Philip Larkin (56 page)

But this show of even-handed balance was short lived. As the reviews proceeded Larkin showed himself as a partisan of traditional jazz, and Parker and Gillespie were increasingly denigrated. In January 1963 he wrote: ‘Trad, everyone agrees, is dead, but it shows no more signs of lying down than modern does of sitting up.’
³⁰
Elsewhere he notes that though Bop has been called development ‘there are different kinds of development: a hot bath can develop into a cold one’.
³¹
His attitude accurately reflected the taste of most British jazz-lovers at the time, and many since: ‘I am afraid that the modernist tradition in jazz – I am not for the moment thinking of gifted individuals such as Parker and Gillespie – strikes me, even in historical perspective, as no better than the modernist tradition in other arts – that is, as tending towards the silly, the disagreeable and the frigid.’
³²
He notes that ‘Even the magazines have a traditional reviewer and a modern reviewer,’
³³
and devotes separate paragraphs to records which ‘All modernists will want’ and those of specifically ‘traditional’ interest.
³⁴
Magnanimously rising above his prejudices, he finds ‘the BBC’s decision to ban modern jazz from its weekly “Jazz Club” on the grounds of public uninterest, a regrettable step in view of Britain’s many fine modern musicians such as Tubby Hayes’.
³⁵
Occasionally he will express enjoyment of a particular performance by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or even John Coltrane. He seems genuinely prepared to be pleased by each new record, even against his expectations: ‘I continue to listen gamely to Archie Shepp (who is wearing a beard now) in the hope that it will one day all cease to sound like “Flight of the Bumble Bee” scored for bagpipes and concrete mixer.’
³⁶
He was wary of his own disputatiousness, and in the Introduction to
All What Jazz
expressed the hope that the reviews themselves ‘are tolerably free from such polemics’, conceding that his ‘was not the only ear in the world’.
³⁷

Usually however, whenever the names of Parker, Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Ornette Coleman or Archie Shepp appear, the reader learns to anticipate an acid drop of delightful wit. Larkin’s dislike varies in tone. His response to Davis shows a lively humour, as though he were marvelling that talent could be so wilfully perverted: ‘his lifeless muted tone, at once hollow and unresonant, creeps along only just in tempo, the ends of notes hanging down like Dali watches’;
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‘the fact that he can spend seven or eight minutes playing “Autumn Leaves” without my recognizing or liking the tune confirms my view of him as a master of rebarbative boredom’.
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‘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.’
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‘To my surprise, I found myself liking at least two tracks of “Miles in the Sky” (CBS), not of course as jazz, but as a kind of soundtrack to some bleak pastoral such as a film of the Paston Letters.’
⁴¹
Even a reader unsympathetic with Larkin’s opinions will surely wince with delight at his deadpan judgement on an LP of Davis in concert: ‘for me it was an experience in pure duration. Some of it must have been quite hard to do.’
⁴²

In writing of John Coltrane, however, Larkin’s poise is less secure. On some level he seems deeply, personally offended by Coltrane: ‘John Coltrane, that relentless experimenter, intersperses the vinegary drizzle of his tone with chords (yes, two notes at once) that hardly seem worth the effort’;
⁴³
‘in the main the effect is like watching twenty monkeys trying to type the plays of Shakespeare’.
⁴⁴
This antagonism reached its extreme in the notorious ‘Looking Back at Coltrane’, written following Coltrane’s death in 1967. There is something chilling and unpleasant about Larkin’s refusal of any glimmer of generosity. He begins, in a most unLarkinesque way, by rebuking
The Times
and
Melody Maker
for not paying proper respect to his authority, in their praise for Coltrane. ‘I do not remember ever suggesting that his music was anything but a pain between the ears [. . .] Was I wrong?’
⁴⁵
It is the most rhetorical of questions, and he goes on to speak ill of the dead in a tone of deliberate malice, concluding: ‘I regret Coltrane’s death, as I regret the death of any man, but I can’t conceal the fact that it leaves in jazz a vast, a blessed silence.’
⁴⁶
Unsurprisingly the
Daily Telegraph
refused to publish this review. Surprisingly, however, Larkin was not chastened by the rejection. Though his next reference to Coltrane shows rare approval – ‘On “Catwalk” in particular Coltrane is light and appealing’
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– four months later he describes his solos as ‘the scribbling of a subnormal child’.
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The reason for his ill will lies deep. Coltrane’s playing exemplified for Larkin a fundamental artistic crime. For Larkin, art exists for its own sake; it does not ‘do’ anything. It has no ulterior designs on the audience. His obituary of Louis Armstrong stresses that the trumpeter humbly served his art and his audience: ‘Armstrong was an artist of world stature, an American Negro slum child who spoke to the heart of Greenlander and Japanese alike. At the same time he was a humble, hard-working man who night after night set out to do no more than “please the people”, to earn his fee, to pay back the audience for coming.’
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He cited Armstrong’s criticism of Parker for failing to please the audience: ‘you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to’.
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Coltrane, in Larkin’s view, takes this perversity a stage further than Parker:

He did not want to entertain his audience; he wanted to lecture them, even to annoy them. His ten-minute solos, in which he lashes himself up to dervish-like heights of hysteria, are the musical equivalent of Mr. Stokely Carmichael. It is this side of his work that appeals to the Black-Power boys such as LeRoi Jones and Archie Shepp.
⁵¹

Some see such views as racist. Ben Ratliff comments: ‘for Larkin Coltrane’s aesthetic problem [. . .] was that he was an American Negro’.
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But this argument does not convince. Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith were also American Negroes. It is not Coltrane’s colour that rouses Larkin’s hostility; it is Coltrane’s attitude towards his colour and, crucially, the effect of this attitude on his art.

