“The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.”
My ideal setting for listening to music is my eleven-year-old Nissan. When
I play a CD, I listen and never treat
it as background. I hate the idea of music as ambient filler, a second
atmosphere. My youngest son plays music while writing and studying. I could
never do that. Whether because it’s very good or very bad, the music would be a
distraction. I can no longer listen to the radio in the car – blather and more
distraction. My playlist of late has been mostly old favorites, comfort sounds
like comfort food -- Mavis Staples, Bill Evans, Chopin, Louis Armstrong.
Recently I was listening to a compilation album of Armstrong tracks that
includes “Dallas Blues,” recorded with his orchestra two weeks before the Wall
Street crash in 1929. I remembered it was Philip Larkin’s first selection on
the BBC’s “Desert Island Discs,” broadcast on July 17, 1976. The transcript of
Larkin’s conversation on the air is collected in Further
Requirements (Faber and Faber, 2001):
“I suppose any jazz lover has to decide which Louis Armstrong record he
is taking, because there are so many and Louis is such a combined Chaucer and
Shakespeare of jazz. I’ve chosen ‘Dallas Blues’ from 1929 because I’ve been
playing it for about forty years and never got tired of it. It is a blues, and
Armstrong plays it in a beautiful warm and relaxed way that he doesn’t always
achieve on his later more showmanship sides.”
The passage at the top is from Clive James’ review of Larkin’s Collected Poems, published in the July
17, 1989 issue of The New Yorker. James
might be describing the blues: “It made misery beautiful.” Each of the three
jazz numbers on Larkin's playlist – the others are by Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday
-- is a blues. I think of Larkin on “Desert Island Discs” as playing the role
of an applied critic. As a jazz critic, Larkin could be a sternly blinkered judge.
He’s famously dismissive of bop and subsequent forms of the music, but a
good critic can be essential even when he’s wrong. James in his review goes on
to observe:
“One of Larkin’s few even halfway carefree poems is ‘For Sidney Bechet,”
from The Whitsun Weddings. Yet the impact that Larkin said Bechet made
on him was exactly the impact that Larkin made of on readers coming to him for
the first time:
“’On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.’”
Listen to Bechet’s gorgeous 1944 recording of "Blue Horizon." The song was performed at Larkin’s
memorial service in 1985 at Westminster Abbey.
[James’ assorted reviews of Larkin’s work are collected in Somewhere
Becoming Rain (Picador, 2019).]
3 comments:
Comfort sounds, comfort reading, too. You have given us a week's worth in this piece.
I've loved Chopin's music since I was a young piano student. I had the good fortune to attend an Artur Rubinstein concert in San Diego when I was in Navy sonar electronics training school in 1971. Rubinstein's performance of Chopin was mesmerizing. Chopin's music, while universal, is anchored in his Polish roots. Rubinstein, who was both Polish and Jewish, captures the Polish spirit of Chopin's music perfectly. Nowadays, I often listen to an 11-CD collection of Rubinstein's recordings of Chopin's piano music.
Mavis Staples, amen! When I'm on my deathbed, if anyone wants to keep me around for five more minutes, all they'll need to do is play "The Weight" from The Last Waltz, with the Staples Singers accompanying The Band on that great song. I'm not going anywhere while it's playing.
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