Books in Brief: All What Jazz

All What Jazz, by Philip Larkin (St. Martin’s, $6.95). When British poet Philip Larkin was asked to do a jazz column for the Daily Telegraph in 1961, he had one worry: his taste for trad and mainstream jazz and his dislike of the modernists (“With Miles Davis and John Coltrane a new inhumanity emerged”) might cost him a nice assignment. So, like a Waugh anti-hero, he set out to play along, editing his copy to replace “insolent” with “challenging,” “excruciating” with “adventurous.” Yet his articles, reprinted here, treat the modernists tartly, the classicists warmly, and everyone stylishly. His book can thus serve as a reliable primer while still offering the buff insights enough to keep him from dozing. What sets Larkin apart in the dreary literature of jazz is his iconoclasm. E.g.: “the term ‘modern,’ when 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.” And: “From using music to entertain the white man, the Negro had moved to hating him with it.” To understand what the lumpen-jazzmen and their scribes are doing to jazz, this breakthrough book is essential reading.