Larkin’s earliest enthusiasm had been specifically for the exuberant rhythms of black musicians. As a schoolboy in 1939 he regretted that ‘America is in the grip of the white bands [. . .] I’d back coloured against white most times.’
⁵³
At this early stage his preference seems entirely aesthetic, with no ideology behind it. Awareness of the socio-political context followed later. The mature Larkin of the
Telegraph
reviews fully acknowledges the social and economic context of the blues and jazz. ‘Behind the blues spreads the half-glimpsed, depressing vista of the life of the American Negro’, he writes in a review of Paul Oliver’s
The Story of the Blues
.
⁵⁴
In a review of Nat Hentoff’s book
The Jazz Life
he refers to ‘the continual indignities endured by the Negro entertainer, who may well be refused admission at a club front door over which his name blazes in lights’.
⁵⁵
Elsewhere he relates how the Ellington band was unable to find food during the interval of a concert in St Louis, since there was no segregated black restaurant close by, and a racist drugstore owner refused to make sandwiches for a white go-between.

Larkin draws an historical lesson in moral consequences, relating this episode to the insulting behaviour of Charlie Mingus towards his white audiences on a European tour in 1964.
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Ellington had returned to the concert after his humiliation, still aiming to give pleasure; Charlie Mingus in contrast retaliated against his white audiences, refusing to be obedient to their pleasure. In a review headed ‘The End of Jazz’, Larkin quotes Mingus: ‘Don’t call me a jazz musician. To me the word jazz means discrimination, secondclass citizenship, the whole back-of-the-bus bit.’
⁵⁷
As Larkin wrote in his weekend
Telegraph
essay ‘Requiem for Jazz’, ‘Where there had been joy and relaxation, there was now tension and antagonism.’
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This he registers as objective history: ‘The Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved. End this, and the blues may end too.’
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Jazz, in the sense that he means the word, is destined to become ‘an extinct form of music as the ballad is an extinct form of literature, because the society that produced it has gone’.

The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only with the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights under the Constitution that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue.
⁶⁰

As he puts it in the 1968 Introduction to
All What Jazz
: ‘The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man, and when the audience as a whole, with the end of the Japanese war and the beginning of television, didn’t in any case particularly want to be entertained in that way any longer.’
⁶¹

Modern black musicians show:

a desire to wrest back the initiative in jazz from the white musician, to invent ‘something they can’t steal because they can’t play it’. This motive is a bad basis for any art, and it isn’t surprising that I found the results shallow and
voulu
[. . .] The constant pressure to be different and difficult demanded greater and greater technical virtuosity, and more and more exaggerated musical non-sequiturs.
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This was the source of the ‘new inhumanity’ which he heard in the playing of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. ‘From using music to entertain the white man, the Negro had moved to hating him with it.’
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It is a travesty to suggest that Larkin would have preferred blacks to remain oppressed and ill-educated so that his beloved pleasure-giving jazz might continue. His antagonism towards the modernizers might sometimes be mistaken for racist condescension: ‘like most of his Negro contemporaries [Davis’s] increasing preoccupation with musical theory is in direct ratio to his liability to make an ass of himself’.
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But Larkin dislikes Davis’s affectation of theoretical complexity not because he is black but because it leads him into unpleasant ‘calculated perversity’,
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a perversity he shares with many white artists.

Indeed, Larkin’s disappointment with modern jazz gains intensity from his respect for the contribution of traditional jazz to world culture. In his obituary of Louis Armstrong, he refers to ‘the great ironical takeover of western popular music by the American Negro (and remember the saying “Let me write a nation’s songs, and anyone you like may write its laws”), Armstrong stands with Ellington and Waller as one of the Trojan horses that brought it about.’
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Shortly after Armstrong’s death Charles Monteith of Faber suggested that Larkin might write Armstrong’s biography. In his reply Larkin showed his appreciation of the historical gravity of the subject: ‘It is already accepted – or if it isn’t, it soon will be – that Louis Armstrong was an enormously important cultural figure in our century, more important than Picasso in my opinion, but certainly quite comparable.’
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One approach to the biography might be ‘cultural’, ‘taking Armstrong as a kind of Trojan horse of Negro values sent into white civilisation under the cover of entertainment’.
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Any biographer, he stresses, must be fully aware of Armstrong’s significance as ‘a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, not overlooking the part he has played (with, of course, other artists such as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and so on) in “Negroising” western culture. This may sound a tall order: it certainly isn’t a description of me!’
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He concludes that he is underqualified for the task.