Fenster writes:
To my post on the possible demise of jazz, dearieme wrote in to say that the chap to read is Larkin.
Larkin being the poet Philip Larkin (subject of this recent article, link thanks to Arts & Letters Daily). Larkin doubled as a jazz critic for the Daily Telegraph though the sixties. The book presents his criticism from the start, 1961, through 1971.
Interesting that while the buzz today is whether jazz is dead in the 21st century, from Larkin’s POV it was over by 1945. Larkin has a love-hate relationship with jazz which can be summed up fairly easily: love the early stuff, hate the new stuff.
Larkin’s asthetic view is fairly straightforward: does music give pleasure? And for him, jazz started going downhill, and fast, when it stopped being about the pleasure the music can bring and started being about something else.
Here he is an (unpublished) piece on John Coltrane, written a few short weeks after Coltrane’s death in July 1967.
Well, I still can’t imagine how anyone can listen to a Coltrane record for pleasure. That reedy, catarrhal tone, sawing backwards and forwards for ten minutes between a couple of chords and producing ‘violent barrages of notes not mathematically related to the underlying rhythmic pulse, and not swinging in the traditional sense of the term’ (Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties); that insolent egotism, leading to forty five minute versions of My Favorite Things until, at any rate in Britain, the audience walked out, no doubt wondering why they had ever walked in; that latter-day religiosity, exemplified in turgid suites such as “A Love Supreme” and “Ascension” that set up pretension as a way of life; that willful and hideous distortion of tone that offered squeals, squeaks, Bronx cheers and throttled slate-pencil noises for serious consideration–all this, and more, ensure that, for me at any rate, when Coltrane’s records go back on the shelf they will stay there.
I will pause here just for a moment to point out that the preceding paragraph was, with the short exception of the first few words, all one sentence. And I thought I could run on! He is obviously worked into quite the lather at this point. So he goes on:
Of course, a great deal of this falls into place if one reflects that Coltrane was a “modern” jazzman. The adjective ‘modern’, when applied to any branch of art, means ‘designed to invoke incomprehension, anger, boredom or laughter, and Coltrane was simply part of the melancholy tendency since 1945 to remove jazz from our pleasures and place it, with all the other ‘modern’ arts, among our duties. Much of this was doubtless due to the fact that Coltrane was an American Negro. 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 into dervish-like heights of hysteria (editor’s note: you oughtta know!) are the musical equivalent of Mr Stokely Carmichael (editor’s note: did I say this was unpublished?). It is this side of his work that appeals to the Black Power boys (editor’s note: ouch!) such as LeRoi Jones and Archie Shepp; toward the end of his life, he had become associated with younger players of even wilder and more excruciating exhibitionism than himself, such as Pharaoh Sanders. It is not surprising that pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones, for long his associates and admirers, quietly dropped off the wagon.
Virtually the only compliment one can pay Coltrane is one of stature. If he was boring, he was enormously boring. If he was ugly, he was massively ugly. To squeak and gibber for sixteen bars is nothing; Coltrane could do it for sixteen minutes, stunning the listener into a kind of hypnotic state in which he read and re-read the sleeve note and believed, not of course that he was enjoying himself, but that he was hearing something significant. Perhaps he was. Time will tell. I regret Coltrane’s death the way I regret the death of any man, but I can’t conceal the fact that it leaves in jazz a vast, a blessed silence.
Editor’s note: note the clever use of ‘blessed’ at the last moment. Two can play this religious high ground game.
As you can see, Larkin is a first-rate ranter. If you are going to have firm opinions, you might as well rant well and write well if you seek to persuade. The book puts me in the mind of other fine rants like Tom Wolfe’s books on modern art and architecture, but the prose style is Larkin’s own, and not Wolfe-like. Wolfe is faintly amused/bemused by the vacuousness of what he sees. Larkin by contrast is very clearly angry and hurt.
For me, it takes some historical imagination to get myself to understand Larkin’s disappointment. Me, I can still get angry at how punk (and its many happy-amateur successors) shoved aside music that was pleasurable to listen to, and that was–duh–musical. This was the rise of the talentless playing for the stupid, circa 1974, and it is with us still (see Sir BH’s earlier post on Austin alt music).
For me, jazz, both pre and post bop, are part of a seamless web of musical development. Yes, I understand how jazz got less accessible, and wanted to be about new things, but I don’t myself feel the pain. And I myself listen more to Monk than Louis Armstrong. Does that mean time has told?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
The length of yarn from Sidney Bechet to “Interstellar Space”-era Coltrane is quite lengthy. So I think Larkin may be speaking for a majority of jazz fans, young and old, when it comes to puzzlement (or hatred) concerning that period. I can’t say I spin those albums very often myself, although Coltrane’s wife did some great work in the late 60’s.
I see Dixieland, “traditional” jazz as pretty different from the bop-era, though. The use of polyphony, the instrumentation, the chugging rhythm: all make it seem like a distant cousin to the bop/post-bop idiom that most people identify as ‘jazz’. Another thing are the sound recordings themselves–while I’m sure those sides were well recorded for their era, most 20s and 30s recordings sound pretty creaky to modern ears. I actually like the way those old records sound now, but it took me a long time to really appreciate them.
Bop really trounced the old style, so much so that it immediately became a relic only played by revivalists. I’m guessing Larking noticed this and felt burnt.
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“Me, I can still get angry at how punk (and its many happy-amateur successors) shoved aside music that was pleasurable to listen to”
I’m with you but let’s leave some room for rap too.
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I was going to mention rap . . . er . . . hip-hop, to use the approved above the fold term. But I didn’t want to come off too much like crankypants Larkin.
