MUSIC Off beat
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
What are we to make of the twentieth cen- tury's attraction to the restless beat of jazz? From that moment seventy years ago when the first tinklings of ragtime stole bewit- chingly on the Western consciousness from the distant Southern states of America, the jazz beat has swept the world. From the Dix- ieland to which Scott Fitzgerald's America drank away the Jazz Age to the sugared variant on 'Lullaby of Birdland' dripping from the elevator Muzak, from the bebop of Charlie Parker to rock 'n' roll on Radio One, its relentless rhythm has passed almost into the air we breathe, the single most ubi- quitous conveyance for our joys and anguishes, loves and despairs.
Yet can we even talk about all these different manifestations as part of the same phenomenon? Jazz itself (quite apart from its insinuation into almost every other kind of popular music) has after all passed in those seventy years from being a primitive communal folk-music to the final stages of electronically-assisted avant-garde disin- tegration. Is there any link, other than the vaguest evolutionary chain, even between, say, the gravel voiced fooling of Louis Armstrong and the introspective, Black- Power-oriented screeches and wails of the jazz of the 1960s—let alone between the New Orleans street bands of 1900 and today's more freaky pop music?
One who would say very definitely not is Philip Larkin, who, between 1961 and 1968, contributed regular articles on jazz to the Daily Telegraph, a collection of which has just been published (All What Jazz Faber, 35s). Anyone who gave casual attention to Mr Larkin's column during those years, noting praise for a piece of Dixieland here, there a compliment for some 'modern' trumpeter for even the latest Beatles record), might have concluded that, despite an ob-
vious bias towards the older forms of jazz proper, he was a generally broad-minded fellow, with pretty liberal tastes in jazz- inspired music of all kinds.
But in the long introduction to the book, he now confesses that all this time he was perpetrating on his readers something of a confidence trick. Mr Larkin first became `hooked' on jazz, like many another in- tellectual, when he was at school, in this instance during the 1930s; his early passion was for almost anything going under the name of jazz up to the end of the swing era. When he blithely agreed to review for the Telegraph in 1961, he was aware that there had been a few changes in jazz since those days—but he was in no way prepared for the shock which awaited him when he began ac- tually to listen to the records.
What he found was that, since the 'jazz revolution' of the early 1940s, the happy, simple, extrovert music he associated with his boyhood heroes, Armstrong, Ellington, Muggsy Spanier, had turned into a bewilder- ing `nightmare'—`pinched, unhappy, febrile', pretentious, chromatic and altogether thoroughly unpleasant. It was too late to back out of his column, so, deciding that discretion was the better part, he proceeded to lavish praise as far as he could in all direc- tions—substituting, as he puts it, "'ad- venturous" for "excruciating" and "colourful" for "viciously absurd",' when- ever his true reactions to the new music looked like getting the better of him.
But now that he has given his column up, Mr Larkin is at last able to come clean about why he thinks that, since 1941, jazz has progressively come to destroy itself. The chief reason, he claims, is that it has become a 'modern' art—and there follows, it must he confessed, a most rollicking assault on the chaos. absurdity and deliberate in- comprehensibility of all avant-garde art: Picasso, Pound, plays with characters in dustbins, sculptures with holes in. the lot In the past thirty years, jazz in the true. good old sense has 'ceased to be produced'. b dividing into two halves, 'modern' jazz and pop music, 'intelligence without beat, and beat without intelligence'.
Now all this is so humorously put. MI Larkin's panegyrics on the happy. foot-tap- ping sort of jazz he likes are so urbanely phrased, that one is almost persuaded that there was a cataclysmic change, not just in the forms but in the very nature of jazz in the 1940s. But what was it after all that modern jazz evolved out of? Were the changes introduced by Charlie Parker in the name of greater harmonic and rhythmic freedom really anything more than ,in ex- tension of the changes already wrought in the same cause by Louis Armstrong in the 1920s?
The one thing which all jazz has always had in common is that it has been a music based on escapism, replying on its ex- aggerated beat and the charm of discords, to enable the minds of its listeners and players to escape into an easy, free-floating dreamworld. It is this which has spoken to the restless and the mechanically disoriented. providing successive refuges for the bored and alienated of each generation in turn in its own way—and it is this which in the end, unites the negro cottonpicker singing the' blues with the teenager of today dreaming to Mick Jagger, the Prohibition crowd with Black Power, even all of these with the muzak in the elevator. Mr Larkin looks back on the music of his youth with affec- tion, because its spell is still unbroken; if he had been born twenty years later, he would have found his escape in the music which he hates and finds incomprehensible. Even so, I must confess that he would not have been able to write so engagingly or intelligently in its defence.
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