'No Wittier Book of Criticism'

What we ask of a critic is not that he be infallible in his judgments, devise a grand theory of everything or even that he be consistent. No, we expect a critic to write well and to have interesting things to say even when he’s wrong. We don’t want blandly kneejerk, fashionable opinions. Neither do we want attention-seeking provocation. We want a capacity for expressing strong approval and condemnation. Enthusiasm is welcome. So is a broad body of knowledge, a good memory, an ability to establish context and – perhaps most importantly – a ready sense of humor. Dr. Johnson had pungent things to say about Milton, Swift and Sterne, but has anyone as a result ever stopped reading them? 

Philip Larkin in his role as jazz critic has been accused of everything from moldy-fig-ism to racism, but is seldom accused of dullness. The important thing to know about Larkin is that he started young as a jazz fan and remained a fan all his life. There’s nothing academic or extra-musical about his love of the music. In a letter he writes: “I became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13, listened avidly to all the dance bands of the day and tried to learn to play the drums.” He started as an adolescent fanboy and developed into an unconventionally first-rate jazz writer.

 

Larkin’s first monthly column as the jazz critic for the Daily Telegraph was published on this date, February 11, in 1961. He collected a decade’s worth of these writings in All What Jazz: A Record Diary (1970; rev. 1985). In that first column, Larkin is already acting as an advocate for lovers of the music, complaining of the way record companies issue and reissue jazz recordings:

 

“Even the ordinary listener has plenty to complain of, the tired or raucous ‘name’ performances, the jumbling of sessions, the duplication, the deletion. For the fan, who knows what is not issued, the situation is well-nigh unbearable. The problem is to convince the record companies that the issue of jazz as jazz, and not as a poor relation of rock and roll, is commercial, and the only possible answer seems to be to buy such material when it does appear to the best of one’s taste and means.”

 

Larkin went on to develop a well-known, often humorous dislike of bop and its stylistic successors, viewing them as a betrayal of jazz. He describes John Coltrane’s sound on tenor or soprano sax as “a thin, keening noise, sometimes sour as an oboe, at times expiring in an upper-register squeak, possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” Admit it, Coltrane lovers (among whom I number myself): that’s funny and at least occasionally true. The music on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew he mocks as “Muzak-like chicka-chicka-boom-chick.” Larkin’s tastes don’t always reflect mine (though I’m with him on Davis’ electric noodling), but his views can serve as a corrective to blanket endorsement of critically indulged music, often avant-garde in nature. You might be surprised that he felt “well rewarded” by Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (he occasionally writes about blues and blues-inflected rock):

 

“Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is probably well-suited to his material . . . and his guitar [Mike Bloomfield’s?] adapts itself to rock (‘Highway 61’) and ballad (‘Queen Jane’) admirably. There is a marathon ‘Desolation Row’ which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.”

 

Again, there’s something to it. Seek out All What Jazz, if only to read the introduction. Here he broadens his critical stance to include “modernism” in all the arts:

 

“The term ‘modern,’ applied to art, has a more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was. . . . 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 is 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.”

 

Clive James writes in “On Larkin’s Wit” (Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin, 2019):

 

“I thought at the time [1970] that All What Jazz was the best available expression by the author himself of what he believed art to be. I still think so, and would contend in addition that no wittier book of criticism has ever been written.”