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Fun reactions to the book, tks.
I love “All What Jazz?” (As well as Larkin generally — his poetry is wonderful: painful, amusing, accessible …) I imagine there are a fair number of people who react to jazz the way he does, loving the shorter, more tuneful, dance-ier stuff while finding themselves put off by bop and later. So it’s super that he gave that point of view such amusing embodiment. (Somebody once called bop “what happened to jazz once the intellectuals got hold of it.” By intellectuals, what’s meant here isn’t that Dizzy was a thinker, it’s that the critics and the press got hold of jazz and helped steer it in a more mind-y kind of direction. On the other hand, Albert Murray once called Charlie Parker’s music “dance music for the mind,” and that’s a pretty great way of describing it.) Yet Larkin could never be accused of being a mere philistine, and he certainly responded beautifully to what he did love — his descriptions and evocations of the classic-style performers were fab, and he knew the trad scene really well. He wasn’t putting down the new stuff merely because he was ignorant or a crank.
Larkin was one of the great reactionary artists and art-intellectuals, IMHO. Funny how they’re kept from us by schools, isn’t it? And often the foundations and magazines as well. Is that entirely because they’re deeply invested in the notion that art-making, art-appreciation, and art-discussing MUST BE, by definition, “progressive” activities? Are they ignorant of most of this work? Are they afraid of what would become of us if we were exposed to it?
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>>Funny how they’re kept from us by schools, isn’t it? And often the foundations and magazines as well. Is that entirely because they’re deeply invested in the notion that art-making, art-appreciation, and art-discussing MUST BE, by definition, “progressive” activities? Are they ignorant of most of this work? Are they afraid of what would become of us if we were exposed to it?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
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I wouldn’t go quite as far as Larkin, but there’s no doubt that he had a point. Jazz did become a lot less enjoyable for a lot of people as time went on. Coltrane did produce a lot of stuff that seems, in retrospect, to be willfully ugly, along with some really beautiful stuff. Certainly one of the things that led to the rise of Rock was the decline of Jazz as a popular art form, which is interesting since we have seen, in the last fifteen or so years, the same process occuring with Rock. Interesting, also, is that Fenster is to Punk what Larkin was to Bop; they both see the advent of a new form as willful ugliness, the death of musicality, people more interested in making a point than in making music. You can’t help but wonder who is going to be the Larkin/Fenster of rap, when it goes in a new direction.
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Didn’t this break already happen in rap, though? The golden age is the 80s, when sampling was still legal (or at least, unenforced) and before gangster rap took over. It’s been a muddled, middling ride since then.
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I don’t know enough about Rap to comment intelligently, but it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if Rap followed in the path of Jazz and Rock. Is there a Rap version of Larkin or Fenster bemoaning this change? If so, that’s really interesting.
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Toddy Cat:
It’s a getting there. Guys like Das Racist and The Odd Future Crew are pretty much pandering to the hipster/pitchfork crowd and have little appeal to the traditional hip hop community. The story on Tyler the Creator actually focused on the large portrait of John Coltrane he has in his studio and the intentional ugliness and brutality of his style. Rather telling portent, eh?
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“The story on Tyler the Creator actually focused on the large portrait of John Coltrane he has in his studio and the intentional ugliness and brutality of his style.”
Wow. Kind of bears out Larkin’s contention, at least somewhat.
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Generally, the more improvisation a piece contains, the less I like it. Or, that is, I listen to the head, my mind wanders during the solos, and then I perk up again at the outro.
“Philistine! You just don’t like jazz.”
Yeah, well, maybe. I mean, I think I like jazz. I listen to the local jazz station when I’m out and about. I play trumpet. Sometimes I practice transcribed jazz solos. But, yeah, I know improvisation is a large (very large) part of jazz, so maybe by saying I don’t like (most) improvisation I’m really saying I don’t like jazz.
I’ve requested the Larkin book through interlibrary loan. I’m hoping it has a section where he really goes off on improv.
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My Dad was a big jazz fan so I heard a lot of it. I grew up in the 60s listening to what I’ll call post war jazz. His favorites were Cannonball Adderly and Miles with lot’s of Coltrane on the side. He also liked a lot of Jimmy Smith and had a sweet spot for Ahmad Jamal. Certainly bopping but also certainly not.
Listening and enjoying it was like breathing for me. I didn’t know the history or the categories, I just heard it and liked what I liked. He heard them all and met a few so there were plenty of stories though not the kind that people are in, but rather, “did you hear that, did you hear him say it!”
I soul’d and popped and rocked out later which led us to heated debates about the righteousness of our musical tastes.
It seems to me that we all have periods in our lives when we are receptive and open to music (and perhaps many other things). The music we ‘get into’ then is indelibly imprinted. We ‘get it’ and that which came before seems quaint while that the comes later seems pointless. I had a significant exposure to live symphony orchestras concurrent with the jazz but I didn’t ‘get it’, which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it.
Anyway, I can listen to Miles or Coltrane today and just fly with it. Pharoah Sanders is a bit pompous but I yell and scream along with his horn. At the same time, Louis Armstrong doesn’t move me in the least though I can appreciate what he’s doing. I try listening to a more contemporary artist like a Stefon Harris but I feel like I’ve heard it before.
But listening to old stuff no matter what the genre can get, well, old. What I find cool is modern electronic stuff that samples some of the old stuff, or better just remixes an old vocal, a horn or even an accordion piece. How about a little Dinah Washington remixed with a little electronic chill?
Anyway, that was an enjoyable rant by Larkin but he’s just stating what we all feel about some kind of music or another.
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