Pound/Picasso trinity) comes to represent everything that is wrong with modern jazz. Larkin holds him personally responsible for the advent of the new music, which is characterized as "Parker and his followers" (AWJ 20); and he comes to epitomize the worst of modern jazz's mannerisms, the "impression of mental hallucination," a "kind of manic virtuosity," and the "substitution of bloodless note-patterns for some cheerful or sentimental popular song as a basis for improvisation." Parker's playing was "fast and showy," he "couldn't play four bars without resorting to a peculiarly irritating five-note cliche" from "The Woody Woodpecker Song," and his tone was "thin and sometimes shrill." He repeats, finally, one jazz critic's testimony that "if he played Charlie Parker records to his baby it cried" (AWJ 20-21, 26).
This is not, however, the Charlie Parker of a 10 June 1961 joint review of Parker and Sidney Bechet. Here the two musicians represent two different but equally legitimate branches of jazz:
Parker . . . had when he died, aged 34, seen jazz re-fashion itself pretty well in his image and heard his own solos coming back at him from a thousand horns. His technique and invention were prodigious, whereas no one would pretend Bechet had any more of either than he needed. Yet both alike on these records display unquestioned individual authority, unclouded and absolute. This is jazz and this is Bechet (or Parker) playing it. (AWJ 40)
Parker is praised as a musician who "not only could translate his ideas into notes at superhuman speed, but who was simultaneously aware of half a dozen ways of resolving any given musical situation. . . ." Interestingly, Larkin's own traditional jazz is now referred to as "the ossified platitudes of 1940 big-band jazz" against which Parker's modern jazz was in part a reaction. The review ends with one of those unexpected and affecting figures that the Larkin reader sometimes stumbles across in the last lines of a poem: "But on the evidence of these solos alone it would be absurd to call Parker's music a reaction. As well call leaping salmon a reaction" (AWJ 42-43). The elation of the leaping salmon and the generosity of coupling Parker with Bechet, Larkin's representative of all the best qualities of jazz, will at first seem odd to a reader who, a few pages earlier in the introduction, has seen Parker coupled with another traditional jazz musician: "I used to think that anyone hearing a Parker record would guess he was a drug addict, but no one hearing Beiderbecke would think he was an alcoholic, and that this summed up the distinction between the kinds of music" (AWJ 20).
